Dir: Lorenzo Doumani Star: Sophia-Adella Hernandez, Edouardo Yanes, Tony Plana, William McNamara, Maria Conchita Alonzo
I was going to write this article as the Knockout drinking game, with contestants having to take a swig each time a boxing cliché appears – but an interest in the health of readers prevents me from so doing, because this film is so full of them, that you’d be dead of alcoholic poisoning before the end of the first act. I don’t know whether Doumani had never seen a boxing movie before (his career gives no reason to suggest he has, including such highlights as Bug Buster), or simply chose to combine them all into one. For this is the kind of diabolical script you would get if you distilled every boxing flick down.
The only significant difference is that here, the hero is…well, a heroine, Belle (Hernandez). Though nobody really bothers to mention it, because she’s so busy slogging her way through the usual problems that have bedevilled pugilistic wannabes since Edison was turning the crank: unsupportive family, a dubious managers, gym-owners doubtful of your talent, a ferocious opponent, etc. So, here goes with an approximate listing, in dialogue and images, of the things you’ll have seen a million times before – just never in such distilled and condensed strength.
The Characters
“Was papa a great boxer?” “He was the best…”
“What should I be when I grow up?” “You can be whatever you want, because nothing is impossible. That’s for you to find out, and once you do, don’t let anyone hold you back. Let your light shine…”.
Father (Plana) is a cop, who works nights so he can spend the days “with the kids at the gym”.
“That’s what your Mom used to say. Think she’d be proud of how we turned out?” Yep, Mum (Miss Venezuela 1975, Maria Conchita Alonzo) is dead – but do you think that’s going to stop her from turning up? Chance would be a fine thing.
Dad bravely talks two Hispanic kids into putting their guns down. I think he largely bores them into submission, with a monologue including the following: “I know you’re scared, but this isn’t the way…You have your whole lives ahead of you. What’s it gonna be: do you lay the weapon down, or do we lay you in the ground?”
The Plot
Belle’s home-girl Sandra is a boxer – at a fight againt Tanya ‘The Terminator’ Tessaro (real-life fighter Fredia Gibbs) we also meet Michael DiMarco, whose business card might as well read “Slimy Manager”.
Needless to say, Tessaro destroys Sandra – thanks largely to what one review described as Sandra’s “leading with her face”. The film, inevitably (a word that will crop up a lot in this review, so get used to it), goes into slow-mo as Sandra collapses to the floor with a “NOOOOOOOOOO…SANDRAAAAAA” from Belle. Cut to a hospital bed, where Belle says things like “You were always the strong one…I’m gonna take care of you.” If I was Sandra, I’d be looking up Kevorkian’s number in my Rolodex about now, rather than sitting through: “Do you believe in fate…that things were meant to be…that everyone has a destiny?” “I hope Sandra’s destiny isn’t to die. Or be a vegetable because of me.” “It’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. She loves it. She lives for it…In the ring, that’s where she lives…The only thing crazy in life, is not living it.”Is it just me, or does it seems rather crass to say that while your friend is in intensive care?
Equally inevitably, Belle signs up with DiMarco – “Boxing – I guess I’ve always wanted to do it.” He takes her to see Ron Regent, wheelchair-bound promoter played by Paul Winfield, who’s about the best actor present despite having to handle dialogue like: “So, you think you got the goods, huh?” “Yeah, I got the goods.”
The Difficulties
Dad tries to dissuade her: “Professional boxing is brutal…You’re talking crazy. I don’t want to hear any more of this”.
She keeps training anyway. Oh, what a surprise.
The only element underplayed to this point is her mother’s deat…no, hang on – what’s this flashback? “I don’t have good news. The tests reveal you have a malignant tumor in your frontal lobe.” “So how much time do I have? “It’s hard to say. But not long.” —- “You have got to be strong…let’s appreciate the little time we have left. “But you gotta promise me something…you gotta let her find a way to let her shine…”
Inevitably, Dad comes along to first fight, inspiring her to victory.
Then we get a montage of further victories, Belle tending to Sandra, Ron listening to money, fake mag covers, and the usual training sequences, all of which leads to:
Revenge
But first, Sandra regains consciousness. “The doctors – they say that I’ll never walk again”
Belle fights with DiMarco because he wants to keep her from fighting Tessaro: “I thought you were different..but you’re just another ungrateful wetback bitch. You were just another ignorant barrio lowlife. You’re nothing without me.”
Ron Regent arranges the fight with Tessaro instead – when announcing this, Belle pretends to be going to Las Vegas to marry DiMarco. How amusing!
Another training montage.
“Thanks for being there, Dad”. Except he isn’t, because the “next few days are all hype, but I’ll be there for the fight…in your corner…”
And, inevitably, he won’t. He gets shot by drug-scum as he tries to protect a kid.
Cue more slow-mo and – a particularly crass touch, this – blood spattering across a magazine cover with Belle’s picture on it.
Funeral footage. “He loved you just like a son”.
“I get the feeling he’s gonna be there at the fight”.
Stultifyingly-stilted chat from Tessaro: “What’s my name? The Terminator! What am I gonna do to her? Terminate her!” And they claim boxing doesn’t promote brain-damage.
