- Directed by Tony Maylam (and Ian Sharp)
- Written by Gary Scott Thompson
- Starring
- Rutger Hauer
- Kim Cattrall
- Neil Duncan
- Michael J. Pollard
- Alun Armstrong
There’s no way I can recommend this as a good movie. It’s a Frankensteined patchwork of better films, held together with a puzzling setting and a bunch of explanatory gibberish that sounds like the aftermath of an explosion in an occult bookstore. It’s patently silly in spots. But if approached in the right frame of mind, it can be a considerable amount of fun. when I first saw it a decade ago, I was in the wrong frame of mind; I saw it at the insistence of my friend Don (he who couldn’t stomach Dead Alive), and his enthusiasm set me up with the expectation of a much better movie. Watching it now, it goes down much easier because I know what to expect. (plus, my standards have plummetted in the intervening decade.)
But director Tony Maylam knew what to put front and center: Rutger Hauer. A very, very tough-looking Rutger Hauer: Big black motorcycle boots to his knees, black fingerless gloves, a huge black trenchcoat, round sunglasses after dark, big-ass guns, and an ever-present cigar. He’s like an amalgam of every fanboy’s delusion of what they look like in their own black trenchcoats. Just ignore the fact that Hauer’s wearing shoulderpads under his (black) shirt to distract from the fact that his torso is showing the effects of the inexorable pull of gravity; that slump is balanced out by Hauer’s appearance at this age: Tired and worn, but still tough enough to chew nails. It’s the perfect version of Hauer for this part.
“Okay, tell me — does this hurt?”
The part in question is that of Harley Stone, an American cop working in London in 2008, after eco-disasters have flooded the city and clouded the atmosphere to a permanent pseudo-night. (The intro material makes sure to blame this on the U.S. dragging their feet on environmental treaties, naturally.) What does this contribute to the movie? Not a lot, really, except plenty of puddles for people to splash through, and an excuse for all the moody night shooting. Why’s Stone in London? Also murky, but best explained by the following exchange between Detective Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan), soon to be Stone’s new partner, and Lieutenant Thrasher (Alun Armstrong), their commanding officer:
Durkin: If you ask me, he’s nuts!
Thrasher: That’s what the doctors say. Here, read the file. He’s worked in every hellhole in the world, and been fired from all of them.
Durkin: They say he’s the best.
Thrasher: He is.
In other words, he’s a Loose Cannon Who Works Alone And Plays By His Own Rules. You may have encountered his type in the movies, once or twice. Not only that, but he’s Tortured By Guilt: His old partner, Foster, was killed by a serial killer three years, while Stone was having an affair with Foster’s wife. Things like this are guaranteed to drive an otherwise straight-shooting police officer to wear fingerless gloves and wear sunglasses at night.
NO CAPTION NECESSARY.
See, Stone’s still on the trail of the serial killer who killed his partner, despite the fact that he’s suspended. As we discover when Stone strongarms his way into a nightclub with bondage-costumed strippers (might as well get the requisite strip club scene out of the way), he’s got some sort of connection to the killer; he can vaguely sense his presence, as indicated by a heartbeat in the soundtrack. Unfortunately, he’s always a wee bit too late, as he is here for a blonde who has her heart torn out in the bathroom. (The editing here is unintentionally humorous, as it really looks like Stone, hyperventilating from sensing the killer, is about to, um, hit the “Big Relax” while watching the stripper shake.)
Thrasher immediately hauls him in and fulfills his duty as commanding officer to a Loose Cannon Who Etc. by shouting at him and demanding to know what he was doing there and such. And then he takes him off suspension. Because hey, what else can you do with a suspended police officer who keeps on waving his badge and Gatling-sized gun in the faces of citizens, right? The caveat, of course, is that straightlaced Durkin, the well-educated and field-green detective, is to be his partner. It’s time for buddy-cop shenanigans! (And no, you get no extra points for guessing that Stone greets this directive with, “I work alone!”)
The killer then helpfully makes sure the entire department takes him seriously by sending Stone a chilled case with a half-eaten heart in it. In fact, the killer critter goes out of his way to be helpful. At his next killing, he paints a huge sigil of Scorpio and some other arcana on the ceiling in the victim’s blood. I dunno; is there such thing as a “Riddler gene” which forces serial killers and other baddies to taunt the police and give plenty of hints? There are, I suppose, situations in which that kind of behavior makes sense (a killer who’s conflicted by self-loathing, for instance, or one for whom half the thrill is derived from making the cops look like monkeys), but as will be shown later, this isn’t really one of those situations. Oh, and Thrasher has a tooth mold made from the bitten heart, and the teeth in the resulting mold are huge and non-human.
