El Crappo

If there was a worldwide vote to find out once and for all who is the weirdest celebrity, my vote would without a doubt be Lou Diamond Phillips. Without a doubt!
I mean, seriously. His name is Lou Diamond Phillips for starters. Second of all, he shares WAY too many characteristics and qualities of a tortoise, and thirdly, I bet he's one of the rare people that are actually overjoyed to be a guest interviewee on countdown special after countdown special. In a place like Hollywood, which has a reputation of chewing up hopeful movie stars and spitting them out without even thinking about it, Lou Diamond Phillips would be one of those dreadful lollies that just get stuck in your fucking teeth and you spend all fucking day trying to toothpick the bastard out until you eventually just give up and leave it there so it can fester and create massive cavities.
The worst part is, we, Hollywood included, never learn any lasting moral from this. We keep on eating those terrible lollies. Well, I mean, I don’t. Because I have small jagged nubs poking out of rotted gum instead of teeth from leaving taffy in between them for weeks. My days of eating foods that are totally impractical to consume are gone.

Not one to abandon a sloppy at best parallel, let’s just say Diamond Phillip’s latest big screen frolic, El Cortez, is a big, chalky El Cavity. The best way to describe this one is Rain Man meets City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold. Or Curly’s Cave of Secrets or something. I don’t know, it’s been a long while since I’ve thought back to that film. And there was a reason. One which was firmly established by the El Cortez trailer. Because gold-fever movies suck.

To be reasonable, El Cortez isn’t the worst looking small-scale movie ever. It has a decent stabbing of a hand. And… actually, no, that’s the only thing that it has going for it. But on that note, something tells me that this movie never even received an official, approved trailer. It shows sex scenes (the woman like, has sex with all the male leads, it seems) and a grisly knife through the hand scene. And even the ‘THIS PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED BY MPAA’ notice at the beginning literally gets blown away in some very cheap and unnecessary animation. Please don’t make that a trend. I think I can only bear that novelty the once. Come to think of it, I couldn’t even bear it the once.


So like I said, it shares connections with Rain Man because Lou Diamond thinks he’s some poor man’s Dustin Hoffman (and he’s not even that), and City Slickers 2, because a ragtag group of people search for some gold with dramatic and zany consequences. Like, anyone remember when Jon Lovitz got shot and he died, then it was revealed the bullets were only blanks? Hehehehe. See, dramatic and zany. Hehehehe.

El Cortez is, without reasonable doubt, a movie starring Lou Diamond Phillips. And a woman with the sickest, boniest back I’ve ever seen… It’s like a donkey carcass picked clean by vultures and than vacuum packed into human skin. Shudder. She adds nothing.
My predicted ending is that Lou and the girl get the gold, but the girl is grifting him and tries to steal it. And then all the main characters reveal that they are grfiting her. Or something predictably unpredictable like that. We’ll see I guess.

El Cortez - Brazos Pictures
Anticipation Level: Low.
Look out for: I enjoyed the hand stabbage. But still, I'm really clutching there.
US Release date: 6th October, 2006.
Trailer Source