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BradH812
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1294 Posts |
 Posted - 12/03/2007 : 10:11:15 PM
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I first saw Timerider on HBO around 1983 or so. Back then, I was, shall we say, less discriminating in what I watched. Even so, it was clear that this movie had some serious hang-ups. Let’s see, first there was the full title: Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann. Not exactly a prestige title for a movie, is it. A lot of the profanity sounded gratuitous, and extremely clunky. Same thing with the violence; it wasn’t graphic, but it left me a little uncomfortable (that isn’t a problem now; my stomach’s a good deal stronger than it used to be). Something about that medallion and the ending left me with an ugly feeling. Finally, when I first saw Lyle Swann, I thought, ”That’s the hero?! Ewwww!”
It did have its high points. The villain was appropriately nasty. The idea behind the story itself (a biker is sent back in time to have to deal with bandits in the Old West) was utterly insane, in a good way. And while the ending made no sense whatsoever, it was just cool.
Recently, I’ve been getting Netflix to send me movies I watched as a kid to see if they hold up under any scrutiny. For the most part, it’s pretty obvious: I had little taste when I was 12 years old. So how does this one stack up?
Ahem. Look at the title of this website. Actually, that’s a bit unfair: the movie has a surprising number of good things to it, although it’s not enough to keep it from being blessed by Ol’ Woodenhead himself. Once more into the breach, dear friends!
How many time-traveling bikers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
The first credit to appear is a bit of a surprise, but it sets the tone. “Michael Nesmith presents....” As in, “Hey hey I was a Monkee, and my mom invented Liquid Paper,” that Michael Nesmith. The film’s title itself appears in a font very similar to the one used for Battlefield Earth, while the subtitle, The Adventure of Lyle Swann appears beneath it in a smaller red font. The rest of the opening credits appear in that red font over a black screen as we hear a press conference in progress. A PR guy is telling the reporters how his corporation is about to move into the final phase of “Project Timerider” and send a live animal (a monkey, to be exact) back in time to the year 1862. The project will be headed up by one Dr. Samuel Stellar; throughout the rest of the movie, he’ll be known simply as “Dr. Sam.” Oh, and because of the “sensitive nature” of the project, the location of the time-travel experiment will be kept secret. That’s about it, really. The exposition isn’t too bad, and I like having it given during the credits, nice and efficient. But already problems are cropping up. First off, someone breaking the time barrier wouldn’t be the subject of a two minute press conference. It would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country and leading off all the TV news reports. Second, about that secret location.... No I’ll hold off on that till the time comes.
As for the credits themselves, the cast was a big surprise to me. I’m not familiar with Belinda Bauer (and a quick check on IMDb shows that she hasn’t acted in much of note, really), but the rest of the cast is pretty impressive. Peter Coyote, Richard Masur, Tracey Walter, Ed Lauter, L. Q. Jones, Chris Mulkey. Not A-listers, but good solid actors who each have a respectable body of work. The last cast member: “And Fred Ward as Lyle Swann.” While he’d had parts in a few movies, Fred Ward didn’t have a lot og recognition in 1982. Maybe I’d been too rough on him when I first saw this thing? (Future Brad: Nope.) So if nothing else, maybe the acting will be fairly decent.
Then the music credit comes up. Michael Nesmith. (Uh oh.) Then the writing credit: Nesmith again (UH OH!) along with William Dear, who also directed. Dear has worked fairly consistenly in Hollywood over the last thirty years, but he’s not very distinguished. From what I’ve seen, he could probably be called a competent journeyman. His best known movies are most likely the remake of Angels in the Outfield and Harry and the Hendersons. Harry was sappy as hell, but ya gotta admit the make-up job they did to turn Kevin Peter Hall into Sasquatch was very good. And of course, John Lithgow could be relied on to give a good performance. Timerider was Dear’s first feature.
Okay, press conference is done, credits are done. We cut to a biker’s POV of a dirt track. This shot is actually quite good; you get a good sense of the speed with which the guy is moving (you couldn’t pay me enough money to operate a camera on a rig that moved like that). Unfortunately, this shot goes on way way way too long, almost a full minute. The really unfortunate thing is, we get our first sample of Michael Nesmith’s score. Oh boy. Lots of synth-rock and noodling on an electric guitar. Yow! Man, I’m in cheese heaven already! (The music is actually passable at first, but as it goes on and on it gets worse.) We have a cut to the biker, who’s outfit is entirely red, as is his bike, then another POV shot.
Finally, we go to a motocross meet of some sort (the only word we can read on the banner is “Baja”; I’ll assume we’re in southern California or Arizona). A guy watches the biker through binocs, commenting on this guys prowess. A bearded guy also watches, saying, “Yeah, that’s Swann.” The guy looking through the binoculars says, “He can sure ride a bike,” because, you see, we need the exposition, since we can’t actually see the guy handling the bike like a pro— actually, we do see him handling that motersickle pretty well. But they kept that line in just in case there were any blind people in the audience. Early political correctness, I guess. We have a shot of a couple of kids confirming it’s Swann, then the bearded guy goes to his truck to take some equipment out. See, this guy is Swann’s pit crew, or something like that. An older guy comes up and gives the bearded guy a name — Jess. They have some expo here: see, Swann is kind of a renegade, a hothead. The older guy is part of some corporate team (boo hiss whatever) who wants Swann to join up. But Swann won’t be beholden to The Man. (Wow! Three clichés in ten seconds!) Also, Swann and Jess have this habit of using the motocross as a sort of testing ground for trying out new contraptions they’ve come up with.
So, Swann comes riding in, stops at the truck. Jess comes up, and there’s an obvious cutaway to a close-up of Jess’s hand opening (I think) the gas cap on the bike. See, we need the cutaway so they can go from the stunt rider on the bike to our star on the bike. He removes the helmet— Ewwwww. I remember my reaction when I first saw this thing. Turns out it was spot on. Okay, I like Fred Ward. You need someone to play a rugged man’s man, he’s your go-to guy. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a helluva good actor. But here, our first sight of him is shaking the sweat from his head. He’s got a mop of stringy, sweaty, matted black hair on top. Fred, my man, biker-dude hair does NOT fit well with that face of yours (which was already looking pretty craggy and rugged in 1982). Ward’s movements ring false. The first thing I thought when watching this was, this guy doesn’t ride bikes regularly. Keep in mind, I have no idea what motocross is like. Maybe the bikers there really do look like this guy. Anyone who knows different, feel free to correct me. But Fred Ward was about 40 when this was made; it strikes me that he was a little long in the tooth to play this part. There’s some painful banter between Swann, Jess, and that older guy which sounds like exactly what it is: scripted jokes that seem more fitting for an Oscar telecast (and the dialogue falls just as flat). Jess makes some noise about the two-way radio showing some trouble, and Swann shows the first of this gizmos they’ve been working on: a direction finder. Hee hee hee. Here’s their direction-finder. They scouted out the best route for Lyle to take on the race-course, narrated it onto a cassette tape, and now have the tape in the bike’s tape deck. Not exactly GPS, is it. Then Lyle puts on his helmet and we see his POV: the helmet has a head’s up display inside of it, showing a tachyometer and speedometer. Another one of those gadgets, I assume, and I’ll have more to say on this guy’s bag o’ tricks later on. Lyle gets back on his bike and starts riding the trail again.
Cut to another part of the desert. We see a piece of equipment that’s supposedly some high-tech thingy, but it really looks like a much larger brother of the motor in the Erector set I had as a kid. We go into a bunker, of sorts, with a mirrored ceiling (seriously!) and lots of computer banks which may have looked futuristic around 1975 or so. There’s Dr. Sam, giving some pseudo-technical banter with a female technician. Okay, looks like Project Timerider is near the motocross course.
Ahem.
I understand the people at the meet not knowing about the project; after all, they exposited for us that the location’s secret. But don’t the scientists planning this major test of a revolutionary form of travel know that there are people around?! Okay, it’s not government, it’s not military, but wouldn’t they have spotters around the perimeter to make sure no one got near them without their knowledge?! Because that’s exactly what Lyle’s about to do.
Ah, here he comes, right on time. Footage of Lyle (or his stunt double) toolin’ around on his bike is intercut with shots of the bunker. Dr. Sam looks at a monitor showing that monkey they’re planning to send back. He taps the screen and says, “Hang on to your hat, darlin’.” Yes, that’s exactly what a scientist and project leader will say. [Sarcasm = OFF]
Lyle chatters with Jess a bit on the radio, and his voice is distorted by the helmet. Around this time, maybe a couple of years later, there was a short-lived TV series called Street Hawk. It featured a crime-fighter with this really cool bike and really cool helmet with gadgets built into it, and his voice was distorted by his helmet. That’s about all there was to the show: bad-ass bike, futuristic helmet. It’s amusing to think that Street Hawk’s creators might have gotten the idea from watching this movie. It would certainly explain why the thing got canceled after half a season (surprisingly, Andrew Probert and Ron Cobb, who would go on to work on Star Trek The Next Generation, worked on this show; not surprisingly, its executive producer was one of the guys behind Buck Rogers and Knight Rider). Oh, and he jumps his bike over a couple of guys hangin’ out by their parked VW beetle. Ha. Comedy. Or something.
Meanwhile, back at the bunker.... Dr. Sam orders that the, um, time-travel guns (best description I can think of for them) be readied. We have four angles of the same device, that overgrown Erector motor, as William Dear tries to convince us we’re looking at four different time guns. Nope, doesn’t work.
Ah, there’s Lyle, riding along some more, as more synth-rock plays on the soundtrack. We get a POV, which fades up that video screen thingy he has in his helmet. Okay, now, I’m sure audiences can tell when they’re looking at shots taken through a cut-out filter; binocular POV shots are the most common type of this. We can allow for it; hey’s it’s just a movie, right? But when it’s so blindingly obvious as it is here, we have no choice but to cry foul. Finally, finally, Lyle tries to radio in to Jess, but the transmitter’s screwing up. Great. This whole thing could’ve been taken care of in fifteen seconds; instead, this bit lasts a full minute and a half. Oh well, at least they ate up some time, making it easier for this movie to fill out 90 minutes. Ah yes, a wonderful thing, filler.
