This movie is memorable for two reasons: H.R. Giger did the cover art and two cast members from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are top-billed. If it weren't for these two facts, genre fans wouldn't even know of this movie. For the uninitiated, H.R. Giger is a famous Swiss artist who is responsible for designing the creatures in both the Alien and Species franchises. He has a very distinct visual style and this film used to leap off the video store shelves at you due to the box art. How Giger got involved remains a mystery but the producers scored when they managed to convince him to do the painting as it gave a somewhat mediocre film instant credibility across the world. As mentioned, the film also reunites Edwin Neal (Hitchhiker) and Marilyn Burns (Sally) from the original TCM as the main villain and his jaded cohort. This is the other major selling point and it is too bad that they are both so unrecognizable that you feel like anybody could have played their parts.

The movie is like a bizarre mixture of The Warriors, Escape From New York, Class of Nuke 'Em High, and Porky's as a group of frat boys venture into the downtown area of their city, which has become a bit of a no-man's land. It has been overrun by a number of anti-nuke activists who describe themselves as mutants. As frat boys are notorious for doing stupid things, they decide to kidnap one of the mutants as punishment for playing a joke on some other frat boys. Naturally, things go haywire when they run into Splatter (Neal), a crazed drug-addicted pseudo-cyborg with steel knives that come out of his hands a la Wolverine. After Splatter kills one of their "brothers", the kids find themselves trapped in the city and for whatever reason can't find their way out of the downtown core. Perhaps all the beer bongs and midnight circle jerks have dulled their sense of direction as it seems to me, it should not be that difficult to get out of the bad area of town. Seriously, we have a pretty bad area in Vancouver but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if you walk ten blocks in any given direction, you should be feeling more comfortable. At any rate, they eventually meet up with a girl named Julie (Alice Villarreal) who helps them with directions and they visit a new wave club before a final confrontation with Splatter and his cronies.

I hated this movie the first time I saw it in the 80's. Inexplicably, I didn't think it was that bad when I revisited it in the 90's. Now, I am back to my original opinion that this was lame, lame, lame. The kids were stock characters with the usual meathead Steve (Wade Reese), the hyper comic-relief guy Tommy (Barton Faulks), and a few interchangeable other guys. Faulks was the best part as he reminded me at times of a young Jim Carrey and stole every scene he was in. I would have liked to see these characters developed a little more as there was a weak attempt to show that they were getting past their negative view of the mutants but this was only touched upon. On the villain side, Neal seemed to enjoy playing the monotone Splatter but was so bulked up with armour that it made the character wooden and non-threatening like a low-rent Robocop in bad need of a lube job. The major disappointment to me was the appearance of Burns as she was not given much to do and you would never have known that this was the same girl who screamed her way out of the hell-house in 1974.

Director Ronald Moore tried to make a fun movie but it felt many times like things were just thrown in at the request of the producers. For example, in one scene a woman attempts to go down on Splatter only to be crushed to death by a piece of corrugated sheet metal when he is offended by her horror at his presumably deformed penis. There did not seem to be any reason whatsoever for this scene other than to show some boobs and then a little bit of blood. The movie had two distinct sections with the first being an 80's sex comedy and the latter being a post-apocalyptic chase. Moore seemed much more at home shooting the 80's party than the action scenes that the latter section required. I am not surprised that this is his one and only credit. The movie could have been a lot more interesting had he incorporated a few more locations, as it seemed as though the characters kept running into the same building. The villains should have been a lot more badass but most of them were those standard 80's thugs with mustaches who were good at falling down often. When the most entertaining parts of a movie are a cat getting shot and a live performance by a female-fronted 80's band while The Terminator is blatantly ripped-off, you know that you have a problem. (Josh Pasnak, 10/24/08)

Directed By: Ronald W. Moore.
Written By: Ronald W. Moore.

Starring: Edwin Neal, Gabriel Folse, Alice Villarreal, Marilyn Burns.