Ghost Town (1988)

How can one make a horror western about a gunslinger coming back from the dead boring? Richard Governor found the answer to that question and the answer if “Ghost Town.” The direction of the film is workmanlike, robbing the premise of its magic. Everything happens to get the film from point A to point B, or more specifically to get the film to video shelves as quickly as possible to earn a buck (this is produced by Charles Band, after all). This is one of those cases where the cover art is purposely deceptive, painting a picture of a film far more entertaining than it actually is.

Governor wastes no time in getting to the paranormal activity. Kate (Catherine Hickland) is abducted by the undead gunslinger Devlin (Jimmie F. Skaggs), with the town sheriff, Langley (Franc Luz), tasked with rescuing her. The empty desert is uprooted with the apparition of the western town that previously resided there. The town is equipped with a saloon, a jail, a whorehouse, a bank, and a blacksmith shop, all of which come equipped with squeaky floorboards for horror soundtrack potential. They all run together, with the saloon set doubling as the other buildings, I presume.

The film then follows a narrow path: Langley chases Devlin through the sleepy town, always narrowly saving Kate. He goes into empty buildings only for ghosts to magically appear and disappear to mess with his mind. He discovers the entire town is stuck in purgatory, as is the audience. Some of the townsfolk, such as the blacksmith, are kind folks who aid him in his quest. Langley even sleeps with the blacksmith’s ditzy daughter, just because. There’s also the town watchman who’s blind. That’s the joke.

Langley tries to piece together the puzzle, eventually figuring out that killing Devlin for good will release the town from purgatory. At least I think this was the case. I’ll be honest; I grew so tired of this film that I struggled to pay attention. It followed such a bland formula that I began to lose focus. So much so that I’m not sure if the bullets that killed the undead were laced with anything special or that the screenwriters, Duke Sandefur & David Schmoeller, were too lazy to come up with anything. I came to the conclusion that regular gunshot wounds killed the ghosts, which is just laughable.

The film does finally start to pick up during the finale. Devlin does more than just stalk the desert and taunt Langley. He begins killing off those who are aiding Langley in his mission. The blacksmith is stabbed in the stomach with his cattle prod, another townsman is tied to a windmill and spun around violently, and others are buried alive. Devlin even hints at raping Kate, which at least ups the stakes. By then, it’s too little too late. Any suspense being built up during the finale is quickly squashed by the hero’s victory.

“Ghost Town” feels like a haunted house attraction under construction. The mechanics are all there, but the effort isn’t. Skeletons and cobwebs are strewn about, but no scares accompany them. There’s an incredible lack of atmosphere in a film built around it. The film is a blank slate, only peppered slightly during the finale. A story about an undead gunslinger shouldn’t be this boring.

MVT: The makeup & special effects. If there was one thing to keep my interest throughout this dreadful bore, it was the surprisingly solid makeup & FX. The ghosts look ghastly and there’s a few good instances where we see their corpses disintegrate. They certainly didn’t skimp on the effects, just on the story.

Make or Break: The third instance in which Langley encounters a ghost only for it to disappear again. Or the third instance in which Langley almost saves Kate, but she slips through his fingers. Or the third instance in which…oh, you get the picture.

Score: 3.5/10

Eliminators (1986)

The Mandroid (Patrick Reynolds) returns to the present from Ancient Rome and dutifully transfers his loot to mutilated mad genius Abbott Reeves (Roy Dotrice).  Defying Reeves’ command to wipe the cyborg’s memory and have him dismantled (because, you know, a Mandroid would totally not be helpful at all in a fight or anything), kindly Dr. Takada (Tad Horino) sacrifices his life aiding the Mandroid’s flight to freedom.  Making his way to robotics expert Colonel Nora Hunter (Denise Crosby), the Mandroid enlists her help in going back to stop Reeves.  Along the way, they hire degenerate guide and boat captain Harry Fontana (Andrew Prine, playing the Michael Douglas/Peter Fonda role and wishing to Hell there were a giant Grizzly around to kill him) and pick up super ninja Kuji (martial artist and once-promising Action film newcomer, Conan Lee).

