- Written and directed by Albert Pyun
- Starring:
- Christopher Lambert
- Natasha Henstridge
- Norbert Weisser
- Elizabeth Barondes
- Xavier Declie
- Produced by Gary Schmoeller and Tom Karnowski
At last! The manifold review sites hunkered under the Cold Fusion umbrella have decided to do our own roundtable — and in a regrettable display of hubris, we tried to take on the man, the legend, Albert Pyun. Examine the trail of bodies left behind for yourself:
| And You Thought It Was Safe? | Nemesis 2: Nebula (1995) |
| The Good, the Bad, the Ugly | Brainsmasher: A Love Story (1993) |
| MonsterHunter | Cyborg (1989) The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) |
| The Sci-Fi Movie Page | Knights (1993) |
And as for me:
I’ve said it before, and odds are very good I’ll say it again every time I review a movie directed by Albert Pyun: Pyun is the unfortunate best evidence for the “auteur” theory, i.e., the idea that it is the director who leads that cohesive authorial stamp to the collaborative effort of a motion picture, thus justifying the possessory “A Film by” credit. Some people think of this as the “Hitchcock thesis”; ha! I say. Sit through as many Albert Pyun movies as I have, and then call it that! Actually, the challenge would to say anything intelligible — Pyun movies have a tendency to turn unprepared braincells to tapioca.
I will say this for Adrenalin: Fear the Rush: Despite being written and directed by Pyun, it seems very little like a Pyun movie. That’s not to say that it’s a good movie, but rather that it’s bad in ways that are different from the ways in which a Pyun movie is usually bad.
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“We’ll get medieval on anyone who says this isn’t really Boston!” |
Our opening prologue (hey, I didn’t say it was completely dissimilar from a standard Pyun movie, did I?) tells us that, in the chaos at the collapse of communism, a biowarfare agent was accidentally released, called “virulent microphage” (which is a lot of Latinate words for “nasty germ”). Emigrants from eastern Europe were carriers, and they ended up quarantined at their entrance to whatever country they ran to. In the U.S., the quarantine camp became a permanent down-and-outer city outside of Boston, and by the year 2017, it’s pretty apparent that life there will perpetually suck.
All of this is told to us by the voice of Natasha Henstridge, who plays Delon, a rookie cop and inmate of the quarantine zone, who’s in the middle of buying a black-market passport to gether son out of the hellhole they live in, despite the fact that being caught with such contraband is punishable by death. (We Americans, we don’t play around with our infected foreigners.) None of that will have any bearing on the plot ahead, though. Actually, neither will the prologue. Though once you see what I’m referring to as a “plot” here, you’ll wonder of the concept of something have any bearing on it makes sense in the first place.
The story, such as it is, begins thus: A bunch of street toughs are hanging out in the burnt-out, shot-out desolate streets of this Boston interment camp which looks an awful lot like an eastern European urban war zone. (”The part of Boston in tonight’s performance will be played by Croatia.”) One of them wanders off to take a leak, and finds someone crouching in an alley. The tough makes the classic mistake of getting closer than he needs to, and finds himself disemboweled by a mutant freak (Craig Davis). The others, hearing him cry out, similarly all get way too close to him (must be something to do with the eastern European awareness of “personal space”) and receive a similar treatment; only one of them makes it away, bumping into a yellow-uniformed hazmat team tracking Mutant Guy. (By the way, helpful advice to all you sci-fi/action filmmakers out there: If one of your characters is a hideously mutated goon and you’ve got him wearing ugly sclera lenses to make his eyes look all discolored and veined and stuff, it’s probably a bad idea to give us a close-up so tight that we can see that his real pupil is off-center from the one in the center of the lens.)
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There but for Visine go I. |
The lone tough makes it to the police station and babbles out the tale of a ferocious monster to the hardass captain, who orders Delon and her partner to go bring the perp in. (The partner’s name? Well, we’ll just call him “Meat Boy” for now.) They take their ranshackle cop car to the scene, creep through the decaying buildings, and find the hazmat team, their uniforms shredded and their torsos gutted. (Apparently, female scientists habitually wear black thongs beneath their hazmat suits. Who knew?)
They cat-and-mouse around just long enough for Mutant Guy to behead Meat Boy, and… Dear heavens. Sorry, I just looked back at what I had just written. Boy, I’m sure all my college professors who contributed to my Summa Cum Laude degree in English Lit would be so proud if they could see me now. Anyway: Delon manages to get a call for backup in on her army surplus radio before it gives out, and cowers in fear until reinforcements arrive.
And what reinforcements! Not just another two cops — it’s a whole three of them. And one of them’s Christopher Lambert! (The character’s name is Lemieux, and I owe that knowledge entirely to the closing credits.) His two companions are Cuzo (Norbert Weisser), the cynical “I’m only a cop for the money and the body armor” guy, and… um… Cop Girl (Elizabeth Barondes). (All right, the character’s name is Wocek, but not only did I not know that until the closing credits, I really didn’t care.)
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Okay, Chris, let’s try “concerned”… All right, let’s go for “apprehensive”… um, maybe just “stunned,” then? |
They team up with Delon and go in looking for Mutant Guy. Creep through the building… peer around corners… wave guns into dark shadows… freeze at the sound of hidden movements… We’re twenty minutes into the movie, and I’m thinking, “Man, this initial action set-piece is taking an awful long time…” Then it hits me: This IS the movie. The whole of it. It’s all this one chase.
