So anyway, the world has gone to
shit yet again, and guys like our protagonist Harry Trent (Matt Mitler) are left to sift through the rubble. Only problem is the rubble is positively
festooned with old magazines (many of which Harry has already read), old
bottles of Seagram’s Seven (which he really should have at least wiped the lip
of before taking a pull or ten), and giant monsters (hooray!). After saving young waif Spider (Kristine Waterman) from a “Mook,” Harry
decides to help her rescue her sisters from the villainous Reinhart Rex (Cameron Mitchell, earning every penny
of his paycheck) and his army of mutants.
Brett Piper’s Mutant War
(aka Mutant Men Want Pretty Women)
follows the boilerplate postapocalyptic narrative, but it has enough of a sense
of humor to make it mildly charming.
Harry is the classic loner character.
He has himself, his harmonica, and his car (replete with a heavy laser
gun). He wastes his time reviewing the ruins of a world in which he used to take
part. He subsists on the road, with
nothing better to do than do nothing. He
also doesn’t want to get involved with humanity anymore. His worldview has become one of aloof apathy. And yet, he does get involved when he sees
Spider in danger, because his indifference is a façade. He wants to believe that he’s only out for
number one, but he actually desires contact with other people, he desires
something more than the cold artifacts of a bygone civilization. Harry becomes the de facto leader of a ragtag
crew of people who have formed themselves into villages, because his time alone
has given him an edge they don’t possess.
They only want to live peacefully; Harry knows this is impossible. He brings the reality of the situation into
focus for them, and they, in turn, provide Harry with a sense of purpose. After all, purpose doesn’t really exist
without other people to give it to you. This
is Spider’s role. She gives Harry a
mission, and in this mission she also gives Harry the revelation that he needs
to be an active participant in this postapocalyptic world. She reconnects him to the world. She also, by dint of her youthful pluck and naiveté,
gives Harry a surrogate family to take care of.
He cautions her not to siphon gas with your mouth, even though he’s
doing so right in front of her (“It can kill you”). After Spider is poisoned by a mutant, Harry
stays closeby overnight to watch over her as she fights off the infection. He hugs her and refers to her as “my kid”
more than once. Harry is the
quintessential lone gunfighter who trots into town, makes a connection, changes
the lives of the people he contacts for the better (mostly), and then trots off
(just with more hugging). But the
connection he makes will stay with him, as well.
Another thing the film deals with
is the past (as all postapocalyptic films do; they are typically concerned as
much with re-establishing the civilizations destroyed in whatever nuclear
war/biological outbreak/natural disaster occurred as they are with seeing what
those civilizations devolved into after the fall of society). The filmmakers use voiceover narration for
Harry’s inner monologue, and it’s in the style of a hardboiled detective novel;
edged, stoic, and weary. His favorite
quote from his favorite book is, “You don’t know me, without you have read my
memoirs,” which, as near as I can tell, is actually a paraphrasing of the
opening line from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (not
exactly Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key, but what can you do?). He clings to relics of the past: his car, his
harmonica, old magazines, old booze, et cetera.
He mumbles to himself like Popeye.
For as much as he is forced to survive in his current circumstances, he
is preoccupied by the way things were.
More than this, the film contains
notions about guilt stemming from the sins of the past. The whole reason the world fell into ruin in
the first place is because of a war between humanity and a bunch of “pig-faced”
aliens. But it’s not the war itself that
caused the widespread devastation, it’s what the humans did to end it that
did. They created a new weapon, Neutron
Ninety bombs, that defeated the aliens but also took mankind with it. Harry was a soldier in the war, and this
reputation gives him a certain notoriety for which he doesn’t particularly
care. He has a combination of survivor’s
guilt as well as guilt over his part in the calamity that destroyed the
planet. At least in part, Harry
distances himself from other people because that’s his punishment on
himself. His relationship with Spider
(someone we can assume, by her youth, wasn’t alive at the time of the war, or,
if she were, has no conscious idea of the world as it was, and thus, makes her
an innocent in the proceedings) absolves him slightly of this guilt.
As for the film itself, it’s impressive
for something made on about sixty grand.
Piper tries to keep things
visually interesting, and the effort is appreciated. This is bolstered by the use of matte
paintings for backgrounds, the angles of which make for some nice
compositions. They also provide a nice
stylistic touch in their flatness (whether this was intentional or not, I don’t
know, but I liked it). There is also the
differentiation of styles for different perspectives. When Harry looks through his spyglass, we get
his view as an iris, but what we see is various moments edited together with an
odd grain to them (I can’t say if this was from the video’s source, but again,
I liked it). An alien moves around his
spaceship’s interior, and we get the view from his perspective with heavy red
filtering and handheld camera work.
Later, this same alien meets some humans, and we get his POV once more,
but now it’s more pixelated, as if frames were dropped out on purpose. This perspective also uses a doubling of what
he sees with his electric eye in a separate, red-tinted inset frame. The special effects run the gamut from
miniature work to makeup effects to forced perspective shots to stop motion
monsters, and I loved it all. The story
moves along well enough, though it does sag and go into some nonsensical
territory occasionally (Mitchell
goes at the material like a Renaissance Faire Henry VIII with a giant turkey
leg). It also leans into mawkishness
more than it should, but its handmade enthusiasm overcomes many of its weaker
aspects. Not shabby for an ambitious
director’s third effort.
MVT: The practical effects
nerd in me has to give it to the effects.
I have to admit, I was overjoyed when I saw that some of the creatures
were done with stop motion techniques.
Make or Break: The scene
with the alien selling munitions to the humans was great, not only in that it
affirms that an extraterrestrial’s costume can include a plain white tee shirt,
but also in that it has several humorous moments that actually work quite well.
Score: 6.5/10
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