• Directed by Craig R. Baxley
• Written by D. Brent Mote
• Starring
  • Michael Biehn
  • Lindsey Haun
  • Lisa Collins
  • John de Lancie

I’m surprised — this is actually an enjoyable and respectable little movie, despite its thoroughly uninspired video box design.

All right, also ignore the Star Wars ripoff shot that starts the movie: Above earth, a small spaceship enters screen from upper right — followed by a monstrously-big ship shooting at it. I’m not apologizing for this lapse on the filmmakers’ part, I’m just saying — it gets better. Much better.

In this sci-fi version of The Maltese Falcon, Michael Biehn is Joe Keyes, a down-on-his-luck PI/security guy with the classic private eye office: pebbled glass, mulch-like color scheme, and an improbably-great view from an equally-improbably art deco window. (However, he doesn’t wear a trenchcoat or fedora — there’s a fine line between homage and parody.) Keyes is hired by a mysterious woman (and her daughter) to find her husband and help him kill a man who is out to kill the three of them.

Keyes tracks the husband down (it’s not hard — the wife provided the address) in a seedy hotel room, where he sits with a flame thrower guarding the door. Why a flame thrower? Because people like him — “people with Reds” — are afraid of fire.

Hey, he’s a loony, but he’s a loony client. Keyes humors him until two men rush in — men dressed as milkmen, but impossibly strong and impervious to bullet holes. It’s a setup. Client dies, Keyes gets battered around, and John deLancie enters as the heavy, roughly asking the groggy Keyes, “What did he say? Where is it?”

Note: The best hard-boiled mysteries involve the PI just trying to figure out what’s going on while staying alive. The best plot device for doing this is a Maltese Falcon-style McGuffin, the object which drives the plot simply because it is valuable. “The stuff that dreams are made of.” Deep Red does this well.

When the police arrive, we discover that Keyes has a deep dark secret. As finally exposed: A year ago, he was hired by a good cop friend, Waters, to guard Waters’ wife and girl from an escaped killer. The killer caught them and put bullets into wife, girl, and Keyes; Keyes was the only one to live. (This fulfills the “internal torment” requirement for all hard-boiled detectives.)

OK, I won’t go through the entire plot line by line. Suffice it to say, the McGuffin is something called the “Deep Red” (thus the title), which is sort of a queen bee of nanites — the production center for thousands of molecular machines called Reds which can repair and rejuvenate the human body. The problem is, normal Reds wear out after a specific time limit, and only the Deep Red can produce more constantly. The Deep Red is currently in the body of the little girl (acquired from a falling fragment of the small ship we saw in the opening), and John DeLancie (playing Newmeyer, elderly Nobel Prize winner driven mad by the promise of immortality) is willing to rip her apart to get at it and control the economics of eternal life.

This was a nearly flawless combination of hard-boiled and sci-fi. Having molecular machinery be the McGuffin prevents the unweildy visual mix of futuristic and retro elements we usually see in sci-fi private eye stories; instead, it’s just present-day LA with a hard-boiled veneer. The dialog is snappy but familiar, and the pace doesn’t flag in the middle of the second act (as usually happens with all substandard movies).

Of course, there are flaws: Stopping to explain the back story in the middle of running away from the bad guys? I was screaming, “Where’s Miss Piggy when you need her?” (Extra points if you get the reference.) And I just couldn’t trust that little girl — not after seeing her lead the spooky children in Carpenter’s Village of the Damned.

But there was a lot to enjoy here, even in the little details. The lighting was especially good (how often do you read a review praising lighting?); it evoked a mood without obscuring the visuals. There’s a wonderful twist in the last few minutes regarding ex-friend Waters. And Biehn even gets to give Picard’s “How many must die before it’s wrong?” speech from Star Trek: Insurrection.

All in all, well worth the time spent watching it.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6 (counting only those that are permanently dead)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 4
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Obviously, John deLancie has built his career on his role as Q in multiple episodes of all three recent Trek series
  • also Lindsey Haun (playing the little girl, Gracie) appeared in three episodes of Voyager (two as one character, one as another)