- Directed by Jeff Burr
- Written by Benjamin Carr
- Starring
- John Patrick White
- Taylor Locke
- Lauren Summers
- Jim Metzler
- Belinda Montgomery
- Produced by Christopher Landry and Vlad Paunescu
- Executive produced by Donald Kushner, Peter Locke and Charles Band
I can rarely hold a movie against screenwriter Benjamin Carr. Granted, the movies that result from his scripts only occasionally rise above the level of utter crap, but it’s easy to blame that lack of quality on factors external to Carr’s own craft and level of talent; if someone came to you and said they need a screenplay to go with the title and poster art they’ve already approved, and it needs to be shootable in under ten days on an East European set with maybe four American actors and a lot of Romanian extras, how close to art would your finished product be? And what manages to a little bit endearing every time, no matter how brain-bruising the final movie turns out, is Carr’s obvious loving nods to comic books, pulpish science fiction, and older B-movies. You can tell that deep down, this is the kind of stuff he loves, and even if everything else conspires to turn every word he writes to crud by the time it reaches the big screen (or, more accurately, the little screen), he’s going to find a way to have fun in the trenches.
In this case, Carr put some Western ghost story cliches, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the classic Star Trek episode “Spectre of the Gun” and the TNG pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint,” and other influences I’ll point out as we go along into a Final Draft blender, then spooned the resulting melange into the strictures of a Pulsepounders! young adult movie to be shot on the standing Western set at Castel Films in Bucharest. (I’ve gotten to the point that I can recognize that Western set more quickly than any other set in all of cinema history. That’s so profoundly sad.)
Things start with a pointless little preamble delivered by adolescent Arnie (Taylor Locke) about things that hide in the deserted parts of the world, things without names that occasionally wake up… It’s all information that we get later in the movie, and more effectively, too. and the kid’s an adequate performer, I suppose, but he’s not nearly good enough to be delivering ominous exposition to set the mood. How did he get this job… oh, wait. Taylor Locke. As in, executive producer Peter Locke. It all makes sense now.
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Bah. The brother on the left is obviously playing “air soaker.” |
So. Arnie’s parents are out of town, so he and his teen brother Mike (John Patrick White) naturally have a party for teens, pubescents, and preteens, including their little sister Cindy (Lauren Summers), with Arnie and Mike playing in their own band. Nice ascots, fellas. Of course, the party is interrupted by a call from Mom (Belinda Montgomery), saying that they’re running a little late thanks to Dad (Jim Metzler) falling asleep at the wheel and almost running off the road in the middle of nowhere, and they should be home by midnight. (These kids are having their party ON THE NIGHT THEIR PARENTS ARE COMING HOME??? For that single act of gross stupidity, they deserve everything that happens to them.)
Just then, though, Mom mentions that they’re pulling off the state road into a little town called Long Hand… and the phone gives out. The kids think nothing of it — cellular coverage in the deserted boonies ain’t that great — but Mom and Dad still aren’t home by morning. The highway patrol has no report of crashes or deserted vehicles. It’s like they just vanished. (Check out director Jeff Burr as Dad’s geeky brother Jack. Also check out Romanian actress Iuliana Ciugulea as his wife, saying her lines by rote.) When they still haven’t arrived by late that night, Arnie and Cindy pile into Mike’s car and they go out looking on their own.
Not only can they find no Mom and Dad, they also find no town called Long Hand, either on the map or on the road. What they find, initially, is a tiny gas station and trading post on the far edge of civilization, manned by an old Indian (Jimmy Herman). we all know that old Indians have exactly one function, even old Indians who wear sunglasses at night: Pseudo-mystical exposition. And this old fella performs that function in spades: He lets on that once there was a town called Long Hand, built atop some old Indian ruins. Then, 120 years ago, something “woke up” and the town vanished entirely. But every once in a while, it reappears. Or rather, people find it. But those who find it never come back. (In other words, it’s a sinister version of Brigadoon.) He also tells them that the only way to find Long Hand is to dream yourself there, and that Long Hand can’t take your soul if you don’t let it, so “don’t make any promises in Long Hand.” (How about if I make ‘em in shorthand? Ha! I slay me!) And then he gives Cindy a gift, a giant rattlesnake fang with “plenty of venom” still in it. I guess if they went to such lengths to give the characters an object which so wholly ignores real-world rattlesnake anatomy, it must be important, right? (Though Cindy and Arnie are soaking this up, Mike treats it all as bunkum. And while, in the context of the movie, the two younger kids are obviously right to give the Indian credence, I can’t help but identify with Mike. That’s an awful lot of pseudo-mystic falderall to expect anyone to swallow.)
