In short: Carnosaur 2 (1995)

Communications to a military uranium mine somewhere in the middle of one of the US deserts has broken down. For reasons, time is pressing, so Major Tom McQuade (Cliff DeYoung) can’t wait for appropriate military operatives and decides to go in with what will be our main protagonists. The film is keeping things pretty vague there, but our heroes seem to be some sort of repair crew for hire, wearing black dusters with a little lightning symbol on them. Though nobody in the costume department could decide if the lightning’s supposed to be horizontal or vertical. So yes, this is the first film I’ve seen concerning the adventures of mercenary electricians.

Once our heroes arrive at the mine, scenes from Aliens happen to them, just with dinosaurs replacing the aliens.

As regular readers know (hi, Mum!), I’m rather fond of low budget specialist Louis Morneau’s films. However, this doesn’t mean his Corman production belatedly answering the masses screaming for a sequel to the painful Carnosaur finds my approval, seeing as I’m not quite stupid enough to be part of its core audience. Morneau’s direction isn’t really the problem: he tries his best to make the usual sets look exciting, merrily films around the problems of the special effects until they look downright solid, and does tend to film okay monster attacks, making the whole affair mysteriously look like an actual movie. The true problem is Michael Palmer’s script. It doesn’t so much crib a bit from Cameron’s Aliens but just reproduces complete scenes. Which probably must have sounded like a genius idea given that Aliens is rather good; unfortunately, Carmosaur 2 rips stuff off without any rhyme or reason, without even the tiniest thought given to questions like if a scene makes any sense in the somewhat different context it takes place in. The stuff Palmer comes up with himself neither fits the parts he has ripped off, nor does it make much sense. Just look at the nature of our heroes, the bizarre contortions the film goes through to explain why there’s nobody competent around, and so on, and so forth.

It doesn’t help the film’s case that John Savage just might be the worst Ripley ever, and that its version of Aliens clearly has no use for female characters at all. Even the Italian rip-off industry knew better than this! This – of course – doesn’t mean a boy can’t have a bit of fun with the film but it’s not the good and clean kind of fun to be sure.

Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead (2008)

Sisters Melissa (Nicki Aycox) and Kayla (Laura Jordan) haven’t seen each other in months, so what better way to change that than going on a road trip to Las Vegas with Melissa’s fiancée Bobby (Nick Zano) for the couple’s shared bachelor bash? Kayla invites her internet boyfriend Nik (Kyle Schmid) as a surprise road trip guest too, though Nik’ll turn out to be a bit of a prick when they meet him half-way to Vegas.

When going on a detour/short-cut Nik suggests, the group’s car dies somewhere out in the desert, about a hundred miles from their last stop. Fortunately, they manage to find a house relatively close-by. The place is mostly empty, doesn’t have a working phone and doesn’t seem to have been lived in for quite a while, but its garage features a rather nice looking car in perfect working order, with a full tank. They decide to borrow the vehicle to get to safety, and – on the insistence of the rather more sane Melissa and Bobby – bring it back once they have found a car rental. To be on the safe side, Melissa does leave her mobile number.

In a rather unfortunate turn of event the car they borrowed belongs to a truck driving serial killer calling himself – rather adorably - Rusty Nail (Mark Gibbon). And Rusty really likes to play, so first he kidnaps Bobby and then begins to play various cruel games with the others, threatening Bobby’s life if they don’t comply. It’s going to be a rather interesting time for everyone involved, though Melissa will turn out to be the kind of woman whose fiancée you probably shouldn’t kidnap.

The prospect of a direct-to-DVD sequel to a thriller that didn’t exactly swim in money isn’t usually a terribly exciting one. However, I’ve always been rather fond of director Louis Morneau’s films, and more or less enjoyed every single one of them in all their various states of low (and ever lower) budget glory. While he’s not a particularly stylish director, Morneau is the good kind of genre film journeyman who actually puts effort into his work, turning out films that generally feel to me like the result of someone trying to make the best film possible under the circumstances instead of coasting on breasts and blood like the Jim Wynorskis of this world prefer.

So it’s not much of a surprise that Morneau does make an at least always decently entertaining thriller out of a script that really could have gone through another re-write or two (so our characters can break into a drive-in morgue to steal a finger but they can’t try to secretly contact the police?), and charming little problems like the fact that British Columbia might not be an ideal place to shoot a movie supposedly set in the US desert states. Turns out there are desert-ish looking places (at least when they are framed right) available, and the rest of the proper desert mood is provided by the yellowest filter to ever turn a place desert-y. Though, honestly, I’m not intent on mocking the film here, for Morneau does make the setting more or less work.

