Slipstream (1989)

Oh look, it’s a post-apocalyptic future, Ma! This time around, possibly man-made natural disasters have turned the world into the playground of a system of heavy winds – or something – known as the Slipstream. There are apparently some more civilized city states still around, but those seem to exist upwind and leave the rest of the world alone to wear all kinds of post-apocalyptic fashion. But instead of dune buggies, everyone has small aircraft, clearly making for the superior post-apocalypse.

Bounty hunter/bum/charming rogue without the charm and about half a brain Matt Owens (Bill Paxton who manages to portray a guy who is by far not as charming as he or the script thinks he is in a very charming manner) drifts around the world in his rundown little plane. When he encounters two police people from one of the city states – the LAPD style psychopath Tasker (Mark Hamill) and the supposedly nicer Belitski (Kitty Aldridge) - who have just caught a murderer in a natty suit (Bob Peck) with a taste for poetry and a talent for healing, he does what every sane man would do, steals the guy he will dub Byron, and flies off trying to bring Byron to wherever it is people pay for Byrons. Obviously, on their way, the odd couple will encounter various groups of the kind populating all post-apocalyptic wastelands (even the picturesque ones), have sex (with women, not one another), and will learn valuable lessons, while avoiding the particularly angry Tasker and the not quite as angry Belitski. It will also turn out that Byron’s right out of a Philip K. Dick novel.

This pretty weird and woolly SF epic by Steven Lisberger, aka the guy who directed Tron, apparently bankrupted its producer on account of finding no audience in Europe and no distribution in the US. Not to kick a dead pig, but I suspect reading the script before putting down any money might have saved someone here.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy my time with Slipstream. It’s just that an off-beat mix of all kinds of SF and post-apocalyptic clichés presented in the form of a picaresque and with little special effects work beyond the flying sequences in my experience is not exactly the kind of movie that’ll draw in huge audiences, even if you have Mark Hamill doing a nice turn as Evil Future Dirty Harry for a bit.

Predominantly, Lisberger’s film is odd, seemingly going out of its way to turn even theoretically pulpy and exciting sequences weird, presenting what on paper should be its big action sequences with the visual equivalent of a confused shrug, because instead of really making us excited about Matt saving Byron from having been tied to a giant kite by a wind worshipping cult while having to fight off Tasker, it really rather wants to get back to another one of its many pseudo-philosophical dialogue sequences. And boy, are there many of those in the film, all vaguely meandering around confused and confusing attempts to define what makes us human made by an idiot (that would be Matt) and the inevitable android (Byron, obviously, and that’s really not a spoiler here) and the various weirdo mini cultures they encounter (the lumpen proletariat! pirates! rich people! etc). From time to time, the film gets a real bee in its bonnet and does things like Byron doing a Fred Astaire imitation while Matt does some slow-dancing with a pretty Rich Girl who is clearly fascinated enough by that perfectly dumb, most certainly stinky, and rather chauvinist stranger to bed him. Did I mention this thing gets admirably weird more often than not?


So yes, nobody not involved in the production of the movie should be terribly surprised this was not a hit at any box office. However, if you’re of the right age or have read the right books, Slipstream is a very fun time, the movie equivalent of one of those 60s or 70s science fiction novels that were interested in the same sort of things as your Dicks or your LeGuins but not terribly sure about what they actually wanted to say about these things and even less sure how to express it, and so just decided to send their vaguely drawn protagonists travelling through various goofy corners of the imaginary world. If that sounds like a direction you think more science fiction movies should go in, Slipstream’s going to be a great time. Plus, you’re probably me, so congratulations.

In short: U-571 (2000)

World War II. The crew – including Matthew McConaughey in his “young star” phase, Harvey Keitel in his “Harvey Keitel” phase, and Jon Bon Jovi in his perpetual “can’t act” phase -  of the submarine of Lt. Cmdr. Mike Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) is sent on a top secret surprise mission to use a lucky opportunity to grab an Enigma Machine from a German U-Boot.

Things do of course become more complicated than that, and soon the US submarine is destroyed and most of its crew killed, with only a handful of men under the command of XO McConaughey alive on a German U-Boot that has seen better days. More tense complications do of course ensue during the attempt to get the Enigma Machine in allied hands.

This is the other diamond in the otherwise naff crown of director Jonathan Mostow, standing at eye level to his pretty damn great Breakdown. In fact, his two good films are so good, I can’t help but think the director must have been exceedingly unlucky with outside forces on his other projects, for the kind of talent for suspense and tense action his two excellent films demonstrate can’t have been a fluke. Obviously, the script Mostow’s working from is of dubious historical authenticity (if you want to know about the actual way Enigma was cracked, Wikipedia and a bunch of sources mentioning many people from exotic countries like Poland, France, and the UK this film has never heard about apart from a tiny mention once the plot is over beckon), and its characters are cut from very typical genre movie cloth.


