When we started throwing around the idea for this Cinemasochist Circle Jerk thing, I though it’d be an amusing exercise in pain and a way for me to steal a little more of Fistula’s soul without him realizing it. I figured I’d seen the deepest depths of what blackened horrors the human mind could bitch slap my sanity with, so nobody would be able to throw anything at me that would give me more than a couple of groans and maybe a headshake or two before throwing together a review and filing it away into the archives of my mind under “Meh”. I got a little uneasy when I realized that Ragnarok would be the one picking my movie(s) for me, but alas, I thought I was prepared. My other options were The House That Vanished (which I’ll be doing shortly in some pseudo-macho display just to prove I can) and another movie whose existence I couldn’t even find proof of, let alone a copy of. I already had a copy of Nukie given to me as a “thank you” gift from the guys of Stomp Tokyo for partaking in their annual forum pledge drive to help pay for the upkeep of the Bad Movie Message Board… this might explain why I haven’t been back to the BMMB in a year or two… KIDDING!

Anyway, I’ve had this DVD sitting next to my computer for a while now. I looked at it on occasion and scratched my chin while the possibility of watching it traipsed about in my skull like a drunken muppet stumbling through a field of wild flowers, ultimately opting for other shit every single time. I no longer have the option of ignoring this little nightmare, which should be considered the kiddie porn of bad movies: be wary of anyone who owns it, report them to the proper authorities, and find religion so you can pray to whichever God you decide on that he/she/it will strike down such ghoulish monsters in a fittingly torturous fashion. With that, I condemn myself to the darkest levels of cinemasochism and spread my butt cheeks for Nukie… Ragnarok, when we do the Circle Jerk revenge sequel, prepare yourself for a mouthful of Polonia, and that’s all the warning I’m gonna give…

This bubonic plague disguised as a kids’ movie follows two alien children from outer space named Miko and, of course, Nukie. He has nothing to do with nuclear arms or radiation or anything whimsical or witty like that, his name just happens to be Nukie. These brothers from the stars look like the half-aborted offspring of E.T. and Mr. Miyagi’s scrotum dressed in some kind of tattered rags (unless those are just parts of the costumes that have become worn and ragged and deemed as too much effort to repair…) and they have the ability to travel the stars as flying flashes of light, though the shapes they take while traveling short distances across Earth look more like giant sperm made of cosmic energy. Miko crash lands in the US, where he’s quickly smuggled away to a NASA lab somewhere to be poked, prodded and generally tortured by the sinister bitch goddess Dr. Rhinestone (who should go back to being a cowboy, because “Like a Rhinestone Scientist” doesn’t quite carry the same zing to it…) who is studying the little wrinkled gnome in the name of, of course, science. Miko’s not alone though, because he has bleeding heart good girl scientist Dr. Pam Carter nearby, who spends the movie half-heartedly telling Rhinestone that what she’s doing is cruel and displays no semblance of actual scientific merit beyond her white coat, glasses, and pinned back hair.

As for our titular crime against humanity, he somehow lands half way across the globe in the wilds of South Africa, where he frightens the local animal life and generally stumbles around like an obnoxious little shithead. In a nearby village, Catholic missionary Sister Anne is teaching the heathen savages about the glory that comes with knowing the shame of God, an old unwashed drunkard known simply as “The Corporal” runs what has to be the most unsuccessful general store in the world, and NASA gopher (“Go for this, go for that”… that’s right, you’re going to die inside with me, damn it!) Dr. Harvey arrives to search for Nukie while also trying to maintain his status as the dreamy hunk of science meat that all the ladies back at NASA’s top secret alien experimentation building are fighting over. Even this part is hard to swallow as Harv’s played by Steve Railsback who, despite being a pillar of awesomeness for portraying both Charles Manson and Ed Gein in his glorious bad movie career, is way too menacing in appearance to play off as either the good guy or the resident heart throb. Then again, I’ve known a few girls who wanted me to dress up like Jason Voorhees and chase them through the woods to commit simulated rape fantasies with them, so who’s to say there aren’t women out there who need to wash their drawers after seeing Mr. Railsback in action… Hell, the guy’s so damn cool (with the exception of this “movie”) that I almost pop wood over him myself!

