In short: 88 (2015)

Gwen (Katharine Isabelle), suddenly finds herself in one of those archetypical US diners in the middle of nowhere. She has no idea how she got there, and doesn’t seem to be too sure who she is either. Parts of that will come back in a series of disjointed, out of order flashbacks to two different points in time when she seems to have been two very different persons – the rather mild-mannered version remembering this again, and a pretty damn murderous woman on a killing spree calling herself “Flamingo”.

Apparently, much of the violence has to do with taking vengeance on her former boss, psychotic drug lord Cyrus (Christopher Lloyd) for the death of the love of her life Aster (Kyle Schmid). Things get messy and violent in every one of the film’s timelines.

There is obviously quite a bit of Memento in the DNA of April Mullen’s film, but where Nolan’s film was very strictly structured, 88 is often confusing and disjointed. That’s not bad filmmaking, I believe, but rather a conscious decision by Mullen and screenwriter Tim Doiron (who also plays a supporting role on screen) to let the film mirror the shattered psyche of its protagonist, leaving the viewer often just as confused by the way things in her world and in her personality hang together as she is for most of the film. Mullen’s visual style adds to this feeling, giving everything a woozy and unreal quality that works well for what she’s doing here, at least for my taste, and also helps keep up a certain pulpy energy.

Isabelle is pretty great, too, providing a visual and personal anchor to proceedings, at once playing three – Gwen I and Gwen II are not perfectly consistent with one another – very different characters yet signalling clearly who is who while also showing a coherent emotional core.

In short: Total Recall (1990)

Truth be told, I’ve never been the greatest admirer of Paul Verhoeven’s US films. Sure, there are Robocop and Flesh & Blood, but even those I respect rather more than I do love them. My problem with this phase is its excessiveness, or rather, its excessiveness in exactly those aspects I least enjoy in a movie: camp so thick and aggressive it is basically weaponized, sledgehammer satire loud and shrill and aimed at all the easiest targets, usually paired with some of the old ultra-violence and the sleaze I do enjoy to just shout down anything about the films that might be subtle. The problem with this kind of excess for me is how tiresome it quickly becomes. Sure, the first half hour of Verhoeven shouting incessantly into my face is entertaining in a freakshow kind of way but afterwards my mind and attention start to wander, and after an hour, I find myself actually bored by all the noise.

Despite probably being the most controlled of Verhoeven’s film of this time, I can’t say I feel terribly differently about this adaptation of a (very) short Philip K. Dick story. For my taste, the film’s Dickian moments are drowned out by Verhoeven’s excess, the tendency to shout plot beats instead of simply hitting them, the terrible action movie one-liners Schwarzenegger spouts (like the constructed everyman he’s supposed to be, right?). There is, to be fair, a lot of imagination on screen when it comes to production design and worldbuilding, and the SF action movie meets spy conspiracy thriller plot is well enough constructed, it is just all drowned out by the soup of visual and aural noise Verhoeven builds up. That situation is of course not improved when what should be the film’s human anchor is represented by Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of an actor. Schwarzenegger’s line delivery is at its worst here, and his attempts at presenting as a human are deeply unconvincing.

The action is of course as competently realized as possible, but I can’t say I ever felt emotionally or viscerally involved (re-)watching any of it.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sf,action,paul verhoeven,arnold schwarzenegger,michael ironside,sharon stone,ronny cox

Cross Country (1983)

Ad “creative director” Evan Bley (Richard Beymer) is starting on a hastily planned road trip from his native New York to California. Surely, this may or my not have something to do with the fact that his – half secret – girlfriend was brutally murdered in her bed. Even before Evan has left New York, we learn that he’s a pretty angry and violent kind of guy. In a strip joint, he picks up dancer/would-be actress Lois (Nina Axelrod) who seems to push a lot of his sexual buttons, gets into a violent altercation, and then finds himself waking up on the backseat of his car, well, actually in Lois’s lap, while Lois’s friend John (Brent Carver) does the driving.

Obviously, a heated melange of sex and violence, secrets and lies ensues between these three; none of them’s a particularly pleasant character, and they all seem to have problems with sex, dominance, and violence in all their combinations.

