Wanted: Dead or Alive (1987)

Nick Randall (Rutger Hauer), for unfathomable reasons the descendant of Steve McQueen’s character in the old TV show “Wanted: Dead or Alive”, is also working as a bounty hunter like is great-granddad (or whatever). He also has a thing for playing harmonica, badly, whenever he has reason to mope. Nick’s actually a former CIA operative, but that particular business got to unpleasant for him, especially when he worked against terrorist Malak Al Rahim (Gene Simmons). Despite being a bit of a loner, Nick has found happiness with his new girlfriend Terry (Mel Harris), and his best buddy, the cop Danny Quintz (William Russ).

Unfortunately, that happiness won’t last when Nick agrees to help out his old (and only) CIA pal Philmore Walker (Robert Guillaume) with a terrorist cell that seems to plan something big, a cell working under the recently arrived Malak Al Rahim. Now, Nick turns out to be well able to help Walker out, but unfortunately, a different old CIA acquaintance named John Lipton (Jerry Hardin, The X-Files’ Deep Throat himself) has rather different plans with Nick, which will eventually lead to various terrorist attacks that really had no need to happen at all, among other things. The film never gets around to actually explaining what Lipton thinks he’s doing beyond making Nick’s life harder as a form of vengeance.

Gary Sherman’s Wanted is a weird one, consisting of various disparate elements that never quite gel enough to become a whole but still make the film an always interesting watch. The main problem is how incongruous the film’s impulses are. On one hand – be warned, this is a film with more than just two hands – there’s the whole call-back to the old TV show that really has no function in the film apart from looking at an audience that has come for a very different film and saying “remember that?”.

On the next one, there’s the nature of the film’s bad guys, who are strictly US late 80’s action movie “Arabian” terrorists, the kind of terrorists that don’t have an actual ideology beyond being evil, and whose leader is played by rock star who can’t act and tries to get away with just not moving his face. Said rock star, to make matters really weird, is also the son of Hungarian Jewish parents. Adding another element of what the heck to this whole business is the fact that Al Rahim enters the US cosplaying as an orthodox Jew. I got nothing.

Hand number three is the way the film handles its very 80s action movie set-up – with the thoughtful slowness of 70s cinema, giving much more space to the characterisation of Nick and his family of choice than any 80s film about an action hero fighting terrorists is supposed to do. As a matter of fact, it’s this part of the film that makes watching it worthwhile, Sherman giving his actors and their characters enough room to breathe. Why, I found myself actually beginning to care about what happens to them. Consequently the entirely expected scene when Terry and Danny are killed off acquires a bit of emotional weight, particularly since Hauer plays the moment as if his character were an actual human being who has just seen the people he loves die. There’s more sadness and desperation than rage in that scene from him, and the film for a moment seems to teeter on the edge of not going the way of all 80s action films but go someplace more interesting.


Obviously, a violent rampage then follows anyway, and as all action sequences in the film, it seems to stand halfway between the way 70s cinema had approached its violence and the gung ho action style of the 80s. It’s not a great place to stand for action scenes, frankly, because it feels less than Sherman trying to split the difference between two eras but rather more as if he simply doesn’t want to commit to one.

The Unholy (1988)

After young Catholic priest Father Michael (Ben Cross) against all reason survives being thrown out of a window by a supposed suicide without even the slightest injury, New Orleans’s archbishop Mosely (Hal Holbrook) and a blind, mysterious and hysterically overacted elderly priest we will later learn to be called Father Silva (Trevor Howard) look upon him with rather different eyes. Why, he might just be “the Chosen One”, which, as you know, is a very important part of Catholic doctrine that just happens to not be written down anywhere, certainly not in that book, whatsitcalled? Right, the Bible!

Anyway, his potential Chosen One status earns Michael his own parish, a church somewhere in what looks like one of the poorer, predominantly black, parts of New Orleans, yet which still harbours that whitest of things – a Satanist themed nightclub. The nightclub and its boss, one Luke (William Russ), aren’t too troubling for the rather modern Father Michael at first. He’s got worse problems to cope with: turns out his two predecessors in his church were both murdered right in front of the altar. The police were so helpless to solve the crimes they even asked the Church to close the place down; which they did before sending Father Michael. As the audience knows – and Michael will take quite a while to accept because he doesn’t believe in the devil or demons – the priests were murdered by a demon appearing as a pretty nude sexy (though curiously grown-up and female) woman (Nicole Fortier).

So clearly, some temptation of the flesh in form of one of Luke’s baristas is on the menu for Father Michael, as well as some theology lessons and other random nonsense.

Camilo Vila’s The Unholy is a deeply flawed film that I nonetheless love quite passionately. Its worst flaw is obviously the pacing: it starts, stops, starts, comes to a halt again, repeats plot points for no good reason to then get going again, and has about as much flow as a German rapper (don’t ask). I also can’t deny that it is much more talky than it needs to be, again tending to repeat ideas and plot beats for no good reason whatsoever. Then there’s the Ben Cross factor. While I don’t have anything against the man as an actor, the film’s slower parts could have used some enlivening by a leading men who is a bit more outwardly charismatic and whose acting style isn’t quite as dry as Cross’s.

Having said all that, here’s why The Unholy is awesome: living as we do in a time where all religiously themed horror (at least the Christian kind) seems to be inevitably about exorcisms, it is such a wonderful change of pace to see a film that just makes up some wacky bit of mythology it adds to Catholicism and then proceeds to tie things up with the sorts of things demons in the Christian interpretation are rather more interested in than possession. Temptation, particularly of priests (and saints) is rather a big thing in this mythology, and there aren’t too many films directly about it, even though this approach potentially adds fine opportunities for actually talking about morals, the complexities of the human heart and getting some nudity into your film.

The Unholy doesn’t stop there, though: in its final twenty minutes, it climaxes in (some might say devolves into) a very 80s horror concoction with multiple crucifixions, a thematically pertinent demonic parody of the Catholic mass, a ridiculous yet inspired demon (who also still looks like said sexy redhead in actually rather disquieting intercuts), his adorable assistant demon dwarfs, a short descent into hell with quick snippets of DEBAUCHERY! CANNIBALISM! LESBIANISM! ICKY STUFF!, and a sudden awakening of Cross’s inner scenery chewer. And while there’s certainly too much feet-dragging before, even earlier in the film there’s still space for fun stuff like Trevor Howard’s channelling of the spirit of Vincent Price in a really outrageous week, or the ten minutes in which Luke (who is only a fake Satanist for publicity reasons, by the way) turns into our short-term protagonist and visits a dramatic yet less than helpful medium who basically explains to the man afraid of the bad shit that’s going down that bad shit is going down and she’s utterly useless.


All of that is directed by Vila in spurts of somewhat stylish 80s colour, some dry ice fog, shot in some cool and some not so cool locations. What’s not to like (except for all that stuff I already mentioned)?