• Directed by “Cameron Van Daake” (Luca Bercovici) and/or Jeff Burr
• Written by Michael Kalesniko
• Starring
  • Gary Daniels
  • Meg Foster
  • Bryan Genesse
  • Jeffrey Combs
• Produced by Barnet Bain

Now you should be careful, because there might be, you know, spoilers ahead…

HA HA HEE HEEHEE! Hhahh heh heh (cough cough)…

Um. Anyway.

Gary Daniels (star of an impressive number of direct-to-video movies that no one has ever heard of) is Roger Mason, the classic everyman convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. The backstory is sketched in for us during the opening credits, through a disjointed series of flashbacks: Mason’s little girl Gillian playing in a park, protestations of innocence as police beat him, Mason playing cards in a bar and being tagged as a “spoiler” (an escapee) by a bounty hunter (Bryan Genesse), and a chase through the subway tunnels, resulting in Mason’s recapture. We then find out why these images have been so disjointed: Mason is being revived from 26 years of “chemo-ligation,” aka cryogenic suspension, his punishment for his prison break. (His original sentence, by the way, had been a single year.) His reputation precedes him; everyone expects him to try to run again. He has no intention of disappointing them.

After a perfunctory interview by a three-person Review Board (featuring an unrecognizable Meg Foster — how did she get a starring credit?), Mason is sent to a cell and allowed one hobby; he chooses sewing. Why? Because his next escape plan involves masquerading as a fire warden to get out. Hah! How witty! He then mugs a priest (Bruce Glover — it’s Cameo City, I tell you) in a confessional and steals his clothes, but makes a fatal mistake on his way out: he genuflects wrong. (Come on, Mason; even a Mormon boy like me knows how to cross yourself correctly.)

Dragged before a wigged judge (and unless I miss my guess [the IMDb cast list is somewhat inadequate], that’s James Booth under the wig), Mason is given another 35 years for the attempt. What does he try to do? Take advantage of the fact that cops in the future don’t know how to frisk; he uses a portable holograph projector to make it look like he’s sitting on the can, while he crawls through the conveniently spacious air ducts.

Alas, it is all for naught, and again we have Mason waking out of cryo-sleep. His mother, father, and ex-wife are all dead; his daughter is now 72 years old. There’s an entire legend built around Roger Mason, legendary spoiler; the other prisoners want to help him, the bulls (you know, the police and prison guards — they all wear the same uniform) each want to be the one to take him down. So what does he do?

Guess.

I’m going to fast-forward here, since I’m not interested in giving a complete plot description, to the reason I rented this in the first place: Jeffrey Combs, who shows up as a sadistic police captain in the last twenty minutes, determined to be the one to put an end to the Spoiler’s career. Combs has apparently reached that point in his career where his stock characters are so well known that no director bothers to direct him anymore; they just say, “Come on set and be Evil Jeffrey Combs.” And he does — smirking, muttering slyly, taking almost erotic pleasure as his goons beat Mason. It’s only a little bit of Combs, but a little goes a long way.

In all, this is an uneven movie, but not exactly disappointing. They say that bad direction can ruin a good script, but good direction can’t salvage a bad one; however, in this case, it’s good direction on the part of director Luca Bercovici (credited as Cameron Von Daake) that keeps a faltering script by Michael Kalesniko from degenerating further; despite the obviously truncated budget (nowhere more visible than in the hovercar “crash” that we just plain don’t get to see), Bercovici uses impressive lighting, camera angles, visual symbolism, etc., to make this a little more interesting than your average sci-fi crank-em-out.

Alas, the story just doesn’t work, largely because we never do get to know Mason well, nor is Daniels the right person to tell the heartbreaking story of a man behind bars (though he’s far from being the worst of the second-string action “stars” — just think if Olivier Gruner had been cast). The elements of his “normal” life have already been left behind by the time the movie starts, and prisoner-to-prisoner reserve keeps him from opening up very far. It’s most of the way through the movie when he finally tells the story of his wrongful conviction, to a family that kindly took him in (a Christian family that isn’t played for laughs? Preposterous!), and it really doesn’t help things: Mason just happened to be in a convenience store when it was robbed, and the police assumed he had been the lookout. It doesn’t make him more sympathetic; it made me scream, “Idiot! You only got a one-year sentence! If you’d keep your ass planted in your cell a little longer, you’d be home with your kid!” Instead, his desperation to get back to little Gillian is what keeps making him break out, which keeps getting his cryo-sentence added to, driving a one-year incarceration to ridiculous lengths.

(Incidentally, I have it on good authority that the director is actually Jeff Burr of The Offspring, Pumpkinhead 2, Night of the Scarecrow, and a couple of Puppet Master sequels; he took credit under a pseudonym because he was removed from the project right after shooting, with absolutely no say in the final edit.)

Of course, I’ve never seen a cryo-prison movie that I thought made sense. The entire concept just doesn’t work for me; why keep a prisoner alive without any sort of a) benefit to be derived from him (popsicles can’t make license plates) or b) rehabilitation going on? Demolition Man is the only film that ever tried to get around b), but even that seemed like a half-assed attempt; do you really need to freeze a guy to teach him to knit?

In the final assessment, it’s a good attempt, which actually manages to rise above its resources, but since those resources are so pitiful, that really isn’t saying much. I can only wonder what the movie would have become with an adequate budget.

And does Mason ever make it home to his daughter? I can’t tell you that — it’d be a Spoiler! (Hah! I slay me!)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 5
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• dwarves: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
  • Jeffrey Combs is obviously a regular in the ST universe, with two recurring roles (Weyoun and Brunt the Ferengi, including one episode in which he was both) plus two other guest shots on DS9, and a guest role on Voyager
  • Meg Foster had a guest role on DS9
  • Sarah Freeman (credited here as Sarah Rayne — I think she played one of the little girls) had a guest shot on Voyager
  • John Putch (the doctor) was a journalist in Generations and showed up as crew members in two early TNG episodes