Let’s go back to the bunker, shall we? The scientists exchange some techno-babble, then we have a false alarm: a tumbleweed rolled in and brushed up against one of the time guns. It is obvious, and I do mean painfully obvious, that an offscreen assistant just tossed that tumbleweed onto the time gun. Ah, so, our scientists are gonna be distracted by this false alarm, and they won’t see Lyle come riding in to the, uh, launch area. Again, I gots to ask, why didn’t they put surveillance cameras or spotters around the perimeter?
Because the movie would last all of fifteen minutes if they did, I know. It was a rhetorical question.
Here comes Lyle. He stops, tries to call Jess again. He pulls the tape out of his outfit (which has more pockets in it than Captain Kangaroo’s jacket) and puts it in. The tape is so helpful that Lyle decides to pull out a map instead. Lyle, guy, don’t rush out and patent that direction-finding system of yours, okay? You’d waste your time. Also, it’ll be revealed later on that the map he’s consulting is an ordinary road map, which wouldn’t be much help finding one’s way around the boondocks, especially a relatively small area.
The scientists start the time-travel process as Lyle continues to consult the map. Lyle mutters, “Oh, crap, this thing is useless.” I don’t doubt it. He continues to try and contact his buddy, then he presses an offscreen button somewhere on his suit, and his visor whizzes down his helmet to cover his eyes. Now we see that his little heads-up display includes a zoom lens and a rangefinder! I have to wonder: is this sort of thing really needed for off-road biking? Also, would it be legal in a motocross race? It seems tantamount to cheating, like having a GPS receiver in an orienteering meet. (Keep in mind that I know absolutely zilch about motocross, so everything I just said and will say may be meaningless. If anyone knows I’m wrong, feel free to add your two cents.)
In the bunker, the scientists start the final countdown (do not start singing that song by Europe— damn, I guess I just planted it in your head now), going from thirty, as Lyle continues to tool around trying to figure out just where the hell he is. Lyle spots what looks like a radio tower of some sort not far away and makes for it. Little does he know it’s this super-secret Project Timerider. I buy this part; if Lyle’s lost, it makes sense he’d try to find anything that would work as a landmark.
He rides straight into the testing area. Inside the bunker, they realize, whoops, looks like that do have a real breach after all. A technician says, “Dr. Sam, it’s real!” Ahem. So, stop the countdown. Abort. The shuttle launch will hold the countdown if they think anything’s wrong, even if it turns out to be a false alarm, and for good reason (the name Challenger comes to mind). So, wouldn’t these guys have a red button marked “SCUTTLE TEST” or something?!
But, again, the movie would be quite short.
Lyle rides straight into the testing area, and a cheesy blue glow is matted onto him. Too late: the experiment is underway, and Lyle flashes back to the past. The whole thing is accomplished with a flash effect and a simple jump cut, as the scientists realize they have a serious problem on their hands. Man, can you imagine what the lawyers would be doing with this?! Even if the scientists pull off a miracle and get Lyle back safely, they’d be in some serious legal trouble, yes?
Lyle is still stopped in the test area, only now he’s back in the 19th Century. He looks at the metal capsule beside him (the one that contains the monkey) and reads the plate screwed onto the side of the capsule: “ESTHER G [the name of the monkey] — TRANSMITTED BY MASER VELOCITY ACCELERATOR — HARTNELL MASS ACCELERATOR — INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER COMPANY — NOVEMBER 4, 1982.” Somehow I doubt a computer company would be heavy into time-travel experiments. Also, why would they have a plate like this on the capsule? They’re not gonna leave it there in the 1800’s (as the astronauts left the lunar lander on the Moon); no, they’re planning to bring it back. Goofy movie.
Dr. Sam’s team is able to view what’s going on there on their monitors. This means they have cameras in the 19th Century transmitting the image 100 plus years forward into the bunker. As Food would say, Anal Blood! Anyway, they see the motorcycle on the monitor, and they figure they need to yank it back. Problem is, the one-minute timer is locked in; they can’t pull back until the timer hits zero. Again, anal blood.
Lyle tries to get Jesse on his radio. Sorry, Lyle, you’ll have to wait 100 years or so. So he decides to go off and try to find his way back to the meet, and he leaves the test area before they can pull him back. We see the flash and hear the electronic snap as the capsule and time guns (snicker) make their return to present day. You’d think he’d look back, just out of curiosity, especially since there’s a matted-in blue glow around the test area before it gets zapped back to our time, but no-o-o-o-o-o! Oh, by the way, just before Dr. Sam’s team yanks the capsule back, one of the technicians shouts, “Now!” Um, guy, wasn’t this on a timer? If it’s set on automatic, you can yell “Now!” all you want. Dim bulb. (And if it indeed had a manual override, they didn’t think to use it. Dim bulbs.) This is not the first instance of sloppy writing this movie has to offer, and it won’t be the last.
Dr. Sam realizes they didn’t get motorcycle boy back, he slumps back in his seat and mutters, “Oh brother.” I thought this was okay; a nice bit of understatement from the good doctor.
Let me make a side trip here and bring up another point. Let’s just assume people have worked out the physics necessary to make going back and forth in time possible. No problem. But you have to remember something. Everything we see here tells us that Lyle has traveled back in time, but not in space. There’s your problem. (WARNING: Science Content Ahead!) Remember, the Earth rotates. It also orbits the Sun. The Sun moves through space, orbiting the center of the Milky Way, carrying the Solar System along with it. And the Milky Way moves through space as well.
The upshot of this is, if you send someone back in time, but don’t change their position in space, they’re gonna show up in deep space countless millions of miles from Earth. Lyle wouldn’t be motoring off across the countryside right now; he’d be dying of asphyxiation, decompression, and/or extreme cold. Not a pleasant way to go. Now, in a movie like The Time Machine, one can see the main character as he goes through time; he stays in his position in a convincing way. And one could assume that the time machine in The Terminator would have a method of zapping Ah nold to the right place as well as the right time—
I’m gonna break off there. It hurts to even think about stuff like this. Okay, never mind. Throw the last three paragraphs (including this one) away. The Terminator movies and the Back to the Future trilogy are guilty of having the same error that Timerider has (of course, those movies are much better than this one, but there you go). So I’ll just give that a mention and let it go. I know, I know, too late.
We then treated to another long shot of Lyle’s stunt double trekking through the countryside as more cheesy early-80’s synth rock plays. Thanks a fat lot, Michael Nesmith. Really, thanks. This goes on for a full minute. Filmmakers, stop it already! Okay, Lyle’s a good biker! We get it! Keep the damn story moving, or we’ll start thinking of crap like the last few paragraphs I rambled out! This scene also looks like it was shot near sunset; the earlier scenes looked like they took place around mid afternoon. Lyle has failed to notice the time change (ha ha). More evidence of his keen powers of observation will follow.
Dr. Sam orders that everyone keep this quiet, then he orders that they try and find out where— strike that, when this guy set down. They don’t want to be embarrassed by all of this, but for once we don’t have an EE vill corporation; these folks seem to be honestly concerned about getting Lyle back safely. One technician gives Dr. Sam a ticker-tape — yes, a punched ticker-tape — showing that Lyle went back “about 105 years... Around 1875.” This ticker-tape would’ve been hopelessly dated in 1972, much less 1982, when we could have had, say, dot-matrix printouts. Dr. Sam looks incredulously at the tape and says, “We’ve got our experiment now, don’t we.” Keep in mind that earlier they said they were sending that monkey back to 1862, not circa 1875. Um, Doc, you guys were about thirteen years off. Your equipment needs some fine-tuning if you’re gonna muck around with time travel like that. (Remember, in Back to the Future, Doc ended up sending Marty back to a date in 1955, the day Doc Brown figured out how to time-travel. If he’d sent Marty back thirteen years earlier, Marty would’ve had to wait ten years plus to contact Doc about his little out-of-time problem.)
Yet another synth-rock cue plays as Lyle motors through the post-twilight landscape; it’s probably around 8:00 in the evening now. I know nothing about motorcycles. How fuel-efficient are they? I know that if I drive my car for five straight hours, I’m gonna need to refill. Yes, a car is less efficient than a bike, but a bike’s fuel tank is smaller. Wouldn’t Lyle be running low on fuel by now? Anyhoo, he sees a campfire ahead and makes for that.
The campfire has three or four Mexicans seated around it. The only one who is really shown is an old man with a full white beard. They see a strange light approaching in the distance and start speaking to each other in Spanish, obviously wondering what that light is. The old man is clearly terrified by this bright light heading his way. Credit where it’s due: that’s a reasonable reaction from a man in the 1870’s seeing a headlight and hearing a growling engine heading for him. Lyle stops the bike, and the old man, seeing Lyle in that red suit and helmet, starts yelling, “El Diablo!” and gasping. Lyle snaps his visor away, and he asks for directions. He doesn’t realize that this old man is literally scared to death. He gets off his bike and takes out a flashlight, shining it right at the old man’s chest. Good move, Lyle. That does it for the old man: he drops dead of a heart attack. Lyle had no need for that light, really, since his bike’s headlight is on; if he’d bothered to pull off his helmet, he’d be revealed as just a man, not El Diablo. But here’s the thing: Lyle isn’t very bright. Read on. It takes him a moment to realize the guy has died; after all, when you’re lying back with your eyes rolled back and staring skyward and you don’t move or breathe, well, who’d imagine you were dead? Right, Lyle? Still, Fred Ward did a decent job of showing Lyle’s confusion and growing fear when he realized what had happened to this poor schlub. Also, he does a passable job of having Lyle try desperately to administer CPR. At this point, you might assume Lyle is starting to piece things together and realize just how far out of his element he is. And you’d be wrong.
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BradH812
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1294 Posts |
Posted - 12/03/2007 : 10:12:26 PM
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Meanwhile, back in 1982 (yes, we’re going back to the present day), the motocross meet is shutting down. Jesse continues to try to contact Lyle on the radio. If I were Jesse, I’d be a whole lot more worried than the actor playing this guy seems.
Back to Lyle, as he sits by the campfire, keeping a vigil over the old man. (There’s another It’s-In-The-Script moment here, but I’m not gonna take the time to describe it; it’s minor, and this review is starting to run long, yet again.) Early the next morning, Lyle buries the old man under a pile of rocks. Isn’t it funny how whenever you need a quick burial, the right size rocks are always lying around? Anyway, Lyle puts the old man’s hat over the grave and leaves. So much for the memorial service. We don’t get any hint that the other men around this fire ever came back. Maybe they were scared off when they saw Lyle pull in, but I don’t buy it.
