Dir: Jim Wynorski [as Jay Andrews]
Stars: Billy Warlock, Kurt Max Runte, Catherine Lough Haggquist, Peter Graham-Gaudreau

I have a lot of time for Wynorski who, along with Fred Olen Ray, is one of the most enthusiastically active B-movie directors in Hollywood, with a career going back to 1985’s The Lost Empire, and which has resulted in such classics – at least in TC Towers – as Deathstalker 2, Chopping Mall and The Bare Wench Project [ok, Chris would disagree with me over the merits of the last-named]. He operates under a range of pseudonyms, including H.R. Blueberry for soft-porn spoofs such as The Da Vinci Coed, with other names including Arch Stanton, Noble Henry, Tom Popatopolous and Jamie Wagner. But the one you have to watch out for, and operating here, is Jay Andrews. This tends to be attached to poverty-row SF/action flicks, often appearing on the SciFi Channel: Komodo vs. Cobra or Gargoyle. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Thing Below.

You’ll notice that the trailer provides only brief glimpses of the titular Thing, and that would be for very good reason: it is total crap, being entirely CGI, and apparently constructed using the full computer power offered by a top of the line Sinclair Spectrum [without the 48 Kb RAM expansion pack] A host will open their mouth, a tentacle will shoot out and wrap itself around the victim’s throat. Except, the use of the words “shoot out” and “wrap itself” implies that the tentacle and the actors interact in some way. Please be under no illusions there: you could achieve a better semblance of visual trickery by getting your six-year old nephew to draw on the TV with Crayolas.

The film starts on an US warship in the Gulf of Mexico, where a sample, dug up from an oil-platform, is being returned to shore in a ferocious storm. The scientists in charge, rather dumbly, wait until the height of the gale to try and move the sample – described as so radioactive, it could tan an elephant’s hide, though this is never mentioned again – to a secure location, from the lab counter on which it is currently sitting. Do they, oh, use a dolly or cart of some kind to move it, as the ship heaves through the waves? No: a bunch of guys each grab a corner, and stagger around for a bit, before the inevitable happens. They drop the container, which shatters and the contents starts shooting tentacles out, as if auditioning for the cosplay at a Legend of the Overfiend convention.

Then the ship blows up. Quite why, I’m not sure, but they probably had used up all of their stock footage, and needed to divert elsewhere. Such as the CGI oil-rig where the bulk of the film actually takes place; this does explain the movie’s alternate title, Ghost Rig 2: The Legend of the Sea Ghost. In case you’re wondering, the original Ghost Rig was a retitling of a British film, The Devil’s Tattoo, about an evil spirit haunting a North Sea platform. It was, presumably, successful enough to merit this pseudo-sequel, though since they seem to have abandoned the title, you’d never know.

Heading towards the rig is a supply ship, under the steely gaze of Capt. Jack Griffin (Warlock), along with a scientist, Anna Davis (Haggquist), and company man Rieser (Graham-Gaudreau) – the latter may be a nod to Paul Reiser, who played basically the same role in Aliens. When they arrive, the find the place almost deserted, and soon find out that a creature is roaming the corridors here. It’s never quite made clear whether this is the same one which was on the ship or not; I think it’s probably a second one, but if that’s the case, how it escaped too isn’t explained. As Oscar Wilde once said, “To lose one many-tentacled beast from the depths may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Or something like that.

Here, we discover the creature’s other ability: it can project visions into the minds of those near it, to lure them within tentacle strike range. I’m pretty sure this was used in a Star Trek episode. And, say what you like about the monster, it doesn’t lack ambition. The crewman who wants to be a cowboy, for example, gets a whole Western town, complete with an opposing gunfighter. Never mind that this is actually a storm-tossed oil-platform, so any normal person might go “Hang on a moment…”, when they stumble through a door into Tombstone (or a semi-convincing facsimile thereof), instead of the expected store-room. Similarly, another crew member gets a visit from his favourite porn starlet, played by Glori-Anne Gilbert, whose breasts have previously been discussed on this site. A third lost her husband and son in a train crash, so – yep, you guessed it – the entire accident scene gets re-created. Hell, if you’re going to go big, go big.