Peter Manoogian’s Eliminators is a prime example of selling the sizzle, not the steak, as Elmer Wheeler would say.  All you need to do is look at the film’s poster for confirmation.  You have all four of the movie’s heroes practically bursting forth from the one sheet in dynamic action poses.  If all you saw of this movie was the advertising materials, you would believe that it was a superhero-esque team film.  What you get, however, is decidedly different (one of the reasons a lot of people enjoy trailers and posters more than the pictures they promote).  This is simply the way of many a low budget effort.  A trailer lasts a few seconds to a couple of minutes, and a poster usually sells a film’s most exploitable elements in one static image (or they used to; today, they’re little more than nigh-indistinguishable, Photoshopped images of floating heads over a limited choice of background images, that is unless some artist is commissioned to create [or just feels like creating] an actually individualized image which you would likely never see in a theater near you, regardless [unless you happen to have a cool rep/arthouse theater in your neighborhood, and even then…]; end rant).  Naturally, the expectation-to-delivery ratio of the films themselves tends to be a bit lopsided.  

But films need to have connective tissue between action set pieces, and this holds even truer for small budget movies.  Low budget films simply cannot afford to have wall-to-wall action.  There needs to be some time spent getting to know the characters in some capacity in order for us to care at all about what happens to them (they don’t need to be likable; they do need to be compelling).  Further, if a film is nothing but action, chases, explosions, and the like, it becomes tiresome (even if the viewer is a self-professed Action Junkie).  A classical narrative film’s structure needs to be arranged in peaks and valleys.  If it hits the ground doing a hundred miles an hour and doesn’t let up for any sort of interaction outside of action, a viewer becomes bored and starts thinking about other things to do (or wishing they were doing other things).  Pacing is key to a low budget Action film, and it’s something that more often than not is mishandled.  The filmmakers almost get it right here.  The actors are talented and interesting enough that they make the long stretches between action sequences bearable.  However, they also seem to forget that there needs to be interesting things for them to do in these spaces, so bearable is as far as they go.  

With this in mind, the characters themselves are about as cliché as cliché gets.  They’re cyphers with no truly distinguishing characteristics at their cores.  So, Harry is a scruffy loner with a heart of gold.  Nora is a hardassed woman doing a “man’s job,” while also being feminine (she has to prove her worth by fixing the motor on Harry’s boat, but everyone stops to gawp at the side boob she flashes when changing out of her wet tank top).  Kuji is the centered living weapon who is out for vengeance.  The Mandroid (aka John Doe) is the man without a past and out of time (literally and figuratively).  By assembling these archetypes, the filmmakers attempt to create an ersatz Fantastic Four (with Dr. Reeves acting as their Doctor Doom), even though two of the members have no super powers to speak of (which is odd to me, all things considered), and they don’t have the rapport that superhero teams typically share.  The characters are forced together and then forced to stay together, because the script says so.  Harry is a scheming sort of guy, out for a buck and himself, but he gets miffed awfully easily when he’s told his services are no longer required (especially dumbfounding since he hardly knows these people).  Nora comes along because she just so happens to have been the person who designed the Mandroid’s robotics.  Kuji literally shows up in the third act and becomes a loyal (and trusted) team member in seconds.  I’m sure there are weaker kinships in films, but this stuff is still paper thin.

As set up in the introductory scenes, the Mandroid’s memory plays a key role in the story, and I think it’s to the filmmakers’ credit that he is the main protagonist, since he’s the sort of character normally relegated to a supporting role (The Partner, The Henchman, The Villain, et cetera).  The idea of the past plays out in several aspects.  Reeves is obsessed with the past, and this preoccupation motivates the time travel element of the story (something I’m surprised wasn’t played up more).  The Mandroid’s memory is manipulated by Reeves, and everything from before he became the Mandroid is lost to him (read: his identity and by extension his humanity).  The flip side of this dehumanization is Reeves, who has kept himself alive via grafts, transplants, and transfusions (assumedly in response to some type of genetic or aggressive disease, since his face is disfigured when we first see him).  He wants to make of himself a sort of Mandroid 2.0.  Yet Reeves has the advantage of maintaining his personality and memories (which help form personality), and since his identity is evil from the start, his Mandroid-ization is the completion of a circle.  The (good) Mandroid knows that he had a life and a family, and this loss (even if only in a cognitive sense) is enough for him to despair of his condition.  This contrast emphasizes the struggle of the main character and should give the character a healthy dose of pathos with which the audience can engage.  

