Perversions of Science S1, E5: Given the Heir

Starring:
Yancy Butler as Lisa Gerou
William McNamara as Nick Boyer
David Leisure as William Tilbrook
Paul Williams as Dr. Mueller
Joey Buttafuoco as Frankie Carelli (yes, THAT Joey Buttafuoco)
Mark Folger as Scientist #2
Doug Llewelyn as Calvin Patterson
Dennison Samaroo as Scientist #1
Marc Segal as Bank Guard
Maureen Teefy as Chrome

Written by: Mark Verheiden, based on the "Weird Science" comic books, by William M. Gaines

Directed by: Ramon Menendez

Well, I praised the show’s first episode, “Dream of Doom”, for managing to be effective despite the show’s obviously low budget. I have also berated a couple additional episodes for trying to be too ambitious--the effects work in this entire show is shoddy, at best, and there are very few things that can ruin anything quite like bad special effects. Especially given the fact this show takes place in the future, at a time when technology runs rampant and has progressed beyond our wildest dreams. I thought the episodes that focused more on story and writing would be the better ones.

“Given the Heir” has ruined that idea for me. Here we have an episode that, aside from a couple of quick time travel sequences, have very little in the way of special effects; and yet, it’s an absolutely terrible, interminable bore. I kept sitting back, waiting for some kind of twist ending, only to be left hanging--this just may be the worst episode yet.

Yancy Butler plays Lisa Gerou, a woman who has a thing for a man named Nick Boyer (William McNamara). It is unspecified exactly what Boyer does, but judging from the women that are constantly vying for his attention, he must be famous for something. In order to appease him, she researches his likes and interests, then uses technology to mold herself into the perfect being for him. There’s just one little problem: All this is happening in 2006...as we learn, Nick died ten years ago, way back in 1996. So how can she meet up with him after he’s been dead for so long? Easy: Time travel. It’s still not common technology at this point, but after exchanging some sexual favors with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, he agrees to build a time machine for her. I guess even distinguished prize winning men are as shallow as the rest of us!

We think there might be some sort of attachment that the two shared at some point, but unless I’m missing something, Lisa is actually just an obsessed fan from the future. In fact, Lisa Gerou isn’t even her real name: she got it from blending his mother’s first name, with his favorite “French-Canadian Scotch Whiskey”. Well that’s kind of creepy. But her attention-to-detail does pay off--armed with her future knowledge, she is able to withdraw $50,000 from his secretive second account, even going so far as to have her fingerprint altered to perfectly match the one that he used to safeguard that bank account.

Needless to say, everything goes terribly wrong for her. Her schemes to get his attention--taking a large sum of money out of someone’s account will do that--work fine for a short while, but after finding her to be inadequate in the sack, he quickly grows tired of her. He thinks she’s scheming with the account manager at his bank, so he has his bodyguard kidnap him. The bank manager, Mr. Tillgood, swears up and down that he had nothing to do with it, but poor Nick doesn’t believe him. So Tillgood steals the bodyguard’s gun and shoots him, the bullet going through the bodyguard and hitting Nick in the neck. Bingo, just like in “real life“, Nick ends up dying in 1996, and not even Lisa’s time travel can stop that. The end.

Based on a little research, the episode of “Weird Comics” that this was based off of had the same title, but focused on a man who had to put off marrying his wife because he’s so poor. After meeting a time traveling relative, he’s convinced that he can come into wealth by having her kill an ancestor, thus passing the money onto him. Even that idea is stupid, so I’m not surprised that, even with the major alterations to the story, this one falls quite flat, as well. There’s nothing really exciting that happens, nor any twist at the end that brings everything around full circle, so “Given the Heir” ends up being irreversibly dull.

EPISODE RATING: 3/10

FULL EPISODE

Body Melt (1993)

Director: Philip Brophy
Writer(s): Philip Brophy and Rod Bishop, based on short stories by Brophy.
Starring: Gerard Kennedy, Andrew Daddo, Ian Smith, and Regina Gaigalas

When I was a teenager obsessed with films and filmmaking as an art form, I immediately fell in love with the early works of Peter Jackson. His devilish filmography featured puppets doing drugs and filming porno movies (Meet the Feebles), a zombie epic with a finale featuring dozens of zombies, a lawnmower, and gallons upon gallons of blood (Dead/Alive, aka Braindead), and his notorious alien film, which shot only on weekends, over the course of four years (Bad Taste). It was obvious even then, amongst the blood-strewn setpieces and over-the-top slapstick gore, that this man had loads of talent, and his gleeful ignorance of the mainstream made me appreciate him even more. This was a guy doing his own thing on his own terms, and so it never really came as a shock to me that he eventually went on to become an A-lister in Hollywood (okay, the level of his success did come as a huge shock).

