‘I’m surrounded with Goddamn idiots and maggots.’
After the ‘Big Burn’, the Earth became uninhabitable, and humanity relocated to a base on the moon. Now, their scientists have invented a device which will purify the planet, but before it can be deployed, it’s stolen by terrorists. The authorities send their best cop down to Earth to retrieve it…
Post-apocalyptic action featuring American actor Michael Paré as this week’s home video store Road Warrior. Boaz Davidson was in the director’s seat, and the script comes from one-shot writer Terrence Paré, the star’s brother.
Life’s all work and no play moon-side for Joe Brody (Michael Paré). Despite being the lunar colony’s top law enforcement agent, he’s still not senior enough to date his attractive cyborg assistant. Things don’t get any better when he’s thrown into a firefight with insurgents, who successfully escape with the Ameranth. The device was just a few days from deployment and would have triggered a global clean-up down below. Migration from the moon to the Earth could have followed. Governor Janeway (David Sherwood) and police chief Aragon (Ron Smerczak) send Paré after the McGuffin, but the cop’s in for a few surprises when he hits Terra Firma.
For a start, humanity still exists on the old home planet and is doing ok. The settlers’ camp run by Pent (Wilson Dunster) and his young assistant Zak (David Clatworthy) is like a friendly farming community, hardly qualifying as the nest of mutants Paré was given to expect. It also helps that Dunster’s beautiful daughter Thora (Walker Brandt) takes a shine to the lawman. The community’s biggest problem isn’t the environment, but the local biker gang, the ‘Rough Boys’, led by the psychotic Kay (Billy Drago). Helping the camp dwellers defend themselves, Paré starts to question his mission objectives, which doesn’t go down well with his bosses back home. Questioning his loyalty, they send cyborg Stopper (Robin Smith) after him with simple instructions: retrieve the Ameranth and kill Paré.
Cheerful mash-up of Mad Max and the Terminator aimed directly at your closest high-street home video rental store of the mid-1980s. The plot holes may be large enough to accommodate a whole fleet of Harley Davidsons, but that’s hardly the point, as Davidson, and his stunt team, deliver a fine selection of bike jumps, explosions and fisticuffs. The action is enlivened further by a standout turn from Drago, who is so convincingly sadistic and unhinged that he probably had his cast mates suggesting an urgent course of therapy. But the real stars here are the bike team as they fly through the air, burst from the ground (in a ridiculous but quite wonderful moment) and shred rubber all across the screen, aided by some sharp editing courtesy of Marcus Manton.
It’s not all a dead loss elsewhere, either. Paré is a rugged lead and sells the surprisingly emotional climax, something you don’t expect after the rest of his stoic performance. The romance with Brandt is well-handled, even if her perfect smile does suggest an unlikely bright future for dentistry after the apocalypse. There’s also a gleefully manic turn from Smith as the killer cyborg, who cackles like a Bond villain on crack, and, on this showing, probably needed the same therapist as Drago. His performance is so over the top it’s entirely out of place, but it’s undeniably entertaining.
That’s where the good stuff ends, however. You want plot holes? We got ’em. The colonists grow food and vegetables and have water for hot showers when it’s not rained on Earth in decades. Apparently, they also have a sophisticated spy network on the moonbase and the capacity for space flight, even though the height of their technical resources seems to be a few beakers and test tubes in an underground lab. Paré turns up Earthside complete with motorbike and shotgun and appears to be an expert with both. Smith gets blown up several times, and although his face is damaged, his clothing always remains intact. I guess it’s best not to overthink these things, really.
A more significant issue is with the scenes on the moon. These are rendered on cramped, poorly dressed sets that look as if they may have been left over from another movie. We only see a few corridors and a couple of small rooms, and the film conveys no sense of anything more. The exterior model work also fails to sell the colony’s existence, bearing an unfortunate resemblance to something an 8-year-old might submit as a science project. The one shot the audience gets of a spaceship in flight is also wretched and should have been left on the cutting room floor.
Paré came from French-Canadian stock and was working as a chef in New York when he began picking up modelling work. Acting followed, with a prominent role on TV’s ‘The Greatest American Hero’ before his big break into films with the fictional rock’ n’ roll biopic ‘Eddie and the Cruisers’ (1983). Mainstream stardom seemed imminent when he fronted Walter Hill’s big-budget rock opera ‘Streets of Fire’ (1984) and the John Carpenter-produced sci-fi thriller ‘The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), but neither film clicked with the public. His first experiences with the apocalypse arrived shortly afterwards with smaller productions ‘Space Rage’ (1985) and ‘World Gone Wild’ (1987). He regularly worked throughout the next twenty years, but in the last decade, his career has hit overdrive with a staggering amount of projects and credits. These have included appearances in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ (2011) and the excellent revisionist Western ‘Bone Tomahawk’ (2015).
Some well-staged action and decent work by the cast help elevate this from bargain-basement oblivion, but it’s probably best not to expect too much.