DNA (1996)

aka Genetic Code

Borneo. Dr Ash Mattley (Mark Dacascos) has found some bug based enzyme that – if synthesized – could result in completely undetailed and unexplained medical progress that will save millions of lives. How? Why? Huh? The film ain’t telling. Alas, Ash has found no way whatsoever to actually synthesize said enzyme, which, given that his research is a side project he’s doing while he operates an underfunded and understaffed free clinic, is not too much of a surprise.

One day, one Dr Wessinger (Jürgen Prochnow) walks into Ash’s life. Wessinger has found the solution to Ash’s problem, and really only needs his help to find another of those wonderful bugs to realize Ash’s dream. Of course, Wessinger is no mere scientist but a mad scientist, and in truth only wants to use Ash’s enzyme to clone (or whatever) the bones of an ancient, unidentified beast the locals saw as a demon. After the following sudden and inevitable betrayal by the German madman, a cave explodes, and Ash believes Wessinger to be dead as his enzymatic dream.

Two years later, Claire Sommers (Rob McKee) arrives in town. She’s positive Wessinger is still alive and has come to stop whatever he’s up to, and she needs Ash’s help to find him. The expected mix of old jungle movie tropes, an antagonistic “romance” and a monster suit that badly rips off H.R. Giger’s most popular creation ensues.

If a viewer is willing and able to make their way through what William Mesa’s DNA laughingly calls its plot, can survive a long game of trope bingo, and is okay with the film’s bizarre ideas about human relations, speech, and general patterns of behaviour, they could actually get quite a bit of enjoyment out of this one. Really, it’s only the plot’s insistence on pretending to be complicated and deep that could get in the way of enjoyment, for the character work (such as it is) and dialogue are often very funny indeed. There’s really something to be said for a film whose creators genuinely seem to believe 50s B movie mad scientist dialogue is still a good idea in the mid-90s.

To be fair, they then make the good move to hire Jürgen Prochnow for the mad scientist role and somehow manage to convince him to go all-out on it. He’s thundering his lines with greatest conviction and enthusiasm, as if this stuff were Shakespeare or Das Boot, putting so much physical effort into his line delivery, he’d put Ben Kingsley in his “vigorous vicar” mode to shame.

Poor Mark Dacascos has it rather worse than Prochnow. Where the bad guy at least gets all the most ridiculous lines, Ash is such as straightforward white hat kind of good guy, there’s really very little he can do with the role. Apart from showing his expected and typical competence in unarmed fights, knife fights and shoot-outs. Ash, it turns out, must have studied jungle warfare and melee fighting as a useful side-line to medicine sometime. This way, he’ll never be without patients. Alas, he’s also pretty boring. Which seems rather symptomatic for the career of Dacascos, a guy who never really seems to have gotten his fair shake - and no, having to pretend to get beaten up by Keanu Reaves is not what I mean - despite talent and looks and the ability to not be an asshole in public.

The action sequences are generally competently done, Mesa usually staging and shooting them clearly and concisely. Whenever things are supposed to be scary, on the other hand, things do tend to get out of the director’s control.

But then, what could anyone do with a rip-off of the xenomorph this blatant (but crap and green)? Apart from showing it not quite as clearly and as often, of course. Or, just filming it in a way that would not suggest the size of its head will cause the poor guy inside the monster suit to lose his balance any minute now?

But then, what would be the fun in that?

Sinners and Saints (2010)

Post-Katrina New Orleans. Policeman Sean Riley (Johnny Strong) is in about as bad a shape as is his city. His little son died a couple of years ago from an illness, his wife left him, and he’s a husk of a man drawn ever further into cycles of violence. Consequently, we find him straight-up murder the man who just shot his partner (a cameo by good old Kim Coates in one of his few non-gangster stints as an honest cop). Things will go even downhill from here, for Sean soon finds himself invited into a particularly horrible homicide investigation. Detective Will Glanz (Kevin Phillips) is the lucky bastard tasked with solving a series of killings whose victims are set on fire, then doused with a fire extinguisher, then set on fire again, and so on. Sean’s supposed to be his street crime expert.

As luck will have it, Colin (Sean Patrick Flanery), an old army buddy of Sean’s seems to be involved in the whole messy affair, though it’ll take some time to clear up if he’s working for the guy leading the killers (Costas Mandylor), is a direct part of the crimes, or what. What’s clear early on is that Sean’s nearly suicidal violent tendencies – and his efficacy as a killer – might actually be the appropriate tools to solve this particular case.

William Kaufman is one of the good handful of truly great, individual voices doing direct to video action films in the USA during the last fifteen or twenty years. In Kaufman’s films, there are little if any of the writing and acting short cuts you usually find in these affairs, nor are these films that can’t afford to show any actual action.

