Quick question — what do you do when you’re flat-ass broke? Watch TV? Read a book? Take a walk down to the park? Daydream? Or maybe something truly pathetic, like sit in front of your computer screen and write at length about movies almost no one gives a damn about on your blog?
I’ll tell you what Nick Millard used to do when he had no money. He made movies. In the 60s and? early 70s his output consisted mainly of 16mm softcore “nudie” fare shot primarily in and around his then-hometown of San Francisco, but sometime around the middle part of the “me decade,” he got the idea to expand his horizons and shoot a few horror(ish) and action flicks on 35mm — then all was silent for a good few years until the SOV mini-craze of the mid-to-late-80s hit and the ever-enterprising Mr. Millard realized that he could make stuff for even less than the couple-thousand-or-so-bucks he had been spending on his previous “features” by just breaking out his commercial camcorder, getting some friends and family together, and shooting everything right in the confines of his own home! As a matter of fact, making movies like this wouldn’t even cost him a dime! What’s not to love about a set-up like that, I ask you?
Oh, sure, chances are the end result wouldn’t be anything too great, but Millard still had enough industry “connections” to get these things distributed, and unlike today’s “hey look what I made!” attention-seeking backyard Spielbergs polluting YouTube by the thousands, these flicks were actually available for rent at most video stores — in other words, people were willing to pay money to watch his zero-budgeters, an accomplishment that today’s amateur auteurs could frankly never even conceive of.
Okay, fair enough —the “quality” of Millard’s product insured that it required the type of hype-filled packaging necessary to oversell what was basically a home movie and effectively relied on hoodwinking people into thinking they were getting an actual, professionally-made horror film rather than, you know, something shot over an afternoon or two in a guy’s Monterey condo that starred his mother, but whatever — that’s just carrying on the old “carny” tradition of the great exploitation moviemakers like Herschell Gordon Lewis or the Mishkins, and if you’ve got a problem with that sort of thing you’re probably not the kind of person that reads my reviews in the first place.
And so, my friends, with that little bit of background info in place, let’s go back to that decidedly un-magical year of 1987, and take a look at a little something our guy Nick came up with called, depending on which video store you found it at and what title the management there purchased it under, either Criminally Insane 2 or Crazy Fat Ethel 2 —
In case you hadn’t guessed, this particular slice of entirely-accidental Millard (working here under his frequently-used pseudonym of Nick Philips) genius is a sequel to the closest thing he ever had to an actual hit, namely 1975′s Criminally Insane or Crazy Fat Ethel, which we’ve reviewed on these pages previously, but if you’ve never seen that film (and yes, that is an actual film), don’t worry — just over 20 minutes of this barely-sixty-minute movie is comprised of footage — presented in the form of “flashbacks,” of course — directly taken from the first one, so you won’t be too lost for too long. So, with just over a third of his “new” movie’s runtime taken up with stuff he’d already shot 12 years previously, what’s Millard got left for the other 4o minutes?
Well, as it turns out — not much. The wonderfully deadpan Priscilla Alden is back as plus-size homicidal maniac Ethel Janowski,? who’s been released from the funny farm, along with everyone else who hasn’t committed an infraction within the past ten years, due to state budget cutbacks and finds herself transferred to a halfway house out in the “real” world (actually it’s Millard’s condo) that’s run by — Millard’s mom. Not that the credits will tell you any of this, of course, because Nick just re-uses the opening titles from the first Criminally Insane flick which tells me that either the (very few) people “starring” in this one either didn’t get paid, or just got cash on the barrel-head at the end of the day (and I’m thinking it was one day, since everything here appears to have gone “in the can,” so to speak, after one take — hey, videotape’s expensive, ya know?) for their “work.”
Anyway, there are two other patients/residents at the halfway house (one of whom is played by Millard regular Albert Eskinazi), and there’s some orderly-type guy who runs the place while Nick’s mom is away and feeds his charges canned dog food, but Ethel kills ‘em all when they stand between her and her snack food. Then she kills poor old Mrs. Millard and takes over the house for herself. The end.
