Neon City (1991)

Man, you never hear anyone talk about the depletion of the Ozone Layer anymore, do you?  Back in the late Seventies through the mid-Eighties, all you heard about was how humans were accelerating its destruction through our love of chlorofluorocarbons (I remember fast food joints like McDonald’s being particularly lambasted for their use of Styrofoam containers for their delicious burgers; And why have they not brought back the McDLT?  That’s right, because it was useless).  Everyone was petrified that the holes in the Ozone Layer were going to kill us all like the Eye of God opening wide to annihilate us and our evil ways.  But these days, almost no one ever brings it up.  Maybe this is because the erosion has slowed because we changed our ecological policies (though someone please tell me how mandating that all lightbulbs be replaced with ones that contain mercury gas was a good idea [yes, I know that some of them don’t have it, but how many people do you know who actually read the packaging before buying them?]).  Maybe it’s because we’re all caught up with Global Warming as the eco-disaster du jour, and the Ozone Layer just gets swept into this bin.  Or maybe it’s because Monte Markham’s Neon City has already shown us what the Ozone’s obliteration would actually be like, and we’re mostly okay with that.

Harry Stark (Michael Ironside) is an ex-Ranger-turned-bounty-hunter who scours the Outlands picking up and picking off perps.  Capturing super-wanted criminal Reno (Vanity), Stark is forced to escort her up North to the titular metropolis aboard Bulk’s (Lyle Alzado) camper-turned-transport.  Alongside a microcosm of characters, Stark weathers the travails of the post-apocalyptic world, but what’s waiting for them in Neon City may not be what they expected (but it mostly is).

As the film opens, it feels like a typical post-apocalyptic movie.  The land is barren.  Everyone dresses like a Tusken Raider auditioning for Duran Duran’s “Union of the Snake” video.  People have been reduced to their basest needs for survival.  Once Stark and Reno get to Jericho Station, however, Neon City becomes a remake of John Ford’s Stagecoach.  This is no real surprise.  Stagecoach has been remade and stolen from a nigh-infinite amount of times.  I know that Neon City is compared to the Mad Max films, but that’s a tenuous connection in my mind and the default comparison for post-apocalyptic movies.  No, this is Stagecoach.  Granted, the characters don’t fit one-to-one between the two films, but they’re certainly similar enough.  So, Stark and Reno, together, are the Ringo Kid character.  Stark is the antihero, and Reno is the outlaw being taken to face justice in Lordsburg.  Further, Stark has a grudge he needs to settle once he reaches his destination.  Sandy (Valerie Wildman) is the hooker with the heart of gold a la Dallas, though she isn’t ostracized.  She also has a past with Stark that illuminates how she got where she is.  Twink (Juliet Landau) is the Lucy character, and if anyone is treated rather coolly in the group it is her, due to her moneyed status (she has a book [by Agatha Christie], a rarity in this world).  Bulk is, naturally, Buck, and Alzado plays it with almost enough charm to at least get his feet inside of Andy Devine’s shoes.  The other three characters, Dickie (Richard Sanders), Dr. Tom (Nick Klar), and Wing (Sonny Trinidad) have aspects of the remaining Stagecoach characters in them.  Markham gives them all some distinction and adds in original touches of back story and motivation, though they don’t feel nearly as solid as in Ford’s film.  Instead, they feel like characters.  Oddly, it’s enough for this film.

One could ask the question, “why neon?”  Cinema depicting the future is rife with the stuff, because it looks futuristic (never mind that neon signs were basically invented circa 1917).  More than this, however, is that it is bright, colorful.  In the context of this film, it is upbeat.  It symbolizes hope, and hope is something which the vast majority of post-apocalyptic films embrace.  After all, the worst has already supposedly happened, so the struggle for survival against the brutality of this new world has to lead to some kind of positive.  Even when the protagonists of such films can’t (or won’t) partake in this hope (Snake Plissken in Escape from New York or Max in the Mad Max films [who, more often than not, plays the role of Moses, leading a persecuted people to safety but is not allowed to enter the Promised Land himself]), even when they act aloof and self-serving, they will always do the right thing and protect others.  Stark does his damnedest to be disassociated, but the script keeps giving him feelings.  While he takes charge, he trusts in Reno enough to uncuff her.  His past with Sandy is an open wound about which he doesn’t mind playing passive-aggressive.  He strikes up a romantic relationship culminating in a gentle love scene.  The problem is that, for this kind of film and this kind of character, it works better for them not to say anything.  Ironside can certainly act well enough that he shouldn’t need to do and say the things he does, but the filmmakers either didn’t trust in their talent or their audience enough to take that risk.  

This goes across the board for the film.  It wants to give depth to its characters, but it wants to do it in nothing but broad, melodramatic strokes.  It wants to give us action, but it doesn’t know how to block, shoot, and edit it in a dynamic, organic fashion (this, more than anything else, really lets its budget show through).  Its pacing is uneven, with dramatic sequences stretching on far too long and action sequences stacked one on top of another, so they bleed into each other and feel contrived and forced.  It wants to show us that this world is fucked, but it wants to give its heroes a smiley ending.  I think that Neon City is better than its reputation would lead you to believe (assuming it has much of a reputation outside of IMDb user reviews), but I also think that its flaws keep it from being a diamond in the rough.  More like a seed in the fertilizer.

MVT:  The cast is solid, and they do what they can with the material.

Make or Break:  The scene where the transport passes through a Bright (see the movie, if you want to get the reference).  It is one of the few well-balanced beats in the whole movie and proof of what this could have been.