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“No, I’m NOT Ward Churchill. But I get that alot.” |
Out on the road again, all three of the kids nod off — including Mike, who’s behind the wheel at the time. Once he regains control of the vehicle, they look to the side and lo and behold, it’s Long Hand! They managed to dream themselves there!
(Ah, the Western village at Castel Studio in Romania. Always immediately identifiable by that saloon door set on the diagonal.)
Mike immediately pooh-poohs the others’ claim that this is indeed a time-lost town, and insists that it’s one of those historical recreation theme parks. Where costumed employees wander the streets at all hours of the night. Right. He does have a point, though; the locals raise nary an eyeball at their 1967 Chevy Impala, nor at Mike’s digital watch when he flashes it in a Westerner’s face. “There’s no way they would accept us this easy, if this place was really for real.” Sure that Mom and Dad are there somewhere, but too tired to spend the rest of the night searching, they head to the hotel, where Mike signs them in after glossing over the “the undersigned agrees to the terms and conditions…” No, Mike! You just made a promise! (Oh ,and Mom and Dad’s names are in there too.)
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“W’all, folks’ round here mostly jes’ call me ‘Snake-Eyes.’” |
So while Arnie and Cindy look out the window and notice that the locals’ actions are repetitive, as if they were replaying a loop, Mike becomes possessed and wanders out into the street. (The whole movie lost twenty points in my book from Mike’s performance here alone: Grunting, peering from beneath beetled brows, dragging a leg like a zombie extra.) Arnie belatedly realizes the binding nature of the check-in book and rushes to the lobby to tear out that page, fighting their way past the creepy hotel clerk (Gabriel Spahiu) who insists on their signatures, too. They get the page with Mike’s signature on it and tear it up, but before they can do the same to Mom and Dad’s signature, the hotel clerk, who is rapidly disintegrating into a Lovecraftian monstrosity, sinks into the floor with it in a puddle of green goo.
With Mike de-possessed, Arnie (he’s the smart one, you know) shows them what he’s deduced about the town: whatever it is, the whole town is like a single organism, including the townspeople. The green goo that the hotel clerk was spewing? Arnie guts a seat cushion, and the same stuff comes out. The same with the walls. (Watch as he very carefully does NOT actually scratch or gouge the wall of the standing set.) And if the town’s a single organism, and it was unsuccessful at assimilating them, the next biological line of defense would be something along the line of white blood cells… or, in this case, three slow-moving gunfighters.
Trapped within the town limits by a green plasticky membrane, the three kids discover that the gunfighters are also pretty fragile, and instead try to get to the bottom of things, literally. When possessed, Mike had been moving toward the funeral parlor, so now the three of them venture there and discover a green-glowing fissure in the floor, leading to the heart of the organism.
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“You’re okay, I got your back.” |
A side note: usually, these Pulsepounders! flicks are as appropriate for children as anything from Moonbeam Entertainment or any of Charles Band’s other kidvid lines. This is one of the rare exceptions which might prove too intense for very young viewers, especially the scene in which Arnie finds Mom and Dad, only to find that they’re slime-filled doppelgangers who dissolve as they’re trying to catch Arnie.
In the end, they find the real Mom and Dad, encapsulated in pods beneath the town but not yet entirely assimilated, and though captured by tentacles and such, they manage to escape by… well, remember that rattlesnake tooth? The one that’s still full of venom, but which the old Indian happily gave to an eight-year-old? Yeah.
As with most Benjamin Carr scripts, there are lots of good ideas in here, but they don’t necessarily belong in the same movie with each other. In particular, the incremental revelation of the town as a biological organism doesn’t mix well with the mumbo-jumbo about dreaming your way into Long Hand, or about Long Hand needing your permission to take your soul (since when do predatory organisms have to be invited?). It tries to be both a ghost story and an alien menace film, and doesn’t pull off either one well.
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“Yodel-ay-hee-hoo!” |
On the other hand, I would watch this movie twenty times over before I’d ever let that misbegotten mess that is Shapeshifter in front of my eyeballs again. So given the company Phantom Town has in the Pulsepounders! line, I suppose that’s fair praise.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 1 (taking the organism as a whole)
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 1 (not counting the fireworks on the lawn during the kids’ party)
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- dwarfs: 1
- Body Snatchers references: 2
- Oz allusions: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
- Jim Metzler (Dad) played “Chris Brynner” in the DS9 two-parter “Past Tense”
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