Gradually, the team is whittled down to the small band of survivors, who are exactly the characters you would expect to survive. They locate a couple of survivors, including Captain Jack’s brother, and there’s a tussle over a floppy disk which contains information on how to defeat the creature. This is questionable in a couple of ways. Firstly, when was the last time you saw anyone copy information onto a floppy disk? And secondly, the method actually used by Jack, seems far more inspired by a recent viewing of Die Hard than anything remotely technological. Sadly, the film lacks the guts to have him intone “”Come out off the coast, we’ll get together with a many-tentacled telepathic fiend, have a few laughs.”

The ending is both eminently predictable, and a complete cop-out in that the creature suddenly decides to develop a hitherto-unmentioned skill – one which, if applied earlier, would likely have resulted in a rapid end to the film. No such luck, however, and we are left to contemplate the horrific possibility of The Thing Below 2 – or, possibly, Ghost Rig 3. So far, however, even Wynorski has not seen fit to go back to that particular well, despite having made 23 features in the four or so years since. Perhaps even he knows when it’s best to let sleeping, ah, things lie.

Despite the copious use of stock footage [some of which is, admittedly, fairly impressive], the film’s cheapjack nature continually shines through. The entire US government is represented by two guys and a Dell computer in a largely-empty warehouse, supposedly in Washington. This is enough to get you the direct-dial number of the President; well, I guess Bush hasn’t got much to do since the election.

If Warlock looks somewhat familiar, it’s because he was the lead in Brian Yuzna’s Society, where he also found himself on the wrong end of an alien species, and I have to say, the acting is probably the least of the film’s problems. While no-one stands out, they all do what they can with the crappy material, especially since one suspects they were acting under false pretenses. Specifically, being unaware that the special FX to be inserted later, were using the term “special” in much the same way as the “Special Olympics.” I can only sympathize with them, so here’s a quick plug for Haggquist’s theatrical and film bookshop in Vancouver. It’s the least she deserves.

Regardless of how you look at this film, there are better entries sitting on the shelves. Alien paranoia? Go for The Thing, which the movie’s title is shamefully invoking. Want tentacles on the ocean? Try Deep Rising instead – which also had far better effects, despite being made six years previously, practically an age in CGI terms. Deserted vessel? Even the crappy Ghost Ship had one good scene. Which would be one more than this manages. But ask yourself a question, folks: how cheap and rushed does a film have to be, before Jim Wynorski won’t use his real name on it?

Dir: Tobe Hooper
Star: Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Mathilda May, Frank Finlay

Lifeforce trailer [NSFW!] Never mind films,
they don’t even make trailers like this any more.

This 1987 adaptation of Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires was famously disastrous, taking less than half its budget at the US box-office, even after being edited down by fifteen minutes, and was one of a series of flops that pushed Cannon Films to the brink of bankruptcy. At the time, Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, “About 30 seconds into Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, two things become clear: that this film is going to make no sense, and that Mr. Hooper’s directorial work on Poltergeist may indeed have been heavily influenced by Steven Spielberg.” And when Wilson saw what Cannon had done with his book, he was unimpressed, famously saying: “John Fowles had once told me that the film of The Magus was the worst movie ever made. After seeing Lifeforce I sent him a postcard telling him that I had gone one better.”

That’s being harsh: Lifeforce is by no means a disaster and time has been kind to it; you’ll find a lot of positive reviews online these days. The IMDB currently gives it a score of 5.8 out of ten, which ranks it third-best among the fifteen features Hooper has directed [trailing only Texas Chainsaw and Poltergeist, obviously enough]. Even allowing for Tobe’s often-wretched output, that isn’t bad. It is a classic B-movie romp of aliens, who inspired the vampire legend, and are brought back to the Earth to wreak further havoc on modern-day civilization. Steve Railsback, chewing scenery to good effect, is astronaut Steve Carlsen, the man responsible for bringing the menace back from Halley’s Comet on the spaceship Churchill, and it’s up to him and SAS Colonel Caine (Firth) to stop them, before NATO does a spot of nuclear sanitary work on London.

It feels much like a Hammer film with a budget ($25m, a huge amount at the time) increased enormously from that studio’s norm, and would have worked particularly well as a Professor Quatermass film. I can easily envisage Messrs. Cushing and Lee playing two central characters, albeit ones perhaps more academic and, in Carlsen’s case, less hysterical. It is terribly British in many aspects, with cups of tea and stiff upper lips abounding, even as the capital collapses into anarchy and chaos.

