Shrunken City, The (1998)

Directed by Ted Nicolaou
Written by Benjamin Carr
Starring
- Michael Malota
- Agnes Bruckner
- Jules Mandel
- Steve Valentine
- Ray Laska
Produced by Vlad Paunescu
Executive produced by Donald Kushner and Peter Locke

It looks like a Full Moon feature, but it’s not. Quite. Yes, it’s released as part of the “Pulsepounders!” line from Full Moon Releasing, but you’ll notice the conspicuous absence of Charles Band’s name in the credits, or indeed any Full Moon attribution. Instead, the Kushner-Locke company (run by Mssrs. Kushner and Locke) take credit. I’m not sure exactly what the relationship is between Band, Kushner and Locke, but it’s pretty apparent that the latter two learned a lot of their movie-making tricks from the former. Ted Nicolaou, Benjamin Carr, and Vlad Paunescu are all frequent Band collaborators, and the movie under discussion was shot primarily in Romania.

Pulsepounders! (can’t forget the exclamation point) is a line of family-friendly genre videos, aiming at the demographic of the GooseBumps/Fear Street books and videos and their counterparts in non-horror sci-fi and such. That’s a bit higher an age than Band’s own earlier Moonbeam Entertainment kidvid line. And fortunately, the aim is a little higher when it comes to quality, too. The Shrunken City isn’t exactly memorable cinema, but it does manage to be relatively inoffensive entertainment for the juvenile fan.

“For the last time, no! My mom says I can’t sneak boys into my bedroom until I’m at least fourteen!”

Our prologue, complete with voiceover, gives us all the background we could ever need: A long time ago, the distant and pacifist planet of Shandar was under attack by mean and ugly Ood (in other words, a bunch of Romanian extras run through the woods in pseudo-medieval garb, chased by CGI Cylon ships). For protection, they all ran into a big and ornate city, which shrank down and encapsulated itself in a bottle, and then…

We go to present-day Pennsylvania, where thirteen-year-old George (Michael Malota) wakes up early on a Saturday morning for a nifty exploratory mission. First he creeps to the house of gal-pal Lori (Agnes Bruckner) to persuade her to come along, and despite our obviously fantastic prologue, this is where my credibility was strained, because frankly, Lori is gorgeous. No, I’m not a dirty old man looking for a child bride. But cast your mind back to your early teens, and try to remember how you related to the opposite sex — or didn’t. Kids at that age are fully in the grip of the Puberty Demon, and there’s no such thing as a casually platonic friendship between boys and girls. I don’t care if you’ve been friends since nursery school, there’s no way to get around that inter-gender thing. Even such innocuous fare as Star Kid realizes this: boys are trying to figure out what they should do around girls, and girls are trying to figure out what to do around boys. So the complete buddy-buddy relationship between George and Lori comes across more as screenwriter fiat, much like “Everyone on every planet’s going to speak English” on Star Trek, or “Cro-Magnon women shave their legs.”

“My next Tardis is going to have privacy screens!”

Sorry, didn’t mean to go off so much. It’s just the part of the movie that my mind keeps coming back to. (And if Lori’s mother hasn’t yet realized that it’s not a good idea for a thirteen-year-old girl to have an exterior door directly from her bedroom, she’ll damned sure figure it out within the next couple of years.)

Anyway. George’s worth-risking-a-grounding discovery is at the demolition site for anold building, where some other stonework is showing through the nearby ground. They uncover a stone covered with alien hieroglyphics, then fall through it into a tunnel. In exploring, they find a nifty little city-in-a-bottle. They take it back to clean up at George’s home, accidentally push something like a power switch, and ZZZIP they’re shrunk down and transported inside.

They find a single phonebooth-like chamber which disgorges an old, frazzled man — Prime, the chief engineer of the city of Shandar, who’s more than a little upset. You see, the plan was to shrink the city, put the 350,000 inhabitants in hibernation, and hide until such time as the Ood civilization self-destructs from its own violence (which is a pretty reasonable plan for pacifist civilation with the necessary resources, I suppose — although they’ve apparently been shrunk and sleeping for 26,000 years, so perhaps that strategy’s not working as well as they had hoped). But George and Lori somehow knocked loose the “powerlink,” the city’s power supply, when they removed it from the cave, and without the powerlink the city is no longer invisible to the Ood’s scans.

“I know, it’s ungainly, but the multi-region hack is really easy.”

(And speaking of such, that’s about the point at which a team of five Ood warriors, nasty-looking aliens in kick-ass Halloween costumes, beam down to the construction site and start scanning. And they’ve got a trick up their sleeves — they can appear as an appropriate local inhabitant, which means that when the site foreman discovers them, all he sees is five construction workers in hardhats.)

But that’s not the only problem. The powerlink also is what keeps the city small; once auxiliary power runs out in a few hours, the city will regain normal size in a split second, and both Shandar and Cochrane Hills, Pennsylvania will vaporize in an explosion roughly equal to a gajillion megatons.

Prime gives the kids an Ood-detecting magnifying glass, recommends they get the city to their “council of elders” to protect it from the Ood, and find the damned powerlink. Then he sends them back out into the real world.

“How did we end up working for the genie?”

What follows, as you can imagine, is largely one long chase. The Ood have the advantage of being able to blend in wherever they go (in the course of the movie, they show up as a radon-detecting environmental team, museum personnel, policemen, and coffee-plant factory workers). The kids, on the other hand, can’t get their story taken seriously by anyone, especially because they’ve apparently had previous run-ins with Lt. Morgan (Ray Laska).

Obviously we’re dealing with a limited budget here — what do you think the odds are that we see any other 349,999 occupants of Shandar aside from Prime? — but creativity helps cover it. I’ve never seen a chase in a coffee-packing plant before, and the final showdown in a junkyard, while not terribly original, is still nifty; junkyards are visually intriguing (and cheap to shoot int), which is why they keep showing up in movies. In fact, the budget only becomes tangible when obviously Romanian actors are given a few speaking lines — either repeating their lines by rote, or being obviously voiced over in post-production.

What happens when a Cylon and a Borg mate? Now you know.

Probably the biggest accomplishment is walking a fine line with the Ood. With a movie that’s going to be watched primarily by grade-school children and younger, you don’t want heavies so menacing that they give the kids nightmares (I’m already going through that with my four-year-old, thanks to Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost). But you also don’t want the villains to be so ineffectual and buffoonish that they destroy any tension in the chase and turn the movie into an out-and-out comedy. The Ood walk that line well; they’re relentless in their pursuit and noticeably menacing even when they appear in human form (thanks especially to Steve Valentine, who plays the thin and shifty-eyed Ood leader), their menace is periodically defused by the fact that they have to continually steal transportation for all give of them, and you really can’t quake in your boots when five alien warriors pile out of a minivan. On any objective scale, of course, they’re pretty ineffectual; the only way they could have established a star empire is if there were a whole string of pacifist pushover planets out there. But that just means that they’re well-matched opponents for a couple of adolescents with nothing but their wits on their side.

I had expected a much worse movie, frankly; the idea of a shrunken city conjured up more visions of either rod puppets or forced-perspective “little people” that are so popular throughout the Full Moon universe, and the initial concept is oh-so-obviously taken directly from the shrunken and bottle-bound city of Kandor in Superman comic continuity. It still ain’t art, but it entertained my kids, and it didn’t annoy me. Given the incredible number of movies I bring home for family viewing have the opposite result, I suppose that’s praise.