The Big Fight
Belle has a glowing backlit vision – is she going to be abducted by aliens? Sadly not: it’s only her Mum and Dad, telling her, inevitably, to “Let your light shine”.
Tessaro’s ring-entrance is like a discard from Grace Jones, complete with feather head-dress and dance routine, totally destroying her credibility and threat.
Shots of Sandra, shouting “Get up, Belle – c’mon!”. That’ll help.
One last montage: round cards, trainer in corner, and occasional boxing, all shot in a manner that is startling only in its tedium.
With Tessaro losing, she butts Belle, forcing the bout towards a hugely contrived conclusion
Albeit after another glowing, Let Your Light Shine-y, vision.
Belle has just one more round to knock Tessaro out – will she do it?
Any guesses?
Right down to the final scene, where flowers are laid on Mom and Dad’s grave, this film is crass, predictable and jaw-droppingly badly written. You can’t really blame the cast for this – they are all trying pretty hard, it’s just the material that doesn’t leave any room for improvement. Even though it came out before Girlfight, it is a waste of space on every level: Doumani’s lack of script-writing talent would get him thrown off any self-respecting daytime soap. His trust fund was allegedly taken away and poured into The Cotton Club, but on the showing here, I think it might have been higher forces at work, trying desperately to keep him out of the movie business.
Dir: Nam Nai Choi Star: Fan Siu Wong, Fan Mui Sang, Cheng Chuen Yam, Yukari Oshima
“Ricky is sent to prison. In the jail, he sees the prisoners being exploited and tortured by chief warden Cobra. Ricky decides to stand up against them. After many setbacks, Ricky gets the support of the other prisoners…” — DVD synopsis
It is perhaps fitting that a film such as this, should come with a synopsis which is wildly inaccurate in just about every way e.g. the chief warden doesn’t so much as appear until more than fifty minutes in. And it also curiously underplays things: as you’ll see, describing what happens to Ricky as “minor setbacks” is one of the greatest understatements of all time. The film is based on the 12-volume Riki-Oh manga by Tetsuya Saruwatari and Takajo Masuhiko, and also spawned two anime OAVs. But it is in this live-action incarnation that it has become most infamous, largely because it may well be the second-goriest movie ever, surpassed only by Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead. And, after a few beers, it could also be the finest film in cinema history.
Ricky Ho (Fan Siu Wong) is sent to prison – he should know he’s in trouble as soon as the transfer bus pulls in, for the courtyard is awash with what looks like tomato juice, but probably isn’t. Such are the choice of a free economy, for as a title-card informs us: “By 2001 AD, capitalistic countries have privatised all government organisations. Prisons, like car-parks, have become franchised business…”. This may explain the lack of guards, but those that are seem not be over-taxed – one guard’s duties solely seem to consist of yelling “Go over there!” at prisoners. Ricky Ho sets off the metal-detectors but an X-ray (carried out with an cheerfully complete lack of safety precautions) reveals he carries five bullets in his chest.
Elsewhere Samuel is bullying an elderly prisoner, Ma. Cue the first appearance of the Chorus – a group of inmates whose role is to forward the plot without getting in the way:
“Samuel is at it again.” “He’s a gang leader, and the captain of his cell-block.” “He’s friends with the guards.” “Well, what can you do…”
Before they, as one, turn to urinate. Such apathy extends to the staff too – “He fell and whined like a pig. What a nuisance!”, says a guard on seeing the results of Ma’s nose meeting DIY equipment. But Ricky won’t stand for this, and trips Samuel, who falls face-first onto spikes – it feels more like a public service announcement warning against the dangers of leaving large pieces of nailed wood carelessly around the bathroom.
Samuel hires the uber-fat Zorro to kill Ricky, for 30lbs of rice. He doesn’t, though the neat wound Ricky inflicts on him bears no resemblance to the torso-wide gash seen in the next shot. “Another move and I’ll…hit you!” says a guard, not exactly causing Ricky to quake in terror, as he encounters the head of the North Cell, Oscar. While locked in his cell, we get a flashback to Ricky’s training. This was from his uncle Shan Kuei, in a cemetery with the gravestones as fodder for smashing – the families of the buried must have been a bit miffed at this. Ricky makes for an entirely unconvincing student, in collar, tie and preppy look, even if the training causes his body to glow like a poster child for Chernobyl.
Back in jail, we meet the assistant warden. He keeps porno vids on the shelf in his office, and has a glass eye, which he keeps in a water glass. Oh, and he keeps mints inside the eye. While on the missing body-part front, he also has a hook for his hand, which acts both as a fork and a tool to drag dead prisoners away, so I hope he washes it between times. And it spikes Ricky when he won’t talk, but he won’t rise to the bait, so the assistant warden hands him to Oscar for a duel. Oscar blinds our hero with powdered glass and slices up his tendons but Ricky is so tough, he just ties them up himself, in a move not found in my First Aid manual. His opponent is no less tough: in a last-ditch move, he commits seppuku, and tries to use his own intestines to strangle Ricky; one bone-crunching punch (as seen in The Street Fighter) settles his hash for good. The other block heads turn up: West Cell’s Rogan (Oshima), East Cell’s Tarzan, and South Cell’s Brendan. Ricky discovers they’re growing poppies for opium in the jail, so sets fire to the crop, bringing down the wrath of Rogan. This time, he is caught by being buried in concrete – is that what they mean by a hardened criminal?