In this setting, Railsback is somewhat of a sore thumb; it may be that his unrestrained looniness, the only American character of significance, was in part responsible for the film’s failures at the box-office there. Firth is admirably tongue-in-cheek, even when faced with Carlsen beating up a nurse believed to be hosting one of the vampires: recommended to leave the room, his po-faced response is “I’m a natural voyeur.” Similarly, the supporting cast, as with Hammer, is full of faces you should recognize, for example Home Secretary Sir Percy Heseltine, played by Aubrey Morris – he was Alex’s parole officer in A Clockwork Orange. Chief among these is probably Patrick Stewart, in his pre-Picard days, as the head of an asylum for the criminally insane. It’s somewhat creepy to see Carlsen impelled to kiss him, though it probably would have been even worse had the role, as originally planned, gone to Sir John Gielgud. Nicholas (Hazell) Ball and Michael Gothard, a villainous henchman from For Your Eyes Only, can also be seen.

And then there’s Mathilda May, who was clearly no bother at all to the costume department for the entire first half of the film, being unencumbered by any clothes at all. This prompts Dr Fallada (Finlay, a role originally offered to Klaus Kinski) to proclaim, with what turns out to be misplaced confidence, “Don’t worry. A naked girl is not going to get out of this complex.” She doesn’t so much perform as exist, and gives perhaps the finest portrayal of a nekkid space vampire in cinematic history: In a long ago printed edition of TC, I made a very complimentary comment about Ms. May’s breasts. Chris, with her superior breasts, has not let me forget this, and nor will I will make that same mistake twice. Though, for the curious, I will point out that if you click on the pic attached to this paragraph, you get the very NSFW version. And we’ll move rapidly on, shall we?

The special effects are a mixed bag. John Dykstra’s outer-space miniature work is impeccable, but some of the body casts on view are less than convincing. There’s one of Stewart which is so bad, it’s difficult to see how it could ever have passed muster, even more than twenty years ago. However, the epic scale of the film really works in its favour towards the finale, when London has been taken over. The feel here is more like a zombie film (co-writer O’Bannon helmed Return of the Living Dead the same year), with Hooper doing a fine job of capturing the anarchy and chaos as Carlsen and Caine try to track down the vampires’ lair. Though, it has to be said, the F-sized beam of light shooting into the sky should probably have given them something of a clue.

The story logic does leave a little to be desired: as Chris pointed out, if vampire victims automatically resurrect themselves two hours after death, why did this apparently not happen in the month or more it took the Churchill to return to Earth? And I can’t say the vampires’ plan makes a great deal of sense, either, sending one of their number off up to Yorkshire, to hide out in the asylum mentioned above, for reasons best described as murky. Still, as a loony slice of eighties apocalyptic sci-fi horror, it’s probably among the best, and this has to go down as one of the masterpieces of Cannon Films – albeit that both of those are somewhat small fields in number. Hooper certainly hasn’t done anything better since, either. I’ll close with this immortal exchange between Col. Caine and Dr. Fallada:

Colonel Colin Caine: You mean life after death?
Dr. Hans Fallada: Yes.
Colonel Colin Caine: Is there?
Dr. Hans Fallada: What?
Colonel Colin Caine: Life after death?
Dr. Hans Fallada: Do you really want to know?
Colonel Colin Caine: No.
Dr. Hans Fallada: Well, to answer your question, yes…

Rating: B

Dir: Penelope Spheeris
While not quite the worst film ever made, Thunder and Mud represents probably the hugest gulf in quality for consecutive movies from the same director. Spheeris’ previous work was The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years, a film which rivals Spinal Tap for dumb rock excess, yet surpasses it simply by being a documentary. And she’d follow up Thunder with Wayne’s World, which grossed over $120m in the US alone.

Covering somewhat similar territory to both neighbours, Thunder still stands alone as the only movie ever to combine heavy metal with mud wrestling. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this before? Er, because half a millisecond’s thought would have shown the huge potential for disaster perhaps? It’s certainly safe to say that it’s a match-up which will never be seen again. Anyone even considering the idea should simply watch this film, and they’ll drop the idea with the speed of a well-bribed cricketer.