And it’s back to 1982. Jesse continues to try to get Lyle on the radio. This jumping back and forth in time really doesn’t work for me. Okay, maybe we need to know what people are doing in the present, but it’s made to look like these things are just happening in different locations, not in different time periods. Messrs. Dear and Nesmith, just stay in the past, okay?
Back in the bunker, a technician gives Dr. Sam the exact date Lyle went back to: November 5, 1877. So, it wasn’t about 105 years; it was exactly 105 years.
Back to 1872. Four men ride up on horseback, while the musical score tries to sound like heavy metal. It’s anachronistic, but it could be worse. The camera move showing the leader of this group is clichéd, but it works. The leader is dressed all in black, naturally, and he’s played by Peter Coyote. We’ll learn the names of these guys soon enough, so I’ll give them here. Peter Coyote’s character is Porter Reese; Richard Masur plays Claude Dorsett; Tracey Walter plays Claude’s brother Carl; the nameless fourth actor plays Jack. Three guesses which one of these three will not be around for very long here. Jack is an old, grizzled guy wearing sunglasses. Yes, sunglasses. Seems Jack is ready to leave the group and head back up north (this is along the U.S.-Mexico border). He says he’s through taking orders from Reese, and he tells Reese to take this job and shove it. Actually, the dialogue isn’t nearly as good. It’s very stilted and peppered with wordy-dirds. Apparently, the filmmakers realized that you could cuss to your heart’s content and keep a PG-rating as long as you didn’t go too far, and as long as you avoided dropping the f-bomb. So they went to town, especially with this scene. Jack’s ready to leave the group, and he holds his gun on Reese, telling Reese not to follow him or try to stop him. Reese comes on pretty smooth. He takes out a roll of silk (which is apparently what these guys just stole), says this should cover Jack’s share of the loot, unfurls it, and waves it around like a pink flag. Yes, pink. This distracts Jack for a moment, and Reese is able to pull out his own weapon and shoot Jack dead. Now, the idea of these outlaws stealing silk is fairly novel. I like that the writers decided to try something other than holding up a stagecoach or robbing a bank. Still, silk? PINK silk?! As goofy as this was, though, it did one thing fairly well. Reese knows that he can’t face Jack in a straight-up gunfight. Jack already has his gun out; Reese will never win this one. So he played the salesman, mollifying Jack for a moment, then using the silk to catch Jack’s eye long enough for Reese to get the drop on him. Reese may be a cold-blooded sumbitch, but here, at least, he isn’t a stupid sumbitch. Good! Good! We have a villain who has half a brain in his head! It can only make the hero look better, right? [Future Brad: that would require that the hero have half a brain himself.]
Claude and Carl aren’t too happy with Reese for shooting Jack, but Reese responds that Jack would certainly have gotten caught if he went back, and he’d’ve sent the law after them. Again, cold-blooded, but not stupid. [Future Brad: pardon the interruption, but one other point: after this scene, the silk is never mentioned again. Just a thought.] Claude and Carl start poring over Jacks body, seeing if they can find anything worth keeping. Richard Masur and Tracey Walter look nothing alike, so they have to convince us they are brothers through their performances. They do a pretty good job. I had no trouble believing these two had been bickering back and forth for the last thirty years. Also, you could tell these two brothers were pretty dense (though Claude seems to have a mite more intelligence than Carl). So their acting, while fairly broad, does the job. But this scene goes on way too long, eating up a minute of screen time, while “funny” music plays in the background; it brings the story to a screeching halt. Bad move, filmmakers. By the way, Carl thinks about burying Jack, but Reese calls for them to get back on the trail; this will come up again in a bit.
Back to the motocross meet. Jesse is still trying to pick up Lyle on the radio. Keep in mind this is about 18 hours since Lyle disappeared. Jesse, better go ahead and call 911. Anyway, he tells Lyle to “rig up a locator” if he receives this message but can’t transmit (this will come back later on in the movie, though it doesn’t really work). One of the scientific team comes boppin’ in, wanting to ask Jesse about our Lyle.
Back to 1872 (feeling like a ping pong ball yet?). Lyle comes up on Jack’s body. He keeps trying to get Jesse on his radio, saying, “It’s all weird out here.” Master of understatement, he is. By this time, one might imagine that Lyle would be piecing things together well enough to know he was way way way out of his depth. Nope. He’s not doing that. He rides off into the wilderness.
Sometime later, Lyle pulls up to a small lake and decides to strip down and have a swim. Can’t say I blames him; after being in that red pleather thing for nearly 24 hours, he has to be feeling pretty grubby around now. He doesn’t see a woman swimming in the water some distance away. She apparently is skinny-dipping, but forget it, guys: the movie has a PG rating. Damn. For the record, the woman is played by Belinda Bauer, and yes, she’s quite attractive. If only the musical score didn’t remind us it was half-lame 80’s synth-pop. I know I’m beating this into the ground, and maybe some of you who have seen this movie can find something to like about the score. But for me, the music was one of the things that really sank the movie.
Pretty Lady spies on Lyle as he takes his swim then gets out and returns to his bike, donning his suit once again, zipping and buckling it up as he goes. At this point, we can see that Lyle is wearing a black T-shirt under that suit, and he also wears a silver medallion around his neck. The medallion will come into play later on... unfortunately.
Uh oh! Here come Reese and the Dorsett boys! Reese is grousing about “that thief in San Marcos” who overcharged them for water, implying he wants to go back to this San Marcos place to have a few words with said thief. (I couldn’t help giggling, and it wasn’t the movie’s fault. San Marcos is the name of a local Mexican restaurant here.) Claude and Carl mention to Reese they think they should’ve buried Jack. Kinda late for that, isn’t it, boys? Reese launches into a flurry of abuse on the two brothers. Peter Coyote overacts the hell out of this scene, but considering how goofy the dialogue is, you can’t blame him. As he continues to berate the Dorsetts, they freeze, looking over Reese’s shoulder to see Lyle approaching. Lyle has his helmet on. Yes, he’s wearing the helmet. Can you say It’s In The Script? I knew ya could. The three men don’t realize it’s just a man under that get-up at first. They panic and take shots at Lyle, and man, are they terrible shots! Feared outlaws? Seriously, Barney Fife had better aim than these guys. (They’re at most fifteen yards away, but they don’t come anywhere near hitting Lyle, even after taking several shots.) Lyle hightails it outta there and jumps on his bike. The outlaws hear Lyle trying to start his chopper and give chase. Of course, Lyle’s motorcycle won’t start right up, since we always have to have it stall to build “suspense”. And of course, it roars to life at the last second, and he makes his escape.
Carl assumes this was Jack’s ghost (!) but Reese figures out it’s a man on “some kind of wheel machine.” Again, Coyote overacts the part, but it works okay. Now that he knows this guy has a “ridin’ machine,” he wants it. Please note that Pretty Lady has witnessed all of this from behind some trees.
We get more filler of Lyle’s stunt double ridin’ through the wilderness, with the outlaws in hot pursuit. Then we go to what looks like a village in Mexico, with a mission building being by far the largest structure in sight. The art direction is okay here; I don’t know how accurate it is, but it does more than well enough for a B-movie. We focus on one particular man, a white guy, played by Ed Lauter. One of the locals is trying to trade a rifle and a loaf of bread for some water. Lauter says, “It is only through sacrifice that one can achieve salvation.” So he’s a shady preacher. Does Hollywood know of any other kind? (The director’s commentary reveals that Lauter’s character is a con man, not a real preacher, who sells “holy water” for money, rifles, etc., to the locals. It’s not made all that clear in the movie.) Lauter tries to show this guy isn’t a complete jerk: he takes the rifle, but not the bread. Oh how nice.
Pretty Lady comes riding up on her horse, dismounts, and strides up to Ed Lauter, filling him in on what she saw. Screenwriting 101, Dear and Nesmith. You don’t need a monologue telling us what happened when we saw it ourselves. Just show a long shot of them talking; the audience can figure out what she’s telling him. Belinda Bauer overacts this bit. So, Pretty Lady and Fake Preacher are in cahoots. And with that, we cut to a scene of more players in this little game.
Two men on horseback come upon Jack’s body. The older one is played by L. Q. Jones; the younger one is played by Chris Mulkey. After identifying the body, Jones goes to “take point” (his words), while Mulkey says, “Ben, we’re out of our jurisdiction.” Obviously these are lawmen. They come upon tracks left by Lyle’s bike, and comment on the strange “wagon tracks.”
Cut to a gully of some sort. Lyle stands among some unusual rock formations, studying the map... and he’s still wearing that stupid helmet! Of course, he happens to be looking the other way when Reese and the Dorsett brothers run past, moving into position. Um, guys, your strategy should NOT depend on blind luck. Just a tip for future reference. They get into a perfect position, ready to shoot; a well-placed shot, and we’ll have one Swiss-cheesed time-traveling biker. And a short movie, to boot. Of course, it can’t go down that way. So Reese yells, “Kill ’im!” Well, done, Porter! Alert the guy to your presence BEFORE shooting. Wow, what a wonderful tactic. Remember what I said about the villain having a brain in his head? Methinks I was too generous.
Lyle beats feet back to his bike. Claude gets close enough to get a good shot. When I say “close enough,” I mean point blank range. But he’s so scared of this strange man that he starts to shake. Seriously. Lyle looks back, gives Claude the finger, and Claude continues to shake as if he had a fault line running right under him. I had to fight the urge to laugh here; Richard Masur overacted the hell out of this scene. Actually, no, I didn’t fight the urge. Lyle gets the motorcycle started and peels out once again.
