Radioactive Theatre: Cherry 2000

Another selection from the dead PA movie website. This time around it's the Melanie Griffith/Sam Treadwell vehicle, Cherry 2000 (1988). Enjoy!

Cast: David Andrews (Sam Treadwell), Melanie Griffith (E. Johnson), Tim Thomerson (Lester), Pamela Gidley (Cherry 2000)

Setting: 2017. A time when humanity has apparently become stupid and has forgotten how to manufacture certain high-tech equipment.

Violent Mutants Present: No

Plot: When Sam Treadwell’s robotic wife short-circuits, he journeys to lawless Zone Seven in search of the Robotic Graveyard. Assisted by a rough wasteland tracker, he seeks to find a new body for his beloved sex-toy, but a bandit leader has other plans for Cherry 2000’s personality chip.

Rating: 2 Nukes


With a title that sounds like a soft-core porn film, you can hardly watch Cherry 2000 expecting a great film. I first saw this film on Cinemax during my post-adolescent years and remembered it as being a somewhat entertaining film. Then again, I thought Hell Come to Frogtown was pretty good when I saw it in college (Warning: Watching certain films under chemical enhancement can color you perceptions of reality).

The film can be fun, especially if you go into it with no expectations (a trend which Hollywood seems to encourage). It’s hardly Mad Max, but keep an eye open for some familiar faces and learn to roll with the ridiculous.

The plot involves uptight, mid-management stooge Sam Treadwell (David Andrews), a man who loses his wife/sex-toy Cherry 2000 (Pamela Gidley) to an electrical accident involving a wet kitchen floor and some over-active hormones. When he learns he cannot get a new body to reinstall Cherry’s personality chip and “resurrect” his beloved robot, he journeys to the lawless zones in search of a replacement. Along the way, he teams up with a hard-as-nails tracker named E. Johnson (Melanie Griffith) and runs afoul of a wasteland despot named Lester (Tim Thomerson). I won’t ruin the ending, but I’m sure you can figure it out on your own.

If there’s any reason to rent this film, it’s Tim Thomerson. Many folks will recognize Thomerson from the Trancers series, Dollman, and about a hundred other B-movies. Thomerson can be hysterical as Lester. He rules his band of wasteland outlaws as a cross between a maniacal despot and a 1960’s sit-com dad. Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and white fedora, Lester entertains his troops and unwitting guests in a potluck barbecue setting. His hideout looks like post-apocalyptic swingers' resort. Thomerson is just too much fun to watch.

Griffith, while being baby-doll cute, is just not believable as the hardened wasteland tracker. Her breathy, little girl voice counteracts any of her attempts to get the audience to accept her as a tough and rowdy desert rat. Andrews’ role as Treadwell almost makes you think that the movie might have been better if another actor played the lovesick corporate pawn. Maybe Steve Guttenberg, perhaps? Two other actors in this film deserve brief recognition. The first is Brion James (Bladerunner, Steel Dawn) as another tracker who Treadwell attempts to recruit. James is always fun to watch. If I were ever going to make a movie involving wrestling, James would be on my A-list to play the film’s heavy. The second actor is…Lawrence Fishburne. Yes, Cherry 2000 is pre-Othello. Keep an eye out for Fishburne’s brief appearance. First one to spot him is Lord of the Wasteland for the night.

Cherry 2000 Pros:

1) E. Johnson’s Ford. They don’t make cars like that anymore. Even if you’re not a gear-head, you’ll still want one for yourself.
2) Tim Thomerson. Tim Thomerson. Tim Thomerson.

Cons:

1) As Joe Bob Briggs would say, “Gratuitous Rocket Launcher Fu”. Not only does every other bandit seem to have one, but they all went to the Imperial Stormtrooper Training Academy and Firing Range to learn how to aim them.
2) The dramatic crossing the river scene. We’re supposed to believe that she does this EVERY time she wants to cross the friggin’ river?

Radioactive Theatre: The Aftermath

I apologize for the quiescence this week. I’m going through one of my periods where I wish sleep was a choice rather than a biological need. Projects, plans, and general stuff to be done is accumulating like the snow that keeps falling on my little island home. I’ll try to do better next week.

