Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #98: Stryker (1983)

Leather! Boobs! Bullets!
Unlikable characters
Road Warrior? No.

The holy trinity of my interest is this:

SWORD AND SORCERY/HEAVY METAL/THE POST-APOCALYPTIC

Stryker is of the third. And it pains me to report that it's not very good. But if you're hankering for some Road Warrior-esque post-apocalyptic atmosphere, Stryker  might do right by you. Provided that you can supply beer and comrades.

So in this one you've got lots of leather, chains, ridiculous looking cars augmented with various impractical weaponry, desert marauders, and bow-wielding amazon biker chicks. What you don't have is any character worth giving a shit about. Each one annoys, each one lacks. You have a movie here in which none of the characters are terribly likable. Not because they're bad people or anything, but because they don't say enough or do enough to endear you to them. Every scene in Stryker is so cut and paste, so laughably obvious that almost no part of you is engaged. They're not even characters. There's nothing like a character arc anywhere in this movie. It's wonderful to behold.

Plot-wise, water's the precious thing everyone's fighting over, not gasoline. Road Warrior, the 1981 flick that was totally rad and sparked this whole screen genre was all about gasoline. Gasoline addiction is something we all know well in our modern age. Just the other day I stepped off of my modified Vespa (it has a mustard gas cannon), pushed back my spiked football helmet and slew a man with my combo sawed-off shotgun/steel trident crossbow. Because prices were so high, you know? I didn't even buy gas, I just wanted a cash for life ticket. I didn't win.

Water's a big deal too though, I guess. We'll worry about that someday I reckon. In Stryker it's serious business, and when the bad guy learns that a good guy has a secret mountain spring somewhere, well, look out! You've got a movie on your hands! Desert marauding is thirsty work on both sides, and Stryker, our lone wandering hero caught between them, has canteens to fill. Stryker's pretty aloof. So aloof that his motivations are completely absent. Self-preservation and greed don't even seem to be his modus operandi. He doesn't seem to care about much, but for whatever reason he seems to like these Jawa-like desert people he gives a bit of water to one time after they attack him savagely. Their tiny, shrill, dubbed voices only able to twitter one word at a time over and over until they're understood is certainly one of the most ridiculous and demeaning depictions of little people I've seen in a movie. I should be pc, sorry: they're mutants.

Unlikable as Stryker is, by the time the third act rolls around all of the other non-characters suddenly care about the guy. Our main heroine makes out with him before he deserts them in their time of need, and everybody pats him on the back as he walks away. Okay, sure.


As you'd expect from an exploitation film (this one hails from the Phillipines) it gets a bit rapey. Lone females inevitably get their shirts torn off by grimy raiders and roughed up a bit before the hero steps in. When the amazon biker chicks show up, you'd expect some ass-kicking to commence, but of course, they have to be reduced to being just women. As soon as the menfolk arrive, the fierce amazons mostly just run around helplessly, look for their male interests and, calling out their names, get shot to death in the middle of a firefight.

Yes please.

The movie's soundtrack is noticeably annoying and hilarious for it. It's very, very overplayed. Essentially it's just one lackluster and inappropriate melody, either synthesized or played by soft piano for those really tear-jerky and sensitive moments. As crappy as the movie is, the ending actually caught me off-guard, and I'll have to give it kudos for that. It wasn't a particularly good ending, it just kind of comes out of nowhere, and is bewildering enough to be a point of enjoyment. Okay movie, you just do your thing. I'll watch you.

So: Mostly worth it if you like bad movies. Certainly if you like bad post-apocalyptic movies.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #91: Six-String Samurai (1998)

Post-apocalyptic wasteland U.S.A, taken over by the Russians! Vegas is one of the only cities left standing, and if you want to make it anywhere, it'll have to be there. But it's tough to get in. Tougher to survive the walk. Our stoic hero is a rockabilly guitar-picker who's decided to make for his fame and fortune.

