Past Misdeeds: (The) Shepherd (1999)

aka Cybercity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Three Films Make A Post: Entombed for eons - turned to stone - seeking women, women, women!

Her (2013): The really surprising thing about Spike Jonze’s film for me is how little of the simplistic “oh noes, the modern world is so alienated” piece its set-up might threaten is actually in it; this is not beholden to any cult of authenticity apart from that of human feeling. It’s also a perfect portray of loneliness, and longing, and sadness, and oh, by the way, it’s also a mainstream (in the broader sense of the word) SF film that isn’t ashamed of having more than two brain cells to rub together, not exactly expanding on what written SF has thought about its themes and props but putting it on a human level as good as anything I’ve seen or read in a long time.

There’s also a pervading sense of joy as well as of quotidian strangeness running through the film, some fine performances in particular by Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson and Amy Adams, and an absolutely perfect score. Why, the film’s so good I’m even pretending not to notice it doesn’t seem to know what an OS is.

Cutie Honey (2004): Between remaking Neon Genesis Evangelion again and again and again, Hideaki Anno somehow found the time to direct this live action version of Go Nagai’s sleazy yet wondrous magical girl manga/anime, turning down the sleaze quite a bit in the process – leaving only a lot of coy and pretty good-natured shots of Eriko Sato’s shapely behind – and surprising me by how enjoyable the result is when it should by all rights annoy me to kingdom come.

Anno manages to turn elements of the original into a crazy mix of pop-art, kitsch, the grotesque and goofy humour, somehow finding just the right mixture ratio to make the film work as something beyond mere camp. There’s a sense of fun, often actually funny humour and an exuberance surrounding the proceedings that does curious things with the film’s crazy and grotesque side, turning the whole affair into one of the more charming pictures you’ll see in whatever week you watch it.

The Serpent’s Egg (1977): This is generally treated as Ingmar Bergman’s Big Failure (yes, with capital letters) but I don’t agree with that assessment at all. To me, the film seems to do exactly what it sets out to do, show the Weimarer Republik as a sort of hellish state of mind, filled with increasingly bizarre elements like the onset of the insanity that would become the so-called Third Reich. The people in the film can hardly communicate with one another, their actors only given the choice to emote either with very emphatic lacks of expression or through over-heated hysteria, which is of course no communication at all.

The film’s an often unpleasant experience, slowly dragging itself along like any good economic crisis does, only waking up for moments of ever increasing unpleasantness, sometimes bordering on the sort of thing that the exploitation movies I talk about more often would indulge in, yet filmed with a palpable sense of revulsion those films can’t afford. Nobody ever said films about people getting crushed by the wheels of history should be a pleasant experience.

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In short: The Long Riders (1980)

There’s something peculiar about the fact that various groups of what most certainly were deeply unpleasant men of the Old American West have become folk heroes. But then, there seems to be a strain in US culture that values independence far more than any moral or ethical values. Of course, in the case of the James-Younger Gang, history did make things quite easy for folklore by involving the even more unpleasant boot of the rich and equally lawless in form of the Pinkertons on the other side, and including the taste of betrayal.

Where folklore went, Hollywood followed very early on, so Walter Hill’s film about the rise and fall of the James and the Youngers is only one particularly fine film about these dubious people among many. And a very, very fine film it is, perhaps one of the best – und certainly one of the more underrated – revisionist Westerns ever made. It’s a film that does little wrong, starting out leisurely in a tone of highly stylized authenticity - which of course isn’t authenticity at all, but a way to make the world a film takes place in feel believable and lived in by real people – that slowly but surely turns darker, culminating in the most surreal Great Northfield Minnesota Raid ever put on screen, as far as I know.

In between, the film walks the line of treating its robber heroes as its heroes without ever turning them completely into the folkloric heroes, nor treating them as mere psychopaths. The James’s and Younger’s exploits are also located in a very specific kind of post-US-Civil-War resentment of poor Southern whites towards the Union, not a place I find particularly comfortable to sympathize with (because, d’oh, slavery) but again something that adds complexity to the characters and positions them in a believable social milieu, something Hill is – to my surprise – just as adept at showing as he is at the violence and the underplayed male friendships. And even though this is quite the male dominated film, Hill also finds room to show women with agency and minds of their own; it just doesn’t help them much.

