Epicenter

Ever felt like you’ve seen a film before?

Usually that nagging sense of déjà vu is just a trick of the imagination. A product of inspiration-lite directors regurgitating the ideas of other, invariably better, movies.

But when Exploding Helicopter watched Epicenter (2000) that feeling of familiarity was no mental illusion. Most viewers really had seen this film before.

That’s because Epicenter is a bona fide Franken-movie. No joking, folks. It genuinely has been made from large chunks of other movies, which have then been clumsily stitched together with a few original scenes.

And like the mad doctor’s ghastly creation it’s ugly to look at, lumbers along slowly, and deserves to be put out of its misery.

The plot

Nick Constantine is the disgruntled employee of a Los Angeles technology company. But rather than do what the rest of us would – ie. skive around on Facebook all day and loiter in the staff kitchen moaning about Barry from Accounts – he instead steals their plans for a top secret weapon.

We know: it sounds fool proof. But just as Nasty Nick is about to flog the blueprints to a group of shady mafia types, he’s arrested by a saucy undercover FBI agent. D’oh.

It looks like our boy is heading straight for the slammer until another entirely believable development occurs: a devastating earthquake suddenly strikes LA, destroying buildings and roads, and knocking out all communications.

With the city in chaos, the cop and the criminal somehow find themselves being hunted by illegal arms dealers and rogue CIA agents who all want the super-weapon’s specs.

So: a secret weapon, FBI, mafia, massive earthquake, rogue CIA agents and arms dealers – and all this happens within the first 20 minutes. In case you were wondering, this is not a Ken Loach movie.

Who’s in this?

Traci Lords: used to going down for her work

In the role of the heroic FBI agent we have the *ahem* legendary Traci Lords. Now the name may not be immediately familiar, but she was once the highest paid, most in-demand actress in the film business.

Or, to be more exact, the pornographic film business.

It’s true. In the mid-Eighties Madame Lords was the lonely man’s masturbatory fantasy of choice, starring in such seedily titled fare as New Wave Hookers, Black Throat and the pun-tastic Beverly Hills Copulator.

Unfortunately, the Princess of Porn’s reign ended in infamy when her real age was discovered. Turns out our Traci was barely 18, meaning her entire oeuvre had been made whilst she was a minor.

The ensuing scandal threw the adult entertainment industry into crisis and saw Lords herself arrested – although by this point in her career our Traci was probably used to going down for her work.

Her co-star is martial arts nearly-man Gary Daniels. He plays the criminal computer nerd Lords must bring to justice.

The Brit-born kickboxer was a B-movie action star during the Nineties. But unlike messrs Seagal and Van Damme, he never made the jump to top tier fare.

The problem was that Daniels could only really do one thing: beat people up. His thespian abilities were as wooden as the bokken sticks he routinely used to batter opponents.

Gary Daniels: transformed from action star to computer
geek simply by wearing glasses

And let’s face it: when someone’s watching Big Steve’s movies and thinking ‘I just wish I had such range…’, you know they’re in trouble.

All of which makes his casting here rather puzzling. Gazza’s role as a nerdy techno boffin almost by definition requires him to not crack any heads together, so we’re left watching the acting chops of a man who can only do karate chops. It’s like casting Timothy Spall as the lead in a martial arts cage-fighting movie. What on earth were they thinking?

And be warned: while his fellow actors were no doubt relieved to not be getting kung fu kicked in the gonads, for the audience this is still a very painful experience indeed.

Déjà vu

Let’s cut to the chase (or more accurately, cut to someone else’s chase): Epicenter lifts entire scenes from other movies.

Some examples: early in the film, there’s a sequence where a car chases an out of control trolley car. You might enjoy it if you hadn’t previously watched Eddie Murphy’s risible action comedy Metro (1997), where it first appeared. You can even see Murphy’s gurning face inside the vehicle.

Once the earthquake hits, destruction is wrought upon Los Angeles in spectacular big-budget style. Unfortunately, Epicenter’s budget barely stretched to Traci’s upholstered bras, so what you see are clips from other movies.

