It's the first question answered by Robert Rodriguez's outrageous and splendidly anarchic joke "Machete." And it grieves me to say it but Steven Seagal was right.

Now we know why Seagal -- along with Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme -- was a conspicuous absence from Sylvester Stallone's singular assemblage of muscle-bound uglies in "The Expendables." He was too busy making Rodriguez's altogether more delightful skin, blood and gorefest "Machete," where the antisocial, parodistic, adolescent joy of it is all on the screen rather than offscreen in Stallone's assemblage abilities and penchant for selling his movie by calling his "the ugliest cast in the history of movies."

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Machete

3 stars

Starring Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez and Steven Seagal in Robert Rodriguez's blood-drenched parody of a grindhouse-style fantasy about immigration vigilantism. 105 minutes. Rated R. Opened today in area theaters.

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I beg to differ. The face of "Machete" star Danny Trejo, alone, can offset Stallone's remarkable gathering of cauliflower ears, muscled jowls and battered cheeks. That face is one of the wonders of nature in cinematic America. After earlier years of drug addiction, felony imprisonment (in San Quentin, among other places) and prison boxing, Trejo now possesses a cinematic visage that is almost a national monument to noble ugliness and toughness in the human male. He's been one of the great movie villains for years.

I've had the pleasure of interviewing the fellow and, not surprisingly, he is, in life, a thoroughly gentle and genial and articulate sort, nothing at all like the hack-and-slash lawman in "Machete." He's playing a dude here who can behead four bad boys with one swipe, dispatch one guy with a meat thermometer, another with a corkscrew and turn a handful of well-armed marauders into defanged pussycats with just a weed-wacker and some hedge-clippers.

If you think that's badass, you should see Jessica Alba, as a gorgeous anti-authority Fed infatuated with him, take out one machine-gunning thug with just a well-aimed pair of stiletto heels.

"Machete" is absolutely outrageous. I had a thoroughly immoderate -- and shameful -- good time. It has its dead spots, to be sure. But here's a movie whose antisocial spirit is so well-developed that it literally crucifies Cheech Marin, playing a gun-toting priest, while his murderer scoffs that his sacramental wine "tastes more like Merlot." That same fellow -- played by Jeff Fahey (who was, once upon a time, a dancer in Buffalo -- no kidding) has a daughter named April who is played by Lindsay Lohan.

When first seen, Lohan is retrieved in a drug stupor from a crack house. In her next few scenes, she parties nude with Machete (Trejo) and is whisked off, still nude and dead drunk, to Marin's church. In the movie's final scene, Lohan's in a nun's habit having joined Trejo, Alba and Michelle Rodriguez's little makeshift venceremos brigade.

They're the good guys. The bad guys are the unlikeliest cinematic coalition ever -- Seagal as a Mexican drug lord, Robert De Niro (no-kidding) as a Texas pol in a cowboy hat, Fahey as his drug-dealing assistant and Don Johnson as a border patrolling vigilante pledging eternal "vigilance" over everything but his jowls and waistline.

In the guise of keeping our borders chaste and pure, the bad guys are actually doing the dirty work of keeping them porous for the drug trade in all the right places. So here's a movie that is not going to please Lou Dobbs or the state legislators of Arizona.

For the rest of us, it's a juvenile antisocial hoot, as you might well guess just from its origins in a parody movie trailer between segments in Rodriguez and Tarantino's "Grindhouse." So hilariously appealing were those parody segments, voila, here's a whole movie in which absolutely nothing is holy, not even itself.

Just look at the cast of this baby. Take that Sly. Nobody is expendable here.

jsimon@buffnews.comnull