The real warden returns: he’s even tougher than his assistant, gouging out a prisoner’s eye for unrolling a red carpet badly, and is especially keen to see Ricky punished. Tarzan charges through the cell wall and goes to work on Ricky, but three punches make his elbow, jaw and hand explode, Fist of the North Star style. Time for Plan B: the roof starts to descend. Tarzan, abandoned by his mentors, assists Ricky to escape, at the cost of his own life – the lack of “squish” here is about the only moment of restraint in the entire film. Ricky falls through a trapdoor instead, and is buried alive for a week underground; it barely bothers him, even when Rogan uses some dismembered dog to block the breathing tube. There’s a flashback to why Ricky is in prison; it’s not important. Ricky’s next torture is having razor-blades crammed into his mouth, before Rogan beats him across the face, till the blades poke through his cheeks. His reaction? Spray a mouthful of blood and flesh into the warden’s face.
You can only push a man so far, and when the guy who brings Ricky food is slaughtered, it’s time to break out, using the old “hanging from the ceiling” ploy. There’s an excellent one-punch skull liquidation, and the assistant warden continues to lose body parts carelessly – first an eye, with an arm following shortly thereafter. The warden is busy grinding up the arm of a prisoner who complained about the food, when Ricky bursts in. After disposing of Rogan (though he doesn’t actually kill her…er, him), he has to take on the big boss, for after all: “The warden of any prison has to be the very best in kung-fu.” It helps that he turns, for no readily-apparent reason, into the Incredible Hulk, with much shirt ripping and crap hair – just orange rather than green. Even Ricky driving an entire arm through his stomach doesn’t slow him down. It’s only when he gets an up-close-and-personal look at the meat grinder, that justice prevails. With one punch, Ricky takes down the prison wall. “You’re all free now!”, he says, begging the question – why the hell didn’t he do that the day he arrived?
Ricky: minute-by-minute
Listing all the violence in the film would take far too long, but here are the highlights…
7:40
Carpentry plane to the face
8:17
Spiked wood through hand, into face
15:03
Zorro opens up…
15:43
…and Samuel does the same
30:58
Really big bread-knife to head
34:21
“You’ve got a lot of guts, Oscar”
37:32
The exploding head scene
43:48
Alan loses face – and the rest of his skin
59:26
Tarzan goes to pieces
72:45
Ricky gets the point(s)
75:50
A stoolie loses his head
77:19
Ricky makes a hole-in-one
78:29
Don’t complain about the food
79:39
Just one, wafer-thin mint?
84:50
The warden goes for a spin.
Footnotes:
Fan Siu Wong and Fan Mui Sang are a father-son combination – the former plays Ricky, while I think the latter is either the guy who trains him or the warden.
Yukari Oshima’s turn as Rogan is bizarre but effective. She’s probably the only name in the film familiar to most Western viewers, given her role in films like Angel and The Outlaw Brothers, so seeing her playing a man is something of a shock!
he DVD has both dub and subtitled versions; the above is based on the former, but the latter offers entirely new possibilities for amusement. All the characters have different names – “Zorro” is known as “Silly Lung”, which is hardly more appropriate – and there are any number of phrases to make you go, “Eh?”:
“Captain, we haven’t brushed our teeth yet.” “Use them as brushes.”
“You’ve even broken my sinus.”
“Ma’s hanging himself to death!”
“Your original name was Rick. But you were strong as a bull at 7 or 8 so I called you Ricky.”
Supernatural forces do not want me to review these movies. In the first three minutes, Emily (my step-daughter) came in to show me some Christmas cards, my mother-in-law asked for my help with a recalcitrant water-tap, and Emily then required help in taking her medicine. Given that she is the ultimate actress, capable not just of making a drama out of any crisis, but a three-part miniseries, this was quite a performance, involving weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth appropriate to the end of the world — and that was just me. I came back to find the power cord of my PC mysteriously unplugged. Is this the work of God or the Devil? And were they trying to stop me writing, or merely trying to protect me from a needlessly painful experience?