At the same time, we regularly pop in with the man investigating the killing of Evan’s girlfriend, one Detective Roersch (Michael Ironside). After some time of beating people up and/or threatening them, Roersch hits on Evan as his most probable suspect. He’s not going to file that in any report, but is instead planning on finding Evan and blackmailing him to pay for the treatment of Roersch’s ill wife. Which, come to think of it, is probably the purest motive any character in this movie has for doing anything, yet also fits nicely into the film’s thematic thrust.

For thematically, Paul Lynch’s early neo noir/proto erotic thriller Cross Country is very much concerned with all the shitty horrible things people are willing for to do for love, sex, or the things they believe are one of these; it’s also interested in the more subtle ways dominance expresses itself in human relationships, featuring more then one scene in which the most obviously dominant character is not at all the one in control of the situation. This does fit nicely with the noir traditions the film obviously moves in, only no studio era Hollywood film would ever have dared even suggest to express its ideas about people and the world they inhabit in sex scenes quite as explicit, steamy, and often uncomfortable as the ones here. And really, once the erotic thriller as a genre was much more codified than it is here in its infancy, it quickly became impossible again to go quite this far into the more unpleasant recesses of the human mind while showing a lot of naked flesh.

Needless to say, nobody in this movie is a particularly pleasant person, but it escapes the curse of the classic “why should I care about any of these assholes” by also making them unpleasant in human and understandable ways, really mirroring rather typical human failures in businesses of the heart and the productive organs on a more intense scale.

Lynch is a interesting director, having a huge filmography in TV, but frequently dipping into the sleazier and more interesting parts of the silver screen as the director of nearly forgotten (and basically unavailable) gems like this, or rather less gem-like and certainly not forgotten movies like the first Prom Night. Lynch’s work here is stylish and intense, focussing on a world that’s dark and grimy, appropriately people by sweaty characters of dubious morals, giving the whole affair a nightmare noir quality that shines through even in the muddy VHS-based version that seem to be the only way to see the film right now.

The acting’s pretty fantastic throughout, the four main actors all portray their characters with intensity and ambiguity, always suggesting emotions not honestly expressed and a sexual and emotional intensity which feels wrong in all the right ways. Which really is a good way of describing the whole of Cross Country.

Visiting Hours (1982)

Politically engaged TV journalist Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant), barely escapes the murderous intentions of a mostly unspeaking serial killer (Michael Ironside) with a fondness for photographing the faces of his victims while they die during a home invasion; a friend of hers is not so lucky, and the killer escapes. Ballin’s injured enough to need to spend quite some time in the hospital. Unfortunately, the killer doesn’t seem to be done with her and starts regular visits to the hospital. He’s having trouble actually locating the journalist, but he’s clearly seeing that as an opportunity to just kill quite a few other people. The guy hates women more than men but isn’t one to overlook an opportunity for killing you, whatever your gender.

Given that the killer does this more than once without being stopped, it’ll come as no surprise to any viewer that the police here is less than useless for anyone not wanting to get brutally murdered. Luckily, Ballin’s pretty tough even in her traumatized and injured state. Plus, one of the nurses, Sheila Munroe (Linda Purl), a highly competent hard-working single mom, has taken quite a shine to the older woman and does her best to protect her and the other patients.

From time to time, William Shatner also pops in as Ballin’s boss, but I suspect he’s only in more than one scene because the production could get Shatner for a couple of days; as a character, he’s completely without consequence.

Which is perfectly alright, for at least half of Jean-Claude Lord’s Visiting Hours is difficult to read as anything but a paean to women. Specifically, women like Deborah Ballin and Sheila Munroe who do difficult jobs with competence, dignity, composure and compassion. On paper, this element of the film should not work too well with its more exploitation movie style sensibilities when it comes to the murders and the habits of its killer. In practice, the film is portraying its female characters so sympathetically, it is never a question if the film shares the killer’s hatred or not. Which doesn’t mean it is going to treat its protagonists nicely. It does, however, mean that there’s no space for a Shatner-style alpha male performance, nor any chance for these women to be rescued by anyone but themselves.

