Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe
1990
Damian Lee

Abraxas (Jesse Ventura) is a Finder, a millennia-old being who has been tasked with protecting the universe. Abaraxas is hunting down his former partner Secundus (Sven-Ole Thorsen) who has escaped to Earth and impregnated (via putting his hand on her tummy) a woman named Sonia (Marjorie Bransfield) with a hybrid child. This child is the Culmator, a being capable of solving ‘The Anti-Life Equation’ and bringing Secundus ultimate power.

Abraxas is a shameless steal from Terminator (1984), just with 10,000-year-old middle-aged looking space cops. They chase each other around, shoot guns, crash cars, and get into the occasional lamp stabbing battle. The fact that this all takes place in a small Canadian town only adds to the ludicrous nature of everything going on. Not only does Abraxas steal from Terminator but it also lifts quite a bit from Jack Kirby’s New Gods comics, substituting Answer Boxes for Mother Boxes, and just straight-up ripping off the Anti-Life Equation. Writer/Director/Producer Damian Lee makes sure to heap on a lot of unexplained technobabble to try and keep all this thievery from looking too obvious but it doesn’t work. Science-fiction elements appear randomly only to serve lazy plot developments like removing our hero's weapons or why one Finder can withstand a machine gun blast while the other nearly gets put down from a minor stab wound.

Once you look into the dreamy bedroom eyes of Jesse Ventura you're never the same again.

Abraxas is a film defined by its quirks and one of its quirkiest elements is its use of music. This is a science-fiction action film that is scored with the remnants from a New Age CD bargain bin. You can watch dismayed as two giant men pummel each other while soft haunting synth choruses play. The final showdown between Abraxas and Secundus is set to a strange melancholy pop number that undercuts the action but not in an ironic way which would probably be the case were it produced today.

It is strange to see Jesse Ventura playing the stoic lead. Ventura’s entire career has been based on his bombastic personality, so to have him underplaying a character and given moments that (at least on paper) are supposed to be tender just come across as very odd. This is in no way Ventura’s fault, he really seems to dig as deep as can to try and bring some compassion across on the screen, but this is not the script nor the director to make that a possibility. Sven-Ole’s Secundus, on the other hand, gets all the best over the top scenes and lines, from threatening school children to eating the bill from a large breakfast.

See?

Surprisingly there is a lot of intentional humor in Abraxas that actually works. Jim Belushi cameos as a principal who never realized he could ask kids to stop bullying one another. Abraxas explains to the cops that he has VD (Vibration Detection.) Secundus’ search for ‘birthing members of this species’ leads him to a strip club. Combining this with the unintentional moments and a breakneck pace creates a film that is never exactly ‘good’ but remains delightfully entertaining for its entire running time.

UFO Kidnapped

UFO Kidnapped
1983
Geoffrey Darby

Back in early days of Nickelodeon, the cable channel had not yet clamped down on a particular formula for its programming.  At the time much of its output consisted mainly of imported shows and reruns. One of its early hits, and the show really defined Nickelodeon, was the Canadian sketch comedy show You Can’t Do That on Television. It was the first thing that was a bonafide hit for the channel. It was where Nickelodeon’s green slime fetish came from, which is still occasionally seen today over thirty years later. Nickelodeon also brought over some repackaged science fiction: The Tomorrow People, The Third Eye, and the TV movie/pilot for UFO Kidnapped, which was both an SF show, and from the creators of You Can’t Do That on Television. It seemed a surefire success, but it was never picked up as a series.

Sam Smythe (Les Lye) is a would-be burglar who is scooped up by a green ball of light emitted by a mysterious disc shaped craft. Nearby, two boys, Alasdair (Alasdair Gillis) and Kevin (Kevin Kubusheskie), along with their dog are transported away too. On board, the boys discover that they are the prisoners/pets of a couple of lumpy aliens called the Shandrillas. They also meet Klea (Klea Scott), a young woman in Victorian age dress who has been a guest of the aliens for some time. Together, along with Sam, a couple telepathic of mini-Wookies, and a horned devil-boy, they must find a way to elude their captors and get home.

The Assheadians of Altair VI

UFO Kidnapped is an SF adventure story that treats its young audience with respect. It throws out a number of concepts (aliens, black holes, time travel, parallel universes, rooms formed by thought, relativistic speeds, etc.) in a short amount of time and it expects the viewers to keep up. The children are bright without falling into the trap of making them wunderkinds. Sam is the only adult human of note in the whole show, and at first he’s bumbling and just a little dangerous, but he shows some nobility by the end which is more characterization than I expected.

