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
Pablum from the (bio)Lablum 