The film isn’t a gore fest. The killings do, however, have the nasty undertone of real violence, emphasising the shock and the helplessness of the victims before anything else. Ironside’s performance and Lord’s camera portray the killer’s misogyny and general hatred for humanity (going by the bits you can catch of his letters, he’s racist, to boot) through the physicality of the actor’s body as well as the staging, keeping the killer silent because there’s really no need for dialogue to express what he is about. There are a couple of flashbacks to the man’s inciting trauma that are, as well as the scenes in his apartment complete with framed letters answering his letters to TV and newspaper journalists and his murder wall, part of what looks like a conscious attempt at not turning him into a slasher movie like killing machine, and keeping him a broken human being.

Visiting Hours is clearly influenced by the slasher genre, though. The number of victims and the variety in murder methods makes this quite obvious. If you want, you can even read the final surviving character and the end sequence as a variation on the final girl trope that changes certain things about the basic nature of the final girl; virginity and such are not a thing of relevance when you don’t populate your movie with teenagers.

Indeed, the film does give the impression that the filmmakers (script by Brian Taggert, who has some pretty great and some pretty terrible work on his CV, much of it in TV) were very consciously trying to adapt certain slasher tropes to those of the kind of thriller you might have – in less violent versions than here – encountered in ABC’s TV Movie of the Week slot, films that also very often centred around competent female characters getting into exactly the kind of trouble the women here do, for no faults of their own. It works rather well, too, the fine performances by Grant, Purl and Ironside, the shape of the violence and Lord’s control over suspense set-ups fitting nicely with the slasher elements, suggesting yet another, less codified, way the slasher could have gone.

Murder by Night (1989)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

The charmingly named “Claw Hammer Killer” is haunting the nightly streets of New York, murdering women, as these guys inevitably do. His latest exploits are a bit below the standards of your typical ultra-competent movie serial killer, though, when one of his victims runs into a car, causing a crash and an explosion. Caught in said explosion is one Alan Strong (Robert Urich), probably out jogging at that moment, or something.

Neither we nor he do know what Alan was actually doing, for he suffers from a hefty bout of amnesia that leaves his past near and far a total vacuum to him. Apparently, he soon learns, he’s the reclusive owner of a successful restaurant he never enters, as well as the owner of a load of crappy modern art in his living room. He’s also a cipher to the world as much as he is to himself. Well, unless you’re the cop investigating the Claw Hammer Murders, that is. For said cop, one detective Carl Madsen (Michael Ironside) doesn’t buy Alan’s amnesia at all, and believes him to be a rich guy trying to avoid the trouble that comes with witnessing a murder.

Karen Hicks (Kay Lenz), the police psychologist tasked with helping Alan, does not at all agree with that opinion, but then, she clearly has no professional ethics and can’t resist the old Urich charm, so she’s soon having an affair with her patient. Why, she’s so into him, she’s even going to stand by him once Alan as well as Madsen start to suspect Alan might not be a witness, but the killer himself.

Paul Lynch’s Murder by Night, a TV movie made for the USA Network whose TV movie output was specialized on making genre movies below the explicitness of HBO but rather above the usual network TV movie fare when it came to sex, violence, and bad ideas, is rather a nice example of the form. Well, one might complain that it doesn’t go quite as far with its basic concept as it could do, turning the whole affair into more of a gaslighting affair than the portrait of a man who doesn’t know himself getting into trouble. On the other hand, however, the killer and his plan are sufficiently nasty and ridiculous to base an effective little thriller on.

The film is of course – being a TV movie - a bit conservative in its construction, so anyone who knows this kind of film will cop relatively early to what is actually going on simply by knowing the basic structure of this kind of plot. Lynch sells it pretty well, though, timing reveals and reversals nicely, and making good use of Urich’s general nice guy image exactly to cause just enough doubt in the audience. Plus, there’s another TV nice guy actor playing the actual killer, so you gotta congratulate the movie for some cleverness here, too.

The cast is generally doing a fine job inside the constraints of what this is, Urich being likeable and confused, Jim Metzler being likeable and evil, Michael Ironside doing his patented driven asshole cop bit as convincing as he always does, and Lenz doing the best with what she is given.


