Past Misdeeds: Sci-fighters (1996)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

It's the far-flung future of 2009, and what a time it is. What we see of the cities looks like Blade Runner lite, there's a high security prison on the moon (so I assume the economy's booming), and people carry little personal electronics devices quite like smart phones without the phone part around. Oh, and Earth has been hanging under a cloud of dust for nearly three months now, leading to an eternal night the locals call Econight, perhaps because The Eternal Darkness was already taken.

Anyway, back on the moon crazy murderer and rapist Adrian Dunn (Billy Drago) decides to infect himself with a mysterious (yes, of course it's alien) virus that seemingly kills him. Unfortunately, Adrian isn't quite as dead as people think he is, so once his body has been returned to his native Boston in a way one might find rather unhygienic and left lying around in the local spaceport, he rises from the dead quite exactly like Jesus, if Jesus had been an increasingly leaky, muttering and physically and mentally quite appalling Billy Drago; so, depending on your favourite parts of the New Testament, perhaps not quite like Jesus.

The newly reborn Adrian continues to do what he loves best, namely going around killing men and raping women in a city that doesn't seem to care all that much. Well, police detective - with a "black badge" that makes him some kind of institutionally condoned version of Dirty Harry or a comparatively harmless version of Judge Dredd - Cameron Grayson (Roddy Piper) cares once he realizes there's a dead virally active murderer around, particularly because he has very personal reasons to hate Adrian. In his quest to catch and preferably kill Adrian, and postpone what might very well turn out to be a viral doomsday, Grayson teams up with virologist Dr. Kirbie Younger (Jayne Heitmeyer) and her mentor Dr. Washington (Tyrone Benskin). Given the surprising powers of not-dying-from-getting-shot and leaking icky fluids Adrian develops, the shape Adrian's victims are in after a while, and the generally fucked-up state of the world he's living in, Grayson will need all the help he can get.

As far as direct-to-video SF/action/horror films go, Peter Svatek's Sci-fighters (whose title of course has sod all to do with the film it belongs to) is really rather good. Sure, the production design is mostly a much cheaper version of Blade Runner's, the world building isn't exactly deeply thought through, and the plotting is very much as archetypal an example of low budget SF/action with added body horror ickiness as you'll find, but Svatek's execution of the whole affair is much better than it needs to be.

It does - of course - help the film a lot that its four larger characters are played by Piper, Drago, Heitmeyer and Benskin who all had been around the low budget movie block for quite some time when this was made, and who all bring charisma and professionalism to roles that could in other hands have turned out pretty boring instead of somewhat sympathetic and slightly interesting. It's certainly no surprise that Drago knows how to chew scenery, or how to go into melodramatic bodily contortions when an infection with an alien virus calls for it (he does that sort of thing every day), but it's as much of a pleasure to watch here as it ever is; as is Piper's ability to keep his character vaguely sympathetic despite him being a bit of a prick.

Mark Sevi's script is sharing some responsibility for this general lack of suckiness too, for it does use the clichés it's working with sometimes quite well. The shared background between Adrian and Grayson is a smidgen more interesting and complicated than usual in these cases, and because its details beyond the most obvious ones are disclosed slowly over the course of the movie, it stays vaguely interesting throughout. Even the obligatory romance between Grayson and Kirbie is more interesting than these things usually are, with a slightly more grown-up idea of how damaged people like Grayson relate romantically. Why, the film even doesn't put the mandatory sex scene in where it would usually be placed, and ends the romance sub-plot at an open yet not all that hopeful point. In this regard, it's also rather interesting which character it is in the end who kills off Adrian, and who it isn't; let's just say it isn't "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.

Sevi's script does quite a bit more of this kind of thing, keeping inside the lines of low budget genre filmmaking of its day and age yet showing some thought, even some ideas of its own. I found myself particularly impressed by the way the film handles all that raping without giving the deeply unpleasant impression a lot of low budget films of all genres fall into - probably seldom on purpose, to be fair - that rape is kinda hot (and the best way to show breasts in a movie). In Sci-fighters, rape and rapists are clearly vile, an idea that is of course cemented further by Drago's performance and physical changes, as well as by the whole alien, terraforming virus angle that puts extra emphasis on rape as something unnatural and inhuman. This does of course also carry a metaphorical echo of the way many raped women feel afterwards, though I'm not too sure the film is having this resonance on purpose and not just by a more or less “happy” accident.

On the other hand, the film also has the heart to include little moments that suggest Adrian isn't as easily filed away as a monster (that is, something beyond and below humanity) than as a twisted and broken human being; if you ask me, that's a rather more horrifying thought than the completely evil Other could ever be.


Of course, all these slightly more clever bits and pieces which I'm not even sure are in the film on purpose are all just minor parts in a rather generic, competently filmed piece of SF action horror (a sub-genre that should have its own name), and are the kind of thing you realize more once you start thinking about a movie than when you're actually watching it. That's as it should be, for while the kind of film I (and I suspect anyone reading this) spend most of my time with is often rather more clever than people not involved in the joys of low budget genre films assume, a film like Sci-fighters lives and dies on its ability to deliver cheap thrills. Fortunately, it's good at that, too.