One of the things on my “get it the hell done” list is to clean out all the pieces of obsolete technology that I’ve manage to accumulate over the last decade and a half. Most of this stuff is going straight to the local tech recycling place, but before I do so, I need to make sure that I’ve gotten all the files I might find a use for off those machines. That’s not so easy when you’re talking about transferring files off of a 12-year old bondi blue iMac onto a cobbled together PC. Talk about an epic adventure…

Despite the hassle, the transfer is now completed and I’ve discovered a vast gold mine of intellectual riches that I’d forgotten about. Most of the stuff is in a half-finished form and pretty rough to begin with, but there are some tiny diamonds amongst the stones. My never-completed post-apocalyptic website is one example.

Some years ago, I decided that I was going to embark on an odyssey through my local Mom & Pop video store’s PA movie collection, documenting the journey with reviews of the movies as I went—very similar to what I was doing with Gamma World inspirational media a few months ago. I’ve since found a handful of those reviews and I’ll be posting the better ones here. The titles are pretty obscure, but the reviews have a sense of humor I hope you’ll find amusing. So, as I go back to the teetering pile that is my in-box, let me leave you with a decade-plus old review of the 1982 film, The Aftermath.

The Aftermath (1982)

Cast: Steve Barkett (Newman), Lynne Margulies (Sarah), Sid Haig (Cutter), and Christopher Barkett (Christopher)

Setting: Recent Apocalypse. If we were lucky, it would have been before this film was made.

Violent Mutants Present: Yes

Plot: Three astronauts return to Earth to find it in ruins. A warlord named Cutter and his gang of bandits rules Los Angeles. When one of the astronauts shelters an escapee from Cutter’s camp, the bandits and survivors face off to see who will survive.

Rating: Toxic Waste

Every now and then in Hollywood, there comes along a man or woman with a vision. They have a dream to make a film, a film unlike anything Hollywood has seen. They pitch it to the studios, but the studios laugh at them and say that no one would want to see such a film. But the dream refuses to die. They decide to prove the studios wrong. Gathering their friends and family as cast and crew, hitting up Uncle Sal for a loan and a producer credit, and making sets and props out in the garage, they set out to create the film that they dreamed of. In the end they prove one thing; they prove that the studio was right—no one wants to see this film.

Aftermath (or The Aftermath depending on who you want to believe) is one of those films. Watching the opening credits, I was surprised that the production company wasn’t “Nepotism Pictures Limited.” I think the entire Barkett clan is involved in this picture in one form or another. That’s always a bad sign.

The plot falls into the classic PA trope “Astronauts Return To Find Earth in Apocalyptic Ruins” or ARTFEAR for short. Believe it or not, this can be a good genre. Just look at The Planet of the Apes. Aftermath is not one of the good ones though. At the start of the film, we find three astronauts returning to Earth from some long mission. When they fail to receive any radio traffic from old terra firma, they begin to get suspicious. During these early minutes of the film, keep an eye out for any scenes that involve shots of the pilot. He’s supposed to be at the helm of an advanced space ship, but instead it looks like he’s flying the ship from an empty closet.

The film just goes downhill from there. Steve Barkett wrote, did half the direction, and starred in this piece of radioactive slag. He is also the reason to rent this film. Get a bunch of your friends together, grab the beverage of choice, and make fun of Steve. His (and to be fair, everyone else’s) acting is wooden enough to outfit the Dutch Olympic Clog Dancing Team. He wanders through the film with his shirts open to the belly button, exposing a forest of chest hair and a bulky, beer-swilling torso. Imagine that your Dad decided to become an action-hero. That’s Steve.

Steve Barkett is also the “Caucasian Jackie Chan”. He does all his own stunts in this film. Of course, most of them involve him jumping over a jeep’s roll bar into the driver seat, or floundering around in the California surf. But, to give Steve credit, he does leap from one building to another…over a gaping two-foot chasm.