Obviously, I wasn’t the only one taking notes, because here we have Phillip Brophy’s Body Melt, a film that exists only to blast the viewer with slimy, gooey special effects in the same vein as the master of slapstick grue. Brophy clearly doesn’t have as much talent as Jackson, but he still proves himself able enough to mix some graphic, tongue-in-cheek bloodshed, with enough comical scenes that this manages to be both entertaining and stupid in equal measures.

There really isn’t much plot to speak of, and what there is serves merely as an excuse to throw as many gruesome effects on the screen as possible: Vimuville, a vitamin company, singles out the residents of Pebbles Court, Homesville, to test out their new vitamin powder. Only, it’s not really a vitamin at all, but rather a vicious poison that causes rapid body deterioration. The residents find the packets in their mailbox, and eagerly try it out, unaware of its lethal properties. A man who works for Vimuville has a change of heart and attempts to warn the Pebbles Court residents of the fatal consequences, but he succumbs to the “disease” right before his arrival. As he is the only “good guy” in the entire thing, this leaves the door open for the townsfolk to melt away, one by one!

The residents are being “watched” by evil Vimuville execs, who are eager to get the product widely released. Now, I don’t know how long a vitamin that causes an agonizing slow death would be able to stay on the market, but that’s an example of something you’re just not supposed to do while watching Body Melt: think. Seriously, everything that happens is so pointless that by just using your brain, you’ve already used more resources than the writers did at any point. But who cares, because it’s all in the name of demented fun! I mean, it’s so stupid that even the executives end up taking Vimuville, in pill form, and melting themselves—what sense does that make? If anyone should know the unlimited evil of Vimuville, you would think it would be the people that they pay to monitor the deaths of unsuspecting test subjects. Buy hey, we get to see a couple more people die, so who cares?

Honestly, I’m surprised at the hate this movie has received, with even fans of bad horror movies chastising it for its terribleness. I mean, the typical “B-movie” stereotypes apply: the acting is pretty bad, the writing is pretty bad, and the threadbare plot is pretty stupid, but I thought the effects were above-average (given the clearly limited budget), and it’s all just so bizarre that it’s impossible to get bored or shut it off. It also knows not to overstay its welcome, clocking in at just under 80 minutes, which is the perfect amount of time for its limited…intelligence. But I have seen far, far worse. Maybe it just caught me in a good mood, but I thought it was competently shot, and given the budgetary limitations, well-made. I am apparently in the minority, but if you like your horror gooey and graphic, and if you don’t mind that it doesn’t even attempt to take itself seriously, then you should at least give this a fair shot.

RECAP: Unfairly maligned by just about everyone, Body Melt is an incredibly stupid horror film with barely any plot to speak of, but it also achieves a level of stupidity that only talent can reach. I thought the gooey special effects were well-done, it was competently shot, and the acting was tolerable for an independent horror feature. Best of all, there’s a freewheeling craziness that I loved—it never takes itself seriously for even a second, and there’s some legitimate humor to be found. If you ever wondered what a David Cronenberg movie would look like if he suddenly lost 100 IQ points, this is it.

RATING: 6/10

TRAILER

Perversions of Science S1, E4: The Exile

Starring:
Jeffrey Combs as 50557
Ron Perlman as 40132
Christopher John Fields as Adolph Hitler
Brian Brophy as Investigator
Jeff Corey as The Judge
David Warner as Dr. Nordhoff
Oscar Dillon as Jailer
Craig Olsen as Lupita
Jae Woo Lee as Coopersmith
Maureen Teefy as Chrome

Written by: David J. Schow, based on the "Weird Science" comic books, by William M. Gaines

Directed by: William Malone

Before I dig in to the specifics of this episode, I must once again express shock at the level of talent that “Perversions of Science” was able to garner, despite being--without question, really--a terribly subpar television series. For example, in “The Exile”, we are treated to Jeffrey Combs, Ron Perlman, and David Warner (you might not recognize the last name, but you will recognize the face the instant you see it--that dude’s been in everything) in the main roles. Granted, Combs is kind of a B-rate actor, known mainly for his work in the Re-Animator series, with a couple of other horror films to his credit, but still, even for a show like this, that’s a pretty solid grab. And Ron Perlman might not have been the mainstream hotshot that he would eventually become (especially after Hellboy), but this show nabbed him during his strong rise--so while the rest of the show was pretty lackluster, credit must be given to casting, who, at least up until now, has been pretty on point.