And that’s the beauty of Criminally Insane 2, my friends. This is a flick that got made for the purest and most noble reason of all — simply because Nick Millard could. The new material features no soundtrack music and the “flashback” scenes aren’t faded into and out of at all which leads me to believe this sucker was probably edited in the same place it was shot, namely right in Millard’s house, on two VCRs, and once he was done he packaged up the tape, sent it in to Z-grade distribution outlet Video City Productions, and the rest is history. 25 years later here we are, still talking about the most upfront and honest complete time-waster in the history of all cinema (not that Millard himself didn’t come awfully close to “winning” that “award” all over again with his next couple of efforts, Death Nurse and Death Nurse 2, but we’ll get to those over the course of the next several days).
Criminally Insane 2, against all odds, is actually available on DVD as part of the Nick Millard triple-bill from Shock-O-Rama that also features the original Criminally Insane as well as Satan’s Black Wedding. The disc has plenty of extras, but since none of them specifically relate to this movie I’m not going to spend any time dwelling on them. Suffice to say that it’s worth purchasing simply for this alone — even though the other two films are, by any and every stretch of the imagination, better than this one in all respects, they don’t achieve the almost zen-like quality of complete and utter nonexistence that Crazy Fat Ethel’s second “adventure” does. It’s complete and utter nothingness that plays out before our eyes. I honestly don’t think it took much more time to make than it does to watch. You might call that half-assed, or incompetent, or worthless, but I call it fucking poetic, man. This is a movie that has no actual reason to exist, and in fact can barely be said to actually exist? on its own at all given that nearly half of it is composed of “archival” material taken from another film, yet exist it does, and said existence is proof of — nothing other than its existence.
Godard, Jodoroworsky, Antonioni, Bergman, etc. spent their entire careers laboring to come up with something this deep. Nick Millard did it without even trying. How galling must that? be to every Euro-film art snob out there?
[Rumour] GF100 Benchmarks vs. Radeon HD 5870
Chinese website Pcinlife has leaked benchmarks of a GF100 based cardsimply titled "A Card" vs. the Radeon HD 5870. The two cards arecompared in Crysis Warhead, Dirt 2 and Unigine. Interestingly, theproducts are mentioned as GTX 360/380, but this may be because thesample tested is an engineering sample, with an A2 stepping GPU, beforethe cards were branded Geforce GTX 470/480.“Seeing Is Believing! 73-32-26″ reads the tagline for this Doris Wishman “classic,” and for once, the ad doesn’t lie. But after seeing star Chesty Morgan’s — ummm — “assets,” you’ll wish it did.
In 1974, veteran sexploitation director/producer Wishman — a true trailblazer for her time, who carved out a fairly successful career in the almost-entirely-male-dominated field of low-budget independent exploitation films, primarily with “nudie cuties” like “Nude on the Moon” and “Blaze Starr Goes Nudist,” but also ventured into the realms of the truly bizarre with flicks like “The Amazing Transplant” and, later, the must-see “shockumentary” feature “Let Me Die A Woman” decided that a new angle was needed to part the more lecherous members of the moviegoing public from their hard-earned dollars. And she certainly hit on a new angle here.
Enter Polish-born burlesque entertainer Chesty Morgan (real name Ilana Wilczkowsky, try saying that one three times in a row really fast — or even really slow — and billed in this film under yet another pseudonym, “Zsa Zsa”), whose strip act was, for reasons I honestly cannot discern, apparently quite popular (freak shows always are).
Apparently, Chesty wanted to break into the acting business in order to save up enough cash for a painfully obviously necessary breast reduction, and Wishman offered her not only a way in the door, but a star vehicle, to boot. Who could say no to that?
