Mindwarp (1991) [copyright 1990]

... aka: Brain Slasher

... aka: Dream System

... aka: Mindwarp - Futuro virtuale (Mindwarp - Virtual Future)

... aka: Odisea en el tiempo (Odyssey in Time)

... aka: Pesadelo Futuro (Future Nightmare)

Directed by:

Steve Barnett

Fangoria magazine became such a big deal in the 80s that they decided to branch out into filmmaking by the end of the decade. The initial plan, and not necessarily a bad one in theory, was to produce one genre film per year. Seeing how covering gory horror and sci-fi flicks was still profitable at the time, the magazine was still selling, they were hosting a popular namesake genre convention and already had a fan base and name brand established, why not cut into a slice of the lucrative home video market while you're at it? Well, a few problems here. For starters, they should have tried this about five years earlier. Video stores were already stocked to capacity and tons of different labels were already competing for shelf space in the early 90s. A store may or may not buy a copy of an unknown movie from Fangoria Films (who had a partnership with Columbia Pictures at the time) but they're definitely going to buy 100 copies of a movie with big name stars from any number of major studio competitors. Additionally, while the types of splatter films Fangoria made their name on were not completely dead in 1990, their popularity was waning and these types of film wouldn't really be all that popular just a few years later.

Still, I'd say the primary problem here was expectations. If your company is comprised of genre aficionados who are supposed experts in the genre, people are going to expect these releases to be, ya know, actually good, or at the very least better than the usual low budget genre fodder. After all, if these people don't know their shit, then who does? Well, they pretty much fumbled the ball here and I think that was primarily because they were banking more on what K.N.B. Effects Group would bring to the table than who they were hiring to make these movies.

Tony Randel, whose previous foray into the genre was the incredibly dreary Hellbound: Hellraiser II, was tapped to direct their vampire film Children of the Night. Not surprisingly, the end result was an incredibly dreary movie that wasn't much fun to watch despite Karen Black giving it her best shot and attempts at humor that were childish at best. For Army (later re-titled Severed Ties), Fangoria was able to get a few known actors (like Oliver Reed) on board and then handed the reigns over to Damon Santostefano. Santostefano's only previous genre work as director was a couple of Scream Greats documentaries and shooting (very bad) "comic" linking footage for the horror shorts compilation FRIGHT SHOW (1985). Mindwarp (easily the best of these for what it's worth) was handed over to Steve Barnett, whose sole previous feature directorial credit was the comedy Hollywood Boulevard II (1989). Aside from that, he did a lot of post production work for Roger Corman.

I'm not saying the people above don't have any talent and I'm not saying the people above shouldn't have been given, or didn't somehow earn, an opportunity to prove what they could do. I'm just saying it probably wasn't a good idea for Fangoria to start a film production wing on the backs of unproven entities, especially since they were connected to pretty much every major horror talent who was working at the time. Not surprisingly, none of these films did all that well critically, commercially or with fans, and in house productions from Fangoria were no more after just three attempts. Instead, they decided to re-brand themselves as a distributor of other people's films.

It's 2037 (just 13 years from now folks... buckle up!) and the human race have mostly retreated from the real world and opted for a virtual one instead. Imagine never having to leave your home - or your BED even (except for nourishment and potty breaks) - and still be able to go anywhere you want, do whatever you want with whoever you want and be whatever you want. A company called Infinisynth has invented a technology that does just that and it's resulted in humans being able to completely retreat from reality and live in whatever fantasy world they choose. With a quick and easy outlet implant in your neck, you can now plug into a machine and live the exact life you want to live. No more jobs, no more interactions with pesky real people, no more responsibilities, no more having to feel bad feelings or negative thoughts, or be disappointed, or worry about friends or family or anything else. Your life is now entirely whatever you want it to be and the best part is that you don't even have to put any real effort into it.

