Past Misdeeds: (The) Shepherd (1999)

aka Cybercity

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

It’s after the end of the world (again and again and again). This time the sweet one-two punch of World War III and an ecological catastrophe has turned our blue planet brown, so humanity has fled underground. There, our descendants dwell in what looks surprisingly like often pretty foggy warehouse sets, suffer from a lack of decent lighting that can only cause depression and off-screen monologues, and are dominated by various competing religious cults and sects.

Our hero of the evening, one properly action movie monikered guy known as Boris Dakota (C. Thomas Howell) works as a Shepherd – an enforcer/killer – for Miles (Roddy Piper) whose religion seems to be what happens when an Evangelical TV preacher goes worse. Miles’s guys (and it’s only guys) seem to be – as far as I parse the intensely vague world building of the film – one of the big two crazy cults in the underground world. Right now, Miles’s guys are living in a truce with the other big cult, the skimpy leather-clad girls of Lilith (Heidi von Palleske), keeping the apocalypse after the apocalypse at bay by not killing each other in public. Or something.

Dakota for his part isn’t much of a believer in anything anymore, since he suffers from the classical action hero traumatic past of a murdered wife and son, and now spends the time he doesn’t kill people for Miles and his old friend Lyndon (Mackenzie Gray) growling off-screen monologues about how much humanity sucks, and watching virtual low-res memories and screen savers of his family on what looks suspiciously like sun glasses, an awesome invention the film never even bothers to name but that will have excellent uses when it comes to hurting the audience’s eyes, as well as for exposition, and other random stuff.

However, when Dakota is assigned a new and - as he hopes and Miles will make sure - last target, something you might at first confuse with a plot surfaces, for said target, one Sophia (Marina Anderson) just happens to have a son right of the age Dakota’s kid was when he was murdered. So obviously, Dakota saves Sophia and the child from other assassins instead of killing her and attempts to take on the role of their protector. At first, Sophia isn’t all too keen on Dakota but after enough lackluster attacks on them, she surely will come around.

As you might suspect after this meandering synopsis of not much of a plot, if you go looking into this Roger Corman production directed by Peter Hayman expecting much of an actual movie as people generally understand the term, you might be a mite disappointed. The plot – such as it is – is really just a series of lamely reproduced clichés presented with all the enthusiasm and coherence of a late period Santo movie (which, if you don’t know your lucha cinema, means none whatsoever), with character actions and motivations that often don’t even make sense in the very broad interpretation of the word we use when talking about post-apocalyptic action cinema, underground (aka “we can’t afford to shoot outside, and Bronson Canyon’s too far away”) division. I, at least, can make neither heads nor tails out of the whole conspiracy angle between Miles and Lilith’s cults. If indeed there even is such an angle. I think it says everything about the quality of the writing here I’m not sure either way. Or, to take another example, why exactly does Lyndon act as he does in the final scenes? How the hell should the script know?

Obviously, things like suspense or excitement are right out in Shepherd, particularly since the action scenes are of the just barely competent type that neither wants to be creative nor exciting and just hovers around words like “there”. And nope, we don’t even get to see a titanic throw-down between Howell and Piper, which is probably for the better seeing how slowly Howell moves here.

However, while Shepherd is barely watchable as a serious piece of post-apocalyptic action film, it is a pretty brilliant lump of utter, inexplicable nonsense, and what creativity was involved behind the camera was clearly concentrated on a) providing various actors with as many opportunities for scenery chewing as possible, and b) adding absolutely pointless yet awesome nonsense/stuff/random insanity to as many scenes as possible. So Shepherd gifts us with great moments in cinema like Roddy Piper living in his own memory glasses world where he does the whole sub-Jesus thing, bare-chested and carrying around a humongous crucifix on his back (shades of Philip K. Dick there, also, obviously). Roddy also dreams of hitting people with one of those crosses-on-a-stick (that’s the technical term, right, religious readers?) bishops and the like carry around, literally likes to kick his henchmen when they are down, and spends most of his screen time angrily ranting and raving in sentences that can’t be meant to make sense. Truly, that part of the film is a thing to behold. And while Howell didn’t get the message about the scenery chewing beyond “do a manly growly voice, dude”, von Palleske and Lyndon in particular really join in the fun with gusto.

Other joys here are the random appearance of a cannibalistic punk (this is not a film who could afford a gang of them, sorry) who leads our hero back to the boy with his awesome power of smelling little boys (seriously), a just as random Roddy Piper crucifixion, and last but not least a cameo by good old David Carradine.

Carradine is not a man to be trifled with in the finding nothing undignified sweepstakes, so his character is only listed as “Ventriloquist” in the credits. And indeed, David is one, and because this film is very special indeed, David Carradine isn’t just a ventriloquist but has his star turn here drugging C. Thomas Howell, then straddling him while good old C. Thomas dreams of having sex with a woman quite clearly not David Carradine, and proceeding to strangle our hero with his ventriloquist’s doll. A doll, that, for reasons I don’t even want to think about, also seems to be trans.


And this, ladies and gentlemen, should really answer anyone’s questions about whether Shepherd is worth watching.

Sleeping Dogs (1998)

Welcome to the future of 2029. The world’s economy isn’t interested in your old “money” anymore. The it thing now are emeralds, and the most important illegal emerald kingpin of them all is one Sanchez Boon (C. Thomas Howell). Boon is letting his emeralds cut by women with electronic gags only dressed in their underwear, so you know he’s a very special kind of guy. He also thinks his connection to the Agency (don’t ask me) are tight enough he can even kill one of their agents without consequences.