Sure, the more up-market actors here – among them Tom Berenger, Jürgen Prochnow, Jolene Blalock and the inevitable Method Man – are only on screen in a few scenes in what amounts to cameos but unlike the typical way direct to video action often operates where certain characters are only in a film because the filmmakers have Dolph or Jean-Claude for a shooting day, here these actors are cast in roles that are actually part of the plot; well, the Prochnow character might not have been absolutely necessary, but what the hey. Kaufman – who co-wrote the script with Jay Moses – clearly knows how to construct his action film as something with an actual plot, and while it is certainly one full of clichés, it uses its clichés with the kind of conviction that turns them into something a little more satisfying than you’d expect. There’s also the plain fact that Kaufman in general uses standards character types and tropes with a great degree of intelligence and care, putting the decisive bit more thought into standard character arcs and actually writing characters instead of character types. Why, Sean Riley often feels like a person as much as he does the Cop on the Edge.

Interestingly enough, the film even has some ethical concerns about what the things its main character does so well say about him as a human being, or rather, what parts of his humanity they might destroy. At the same time – which makes rather a lot of sense for an action flick – Sinners and Saints is also very specifically interested in how abhorrent acts of violence may or may not be justified depending on one’s position. It’s certainly a more thoughtful approach than you usual find in direct to video action, and it leads to a film which features certain Cop on the Edge movie standard scenes it can approach from a somewhat different angle.

On the acting side, Johnny Strong isn’t quite as, well, strong as I would have wished for the role. He’s not terribly good at acting out the more nuanced emotional beats, though he’s certainly not phoning things in, nor does he ever feel like robot or inadvertently funny. He’s just not quite there. He’s certainly a fine action performer, though, which goes a long way in this context. Costas Mandylor for his part does some fine scenery chewing (but not too much), a weird accent, and is believable as a guy who does truly horrible things as a matter of course.


Last but not least, the action is pretty terrific, with various violent shoot-outs, as well as a few more acrobatic bits, all staged by Kaufman with a sort of casual surety that really sells them as gritty and exciting.

In short: The Keep (1983)

1940. A troop of German soldiers under the command of Hautpmann Klaus Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow doing his usual “good German” shtick that has little to do with the atrocities the real Wehrmacht committed quite without SS help, but you know how it goes with these things) takes control of an ancient, and rather strange, keep in a Romanian mountain pass. Some greedy soldiers accidentally free an Ancient Evil™ from its captivity, and soon, said Evil is killing about one soldier a night. Woermann finds himself helpless to do anything against it.

Things don’t improve when SS major Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne) arrives with his men to “help out”. Carting in a Romanian, Jewish scholar (Ian McKellen) and his daughter (Alberta Watson) just before they’re deported into a concentration camp only provides the Evil with a useful Renfield. Fortunately for those parts of the world who aren’t fans of the whole evil thing, our AE does have an Ancient Enemy™, too. A certain Glaeken (Scott Glenn) slowly makes his way to Romania and just might get around to doing some good.

I’m what you’d generally see as a good candidate to appreciate Michael Mann’s The Keep (based on one of the few readable novels of the mostly insufferable libertarian F. Paul Wilson), as I’m the kind of guy who often sees no problems with films taking a “style over sense” approach. Of course, most of those films don’t make heavy, yet empty gestures towards saying something profound about the nature of “Evil”, and aren’t as dull as The Keep is.

Pretty the film sure is, though, with Tangerine Dreams’ ill-fitting soundtrack and Alex Thomson’s beautiful photography producing some fine picture postcards with sound. Alas that prettiness is completely at odds with the tone the film needs to have to actually reach the effect it is aiming at. It’s rather difficult to feel dread, or even become convinced of the existence of Evil when the film’s visuals have nothing whatsoever to do with these things. Mann’s type of artificiality as a director is the completely wrong one here too, completely missing the mark of the dream-like state the film needs to induce in its audience to work, given the vacuousness and just plain bad craftsmanship of a script that drags out the least important scenes until they feel as if they were going on forever, and barely finds time for the important stuff.

One might think the really rather wonderful cast might manage to salvage something out of the script’s mix of dullness and disinterest in the themes its supposedly about, but all performances are just as dull and lifeless, the unconvincing and uninteresting dialogue delivered in ways suggesting everyone involved was replaced by a life-sized manikin of themselves.

The resulting film has such an air of boredom surrounding it I’m not even interested enough to find out what went wrong during the course of The Keep’s production (because this surely can not be the film Mann actually wanted to make); I’m just glad it’s over and I won’t have to watch it again until I’ve forgotten how little I care for it.

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