Locked Down

Locked Down has a dirty secret. It is not a movie at all – it’s one of the world’s longest, most boring, poorly scripted commercials. The product placement for the mixed martial arts merchandisers and some-time film producers Tapout is all over the place, and for that alone Lo-Do scores well below zero on a scale of nought to zilch. If you’ve seen any of Van Damme’s vintage stuff (or, indeed, any martial arts film) then you already know the basic plot of “man must fight multiple challengers in order to win his freedom/life”, but be aware that there are plenty of spoilers lurking ahead. Just skip to the end of this review if you care whether or not there’s girl-on-girl action in it.

At least the blatant advertorial content explains Lo-Do’s existence – without it you’d be convinced that it had been made solely to make use of a disused factory and a lot of fencing wire that someone had left over. Either that, or it was conceived by some mouth-breathing lump who thought: “What if The Shawshank Redemption had been a cage fighting film, with lots of product placement, and it totally blew chunks?” This, my friends, is the answer.

To successfully pretend that Lo-Do was meant to be a real film requires being 100% more imaginative than anyone involved in its creation. It has never had an original thought pass through its meaty little head.

The script might have been pieced together using random subtitles from 70s kung fu films and The Big Book of Cliché, but that would credit the writers with some effort. Even Ian McKellan would struggle with material that could be used as an argument for giving up on language altogether, so there is no hope for star Tony Schiena, an actor so limited in range that he can’t even wear a T-shirt with conviction. Did I say star? Forgive me, I meant to say black hole. Schiena is massive and he also really sucks. His appalling lack of talent doesn’t stick out though. During the more agonising bits of poor acting, i.e. all of them, the pain could be somewhat relieved by closing your eyes and imagining that the dialogue was being delivered by the puppets from Team America.

The plot, such as it is, is that Danny (Schiena) is an honest undercover cop who is framed by crime boss Anton Vargas (Vinnie Jones). Vargas engineers it so that he and Danny wind up in the same prison, where Vargas runs a lucrative fight club with the collusion of the prison guards, including the governor, all of the prisoners and – so we’re told – a large number of people on the outside who bet on the outcomes of the fights. In fact, it’s so successful that Vargas has managed to get franchises going in other prisons! It’s all literally unbelievable.

Danny is first glimpsed beneath a Joan Jett-style party wig, trying to pass himself off as a coke dealer to the world’s smallest motorcycle gang. The four of them hang out in a disused warehouse that looks a hell of a lot like the prison where Danny will later do his lag. While two of the bikies try to convince Danny actually to do a line of coke, the other two put some half-hearted effort into cheering on a bored stripper. This is the first of many, many instances of gratuitous female nudity in the otherwise exclusively male world of Lo-Do. (The female prison guard (Bai Ling) is subjected to a vicious and misogynistic visual metaphor during a fight scene, when there’s a close-up of her face as she’s splattered with blood.)

After a bit of a shoot out, characterised by surprising ineptitude on both sides, Danny drops a bloke on his head and then goes home for rumpy pumpy with his girlfriend, who is miffed that Danny spends so much time convincingly inhabiting the skins of other people that she doesn’t even know who he is any more. If only. After a sex scene that manages to be 200 times less erotic than a detailed description of your boss’s hernia operation and 300 times more uncomfortable to endure, Danny wakes up alone. His day worsens when he is arrested by some hard nut who accuses him of shaming the memory of his father and grandfather … both of whom were cops.

In a maximum security prison with only two guards, Danny meets his mentor, Irving, an elderly black man who schools Danny on life inside. He’s also a mixed martial arts guru. Irving is intended to be the stock character Spike Lee once contemptuously dismissed as “the super-duper magical negro”, except that Lo-Do can’t manage either super-duper or magical, so he’s just a super-annoying stater of the obvious. He gets lines like “I have a bad feeling about this”, “Damn boy, looks like you got some moves” and “I’m too old for this shit”. At least Irving is always distinct. When Schiena mumbles “I fought in the cage”, it comes out as “I fart in the cage”. Who knows? Maybe that’s what he did say.