Reese comes in and berates Claude for letting Our Hero get away. He’s right, technically, but his choice of words don’t help him: Reese calls Claude, “You craphead! You yellow chickensh!t-head! You yellow craphead!” Man, the Academy Awards snubbed this movie by not putting it up for best screenplay, yes? While Reese and Claude (a.k.a. Dumb and Dumber) continue to argue, Carl (a.k.a. Dumberer) looks at the ground, seeing a plastic compass that Lyle dropped when making his escape. Smooth move, Lyle. He fetches it for Reese. Reese sees the word “America” on the compass (it has a Boy Scouts of America label on it), then gives it to Claude for confirmation, who reveals he can’t read. Ha! Comedy! Reese listens to the bike, which is still echoing through the gully, then he says, “He’s heading up to Rock Gorge. He ain’t gonna get away.” Rock Gorge? Oh, yeah, it’s the home of the Wet River, and it’s not too far from the Sandy Desert. There’s a fairly amusing moment where Claude comments on how the machine “spat rocks” at him when peeling out; I imagine Claude, while not exactly Einstein, would have seen horses kicking up dust in their wake, and would’ve figured out that this was something similar.
We get almost a full minute of Lyle’s stunt double going through “Rock Gorge,” as an acoustic guitar plays an okay, but generic, bit on the soundtrack. This particular melody will come in from time to time, and it’s the closest thing this movie has to a theme. Judging from this theme, one can figure out why Michael Nesmith isn’t mentioned in the same breath as John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith or Bernard Herrmann. Certainly, the music doesn’t give any feeling of suspense. Or anything else, for that matter. Reese and his boys follow in lukewarm pursuit. (Actually, I can understand them not going so fast: they figure they have Lyle cornered, so why rush?)
The stunt rider goes through a crack in the gorge, then we cut back to Reese and the Dorsetts, just waitin’ around. I have to ask: do Reese and his crew see Lyle from here? Is he heading back? If so, why don’t they shoot? And if they can’t see him, then he’s going through that crack, and the gorge isn’t such a dead end, right? Right? There’s a word for this: sloppy.
The next shot we see is a close-up of Fred Ward in the helmet, and the background obviously looks nothing like that crack he was going through. Continuity, folks; look it up. Lyle asks himself, “Who are these a$$holes?!” then triggers his visor to snap back down. Note that the outlaws are ahead of Lyle, and he can see the outlaws from here, so he himself should be in plain view. Reference my note in the above paragraph. Lyle kicks his bike into gear and ramps over the bad guys. This, by itself, isn’t a bad shot; actually, it’s pretty good. Problem is, he had to get pretty close to them to be able to ramp over them. Why didn’t they get a shot off?
Again, because the movie would be over. Now, some of this could be written off to First Film Syndrome. We can’t all be on the order of Orson Welles, right? But that’s no excuse for having one crappy moment after another. No, this is laziness on the part of the writers. And since this makes Reese and the Dorsetts look really foolish, it looks like we’re in the presence of that old Jabootu chestnut, the Idiot Plot.
Reese watches Lyle roar off into the distance, and he says, “If General Lee had had that machine, we’d’ve won the War.” Great. So, he was a Confederate soldier, and that makes him EE-VILL! Oh, remember, no matter how newfangled or outlandish this “machine” might be to these guys, it’s one motorcycle! One bit of technology does not a winning army make, Reese, especially one that could be taken out with a few well-placed bullets. This brings up just how goofy the writing is: there’s not consistency. Earlier on, Reese was shown to be fairly wily (appropriate for a part played by a guy named Coyote, yes? Ha! I kill me!), ruthless, and sharp. Well, at least he had a bit of intelligence. Here, he acts like an idiot. It’s not because of human error; it’s because the script dictates that he be competent one moment, a doofus the next. Peter Coyote plays the part as well as he can, for whatever it’s worth. Once again, they ride off in pursuit.
We get yet another POV shot of Lyle’s special helment (snicker) showing the rangefinder and tachyometer, and it looks extremely cheap. Why did Dear and Nesmith bother with this thing? It really plays no part in the movie; the only thing it does is clue people in that the filmmakers didn’t really know what they were doing. Oh, now we have his helmet cam showing a zoom feature. The zoom-in is fairly slow, but the meter in his helmet seems to indicate the zoom is quite fast. Again, why bother?
Lyle sees what looks like a.... Fortress? Castle? Walled city? Anyway, it’s on the horizon, and decides to make for that. Actually, it’s the old stone church by the village.
Now we’re in the village. Pretty Lady (who has yet to be named) hears the bike in the distance. She calls for Lauter’s character; we finally get his name: Quinn. Quinn does a macho drawing of his gun, which Ed Lauter manages to pull off. Lyle comes roaring in on his motorsickle, and big surprise, the locals go into a panic. Several of them shout “El Diablo!” Lyle tools around asking where he is and wondering what’s the matter with everybody. At this point, I can still buy this. The extras (maybe a couple dozen of them) scatter from “El Diablo” on his strange red riding machine (snicker). The only one who doesn’t cut and run is Pretty Lady, who watches with interest. He singles her out and asks for help, but she just looks at him. Uhhhhh, okay.
Oops! Here come Reese and Company, riding into town. The action sequence that follows, with Reese and the Dorsetts chasing Lyle around the mission and surrounding village, is pretty decent. It reminded me of the F-14’s getting in a dogfight with Japanese Zeroes in The Final Countdown: it’s so ridiculous that you can’t help but like it. C’mon, a motorcycle shooting around in a 19th-Century town? This is a B-movie’s wet dream of itself, ain’t it?
Finally, Lyle sees Pretty Lady motioning him to ride down a flight of stairs into a cellar where he can hide. Carl follows, but he doesn’t get there soon enough to see Lyle get down the stairs. He takes a potshot at Pretty Lady, and Pretty Lady shoots back. Her aim’s pretty good: she gets a shot across his face (yowch!). He clutches his face and goes to the ground. Pretty Lady goes down to the cellar and closes the door behind her, then holds the gun on Lyle. Once again, Lyle asks what’s going on. His attempts to explain where he was ring true, for now, and I got an honest chuckle when he asked her if she had a phone he could use. However, once he takes off that helmet, Fred Ward is all sweaty, with matted hair. Fred, my man, this is not a good look for you!
Outside, Claude has caught up with Carl, who continues to writhe in agony on the ground. Quinn is now holding a rifle on the two of them, telling them to get out of there. Reese comes up, and there’s a stand-off. Claude exclaims, “Oh God! She blew his nose clean off!” This works well enough. It’s credible that Claude would yell something like this, and it’s not like Tracey Walter would go in for an drastic rhinoplasty just to satisfy the needs of a B-movie. But again, we have a problem: it’s been a full minute since the shooting stopped, and Reese can obviously see what happened without Claude filling him in. Also, when he went down earlier, Tracey Walter’s hand slipped off his face. His nose was right where it was supposed to be. We can let this one slide; the movie’s low-budget, and the goof only lasted a split-second.
Quinn tells Reese to get his ass out of there, and take the brothers with him. Reese says, “There ain’t no dealing on this. That machine is mine!” before he rides off. This part’s okay: Quinn has the rifle on Reese, and Quinn’s probably too bright to be taken in by a flap of pink silk. Also, if there was a real gunfight here, Reese and Claude would be outnumbered; remember, there are townspeople here who would be happy to get behind Quinn and take these jokers out.
Back to the cellar. Lyle continues to wonder what’s going on. He tries to hightail it out, until Pretty Lady points the gun at his crotch. I can’t blame Lyle for deciding to do whatever she tells him to do: a gun to the family jewels is a very good convincer. Pretty Lady tells him he’s in San Marcos. Lyle consults his map but can’t find San Marcos on it. I started chuckling again, but here it wasn’t the movie’s fault: San Marcos is the name of a Mexican restaurant not far from where I live. Pretty Lady asks him where he’s from, and he answers, “Canoga Park, L.A.” Again, I buy him not picking up on the fact she doesn’t realize that L.A. is short for Los Angeles; after all, he has some other things on his mind.
Outside, the locals are still panicking, thinking Old Scratch himself has come for them. They’re also mad at Quinn, because he’s been selling them “holy water” that would “protect” them from El Diablo. One of the locals says, “But the Devil is here! We saw his red and his fire hose.” That is a direct quote. Please, no jokes about Fred Ward’s fire hose, okay? The bit player who acts this part is pretty bad. His accent is clearly fake, and his acting isn’t much better. Before the locals get too riled up, Quinn decides to put a stop to it, and he fakes getting a message from on high, that this isn’t El Diablo in their midst; he’s just a man. The locals see Quinn raise his arms and look skyward, then they drop to their knees. Quinn’s lucky the people here are particularly gullible. Because everyone’s kneeling down now, Quinn’s the only one to see the two U.S. Marshals riding up in the background.
Quinn goes back to the cellar, telling Pretty Girl about the marshals. The minute he mentions the lawmen, Lyle moves to go out and talk to them, but Quinn hold his gun on Lyle. He is then distracted by Lyle’s map, and he asks Lyle where he got “this beautiful map.” Lyle’s answer: “I got it at an Exxon station.” This was an honest laugh, probably the best joke in the whole movie. Pretty Lady has an idea: Quinn will handle the marshals, and “I’ll take care of him [Lyle].” Quinn agrees to this idea, “But that machine stays here.” |
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BradH812
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1294 Posts |
Posted - 12/03/2007 : 10:14:32 PM
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It is never explained how Pretty Lady is able to spirit Lyle out of the village, especially in that red get-up he’s still wearing, but she manages to get him to a small cabin, which I assume is nearby but not in the village proper. Quinn obviously didn’t do that good a job getting rid of the marshals, because we see them spying on Pretty Lady and Lyle and remarking on Lyle’s monkey-suit.
Pretty Lady and Lyle go into her cabin, and Lyle asks if she’s part of some sort of cult that doesn’t believe in using running water or electricity. Okay, keep in mind that Lyle is still in the dark about what’s happened to him. He has no idea that he’s gone back in time 105 years. Up to here, I could buy it. First, he’d have no reason to believe he’d done a Marty McFly. Then, the idea could be so weird that he’d never believe it. Finally, he could be in denial; after all, when you’re so far up the creek, you’ll do anything to believe your situation isn’t so bad, right? But here, he starts to look quite dense. Finally, finally, Pretty Lady introduces herself: Claire Cygne. Lyle introduces himself. Claire continues to make come hither looks at Lyle throughout the scene, and it’s not too subtle what she’s interested in. Lyle tries to reason with her, telling her he doesn’t want any trouble, and he just wants to get his bike and get moving. The background music is a soft-rock number. No, it doesn’t work. Here’s a game you can play. If you’re ever watching a movie, and the music feels off, try imagining the scene without music. If the scene’s quality takes a big step up, then the composer wasn’t doing his or her job. Unfortunately, here the composer was also the co-writer and one of the producers.
