• Written and directed by David Heavener
• Starring
  • David Heavener
  • Stuart Whitman
  • Darwyn Swalve
  • Allyson Davis

Poor David Heavener. He’s tried so hard. Since the mid-’80s, he’s been trying desperately to make himself an action star. The number films he’s written and/or directed to star himself is staggering (to say nothing of other films he’s appeared in) — in addition to our current punching bag, there’s Outlaw Force (1987), Twisted Justice (1990), Kill Crazy (1990), Prime Target (1991), Eye of the Stranger (1993), Dragon Fury (1995), Fugitive X (1996), Outlaw Prophet (1999), Death Force (2000), and the upcoming Forbidden Angel (2002).

And yet, after all that… Well, try this experiment. Go up to a friend who’s a “normal” movie watcher, and ask:

“Seen the latest David Heavener movie?”

And wait for the blank stare.

Then say, “Seen anything with David Heavener?”

And watch the mute incomprehension intensify.

And your friend will be the luckier for that ignorance. Because this movie is just plain bad. Really, really bad. So bad it’s not even funny. So bad it made my fillings ache.

Since this is a post-apocalyptic movie, we have to open with that staple of such movies, the Explanation Of How Things Got This Way — an inexplicable convention, since if there’s anything that moviegoers have figured out in the past sixty years, it’s how atomic weapons work and what the world looks like after. In this case, according to (ewww) the ever-present narration (by Heavener, naturally), there were only two kinds of people left afterward: “The good kind — and the bad.” Apparently, then, all of the people in the middle were the ones who got toasted.

What he fails to mention in this oh-so-enlightening intro is that both types, good and bad, have a uniting characteristic: They’re all as dumb as rocks.

“Please tell me you managed to save some other paintings.”

The movie proper starts with gunshot-wounded Cody (Heavener) flashing back to how he got said gunshot (with the help of the ever-present narration, natch): To wit, a gang of outlaws interrupted his guitar-playing with his sister, niece, and nephew. They killed the kids, raped the sister, and shot Cody, leaving him for dead. Now, I know you’re used to to the standard post-apoc goons. These are not they. No studded leather. No painted football pads. No extra grills and spikes on their late-model sedans. No tattoos or warpaint. No, they look like your standard mid-’80s street punks, with their demin and their bandannas and the occasional leather jacket, and their leader is a huge, fat, bald, scruffy, slow-moving lardass named Hog (Darwyn Swalve). He’s even missing one of his front teeth. I saw this guy, and said, “You gotta be kidding me.” This is the great menace of the wasteland? This is the charismatic leader who gathers tough thugs around him and bends them to his will? Hell, even the back of the box calls him a “cretin.” How in the hell would he gain and hold onto power? How stupid and weak must everyone else be for that to happen? (Prophetic question, that.)

Anyway. (Jeez, this review’s gonna be extra-long if I stop to rant about every single idiocy.) Cody was found and nursed back to health by old Duke (character actor Stuart Whitman, the only recognizable face in the whole movie) in his mountain cabin. Meanwhile…

There’s this rundown town inhabited by the Agopy people, who are apparently the future descendents of the Amish. The women all wear long black dresses, the men all wear white shirts, black pants (with suspenders) and black hats. They’re a pacifist people, though they’re not above having a non-Agopy sheriff to deal with lowlife wanderers who come through, like the ex-soldier who tries to hold up the cafe for a meal. That’s right, a small Amish-style town of maybe forty citizens has a restaurant. Whatever. It’s important, though, because working with her father and mother in the cafe is Shauna (Allyson Davis), the young hot blonde Agopy girl who will undoubtably become not only Cody’s love interest, but the object of Hog’s lust. (How’s that for prescience?)

Because Hog has found out about the town and its cafe, and rightly surmises that where there’s a cafe, there’s food (ooh, good deduction), and so goes after it. So they invade, raping and acting like louses.

