Weirdhouse Cinema: Metalstorm

You know, we're just kind of chucking in elements from everything and you mix them all up into a cinema smoothie. But it's also a great example of something that I think a lot of listeners will will have experience with from their day to day jobs. This movie is a great example of the boss had an idea and now it's our job to make it work. Yes, to bring it to life. That the boss in this case, for the most part, is Charles Band. So yes, we are

returning to band Camp. I don't think we we necessarily intended to return to to the cinematic world of Charles Band so soon after transfers too, but then you ended up I mentioned it in the Transfers episode, and then

you ended up watching it. And here we are. Right last weekend, I was visiting with an old friend of mine who I hadn't seen in a long time, and we ended up going out to rent some discs and and one of the disks that was just glowing on the video store shelf was metal Storm The Destruction of Jaredson. It was fresh in my mind from your mention on the Transfers two episodes. I was like, well, we got to pick it up and we had a blast watching

this thing. Though I will say, for uh, for a really pretty dumb movie, a really enjoyable but dumb movie, this one definitely took me to go around to understand the plot. I look. I look forward to that. I I have seen it twice as well, but those viewings

are separated by by many years. Uh uh. Now, speaking of the disc, I will just go ahead and mention right now that this is the we both watch the Shout Factory Blu Ray edition that I think came out in pretty awesome, has some neat extras, and it's two discs. One disc is your typical Blu Ray two D format and any other one is in three D. For those of you who have the equipment to make three dimensional cinematic viewing possible. Yeah, well, what what would it require?

Would be red blue glasses even at home. I'm not sure. I'm not up enough on this technology. Um So I was afraid to even put it into my xbox. That was like, I don't know what will happened? Could be this devastating. But what like other three D movies, this movie has a lot of shots that don't make sense at all when you're watching it in two D. So characters just shoving things towards the camera here, you know, like here's a squirt of goop into the camera lens,

here's a here's a thing flying at you. It's very much like you know, uh, Friday thirteen, Part three in three D, where there will just be characters like holding out a mug towards the screen. Why yeah, I mean most of these moments you probably would. I mean, I don't know, it depends. I guess I went into it to this second viewing knowing it was filmed in three D. So the sequences where people are reaching at the screen like they really stand out, uh to stand out to me.

I don't know if if they would seem out of context to other viewers, But there is one terrific sequence in which a truck drives off into the distance and then we pan over to a bush that has like like or like you know this you know stick tree, and we we kind of zoom in on a branch that's pointing at the camera and we just linger there

for for several seconds. And of course, the whole reason is like, all right, we're shooting in three D. We gotta get something in there, get something pointing at the camera, something jutting at the audience so they can marvel at it and reach out and try to touch it. But this is actually three D theology within the world of the movie, because that tree has religious significance in the world of the waste land of Jared sin right, because he has the vision with the tree in it. It's

a tree that looks like that one. Yeah, yeah, we have we have some some there. There are. There are a lot of ideas in this film, many of them kind of you know, not completely formed and kind of ethereal. But there's definitely some Old testamentisticism, uh, you know, floating around somewhere in this picture. Yeah, it's the Old Testament

if it involves cyborgs in a crystal mask. Yes. Uh. Like a lot of the you know, sci fi mashup movies of the nineteen eighties, this one, I think is some of its strongest elements are sort of the meta of the movie rather than the movie itself. Like this movie has a killer poster, it has a killer trailer, will let you hear a little bit of and it also just I mean, you can't deny that name metal Storm the Destruction of Jared Sin, which is funny on

on many levels. I mean, number one, I love the combination of like the tech Viking vocabulary metal Storm, but then with the name Jerry Red's utterly mundane names. So I was trying to think variations on it, Like did they also try out Bone Crag, the Scaton of Cyber Jimmy, or blood Blizzard the Annihilation of Cody Tron. I don't know. I don't know, Jared sounds a little more regal than some names. I don't know. Maybe it makes me think of Jarreed, that the Goblin King or something. I don't know.

It has I don't know that there's this there's a certain bit of of of mystery to the name Jared, and then you combine it with sin s y n uh, you know, and then it takes on other worldly qualities. Okay, maybe we have different associations. I mean when I think Jared, I think kids I knew in Tennessee in the nineties. Oh well, I mean yeah, I mean I can also think of of people I've known with the name Jared. Um. They they're just regular people. They don't seem like space

goblin kings or anything. But I don't know. Yeah, I can't explain it. But maybe it's because ultimately the Jared's and the Jariff's that I know best are the cinematic ones. I was trying to think of a real good nineties Tennessee name, and I was coming up short. I don't know, it'd be like like Braden Tron or something, you know, Braden's I is noting with Jim Bob and it maybe Jim Bob is a solid nineties Tennessee name. Oh, I think you're thinking a little more by you than than

I am. I don't know. These were these were Tennessee names. Jim Bob Okay, no, no, no. The other thing. The other half of what's really amazing about the name though, so you got the tech Viking vocabulary, the name Jared. But also, this is a movie that promises the destruction of Jaredson and does not come close to delivering on

that promise. Jaredson escapes this movie completely intact. Yes, yeah, this is this is hilarious because it's not just us the viewers making this comment, like, apparently this was a concern of the screenwriter at the time, uh talking to uh the producer and Charles Band's father, Albert Band and saying, hey, this this title makes no sense. Can we call it the escape of Jaredson because that's what happens at the end, He's not destroyed. And our Band's like, no, that's that's

that's not a good title. The destruction of of Jaredson. I think they were trying to set up like Jaredson in Beverly Hills sequel. Yeah, Jaredson trilogy. I don't know if I if I'm being generous, I might say, well, maybe the idea is it's the destruction wrought by Jared Sin kind of like the desolation of Smog in the Hobbit trilogy. But I don't think anyone actually interpreted it that way. Um And as we'll get to the ending,

obviously towards the end of his episode. But the thing is, there are plenty of other films that managed to give their hero and actual victory over a villain while preserving said villain for a possible sequel. You know, I think of there's so many examples, you know, where at the end of the villain rises up. Oh they're not dead after all, hand comes reaching out of the lava or whatnot. Um, So, I don't know, it seems weird that he just completely escapes. Yeah,

he just zooms off into a world of triangles. Yeah, he will actually know what we were saying that. So maybe the sequel they were setting up as he comes to Earth and he you know, is around Beverly Hills or something. But the other option is Jaredson goes to flatland and it's an Edwin Abbott kind of thing. You have to figure out, like how Jaredson would fit in this world of two D shapes. Or maybe it's like he just transcends. He he becomes part of another dimension

and he just gets away. I don't know. Our heroes seem to think they can catch him in a sequel. Uh, but that sequel never came to be. Okay, elevator pitch on this movie, Jaredson, the tyrant of the Waste Land, wants to become even more tyrannical with the help of a large magic crystal, and it's up to Mad Max, Han Solo and Kelly Preston to stop him. Ah. This is an absolutely wonderful trailer. This is This is an amazing trailer. You should you make sure you check this out.

I'll include the trailer at the the blog post for this at Samuta music dot com. But this is the voice of God himself in this. This is Don Lafontaine, uh, who narrated so many wonderful movie trailers back in the day. In a future that grows ever closer, the fate of our earth will lie in the hands of one man, a solitary warrior of great courage. His name is Dot and he is called the Finder. His enemies will emerge

from the underworld to test his strength. Eurok, the Cyclopean warlord of the One Eyes, the Assassin Balls, Half Man, Half Machine, and Jared sin leader and mastermind of the Sinister Renegades Metal Store the destruction of Jared sin in three D. I would also say this movie is very well suited for a clip show style trailer because it has a lot of great elements in it that are only in the loosest possible way strung together by plot logic. It's mostly just how can we fit together these set

piece ideas that that the Boss had. Yeah, and the trailer try, you know, like a lot of trailers. It shows you all the cool stuff in the film, but it does a great job of selling it, and ultimately, the story of metal Storm is a story of successfully selling an idea, even if the idea hasn't completely been developed yet. Okay, well, let's explore that story of metal Storm by getting into the cast of characters. All right, Um, well, we've already mentioned the director. The director is Charles band

Born One. We've discussed his bio on two previous episodes because he he directed Transfers to and he was the producer on Robot Jocks. Yeah, so go back and listen to those if you if you want to hear more about the band family. But just in brief, he's the man behind first Empire International Pictures and then Full Moon Features and Full Moon Features is still going strong today. So this movie came out in what year was it? Three? That seems about right, that's right, eighty three, a big

year for three D films as well. To discuss here shortly. Now, um the again that Blu ray edition of metal Storm from Shout Factory or maybe it is a screen factory on this one. Sometimes it's screen Factory, sometimes the Shout Factory at any rate, one or the other same company. It's really good. Has some wonderful behind the scenes stuff and they get into a little bit into how this film came to be and basically Band had this basic idea for the film that was brought to him by

screenwriter Alan j adler Um. And then Band had some effective posters and one sheets put together, you know, hired an artist and so forth, and then he started pitching the movie um to a certain extent, like they were it was already in production, you know, like like metal Storm is happening, do you want in on metal Storm? Okay?