Every ten minutes or so, the script also throws the director a bone in form of a budget-conscious suspense or action scene. These mostly turn out pretty darn well, with Morneau usually finding the most interesting and exciting looking way to shoot a given scene – again, this is not something you can actually expect from a direct-to-DVD movie. More often than not, these scenes get downright exciting.

And while it’s easy to mock the script for plot holes and a certain silliness that comes with the territory of how artificial most thriller plot set-ups are, it also subverts some of the more typical thriller expectations, like letting Bobby (whose actor also looks the part of a low budget action hero) be the kidnapped princess while Melissa as the female character goes to insane and violent lengths to get him back. Aycox is rather convincing in the part, too, particularly in the second half of the film when she applies her own killer instincts to the situation.

All of which certainly makes for very enjoyable, sometimes exciting ninety minutes of movie.

In short: Werewolf: The Beast Among Us (2012)

Some time in the 19th (I think) Century in backlot Europe (quite fittingly embodied by Romania, still the Mecca of direct to video films) with the typical mix of confusing accents and dubious historicity, with the Universal logo at the beginning of the film sort of making it a canonical of Universal Horror Backlot Europe (or the UHBE, as we call it). It’s a place where people can say sentences like “this is no common werewolf” and make sense, because werewolves and wurdulaks are real there.

As real as, fortunately, a merry band of monster hunting mercenaries - among them Ed Quinn, Ana Ularu and Florin Piersic Jr., or the cowboy, the woman with the crossbow and a flame thrower for burning monster corpses, and the guy who puts in silver fangs to fight werewolves, respectively.

A small village needs their help quite particularly, for an especially nasty example of werewolf kind is eating its way through the population. Why, it doesn’t even need the full moon to kill! The local doctor (Stephen Rea) and his young assistant - and our viewpoint character - Daniel (Guy Wilson) can’t do more than get rid of the corpses and shoot everybody in the head who was bitten, so more professional help is badly needed. However, things will get much more complicated.

For a Louis Morneau film, Werewolf is nearly glacially paced, with about forty minutes going by before the plot starts to get interesting. That’s the nature of the beast with the 2010s’ type of direct to video fodder, of course, but it’s a bit of a shame when the problems of the form infect directors who can do much better.

This isn’t to say this is not at least a somewhat worthwhile movie: its worldbuilding of backlot Europe is actually pretty great (or at least, the effort put into thinking about it as a place with its own rules the script makes is), as is the cornucopia of silly details like the flame thrower, the fact the world contains monster hunting mercenaries, as well as the increasingly baroque additions to that world the film continues to make (some of which are too spoilerish to mention here). Plus, once the film does get going, its plot becomes actually interesting, the film adding stray bits of gothic romance, mystery, and some not half-bad ideas of its own, making the film more complicated, more interesting and even a bit original. At least I haven’t seen its elements together in this form before, and that counts for much in my eyes.

Once the sudden acceleration starts, it becomes more of a Morneau film too, with the by now expected (and in this case rather sudden) fast pacing, the sure hand in directing action and suspense, and a sense of concentration that still works in a film like this that likes to just pile on the silly details and let god – or the audience – sort things out. It’s entertaining enough, and while I’m sure Morneau could have done more with a mildly (that guy’s never been a blockbuster director) higher budget, what he did with this one is entertaining enough.

Retroactive (1997)

Warning: there are spoilers ahead

Former Chicago PD psychologist Karen (Kylie Travis throwing herself into the only good role she’ll ever play with all she’s got) is having a really hard time. She’s just quit her job after a hostage negotiation went horrible wrong, and is now going back to her roots somewhere in Texas. In this particular case, that means having her car break down out on a desert highway.

Things don’t improve for Karen when she’s picked up by a loud-mouthed asshole named Frank (James Belushi doing what he does best) and his at least psychically battered wife Rayanne (Shannon Whirry demonstrating that being mostly a softcore actress doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t act when a film lets you). Frank’s not just knee-deep in some sort of illegal activity but he is also just this short of breaking out into all kinds of crazed violent behaviours. Learning Rayanne is – quite understandably – cheating on him sure will do the trick. So soon Karen finds herself witnessing Frank murdering Rayanne, and just barely escapes into a one-man research facility where she just happens to get sucked back in time into her body of twenty minutes ago.