Meanwhile, Duke, who makes his own guns and shells (in a little cabin without any metalworking facilities), recognizes Cody as being one of the Agopys himself. (Agopys? Agopies? Whatever.) But now, with revenge on his mind, Duke teaches him to shoot, which Cody can’t do straight even though it’s revealed that, before the Big One, he used to be a cop. (Completely useless information, that.) But a two-minute lesson in Gunfighter Zen improves Cody’s aim dramatically, as does a lesson in drinking and smoking (without which you jes’ cain’t shot, I reckon). He also introduces the phrase that becomes the basis for the title: “Always let [the other guy] act first. It’s always better to be the reactor.” And I bet you thought the title referred to, I dunno, a nuclear reactor or something, right? (This scene is also notable in that apparently Whitman was unavailable for looping in post-production, because his dialogue is pervaded by the click-click-click of an imporperly-muffled camera picked up on location. Heavener’s dialogue, meanwhile, is crystal-clear. Similar looping funnies occur throughout the entire movie.)

Then later, while Cody’s out wandering the hills (just, you know, wandering), Duke is attacked at the cabin by a couple of incredibly stupid bandits. How stupid? Here’s how stupid. They club Duke across the head with a shovel on his front porch, then explore the cabin and discover some of his guns — and then do that Western routine,”Dance, sucker!” and shoot at his feet. Note: He’s still lying on the ground. Jeez Louise… Anyway, Cody stumbles back on them and pulls a gun, but hesitates in shooting until after they shoot Duke. Then he blows them away. Nice shooting, Tex.

Oh, and by the way, Hog is still chasing the Agopy folks around. (Wait a sec. The former scenes with Duke and Cody seemed to cover several hours, if not days — and now it’s ten minutes later in the Agopy town? Who edited this mess?) And naturally, his eye falls upon Shauna, so after he dispatches the sheriff, he starts pawing and groping her — until an underling reminds him that they need to make a 20-hour drive to get some more guns. (And some more gas, one assumes, though nobody so much as mentions it at any time.) You’d think they would have taken care of such business before an assault on a new town, but anyway. Hog leaves a handful of men in town to keep the locals in line, with explicit instructions that Shauna not be touched — she’s his personal property.

Once Duke dies in Cody’s arms, Cody buries him in a pile of rocks before riding off, guns strapped on under his duster and a cigarillo in his mouth, to find Hog and get some revenge.

Despite a supposedly-surefire business plan, the Planet Mennonite^TM franchise sank like a stone.

Of course, it’ll take several hours to get to town, so in the meantime we’re treated to scenes of the locals being maltreated by Hog’s men, including one girl being forced to strip to her underwear and play the guitar while standing on a table. We also get a glimpse (as does the goon who’s got the hots for Shauna) of Shauna bathing naked in the pond. All together now: Huh? This is the closest water source? I mean, we’ve seen very clearly that there’s electricity in town; isn’t there a working pump? Or maybe just a bucket-filled bathtub somewhere a little less exposed? Anyway, after what seems like hours of browbeating and sexual assault (yuk, yuk, that’s always good clean entertainment, right?), Cody arrives in town.

And here, folks, is the single good(ish) scene in the movie. Cody walks into the church, where a couple of goons are hassling the locals. They spot him for a preacher-man, and push him up to the pulpit for preaching. He instantly opens the Bible to an appropriate verse which I’ve been unable to locate, but which basically says, “Watch out for the minister of the Lord or you’ll get a divine ass-kicking,” and then he blows them away.

Note that I didn’t say it was a good scene per se; it’s slow, cliched, and predictable. But it’s still the best scene in the whole thing.

He then lures out the second group of baddies into the street and shoots them down from the rooftops (did you know that a single shot to the crotch will kill a man instantly?), earning the gratitude of the townsfolk. Especially Shauna — you can tell from they way she sets a plate of food in front of him in the cafe and asks, “Is there anything else you want?” He’s offered the job of sheriff, and accepts once he finds out that Hog’ll be on his way back. (By the way, I was expecting the townspeople to recognize him, seeing that he was Agopy, too. Apparently he’s from another town or something, which leads to further questions: Why the hell don’t the Agopy all pick one town to live in for strength in numbers, rather than spreading out forty to a town where they can get tromped so easily? Or is the competition between the Amish Cafes that fierce?)

