In short: The Silencers (1996)

Or, PM Entertainment has watched the X-Files and liked it so much Richard Pepin is directing this one himself. So this time around, it’s an alien would-be invasion responsible for car chases, random and not so random explosions, shoot-outs and general carnage. Jack Scalia is a luckless secret service agent who teams up with the lusciously haired Pleiadian (so PM entertainment has also read some David Icke or stuff in that vein?) space agent played by a lusciously haired Dennis Christopher he was supposed to cart to vivisection to fight the clone army of Lekin (Carlos Lauchu), a part-time Man in Black with an unbecoming ponytail (one supposes his hair isn’t as great as that of Christopher) and a love for hats bigger than his head. Will our heroes and a couple of submachine gun toting UFO journalists stop Lekin before his army of about ten people can walk through a dimensional portal it took the US government fifty years to build for them?

I don’t know about you, but I always wanted a best of series of alien conspiracy theory bits in my cheap yet loud action movies, so this is a bit like a dream come true, at least as long as the buddy cop movie elements don’t interfere too much, which they really don’t for most of the film’s running time.

Plus, how often does one have the opportunity to watch Jack Scalia shout “Noooooooo!!!” while shooting a humungous handgun that makes one wonder about his character’s penis nearly as much as the one Charles Bronson lugs around in Death Wish 3, while later on the female UFO journalist included for the mandatory romance (Lucinda Weist) actually shows a photo of him making his “Nooooooo!!!” face to her editor - to introduce the concept of action movie Scalia, I suppose.

And you really can’t complain about the action either. It comes fast, it comes furious, and it’s obvious that Pepin takes his responsibility of showing his audience as many stunts, explosions, and crashes as possible on his budget very seriously indeed, a dedication to the truly important things in filmmaking I wish more of today’s direct-to-video action directors would show.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (2006)

Marine archaeologist and bikini top fan Nicole (Victoria Pratt) and two of her students (Kristi Angus and Cory Monteith) are searching the waters of Desolation Sound in British Columbia for artefacts, particularly a mask and a humungous opal supposedly once part of the more mythical treasures of Troy, which she hopes are buried under water among the cargo of a Chinese freighter that sank somewhere around there a few decades ago. Just when Nicole's theories are about to be proven right, her ship's skipper is killed by a giant squid, which is the sort of thing that throws a wrench, or rather a tentacle, into treasure hunting proceedings, particularly when the boat's motor breaks a little later. And when the harbour town they anchor in at nights doesn't seem to have people making their living repairing boats.

Fortunately, underwater photographer and all around sea person Ray (Charlie O'Connell) comes to the rescue, willing to help, repair, and become Nicole's new skipper. Ray has a little secret: twenty-five years ago, his parents were killed by a giant squid in the same waters, and he has been obsessed by the seas and what lives in them ever since, never finding a way to explain why the squid acted like it did back then. This - assuming the murderous giant squid Nicole and co. encountered was the very same squid as Ray does - seems like as good a chance for finding closure as he's going to get. It sure helps that Nicole and Ray are hitting it off rather well (one can't help but imagine a row of particularly healthy descendants in their future, and shudder).

Alas, the giant squid - later to be theorized by Nicole to be the original mythical Scylla - isn't our heroes' only problem: evil Greek pirate from an evil Greek pirate family Maxwell (Jack Scalia) has come to town with his black-clad team of bad guys, and he really, really needs the treasure to buy back the love of his - presumably evil - Greek pirate family. Obviously, him being an evil pirate and all, he's willing to do anything to get it.

Tibor Takacs's Kraken is another of those SyFy movies not really as much of a creature feature as the marketing makes it out to be. Instead, this is another cheap but fun adventure movie that just happens to contain a giant squid among the lethal dangers its heroes have to pass; in practice, Jack Scalia's boat-exploding, henchmen-using ways are a much greater threat.