So, all in all, Murder by Night is a nice little example of a well-made TV thriller, winning over hearts and minds, okay, my heart and mind, via the virtues of craftsmanship.

In short: McBain (1991)

I don’t believe James Glickenhaus actually knew about irony, not to speak of anything with the post prefix, so he presents this patently goofy transferral of his typical New York vigilante shtick into a Colombia just waiting to be freed from tyranny by some Vietnam vets under the leadership of Christopher Walken(!) as the titular McBain – also including Michael Ironside as their arms dealer frenemie who really needs to feel alive by shooting a lot of people again as well as Steve James for all your action movie needs - and the worst rebel army ever as sort of spearheaded by a Maria Chonchita Alonso who commits to her role with total earnestness. Every cheesy bit of revolutionary kitsch his script comes up with, every dubious speech about the very real horrors of dictatorship and the domination of one Simon Escobar (cough) is done with total conviction, as if the stuff these people spouted had any actual emotional impact.

For a Glickenhaus film, the whole affair is surprisingly awkwardly paced, partly because the film does want to tell an epic tale of Vietnam flashbacks, the death of a friend and the following revolution but only has 107 minutes time for it all instead of the three hours it would probably need to get serious. More curious, even a couple of the action sequences fall flat, perhaps because so little of the film takes place in the grimy New York of the director’s best films. Instead, most of it was shot in the Philippines which do of course stand in for Colombia as well as take on their more typical role as Vietnam for a low budget production.

However, even though the whole thing doesn’t hang together too well, at least Walken, Ironside, James, Alonso and the merry rest of the cast are usually fun to watch, the film’s freewheeling moments of craziness can be pretty great, and from time to time, Glickenhaus comes up with the sort of thing I have by now learned to love him for. Take the scene where our heroes are in dire need of money to buy guns from Ironside, and shoot through a bunch of drug dealers, only to be taught the class politics of the drug war by the lone survivor (Luis Guzmán!), after which they rather steal from a banker (while pretending to be Mossad agents, because why not, right?). That’s not the sort of thing you’ll encounter in many vigilante and mercenary movies, and it is this kind of curveball that makes slogging through the slow bits perfectly worthwhile.


Do I need mention that Glickenhaus’s politics are certainly rather more complicated than those of the filmmakers of your typical flag-waving US action movie?

Hardwired (2009)

Welcome to a cyberpunky, corporate-owned future, where even the Pyramids have an ad banner stuck on them. Former special forces badass Luke Gibson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) has relaxed quite nicely into civilian life. His wife and he are clearly happy, and a child’s going to pop any day now. Alas, their car is hit by a truck, killing his wife and child. Because his insurance very suddenly expires, things wouldn’t look terribly great for Luke’s survival either, but a couple of corporate goons working for tech company high-up Virgil (Val “Doesn’t give a shit” Kilmer) convince his surgeon to save our hero by hardwiring an illegal experimental chip into his brain, as per the film’s title.

The procedure does indeed save Luke’s life, but he also loses large parts of his memory and starts to see things that suggest the chip is beaming ads right into his brain, a prospect that would most probably convince ad executives in our world to break a few laws, too. Worse, there’s also a kill switch installed that’ll blow up his head when he gets too uppity.

Fortunately, the mandatory semi-heroic group of hackers – tough yet avuncular Hal (Michael Ironside!), his paraplegic hacker son Keyboard (Chad Krowchuk), and the adorably named Punk Red (a pre-Orphan Black Tatiana Maslany) and Punk Blue (Juan Riedinger) – hack into Luke’s brain to for some well-needed ad-blocking and recruit him to their cause by showing him rage-inducing pictures of the family he lost. Turns out a multinational corporation is no match for badass Cuba Gooding Jr. and a couple of hackers with idiotic names.

