Freeway (1988)

A year or so ago, the husband of nurse Sarah “Sunny” Harper (Darlanne Fluegel) was shot dead while driving the LA freeway system. The killer has never been found, and the police don’t give any impression of caring about her pain, or simply trying to do their jobs and find justice for a murdered man.

In the last couple of weeks, there have been a increasing amount of people dying like Sunny’s husband did, without any visible provocation for the deeds and no connection to the victims beyond them traveling the LA streets by night. The police don’t believe in Sunny’s theory about a spree killer. Not until, that is, a guy (Billy Drago) ranting biblical passages starts phoning in to the talk radio show of psychiatrist Dr David Lazarus (Richard Belzer), old school live-streaming his killings via car phone. It’s not that the cops do much about this, mind you, so it’s left to Sunny and ex-cop bounty hunter with a tragic past Frank Quinn (James Russo) to do perform an actual investigation.

It is a bit of a movie cliché that New York movies from the 70s and 80s have the best urban grime, but in reality, every major metropolis the world over can look like a hell-hole (very literally to the serial killer in this particular film). Francis Delia’s Freeway does its best to make Los Angeles look appropriately bad, though the film does tend to a rather more artificial kind of grime than a James Glickenhaus New York joint, turning the film rather neo noir-ish in its look and feel.

That’s not a complaint, mind you, and if you believe in cities having specific characters, it makes sense an LA movie would have botox-ed grime, so it will feel appropriate to what many of us not living there believe Los Angeles feels like. As does the film’s focus on Greater Los Angeles’s freeway system as the only proper place for a local serial killer to obsess over as a sign of biblical apocalypse and and take as a place to haunt.

The film’s first third, before the plot really gets going, is particularly strong in its evocation of its idea of Los Angeles as a place of biblical corruption, where nothing is not dark and dirty yet neon-lit, and days seem more unreal than nights. Every man Sunny encounters at this stage of the film seems to be some sort of creep or asshole, be it the cops who don’t give a toss about her pain or the murders they are supposed to solve, a short Clint Howard appearance as ridiculous gas station creep, and so on and so forth. Even Quinn’s first appearances seems to fit into this template, until it turns out he is just as damaged by violence as she is. Really, it’s barely any wonder the killer sees the place as the “Whore of Babylon” or some such.

Ironically, enough, given a rising body count and the ever increasing calibre of the weapons the killer uses (he gets up to a bazooka in the end, because this is still the 80s), and the things Sunny and Quinn uncover about his background as a troubled priest, the film does get somewhat lighter in tone the longer it goes on, the film’s world turning out to be a place where people – though not police – can still cooperate to do some good. Even the highly dubious (the film includes the media world of 1988 with a generally sceptical eye) – and awesomely named – Lazarus does some good, here, and the film does end on a hopeful note I wouldn’t have expected of it going in. Even better, it actually works for this note instead of treating its happy end as a matter of course.

The film’s main strength is obviously its creation of a sense of place, turning Los Angeles – following the old cliché – into one of the main characters, so much so that you can see the narrative as being about a struggle over the soul of the city. If you want to give that sort of depth to a film about a serial killer who likes to (awesomely, because Drago is always great with this kind of performance) shout at streets as if they were living things.


Having never met any disbelief in the arts I didn’t want to suspend, I’m obviously on board with that reading of the movie, particularly when a movie is as moody and interesting as Freeway turns out to be.

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.

On ExB: Sci-fighters (1996)

One of the beauties when digging through the kind of low budget fare I spend most of my movie watching time on is stumbling upon a film that is just that decided, if small, bit more interesting and complex than its peers, even though it is in many ways an utterly generic SF/action/horror piece.

Despite its deeply threatening title, threatening stupidity, that is, Sci-fighters is one of these films, so if you want to know what I found somewhat interesting about this Roddy Piper/Billy Drago vehicle, click on through to my column on Exploder Button.

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In short: Cyborg 2: The Glass Shadow (1993)

In the future, two companies, one Japanese and one American, producing intelligent, feeling androids they call cyborgs for no good reason vie for world domination. Pinwheel, the American corp, decides to dominate their Japanese counterpart once and for all by blowing up the competition's executive level with a special cyborg explosive they have prepared their cyborg Casella "Cash" Reese (Angelina Jolie) with.

A quite independent cyborg (who actually is a cyborg and not an android like Cash) named Mercy (Jack Palance) who likes to communicate with the world via a negative image of his luscious lips on TVs lying around - and in this future, TVs are lying disused in the dust everywhere - has other plans for her, and pushes Cash and her martial arts instructor and owner of a big crush on his charge Colson "Colt" Ricks (Elias Koteas) into a daring escape attempt.

The bad guys send a crazy bounty killer (Billy Drago) and an equally crazy cyborg bounty killer (Karen Sheperd) after what will soon enough become the lovers, but as you know, love, kicks in the face and Cyborg-Palance conquer all.

Michael Schroeder's Cyborg 2 is a film that usually gets a bad rep as a horrible, horrible movie. I, however, somewhat emphatically disagree with that position, possibly because I just watched the film this isn't really a sequel of (even though there are a few seconds of random scenes from it inserted into this), and therefore know the difference between a boring low budget movie and one that is trying enthusiastically. Cyborg 2 is the kind of film Roger Corman could have produced in the late 70s if the late 70s had had a thing for somewhat cyberpunk-y futures. It's cheap, it's not as dumb as it pretends to be, and from time to time, it's even rather funny.

And really, what's not to like about a movie that contains: Jack Palance's lips chewing the scenery, and then Billy Drago and Karen Sheperd taking care of whatever he left of it, a young, pretty insecure and very cute Angelina Jolie (who does get naked, as does Koteas so there's nudity for everyone), copious amounts of blue, amber and red lighting, an arena fight below two ventilators, Jack Palance making things explode, cheap production and costume design that is either meant to suggest curious cultural crossovers in the future or a random grab into a wardrobe, and a story - such as it is - where love and an exploding Jack Palance cure all ills? Even better, all this stuff is told without too much boring filler and with a totally annoying synth soundtrack. If that doesn't make Cyborg 2 a winner in anyone's book, I don't want to read it.

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