Right away, this is a fascinating, still-timely premise that has parallels to our modern day online existence. Most of us now kind of do retreat from the real world on a daily basis, at least for part of the day. There are those that take it to extremes by essentially burying themselves in gaming worlds and small online communities, where we enjoy our anonymity and can claim to be whatever or whoever we want. It's certainly not to the extreme it is here but this isn't too far out of the realm of future possibilities at all, especially with all of the recent metaverse talk. I'd say a large chunk of the population probably would volunteer to live exactly like this if given the option.

Our protagonist, Judith Apple (Marta Alicia), is sick of the virtual world and wants to get outside and explore the real one. She finds her current life to be a prison and has been going without her virtual fix for awhile now. Her mother, Pamela (Mary Becker), is too far gone at this point. Using such technology for a constant deluded high would certainly have an effect on one's mental state over time. Judy is revolting against it. In an effort to wake her mother up, she manages to plug in and invade her virtual opera singer fantasy but accidentally kills her in the process. When she unplugs, she awakens to find her mother actually dead. An alarm sounds, two helmeted guards bust in and she's injected with a substance that knocks her out.

When Judy awakens she's buried in a very shallow grave in a desolate, icy, nightmarish post apocalyptic wasteland. Clawing her way out, she's first greeted by the sight of a corpses strewn on poles, and then stumbles into a sinkhole. A pair of nomads wearing gas masks and driving a refurbished tractor swing by long enough to throw her a rope and pull her out. Unfortunately, the nomads are also cannibalistic mutants, so they proceed to immediately tie her up and gag her; presumably to make her their next meal. Another wasteland dweller, this one decked out in patchwork animal rags and goggles, and armed with a crossbow, shoots the cannibals. Luckily for her, this time she gets Bruce Campbell in hero mode.

Campbell's character, Stover, is one of the only non-mutated humans still presiding in an area known as the Deadlands, which may be the only habitable above-ground area on Earth as far as we know. He's careful to wash off the toxic chemicals he comes into contact with, eats possum instead of human flesh and knows how to survive. Before destroying the Ozone layer and rendering Earth almost completely uninhabitable, the rich naturally retreated underground to safety where they've lived as "dreamers" hooked up to their Infinisynth machines, while the poor were left to scavenge, wither, mutate and / or die. Those adversely effected have turned into those cannibal mutants (called "crawlers"), who've built a civilization under some landfills, while Stover has bucked all the odds and managed to keep himself alive, and relatively normal, all of this time. His wife and family weren't so lucky. As Stover is teaching Judy how to survive in her harsh new home, the two fall in love.

Ambushed by the crawlers late one night, Stover and Judy are dragged into the bowels of their catacomb home. There they discover a makeshift society and a hierarchy of sorts with some of the mutants treated as captive slaves (used to dig out the tunnels and find "treasures" in the mountains of trash) and the others the sadistic guards, meant to whip the workers into action and / or punish those who disobey. Stover and Judy are separated, with him promptly shackled and put to work digging and she ending up in the clutches of the sadistic Cornelia (Elizabeth Kent), who hopes to put her to work as a breeder to help repopulate their society. Cornelia has a mute young female slave named Claude (Wendy Sandow) and is the mistress of the real ruler of this society: The Seer (Phantasm series star Angus Scrimm).

Things open promisingly and this is a fairly well-made film from a technical standpoint on a million dollar budget, but it loses its way once our heroes find themselves in the clutches of the crawlers. The film then treads water as our heroes plot their escape and doesn't pick up again until Scrimm enters the picture hatching incest plots, ripping out eyeballs with a Freddy-like clawed glove, presiding over human mulching rituals and drinking fresh blood out of a skull goblet. The underground trash heap production design is appropriate for the story but the relentless hideousness of the backdrop, dreary lighting and ugly, muddy color schemes make this look, and feel, miserable. And while that may be the desired effect, it's tedious all the same. The plot twists trotted out toward the end are mostly predictable and the more interesting plot points don't feel like they're being utilized to their full potential. That said, there is at least some interesting content and genuine ambition that went into this, which helps to make up for some of the flaws.

