Post-apocalyptic rollerblading, a new Frankenstein, a vengeful scarecrow, and Jamie Lee Curtis vs. a psycho. Again.
ROLLER BLADE WARRIORS: TAKEN BY FORCE (1989)
Filmmaker Donald G. Jackson earned over 35 directing credits before he passed away at the too-young age of 60, and many of those credits were on films set in a post-apocalyptic world where the main mode of travel is on rollerskates. The first movie, titled Roller Blade, sounds great in theory, as it tells a story of knife-wielding, rollerskating nuns battling Road Warrior reject ravagers and a hand puppet monster with the fate of the world hanging in the balance... But I found actually trying to watch it to be a struggle. Later movies I'm not even going to try to endure, because Jackson took a "Zen filmmaking" approach to making those - meaning they're non-linear movies that were shot without a script. No, thank you.
But in the midst of all this, Jackson made a sequel called Roller Blade Warriors: Taken by Force, and this one is worth mentioning for two reasons. The lead actresses. The film stars Kathleen Kinmont (Hardbodies, Halloween 4, Phoenix the Warrior, Bride of Re-Animator, Final Impact, CIA Code Name: Alexa, CIA II: Target Alexa, Stormswept) as Karin Crosse, a holy crusader in the Cosmic Order of Roller Blade, who has been tasked with escorting the psychic Gretchen Hope through the apocalyptic wasteland... which, yes, is populated by Road Warrior reject ravagers and mutant creatures. Gretchen is played by Elizabeth Kaitan of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, and Twins. Having Kinmont and Kaitan in the lead roles makes this Roller Blade movie watchable for me.
The villains in this film are searching the wasteland for attractive young women they can feed to their mutant boss. That's all the mutant will eat - they try feeding it a man they have put a dress, wig, and makeup on, but it rejects the meal. So of course they take interest in Karin, who dresses in skimpy leather (when she's not wearing her habit, which resembles a lawn gnome costume) and carries a samurai sword, and this innocent psychic girl she's traveling with.
Roller Blade Warriors is terrible. The dialogue is awful ("I have never loved a man, what is it like?" "Warm, like soup on a cold night. And strong, like the earth beneath you."), but it provides more laughs than the more outright attempts at comedy. To call the action and fight scenes mediocre would be an understatement. There's a rape that should have been cut out. The acting is often ridiculous. Scene after scene it's so bad that it feels overly long at just 84 minutes. And yet it's watchable overall, almost entirely because Kinmont and Kaitan are leading the viewer through this mess.
DEPRAVED (2019)
When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in the early 1800s, she not only crafted one of the all-time greatest horror stories, she also presented a concept that others have been using as a foundation for their own stories ever since. There are countless versions of the Frankenstein story out there, and writers and filmmakers have put their own stamp on each one, having the scenario play out in various settings and time periods. This week's take on Frankenstein is Depraved, a film that was written, directed, edited, and produced by Larry Fessenden.
One thing that's unique about Fessenden's take on Frankenstein is the fact that his characters are actually aware of the Frankenstein story. When they decide to assemble a body out of parts lifted from various sources and then bring that body to life, they know they're doing something that Shelley wrote about, and they're even familiar enough with it all to know that the doctor in the novel was named Victor Frankenstein but his name was changed to Henry Frankenstein for the 1931 Universal Pictures adaptation. Oddly, they don't seem to notice how many aspects of their lives are mirroring Shelley's story. Also making Depraved stand out from the pack is the setting, as Fessenden has moved the story to present day New York. As one character says, it's "Frankenstein of the Hudson"... which would have been a better title for the movie than the generic Depraved.
The film starts with a young man named Alex (Owen Campbell) having a rather realistic relationship argument with his girlfriend Lucy (Chloë Levine). Alex and Lucy's issues won't mean much for long, but their conversation does establish a theme of the film. Alex doesn't want to have children with Lucy, but he's about to become part of an unusual parent/child relationship anyway. He leaves Lucy's apartment and heads back to his place, but gets murdered on the way. When he unexpectedly regains consciousness, his brain has been placed into the body of a large, stitched-together creature played by Alex Breaux. This thing is given the cliché name of Adam by its creator, its "father", David Call as Henry, but we'll come to find out that it wasn't given this name for the cliché reason.
Adam is haunted by vague memories of Lucy, but he basically has the mind of a toddler now, so Henry has to give him an education, and for a large portion of Depraved's running time Adam will be learning about the world around him. During this stretch of the film, I found it easy to begin caring for Adam and hoping that things would turn out better for him than they have for previous Frankenstein's Monsters.
