A Rogue Cop Addicted To Anxiety, Coffee, And Chocolate: Split Second Is A Lost Bargain Genre Classic

As part of my weekly arrangement to explore the murky underworld of straight to DVD and bargain basement genre movies in the hope of finding a lost gem, I returned to a movie I had enjoyed greatly in my youth, Split Second (8/10*). I remember buying this in Woolworths as a two for £5 deal when I was in my early teens. My other choice was the ever so slightly underrated Super Mario Brothers (5.5/10).

Split Second is far better. In fact, I’d go so far as to label it one of those rare classics in its admittedly stagnant field. The near zero budget, genre-fixated B-Movie landscape is crowded with bloated wastes of time, total failures of imagination and self-important monuments to supposed (but non-existent) talent (Blood Gnome (0.5/10) being a good example), but Split Second is different. It’s the diamond in the rough. It feels like punching Jennifer Lopez in the face for every moment of torture she’s ever given us (a lot).

RIDICULOUS RAT-FLOODED WORLD WITH HOVERCRAFTS

The movie is set in 2008 (good start), and a rat infested London has been flooded from forty days and nights of continual rainfall- although there is little evidence of that to be seen, despite many lingering shots of a perfectly normal looking Thames. People seem to drive about in ludicrous jeeps or even more preposterous mini-hovercrafts. Everything is dark and the movie seems to be set in perpetual night. Chingrizzling blond meat hunk Rutger Hauer plays renegade cop Harley Stone, a paranoid ex-alcoholic who is as ridiculous as his name suggests. We are told he lives on a diet of anxiety, coffee, and chocolate after his partner was killed in front of him by some unseen killer. Stone then picked up his partner’s girlfriend (Kim Cattrall, definitely the pinnacle of her career), and spiralled out of control. And now the killer is back, cutting the hearts out of its victims and taking huge bites out of them as if it were Jennifer Aniston. But fear not, it isn’t.

HOWLING, RANTING, CHEWING

Best known for his unhinged performance in Blade Runner, Hauer howls and rants his way through this movie, chewing up the scenery with cheerful abandon but never letting on that he’s not to be taken seriously. He stomps down moody corridors in a truly ludicrous leather jacket and boots, brandishing a gun the size of a tree trunk and wearing sunglasses seemingly borrowed from Woody Harrelson’s character in Natural Born Killers. He smokes cigars, lives with pigeons, and is unnecessarily aggressive to everyone he meets, including his new and rather bookish partner, Dick Durkin. And all the while he’s pursuing a huge DNA-collecting rubber monster that may or may not be the devil but which, despite its oversized claws, is still able to write things like ‘I’m Back’ and ‘For You’ on things very neatly in human blood. Split Second is a movie that is clearly in thrall to the Tech Noir gloom of The Terminator and monster mash terror of films like Alien and Predator, but clearly doesn’t have the budget to scale those heights and approaches the whole business with all the stops pulled out and its eyes bugging out of its massive little skull. It’s a film all the stronger for its awareness of its limitations and its contentedness to realise its place in the movie landscape and play within that. It’s happy to be itself and doesn’t need the constant slow motion clanking explosions that have bored us all to tears in eye-blinding, brain-freezing spectacles like Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen and Terminator: Salvation. In fact, Split Second is far more enjoyable than either of those. Inside its own world, it’s a great success.

OVER THE TOP HURTLING AND DOG TALKING

Everything about this movie is gloriously over the top- from the clunking ridiculous synth-heavy soundtrack (clearly aping the template laid down by The Terminator), to the preposterously aggressive and furious pace with which anything happens in the movie. When we first see Hauer’s character he screamingly rattles his own cage, chases rats down an alleyway as a thumping heartbeat and some incredibly silly heavy breathing play over the action, and mutters gibberish abuse into the night. He fills half a cup up with sugar and half with coffee and then stirs it with a hapless colleague’s pen before opening a freeze box containing a half-eaten heart and muttering intensely at it and acting surprised. Anything that happens, even the tiniest detail, is delivered at a heightened and frenetic pace that reflects Stone’s pumped up and strung out state of mind, and there are enough geniusly daft moments to ensure you never get a chance to be bored. We witness Stone and Durkin hurtling sullenly down a corridor like moody teenagers in a rush muttering, ‘Get lost’ and ‘Get out of my way, you fuck’ to random passersby. At one point Stone talks seriously to a dog before calling it a ‘dickhead.’ What’s not to like?