Anyway, “The Exile” tries to cram a lot of ideas into not a lot of time. It all begins with Jeffrey Combs’ character, who we believe to be a doctor, trying to convince a woman that he has found a way to remove people of their inconsistencies--she’s unfortunately being told this as she’s tied up under one of his heavy machines. Essentially, he “burns away” their physical problems. Well, judging from the police raid that interrupts the discussion he’s having with his poor, defenseless subject, this whole thing isn’t entirely legal. And judging from further discussions that take place later in the episode, he doesn’t actually “cure” his subjects of anything: he merely kills them.

Following the police raid, he is captured and placed into prison, where he is given the prisoner code 50557. That’s where he meets Dr. Nordhoff (Warner), a scientist who seems to be obsessed with “rehabilitating” him, which as we can assume, means “curing” him enough to return to society. You see, murder in the future is a very rare offense, with many of those responsible for carrying out the crimes able to be “treated” and placed back into the normal world. But should rehabilitation fail, the subject is forced to be “exiled”, a punishment that is frequently mentioned, but kept a secret until the end.

As it turns out, 50557 is that rare killer, one that is proud of his accomplishments, and refuses to be “fixed”. Dr. Nordhoff tries electro-shock therapy, but that doesn’t work, and with his hearing with a judge just two days away, he is desperate to find something that works, lest he be “exiled”. Well, of course nothing works, and he is sent before the judge. And as can be expected, his laundry list of prior felonies and crimes, not the least of which is the murder of 41 people, can only be punishable by “exile”.

I won’t reveal what “exile” is, because that’s the whole point of the episode. But needless to say the finish isn’t anywhere near as revelatory as it thinks it is, or tries to be. Along the way, 50557 is coached by prisoner # 40132 (Perlman), a successfully rehabilitated murderer himself, who is waiting to be placed back into a society he is now ready for.

As with many of the episodes, the strengths here lie mainly in its acting: Combs seems only capable of overacting--I mean, he‘s pretty much built his entire career around it--but given this relatively low-grade material, his performance works. Meanwhile, Warner and Perlman are just reliably good. They don’t really go above and beyond in any way, but again, given the fairly-lame premise and writing, and sometimes painfully low budget, it’s better than what the material deserves.

After getting off to a strong start with “Dream of Doom”, it’s quickly becoming apparent why this show failed so quickly: the plots are very straightforward, and none of them really push the envelope the way HBO audiences of the late ‘90s were expecting them to. In other words, there’s very little sex or violence in any of these, with language being the only reason most of these even reached a TV-MA rating. “The Exile” is the perfect example of this, with some foul language, and some random (non-sexual) boobies at the beginning, all captured in an idea that’s only minorly fascinating.

A stray observation: At this point, I’m also starting to think just how stupid the “Chrome” intros are, with her constant barrage of double entendres and clearly-sexual movements. For an episode like “Boxed In”, it makes sense to have her introduce the segment, because that episode itself had a lot to do with sex. In episodes like this, however, she just seems tacked on in a desperate attempt to appeal to the late-night crowds that were watching HBO at the time--which, namely, were pretty much younger guys and creepy old men (and babysitting teenagers like me) who were just looking for something to appeal to their libidos. I get it--that was probably the point--but judging from this show’s mere 10-episode run, it didn’t work. And while it’s far from the only thing wrong with the show--it probably wouldn’t have lasted no matter what--it’s curious to me that they didn’t at least try to get rid of those random intros, or substitute them for something else. I guess they were trying to mold Chrome into the next Cryptkeeper, only to no avail.

EPISODE RATING: 3.5/10

FULL EPISODE

Bled White (2009)

Director: Jose Carlos Gomez
Writer(s): Jose Carlos Gomez
Starring: North Roberts, Matthew E. Prochazka, Colleen Irene Boag, and Bruce Spielbauer

I was perusing through the movie collection on hoopla (basically a Netflix for certain library systems) when the artwork for Bled White caught my eye. There was something about its minimalistic approach that appealed to me, featuring only a person with a bloody face lying in a bed of snow…it was really quite striking. Well, on a late-winter’s eve, I was terminally bored, and randomly picked this out of my “favorites” list to watch.

