Omega Doom (1996)

Revenge of the Nerds, it’s stunning to imagine, is a divisive film.  Primarily, its critics tend to call up the film’s questionable sexual politics as the reason why it’s so awful (and, yes, they are problematic).  I’m sure that, when it was released back in 1984, there were still plenty of people who detested this aspect of the movie.  It’s just that the internet wasn’t around for everyone and anyone to vent their spleen and instigate a hip, mob mentality that usually comes and goes so fast, the people complaining rarely even remember what it was they were decrying, having moved on to the next outrage du jour.  Having now vented my own spleen, no, I have never particularly cared for the crass, assaultive way that women are treated in the film, but it also never stopped me from mildly liking the film for what it is: a crass, assaultive sex comedy.  It was never meant to be anything else, the same as gore films are filled with gore.  To expect otherwise is missing the point (or maybe it’s just me).  Call me crazy, but I always preferred the second film, Nerds in Paradise more, and either way, I don’t hold these films up as favorites by any stretch.  So why in Green Hell am I talking about Revenge of the Nerds in my introduction to Albert Pyun’s Omega Doom?  Because every time I think of the title and the titular character (as essayed by Rutger Hauer), I can’t help but think of the big song number from Jeff Kanew’s magnum opus, just changing the lyrics to amuse my juvenile self.  “We’re Lambda Lambda Lambda and…Omega Doom…”  Don’t try and tell me you didn’t start singing along to that.

During the big human/robot war, robo-soldier Omega Doom (cue music) is shot in the back of the head, wiping away his memories and prime directives (which we can only assume were counter to Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, anyway).  Doom wanders the wasteland doing stuff, while the various remaining robot factions feud over a legendary arsenal (which they call treasure) that will give them the ability to defeat not only their automaton enemies but also the humans who have been crawling back to prominence.

It amazes me how many times Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Yojimbo have been remade, retooled, re-envisioned, etcetera (I get the why of it; they’re outstanding films outstandingly crafted, and imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that), and Omega Doom (cue music) is yet another stab at the latter of the two.  Doom comes to town, befriends the local put-upon robot who literally always loses his head (named The Head, played by Norbert Weisser), does good for the local put-upon female robotic saloon owner (named The Bartender, played by Anna Katarina), and kind of sort of pits the local robot gangs (The Roms and The Droids) against each other, though really, he just picks them off.  The difference is that, instead of Ronin or gunslingers, these are robots in a post-nuke, post-human/robot-war world, get it?!  Sure, Doom tries to talk the other robots to death before throwing down with them, but eventually that’s what it all ends up being.  I can understand Pyun’s desire to put his spin on Kurosawa’s classic (and Pyun has surely made some classic Action films [Cyborg, Nemesis, Dollman to name but three] in his own right), but I cannot for the life of me fathom how he managed to make this one so confusing and dull. 

The robots all act like humans whenever it’s convenient.  For example, why the hell do robots need to or want to drink water?  Why would a robot open a saloon to serve same?  Why would a robot derive any sort of pleasure from kicking around a disembodied robot head (or derive any sort of pleasure from anything at all)?  Why would robots express feelings like regret or hope?  At least with Omega Doom (cue music) it’s semi-logical.  He was changed by the shot to his melon.  It would make more sense and work better dramatically to have Doom be the only one with emotions, needs, wants and to have him bring these things to the other robots, to change them through their interactions.  The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that Pyun wanted to show that robots are as bad as people.  And again, I have to ask why?  It doesn’t play with the setup of the narrative, and it’s needless window dressing that robs the film of any resonance it could have had (although I suppose it’s gangbusters as an “elevator pitch”).

Omega Doom (cue music) has a purpose, and it’s this that he ostensibly bestows to his android brethren.  He’s there to save them in messianic fashion (the ones he doesn’t destroy).  What’s interesting about this is that his purpose came about due to damage caused by a human.  If anything, his peaceful goals are a defect (or, I suppose, free will, but that’s not nearly as intriguing to me).  One of the first robots he talks to and befriends is The Head, the part of Doom that was impaired.  This is the direction that Pyun should have taken the film, that Omega Doom (cue music) is a brain damaged robot with a messiah complex.  Instead, The Head recalls that he was a teacher (along with providing tons of painfully unfunny comic relief), The Bartender recalls that she serves water (as well as the lyrics to Joy to the World [the Handel version, not the Three Dog Night one]), and Zinc (Jill Pierce) decides to join the good bots for no real reason.

I really don’t enjoy beating up on this film, because it did have a lot of potential, and that’s the reason I’m doing it, though not for too much longer.  The robot gangs just stand around talking to each other or to Doom.  Then they talk some more.  Then there’s a showdown.  Then there are less robots in the gangs.  All this dialogue wouldn’t feel so useless if any of it went anywhere or if it wasn’t all simply wasting runtime until the fights.  And let’s talk about the fights.  There are some bright spots in their execution, but otherwise they are jumbled, scattershot messes.  I can see why Pyun chose to edit them together as he did (whip-fast cuts between awkward closeups and long shots of combatants in silhouette), Hauer not being the most leggiadrous of onscreen fighters (or certainly not by this point in his career).  The director had to find a way to cut to the stunt people as economically as possible.  I can only assume he didn’t cover his leads well enough to allow for longer, clarified shots in these scenarios, or maybe he mistakenly thought this approach would amp up the excitement.  It’s a shame, because I really wanted to like this movie, but neither the story nor the action live up to the title Omega Doom (cue music).

