Past Misdeeds: (The) Shepherd (1999)

aka Cybercity

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

It’s after the end of the world (again and again and again). This time the sweet one-two punch of World War III and an ecological catastrophe has turned our blue planet brown, so humanity has fled underground. There, our descendants dwell in what looks surprisingly like often pretty foggy warehouse sets, suffer from a lack of decent lighting that can only cause depression and off-screen monologues, and are dominated by various competing religious cults and sects.

Our hero of the evening, one properly action movie monikered guy known as Boris Dakota (C. Thomas Howell) works as a Shepherd – an enforcer/killer – for Miles (Roddy Piper) whose religion seems to be what happens when an Evangelical TV preacher goes worse. Miles’s guys (and it’s only guys) seem to be – as far as I parse the intensely vague world building of the film – one of the big two crazy cults in the underground world. Right now, Miles’s guys are living in a truce with the other big cult, the skimpy leather-clad girls of Lilith (Heidi von Palleske), keeping the apocalypse after the apocalypse at bay by not killing each other in public. Or something.

Dakota for his part isn’t much of a believer in anything anymore, since he suffers from the classical action hero traumatic past of a murdered wife and son, and now spends the time he doesn’t kill people for Miles and his old friend Lyndon (Mackenzie Gray) growling off-screen monologues about how much humanity sucks, and watching virtual low-res memories and screen savers of his family on what looks suspiciously like sun glasses, an awesome invention the film never even bothers to name but that will have excellent uses when it comes to hurting the audience’s eyes, as well as for exposition, and other random stuff.

However, when Dakota is assigned a new and - as he hopes and Miles will make sure - last target, something you might at first confuse with a plot surfaces, for said target, one Sophia (Marina Anderson) just happens to have a son right of the age Dakota’s kid was when he was murdered. So obviously, Dakota saves Sophia and the child from other assassins instead of killing her and attempts to take on the role of their protector. At first, Sophia isn’t all too keen on Dakota but after enough lackluster attacks on them, she surely will come around.

As you might suspect after this meandering synopsis of not much of a plot, if you go looking into this Roger Corman production directed by Peter Hayman expecting much of an actual movie as people generally understand the term, you might be a mite disappointed. The plot – such as it is – is really just a series of lamely reproduced clichés presented with all the enthusiasm and coherence of a late period Santo movie (which, if you don’t know your lucha cinema, means none whatsoever), with character actions and motivations that often don’t even make sense in the very broad interpretation of the word we use when talking about post-apocalyptic action cinema, underground (aka “we can’t afford to shoot outside, and Bronson Canyon’s too far away”) division. I, at least, can make neither heads nor tails out of the whole conspiracy angle between Miles and Lilith’s cults. If indeed there even is such an angle. I think it says everything about the quality of the writing here I’m not sure either way. Or, to take another example, why exactly does Lyndon act as he does in the final scenes? How the hell should the script know?

Obviously, things like suspense or excitement are right out in Shepherd, particularly since the action scenes are of the just barely competent type that neither wants to be creative nor exciting and just hovers around words like “there”. And nope, we don’t even get to see a titanic throw-down between Howell and Piper, which is probably for the better seeing how slowly Howell moves here.

However, while Shepherd is barely watchable as a serious piece of post-apocalyptic action film, it is a pretty brilliant lump of utter, inexplicable nonsense, and what creativity was involved behind the camera was clearly concentrated on a) providing various actors with as many opportunities for scenery chewing as possible, and b) adding absolutely pointless yet awesome nonsense/stuff/random insanity to as many scenes as possible. So Shepherd gifts us with great moments in cinema like Roddy Piper living in his own memory glasses world where he does the whole sub-Jesus thing, bare-chested and carrying around a humongous crucifix on his back (shades of Philip K. Dick there, also, obviously). Roddy also dreams of hitting people with one of those crosses-on-a-stick (that’s the technical term, right, religious readers?) bishops and the like carry around, literally likes to kick his henchmen when they are down, and spends most of his screen time angrily ranting and raving in sentences that can’t be meant to make sense. Truly, that part of the film is a thing to behold. And while Howell didn’t get the message about the scenery chewing beyond “do a manly growly voice, dude”, von Palleske and Lyndon in particular really join in the fun with gusto.

Other joys here are the random appearance of a cannibalistic punk (this is not a film who could afford a gang of them, sorry) who leads our hero back to the boy with his awesome power of smelling little boys (seriously), a just as random Roddy Piper crucifixion, and last but not least a cameo by good old David Carradine.

Carradine is not a man to be trifled with in the finding nothing undignified sweepstakes, so his character is only listed as “Ventriloquist” in the credits. And indeed, David is one, and because this film is very special indeed, David Carradine isn’t just a ventriloquist but has his star turn here drugging C. Thomas Howell, then straddling him while good old C. Thomas dreams of having sex with a woman quite clearly not David Carradine, and proceeding to strangle our hero with his ventriloquist’s doll. A doll, that, for reasons I don’t even want to think about, also seems to be trans.


