Cheesy Sci-Fi Night

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. 

Joe Bob serves up some sci-fi cheese.

METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED-SYN (1983) – Hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on MonsterVision

Of all the people who benefited from the making of Jaws 3, the most surprising may be Charles Band, who’s best known these days for being the founder of the Full Moon film company. Full Moon didn’t exist yet when Jaws 3 was made, but Band had already been making movies for several years – and his latest production was a Mad Max knock-off called Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. It wasn’t exactly an impressive movie, but Universal had just spent a lot of money getting theatres set up to show Jaws 3 in 3-D, and they wanted to put another 3-D movie on their release schedule to make those expenses worth it. Metalstorm was shot in 3-D, so it was picked up for distribution by Universal and went on to have some success at the box office. Jaws bites and Band profits.

Mad Max knock-offs are usually set, like the Mad Max sequels, in post-apocalyptic wastelands. Metalstorm appears to be the same, but that appearance is deceiving. The story concocted by writer Alan J. Adler actually takes place on a different world, somewhere at “the end of the universe.” Jeffrey Byron stars as the Mad Max clone Dogen – a Ranger, Finder Class – who is searching the desolate lands and forbidden territories, which are populated by weirdos, mutants, and even some sandworms that are sort of like the Tremors graboids, for a Highborn madman named Jared-Syn (The Road Warrior’s Michael Preston), who has been inciting the Nomads and reigniting the Holy War. As you can tell from this description and the fact that the movie has a subtitle, Band and Adler were clearly doing some world-building with this movie in hopes of launching a franchise... but that didn’t happen.

Jared-Syn has gotten his hands on a powerful crystal that can drain the life force of people and store their essence within the crystal, making it more and more powerful. This is so fancy, the villain can even have his half-cyborg son Baal (R. David Smith) spray people with a hallucinogenic goop that gives them a vision that Jared-Syn is appearing right in front of them, and this vision of the guy can even suck out their life force while they’re tripping!

Dogen crosses paths with Dhyana (Kelly Preston), the daughter of a crystal miner who was killed by Jared-Syn, and she stubbornly accompanies him on his quest to find the bad guy. You might think the movie is setting them up to become an item over the course of the entire running time, but Dhyana actually gets abducted early on and Dogen has to team up with a washed-up former Ranger named Rhodes, played by Tim Thomerson. This is an upgrade, because I’d much rather watch Tim Thomerson than get too much wasteland love story mixed in with my sci-fi action.

Metalstorm is reasonably entertaining, but the best way to watch it is with Joe Bob Briggs hosting, as he did on a July 1996 episode of his show MonsterVision. Joe Bob is no fan of the movie, he only gives it 1.5 stars out of a possible 4 and describes it as “a gobbler,” but it’s fun to watch him talk about it. He says he’s sick of el cheapo Mad Max rip-offs that look they were filmed at the Charles Manson ranch, complains that there’s too much plot getting in the way of the story, points out that the crystals being mined in the film don’t look like the crystals you can really dig up, celebrates the arrival of Tim Thomerson, admits the movie is not “that bad,” asks if some of the mutants have heads made out of bowling balls, gets sarcastic about multiple moments involving the same cliff, and realizes that the film is saying that life is a series of green, gooey things.

The worst thing about Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn is how underwhelming (really, non-existent) the actual destruction of Jared-Syn is, which baffles Joe Bob. 

Before properly introducing the movie, he gets the episode started by talking about his friend Buster Peebles, who previously got into llama breeding and was now looking into ostrich opportunities. Which made Joe Bob wonder, what are ostriches good for? This comedic bit is one of the rare Joe Bob bits I could imagine my father really enjoying.

LOGAN’S RUN (1976) – Hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on MonsterVision

The second movie in Joe Bob Briggs’ July 1996 “cheesy sci-fi night” double feature is one that he describes as a minor camp classic, Logan’s Run, which was based on a novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. As Joe Bob puts it, this movie is set in “a future world where everybody who turns 30 has to either die or become reincarnated as a newborn baby in a ceremony called Carrousel.” And a very spooky ceremony it is. This is a classic ‘70s sci-fi movie that Joe Bob says was a sleeper hit like Twister was in the summer of ‘96. Critics hated it, regular viewers loved it, and Joe Bob falls in the middle because, although it takes off at a certain point, it’s kind of slow up until then. He urges viewers to stay with it, as it ends up being a 3 star movie.

I had only seen Logan’s Run once before taking in this Joe Bob hosted viewing, and that was decades ago. Since it stars the English duo of Michael York and Jenny Agutter, I had remembered this as a British movie – but, as Joe Bob proudly points out, it was actually filmed in Texas, with the Dallas Apparel Mart being made up to look like a futuristic indoor city. As mentioned, the story is set in the future (2274), when humans never know their parents and anyone who turns 30 has to willingly be destroyed in the Carrousel ceremony so they can be reincarnated. If someone goes on the run instead of participating in Carrousel, they’ll be hunted down by enforcers called Sandmen. And if you’re killed by the Sandmen instead of being destroyed in Carrousel, you don’t renew. You’re finished forever.

At least, that’s what the computer that runs everything tells everybody. Of course, this whole set-up is just brainwashing and nonsense, as a Sandman called Logan 5 (York) learns while the story plays out. The computer system informs him that there’s a place called Sanctuary, where over 1000 Runners have gone to over the years – and the computer wants him to destroy the place. Sending him on this mission backfires on the computer in a major way.

In his search for Sanctuary, Logan teams with Jessica 6 (Agutter), a young woman who was aware of the concept of Sanctuary long before the computer told Logan about it. Since it looks like he’s on the run and hoping to live outside of their city, he’s relentlessly hunted by his former friend Francis 7 (Richard Jordan) through a cathedral packed with violent youths, a plastic surgery center, a sex club, into the underground, and beyond. The mind-boggling, world-rocking journey takes them to the abandoned city that used to be Washington D.C., and along the way Logan and Jessica encounter a character played by Farrah Fawcett and a freeze-blasting robot, among others, including the most shocking sight of all: an elderly man!

Directed by Michael Anderson from a screenplay by David Zelag Goodman, Logan’s Run is a fairly entertaining movie, although its action sequences never manage to be as thrilling as they seem like they should be, and there are certainly sequences where it feels like things are bogging down and your attention might threaten to wander. This is definitely, like so many others, a movie I would rather watch with Joe Bob Briggs hosting segments than sit through it on my own.

During his hosting segments, Joe Bob points out that Michael York was a major star when this movie was made, even though he’s always “this close” to coming off like a total wuss; he compliments Farrah Fawcett as one of the finest things to come out of the University of Texas since the 1969 football team, celebrates the women’s wardrobe that shows off some “major flesh,”  doesn’t condone the use of hookers unless it’s necessary for the plot, gets impressed by a Jetsons-esque space cab; assures the viewer that, while the movie is slow during the exposition scenes when they have to explain everything, there’s plenty of gratuitous death coming up; thinks one actor (Peter Ustinov as the Old Man) was deserving of an Academy Award, points out that the “secret entrance to the city” is the Fort Worth Water Gardens, which any locals in the Dallas / Fort Worth area have been to many times; and says the story was inspired by the hippie slogan, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” (But in the novel, people were only allowed to live to the age of 21.)  

He ends with a note to the students in the audience: “College is a fountain of knowledge and the students are there to drink.”