Okay, you start off the day chasing ninja street punks through an airport, and by the end of the night a guy wearing forty-eight square feet of straw on his head is kicking your ass all over a China Town whore house. What do you do? Probably cry like a little girl and go running home to mama, right? Yeah, that's what I thought pussy. (How can you even look at yourself in the mirror?) But what does Jack Burton do in that very same ninjaful situation? He just looks that big sucker right in the eye and says, "Gimme yr best shot pal. I can take it." Which is why everynight before I go to sleep I put on my muscle shirt and imagine that I'm Jack Burton, and not you. It's not really a fair contest though. Sure gangs of street toughs scare you, even when they wear those ridiculous horozontal-stripe sunglasses, because you don't ever have to deal with them. On the Highway of Life, you don't ever get out of your truck. In Jack Burton's case however, years of punishing his kidneys with alchohol have probably left him fairly incontinent, and so every hundred miles or so, he gets off the Highway of Life on the Exit of Life and pulls into the Rest Stop of Life to go take a piss in the Urinal of Life. What I mean by that little metaphor is this: Every Day Jack Burton's life is filled with the same kind of nonsense. The guy puts up with more shit than Bruce Campell in Evil Dead 1 and 2 combined. But the best part is- he doesn't have a fucking clue. He thinks he's just a normal guy. It's like he has some kind of brain tumor that makes him forget everything that's ever happened to him every time he wakes up in the morning. Like that movie "Momento" but with more karate and less retarded bullshit. All day long Jack gets chased down alleys by undead ninja-sorcerers who go around kidnapping every woman the guy's met in his entire life, and whenever he gets the chance to catch his breath, he says something like, "Woah, woah, woah, hold the damn phone, Wang. You want me to believe that Chinese acrobat-ninja-zombie-P-Funk All-Stars have stolen all of the 1986 LA Raiders cheerleading alternates and plan on using their blood to fuel their low-rider kung-fu rocket ship? I just want to get my truck back!" Jesus Dog-Eating Christ! Yesterday you saw two magical RockEM SockEM robots battle for the fate of the world and a fat ninja guy inflate like that little blue Willy Wonka bitch until he exploded! Figure it out! Your life is Alice in Zombie Ninja Wonderland, and you might as well just shut the hell up and accept it. Jack. I do feel bad for Jack, though. Sure he's a moron. And sure I emulate him anyway, but he can't even spend an evening gambling for fish heads on a wharf in China Town or launch into a c.b. radio monologue about an eight foot tall maniac throwing Goldie Hawn off a boat without finding himself surrounded by craziness. He's like a magnet, but instead of attracting metal, he attracts kung-fu adventure, except instead of just attracting kung-fu adventure, he attracts it and then gets his ass beat like a fat third grader wearing a "Bill Nye the Science Guy" tee-shirt. He gets the shit knocked out of him more in one day than Tina Turner did in the whole sixties. It makes you wonder why they kept sending him out on missions. "Okay, we've got two dozen highly trained martial arts masters and a kung-fu magician, who should we send to the enemy headquarters? I know! We'll send the drunk ass trucker!" Why not just send one of the ninjas but cut off his arms and legs first. If on a guy's resume all it says under "skills" is "not blind" and "whiny bitch", maybe you shouldn't make him CEO of the company. Oh well, I guess its "all in the reflexes," anyway.

Big Trouble in Little China, 1986 Directed by John Carpenter Starring Kurt Russell as Jack Burton and half the population of Asia as ninjas. If we're not back by dawn, call the president. It took two dozen Vietnamese seven year olds almost four months to create these hats, using only a square mile of straw and their own blood-caked fingers. Good job, girls! This is the killer zombie ninja enemy in the film. Fear his exploding head! Click here to go to the next page