The big problem here is that, outside of mentioning John’s past, it’s not investigated in any detail.  Apart from a photograph, he has no tether to his pre-Mandroid past, so we can feel for his loss, but we can never know its true depths, because we never learn about his past relationships.  Perhaps that was partially intentional on the filmmakers’ part: by not giving us a glimpse into his past, we understand his loss and emptiness that much more (that is, we may empathize through this feeling of incompleteness).  Unfortunately, ignorance is not always bliss any more than knowledge is always ecstasy.  Consequently, like the rest of Eliminators, this attempt only works by about half.  It’s a fun, mildly entertaining half, but I couldn’t help thinking that the other half was so close to getting it right I could almost touch it and turn the total experience into one whole ball of joy.  So near, and yet, so far, I suppose.

MVT:  The main idea is intriguing, and it’s something there wasn’t a ton of in the mid-Eighties.  Plus, it’s ambitious on its face, so points for that.

Make or Break:  The big showdown works well enough, under the circumstances.  Of course, it also resolves itself in a headscratchingly unresolved way.  You’ll know what I’m talking about when you see it.

Score:  6.25/10         

TerrorVision (1986)

Plato's Retreat was a Manhattan swinger's club started in the late 1970s by Larry Levenson. It basically gave people who want to have unfettered, heterosexual (and this was stressed by the management, though lesbianism was okay) intercourse a place to do so. The club and its owner(s) espoused the sort of hedonism that the era was known for before the rise of HIV/AIDS called attention to the perils of promiscuous, unprotected sex. Reportedly, Levenson structured the rules to ensure that the women outnumbered the men, and he provided multiple amenities for its members, including a sauna and pool. If you've ever seen the type of people who frequented discos (or were one yourself), then you know that they had a sort of primitivistic quality that seemed to produce a fine coating of…something with which they were perpetually glazed. I can only hope that Plato's Retreat had the overwhelming smell of chlorine permeating every square inch, at least some indication that the proprietors attempted to keep the premises and its (very) public conveniences somewhat hygienic. Unfortunately, I'd be willing to gamble that this was not the case, and the pool alone probably looked like the chunder-filled pool of Ted Nicolaou's TerrorVision. Now I don't know (nor do I care to know) what your particular bent is, but the mere thought of fuzzy, chunky, possibly-living things crawling all over my nethers is simply unromantic, my son.

Over a marvelously cheapjack alien world establishing shot, we are informed that we are on the planet Pluton looking at the Mutant Creature Disposal Unit section of the planetary Sanitation Department. Alien Pluthar (William Paulson) wrestles a mutant into the disposal and zaps the being off into space (via a cleverly undisguised USS Enterprise [the interstellar one, not the nautical one] model). After bouncing (replete with "funny" sound effects) off multiple planets as if they were pinball bumpers, the signal carrying the mutant winds up hitting (you guessed it) Earth. Meanwhile, jumpsuited, ascot-sporting dullard, Stanley Putterman (Gerrit Graham), finishes up installing his new satellite dish, while wife, Raquel (Mary Woronov), aerobicizes. Son, Sherman (Chad Allen), runs war games with military- and absent-minded Grampa (Bert Remsen), and punk daughter, Suzy (Diane Franklin), leaves to go on a date with metalhead boyfriend, O.D. (Jonathan Gries). I'll give you three guesses where the monster from the prologue lands.

