S02E02 - The Sidehackers

Plot

A member of a sidehacker racing team becomes familiar with a traveling biker entertainment gang when the gang's leader needs his bike fixed. The hot-tempered gang leader tries to convince the sidehacker to join his group, but to no effect. When the sidehacker later on turns down the advances of the gang leader's girlfriend, a horrible lie leads to the sidehacker's idyllic life being shattered and seeking revenge against the ones who had destroyed everything.


Movie Review

What kind of film were they trying to make here? That was the question that ran through my mind as The Sidehackers unfolded, mostly in the latter half of the film. The movie's title would indicate that this is some kind of sports film, but the movie itself says otherwise. Of course, if the film itself is good, then that would excuse that kind of disconnect between title and film, but the overall result presented here is not something to be proud of.

As mentioned above, one would think Sidehackers was a film about the eponymous sport of motorcycles with side carts (the so-called "sidehacks"). But the sport plays very little of a role in the story, if any. In fact, its only use is to pad the movie's run time, and boy, does it pad. The sidehacking races just go on and on and on with absolutely no relation to the narrative other than a flimsy reason to tie the protagonist and antagonist together. And the sidehacker bike's appearance at film's end also serves no purpose other than to remind the viewers that the movie is named after a niche sport.

Outside of these races, the movie is a generic biker film that tries to one up other biker films with unsettling brutality. Said brutality is, of course, the deaths of the two main females, particularly the girlfriend of the film's protagonist. In a set of scenes that are jarring compared to the rest of the film, the hero's girlfriend is viciously raped (no nudity, but little is held back) and strung up on the ceiling after she is killed. The villain's own girlfriend, who is abused throughout the film, ends up getting choked by the villain during a fit of madness. To say this film is misogynistic is putting it lightly.

And let's not forget about the characters themselves, who inhabit a set of personalities that try to have depth but end up over the top. The prime example of this is the movie's villain, JC, who chews enough scenery to make a whole new film; if not for the rape scene, he would make this movie hilarious. The hero tries to hard to be a gruff hard-ass with a soft spot in his heart, and the two girlfriends, despite their polarizing characters, still end up portrayed as attachments to their male counterparts. The only truly annoying character is one that appears near film's end and who burns his hideousness into the audience's minds with his terrible joke-telling. Everyone else in the movie doesn't have anything interesting to truly distinguish them.

In short, the film fails at being a sports film and fails at being a good film in general. Outside of the sidehacking, the generic biker narrative is completely uninteresting beyond an unnecessary rape sequence. Some people might choose to elevate it a little because of its interesting decision to go with a nihilistic ending, but that only makes a terrible film a miserable one.


MST3K Review

With the "season shock" between seasons one and two finished, now I can judge MST3K's episodes on their own merits, and while The Sidehackers does offer some good riffs, it isn't one of the strongest episodes in the series. This episode actually became infamous because before this film, Best Brains would never watch a movie before writing their riffs; they always wrote their jokes while watching a movie for the first time. The brutal rape scene in Sidehackers convinced them to change that policy and watch a movie in its entirety before committing to using it in the show. The movie's nihilism streak, coupled with the rape scenes that they had to excise, likely contributed to the riffing's overall subdued feeling.

On a positive note, I did enjoy the one riff done by Cambot, the bot only seen in the show's opening. The parody on the EPSN sports tracker was brilliant.