Fun fact: I just love the direct to home video action movie phase of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s career much more than most of what he did in his Oscar-baiting time. As I have mentioned before, the wonderful thing about Gooding in this context is that he doesn’t act like a guy who is slumming at all, but applies his not inconsiderable talents fully to whatever bizarre crap the film at hand asks of him. Consequently, Gooding plays the silly bits, the trite bits, and the parts where he interacts with the horror of the ads beamed into his brain totally serious, with admirable professionalism, really making much of what we see doubly enjoyable. His performance – and those of the cast of fresh young actors and low budget veteran aces like the always great Ironside – stand in extreme contrast to Val Kilmer’s usual pay check grab. One could have put his absurd wig onto a life-sized doll and put his dialogue through a computer and have gotten the same performance for considerable less money. Fortunately, Kilmer isn’t actually doing much, so his lazy diva crap isn’t doing too much damage beyond adding one more embarrassment to a career that could have been great.

Anyway, while the plot is obviously silly, there’s quite a bit more to enjoy here than bashing Kilmer and watching Gooding and co. Director Ernie Barbarash is certainly one of the more talented people working in the direct to your couch action space, here as usual demonstrating a sense of pacing that’s good enough to convince a viewer there’s more action happening in the movie than there actually is. The action sequences that are there are indeed fine, mind you.

What’s most fun about the film – at least to me – is its somewhat early 80s Corman-esque sense of sledgehammer satire. Luke’s brain ads are truly hilarious, as are the branded landmarks in the intro and many another idea of the sort. Plus, who doesn’t like a movie that’s so down on ads?


There’s also something to be said for the somewhat thrown together look of Hardwired’s near future that mixes the mildly science fictional with the grubbily contemporary as of its making, and a handful of dubious aesthetic ideas, and probably ends up on a more realistic look for its future than the completely designed one of a film with a budget would have been. After all, whose outer reality consists exclusively out of objects made during the last two or three years?

Three Films Make A Post: VENGEFUL GIANTS...STORMING ACROSS A TERROR-GRIPPED LAND!

Húsið: Trúnaðarmál aka The House (1983): Egill Eðvarðsson’s haunted house movie about a teacher for deaf kids and her composer boyfriend getting a house very, very cheaply and paying for it dearly is well-directed, well-acted, and from time to time oh so very 80s even though it is pretty much the opposite of what you’d call an 80s horror film. It’s also, the IMDb informs me, the first Icelandic film to have a screen credit for a stunt double, which is a bit ironic in a film that is quite as slow-going as this one. Now, I generally don’t mind a slow film but there’s being slow and careful, and then there’s slowing everything down for no particular reason, the film at hand slowly crawling into the latter category. Despite some moody moments and the exotic bonus a film gets by being one of the handful of Icelandic horror films, this one’s also not terribly effective: neither as a ghost story nor as the sort of psychological study it clearly has ambitions on being.

Ice Queen (2005): If you have always dreamed about a film that grafts bits – mostly the “jokes” – taken from atrocious sex comedies to a would-be SyFy movie said channel wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot-pole because it’s so bad, you’re in luck with Neil Kinsella’s epic. If you’re, well, sane, you’ll have to look forward to snowboarding scenes, a fake avalanche from planet fake, a monster that is basically an ice-based version of Smurfette after a very bad week, hilariously weak acting, and of course a lot of feet-dragging. It’s not pretty.


Lake Placid 3 (2010): If you’re generally not convinced by the charms of the SyFy Original movie, this second direct-to-SyFy sequel to “Ally McBeal vs. The Gators” directed by Griff Furst certainly won’t change your mind, what with it being, well, pretty crap. It goes through the usual SyFy Original dance of really bad jokes (well, admittedly there are one or two that made me snort), the usual family stuff made worse by the fact that the more typical teenage-daughter-as-portrayed-by-an-actress-in-her-mid-20s has been replaced by a particularly stupid little boy, and features blurry CGI crocodiles that seem to float over their surroundings. Unlike in a lot of the more entertaining films of the Channel, the action and suspense sequences aren’t much fun, and apart from a somewhat funny turn by Yancy Butler as a poacher, and a bit of Michael Ironside slumming, there’s really no one else on screen who either can or is willing to act. It’s still much better than Ice Queen, mind you.

Three Films Make A Post: SURGING SPECTACLE! ...of Savagery and Sex!