Nicolaou's film (produced by the Brothers Band under the Empire Pictures banner) is first and foremost a satire of the "Me Generation" and their progeny. The screenplay (also written by Nicolaou) divides the characters up into three distinct subsets, each a broad stereotype. So, Stanley and Raquel are hedonistic swingers solely focused on their own pleasures. Suzy and O.D. are dimwitted, heavy metal enthusiasts. Sherman (as in the tank, get it?) and Grampa are warmongers who want to shoot first, ask questions later. When MAD Magazine does a satire (or at least when they used to), they very cleverly highlighted the most egregious faults of a movie, show, and/or genre in the short space they were provided. It helped that they were drawn in a caricatured style by such greats as Mort Drucker, Angelo Torres, Jack Davis, and others. They played, because they were already removed from reality by their medium, but to do the same in a live-action feature film is not nearly so easy. For starters, there's a lot of time to fill, and if you repeatedly crack the audience over the head with the same joke, they will tire of it quickly. Further, you have to overcome the hurdle of dealing with actors rather than drawings. Viewers instinctually want to connect with actors they see on screen (this is, after all, one of the primary reasons they go to the movies in the first place). But when they see a live-action cartoon peopled with one-dimensional parodies, there is a disconnect. 

Naturally, a film can still be effective and even enjoyable despite these things, but they are obstacles that require a deft hand behind the camera. Nicolau tries by filming the movie primarily on soundstages, thus granting himself a large degree of control (in theory). His lighting is garish and unnatural, similar to Bava's, and even the sky in the distance is purple and pink. The Putterman's are art consumers ("I know a place where you can get all this stuff real cheap") of the tackiest sort. Every painting on their walls has at least one bare nipple, and several depict light bondage. The Roman-style statue in the foyer has breasts that act as fountains. Every character is self-centered in one way or another, and their immobility in this regard makes them unappetizing (to the viewer, perhaps, but not to the monster). As I said, though, since the characters are only skin-deep in every conceivable way, you not only don't care what happens to them, but you want it to hurry up and happen faster. It's possible that this dearth of character was intended by Nicolaou as part of the lampoon, but it comes off mostly as lazy writing.

The filmmakers also use the film as a mild critique of television culture. The monster enters the house through the televisions. The characters think that Pluthar is a character in a movie when they see him pleading for us humans to render our TV sets inoperable for the next two hundred years. Grampa believes that only war stories and horror movies are educational, because they focus on survival (that's actually pretty sound reasoning). Horror host, Medusa (Jennifer Richards), dresses like a monster and puts on a performance while on air, but off air, she's just another egocentric phony. The concept of television being both alluring and dangerous is nothing new. Cronenberg's Videodrome covered the bases on the subject thoroughly. It's a subject that is ripe for investigation, but TerrorVision only gives it cursory attention (except in its background/symbolic context). The filmmakers also use real B-movie footage, rather than taking the time and (more importantly) money to come up with their own mini-parodies. And this leads to one of the film's biggest weaknesses. It is never consistent enough or fully committed enough to come together at the end. The characters flip-flop from likable to unlikable, reasonable to unreasonable and back for no other reason than that's how the director needs them to act for that scene. While there are some interesting notions in the film and it's worth a perfunctory glance (and it must be said, Graham and Woronov are excellent, as always), it's as if Nicolaou were channel-surfing in his mind as he wrote the screenplay. And that can be really annoying when you're not in control of the remote.

MVT: Buechler's monster is slimy and interesting to look at (and you get to see a lot of it), and best of all, it's huge. You have to give the man credit for being able to pull off a creature creation like that for a low budget film. You get the feeling that everyone was so impressed with it that they included it in more of the picture and rightfully so.

Make Or Break: The moment that Grampa shows up in military dress with toy fighter jets glued to his hat, the viewer suddenly realizes that they can erase all hope for any attempt at subtlety from their minds. From that point on, whether you enjoy the film or not depends completely and utterly on how easy you are to please. I admit I can be a little more difficult in this regard than some.

Score: 5.5/10

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Episode #14: Tomato Trancer

Episode #14 is finally done, what with the Christmas holiday it took a little extra time to get it out but here we are....ready to go....
This week is a listener content episode for one FakeShemp, he picked two very diverse and different films....we cover Tim Thomerson in TRANCERS and George Clooney in RETURN OF THE KILLER TOMATOES....very nice picks Mr. Shemp.....