Lyle continues to try and talk his way into getting his bike back, but, like I said, Claire has other things in mind. She points her gun at Lyle and orders him, “Take off your clothes,” while unbuttoning her blouse. Okay, if someone who looked like Claire ordered me to take off my clothes while starting to disrobe herself, I could imagine worse spots to be in; after all, she is very attractive. But imagine this: Fred Ward, with a black mop-top, taking off a red leather or vinyl suit he’s worn for at least twenty-four hours. EWWWWWW!!! That guy’s gotta be ripe at this point. (I know, people in the Old West couldn’t bathe as often as we can today, but still.) Lyle is dumbfounded by this, but Claire repeats her command: take ’em off. But before she can finish unbuttoning her blouse....
Dammit! We cut back to the present day. Stop that, filmmakers! We’re in the bunker. Nothing happens, really, but a female technician does say, “There’s no telling where that guy is.” Next thing you know....
We see Lyle in bed with Claire, doing the deed. Claire keeps asking, “How did you get here? Why did you come here?” If a woman said that to me in such a calm voice while we were making hot passionate love, I’d know my performance was way off.
Quinn rides up to a spot in the wilderness where Reese and the Dorsett brothers have camped out, tending to Carl’s wound. Reese demands to know “what’s wrong with her,” saying “it’s bad for business.” Hold on. Are Claire and Quinn working with Reese and his crew? This is never explained, and they really don’t come back to this. Quinn answers, “The man and the machine. He has a power. She’s acting strange.” Damn right. I’ll say it again: if a sweaty and unwashed Fred Ward could stir the loins of a lady who looks like that, I’d hope they could bottle up whatever pheremones he used; I’d buy a bottle. Quinn goes on to tell Reese about the two marshals looking for them, and he names one of them: Ben Potter. Again, I ask: is Quinn one of the bad guys? Reese starts to laugh at this bit, and we go back to....
The bedroom of the cabin. They’ve already, uh, finished up, and Claire’s wearing a slip. Damn. They start going into a little getting-to-know-you banter, which I think would be more appropriate before getting all hot ‘n’ heavy between the sheets (remember, this occurs 100 years before singles’ bars and one night stands were around). The music goes into a treacly electronic soft ballad sort of thing, as Claire repeats her name, Claire Cygne, then gives her backstory: “I was born in Louisiana. My father was a planter. I had two brothers who taught me to shoot and ride. I went to school there. The Civil War came. My brothers and my father were killed, so I left with my mother. We went to New Orleans. She died soon after. Left me with two choices, to use my body or my gun. I chose the gun to get money to eat. There was some trouble. I heard of this place. So I came here. The Padre [Quinn] and me, we buy things from people that’d be difficult for them to sell elsewhere. Then we sell them.” (Kind of like an 1870’s version of e-Bay, eh?) Lyle finally reacts, saying, “The Civil War?” then he says, “What in the world is happening here?!” Claire answers, “You ride this machine, Mr. Swann. No one has ever seen that before. It is you who should be explaining.” Lyle states, “I started riding motocross right out of high school.” Claire is surprised that Lyle went to school and is an “educated” man. She then notes that she owns three books, and asks if Lyle would like to see them. Remember Lyle’s reaction when she mentioned the Civil War? He has forgotten all about that. Imagine Lyle pausing for twenty seconds or so, figuring it out, then jumping to his feet when he realizes what’s happened. Now just keep imaginin’, because that doesn’t happen here. It is at this point he should know exactly what kind of fix he’s in. Lyle doesn’t have a clue! Yes, that’s right, this guy is a first-class IDIOT!
Claire goes to her trunk, which is loaded with guns, knives, ammo, what have you, and finally pulls out a book by Mark Twain. She gives Lyle the book, which contains the story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and Lyle starts to read out loud, chuckling at every other word. Literally. I wondered if Fred Ward had realized how dumb his character was, and just couldn’t hold back the laughter. If that’s the case, he deserved a good-sport award of some sort.
Back to the cellar, where Lyle’s bike is sitting innocently. A local sneaks in and wants to take a look at this strange red contraption. He decides to go ahead and put on Lyle’s helmet. At this point, I assumed that someone — maybe Quinn, or maybe Reese or Claude — would come in and mistake the local for Lyle. Nope. This guy climbs onto the bike and pretends to ride it like he would a horse. He accidentally trips the tape deck, turning it on. You’d expect that direction-finding tape Lyle played earlier to start up. Nope. Instead, the tape plays a song where a male vocalist “sings” (it can barely be called singing) “All I wanna do is dance and have a good time.” You gotta be kidding me. First off, why in the hell would Lyle bring music along to a race?! Why would that tape be here right now? Even if you buy that.... All I wanna do is dance and have a good time”? Seriously, this is lame. What the hell?! Your average techno-pop singer doesn’t get this lame. Britney Spears doesn’t get this lame. (Management: Well, Brad....) Okay, Britney gets that lame and lamer. Anyway, the local panics and pulls the helmet off, tossing it to the ground. For some reason, this causes the tape to stop playing. Uh oh, here come Claude and Reese, opening the door to the cellar and comin’ on down. This sequence could’ve lasted all of 15 seconds: show the bike, then show Claude and Reese coming through the door. They threw in this bit part to get a laugh, and it doesn’t work. This is another hallmark of a bad movie: filler. Throw in lots of junk just to get your movie up to the 90-minute mark. (This scene ate up a minute and a half of screen time.) Oh, by the way, how did these guys know where the bike was? Did Quinn tell them? Again, it’s never explained.
Cut back to Lyle, who is still reading to Claire and giggling like an idiot. Because it’s in the script, Claire notices for the first time that Lyle is wearing that silver medallion, and she asks about it. Lyle gives his backstory to her: He says it was his “great-great... way back there somewhere great grandfather’s.” He then states.... Well, for the sake of an argument, I’ll say it was his great-great grandmother. She stole it from his great-great grandfather “as a reminder of one incredible night they had together.” The grandmother kept looking for the grandfather, heard he was around L.A., went looking for him but never found him, then started a business and started the Swann clan. The medallion has been passed down from mother to daughter for generations, and I couldn’t help wondering what that discussion must be like, when mother told daughter about the “incredible” night the great-great grandmother spent with the mystery man. Ewwwww! Anyway, Lyle’s mom gave it to him when he was 21.
Wait a minute. Wait. A. Minute! “Claire Cygne?!” (If you don’t get it, look it up in a Latin dictionary.) Oh no no no no no no. No. Uh uh. No way. No they didn’t. No they didn’t!!!
(Future Brad: Yep. They did.)
EWWWWWWW!!!
Oh, Lyle adds that the medallion is “supposed to bring me luck.” Claire asks if it works, and Lyle says it certainly does. It’s obvious we’re being set up for a twist at the end, and in case you haven’t guessed already, I really don’t like where this is going.
Sometime later, Quinn comes storming into the cabin, as Lyle and Claire are getting dressed. Fred Ward looked like he was constipated in this particular scene. (I’ll go into the problems with casting Fred Ward in the Afterthoughts.) At this point, Lyle is wearing a red under his suit. Hold on; wasn’t he wearing a black shirt earlier?? Anyway, Quinn, from the look on Ed Lauter’s face, is none too happy to see Lyle and Claire together. It looks like there was a subplot involving Quinn and Claire, but it wasn’t developed; this script meanders more than someone with bad ADHD (and this claim has support from an unexpected source; more on that in Afterthoughts as well). Quinn demands that Lyle get out of town, since Lyle seems to have brought all this ruckus in with him. Lyle voices that this suits him fine: just let him have his bike back, and he’ll get moving. Note that he says this right in front of a woman he just finished having a little bedroom encounter with. He’s an old romantic, isn’t he. Claire’s response: “So, then, he leaves. I’m through with him.” Man, can’t ya just feel the love here? If it was clear she was pissed at Lyle for being so callous, this line would work. That doesn’t come across, though.
After a long moment where Ed Lauter glares at Fred Ward once again, they head back to the mission and check out the cellar, to find— Bum bum BUM! Lyle’s bike is missing! The extra is lying in the corner, apparently knocked out. While Claire goes to tend to him, Lyle grabs his helmet and bolts out, looking for the marshals, Quinn following in hot pursuit. We hear the villagers outside going nuts once again when they see “El Diablo.” And then... Bum bum BUM! Claude’s hiding under the stairs, waiting for Claire. How did he know Claire would be left alone in here? The script told him, of course! He comes up behind he and knocks her out cold with one punch.
Lyle storms through the mission courtyard, while the villagers make a stir but don’t move around much (I don’t know how William Dear handles extras today, but he wasn’t too good at it in 1982). The marshals see him coming and wonder Who — or what — in the hell is THIS dude?! Younger Marshal takes a position on the roof of the shed they’re hiding in, while Quinn tries to calm the villagers, even though they seem to be calming down already. This is yet another missed opportunity; it’d be fun to find out just what Quinn told the villagers to placate them. The marshals hold their guns on Lyle in case he tries to draw a pistol. Younger Marshal notes that, other than his helmet, Lyle isn’t carrying anything (I would think this guy would wonder if Lyle didn’t have a gun hidden on him somewhere). They let him come into the shed and have a meeting of the minds — the very tiny minds.
Lyle goes in, asking for the fifteenth time, what the hell’s going on?! Potter (the older marshal, remember?) just stands there, not saying anything. Lyle presses him to talk, and Younger Marshal takes a potshot at Lyle’s feet. Quinn comes in and tries to smooth things over, and Potter says, “I don’t like his smart mouth.” Lyle apologizes for losing his temper, although, in my opinion, Lyle’s right for once. He went in asking if they were cops, and Potter’s refusal to say anything was more rude than anything Lyle did. Yes, Lyle is the reasonable one here. Savor this moment; there aren’t many like it in this movie. Lyle says, “They stole my bike!” Quinn clarifies: his machine; Lyle says, “Okay, my machine!” The marshals ask him what he wants them to do about it, and he responds, “Can’t you get on the radio?!”
Thud.
Oh good night! Haven’t you figured it out yet, Lyle?! Haven’t you worked it through your thick skull into your tiny mind?! Haven’t you looked around and made some sort of connection?!