There was only one problem : Chesty can’t act. I mean, she really, well and truly, absolutely cannot act. The sound for this entire film was dubbed in later, but even still, it’s apparent that Ms. Morgan is literally being told exactly what to do at all times. She looks forlorn and confused for a moment before she does anything, and then whatever she does end up doing, be it walking across the room, picking up the phone, sitting down at the table, or even taking off her shirt, which she certainly had plenty of experience doing, she approaches it with visibly cautious, almost unnerving hesitation. Apparently she actually knew very little English (another actress’s voice was dubbed in over hers and since she’s got the majority of lines in the film it just made sense to dub all the voices for the whole picture — and hey, it’s cheaper to record without sound, to boot, so that never hurts), a fact that’s hysterically evident from start to finish. To make matters even more difficult, Chesty’s enormous endowments exerted so much strain on her back that she was apparently hopelessly hooked on pain killers — again, another fact that her strained attempts at “acting” make quite obvious.? And finally in the difficulty department, Wishman claims that Chesty was an absolute prima donna who, even when she understood what the fuck was going on, often intransigently refused to take direction and made it clear she hated what she was doing and was only in it for the paycheck. Oh, and she was apprently late to the set all the time, too.? Wishman has called her the most difficult actress she ever had to work with, which is really something when you consider that working with? untalented non-professionals with no experience and no clue was a staple of her career!
Russ Meyer, of course, is considered the king of big-breasted “B” movies, and rightly so, and given Chesty’s mind-numbing measurements, you’re probably wondering why she never appeared in one of King Russ’s pictures. It’s not like dubbing over a lady’s voice was anything new to R.M. — after all, he did it for both Kitten Natividad and Uschi Digard, among others. And it’s not like Russ required his ladies to be great actresses, either, although some of them actually did display old-school, almost vaudevillian-style comic ability. So why did Chesty never hook up with Russ?
Well, let’s be honest — even if the more buxom ladies aren’t your own particular cup of tea, the ladies in Russ’s films were almost invariably good-looking. Uschi, Kitten, Raven de la Croix, Haji — these were all attractive women, and would be considered so even without their obvious “special features.” Chesty — well — Chesty just isn’t. Period. She sports a bad platinum blond wig, has a glassed-over look in her eyes at all times, and as for her boobs — well,? the liner notes on the old Something Weird VHS box for this film say that her ponderous endowments “look more like tumors than tits,” and that’s absolutely right on. They’re almost painful to look at. They’ve got deep bluish/purplish veins running throughout and I swear to God you can even see some cellulite in there. They really are, well — freakish, sorry to be so blunt. Even the world’s biggest breast fetishists would more than likely find these monsters to be too damn much for their liking.
It’s just as well, then, that Wishman makes the wise move to eschew titillation (no pun intended) here, since it really wouldn’t be possible anyway, and instead play up Chesty’s downright bizarre appearance as a bludgeon used against the stupidity of the male of the species and our collective obsession with the size? womens’ breasts, a genuine genius move that makes this movie incredibly watchable even though gawking at Ms. Morgan’s mams by all rights should get extremely old extremely fast, and certainly would in the hands of a less shrewdly sensible director.
Which brings us, finally, to the story itself. Chesty plays Crystal, supposedly a “successful advertising executive,” who’s dating a guy named Larry (Richard Towers, best known as the dad in the original “Last House on the Left,” and who is according to this film’s dialogue “pushing 40,” even though it looks a lot? more like he’s pushing 60), who happens to be employed, unbeknownst, apparently, to Crystal,? as a mid-level organized crime hood. One day after a hit on an underworld rival, Larry comes across a little black book in the now-dead man’s belongings containing names, numbers, transactions, dates — and decides to use it to blackmail his own boss by calling him, pretending to be someone else, and saying he’s got all the dirt on him and wants X amount of cash dropped off at X location in exchange for the black book’s safe return.
Larry’s boss, whose face we never see but who has a visible tattoo (or is it a scar?) on one of his hands (another move of improvised-out-of-necessity genius on Wishman’s part is that she doesn’t show the character’s mouths that often, focusing instead on things like the mystery crime boss’s hand and Chesty’s — well, chest, in order to conceal how awful the dubbing is for this film) figures out who? is behind the blackmail real fast and has Larry taken out by a couple of his other goons.
The boss thinks that things will probably be too hot for Larry’s killers in town (wherever that “town”? may be — the film was apparently shot in Florida), and flies sends them packing to various parts of the country for a little “vacation” — one from which, little do they know, they’ll never return.
