I Come in Peace (1990, Craig P. Baxley)

I Come in Peace is a Dolph Lundgren versus alien movie. It’s from the period before Lundgren went to acting classes but had gotten rid of his Swedish accent, which ends up working against the picture. The terrible one-liners might have some personality if Lundgren had some accented inflection. Or if he just lost the accent. But no. He’s monotone. He’s not unlikeable; he’s just monotone.

Brian Benben is his partner. Benben’s unlikeable but not incompetent. The bad guy–Peace doesn’t have Predator, Robocop, Terminator 1, maybe Trancers money, so the bad guy is just tall guy Matthias Hues. He’s got in opaque white contact lenses, and he grins in what someone thinks is maniacal. He’s unlikable and incompetent.

Peace has some ingredients for being a good sci-fi action camp, but it always messes them up. Lundgren without the accent, Hues in general, Benben. Then the supporting cast. First is Lundgren’s girlfriend, Betsy Brantley. She’s got too good of timing for the movie. Director Baxley likes to blow things up and shows his most enthusiasm when there are pyrotechnics going off. And he’s apparently competent enough with them to convince Lundgren, Benben, and Brantley they’re safe enough they don’t need stunt people for all the shots. So when Peace goes “boom,” the booms are impressively boomy. The scenes aren’t, you know, well-directed or even better directed, but the boom is impressive.

Baxley’s also particularly bad with things like headroom. And, what’s that other sort of important one… actors. He’s terrible with the actors. The best performance in the film is Sam Anderson. He’s got one scene. It’s the same lousy material, but Anderson does better with it than anyone else. Anderson’s the vice president of the yuppie gang in the movie—The Whiteboys. Peace is shot on location in Houston (which it doesn’t really emphasize until the third act set pieces, so it’s got more a Toronto vibe), and a better movie could’ve done something with a yuppie gang. The script’s from Jonathan Tydor and David Koepp; Koepp wanted more work in the future, so he went with a possibly Pychonian pseudonym Leonard Maas Jr. (cousin of Oedipa?); one of them definitely knew what worked in Robocop. Then there’s the alien thing.

Hues is an intergalactic drug dealer, come to Earth to harvest our endorphins. How do you get the best endorphins from humans? You o.d. them on heroin then suck out their brain juices. So it’s remarkably similar to Predator 2 at times. Peace is an entirely inconsequential bad sci-fi action movie from the era of bad sci-fi action movies. It’s a knock-off twice removed but still (academically) interesting.

Good guy alien Jay Bilas is trying to stop Hues, Houston is their battleground, Lundgren is the toughest cop in the city with a heart of gold and great taste in wine, of course, titans will collide. It’s so much more entertaining when you pretend the aliens are Battlefield Earth Psychlos (because they’re alien in their height and discount store Predator weapons). I Come in Peace: A Saga of the Year 1990; they wish.

Jim Haynie’s terrible as the police captain. Ditto David Ackroyd as the FBI suit (though Haynie’s worse). No one knew yet in 1990 to get actual good actors in supporting roles to legitimize a picture instead of getting good performances out of middling character actors. Or at least not Baxley.

Sherman Howard’s appropriately slimy as the lead “Whiteboy.”

For some reason, Michael J. Pollard is also in the movie.

Bad photography from Mark Irwin doesn’t help anything—especially not with Baxley’s wanting composition.

Peace is a laborious ninety minutes. Its lack of personality makes even its badness bland.

Michael Hayes (1997) s01e20 – Devotion

It’s an almost entirely middling episode with a great as always guest star performance from Joanna Gleason—she’s married to family values congressman, Jim Haynie, who’s schtupping Godly campaign worker Gina Philips—and they’re getting death threats because Haynie wasn’t pro-gun enough with the Republican party’s white supremacist base. The episode opens with David Caruso on a politics talk show opposite Haynie, who just rambles about the culture war, before we find out Caruso’s only on the show because he’s dating host Susanna Thompson.

The episode’s B plot is Thompson getting a job offer in Los Angeles and having to figure it out with Caruso whether or not they can keep going. They’ve only been dating a few weeks (at most) but it’s ostensible character development for Caruso so the show’s going to pretend Thompson might stick around. Who knows, maybe they’re floating second season possibilities by the network (though at this point “Hayes” was in summer burn-off so they were probably already not renewed). It’s hard not to see Thompson as a stand-in for Helen Slater, a similarly blonde, similarly upwardly mobile girlfriend Caruso had a while back. Maybe if she’d stuck around the story would have some heft to it. With Thompson, it’s fine, but it’s obviously filler.

The A plot is almost entirely Caruso and Rebecca Rigg, with Ruben Santiago-Hudson out of commission due to a foot injury—he at least shows up for a couple scenes throughout, whereas Peter Outerbridge and Hillary Danner are as forgotten as Caruso’s extended family. It’s such a weird show; they aimed low, they aimed high, they aimed desperate, and it turns out their best goal was just being middling. Get good guest stars, do a reasonably engaging investigation procedural (it’s inexplicable why Caruso and company—i.e. Caruso and Rigg, though Jodi Long gets a bunch to do presumably because it wasn’t in her guest star contract to shoot pilots or get to run away after the show didn’t get renewed). Both Rigg and Caruso have acting moments where you remember the show used to be better, used to require better acting moments. Not anymore.