Henry's benefactor is a man named Polidori, played by Joshua Leonard - and I felt that Leonard stole the show as this sleazebag, who is a bit too interested to find out whether or not Adam's penis functions properly, and wants to make sure Henry keeps feeding him a certain experimental drug three times a day. The modern day New York setting is most prominent when Polidori takes Adam out for a field trip to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Then takes him to a strip club and gives him a snort of cocaine. He's not a good person for Adam to be around, but he's entertaining to watch.
Despite my wishes that things would go well for Adam, anyone who knows Frankenstein knows that this is going to head in a bad direction. And it does soon enough, with one bone of contention being Adam's desire for a bride. Lonely and jealous that Henry has a woman in his life (Ana Kayne as Liz), Adam escapes from the loft apartment Henry keeps him in, goes to a bar, and finds a potential mate in a girl named Shelley (Addison Timlin). But Henry's not into it. It's around that time the situation completely falls apart.
I was concerned when I saw that Depraved has a 114 minute running time, I thought Fessenden might lose me along the way, but that concern quickly faded away. It's longer than I expected, but it didn't feel like it. It moves along at a good pace and kept me captivated, invested in Adam's story and eager to see what would happen next. The film is well written, and Fessenden did a great job of updating the Frankenstein story, tying Henry's motivation into his military service and commenting a bit on the pharmaceutical industry.
Fessenden also put together an excellent cast, although my one disappointment with Depraved was because of the cast. Familiar with Levine from The Transfiguration and The Ranger, I was glad to see her in this film and assumed she would be the heroine. Unfortunately, she's not in this very much. After the opening scene she only shows up for fleeting moments here and there. I was hoping Fessenden would focus more heavily on the idea of Adam, driven by Alex's memories, trying to get back to Lucy, but Lucy gets pushed aside and overshadowed. It's almost enough to make me hope for a sequel where Lucy would have a more prominent role.
While Depraved does feature some gore and intense scenes, anyone looking for a film that's packed with blood and scares won't find what they're looking for here. However, any viewer who goes into Depraved with an interest in delving into the drama of a Frankenstein-esque situation will be rewarded with a fascinating character study that's largely told from the perspective of the "monster".
The Depraved review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW (1981)
I encountered a lot of hype for director Frank De Felitta's Dark Night of the Scarecrow before I finally had a chance to see it when it reached DVD in 2010... and I'll admit, the first time I saw it I was disappointed. I guess I expected it to be more of a straightforward slasher with a guy in a scarecrow costume walking around knocking off people with farm tools, and I should have known that's not what it would be since it was made for television. Now that time has gone by and I've given Dark Night of the Scarecrow another chance, I was able to put aside expectations and enjoy the movie for what it is - a revenge tale that would have been a fitting Tales from the Crypt story, or segment of Creepshow.
The film begins with a mentally challenged man named Bubba (Larry Drake) being falsely accused of hurting a little girl who liked to play with him. The girl was actually mauled by a dog and Bubba saved her life, but before that information has been circulated Bubba has already been killed, gunned down by a group of vigilantes led by Otis P. Hazelrigg (Charles Durning). Otis always suspected Bubba was going to do something terrible to a child, and there's some indication that Otis is actually a pedophile who was projecting his own sickness onto Bubba.
Bubba was hiding in a field, disguised as a scarecrow, when Otis and his pals caught up with him. The story J.D. Feigelson and Butler Handcock came up with is titled Dark Night of the Scarecrow because a supernatural force begins avenging Bubba's death, killing off Otis and his friends one-by-one... and during this spree of vengeance, a mysterious scarecrow keeps appearing in farm fields around the guilty men. Most of them do end up being killed by farming implements, we just don't see the scarecrow stalking around and slashing them.
As Otis's circle of friends is whittled down, he desperately tries to figure out exactly what's going on, and only manages to make the situation worse at every turn.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a rare film in that we're actually hanging out with the villains for the majority of the running time, watching them worry about when they're going to get their comeuppance. So we don't really care when they're knocked off, and we grow to hate Otis more and more as time goes on, but there are still effective sequences built around their deaths.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a really good movie, the first time I watched it I just couldn't see past the version of the concept that I had in my head.
BLUE STEEL (1990)
Blue Steel was directed by Near Dark's Kathryn Bigelow from a screenplay she wrote with her Near Dark collaborator Eric Red, who also wrote The Hitcher, it was produced by Oliver Stone, and the film stars Halloween heroine Jamie Lee Curtis, once again cast in the role of a woman who is targeted by a bloodthirsty maniac. Those elements combine to make Blue Steel a must-see event movie as far as I'm concerned.
