(9)- he practically stars. Woo hoo!Woundage:
(10)- what DOESN'T happen to him in this?RATINGS:
Screen Time: (9)- he practically stars. Woo hoo!
Woundage: (10)- what DOESN'T happen to him in this?
Aesthetics: 
(7)- damaged goods, but tasty nonetheless.
With my review of Dominion comes two very sad facts. The first sad fact is that when I taped this movie off of TNT this summer, I accidentally did not tape the first thirty minutes of it. The second sad fact is that despite this, I was still able to figure out the plot without much trouble.
This film is the story of a guy named Harris. Harris is a cop. (OK, I didn't figure this much out until the very end when he says something about being a cop and I went, "ohhhh....that makes sense.") Harris has a partner named Joel. Joel is young, smart, hip, friendly, and very, very good-looking (guess who plays him). Well, anyway, Harris and Joel and a few of their other buddies decide to go on a hunting trip with one of those cheesy wilderness outback helicopter tour thingys. The tour thingy is owned by a guy named Lynwood, who makes them all wear these little dog tag ID things around their necks for some weird reason. So they get to the wilderness and they go out looking for deer, but what they don't realize is (cue scary music) someone is looking for them. It's a classic case of the hunter becoming the hunted.
I tuned in to this movie just as someone started shooting at our intrepid hunters. One of the hunters gets shot right away, and the only one who's brave enough to go see if he's all right is our Geoffrey. The poor man with the bullet holes is dead, and because this Unseen Sniper is still, well, sniping, poor Geoff is told to go back to their camp and wait for everyone else to reconnoiter.
And here's where the Blake abuse comes in, because, hey, let's face it, no Blake movie is complete unless someone gets to beat, torture, maim, murder, or otherwise injure him. Geoffrey goes back to camp with the dead body and puts it in a tent. He then goes looking for matches, and you see a pair of boots tromping through the forest toward his round little denim-clad butt that's sticking out of the tent flap. It is here that you're thinking "Uh-oh, he's toast." And you'd be right in thinking so, since he gets clubbed over the head like a baby seal and dragged off. Since the owner of the tromping boots is obviously killing everyone else, you'd pretty much assume that that is the end of Mr. Blake. But you'd be wrong.
This is where the main hole in the plot comes in. It's never quite explained why this happens, but Geoff doesn't die. Nope. That would be too easy. He hasn't suffered enough. He gets locked in a big wooden cage in the bad guy's cave. I don't get this. If Lynwood (whom, if you haven't guessed by now, turns out to be the bad guy) is bringing all these guys out here to kill them, why didn't he just waste Geoff when he had the chance? I mean, he's got guns and knives and rakes and shovels and other implements of destruction (obscure Arlo Guthrie reference), so why didn't he just kill him, take the little dog tag, and be done with it? Instead, he locks him in a wooden box from which it is very easy to escape after several very emotional scenes in which Geoff sneers at him and whispers, "you bastard."
Sometime around the third Blake-in-a-box scene, I made the comment to a friend that "when the box is a rockin', don't come a knockin'." Amusingly enough, two seconds later, the box began to rock back and forth as Geoff attempted to tip it over. ("Rock the box, don't rock the box baby, rock the box, don't tip the box over..." ahem. where were we?) Well, I could go on for days about his adventures escaping the Evil Cave of Lynwood (tm), but this is getting a little long, so I'm just going to attempt to summarize the rest of the film in about thirty seconds. As he escapes, Geoffrey gets a third-degree burn, floats down level 6 whitewater without a boat, gets shot in the chest, screams like something between a wounded bear and an infant (must have gotten a lot of practice when he was doing the Sega scream), and, miraculously, survives whole and intact. Well, they left this one about as wide-open for a sequel as any movie can possibly get, so maybe they're saving him to be killed in Dominion II.
To sum things up? SEE THIS MOVIE. It is great. It has everything- violence, suspense, opportunity to mock, and Geoffrey Blake getting injured and mutilated in many creative new ways. As if that wasn't enough, Leif Garrett is also in this! Doesn't that pretty much make you want to see this movie above all else in your life? I mean, an obscure 70s teen idol is pretty much icing on the delicious cake that is Dominion. Aside from not being able to find the damned thing, I can't think of a single reason why you shouldn't watch this movie.