Of course, the answer is no. Lyle, you are such a damn fool.
Quinn and the two marshals look at Lyle like he’s crazy; all things considered, I can sympathize. Hell, if it were present day and he acted that way, I’d be wondering if his bread was done all the way. At long last, Lyle finds out that the marshals are after Reese and the Dorsetts. Quinn tells them that Reese and his boys have gone up to “Swallow’s Camp”. Okay, so now Quinn’s one of the good guys? What’s up with this guy, anyway?
The transition, cutting from Lyle’s line, “Swallow’s Camp? Where’s that?” to a shot of Swallow’s Camp, is clichéd, but what the hell, it works okay, and better movies are guilty of doing the same thing. We see a few extras trying to give the impression that this is some sort of outlaws’ hideout. Then we see Reese and Claude riding up, dragging the bike along behind them. Once again, the musical score does not impress. The extras, who look like they were starring in a community theater production set in the Old West, start poking and prodding the bike with their rifles and sticks. One of the nameless extras says, “What in the hell is it?” and Reese answers, “It’s mine, that’s what it is. It’s mine.” And looky here, Claude has a little somethin’ extra. He has Claire, still unconscious, draped over the horse. Reese says Claude should’ve offed her: “Bringing her here ain’t nothin’ but trouble.” From Reese’s perspective, he has a good point. They had no reason to bring her in. Claude gives a little smirk and rides on without explaining or defending himself. But then he reveals what he had in mind. He goes to one particular cabin in this hideout, where Carl is waiting, his face bandaged by a large bandanna in an attempt to hide the fact that Tracey Walter’s nose is in fact right where it should be. Walter speaks in a nasal voice, trying to give the impression of a man who is now beakless. I’ve never heard a noseless guy speak, but I didn’t buy this. Decent try, though, Tracey.
Claude brought Claire in as a “present” for Carl. He made sure she was untouched, so Carl could get her in pristine condition and go to work on her. He takes Claire into the cabin, giggling like an idiot.
Now it’s time for the marshals, Quinn, and Lyle to hit the high trails. Quinn rides a horse up to the others and yells, “They took Claire!” Uh, wouldn’t he have found this out much sooner? As in, sometime before they’re ready to saddle up and move out?! If this were any sloppier, it’d be a Joe. (Just to torture ya, let me remind you of Adam Sandler’s song, “Sloppy Joe, slop, sloppy joe.... Sloppy Joe, slop, Sloppy Joe.”)
They go riding out, and Lyle is still wearing that damn suit! Only now he has a serape draped over it. I know they were in a hurry and all, but couldn’t they have found Lyle something that wouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb?! Oh, and while they leave, Lyle is clearly barely hanging onto his horse, and he yells, “I need some handlebars!” Ha! Comedy!
Meanwhile, back at Swallow’s Camp.... Carl looks down at Claire, who is now tied to a bed. He gloats, saying how he’s going to enjoy torturing her, then he goes to the window to look at the extras gathered around Reese and the “machine.” I’ll get back to Carl in a moment.
Reese is now astride the bike, and he and Claude are trying to figure out how to start this thing up. This scene is actually fairly amusing, and shock of shock, it’s plausible. I bought the way Reese jumped up and down on the bike trying to kick it in the right spot the way they’d seen Lyle do it. Also, Peter Coyote and Richard Masur acted this scene well; their characters may be one-note, but they hit the right note in this bit. Finally, Reese is able to start the bike, and whaddaya know, it shoots out from under him, leaving him to fall down on his ass. Okay, it’s a cheap laugh, and it’s obvious what’s gonna happen, but give credit where it’s due; I found myself chuckling at this scene. The bike goes several yards, then topples over on its side. For once the music in the scene isn’t half bad. Mostly it’s a couple of mandolin trill stings whenever Reese tries to start the bike; not the best in the world, but it works well enough [Future Brad: the final credits note that the mandolin was performed by David Mansfield, who also wrote the score to the infamous Heaven’s Gate. I’m surprised he got roped into working on this movie; judging from the score for Gate, Mansfield’s a pretty good composer.] Up to here, this scene works. But now the other outlaws panic and start shooting the bike. And when I say “shooting”, I mean they pump at least two dozen shots fired at the bike. Um, if these guys are firing nearly point blank range and getting 24 or 25 shots in, wouldn’t that tear the hell out of the bike? Imagine a bullet hitting the tires, or better yet, hitting the gas tank (which STILL has fuel in it). Nope, no damage taken, since Lyle’s gonna need the bike to make his heroic escape later on.
Reese isn’t too happy with Claude; Claude had told Reese how he saw Lyle start the bike, and it didn’t work too well for Reese. Claude’s encouraging, though: “I just told you what I saw. Besides, you did real good. You made it work.... a little.” Yeah, I chuckled at this, too. Reese inspects the bike, then turns around and starts to chew out the extras for shooting “a machine!” He goes on to call them “You buttheads!” Uh huh-huh huh-huh huh-huh. He said “butthead.” Heh-heh hmm-hmm heh-heh. So the bike’s still working fine, despite having been all shot up.
Cut to Our Four Heroes finding a fairly safe position where they can watch the camp without being spotted themselves. Quinn is able to figure out there are about fifteen men down there, and he also works out which cabin Reese is likely to be in. Lyle asks if Claire’s in the cabin, too.
Cut to a close-up of Claire still lying tied up to the bed. There’s nothing in the world that kills a filmmaking technique like overuse, eh? Anyway, Claude and Carl stand over her. Claude wants Carl to “do something to her now.” Carl says he’s gonna cut her. But Claude tells Carl to wait for later: he wants to have a little fun with her first. He reaches down to roughly kiss Claire, but Claire bites his lip. Reese pulls a knife on Claude and says, “That’s enough!” Um, what are these guys doing? Just standing around and waiting? Yep. Now that they have some time on their hands, is Carl gonna start doing a carving job on Claire? Nope. I’m glad they didn’t have a torture sequence here; it’d be pretty disgusting to see something like that. But they need a reason to hold off on doing anything to Our Heroine. None is given. So Our Heroes are sitting up their biding their time, while Our Villains are waiting for Our Heroes to make a move.
Speaking of Our Heroes.... Lyle tells the marshals he’s with them. Uh, Lyle, I think they know that already; you rode out here with them, didn’t you? He says, “I don’t know what your plan is, but you help me get my bike back, and I’ll get us into a high zoot boogie like you never saw.” A WHAT?!?! Can anyone tell me what the hell Lyle is talking about?! Is this motocross lingo or something?! A high zoot boogie?! He then spells it out for them: “You help me get my machine, and I’ll help you kick ass.” Shoulda said that the first time, ya dunce. Quinn’s asks why they should trust Lyle, and Lyle answers, “Why not?” This would make some sort of sense if Lyle wasn’t talking about high zoot boogies (snicker) thirty seconds ago. Potter says they’ll make their move after dark. Lyle wonders about Claire, worrying that Reese and the Dorsetts “will grind her to pieces.” And for once, Lyle has a good point. Quinn answers that whatever happens to Claire is on Lyle’s head: “She wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t come along.” I was kinda mad at Lyle for not defending himself here. After all, he didn’t go looking for trouble; he’s just way out of his element.
Now it’s nightfall. No, Carl hasn’t done anything to Claire. Reese and Claude are sittin’ around doin’ nuthin’. Claude tries to blow into a jug, badly, and Reese tells Claude, “Stick to crime.” Not a great joke, but I did smile at it. Are these guys waiting for the good guys to come storming in? Yep.
Up in the good guys’ camp, Lyle watches as Potter calmly shaves himself, sans shaving cream. Then he decides to reach into his suit and pull out a couple of energy bars, offering one to the marshals. There’s a moment where he unzips a pocket loudly and Potter draws his gun on him and gives him a look that says, “Do that crap QUIETLY, boy!” Potter’s right. Lyle, you idjit. Younger Marshal accepts Lyle’s offer and seems to like the energy bar. I checked the IMDb (as I write this, the DVD has already gone back to Netflix, and I’m writing from my memory and the notes I dictated into a tape recorder), and Chris Mulkey’s character is listed as “Daniels.” But I never heard his name given in the movie, so I’m calling him Young Marshal. One question: has Lyle been carrying all this stuff on him the whole time? Also, when has Lyle eaten or drunk? One could presume he had a meal while at Claire’s place, but everything we’ve seen tells us they got to the cabin, did the horizontal tango, then got out. Certainly he didn’t have anything to eat before then. Has he been munching these energy bars this whole time? And hey, wasn’t Lyle supposed to be on that track for a couple of hours? He didn’t expect to be lost for two or three days? It gets better.
There’s more supposed comedy when Lyle turns on a night-vision scope inside his helmet to get a better look at the camp. So, this helmet has an infrared scanner as well? What in the hell were they doing putting all this stuff in that helmet?! Lyle gets Potter to try the helmet on; I hope L. Q. Jones got paid really well for appearing in this movie. He’s a good character actor in a crappy film, and this scene in particular is embarrassing, seeing this guy putting on this helmet. Potter still can’t see very well, so Lyle unzips another pocket in his Captain Kangaroo racing suit and pulls out a couple of glo-sticks. Again, why would he be carrying— oh, forget it. Let’s just get through this, okay? Lyle tries to increase the power on the night-vision scope, and Potter pulls the helmet off, scared by this newfangled technology. There’s a decent bit where Lyle shows the others how to activate those glo-sticks, then Young Marshal asks if his helmet would stop a bullet. Lyle says he doubts it: the helmet’s not built for that kind of protection. Every now and then you get little flashes where the movie works pretty well. But this is a bad movie review, which means when something’s working, get ready for the other shoe to drop. Young Marshal puts things together and asks the big question: where did Lyle get all this stuff? Lyle starts rattling off the different companies he got his equipment, how he cobbled his bike and helmet together from different models, and so on. There’s a genuinely funny bit where he mentions that he got the glo-sticks from K-Mart. But mostly, this nails home that Lyle is utterly clueless what time period he’s in!
I’m not sure what word to use for this guy anymore. Dumb just doesn’t cut it. Stupid? Idiotic? Nope. Hair-brained? Dummy? Ignoramus? Moron? Nah, but getting closer. Profoundly mentally retarded? Good, but it’s too technical.
Lyle Swann Stupid.