Despite this, Stone and Durkin are really the only people actively working on the case — if by “working on,” we mean “wandering around waiting for Stone to get one of those premonitions accompanied by the heartbeat sound.” And even they have enough time for some extracurriculars; At Foster’s slot in the mausoleum, Stone runs into Foster’s widow Michelle (Kim Cattrall, still wearing her haircut from shooting Star Trek 6, right down to the shaved temples), and she comes with him back to his apartment, more to commiserate than to restart the affair they used to have going.
“Whoa, this can’t be right. I guess the cafeteria’s the SECOND door on the left.”
Stone’s apartment is perfectly fit to the character: It’s a cluttered hole in a half-abandoned highrise, decorated in “late industrial” — motorcycle parts and other mechanical doodads take up most of the space. (There’s also a ton of Harley-Davidson memorabilia all over the place, because you recall that Stone’s first name is Harley. Good thing his mother didn’t name him Edsel.) The kitchen contains almost nothing but coffee and chocolates, because, you know, Stone is driven and denying himself sleep to catch the killer. And sleep deprivation-induced psychosis is good for such things. (There are also pigeons all over. Unless he’s got the rare housebroken kind, I’m thinking that this place is even worse than it looks on screen.)
From here, well, it’s a bunch of stuff strung together. Durkin makes himself an instant expert on astrology and the occult, and together they deduce from the fact that the killer only attacks at high tide during the new moon and from the water-related Scorpio sign that, um, the killer has something to do with water. Maybe. Good thing they put the sharp knives on this case. Oh, and the connection between the killer and Stone? It’s because Stone got slashed in the arm by its talons when it killed his partner, and because the lab report on the saliva on the heart bears “polymorphic DNA,” encompassing the genetic code of all of his victims, as well as the sewer rats that are infesting the flooded city. Does that make any sense? No, it does not.
The single funniest scene puts Stone and Durkin outside his place while Michelle is upstairs having a shower. Suddenly, a scream rings out! They race upstairs, Stone runs into the bathroom — and gets his face slapped by naked Michelle for his trouble. But why did she scream? “The water got colder!” (It was a particularly bloodcurdling shriek, too.) But the creature’s been there; the front door is open, and Stone’s Harley is running.
“No sex in THIS city, buster!”
As the dynamic duo starts piecing together the whats and wherefores of the killer’s patterns, it seems more and more like a creature with a bizarre form of obsessive-compulsive behavior than one following any sort of ritual or plan. Case in point: He gets interrupted before he can yank the heart from one victim, so Stone and Durkin show up in the morgue to keep him from finishing his business. Hello? Firstly, it’s not like there are no other potential victims with which the creature can keep up its quota. Secondly, Stone and Durkin don’t have any more information than we do, which means there’s no reason that they should suspect that the creature will come back to the morgue for that specific, particular heart.
But the shootout in the morgue ramps us up to the final confrontations; Durkin, seeing it (fleetingly) for the first time as he empties his gun in its direction, makes the transformation from bookish nebbish to ung-ho gunwielder. (“We’re gonna need bigger guns!”) They also make the intuitive flash that the pattern of the killings is a geographic one — he’s killing people across the city to draw a huge dot-to-dot version of the sigil he drew on the ceiling. (See former comment about the Riddler gene.) Since he killed someone in Stone’s own building, does that mean that coincidentally Stone lives right in a convenient spot for the pattern? Sure, what the heck. Further mumbo-jumbo has the creature gaining power from the souls of his victims, and of course the new moon/high tide/Scorpio connection means… well, something.
Surprisingly, the killer is never shown to be a were-creature of any sort. One half-expects there to be a shocking revelation that the creature is someone we’ve met — Durkin, Michelle, or maybe Poulsen (Pete Postlethwaite), the cop who’s got it in for Stone — but no. Apparently he’s a fulltime creature with polymorphic DNA and delusions of Satanic grandeur.
One also might suppose that the final showdown, in the blocked-off metro tunnels beneath the city (shown to them by Michael J. Pollard), would have or need some mystical awareness and maneuvering to defeat a creature who had thus far proved invulnerable. But no; their eventually-successful strategy simply revolves around shooting and blowing up the creature until it does shows some damage. Bigger guns have proved themselves sufficient.
Naturally, these teeth bear absolutely no resemblance to the dental mold they took.
It’s all really a hopeless mishmash, held tenuously together by the unusual choice of The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” as a theme song (not only playing in the background, but incorporated into the score). That, and Hauer looking like all of the toughest characters from all first-person shooter games combined.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 7, plus 2 rats
- breasts: 4
- explosions: 10
- dream sequences: 2
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
- Kim Catrall (Michelle) played “Valeris” in Star Trek 6
- Michael J. Pollard (the Rat Catcher) played “Jahn” in the classic episode “Miri”
