It's always hard to decide what deserves a review and what doesn't. One criterion is consistency, ``the bugbear of small minds''. Having written up a review of The Bells of Belampang, a Thai remake of The Midwich Cuckoos, it seemed natural to get in the habit of writing reviews about films which were
The setting is near future and at least locally dystopic, a sort of restrained cyberpunk world. All the action occurs somewhere around the eastern end of the border of the United States and Mexico: I'm guessing in Southern Texas. The community of Atolladero is run-down and in decline: less than a town, but not tasteful enough to call a village. Everyone wants to leave, but they don't because "this is where we belong". This may seem to you a rather quiet, personal sort of feeling unlikely to engender any serious sort of conflict. In fact, nearly every significant character will die because of it.
Atolladero is utterly in the thrall of the malign and decrepit Judge. The Judge is the wrong side of one-hundred and fifty, and to borrow from Stephen Goldin, ``as life it is hideous, but as survival it is triumph''. Despite having many organs transplanted in from less fortunate people and a large mechanical life support system the Judge is barely up to paraplegic standards.
Exactly how he maintains his power isn't clear, but one mechanism is his sociopathic henchman, played by Iggy Pop. Iggy Pop's somewhat androgynous look works reasonably well here. Why Iggy never pulls the Judge's plug and takes over for himself isn't clear either, but I suspect his tendency to kill people any time he can get away with it makes it hard for him to hang onto good staff.
The police don't seem to be a huge factor either way, though the sheriff does see off a clergyman who is telling the populace that the Japanese are putting components in consumer electronics that emit radiation to ... do something unspecified. There are some references to the Texas Rangers as the only competent muscle in the area, though they are "unscrupulous mercenaries'". This could be taken to imply
The other main acting name seems to be Pere Ponce, who plays a young deputy sheriff. Pere has just received a letter of acceptance from the Los Angeles Police Academy. It's a reflection on the town that going from deputy sheriff in Atolladero to a recruit at the LA academy is an enormous step up, sufficient to engender homicidal tendencies in a man's sworn comrades.
Pere's boss the sheriff tells him that it's polite to talk to the Judge ``when you arrive and when you're leaving'' (the area). Pere's plan is to spring it on the Judge when he's in a good mood, which means on the long-awaited day of the dog fight. The Judge is so pleased by the news that he makes Pere the main man of the day. Or, rather, not being up to the physical bit himself, he asks Iggy to do it.
Pere has the wind knocked out of him a bit by the fall into the dog pit, and is mauled in a desultory way by a somewhat hesitant hound. (Mostly his uniform gets chewed. This is a nice point, I think: it must be tempting for the director to make the dog seriously ferocious, but this would tend to obscure the squalid nature of the fight and the Judge's operation generally. And a dog, even one trained to fight other dogs, probably would hesitate before attacking a human.) At this point Pere reveals the key error in the Judge's preparation of death traps by pulling out his service pistol and shooting the confused canine dead.
There's a general feeling amongst the audience that this isn't nearly as sporting as they'd been led to expect, and that Pere is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a piker. (``Really, Rex, the sport hasn't been the same since they let the humans play.'') The sheriff points his own weapon preparatory to finishing Pere off. There's a rather nice scene here with a (literal?) Mexican standoff, as Pere and the sheriff point guns at each other. Pere knows he's likely to die if he doesn't pull the trigger, but certain to die if he does (even if he takes the sheriff with him, Iggy or one of the others will gun him down). He backs down, and the entire explanation of the scene is done without a word being spoken or anyone else drawing a weapon.
Clearly, nothing can now save Pere except a deus ex machina.
``Look!'' cries an otherwise irrelevant extra. ``A tornado!''
Everyone examines the stock footage. Yep, it's a tornado all right, and apparently nobody's noticed until it's almost on top of them. The lynch mob scurry off, jumping into vehicles to escape ... or perhaps to go twister-chasing, there being no other form of entertainment in Atolladero now one of the dogs has been shot ... it's not really clear. Pere hauls himself out of the pit (did I mention it's full of barrels marked with radiation warning trefoils? There's a reason for all of this, I'm sure), borrows a car and heads out into the local badlands, fleeing bad locals.