UFO Kidnapped was a low budget television production from early 1980s, so the special effects are not astounding, but they are made with care. The models and the composite shotswork better than you can imagine from such a production. The alien make-up and costuming is actually good and a cut above some movies of the time. The Shandrillas look like the This Island Earth (1955) Mutant’s distant cousins. I had concerns that the Loolis (red-nosed hairy telepaths) were going to be cloyingly cute, but they are used sparingly enough to keep from becoming annoying.

"OK, that's close enough you smell like beef jerky on a wet carpet."

Why UFO Kidnapped was not picked up for series, I am not sure. It may have been too expensive a prospect for Nickelodeon. It has never been officially released, but there is a VHS sourced version available on YouTube. UFO Kidnapped is a weird footnote in children’s shows, SF, and Canadian productions. It’s definitely worth 51 minutes of your time.

31 Monsters #2 - Barry Nyle

Barry Nyle does not look like a monster in the opening moments of Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), but already he has a cold cruelty about him. Slowly, piece-by-piece, what's left of Barry's humanity falls away. He is a casualty of pushing his mind into spaces too far and alien to return unscathed. Barry focuses his inhuman rage on a young girl. His ultimate goal is difficult to discern, but it is almost certainly unpleasant.

Proudest Accomplishment: Arboria Institute Employee of the Month
Likes: Bringing back the mother lode
Dislikes: Hair, Young psychic girls

31 Monsters #1 - The Brain

Star of 1988's The Brain, this alien menace plagues the wayward youth of Canada with a combination of hallucinatory attacks, spinal cord strangling and swallowing people whole. Growing from about the size of an easy chair to about the size of a compact car, The Brain is a lot faster than it looks. Best of all, it really seems to enjoy his work as it loves to play with its food before moving in to gobble them up.

HQ: Deepest Darkest Canada
Secret Weakness: Sodium

VHS Summer Week #2

Things
1989
Andrew Jordan

Often the real appeal of viewing shot-on-video movies is seeing passion emerge from people who are using limited resources and skill sets to produce something unlike anything produced from large studios. Making fun of the cheapness of the effects, stilted dialogue, or poor editing is easy, but if you put that aside for a moment, you can take in how gloriously bizarre some of these films can be when not reigned in by executives looking at marking data. Things competes with The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre (1974) for films that become gloriously unhinged by the time the credits rolls.

The plot of Things (insofar as it has one) is about a man named Doug (Doug Bunston) who, upset that his wife has not been able to have children, forces her to undergo an experimental treatment. Doug’s knucklehead brother, Don (Barry J. Gillis) and his friend, Fred (Bruce Roach) show up and proceed to drink beer, watch TV and occasionally deal with some ant monsters that Doug’s wife has been birthing in the bed room. Things descends into incoherence as the trio fend off the creatures, the mad doctor behind it all, and their own incompitence.

"Oh god, I smell delicious!"

The above plot description was only been compiled by me after several viewings. Things begins with a dream sequence involving a nude woman in a devil mask and only occasionally lets up on the weirdness so that the brothers can sit around and make comments while downing a few beers. The dialogue can be legitimately funny at times, but character actions are often frustratingly at odds with what is happening. Characters vanish and reappear without explanation, and no one seems terribly concerned about a house full of monsters until they descend into utter madness about it. Things moves beyond fever dream into something akin to drinking a case of cheap beer and washing it down with a bottle of cough medicine while waving a power drill around.

The majority of the film is confined to one house. The geography of the space is never defined, but there is something claustrophobic about the whole place. The monster effects are cheap and stiff, but Things isn’t afraid to pour on the gore by the third act, and what it lacks in finesse it makes up in volume. At a certain point the film stops trying to make narrative sense all together, and it can have an overwhelmingly numbing experience on the viewer. Like Science Crazed, (1991) this isn’t a film you watch so much as survive, and you will not be the same person when you arrive on the other side.

The new Energizer battery mascot is not working out.

Things was originally released on VHS back in 1989, and I can only imagine what the casual renter thought of it when they brought it home, assuming they made it past the opening dream sequence. Although shot on 8 and 16mm film, Things feels most at home in all its lo-fi glory creeping out of a cathode ray tube like some kind of Canadian Sadako there to slap the beer and bowl of poutine out your hands and drive you mad.