It’s a humanizing effort that is further supported by some fine acting by the collected Keachs, Carradines, and Quaids that make up its cast in what sounds like stunt casting but really does work out very fine in this case, with the various siblings playing siblings with not exactly surprising sibling chemistry. Ironically, at least for me, for once letting actual relations play relations does feel a bit strange in a movie, because I – and I do imagine I’m not the only one – have so gotten used to see siblings on my screen not looking similar at all, the film’s gesture of particular naturalism does feel weird rather than natural. Which, come to think of it, is quite a trick of Hill to play on his audience.

But then, The Long Riders does play quite a few tricks on its audience, subverting expectations and making things much more messy than they appear at first; that the film is also just a fantastic revisionist western might be one of these tricks.

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On ExB: (The) Shepherd (1999)

aka Cybercity

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

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

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

In short: Dune Warriors (1991)

Welcome to drought plagued post-apocalyptia. A scouting party of decidedly evil warlord William (Luke Askew) takes the small, peaceful village of Chinley (who knows how it is spelled?) that is a water-y paradise in the desert, waiting for William to come and complete the invasion. Val (Jillian McWhirter), the daughter of one of the village elders, knows it’ll be over with any idea of democracy or non-slavery once William takes over, so she sneaks out into the desert to find warriors to get rid of the scouts and fight William.

She’s in luck, too, for fleeing one of those Filipino post-apocalypse movie mainstay groups of angry little persons, she is saved by Michael (David Carradine), who just happens to be William’s arch enemy, even though he isn’t telling that yet. Michael helps Val find the usual bunch of fighters – there’s her new love interest Dorian (Blake Boyd), his friend, the self-declared “scoundrel” John (Rick Hill), who were running a scam in the fine sport of motorcycle jousting, John’s friend, martial artist Ricardo (Dante Varona), and shotgun toting Miranda (Maria Isabel Lopez). Not the magnificent seven, but they’ll have to do.

So soon enough, things will explode, people will be shot, knifed and sworded (technical term), David Carradine’s legs and Maria Isabel Lopez’s breasts will be shown off, and peasants will be trained as warriors. To mix the Seven Samurai formula up somewhat, this village does have its very own traitors.

I often grump about the films directed by Filipino exploitation film king Cirio H. Santiago because I find most of them even more boring than they are shoddy – the capital sin in low budget cinema – but from time to time, I find one I actually enjoy watching.

Dune Warriors does have it rather easy to conquer me (I suspect William would be jealous if I were a village), for if there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s Seven Samurai style films. Not that anyone would confuse Santiago’s approach to the material with Kurosawa or Sturges or Sayles, but it’s a perfectly fine scaffold to hang one’s action scenes on, and a straightforward structure for a plot. Quite unexpectedly for Santiago the director (I generally respect his work as a producer quite a bit more), he doesn’t mess up the traditional structure, but keeps so close to it this is actually a Santiago film I’d call tight. At the very least, the film moves from one fight to the next with pleasant pace, not getting bogged down in bad comedy, or distracted scenes full of nothing.

Santiago still doesn’t like to move his camera much, it seems, yet this time around, the film isn’t killed by the nailed-down camera set-up of doom, and the action sequences are actually edited together from of so many different shots, I suspect you could make three other Santiago films from them. It’s not pretty but it’s dynamic enough to make the action scenes actually entertaining, with many a stunt double throwing himself backwards, random explosions, David Carradine posing with his sword while wearing boots and no trousers, copious blood squibs whenever somebody thought about using them, and a rusty assortment of cars, motorcycles and – of course - dune buggies. It’s not deep, either, but Dune Warriors sure as heck is fun to watch.

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In short: Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (1998)

After taking a time-out in the last movie, our old friend He Who Walks Behind the Rows is back again. Unfortunately, the mysterious Godhood's return to kids' favourite corn-based horror series isn't all one would have hoped for.

For one, He (as his friends call him) is now some sort of living flame thing, which must be awkward when you're a mysterious power living in a cornfield. Consequently, He now lives exclusively in a corn silo, stinking up the neighbourhood while waiting for his followers to throw themselves down into the silo once they reach that horrible age of eighteen. This time around, there's one exception to the age rule though, because the production was able to hire David Carradine for ten minutes of sitting in a comfy chair, which he does while doing a cult leader shtick, until his head splits open and a fire-breathing something burns a hole into useless sheriff Fred Williamson's head, which might be the one scene that makes this rather tepid and boring outing worth watching.