I’m actually a big fan of religious apocalypse movies, which is a bit of a surprise since I’m certainly no fan of the church – indeed, any church. But the Book of Revelations is a fabulous piece of writing, even if you do have to wonder what the author was on when he wrote it – odds are it was significantly stronger than holy water. If it truly is the word of God, then God must be Timothy Leary. Movies like The Seventh Sign and The Rapture serve to demonstrate that religion is no bar to interesting and thought-provoking cinema, and if Paul Verhoeven ever gets the chance to make his long-planned film on the real life of Christ, I’ll be there for it too. That was originally scheduled to be released this year, but he did Hollow Man instead; perhaps he was thinking he’d signed up for Holy Man…
Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately, from an Incredibly Bad point of view – most of them fall short of this level of competence, perhaps because they are intended for true believers, rather than sceptics. They take the presence of God as a given, and thus the actions of characters which result from this faith, is usually completely inexplicable by secular standards. I’m pretty much with Sam Goldwyn with regard to the topic of messages in movies – if I want one, I’ll call Western Union – but in the case of religious films, I’m prepared to occasionally make an exception. Here are two samples, one bad, one good…
The Left Behind books are a publishing phenomena – the latest volume in the series sold 2.3 million in the first week, and the series as a whole is around 15 million. There’s clearly a market for this kind of thing, and it was perhaps inevitable that they would move across into the modern-day Sodom of Hollywood. The production company, Cloud Ten, have previously made a number of Christian-themed movies, with titles such as Tribulation, starring Gary Busey, but Left Behind is easily their biggest production, even at a moderate budget of around $17m. They’ve adopted a somewhat strange technique to promote its theatrical release – put it out on video first, in the hope of building word-of-mouth in advance of its February arrival in cinemas. This explains why there were two money-off coupons in the box. However, I should point out that the last movie with such a religion-inspired campaign was Battlefield Earth.
Left Behind begins in the expectedly po-faced style; even the logo is preachy, depicting a child hesitating before a road which goes in two directions. A man takes the kid’s hand and leads it along the right-hand path, while lighting flashes ominously over the other. Add in an opening voice-over including lines like “We should have known better. But we didn’t…In the end, there’s no denying the truth” and the pious tone is set.
The film proper starts with a surprise Arab attack on Israel, where journalist Buck Williams (Kirk Cameron) is interviewing a scientist in the middle of a wheat field. They take shelter in a nearby village which just happens to conceal the Israeli base of operations – yeah, like they’d really let a random Yankee journo in there without asking any questions – but the Arab planes are smote (smited? smut? smeet?) mysteriously from the sky to the bafflement of everyone. Or, at least, everyone who hasn’t read the video sleeve. Buck sends footage back to his company, beaming his hi-definition – albeit looking suspiciously like 35mm film – footage to his network using a dish the size of a cake-tin, manually perched on a dustbin, as a satellite uplink. Isn’t technology wonderful?
Williams gets a hot tip on the whole smiting thing from paranoid conspiracist Dirk Burton, who blames industrialists Cothran and Stonagal. Initially dismissing the claims as the rantings of a paranoid conspiracist, Williams is forced to re-evaluate them after Burton’s predictions come true (gasp!). So, it’s accurate rantings of a paranoid conspiracist then… At this point, the Rapture occurs, though it’s not until 74 mins in that anyone mentions the R word, which is weird in a supposedly religious movie. For those unfamiliar with Biblical eschatology: the Rapture is when the truest believers are swept up to heaven, thereby avoiding the Tribulation, a rather nasty period on Earth before the second coming.
Williams is on a plane when “dozens” of passengers vanish; this is pretty dodgy from a statistical point of view. The Bible is obscure on many things, but it’s damn clear about the number that get raptured: “and no man could learn that song but the hundred [and] forty [and] four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth” [Revelations 14:3]. That may seem like a lot, but it’s barely 0.01% of the Christians on Earth, so the odds are heavily against even a single person being raptured off a Jumbo. Perhaps a package tour of Israeli monks was on board, since the Bible also says those Raptured must be virginal Jews [Revelations 7:4 and 14:4], points strangely ignored here. The film at one stage claims 144 million have vanished i.e. the Bible is out by a factor of a thousand. Suddenly, the Feeding of the, er, Five doesn’t seem so impressive.
Back on the plane, the carefully-considered response of pilot Rayford Steele (Brad Johnson) to this catastrophe is…to drop the oxygen masks. This has a strange calming effect on the passengers – maybe they should try it on the ground, where the Soviet leader of the UN, Nicolae Carpathia (Gordon Currie), a pawn of Cothran and Stonagal, takes the reins over the panicking world populace. Steele and Williams team up: Steele’s wife and son have been raptured (repeat previous statistical discussion about how unlikely this is, and never mind the bit about being a virginal Jew), leading to a pitiful scene as he sobs over their belongings, though the most pitiful thing about it is the over-acting on view. Blaming his wife’s religious beliefs, he hurls a bible at the mirror. but then, of course, starts reading it…
Williams finds Dirk Smith murdered (yes, I know he was Dirk Burton earlier in the film, but the computer screen definitely says Dirk Smith – his email address is dirk@isdn.com, if you want to send him some), and is shot at himself while examining computer files. Meanwhile the newly-born again Steele links up with the local priest, helping the latter to refind his faith. I drift on the edge of finding sleep, since it’s painfully obvious where this is all heading. When Chloe gets down her “Teen Devotional Bible” and starts reading it, my worst fears are confirmed – this is truly the stuff of nightmares, albeit perhaps not in the way that the makers intended.