And oh, how I hate to be right…
So. While the cops are creeping around after Mutant Guy, a couple of government sp00ks show up in the police captain’s office with a story about Mutant Guy being a carrier of a new strain of malaria. Of course, as soon as the captain leaves the room, they start talking to each other about stuff they already know for our benefit, to wit: The carrier is infected with something a helluva lot meaner than malaria, and what’s more, they’ve only got two hours before he becomes contagious and spreads whatever’s making him murderously violent to all the denizens of the quarantine. Which, from what I’ve seen, is a handful of street punks, a few cops, and one old German woman looking dourly from her window.)
The cops, meanwhile, have chased Mutant Guy (I’m sorry, “the carrier”) into some dilapidated air shafts which lead into an old prison complex, from which there’s only one way out on the other side, so the two less important characters go ’round to the other side to head him off, while Lemieux and Delon crawl in after him. This results in at least ten minutes of two actors seal-crawling through the muck on the floor of dripping, crumbling stone shafts. Since Mutant Guy has a gun he lifted from one of his previous victims, it also results in Lemieux getting the first of many, many gunshot wounds.
It’s right about here that I had to admit: Technically, the film’s pretty competent. Sure, the story’s nonexistent and the characterization’s thinner than the one-ply toilet paper that no one in their right mind should buy, but on a purely visual level, it’s carried off moderately well. Certainly, the decrepit structures of eastern Europe bring their own layer of atmosphere to the production, and Pyun manages to keep the shadowy grime of the tunnels from compromising our ability to follow the action (which isn’t a given with the auteur in question). I’m not nominating the movie for any awards or anything, but with Pyun, basic competence is a goal, not a given.
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“We big! We bad! We yellow!” |
Anyway. After further abuse, the four cops all meet up in the center of the prison complex, scratching their heads at how their quarry eluded them. Mutant Guy then gives them the runaround, owing mainly to his spidery agility (and his off-screen teleportation abilities), until they’ve basically trapped themselves in the prison and Lemieux has caught another bullet. Can splitting up so they’re picked off one by one be far behind?
By the end, naturally, Lemieux and Delon are the only ones alive, owing mainly to dual Hero’s Death Battle Exemption (and I’d better start crediting Ken Begg for all of the terminology I’m rolling through in this review). Despite Mutant Guy’s propensity for disemboweling or otherwise instantly dispatching everyone he meets (including the sp00k and another half-dozen hazmat agents), he instead strings Lambert and Hendridge up in the bowels of the prison like flies in a spider’s web. Heck, the very laws of human physiognomy seem determined to bend in the favor of our heroes, as Lemieux takes probably half a dozen bullets to his torso and not only lives, but stays conscious and even moderately active. (I was starting to think that maybe someone had confused Lambert’s character here with, you know, that other one he’s famous for.)
Oh, I oughtta back up to those hazmat guys. Remember that deadline for Mutant Guy to become contagious? The sp00k was serious when he gave an exact time. He’s even got a watch with a countdown timer that ticks down the seconds with appalling precision. It gives rise to the image of all these deadly little microbes clustered around the timeclock, cards in hard… “Ready… ready… not yet… aaaalmost there…”
In the end, of course, everything comes out okay, because Delon plugs enough bullets into Mutant Guy a couple of minutes before the contagion deadline and thus all of the microscopic beasties lose their interest in infecting anyone else. And just to make sure that we haven’t forgotten that whole extraneous “black market passport” thing from waaaay back, the injured-but-alive sp00k finds out about the passport but decides to overlook the infraction (did I mention that this was a capital crime?) and instead arranges for a Get Out of Jail Free card for Delon and her son.
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Makes the prospect of a string of Species sequels seem downright desireable, doesn’t it? |
What makes this different from the typical Pyun film is that there aren’t a dozen different undeveloped plot ideas, each leading nowhere and slowing the story down. No, in this case, there’s only one undeveloped plot idea, a story so thin it seems more like a trailer or a vignette than a (barely) feature-length film. Of course, there ARE unfollowed plot threads, like who this Mutant Guy was and how he managed to get infected with an apparently government-developed viral strain before escaping into the Boston containment area. (There’s even about twenty seconds’ speculation on the part of the cops that Mutant Guy knows the prison complex and police habits so well because he was either a cop or a prisoner. Then the whole idea is dropped in favor of shooting Lemieux some more.) The biggest mystery is, of course, why even put up the charade of this taking place in Boston? It’s pretty damned obvious that the whole thing was shot in eastern Europe; just setting it in, say, a plague zone in eastern Europe would explain the architecture, the vehicles, and the Slavic accents of all but the top few members of the cast.
When it comes right down to it, it’s simply a movie about a few cops chasing one meanie through a bunch of old buildings. Is that a step up or down from Pyun’s usual output? Tell you what — why don’t you go watch another half-dozen Pyun movies, then come back and see if you can articulate your opinion.
Nathan Shumate
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 14 (unless I counted somebody in a yellow hazmat suit twice)
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 1 (in stock footage of the breakup of the Soviet Union)
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
- Craig Davis (Mutant Guy) did stunts on in Star Trek: Nemesis
- Nicholas Guest (”Rennard”) played a cadet in Star Trek 2
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