This reminds me very much of the Cannon films approach, or at least what would happen with a lot of the canon films of this era, which is a very poster first production process, you know, you're kind of leaning into the marketing before the creative product is really been finished,

or sometimes before it's even begun, right. Yeah. So and you know, I think that that was also like part of bands um strength is that he was really good at it's selling this kind of stuff, so um, you know, in in some areas, I think this this totally shows with the with the finished picture. You know that a lot of it ended up coming together in real time or at the last minute on an extremely tight budget

and schedule. Um. Maybe not tight schedule by like modern standards, but at the time this was a tight schedule considering all the practical stuff they were having to do. Uh. In other cases, watching this, I don't know it it I was really impressed with what they were able to achieve. You know, it would make makes the results all the more impressive. But at one point band pause productions so that he could take he could go to kind of film festival and basically pitch the film so they could

get enough money to finish filming it. And so just about everyone involved, especially in the effects and the music department, they seem to have stories about like how little sleep they got how down to the wire everything is and having to sort of roll with like sort of last minute changes in requests. This is hilarious, like that he's getting investors at con where the people are there to watch the you know, the big like art films of

the year. Yeah, well, I don't know, I mean this and and since this is maybe it played well at the festival, I don't know. Um. So Again, this was one of the big reasons that this film they made it out not only you know, was completely finished, but also ended up on a number of screens across the country was that it was a three D film. Um. And this is obvious if you watch the trailer. Even the trailer was released in three D in in theaters. I believe it was shown at the front of Jaws. Three.

So Band was an early adopter to the early eighties three D boom. Um. He actually used it in his first film, two Parasite, which starts Jimmy Moore. Um. And the fact that he he went with three D on this pictures and one of the major reasons that it was picked up and widely released. So of course this was not the first big three D movie boom. At least one other wave of three D movies had come before,

maybe multiple waves, but this was a revival of the technology. Yeah, I mean basically, three D films have been around for a while. I think the first three D film was actually The Man from Mars m A R. S. I'm not sure where that stands for, but a silent film that used a three D process called Tell of You.

So there are technological changes over the years, obviously, but yeah, there's there seems to be this ebb and flow of the three like three D goes away and then uh, filmmakers returned to it as a way to try and attract audiences into the into the theater. You know, it's it's a it's a novelty. So if it's always there, people maybe get tired of it. They decided they don't want to wear grubby glasses and get a migraine while they watch a blockbuster, or at least that's that's my

approach to it. Um. But yeah, we still see this today. You know, three D will come back three D you know, Imax three D or whatever it happens to be. What year was wasn't like Avatar was around the time, there was another big three D fad and then that went way again, and it will be back another fifteen years

after that. It seems like fifteen twenty year cycles. Maybe yeah, and I'll and I'll fall for it and go and watch something and I'll get a headache, you know, end up watching half the film in uh, you know, brain twisting three D, and then watch the last of it with the glasses um just folded up beside me and just watching like the weird way that the screen looks

if you're not wearing the glasses. But anyway, this was again we're talking about the early eighties and eight two and eighty three were pretty big for three D. And part of this whole thing was that you had at least three different film franchises that were about to hit

their part three in their their series. And so I mean that's perfect, you know, Friday the Thirteen, Part three three D, Amityville three D, Jaws three D. So that those were eight two and eight three films often the nadir of a series that in many cases wasn't good anyway, Like there there are Friday the Thirteen films that are like good movies, but some of their some of them are enjoyable trash part three is just is just the bottom of the barrel, like you cannot get worse. But

there are a lot of stabs at the camera. Yes, you know, a lot of not just stabs though that's what you'd expect, you know, the knife going towards the camera, but a lot of it is also just like people adjusting a clothes line and the pole at the end of the clothes line is poking into the camera. Things

at that level of mundanity. Now, there were other pictures that came out in three D, and we're not certainly not going to list them all, but one was the the film Space Hunter Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, which I love to come back to on the show at some point because it's kind of metal Storm with a much bigger budget. Oh I don't think my heart could contain it. I mean, like, what if, what if? What if metal Storm had both Ernie Hudson and Michael Ironside

in it. Just prepare yourself for such a possibility. I love those actors. All right, Let's move on to the writing on this film again. We mentioned their name. Alan J. Adler born eight He was one of the writers on Bands two film Parasite. He also wrote his nine eight three film The Alchemist, and he went on to ride an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation and the filmation Ghostbusters cartoons. So not the one, not the real Ghostbusters with the characters from the film, but that other

Ghostbusters show that had like a cartoon guerrilla in it. What. I don't even remember this? Yeah it exists. Uh okay, I always forget that it exists. But is it a ghost gorilla? I don't know. I've never watched it because I always just I looked at it and I would instinctively know These are not the Ghostbusters, though I think they actually pre date what we think of as the Ghostbusters,

like it was an earlier property. Anyway. Adler was also a toy consultant on the Robin Williams film Toys Wow, which is uh what a much but loved phil I don't know it. It's an extremely weird and alienating movie about the military industrial complex through the guys of a

children's movie about toys. I think the premises that Robin Williams plays somebody who like is the the heir to a toy factory fortune, but then like his step brother or something comes in and he's like this gruff military guy and he wants to use the toys to train children to be soldiers. And there's also like a sea monster in it. Yeah, it had a good cast. As I were calling, Tory Amos did a song for it. So ha's that going for it? That's interesting? Well, shall

we move on to the cast? Oh? Yeah, we got some Jeffreys in this movie, right, Uh so starring Jeffrey Byron as is it Dogan or Doggin? I can't remember. It's Dojin that we were calling him. So because the main character of this film, Dojin is dressed exactly like Mad Max. It's not like a little bit of a he's like they were just like dressing him like Mad Max. And I guess costume department said okay, and uh so

he's mad Max. So we were calling him mod Mocks or sometimes doge Coin because we couldn't we couldn't hear exactly what his name was, but we knew it started with doge. Yeah, yeah, he is. He is basically Mad Max in this very Mad Max esque in the same way that this whole movie is Road Warrior esque. Um, but I think we would we should say that. I think the leather outfit he's wearing is tighter than Mad Max's outfit, and so we ultimately have a sexier mad Max.

I think so. And it is Road Warrior esque, but I would say nerve a little bit. So whereas The Road Warrior is a hard our action movie, this is like The Road Warrior, but PG with a bunch of Star Wars thrown in with it. Yeah, and also the the I didn't really notice this when I was watching it.

I enjoyed all the cars driving around and chasing each other. Um. But but when I was watching the behind the scenes stuff, they were talking to Uh, they were talking to Richard Band who did the me music, and I believe it was it was he was the one who pointed out he had the car chases really slow in this um Like, I think they meant to speed them up, speed the film up. But then they realized that the movie wasn't quite long enough to do that, that if they did that,

it would be too short. Um. But I didn't have any price. I enjoyed all the car chases I've seen enough, like Road Warrior asked car chases that I can take like any quality level there that though that's a terrible instinct. I mean, if you're thinking, like, oh, people won't think that this trashy movie is long enough, we've got to pad it out. That that is the sign of that you're you are thinking about making a B movie in

the wrong way. Embrace the spirit of Attack of the Crab Monsters, a movie that is sub seventy minutes and it's still and it's great trash. I agree, I like, I like a good short film. They can they can get everything done and get me in bed, you know, in an hour and some change. But so Jeffrey Byron as Dojin, he's our He's our scruffy, sweaty, hunky mad Max want to be that. He he is sort of a wanderer of the waste land, much like Mad Max

in The Road Warrior. But he's also uh, he's got like a job, right, Yeah, Like we're told he's a hunter and he's hunting Jared Sin so we were not really I don't think we get much in the way of information on who's employing him if he's is he salary, is he hourly? Is he freelance? I don't know. But but unlike Mad Max, he seems to be there on official business and not just wandering the wilds now. If I remember correctly, I think mad Max does have a job. In the first movie he's some kind of cop or

by the second movie, yeah, he's not employed. He's just trying to survive and get the guzzaline. But but he dojin has a job. He's called a ranger finder class. Okay, that's like a like a subspecialty. It's an upgrade from ranger loser class. Alright. Well. Jeffrey Byron, who plays his character, born nineteen fifty five. He was also in nineteen eighty four is The Dungeon Master, which is another band picture which he wrote a segment for. I believe that was

an anthology. He did a lot of TV work, he did so he certainly spent his time at band camp. He started out as a child actor. So he actually appears in the nineteen sixty three John Ford film Donovan's Reef, as well as an episode of the original Twilight Zone. Huh, and he's He's done a lot of bit parts here and there. He played. Interestingly enough, he played at this character, if you can call it, a character test administrator in the two thousand nine Star Trek movie. Oh for the