However, the script does know how to make its shorthand characters just lively enough for an audience to care about their fate, and provides the damn great cast many a good opportunity to sweat and stare dramatically without the plot ever getting bogged down in melodramatics. Instead, things always feel tight, tense and teetering on the edge of catastrophe, Mostow using all tricks of the thriller-style war movie to do a very classic thing: dragging his audience to the edge of their seats. It does help here that the film, despite its historical inauthenticity, is the kind of war adventure that very well knows that war isn’t actually an adventure, so this isn’t only showing heroic pursuits, but men following these pursuits while in desperate fear for their lives, everybody quickly coming to the edge of their respective breaking points. Which, obviously, enhances the tension Mostow creates through masterful staging and editing of the suspense quite a bit.

Three Films Make A Post: He's not just in your mind...he's in your house.

The Vagrant (1992): This is the second and final feature film special effects guy Chris Walas directed, and, despite being a marginal improvement on his “sequel” to Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, if only by virtue on not pissing on a classic, it’s really no surprise to me his directing career didn’t go anywhere. Though, to be fair, Walas, didn’t write the script (that was Richard Jefferies), so it’s not exactly his fault that this supposed horror comedy only ever aims for the most obvious joke and eschews the social satire its set-up (Yuppie versus possibly imaginary vagrant! Intense homeownership!) suggests, instead playing out like a long, long, looooong episode of the “Tales from the Crypt” show. Walas’s direction, while certainly professional enough, doesn’t add anything of note, so it’s the job of Bill Paxton’s enthusiastic (if again puddle-shallow but what is he supposed to do, re-write the script?) performance to keep an audience awake to the end.

The Lightning Incident (1991): This TV movie by Michael Switzer featuring a cult that really needs to acquire and sacrifice our heroine’s (Nancy McKeon) baby for reasons of post-colonial shenanigans, isn’t terribly great either. A couple of times, it hits upon an effective moment or two – usually involving dream visions or very standard conspiracy tropes done alright - but the pacing is draggy and the filmmaking not terribly involving. Even though there’s a lot of material in the basic plot to make an interesting little horror film about colonialism featuring a heroine who is actually closer connected to the people she has to fight off than she knows and/or children paying for past sins of their parents, in practice, the whole she-bang sits awkwardly between classic pulp racism and a more complex treatment of the questions its script begs. The heavy hints of the film having ambitions on being a less exciting Rosemary’s Baby don’t help.


Rumpelstiltskin (1995): Finishing today’s trilogy of not terribly great 90s horror films is this example by Mark Jones, that finds a revived Rumpelstiltskin (Max Grodénchik) also doing some baby stealing, though in this case, to acquire a soul. Fighting against Rumps are the baby’s mother (Kim Johnston Ulrich) and the most horrible man alive (one Tommy Blaze). To nobody’s surprise, this is exactly the kind of movie you’d expect, with a bog-standard (fairy-tale background or not) quipping 90s supernatural horror villain in an okayish monster suit, murdering people with okayish special effects while doing nothing exciting whatsoever. Don’t even ask questions like how Rumps learned all the stuff about 90s pop culture he never stops referencing when he was transformed into a rock for the last thousand years, or how someone making a tearful wish in the presence of his rock is entering into a pact that sells a baby soul to him, or what the hell a Tommy Blaze is – nobody involved in this part of 90s horror ever cared about these kinds of questions, because all they were interested in were the quips (which are all horrible) and the effects (which won’t turn anyone’s head). Making an actual movie was just too much effort in the wild 90s world of Leprechauns, Wishmasters (yes, I know, there’s one good Wishmaster film) and Rumpelstiltskins.

Predator 2 (1990)

In the far-flung future of 1997, LA’s early 90s gang wars have taken on apocalyptic dimensions, with a semi-militarized well-equipped police force apparently unable to even win straight shoot-outs against half naked but at least properly armed gang members. Perpetually enraged Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) is still trying, mind you, but really, his only ability as a policeman seems to be shooting people really well, so it’s difficult to be impressed by him, or his bunch of doomed side-kicks (including characters played by Bill Paxton, Rubén Blades and Maria Conchita Alonso).

Things in Los Angeles don’t get better once a very rude alien (Kevin Peter Hall) starts murdering gang members, police, and anyone else who isn’t pregnant. Because this was made in 1990, a shady group of government male models under the less catwalk-ready leadership of Gary Busey and Daniel Baldwin gets in on the action too. Time for Harrigan to get even more angry.

Where John McTiernan’s Predator is one of the central masterpieces of US action cinema with a brain, the second film as directed by Stephen Hopkins is just a damn mess that squashes action movie clichés, violent conservative wish fulfilment, and a terrible looking version of the titular creature into a film that manages to be loud and obnoxious yet still pretty damn boring for most of the time. Hopkins just doesn’t have a hand for flair and pacing, and while his mass shoot-outs are competently shot, they never have the impact they should. Which of course might have something to do with the fact that on paper, the cast may be low budget action movie heaven, full of actors to put a smile on every action movie lovers’ face, but in practice could be any group of guys and one gal getting killed for our entertainment, for all the depth and interest these one-note characters have. Somehow the film manages to make me not care about characters played by Bill Paxton and Danny Glover, for Cthulhu’s sake!

