Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe (1994)

abraxas

Written and directed by Damian Lee
Starring
- Jesse Ventura
- Sven-Ole Thorsen
- Damian Lee
- Jerry Levitan
- Marjorie Bransfield
Produced by Damian Lee, David Mitchell, and Curtis Petersen

When you think about it, it’s a natural for mindless entertainment: Good space cop vs. bad space cop on Earth. It’s not an ambitious premise, but jeez, it shouldn’t be a trial to squeeze ninety minutes of painless distraction from it, should it?

Should it?

Abraxas, Disco Godfather!

We start with a feature which has been haunting far too many of the movies I’ve watched lately: An explanatory voiceover, from the titular Abraxas (Jesse Ventura), explaining things we either don’t need to know or would pick up on very soon, such as the fact that Abraxas is a “Finder,” an interstellar cop with the mission to “protect all life,” and that he’s hard on the tail of Secundus (Sven-Ole Thorsen), his former partner who’s turned renegade. Secundus is on his way to earth via “travel-warp” (a teleportation special effect that makes the transporter from the original Star Trek look really cool, and which saves on costly spaceship effects) in order to… uh…

Okay, here’s what I was able to figure out. Secundus is trying to mate with an earth woman because his child could very well be the fulfillment of a prophecy — the Culmator. At least, that’s what I want to think they’re saying, because it would make at least half-sense as an idiot’s version of “culminator,” i.e., one who culminates — on the other hand, it sounds like everyone’s saying “Comator,” which makes absolutely no sense to me, unless they mean that he (and the movie as a whole) can cause comas, in which case I agree wholeheartedly. Anyway, this Culmator would have the ability to calculate the Anti-Life Equation, which would open the door to the Anti-Life Universe, which Secundus thinks would give him ultimate power but which might actually destroy the universe.

Dear heavens, I never thought I’d type anything so insipid in my life.

Good thing he teleported to earth wearing his Space Parka.

Anyway. Abraxas follows him to earth, and they spend several minutes chasing each other through snowy woods at night, using guns that cause big explosions but don’t actually hit the target. (Abraxas has been on the job for over 9,000 years and can’t hit the broad side of a barn door? Um, is there any other interstellar police force we could deal with?)

Unfortunately, Secundus stumbles across just what he needs — a couple parked in the woods for a little makeout. He tosses the guy on his keister, and thanks to an apparently instinctive understanding of the operation of terrestrial motor vehicles (it’s a guy thing, I guess), he manages to get away from Abraxas’ pursuit long enough to impregnate the young lady — or rather, to accomplish a “DNA infusion” by placing a glowing hand on her abdomen. (Wow, that sure beats the old-fashioned way…)

Abraxas catches up and sends Secundus back via travel-warp (since there’s a law that any Finder, past or present, is immune from execution — again, is there some other interstellar police force up there we could deal with?), and then finds the girl, Sonia (Marjorie Bransfield), in a state of advanced pregnancy. His “answer box,” an annoying computer linkup with headquarters on his wrist, tells him he has to terminate the woman and baby to make sure it’s not the Culmator, but he won’t — instead, he just leaves her there in the snow with her newborn baby.

Well, of course there’s going to be wrestling in this movie!

Not only is Sonia okay with the baby, but she’s remarkably hale and hearty (I’d have thought that going through all of the changes of a nine-month pregnancy, plus delivery, in under five minutes would have some serious repercussions on the internal organs — silly me!). And five years later…

Now, let me pause and point out one of the sillier stylistic decisions here (one among many, many silly decisions). I get that Abraxas has the occasional voiceover, even though all of the stuff the intrusive voiceover told us was repeated a few minutes later, almost verbatim, by the two jokers in the headquarters control room (one of whom is writer/director Damian Lee). But then, Secundus gets his own couple of voiced-over scenes (and unfortunately, Thorsen has all of the enunciative skill of a moderately inebriated Andre the Giant). But then, to make it even more comical, Sonia gets a voiceover, explaining how in the last five years, she’s grown to love her baby, whom she named Tommy, but that he’s peculiar in that he never ever speaks, didn’t even cry as a baby. Oh, and that she has the fear that someone or something is going to try to take him away from her. Foreshadowing, you know.

And as luck would have it, Secundus breaks out of the penal colony right about then and heads to earth to try and get the Anti-Life Equation from his son’s head (nope, it doesn’t sound any less silly when it’s repeated), so Abraxas is sent back after him. And presto, we finally get down to what this film originally meant to be: A ripoff of The Terminator, with Abraxas trying to protect young Tommy and Secundus trying to rip the Anti-Life Equation (nope, still silly) from his skull. But I don’t think you need me to tell you that Jesse Ventura is no Michael Biehn, and Sven-Ole Thorsen is definitely no Ah-nuld.

A shirtless man offers to tell a five year-old boy a story about “two men who were partners.” I ain’t sayin’ nothin’…

But a simple summary doesn’t show you all of the ways in which this movie bites. The dialogue is repetitive, but not terribly informative (as evidenced by how many times they try to repeat that bit about the Anti-Life Equation, hoping that you’ll get acclimatized to it); there’s loads of backstory foisted on us that never makes one iota of difference; and the whole thing never bothers to pace itself, instead simply loading on events to fill out the running time (including, you guessed it, a visit to a stripper bar that exists for no other reason than to include a stripper).

Now, let me clue you in to what bothers me most about this. As longtime readers have gleaned, I’m a screenwriter. Not a terribly successful one so far, but I do have one script under option, and several other orphaned first drafts lying around. And there are very good reasons for each of the orphans to have been discarded: They’re BAD. I’ve learned enough in my years-long study of screenwriting to know when a script sucks, even if I’m not good at repairing them yet. So it simply appalls me when anyone would let a script go out the door in such a fashion — unpolished, crude, lumpy, unfit for man or beast. Even if you’re the director and co-producer, and really have no one higher to answer to as far as script quality goes, how can you not have that inner compulsion to get things as good as you can? How can you not hear the voice of the muse on your shoulder, pointing out the unreadiness of this draft?

And the winner for Most Omnipresent Product Placement is…

Another thing I’ve learned is that you can rarely be fair in criticizing a script from the finished project, since the producer and director can and do muck around with it to an appalling degree before it gets to the unwitting audience. But when the writer is also the director and the co-producer — really, who else is there to blame?

I can’t tell you to absolutely avoid this one at the video store, but I will say that there would have to be a lot of other things already checked out off the shelves before it would become worthwhile. You’ll have more fun sitting in the dark for ninety minutes, imagining how fun a good space cop/bad space cop movie really should be.