Warp Speed

Warp Speed
1981
Robert Emenegger, Allan Sandler

A derelict spacecraft is found with no crew on board. The authorities decide to send a psychic, Dr. Janet Trask (Camille Mitchell), inside to pick up any memories that might be lingering in the confines of the ship. Dr. Trask enters the vessel and soon she is absorbed in the lives of the crew. The story that unfolds tells of Captain Lofton (Adam West), the stiff backed leader of an experimental deep space mission. The crew gets along fine, but tensions mount when an accident slows their progress to a crawl. The crew mutinies and turns the ship around. They are running low on food and fuel and the only answer seems to be deciding what or who to toss off the ship.

Visually the movie is pretty much what could expect from a low budget made-for-TV Canadian production from the 80s. There are some competent if inexpensive model shots, the interior of the ship looks like someone’s basement. There are also some sequences in a virtual reality simulator that look like a low-end Cinemax softcore movie, minus the nudity. The gloomy atmosphere is helped greatly by the dim confines of the ship, and there is a general dinginess that, whether intentional or not, does play up the tensions among the crew.

"Deal those cards, or I'm going to hot glue the hell out everyone here."

Without much in the way of visuals we are reliant on the actors to carry the bulk of the film. Here, I think, everyone does the best with what they are given, but trying to give Adam West anything with real gravitas is a mistake. It’s not that he’s a bad actor. He’s a hugely entertaining and charismatic one, but his strengths are in broad hammy characters, so trying to force him into a role that requires him to basically have a mental breakdown just doesn’t work. The rest of the cast attempt to muddle though some bad lines with minimal embarrassment.

Awkward senior class photos dot com

Despite all of these issues there are two things I really enjoy about this film. One is the music. The Emenegger/Sandler productions are filled some very eerie analog synth music that really hits a sweet spot for me, Warp Speed is no exception. The other element that I enjoyed is when the plot takes a strange third act twist with Dr. Trask becoming more and more physically embroiled in the events onboard the ship. The whole film concludes on a odd downer ending that is never explained and is the stronger for it.

Created by the same production crew that made The Killings at Outpost Zeta (1980), and several other films all containing reused props and actors, Warp Speed’s story is much more grim than its dated appearance would have you believe. Essentially it’s a redressed sailors stranded at sea tale albeit with more psychics and less cannibalism. (Pity about that.) It’s a very slow burn in a film that doesn’t have the scenery or unfortunately, the acting prowess to really pull off.

31 Days of Halloween 2014: Day 9

Week #2: Weird Werewolves

Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning
2004
Grant Harvey

In the wilds of Canada circa 1815, sisters, Bridgette (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) are lost in the woods. They encounter a strange old woman who tells them they must kill a boy or one sister will kill the other. Ginger is wounded by a trap, and the girls are rescued by a hunter who brings them to a nearby fort. Ginger discovers a strange feral boy who is locked away. He bites her hand. As a series of secrets and deals swirl inside of the fort, giant wolves begin besieging the outside.

With Ginger Snaps (2000) being such a monumental success, and Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed (2004) being a bit of a disappointment, Ginger Snaps Back seems to get forgotten. It’s definitely not as good as the first film. It lacks the subtext and wit of its predecessor, but it does have a good story and a unique setting. I am a little less convinced at the attempts to tie this film into the events of the first, it really wasn’t necessary and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense anyway. Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle are a great duo, I would love to see them work together more often. The movie makes great use of the cold and isolation. Some of the werewolf effects aren't as successful as they could be, but they are used sparingly enough that isn’t a huge issue. Ginger Snaps Back is a minor gem that hopefully gets a little more recognition in the future.

Snake Eater

Snake Eater

1989
George Erschbamer

Jack “Solider” Kelly (Lorenzo Lamas) is an ex-Marine now turned undercover cop. At least until he is put on leave after a drug deal goes (sexy)wrong. This is excellent timing as swamp hicks murder his family and his kidnap his sister. Soldier heads down south to even the score.  He meets, The Kid (Josie Bell). The Kid offers to help Soldier find the despicable ringleader of the bad guys, Junior (Robert Scott). Will Junior’s killer bear suit be enough to stop the wrath of Soldier?