And this, ladies and gentlemen, should really answer anyone’s questions about whether Shepherd is worth watching.

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.

In short: The Bad Pack (1997)

A small, mostly Mexican-populated Texan village is oppressed by the neighbouring right wing militia of one Lamont Sperry (Marshall R. Teague) who are robbing, stealing, and murdering. It’s a curious way to demonstrate one’s supposed superiority, but then moral superiority is something these types usually miss out on claiming, unless it’s about sex.

Anyway, of course the village sends out two of their own to hire themselves some mercenaries. After a bit of back and forth that surely comes cheaper than an actual action scene does, the guys stumble on Confederate cap wearing badass McQue (Robert Davi) whose politics seem rather confusing to me, seeing as he lets himself be hired by brown people and treats everyone politely. As this is another Seven Samurai variation (perhaps with a bit of the A-Team thrown in), McQue gets together a team of specialists consisting of a driver (Roddy Piper), the brawny one (Ralf Moeller), a sharpshooting woman (Shawn Hutt), the obligatory African American who won’t stop talking (Larry B. Scott), and some crazy explosives guy (Patrick Dollaghan, I think). Together, they’re going to kick militia ass, at least as much as the budget allows.

Which, I’m sad to say, doesn’t seem to be much. At least, Brent Huff’s kinda-sorta action movie prefers talk to actual action to a suspicious degree. Now, Seven Samurai variants are generally a bit more talky than their genre brethren, but that’s usually because they’re interested in actually doing a bit of character work, taking cliché types and letting them breathe a little. Unfortunately, The Bad Pack really doesn’t do much of interest in that direction, and doesn’t put the copious amount of dialogue scenes to good use, or, in fact, any use at all except prolonging the film, with little said I’d actually want to remember, or will in fact be remembering for more than an hour or so.

The action’s not much to write home about either. There’s not only too little of it but what there is doesn’t show much energy, or creativity. Huff’s (who also plays a perfectly forgettable role as an actor here) action direction reminds me in a bad way of how 80s TV shows more often than not handled these kinds of sense. In other words, the action is not horrible but neither exciting nor ridiculous in a fun way - it’s just there.

“It’s just there” seems to me the perfect description for the whole of The Bad Pack, and, at least tonight, that’s just not enough for me.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,action,brent huff,robert davi,roddy piper

Jungleground (1995)

Vice police Lieutenant Jake Cornell (Roddy Piper) takes part in an undercover operation in the part of his city that is so bad, people call it “Jungleground”. The operation goes very bad indeed, Jake’s colleagues are killed, and Jake finds himself the object of the tender mercies of the leader of a local gang who has been killing off drug dealers as well as his colleagues left and right, the Ragna Rockers.

While parts of his multi-racial gang think they are indeed drug dealer murdering vigilantes (that’d be the Punisher Rockers, guys), their leader Odin (JR Bourne), as he’s not surprisingly called, is actually planning to just put the whole local drug business in better hands, namely his own. Still, he enjoys a good little sadist game, so instead of just killing Jake, he goes all most dangerous game on him, setting our hero loose unarmed and underdressed in Jungleground, and putting a team lead by one Dragon (Peter Williams) on his trail. As an added incentive, Odin has put two of his men on Jake’s girlfriend, sculptor and surprise woman of action Sammy Woods (Torri Higginson). If Jake doesn’t reach her, and the safe part of down, before sunrise, she’s going to die.

I am sure, a Most Dangerous Game/The Warriors variant with a bit of ye olde “white man caught in the ghetto” added to the mix is exactly what the Canadian youth was clamouring after – though, I suspect they did that rather a few years before director Don Allan finally made these dreams finally come true in the glorious year of 1995.

Snark aside, for what it is, Jungleground is a perfectly entertaining film, crafted reasonably well as it is, and starring the always agreeable “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in the main ass-kicking role as it does. Because it’s a Canadian film, it also gives the object of Roddy’s rescue aspirations a bit more agency and personality than usual in direct-to-video action fodder, delighting its audience (well, me) with a really fun scene where she laughs a gallery owner with casting couch aspirations out of her studio, and a MacGyver style interlude concerning an escape attempt from the baddies, which might not sound like much – or sensible – but does give Higginson’s Sammy about three times as much personality as is typical of these kinds of roles. I also couldn’t help but notice that the film’s evil gang isn’t just multi-racial but also practicing gender equality outside of its leading circle, and because I’m all about absurd essentialist explanations today, that’s now officially part of Jungleground’s Canadian-ness too.