Williams and Steele discover that Burton had decoded the prophecies in the Bible, revealing the Cothran-Stenagal plan. Williams gets into the UN, helped by a former air-hostess whom Steele had been screwing – obviously, before he found God and stopped doing that kind of thing. He reveals the conspiracy to Carpathia, and even turns to prayer. But, oops, Carpathia is the Anti-Christ: all lit from below (right) and with his Russian accent becoming thicker by the syllable. He shoots Cothran and Stenagal and takes over the world, simple as that. It’s a really weird and downbeat climax, despite a desperate attempt to make the ending uplifting, with a closing voice-over which goes, “Our only hope is to join together and trust God. I don’t have all the answers; but for now, faith is enough.” It doesn’t work. I know there’s another half-dozen books to go, but the impact on someone like me who hasn’t read the series, is that Satan has won, and God hates everyone, especially Christians – I don’t think this was the desired effect, but I confess to finding it oddly gratifying…
The Omega Code
Dir: Rob Marcarelli Star: Casper Van Dien, Michael York, Catherine Oxenberg, Michael Ironside.
This didn’t exactly start in the most promising of ways: the DVD mis-spelled the leading man’s name on his bio, it’s a production of ‘Good Times Entertainment’ (wince), preceded by a trailer for CrossWalk.com – “the intersection of faith and life” – and the first scene (once again, in Jerusalem) has Michael Ironside looking utterly mortified, disguised as a Hassidic Jew assassin complete with hat and extremely fake beard. Meanwhile, motivational speaker Dr. Lane (Van Dien) gets the exposition out of the way on a TV show hosted by Cassandra Barris (Oxenberg). A code hidden in the Torah predicts the future – as well as, incidentally, Princess Diana’s death in a Paris tunnel. Guess God had a bit of space to fill at the bottom of a page. I presume Lane is supposed to be immensely irritating, like all motivational speakers, coming out with phrases like “we are the higher power,” early signs that he’ll undergo a conversion somewhere between here and Damascus.
Elsewhere, in a laboratory populated with whizzy graphics work-stations, some Russian-sounding dudes are decoding the Torah and coming up with convenient one-sentence summaries which punctuate much of the film like intertitles from the silent era. Stone Alexander (Michael York), a “media mogul turned political dynamo” is now leader of the European Union. Lane wants to speak to him, but is dissuaded by Stone’s personal assistant/bodyguard/part-time Hassidic hit-man Dominic (Ironside). Instead, he has a vision in which one of Alexander’s horses goes all glowy-eyed and berserk. This is just one in a series: as someone asks him, “What kind of visions?”, to which the reply is, “I dunno – weird ones.”. He’s undergoing a divorce, and given his separated and whiny wife, it’s no surprise his small daughter appears to have picked up the Immensely Irritating gene.
The Russians take action to make sure their latest decryption comes true. In another strange echo of Left Behind, a reporter is conveniently right on the scene for the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, as the Dome on the Rock in Jerusalem (or a 1/12-scale model thereof) blows up. Lane assists Alexander’s efforts to keep the peace; “We need an archetypal figure to embody the message,” he says, and signs up as Alexander’s Minister of Information. Alexander proposes a global currency (another common cornerstone of the apocalyptic brigade, tying in with bar-codes as the Mark of the Beast), and Lane is contacted by a defector from the decryption program. Memo to self: if I ever become the Anti-Christ, instruct staff to shoot traitors before they hand over incriminating sheets of paper to my enemies, not just after.
From this point, you can pretty much tick off the Common or Garden Interpretations of Revelations: a seven-year peace treaty between Israel and Arabs; the rebuilding of King Solomon’s temple; miracle food and water technology from Alexander; a global government under ten heads. Skip forward three years, and Lane is still having visions, though he’s not mentioned them to anyone in the meantime. He discovers Alexander’s plotting, as he and Dominic prepare to initiate Phase 2. The latter is miffed to discover Lane is slated as the prophet for Alexander’s vision and tries in a fit of whiny pique to shoot Lane; Alexander takes the bullet, but Lane is blamed for the assassination and is forced on the run. However, Alexander comes back to life, to everyone’s surprise – not least, Dominic’s…
This is where the movie really kicks in; you’re used to seeing Michael Ironside as a bad guy, but Michael York as the Anti-Christ is so delightfully against type that it works completely, and is huge fun. Plagued by voices, “painful yet sweet”, he takes over as world leader. Lane links up with two prophets who have been causing trouble, and tries to spread the not-so-good word about Alexander, but is blocked at every turn. His helpful prophets give him the final code, which Cassandra steals from him – yes, Catherine Oxenburg is evil too! Is nothing sacred? As she says, “Even Satan comes as an angel of light.”