Packing little beyond his guitar, a torn umbrella to shield himself from the hot desert sun, and a fucking samurai sword to defend himself against Russian raiders, he sets out across the arid land. Oh, and Death is literally after him. Death and a bunch of his evil henchmen. This is a winning concept, but the ultimate result is a little on the underwhelming side. I found myself bored more than once, which usually means that I need a gang to watch the movie with, and some sake.

If you can set up that kind of situation, also be prepared for wretched acting, camp dialogue, breakout gypsy-punk sequences, and sword duels that sometimes manage to be pretty stylish.

So: Could have been the best movie ever, but doesn't get too far along that track.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #64: Survival of the Dead (2009)

Oh! Who put this neck here?

The original Dawn of the Dead is one of my favourite films of all time. I've got a lot of respect for Romero as a filmmaker. But I can't follow him into his newer works.

The problem with Romero films (and they get progressively worse for this as he gets older) is that they don't seem to be terribly well-reasoned. As time as peeled away, he seems less and less interested in making sense and more and more interested in being unfunny. He likes to throw things away so he can have a silly scene now and again, things like logic, physics, reasonable human behaviour, consistent character. You kind of need these for movies to be somewhat believable and worth investing in. Not always, but usually. Normally this tendency is forgivable in a comedy, but that is dependent on your comedy not SUCKING. Unfortunately, as GenXMike pointed out to me, Romero has the sense of humour of a 70 year old man. Probably because he's 70. Somehow, this works to give him the comedic sensibility of a 10 year old boy.

I can never quite accept just how often people refuse to shoot someone they know, either friend or family, that is clearly a zombie. Now, I know that I can't quite say just how a person would react in a horrific and zombie related crisis, but to my mind, if people were faced with a 100 percent lethal and highly contagious plague that caused the infected to attack and kill the uninfected with abandon, they would have little trouble pulling a trigger. Society has collapsed. You can't let an infected person to touch you or your loved ones. You also don't want one of your loved ones to devour another one of your loved ones. Everyone in this film has seen what a zombie will do. You'll pull the trigger.

But we get an island community that's torn down the middle and fighting amongst themselves as to whether or it's kosher to put down the zombies that are clearly trying to eat them. It's the reasonable "We should make sure they don't kill us." people vs. the crazy "They're human beings even if they're dead!" people. The big ethical question is whether or not we should kill all the zombies or teach them to eat something that isn't us. Again, it's a no-brainer. Put down dangerous infected corpses or spend all of our time keeping them penned up and fed with fresh animals. Sarcasm will here be shown in bold. Gee! We best do the latter! I just can't bear to see these lovable shambling horrors killed!

Oi. Onto the characters. They're pretty annoying. Particularly the tech-obsessed emo teenager wearing his headphones around his neck (in a zombie apocalypse) and surfing the web on his iPhone. I guess society hasn't entirely collapsed. The kid seems to be a crack shot with a pistol for some reason. Then there's the embarrassingly horny lesbian soldier that can't keep her hand out of her pants.

The film wastes most of its time on a ridiculous feud between two Irish families, and all drama is weightless and forced. There is also, sadly, a serious lack of zombie action. When the zombies are there, they're actually pretty non-threatening. Now, I tend to prefer slow moving zombies to the modern fast type, so it's not that. It's the fact that you can apparently just push a zombie around and kill them gingerly. When a zombie does get someone, it's played up for its comedy so lamely that Romero is effectively de-horrorising his own genre. He's making zombies a joke, and I can only assume it's out of some kind of spite. Spite not for fans, but for something I can't quite place. Spite for the film industry? I have the sneaking suspicion that he has spite for filmmaking in general. That he hates the money and the teeth-pulling, so he goofs around on screen. Or madness over the fact that there are a great many 'of the dead' films and he owns very few of them. In the special features he seems absolutely exasperated about filmmaking, and laments about what a slog through horrible conditions his film productions tend to be.

So: Poorly reasoned. Not funny. Excruciatingly boring. Reeks of Canadian mediocrity.