• Directed by Tom Callaway
• Written by Daniel Elliot
• Starring
  • Charles Wesley
  • Cassandra Ellis
  • Robert Donavan
  • Michael Vachetti
  • Robert Stoccardo
• Produced by Kirk Edward Hansen
• Executive produced by Peter Locke and Donald Kushner (and Charles Band, uncredited)

Motes and beams. Penny wise and pound foolish. Our culture has plenty of metaphors for concentrating on minutiae while letting larger concerns go unattended. As of right now, I declare that the English language has garnered one more such idiom: “Murdercycle.”

We’ve got here a movie that goes out of its way to be obviously, preciously clever. Not the kind of cleverness that winks slyly to you and makes you feel like you’re in on a secret, the kind that winks by contorting the whole side of the face repeatedly just to make sure that you got it.

Here’s the main offense: every character is named after a comic book creator from the ’60s. And it’s blatant, too; the first two characters identified by name are “Vince Coletta” (that’s right, full name) and “Ditko.” That last is a killer to any hint of subtlety, because the first seventy-nine results from a google search for “Ditko” all point to Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man. These are quickly followed up with “Kubert,” “Frazetta,” and “Buscema.” (And not unlike comic fans at large, this movie can’t quite agree on the pronunciation of that last one.) By the time we get through this roll call, your humble reviewer was to sensitized — all right, rubbed raw — that even more innocuous names were immediately identified as being in the same vein, like “Lee” (Stan), “Adams” (Neal), and “Wood” (Wally).

That just summarized for you the lion’s share of the cleverness to be had in this movie. Awful cheap nickel to spend so early, don’t you think? And it’s not just that the rest of the movie is simply lackluster; every single scene has some deficient element, some feature which just cries out to be noted and ridiculed. It’s a perfect candidate for the in-depth treatment doled out at Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension; I will resist the urge to point out every single flaw, or else this review would take twice as long to read as the movie took to watch. (Which, in my case, was two days; it was simply too much for me to stomach in one sitting.)

Liquor and a loaded gun: The main elements that led to the production of the script.

Things open with Coletta (Steven O’Mahoney) in a shack in the middle of nowhere, monitoring a bunch of computerized equipment quite out of step with the dilapidated structure housing it, and making vocal log notes largely for our benefit. As he’s watching, a motorbiker (Mark Edward Roberts) shows up along the perimeter fence, very clearly lost. At almost the same time, a meteor streaks across the sky and impacts just outside the perimeter. The biker goes off to investigate; Coletta hops in his truck to check the perimeter.

The biker discovers a surprisingly shallow crater around the meteor, which splits open to reveal a green glowing orb. The orb extends biomechanical tendrils around the surprised biker (in other words, tubes and cables are pulled off the rider, then the film is run backwards), and it transforms him and his bike head-to-toe into something angular and paneled and black and crackling with electric discharge.

By the time Coletta gets to the fence, the rider has burned its way in, and soon hunts Coletta down with its laser beams; Coletta dies screaming, “Ditko!” No, that’s not supposed to mean anything to us yet.

Meanwhile: Marine Sergeant Kirby (Charles Wesley) is summoned to see General Kubert (Robert Donavan). Seems the General wants to pull Kirby off suspension for a covert assignment, one which they have to keep secret even from the Department of Defense. Okay, let’s count the unlikelihoods in that sentence alone: Why is a general communicating orders directly to a sergeant – don’t they have intervening ranks to take care of something like that? Why would the general inform Kirby up front that what he’s asking him to do is, in all probability, treasonous? Why is the general pulling a sergeant off of suspension (unofficially, anyway) to accomplish this mission? (The reason given, that the need for secrecy precludes using any active-duty marine, is so ridiculous as to be summarily dismissed.) And why, given all of the oft-repeated need for secrecy, are these orders being given as Kirby and General Kubert stroll along the sidewalk outside? You’d think, after the first time they have to hush up as someone walks by, that the general would realize, “Probably not the best briefing location for a covert op.”

“…known as The Rider.”

From there, Kirby meets the rest of his team: two privates, Buscema and Frazetta (William Vogt and Dane Northcutt). And in case the “cleverness” of the character nomenclature has passed us by, Frazetta is reading a comic book and commenting on how their little team could be compared to the Fantastic Four. Not that there are four of them, though, but given all of the other intellectual lapses on display, the inability to count on one’s fingers doesn’t surprise me. (There’s no sign, by the way, that either of the privates are themselves suspended or otherwise non-active duty. Explain that, General Kubert!) Also on hand are Dr. Lee (Cassandra Ellis), who turns out to be from the “Second Sight Program.” Yup, she’s the designated telepath, who gets to explain the entire concept of psychic phenomena to all of the skeptics and endure their small-minded ribbing. There’s also Dr. Adams (Robert Stoccardo), whose along for his forensics expertise, as well as for his emotion-sucking thespian skills – useful to have in case any of the other actors get to deep into hyperbolics. And last but definitely not least, Mr. Wood (Michael Vachetti) of the CIA; although Kirby is in charge of his men, Wood is in command of Kirby.

A note about Cassandra Ellis: I swear I’ve seen this actress before. Her unusual eyes and pouchy cheeks give the impression of a strung-out chipmunk; it’s an easy-to-remember face. But the IMDb gives this as her only credit, at least under this name. If anybody can fill me in on where I’ve seen her before, you’ll save me many a sleepless night. (Yes, “Where’ve I seen that actress before?” contributes greatly to my insomnia.)

And their mission? The semi-covert, pseudo-treasonous objective for which this disparate team has been assembled? It’s to infiltrate… Colorado. Really, I can’t be more specific than that; Wood keeps it all hush-hush, and tells them they’re simply going in to a CIA listening post because the one guy who was stationed there hasn’t checked in.