As expected, there's a heaping helping of gore on display; so much so that this originally had to be released in both R and unrated versions. We get dismemberment, hooks stuck in faces and backs, disembowelment / gut splatter, slashed throats, impalements, eye gougings, pulverized bodies, mutant leech-fish burrowing under skin, a mouth spraying a blood geyser and loads more. The effects are generally fun / good, though the low lighting makes it difficult to appreciate a lot of the mutant make-up jobs.

Campbell isn't as campy, cartoon-like and over-the-top as Evil Dead fans are accustomed to, but instead a bit more warm and human whenever they allow him to be. Leading lady Alicia (who has a much larger role than either Campbell or Scrimm despite being billed third) gives a surprisingly capable performance, especially considering this was one of her first film roles. Scrimm, Kent and Becker all do fine in support. No real Oscar turns here, but the quality of the acting was still better than expected.

There's still some conflicting information about this online, with some sources claiming it began filming in 1989 and others claiming it was 1990, and the release year given as both 1991 and 1992 depending on where you look. The credits copyright date is 1990 (the same year the male stars were promoting it at the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention) and, while it may have played at film festivals in late '91, it didn't see the general release light of day here until the following year. The U.S. VHS debut came in August 1992, at least two years after it was shot. The Blu-ray releases are from Mill Creek and Twilight Time.

★★1/2

Psy (1989)

... aka: Псы

... aka: Dogs

... aka: Stray Dogs

Directed by:

Dmitriy Svetozarov

The Aral Sea, located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, once covered over 26,000 square miles (making it the fourth largest inland body of water in the entire world), was home to over 1,000 small islands and was a thriving central point for all manner of agriculture, industry and fisheries... and then the Soviet government (led by Nikita Khrushchev) decided to pollute, pillage and tinker around with the ecosystem, resulting in one of the worst ecological disasters of all time. Thanks to the redirection of rivers, poorly-constructed irrigation dams, canals and reservoirs, industrialization, the introduction of invasive species from other parts of the world into the waters, careless dumping of deadly agents at bioweapons labs, wide scale pollution from canning and cotton factories and overuse of chemicals and fertilizers in and around the lake, the Aral Sea was doomed. Even Soviet scientists predicted a disaster from very early on, yet they still kept going anyway, which is depressingly similar to how the world at large is currently reacting to the dangers of manmade climate change.

Starting in the 1960s, the lake began to shrink at an alarmingly consistent rate. The once vast body of water then split into smaller lakes and those smaller lakes either shrunk considerably or completely dried up, leaving vast, dusty deserts behind. Now without a large enough volume of water to dilute all of the chemicals that had accumulated over the years, these toxins became concentrated in both the soil and remaining water. That in turn rendered much of the area unsuitable for farming or fishing, with farmers having degraded soil and fresh water shortages to contend with and fishermen dealing with an increase in H2O salinity, which killed off all of the fish, even driving some species to extinction.

The already-shrunk Aral Sea three years prior to the release of Psy vs. the Aral Sea today.

As for the humans who remained in the area through all of this, they've had numerous other problems to deal with other than having their livelihoods destroyed. They've also had to deal with poverty, the ensuing extreme weather conditions (hotter summers and colder winters) and a host of health problems caused by frequent dust storms spreading hazardous chemicals around. With the Aral having now receding miles away from the once-thriving villages that sprung up there during its industrial heyday, rusted out old ships and abandoned buildings and factories now blot the dry, desert terrain. Seeing how the area is basically one big, self-contained catastrophe in and of itself, can you imagine a better setting for a post-apocalyptic movie?

Mutilated, half-eaten corpses have been turning up in and around a near-vacant "dead city" out in the desert, but these attacks have been slowly creeping in toward more populated areas. In order to keep this menace at bay, a government agent organizes a top secret mission. He brings in former army civil engineer Ivan Maksimchuk (Yuriy Kuznetsov), who was directly involved in some of the projects that have wreaked havoc on the environment in the first place and now has something to prove to himself, and tasks him with putting together a team of six skilled hunters and outdoorsmen to go into the desert wasteland and exterminate what they believe to be the culprit: wolves. Strangely enough, this elusive pack of animals have somehow managed to escape previous attempts to snipe them from helicopters. They have the miraculous ability to vanish soon after they've been spotted.

