DIE HARD WITH NO VARIANCE

DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE (1995)
dir: John McTiernan

DIE HARD WITH NO VARIANCE
MAD #340, October 1995
w:Dick DeBartolo
a: Drew Friedman

Third in the Die Hard series. This is the only movie parody Drew Friedman ever did for MAD, at least in my time frame.

An explosion happened at the Bonwit Teller department store in New York City, and Simon (Jeremy Irons), the German terrorist responsible calls the police and threatens to set off another bomb unless John McLane (Bruce Willis), a cop recently suspended, goes to Harlem in his underwear wearing a sandwich board that says 'I Hate N----s'. This is a convoluted plot device to get Willis and Samuel Jackson to meet but I think it was excuse for the filmmakers to see what they could get away with, since the 90s are well past the "it was another time" date.

John and the police are both confused as to why they have to do this, as am I, and why Simon chose him but go through with it anyway. Zeus (Samuel Jackson), a local shop owner, sees this and rescues John before he's killed by residents of the area. They escape and get John back to his precinct and now Zeus is forced to team up with McLane to solve this case in the movie reality where civilians can be drafted into police business. The case involves solving a bunch of riddles and lots of improbable explosions, gunfire, and car chases. This parody is about how derivative this is of other action movies. The plot will be summarized in further detail with the Cracked parody.

So far, there have been caricatures of Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Eddie Murphy, Leslie Nielsen, Nick Nolte, Sean Connery, and Dennis Hopper.

A subway explodes, John and Zeus do the usual action trope where cops have the authority to take peoples' vehicles, after driving through the city and wrecking property they keep the criminals from getting away in a ship.

Caricatured are Keanu Reeves and Sylvester Stallone.

Stars of other action movies keep claiming that they're being ripped off but ultimately the original conventions come from Warner Brothers cartoons.

Drew Friedman has been a MAD regular for years. I had the pleasure of working with him at my first job with Topps lo these many years ago. I'm sure almost everyone here is familiar with his work which has appeared almost everywhere. A documentary of his life and work by Kevin Dougherty called Vermeer of the Borscht Belt is in the works.


TRIED HARD WITH VIOLENCE
Cracked #303, November 1995
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Walter Brogan

This also opens with the idea that this movie was taken from earlier action movies, including cartoons. Did Cracked have spies at MAD? It should have also had Alfred E. Neuman claiming Sylvester P. Smythe is a ripoff.

Simon requests John wear sign with a racial slur, he gets saved by Zeus yadda yaddda. One of the puzzles they must solve is to keep a bomb in a briefcase from going off in Central Park by placing four gallons of water on top of it. They have empty 3 and 5 gallon jugs and need to figure out how to get the bigger one to hold exactly four gallons.

The jars do not need to be full of urine like in the parody, but any excuse to be scatological. They now must get to Wall Street to stop another bomb from going off. The Germans also let the police know that a bomb will go off in a city school, but don't say which one.

Now John and Zeus are told to go to Yankee Stadium on their scavenger hunt throughout the city. It turns out this was all revenge for McClane killing Simon's brother in the first Die Hard. Meanwhile, the police call in every city worker to search every public school for bombs. McLane figures out there never were any bombs, it was all a decoy so Simon and his group of terrorists could break into the Federal Reserve and steal all their gold.

John and Zeus find the trucks that are used to haul the gold. John commandeers a truck to chase them down as they drive through the aqueducts under New York. The Germans try to flood the ducts to drown McLane but he rises above ground in time.

John and Zeus chase the Germans onto a boat they're escaping on but are captured and tied up on another boat where a bomb is set to go off. Somehow everyone ends up chasing each other in Canada by helicopter and when the terrorists are finally caught and killed, Zeus gives John a quarter to call his wife and reconcile with her.