Oblivion (1994)

Welcome to the township of Oblivion on a planet we’ll just call Wild West. After all, it’s just like the Wild West from the movies, but in space and with random goofy SF bits bolted on.

Town Marshal – and yeah, the film clearly means sheriff but in a recurring problem is too dumb to know the difference - Stone (Mike Genovese) is shot by evil reptile dude Redeye (Andrew Divoff) in a perfectly fair fight. In fact, Redeye took care of it actually being fair by disabling the Marshall’s force field which would usually have protected him from all harm – something the outlaw doesn’t have; and it’s hardly Redeye’s fault that Stone is the slowest draw on the planet. Anyway, after that Redeye does some actually evil stuff, and he and his gang of idiot wackos (played by people like Musetta Vander and Irwin Keyes) lord it over the town rather badly.

The Marshal’s alienated son Zack (Richard Joseph Paul) is out prospecting - and saving Space Indian Buteo (Jimmie F. Skaggs) from death by giant scorpion – but even once he hears of what has occurred, he is really going to take his time to get up to some revenge, what with him being an empath and – gasp! – a pacifist. He will later turn out to be a crack shot too, for reasons the film of course doesn’t bother to get into.

And that’s because Sam Irvin’s Oblivion is one of those comedies that believes it can escape any question about world building or internal logic by vaguely waving its and and cracking a crappy joke. Which comedies often can indeed get away with. Alas, that trick only works when a film’s jokes are actually funny, so no chance for Oblivion there.

The script was apparently written by great comics scribe Peter David (with the IMDB also giving “story” credits to Charles Band, John Rheaume, Greg Suddeth and Mark Goldstein), though it doesn’t actually feel like it at all. Or really, it doesn’t feel as if any professional writer had had much of a hand in it, but rather like a series of bad ideas and underdeveloped jokes somebody has scrawled on a napkin and called a script. To be fair, one or two of the film’s sixty-nine running jokes are actually somewhat funny. I found town undertaker Gaunt (Carel Struycken) with his habit to always appear shortly before somebody is killed and the resulting social awkwardness whenever he simply goes somewhere for a beer (and so on) fun and indeed funny, but this sort of thing is buried under jokes I felt actively embarrassed by despite not at all being responsible for them.

You’d think that this could still have been saved by the pretty wonderful cast of character actors and troopers – apart from those whom I have already mentioned there are also Meg Foster, Isaac Hayes, Julie Newmar and George Takei to wonder at – but most of them are pressed into bouts of deeply unfunny mugging. The usually intensely charming Takei and Newmar are particularly terrible, also thanks to the film’s insistence on making bad meta-jokes about certain other roles of these two, again and again and again. But really, the only actors on screen who seem to have any idea what they are doing and why are Divoff, Foster, Struycken, and boring love interest to a terrible hero Jackie Swanson (because really, being boring is never difficult). Everybody else seems rather too conscious of how deep the cow shit is they have stumbled into and acts accordingly.

Things become even worse whenever the film tries to turn sort of serious for a scene or two and attempts to treat Zack’s “inner struggle” as if anybody watching cared. Something that is completely impossible to take seriously given the surrounding nonsense, badly written anyway, and done by an actor who couldn’t act his way through an open door.


But hey, the space scorpions and Divoff’s make-up are pretty good, and it’s a mid-90s Charles Band movie without puppets and dolls, so there’s that to say for the whole mess.

In short: 7 Seconds (2005)

Super-mega hardcore ex-Special Forces dude turned thief Jack Tuliver (Wesley “What’s a facial expression?” Snipes) has a super-mega hardcore plan to rob twenty casinos at once. Or something. Alas, things become problematic because he accidentally also steals a case with a Van Gogh painting. Soon, his gang is murdered by another gang, his favourite partner kidnapped and he’s on the run from said gang, the police, and other factions. Jack’s only ally apart from a guy named Spanky (Deobia Oparei) who just might not be an ally at all is a disturbingly orange-coloured British military cop (Tamzin Outhwaite). Why should the audience be the only ones who suffer?

Let’s start with the positives, shall we? Simon Fellows’s 7 Seconds certainly does not suffer from the bizarre phenomenon that plagues quite a few direct-to-video action films that causes so-called action films to contain as little action as possible. In fact, 7 Seconds is perfectly action packed, with nary a scene going by without a car crash, shots, explosions, or what goes for martial arts in the world of Snipes. It, therefore, should be pretty fantastic.

Unfortunately, the action direction and editing is so incompetent the film might as well not bother. Some horrifying demon must have convinced the director that there’s never any reason not to cut to a different camera angle, leading to action scenes that cut to a differently angled shot every two or three seconds – I’m not even exaggerating. Not surprisingly, for most of the time it is completely impossible to make out who is chasing whom, in which position chasee and chaser are to each other, or frankly, what is going on at all beyond “car chase”, “people shooting”, and so on.

To add insult to brain damage, about every third cut is accompanied by a whooshing noise and random camera swirling. And sometimes the film just goes completely ape-shit, like this: close up on countdown timer with the number 3 – whoosh-cut – now it’s at 2 – whoosh cut – now it’s at 1 – whoosh cut - etc. It suggests a rather peculiar idea of what words like “editing” or “direction” mean. In this context, it probably won’t surprise anyone that the film also likes to cut into tiny little flashbacks to scenes that happened five or ten minutes ago, just in case some of the viewers suffer from really bad short term memories, had a little nap, or went to the loo.

