Hulk Hogan made his feature-starring debut within the 1989 motion movie No Holds Barred, which was a catastrophe with each critics and audiences. Following No Holds Barred, the artistic course of continued to fail Hogan along with his subsequent feature-starring car, the 1991 science-fiction comedy movie Suburban Commando, wherein Hogan performs Shep Ramsey, an extraterrestrial warrior whose spaceship crash-lands on planet Earth, the place he befriends a unusual suburban household.
Whereas the kid-oriented Suburban Commando is a welcome departure from the blood-soaked No Holds Barred, the movie’s sheer innocuousness made it unappealing to the shifting tastes of Hogan’s wrestling fandom in 1991. The failure of Suburban Commando, which grossed lower than $7 million on the home field workplace, destroyed Hogan’s box-office credibility and successfully ended his bid for main Hollywood stardom. It is a actual disgrace, as a result of along with his bronze physique, inherent likability, silky bleach-blond hair, and nearly incomparable charisma, Hogan, who died on July 24, 2025, on the age of 71, was a cultural icon who might have achieved feature-film stardom with the suitable materials.
Almost 35 years after its preliminary launch, probably the most enduring legacy of Suburban Commando, and the general botched experiment in translating Hogan’s wrestling stardom to the large display screen, is how this era turned a cautionary instance for later wrestling superstars Dwayne Johnson and John Cena, who’ve achieved nice success in Hollywood by exactly avoiding the disastrous errors that had been made with Hogan.
‘Suburban Commando’ Is Higher Than ‘No Holds Barred’ (Which Is not Saying A lot)
Suburban Commando
- Launch Date
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October 4, 1991
- Runtime
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88 minutes
- Director
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Burt Kennedy
The launching of Hulk Hogan’s big-screen profession was engineered by his longtime wrestling promoter, Vince McMahon, who proved to be utterly inept at translating Hogan’s rampant wrestling recognition to the large display screen. As a substitute of showcasing his plain qualities as a performer, Hogan’s first feature-starring car, No Holds Barred, degrades his picture via its sheer predictability and unbridled vulgarity. With No Holds Barred, McMahon couldn’t have devised a worse starring car for his high draw, even when his purpose had been to sabotage Hogan’s profession and waste the reported $8 million invested within the movie.
With Hogan’s subsequent characteristic starring car, Suburban Commando, for which McMahon was solely connected in an advisory capability, a aware try was made to include the campy appeal of the Nineteen Eighties wrestling product to draw the younger viewers that was repelled by the utter grossness of No Holds Barred. Suburban Commando opens as a jokey Star Wars rip-off, with Hogan’s larger-than-life motion hero character, interstellar warrior Shep Ramsey, trying to seize an egomaniacal and obnoxious intergalactic despot named Normal Suitor. After the mission ends poorly, Shep is ordered to take a trip, and he angrily smashes his ship’s management methods, thus forcing him to crash-land on Earth.
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After arriving on Earth, Suburban Commando turns into a fish-out-of-water comedy, as Shep homes his broken ship on the residence of a harried architect, performed by Christopher Lloyd, and his spouse, performed by the great Shelley Duvall. As Shep varieties an emotional attachment along with his household, his whereabouts are tracked by Suitor, who sends a pair of intergalactic bounty hunters to Earth to destroy Shep. Nonetheless, whereas the comparatively family-friendly Suburban Commando represents a welcome change of tempo from the dirty and sadistic No Holds Barred, the movie’s intentionally hokey particular results and sitcom-like conditions contribute to an total lack of compelling curiosity, making the movie a completely dispensable and forgettable viewing expertise.
Hulk Hogan Is Too Light-weight in ‘Suburban Commando’
Hulk Hogan made his memorable feature-film debut reverse Sylvester Stallone within the third installment within the Rocky franchise, Rocky III, wherein Hogan performs Thunderlips, a flamboyant wrestling champion who pretends to battle Rocky in an exhibition charity match. Nonetheless, whereas Stallone supplied an efficient instance for Hogan to comply with by way of establishing his personal profitable big-screen persona as an motion daredevil, a greater mannequin for him was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who gained superstardom within the late Nineteen Eighties by mixing motion and comedy, as Hogan tried to do with Suburban Commando.
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Certainly, Schwarzenegger was initially connected to star in Suburban Commando, which was a scorching venture in Hollywood, ostensibly as a result of it supplied a seemingly foolproof car for a longtime motion star like Schwarzenegger to exhibit their innate potential to inhabit an enormous panorama, on this case a complete galaxy, primarily via the drive of their magnetic character and outsized presence. This proves to be Hogan’s failure in Suburban Commando, as whereas he dwarfs Schwarzenegger and Stallone on a purely bodily degree, he fails to command the display screen the best way his dimension may recommend. In a intentionally foolish position that principally requires him to intimidate the remainder of the forged along with his imposing presence, Hogan as a substitute seems and appears comparatively atypical, like a pleasant neighborhood area vigilante.
Dwayne Johnson and John Cena Could not Have Survived ‘Suburban Commando’
Whereas the enterprise {of professional} wrestling, or sports activities leisure, has considerably expanded over the previous 40 years, no performer has achieved higher recognition inside a given period than Hulk Hogan did within the Nineteen Eighties. He didn’t fail to realize main movie stardom as a lot because the lackluster feature-film automobiles that he was given, with No Holds Barred and Suburban Commando, failed him. This disconnect is very evident as compared with how later wrestling superstars, resembling John Cena and Dwayne Johnson, achieved movie fame via a artistic course of that’s infinitely more proficient at grooming wrestlers for film stardom now than it was for Hogan within the late Nineteen Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties.
Certainly, as Cena and Johnson’s performing careers have been vastly helped by an enhanced artistic course of and high quality management ideas that didn’t exist for Hogan in his prime, there’ll at all times be a fascination in imagining how a youthful Hogan might need thrived in in the present day’s setting with a a lot stronger help system, simply because it’s attention-grabbing to invest how Cena and Johnson would have fared in the event that they’d been compelled to hold low-quality starring automobiles like No Holds Barred and Suburban Commando. Suburban Commando is streaming on Tubi.