You see, through the lamest and most obvious plot device possible this side of the mad villain giving away his entire scheme to the captured hero just before said hero escapes, Crystal finds out exactly who Larry’s killers are, where they’ll be, and , well, what guy could resist her charms, right? Ummm —- right? She’s especially mad because Larry, it turns out, was planning to take the cash he made from his “one big last deal,” fly her off to paradise, marry her, and live happily ever after. Now she’s got revenge on her mind, and do you care to venture a guess as to what she’s going to use to kill the guys who bumped off her sweetheart? You got it, my friends — they don’t call this movie “Deadly Weapons” for nothing.
Cue in the stock footage of airplanes taking off and landing and various locales ( I have a theory that almost all of this film was actually shot in the same house — it’s painfully obvious that all the various dwellings for each of the characters are in fact the same place, and the scenes at the “hotel bar” and “hotel pool” are also readily identifiable as being shot at a house as well) as Chesty goes about the business of tracking down Larry’s murderers (one of whom is played by Harry Reems of “Deep Throat” and congressional porn hearings fame) by any means necessary (including going “undercover” as, shock of all shocks, a stripper — again, the “strip club” appearing to be little more than a pole and mirrors set up in the finished basement of the house where I thik almost all of this was made), luring them to their doom with her supposedly-irresistible flesh torpedoes, and suffocating them with them!
At this point I simply have to mention the sound effects, dubbed-in as they are, for this film. Whenever Chesty reveals her “deadly weapons,” the “unveiling” is accompanied by cheap fuzz guitar and the sound of crashing bowling pins, once again stating in the most obvious terms that the intention hear has nothing to do with titillation (again, no pun intended). Yes, these boobs are meant to be gawked at — face it, how could you not? — but not as objects of lust, but as deadly (and freakish) forces of nature!
The soundtrack features appropriately cheap and cheesy music, as well, with the title song “Hard-Selling Woman,” repeated over — and over — and over — and over — again. The film is only 75 minutes long and frankly moves along at a nice little clip, but I swear to God that somehow, in defiance of laws of temporal possibility, the theme tune plays for at least 90 minutes, even if the movie itself isn’t that long.
The big finale has Chesty taking on the mystery head honcho of the criminal underworld himself, only to find herself in for a rude and unexpected shock when she learns his true identity! Never mind that we’ve seen this guy’s hands in other scenes and neither one of them is marked, you’re not in this for plot consistency. Or rather, you shouldn’t be, and if you are, then you’re missing out on the real point of this film.
“Deadly Weapons” is a freak show with a feminist undercurrent throughout. Yes, the entire film is essentially nothing buy gratuitous nudity, and yes, Chesty’s body is displayed like a bearded lady or the Lobster Boy or any other circus sideshow attraction, but it’s done to make drooling idiots of the men, who can’t shut off their desire for the biggest boobs possible even when confronted with the fact that the object of said lust is not only hideously unattractive, but downright deadly. In short, yes, the woman in this movie has enormous tits — but she beats the guys by outsmarting them, even if she’s obviously dumber than a bag of hammers. Sure, that doesn’t paint a very nice picture of Ms. Morgan, but the picture it paints of us guys even uglier, since apparently we can’t stop thinking with the wrong head even when it’s about to lead us to our death.
I don’t know if Chesty ever got her breast reduction or not. Besides appearing in another Wishman film less than a year after his, “Double Agent 73,” in which she plays a spy with a hidden camera surgically implanted into one of her gazongas (there’s plenty of room).? Apparently she also appeared in Fellini’s “Casanova,” but her scene was cut from the film. That was 1976.? I hope she was able to get herself to a doctor sometime soon after that. It’s possible, since that was her last screen credit.
“Deadly Weapons” is a film whose rights traded hands several times back in the VHS days, even landing in an edition hosted by Joe Bob Briggs as part of his line of grindhouse and drive-in classics, before finding a permanent home at Something Weird Video in the 90s. It’s been released as a stand-alone “special edition,” featuring the original theatrical trailer, a 1950s “educational” short on “breast development,” a gallery of stills and advertising material for this and other Doris Wishman fare, and an archival short on making a plaster cast bust of burlesque legend Tempest Storm’s — ummm — bust.