Those three characters trapped inside a damaged building, where the elevator fails and crashes? Hello, Speed (1994). That impressive subway crash? Hmmm, looks like Money Train (1995) Even the footage of the earthquake ripping buildings apart is nicked from The Big One: The Great Los Angeles Earthquake (1990) (TV Movie).

Ironically for a film about an earthquake, the shakiest aspect is the actual veracity of what you’re seeing.

Exploding helicopter action

But here’s a surprise! The exploding helicopter action appears to actually be an original sequence.

Pursued by corrupt government agents who are aboard a helicopter, Lords and Daniels take shelter inside a quake-damaged building. While the gunmen on the whirlybird try to shoot down the doughty FBI agent (who, in fairness, presents two almost unmissable targets), Daniels sneaks onto the roof of the building.

Grabbing a piece of broken masonry, Daniels hauls if over the side of the roof. The rubble plunges downwards into the rotor blades of the chopper. The damaged aircraft flies into the side of the building and then falls to the ground, where it explodes.

Artistic merit

In keeping with the film’s shoddy tone, this is a lamentable chopper fireball. The explosion looks unrealistic and the fuselage doesn’t disintegrate nearly enough to satisfy ardent chopper fireball fans.

Exploding helicopter innovation

However, there is a refreshing simplicity to this whirlybird conflagration. We’ve seen helicopters destroyed in all sorts of convoluted ways, but never by someone just dropping a bloody big rock on it.

It’s unsophisticated, but oddly satisfying.

Tagline

‘Las Vegas is about to become beach front property.’ Ho, ho.

Review by: Jafo

T-Force

Roger Corman has just three rules for agreeing to produce a film.

One: deny any request for more money. Two: deny any request to make the film longer. And three: there must be a strip club scene or an exploding helicopter.

So, had T-Force (1994) been pitched to the legendary filmmaker, I’ve no doubt the king of schlock would have whipped out his cheque book immediately – and might even have been momentarily tempted to break his golden rules. For not only does T-Force have the necessary strip club scene, it’s also got an exploding helicopter.

Yes, it’s fair to say T-Force doesn’t really try to rewrite the rules of exploitation cinema. In fact, it scarcely even makes an effort to rewrite the films it’s so obviously, ahem, inspired by.

In the near future, the police have a special unit of kick-ass killer robots called the Terminal Force – or T-Force – who are used to deal with the most dangerous situations.

Sent in to a skyscraper to end a hostage situation (think Die Hard), the robots (think Terminator) end up killing some innocent civilians. With a public relations disaster on her hands, the Mayor (Erin Gray) orders the T-Force programme to be shut down. Unfortunately, the robots find out they’re about to have their batteries yanked, and through some crazy circuit board logic decide that the Mayor must die (think Blade Runner).

The only man standing in the way of all this cybernetic silliness is Jack Scalia, an old-school, robot-loathing cop (think I, Robot). He’s joined by ‘Adam’, the only tinny member of the T-Force who rejected the Mayor-murdering plan, thinking it clashed a bit with his programme to ‘protect and serve’ (think I, Robot. Again).

In the finest tradition of mis-matched buddy cop movies, Scalia and Adam team up and stop the rogue T-Force members before they whack the Mayor. That’s assuming, of course, they can stop irritating and arguing with each other for three consecutive minutes.

In typical PM Entertainment fashion, what follows is a riotously explosive 90 minutes of near non-stop action. Scalia is great as the grouchy, hard boiled, ‘shoot-first ask questions later’ cop, aghast at a future where the fun bits of his job – essentially, beating up punks and shooting people – are now done by robots.

Unlike Scalia though, we at EH headquarters aren’t fussed whether the real fun bits of films – exploding helicopters – are brought about by humans or cyborgs. Which is fortunate, as this is definitely what experts would term a robot-initiated chopper fireball.