I had bigger hopes for this film at first. In the beginning, there is a special effects shot that reminded me of some of Tom Savini’s early work on the Dawn of the Dead. But I think they blew most of the special-effects budget on this one scene. Nothing else even resembles that shot again. My hopes were raised once again by some realistic looking radiation-fried corpses, but that was until the camera got the close up shot. Then, they looked like mannequins covered in gray Play-Doh.

This movie has so many strikes against it that it’s hard to point out all the bad things. One minor saving grace is the presence of Sid Haig. Audiences may recognize Sid from the countless appearances he’s logged on TV and B-movies over the years. Usually, Sid gets the stereotypical Biker or Psycho role. He plays the heavy in Aftermath; a vicious warlord named Cutter. Sid portrays Cutter as just slimy enough that we hate him, but given the choice between hanging around in his camp of cutthroats or moving into Barkett’s manor in the Hollywood Hills, I think I’d go with slimy.

Pros:
1) Steve is so easy to make fun of in this picture. Perfect for those seeking to parody their first film or give it the old MST3k treatment.
2) Oh. My. God. There is a scene in this film where Barkett’s character takes shelter from Cutter’s gang in a shack. In true Hollywood fashion, he breaks out a pane of glass in the door to shoot out of…despite the fact a pane right next to it IS ALREADY MISSING!

Cons:
1) Planet of the Bra-less Women. I know that this film was made in the early Eighties, but is the Aaron Spelling Jiggle Style of Film-Making really needed? The three women in this film all go without under-wire support.
2) “A planet where man evolved from paper-mache dinosaurs?” At one point, Barkett enters a museum. While exploring the place, he comes across “The Hall of Fossils.” Either these are dinosaurs made from clay and super-imposed on the screen, or the crew built three half-sized dinosaurs out of chicken wire and newspaper. It is hard to tell since the scene’s shot in the dark.
3) Now it’s in ruins, now it’s not. During the film, we keep seeing a model of ruined Los Angeles. They cut to this miniature every now and then to remind us that we’re still in The Aftermath. But, during other scenes, we catch glimpses of buildings in the background and they all look just fine.
4) Breaking of the Cardinal Rule of Narration. In order to avoid such think like character development and decent dialogue, Barkett is heard in narration throughout much of the film, often speaking in the past tense. We later learn that this is impossible. I won’t spoil it for you, but I’m sure you can figure out why this later becomes unrealistic.

Radioactive Theatre: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

It is amazing how a little bit of money can ruin a perfectly good apocalypse.

Just four years prior to the release of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, a little movie called Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior) set the standard for all post-apocalyptic movies with a budget of $2 million dollars (US). The movie went on to earn eleven times that amount at the box office in the US alone. It’s therefore no surprise that the sequel saw its budget inflated to three times its predecessor’s and had a whole lot more people interested in the success of the film. In Hollywood, that’s usually a recipe for a disaster and Thunderdome can’t quite escape that morass unscathed.

Before we get down to the nitty gritty, here’s the thumbnail recap:

Max, last seen standing alone on a desolate stretch of highway, is still wandering the wasteland. With the last of the V-8 Interceptors a smoldering ruin, Max has traded in horsepower for camel-power to haul his wreck of a truck across the desert. That is, until he’s cold-cocked by the landing gear of a Transavia PL-12 and finds his camels and vehicle heading off into the desert without him. Luckily, Max has replaced his dog with a monkey, who tosses Max his boots and bosun’s whistle—which will come in handy later. Everything’s better with monkeys.

Hot on the trail of his hijacked vehicle, Max makes his way to Bartertown, a sort of Los Vegas/Mos Eisley/flea market that represents the return of civilized life to the wasteland. When Max finds his camels up for sale, he makes a stink that attracts the attention of Bartertown’s head honcho, Tina Turner (Aunty Entity, really, but I think the movie is improved by pretending Tina, finding her singing career dead after the apocalypse, becomes a semi-benevolent despot). Aunty has a problem: a certain “George and Lennie” duo named Master-Blaster that effectively runs Bartertown via a stranglehold on the settlement’s methane supply (energy consumption and control being a recurring theme throughout the Mad Max series). If Max kills Blaster, he’ll, like a country-western song played backwards, get his weapons back, his truck back, his camels back, etc. Max takes the deal, showing exactly how far his morality has crumbled since his days as a police officer prior to civilization’s collapse.