After Alexander’s coronation, he goes totally out into left field: “I have become king and God,” he says, which doesn’t go over very well. Oblivious, he shoots the prophets, following up with, “I want these reprobates put on display. And guarded.” This seems a little excessive, given they’re dead, but in this film, the scythe-wielder is more Slightly Inconvenient Reaper than anywhere near Grim, so you can see his point. Other omens start cropping up, and it turns out the code Lane got wasn’t the proper one. As digital planes fly overhead on their way to a nuclear strike, Lane has another vision, and finds that prayer makes the gates to his cell fly open. The prophets are indeed resurrected – score one for the Anti-Christ – and take their wrath on Dominic. Lane tries to shoot Alexander, but is forced to surrender the final code…
Which is where I’ll stop, less for fear of spoiling the end, more because I wouldn’t be prepared to swear to the veracity of my vision. Watching this on New Year’s Day 2001, the only thing I could think of was, “My God, it’s full of stars.” It certainly is an ending, but precisely what it means is something I leave to you. Still, it’s a damn sight better than Left Behind, on a number of levels. Firstly, and most importantly, the religious stuff is actually kept well in the background; the hero never really converts as I expected, and the writers eschew over-zealous attachment to the Bible. If it doesn’t fit in, it gets dumped – there is no mention of the Rapture at all, and it’s much more self-contained, whizzing through the entire Apocalypse in 100 minutes. The presence of decent actors like York and Ironside is an undeniable plus too, and overall, this is not a religious film. Nor is it even really a film about religion, because Christianity is never allowed to get in the way of entertainment, and that realisation by the producers may have been the most important code to crack of all.
It proved a surprising success at the box-office, despite only having a few hundred prints to cover all the cinemas. Opening the same week as Fight Club, The Omega Code grossed more per screen, and also outlasted Messrs. Pitt and Norton, inhabiting the top twenty for seven weeks to gross a respectable $12.6m. As a result of this success, a sequel, Megiddo, is now in post-production, and is due to open in autumn 2001. York and Ironside return, and are joined by cult heroes Udo Kier, Michael Biehn and Franco Nero. With Brian Trenchard-Smith (Leprechaun 4: In Space) directing, it’s safe to say that Incredibly Bad Film Show correspondents are keenly awaiting its arrival…
Dir: Lorenzo Doumani Star: Katherine Heigl, David Lipper, Meredith Salenger, Randy Quaid.
“Let’s get ready to bumble!”
Killer insects have been responsible for some classically bad movies in the past: the entire killer-bee genre, for example, or J.P.Simon’s extraordinary Slugs, which took a Shaun Hutson novel and removed all the artistic qualities therein. Bug Buster operates in a similar way, except without a source novel to plunder, so resorts to scenery-chewing and not one, but two, actors who’ve never done anything outside the starship Enterprise: George Takei and James Doohan. But like many bad movies, there is a saving grace, and in this case, it comes in the form of Randy Quaid. He plays General George, a pest eliminator – or, as his ultracheap TV adverts put it, “elimina-torrrrrrr” – who is lurking in the background for the first two-thirds of the film, foreshadowing events with a glorious mix of machismo and bullshit. His commercials alone are enough to keep you watching.
This is fortunate, since the rest of the film doesn’t have much on this front, beyond poor Katherine Heigl going through more insectoid torture than most fledgling actresses should have to. She plays Shannon, who has been having nightmares involving giant cockroaches crawling over her skin – and let me put it this way, I couldn’t see any CGI being used. While not quite up to the standard of infamous Hong Kong nasty, Centipede Horror, you still have to take your hat off to her. Such are the traumas that have to be endured when you are in a movie with a monster which is not in the slightest big threatening or dangerous; the “Ick!” factor must be upped instead, and Heigl is the unfortunate heroine.
Anyway, she and her family (including another has-been from television, Bernie Koppel from The Love Boat) buy a hotel, and move into the sleepy California town of Mountview. At least, it was sleepy, until Steve (David Lipper) and Veronica (Meredith Salenger) go for a dip in the local lake, despite “the old wives’ tales about people getting their legs gnawed off in the water”. And, lo, before you can say “Wasn’t she in Lake Placid?”, Veronica has duly been nibbled by something slimy, and I don’t mean Steve. The local sheriff (Doohan) closes the lake with admirable promptness – as he says, “You saw ‘Jaws’, didn’t you?” – until he shoots a “scarfish”. The local vet, who moonlights as the local doctor, local forensic pathologist and, for all I know, local priest, helpfully informs him it’s a fish out of its water, and also has a giant cockroach in its stomach.
Realising this is not 100% normal, she calls her old teacher, Professor Fujimoto (Takei, shown right). He gives a new meaning to the old saw about “phoning his lines in”, since he never appears in a scene with any of the other characters, only talking to them on the telephone. Back at Shannon’s hotel, the lounge act have turned up; charmingly named ‘Trailer Park Trash’, their set is interrupted by the sudden, roach-related death of their sax player (played by cult movie guru Johnny Legend). Shannon is so upset, she…goes to see Fall of the House of Usher with Steve. As you do. But by an amazing coincidence, two audience members also suddenly go icky in an insect style – what are the odds against that? Cue an amusing cameo from MTV-jockette ‘Downtown’ Julie Brown as rabid reporter Katie Cunning of FU2 news, who is immensely irritating, yet is equally spot-on the mark, as a caricature of immensely irritating local news reporters.
“I can’t help wondering if there’s any connection between the roach I found in the fish, and the ones I found in the humans,” says our local vet/pathologist/whatever. Well, duh! Shannon continues her unusual therapy for her traumatic experiences by…taking the world’s bubbliest bath, watched by the town loonie, though her only reaction is to grab propane curling-tongs. Before you know it, she’s taking a shower too, in preparation for her next date with Steve – hey, why let a few deaths get in the way of your social life? Although in mitigation, if I had to let bugs crawl over me for the sake of art, you’d not get me off the soap for months. Veronica cunningly distracts Steve by having her leg go all septic (the one nibbled in the lake; it seems like a lifetime ago, but is really only three beers) and the unfeeling bitch then goes and dies on him. Sheesh.