Irving is there to assure Danny that, contrary to what he might have expected, former cops are not very popular in jail, that prisoners self-segregate by race, and that the custard in the canteen is best avoided. When Irving is shot trying to escape, it’s a wonder that he doesn’t muster enough strength to mutter “Damn, I’m shot and I’m gonna die!” before expiring.

In fact, Irving’s only notable contribution is a pithy summing up of everything that’s wrong with Lo-Do. Teaching Danny a method of Japanese martial art called Wu Shu, he explains it means ‘no mind’. How apt. To compound the dumbness of this, a quick Google reveals that Wu Shu is actually Chinese for ‘martial art’.

Director Daniel Zirilli is the veteran of over 250 music videos and doesn’t even bother trying to direct an actual movie here. There’s a lot of generic hip-hop and nu-metal on the soundtrack and Zirilli takes his cue from that: not that you can blame him when the plotting, script and acting give him bugger all to work with. You can blame him for the stunning ineptitude he brings to the stuff he can control. A fight movie should have decent fights, but they’re filmed with such cack-handedness and lack of pacing that they may as well have been recorded on a cheap mobile phone.

Locked Down is so dire that even Vinnie Jones deserves better than this, but maybe that’s only because he now bears an unsettling physical resemblance to Morrissey. Avoid this sorry excuse for a movie at all costs.

*There is a catfight in this film, but it is brief, and fully-clothed. Like everything else about Locked Down, it’s a let down.

This review was originally published on FilmWerk

Science Fiction Double Feature with John Carpenter pt 2

Prince of Darkness


Can science defeat a bucket of green evil and Alice Cooper? Prince of Darkness uses the best of 1987’s technology in an attempt to find out.


This second instalment of Carpenter’s ‘Apocalypse trilogy’ (between 1982’s The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness (1995)) was almost universally panned on its release. “Cheesy”, “stinks” and “misfire” sum up the reviews. But despite its deliberate pacing, laugh-out-loud premise and bullshit science, this is a brainier and more interesting movie than I was expecting. Hell, Jim Emerson even saw shades of Un Chien Andalou in it.


An elderly priest dies in his sleep, clutching a small box containing a large key. He leaves behind a diary, but instead of fascinating insights like “got up early, had a bit of a pray”, it is filled with demented ravings: e.g. “I have felt the cold hellish blast”.


Meanwhile, on a leafy college campus, young people sporting mullet haircuts and polo shirts tucked into chinos dream of a world beyond green screen computers and wonder when Madonna’s 15 minutes of fame will end. Metaphysics professor Birwack (the late Victor Wong, a Carpenter stalwart) lectures on the nature of reality and unreality to a group of physics students looking for extra credit: “Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the sub-atomic level into ghosts and shadows!” he tells them. Every film about the son of Satan creating zombies should contain a line like this.


Birwack is then visited by an unnamed priest, played by the late Donald Pleasance (another Carpenter fave), who has used the dead priest’s key to unlock his monastery’s basement. He wants Birwack and his students to come and examine the mysterious container of agitated green liquid he’s found down there, though any fool can see it’s the Original Big Ol’ Can of Whoop Ass™.


The students are post-grads and so a bit more lived-in than the typical horror movie cannon fodder – this lot come with wedding rings, pattern baldness, myopia and burgeoning beer guts. It’s kind of a nice change. In a clear breach of academic ethics, Birwack promises them a good grade if they show willing to give up their weekends of studying/getting high/screwing in order to spend it sitting in a monastery with a big jar of pure malevolence. Thus, the first rule of horror movie set-ups is achieved: isolate your characters from the outside world.


Along the way, Carpenter manages to squeeze in a love story between mustachioed, sensitive stud muffin Brian (Jameson Parker) and emotionally distant, baggy chambray-shirt favouring Catherine (Lisa Blount, who died last year). Comic relief comes in the form of Walter (Dennis Dun, of Big Trouble in Little China). Walter can’t get his head around the concept of Schrödinger’s cat, which seems significant-ish in light of what’s in The Canister of Evil. There are also portentous shots of the sun, ant hills, and mentally ill homeless people congregating around the monastery.