Through an arranged conflict, Max finds himself in the Thunderdome, which is the film’s greatest contribution to Western culture so I need not elaborate. During the fight, Max discovers that Master, hulking brute that he is, is mentally disabled and has a child’s intellect. When Max refuses the kill Blaster, Aunty, sensing that her administration is about to have some uncomfortable questions lobbed at it, gets Maxgate swept under the rug by strapping him to a horse, planting an oversized Carnival head on him, and sending him out into the desert.

Normally, this would be a death sentence, but Max is discovered by the band of ridiculously-named, adolescent hunters-and-gatherers. The movie then picks up an aviation theme and runs with it, which is appropriate because this part of the plot almost causes the whole film to crash and burn.

It turns out that these kids were all survivors of a plane crash that occurred not long after the fall of civilization. Organized by the messianic figure of Captain Walker, a small group of adults and children fled the cities aboard a jet liner only to go down in the wasteland. The adults, probably as annoyed by the kids as I was, decide to abandon them to go find help. They wisely never come back for them, leaving the children to grow up, go all Blue Lagoon, and wait for Captain Walker to return to take them to “Tomorrow-morrow Land,” that magical place where steel-eyed airline pilots live in luxury with their Vegas showgirl wives.

The kids mistake Max for Walker in a most contrived plot development, but Max sets them straight quick after realizing he’s about six seconds away from wandering into Daddy Daycare territory. Some of the kids say “Screw you, old man,” and decide to head off to Bartertown, which they mistake for the Land of Pilots and Showgirls. Max, perhaps seeking redemption or just trying to avoid spending the rest of his life with these mouth-breathers, heads back to Bartertown to save the Kids Who Went. The Kids Who Stayed are thankfully never seen again.

It will surprise nobody to discover that the kids quickly find themselves in hot water (or at least warm pig shit) and Max has to rescue them. In the process, Max blows up Bartertown before escaping with the kids, a convict named Pig-Killer, and the previously mentioned Master, who, like so many of his race (see Yoda), is a mental genius yet unable to speak using coherent sentence structure.

A train-and-car chase erupts when Aunty sets off in pursuit of Max and her escaped brain trust. Luckily, Max runs into the same father-and-son team that stole his camels at the start of the movie and everybody but Max escapes in the airplane, leaving Max to face Aunty Entity –who chuckles and leaves. The film ends with the kids who left now established in the ruins of Sydney with a new civilization growing around them.

You’ve probably guessed that Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is not my favorite of the series. It is a film that doesn’t seem to know what it’s supposed to be about or who its audience is. Digging around a bit to get the behind the scene story makes it clear that Thunderdome was following a wildly spinning compass from the very start.

Thunderdome began life not as a Mad Max film, but instead about a group of children living in the wild without parental figures. When the screenwriters began tossing ideas of who might find these kids around, Max’s name dropped into the mix and the film was reworked as a Mad Max vehicle. And since Mad Max 2 had been a hot property, this film found American financing sniffing around it and offering up gobs of cash, which is why you get Tina Turner shoehorned into the largely Aussie cast. A bigger budget also calls for a wider audience, so the film was shot with a PG rating in mind.

On a tragic note, Byron Kennedy, producer of the first two Mad Max films and a friend of director George Miller, died in a helicopter crash prior to shooting. Miller lost interest in the project in the wake of Kennedy’s death and a co-director was hired to take some of the weight off his shoulders. This second director, George Ogilvie, handled most of direction so that Miller could concentrate on the action sequences.

To further burden the movie, the children actors are not especially memorable or gifted one. Many eyes glaze over once they show up in the film, which brings the movie to a screeching halt just as things get going. This, however, is not the strangest decision regarding actors in the film.