MVT:  Some of the shots in the film look okay.  Unfortunately, they also look so similar as to become nigh-indistinguishable.

Make or Break:  The first scene featuring The Head.  You may feel like you got kicked in yours.

Score:  3/10           

New Rose Hotel (1998)

Directed by: Abel Ferrara
Run time: 93 minutes

When I saw this movie in high school I was rather disappointed. I liked Johnny Mnemonic and when I found out this movie I had to watch it as well. Being a teenager and insufferable ass I found this movie boring. My thoughts at the time was that it need an 80's stereotypical covered in chrome stomping on some suit while in car chase with gun fire. I don't think my teenage self was wrong but I'm older and I have read most of what William Gibson written.  So a re watching was in order and it proved that my teenaged self was an idiot. 

The story is about two mega corporations, two experts in corporate extraction, a girl, and bio engineering rock star.  Hiroshi is a bio engineer character has the ability to walk into a lab and turn out numerous multimillion dollar patients. This makes his mega corporation Maas a lot of money and gives character anything he wants.  However this is not making him happy and he is looking for greener pastures.

This is where Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe) come in. They are freelance corporate extraction experts and they are more than willing to help character get out of Maas' grasp and working their rival Hosaka. In order to get close to Hiroshi they need an intermediary who can sell him on finding happiness with Hosaka. Luckily for X and Fox they found the perfect agent for this in Sandii (Asia Argento). So Fox and X train her to seduce Hiroshi so she can convince him to leave his wife and Maas. During Sandii's training Fox falls for her and slowly the simple extraction plan gets complicated

Time passes and Hiroshi follows Sandii from Maas to Hosaka. Fox and X help set up a lab on Hosaka's behalf for Hiroshi in Marrakesh. Fox and Sandii make plans to give up life as corporate pawns and get married. X learns that Marrakesh is being coming the site for an impromptu convention for  Hosaka's top scientists. This leads to Fox and X being distracted by their divergent interests. That is when the complication from earlier happens it forces everyone to deal with the fallout.







This movie is a rather faithful adaptation of the William Gibson short story with the same name. It gets the feel of Gibson's writing and presents the story in the same quick pace that his short stories take. The leads are great in both performance and casting. That being said, the run time being padded with cuts from unsteady surveillance camera footage really took me out of the film. Also there are long scenes of dialog that make the film seem to drag. I get the scenes in question are there to develop the characters and to cut down on cost but it would have been nice if they shorten those scenes and shown more of the world or shown more.

Overall my younger self needed a punch to the head, this is a solid cyberpunk film, and a good Gibson adaption. This is a must watch if you are a hardcore cyberpunk fan and or William Gibson fan.

Make or Break: The unsteady surveillance camera footage did a hell of a job of jarring me out of the film. I get it was made in the 90's but less would have been better.

MVT: This film shows smart phones years before they were a thing.

Score: 5.9 out of 10

Alien Seed (1989)

Mary Jordan (Shellie Block) loves to jog, and she even has her sights set on Olympic gold in the near future.  If only she hadn’t been abducted and inseminated by aliens.  Now her life is in mild turmoil.  Enter journalist Mark Timmons (Steven Blade), who types while wearing sunglasses indoors as if he were Saturday Night Live’s Michael O’Donoghue, and has been in contact with Mary for the purpose of telling her story to the whole, wide world.  Of course, Mary is also being pursued with much more malicious intent by the probably/definitely insane Dr. Stone (Erik Estrada), and when Mary’s sister Lisa (Heidi Paine) gets abducted too (gee whiz!), all bets are off.  Not that they were ever really on.

I am in absolute amazement how vivid and downright coherent dreams are when portrayed in media.  They may have odd elements in them, but oftentimes they’re little more than either a clue to a mystery the characters need to solve or a shorthand to delineate a character’s inner turmoil.  Personally, I rarely remember my dreams, but several differences stand out between mine and those in fiction.  One, the people I’m with are rarely people I actually know.  In fact, outside of a few instances, they’re simply bodies serving as placeholders in whatever events are taking place, and they are just as likely to become someone else (recognizable or unrecognizable) ten seconds down the road as not.  Two, not only do the people change at a moment’s notice, but the settings do as well.  I don’t even need to leave one place and go to another.  Sometimes all I have to do is turn my head, and suddenly I’m nowhere near where I started.  Three, nothing ever seems to be resolved at the end of my dreams.  They usually begin (if they have beginnings at all) and end with very little having taken place and very little of anything with any explicit value having been learned.  