Before I go further into this blithely talking about CIA operatives and such, let’s clear the air: the CIA does NOT conduct operations within the United States. That would be stupid. They’re spies. They spy on OTHER countries, NOT our own. The term for a CIA operative within the United States is “civilian.” Had I the money, I would erect billboards all through Hollywood educating the populace on that simple fact; had I the pull, I would add a mandatory class on law enforcement and intelligence agencies to every film school program in the nation. But since I have neither, I’ll simply bitch and moan about it in this review.

“Hey! Any sign of the plot yet?”

So off they go to Prairie Dog, CO, a resort town now mysteriously abandoned. Time here is filled with “cute” stuff between Kirby and Lee, who gets psychic flashes about the big emotional scars Kirby carries and such. Eventually, though, they reach the ramshackle hut where Coletta had been exposing the government’s expensive equipment to the elements, and Wood gets all hush-hush and “need to know” and makes sure everyone else stays away while he checks stuff out. Which means that everyone else gets to react to the attack of – the Murdercycle!

Note: this is how all subsequent attacks will go, too. The rider will show up, zip back and forth, and fire his badly-composited lasers. The marines will fire an ungodly number of bullets back, despite the fact that they do barely any damage. Then the rider will disappear (literally – he fades away as he rides off), the encounter ended inconclusively. At no time to they actually fight him off; he just shows up when the director says, “Hey – it’s been too long without a firefight!”

After this initial encounter, Kirby and Wood start arguing, because Kirby wants to call in backup, and Wood’s playing the stonewalling CIA dick. The mission’s too important, the installation’s too important, blah blah blah. So important that they stationed an entire single guy there to monitor it. Oh, and Lee can’t read Wood’s mind easily either, as he’s been trained in defensive techniques against telepathy. Which raises the question, Why the hell is Lee there in the first place? You’ve got an abrasive CIA operative leading a team he deliberately keeps in the dark under mysterious circumstances; what other use does a psychic team member have, other than to probe the CIA operative’s mind? For that matter, who decided we needed a forensics expert along? Congratulate me; I just put more thought into story mechanics than the credited screenwriter.

The whole middle section of the movie is composed of repetitive episodes like this: the murdercycle attacks; Lee spouts some fragmentary gibberish about “hearing two minds, only one human”; Wood stonewalls, obfuscates, and generally pisses everyone off; Kirby gets up into Wood’s face about Alpha Male status, then lets him keep his sidearm. Repeat ad nauseum as the crew works their way down into the abandoned town (about two blocks’ worth of leftover western sets).

Strung-out chipmunk… of mystery!

Long after we’ve stopped caring, one mystery is solved: who the hell Ditko is. He’s a local UFO geek (David A.R. White) who remembers when this place was a hotbed of mothership activity; he also sneaks within the perimeter regularly to play chess with Coletta. Or “snuck,” rather, since his chess partner is now dead. (Ditko finds it almost unbelievable that Coletta was CIA. Yeah, the idea that our main intelligence agency would be running such a poorly-managed nickel-and-dime operations pretty hard to believe for me, too.)

At the bottom of town the rest of the (yawn) mystery is revealed. The whole town was evacuated when a crashed saucer or something left an orb like the one that touched down at the beginning of the movie. The CIA got their hands on it (yeah, I guess there are less likely agencies – ATF, maybe?) and built a massive underground base to house it, the kind with all sorts of pipes and conduits along the walls (such as one might find if one were shooting part of one’s movie in a water reclamation plant). They placed monitors all around it because it was feeding them all sorts of scientific and technological data. They cleared out the entire town without raising any sort of public fuss, and left a single solitary agent to monitor the orb remotely from a drafty shack.

And the second orb? It’s come for the rescue.

I had thought that, by this part of the movie, I would have no more capacity to be astounded by the sheer idiocy of the script. Silly me; there’s always further for my jaw to drop. I mentioned how Lee kept prattling on about two linked voices in her head, right? That would be the orb and its host motorbike rider, in case you haven’t figured that out. (Sorry. I know you’re intelligent. I know you already figured it out. This movie’s condescending manner of over-explaining everything is rubbing off on me.) One would think, now that we’ve ascertained that it’s a human rider who’s been taken over by the alien orb, there would at least be some discussion of whether the two were separable. You might even think there would be some discussion as to whether the Murdercycle was truly hostile, since it’s only there to free a captured piece of technology (or possibly a sentient member of its society). After all, the whole movie’s been using ethical dilemmas as filler, with numerous boring conversations about the justifiability of CIA coverups and misdirection, the culpability of commanding officers like Kirby toward those they command, and the possible rape analogies raised by Lee’s psychic invasion of privacy. (Again, why’s she along, except to fuel mistrust among people supposedly working together?)

But no. Any awareness of ethical questions posed by the situation is tossed out, as Kirby and Lee figure out how to destroy both the orb and the Murdercycle at once. The poor human host doesn’t even get a passing mention.

The end.

“I wonder how much one of these goes for on eBay?”

Despite having seen more movies that can truly be called “godawful” than is recommended by the FDA, I still find myself staring aghast at such backfires as this. How could a script so chock-full of blunders and wrongheadedness, of answering every possible dramatic question the wrong way, have been produced? It goes beyond simple cinematic incompetence, and seems nigh to a kind of congenital mutation or psychosis. It’s just that bad, folks. This isn’t a “leave your brain at home” kind of movie, it’s a “FedEx your brain beyond the event horizon of stupidity and leave it there” kind of movie.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 7
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 10
• ominous thunderstorms: 9
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Stephen O’Mahoney played “Med Tech” in the Voyager episode “Critical Care”
  • Kim Koscki (the Murdercycle rider, as well as the stunt coordinator) performed stunts in First Contact