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The main joke is from Brooks' Defending Your Life, "there is no hell, although I hear Los Angeles is getting pretty close." Fin de siècle tremors, the Big One that quakes the City of Angels into "the island of the damned," home of undesirables. The President (Cliff Robertson) runs a gaudy theocracy, the seditious First Daughter (A.J. Langer) absconds with the doomsday MacGuffin and hooks up with the junkyard "Che" Guevara (Georges Corraface). ("Revenge of the preindustrial societies" is the would-be revolutionary's dream, cf. Milius' Red Dawn.) Snake Plissken to the rescue, Kurt Russell back in leather and eye-patch growling at a kaleidoscopic gallery of La La Land grotesques. "What are you doing in L.A.?" "Dying." A cartoon Weekend to complement the original's grungy Alphaville, John Carpenter summarizing the Nineties with a shot of the Hollywood Sign in reverse before a raging inferno. The Universal Studios building is submerged and guarded by a digital shark, Beverly Hills has become a misshapen plastic-surgery cult cheerily run by Bruce Campbell in a puffy Kirk Douglas mask. The potential love interest (Valeria Golino) is locked up for being "a Muslim in South Dakota" and promptly dispatched, the tour guide (Steve Buscemi) doubles as a press agent, the weathered surfer (Peter Fonda) favors aftershock tsunamis. "I'll read your future." "The future is right now." Hang-glider raids and basketball games of death, a tenor of amplified chintz admirably sustained. Pam Grier lords over the rubble as the transgender gang leader, Disneyland makes for a handy showdown arena. It all leads "right back to the Dark Ages" and the hero's raspy kiss-off, the only happy ending for an aging anarchist like Carpenter. "Welcome to the human race." With Stacy Keach, Michelle Forbes, Peter Jason, Robert Carradine, and Leland Orser.
--- Fernando F. Croce |