Kobeyoshi Maru test. That's what I guess. Yeah, in this movie, he is always shiny. Did you notice that, It's like he's never he's never dry, So he's always, I guess, been recently sweating and the sun is glinting off of

his face. Well, another I didn't think about this. I just don't know much about three D and what it takes to to film in three D. But in the the feature they were pointed out the first of all, you have to light everything a lot more intensely to film in three D, or certainly they did at the

time back in the early eighties. And they also had to use our like orange makeup on everybody's face, so that could be part of the the look that we see with our main character here is like that that perhaps he's a lot of orang er in you know, in real life on the actual set and um, and maybe that ends up making his face looks sweatier than it is. I don't know. Well, he's very shiny in the movie, but not all the actors are shiny, like the the actor playing Jaredson is very matt He's he's

a very matt guy. Yeah, alright, let's move on to the next. Uh, I guess kind of a sub hero of the film. This is the Han Solo character Rhodes played by Tim Thomason. Uh, that's Jack Death himself, Timmy Tas. I mean, one of the things that's absolutely astonishing about this movie is the age question that we're gonna get into about, Like about him Thomason here, But yes, he's he's sort of playing Jack Death as as this character Rhodes,

but he's also definitely Han Solo. Like you said, the idea was like, what if mad Max and Han Solo were buddies and they went on an adventure together. Yeah, but in a weird way, it is like it's like the old version of Han Solo, the Han Solo from the Star Wars sequels. And and yet the age question

that comes up, this is this thing. It's like, unless I'm just drastically wrong on the math, Tim Thomason was thirty seven during this film, during the filming of this this movie, Like I just I don't know, I just I just I look at I look at him in this and he's just a lot more weathered looking um, and I just would not guess that he was thirty seven years old. It seems like he's always been at

least forty two. We had the same comment about Trainsers too, and that he seemed much older than he actually was, and the same is true here. He I can't believe that. I mean, yeah, he seems at the absolute youngest mid forties. Yeah, so I don't know. I mean people aged differently, and uh, I mean maybe that's ultimately and also, you know, makeup

in hair are part of it. Uh and maybe this ultimately, like this, this leaned into his um, his his vitality on the screen, you know, is that like he's a he's much younger than he appears, so he's able to bring energy to these kind of rugged roles. I don't know. At any rate, he's he's always a pleasure. He's great in this. He has great comedic timing and so forth. Yeah, he's a he's a whiskey drinking cynical. You know, I don't.

I didn't get myself into this. He's also the source of comedy in the same way that Han Solo is sometimes the cynical source of comedy, the person who has a pessimistic outlook on the adventure. Yeah, all right, let's move on to the next actor. We have the character Diana. Uh. It's spelled d h y A and A in the credits and uh. This character is played by Kelly Preston, who lived nineteen sixty two through Oh she passed way

last year. Yeah, yes, that sadly did she. She started it off on various early eighties TV shows, but this this was her first feature film, followed the same year by John Carpenter's Christine, the adaptation of the Stephen King novel about the Haunted car Now. She eventually met John Travolta on the set of the The Experts seven and the two married. She acted in a number of notable films um over the years, but genre films of note

of interest to us. She was in Space Camp, she had a brief part I Think and From Dusk Till Dawn. And she was also in her husband's sci fi passion project Battlefield Earth in two thousand. I did not remember this at all, though I have seen Battlefield Earth and I was just laughing this morning remembering that the aliens in it are called the Cyclose. Yeah it was. It's just the word psychos with an L in it. Yeah, yeah, the cyclos. And she plays the cyclos. She's a sexy

cyclo named Kerk. She has a big, long cong well not in my brain at all, completely forgot that. I should also mention she's also so Ian Jerry McGuire from which isn't a genre film, but that means her performance will one day become a part of the brilliant pyramid that rises out of the American desert. Oh that's right. Yeah. Acting wise, Um, she's present in this film, she's not really given much to do. And again she was, like

you know she was. She was very young at the time, so uh, you know, not a knock on her her acting ability, but there's just not this is not much of a role. There is a great scene where she gets teleported and before she gets teleported, she turns into a big red laser blob. Yes, all right, and you know who who did that? Whose magic that was? That was the magic of Jared Sin. So let's get to the actor who plays Jared Sin. The actor Michael Preston. Uh no relation to Kelly Preston by the way, Um,

born in ninety eight. Uh. This is our our central villain, you know. I he's somehow at the same time wonderful and very underwhelming as a villain like he he is a very ineffective and underwhelming villain in many ways. But at the same time, I enjoyed his presence because of his bizarre armor that he wears the whole movie. It's it looks like, I don't know, like sparring pads in a weird way. It's like it looks very puffy and foamy and has these odd bubble shapes where in some

places where his muscles would be. It has this giant called era of a collar um. And his hair is just out of this world. It's this matt flat combed down in the front, kind of nineties alt rock haircut. Yeah, it's it's he has weird hair and a very weird outfit that has like kind of a muscle suit, kind of like power armor. It's it's black and crimson, and it's the sort of outfit that if it were just a few degrees to the left, if we're just a

little cheaper, it would look just absolutely awful. It would just look like something out of Power Rangers. But you know, part of it, maybe it's the cinematography, maybe, but but I think a large part of it is is the costume. Like The costuming in this film is generally just is really effective. Um and credit were credit to do. This is the work of Kathy Clark, who also gave us those wonderful jumpsuits in Robot Shocks. Okay, yeah yeah, so

um yeah. I think that the Jaredson character, like, ultimately, it's a large percent of it is the weird hair and the strange costume and the lot, especially in the shadow realm sequences, it's really well let it looks really cool, and the actor tends to have a certain intensity about him. I found that he never looked completely silly, which is a huge accomplishment considering some of the elements that were in play. He has notes of Mick Jagger as what's

his name in free Jack? That the syndic or whatever it was. Yeah, I think that was right. Yeah yeah. So occasionally I really thought Jaredson was going to say get the mate, but he never did. In fact, a lot of times he doesn't talk. He just stares into the camera, smoldering with the eyes, with the awesome you know, flat front haircut. Yeah. Yeah, Ultimately, unlike McJagger in in free Jack, when when Michael Preston opens his mouth and

and actually uses dialogue. There's some level of consistency and it doesn't just completely destroy the illusion of coolness. Uh. But anyway, Michael Preston was was like a big get for the filmmakers here because they were making a Road Warrior esque film and Preston was actually in the Road Warrior playing this character Papa Gallo, who I think was the leader of the good guys. Oh yeah, I think he was sort of the leader of the compound that

was being assaulted by the Gang of Lord Humongous. Yeah. So this guy was London born. He was a boxer turned singer turned actor. I think he ended up spending most of his time in Australia if I'm not mistaken. There he started acting in the early seventies, wound down in the late nineties, but don't worry, he got an episode of Highlander the TV series in there before he retired.

Did he play an immortal? I assume so. I mean, if you're if you're a guest player on Highlander the TV series, and you're you know, at all notable for any villain rolls, you're you're losing your head. That's all there is to it. I haven't seen Highlander of the TV series. But a while back you shared with me a really great, uh compilation video and that was something like the seventeen best Quickenings of the Highlander of the TV series. Oh but did you see the seventeen or

however many worst? Actually I think maybe that guys it, Yeah, because there are some bad ones, so you had to have a quickening every episode and they all had to be like somewhat different. Some of them involved incredibly tasteless visions. Yeah, so anyway, he got in there on that. He also did a fair amount of TV work and um, I think he was in a couple of different Australian cop shows. Okay, all right, well let's move on to the next character.