It doesn’t take long to realize that Bled White wears its inspirations on its sleeve. The most obvious example of this is in the way its story is told—the chronology jumps around, and the story is even broken down into titled vignettes, much in the same vein as Quentin Tarantino's seminal crime-caper Pulp Fiction. The main problem with that is that director Jose Carlos Gomez doesn’t have a hundredth of the talent that Tarantino has, and probably has even less than that fraction of the budget. This means the narratives are only loosely interwoven, and it makes it feel more like a gimmick rather than a necessary story device.

It all takes place in a future world where the dead have overrun the living. I suppose wisely, given the obvious budget restraints, the zombie attacks are few and far between, with Gomez instead filling the film with a countless shots of barren, snowy landscapes that are meant to evoke the mood of a lonely, solitary landscape. I surmise that if these shots were removed, the movie would only end up running somewhere around 60 minutes. Also working to pad the running time out even further are the random zombie attacks, which are usually poorly edited, and feature lots of close-ups of bloodied zombie faces as they move forward for the kill.  There's not much in here that works.

Ed and Matt are two guys who survive by robbing, killing, and looting. They trade some of the canned goods that they find (which seem to be the main currency of this future) for rent in a nearby motel, and survive off the rest. They also donate the lifeless bodies of their victims to Sam and Mary, a couple who still occupy the same house that they lived in with their son, Victor. Mary is desperate to get out of there, but Sam refuses, because their son is still in the house with them, chained in the upstairs attic and kept alive by the corpses Ed and Matt give to them.

At some point, they get into it with the owner of their motel, the wife of whom Matt has a thing for. Matt also keeps a zombie in his bathtub, though I’m pretty sure it’s never explained why, though of course it ends up moving the plot forward by attacking someone at one point. Meanwhile, Ed dreams of leaving the town and looking for Melissa, a woman on an old VHS tape that he just randomly found on a street, something he eventually heads out to do. I think this story marker is trying for irreverence, but it just comes off like a bad, half-baked idea that never goes anywhere, both literally, and figuratively.

There are also some other things that happen, but none of them are really worth getting into, and it all leads up to an overwhelmingly stupid ending that seems to suggest that our surviving heroes are only in for more of the same (a fate that we are gratefully spared). The worst part about it is that it just seems to come out of nowhere—I was expecting the final scene to be a lead-up to some kind of revelation, but it just stops and the credits started rolling.

The experience of watching Bled White is quite a drag—it’s pretty boring, amateurishly shot, and not even remotely shocking or surprising—but I do have to at least give it some credit in that it doesn’t try to be like every other zombie movie. Multiple angles of the zombie outbreak are explored, such as the family who keeps their zombified son in the attic because they don’t want to let him go. Granted, stories like that have been done many times before, but I can at least appreciate that they were trying to do something a little bit different with the overdone zombie subgenre. The makeup effects are what I could consider “standard”—just a lot of extras covered in fake skin and blood and growling up close at the camera—but gorehounds will be very disappointed, as there’s really not a lot of the red stuff.

The acting is fairly decent, for the most part, though I have to confess I was really impressed with North Roberts’ performance as Ed. He successfully walks the line between wannabe tough mob type, and sensitive father figure to Matt, his partner in crime, and does well with the range of emotions he has to display. The rest of the actors are pretty much what you would expect to find in a movie with such a small budget, though none of the performances are terrible.

As I said, I popped in Bled White because I was bored, and while it didn’t alleviate my boredom, it at least managed, for the most part, to take my mind off of how bored I was for about an hour and twenty minutes. And that has to count for something, right?

RECAP: It won’t fool anyone into thinking it’s anything other than a low-budget film, but Bled White does benefit from some good performances, and the ambitions of writer/director Jose Carlos Gomez, no matter how incapable he is of matching them. The film is broken down into several vignettes that jump back and forth in time, making it an ultra-low budget zombie version of Pulp Fiction, but with half the imagination and very little of the (writing) talent. It’s all pretty bland, with shots of a barren, snowy landscape taking up what feels like a quarter of the run-time, but it's also mercifully short, another little detail that works greatly in its favor.