Your hosts for the evening are Sam Mann, Tawn Mastry and Jessica Hahn. The first looks like a washed-up, has-been musician (and as a presenter, often seems to be channelling Ozzy Ozbourne), the second is a local DJ of minor LA renown, while you’re probably going, “I know that name” about the third. And you’d be right. Hahn was the woman who slept with TV-angelist Jim Bakker and brought down his PTL ministry (mind you, if you’ve seen his wife, Tammy-Faye, you can hardly blame the guy). Hahn got over the trauma by getting implants and posing for Playboy. Twice. How this qualifies her as a host is never quite made clear.

If the presenters are inept, talentless buffoons, they seem like icons of professionalism beside the musicians. The running theme throughout the presentation was desperate attempts to prove how macho these guys all are, despite mostly looking like badly made-up drag queens. Rejecting all claims to the contrary, it seems that “glam” probably does stand for “Gay LA Metal” – perhaps the most telling scene cut between the mud-wrestlers in their dressing room, and the bands in theirs. Hard to say who was applying more make-up or had bigger hair.

The format is simple. Each band of the five on display is “championed” by a mud-wrestler; a band plays, two girls battle, winner continues on. Now, I could go on about the unfairness of this – the champion might have to win just one bout, over an opponent who had already fought three times previously – but this is mud-wrestling, not professional boxing. [Though in terms of credibility, they’re about equal.] Matters are not helped much by a ‘commentator’ whose vocabulary appears to be at about the level of a particularly unchallenging Dr. Seuss book.

I do have to say, however, that the mud wrestlers are easily the most convincing performers: the bands all mime, and the hosts have the comedic timing of a pack of permanent markers. We can’t really blame Spheeris, who has said she’s not at ease with comedy (and a cameo appearance by her confirms this); it’s more that the lines are simply not funny. We thus lay the blame mostly at the door of writer Wally Anne Wharton [yes, that’s her name] who also makes an appearance as the ‘manager’ of the wrestlers. Their federation initials are M.U.F.F. Oh, hold my aching sides, I fear they may split…

With about 20 minutes of mud-wrestling, and perhaps the same of ‘performances’, this leaves around 50 minutes to be filled with totally dire comic skits. This includes protests by a group of fundamentalist Christians from the group U.P.T.I.G.H.T, attempts by a trio of skanks to whine their way in for free, sexual harassment for comedic effect, and – worst of all – monologues by ‘Barbi the Bimbo’, who spouts such drivel as, “I must be telepathetic”. Half right, Barbi, half right… If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was played by Linnea Quigley, but none of the names in the end credits rang any immediate bells, and there’s absolutely no way I’m going back to check.

The sole moment of wit in the whole thing is after one wrestler quits after having her top accidentally torn off. We’ll take at least four sets of quotes in that sentence as read, shall we? One of the replacement wrestlers is Big Bad Mama, who must be 200 pounds at least. Fighting for She-Rok, the all-female band (who are, sadly, just as shallow and cliched as their male brethren), Mama wins, in a moment of cheering defiance to the relentless parade of moronic stereotypes inflicted on us over the past 90 minutes. And that was just the audience – though did we spot Dennis Quaid, looking rather shamefaced? As a final highlight, they wheeled out Bill Gazzara, veteran Sunset Strip promoter of everyone from The Doors to Van Halen. He was looking even more near death than usual (he’d eventually peg it a couple of years later), which made his lecherous comments about the girls even creepier.

Where are they now? A little detective work (okay, 5 minutes on a search engine) revealed the following:

• Grave Danger: God knows. Type in “grave danger heavy metal” into Google, and you get articles on the perils of depleted uranium ammunition.
• Nuclear Assault: Drifted apart around 1993, but like so many 80’s bands, came back for a reunion tour in 2002, and released a concert recording, Alive Again this year. Official site.
• Tuff: Ditto. Lead singer Stevie Rachelle is also in a parody band called Cheeseheads With Attitude, who sing songs about Wisconsin, as well as a tribute band called Motley Priest. Official site.
• She-Rok: Despite “winning”, they apparently vanished without a trace, leaving only a photo (right). Google mostly points to porn sites, suggesting “she rok” is something rude in Dutch. Remember that for your next Amsterdam trip.
• Young Gunns: Changed their name to Wildside, released CDs in ’92 and ’95. Rumour has singer Drew Hannah running a porn company, while guitarist Benny Rhynedance played a pirate at Treasure Island in Las Vegas for a bit.

But wait! There’s more! A January 2006 email from Heather Harris sheds some light on She-Rok.