We we we have so many interesting characters in this one. Richard mole is in this playing her Rock, the dinosaur Hunter. Uh well yeah, similar, similar r Rock. So this is the legendary Richard mole Borne. Um. You know, I grew up watching him on reruns of night Court, in which

he plays the good natured giant bailiff Bull Shannon. Bull Shannon appears in all nine seasons, all one nine three episodes of night Court, and it was only much later that I realized that that he you know, had it was already making a name for himself as like a B movie actor before this came out. And then then of course he went on to to do a lot of voice acting afterwards, and it's still active today. I've never seen Night coord But Richard Mall is a lot

of fun in this movie. He plays this, uh, this big warrior of this faction in the movie known as the Cyclopeans. So he's only like one half of his face, has this makeup on where he's only got one eye. But he's like this big tough warrior guy who has a great great battle with size, like like Raphael the Ninja Turtles has and with our with our hero Dojin. Yeah, he's I guess he's kind of cling on asking this. You know, he's the he's a member of this warrior

culture he had. He's he's gonna fight, but he's noble and you know he ends up uh turning face by the end of it. Now, this is a fun, fun fact from the making of this film. Um, Richard Mole had and still has like a full head of hair, so he didn't want to shave his head for Metal Storm. Uh, but they wanted him to because it ultimately made the makeup that heat much easier because if he had his head all of his hair, they were gonna have to put a bald cap on him and do all this

extra stuff. So that they were like, can you can you shave your head for this role and he said absolutely not. And then apparently his agent was like, like, look, he really needs the work right now. Um, I bet if you offer him five hundred bucks, he'll do it. So they did. They offered him five hundred extra bucks to shave his head and he did it. Uh. And as it turned out, it was pilot season at the time, and that was one of the reasons he didn't want

to shave his head. Uh. And this was the time period during which he auditioned for night Core and they offered him the part, but they loved the look, so they said, you know, it was in his contract that he had to keep his head shaved as long as he was Bullshannon. So that's interesting as well. So metal Storm indirectly responsible for the creation of a TV icon exactly, Yeah,

where would we be? Uh? So Rigald mole Um his first role was playing Joseph Smith in the ninety seven film Brigham, But then he went on to do some TV work and finally an increasing number of of genre films Evil Speak, The Sword and the Sorcerer, The Dungeon Master, Galaxis. But I think once he established himself as a comedic actor, that was that was kind of hard to shake. Though.

He also shows up as a villain on an episode of Highlanders, the TV series, um and then he uh, yeah, he's also done some other interesting to Like I said, he was a voice actor. He was in the old Batman, the animated series. He did the voice of Harvey Dent. Slash to Face Batman the Enemy series is great. They recently added that on one of the streaming services, and I've been watching some old episodes of it. It still holds up. It's wonderful. I loved it as a kid. Yeah.

Was Now you said he was in The Sword and the Sorcerer. Was that also one that Richard Lynch was in? Yeah, I believe that's the Richard Lynch picture. That one's on my list to watch, but I haven't quite got around to it yet. That's the way that is much beloved in some circles. Alright, let's move on to another secondary character. At this time of secondary villain the right hand man to uh to our man Jaredson, this is the character ball uh B A A L. And this is played

by our David Smith. So this is spelled like the like the ancient god ball, like Lord's Lord Ball. Yeah. So Smith acted in various TV shows. Um he was in you know, and then also there was this, there was there was AI artificial intelligence apparently has a role in that. Um. He did stunts on Predator Too, which which is very interesting. So one of the things that becomes obvious as you watch metal Storm is that is

that he's missing part of his left arm. He was born missing his left arm just beneath the elbow, and so he ended up this was utilized in a number of different films that he did don't work in or or in this case acting work. Um, particularly Predator Too. I don't know if you remember, but there's a part where Danny Glover, our hero is fighting back against the

predator and manages to slice the predator's arm off. Well at that point, our David Smith is playing the predator and uh and apparently played him in this kind of ultimately dangerous repelling scene where like the Predator slides down like a drain pipe or something from the roof to the to the pavement, and much like in so in the Predator movies, the Predator has glowing green blood, and I believe in that sequence in Predator to Danny Glover after the arm gets cut off, tracks the Predator to

his lair by following the splatters of blood. There is a scene exactly like that in this movie played by the same guy or David Smith, as Ball gets like his cyber arm ripped off. He's squirting green goop all over the place because that's I don't know, he just green goop comes out of his arm for some reason. And our hero, that the mad Max guy, just follows the green blood. Yeah. So interesting, even though this film, of course was years before Predator two came to be.

But at any rate, uh, he Ball, the Ball character is pretty cool. It is perfectly weird looking character that I ultimately helped sell the picture. He's like a cyborg with a robot arm that we'll we'll we'll get into the details of his abilities here in a bit, but he reminds me a bit of the Heman character that I think came after this. The character trap jaw. Oh

I don't remember that character. What was his deal? I included a picture of him here from like a comic book back in the day, so you can see it. But basically, he had one robot arm and of course huge muscles because that was part of the whole human thing. And then he has like a lower like he's a cyborg. So he has like a helmet and a lower jaw

that's like a trap, like a bear trap. Oh yeah, I do see the comparison, you know, with the helmet also because so wait, this is even more complicated because Ball in this movie, even though he looks like he's an alien or something like, he's kind of green and he's got the cyborg stuff, he is supposed to be Jared Sin's son. Yes, I mean, I have no idea how it works, but yeah, you know, I mean I don't know it. You know, we don't know that the jaredson is Ball's birth father. I mean, we we're not

sure what. We're not privy to the details on this relationship, but but they do seem close. Okay, alright, finally, just I already mentioned him, but Richard Band did the music. This is Charles Band's brother. An accomplished film score composer. His work tends to be very traditional but effective, sometimes suitably cheesy, and he's worked on pictures like Terra Vision before and like that's the perfect place for slightly cheesy

traditional music. I watched this movie with subtitles, and a lot of good humor came out of the bracketed subtitles telling me what kind of music was playing? Orchestral? Yes, yeah, so it would just show uh Jaredson like with the flat haircut, staring into the camera looking like he's composing a really angry like you don't Internet reply in his brain and staring ahead, and then it just says like

ominous orchestral music. Brackets Yeah, speaking of composing. The other interesting thing, Like I said, a lot of this film apparently came together on a very tight, very tight budget, but then also a very tight schedule. Band had to do all the music and something like eleven days. Wow. Yeah, like composed record everything. All right, you ready for a full plot breakdown, Let's do it now. I gotta say

there is a very nice three D title sequence. Always love those and you can always tell so I when I rented this didn't realize it was a three D movie, but I could tell as soon as I saw the credits, because it's that style where they're the blocky letters that you can just see them like with this dimensionality that would not really be there if they weren't intended to jump out of the screen at you. When we get our first glimpse of of real action, it is in

a taste of things to come, a driving montage. I thought that would be appropriate because I don't know what percentage of this movie's run time. Would you guess is made up of driving? A lot of it? A lot of it? Yeah, like like I like I mentioned, Uh, I believe it was. I believe it's Richard Band who brought up that they didn't speed up the driving sequences

and that they ended up running the credits. I didn't notice this when I watched it, but the credits run exceedingly slow on various cuts of this picture, so that it takes up as much time as possible. Uh So, Richard Band says this is actually one of the rare movies where there's more music than there is film. I'd say there's a solid seventy two minutes of film content in this movie, and then the rest is credits. Now the driving sequences though, or like I said, they're not boring.

They have some really cool looking vehicles. We immediately meet our heroes vehicle. This is the I come to think, came to think that it is the dog skull doom truck because it looks kind of like a dog skull. It looks like what might happen if you took the dog truck from Dumb and Dumber and you boiled all the flesh and hair off. Ye yes, yes, yes, yes, it's got he's even got teeth, you know, it's got a little great on the bottom, some kind of cow

catcher type thing, but it looks like teeth. So yeah, as soon as you pointed that out, I saw it. It's dog skull every time. And so of course the driver of dog truck here is our hero, the man named Dojin, which I guess is appropriate since he drives the dog truck and he is as we described earlier, he's a scruffy, sweaty earth rim roamer dressed exactly like