There are themes that run through many of these dreams, I’m sure, and I’m even more certain that there are those who would suggest that the reason these themes remain constant in my dream life is because they remain unresolved in my waking life.  I understand the reason that dreams seem so cogent in movies, television, and so forth.  They need to serve some narrative function, so they can’t be as deliriously frustraneous as those I’ve experienced.  And that’s what, funny enough, Bob James and company get (mostly) right in their film Alien Seed.  The dreams in this film are nigh-unintelligible outside of the god-awful EBEs (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities) that are peppered here and there in them.  There is a woman sleeping in a very wet bed with some unknown person next to her.  There are women in nighties getting splashed with blood (the only reason I could decipher for this one was as a surrogate wet tee shirt shot).  There are shots of fire.  The point is little to none of what we’re shown is integrated into the film in any significant way.  I suppose that some of it is meant to mimic what UFO abductees have recalled of their experiences, and I can appreciate that.  But so much more of it is just visuals.  Granted, there are some nice boobies in said visuals, but otherwise there’s little point.  But that’s enough for some folks, and it absolutely fits with my personal experiences.

The “alien messiah” angle of the film is easily the most intriguing.  As has been posited by people for decades now, aliens have supposedly been integral in forming and guiding our civilization since its very beginning.  It’s been said they helped build the pyramids of Egypt (most famously).  It’s been said that they have regularly chosen humans with which to breed.  It’s been said that the human race sprang forth as an experiment conducted by aliens, that we’re living on a gigantic Petri dish under a galactic microscope or worse, that we’re being bred as some form of cattle (in which case you would think they should have harvested their product some time ago and/or should really get on the ball with the seeming state of global affairs).  For my part, I can’t fathom why aliens would want to interbreed with human beings, especially if they’re so vastly superior and so much further evolved from us.  Unless, of course, Earth is a big old interstellar brothel for extraterrestrials, and their outer space contraception isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  

Regardless of how involved or uninvolved one wants to get in considering this subject, Alien Seed does its damnedest to play it all inconsequentially and straight down the line.  The government (read: The American military-industrial complex) wants to possess Lisa’s baby to harness its power and increase their influence across the globe, because peace doesn’t sell (contrary to what Dave Mustaine may tell you).  The Reverend Bolam (David Hayes) and his “ministry,” which I believe is in league with General Dole (Terry Phillips), also claim ownership of the infant and the power it will bring, but his motives (whatever his specific aims may be) are more personal.  Bolam is depicted as a genuine man of the cloth, but he is also depicted in the standard cynical way for this type of character.  The very first scene he’s in, Bolam’s eyes bug out of his head as he reminds his secretary (Marilyn Garman) that they will have their usual sexual liaison that evening.  He is in a constant, diaphoretic state of agitation.  We even get a throw away shot of him tossing his clammy head back in revelatory ecstasy while kneeling by some votive candles (though he could just as easily be getting his knob shined by his gal Friday).  The most intriguing pursuer of Lisa and Mark is Dr. Stone as a biological riff on the Terminator (though neither the character nor the actor portraying him come even close to the impact of the James Cameron/Arnold Schwarzenegger/Stan Winston creation), but he gets so little screen time and he’s so ineffectual, you really have to feel bad that Estrada actually put his name on this film as a producer (an associate producer, I grant you, but still…)

What undoes this film in the final analysis isn’t that it’s dumb.  There have been plenty of dumb films stretching back to the very dawn of cinema.  And a lot of them have managed to be entertaining, even when they have been incompetent (and some are entertaining because of their incompetence).  Alien Seed is not one of those films.  There are elisions of time and plot points we are only told about when it becomes important to what narrative there is (and I’m being generous when I use the word “important”).  One can deal with characters who behave unlike actual human beings, but when it’s done with the intent of plot convenience, it’s irritating.  Motivations change just to attempt generating tension to keep the story afloat for a longer run time.  It doesn’t work.  

It’s been a complaint of reviewers for many years that chase scenes are nothing more than padding for films/television shows that are light on content.  Now, you and I know this isn’t strictly true.  Some chase scenes are so well done and so well thought out, they become integral to the potency of the work in which they are featured.  With that in mind, there are no less than three chase scenes in this film, and I can tell you confidently that not a single one of them adds any value to this film as either narrative development or spectacle.  So, no, I don’t hate this movie because it’s dumb.  I hate it because it’s dull.  But you can just read that as “it stinks.”

MVT:  There are several scenes set in the topless bar where Lisa works (Mary may work there too, but who can tell?).  They’re entertaining and engaging for the most obvious reason.  And they’re the only reason I could see anyone watching this film.  Too bad there weren’t more of them.

Make or Break:  The scene where Mark visits Lisa’s apartment is stalker-y and implausible in the extreme.  He brings her Chinese food, and then she lets him in, and then she tells him to leave.  Then he sleeps on the couch.  If this scenario took place in reality, it would end in restraining orders, I assure you.

Score:  3/10