“The photo you offer to illustrate the band She Rok actually depicts Jessica Hahn, co-MC to the film with musician Sam Mann. She had topical frisson at the time due to her defection from the evangelical ranks, courtesy of her involvement with a well-known, adulterous minister.

Although many of the bands in the movie are deservedly forgotten, She Rok should not be lumped in with them. They were the best of the all-female metal bands of the era, courtesy of better instrumentalists than many signed female metal acts such as Vixen or Girlschool. Guitarist Geri Etinger can be viewed in the film peeling out her trade Van Halen-worthy technique, and 2 other members had musical notoriety outside the band’s ranks as well.

Singer Emi Canyn became one of Motley Crue’s Nasty Habits, the backup singers who exuded their own personalities despite the cliches of the Metal era, and She Rok bassist Mary Kay was co-founder of Detroit’s legendary proto-punk band The Dogs. She’s still onstage playing with Kanary, a band with Precious Metal’s Leslie Knauer, and remains as pretty today as my photos of the filming below indicate. The film was silly fun, and is quite representative of the 1980’s hair metal daze in Los Angeles. Perhaps this info and my photos will make viewing this curio more fun to your readers.”

The non-musicians involved with Thunder & Mud seem deeply embarrassed, save for Quaisha, the girl who had her top torn off, who still seems be working happily in the field fourteen years later. Mastry, last heard of as a DJ in Minneapolis, says simply, “I sucked”, while Spheeris, in an Onion interview described it as, “A flaming piece of crap”. She also doesn’t believe she ever got paid for it – somehow, a more fitting epitaph for this monument to 80’s metal is hard to imagine. Some things about that decade truly are best left forgotten…

[Another reader writes: “I don’t know who wrote the review of the Penelope Spheeris project, Thunder And Mud, but I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed it. I remember some funny sequences in the video, and your reviewer helped remind me of some others. By the way, Sam Mann (left) is alive and well in Hollywood, CA, splitting his time between his band ‘RAM’ and DJing at a Mexican bikini bar in downtown Los Angeles called Alameda Strip.”]

Dir: Emmett Alston
Star: Sho Kosugi, Brent Huff, Blackie Dammett, Vijay Amritraj

Vijay Amritraj. Good tennis player. Top Asian for 14 years, reached the Wimbledon doubles semis with his brother. But an actor? That he has a supporting role here tells you something. That he doesn’t stand out as particularly awful tells you more about this semi-Bond wannabe, that wavers between jaw-dropping incompetence and incoherence. We know we’re in trouble from the opening credits, featuring Kosugi (a low-rent Sonny Chiba at the best of times) doing kata surrounded by leotarded ladies, in a bizarre yet chaste 007 ripoff. It even has a strikingly crap song, strangely comparable to All Time High.

Set in the Phillipines (another reason for bad movie fans to sit up), it starts with a busload of tourists being kidnapped by terrorists, having missed subtle warning signs such as a man in dark glasses by the road-side muttering into a walkie-talkie with a three-foot antenna. Mind you, given the stultifyingly banal tour guide, I’d be grateful for the diversion: once the native dancers appear, capture by sadistic goons would seem a welcome alternative. This is especially so, when the leader of the gang is named – and we rewound the film to check this – Colonel Honey Hump. She is a lesbian, naturally, though one for whom English does not appear to be a familiar tongue, going by her performance.

She is, however, a model of restraint and understated acting, compared to her boss, Alby the Cruel. He is German (why he is in the Philippines is never made clear), in a wheelchair, and has a monkey with a diaper in lieu of the traditional white Persian. Played by the wonderfully-named Blackie Dammett – let’s just say that again: Blackie Dammett (in real life, the father of Red Hot Chilli Pepper Anthony Kiedis!) – he has kidnapped the group in order to force the release of Arab terrorist Rahji the Butcher, a character whose dialogue consists almost exclusively of “BWAH-HAH-HAH…”

To rescue the hostages, the government call in the DART team, a threesome led by Spike Shinobi (Kosugi), although not until he has a flashback on a sun-lounger (why does he take his samurai sword with him poolside?) during which we learn he was expelled from Ninja Academy for letting his emotions get the better of him. You may be excused for thinking this is an Important Plot Point. Don’t bother: it is never referred to again. Chief sidekick, Steve Gordon, is played by Brent Huff – with his roles here and in Gwendoline, he is the first man to have starred in multiple Incredibly Bad Films, alongside actresses Sybil Danning and Yukari Oshima. [Michelle Bauer has managed three, but two were minor roles]

Our heroic trio end up in a museum, where they are attacked by midgets. It’s sentences like that one, which keep me going through all the long, dark dull movies, y’know. Despite having all his dialogue dubbed, Kosugi looks suitably flummoxed by this. Well he might, as a fall of perhaps a yard, tops, kills the guy they’re after, even though he lands on his feet. They don’t make villains like they used to. “That was his last jump,” adds Shinobi cryptically.

