Director: Peter Sasdy
Writers: Stephen Schneck and Michael Winder
From: Sci-Fi Invasion
Five people with no memory awaken to find themselves in a wild west town where your place is determined by how many people you kill.
Open in a city where a voice over a loudspeaker is announcing a bombing and directing people to a rally point. A man is stopped in his car by officials.
Cut to a sandy landscape where Lewis, in blue coveralls, is just waking up. Martine and 3 men, dressed just like him, are also there asking what he can remember. He doesn’t remember anything and neither do they. All they know is what’s written on a little card in their pockets: their name, the number of people they killed, and how. Lewis looks at his card, tears it up, and throws it away.
They start walking and get ambushed by two rednecks with guns. The rednecks kill one of the group, steal everyone’s boots, and then rape Martine. Way to go, movie. You’ve lost me before the ten-minute mark. Can you win me back over?
Nope.
Cause the movie never engages with the subject seriously; it’s just there to demonstrate how awful this setting is. The movie is so ambivalent about its own portrayal of sexual assault that it never mentions the event again even though one of the big motivating factors for the characters is escaping sex slavery.
Oh yeah, it goes there too.
So I’ll just speed through this. The now quartet is found by Jack Palance, sheriff in these parts (although he didn’t intervene in the rape), and he takes them to the titular Blood City. Everyone here is a citizen or a slave. Newcomers, like the quartet, are kept in arrivals and then sold off to citizens to work for one year before earning their freedom. One citizen has called dibs on Martine.
Lewis isn’t willing to accept the situation so strikes off into town on his own. He’s almost killed, but ends up killing a citizen instead after the mysterious citizen Katherine tosses him a shotgun. Having killed a citizen, Lewis is now a citizen and learns the rules of the place: kill twenty people and no one can touch you.
Meanwhile, we keep cutting to scientists in a lab monitoring what’s happening in Blood City. The whole situation is a game designed to find ideal recruits to work as part of the government’s elite killer corps. Katherine is one of the scientists and she’s taken a fancy to Lewis, both romantically and as her pet project in the experiment.
Anyway, Lewis faces off against the guy who wants to claim Martine, kills him, but finds Martine’s vanished. Katherine took her away and handed her off to the rednecks from the beginning. Lewis goes to save her, Katherine sends reenforcements to help, and then Katherine herself shoots Martine. Since Lewis is angry about it, Katherine sets up Palance to kill him, but Lewis ultimately wins. Katherine then gives the only other surviving member of Lewis’ initial group a gun and Lewis is shot. The supervisor of the project, though, likes Lewis’ performance and brings him out of the game.
When Lewis wakes up, he sees the monitors with the game as well as the room next to his own where everyone he’d seen die in-game is walking around lobotomized. He overhears the supervisor’s plans for him and injects himself back into the game, seemingly killing himself in the real world. THE END.
If the movie hadn’t been cavalier with the subject of rape, I’d like it a lot more. Granted, it feels a bit like Westworld meets The Prisoner, but it’s interesting for that very mash-up. The characters are dropped in a surreal space that doesn’t make sense to them as their memories of their past lives try to intrude. Palance tells Lewis, “I never killed anyone,” and then has a flash of himself as a minister. Lewis keeps having flashbacks to himself as a track-and-field coach. I kept expecting those parts of the story to expand, for the gaps in this fake world to be pried open as the characters realize what’s going on.
Instead Lewis just wakes up and hears it all told to him. A little less interesting and the central twist of the piece is given away by cutting back to the scientists all the time. Cabin In the Woods did this, and I think to good effect, but was more up front about both aspects. The kids in the cabin are both experiencing the genre story while also starting to question the set-up, and that’s a big part of why that movie works.
One thing holding the piece back is the quality of the print. A lot of these movies are the VHS edits (tracking errors and all) so there’s plenty of pan-and-scan. This movie feels cropped beyond that, though. Like they zoomed in on the widescreen print and then zoomed in one step further. Not only do you get the normal pan-and-scan artifacts of people clearly being cut out of the shot, it’s exacerbated with the tops of people’s heads being sliced off by the framing.
I’m going to be honest, I’m a little bummed to not be able to recommend this movie. The premise is interesting if not executed as well as it could be. The acting is pretty solid—Jack Palance is clearly enjoying himself and there’s a lot of talent on-screen. When you open with an act of violence like sexual assault, though, and the extent of your reaction is a shrugging, “sucks to be you,” you’ve lost me.
Yes, these are exploitation films and I’m not going to bag on them for having extreme content. When you have it, though, you have to acknowledge that it’s there, not just sprinkle it across your movie for a bit of spice. Once you add a pinch of rape, nothing else is going to come through.
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