For years, I never could understand the relationship dynamic between the character played by Bruce Spence and Max. They had formed a partnership if not friendship during the events of Mad Max 2, but events in the film separated them by the end. I always assumed that the hijacking of Max’s truck at the start of the film was a random accident, as it must be hard to identify a robed figure sitting atop a buckboard while clinging precariously to the wing of a moving aircraft. I figured that it was this perceived betrayal that leaves Max and the pilot at odds near the climax of the film. But then, to my surprise, I learned that Bruce Spence is not playing the same character in both films.

The decision to have Spence play two pilots in the wasteland and do nothing to differentiate them other than change aircraft and give one character an actual name (which is never mentioned on screen) boggles the mind. You can’t blame poor Spence for the situation and one wonders if even he was informed that he was indeed playing another character before the film finished shooting. I think this is another sign of the film’s lack of specific direction.

I will give a hearty round of applause to Tina, however. She’s got charisma and presence, and she holds her own on the screen in a role that she appears to be having a lot of fun with.

Phew. I guess my issues with this one go deeper than I imagined. Now that I’ve vented them, let’s look at what there is to steal for a Gamma World campaign. There’s not a whole lot, but the stuff worth taking is all 100% pure cinematic beef.

Top of the list is Thunderdome, no questions asked. Whether as wasteland justice, Cryptic Alliance initiation, or an alternative to jugging, the apocalypse will forever remain incomplete without a Thunderdome or at least a similar form of public execution/sports entertainment. One of its ilk will be incorporated somehow into campaign.

Next is Bartertown itself. While the trend in later editions of Gamma World was to bump up the tech levels and baseline civilization development at the start of the game, I’m old school apocalypse and the idea of a grungy, rad counter clicking settlement with a bar and grill called the “Atomic Café” hits all my right buttons. There will be Bartertown, albeit under a different moniker. I’m on the fence about the pig shit power plants though. Maybe big honking mutant pigs instead…

Third and final thing to steal:

Cow F’ing Car: Don’t cruise the wasteland without it!

I was going to cover The Quiet Earth in a future installment of Radioactive Theatre, but some time has elapsed since I watched it for this series and my impressions of the film have grown a bit dim. Although an entertaining film, I’m not certain if I want to go back there again so soon just to cover it here. From what I remember, there is not a lot worth stealing for an outright Gamma World game. I may instead do a big budget Hollywood double feature next month and cover both The Road and The Book of Eli. I need to think on it.

Radioactive Theatre: The Blood of Heroes

To occasionally prove that the entertainment industry isn’t completely creatively bankrupt, someone proposes that the mixing of two or more genres into a never before seen mashup is precisely what today’s jaded audience is clamoring for. This can lead into strange territory. Some of these mixes look bizarre on paper—“science fiction plus haunted house” or” buddy comedy meets zombie movie”—yet the results (Alien, Shaun of the Dead) speak for themselves. Other mashups aren’t quite so successful—"Cop Rock", for instance—but at least somebody gave it a go.

Amongst the weird bedfellows these genre mashups have produced, none is quite as weird as our next installment of Radioactive Theatre, The Blood of Heroes. This film is the only entry in the genre of “post-apocalyptic sports drama,” although I suspect its inspirational pedigree can be traced to such fare as Rollerball or Knightriders. Whatever its creative font, it does seem to have more in common with something you hallucinated during a particularly nasty case of the flu than actual cinema. Luckily for us, this is not the case. It does exist and even features genre film favorite, “Root beer” Hauer.

Here is the obligatory spoiler warning, but I bet you can guess how it ends simply by knowing it’s a sport drama film. Continue to read at your own risk.

The thumbnail synopsis: In the years after Armageddon, mankind sorely misses football (of either variety) and decides to make do with what’s on hand. Being that this is after the apocalypse, what's on hand is an endless supply of dog skulls, spikes, and surplus sports padding. Thus "The Game" is born. Consisting of two teams trying to stick said dog skull on the other side’s spike, "The Game" is the only diversion available in a world so backward that full grown armoires are considered to be reasonable replacements for backpacks. "The Game" is popular from the Nine Cities—underground metropolises where the rich dine of Komodo dragon—to the outlying “dog towns” that apparently meet the apocalypse’s need for dead bamboo.

