In short: Mars (1997)

In the near future of Elon Musk’s wet dreams, Mars has been colonized and is controlled by a single Company whose miners are tasked with acquiring a new, totally, completely, nay, absolutely healthy fossil fuel for Earth.

When a member of the Company’s private police force is killed under dubious circumstances, the delightfully named Caution Templer (Olivier Gruner), also one of the Company’s so-called “Keepers”, as well as brother of the victim arrives to kick some heads in.

Because there’s no subtlety on Mars, the bad guys responsible for the death of Caution’s brother try to kill our protagonist as soon as he arrives on the planet, making it pretty easy even for him to stumble upon the conspiracy in which the Company is of course and obviously involved. On the way, Caution acquires the help of local grumpy physician Doc Halliday (Shari Belafonte) and a local street rat named, adorably, Buckskin Greenberg (Gabriel Dell Jr.).

As you can see, character names in Jon Hess’s science fiction action piece Mars are a pretty painful affair, unless one is a big fan of awkward attempts at “subtly” hinting at the Western genre, as I am, as it turns out. Its very own special naming conventions are pretty much Mars’s only independent ideas, for otherwise, this is a cheap knock-off of Peter Hyams’s Outland, without the brains, the quiet cleverness of the writing, the Connery, or Hyams’s brilliant direction, mixed with just as badly copied bits of Total Recall. Turns out you can’t really make Outland on a DTV budget, or at least, Hess can’t.

So expect a Mars colony that looks suspiciously as if it were build from bits and pieces of the usual warehouses and industrial buildings where all action movies of this type are shot, some choice bad CGI, the usual nightclubs that look nothing like nightclubs apart from the naked women with awkward boob jobs, and a script that just screams for some proper scenery chewing none of the villain actors is really bothered to provide, even though the writing does offer them the opportunity.

All of this, apart from the lame villains, is to be expected. Why the film doesn’t seem to be able to stage a proper fight, despite having a perfectly competent screen fighter as its load, and does the kind of choppy editing nonsense you typically encounter whenever nobody in front of the camera can be trusted to execute any fighting move properly, is anybody’s guess however. It’s not as if you’d hire Gruner for his acting chops, so why not make use of the skills the guy – within limits – can actually offer?

Automatic (1995)

Some time in a weird-ish near future that features roombas which use a moray eel technique, silver-faced butler robots, and the J Series Automatics, combined servant/bodyguard androids who for some horrifying reason we are never made privy to all look like Olivier Gruner. I’d rather prefer flying cars, thank you very much.

Nora (Daphne Ashbrook) is working for the company making the J series as something like an executive assistant. When her direct superior attempts to rape her – all men who aren’t androids are pretty rapey in this one – she is rescued by one of the J’s, J269. Alas for him and Nora, he accidentally kills the rapist while kicking him in the face. When he hears of the incident, Goddard Marx (John Glover) the company’s boss, decides it would be a catastrophe for the image of his already ailing company (the film never explains why the company making ubiquitous Grunerdroids is ailing, though I suspect it’s the lack of face variety), and does the logical thing: contain Nora and J in the otherwise empty (it’s night) company building and hire the band of – also rapey – mercenaries of one Major West to murder them, too.

It turns out that J’s rather great at murdering mercenaries right back, though.

John Murlowski’s Automatic is a surprisingly fun piece of 90s action SF, making rather a lot of good decisions. Not necessarily the kind of decisions that make for a deep and thoughtful little movie, but certainly the sort that makes for a fun direct to home video action movie.

It starts with the traditional method of getting away with a martial artist/actor lead who has little talent for the second half of his job description by letting him play a character whose woodenness is actually kind of the point, avoiding the need to have him emote above his abilities and focus on what he does well. Which is mostly looking good when kicking, though clever staging and dark lighting does manage to make Gruner, who may be a great martial artist for all I know, but certainly is a mediocre screen fighter at best, look perfectly believable and effective in the film’s series of not at all Die Hard inspired action sequences.