Bugs are now pretty much everywhere: Veronica starts hatching, Shannon’s nightmares come true, though the insects attacking her are vacuumed up by Steve [as an aside, I’ve done this myself in New York – it’s about the only way to get rid of the roaches there], and her parents are ambushed while making love. Cue Katie Cunning again, though her horror is as nothing compared to the viewer’s, at having watched The Love Boat‘s doctor have a shag. “This whole thing has gotten way out of hand,” says a deputy, but I don’t think he’s referring to the movie in general. However, there’s only one man who can help…
“He was a war hero in Vietnam.” “What did he do?” “He survived…”
As the man himself says, “When General George opens up his can of whup-ass, there’ll be roaches in Siberia feeling the heat…” Associating with the General is nothing if not educational: “They appear to be amphibious…that means they can live in water and on dry land.” On the other hand, I wouldn’t put too much reliance on his scientific accuracy; five minutes later it’s, “Vampire bat: its bite’s deadlier than a king cobra…kill you like that…” Minor details like there not being vampire bats in California, and their bite not being poisonous anyway, don’t get in the way. But pseudo-science and cliche is this film’s stock-in-trade, as the following exchange shows:
“So you’re saying that once they get inside the body, they spontaneously lay larvae which destroy human tissue as they multiply at hyperaccelerated rates?” “That’s exactly what I’m saying!”
Things gallop cheerfully on to the inevitable conclusion in the roach lair – an old mineshaft, should you care about such things – which sees Oscar-nominee Quaid (1973’s The Last Detail) rolling around on the floor, engaging in a fist-fight with a papier-mache insect. Difficult to say whether he or Heigl were the most humiliated in making this film. There’s a Scooby-Doo moment, in which Scotty proves that ye canna change the laws of physics (ok, he doesn’t, but I always wanted to write that) before the obligatory ending that isn’t, leaving scope, more in hope than anything else I suspect, for Bug Buster 2. In your dreams, Doumani.
This is shallow, laughable and badly-written. There’s no doubt about that. But in its defence, it never stops moving, with something always going on. Heigl is cute and personable, and any producers reading this should also note she is clearly willing to do anything for a role… Randy Quaid is quite magnificent, and it’s a shame that he only turns up properly for the last third of the film, as he sets things ablaze and the character could easily sustain an entire movie. The effects are pretty decent, even if there’s some confusion over the difference between “cockroaches” and “millipedes”…hey, they’re all bugs. Mindless, gloopy and passable fun, if taken with the prescribed dose of alcohol.
Dir: Jeannot Szwarc Star: Helen Slater, Peter Cook, Faye Dunaway, Peter O’Toole.
“Supernatural forces of malevolent evil are seeking to bring the Earth to its knees. Only the summoning to the planet of a true superhero can save us from demonic control.”
Thus begin the strikingly po-faced UK trailer for Supergirl as voiced by Patrick Allen, best known perhaps as the man who “narrated” Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes. But as full-on nuclear holocausts go, the film probably trumps even “the last voice you will ever hear”. Oh, you can see how it could have made sense at the time, after three successful (albeit increasingly wobbly) installments of the Superman franchise. It’s just the startlingly bad execution which amazes.
You can’t knock the star power, right from the off. Peter O’Toole is Zoltar, creator of Argo City, some kind of extra-terrestrial hippy commune, going by the floaty dresses and wall-hangings favoured by the inhabitants, and his hang-dog expression suggests he saw the writing on the wall for the movie early. He is using the power source for the city, the Omegahedron, to…well, I’m not quite sure what, but it seems to involve making bad sculptures of trees. Supergirl (Helen Slater – sister of the then equally-unknown Christian) gazes enviously on, possibly contemplating the masturbatory potential in the rotating stick of sugar cane he wields for his tree-making. An clumsy and unfortunate incident sends the Omegahedron through a time-warp, and Supergirl follows in a sequence which combines the visual worst of 2001‘s climax and the opening of Doctor Who.
In one of those amazing flukes which tend to power Incredibly Bad movies, the Omegahedron, looking like a cloisonne paperweight, lands in the picnic of chief-villainess Selena (Faye Dunaway). What are the odds against that? Dunaway, while not looking round for scenery to chew (“Such a pretty world. I can’t wait until it’s all mine”), uses it to power the car radio, and abandons her sidekick, Nigel (Peter Cook). Supergirl turns up in the same spot, now in costume, and discovers her powers by crushing a rock to dust. Cue a montage of her flying cross-country, chasing second-unit footage of horses and sweeping over mountains in such a melodramatic manner, you expect her to break into, “The hills are alive…” Note that her skirt appears to be velcro’d to her thighs, to prevent it from ever rising more than an inch..