GORDON RAMSAY

*In its own field, with its own limitations and the expectations we can reasonably have of it, this movie has nothing wrong with it- hence the high score I’d give it out of ten. It delivers on its promise. Obviously it’s not Citizen Kane, and it’s not aspiring to be anything it’s not- which is more than you can say for most of the pigs’ garbage we have to contend with at the megacineplex. Split Second has ludicrous lines and action, a half-decent plot, breakneck pacing, and a pleasing amount of gore also. You can really get a sense that they’ve got the most out of a limited budget, and the movie looks better than you might expect. A number of now famous British actors make appearances (Pete Postlethwaite, Alun Armstrong), and at one point even a Gordon Ramsay look-a-like shows his leathery face as some hapless data-entry clerk. Why it’s called Split Second is anyone’s guess, as it seems to be totally arbitrary as a title. The movie is closer in tone (and more successful) than either of the recent entries in the Terminator franchise, and begs the question that if a bargain basement straight to video movie like this can achieve that why couldn’t Jonathan Mostow or McG?

Insert your own spiteful comment.

Rubber Monster Hunting Regards

Biolab

Split Second IMDB entry here: www.imdb.com/title/tt0105459/

Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nycE98gSB0w

Tits, Blood, And Fish: Is Piranha 3D Trashy Fun Or Dangerous Cultural Menace?

There’s a whole lot of screaming and gnashing of teeth going on about this new Piranha 3D movie. One the one side you’ve got horny teenagers sweating into their school uniforms as they imagine scantily clad gargantuan 3D breasts poking nipples into their eyes and CGI fishy monsters slicing and tearing at the innocent flesh of defenceless hot girls. On the other hand you’ve got people who really ought to know better moaning and groaning about how this sort of cynical sensational tosh represents a step back for our society and pushes us ever closer to the cultural abyss. Some people have held it up as a symbol of the worst sort of common denominator brain-melting prick-teasing rubbish, and it probably is, but then again that sort of high class entertainment has been with human society and culture for centuries. For some reason I feel compelled to defend it slightly. Not that I’ve seen this movie yet, but it’s got to be better than your latest Janiston rom-com or your latest macho exploding borefest. In my mind those types of movie are both a lot more tedious and a lot more damaging to anyone who dares to let them into their brain via the eyes.

DELIBERATELY IMBECILIC FLUFF THAT WILL NOT TEAR THE FABRIC OF OUR SOCIETY APART (FURTHER)

Personally, I’m not offended by the idea of mean-spirited carnivorous fish guzzling the bikini-clad teenage girls of this world in the name of entertainment (as long as it’s only in the world of a movie), but I can fully understand that this sort of deliberately imbecilic fluff gets some people’s goat. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest it will damage the fabric of our society and twist impressionable minds into perverse aquatic slasher-killers or force more women into fishy sex slavery, but at the end of the day people will have their opinions. And people who will watch this movie and somehow let its non-gender non-politics and cheerily callous comic-book non-attitude to human life influence their nascent values must be so impressionable that any sort of images or messages embedded in their environment will no doubt exert a similarly powerful influence. Better cover their eyes. Frankly, I’d rather they thought that tits and fish were all the rage than became obsessed with cheating on their friends an chomping down heroin as they do in soap operas or aggressively aspiring after looking good naked whilst obsessively redesigning second homes and craving things. After all, these aren’t the kind of people that will be tearing the fabric of our society apart by widening the gap between rich and poor or causing recessions or anything like that. Pffft.

MAKING CHEERY EXCUSES

To get back to the movie- I’ve heard that it doesn’t skimp on the gore (or the flesh). The idea of mercilessly hungry fish guzzling and shredding innocently buxom swimmers with their right dimensions in multiple dimensions appeals to me for all the right and wrong reasons. I’ve seen Piranha 2: The Spawning (Director: James Cameron), which was a distinctly average rubber fish-a-thon, but this is a different kettle of piranhas altogether. As such, I’ll cheerily make my excuses to the wife and slip on my 3D glasses for a spot of mindless brain pummelling and eye-busting, blood-letting action. Why not join me?

 Carnivorous Regards

 Biolab

 P.S. Here’s a website that was recommended to me recently and which I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s hungover owls being grumpy. http://hungoverowls.tumblr.com/