The car happens to contain the (drunkard) clergyman, who will later explain to Pere about the cause of epilepsy. (Pere is an epileptic, and has one grand mal episode while the target of a search and destroy by his ex-comrades. This has, however, no effect on the plot.) Apparently epilepsy is caused by the reptile part of your brain taking over from the rest. Iggy is alleged to have a brain that is ninety-nine percent reptilian, but never suffers from epilepsy, I believe this is a film convention known as a metaphor. Either that or alcohol is toxic in large concentrations over a period of decades. Yes, on second thoughts that's probably a much better explanation, just forget the bit about reptiles and metaphors and we'll get back to the plot.
The posse chase the rogue would-be-emigre through desert, pre-collapse crude oil pipelines, and rocky mesas. The standard pattern is:
During one of these cycles the car batteries used for the Judge's life support power supply run low. His helpful friends rig him up to the mains at an electrical power station. He explodes. This is greeted with a certain existential angst, but no evidence of grief. After a brief pause, more for confusion than mourning, the posse sets off again. (Nice touch: Pere sees the preparations and assumes it's a plot to electrocute him.) I believe the judge is the only fatality to get a burial, which is interesting because he's by no means the most intact.
Eventually the sheriff tells Iggy he's had enough, and is off to reassure his flock that despite the detonation of the judiciary the status quo will be preserved. Cam shafts clunk over noisily (but, again, non-verbally) in Iggy's reptilian brain: "If he goes back and takes over the town, what happens to me? Maybe it would be better if I was in charge. Maybe I should kill him. Mmmm, kill good." These last two members of the posse have the good taste to kill each other ("D'oh!") removing all the untidy loose ends. The sheriff has time for a soliloquy into the police video camera in which he explains to Pere that the secret of happiness in life is, amongst other things, not to be honest, not to tell everyone everything you know, not to love a good woman, and not to let someone know you are going to shoot them until you do it. A rather negative person, the sheriff.
There's one last obstacle for Pere to pass: a line of caltrops across the road manned by a very unsure-of-himself deputy. It takes about two minutes for Pere to talk him from "I'm going to have to take you in" to "Do you need any petrol?". Pere's young friend plans on becoming the sheriff's new right hand man, until he finds out the sheriff is dead, and then plans on becoming the sheriff under the Judge, and then on just becoming sheriff. "The only thing that worries me," he worries, "is the Texas Rangers. They respond as soon as they get the call, and the word is out about you all the way to San Antonio."
The karmic distortion (caused by the creation of the tornado early in the film) suddenly resolves itself into an aircar carrying three Texas Rangers: thus, nature balances itself. The cyberware equivalent of wrap-around shades involves high-tech goggles. The friend goes out to talk to them and is absent-mindedly shot. Pere hunkers down behind the best available cover: a car the bad guys can both see and shoot through; and a copy of the script. The bad guys stand in the open and empty multiple magazines into the car (it's quite a long scene ... in fact, long enough to make me reach for the fast forward on the video). Every square centimetre of the car seems to get penetrated by something.
Pere, uninjured, shoots all three Rangers from beneath the car. His friend emerges from the ditch by the side of the road, a bit miffed to have participated in the gunplay not at all as a shooter and only to the extent of a flesh wound as a target. The scriptwriter summons one Ranger back from the dead to a state of being mortally wounded but determinedly homicidal. He lasts just long enough for ditch-skulker to save the day and justify his actor's equity rates.
So everyone still alive (that's two characters) drives to California. The budget doesn't stretch to a backdrop of a futuristic LA, so the city is shown from a low camera angle, looking out and up through the windscreen. All we can see is a couple of aircars cruising around and the tops of some palm trees. I'm not sure this bit was necessary at all but to the extent it was I liked it: whoever was responsible made a good fist of suggesting somewhere more prosperous and less yuck while staying within a budget that wouldn't have paid for Schwarzenegger's running shoes.
There's a lot of other stuff that happens, much of which seems to have no real connection to the plot. Perhaps if I'd been watching this more seriously I would have understood. Some examples are:
Some of the gadgetry is kind of neat.
The story is structured into parts with titles like ``The Men'', ``The Guns'', ``The Reptiles'', ``The Dogs'', etc.. I didn't view the story carefully enough to understand the relevance of all this. Or, indeed, of any of the reptile theme (the bloody iguanas, for instance, are everywhere, and I suspect work for the Japanese ... they probably grew out of skinks when exposed to radiation?).
In summary, kind of weird, kind of interesting, kind of stylish directing, kind of worth watching, kind of glad my video has a fast forward button.