I could go on, but I really, really don’t want to.

In short: The Cave (2005)

An archaeologist hires the cave diving expert team of Jack McAllister (Cole Hauser) to help him explore a cave system that was sealed up under a church somewhere in Eastern Europe (the film was shot in Romania and Mexico, apparently). The team includes characters played by Morris Chestnut, Eddie Cibrian, Piper Perabo and others, while the scientific side adds Dr Kathryn Jennings (Lena Headey) and cinematographer Alex Kim (Daniel Dae Kim).

Of course, the cave system had been sealed up for a reason (having to do with the truth behind a legend concerning Templars fighting winged demons), and so the expedition members soon find themselves with quite a few problems: there’s rather active and increasingly monstrous fauna down there, and an early death seals up out heroes’ way back outside. And, to put insult to injury, our guys only have enough supplies to last them until exactly the point when someone might start looking for them. The planning of dangerous expeditions is more difficult than you’d think.

So there’s nothing to it, our heroes have to find a different way out.

When it came out, Bruce Hunt’s The Cave quickly got a reputation of being the stupid person’s The Descent but I don’t think that’s fair, for it never actually tries to copy that great film very much. Unless every horror film with monsters taking place in a cave system must be called a rip-off of The Descent, but that’s an assumption I’d call neither fair nor helpful in actually looking at a film.

It is pretty clear right from the start that The Cave isn’t at all interested in the psychological depth of the film I’ll be ceasing to mention any sentence soon now, nor has is any feminist ideas in its head (if it indeed has a head containing ideas beyond “monsters cool”). This is very much a creature feature with a big dollop of adventure movie tropes added in, and it is neither ashamed of that, nor is it trying to be anything more meaningful.

And as such, I actually think the film is rather successful. Sure, Hunt may sometimes overdo the shaky camera stuff, the film completely wastes Lena Headey (who is still game), and some of the monsters don’t look all that great. On the other hand, the film is rather well paced, goes through its series of well-worn plot beats with conviction and verve (which is the way to go when you’re not trying to subvert them, I’m convinced), and features at least three tightly staged, cleverly imagined and pretty damned unbelievable in the best possible way action set-pieces in its final third. I’m particularly fond of the one concerning a horrible creature, Perabo (and her stunt double) and some frightful rock climbing action, a scene that’s as good an action scene as you’ll find anywhere, ending in a perfect downbeat moment I didn’t think the film had in it.

Huntress: Spirit of the Night (1995)

Upon the death of her father, Tara (Jenna Bodnar) returns to the mansion in the small Welsh village in Romania where she grew up for the first ten years of her life before her mother died, when her father shipped her off to the US at once. There’s something rather strange going on in the village, for her father’s old friends warn Tara not to stay for too long, giving all the signs of Crazy Ed characters who never help anyone by muttering extremely vague warnings that sound even crazier than what they’d say when they’d just actually told a protagonist what’s going on.

Well, at least Tara’s childhood friend Michelle (Blair Valk) is greeting her with open arms (and an open blouse, if push comes to shove). Of course, as we will soon learn, she and Tara’s old childhood crush have plans on acquiring Tara’s family estate for cheap to get at something much more valuable that’s supposed to be hidden there, even if it means a bit of seduction and aphrodisiac use is necessary.

These plans will be a secondary problem for our heroine, though, because she soon finds herself afflicted by an old gypsy curse that make her eyes go black, provokes the dry-humping of furniture, and loosens her formerly tight inhibitions up for quite a few sex scenes. There might also be a killing spree in her future, but the film keeps things vague regarding that point.

When it comes to late night cable TV style softcore movies with a horror base, Huntress is certainly one of the more watchable ones, seeing as it actually bothers to have something of a plot, aims for style (even if it mostly arrives at kitsch and blue light, but that’s more than a lot of films I’ve seen manage), and makes mightily mood-improving use of the not at all Welsh looking locations in Romania where it was shot.

There’s a pleasant degree of the Gothic about Tara’s family mansion, there’s a gypsy curse, and those parts of the film not concerned with the obligatory and often quite hilarious sex scenes (though the film really prefers Tara having her way with furniture than with people) are even somewhat atmospheric. Plus, in which other sub-sub-genre would anyone think having one’s protagonist pressing herself against taxidermied animals would 1) be a good idea and 2) be sexy?

I’m also kind of on board with director Mark S. Manos’s (no relation to the Hands of Fate, one hopes, though the Master is silent about the matter) attempts at keeping ambiguous how bad the curse of the Beast Tara is suffering from actually is for her? Sure, it makes her hump furniture but it also gets her in touch with her sexuality and her cursed person that isn’t quite a werewolf superpowers do save her life at least twice.

Less great are the whole semi-gaslighting angle, as if an old gypsy curse just weren’t enough for a film, and the film’s interpretation of an open ending, which in this case consists of it simply ending one or two scenes before its story is actually finished. On the other hand, being actually watchable as a movie that’s visibly striving for and sometimes even achieving a gothic atmosphere (with added nudity), is more than I can say about many of the sub-sub-genre colleagues of Huntress I’ve seen.