Next morning, he deputizes the ex-soldier in the jail, and then he heads out to bathe. No, really. He heads out to that same swimming hole where Shauna was the day before. So, does everyone in town stop to bathe at the same place? Is there a sign-up schedule in the town hall to guarantee privacy and embarrassing accidental encounters? In any event, while he’s washing with his back to the shore, Shauna walks up quietly and then, without a word, drops her dress and wades out into the water with him naked (I guess not all Amish chicks wear underwear). This, mind you, is after she’s spoken maybe ten words to him, and he’s never said anything to her. Man, once word gets out how easy Amish chicks are, Hog’ll have some stiff competition (did I just type that?).

And i thought my bishop was tough.

Cody greets this with the same reaction he’s had for everything: A stony stare. You’d think that David Heavener was afflicted with a stroke early in life, because his face changes expression about as often as the third guy from the left on Mount Rushmore. Learning to shoot to take vengeance on murderous bastards? Stony stare. Burying your one friend in the world? Blank stare. Shooting cretins in a church? Stony stare. Offered the job of sheriff? Stony stare. Easy-on-the-eyes Mennonite babe shucks it and wades in for some bathtime lovin’? Stony stare. It’s almost shocking when his lips move to deliver his lines.

Meanwhile, the sole survivor of Cody’s rampage makes it out of town and informs Hog of the sharp-shootin’ hero in town, so Hog decides to go back to the main camp to gather the rest of the gang to stomp the town into the ground. Which gives Cody enough time to get cleaned up, find the five (count’em, five) handguns in town and do exactly what you’ve got to do in these movies: Arm the locals. Granted, these Agopies have never held a weapon in their lives, and they don’t have enough ammo to waste on practice, but what other plan is there? Shauna’s father, who’s been notably against this drinking/smoking sheriff since the beginning, refuses to take a gun, so Shauna takes it. (Bet he’d change his mind if he knew that sheriff was making “the Agopy with two backs” with his daughter.)

After a tense night of waiting for the baddies to show (and the requisite “Oh Mother, I love him” talk), the showdown finally comes at dawn, with Cody mysteriously absent. And it comes down exactly like you’d expect with guns being wielded by until-yesterday pacifists: They don’t hit a thing. Not a damned thing. For ten minutes, they shoot down from rooftops and upper-story windows at Hog’s goons, and not a single bullet hits. The bad guys don’t even bother ducking for cover; they just stand there as the bullets hit the blacktop around them — or rather, the embarrasingly obvious piles of dirt that are hiding the squibs. And they fire back half-heartedly, just to make the Agopy shooters duck, and don’t hit them either. Ten whole minutes of people firing and nobody hitting anything. Boy, the excitement just drips off the screen and pools on the floor, don’t it?

Finally, Cody shows up as if this was all part of his plan, and plays his trump card: Grenades. A shitload of grenades. Where did he get them? I dunno. Were they back in Duke’s cabin? I dunno. Maybe. They had to come from somewhere, right? So Cody works his way through the town at a leisurely pace, shooting and blowing up bad guys.

He manages to kill just about all of the ruffians, and rescue the townspeople who were being held in the open outside (even though Hog had stated that he planned to wipe out every living person, so why the hell are they holding them? just so Cody will have someone to rescue?), and also investigate the gunfire from the church, where Shauna’s father finally picked up a gun that Cody left there just in case (the one and only townsperson to manage to hit anyone — hell, even the ex-soldier didn’t bag anyone), and then he asks, “Where’s Shauna?” At which point, the ex-soldier finally tells him, Oh yeah, Hog dragged her off thataway to rape her about ten minutes ago.