Curtis plays Megan Turner, who has just greatly disappointed her abusive father by joining the NYPD. Her first night on the job, Megan jokes with her partner that she wanted to become a police officer because she "wanted to shoot people". Just minutes later, she actually does shoot someone, a maniac played by Tom Sizemore who she finds robbing a supermarket at gunpoint. When the robber turns his gun on Megan, she shoots him dead. But that's just the beginning of her trouble, because the gun happens to land right in front of commodities trader Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), who feels compelled to pick up the gun and leave the scene.
There are some frustrating things about Blue Steel, one of them being the fact that nobody can corroborate Megan's claim that the robber was holding a gun. Somehow everyone in this supermarket managed to get held at gunpoint without seeing the gun and being certain the guy had one. So Megan gets in trouble from higher-ups for being trigger happy and shooting an unarmed man and/or allowing a gun to disappear. Meanwhile, the longer Eugene has the .44 Magnum in his possession, the more powerful he begins to feel. He even tells himself that he's a god. He starts going out at night to shoot random innocent victims with bullets that have Megan's name scratched into them.
Not content to just write her name on bullet casings, Eugene also seeks Megan out and starts working his way into her life, presenting himself as a potential love interest. Megan falls for his act... For a while. Eventually it all falls apart, and that's when things get really creepy for Megan. Eugene is an unpredictable maniac who crosses paths with her best friend and shows up at her parents' home, but he also has a great lawyer (played by Richard Jenkins) who is able to get him out of trouble every time Megan and homicide detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown), the only person on the force who believes Megan's stories, think they've nailed him.
Of course, this is all building to a tense situation where Megan and Eugene will be firing guns at each other.
Blue Steel doesn't work as well as I would like it to, I'm not always on board with the movie's logic and it falls short of the hopes I have going into a Bigelow / Red / Stone / Curtis collaboration. Still, I find it to be a solid thriller with some great action beats. Bigelow was able to capture a dark, unnerving mood for it and Curtis does well in the lead role - as you'd expect, since she made a career out of doing this sort of thing. Silver makes for a fine, scummy villain who you really want to see get taken down. It's worth watching, but don't expect to be blown away.
Blue Steel was directed by Near Dark's Kathryn Bigelow from a screenplay she wrote with her Near Dark collaborator Eric Red, who also wrote The Hitcher, it was produced by Oliver Stone, and the film stars Halloween heroine Jamie Lee Curtis, once again cast in the role of a woman who is targeted by a bloodthirsty maniac. Those elements combine to make Blue Steel a must-see event movie as far as I'm concerned.
Curtis plays Megan Turner, who has just greatly disappointed her abusive father by joining the NYPD. Her first night on the job, Megan jokes with her partner that she wanted to become a police officer because she "wanted to shoot people". Just minutes later, she actually does shoot someone, a maniac played by Tom Sizemore who she finds robbing a supermarket at gunpoint. When the robber turns his gun on Megan, she shoots him dead. But that's just the beginning of her trouble, because the gun happens to land right in front of commodities trader Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), who feels compelled to pick up the gun and leave the scene.
There are some frustrating things about Blue Steel, one of them being the fact that nobody can corroborate Megan's claim that the robber was holding a gun. Somehow everyone in this supermarket managed to get held at gunpoint without seeing the gun and being certain the guy had one. So Megan gets in trouble from higher-ups for being trigger happy and shooting an unarmed man and/or allowing a gun to disappear. Meanwhile, the longer Eugene has the .44 Magnum in his possession, the more powerful he begins to feel. He even tells himself that he's a god. He starts going out at night to shoot random innocent victims with bullets that have Megan's name scratched into them.
Not content to just write her name on bullet casings, Eugene also seeks Megan out and starts working his way into her life, presenting himself as a potential love interest. Megan falls for his act... For a while. Eventually it all falls apart, and that's when things get really creepy for Megan. Eugene is an unpredictable maniac who crosses paths with her best friend and shows up at her parents' home, but he also has a great lawyer (played by Richard Jenkins) who is able to get him out of trouble every time Megan and homicide detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown), the only person on the force who believes Megan's stories, think they've nailed him.
Of course, this is all building to a tense situation where Megan and Eugene will be firing guns at each other.
Blue Steel doesn't work as well as I would like it to, I'm not always on board with the movie's logic and it falls short of the hopes I have going into a Bigelow / Red / Stone / Curtis collaboration. Still, I find it to be a solid thriller with some great action beats. Bigelow was able to capture a dark, unnerving mood for it and Curtis does well in the lead role - as you'd expect, since she made a career out of doing this sort of thing. Silver makes for a fine, scummy villain who you really want to see get taken down. It's worth watching, but don't expect to be blown away.
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