It sounds like a long, slow set-up because it is. Carpenter is in no hurry; in fact, he takes such a long time that my viewing companion gave up on PoD long before the main action got going. Carpenter’s trademark score of sparse, electronic music is used almost non-stop for about the first 40 minutes, despite the fact that nothing too spooky happens. Depending on your tolerance level, either this is irritating or a good way to convey hypnotic menace. Adding to the sense of disorientation is the weird picture quality, which is apparently due to the subtle use of an anamorphic lens (which ‘squeezes’ the picture to make the images denser).


As the researchers and the priest settle in, the homeless gather quietly outside and worms start appearing on the windows en masse. The priest is accosted by one of the homeless – a woman who kisses his hand and thanks him, in sepulchral tones, for re-opening the church. He pulls away from her when he notices that the coffee cup she’s carrying is filled with maggots.


The first death, when it eventually comes, is courtesy of the ‘Street Schizo’, portrayed by Vincent Furnier, who is credited here under his stage name of Alice Cooper. Yes, that Alice Cooper. And what an odd, blackly comic death it is. An egghead exits the monastery and finds a crucified pigeon propped up outside. He then notices the singer of hits like ‘Muscle of Love’ advancing on him with a bicycle frame, upon which the hapless boffin is duly impaled. It’s worth noting that there’s nothing supernatural about this death at all, apart from the fact that ‘Street Schizo’ and the other homeless appear to be possessed.


The homeless then barricade the scientists and the priest in and the fun really begins, with a few meditations on the true nature of Satan chucked in for good measure. The most interesting of these involves the priest’s epiphany that God and Old Nick are not remotely interested in the souls of humanity and function more like matter and anti-matter. Jesus, bringer of light, is negated by the bringer of darkness (hence the ‘cold’ blast of hell). Such philosophical musings are perhaps to be expected in the confines of St Godard’s; a monastery named for a radical, existentialist film maker.


After what feels like the 7 million years the substance is estimated to have been trapped in the jar, the goo escapes and takes control of Susan the radiographer. This triggers a cute running gag, which may or may not have been inspired by Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), whereby various characters have the following exchange:


“Have you seen Susan?”
“Who?”
“Susan! The radiographer? Glasses?”


As Susan transmits the gunge by spewing it into other people’s mouths, those fortunate enough to escape her vomitous wanderings try to get some sleep. They all have the same dream, a transmission from the far-off year of 1999 in which a dark figure at the door of the monastery tries to deliver a message. At long last the green stuff comes to rest in Kelly (Susan Blanchard, yet another Carpenter regular) and she instantly manifests the advanced stages of pregnancy before ‘the bump’ seeps into her very bones and she becomes the personification of Belial’s son. This is a quick, clever way of dealing with the gestation and birth of a supernatural entity – look closely and the room this all takes place in has a ‘Nursery’ sign affixed to the door.


In another nice touch, a student infected by the green stuff seems to realise he’s possessed by evil and stabs himself in the neck in a futile effort to kill himself ‘properly’. Nevertheless, the priest is unable to bring himself to finish performing the last rites over the soon-to-be-reanimated body.


In the end, Kelly/The Demon Spawn attempts to bring ‘Father’ into the material world by reaching for him through a large mirror. This is thwarted by Catherine, who tackles her and leaps through the mirror with her just as the priest shatters it behind them. The last glimpse of Catherine is a haunting image of her seemingly outstretched in dark water, reaching back towards the shattered, fading light. It’s a simple but effective special effect.


In the final scene, Brian dreams the “transmission from 1999” dream again, but this time the figure is clearly Catherine standing with her arms straight out at her sides. He then dreams that Catherine’s disfigured corpse is in the bed next to him. He wakes up, crosses to his mirror and reaches out to touch it, whereupon the film ends.


