1. DIRECTOR’S FIRST FILM: Starting off with an easy one for you. Make it especially cool by choosing a director not particularly known for making psychotronic stuff.
This movie is ridiculous.
Jean-Charles Pommier is a French anthropologist played by Pierce Brosnan, who is Irish and yet attempts a French accent that makes him sound at times like Rocco Siffredi. He starts the movie off by dying, which is a bold choice, and ends up possessing the doctor who tried to save his life, Dr. Eileen Flax (Lesley-Anne Down). Both of these actors are TOO GOOD FOR THIS MOVIE™ which makes it even better because they’re slumming it and I demand that in all my movies.
I can explain why Brosnan is a French scientist as his role was meant for Gérard Depardieu.
As for Lesly Anne-Downe, she can speak for herself.
She told Fangoria that director John McTiernan — this was his first movie and while critics hated it, Arnold Schwarzenegger loved how tense the atmosphere was and hired him to direct Predator — “was exceptionally hostile toward me. He didn’t want me anywhere near that film. He wanted to go more Hitchcockian and have some blonde, Yankee whatever.” While she could concede that some of the movie was very good, she also said “…some of it was plainly fuckking stupid. I believe, had he gone for more of a supernatural or ghostly situation, and not so much “Here are these people who do this”, it would have been a better film. But making it all a reality didn’t work. He should have made it a straight-up supernatural horror film, and then it would have been good.” She also decided to go all in and state that McTiernan was having an affair with Anna-Maria Monticelli.
Anyways…
Dr. Flax has to relive the last week of Pommier’s life. After studying the religious beliefs and spiritual rituals of non-Western cultures, Pommier and his wife Niki (Anna Maria Monticelli) have settled down in Los Angeles where he plans on teaching at UCLA.
As soon as they get there, a gang of punks — movie punks at that — show up in a black van and pray at the shrine in his garage they made to a murderer. Far from being upset, Pommier grows obsessed with the gang, which he soon learns is all Einwetok. You know, demonic Inuit trickster gods that are kind of like vampires — they don’t show up in photographs — and are drawn to places where violence has ruined lives.
Oh man, these Nomads. They’re led by Number One, who is played by Adam Ant. There’s another that randomly shows up in your house and dances until you get upset and that’s Dancing Mary played by Mary Woronov. At this point, I realized that I have never wanted to be in a gang more. There’s also Razors (Frank Doubleday), Silver Ring (Josie Cotton, who sang “Johnny Are You Queer?”) and Ponytail (Hector Mercado), who gets launched off a roof by Pommier.
Now that Dr. Flax is the doctor, she gets to wake up in bed with his wife, which is a neat exploitation trick, and deal with the Nomads. They leave the city behind and one motorcycle follows them on a dirt road. Flax tells Niki to not look, no matter what, because Pommier’s dead spirit has become one of the gang and now he has a cool earring and steampunk goggles and what wife wants to see that?
You have to love a movie that has a tagline like “If you’ve never been frightened by anything, you’ll be frightened by this!” What balls! I mean, Frances Bay, Happy Gilmore‘s grandmother, shows up as a scary nun! Noir and horror queen Nina Foch (The Return of the Vampire, Cry of the Werewolf) is a real estate agent! That’s chilling, kids! Ohh! Read that as if my words were said by Count Floyd and try to comprehend a movie that goes for surrealistic punk rock vampires against Remington Steele and wonder, “Is this Italian?” Well, no. It’d be so much better if it were, but still, there’s something absolutely and wonderfully baffling about this movie.
It’s also the only movie I’ve seen scored by the team of Bill Conti and Ted Nugent.
Physical media forever but you can also find this on Tubi.
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