Wanted: Dead or Alive (1987)

Nick Randall (Rutger Hauer), for unfathomable reasons the descendant of Steve McQueen’s character in the old TV show “Wanted: Dead or Alive”, is also working as a bounty hunter like is great-granddad (or whatever). He also has a thing for playing harmonica, badly, whenever he has reason to mope. Nick’s actually a former CIA operative, but that particular business got to unpleasant for him, especially when he worked against terrorist Malak Al Rahim (Gene Simmons). Despite being a bit of a loner, Nick has found happiness with his new girlfriend Terry (Mel Harris), and his best buddy, the cop Danny Quintz (William Russ).

Unfortunately, that happiness won’t last when Nick agrees to help out his old (and only) CIA pal Philmore Walker (Robert Guillaume) with a terrorist cell that seems to plan something big, a cell working under the recently arrived Malak Al Rahim. Now, Nick turns out to be well able to help Walker out, but unfortunately, a different old CIA acquaintance named John Lipton (Jerry Hardin, The X-Files’ Deep Throat himself) has rather different plans with Nick, which will eventually lead to various terrorist attacks that really had no need to happen at all, among other things. The film never gets around to actually explaining what Lipton thinks he’s doing beyond making Nick’s life harder as a form of vengeance.

Gary Sherman’s Wanted is a weird one, consisting of various disparate elements that never quite gel enough to become a whole but still make the film an always interesting watch. The main problem is how incongruous the film’s impulses are. On one hand – be warned, this is a film with more than just two hands – there’s the whole call-back to the old TV show that really has no function in the film apart from looking at an audience that has come for a very different film and saying “remember that?”.

On the next one, there’s the nature of the film’s bad guys, who are strictly US late 80’s action movie “Arabian” terrorists, the kind of terrorists that don’t have an actual ideology beyond being evil, and whose leader is played by rock star who can’t act and tries to get away with just not moving his face. Said rock star, to make matters really weird, is also the son of Hungarian Jewish parents. Adding another element of what the heck to this whole business is the fact that Al Rahim enters the US cosplaying as an orthodox Jew. I got nothing.

Hand number three is the way the film handles its very 80s action movie set-up – with the thoughtful slowness of 70s cinema, giving much more space to the characterisation of Nick and his family of choice than any 80s film about an action hero fighting terrorists is supposed to do. As a matter of fact, it’s this part of the film that makes watching it worthwhile, Sherman giving his actors and their characters enough room to breathe. Why, I found myself actually beginning to care about what happens to them. Consequently the entirely expected scene when Terry and Danny are killed off acquires a bit of emotional weight, particularly since Hauer plays the moment as if his character were an actual human being who has just seen the people he loves die. There’s more sadness and desperation than rage in that scene from him, and the film for a moment seems to teeter on the edge of not going the way of all 80s action films but go someplace more interesting.


Obviously, a violent rampage then follows anyway, and as all action sequences in the film, it seems to stand halfway between the way 70s cinema had approached its violence and the gung ho action style of the 80s. It’s not a great place to stand for action scenes, frankly, because it feels less than Sherman trying to split the difference between two eras but rather more as if he simply doesn’t want to commit to one.

Poltergeist III (1988)

After their experiences in Poltergeist II (which I’m not going to write up because I just can’t cope with quite this much Magical Native American), the Freelings must have turned into assholes, for they have left their ghost magnet daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) with her aunt Pat (Nancy Allen), her hubby, rich architect Bruce (Tom Skerritt) and Bruce’s daughter Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) in a high rise building in Chicago that is apparently some kind of arcology. Carol Anne is going to a school for talented but weird kids, where the chief psychologist, one doctor Seaton (Richard Fire), holds regular hypnosis sessions with her to prove that what happened in the first two movies was “mass hypnosis” somehow induced by Carol Anne. Which sounds even more ridiculous than poltergeists, so he at least deserves credits for countering the bat-shit insane with the even crazier.

Of course, the whole thing somehow calls back ole Reverend Henry Kane (Nathan Davis) and his crew of ghosts, who have suddenly developed the habit of exclusively centring their hauntings around mirrors, reflections, cold and evil doppelgangers. That’s going to become a bit of a problem, for Bruce’s high rise is hyper-modern and built in the 80s, therefore it is full of mirrors.

Gary Sherman’s Poltergeist III generally has a rather bad reputation but I enjoy it quite a bit more than the second film in the series. It’s not at all on the level of the original, of course, but at least the new things it is trying are more interesting than embarrassing, unlike what happens in film number two.

Characterisations aren’t terribly inventive – apart from the fact that Bruce who isn’t a blood relation clearly loves Carol Anne much more than the sister of her mother does. Pat learning to love the girl despite Carol Anne’s intrinsic weirdness (which you can read as a metaphor for illness or disability, if you’re so minded) is actually pretty much what part of the film seem to want to be about but the final twenty minutes of Poltergeist III are such a chaos of bad writing, characters saying and doing things that make no sense whatsoever, and plain bullshit that there’s no real pay off to the theme.

What does pay off, and what makes the first hour of the film worth watching quite a bit, is how much of a master class on building a variety of supernatural phenomena out of a small number of things – reflections and cold – it is. While there’s more than enough diversity to the phenomena to avoid boring anyone through repetition, they clearly belong to the same supernatural theme where quite a few horror films would just randomly throw supposedly spooky stuff at the audience. The feel of connection between various weirdnesses here is quite effective, and some of them make for really trippy and original little shocks and twists.

Until the film suddenly goes to a bizarre encounter in a frozen parking garage, one of the most stupid fake happy ends in horror history in which I have no idea why the characters are suddenly supposed to believe that things are over, not to speak of the audience, and a series of final set pieces and dialogue sequences that seem to have little connection to what came before, and which are probably the fault of your usual “troubled production history”.

Which puts Poltergeist III into the rubric of interesting but annoyingly flawed films worth watching for the good in them.