Score:  6/10        

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)

I didn’t go to my senior prom (boo hoo!), but this doesn’t sadden me in the least.  I had no girlfriend at the time, and I was petrified to ask anyone who I thought could possibly have been available to go with me.  I was also fiercely against things like proms and sports and so forth (perhaps because I never participated in them, perhaps because I genuinely just didn’t give a shit about them and still don’t; so punk rock).  I didn’t relish the idea of renting a tux, a limo (or just a nice car; I drove a 1964 Oldsmobile way back then [The Lima Bean Green Machine, it was dubbed]), buying a corsage, etcetera.  It seemed like a whole lot of bother for an evening I likely wouldn’t have enjoyed, especially since there weren’t many people at my school with whom I hung out on the regular who were going.  I did go to a semi-formal early on in my high school days, and the evening was, to put it lightly, a letdown (maybe this soured me; after all, if one time sucked, every time had to suck, right?).  Having seen my share of horror films, proms and their ilk appeared like Hell on Earth, and people always got massacred at them, and movies never lie.  Decades down the road, Bruce Pittman’s Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II arrived to confirm everything I believed in my teens.  I stand justified (or maybe just rationalized).

The year is 1957, and Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) wreaks havoc on her prom and jilts her boyfriend Billy Nordham (Steve Atkinson) for bad boy Buddy Cooper (Robert Lewis).  Billy comes upon an abandoned stink bomb as the perfect revenge, but the fuse lights Mary Lou’s dress on fire as she accepts her prom queen coronation, killing her (we’re left to guess what the combination of burnt flesh and hair, chiffon, and stink bomb smell like).  Jump forward to 1987, where young Vicki (Wendy Lyon) struggles with her virginity, her ice queen mother, and her forbidden love for Craig Nordham (Louis Ferreira), Principal Billy’s (now played by Michael Ironside) son.  It doesn’t take long for Mary Lou to exact her revenge and lay claim her crown with Vicki as her weapon of choice.

The thing which struck me the most about this film was its refreshingly unglamorous view of the Fifties in America (or Canada where this was filmed, but po-tay-to, po-tah-to).  Usually, this era is glorified for being lily-pure and straitlaced and oh-so-perfect.  Sex and murder and rape and all of the evils of the world didn’t exist back then, if popular media is to be believed, and if these things were portrayed (post-Hayes Code), they were sanitized to the point of blandness, more often than not (perhaps the more egregious crime than denying them outright).  Of course, we know that this isn’t the case; Let’s assume we’re not all that naïve.  But it was a simpler time for many (maybe this is due to putting on the proverbial blinders), and it’s exalted for this (I certainly don’t deny having a fondness for it, myself).  Personally, I like the restrictions that were placed on filmmakers back then to a degree, because if they really, truly wanted to portray darker themes or more salacious elements, they had to get creative in order to do it.  This, for me, adds some depth to many of these films, the fact that they didn’t just wiggle all their naughty bits in your face (just look at Nightmare Alley for proof).  Prom Night 2 states that people were just as awful back then as they were in the Eighties (and now, naturally).  

Mary Lou LOVES sex, and she’s a self-centered asshole every inch of the way (she taunts a priest in a confessional before hitting the prom just to tell him how much she enjoys herself).  She dumps Billy unceremoniously in the middle of the soiree just to get her hump on with Buddy, grabbing his crotch and positively salivating at the prospect of what’s awaiting her within his pants.  Buddy’s also a dick, razzing Billy in a finders-keepers, go fuck yourself sort of way.  Billy is no slouch, either.  We can understand wanting to get back at Mary Lou for his heartbreak, but he takes it too far from his idea’s impetus.  Plus, he’s never punished for what he did (that the audience is made aware of).  In fact, he’s rewarded (like Dorothy dropping her house on the Wicked Witch of the East), being given a position of power in the community.  

Little has changed in the intervening years.  While Billy has put the past incident behind him, Buddy has spent his days trying to make up for it (he feels guilty for not trying to rescue his burning paramour), becoming a priest and swearing off the sins of the flesh.  In high school, however, the kids are still jerks, beset with problems that make their lives a living hell.  Vicki’s mother forces her family to pray all the time (instead of having a doctor look at Vicki after a volleyball “mishap,” mom insists that Vicki simply “needs to spend some time with the Lord”), shades of Piper Laurie in Carrie, in case the similarities weren’t obvious enough.  Craig spends his time trying to be accepted by Vicki’s mother (her dad likes him, though), but he’ll forever be an undesirable to her.  Vicki herself is virginal, but she’s investigating her sexuality (the first shot we get of her is Vicki checking her body out in her mirror) in the face of her escalating puberty and rampaging hormones.  Her room looks like a ten-year old’s, including a rocking horse (which plays a rather creepy role a little later on).  Vicki is friends with Monica (Beverley Hendry), who wants a date to the prom but tells guys who want to talk to her to fuck off.  Jess (Beth Gondek) is a quasi-outcast among this group, looking like a distaff Robert Smith in MC Hammer’s wardrobe.  She’s also pregnant from some jerk who ditched her and is positively miserable about her situation.  Josh (Brock Simpson) is the real humdinger.  He’s supposed to be cool and smart (he’s anything but), and even after he gets a date with Monica he still has time to ask for a blowjob from Kelly (Terri Hawkes), the school’s current queen bitch, in return for rigging the prom’s election.  What this all amounts to is a reflection on the fact that being a teenager is nothing but gloom and doom, no matter which generation you came from or your supposed place in the pecking order.  Not many horror films of this era espoused this viewpoint, but it’s nice that this one did.

MVT:  The film’s misanthropy is prominently showcased from first frame to last.

Make or Break:  The opening prom sequence gives us everything we need to get the idea of how we’re supposed to take this film and its characters.  Plus, it mirrors the finale, so if you don’t want to make it that far, at least you kind of know what you’re missing.

Score:  6.75/10