Latent homoerotic tendencies aside (up yours Freud, a cigar is just a cigar!), Nukie and his runny nose are contacted by Miko via psychic link, who tells his brother that he must come and save him from “America”. While trekking across the wilderness, our flaccid excuse for a hero makes friends with two young twin boys from the village named Tiko and Toki… great job writers, very creative… The kids are of course there just to mime the brotherly struggle of their galactic counterparts as Nukie tries to find Miko so the two can return to their home planet. When Nukie’s mischief making (including crashing Dr. Harvey’s chopper, which the doc later MacGuyvers back together with a wad of chewing gum…) puts the village into a uproar that includes chasing the little freak around the grasslands in a terrible moment of spear chucking madness that’s made all the more genital bashingly painful by speeding up the film… The adults abandon Sister Anne’s false god in favor of their own and their witch doctor rolls some bones (and a couple of dominos…) and decides that the boys (two of the only kids I’ve seen in this entire village so far…) need to be exiled to appease the gods. Tiko (or Toki, it doesn’t really matter which) gets bitten by a snake and has to be left at the local hospital while Toki (or Tiko, again it’s not important) continues on with Nukie to try and find the mysterious realm known as “America”.

Speaking of America, back at NASA’s secret lair Miko discovers that despite having a security super computer that’s so advanced it can hold direct conversation with its human controllers (and has strange hypnotic powers and a suitably maniacal laugh to accompany it!), the guys at NASA apparently don’t lock the doors to their specimen containment rooms. Free to roam the compound, Miko introduces said super computer to the concept of love and other emotions, making friends with the advanced technology, which now refers to itself as “Eddie”. Not only does Eddie now chill with Miko while everyone else is away, but he also falls in love with “Dr.” Carter based on her enchanting odor like some kind of ‘G’ rated Demon Seed and also helps NASA director Dr. Glynn touch his inner child inappropriately and rediscover his boyhood dream of being a circus clown with the help of NASA’s excessive “strobes and colored spotlights” budget… Do you hear that? It’s the sound of a glass bottle being broken so I can run the shards of glass across my wrists and bring an end to the suffering before I’m forced to finish this review.

Jesus jump-roping Christ, what haven’t I covered yet? Uhm, the Corporal tries to capture Nukie and sell him to South African officials, so there’s that. While the rest of the movie’s animals speak in grunts and animal type noises, it seems that monkeys speak perfectly good English so Nukie has no problem communicating with them. This of course leads to the latest in useless characters for the movie: a chimp in a red dress that hangs around the Corporal’s general store and only serves to knock things over, infest the food with fleas and bits of dung, and save Nukie from his eventual capture… despite the fact that the little idiot can simply turn into a ball of energy and fly away… What else is there? Oh yeah, while he’s helping the twins survive their exile, Nukie also puts them to sleep with a disco fireworks display lullaby spectacular (click the rolling head at the bottom of the page for more on that…). Still with us? Well, it’s your funeral. Let’s try to get this over with.

Miko finally stops dicking around and waiting for his retarded brother to come and save him. With help from Eddie, “Dr.” Carter, and the general incompetence of the NASA security guards, Miko escapes from the compound. Dr. Harvey then smuggles him into South Africa where the shriveled up space morons are finally reunited, say goodbye to their Earth friends, turn themselves and the dress wearing monkey into balls of energy, and return home, hopefully dying painfully in an asteroid shower on the way. Dr. Harvey is left to hide out in South Africa for fear of swift and violent reprisal from NASA’s “collections” department; NASA responds to Miko’s escape by immediately giving up any possibility of a search and shutting down the project, classifying any and all files as top secret and shipping them off the to the CIA (they don’t really seem too concerned with this “greatest find of the 20th century” if they give up on it at the drop of a hat); and Sister Anne, having witnessed alien life first hand, immediately abandons her monotheistic faith and becomes a Scientologist… okay, that last part about Sister Anne was complete bullshit, but admit it, given the shitstorm of petrified fecal matter I just waded through, you can afford me one stupid fantasy that didn’t actually happen in the movie, right? Thanks.

I once named my microwave “Nukie” because of its high output of radiation and the likelihood that it would one day kill me with said radiation. While watching Nukie, all I could think about was my regret for having not spent more time with my pet microwave, preferably staring directly into its glowing atomic bulb and advancing any possible brain tumors to a lethal point before something like this movie could happen to me. After having my toilet back up on me last week and wading through three inches of brown sludge in an effort to fix it, I’ve decided that said toilet will now be “Nukie” while the microwave will now be, uhm, Admiral Zap… for some reason.

