On Deadly Blog is Colm Seeley and Padraig “Pod” Linden. We are approximately 20 years old and equally approximately from Belfast, Northern Ireland. In the summer of 2009 we embarked on a voyage across the length and breadth of the Sea…gal. Inspired by curiosity and guided by Vern we bought and are currently watching Steven Seagal’s entire headlining filmography (as well as Executive Decision because it was in the big box set). We are currently at the cusp of his his Great Descent into the quagmire of straight-to-dvd movies. But please understand that I mean quagmire in the most affectionate way possible, like if you were five years old and wading through it in your wellies: it’s tremendous fun even though you understand that you’re walking through much and you’ll feel dirty afterwards and the the filth will never come out. In the same way we are already Marked for Life.
I need to make it clear than none of these films are being watched “ironically” or with a “post-modern sensibility”. I love Steven Seagal and think that when he’s properly utilised he does great things on anyone’s scale (Out For Justice is a fantastic film) but like all those we love he makes mistakes. I am not a Seagal apologist. Some of his movies are irredeemably bad, meaning that apart from the man himself there is little to hold your attention. The contest for out and out worst film we’ve seen so far is a dead heat between The Glimmer Man and The Foreigner. The former has its ridiculous title going for it, whilst the latter has some amazingly bad sequences and some of the worst “I’ve just gotten Adobe Premier” editing I’ve ever seen. The Glimmer man has an acceptable story, badly told and The Foreigner has a terrible, incomprehnesible story that is badly told (I still have no idea who Dumois was working for or who the Russian motherfucker in the airport was), but I don’t know which one is more worth your time.
That rambling paragraph was to try and establish how we’re watching these films. If you think Steven Seagal is a fat burned-out joke then this blog will not reflect your opinion, nor will you find solace here if you try and defend The Glimmer Man. On the IMDB boards for the Glimmer man all of the posts seem to fall into one of two categories: “The Glimmer Man is a great thriller” and “Steven Seagal is fat. lol”. Now, as much as I understand and would rather spend time in the company of the former group, I fear that only the latter argument is true, if misguided.
Throughout the course of the blog we hope to do a number of things. We’ll gradually get caught up with posts on what we’ve watched, which means we should always have something to write and we hope to put up some essential clips from the films and promote some clips to the envied status of .gifs. We’ll be giving impressions and opinions on the movies after we watch them and maybe some extended essays (starting with the fascinatingly inept lead hitman in Hard to Kill). We might possibly be liveblogging one (we ended up with two copies of Out of Reach thanks to how the box sets worked out) since I’ll be out of the country for a while and might record audio commentaries for some of them so you can add another two guys shouting “OH SHIT!” at the appropriate moments. Speaking of which, we’ll have posts concentrating on the “OH SHIT!” moments along with “What the fuck is he doing/wearing?” and something dedicated to trying to discern what he says when he mumbles, which I’m tentatively calling mumblecore (a pre-existing term, not one I made up). <Shit, wait, MumbleCorps is better. That’s what it’ll be called.> I’m sure the structure will get more clear and I can comeback and separate this by category in a few months time.
In addition to Pod any of our friends who were at any of the viewing will be able to post, but they can introduce themselves if needs be.
Beyond Seagal both of us have a few interests and I may start another blog chronicling those (like movies that don’t have Steven Seagal in them) but right now we’re concentrating on a focused Seagal blog but if it gets dry expect some non-Seagal filler, tagged as such.
Colm
-changing his essence
