Year: 1996
Runtime: 94min
Director: Peter Svatek
Starring: Roddy Piper, Billy Drago, Jayne Heitmeyer, Tyrone Benskin, Richard Raybourne
I’ve always had a fondness for wrestler turned thespian “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. This is a guy who stood toe-to-toe with the great Keith David in They Live, who played alongside legendary martial artist Sonny Chiba in Immortal Combat, and battled the horrors of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle knock-offs in the classic (?) Hell Comes to Frogtown. And you should absolutely go out and watch any one of those movies today. Any one of them. Just don’t get too excited and accidentally watch Sci-Fighters, a movie so bad they decided to trick me into watching it.
I’m not bitter. Well…maybe a little.
This Canadian schlock stars Roddy Piper and genre veteran and all around awesome villain Billy Drago. That was what caught my bad movie receptors first. Then the trailer promises a goofy direct-to-video science fiction action film with sets made of cardboard and hilariously oversized firearms. They convinced me this couldn’t be all bad. I mean, obviously it couldn’t be good, but doggone it, I had no interest in breaking open my Criterion Collection edition of Seven Samurai and how many Kurosawa films had “Rowdy” Roddy Piper been in anyway? Less than two, I think.
So I settled in for a silly bit of sci-fi fluff. It did not take long for my meager hopes and dreams to be melted like a bowl of ice cream in a volcano.
Sci-Fighters was never going to win awards for originality, but the ad-copy read halfway decently: Piper plays a hard-nose Earth cop (I have to add ‘Earth’ in that sentence because we actually start on the moon) who believes a serial rapist plaguing the city of Boston is an old enemy thought to be dead and he is determined to hunt him down all the while a dangerous new virus ravages the city (or at least two people). As we, the audience, learn in the first few minutes of this dreary flick, Billy Drago, the aforementioned old adversary, has just escaped the moon prison he was on due to a sudden case of death.
Why the hell they bring dead moon prisoners back to Earth instead of, you know, just shooting them into space, remains to be explained.
Drago ain’t dead, however, just a little sick, and once he escapes, he begins a spree of violent murders/sexual assaults that begins to spread this deadly new virus.
Nobody believes our hero cop that this is the work of a moon zombie infected with moon rabies, so he turns to a doctor played by Jayne Heitmeyer, who helpfully enough is an expert on infectious diseases and happens to be trying to put a lockdown on this virus thing. Without realizing that the entire human race is on the line, Piper must find and stop Drago.
Any of that sound watchable? If so, I will apologize at once. It was not my intent to make another human suffer through the criminal injustice that is Sci-Fighters.
See, like a little kid who idolizes their parents, director Peter Svatek attempts to dress up in their clothes, so that he’s just like the grownups. This analogy only works if Svatek’s parents were the movies Blade Runner and Alien, because he takes the plot of each and tries to mash them together. But like the little kid in his parent’s baggy attire, it is ultimately unconvincing.
This analogy is getting worse, isn’t it? Just like every minute of Sci-Fighters.
We have the necessary ecological disaster that has rendered the Earth fairly dystopian (you remember the great Eco-Night of 2009, when we had an ash-filled sky that left us in perpetual darkness for almost a hundred straight days), all very Blade Runner. And then we have the virus which…uh, is not a virus. Unless having little tentacled aliens burst from your innards is a virus. I am not a doctor but I am comfortable in my diagnosis that this is no freaking virus. It’s literally the chestbursters from Alien, shoehorned into this plodding drama with all the cleverness and subtlety of…well, freaking chestbursters from Alien!
And yes, I did say drama. This is not, as the trailer implied, an action movie. This is a police procedural with elements of science fiction thriller, only without the thrills.
Poor “Rowdy” Roddy Piper is forced to spew thick sections of dialog interspersed with goofy future-speak and he looks like he wants to break down and cry. I don’t blame him; if I were forced to recite half his nonsense in this movie, crying would be the only option. He is a performer best in his element when presented with a problem he can punch. This movie gives him nothing to punch. Not Billy Drago, who spends most of the flick wandering around and succumbing to moon rabies. Not even Richard Raybourne, the street hustler who Piper delights in torturing with an extra-heavy dose of police brutality. Neither villain poses any kind of threat, each being no more than a mild speedbump in the sluggish proceedings.
This movie leaves nothing for Piper to do except walk around and talk, two things he seems ill-suited to do with any regularity.
And that would be bad enough if the movie were in the hands of someone who knew how to direct a genre film, but Peter Svatek bumbles through this whole affair without a single interesting scene ever crossing our path. Plodding would be a fair way to describe this movie. The best scene, by far, is the opening one, which features Drago dueling another moon prisoner with moon chop saws. Everything is downhill from there.
Nothing feels especially sci-fi about the movie. I can’t tell if it’s just my copy of the film or a stylistic choice, but the whole mess is so dark and grungy it is often impossible to tell what’s happening. I get that it’s permanent night out in future Boston, but that doesn’t mean you need to light your production with a couple of nightlight bulbs and a candle.
A good B-movie should be a little self-aware and a bit silly. We can tell the sets are held together with string and the tears of young prop designers, and that’s okay. But Sci-Fighters is far too stoic and serious for its own good. This is a movie that insists its asinine plot involving moon rabies is worthy of serious examination, while also blithely imagining that we could possibly care about the one-dimensional characters who bombard us with trivial dialog.
Billy Drago’s only meaningful lines come in a brief scene stolen from the superior ending of Blade Runner, and this only has the unfortunate side-effect of reminding us that we aren’t watching that science fiction masterpiece.
I still love Roddy Piper. I always will. The man was a charming mountain of goofy fun.
There just isn’t an ounce of goofy fun to be had in this dreck.