Or better yet —
The kind folks at SWV have also seen fit to package “Deadly Weapons” and “Double Agent 73″ together into a two-disc set titled, appropriately if obviously enough, the “Chesty Morgan Double Feature.” It’s the same price as buying either one alone, so it’s self-evidently the way to go. “Deadly Weapons” is definitely the better of the two flicks, but both are worth a look — it’s just that you really only absolutely need to see this act played out once.
Okay, I use the term “absolutely need to” lightly, but really, if you’re any kind of B-movie fan and for some reason you haven’t seen this, you’re? missing out on a movie that for better, as well as for worse, you certainly won’t ever forget.
What’s a header?
I’m not going to tell you. Because you don’t want to know. Really. You don’t. But you do want to see this film. If you want to know what a header is. And maybe even if you don’t. And whether you do or don’t, you won’t really like the answer. Or maybe you will. If you’re sick. I mean really sick.
Confused yet? Good. Me too.
But truth be told, first-time director Archibald Flancranstin (with a name like that, it’s got to be real)’s 2006 shot-on-high-def video indie horror? “Header,” based on the story “Redneck Greek Tragedy” by cult horror author Edward Lee later adapted into comics form by Verotik, isn’t a very confusing film at all. It’s pretty straightforward. It’s also almost incomparably OTT, at times pretty amateurish, indisputably gross, and at times it’ll make you laugh in spite of yourself. Right after it makes you puke.
In other words, it’s a perfect addition to our little unofficial “countdown” of good movies to watch in the days leading up to Halloween that you stand a pretty good chance of never even having heard of, much less seen. But bring a strong stomach, because goddamn are you going to need it.
Let’s just say that the movie won’t keep you guessing about what a header is for very long. It’s the ultimate form (in this flick at least, hopefully not in reality) of hillbilly revenge, and you have to wonder if author Lee is right in the head (okay, pun intended) for even thinking of it. But I digress.
The action here takes place somewhere below tobacco road, where ATF agent-on-the-take Stewart Cummings (Jake Suffian) is struggling to move up the federal law enforcement ladder and getting nowhere and so has resorted to a not-lucrative-enough side business of running dope and hooch for local moonshiners so that he can afford the expensive medication needed by his girlfriend, Kathy (Melody Garren), who suffers from some undisclosed illness that prevents her from working or even, apparently, getting out of the house.
Somewhere in the nearby vicinity, meanwhile, small-time white trash car thief Travis Clyde Tuckton (Elliot V. Kotek) has just gotten out of prison and given that his mammy and pappy dies while he was in stir he’s got nowhere to go but to the home of his legless grandpappy, Jake Martin (Dick Mullaney), an old-time shoe- and boot-maker who lives in a crummy lean-to and dreams of the days when he could walk around and give out headers to his heart’s content.Being that he can’t, though, he’s about to pass on this disgusting little secret family tradition to his fresh-out-of-the-joint grandson and get his jollies by watching. And that’s all I’m saying about that.
The divergent paths of these characters are about to collide in ways that give the original story’s handle of “Redneck Greek Tragedy” the “most obvious title of the year” award, and will, as I mentioned before, leave you sickened and chuckling in equal turns, if not both at once on more than one occasion.
Like just about any of the movies we tackle on this blog, “Header” is not without its problems. The acting is uniformly amateurish, with some truly unbelievable quasi-southern accents, but at the same time that can be kind of charming, too, if you don’t mind watching actors you’ve never heard of ham it up (and look for both author Lee and another cult horror literary icon, Jack Ketchum, in brief cameos). And Mullaney is great fun as the twisted old grandpa. In addition, some of the gore effects are pretty cheap, although on the whole they’re not bad considering this whole thing only cost a couple hundred grand. A lot of the pseudo-”edgy” high-def video editing is more annoyingly jarring than it is stylish. And there’s nothing particularly unusual or inventive in Flancranstin’s choice of shots and camera angles.
Still, those are pretty small gripes for a film that sets out to do one thing above all else, that being shock and repulse the hell out of you and make you feel pretty damn guilty for laughing at some of the seriously horrific shit on display, and certainly succeeds in that regard hands-down.
