- Directed by Fabrice Lambot
- Written by Jean Depelley, Fabrice Lambot, Nicanor Loreti, and German Val
- Starring
- James Horan
- Lance Henriksen
- Erin Brown
- Samuel Arena
- Agathe de La Boulaye
- Produced by Jean-Pierre Putters
- Executive produced by Uriel Barros
“A cop on the trail of a serial killer begins to suspect that the killer isn’t quite human.” There are probably a score or more of B-movies with this plot description, and that’s okay; anyone who picks up a movie with this kind of description knows what he’s in for, and wants it – a simple diversion that doesn’t challenge expectations. (I say “he” because, well, this is definitely the description for a Guy Movie. Women are the same in wanting familiarity in their entertainment; their go-to plots are just different. Take a look at the synopses for TV-movies showing on Lifetime or some other female-oriented cable channel: “A woman copes with her recent divorce…” “A woman and her family cope with a terminal illness…” Ever notice how often women’s movies are about coping, and men’s movies are about finding the problem and blowing it away? It’s a Mars/Venus thing. Wow, this parenthetical note is longer than the rest of the paragraph.)
There’s not an element of Dying God that is original in any way, and that in itself is not a criticism. But even comfort food can be ruined by too much of the bad-but-good elements that we came for. It’s like salt; salty greasy french fries are a guilty pleasure, but it’s possible to put so much salt on them that they end up being unpalatable. Dying God is like that.
“Nah, homicide detectives are at their best with a hangover. Really.”
We open with that standard of genre movies of all types, a dead hooker. (Actually, we open with an Amazonian Indian boy carrying a bundle being chased through the jungle by white men with machetes and guns and being rescued by another white man with a machete, but we never really understand exactly what this scene is.) The hooker in question is in Buenos Aires, and the arrival of Detective Fallon (James Horan) on the scene informs us of two things. 1) By his casual dress, his sunglasses, his hangover and his foulmouthed reaction to authority, we are informed that he’s a Loose Cannon Who Doesn’t Follow Orders But Gets Results (stock character #26). 2) By his diction and that of most of the other police officers, we are informed that the Buenos Aires police force – and the citizenry of Buenos Aires as a whole – contains a surprising number of North American anglos who speak without a hint of accent.
The hooker, according to Benny the medical examiner (Hugo Halbrich), wasn’t killed in any of the normal ways; she appears to have been raped to death. The uterus was punctured from the inside, and there’s a gaping hole in her stomach with her intestines pushed out. How lovely.
If you poured some hydrogen peroxide on this guy, he’d fizz away to nothing.
But we need to take a break from the headlong velocity of the plot to get to know Fallon better. As we quickly learn, he hangs out in strip clubs (I thought that he showed up there as part of the investigation, since if movies have taught me one thing, it’s that information vital to murder investigations will always be imparted when there’s a skanky girl gyrating on a pole in the background, but no, it’s just for his morning drink), especially the one where his sort-of girlfriend Mary (Erin Brown, better known to certain facets of the moviewatching public as Misty Mundae) works as a dancer/hooker. As the movie went on, I wondered what, exactly, she saw in him, and why she stayed with him; he gets the same thing from her that paying customers do, and treats her worse. Just as there have to be better detective candidates than Fallon available to the police department, there have to be better boyfriend candidates available to Mary. In both investigations and interpersonal encounters, his main behaviors seem to be smoking, grimacing, and dropping the F-bomb.
Oh, Fallon also has a little sideline business: he swipes guns out of the evidence room and sells them, via a go-between, to the local pimps and crimelords. He’s also a friend to several of the local hookers; they call him when a John gets violent, and they pay him with a three-way, during which he snorts coke off one girl’s back.
And the fact that she’s young enough to be his daughter? Sooo not icky.
I think you can see that we’ve gone far beyond the “Loose Cannon Who etc.” classification. Heck, we’ve gone far beyond the “irredeemable jerk” classification. I try to keep myself to language here that won’t shock the people who would never see a movie like this in a million years, but after hours of consideration the only word that can describe Fallon rhymes with “glasshole.” And there’s no indication that he’s supposed to be the kind of anti-hero for whom we hold a grudging regard, if any; the impression I get is that we’re meant to sympathize and identify with him, as if he’s supposed to be a wish-fulfillment figure for the male audience. Maybe I’m out of step with my culture and gender, but I’ve never fantasized about being a selfish amoral D-bag.
While we’ve been getting our introduction to how Fallon spends his days, meanwhile, there have been more murders – all hookers or other unaccompanied young women, all killed the same way. The medical examiner is flummoxed; not only are all of the victims full of a volume of semen that a human couldn’t muster (ew), but it’s not even human (double ew). The local pimps are getting upset about their “cash cows” being slaughtered, which prompts head honcho Chance (Lance Henriksen making his mortgage payment), a wheelchair-bound hardcase with a silent kickass female bodyguard, to call the other crimelords together for a confab. There are very few pleasures to this movie, but one of them is seeing a paraplegic Henriksen subdue another unruly pimp at the bargaining table by vice-gripping his wedding tackle.