And we don’t have to wait long for some ‘copter mayhem either, as the movie obligingly serves it up in the opening minutes. When the T-Force go in to deal with that initial, hostage-bothering skyscraper situation, the terrorists attempt to escape by fleeing to the roof where a helicopter is waiting to whisk them away.

They make it onboard, but the T-Force – having arrived on the job with enough weapons for a small war – fire a bazooka at the disappearing chopper. “Mission accomplished,” quips their leader as he surveys the whirlybird explosion.

Artistic merit

Unexceptional. The helicopter explodes, completely and thoroughly. No wreckage falls dramatically from the sky. Rotor blades don’t shear off and spectacularly spin away. There’s just a big, screen-filling explosion, and it’s gone.

Exploding helicopter innovation

None. The method of destruction certainly isn’t new, and we’ve seen robots destroy helicopters in Terminator 2.

Positives

The great Vernon Wells has a juicy little cameo as the terrorist who seizes control of the skyscraper at the beginning of the film.

A hulking, imposing figure, Wells has a nice line in flamboyant villainy, with memorable turns as a mohawked, S&M biker punk in Mad Max 2, and as the chain-mail vest wearing Bennett in Commando.

Here, somehow squeezed into a grey double-breasted suit, Big Vern looks rather ill at ease while trying to impersonate a suave criminal mastermind. Still, he retains the inimitable mad glint in his eye that’s the hallmark of his best work.

Negatives

Director Richard Pepin falls into the all too common trap of having the robots act like emotionless automatons. One of the reasons Blade Runner remains so eminently watchable is that Rutger Hauer and his cohorts get to act like real people, rather than flatly intoning their dialogue while maintaining a blank expression. If I wanted that from a movie, I’d just watch Keanu Reeves in The Matrix series over and over again.

Unfortunately, actors portraying the T-Force are required to give stilted performances, like lurching Frankenstein’s. Watching them act is almost as painful as having the old monster’s bolt shoved though your neck.

Favourite quote

“Get me six hostages into the chopper and then blow the rest to hell.”

Review by: Jafo

Still want more? Then check out a reviews by our buddies over at Comeuppance Reviews and DTV Connoisseur or have a listen to our podcast episode on the film. Listen via iTunes, Acast, Stitcher, Spotify or right here. 

The Sender

To crudely paraphrase Kipling: “If you can stay cool when everyone else is losing the plot, then you‘ll be one hell of a man.”

This piece of doggerel came to my mind while watching Michael Madsen in The Sender (1998), in which the slouching star meets a succession of preposterous disasters with a phlegmatic languidness that Kipling himself would have marvelled at.

Madsen plays Dallas Grayson, an army intelligence officer investigating the mysterious death of his father 30 years ago. But, as is so often the case in straight-to-DVD thrillers, his search for answers is about to uncover a far more incredible truth about his family.

Big Mike discovers that his father, an air force pilot, was shot down by aliens who are now in contact with his young daughter. It seems the wee scamp has something called the ‘Sender’ gene, which gives her unworldly powers and the ability to “open gateways to other worlds”.

Unfortunately, a secret Government unit dedicated to hunting extraterrestrials – led by grizzly R Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket) – has got wind of all this, and they snatch Madsen’s daughter so they can learn the source of her powers.

Half an hour in, the film – exhausted by such plot detail – simply turns into an extended chase sequence, as Madsen teams up with Angel (the friendly female alien his daughter had befriended) to rescue his wee bairn from the nefarious clutches of the Government.

But how’s Big Mike coping? Facing such a distressing sequence of events, surely even a man possessed of the stiffest of constitutions might find themselves reduced to a jibbering wreck?

Madsen, though, is no ordinary man. Having found out in quick succession that extraterrestrials exist, that they butchered his father, and that his daughter is now some kind of genetic freak who’s been kidnapped by the Government, he adopts the expression of someone just told they’re all out of bacon so he’ll have to have the cheeseburger.

The boy is made of stern stuff. Surprise, shock, anger, fear – emotions which might trouble lesser mortals – are unknown to the man. His only reaction to each increasingly fantastical development is to slightly furrow his brow or, if it’s really bad news, tilt his head.