Mad Max in The Road Warrior. Black leather up and down in this hot, dusty desert seems like maybe not the best choice, but perhaps that's why he's always so shiny and sweaty. Uh. And yeah, he's playing some kind of cop of the post apocat Elliptic wilderness. He's driving around with a helmet on at first, but then he takes the helmet off and you hear him getting some kind of radio transmission. Uh. They're they're, you know, they're

saying like, hey, ranger, ranger. Uh they're they're they're calling him about some kind of crystal interference. And so he drives out to meet the challenge while a bunch of very determined sounding orchestral music plays, you know, done dundune to dune um. And then there's a road battle. So Dojin is attacked in his dog truck by a Cyclopean warrior who's only got one eye, who is flying on a speeder in the air and trying to blast the

dog truck with lasers. They have a laser shootout. Uh. The effects are cheap, but like I said earlier, I like them even though they're cheap. I would say this is very much in my rub the fur category type movie. But it's cheap synthetic fur, but it still feels pretty good. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like when you're watching a play like on the stage, and it has special effects, you know those special act be it's something like a

red handkerchief representing blood and all. Uh. You know, just because it doesn't look real doesn't mean that it doesn't have its own sort of style, and then it can't be um, you know, it can't be effective, and then you can't adjust your viewing. Uh. You know, you can't suspend disbelief to meet like the level of the artistic medium. Yeah. Yeah, And I would agree that I would say that the effects in this movie are fun despite being cheap and

not super convincing. Uh, in the same way that the effects or the sets or whatever in a good play can be. So they have a shootout. Dojin wins the battle. The the speeder crashes into a cliff and explodes. This movie is absolutely of the school of any time of vehicle crashes. It explodes in a fireball always of the time. So Dojing goes up to explore the crash cyclopean vehicle

and he finds among the wreckage a red crystal. And this will be the first crystal of the movie, but by no means the last, because if there are two things this movie is obsessed with it is driving sequences and crystals. Yeah, a lot of crystals in this movie. If you own a crystal store, you should have this playing in the background at all times. Oh yeah, it'll really convince people of their power to Yeah. I mean, The Dark Crystal probably has more crystals in it than

this movie. But I can't think of another film wrong that this movie has more crystal than The Dark Crystal. You may be right, now, yeah weak. Now, from here, we cut to a mining scene because we get this is the whole thing about the crystals is like, this is the planet. I guess is this is this Earth? Or is this a different planet? They never make that clear. I don't know if this is supposed to be far in the future or just some alternate fantasy realm that

that's never fully clear. It doesn't it doesn't ever in any explicit way connect to real history, so we don't know. But yeah, we get some crystal mining and this is where Kelly Preston and her dad, not the actress's dad, but the character of this character's dad. They're drilling for crystals with these little handheld tools in a mine shaft,

and Kelly Preston's character's name is Diana Uh. And they make clear that this is like an old mine that's been abandoned by the original miners, and I was I have to admit I was having like a little No Man's Sky flashback here, because here we have these characters in a weirdly shaped cavern with uh and they're they're mining weird crystals that are everywhere with a weird space guying. It's like a laser. Yeah. Yeah, it's like straight up

No Man Sky. I was afraid I was about to spend like an hour and a half tediously collecting these crystals with these characters so that you can buy like a shorter cool down period for your mining gun. Yeah uh yeah. And so the characters here, so the Dad is sort of reminiscent of Sam Elliott as the Stranger.

He's sort of affable, gray haired with a mustache. And we get a little bit of a window into the politics or the world building here because Kelly Preston says, you know, treaty or not, I don't like being in Nomad territory. They don't allow trespassers. And the dad says they'll never even know we were here, and then immediately Kelly Preston finds a gigantic crystals the size of a thermus, and then the dad is like, wow, we're rich, and so they take it outside to look at it in

the light. Uh. They're standing around the opening of the mine, and Uh, I wanted to point out quickly there's one set dressing detail I really like. Here in the mine, there's this giant pile of some kind of flexible tubes or hoses that are just coiled chaotically all over the place, and it looks like a giant battle meck just spilled its intestines. Yeah. I think they filmed a lot of these sequences in a quarry, but they dressed it up nicely. And I mean I ultimately bought this. The thing is

in the viewing it visually. I bought this as another world, but I never got enough information from the film to know of, like the nomad territory is an entire planet, is it part of another planet, what's sort of what's going on, what's the what's the interstellar community? Like? Nothing? So, like I said, is this Earth? Is this an alien world? This is maybe something to think about as we go on, the question of what makes good world building versus bad

world building. And as much as as much fun as this movie is in a you know, other movie, mash up elements in a blender, rubbed the fur kind of stuff, this is this movie, I would say, is a very bad example of world building. I don't understand the world, and it does not seem very interesting. But it's full of interesting characters, and we immediately meet some of them. Yeah, that's right. So we get the bad guys coming in there there outside, Oh, look at the crystal. We're rich,

immediately ambushed by Ball and his cyclops enforcers. So Ball is the the cyborg guy with a cyborg arm, and so Kelly Preston hides in the mind while her dad gets attacked by these guys. They come up on him. They say like, you can't be here. You're not allowed to be here. The law says you must die, And so they grab his crystal and they smash it on the ground. They sentence him to death, and then the form the execution takes is one of the strangest and

most elaborate that I've ever seen in a movie. They've got laser guns there, but they don't just shoot him. Instead, it's a four step process, right, And I'd say the process is squirt, trip, crystal die. This is wonderful. So the squirt is that Baal has on his cyber arm. He squirts green goo on you and then the and then the green goo makes you hallucinate, and the hallucination transports you to another plane of existence, like another dimension.

And then in that other dimension, Jaredson is there and he's holding a red crystal and then he touches you with the red crystal and then you die. And this is a wonderful sequence because the other realm is is realized, is this kind of place where it's like black gravel on the ground and it's just infinite darkness all around you. And then once you're there, here comes Jaredson strolling casually up to you, just exceptionally well lit, like just the

right amount of shadow and light. Strolls up to you with this smoldering look on his face, reaches out with the red crystal, touches you on the side of the neck, and you scream in anguish and presumably die and and he gets the meat. And so yeah, and it's very darkness was washed over the dude because it's the Sam Elliott guy here dying. Uh. And so the bad guys they kill him and then they leave, and then Dojin arrives in his dog truck to the rescue, but he's

too late. The dad character has already been crystals here. Uh. And instead he meets Kelly Preston. And here we get some kind of plot because Dojin says the following to Diana. Let's see if you can follow this. He says, you've been isolated. You haven't heard. Treaty has been broken. There's a madman named Jaredson who's been inciting the nomads. There's

Holy Warwick in this whole Crystal minds in forbidden territory. Okay, so maybe this is a good place to see because we're not gonna like reac every new piece of information we get as we go, but maybe this is a good place to try to figure out what is the situation of this film? All right? This is this is the plot as I understand it. This planet is a waste land overrun by two factions. You've got the humanoid nomads who always wear environmental protection gear. I'm not sure

why because our heroes don't. Perhaps they're from another planet or you know this, or maybe it's due to continued exposure to hostile conditions, or maybe it's a religious choice. I'm not sure, but that's the Nomads, Okay, permanent gas mask and they were like a hood. Yeah. And then you have the Cyclopeans, and this is a race of large, powerful warriors, again kind of cling on esque, and they seem to have a congenital mutation that has obscured half

their face. So half of their face is just kind of like twisted mutant flesh, and there's either not an eyeball there or the eyeball is completely obscured by flesh. Okay, I think maybe I misinterpreted this as them having like all ritually gouged out one of their eyes. I mean, I don't. I don't think there's anything in the film that says one way or another. So it's ultimately a

fair idea. I think in some of the supplemental information, like the interviews, I think they may have referred to it is kind of like a congenital treatment that they gave it because they ultimately wanted to go the mutant route and have and go with this, because they thought that it might look too crappy if they just did the one eye in the center of the face, which

I have to agree. I mean, you think of cyclopsis when they show up in other films, even with films with a lot bigger budgets than this one, and it can look a little off because at least this way, the actor is getting to to act with their one unobscured eye. That's true. Yeah, So like Richard Moue, for example, he has he has great eyebrows, very expressive eyebrows, and he gets still gets to use one of them in

this film. So yeah, they're paying up for at least actors who are potentially going to be you know, expressively getting into the parts. Like I'd say, Richard muell is maybe the most expressive faced actor in the movie. If they were to completely cover up his face, that would be that would be a heck of a loss. Yeah, alright, So that's that's what's going on with like the Occupants

of this Land. The main attraction here crystal mining, of course, including powerful red crystals that can drain and collect human soul power and enable individuals uh to to utilize that power to give themselves like like wizarding type abilities. So the warlord Jaredson is amassing all this crystal power in order to control the entire world, maybe worlds beyond. We're not sure. I'm not sure how local this dispute ultimately is. And then Dogan is the Hunter sent to stop him.

Kellie Preston's character Diana gets roped into it because she wants revenge for her father. And that's pretty much where we are, okay. Yeah, And so there is a territorial dispute, right, It's that the Nomads and the Cyclopeans both they they are have some kind of grievance about their land and they want their land back from I think another faction who we barely encounter in the movie, who are like the crystal miners. And Jaredson is promising the Nomads and

the Cyclopeans their land back from the crystal miners. Is that how you understood it? Yeah? I think so. Okay. So he's like, you put me in charge, I'll get you your land. And he seems to he seems to be getting, you know, going with this. He seems to have some momentum. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Uh. So he's using the red crystals to to you know, crystal ghack people and and that's working for him and then so yeah, so we of course, uh here here Dojin and Kelly Preston.