Apart from that, the film consists of a series of decent action scenes taking place in crummy sets and on dark, crummy streets, some scenery chewing by Bourne, Piper doing Piper as well as he always does, and from time to time a bit of enjoyable nonsense. Of the last, I particularly liked the delectable way in which the Ragna Rockers (at least gang name of the month) execute one of their own, namely by driving a car through the window of their warehouse headquarters (of course called Valhalla), throwing a plate-o’-spikes onto the car’s roof, and then throwing their intended victim onto that now spiked roof. It’s certainly a thing. If there’s something I really dislike about this comparatively pleasant little movie, then it’s the fact that it doesn’t have too many elements quite as silly as that scene. Add another comment on the film’s supposed Canadianness here, if you like.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,action,don allan,roddy piper,torri higginson,peter williams,jr bourne,reviews

On ExB: (The) Shepherd (1999)

aka Cybercity

Hey, you! Yes you! You might not know it, but you need some Shepherd in your life! It’s the cheap-o post-apocalyptic sort-of cyberpunk action movie of choice for everyone who wants to witness how Roddy Piper gets religion, C. Thomas Howell makes a growly face, and David Carradine becomes one with his ventriloquist’s doll (I suspect The Method).

Just click on through to my column at the brilliant ventriloquist doll lovin’ Exploder Button for enlightenment!

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,post-apocalypse,action,peter hayman,c. thomas howell,roddy piper,marina anderson,david carradine,other places

In short: Tough and Deadly (1995)

CIA agent Jack Monk (Billy Blanks) is captured and nearly killed for reasons that will become sort of clear much later. He barely escapes with his life and ends up as an amnesiac John Doe in a hospital bed. Bounty hunter and private dick Elmo Freech (Roddy Piper) stumbles over him in hospital. At first, Elmo only hopes there might be a bounty and therefore profit involved, but when somebody tries to kill his new-found interest, he saves Jack’s life, springs him out of hospital, lets him move in, trains him up again and makes him his new bounty hunting partner under the exciting name of John Portland. Why? I suspect the love that dare not speak its name.

Of course, John’s/Jack’s enemies are soon on his trail again. As luck will have it, the mysterious traitorous CIA agent (Phil Morris) after Jack’s life just happens to be in business with Elmo’s old nemesis, mafia boss Milan (Sal Landi), which will most probably raise the body count a bit.

After they turned out to be a rather effective duo in 1993’s Back in Action Roddy Piper and Billy Blanks reunited again – and unfortunately for the last time – for this little lark. Directed by Steve Cohen, Tough and Deadly features your typical Direct-to-DVD movie script, where nobody’s motivations, not to speak of plans, make much sense, but where bone crunching kicks happen every five minutes; mostly to bad guys’ faces. Though, to give the script credit where credit is due, it is well-paced - aka contains only scenes of male friendship my brain can’t help as parse as romance, a few one-liners, and ass-kicking of varying and increasing brutality, and nothing else to slow it down any – and clearly knows what its viewers will want out of their low budget US action flicks.

I for one can hardly resist the siren song of crunching bones, gun shots, and very minor explosions set to a synthesizer soundtrack possibly even more generic than Tough and Deadly’s title, particularly not when all the cheap yet cool carnage is committed by a martial artist and fitness guru who is a neutral actor (so good enough for this sort of thing) and a pretty fantastic, if showy, screen fighter, and by everyone’s favourite unmasked wrestler-turned-actor easily getting by on regular Joe charisma, a shit-eating grin, who is also a pretty fantastic - and completely different - screen fighter.

As a buddy action movie couple Piper and Blanks work quite well too, with many a tender look between the two, speaking dialogue that is at worst so unfunny it becomes funny again, at best quite purposefully funny, and tending more to the latter. As always, it’s a bit of a shame the romance between the two is never consumed on screen but I suspect action cinema won’t be ready to make its obviously yet unspoken gay characters just gay until 2025; I’d be glad to be proven wrong, particularly because certain critics can then stop pretending every tender male friendship on screen is a sign of repressed homosexuality, and instead concentrate on praising those that actually are, like the one here.

Anyway, Tough and Deadly is another fine outing for Blanks and Piper, and while it didn’t make me think, watching it made me pretty happy.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,action,martial arts,steve cohen,roddy piper,billy blanks

On ExB: Back in Action (1993)

This is an easy one, because we all love Roddy Piper, right? And we can hardly contain ourselves finding him teamed-up with a weird-looking, shirt-hating fitness guru who kicks people in the face a lot, right?

And wouldn’t you know it, that team-up is exactly what this week’s column over at Exploder Button is all about, so just click on through.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,action,billy blanks,roddy piper,bobbie phillips,kai soremekun,nigel bennett

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.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,other places,sf,action,horror,peter svatek,roddy piper,jayne heitmeyer,billy drago,tyrone benskin