Hog. I repeat, why in the hell does anyone follow his orders?

Apparently “thataway” is a precise address in this town, because Cody immediately runs across the street, between two buildings, around the corner, and directly to the run-down building to which Hog has dragged her for absolutely no good reason. I mean, there are plenty of similar abandoned buildings on both sides of the main street, and Hog has never really shown an obsession with privacy before, so there’s absolutely no reason that he should drag her to yet another crumbling building — a distance which takes him ten minutes, and takes Cody two. And don’t worry, Hog doesn’t get very far in that extra two minutes; he spends it all forcibly slobbering on Shauna’s neck. (Hog. You’re raping her. I don’t think any efforts at foreplay will be well-received, do you?)

When Cody arrives on the scene, he doesn’t just shoot Hog through the door, no. He creeps up on him slowly, trying to get the gun right behind his head — giving the last henchman a chance to club him into unconsciousness. And what does Hog do? Why, decides to drag Shauna another ten minutes to finish the job! So that in the time it takes our tubby antagonist to get to his new Designated Spot (out by the train yards this time, in case you care), Cody has had time to come back to consciousness, get shot at by the henchman (again, the “dancing” thing, again with someone prone on the ground), and shoot the henchman with the hidden one-shot up his sleeve. He then stumbles out to the train yard without a weapon, where Hog hasn’t gotten any farther, and (oh joy) shouts Shauna’s name. He gets a bullet in the shoulder for his trouble (actually in the upper left side of his chest, so he should be out for the count, but he’s the hero, so he keeps on going). Hog decides it’ll be more fun to shoot the hero than rape the heroine (and he’ll probably do better — I sweat, I was getting flashbacks to the beginning of Erik the Viking by this time), so he chases him across the train yard –

– Until Cody pulls a pair of shotguns out of frigging nowhere and shoots him dead.

A couple of quick winding-up scenes, and then the most blessed moment: The credits roll.

I’ll note in passing that I haven’t mentioned the musical score, which includes Cody’s synthesized cowboy theme; I also haven’t dwelt on the pointless subplot about the ex-soldier’s conflict with another guy who used to be in his unit, who’s been making a living selling cocaine. Cocaine? How the hell to they have a distribution for cocaine? As far as I can tell, the only difference between the post-apocalyptic world and a heavy garden-variety economic depression is that there aren’t any cops or telephones.

And this grand exhibit of sickeningly bad cinema is without the scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot, line-by-line analysis which could show that the mediocrity descends uniformly to that level, like a fractal design which keeps reproducing itself at greater and greater magnifications. There are exactly two things in this movie which don’t cause pain: That aforementioned scene in the church (not good, but at least not painful), and naked Shauna, who is at least fit and good-looking, as opposed to Hog’s pet skanks that we see during the opening credits — saggy and with tattoos in all the wrong places.

Ow! Ouch! Splinter! Ouch!

Watching this, I could help but feel, in all honesty, embarrassed for David Heavener. I’m sure he knows it’s not a good movie — he can speak intelligibly, and walk without tipping over, so I’m pretty sure he’s at least that smart — but does he have any idea how gutwrenchingly bad it is? And here it is, available on the occasional video shelf for all the world to see. It’s like seeing someone stand up in a public place and propose an idea that he obviously is proud of, though it’s obvious to all observers that the “great” idea is one of the most insipid comments ever uttered out loud. And that person is so oblivious, he doesn’t even realize how badly he’s embarrassing himself, and you have to cringe for him because he can’t do it for himself.

And then, most inexplicably of all, Heavener has gone on to make more movies! How the sweet hell did he get financing? How did he persuade anyone to let him without twenty feet of a camera or a typewriter ever again? Did the people who put up money for later projects never bother to see his previous output? Or did he show this to them, and they (not having the bad cinema endurance that some of us have built up) simply lapsed into bludgeoned unconsciousness, allowing him to steal their wallets?

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 29
• breasts: 10
• explosions: 4
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0