They become friends, We get brackets, gentle orchestral music, and they decide that they're going to work together to avenge the death of her father, hunt Jaredson and solve the mystery of the Red Crystal. So you know the plot is underway. And then of course we get to meet the villain. Well, I suppose we sort of met him before in the vision where he does the Red Crystal

on Sam Elliott. But he but then we meet him in person, and when we need him in person, he's wearing this hilarious armor we mentioned earlier, this like bubble muscle armor, uh that looks kind of like inflated foam paths, and it's this strange mix of it's like semi and anatomical. So you've seen armor before that has contours on it.

They're supposed to match human muscles, and this sort of has that because it's there for like the pecks and the abs, but there are other parts that just have all these little like bubbles and contours that have nothing to do with human anatomy. Yeah. Again, I have to say I think it's strong costuming, because if it looked too much like human anatomy, he would look like the biggest dummy in the world in this thing, you know.

But it's just the right level of of of musculature and armor and and like alien weirdness that it somehow works well despite uh, the elements that are coming together here.

So when we first encounter him, Jaredson is in a cave, surrounded by the nomads, who are the people wearing the gas masks and psyche Loops warriors, and he's just waving a red crystal around in their faces, saying, with this crystal, we have the power to steal life, which when I first saw it, I was like, wait a minute, couldn't you also do that with one of those laser guns

or just like a big club. Uh. And then he's promising no one can stop me now, and he and then at the end he's like, oh, I do this for you, my brothers, because he's offering he's clearly trying to get them on his side because by promising them some kind of outcome. And then I guess to demonstrate the power of the red crystal, which seems utterly superfluous because we just saw what it could do to the

other guy in the in the previous scene. But they bring him a prisoner and this guy's they're like no, no, And Jaredson walks up touches his neck with the red crystal and he just goes gag and he dies. Yep um. And of course the whole, the whole reason to use crystals and not laser guns is because the crystal harvests the soul energy. Yes, Jaredson gets to use it later, like his powers seemed to come out of his harvesting of of life force. That's right. The crystal doesn't just

kill people. It's an external hard drive for souls. So when you touch somebody, you download their soul into the crystal, and then you bring it back to Jared Sin and then he touches the crystal to his really big crystal and that uploads the souls into it. And when he gets enough souls in the big crystal, he's going to use that as an army to take over the world. So you can't say that this movie doesn't make sense. A sense make sense. But of course the characters don't

know this yet. So when you come back to Kelly Preston and uh, and and Jeffrey Byron. Uh. They got to take the red crystal they found to their crystal guy. You know, they of you've got a crystal guy. Yeah, I got one. So they go to the crystal guy so he can explain what it does. Yeah, and he's kind of this fire tuck looking character in this cave with crystals hanging around everywhere. I like him, not that

he's he's fun. This actor, I think his name is Marty Zaggon or zagon I'm not sure which looked him up. He was in a number of things over the years, but this is probably one of the least effective looking sets but in the picture, but it's it's it's kind of fun in its cheapness. Yeah, he's got a crystal diagnostic process. He's trying to figure out what their crystal does.

And so he hangs it off of a fishing line, sort of a long a string of other crystals like their Christmas lights, and they're all wrapped around these, uh, these shelves made out of PBC pipes, and then he shoots the crystal with a laser and then the laser bounces around between different crystals and that tells him something about what it does. And of course what it does is it harvests that soul energy. Right, he says, I should have known storage crystal storage of what life force. Uh.

So they've got that figured out. But then also he goes and he looks at it and he's like, oh, yeah, I see some emblems here. He says, this is an emblem of set the Lost City and uh. And Kelly Preston says, oh, the Lost City. My father told me stories of this place. And so they get a tip off from their crystal guy that there's a man who can take them to the Lost City and his name is Rhodes. Crystal guy says he was once a finder. He lives in zo Are, one of those overnight crystal

mining towns. So before we get to all that, there's there are some more action scenes that don't have a huge import on the plot. There's just like road battles, driving car chases and explosions with with Bal and the cyclops troops and uh. And of course, as I said earlier, it's of the classical school, which is that when a

car crashes, it explodes giant fireball. But they get captured by Baal, and I don't think We've said this before, but every time Bell talks, he sounds like a text to speech editor or like, um, do you ever have one of those toys when you were a kid that was like the plastic microphone that made your voice sound weird and echoe when you talk through it? Yeah, I think he I think maybe he's talking through something like that. But so he he says welcome, Welcome to your death.

And then there's a big fight. And in this fight, Dojin does get squirted by the green goo. So you think, oh, he's done for right, you know, squirted by the goo. That means he's gonna hallucinate. Then he's gonna get red crystals. But it isn't like when Kelly Preston's dad got squirted. It seems to affect him more slowly. So you see later that night he's sort of laying by the campfire being cradled by Diana, and he starts having visions of

Jared Son. But Jaredson's evil crystal magic does not work in the hallucination, and Jaredson explains he says, well, together, you're strong, but I'll separate you and I'll destroy you both. And so of course Dojin Diana are just immediately falling in love for no discernible reason. But they're just they're just both like, I love you. Now. Their bond is so strong that his evil psychic crystal magic can't stop them.

But they clearly they just met. They just they just met earlier this day, and we have seen no no reason for them to have emotional connection whatsoever. They see to have shared nothing really except that they went to the Crystal Guy together. Yeah, that's it. But you know the I guess life is hard in the waste land, and you find love where you can. So they just both there immediately head over heels in love with each other. And uh, and their bond is so strong that even

the magic can't break it. But that's all right, because Jaredson he can work with this. He can work with this. He's got some plans. Yeah, and his plan is that, well, first we see him just sitting there stewing, and we get brackets that say mysterious orchestral music. And then Diana back at the campfire, turns red and disappears. Then that's the red crystal energy. He basically teleports her away from where she is and brings him to his camp that

seems like a really good power. So if he could do that, why didn't you just do that with with the guy he's trying to kill, Like you can teleport him into the tent and they can just get him there. Why not? Well, I mean, well, we don't know what else he's got going on. You know, he's he's got big plans. It probably requires big crystal energy that he's

having to. You know, if he makes time to to teleport everybody that opposes him, you know, he's not going to have the crystal energy he needs for all that stuff. So he would prefer not to, but he has to now. But then there's a sequence that was one of my favorites in the movie, and this involved some some special effects and design that I thought actually looked really good. Uh,

this is the part with the crystal golam attack. So Jaredson has a little crystal doll that he liked that he hallucinate teleports through time and space to turn into a giant monster that attacks dogin at his campfire. Yeah, which is it's ultimately like it is really cool, all white,

practical monster suit. But then they've added uh, you know, animated electricity, sparks, around him, Like not certainly not on the same level of intricacy as you find with the Lightning Warrior in Big Trouble and Little China, but that in the neighborhood of that sort of effect. Yeah. Yeah, So he's this cool luminous monster with the mask that I liked. It's kind of a uh almost like a

ring Raith kind of head. And then so Dojin has to like he's using his laser on it, but that doesn't work, and he has to kill it by like tricking it into stepping into some kind of liquid. I didn't quite understand this part, but maybe it's the movie logic that this thing is electrical and electric things can't touch water, doesn't He like shoot a rock and liquid comes out of the rock and then the monster steps

into it. That felt weirdly um old testament to me, Like, isn't there isn't there something where like Moses shoots a rock with a laser gun and like what comes out of it? Well, he strikes a rock with his staff and water comes out of it. There you go, the same thing. Okay, uh, well, whatever this connects to, I wasn't aware. I didn't understand what happened here, but you know, I'll roll with it. So anyway, we we get to see Kelly Preston at Jared Sin's place and he's showing

her how the big Crystal Soul hard drive works. Uh, and and he's, uh, he's storing the souls in the big crystal to turn it into an army that will crush anyone who opposes him. And they're they're all these people watching, and it was actually, you know, I was thinking, it's kind of like one of those tech presentations, you know, like the Apple thing or he's got this big audience and he's like, let me show you how my big crystal hard drive works. Everybody, you know, it's the it's

the it's the killer app. Everybody's gonna have one. And then next do Jin goes to find roads. So he goes to a place that is I think this is supposed to be the most icely cantina. He goes to a minor camp. Uh. And some people in this camp are wearing strange future clothes or they're dressed like shepherds or whatever. And some of them are wearing the robes.

