Babe Runner

I was pleased to see a lost movie finally released, over a decade late, but 'Babe Runner" (a/k/a "Babe Runners") is a pretentious, boring flop. What was released on Bluebird's website in 2022 plays something like a rough cut, obviously unfinished. And its touted $1,000,000-plus budget is not in evidence.

The five static sex scenes run about 3-1/2 hours, more than 20 minutes short of the 2011 running time advertised on the back liner of the DVD boxes. Those DVDs were not issued, the new version being just VOD for streaming.

It copies somewhat the original Ridley Scott movie's premise, basically Evan Stone as the runner, perfecting his skills to identify and hunt down the replicants, while evil industrialist Paul Chaplin and his main scientist Anna Lovato work on perfecting the sexy robot women, as well as a nurse played by Phoenix Marie perfecting special serums to inject into Evan to soup up both his investigative and sexual abilities. Not much more plot than that for this 4-hour "epic". The replicants are also called "skin jobs", to rip off the "Battlestar: Galactica" TV remake.

Making it barely watchable is ego tripping Chaplin, owner of Bluebird and executive producer/star of the movie. He gets plenty of costume changes, gets to hump perhaps a dozen of the actresses and plays his Bond villain role very poorly. At times he seems to speak like Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) of the "Matrix" movies, other times just his usual overacting, always failing to achieve the intended black humor. The actresses are properly robotic, just having lots of sex and wearing futuristic fetish garments, while poor Stone in the title role is intentionally rumpled looking, making Falk's Columbo look like a fashion plate by comparison. The lead replicants are played by Madelyn Marie and Gemma Massey as mannequins -it's the wigs and costumes that count.

It's about as dull as possible, except of course the talent delivers their sex footage quite adequately, Absence of a final music track and proper/consistent sound levels indicates post-production wasn't completed, or if there was a final cut it might have been lost/destroyed, and what's released here is an earlier assemblage that survived in the vaults. Nicholas Steele directed and was the original producer, but print gives producing and editing credits to Kelli Roberts, likely a caretaker at the new Bluebird that inherited the catalogue of released and unreleased titles.

Kelli I suppose has to take the blame for a sex scene early on in which a cameraman is fully visible, not edited out. There are zero action segments, not linking footage between the five setpieces and no ending. Sets, costumes and striking green screen backdrops are quite good but the special effects that might have accounted for a big budget are also missing.