Suburban Commando (1991) December 4th, 2023

I’ve probably seen the trailer for Suburban Commando 50 times because it was included in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze VHS tape I watched obsessively as a child. In my mind a mystique grew surrounding Suburban Commando as the funniest comedy of the 90s. Lines like “What’re you nuts? It’s the 90s, we’re gonna sue you!”, “That’s not my cat!”, and Christopher Lloyd’s immortal “I was frozen today!” promised Suburban Commando was as funny as The Mask, as futuristic as Back to the Future, and as… wrestling (?) as The Predator. I was mistaken, and disappointed.

“Your disappointment is a sign of low intelligence, any fool could guess a movie starring Hulk Hogan would be bad!” Shut up intrusive-thought demon!

Suburban Commando stars The Shining’s Shelly Duval and Christopher Lloyd from The Addams Family Values! These are films with pedigrees! Prejudging Suburban Commando simply because it ALSO stars the most famous professional wrestler of all time would be doubly foolish! I’ve seen wrestlers deliver genuinely heartwarming, action packed, and hilarious performances in films like The Princess Bride, They Live, and Train Wreck. It’s simply not fair to presume a movie’s overall quality will suffer because of their inclusion. Unfortunately none of that ballyhoo unfucks Suburban Commando.

No amount of star power or amazing performances from Shelly Duvall and Christopher Lloyd (they aren’t amazing) could save a script that could only be improved by burning. While Suburban Commando is actually as funny as the unlaughable Ghostbusters (2016) and as futuristic as Roger Corman’s pocket-change-budgeted Space Raiders… it IS twice as wrestling as The Predator! How much ‘wrestling’ a movie has is directly correlated to how many professional wrestlers appear in a movie. While The Predator has twice as many governors as most films, Jesse Ventura is its only bonafide professional wrestler. Suburban Commando is obviously a Hulk Hogan vehicle, but one of the main villains is played by The Undertaker! Yeah… the thinnest of silver linings but it’s the phantom of quality we can grasp as we drown in Suburban Commando’s in-ground-shit-pool of a movie.

My inner child, who spent countless hours exhibiting pre-psychotic tendencies by not fast-forwarding past the trailers on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze VHS, was utterly let down by Suburban Commando. I wish I could give that little dude back the hope he held for so long. The hope that a Hulk Hogan movie could be good, or at least better than the trailer.