She still has all the memories and knowledge she had accrued in these twenty minutes though. Instead of sitting there slack-jawed as you and I would do, Karen at once takes charge trying to disarm the whole Frank situation, but her all attempts – despite her being ridiculously competent and off-handedly badass - only lead to an even higher body count and herself again having to flee into the research facility. Perhaps the next time’s the charm?

Retroactive’s director Louis Morneau is one of those generally ignored and unsung people who went through the early 90s under the tutelage/thumb of Roger Corman – the last point when that was a good thing for anyone but Corman. That means he’s learned how to shoot cheap, not necessarily stupid genre films and how to keep them entertaining as well as on budget.

The film at hand really is a case in point. It starts off with a preposterous set-up stitched together out of lost and found bits of other popular movies of the time that absolutely should not work together at all, but is redeemed by Morneau treating these ideas with utter seriousness and conviction, as well as with an eye for telling details that turns a cliché into something that feels real – or at least real enough for ninety minutes.

One of the great pleasures of Retroactive is when you realize – about halfway through when you’re me – how well constructed it actually is, how clever it uses facts it has established earlier on to turn any given situation into an even greater clusterfuck for Karen than the last time she went back in time, every attempt to change things for the better only making everything worse. The film’s solution to that problem is Karen just stepping back from the whole situation in the end, which also suggests her letting go of the guilt for the failed hostage negotiation. So, this is an action film that solves its plot by suddenly yet organically cutting off the increasing escalation of the violent proceedings by having its – utterly badass – heroine reassessing her situation and realizing what she isn’t able to change. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen something quite like this before.

Up to this point, said escalation is pretty brilliant too, Morneau squeezing an enormous amount of thrills out of four cars, half a dozen characters, a highway, a gas station and an underground time travel facility, using all these elements in a way that makes the film feel much bigger than he should by all rights do. The direction is tight, the plot runs at the proverbial breakneck speed yet the few slower moments and the finale when the film suddenly and very deliberately turns calm are just as effective. I don’t want to throw around a word like “masterful” but I can’t see how you could improve on what the director does with his material here.

In short: Bats (1999)

A small town in Texas has developed a bit of a bat problem. Two flying dogs infected with an experimental virus have escaped the laboratory of mad scientist Dr. McCabe (Bob Gunton) and have infected the local bat population, turning them into a murderous, tactically adept swarm of super bats. Of course we will later learn McCabe was trying to weaponize bats for the government, turning them stronger, more intelligent, omnivorous and just plain evil. Whatever could go wrong?

The CDC very quickly flies in chiropterologist Dr. Sheila Casper (Dina Meyer) and her assistant Jimmy (Leon). Together with local Sheriff Emmett Kimsey (Lou Diamond Phillipps, of course) they’ll have quite the time fighting what will turn out to be not just a murderous bat-menace but in fact the dawning of the batpocalypse. (And let’s not even think about what’ll happen if that virus reached Gotham City).

Yes yes yes, I know the plot of this thing is silly, its science absurd, and its characters shallow, but Louis Morneau’s Bats is also a whole load of fun when you’re in the mood to watch a highly traditional film about animals/monsters attacking a US small town. It might even be the platonic ideal of the form, cutting off all extraneous meat – nobody needs to get over a divorce here, there are no children involved except as bat food – only leaving the most important and tastiest bits of its genre. On the writing level, it also recommends itself by having a female lead scientist who never becomes The Girl but stays convincingly competent and tough without being an asshole about it (which is just the right role for Dina Meyer), no romance but more a not even grudgingly growing friendship between the main characters, a black character who might be the comic relief (of dubious merit) but is still allowed to actually do something and – spoilers, sweeties! - doesn’t die, and possibly the most ridiculous animal species to weaponize imaginable (unless there’s a film about killer goldfish I’m not aware of, Megashark vs Giant Goldfish, perhaps).

Add to that Morneau’s typically excellent direction, filled with cleverly set-up moments of classic suspense, breakneck pacing and an ability to create a sense of place that helps proceedings feel less generic than they actually are, and you have one of the finest examples of this sub-genre you could imagine. But that’s not all: there are also the ridiculously awesome animatronic bat puppets used for most close-ups of our monsters, as well as the film’s many scenes of bats crawling around that look less like bats than like the stuff of nightmares, a fine send-up of the genre-typical “but one still survived!” ending, the total uselessness of the US military, the Sheriff rocking Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and so on and so fort. I think I’m in love, and it’s Bats!