Let he who has never had to make a house payment cast the first stone.
There are filler plotlines galore, most of them rubbing our noses in a movie that makes us spend time in company with a complete waste of oxygen: Fallon’s gunrunning go-between trying to cheat him and Fallon in return putting a bullet through his defenseless head (to keep up with the level of “glassholery” Fallon’s exihbiting, I’m going to have to start using exponents), Fallon butting heads with the detective who’s officially assigned to the case and ignoring entirely the commands of his superior officer, Fallon’s abuse of Mary in a drunken rage and his half-hearted apology that brings her crawling back… I’ve rarely seen a movie that makes me wish so heartily that it would pull a ”Psycho” and exchange the protagonist we’ve had up till now with a new one entirely. Alas, it is not to be.
Oh, right, the plot. Fallon and the other police capture an older Amazonian Indian running away from one of the crime scenes. (Is this supposed to be an older version of the Indian boy from the pre-credits scene? If so, what is he doing still running around the city in the same loincloth ‘n’ headband ensemble? Am I supposed to be having flashbacks to the spoof movie Top Secret! here?) As translated by a helpful grad student from the nearby university, the injured Indian rambles on about his “god,” who is dying, and came to the city to breed: a god also known as a “kurupi” (that’s the best way to render it, although I’d swear that they said “Keroppi” a couple of times, which puts an entirely different spin on it).
The kurupi is a monster of folklore which rapes and breeds compulsively, kills the infertile women during the act with its massive member, and keeps the fertile ones in a lair to bear his offspring. Triple ew.
All of which means that Fallon and Chance – that’s right, a lone cop and an aging thug in a wheelchair — have a showdown with a stuntman in a rubber suit at the old mercury factory which is has adopted as its lair. You knew an old factory would have to figure in it somewhere, right? And yes, to our horror, we do get a good close-up view of the kurupi’s rubbery uber-member as it retracts into its body (cue George Costanza flashbacks). All three feet of it. Brain bleach, please.
You know what they say: Crystal skull = glass jaw.
It shouldn’t be hard to create a slasher-monster movie that hits all the familiar bases and provides well-worn but competent entertainment. But this one, through the combination of a rambling and witless screenplay and a protagonist so vile that the monster has to be a slimy, supernatural raping machine to be less sympathetic, is more like an ordeal to be endured.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 17
- breasts: 10
- explosions: 0
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
- James Horan (Fallon) played “Dr. Jo’Bril” in the TNG episode “Suspicions,” “Lieutenant Barnaby” in the TNG episode “Descent: Part 2,” “Ikat’ika” in two episodes of DS9, “Tosin” in the Voyager episode “Fair Trade,” and the recurring role of “Humanoid Figure” on Enterprise (he also provided voice talent in the videogames Klingon Academy and Starfleet Command 3, but that doesn’t really count)
“he’s supposed to be a wish-fulfillment figure for the mail audience.”
Well, maybe just the disgruntled ones.
Caught that. Thanks.
Great. So Misty Mundae survives the Carbine High Massacre only to wind up in a cheap knock-off of Split Second, shackled to the rat-soup-eatin’-est fanboy Dolemite never knew he had. That about the size of it?
And why Buenos Aires? Just so the Token Indian can explain away the monster? Why not go the full nine, set the whole mess in Tokyo and rotoscope over everyone’s bad acting? Then they’d have had the Hentai they clearly wanted to make in the first place.
Bad, bad decisions all around. Sometimes I almost think that it’s supposed to be some generic North American city instead of Buenos Aires (they never mention it, and I had to check the shooting location on the IMDb), but it looks even less less believable as a U.S. city than those Romanian locations that I know so well.
Even if it is Buenos Aires that’s still pretty far away from the Amazonian jungle. How and why did the beastie go there and how did he manage it without anyone noticing?
I dunno. If Lambot had cared about making a comprehensible movie, he might have made clear that the bundle that the young child was running out of the jungle with in the intro scene was the juvenile “god,” and that he’s been hiding in the city with it. But that would mean that the fifty-something Amazonian we see later has been hanging around in the city for decades in a loincloth and still never has learned to speak anything but his long-thought-extinct dialect.
BTW, here’s a little tidbit for all of you who haven’t put a lot of thought into your personal theology: If your god is going to die unless you help him rape a lot of hookers, YOU NEED TO WORSHIP SOMETHING ELSE.
Between you and Foywonder, it sounds like Misty would be better off going back to crap like “Spiderbabe” and “Lord of the G-Strings.” Which is really saying something.
She looks quite different when she’s not slathered in make-up.
What led you to review a movie like this? It seems outside of your norms (maybe that’s it?) Not a criticism, since I enjoyed the review; just an honest question.