There’s my term for him. Lyle is Lyle Swann Stupid! Seriously, this guy has to be one of the biggest dopes I’ve ever seen in a movie. He deserves his own term for stupidity! Oh, for the record, I think Fred Ward was onto how Lyle had bubble-gum for brains: you can see him grinning in this scene, and one suspects he may have been fighting the urge to laugh. Okay, back to the story. (Groan.) Oh, Lyle notes that he hangs with “a bunch of technoid types who come up with a bunch of boogie. Real zoot, huh?” Ah yes, thank you, Messrs. Nesmith and Dear. |
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BradH812
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1294 Posts |
Posted - 12/03/2007 : 10:18:58 PM
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We have several shots of people in the camp drifting off to sleep. Reese stays on the alert. Then we go to a close-up of Potter, who slips a garrotte around a guy’s neck. The extra does a mediocre job of acting like he’s being strangled, then we have a close-up of L. Q. Jones’s face as a little bit of blood spatters on it. The commentary reveals that this shot was meant to show that Potter had cut the outlaw’s head off, and we’ll have Lyle confirm that through dialogue in a moment, but it doesn’t come through here. Still, the fact that Potter has killed this man in very cold blood is clear, and he’s shown to be pretty ruthless. Somehow, the others have also made their way down here undetected (apparently, the outlaws never thought to post a lookout). Lyle, seeing Potter kill the guy, nearly throws up, and the others shut him up and whisper at him to keep quiet. Note that in this scene, they’re right by Lyle’s bike. Let’s see. No lookout, no one to stand watch over the bike, no alarm raised so far. Bang-up bunch of outlaws these guys are, hey? Potter goes to another sleeping outlaw, pinches his nose to force the guy to open his mouth, then sticks the barrel of his gun in the guy’s trap. He whispers to the outlaw, ordering him to point to the cabin where Reese is. This is pretty good, actually, and it sets up what will be hands down the best scene in the movie. After the guy points to Reese’s cabin, we cut away to Reese’s cabin, and we hear a dull “puff.” In the commentary, again, William Dear reveals that the sound was Potter killing the guy. I wish they’d found a way to make this clear. All in all, though, this sequence is working surprisingly well, mainly due to L. Q. Jones’s performance. Potter whispers to the others, “This is between me and Reese.” If anyone else tries to interfere, Young Marshal is to put a stop to it.
Lyle asks the others if Potter has gone crazy. Yikes. Lyle’s showing some sense now. Should I put a paper bag over my head? The world might be coming to an end. The other two reveal Potter’s backstory: his son was murdered by Reese two years ago, and Potter’s been hell-bent on revenge ever since. This could have been the oldest cliché in the movie, but here it seems fresh, for one simple reason: Potter’s obsession is shown as being crazy. This turns the cliché on its ear. Oh, one more thing: Young Marshal tells Lyle that Potter “ain’t never been beat in a fair fight.” Then he tells Lyle to get his bike ready while Young Marshal and Quinn find a good position to cover Potter.
Potter comes marching right up through the center of the camp, calling for Reese to come out and fight. The other outlaws decide to get outta the way and let things run their course. Reese, however, has another idea. He throws his coat to Claude and tells him to “get ready.” Reese’s plan will be revealed in a moment. It’s clear he’s going to try something sneaky and underhanded. Claude says, “Ben’s calling you out personal. What’s the matter? You yellow?!” Reese answers, “Not yellow. Smart.” And Reese is absolutely right! What do you do when you’re being called out by someone who can’t be beat standing toe to toe? Go for stealth.
Potter stands outside the cabin, holding his gun on the door, demanding again for Reese to come out. The door opens, and we see what looks like a person silhouetted against a fire. Potter starts shooting immediately, but it’s obvious after a moment that the “person” is just Reese’s coat on a hanger; Claude made up a makeshift dummy as a decoy. Potter, who’s gone around the bend here, empties his gun into the dummy, not realizing he’s been set up. Reese appears behind him and shoots him in the back with a shotgun. There’s a little bit of offscreen teleportation: Reese got behind Potter awfully quick. But other than that, this scene was very well done. Again, it turns the whole revenge story angle completely around, having Potter spend all this time tracking Reese down, only to be felled by his own obsession, along with the fact that Reese isn’t stupid.
Reese stands over Potter’s body, gloating, until a couple of outlaws come up and inform him that the “machine” has been taken; they also mentioned the two guys Potter killed, and it is hear that we learn that that first guy was beheaded. Reese snorts in disgust and says, “That’s a Yankee trick.”
By this time, Lyle and Young Marshal have gotten the bike out of there, but they’re not done here. Young Marshal is ready to go in guns blazing, and he pressures Lyle to go with him. Lyle is horrified by what’s going on. He makes the point — rightly — that Potter just went right into certain death, and Lyle’s tone carries that he thinks Potter was an idiot. Young Marshal’s response: “Well, maybe you just don’t understand anything about honor.” Lyle reminds Young Marshal that they have to get Claire out of there, and Young Marshal states he doesn’t give a damn about that girl. Lyle’s face shows it all; he’s appalled by all of this. Lyle insists they have to work together here. Not sure whether he’s right about that or not, but he has to say something. For once, Lyle acts as the audience’s eyes; for this one scene (and one other one later on) he is an Everyman of normal intelligence. Enjoy it while it lasts. Also, we have a surprising bit of depth to this B-movie here. The marshals are turning out to be almost as bad as the outlaws, and it’s working. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Timerider is actually dipping its toe in waters that Unforgiven would swim in ten years later. (Of course, Unforgiven had a much better script and Clint Eastwood at the helm, explaining why it became an instant classic, but there ya go.)
Lyle pulls out another handy-dandy gizmo from his suit o’ tricks. Looky here, he’s got emergency flares, which, when lit, look an awful lot like dynamite, at least to someone who’s never seen a flare before. They throw the flares into the camp, putting a nice scare into the outlaws. If only we believed that Lyle would carry all this junk with him at all times, this would be pretty good. Another thing: at this point, Lyle knows the outlaws will mistake the flares for dynamite. Um, so, has he figured out where and when he is? And if so, when did he do this? We never saw that lightbulb light over his head.
While the outlaws scatter, Lyle gets on the bike, puts a large wooden beam across the handlebars, and goes riding in. He uses the beam to knock down anyone getting close to him when he rides through. I don’t know whether this would work or not in real life, but it does okay in the movie. Young Marshal goes in shooting up the place, hitting quite a few outlaws. Then he takes two shots to the torso.
Lyle bursts into Reese’s cabin. Carl is knocked back to the far wall and caves it in. Note that Claire is still unharmed in any way. Rather than crying from relief, Claire starts laughing, which rings very false, especially from a woman in 1872; I don’t care how liberated Claire is. If I came within an inch of my life, I’d tear up after finding out my ass wasn’t grass after all. Lyle pulls out a pocket knife, saying, “Well, here it is. Heroics, Miss Claire, heroics.” Yeah, right. Heh heh heh.
At the same time, Quinn (d’you remember Quinn?) is making his way toward the cabin. For a moment, it looks like he has a clean shot... at Lyle. WHAT? Is he gonna shoot Our Hero? In the director’s commentary, William Dear revealed that Quinn had been carrying a torch for Claire, and he was considering getting rid of the competition in this scene, before deciding to be the good guy after all. In the movie itself, this look less like ambiguity and more like, yep, sloppy writing. Too bad; Quinn is the closest thing to a three-dimensional character in this movie, and one wishes he’d been drawn a bit more carefully. Anyway, Quinn does indeed see another outlaw at the window and shoots him instead.
By the way, remember how I mentioned the music would play a melody that could pass as this movie’s theme? It plays in full rock mode here. Personally, I thought it sounded like a poor man’s version of Van Halen’s “Jump.” Competently played, but not much of a theme song.
Claude rushes into the cabin to see to Carl, and there’s now a fire of some sort in the cabin. No, it’s not shown how that fire got started (unless it was the same fire Reese used to distract Potter, and that fire was nowhere to be seen when Lyle came in to get Clair), and the “fire” looks suspiciously like an arc lamp. Seriously!
Lyle and Claire get out of there on the motorcycle, with Quinn and Young Marshal tagging along on their horses. Reese watches them go and says, “He took our machine! You gonna let him get away with that?!” One of the other outlaws basically says, whaddaya mean our machine?! Claude comes rushing up, literally growling to Reese that Carl’s dead. Considering the material, Richard Masur’s performance has been pretty good, up to here. His rumbling “Carl’s dead” had me snickering. Reese decides to give chase, and the other outlaws — who, twenty seconds ago, called Reese on his flip-flip to calling the bike “our machine” — lock step behind him.
Finally, the action’s about to get underway! Well, sort of. And what do we do? We cut back to the present day. Stop that, filmmakers!
Back to the bunker. The female technician sees Dr. Sam on a monitor, and they try to talk to each other, but the transmission’s garbled. It’s obvious they’ve sent Dr. Sam back in time to look for Lyle.
Ahem.
1. These guys sent a monkey back in a little metal capsule as their first real time-travel experiment about a day and a half ago. Now they’re sending their project leader back with transmitting equipment and what have you. Remember, they didn’t mean to send Lyle back. Hmmmmmm, they’ve made fast advances in the technology, haven’t they? NASA would be jealous.
2. They are carrying out a live transmission between 1982 and 1877. I’m not even gonna try to wrap my mind around that. But I have to ask for the fiftieth time, what were the writers THINKING?!
Oh, they mention that they have to yank Dr. Sam back before a three-hour time limit expires. Um, why? Their equipment seems to be doing fine. Say it with me: It’s In The Script.
Back to Lyle and Company. It’s now the following morning. One presumes Lyle and the others have been riding through the night, and I have to wonder once again how Lyle fueled up that bike (for that matter, have the horses gotten a rest?). Anyhoo, without bothering to set up the scene, we have Young Marshal falling off his horse, muttering “Ben, it ain’t right Ben.” This death scene isn’t all that great; I don’t know how well Chris Mulkey does death scenes in other movies; remember, he was working with an inexperience director and a slipshod script here. He gives an effort here, but it doesn’t work. What does work is Lyle’s reaction to Young Marshal’s death. Yes, he’s acting like a normal human being here. At first, Lyle is disbelieving: Young Marshal had lost a lot of blood, but Lyle had seen worse, and Young Marshal seemed okay a few minutes ago. Then he opens up Young Marshal’s shirt to find that one of the wounds was near the chest, serious enough to be mortal If not treated. Quinn goes through the motions of closing Young Marshal’s eyes, and Lyle steps back a bit, still confused and frightened. Give Fred Ward credit here; he makes the guy’s reactions pretty believable.