I really don't know what it is with the film's whole obsession with fire anyhow, seeing as He will also be beaten (until the inevitable, lame kicker ending, of course) by fire ("fight fire with fire", the film helpfully explains), which makes even less sense than the whole cult this time around. The lameness of this film's cult also has a lot to do with the lameness of the supposedly creepy kids, or rather, the bored looking teenagers led by Adam Wylie playing a boring prophet named (I kid you not) Ezeekial as if he were a kid staring someone down playing with marbles.

All in all, it's so dispirited and dispiriting stuff, I'll even spare us all a plot synopsis, and only mention that you'll also get to see final girl Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Eva Mendes, Ahmet Zappa, and Kane Hodder, if that sort of thing is important to you, but honestly, excitement lives elsewhere than in Ethan Wiley's movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,ethan wylie,stacy galina,david carradine,fred williamson,adam wylie

Deathsport (1978)

In the realm of Post-Apocalyptica, a thousand years in the future, the surviving members of humanity have divided into three groups. Firstly, there are the so-called Statemen. Living in domed or force-fielded city states, they use charming skiffy tech and wear the usual mix of togas and silver Lamé, or, when they are evil, uncomfortable looking uniforms. The wasteland between the cities is mostly populated by mutant cannibals with Ping-Pong eyes, you know, the kind of people nobody likes. Lastly, and most terrifying, is the third group, the Range Guides, violent libertarian hippies utilizing swords made from transparent plastic and laser blasters that look just a wee bit like large flashlights who ride the post-nuclear ranges, sprouting mock-philosophical nonsense wherever they go until their victims had rather been eaten by mutants.

Lord Zirpola (David McLean), the leader of one of the city states entertains his populace with the good old Roman method of arena fights to the death. Everyone seems pretty happy with that, but radioactivity is turning Zirpola's brain to mush and so he decides that the fights will be a good way to convince his populace of the superiority of his new secret weapon - motorcycles with built-in (and of course immobile) lasers with a tendency to explode at the slightest provocation. It seems when your brain's radioactive goo, these things look like the ideal weapon to attack other cities. Zirpola plans to demonstrate his dubious understanding of weapon technology and the tactics of urban combat by setting his superbikes into a fight against some of those obnoxious Range Guides (you know, people he isn't actually planning to attack later on), who are known as right ass-kickers. How else could they get away with their Randian hippiedom?

So Lord Zippy sends his favourite henchman Ankar Moor (Richard Lynch), who just happens to be a renegade Range Guide, into the wastelands to catch him some arena fighters.

Among those caught are Kaz Oshay (David Carradine), a guy who just happens to be the son of a legendary fighter Ankar killed (man, the post-apocalyptic world is full of coincidences), and a gal named Deneer (Claudia Jennings), who just happens to be a former Playboy model. Obviously, there will be more idiotic philosophizing, Claudia Jennings's breasts freed from their chains, too many motorcycle stunts, daring escapes and a "climactic" duel between Kaz and Ankar.

Deathsport sure isn't one of my favourite movies from this phase of Roger Corman's New World Pictures. For large parts of its running time, the film suffers from an air of disinterest nearly as strong as like the odour of weed that hangs over David Carradine. Directors Allan Arkush and Nicholas Niciphor weren't among the better of Corman's stable of young, promising talent and would deservedly both go into careers of directing and producing exceptionally boring TV shows. Here, where you'd expect a product of people young and hungry and creative, they delivered an at times draggy, at best vaguely entertaining mix of silly ideas that doesn't dare to really get into that silliness, but instead just aimlessly trundles along.

Worse, the film's script often takes itself painfully serious, bombarding the audience with stiff noble savage Libertarian dialogue from Carradine, Jennings and Lynch whenever there's no motorcycle exploding. It's not much of a surprise that the script does not seem to know the difference between the profound and the ridiculous, and is incapable of smiling about its own foolishness, as is always the way with really bad philosophy.

It's not all Arkush's and Niciphor's fault, though. Deathsport's three cult movie stalwarts in front of the camera all must have had a very bad week when shooting this. I'm used to Carradine being permanently stoned, but in this case, he doesn't even seem to realize there's a camera running. Jennings, and even the usually scenery-chewing Lynch, also just don't seem to be fully there. That's not much of a surprise given Jennings's life when this was shot, yet it's still not pleasant to watch.