Ashbrook is the Carl Weathers to Gruner’s low budget Schwarzenegger, the low-profile but effective pro who goes out of her way to make Gruner’s performance more relatable, while also being allowed to do slightly more than the female damsel in this sort of thing usually is. The rest of the cast is involved in various kinds of scenery chewing, Glover never having met a script with a corporate asshole he couldn’t milk for fun, Kober making all kinds of nasty faces at everyone, and everyone else reacting in kind to all this.


Because low budget action movies not made in Hong Kong never can afford quite as much action as they need to fill their runtime, there’s not just the need for bad guy scenery chewing and a plot twist that screams “I have read Philip K. Dick!” but also weird and wild little ideas to keep an audience away from boredom. Those, Murlowski (and the script by Patrick Highsmith and Susan Lambert) has down pat, filling Automatic with all kinds of goofy, silly, wild and woolly little bits of worldbuilding that suggest something has gone very wrong with this world, like the jump scare roomba that would kill people with weak hearts en masse, ideas like a company that can build androids but only uses one face and body type, and so much bizarre day to day technology, like the little automatic thingies on desks that do things like pop up a full cup of tea in a couple of seconds, or lower the photo of rape company man’s family when he goes about his nasty business. It’s all very tongue in cheek but in such a friendly and companionable way I felt charmed by it rather than annoyed.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Interceptor Force 2 (2002)

A few years after the first film, the second (and final, don’t you worry) Interceptor Force movie found its true home with the Sci Fi Channel, which doesn’t seem to have changed the production values for the worse. The new crappy CG alien still looks and moves ridiculous, the number of locations is limited and corridor-heavy – you know the drill by now.

Plotwise, the company idiot mercenary Sean Lambert (Olivier Gruner) is still working for is now under exclusive contract to the US government, a fact the mild-mannered will explain with the theory that they must be very very cheap, the cynical with corruption. Both philosophical factions will at least agree the reason for renting these guys can’t be competence, because if ever I’ve seen a group of “special operatives” where the “special” is the same as in “special needs” it’s the guys and girls who accompany Sean on his new alien hunting assignment. The gang’s off to a nuclear reactor near Grosny the mate of the alien (who prefers the form of one Eve Scheer to the crappy CGI form it can also take because Terminator 3 is totally a film you want to copy from) is planning to explode together with enough nuclear war heads to poison the whole world. I’m sure Sean, his new best black buddy McCallister (Roger R. Cross), least likely to get through any psychological assessment – even among these people – Adrian Sikes (Elizabeth Gracen), German heavy weapons guy Bjorn Hatch (Alex Jolig) – totally a German name - and scientist without field experience or training – because why would you need that when you fight aliens from time to time - Dawn DeSilvia (Adrienne Wilkinson) will have everything under control, not one of them will panic or play a junior version of “oh noes! You might be the shape-shifting alien, you fiend!”, and there certainly won’t be need for a last minute bomb defusing by people you wouldn’t trust to locate their own hands while a nuclear strike force wants to strike.

Again, as with the first film, I actually kind of enjoyed this thing, not as much as the first one thanks to its replacement of crazy stupid with mere stupid, but on the very simple level where attractive people move in front of a camera, mild action sequences excite mildly, guns are shot, people are fake-killed and Nigel Bennett makes profound efforts to look concerned. So, just like the first part, but a bit less so. We can probably be thankful for the lack of a third Interceptor Force film, for the highly probable next step down on the quality ladder would have been from mere stupid to boring stupid.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,syfy vs the mynd,in short,sf,action,phillip j. roth,olivier gruner,roger r. cross,adrienne wilkinson,elizabeth gracen,nigel bennett

In short: Interceptor Force (1999)

With great difficulty, some jets under the command of a slumming Ernie Hudson shoot down a UFO. Alas, it goes down in Mexican territory, or rather in the territory of cartel boss and Spaghetti western reject Rosario (Stefan Lysenko), so Weber (Brad Dourif), a guy we must take to be responsible for the secret US anti-alien effort, doesn’t send out special forces but a trio of mercenaries. These guys suck so much they haven’t even earned themselves stupid call signs, and are instead called Shaun (Olivier Gruner), Dave (William Zabka) and Russell (Glenn Plummer).