The main message seems to be that mere mortals will have to save themselves from the clutches of eternal darkness, because although there is an omnipotent god out there somewhere, it’s not very interested in us. (“Where are you?” implores the priest more than once, eyes rolled heavenward and hands gripping his Bible.) Another timeless lesson is that, no matter how small a secret society is, after the last official member dies there will still be enough people who knew about it to go and light hundreds upon hundreds of candles in the secret basement where it used to meet.






Village of the Damned


John Carpenter’s version of Village of the Dumb Damned is from the director’s awkward ‘90s phase.


As the box office returns proved, in 1995 the world was not exactly gagging for a remake of a 1960s UK/US horror film (it grossed less than half its budget). So why, for the love of Dusty, did Carpenter do it? My theory, for what it’s worth, is that in 1993 human embryos were cloned for the first time. Rather than explore the ramifications of that in an intelligent and original way, the expedient option was to raid the past.


The major problem is that Carpenter brought nothing new to what had been a post-Second World War fable about society’s unease at the rapid advancements in science and technology, and the still-fresh fear of being invaded by a foe who is like you, but with all your least appealing qualities to the fore. (It can hardly have been an accident that in both versions of the film, the children are eerily blonde, dressed alike, and march in formation.) Laziness like that is no doubt what garnered the film its Razzie nomination for ‘Worst remake or sequel’.


The strength of Carpenter’s version, if it has one, is the late Christopher Reeve in the role first played by classic English gentleman George Sanders. Richard Donner, who directed Superman, once said, “Reeve convinced me, when I met him, that Superman could fly.” As the doctor in the afflicted town of Midwich, Reeve radiates strength, compassion, dignity and intelligence. His performance here, as a grief-stricken widower trying to raise a child he cannot relate to, is grounded in a reality that this ridiculous, campy film in no way merits. This was his last role before the riding accident that shortened his life and left him quadriplegic, and he deserved better.


Instead, he is surrounded by cheap and nasty special effects and a chain-smoking, black-clad Kirstie Alley doing her best spoof of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Only she and Mark Hamill, as a crazed priest with a wild look in his eye, seem to know that they’re in a B-grade flop and treat their parts with the correct level of disrespect. In fairness, Linda Kozlowski takes the same serious approach Reeve does, but the two of them were fighting a losing battle against a rising tide of schlock. The ‘glowing eyes of mind control’ are no more frightening or effective than they were in the video to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, and all the children seem to grow at different rates (while ‘David’ is still a baby, ‘Mara’ is already the size of a toddler) despite being conceived and born at the same time.


The children are the product of a mysterious blackout that affected everyone in the town of Midwich and left all the women of child-bearing age pregnant. Carpenter was obviously aware that other horror movies had explored the socio-political, feminist, psychological and physical aspects of conception and childbirth, because he opts not to develop those ideas here. In fact, nothing much in Village has received real attention: the still-born babe Alley whisks away in a blanket can’t be bigger than a kitten, but when its preserved remains are unveiled later in the film it’s the size of a bloated Ewok. If Carpenter’s cunning plan was to bore the viewer so much that this kind of sloppiness went unnoticed, he almost succeeded.

Science Fiction Double Feature with John Carpenter pt 1

Escape from LA

The walking, one-eyed phallic symbol that is ‘Snake’ Plissken is back. For some reason.

In 1981, Escape from New York inspired a young Robert Rodriguez and became a near-instant cult classic. It is rumoured that Carpenter conceived the plot as a response to the Watergate scandal, but confused studio bosses by handing them a script about a dystopian future where New York has become a maximum security prison and the kidnapped US President has to be rescued from it by a one-eyed bank robber. Though they turned the script upside down, had it translated into several languages and tried reading it at midnight whilst sky-clad and drinking pig’s blood, the studio execs still couldn’t figure out what the hell it had to do with Watergate. “No,” they said.

All that changed when Halloween, Carpenter’s response to the rise of Quebecoise separatism cunningly disguised as a slasher flick, did good box office. The studio execs re-examined the script for Escape from New York, and though it was still baffling they decided to greenlight it. The process for getting 1996’s Escape from LA from go to whoa (woe?) was easier and can be summed up as: $ + $ = $$. Hundreds of people were hired to do the special effects that the film heavily relies on. Since those same effects can now be achieved by any mouth-breather with a laptop, Escape from LA’s laughably cheap and dated look can be added to its long list of failings.

