Mutant War (1987)

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

Hollywood Cop (1987)

Director/Writer: Amir Shervan

Cast: David Goss, Julie Schoenhofer, Lincoln Kilpatrick, James Mitchum, Troy Donahue, Cameron Mitchell, Aldo Ray

When you think of memorable action film henchmen, Goldfinger’s Oddjob, Lethal Weapon’s Mr. Joshua, and Al Leong from roughly 90% of 1980s action cinema spring to mind. Unfortunately, not every worthy henchman gets the notoriety he deserves. Animal, the bearded and oft-cackling henchman in 1987’s Hollywood Cop, falls into this category not simply because of the film’s relatively low profile, but because director Amir Shervan failed to include the actor’s name in the credits. This was but one in a flurry of egregious errors in Shervan’s American directorial debut, where the hair is feathered, the aviators are polished, and the jeans and jackets are a little on the snug side.

The audience gets its introduction to Animal in the film’s opening scene, where members of a gang are gathered poolside at the Feliciano mansion before an important operation. Feliciano (Mitchum) has carefully planned the kidnapping of the son of Joe Fresno, a former associate who screwed him out of a large sum of money. He demands that no one be left alive with the exception of the mother. Animal assures him that he’ll “kill them all” and then cackles maniacally. In response, Feliciano asks that the rest of the gang keep an eye on Animal because “he’s strange.”

Shortly before the kidnapping, single mother Rebecca (Shoenhofer) is grappling with the latest of her son’s mischievous outbursts. Little Stevie is washing a goat for the third time that day. Perhaps this is forgivable since they live on a ranch, but chronic goat-washing is the type of behavioral problem endemic to single-parent households. On the bright side, the kidnapping itself is a rousing success. The gang guns down several fleeing ranch hands before wrestling the terrified boy from his screaming mother’s arms. Raises for everyone!

Rebecca is left with a ransom letter demanding $6 million and forbidding police involvement. To whom can she turn for help? The police, of course. She crosses paths with L.A. cop John “Turkey” Turquoise (Goss), fresh off a recent rape and robbery bust that leaves three perpetrators dead and one officer violently ill after witnessing a beheading. Turkey is that ultra-rare breed of cop who works by his own rules and is regularly chastised as a loose cannon by superiors Capt. Bonano (Mitchell) and Lt. Maxwell (Donahue). From what I can tell, he doesn’t live on a houseboat however. Turkey and his partner, Jaguar (Kilpatrick), take Rebecca’s case and vow to bring her son back safely.

Having seen Shervan’s Samurai Cop a few years ago, I expected Hollywood Cop to be its sloppier and even more inept grandfather since it was filmed two years beforehand. Instead, I was surprised to find that this was the (slightly) more polished of the two. While so many of Samurai Cop’s weird moments could be attributed to an inexperienced cast, Hollywood Cop is chock full of grizzled veterans. Mitchum looks bloated but is suitably irritable as crime boss Feliciano, while Mitchell and Donahue do a bit more than cash checks in their limited screen time. The real standout here is Lincoln Kilpatrick, who looks like he’s having a blast as the oversexed and appropriately named Jaguar. Had blues legend Billie Holiday not encouraged him to pursue a career in acting, it's unlikely that he ever would have found himself performing alongside Sidney Poitier in the original Broadway production of "A Raisin in the Sun," or oil-wrestling two busty chicks in a completely unnecessary nightclub scene here. Thanks again for everything Lady Day.

The film’s action scenes are lively, for the most part. The foot pursuit near the beginning of the film which introduces the audience to Turkey leads to a severed hand and subsequent decapitation, both by machete. The shootout sequences contain some of the most wildly inconsistent behavior in the midst of gunfire I’ve ever seen. In one instance, a baddie writhes and twitches after taking several shots before sliding down a staircase to a (dead) stop. That’s reasonable. Just a few minutes later though, his cohort takes a shot to the arm and winces as if pressing on a fresh sunburn. During a climactic gun battle, Turkey shields Rebecca from gunfire by lying on top of her on the ground. This kind of selflessness would be admirable were it not for him sticking his ass in the air in a seductive manner. To quote a Beastie Boys lyric: “in the animal kingdom, they call it presenting.”

This was Shervan’s first American production, and it shows. Actors routinely talk over one another, a boom mic is visible during a scene without any dialogue, and he frequently films scenes with obstructive objects -- such as counter-tops and asses -- in the foreground. Shervan also spends much more time than is necessary on Stevie’s captivity and as far as child actors go, he’s pretty awful. Most of his lines occur in an attempted conversation with a Doberman guard dog. Yup.

Make or Break: The lone car chase near the back-end of the film. Sure, the vehicles Shervan chose are the types of shitboxes you'd inherit from a deceased grandparent. There's little flow, no real sense of danger, and the camera angles are pretty dull. However, even a scene as plodding as this still results in a ramped car, a man on fire, and a carsplosion within a 40-second time-frame. As an intersection of Shervan’s desire for visual bombast and his inability to properly execute it, this sequence was a clear make.

MVT: Director Amir Shervan. Even when the execution is clunky, his approach to filmmaking is sincere and the results are entertaining. When his dialogue is unrealistic and his characters' actions are inconsistent with acceptable human behavior, we dig him all the more for it.

Score: 6.25/10

Hollywood Cop isn’t a good film by most standards but like so many other action films of the 1980s, its charm lies in its flaws. This is “beers and buds” fodder and a pretty enjoyable watch for what it is. Even if you don’t dig the action, the bearded thespian behind the Animal character is a revelation.