RATING: 4/10

TRAILER

Perversions of Science S1, E3: Boxed In

Starring:
Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst as Emmy
Kevin Pollak as Pilot
Melanie Shatner as Dulcine
William Shatner as Admiral Kornfeld
Brian Phelps as Soldier
Mark Thompson as Soldier
Maureen Teefy as Chrome

Written by: Chris Miller & Kevin Rock, based on the "Weird Science" comic books, by William M. Gaines

Directed by: William Shatner


The first two episodes of “Perversions of Science” have really run the gamut in terms of quality. The first episode played to the show’s miniscule budget, and turned out to be a fantastic episode, while the second one was done in by a finale of bad special effects, and a rather sloppy excuse for a story. So, then, I suppose it’s pretty fitting that we would follow those up with an episode that varies wildly in quality just within its own 25-minute existence.

This was the only episode that I remembered bits of from my initial viewing, as a horny teenager in the late '90s babysitting some kids (yes, the children were long in bed by the time this came on). It's not that it's an overly memorable episode on its own, but I always liked it for its sheer stupidity; the way it blended late-night cable sexuality, with a completely over-the-top plotline (and some pretty awful effects) is what made it appeal to me back then.  Watching it now wasn't quite the fun experience it was the first time, but it's still an entertaining episode.

“Boxed In” starts off in space in what I would assume to be the faraway future, where Kevin Pollack is piloting a rickety spaceship in a war that he has been fighting for over two years. Traveling alone in the outer reaches of the galaxy with no one to talk to would be enough to drive any man insane, but thankfully Kevin (who has no name in the show, and is referred to only as “pilot” by his superior, and “dunglelips” by his girlfriend) has a helper: “Emmy”, an advanced sex-bot that he won in a card game. Conveniently, she’s also handy with tools (see the world they create, in which everything can be turned into a double-entendre?) and spends most of her time repairing the many things that Mr. Pollack is unable to.

She may only be a robot, but apparently even robots have needs; Emmy spends most of her time trying to seduce the pilot. But he’s an honest man of good integrity: he has a girlfriend back home who goes by the name Dulcine (a perfectly annoying Melanie Shatner), and he swore to her father (William Shatner, reprising his real-life role), who also happens to be his superior, that he would remain faithful (I guess even sleeping with robots counts as infidelity in the future). After two years of no booty, you can imagine how tough things get, but just when it seems like Emmy might finally break him, he receives word from the admiral that the war is over, and he can return home.

Home, in this case, is a bland futuristic set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. All he can think about is consummating his relationship with Dulcine, but after the admiral drops her off, Pilot Pollack learns that she has been fitted with an electronic chastity belt that sends an electronic shock to any unauthorized personnel that happens to touch it--and the pilot learns the hard way that, until they get married, he’s one of the unauthorized ones. Frustrated with the situation herself, Dulcine leaves--and the pilot decides that it’s time to put together a little friend that he happened to bring home with him…

That's right, it's Emmy, and she has not lost her hots for the pilot!  A few minutes into their passionate lovemaking, he receives a video call (remember, it’s the future!) from a horny Dulcine, who successfully found a way to remove the belt without killing herself; she announces that she will be returning to his house in ten minutes for some intimate time. The abrupt stop angers Emmy, who shuts herself down--conveniently fastening herself to him and refusing to get off. Will he manage to free himself from the rejected sexbot, or will he be discovered by the love of his life?

What works in this episode is that the show never takes itself too seriously--it knows this idea is fully ridiculous, but commits to it, giving it an overall lighthearted feel with some genuine chuckles thrown in for good measure. It doesn’t work all the time, but this is “Perversions of Science” at its most playful, proving that it can still be entertaining even when its frustratingly non-existent budget rears its ugly head--the scenes of the pilot desperately struggling with a robot torso attached to his crotch manages to be humorous, even though the robot is obviously a dummy. Much like the last one we saw, though, and like many others that await us, it all builds up to a terrible conclusion that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and feels tacked-on.

The area that “Perversions” hasn’t quite let me down in are the performances, and this one continues that streak. Kevin Pollack is just fine as the pilot, while Melanie Shatner plays the idiotic Dulcine with a level of ease that seems a little alarming. William Shatner is good as the admiral, but it’s because he’s in on the joke, the kind of role that he tends to excel in. Unfortunately, the production, with its pretty bland and unconvincing sets, as well as the finale, mar what still manages to be an above-average episode that blends laughs with sex the way late cable TV shows were always attempting to do, to appeal to teenagers always trying to sneak viewings of late night cable TV shows, as I was always attempting to do.

EPISODE RATING: 5.5/10

FULL EPISODE