Indeed, so impassive is Madsen before unfolding events, not even the actual event of his own death can garner an observable reaction.

Yes, you read that right – not even his own death. In one corker of a scene, Madsen is shot dead by R Lee Emry, only to be brought back to life shortly thereafter by Angel. And yet, even after having his life miraculously saved by an alien dressed as a Seventies disco dancer, Big Mike is unable to muster any sign of relief, nor even mild curiosity.

Where lesser men might be hysterically exclaiming: “Who are you?”, “Why aren’t I dead?”, or “Why are you dressed in tin foil and wearing a silver wig?“ Madsen just drolly gazes into the middle distance. Perhaps this sort of thing happens to him all the time.

Given such imperturbable implacability, you begin to wonder what it might take to wring an emotional response from Madsen? Sadly, we never get to find out. Because even when reunited with his supposedly dead father, our Mike still doesn’t bat an eyelid. Instead, he casually suggests to his long-missing dad that they go and get some ice cream. Now that really is cool.

Given this laidback approach to the drama of life, it’s no surprise to find Madsen remains equally nonplussed by a near fatal run-in with a couple of military helicopters.

Having teamed up with Angel, Mike is aboard her spacecraft when they are pursued by two heavily armed choppers. Badly damaged, the spacecraft is unable to return fire, so dodges and weaves amid skyscrapers to evade their pursuers.

Our heroes are in a tight spot – not that you’d know it from the way Madsen lounges around in the spacecraft’s cockpit. Fortunately, the helicopter pilots are two of the dumbest fools ever to have taken to the skies.

Given a clear shot of the spacecraft, one chopper pilot unleashes a volley of machine gunfire, only for the spacecraft to niftily dodge out the way. The bullets hit the other chopper which has obligingly come round the other side and boom! Scratch one helicopter.

The remaining whirlybird continues the pursuit, as Madsen and Angel fly under a bridge. Despite it being clearly observable and entirely avoidable, the pilot – perhaps overwhelmed by the number of safe options he could take to avoid an imminent death – chooses to fly straight into it. Kaboom. End of chase.
Artistic merit 

The sequence is rendered in low budget CGI, so wisely director Richard Pepin doesn’t linger on any of the explosions too long. Unfortunately, as a connoisseur of helicopter explosions, we like to linger over them. Overall, unsatisfying.

Number of exploding helicopters 

Two.

Exploding helicopter innovation 

No great innovation, unless we’re prepared to count idiocy, and the new level of dunderheaded stupidity we witness in this scene. The chopper crash into the bridge heralds a new nadir in failing to avoid the bleeding obvious.

Positives 

Michael Madsen is perhaps the greatest sunglasses actor of all time, rarely, if ever, appearing on-screen without a pair of Ray-Bans.

He takes them off, he puts them on – often several times within the same scene. Yes, it is hard to think how Madsen would function on-screen without this convenient prop.

And with Big Mike generally loathe to actually do any demonstrable ‘acting’, his sunglasses adjustments are about the only evidence that he hasn‘t just fallen asleep with his eyes open.

My favourite sunglasses moment in The Sender though, is one astonishing scene in which Madsen engages in a fist fight on the top of a moving lorry still wearing his Ray-Bans.

Despite taking numerous punches to the head, Mike’s sunglasses remain undamaged and perfectly balanced on his face.

While it may seem a little churlish in a film with aliens, kidnap, miraculous resurrections and reappearances, this was the most unrealistic moment in the entire film.

Negatives 

The former Mrs Cary Grant, Dyan Cannon, appears in the film as Michael Madsen’s double-crossing mother-in-law. Clearly she’s been no stranger to the plastic surgeon’s knife as her face looks like a melted marshmallow.

In an act of kindness, director Richard Pepin never shows her face in close-up. Either that, or he was worried that the close proximity of strong lighting would cause her face to drip completely off her skull.

Favourite quote 

I particularly liked this perplexing line: “All great discoveries are violent - like volcanoes.”

Review by: Jafo