Is Snake Eater a deliberate comedy? Filmmakers have often backtracked and claimed they meant their work to be funny after it became clear the audience wasn't taking it seriously. The Room (2003) is the most recent and famous example of this phenomenon. Snake Eater just keeps tossing silly moment after silly moment on screen. It’s obvious that Solider isn’t too concerned about anything. Is that winking 4th wall breaking or typical macho action hero stuff? The line can be razor thin at times.  There is also the matter of his family getting murdered and the repeated threat of rape against his sister, Jennifer. These events stand at odds to lightness of the rest of the film. I’ve re-watched this film a few times and I’m still not sure what the tone is supposed to be.

Regardless of the tonal issues, Snake Eater is quite watchable. Soldier is the Canadian answer to John Matrix/Mario Cobretti. He’s aloof, filled with one liners, and happy to mix it up with the bad guys. Lorenzo Lamas has never been an amazing actor. Here, appears to be enjoying his role and he allows his character to be the receiving end of quite a bit of misadventure. It goes a long way to making him endearing.

There so several ridiculous moments throughout the film. Soldier having his motorcycle turned into an aqua-bike hydrofoil. Villains who use a bear suit to murder their victims. The most fantastic sleeping bag escape attempt since, The Prophecy (1979).

The film is brimming with late 1980s action grit and jokes that fall flat. Snake Eater never works as well as something like Deadly Prey (1987). A film which keeps its grim façade up regardless of whether a man in cut-off shorts is blowing up a tank, or he's beating someone with their own severed arm. Snake Eater doesn’t have near that level of conviction in its own premise.

Sure it’s cheap, it’s dumb, and I don’t think it has any idea of what it wants to be, but Snake Eater is an enjoyable albeit disposable action film. If anything, Snake Eater is a good gateway drug for anyone curious about low budget action, but put off by over the top violence. It’s an almost bloodless affair but still manages to deliver a few enjoyable set pieces.

Gate II: Tresspassers

Gate II: Trespassers

1990
Tibor Takács

I’d seen ‘Gate II’ once during its very brief theatrical run. I remember walking out of the theater feeling… well not feeling much of anything at the time.  The original Gate was near and dear to my dorky teenage horror loving heart, so it was probably folly to think that the sequel would be able to capture the isolation and private horrors of being a suburban kid home alone all the time. Not to mention at 15, I was looking for darker fare, and both Gate movies fall squarely in the realm of kid’s adventure stories, not unlike ‘The Goonies’ (1985) or Explorers (1985), just with a touch of demons and magic rather than pirates or aliens.

The film picks up a few years after the events of ‘The Gate’. The house were Glen (Stephen Dorff in the original) lived is still a wreck and he’s long since moved away. Glen’s friend Terry (Louis Tripp) takes center stage in this movie, and he’s using Glen’s house to preform magic rituals (that involve the usual trappings as well as a computer, lasers and a sound system). In this case his ritual is to implore interdimensional demons to help his dad get a job. His ritual is interrupted by some local toughs, John (James Villemaire), Moe (Simon Reynolds) and Liz (Pamela Segall), but Terry still manages to succeed in summoning one of the tiny minions from the first film. He soon discovers that the minion can grant wishes but there is a price. Liz offers to help him send it back through the gate but not before Moe and John get a hold of it.  Terry and Liz now have to try get the minion back before awful things come pouring through the gate.

Taken a sequel to ‘The Gate’, ‘The Gate II’ is a bit of a mess. There’s none of the growing menace, or the slow and steady rising tension as each supernatural encounter gets more intense and dangerous. Although Terry’s dad’s life is kicked around by his son's fooling with the minion, nothing really feels at stake.

Taken on its own, ‘Gate II’ is a fun and fairly breezy adventure.  Terry is a likeable character, and the movie goes a long way to portray him as sympathetic. His main antagonist John is a meathead, but there’s very little to him beyond that. 

The special effects are definitely a mixed bag. Some of the forced perspective shots with the minion are fantastic, while a lot of the matte work is sub par at best. Sadly, the big demon makeup is uninspired and the stop motion lacks the care and detail that made the monster at the end of the original so memorable. I do appreciate any movie that tries to stretch its bounds, so credit to the filmmakers when the third act takes the characters to a cost effective but very well realized hellscape.

‘The Gate II’ is an essentially weightless exercise in late 80’s style horror comedy. It’s not a great film I’m not even sure it’s a good one, but I do think it deserves more credit than it gets.