As “Michael Hayes” heads towards its sunset, it’s nice it isn’t going out on its low point (there’s still time of course) but it’d almost be better if it had. Reminding of all its potential—and its occasional successes—doesn’t do it any good.

Sleepwalkers (1992, Mick Garris)

Sleepwalkers is a very peculiar motion picture. Director Garris never quite composes the shot right, even though he’s really close. Maybe he needs a wider frame or just to zoom out a bit. Instead it always looks like he’s shooting for the home video pan and scan. Rodney Charters’s photography is totally fine, unless they’re trying to do an insert then he never matches and there’s only so much he can do for the CGI morphing scenes.

Sleepwalkers opens with dictionary text setting it all up–Sleepwalkers are these monsters who suck on the life force of female virgins. Cats hate them. Then the action starts. Mark Hamill in a “really? why?” cameo. Then the opening titles. And cut to small-town Indiana–but that Southern California smalltown Indiana with the mountains and all–where teenager Brian Krause is sitting around shirtless and cutting himself.

But, oh, isn’t he kind of a dish. Because it’s weird. Sleepwalkers is always weird, but it actually starts ickier than it finishes because even though the film–mostly writer Stephen King–wants to be really explicit about Krause’s love affair with mother Alice Krige because it’s sensational… and then never does anything with the attention it brings. It’s just icky, then tedious, then annoying because Krige’s performance gets worse as the film goes along.

She’s Mama Monster, which means she stays at home while Krause goes to high school and finds a target. He’s going to feed on the target, then share with Krige. Sleepwalkers is a mix of bad thriller, not great gore, weird monster-based sci-fi, and the incest thing. If Garris and King weren’t making a terrible movie, who knows, maybe they’d have created a new sub-genre. Or at least not made this godawful thing.

But it’s really interesting to see how these disjointed pieces all fight together. Ingenue Mädchen Amick starts the film with Garris trying to make her seem like a slutty virgin. She’s at work at the movie theater, listening to fifties rock on her Walkman, dancing seductively as she sweeps up popcorn. It’s weird. And a little icky but nothing compared to Krause and Krige’s sex scenes; Sleepwalkers’s icky spectrum is long. So then Amick meets Krause and he’s kind of creepy then he’s not, even though the film thinks him reading his story about him and his mom to his English class is a good scene. It’s really bad. But kicks off a “is Krause going to be redeemed” subplot, which doesn’t really matter because Sleepwalkers ends up being a monster movie for most of its run time. Like people running from monsters.

Somehow I’ve missed the part how the first act is also about Krige and Krause torturing cats. Krige’s homebound because she’s deathly afraid of cats. Maybe. It’s unclear. But it sure seems like it. For such a long movie–Sleepwalkers is a long ninety minutes, not in a good way because Garris is astoundingly uninventive–King’s script doesn’t really do character development. Even as scenes often go on way too long. Like the ones with Cindy Pickett and Lyman Ward as Amick’s parents, in a tedious “is this a Ferris Bueller reference” or isn’t it subplot. Everything in Sleepwalkers is tedious.

Some really bad acting throughout. Including the King cameo. Krige’s terrible, though it’s hard to say how much of it is her fault. Though she did take the role. So. Krause kind of has an interesting arc but his performance starts bad, gets worse, gets better, gets worse than worse.

Ward and Pickett aren’t good. Pickett’s worse but only because she’s in it more. Ron Perlman’s really bad as a state trooper. Glenn Shadix is the pervert school teacher out to blackmail Krause. He’s really bad.

Amick makes it through. She’s never good, she’s never terrible, she’s occasionally sympathetic. She’s not trying. Amidst all the trying aspects of Sleepwalkers, Amick weathers the storm. She never seems like she’s in such a bad movie. Krause and Krige always do.

Interesting music from Nicholas Pike. Not terrible. Uses Enya well, even if it does make Sleepwalkers seem like a Cat People ’84 rip-off, eight years too late. Sleepwalkers is in a hurry to get to the monster stuff and then the monster stuff isn’t even cool. They can make objects disappear and change appearance–Krige and Krause–but their reflections in the mirror are of their monster forms. The monster forms are more gross and awkward than scary. And they’re annoying, because they’re not very good. Sleepwalkers is this mish-mash of tone, narrative distance, genre–and it never lets up. Sleepwalkers consistently makes unique and bad choices through its runtime. Including the ending. And it never does anything right. Garris and King don’t pull off a single thing.

It’s the type of movie where the monster woman in her hippie disguise trying to find a virgin to feed her son and lover shoots a car and it blows up. Sleepwalkers is either accidentally ambitious or wholly incompetent. If they’d pulled it off, the film would’ve been amazing. Instead, it’s astounding. And bewildering. And frequently icky bad.