Other people here are just wearing nineteen eighties American clothes, just jeans and T shirts, and he goes into a bar that is like the it's the most icily bar, but with no aliens, so I think lower, lower budget. And he meets the bartender Annie, who I loved by the way. I thought she was great, and her bar

consists of a counter. And then again, this movie is fun of sets made out of just lattice of PVC pipe, so they're these these pipe sets behind her, and then there's they're just wrapped up with random hoses and neon lights, and then a big snake. There's just a snake in the background. But she she's like, oh, yeah, you're looking for Rhodes. He's over there, And of course it's our old friend Tim Thomerson, who is this grizzled old Han

Solo living life at the bottom of a bottle. He is content to sit at the corner of the bar and have no friend but alcohol, right he is, I think at one point he tells us later in the film he's getting too old for this stuff against But of course Dojin is like, hey, I need to find the Lost City because I'm taking on Jared Sin and we get the classic Han Solo style refusal of the call he says, sorry, kid, treasure hunting is one thing, getting killed another. So he's like, I'm not going to

risk my neck on some fool errand like this. Uh So, anyway, Dojin tries to leave, but then there's this high noon style shootout in the street. And this was another thing where having watched it twice now I still don't understand

what happened here. Uh I'll try to explain. Dojing goes outside and they're these just guys beating up on one of the Cyclops dudes, and then he and then Dojin and then they walk away from him, and then Dojin walks over to the Cyclops dude and looks at him, and then the guys who were beating him up they turn around and they look at Dojin and then start pulling guns on him in slow motion like a like

a gun slinger duel. Yeah. I was thinking that this scene was setting up um the main Cyclops character, the Richard Mole character, because this seems like the way you would typically introduce somebody, Oh, well, will you just save me? And now I'm you're a part of your party, you know. It seems like the standard Dungeons and Dragon's character and introduction scenario. But he didn't work out like that at all. Now, why did the guys pull the guns on him? Like?

What did he do? What? What did he have to do with them in any way? I don't know. I guess just a rough part of town. Okay, Yeah, it didn't seem to make any sense. But they they disarm him, they shoot the gun out of our heroes hand, and it's then he doesn't even dodge, he just stands there. He's like, okay, I'm ready to be vaporized. But Tim

Thomason to the rescue. It's like the you know, it's like Han Solo showing up with the Millennium falcon at the at the trench run Uh, you know you and he shoots the gun out of the bad guy's hand and uh, and he's on board. Now I guess for some reason, he's on board for some driving and that's what they're gonna do. So so they just go driving for a while. I think they're trying to find this lost city. And there's an exchange I wrote down where uh where Dojin says to him, you must have fought

in the sand Wars. Yeah, so what that's when they stopped issuing those uniforms. So I think that's supposed to be comedy, like he's, you know, you're wearing old, old uniform clothes. He's all. That's kind of the But then also, uh it also the sand Wars just dropping that without context. It's it sounds a bit like the Clone Wars mentioned in the original Star Wars film, you know, except less mysterious. Yeah,

So they go to these Cyclopean ruins. I think the Lost City is supposed to be this great like ancient sacred burial ground that has been abandoned where the ancestors of the Cyclopean people lived. And I thought this sequence was great. It is. It takes place next to what looks like a filled in open top mining pit. So if you've ever seen those where you know the it's been dug out from the top down and then now

it's just filled in with green water that's very still. Yeah, and it's just this gnarly ultimately death metally look like this thing could be the cover of a death metal album because it's like this weird Bahamad esque Cyclopean cyclops god with weird ruins and strange script all around it.

It's it's really cool looking. Yeah, and in this statue, the Cyclops statue is over this treasure box that Dojin opens, and it's very Indiana Jones because this yellow light pours out of the treasure box when he gets into it, and inside he finds this mask. It is the magic

mask that has been spoken of in legend. And then afterwards they're walking around in the mist and there's been some foreshadowing of this because we saw the sands shifting behind them and they get attacked by some really great sand creatures that I think are literally hand puppets, but I love them. A great cheap effect, a little subterranean

pig snakes that are biting our heroes on the legs. Yeah, now you don't see it in this, but apparently they had arms like I saw a picture of like the full creature they made, and they ultimately have little harms. So they do just look like um like snake puppets in this, but they look pretty cool and and also ultimately what there were three of them. That's reminiscent of Trimmer's later on when we get the Trimmer's movie, because remember the Graboids had I think what they had three

hand puppet like appendages inside of their beaked mouth. That's right. Okay, So eventually they're escaping with the mask. But here we get to meet the night Court guy. So so what happens here, Well, they run into these warriors and the warriors are like, hey, what you're doing here? Well, what's your whole reason? And they started laying down cyclonic lawn right right, so that yeah, they say. Uh. The guy says, having having come this far, you've proven your warrior, but

being found on our land, you must die. That is our law. And then Tim Thomerson's like, hold it, a warrior must also be given the chance to take the challenge. That is also the law. So I find it interesting that Tim Thomerson knows his cyclops civil rights, so so her rock. The Cyclops guy is like, okay, fine, you must meet me in the pit. And then they have a duel where their hands are tied together via this

tether uh. And then in the other hands they have si like Raphael has in the Ninja Turtles, and and of course guess who wins. But but but Mad Max shows mercy to the Cyclops guy. He's got him on the ground, but he doesn't kill him, and like, oh, what a stand up guy mad max Is and then um, Richard Mule is like, well now we're friends. Uh, and he informs him. He's like, I know you're looking for Jaredson. I've been called to a war council by Jaredson. We

can't go there together, but but maybe i'll see you there. Yeah, well we'll meet up later. Now there's some other stuff that happens in between. There are more the more road battles, more car chases, uh, you know, shooting shooting at each other from cards. A lot of these battles are between Dojin and Tim Thomason on one side, and then Ball and his people on the other. Uh. And I will say, in this attack, there are some stunts that look very real,

and I'm not sure how exactly they were accomplished. I kind of wonder if something very unsafe happened on set. But Dojin at one point drives the dog truck off of an embankment, and it really just looks like the truck lands on a couple of balls troops. I don't know how it looks or at least it comes dangerously close to these guys. When I was like, whoa that was?

That was a little too real He was also a scene where a guy comes flying through the windshield of a vehicle at the camera for that three D effect, and and that one too. I was like, well, it's it's kind of rough. That's these these stunt guys were going for it. Yeah, so as long as that was done in an actually safe way, hats off to the stunt people there. That's yeah, it looks good. But then after the battle we get a vision and this part

is great. We get the crystal mask, the magic mask, and Dojin puts it on and has some adventures in the shadow realm. He sees visions of a flaming tree and a sort of red light district of the mind. There's just this red light in the fog everywhere, and he produces a mind hatchet and wax at the tree and then the trees bleeding. It's good stuff. Yeah. He's

also shirtless and oiled up the whole time. So this, along with the other shadow room sequence, these are shot like I think, entirely in a set uh, and the lighting is like really really well done. So these are some of the most beautiful and weird segments in the entire picture. Yeah, so Dojin and Tim Thomerson get ambushed by Boll and his troops and in the fight they actually rip off Bow's cyber arm and then the green

goose squirts everywhere and the bad guys runaway. Tim Thomerson is wounded, and you know, I wonder what will happen to him? Dojin promises I'll be back for you, buddy, and so he's like leaves him, just leaves in the dust mid the ruin and the death, and he's like, I'll come check on you later, and Thompson's like, hi, yeah, and he follows the green slime trails of the villains like in Predator, like I said earlier, um. And then back at Jaredson's place, Ball is of course wounded and

he's very mad. He's like, you have to kill Kelly Preston now, and Jaredson says, no, Kelly Preston and Mad Max they're gonna be my final sacrifices to the Crystal. But in the meantime, it's time to go tell the troops, and so he goes outside where the Nomads and the

