Worth Mentioning - You Are Not Dead!

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody watches a '90s sci-fi bomb and an '80s horror misstep.

SOLDIER (1998)

Soon after working on Ridley Scott’s classic Philip K. Dick adaptation Blade Runner, screenwriter David Webb Peoples wrote the script for what would become Soldier – it just took fifteen years for that script to make it into production. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, Soldier is meant to be set in the same universe as Blade Runner – just off to the side, where “blade runners” and “replicants” aren’t an issue. We do see that vehicles that previously only existed in Blade Runner also exist in the world of this film, and when we see a list of the battles the title character has fought in, it includes battles that were referenced in Scott’s movie. Unfortunately, these Blade Runner connections didn’t do Soldier any favors. Blade Runner was a box office disappointment when it was released in 1982, and Soldier was a bomb in 1998.

It’s a sad fact of star Kurt Russell’s career that he has starred in several awesome movies that had underwhelming box office. Used Cars, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Grindhouse, they all made far less than they deserved. I don’t personally rank Soldier as highly as I rank the four movies I just mentioned, but on the surface it does seem like a movie that should have had some success instead of sputtering out with just $14 million at the global box office (on a budget of $60 million).

Russell’s soldier character is Todd 3465, who has literally been raised by the military. In 1996, several children are born into the Adam Project, where they are raised not by parents but by military officers. They spend the first seventeen years of their lives in training, and then they are sent off to war. Forty years into his military career, Todd and his squad – who are under the command of Gary Busey’s Captain Church - become obsolete when Colonel Mekum (Jason Isaacs) introduces a new breed of soldier. A squad that has been genetically engineered to be the perfect flesh and blood war machines. When Todd and others are bested by Mekum’s Caine 607 (Jason Scott Lee), the incapacitated Todd and the corpses of his fellow soldiers are shipped off to the waste disposal planet Arcadia 234. When he comes to on this planet, which is supposed to be uninhabited, Todd finds that he’s surrounded by a group of people who crash landed there. They take him in and nurse him back to health, and by being around these people – including a family that’s headed up by Sean Pertwee and Connie Nielsen -  he gets his first experience with human kindness and emotions.

Then Mekum shows up on a training exercise with his DNA squad, including Caine, and the people on Arcadia are classified as hostiles just for being there. Mekum orders his soldiers to wipe them out... so Todd steps up to protect them, becoming a one man army in a battle against these superior specimens.

It’s a cool idea for a story, I just don’t feel that Anderson brought it to the screen in the most effective way. While watching the movie, I’m never able to connect with the story or characters as much as a viewer was intended to. And Soldier may have had a budget of $60 million, but there’s something about the sets and cinematography, at least early on, that make it look much cheaper. That doesn’t necessarily impact my enjoyment of the movie, it’s just something that I find to be odd about it. But even though the movie doesn’t work quite as well as it should, Anderson definitely assembled the perfect cast for it. Kurt Russell was only required to speak 104 words in the film’s 99 minutes, but he does a great job of conveying what’s going on with Todd without words. It’s on his face, in his eyes, in his body language.

I didn’t like Soldier at all when I first watched it in ‘99 or the early 2000s. Revisiting it over twenty years later, I can see that it’s actually a decent movie. It could have been better, and I don’t see myself having many more viewings of it, but it’s not the total failure that its box office makes it appear to be. And when the action kicks in for the second half, it’s fun to watch Russell take down his enemies.

A RETURN TO SALEM’S LOT (1987)

In the late ‘70s, filmmaker Larry Cohen wrote a script for the mini-series adaptation of the Stephen King novel Salem’s Lot – a script that the project’s home studio, Warner Bros., rejected. The mini-series ended up being written by Paul Monash, and director Tobe Hooper brought the story to the screen. Something about Salem’s Lot must have stuck in Cohen’s mind, though, because when Warner Bros. asked him to make a low budget genre movie for him in the second half of the ‘80s, he suggested making a feature film follow-up to Salem’s Lot. It was an odd suggestion, because Cohen was admittedly not a vampire fan, and the only thing about Salem’s Lot that really seemed to appeal to him was having the chance to tell a story about a town inhabited by bloodsuckers. Still, the idea of the writer of the Maniac Cop films, the director of movies like It’s Alive, Q: The Winged Serpent, and The Stuff, making a Salem’s Lot movie sounds very promising... But when Cohen and co-writer James Dixon sat down to write the screenplay for A Return to Salem’s Lot, they came up with something that is really bizarre.

Cohen regular Michael Moriarty stars in A Return to Salem’s Lot as Joe Weber, an anthropologist who is shown to be very respectful of other cultures right in the opening scene. As he witnesses a jungle tribe punish a man by cutting his heart out, Joe doesn’t flinch. He just brushes it off by saying it’s their society and their rules. But by the end of the film, he’ll have run into a culture that he’ll have more difficulty respecting. When his ex-wife Sally (Ronee Blakley) tells him she’s going to send their troublesome tween son Jeremy (Ricky Addison Reed) to a mental hospital if Joe doesn’t take the kid and find a way to reach him through his bad attitude, Joe decides to take Jeremy off to a bungalow he has inherited in the small Maine town of Salem’s Lot. Of course, he’s unaware that Salem’s Lot is completely overrun with vampires... but he quickly finds that out. And the vampires have plans for him.

No, they don’t want to suck Joe’s blood. The vampires in this film are very different from the ones in King’s story and the mini-series. They live like regular New Englanders and mostly live on cow blood. They only attack people on special occasions. So what they want Joe to do is to write the history of their ancient race. The Vampire Bible, basically, which they’ll shelve for two hundred years before releasing to the public. While Joe considers the idea, they reunite him with Cathy (Katja Crosby), a vampire he fell for when he visited Salem’s Lot as a teenager, not realizing she was a vampire. They also introduce Jeremy to child vampire Amanda, played by Tara Reid, who seems to want to marry the little jerk. And Jeremy starts to think that’s not such a bad idea, he just has to become a vampire himself first.

The Salem’s Lot mini-series was exceptionally creepy, so the light tone and odd humor of A Return to Salem’s Lot is jarring from the start. Sometimes a shift in tone between movies works very well – Evil Dead II and Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI are prime examples of awesome comedic sequels. But the shift doesn’t work as well here because the story is weird and clunky, and the movie isn’t very interesting for most of its 100 minute running time. Joe isn’t an interesting person, Jeremy is annoying as hell, and nothing much is going on. They’re just wandering around among the vampires, who conduct themselves like regular people for the most part. There are police officers, a judge, a teacher, schoolkids. Things don’t liven up until about an hour in, when legendary director Samuel Fuller shows up in the role of Nazi hunter – excuse me, Nazi killer - Dr. Van Meer. With no Nazis around, Van Meer proceeds to hunt and stake vampires instead.

If you fast forward through the first hour of A Return to Salem’s Lot, there’s some entertainment to be found in the movie. But for the most part, it’s an awkward misfire. It’s baffling that Larry Cohen wanted to make a sequel to Salem’s Lot so he could tell this goofy story.