Despite the presence of an international hostage crists, the good guys take time out for a few drinks, and seduction in Gordon’s case. But Alby and his henchmen have turned the Phillipine jungle into a Bavarian drinking hall too, so they’re not exactly losing ground. The government, however, is left with no option but to release Rahji. Who, in keeping with fundamentalist terrorist tradition, heads straight for the nearest whorehouse, pausing only to exchange his car for a horse and buggy.

Tracking the manic laughter, Shinobi follows Rahji, clings to the escape ‘copter, throws him from it, visits a floating brothel, leaps overboard, is chased by scuba divers (clearly always on standby) and finds the terrorists. Thus passes the middle 1/3. We know we are heading towards the final, climactic, all-out assault but get two classic lines first: “It would take a tougher man than you to pull apart industrial epoxy” and, “Do you understand? PIG HEADSSSS!” from Colonel Hump.

The end battle has an almost Zen-like approach. Witness the following sequence:

• Medium shot of waterfall
• Sound-effect of shuriken flying through air
• Close-up of guy holding shuriken unconvincingly to eye
• Medium shot of waterfall.

This is cinematic genius on a par with Welles or Lean – the midgets earlier suggest Alston may be a pseudonym for Fellini. I note that “Alston” has not apparently worked on anything since Fellini died…By now, we are deep into “Eh?” territory, with Shinobi fighting evil ninjas for no readily apparent reason – between Germans, Japanese, Arabs and the locals, it is truly a terrorist United Nations. Rahji is dispatched with a detonator in the mouth, while Alby is trampled to death by a herd of stampeding polo ponies. At the risk of repeating myself, sentences like that sum up the reasons we lurk in the “under $10” section of less-discerning movie outlets: an unfettered imagination is a good thing, and when it goes utterly berserk, it’s even better. One can only wonder at the script meeting where they came up with this ending for the villain.

In keeping with traditional badmovie ethics, the title is meaningless, as far as I can tell, since at no point in the film do nine ninjas die. The German title translates as Nine Lives of the Ninja, which might make more sense. But what else would you expect from a film where Shane and Kane Kosugi play characters called Shane and Kane, while Vijay Amritraj plays one called…yep, you guessed it, Vijay. There’s one extraordinary appropriate line from the film that sums up the whole surreal experience: “Too many drugs this time, boys, too many drugs.” For the makers, perhaps – for Chris and I, not even a 151-proof rum-soaked pineapple proved sufficient to mask all of this film’s delicious flaws.

Dir: Roger Christian
Star: John Travolta, Barry Pepper, Forest Whitaker, Kim Coates

It doesn’t actually begin too badly, though I don’t know about man being an endangered species, as the opening text claims – it’s John Travolta’s career that’s about to be put in extreme peril. In the year 3000, humanity has been reduced to a primeval state, harbouring vague memories of civilization, gods and demons. We can tell it’s primeval, because all the men look like Swampy. Hell, all the women look like Swampy. Our hero, Jonnie (Pepper, in his last starring role – trust me on this one) leaves the sanctuary of the mountains to find these mythical gods in a ruined city. I have to say, the effects and sets are excellent, and I was wondering if this was perhaps more a misunderstood gem.

How wrong I was. For then the invading alien race, the Psychlos, turn up and start firing. For some reason, the movie suddenly acquires a virulent green tint, the first of many totally gratuitous filters director Christian puts in front of the camera. Green, blue, orange – even more than one in the same shot. And when he hasn’t got out his Crayolas, he’s tilting the camera: initially, it didn’t make much difference since, hey, mountains are kind of tilty anyway, but this gets old fast on any level playing-field. The drinking game for this movie should involve taking a swig each time the camera moves off the horizontal: should ensure oblivion is reached by about 30 minutes, a best-case scenario for any viewer.