Snake (Kurt Russell) slithers back into being in 1996, when Los Angeles is the new American hell hole thanks to a devastating earthquake that has separated the city from the mainland. Here, the USA’s moral undesirables are exiled and rendered stateless. The recent disasters in Japan, Haiti and New Zealand make the images of a city in ruins a lot more upsetting than they deserve to be, but this poignancy doesn’t last long thanks to the ensuing tsunami of dross. The plot is 98% the same as the first instalment, except this time it’s the President’s daughter in a pickle and Snake’s not meant to save her.

Young Utopia has been ‘groomed’ online by a terrorist, Cuervo Jones, who has convinced her to rebel against the totalitarian regime headed by her Christian fundamentalist father. This involves Utopia hijacking Air Force One all on her lonesome, seizing some kind of doomsday device and then escaping to L.A. where she gifts the weapon to Jones. Jones is supposed to be Snake’s main opposition, but he is as charisma-free and devoid of menace as you could wish. His Che Guevara costume doesn’t compensate for a complete lack of magnetism. This guy couldn’t convince a single person to follow him on Twitter, let alone brainwash a privileged brat into giving up her life of luxury for the chance to wear hot pants and spend her days dodging bullets.

Snake is dragged in and forced, through means too implausible to mention, to bring the weapon back and execute the First Daughter.

When, in 2007, the idea of remaking Escape from New York with Gerard Butler in the role of Snake was floated, Russell was less than impressed. “I will say that when I was told who was going to play Snake Plissken, my initial reaction was ‘Oh, man!.’ I do think that character was quintessentially one thing. And that is, American.” This chauvinism is all over Escape from LA like fake tan.

It manifests itself as a complete lack of humour, despite the fact that Escape from LA shoves its tongue so far into its cheek it does itself an injury. (For example, a Great White shark snaps at Snake’s speeding submarine, and Peter Fonda and Snake surf a wave down Rodeo Drive.) A very brief scene, in which Snake and his new-found Muslim best friend (Valeria Golino) are kidnapped for body parts by plastic surgery addicts, is as ham-fisted an attempt at satire as has ever been filmed. Even Bruce Campbell, barely recognisable under all the prosthetics as LA’s surgeon general, can’t rescue it. Once out of the doctor’s clutches, Golino makes a half-hearted pass at Snake which he rebuffs. She declares that LA isn’t so bad “once you get used to it” and is shot dead by a Korean gang.

The fate of Golino’s brazen hussy is at least doled out faster than Utopia’s horrible plotline, which goes like this: a young white girl, from a ‘good’ Christian home, runs away to the slums to live with a violent Latino crime boss who psychologically and physically dominates her. Her father’s response is to send an assassin after her. Not only is Utopia’s story all about the male domination of women, it’s also a blatant expression of racist, psychosexual nightmares. I am not alone in seeing unpleasant undertones beneath Escape from LA’s cheerful meat-headisms.

Scott Bukatman describes the two Snake Plissken films as ‘white man’s revenge’ stories, and cites the ‘shooting hoops’ scene as an example. In this scene, Jones locks Snake on a basketball court and sets him the near-impossible task of shooting 10 points in 10 seconds in order to avoid execution. When Snake succeeds, the mainly black and Hispanic crowd stop baying for his blood and start chanting his name. “This town,” observes Steve Buscemi, “loves a winner.” Between scenes like these, the casual murder of Golino’s character, Utopia’s constant tears, and the bizarre treatment of Pam Grier, Escape from LA looks like the ultimate middle finger to liberal values.

Grier has most reason to feel bitter. She plays a transsexual version of Carjack Malone with an over-dubbed voice and a wardrobe pinched from Tina Turner in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. On their first encounter, Snake recognises her and runs his hand up her leg to her crotch, where he discovers a gun that he takes away from her. (Paging Dr Freud etc.) Needless to say, no black transsexuals make it out of LA.