Because neither Weber nor I would trust these guys with making a sandwich, he teams them up with science people Jena (Angel Boris Reed) and Perez (Mark Adair-Rioz), who are also the only people involved who know this is to be an alien hunt and not a case of secretly fetching a black box from under a crazy guy’s nose.

Not surprisingly, things don’t go too well on this ill-designed mission, and it might just become necessary for Weber to nuke a small Mexican village lest an alien threat is loosed upon the world.

For those of my readers who haven’t already smelt the crap, let it be known that Phillip J. Roth’s Interceptor Force is indeed a decidedly stupid piece of crap. Though it is one that is perfectly honest about its nature, seeing as we first encounter our Gruner-shaped hero while he’s stealing some secret data a be-suited guy carries around in a hard drive somehow built into his body (what, no flash memory?), one of his nipples replaced by a port, a heist during which our hero only escapes via an intensely bizarre rooftop escape featuring a long pole and a low flying aircraft.

On the other hand, the film sure as hell doesn’t manage to keep its stupidity as awesome as these scenes promise for the whole of its running time, spending a bit too much film on our leads discussing how betrayed they feel because Weber didn’t tell them about the aliens from the start. Which, given their performance throughout the film and that they’re even doing the old “a ga-a-ga-a giiiiirl” thing when Weber informs them about one of their part time partners being, you know, female, is no surprise to anyone. You’d think even in action movie land you might be able to find expendable operatives with a hint of competence about them.

When the film gets its stupid going, it does so very well, delighting with Brad Dourif giving an absurdly intense and utterly weird performance (which is to say, a very typical Dourif performance), Hudson popping in for three scenes of looking professionally concerned, a crap CGI alien that can also turn into crap CGI green energy and into people it has killed to utter crap jokes (and because the CGI truly is an eyesore), a handful of explosions (propane tanks explode when shot at, our genius heroes discover whilst shooting a propane tank), and a bit of competent hand-to-hand choreography so Gruner can show off the stuff he’s actually good at. For my tastes, the film at the very least contains enough of these shenanigans not to drag too painfully, and actually, I found myself mildly entertained for most of its running time, which is more than I can say about a lot of action movies.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,action,sf,phillip j. roth,olivier gruner,brad dourif,angel boris reed

In short: Crackerjack 3 (2000)

If you were – like me - hoping for another retcon of the craziness of Jack Wild, cop on the edge, with Jack Wild doing another “Die Hard in an improbable place” bit, you will be sorely disappointed. In fact, we’re not even in the same genre anymore, and instead of weirdo action, this is a piece of unfunny espionage comedy.

The only tenuous connection to the first two movies is the first name of our hero – Jack, the most original first name available. This, though, is Jack Thorn (Bo Svenson), freshly pensioned off CIA boss who finds himself and a bunch of elderly friends in the position as the scapegoats for the insane plan of his replacement Marcus Clay (Olivier Gruner) and a bunch of young up-and-comers to detonate a neutron bomb and make lots of money on the financial markets afterwards. Despite the desperately stupid evil plan of the bad guys, this might very well have made for a funny little movie, but the script’s just too weak for that, going for inane and utterly random rambling where a clash of espionage cultures and generations could actually have been funny.

The pacing is pretty dreadful too, with scenes dragged out so incessantly even the film’s few genuinely funny basic ideas (like a blackly humorous discussion about the best ways to torture people) become boring and tedious; most of the film’s ideas are tedious and stupid, anyhow, and can’t actually be made worse by the atrocious execution. Among the actors, Svenson and Leo Rossi at least seem to have a degree of fun with their roles – I suspect much more fun than anyone can possibly have watching them going from one cringeworthy joke to the next – while Gruner is desperately misplaced in a role that plays to all of his weaknesses – like acting – and ignores all of his strengths – like fight scenes – while the rest of the cast does a perfect imitation of being drugged up and bored.

Do I even need to add that the film frankly looks like crap in a way that’s easier to explain with complete disinterest in actually making an enjoyable film by everyone involved than the film’s mere low budget, and that Simandl’s direction lacks ideas, spark, or even just the ability to avoid lulling me to sleep?

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,in short,spies,comedy,lloyd a. simandl,bo svenson,olivier gruner,leo rossi,amy weber