If you like all your horror films to frighten you, then you can safely give “Header” a pass. But if, in lieu of scares, you’ll settle for jaw-dropping “what the fuck did I just see?”-ness, then you’ll no doubt find “Header” to be a pretty engrossing little flick. The story’s pretty solid and it’s pretty damn ballsy to think anyone even committed this thing to celluloi—errr, excuse me, video. And even if you don’t like it, you will remember it. That’s a cinch-lock guarantee. Those memories won’t necessarily be pleasant, but they will be unshakable, and there’s something to be said for that in and of itself.
After languishing in indie non-distribution hell for a few years during which time it got the occasional screening at a handful of horrorand genre?film festivals where it usually met with highly-qualified and sometimes even grudging praise, “Header” generated enough of a buzz in the horror underground to warrant being picked up by the always-reliable Synapse Films for DVD distribution. It’s a fairly solid little package that’s generally up to pretty high technical standards (although some of the dialogue is rather tough to pick up on in places since the “southern” accents have the effect of garbling what’s said and burying them behind the music and sound effects in the 5.1 mix doesn’t really help matters much) and? includes a thoroughly comprehensive series of behind-the-scenes interviews with most of the principal cast and crew. A commentary would have been nice, I suppose, but the interview segments cover more or less any “making-of”-type information you’d want to know.? All in all not an exhaustive selection of extras, then, but plenty good enough.
So that’s “Header.” Scary? No. But horrific?? Oh yes. Most definitely.
Whatever happened to the guy in the rubber suit?
Ever since “The Creature From The Black Lagoon,” the rubber? reptilian (usually) monster has been something of an on-again, off-again mainstay in the world of horror cinema, and while CGI has certainly made putting an actual human inside one of these slimy sweatboxes redundant at best, it’s fair to say that the era of this particular type of movie baddie was over long before today’s computer effects wizards went to work.? The purported “sophistication” of more modern audiences convinced filmmakers long ago that a dude in a goofy costume just didn’t have what it takes to scare people anymore, and while I can’t say for certain, it seems to your humble host that the 1990 horror-sci-fi semi-thriller “Syngenor” is quite probably the last stand of the rubber-bedecked bad guy, and for that reason alone, it’s worth a look.
First off, it should be stated that “Syngenor” is a sequel — of sorts. Actually, it’s not so much a “part two” as it is another movie featuring the exact same monsters as William (“Creature”) Malone’s 1981 ultra-low-budget (but nevertheless effective) “Scared To Death.” It’s not in the least bit necessary to know the first thing about the earlier? film, though, in order to fully comprehend this later offering, so I won’t go into detail about it here beyond saying it’s definitely worth a look,? and it’s a fair bet that most audiences (such as there were) that caught “Syngenor” during its ultra-brief theatrical run didn’t know the first thing about the previous Syngenor flick, either. Malone himself was not involved with the movie in any way—he had written a brief outline of a script which was later changed more or less wholesale by screenwriters Michael Carmody and Brent V. Friedman, and the directing duties were handled by George Elanjian, Jr., so this thing probably doesn’t even count as a “follow-up” to “Scared To Death” — like I said before, the best way to describe it would probably be to call it a movie that features the same monsters as another, earlier movie.
The plot is pretty simple stuff — a couple of low-life yuppie types pick up a couple of ladies of? “easy virtue” and take them back to the flashy corporate headquarters (actually L.A.’s disused Ambassador Hotel, infamous for being the site where Bobby Kennedy was assassinated) of Norton Cyberdyne, where the fellas serve as mid-level executives. Unbeknownst to the women, though (and to one of the yuppie scumbags himself), they’ve been “selected” to become “test subjects” for the ruthless killing efficiency of the Syngenors (shorthand for Synthesized Genetic Organism), a race of reptilian super-soldiers genetically engineered by the corporation to fight in the hostile climate of the Middle East (it’s worth noting that Gulf War I was going on at the time this film was released) The Syngenors don’t need any water, and survive by drinking the spinal fluid of their victims with their long lizard-tongues. They also reproduce asexually by laying a pod every 24 hours from which a new Syngenor hatches, fully-formed and ready to fight. So even if there are any casualties on the Syngenor side, they’re replaced rather quickly. Obviously, then, the Pentagon is pretty hot-to-trot to get these new slime-coated soldiers into action.