Happily, however, even in the olden days of 1996 Snake was a man out of step with the times and Escape from LA was a bomb. Of the Carpenter films I’ve watched for this retrospective, this was the only one I found to be not only tedious beyond redemption, but offensive and boorish as well. Plissken’s not so much a snake as an utter dick.

Ghosts of Mars

Death metal fans and feminists in space! Doesn’t sound bad, does it? But 2001’s Ghosts of Mars is not, in any way, ‘good’. Or, indeed, ‘watchable’.

For a start, Ice Cube plays someone named James ‘Desolation’ Williams. Yep, you read that right. His nickname, which everyone calls him by even though it is the most rubbish nickname in the history of the world, is longer than his actual name. That’s how bad Ghosts of Mars is: even the names are utter pants. The only interesting thing about this film is the light it might shed on Carpenter’s feelings for Pam Grier. In Escape from LA she’s a ball-breaking transsexual who dies at the end, here she’s a ball-breaking lesbian in a long leather coat who winds up being decapitated and having her head shoved on a stick. Let us all take a moment to stroke our goatees in contemplation of what these facts might tell us about Carpenter’s psyche.

The plot is really stupid so I won’t waste much time on it, but it’s set in the not-too-distant future on, erm, Mars, which is controlled by a matriarchy that is in thrall to a mining cartel. Mining communities are being gripped by a mass psychosis that results in them dressing up like members of Scandinavian death metal bands and slaughtering anyone not likewise afflicted. It is not exactly a penny-drop moment when scientist Joanna Cassidy reveals that these people are possessed by ‘the ghosts of Mars’. The Martians have been awakened from slumber by all the tunnelling and what-not, and are now using their corporeal hosts to butcher the human invaders and to manifest their own brutal take on the ‘urban primitive’ aesthetic that was so popular in the 1990s – think daggers used as facial piercing adornments and severed hands as breast plates.

Natasha Henstridge (Lieutenant Melanie Ballard) and Pam Grier play cops leading a small team to such a community, unaware that, as Desolation puts it, ‘shit is getting real right here’. (Just so we’re clear, the dialogue is hopeless.) The team’s mission is to collect Desolation, a remand prisoner, and bring him back to the capital for trial. The story unfolds from Melanie’s point of view as she explains to a tribunal how she came to be found drugged and alone on a mining train set to autopilot.

The team’s assignment takes on shades of what Carpenter plainly hoped would be a classic Western when they attempt to rescue the few unafflicted people left and avoid getting dosed with ghost themselves. There is much running, and things exploding, and nasty blades being waved around, Jason Statham, and the self-mutilated townsfolk hurling missiles from rooftops along the main street as our rag-tag band of cops, survivors and criminals dash for the last train out of town. They make it, but Melanie orders the driver to go back so they can destroy the settlement. Alas, after this second assault, only Melanie and Desolation survive. Whoops, spoiled the ending!

The Martians don’t speak English, but are mad keen on howling, yelling, and rallying each other with their stirring cry of “Voar! Rob-trotewolf! Asidjowoewah!” This is much better than the dialogue Henstridge and Statham (as the significantly named Sgt Jericho) get in their scenes together. These consist of Jericho pestering Melanie to take advantage of his massive penis, and the glassy-eyed Henstridge attempting a facial expression in response. Bogart and Bacall it’s not, and the later ‘odd couple’ pairing of Melanie and Desolation is no more successful thanks to Henstridge having the emotional depth of an oyster.

As a double-whammy non-payoff, not only has Melanie been telling the truth (I was hoping for a twist unmasking her as an unreliable narrator), but the ending – oh dear God, no! – leaves the way open for a sequel.

To sum up: Ghosts of Mars teaches us that John Carpenter is afraid of both sexy, sexy Pam Grier and the fashion sense of Finnish metallers Lordi. When Alfred Hitchcock said “Always make the audience suffer as much as possible”, this great steaming pile of asidjowoewah is not what he had in mind.

These retrospectives were originally posted on Filmwerk.co.uk