Cyclopeans are waiting. They're all watching like they're you know, watching to see the dolphins show, or like the you know, the Apple iPhone demonstration or whatever, and he shows off people downloading souls from their little red crystals into his big crystal, and he says, we'll be kings of our land again forever. And of course do Jin arrives during the big presentation, and I thought it was really funny how he just walks in like nobody kills him, nobody

even tries to stop him. He just walks in. And the additionally funny thing is he's just holding this magic crystal mask in his hand. Yeah, well it looks it's hard to imagine how you would really wear I mean, maybe he's wearing it briefly in the vision world, but it also doesn't I got the impression like this is not made for a human being to wear. It's like an alien mask or something. Yeah, I think so. So you get a bowl, of course, is like, oh, that's

the guy I've been fighting. Kill him. But then Rock, who is now because he is friend that you know, he steps in and it's Bow versus Horrock. And and at this point we quickly realized that Jaredson's claim to rule is is just very tenuous and he very easily overturned. Yeah, I thought it was funny that the final battle here is really one of persuasion rather than violence, and it's not even that difficult. Doge Coin is just like he goes up in front of everybody and he's like, Jaredson

is bad, and then the Cyclopeans are like, hey, he's right. Yeah, no real evidence presented, like he didn't give a power point or or display any evidence. He's just like like that this guy sucks, and they're like, yeah, he's right, yeah, and that's it. Jaredson does not do very well in defending himself though, because I wrote down one of the

actual exchanges. Dojin says like, he says something like he's using you, he wants to rule over you all, and then Jaredson responds by saying let him babble, I am your master, yeah, which the Cyclopeans immediately rejected, like you're not our master. Yeah. Her Rock says Jaredson is a false chief, this is false metal, and then there's some crystals apping. Jaredson is like, well, uh oh, the jig is up. Well now I'm just gonna try to zap everybody who doesn't go along with me. So he uses

his big crystal to shoot lasers. At people. And here's where the magic mask comes in. It seems that this is the purpose. Dojin uses it to deflect a laser blast from the big Crystal. It works like a sort of mirror shield that shoots back in the other direction, and he does this like twice and then bow smashes the mask, which is funny. It seems like a relatively small return on the investment of that whole plot line in the middle of the movie. If this is what

the mask did, Yeah, it didn't. It didn't seem to make a huge difference in the battle. So anyway, so Jaredson's like, well, okay, this didn't work out for me, so I'm getting out of here. So he runs off, gets on his air speed er to escape, and then there's an airspeeder chase because dos Coin also gets on an air speeder and they chase each other around. This part might have been cooler in three D, but here I think the ending chase is pretty weak. It's a lot of aerial footage of just p O V zooming

over scrub land. Uh, some miniatures thrown in as well, yes, yes, until Jaredson finally at some point he just escapes into the phantom zone, like they go into this realm of triangles. That's the kind of cool psychedelic sequence when that happens. But Jaredson gets away, Dojin is unable to catch him. He's gone to triangle land and and we don't know

if you will ever be coming back. Yeah. At the end, we're well, I guess we're let Yeah, we're left with the side of the Sin has escaped to another dimension, perhaps another time in space, which they allude to their like he could be anywhere, he could be in any place, any time, which kind of sounds like there they were setting up the possibility that they could do a cheap sequel where uh where where our road Warrior character is

chasing Jaredson into, say, like you know contemporary Los Angeles, Right, Yeah, that's what we're talking about at the beginning with like Jaredson and Beverly Hills, or Jaredson goes to New York. Yeah, like basically Beast Master two, which we know how that turned out, So maybe it's best that we didn't follow

Sin into such a world. But on the other hand, in the the extras on this, they mentioned in passing that that Banned Are already had some big ideas for the sequel that involved like giant robots, but of course he got to do that in subsequent pictures. So, um, who knows. Who knows what what a Metal Storm Too might have consisted of had it ever come come to pass. You know, should we still be holding out for Jared'son Too? Do you think it's possible at this point? I mean no,

I mean I guess it would. I assume if band still had had retained the rights to it, we would have seen something like that at some point, right, I mean why not? But I don't know. I think ultimately the film did not It did not do well, um critically anyway. Uh, you know, it ended up on a lot of a lot of screens, but it didn't. I think you had you had a number of different elements going on there. I think there was like some three D fatigue going on and utics don't know how to

rub the fur. Yeah, I think so. I mean maybe also, like Road Warrior, Star Wars Wars inspired pictures of the early eighties at the time, maybe there just were a lot of them and we're able to better appreciate them now because nobody's really putting out that kind of stuff like where Arthur. I mean, I guess, And if they did were putting them out today, they probably, I mean it would probably he just wouldn't be the same. Maybe it wouldn't wouldn't be shot on film, it would be

a different scenario altogether. Nobody has room in their heart for a PG mad Max rip off. You know. That is where ultimately jared'son escaped. He escaped into our hearts, uh, into the hearts of a future generations of of weird film enthusiasts. Also, the end of the movie is is quite sappy and sentimental in the same way because of

course Tim Thomerson's fine. He arrives at the end as the chauffeur of dog Truck, and and uh and Jeffrey Byron and Kelly Preston are there, and he's like, hey, hop in, I'll you know, I got a big bandage on my head. I'll drive you wherever you want. And then they're off, Yeah, and they're just just bantering into the sunset. So well, ultimately, yeah, this is a really fun film with a lot of weird stuff going on

in it. I don't think there was really I mean, I saw some stuff about reviews at the time, they were like, oh, this is boring, you know, and they were comparing it to to your the what the Warrior from the Future, UM, Hunter from the Future. Yes, Hunter from the Future, that that sort of thing. But I don't know, I didn't think there was really much in the way of boring uh content in this film. I felt like visually there was a lot going on. I I enjoyed it, though. I think that the trailer probably

delivers just as much wonder as the full film does. Um, if you're looking to get out cheap on this one, you could just watch the trailer. I fully agree they could have sped up the driving. I think this is one of those movies. I mean, if you are making a movie and you're putting significant driving in the movie, unless it's really really top not driving stuff like you are George Miller and you are making a Mad Max movie. Otherwise I would say, cut out significant amounts of driving

and you're probably making an improvement. Yeah, but they do hit all the cliches with the with the with the apocalyptic driving. You know, you have the you have a car go off the side of a cliff and explode, uh, multiple cards exploding. They do that that wonderful car stunt. I'm sure it has a specific name because it's done

all the time. The one where a car will hit a ramp with only one side of it and they'll generally be some stuff to obscure the fact that there's a ramp there and it makes the car flip up on two wheels. Yeah. I always love seeing that one, especially if I can see the ramp. Sometimes they really mess up and you see like an actual ramp behind some trash cans. I think that happens in Final Sacrifice, the Roused Hour movie. So yeah, it's not Fury Road,

but it has its pleasures. Yeah, And I will say again that no matter how half formed some of the ideas for the film might have been, I feel like the crew that the people acting in it, the crew creating the effects and the costumes and dressing up the settings, the uh as you know, as well as um you know as the score, like all of these things really over delivered uh and ultimately made for a film that's

that's quite watchable in my opinion. Alright, So once again, I don't think I think currently there's not a really good place to stream this, at least in the United States. But you know, keep an eye out. I know I have. I have streamed it in the past through uh like Amazon Prime or something, or maybe even Netflix back in the day when they had older films. Uh wait, is it not on in there like a band tube app? Now essentially there is, and I'm a current subscriber to it,

but this was not on there. This was pre um either of those companies, So it's not not available. Uh you know it's it's not a full Moon picture, so it's not available through full Moon. I wasn't even able to rent it digitally, but you rented that shout factory Blu ray from Atlanta's own Video Drome, the last video store here in Atlanta. And if anyone wants to check out information about Video Drome or buy submerged from them, you can go to video Drome dot tv. They're not

paying for this, even know we're giving them these free plugs. No, I mean, I mean we could hit him up and say, like, can you forgive our late face if we promote the website, but now we're happy to support video droump Um. Yeah, I guess that's it. I would love to hear from anyone who saw this on the screen in three D back in the early eighties, or saw or or saw any of the other early eighties three D pictures, or what you I would love to hear from everyone. What's

your thought on just three D cinema in general? Uh? Does it give you a headache? Does it just fill you with wonder? Uh? You know, I I would I would love to hear everyone's experience. What are your favorite movies that are obsessed with crystals? You got this, you got The Dark Crystal. There's gotta be some other ones. I'm sure they have to be. There's so much crystal.

There's a lot of crystal mania. I think the screenwriter for this mentioned that he was super into reading about Atlantis when he wrote, So I don't know how that relates to it, but it does remind me a bit of the whole story with Shock Waves, about the screenwriters for that being inspired by a Morning of the Magicians. So I think this is all an appropriate use of

occult um and conspiracy theorist nonsense. It's like, take it and make some sort of zombie film out of it, make some sort of goofy science fiction film out of it, rather than you mean, like misleading studo documentaries for TV. Yeah, yeah, I would think so. Yeah. Alright, well we're gonna go ahead and close it up here. Um. But in the meantime, you can check out other episodes of Weird How Cinema every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast

feed We are primarily a science podcast. In our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind here on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Friday's we we unwind and we discuss a weird movie. We also published some short episodes on Mondays and Wednesdays, with a vault episode a rerun on the weekend's Huge Things. As always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, just

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