Anyway, Jonnie gets captured, pausing only to crash through a succession of plate-glass windows, all remarkably intact, despite the passage of enough time for cities to crumble. His attempts to escape bring him into contact – literally – with Terl (Travolta), the Psychlo security officer who is mean and grumpy even when he isn’t stuck on Earth “with endless options for renewal”, after being caught shagging a senator’s daughter. Bizarrely, there’s much in the film that revolves around office politics of the most banal sort, which is wildly out of place in a supposed SF-action pic.

“In order to feel safer on his private jet, John Travolta has purchased a bomb-sniffing dog. Unfortunately for the actor, the dog came six movies too late”
Tina Fey, Saturday Night Live

Hard to say which is worse, Travolta’s appearance or his acting. Things the movies teach us, #391: it is hard to exude menace, when you have tubes stuck up both your nostrils. And that’s excluding Terl’s funky dreads and the platform soles, clearly intended to increase his stature, but which actually make him resemble a former member of Slade as he clomps around. Travolta’s performance is no more comfortable, and would be barely acceptable as a pantomime villain at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon.

Our hero, meanwhile, is stuck with the other “man-animals” and fed something green and lumpy; it must be good, as a fight breaks out over its distribution, albeit only so Jonnie can give the “we humans have to stick together” speech. Terl, meanwhile, has his own plans. The Psychlos came to Earth in search of gold (coincidentally, also a rare element on their planet), and he wants to use humans to operate the mining machinery, which would be a breach of the rules. He also lets Jonnie and two colleagues out, purely in order to find out what humans like most to eat – I guess asking them would have been too much trouble – and comes to the conclusion that it’s rat.

He plugs Jonnie into a learning machine, force-feeding him, not just the knowledge necessary to work the machinery, but the entire Encyclopedia Galactica, including the bits on military technology. Oops. If Terl is supposed to be one of the elite, you wonder how such a dumb species ever discovered the wheel, never mind interstellar teleportation. He then brings Jonnie to the destroyed Denver public library, just to emphasise that knowledge is useless. Jonnie picks up from the rubble…well, for one glorious moment, I thought it was going to be a copy of L.Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, but it’s even more cliched – the Declaration of Independence.

Terl can’t survive outdoors because radiation makes the atmosphere the Psychlos breath explode [This an Important Plot Point, once you can get past wondering about the dubious physics involved]. So he leaves Jonnie and his crew to mine for two weeks and wanders off. Jonnie uses his new-found knowledge instead to sprint around the United States, dropping off local cavemen at flight simulators so they can learn to fly fighter jets [miraculously still in working order after a thousand years or so], picking up nuclear bombs, oh, and looting gold from Fort Knox. Terl, of course, barely questions why his gold mine is miraculously producing bullion bars, probably stamped, “Property of US Government”.

Jonnie kicks off the revolt, and then…to be honest, I’m not sure what happens, exactly, as the story is edited in such a way as to border on the incoherent. Must have been damn fine flight simulators though, as the cavemen are now flying like Tom Cruise on amphetamines. The nuclear bomb is snuck through the teleportation gateway to the Psychlos home planet, where it blows up, causing the entire atmosphere to go with it. Kinda lucky such an unstable planet had survived the four billion years necessary to evolve intelligent life.

Terl meanwhile, gets his arm blown off – reacting with much the same depth of emotion you’d get if someone told him there was a thread on his suit jacket – and is kept hostage by Jonnie for reasons which remain unclear to this day. Estimated cost: $73m. American box-office: $21m. Watching John Travolta’s smug Scientologist face as his career goes down the plughole: priceless.

It’s impossible to list all the ways in which this film is jaw-droppingly awful. The plot makes no sense, the acting is awful, the direction woeful. I’ve read the original novel (hey, so shoot me) and it’s actually not bad, or at least not disastrous, in a pulp SF kinda way. Its miserable box-office doesn’t tell the whole tale, since it’s widely known that Scientologists were asked to go and see the movie multiple times on the first weekend. About the only thing in its favour is that, while I’ve no doubt Hubbard’s name is largely what got Travolta interested, it surely is too bad to contain any kind of cult-indoctrination message.

Rottentomatoes.com lists the final critical score at 69-4 against, an unprecedented tidal wave of hate. The Battlefield Earth FAQ goes even further, cherrypicking the bad ones. Believe the hype on this one: it’s every bit as poor as you imagined, and then some.