There’s nothing to watch here. I hated every one of the characters, I hated the writing and even Steve Railsback couldn’t even come within a mile of saving this helpless toddler from the burning building of craptitude. Not only is there nothing worth watching, but it’s presented in such a haphazard way that it’s not only pointless to watch but it’s also incredibly difficult to watch. I honestly think that a script was written and the scenes were shot like any other movie, but I don’t think they were filmed with any intended order to them. If someone told me that Nukie was really just a bunch of random scenes shot with a common element to them then sent to one miserable editor who was given the unsavory task of trying to splice them together into a cohesive movie, I wouldn’t be surprised if they continued the story by saying that it actually took several editors to do the project, each one killing himself after trying to edit no more than 20 minutes of film, thus requiring a new one to be brought in only to end his or her life in the same fashion until, seven dead film students later, it was final completed, bolted into a crate, and filed away in a warehouse full of similar crates Raiders of the Lost Ark style. Additionally, each NASA scene is opened with a narrator telling us exactly what it is we’re about to be subjected to. As if being shot in the head isn’t bad enough, being told that you’re about to be shot in the head just makes it worse. If Miko’s half of the movie could’ve consisted of nothing but the narrator speaking his lines while we looked at the exterior of the NASA facility, we could’ve trimmed the movie down immensely. It still would have been painful and stupid and killed an unhealthy number of my remaining brain cells, but I probably could have stomached the whole debacle in one sitting rather than the three fractured viewings that it required in its current state…

The so-called “creative” staff went on to do pretty much little to nothing of worth, either accepting the career suicide that would be Nukie or trying to piece together some semblance of a resume. Co-writer Ben Taylor is the only interesting addendum to this tale of woe as he, despite some of his other works being cookie-cutter romantic comedies or family friendly Christmas tales, wrote and directed the movie In the Flesh in 1998, whose imdb synopsis reads like this: “A police detective (Ed Corbin) assigned to work a gay bar on an undercover drug operation gets hooked up with a gay student hustler (Dane Ritter). After the student witnesses a murder, the cop provides him an alibi and invites him to stay at his apartment. There a homosexual relationship develops.” Taylor also co-wrote a movie called An Unusual Affair about a teacher family man type who has a gay relationship with a male student; wrote a movie called Fragile Witness about a gay boy prostitute who helps a handicapped girl run for her life after she witnesses a murder; co-wrote a movie called Over the Edge about a boy who is sexually abused by his father and a girl who’s abused by her mother who then agree to kill their respective abusers (ala “Faust” or Throw Momma From the Train…); and he wrote Innocent Little Angel about the teen son of a cop who investigates the murder of a gay teen prostitute that his dad supposedly committed by doing some dick work of his own (don’t laugh) in the seedy part of town. On the plus side though, I’d rather the man do a hundred more movies about gay teen prostitutes and sexually explorative middle aged men than have to sit through another Nukie… though this does explain in excruciatingly uncomfortable detail why Tiko and Toki were forced to run around the entire movie in loincloths so short they’d make the guys in NAMBLA blush… uggh.

In case my point hasn’t been driven home enough, Nukie is garbage. Complete and irredeemable garbage at that, not fun garbage. It’s not infuriatingly bad like some movies, it’s depressingly bad. Heart crushingly bad. I can’t even get worked up about it because it’s the kind of movie that just abuses you and makes you feel horrible about yourself. It’s the evil stepmother of bad movies. It beats you with a broom, pours scalding hot water over the welts, dresses you in rags, and kicks you down the stairs into your basement cell where you’re left to be chewed on by the rats while everybody else gets to go to the big gala costume ball and have a good old time. If I had to choose between showing my future non-existent children this movie or Cannibal Holocaust, they’re gonna be watching Cannibal Holocaust. Anthropophagus? Nekromantik? Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer? My kids will see each of these before I’ll even consider letting them ruin their lives by watching Nukie. I used to suffer from crippling depression in high school, but I’ve been a lot better these last 8 or so years. Nukie left me with a black pit of bile festering in my stomach the likes of which I haven’t felt clutching my soul since the day I realized that Revenge of the Nerds lied to me and the awkward kid never gets the hot girl. I’d rather let Estelle Getty and Sylvester Stallone have oily geezer sex on top of me, then hatch a pair of brown pythons on my face as opposed to watchingNukie ever again…