Which is only a bad thing if you want to see the movie the film's marketing material promises, instead of just a fun piece of nonsense. Given the quality of the SquidGI, I'm actually rather happy it isn't more often on screen than it is, for, how shall I put it, it's about as believable as the film's rampant misuse of Greek myth.

No that I truly disapprove of the film's use of what one of its four writers must vaguely have remembered about Greek myth from school. Myth, legend and folklore are there for the taking, they are meant to be changed, misused or put in a dialogue with pulp tropes, so using Scylla and mythical Troy (not to be confused with the actual ancient Troy, unless your name is von Schliemann) to make the treasure McGuffin in a cheap adventure movie more interesting as Kraken's script does is a perfectly fine thing to do. The best way to respect cultural achievements of the past is to build upon them, even if one's building is just a SyFy Channel film.

Takacs, as is his usual wont, realizes the whole adventure without a budget for globetrotting she-bang up to his usual standards, with an eye for simple, yet effective scene-setting and straightforward storytelling.

The acting's mostly okay for what it is, with Pratt and Scalia as the charismatic stand-outs, and O'Connell the void low budget films (made for TV or not) love to cast as their male leads. Fortunately, Takacs is in this game long enough to avoid putting too much weight on O'Connell's shoulders (and really, why would you, when you can have Scalia mugging into the camera?), so it's not much of a problem.

In the end Kraken is a fun enough piece of SyFy film.

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In short: The Rift (1990)

aka Endless Descent

A new-fangled, experimental military sub, the "Siren", has disappeared in the depths of the ocean, all contact to it has been lost. The contractor company responsible for the sub brings its designer Wick Hayes (Jack Scalia), who had left them once it became clear his bosses were working for the military, back into the fold to take part in the rescue mission for the "Siren". They're quite convincing, too, for if Wick doesn't help the company they'll put all the blame for the submarine's accident on him, even though they changed the initial design so heavily the ship's not even using the same type of drive anymore. I suspect not even the patent office would buy that one, but then my name's not Wick.

Anyhow, to make the rescue mission as successful as possible, it is decided that the rescue submarine will be the "Siren II", of the exact same build and model as the disappeared ship (because why not take a gamble), commanded by tough Captain Phillips (R. Lee Ermey at his least shouty), and crewed by a random assortment of people of various nationalities (as you do when hunting top secret submarines), among them the obvious traitor (Ray Wise), the black "comic" relief character (John Toles-Bey), the Italian comic relief cook, and Hayes's ex-wife (Deborah Adair). Need I even mention that everybody on board has already been informed it's supposed to be Wick's fault that the "Siren I" disappeared?

Whatever can go wrong when the mission turns into a fight against a big underwater rubber monster, and later leads our heroes into a sub-oceanic cave full of a whole zoo of various other rubber monsters?

The Rift, a Spanish-US co-production, is veteran Spanish director of schlock Juan Piquer Simon's entry into the small late 80s/early 90s wave of kinda-sorta underwater Aliens-by-way-of-Abyss rip-offs. I suspect this specific sub-sub-genre came to pass when an exploitation film producer finally realized that there just wasn't room in space anymore for further Aliens-a-likes, and used all his power of creativity to think up the high concept of "Aliens under water".

Simon's film is actually one of the more entertaining entries into this not particularly awesome circle of films, mostly because it, while putting a check mark beside a lot of Aliens' plot points, has the feel of a type of slightly SF-nal horror movie that could have been made anytime between the 50s and the time of its own production. Sure, the 50s version would have been a bit less gory, and a few details would have been different (no evil government experiments in the 50s, but radiation problems), the basics however are still the same, and the audience still watches mostly to see some monsters.

Simon seems to realize this quite clearly, and does a nice, clean direction job of the pretty silly and flat script, without wasting much time on filler, characterization or any other stuff that doesn't have anything to do with showing us monsters doing monster stuff or charming submarine models.

The whole affair is a bit dumb, obviously, and scientifically dubious (there's even some reversing of polarity going on), but it's also unpretentious and fun, which is all I would ever ask of a film like it.

 

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