Oblivion (1994)

Welcome to the township of Oblivion on a planet we’ll just call Wild West. After all, it’s just like the Wild West from the movies, but in space and with random goofy SF bits bolted on.

Town Marshal – and yeah, the film clearly means sheriff but in a recurring problem is too dumb to know the difference - Stone (Mike Genovese) is shot by evil reptile dude Redeye (Andrew Divoff) in a perfectly fair fight. In fact, Redeye took care of it actually being fair by disabling the Marshall’s force field which would usually have protected him from all harm – something the outlaw doesn’t have; and it’s hardly Redeye’s fault that Stone is the slowest draw on the planet. Anyway, after that Redeye does some actually evil stuff, and he and his gang of idiot wackos (played by people like Musetta Vander and Irwin Keyes) lord it over the town rather badly.

The Marshal’s alienated son Zack (Richard Joseph Paul) is out prospecting - and saving Space Indian Buteo (Jimmie F. Skaggs) from death by giant scorpion – but even once he hears of what has occurred, he is really going to take his time to get up to some revenge, what with him being an empath and – gasp! – a pacifist. He will later turn out to be a crack shot too, for reasons the film of course doesn’t bother to get into.

And that’s because Sam Irvin’s Oblivion is one of those comedies that believes it can escape any question about world building or internal logic by vaguely waving its and and cracking a crappy joke. Which comedies often can indeed get away with. Alas, that trick only works when a film’s jokes are actually funny, so no chance for Oblivion there.

The script was apparently written by great comics scribe Peter David (with the IMDB also giving “story” credits to Charles Band, John Rheaume, Greg Suddeth and Mark Goldstein), though it doesn’t actually feel like it at all. Or really, it doesn’t feel as if any professional writer had had much of a hand in it, but rather like a series of bad ideas and underdeveloped jokes somebody has scrawled on a napkin and called a script. To be fair, one or two of the film’s sixty-nine running jokes are actually somewhat funny. I found town undertaker Gaunt (Carel Struycken) with his habit to always appear shortly before somebody is killed and the resulting social awkwardness whenever he simply goes somewhere for a beer (and so on) fun and indeed funny, but this sort of thing is buried under jokes I felt actively embarrassed by despite not at all being responsible for them.

You’d think that this could still have been saved by the pretty wonderful cast of character actors and troopers – apart from those whom I have already mentioned there are also Meg Foster, Isaac Hayes, Julie Newmar and George Takei to wonder at – but most of them are pressed into bouts of deeply unfunny mugging. The usually intensely charming Takei and Newmar are particularly terrible, also thanks to the film’s insistence on making bad meta-jokes about certain other roles of these two, again and again and again. But really, the only actors on screen who seem to have any idea what they are doing and why are Divoff, Foster, Struycken, and boring love interest to a terrible hero Jackie Swanson (because really, being boring is never difficult). Everybody else seems rather too conscious of how deep the cow shit is they have stumbled into and acts accordingly.

Things become even worse whenever the film tries to turn sort of serious for a scene or two and attempts to treat Zack’s “inner struggle” as if anybody watching cared. Something that is completely impossible to take seriously given the surrounding nonsense, badly written anyway, and done by an actor who couldn’t act his way through an open door.


But hey, the space scorpions and Divoff’s make-up are pretty good, and it’s a mid-90s Charles Band movie without puppets and dolls, so there’s that to say for the whole mess.

Uncle Sam (1996)

After years of being missing in action, the US military finds the corpse of Master Sergeant Sam Harper (David “Shark” Fralick) who died in a friendly fire incident. Sam’s “return” does awaken very bad memories in his wife Louise (Anne Tremko) who is just barely getting over years of physical and psychological abuse she had to suffer from him. His sister Sally (Leslie Neale) certainly doesn’t feel any better about her brother – that is, she’s relieved he is truly dead, too. The only member of the family who thinks fondly of Sam is his nephew Jody (Christopher Ogden).

Following wild and self-serving stories his uncle told him and a couple of poisonous letters, the kid has turned Sam into a great hero in his mind and is dead-set on becoming just like him.

Fortunately – well, unless you’re one of the people who gets killed by him – some teenagers playing around with Sam’s grave and even (gasp) burning an American flag provide Sam with the reason to do what the violent dead in William Lustig/Larry Cohen joints tend to do: awaken and go on a killing spree. Soon enough, Sam’s murdering people for fun and “patriotism” wearing an Uncle Sam rubber mask. It’s gonna be a teachable series of moments of bloody violence for little Jody.

This direct-to-video slasher is the final (until now) feature directed by William Lustig, again teaming up with his Maniac Cop partner as writer and producer, the great Larry Cohen. This time around, the two leave their local comfort zone – skeezy New York – behind and move to the suburbs. Calling the resulting film an artistic success would be a blank-faced lie. Rather, this is one of those films that’s all over the place in tone and effectiveness, the sort of thing we in the business of using dumb phrases call “an interesting effort”.

I surely can’t blame Uncle Sam for its basic concepts and its willingness to go for what from over here in Europe feels like a sacred cow for the US: that soldiering and the love of it might not be the sign of heroism but of of violent psychopathy; and that sending the kind of people least impacted by killing to war only makes them worse. Of course, this being a gulf war movie, what we see of politicians and officers doesn’t really get off any lighter: everyone who isn’t a woman, a kid, a doomed deputy or Isaac Hayes here is pretty much a total shit. This does unfortunately lead to one of the film’s greatest problems. Even though we the audience are supposed to understand Sam as a horrible person turned into a horrible undead person, his murders and his victims are mostly of the EC school of people who deserve it meeting appropriate ends, so there’s a schizophrenic character to the film’s argument against organized violence, portraying the things it damns much too gleefully, even more so than this happens in other horror movies.

As set pieces, some of the killings and their victims (Robert Forster is again there to be horrible and murdered) are very fun, but Uncle Sam’s thematic direction really doesn’t work with fun violence, leading to a very confusing tone.


That tone gets even more confusing because the film plays the family drama scenes with Jody’s obsession with his uncle and the pain this inflicts on his mother and aunt absolutely seriously, as they do Isaac Hayes’s part as a Vietnam vet who thinks he carries some of the responsibility for the way Sam turned out. Well, seriously until the film’s incredibly goofy climax that sees Hayes teaming up with a blind little boy in a wheelchair (don’t ask) and Jody to dispatch Sam with a cannon.

Re-watching Escape From New York

John Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981) has been one of my favorite movies seen I first saw it on German cable TV about twenty years ago.

There wouldn't be much sense in reviewing it - me using six hundred words to squee "I love it, I love it" looks like a waste of perfectly good blog space to me.

So I'm just going to list some of the details that made me especially happy this time:

• Parts of the music sound like further reduced E.S.G.!
• The relative disinterest the film takes in Snake's little gladiatorial match, which fits its anti-hero's poise perfectly. (And is exactly the thing some of Carpenter's later macho-fests like Vampires are missing)!
• The pure joy of having just about every single role cast with a b-movie hero(ine)!
• An ending that still says "Fuck you!" as beautifully as a perfect punk single!

Darling of the Day: "Snake Plissken!? I heard you were dead!"

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