The in-on-the-plot yuppie, a greasy operator named Armbrewster (Charles Lucia) turns the Syngenors loose on his colleague and their—uhhhmmm—”dates,” but he doesn’t count on one of them getting loose from headquarters? and going straight to the home of their creator, a reclusive scientist named Ethan Valentine (Lewis Arquette, patriarch of the Hollywood Arquette clan) who has left Norton Cyberdyne and now works out of his garage on various mad-geneticist-type projects. Evidently, though, the Syngenor doesn’t harbor warm feelings for its surrogate “father,” and mauls him to pieces before laying a pod in his garage.
Unfortunately for her, Valentine’s live-in niece, Susan (Starr Andreeff, who bears something of a resemblance to a younger Mariska Hargitay), gets home from an evening out just shortly after her uncle’s murder, and the Syngenor attacks her in the family home. She manages to get away, though, and report what happened to a friend of her uncle’s who works as a police lieutenant. She doesn’t get a whole lot of help from the cops, though, who bury her report under pressure from Norton Cyberdyne’s CEO, Carter Brown (David Gale of “Re-Animator” fame who delivers an equally fun and OTT performance here as a corporate boss slowly losing his mind as his whole world comes crashing down around him—largely due to his own sleazy machinations).
She does, however, find help in the form of newspaper reporter Nick Carey (Mitchell Laurance), who went down to Norton Cyberdyne HQ in order to do an “executive of the year” puff-piece on Brown and ended up finding out about the previous night’s murder from a chatty secretary (played by Melanie Shatner — yes, you-know-who’s daughter) who also happens to be Brown’s niece.? The younger Brown also clues Carey into the fact that a leading scientist for the company quit a few weeks back, and when he can’t get in to see Brown to write his fluff story, he decides to follow his reporter’s instincts and go check out the home of said no-longer-employed-there scientist. That’s when he meets Susan, finds out what happened to her uncle, and the two of them go on the trail of the Syngenor mystery.
From there the pace does drag a bit as we get enmeshed in corporate scandal between Carter Brown, Armbrewster, who’s trying to depose him and move up the ranks, and a third untrustworthy executive , Paula Gorski (Riva Spier), who Brown has the hots for but who’s secretly playing both he and Armbrewster against each other for her own ends.? Things get a bit talky, in other words, and the action lags as our heroes (who quickly also become lovers) investigate all this company intrigue, but it never gets truly dull, and watching Gale (who really does look like John Kerry with a receding hairline) portray Brown’s gradual melt-down really is a lot of fun (I just wish I knew what the green serum he’s always injecting in his neck is—it’s never explained and, according to the commentary track on the DVD, this is intentional. Still, I’d be curious to know—that’s just the kind of guy I am).
The somewhat slower middle section is certainly worth it in the end, though, as the pod in Susan’s uncle’s garage hatches and terrorizes her and Nick at the house before they make their escape and plunge into a? final, protracted battle against the Syngenor army at company headquarters, with Brown going apeshit and killing everybody the evil reptiles don’t.? It’s? an absolute blast to watch, with plenty of bloodletting, pretty solid gore effects (from Robert and Dennis Skotak, who worked with James Cameron on “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), and an impressively high body count. In other words, don’t give up on this thing halfway through because the finale is everything you could hope for and then some.
“Syngenor” certainly isn’t a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s definitely plenty solid all things considered,? has a seriously great performance from Gale, and pays off the patient viewer, with interest, at the end. All in all, the era of the rubber-suited monster (and it’s a pretty damn good rubber-suited monster at that) probably couldn’t have asked for a better send-off.
“Syngenor” is available on DVD from Synapse Films in a terrific package that includes an impressively sharp 1.85:1? widescreen transfer, a newly-remastered 5.1 surround audio track, an extensive gallery of behind-the-scenes photos and publicity stills and artwork, three pretty interesting behind-the-scenes featurettes, and an audio commentary featuring actress Starr Andreeff, screenwriter Brent V. Friedman and producer Jack F. Murphy.? A really nice “special edition” that, for once, genuinely lives up to that name.