Confusingly enough, the script with its pretty damn racist insistence on comparing the black parts of an American city with a jungle in the worst possible ways and gangs exclusively built on the worst stereotypes is by the same guys who wrote the first film, who apparently haven’t understood what they did there, nor how to use the alien monster they created well. But then, the various attempts at more Predator films following all have demonstrated a surprising inability to understand what works about the Predator and why. Though they, at least, won’t have monster suits that look as crappy as this one here, nor a director who is quite as inept at keeping it out of sight as Hopkins here turns out to be. Though they all seem to agree with this film that what the Predator really needs is to be less mysterious and dangerous, and more like a space prick.


Glover’s Harrigan is a pretty sad excuse for a protagonist too. Sure, the film is obviously trying to present him as a man broken by repeated attempts to change the state of the city he is living in for the better, but it never actually seems to understand itself that he’s failing because he’s the proverbial guy who only has a hammer so everything looks like a nail to him, and so can’t actually come up with another direction for him to go into than to stay perpetually angry, shooting at somebody. Which a cleverer movie (say, Predator) might have realized and used to say something profound (or at least mildly clever), or something nihilistic, or perhaps even something hopeful. Alas, Predator 2 only uses it as an excuse for another (and then another) pointless shoot-out, but then doesn’t even have the ability to make that shoot-out at least actually entertaining to watch.

Term Life (2016)

Nick Barrow (Vince Vaughan) works as a planner for all sorts of heists, though he doesn’t involve himself in crimes where people get killed or actually hurt. His last plan for stealing quite a bit of money being held as evidence doesn’t work out terribly well, though. Someone murders the group that were his clients, which makes the father of their leader rather unhappy. Unfortunately, Viktor (Jordi Mollà), as the man is called, is a big Mexican cartel boss, so he’s bound to seek someone – like a certain planner he just might suspect to have sold his plan to two groups at the same time – to blame for the death of his son and do nasty things to him.

The first little talk between Viktor and Nick ends with the cartel boss leaving Nick in the hands of his goons to go and fetch Nick’s estranged teenage daughter Cate (Hailee Steinfeld) as a tool of persuasion. Fortunately, Nick escapes and grabs a rather unwilling Cate before Viktor can get his hands on her and goes on the lam with her. It’s really a rather awkward way for a father and a daughter to reconnect, particularly since Nick’s actual plan right now isn’t to find a way to get Viktor off his back so much than it is to keep Cate and himself alive until a freshly signed life insurance policy comes into effect and Nick can die with a good conscience.

Exacerbating the problem of survival is the fact that the people who actually killed Viktor’s son and his gang, a group of corrupt policemen lead by Joe Keenan (Bill Paxton), are on Nick’s and Cate’s trail too; and let’s not even speak of the father-daughter trouble ahead.

Peter Billingsley’s crime thriller and father-daughter (sort of) road movie Term Life certainly is not an original film: it’s full of well-worn character types going through well-worn plot points until things finish on a bit too much of a happy end. It is, however, also a well-directed film chock full of fine actors breathing life into their stock characters. There are not just Vince Vaughn and professional teenager (who is actually really good at playing this sort of role while feeling real and not becoming annoying) Hailee Steinfeld. This is the sort of film that can cast Annabeth Gish for what amounts to a single shot of a telephone conversation with Steinfeld, just happens to include guys like Shea Whigham or Mike Epps among Bill Paxton’s gang, and adds Jonathan Banks and Terrence Howard for supporting roles. Basically, it’s a bit of a dream cast for this sort of thing, and elevates what could be a film going through the motions into something at least much more lively.

When there’s action, Billingsley does stage it well, if not spectacularly; I couldn’t shake the feeling spectacle wasn’t really in the budget.

Billingsley does have a nice, straightforward directing style that works well when it comes to supporting actors doing their thing, and isn’t interesting in wowing the audience with style. Rather, it’s the kind of direction that puts itself in the service of characters and plot and prepares room for them to breathe. Which is just the right sort of approach for this sort of film, if you ask me.


The script might not be original but it features quite a few good scenes and no bad ones (which makes it a good film in a Howard Hawks sense as well as in my book) with particularly the father-daughter conflict feeling believable enough to make me root for the two to patch things up and survive. In general, most scenes here have a moment, a line or a dialogue exchange that feel more real, more interesting, or just more alive than usual in this particular sub-genre. It’s not enough to start mumbling about this being a future classic but most certainly enough to turn Term Life into a satisfying genre film that puts more effort in than it strictly needs to.