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987): On one hand, I’m perfectly fine with Bruce Pittman’s sequel to okay Canadian slasher Prom Night having nothing whatsoever to do with the first one – where the hell should it have gone from there, after all – on the other hand, the resulting mix of possession horror and Freddy Krueger style (at times barely one step ahead of ripping off whole scenes completely) supernatural slasher never gels into an actual movie. Instead, we get a bunch of unfulfilled promises (you could make a perfectly great film about guilt and punishment as spiced up by religion out of the material), some good scenery-chewing by Michael Ironside and Wendy Lyon once she’s possessed, and the usual bunch of murder scenes that have not much of a thematic connection (would it really kill this sort of film to have a killer with a theme and then go through with it instead of having people randomly explode through their computer and other random crap?), and barely cohere into something like an actual plot.

Starship Troopers 3: Marauders (2008): The second Star Ship Troopers sequel, this time around directed by series screenwriter Edward Neumeier, is a pretty tedious way for the series to go out. It clearly wants to connect the satirical aspirations of the first film with the B-movie thrills of the second one, but it’s even less successful with the former than the original film and sabotages the latter ambition by insisting on the former. It’s also godawfully paced, spending an astounding amount of time on things with no bearing on its actual narrative whatsoever. The whole first hour is paced and feels very much like the prologue to the actual film; the rest isn’t nearly exciting enough to make up for that failing.

Dance of the Damned (1989): Katt Shea’s late eighties neon indie vampire movie is a bit of a frustrating experience. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this attempt to use an awkward date night (at least he seems to think it’s a date despite his early announcement to kill her at exactly 6am) between a vampire (Cyril O’Reilly) and a stripper (Starr Andreeff) to talk about broken lives but for every moment that’s emotionally resonant, for every good idea, there are two moments of 80s vampire movie pompousness, lines of dialogue that are trying oh so very hard but never achieving, and some horribly ill-advised contact lenses. Worse, what for large parts of its running time amounts to a two person play only has one good performance in Andreeff’s (who going by what she’s doing here would have deserved to go on to much better things than she actually did), with O’Reilly mostly letting his luscious 80s locks, those contact lenses and not a lot more doing his work, which just isn’t enough.

This is still a very interesting film, mind you, just not one that actually succeeds at what

In short: Children of the Corn: Revelation (2001)

For reasons only known to her, Journalist Jamie's (Claudette Mink) grandmother Hattie (Louise Soames) has moved into a dilapidated apartment building in a town in Oregon. Jamie doesn't understand her grandmother's move at all, so when she suddenly stops hearing from Hattie, she flies on over to investigate. Hattie sure is gone, and the state of the building, peopled by eccentrics, and situated nearly inside of a corn field as it is, just provokes more questions for Jamie.

There's something very wrong with the place, yet still Jamie decides to stay, in the hopes of finding any clues to her grandmother's whereabouts. What she finds instead are pale, creepy, teleporting children who really like to stare at her, a creepy priest (Michael Ironside wasted in an expository cameo), and a creepy cop (Kyle Cassie) who seems more interested in getting into her pants than in doing any police work (though the film doesn't actually seem to realize that its supposed male romantic lead is a deeply unprofessional creep, and instead thinks he’s, well, the male romantic lead). At least, the copper informs Jamie of an interesting fact about her grandmother - she was the only surviving member of the mass suicide of a children's cult. Jamie smells a revived cult; we smell supernatural revenge.

Soon, the obligatory series of murders starts, and it is quite clear to anyone except Jamie that she is supposed to be their final victim. And really, she should be the only victim, seeing how nobody else who dies has anything to do with the supernatural revenge wreaked upon her family.

I can't believe I'm on the seventh Children of the Corn movie now, but thus are the ways of the horror franchise gods. Fortunately, this one's not as bad as Isaac's Return. In fact, I can't help but think that what makes Revelation at least watchable is its only very tenuous connection to the original mythos beyond the obvious ones of children, corn, and supernatural shenanigans, which frees the film from having to try and clean up the mess of the films that came before it. Again, as with some earlier Children of the Corn films, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the initial script wasn't supposed to be a part of the franchise (such as it is) at all.

In any case, Guy Magar’s film is far superior to the last Children outing, which of course is rather easily done simply by making a film that contains an actual plot, an escalation of dramatic events, and supernatural happenings that do have a visible connection to each other as well as said plot. Magar clearly knows these simple basics of making a horror film, and is even able to add a few mildly atmospheric scenes taking place in obviously cheap yet effective sets, turning this thing into something I can at least accept as an actual movie.