Against this evocative canvas we meet Sallow (Hauer), a disgraced professional “jugger” (or player of The Game--hate the Game, not the player, baby) that’s been banished to the dog towns for his youthful indiscretions with one of the nobles of the Nine Cities’ wife. He travels from town to town taking on the local teams with his assortment of bush league juggers (which include Vincent Philip D’Onofrio fresh off his success in Full Metal Jacket). In one of these towns lives Kidda (a young Joan Chen, seen here just before her move to the quiet town of Twin Peaks). Kidda dreams of being a professional jugger, living the high life as a “qwik” (the speedy bastard whose job it is to put the skull on spike) in the Nine Cities. When Sallow and his band come to Kidda’s town, she plays for the home team and brutally decimates Sallow’s qwik, ensuring a place on his team when they split town.

What follows is the usual sports montage of Kidda earning her place on Sallow’s team and watching them take on all comers in the dog towns of the post-apocalyptic future (which looks unsurprisingly like Australia—go figure). Eventually, Kidda and Young Gar (D’Onofrio) grow tired of playing in the bush league and convince Sallow to take the team to the Nine Cities so that they can prove their competitive worth and live the luxurious life of pro juggers. After some hemming and hawing, the team does just that—with predictable results (it is a sports drama after all).

The Blood of Heroes is not high cinema by any means. In fact, when you break it down into its component parts, it’s not even good cinema. The sports drama plot is a by-the-numbers story, one you’ve seen a hundred times before. The post-apocalyptic elements are limited to sandy backdrops, ragged clothing, and the usual rusty and battered props all such films are required to have. Nevertheless, the film somehow manages to become more than a sum of its parts, combining two so-so examples of genres to become an entertaining and somewhat guilty diversion. Hauer, D’Onofrio, and Chen bring workman-like performances to the material, which is better than most apocalyptic fare from this era can claim credit for having, but one can see nobody was mistaking this for capital-A “Art.”

The movie’s most mysterious legacy is that it has an odd effect on certain personalities. Some people, after watching this movie for the first, fifth, or five hundredth time, get the overwhelming urge to actually play “The Game” for real. What’s even more mysterious (and somewhat disturbing) is that these individuals find one another and form actual leagues. But it takes all types to make the world go ‘round, neh?

But since we’re not here to perform film criticism or pass judgment on people’s pastimes, let’s see what there is to steal from The Blood of Heroes for use in my inevitable Gamma World game, shall we?

The short answer is, unfortunately, “Not a lot.” The thrust of the movie concerns “The Game” and its associated rules, regulations, and emotional baggage—which is to be expected from a sports drama. I am a referee who likes games within my games, but “The Game” just doesn’t do it for me. If I’m going to cram a post-apocalyptic sport diversion into my game, I’m either going to Thunderdome/maze from Spacehunter route or bring back Aztec handball. Hyped-up football just isn’t my bag.

The subterranean Nine Cities has some charm, especially the fact that they seem to be located so deep under the earth that it’s considered de rigueur to catch a nap while waiting for the elevator to reach bottom. The strict class system of the cities is predictable, but always makes for good role-playing opportunities. The movie’s take on hotels after Armageddon is entertaining and good for campaign color, making it an interesting if not required tidbit to steal.

The Blood of Heroes simply doesn’t lend much of itself to my vision of Gamma World, but that’s largely due to the fact that it’s an example of sports drama at heart and not a post-apocalyptic one. The trappings all scream post-Armageddon, but the real meat of the tale has more in common with The Bad News Bears than Bartertown, making it less than ideal for my purposes. That doesn’t mean it can’t continue to serve as a guilty pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Next time on Radioactive Theatre: We’ll either get Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome out of the way or take a quick trip over to New Zealand to listen in on The Quiet Earth. Until then, here’s hoping your rad count stays low.