The eventual team gathered is a ragtag, Dirty (half) Dozen-esque bunch of down-on-their-luck has-beens and eccentrics of varying degrees of sanity, though in this world that's probably about as good as one can hope for. Mikhail Zhigalov plays a never-named former DOSAAF (paramilitary sporting organization) champion and man of very few words who now works as a manager of a shooting range. Boris Grigoryevich (Sergey Kokovkin) is an impoverished, unemployed, poetry and philosophy-spouting drunk stuck at home with a nagging wife and constantly-crying baby. Hired to be their guide is ex con Egor Manikin (Aleksey Krychenkov), who used to live in the dead city back when it was a lively, thriving, seaside town and hopes to do some looting while he's in the area. Viktor Utekhin (Andrey Krasko) is a nihilistic, anti-Semitic, gung ho hunter, while Innokentii Fursov (Aleksandr Susnin), a military vet with previous animal extermination experience, will be their driver. The team load up their transport van with supplies and they're off.

The desert terrain proves to be a harsh and unforgiving place. The torturous heat is suffocating, available water is in extremely limited supply, the sands are filled with potentially deadly sinkholes caused by the disappearance of stabilizing ground water and there's nary a patch of lush green vegetation anywhere in sight. It's all sand, dust, heat and the occasional piece of rusted out car, boat or heap of half-buried scrap metal dotting the landscape. They finally make it to their "dead city" destination and, to their horror, discover there aren't really any rampaging wolves. Instead, the area has been overtaken by vicious feral dogs with a taste for human flesh. Like the now-severe environment, the once passive pups represent nature (deservedly) turning against man.

The few human interactions the group have are limited to a young marauder (Andrey Nikolaev) who ends up stealing their van, effectively stranding them there, and a couple who live in an abandoned lighthouse hauntingly sitting right in the middle of the desert where water should be. (Ironically, they're now forced to collect snow in the short winters to get them through the rest of the year.) The husband, Pakhtusov (Nikolay Ispolatov), is a hydrologist and convinced that man can some day find a way to restore the lost sea. At least he's telling himself that. The wife, Saira (Rajhan Ajtkozhanova), tosses on a monk-like robe and sneaks out every night to kill dogs as an act of revenge for them killing their one and only child. Hopelessness, insanity and death follow for all.

Conspicuously missing from most nature-runs-rampant and killer dog film lists (a Top 10 on Screen Rant has some worthy titles like White God, Cujo and Baxter yet leaves this one off in favor of obvious filler), this deserves to be much better known. Unlike most other films in this category, which are usually schlocky botched attempts at seriousness or intentionally played for laughs, this is dark, dirty, grimy, bloody, completely serious, multi-layered, well-made and frequently quite disturbing. With its unforgettably bleak atmosphere of actual anthropogenic decay, Svetozarov's film is a stark reminder of what effect man's devastation of the planet has on all lifeforms.

As a warning, dog lovers may have a difficult time stomaching all of the yelping, whimpering, whining and obvious fear / distress of the dogs in certain scenes, not to mention seeing the cast casually machine gunning down their canine co-stars. There's also the question of whether or not some of these dogs were actually harmed or even killed in the film, as they're seen limping, falling over, suddenly being jolted, etc. I suppose it's possible that squibs hidden under patches of fake fur could be attached to trained dogs and set to explode to provide some of the gunshot effects seen here, though we're never quite so sure just how they pulled some of this stuff off. In fact, the dog carnage is so convincing that I honestly don't fully believe the disclaimer in the end credits that claims no animals were harmed in the making of this.

The performances are all very strong, there's good use made of slow motion and the long-standing Russian rock band Mashina Vremeni ("Time Machine") provides an excellent, eerie score. Sadly, this has never been officially released here in the U.S., though there have been several DVD releases in Russia, though they're full-screen, could use a remaster and none come with English subtitles. However, fan-made subs exist and are easy to find online, along with the film itself.

★★★1/2