Selena’s lair is decorated in zebra skins and Turkish brothel off-casts, and one wonders whether she’s a lesbian, since the precise nature of her relationship with her assistant Bianca (Brenda Vaccaro) seems open to question. Indeed, the whole film sinks with surprising frequency into something bordering on the sordid, such as when Supergirl is menaced by two truckers. She escapes with the help of her breath power; I am tempted to make some kind of ‘blow-job’ comment at this point, but will refrain. The next morning, she wakes up next to a rabbit, and for one glorious minute, I thought it was going to go the same way as the rock, two paragraphs back. Sadly not, but Supergirl is soon disguised as a mousy schoolgirl, whose educational establishment just happens, by pure chance, to be the one where Nigel teaches maths. What are the odds against that? And if your credulity is not already snapping, she ends up rooming with Lucy Lane…yep, the sister of Lois. What are the odds, etc. etc.
Supergirl’s powers don’t win her any friends there, despite her lack of knowledge about bras. Meanwhile, Selena tests out a love-potion on Ethan, a handily-passing hunk, triggering a sequence that tries to be psychedelic, and fails miserably. He has to be rescued by Supergirl from a runaway digger — well, ‘walkaway’ is perhaps closer to the truth, since he could have saved himself with anything more than a sluggish amble. Mind you, the presence of Howard Jones on the soundtrack more than makes up for this. Viewers should also note the extremely obvious wires as Supergirl lowers the digger to the ground. Ethan falls in love with her instead, thanks to the love potion, which kicks in at just the right moment. It’s a good job the film isn’t set in Portsmouth, where drooling over schoolgirls tends to get you a brick through the window.
A miffed Selena unleashes an invisible monster, which speeds through the forest, Evil Dead-like, felling trees as Supergirl undresses, before dragging her into the woods where she is raped by the trees. Well, okay, I made the last bit up: she opens the window, says “Leave this place and do no harm”, and uses an electrically-charged lamp-post to zap the monster, in a scene nicked from Forbidden Planet, and its monsters from the id. After a brief pause for Ethan to spout some iambic pentameter – I guess that’s love for you – and get taken flying by Supergirl (whom he doesn’t realise is the same person as the mousy teenager with which he’s in love).
She has brought Nigel back into the fold, needing his knowledge of occult…things. Such as the Burundi Wand, which is “pure, unadulterated evil” (in stick form). Nigel shakes it. Ethan and Supergirl get it on, and he realises the connection to the object of his affections, proving that you can change the colour of your hair, but you can’t change the taste of your tonsils. A mountain has mysteriously appeared in the middle of town, with a castle on top — I presume the Burundi Wand had summat to do with this. To no-one surprise bar Supergirl’s, it’s a trap, and she gets imprisoned in a place with rocks even she can’t crush. She rapidly finds herself up to her neck in black tar, a sequence to gladden the heart of every lover of quicksand [you know who you are…] — oddly, the next time we see her, she’s all clean again. I presume the ‘hosedown sequence’ is in the director’s cut.
Selena installs a martial dictatorship, ruthlessly suppressing all demonstration – though since this more or less consists of Lucy Lane waving a placard, it’s not a major task. Supergirl teams up with Zoltar, who has been sent to the same place for losing the Octahedron (it’s nice to see that even super-advanced civilization prefer incarceration to rehabilitation). There is, inevitably, an escape route: the quantium vortex, which is a Wizard of Oz-like double tornado, resembling red and blue candy floss. Zoltar dies, but Supergirl makes it out, crashing back into Selena’s castle where the rest of the cast are enduring “the old dangling-in-a-cage routine”, as Nigel puts it.
The scene is thus set for a climactic battle between Selena and Supergirl, who looks a bit like Buffy – or maybe it’s just that all blonde, arse-kicking girls, look like Buffy. Will Supergirl defeat her evil nemesis, save the world and, most importantly of all, point towards a sequel? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out…
Any hopes of a sequel proved frighteningly optimistic – looking at it now, it’s hard to see how anyone could ever have released this and expected it to make money in the first place. The script never works out whether it is taking itself seriously, and while the cast is high-profile, they largely appear to be auditioning for panto. The two Peter’s, Cook and O’Toole, in particular have the same “I’d rather not be here” look seen on Gielgud and Mirren in Caligula. Rarely can hopes have been so high, not least for the previously-unknown Helen Slater, plucked from obscurity. One can only feel sympathy for her, a career sunk before it started, contaminated beyond all hope of recovery by one of the all-time turkeys. In the documentary about the movie, one of the creators says that Slater’s life will change after making Supergirl. I imagine that was likely very true: it probably had a great deal more laughing and pointing afterwards.
Footnotes
Keep an eye out for Matt (Max Headroom) Frewer, as one of the truckers who try to ravish Supergirl, and Sandra (Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) Dickinson as a guest at Selena’s party.
One of Supergirl’s costumes sold for $12,925 in May 2000 — I don’t know whether the velcro was included…
Director Jeannot Szwarc’s career didn’t exactly take off as a result either; subsequent work such as Santa Claus: The Movie would suggest that a lot of the blame can be laid at his feet.
The version reviewed is the 124-minute international version; a 138-minute director’s cut is also available, but there are some sacrifices I am not prepared to make.