Fortunately, it's not all watching near-cataleptic actors mumbling nonsense that isn't even funny. Deathsport does sporadically feature some decent stunts (although exploding motorcycles only go that far for me), and I don't know any other film where one of the big bads dies by being pulled into his own electrified wind chimes by a random naked dancer. The problem is that Corman's production house at this point in time was churning out so many better, or at worst more entertaining, films than Deathsport is.

 

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The Warrior And The Sorceress (1984)

A lone swordsman dressed in black - whom the end titles in their incredible originality call Kain (David Carradine), but who is never named in the film itself, so I''ll just call him Toshiro - comes to a desert town somewhere on a two-sunned planet in sword and sorcery land.

Two bands of thugs are competing for dominance of the village's well, and with it its citizens. One of the gangs is lead by an overweight guy named Balcaz (William Marin) and his pet lizard doll person, the other by the only slightly more impressive Zek (Luke Askew) and his captain of the guard - if you want to call about a dozen badly armed hollering yokels a "guard" - Kief (Anthony De Longis).

As will come as a complete surprise, Toshiro plans on putting both groups even more at each other's throats than they already are, hoping to achieve a nice profit and possibly a thugless town in the process. The swordsman is rather good at his job, too. At a later stage in his plans he even manages to put the reptiloid slave trader Burgo (Arthur Clark) to good use.

Our hero's life gets a bit more difficult when he discovers that Zek keeps Naja (Maria Socas and her perpetually unvovered breasts), a sorceress/princess of a now fallen empire Toshiro had once sworn allegiance to, as a prisoner. For some reason, Zek wants the woman to make him a magical sword whose usefulness besides its sharpness the film never bothers to explain.

Toshiro for his part has not freed himself completely from his old oaths and tries to help Naja (or her breasts?). That is not going to make his life any easier.

I like to imagine that, like the character David Carradine always played, the actor drifted from country to country for most of his career, sprouting wisdom of the east he didn't have a clue about, lending his dubious acting talents to whomever payed him enough needed him. His wanderings must have lead him onto the set of this US/Argentinian sword and sorcery rip-off of Yojimbo some day, and because its director John C. Broderick gave him a bit of money and promised him many scenes of interaction with pretty, bare-breasted women, the veteran of looking bored while carrying a weapon stayed.

Keeping in mind the type of guy who usually starred in cheap sword and sorcery flicks, a professional sleepwalker like Carradine is an improvement. At least he looks like an interesting human being and not like a bodybuilder and has some experience in looking not completely ridiculous in fight scenes. Of course, a lot of Carradine's acting here still consists of him looking bored or stoned, possibly both, but that's still a better performance than Miles O'Keefe ever delivered. From time to time, Carradine even looks somewhat awake (I blame Maria Socas). Sometimes, he even looks as if he is having a bit of fun with trying to imitate Toshiro Mifune's body language out of Yojimbo, or at least the part of it that consists of rubbing his face or his chest.

The rest of the actors is about as good as you'd expect from a film like this. Maria Socas looks quite striking but doesn't have anything to do, while Askew and especially Marin do look appropriately silly/menacing.

Not surprisingly, while he's stealing merrily from both directors, Broderick's work on his film is neither on the level of Kurosawa nor on that of Leone, but he does a solid and unremarkable job of the point and shoot type. The film's pacing is also kinda alright. This outpour of relative technical competence alone does put The Warrior and the Sorceress on the higher tier of Sword and Sorcery films for me. Yes, I am damning with faint praise, but what can you do?

At least, the film tries for a bit more internal coherence than typical of its genre on screen. It might be a bit generous to speak of believable world building, but the characters at least seem to have a past that has something to do with the history of their surroundings. I'd even go so far to say that a better scriptwriter could have used the characters' pasts to produce a bit of tension here.

Of course, there was only John C. Broderick, and so the tension is replaced by sometimes competent, sometimes dreadful fights, a four-breasted woman with a poison tentacle, some rubber monsters, a lot of naked women with a more normal amount of breasts, an unfortunately also nearly naked fat guy and David Carradine. That, however is entertaining enough for me, so I'm not going to complain.

 

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