Jewel thief Harry Maxwell (Scott McNeil) has chosen just the night when Boon puts that theory to the test to rob the villain’s main emerald store. Harry’s not too happy with how things are going down, for not only does he end his strike of consecutive break-ins without murder when he has to gun down some of Boon’s henchpeople but he soon finds himself involved in a series of firefights and explosions. On the positive side, he finds instant action hero love – which means the characters are going to sneer at each other and exchange unwitty one-liners for half an hour or so – with one of Boon’s emerald cutting slaves, one Pandora Grimes (Heather Hanson).

Said series of explosions and firefights somehow (and it’s really better not to think about the plot mechanics here too closely, lest one’s mind might just break) leads everyone onto a prison ship bound for titan with a cargo hold full of weapons and cryogenically frozen criminals. Of course, Boon soon un-freezes the criminals, becomes BFFs with super-evil android-the-film-calls-cyborg Zee 4R (Kiara Hunter), and takes over the ship, so that finally Die Hard on a space ship can begin.

Oh yes, it’s another Lloyd A. Simandl production, made by the purveyor of only the finest Canadian cheese, and it’s got everything I have learned to love and fear about Simandl’s productions of the era. Namely, this is an action film so stupid, it might be possible to weaponize it and kill people – or at least their brains – stone dead through prolonged exposure. Oh no, it’s already happening to me!

So, we have a plot that makes little sense even if you’re giving it the special action movie dumbness pass, takes place in a world whose technological level makes no sense at all, is tacky at all get out, and never ever stops to throw out at least one delightfully idiotic bit per minute. No scene goes by that doesn’t either contain numerous explosions, guys holding their guns like John Woo reject gangsta wannabes, needlessly exposed breasts, an awesome stupid idea (quick example: the film gets some of its early exposition, like the name of its protagonist out of the way by letting Harry dictate stuff for his autobiography while he’s breaking into a highly secured building), or if you’re really lucky all of that at once.

Then there’s the acting: McNeil mostly seems a bit embarrassed by the whole affair, nearly visibly wincing throughout the psychotronic dialogue where nearly every sentence is a surreal winner, while Hanson keeps up a never-changing look of annoyance, whatever is going on around her, whether she’s flirting or being threatened with torture. Hunter gives her sadist android gal by contorting her face into all kinds of interesting grimaces like a nine-year-old’s concept of how bad guys emote, an approach that seems perfectly appropriate to the film’s idea of characterisation. Throning over them all is C. Thomas Howell, putting on an affected voice that might be a particularly offensive idea of a cliché gay voice but that just as well might be an attempt at a British accent gone horribly wrong, providing Boon with the most cartoonish tics he’s capable of thinking up, and chewing the scenery as if somebody had lathered the cardboard used to turn the usual warehouse sets “futuristic” in honey. It is truly a thing to behold more than one to describe, for words just cannot do Howell’s performance here justice.

Director Micheal Bafaro barely keeps all this nonsense und nearly surreal bullshit under control in typical late 90s cheap-shot movie hired gun style. That is to say, he adds a lot of inappropriate (the only kind fit for this movie) slow motion and does his best to pretend three grey walls and a handful of monitors from the 80s do a futuristic set make. Though I have to admit, some of the action scenes work as well as anything this deeply stupid in conception could, so kudos to Bafaro, I suppose. And given how much I enjoyed this misbegotten thing calling itself a movie, I’m not even wearing my ironic hat right now.

In short: Shepherd II (1999)

Remember how much I loved the first Shepherd in spite of and because of all the horrible nonsense in it? Well, the Roger Corman produced sequel nobody asked for does its hardest to drive that love right away again. It’s the sort of low budget sequel that contains so much recycled footage (though in black and white) from its prequel even the least suspicious of minds can’t help but imagine someone involved didn’t actually have the budget to shoot a full movie and did everything he could to pad out the running time.

Ironically, the new footage we get to see looks even cheaper and shoddier than that in the first film, with director Eli Necakov putting all his faith and all five dollars of Corman’s money in sets that often don’t even pretend to have anything in it, VR scenes that use the same background effects as a bad early 90s house video, some truly awful VR strippers to add in the all-important breasts (though we also get a full repeat of the first film’s sex scene, because that’s the kind of film we deal with here), action scenes that don’t look a bit awkward but just bored and disinterested, and a plot there’s really no point in synopsizing, as the film spends little time on it anyway.

Of course, the thespian glories – such as they are – of ventriloquist David Carradine and priestly Rowdy Roddy Piper are absent too, and while the returning Mackenzie Gray (now spending his time in a cyber chair and wearing funny wigs in the VR world), C. Thomas Howell and Heidi von Palleske do some perfectly decent eating of scenery, things around them – even the things so silly they should provide decent entertainment value – dreg so painfully, all sense of fun I had from the first film is drained out of this one as if it were beset by fun vampires. Which would probably be an improvement over the plot the film actually has, so call me, Roger.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sf,stuff,eli necakov,c. thomas howell,heidi von palleske,mackenzie gray

On ExB: (The) Shepherd (1999)

aka Cybercity

Hey, you! Yes you! You might not know it, but you need some Shepherd in your life! It’s the cheap-o post-apocalyptic sort-of cyberpunk action movie of choice for everyone who wants to witness how Roddy Piper gets religion, C. Thomas Howell makes a growly face, and David Carradine becomes one with his ventriloquist’s doll (I suspect The Method).

Just click on through to my column at the brilliant ventriloquist doll lovin’ Exploder Button for enlightenment!

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,post-apocalypse,action,peter hayman,c. thomas howell,roddy piper,marina anderson,david carradine,other places