Of course, Revelation's plot is rather lacking in revelations, its scares are not all that scary, and its ideas are generally not very interesting, but given the franchise it’s a part of (for better or worse), and its nature as a direct-to-DVD feature from the early 00s, I'm satisfied by it actually being a competent, coherent, and more or less entertaining movie. Low expectations, it turns out, can be very useful.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,in short,horror,guy magar,claudette mink,kyle cassie,michael ironside

Neon City (1991)

As is so often the case on this blog, it's the end of the world. This time though, it's a combination of various ecological catastrophes and holes in the ozone layer caused by a scientific experiment gone wrong that has turned North America (and that's the only place that's important, surely) to crap.

At least, there's still some sort of government trying to uphold a certain amount of order among the few survivors huddling together in the handful of population centres, but its idea of order, containing the murder of "mutants" and enforced sterilizations, isn't necessarily one distinguishable from barbarism. The country between settlements isn't better off though. It's controlled by half-mad bands of roaming bandits and full of the strange new environmental dangers of this grungy new world.

The ex-ranger (in this case "ranger" means a mix of cop, soldier, and fascist bootlicker) - now bounty hunter - Stark (Michael Ironside) finds himself convinced to do a bit of work for his former bosses, namely transporting the murderer Reno (Vanity), whom he has just caught, on a passenger transport through the dangerous outlands to a place called Neon City (the Paris of the wastelands?). On board are a merry company of characters. There's Stark's ex-wife Sandy (Valerie Wildman) who shares a rather traumatic past including a dead baby with him, the driver Bulk (Lyle Alzado) who was a friend of Stark's before Stark arrested him for murder, a doctor of medicine with a dark secret (Nick Klar), a debutante who spent most of her life in Switzerland (Juliet Landau), an elderly scientist with another dark secret (Arsenio "Sonny" Trinidad) and Dickie Devine (Richard Sanders), bad professional comedian and trader in suicide drugs.

With these people on board and the bandit raiders on the transport's track, there will be never a dull moment on the journey.

The word that comes to mind first when thinking about Neon City (which I'd rather have called The Road to Neon City, but of course nobody ever asks me stuff like that) is "solid". In fact, the film might be the textbook definition of the description, or of that other frightening word, "competent". Usually, I prefer my movies "clever" or "terrible" or "mind-wrecking", but complaining that a film like this is neither very good nor so terrible that it becomes interesting again seems a little unfair.

Neon City seems to have been made with all the best intentions of creating a solid (there's the word again), cheap little post-apocalyptic variation on Westerns like Stagecoach or El Dorado/Rio Bravo in a vehicle, with a truck standing in for a stage coach (or a sheriff's bureau) and post-apocalyptic bandits standing in for the "Indians" (or for pre-apocalyptic bandits). It's the sort of idea John Carpenter would have loved to use, I'm sure, and I'm equally sure that Carpenter's version of this film would either have been pretty great or pretty terrible, definitely not solid. But I digress, which is understandable given that the film is as all-around solid as it is, and therefore not inducive to much analysis, ranting or bad jokes.

Director Monte Markham (probably better known as an actor) points and shoots nicely and makes what he has to work with (barren, slightly snowy landscapes, grubbiness) look as interesting as possible; the script isn't brilliant, but puts the character types it includes to enough use not to annoy, lets the expected plot move forward without pretensions of greatness and is not completely without moments of cleverness in its worldbuilding; the actors as well as the ex-NFL pros embody these characters with professional vigour; Michael Ironside is for once allowed to be the (grumpy, bad-tempered, yet golden-hearted) good guy. And that's more or less the film - a solidly made cheapo in the tradition of classic character-type based B-movies that isn't ever going to be a "classic" of any kind itself, yet manages to achieve its goal to entertain for ninety minutes if a viewer is willing to let herself be entertained.

That's perfectly fine by me. Of course, I tend to like the sort of movie Neon City is based on quite a bit,too.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,reviews,post-apocalypse,monte markham,michael ironside,vanity,juliet landau