Welcome to Blood City

You know what this film reminded me of? The Cabin in the Woods. If you've seen that, you'll know what I mean when the film totally takes you out of the 'moment' and twists things up a bit.

Keir Dullea wakes up somewhere with no memory except a card in his pocket that tells him how many people he's killed. Not that he reads it mind. His other buddies at the time do, but by the time the plot gets going most of them are dead.

He finds himself in some sort of Cowboy world where life is cheap and terrible clothes are even cheaper, but who can he trust? Probably not Jack Palance. And is this world even trustworthy anyway? It's a very early take on Virtual Reality, this one. But then it's another film where you shouldn't really reveal much of the plot, because that's where the enjoyment lies. P'ting

The untouchable Jack Palance leads a pack of virtual reality cowboys in this shameless high-concept ripoff of Yul Brynner's WESTWORLD. Several amnesiacs awaken in a dusty old west town, where they are immediately forced into slavery. Their only hope of social advancement is to murder other denizens of Blood City, gaining all-important street cred and working their way up to a face-off with the schizophrenic sheriff, valiantly played to the straight-faced hilt by Palance. The prematurely revealed would-be `twist' is that all the amnesiacs are actually in suspended animation, merely passing a computerized aptitude test in the technologically manufactured west, uh.world. And if you've rented BLOOD CITY in search of blood, there's not a drop to be seen. This constantly deflating film co-stars sci-fi veterans Keir (2001) Dullea and Barry (SPACE:1999) Morse, and was also released as WELCOME TO BLOOD CITY.

The intriguing subject of virtual reality gets a rather unremarkable treatment in Peter Sasdy's sci-fi/western Welcome to Blood City, which sees a group of strangers unknowingly plugged into a computer simulation of a wild west town, the purpose being to identify natural fighters and leaders.

Keir Dullea puts in fine performance as Lewis, a recent arrival who gradually works his way up the social ladder, and Jack Palance is solid as the town's sheriff, but the film suffers from lifeless direction and a badly structured plot, which misses an opportunity for a neat twist at the end by revealing it's virtual reality angle way too early.

My copy was the dreadful pan and scan version, which didn't exactly help the viewing experience, but even cutting it some slack for this fact, Welcome to Blood City was decidedly mediocre. Westworld did the sci-fi/western thing so much better.

A muddled attempt at an interesting premise - people are trained to perfect killers in a Wild West environment - which plays its trump card too early by revealing that Keir Dullea & friends are in a VR situation at the start, when it would have been more of a surprise to reveal it nearer the end, and we could have done with more of an explanation as to WHY the scientists are doing what they're doing and why the people involved have been selected. That said, the film just about keeps the viewer interested throughout, with the best performances coming from Dullea & Palance. It's all very similar, by the way, to "The Prisoner" episode "Living in Harmony", which also had its hero thrown into a VR wild-west scenario.

Always enjoy a film in which Jack Palance,(Frendlander) appears in and know that it will be a great film to view and this film was a big surprise for a 1977 film and I enjoyed it from beginning to end. This film starts out with a large group of men who were chained and pounding on rocks in a place that looked like a desert. Keir Dullea, (Lewis) was one of these men pounding rocks and all of a sudden he is being released by a proclamation from the President of the U.S. The next scene shows Lewis laying on the ground and wakes up and cannot remember anything at all and joins a group of other people in the same situation. These people eventually are met by Jack Palance, (Frendlander) who brings them to his town and they soon find out that they are going to become slaves in his town and have no future to be able to think for themselves. This is a Sci-Fi film and at this point, I cannot say anymore, except, don't miss this film, it is a great 1977 Classic.