I want to tell the world about JCVD! No, it’s not Jess Carries Venereal Disease but Jean Claude Van Damme!

I recently watched JCVD (twice if you must know) and was blown away by its awesomeness. Now, perhaps because this is text and many markers of communication are missing, you might think I’m being sarcastic or employing hyperbole. But I simply must inform you with all seriousness that JCVD is one seriously impressive movie. After watching this movie I discovered something: JCVD can actually act--I know; my shock was significant as well. I also rediscovered something: I have inappropriate (you have no idea how inappropriate) love for JCVD in all his incarnations.

I admit I feel better about my JCVD love than, say, Steven Segall (it just happened okay? One day I was watching Under Siege and before I knew it I found him attractive. It wasn’t my fault; the devil comes at us in moments of weakness) but I’ve never owned my VD love as I have other obsessions. In all honesty, however, there was a summer when I rented every movie our video store had, but that isn’t a story I’ve shared freely until recently.

Spurred on by my re-ignited love for Mr. JCVD I happily dove into my Netflix watch instantly and discovered to my thrilling delight a classic known as Double Impact awaiting me. After finishing it I find myself giggly and nostalgic for the action movies of yesteryear. Double Impact (hereafter referred to as DI in keeping with my egregious abbreviations abuse) has everything a great action movie from the 80’s and early 90’s ought to have: there’s martial arts, there’s gratuitous boob shots, there’s a purposeless sex scene, there’s unlikely explosions, there’s ripping of the action hero’s shirt for proper exposure of pectoral muscles, and there’s such a painfully juvenile attempt at a story that as a viewer you can’t help but cringe every time something like genuine emotion comes on the screen. In short, it has everything I love and miss about action movies.

Sure it’s sexist. Dear lord is it sexist. At one point the heroine, who didn’t bother me overmuch until she started talking in the second half of the movie and it become painfully apparent that she couldn’t act, dropped the blanket she was wearing while her clothes dried (because she got wet...obviously) and we saw her chest. You know...like ya do. And there was the “bad girl” who had to have been a professional body builder cause the girl was stacked. Naturally she had to “search” the “good girl” at one point in what was a clumsy attempt at 1992 heterosexual male fantasy of lesbian domination. Oddly enough the “bad girl” wore leather and black and had dark hair while the “good girl” wore pastels with flowers and had blond hair. You just can’t get gender roles and sexism like that anymore. And I simply must mention the sex scene; you see there was no reason, even in this hastily thrown together plot for there to be a sex scene but they got around that by Alex (played by JCVD) getting drunk and hallucinating that his brother Chad (played by JCVD) was having sex with his girlfriend--the blond girl. Brilliant!

And the final fight scene was glorious, stupendous, beautiful! JCVD, wearing a rather dull turtleneck, loses said turtleneck when the bad guy rips it off of him. You only wish I was making this up. And then (AND THEN) bad guy, played by Bobo for those of you that know who I’m talking about, takes his shirt off so they can have some short of martial arts throw down and assert their dominant masculinity over each other. ‘Twas awesome.

And I sat here and ate this shit up. Seriously, we don’t have action movies like this anymore. You could call it senseless violence and say it’s a good thing, but as I enjoyed the dubious pleasure that was DI I couldn’t help but miss the time when gratuitous violence was SO gratuitous that it had absolutely no chance of warping a child’s mind. You watch classics like Kickboxer or American Ninja or Under Siege and you know you aren’t bettering yourself. You are, in fact, treating the lowest part of yourself. I, the person that rails against the concepts of “high art” and “low art” gladly concede that this stuff is low art. But it does what it does well. Things blow up in exciting ways. Heroes are sexy and action stars can actually do the moves you see on the screen. Bad guys die overly complicated deaths, usually through helicopter blades or a thoughtfully exposed electrical box. If ever there is a scene with things marked “flammable” you know there will eventually be an explosion even if there has been no HINT of an incendiary device on screen; sometimes I think the hero is so cool that all he has to do is look at a barrel marked “flammable” and it will explode. But the neat part, the reason why I think I like it so much, is that no one watches a movie like DI and walks away worse because of it. The gender roles are crap, but there is less chance of danger for a young girl watching the chick in this be weak all the way through then there is in watching something like G.I. Joe where she learns she can be tough like Scarlett--as long as her uniform is thoughtfully unzipped all the time. There’s less danger in watching the violence of JCVD’s sweet martial arts moves than there is in watching any number of revenge movies where the thrill isn’t in the fighting but in the gore.

I’m not saying you should run out and watch DI (really, I promise I’m not saying that) but I offer this slightly embarrassing testimonial of JCVD love to helpfully bring back whatever fond memories you too might have of a time when action movies were simple and action movie stars didn’t shave their body hair.

Sometimes you just want to watch stuff blow up, and I know that JCVD will always be there for me when I do.