The concept of the “dying god” here sounds like the demon from “The Incubus” (circa 1981 I think)
It must be truly scary inside Nathan’s mind. How many things seen that cannot be unseen must there be lurking about in there…
Now that would make for a good movie!
Rev: I got sent the screener. That’s all the excuse I have.
John: I think you just pitched The Cell 3.
For the record, I always thought Misty Mundae was too good an actress to be in softcore. Upon reflection and viewing her latter works, I was wrong. She’s the perfect actress for softcore.
There have been very few Misty Mundae movies I have been able to sit through. She’s always been good (and usually the best part) but nearly all the non-softcore movies of hers that I’ve seen have been so vile I couldn’t finish. I’ve only seen one of her softcores by the way, didn’t get too far into it.
By the way Nathan, love your reviews and have for years.
Thank you very much, Nine (may I call you Nine?).
I have to admit, I didn’t recognize Brown/Mundae because I’ve never seen one of her plentiful softcore movies; I onlu knew her by reputation.
“Nine” works, a lot of my friends call me Nine-Fingers. My first name happens to be Nathan as well.
My evil twin! (Or maybe you’re the good twin.)
Since I first started reading your site, a question always pops into my head and vanishes almost immediately, but it’s stayed there this time and so I shall ask it: the rest of the Notable Totables are self-explanatory, but the Breasts. Is it pairs of breasts, or singular ones? Like, for this movie, would it be ten pairs or five pairs?
I realize this question makes me sound like a pervert, but I promise this is not the case. I’m just inordinately curious about your classifications.
I’ve never understood why appreciating the female form is seen as “perversion.” Just about everyone notices breasts, male and female. It’s only when that becomes the only thing you fixate on that it becomes a problem.
And Nathan, I’m probably the evil twin. I am a preacher’s kid, after all.
Meekrat: Each individual nipple is logged and noted by our trained staff of forensic mammary actuaries.
Nine: Shucks, right now I qualify as a preacher. According to Hollywood, I’m DEFINITELY evil.
And if you think Hollywood’s branded you as evil, wait until the Sanrio legal squad finds you…
Goodbye, Kitty!
As a long time reader and fan forgive my ranting please ;) But I take some serious offense to that parenthetical aside!
Give me blowing away the problem and horror movies, esp bad 80′s horror with plenty of blood and bare tits every time! Even the very worst of the Italian cannibal flicks is better than that Lifetime movie garbage. Not everyone with ovaries thinks maudlin, weepy crap is a good time.
I like Nicole. And it has nothing to do with her saying “tits”. It was her whole hearted revulsion at the Lifetime channel.
I salute you Nicole!
Nathan: I bet we could get The Cell 3 – 5 or 6 easy out of your mind. YOu have witnessed much which would liquify the brains of us lesser mortals.
@John Campbell
Why thank you, I salute you right back! Anybody who both appreciates tits and hates the black hole of vile suck that is LMN is ok in my book. Cheers! :)
Most of the time I prefer more to my movies, but every so often you just need gratuitous blood and tits. And sometimes (hope I don’t sound too chauvenistic admitting this) you can even leave out the blood.
I’m glad that we’ve achieved gender harmony here. I’d like to buy the world a Coke!
Please note, though, that I made no generalizations about what men or women like or want in a movie, but what men’s movies and women’s movies — that is to say, movies which are specifically targeted and marketed at one gender or the other — concentrate on. Aim your offense toward those who produce movies aimed at stereotypes.
@Ninefingered
No worries. Sometimes you can leave out the blood for me too! I dig the female form. Both genders rock but women are just more artistically beautiful. (Which sounds so much nicer than what I was originally going to say… “I love boobs!” :D)
@Nathan
Sorry, I took your saying the “go-to plots” of both genders are different to mean that you thought all women went to weepy crap for escapism. I shall indeed aim my wrath at those who produce and perpetuate that kind of idiocy. As a peace offering, please accept this strange book I found… it speaks of a man who shall fall from the sky and save us from the evils of the deadites! :)
Hey, sometimes you just need to admit the truth as directly and bluntly as possible; and the truth is we like boobs.
Nathan – Thank you.
Nine – Indeed, I just wanted to make it clear it was idle curiosity and not me fixating upon them.
Three feet? My God! This movie sounds like some super-perv’s wish-fulfillment porno gone wrong!
Horribly, horribly wrong.
Nathan, here is some useful piece of information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurupi
My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
If you read folklore from most cultures, you’ll find that gods a) tend not to be very nice or pleasant and b) are often horny bastards.
Well, yes, but most of them aren’t subhuman serial rapists who puncture women’s stomachs outwards with their penises.
Not quite, but some come pretty close.
Sorry about the two entries in one go, but it just occured to me that this particular review of yours has inspired some really interesting (in every sense of the word)conversations.
And unlike some recent wrestling conversations, all the participants know what punctuation is. Bravo!