Uh oh, Young Marshal thinks he’s in a slasher pic, and he gives a gasp for life to a cheesy musical sting. He asks, “Did I get Reese?” and Lyle tells him he did. Young Marshal says, “Not my jurisdiction,” then dies for real. They don’t have much time to mourn, because Reese, who is standing on a ridge nearby, takes a pot shot. Well done, Reese. They don’t know you’re here, they’re sitting ducks, so you take a bad shot, rather than get close and shoot ’em point blank. Dummy. Quinn lays down some covering fire as Lyle and Claire make tracks out.
They put some distance between themselves and Reese’s gang, when finally, the movie makes a small concession to reality. The motorcycle runs out of gas. At last! In frustration, Lyle slaps the radio, which aparks to life! Looks like Dr. Sam is in the area looking for them. Quinn stands in the open and picks off a couple of outlaws, but he doesn’t get down when they get off their horses and go for position. Um, Quinn, I’ve never been in a firefight, but man, lemme tell ya.... If they’re getting in position to shoot, get your ass down! Quinn then tells Lyle to just give up the bike, and he points the gun at Lyle to make sure Lyle will listen. All things considered, Quinn seems to have a point... until Lyle hears a voice on the radio! Yay, it’s the cavalry! Or at least Dr. Sam. Lyle tries to beep out an SOS in morse code on his radio; I was surprised he didn’t just try to talk to the guy. Also, it would’ve been nice to establish early on that the bike had, say, a homing beacon among all its gadgetry. Claire figures they could use the bike to call for help, and they need to hold onto it. They tie the bike to a horse so they can tow it along behind them. Here the music, as goofy as it is, gives a bit of urgency and picks up the pace a bit. Quinn and Claire succumb to the Idiot Plot shortly after that, though, when they go straight to a ridge that ends in a cliff, dropping a couple hundred feet. Oops! Good job boxing yourselves in, folks!
So, Reese and his crew are closing in and Our Heroes are trapped on that cliff. They leave the bike in plain sight and find a hiding spot. Lyle goes back to the bike to get the radio then makes for the hiding place. He starts fiddling with the radio to send a distress signal while Claire lays down covering fire. Claire and the outlaws trade fire while Lyle works the radio; this scene was pretty decent, actually, getting the suspense up to a good degree (it doesn’t hurt that the scene plays with no music). Finally, Claire runs out of ammo. Guess these guys are screwed. Only the music starts up, building to what sounds like it’ll be a big flourish (as close as this sort of thing can get anyway). Claire pulls out a knife; she’s not going down without a fight. She and Lyle exchange a look of extreme boredom (I’m serious: Fred Ward looks like he’s fighting sleep here!). Reese leads his gang toward the bike as the electronic drum section of the score picks up. Well, they tried. Guess something big’s gonna happen
And it does. A helicopter rises up over the cliff face! Lyle starts jumping up and down, whooping and cheering! Claire, Quinn, and the outlaws let their jaws hit the ground! John Lone jumps out from behind a rock and waves his arms at the helicopter, yelling, “Pee-TAH!!! Set-NAH!!!” (Management: Okay, Brad, knock off the inside jokes and get back on topic.) Okay, okay. This scene could and should’ve been a great capper, and if this were a decent movie, well.... But I have to wonder: they sent a monkey back in a small capsule two days ago. Now they’ve advanced far enough to send a helicopter, complete with pilot, co-pilot, and Dr. Sam, back?! “Jump” Lite blares on the soundtrack. Great triumphant theme, Mr. Nesmith. Way to kill the moment. Too bad: the sight of a helicopter rising up over an Old West setting is so utterly insane that it should’ve been great. I wanted to love this scene. Damn. (That’s the mark of a good B-movie. They wear their cheesiness like a badge of honor, making it part of their charm.)
They just had to go and blow it, though. During this scene, Reese goes completely around the bend. While the other outlaws panic and run like hell, Our Villain decides to go mano e mano with the chopper! He yells “Get away! Get away! That’s MY machine!” at the helicopter, then starts taking shots, hitting and killing the pilot! Oh, crikey! It’s official: Reese has been carried so over the top that he’s more comical than menacing.
The helicopter, minus its pilot, goes into a tailspin, nearly crashes into the ground, and in the process hits Lyle’s motorcycle! The bike goes crashing down the cliff face! In slow motion! Okay, I understand that they wanted this crash to be climactic and all, but still... it’s just a motorcycle.
Reese ain’t having none of that. He watches it go. We hear him scream, “That’s MI-I-I-I-I-INE!!!” and we hear a strange sort of squishing sound, but when we see Reese again, he’s cowering on the ground, agonizing over the loss of his precious machine. That’s what the DVD shows, anyway. I remember seeing this on cable in the 80’s, and that’s not how it went down. Originally, the chopper continued to spin, and its tail rotor went right into Reese. What’d you say? “Ewwwwwwww”? Exactly. We didn’t see it; we just saw a pair of empty gore-covered boots fall back. So, I guess they censored that a little bit for the DVD, but we still hear the squishing noise, and later on we’ll see a wide shot of the ridge, and Reese will be nowhere to be found.
The co-pilot of the helicopter finally gets control of the bird, bringing it in close to the cliff face. Dr. Sam extends his arm, motioning for Lyle to jump on board. About this point, the helicopter sound becomes an electronic “whump-whump,” suspiciously like the helicopters in Apocalypse Now. I didn’t mind that all that much, since this moment wasn’t supposed to be all that realistic anyway (dear Lord, did I just type that?). Lyle gets on board, then reaches out, telling Claire to hop on; he wants her to come back to the present day with him. One still wonders, when did Lyle figure out he was in the 19th Century? The night before? This morning? Five seconds ago? As far as we know, he may still be unaware he’s in 1872.
Dr. Sam insists they have to leave Claire behind; they don’t want to create any paradoxes (Immediate Future Brad: too late, Doc). We intercut between shots of Lyle and Dr. Sam arguing and a shot of Claire eying Lyle’s medallion, which has conveniently come out of his suit. It’s painfully obvious that the medallion is being held right in front of the camera. Oh yeah, here we go.
Claire reaches, grabs Lyle’s medallion, and pulls it off his neck. We see a little look on Lyle’s face. And now we know. This is where Lyle puts it all together, at the end. Sigh. Lyle, have you taken had any CAT scans or taken any IQ tests lately?
The helicopter lifts off, as Lyle continues to protest and Dr. Sam fights to keep this dope on board. We pull back on Quinn, who is hunched over, looking up at the helicopter in aw, and Claire, who holds out the medallion in triumph. Um, now, Lyle should have figured out what was going on some time ago. Claire, on the other hand, should be in the dark? What, is Lyle terminally dense while Claire is Voyant? (Management: one more pun like that, Brad, and we’ll sic Louie and his firehose on you again.) As Lyle watches the ground fall away, we hear his voice in flashback. It’s his post-coital monologue to Claire: “My grandmother stole it from him as a reminder of one incredible night they had together.* He took off, and she went to L. A. to find him, but never did. She started her own business, nobody remembers what, least they ain’t saying. She became the great matriarch of the Swann clan.... Anyway, it’s supposed to bring me luck.”
*[Actually, it was an incredible afternoon they had together. I remember this; the writers did not.]
We see the long pullback of Claire and Quinn standing on the ridge, and we go to the final credits. Yes, Claire was Lyle’s great-great grandmother. Ewwwwwww!!! Ah, but remember whom she stole that medallion from.
That’s right. Lyle’s his own great-great grandfather.
Oh, Mommy!!! Maybe that should be, Oh, Great-Great GRANDMommy!!!
And with that, The Adventure of Lyle Swann is over. Thank God.
Afterthoughts
And this was supposed to be a return to writing shorter reviews. Yeah, right. Hopefully, this section will be relatively brief. (Management: Yeah, right.) Shaddap.
Leonard Maltin gave Timerider two stars out of four. His review reads as follows: “Motocross bike racer is accidentally sent back in time to the Old West, circa 1875... and that’s where the writers fell asleep. Good premise and cast are left hanging as film crawls downhil.” I often disagree with Maltin’s reviews, and I’d dock a half star from this one, but he nailed it here. This could, and should, have been a damn good yarn. Some other filmmakers would try similar things a couple of years later, of course. The Back to the Future trilogy and the first two Terminator films (I still have yet to see the third) dealt with the same ideas of mucking around with the past, and they also both threw in a Grandfather Paradox. Terminator 2 would snap that premise in half, when one thinks about it. But they worked, and often they worked brilliantly, BTTF by mining the material for laughs and Terminator by pushing forward with a very dark sci-fi action story. Of course, that’s why you’ll never hear William Dear mentioned in the same breath as James Cameron or Robert Zemeckis.
Time to beat a dead horse. The movie has four basic problems. Actually, it has more problems than that, but I’ll forgive some of them as being part of its low budget. At least they did what they could with the money they had. But of the four problems it has, three of them run throughout the entire movie, and the last one is such a howler that’d it would be hard to imagine any movie recovering from it.
First off, there’s the music. Now, some people who have seen this movie may actually like the score. I didn’t. At all. Competently played, but badly scored, and completely inappropriate. Now, I have no problem with anachronistic scores. I have no problem with scores that become dated. If the composer does a good job to start with, the music will remain good. But second-rate Van Halen and synth-pop and an Old West/time travel tale do not mesh.
Second, let’s face it, the script stinks to high heaven. Some good moments (and there were a few) are drowned out by many, many bad ones.
Let me break off and make a recommendation. If you do decide to rent this movie on DVD, listen to the commentary. There’s the usual patting on the back of the cast and crew, and William Dear praises Michael Nesmith’s score. But there are some genuinely amusing stories about the making of the movie, often relating to its low budget. And Dear shows a refreshing amount of candor here. He ends up saying he considers Timerider to be a cult movie that will continue to be popular. I think he’s being much too optimistic. But something else creeps in. You could play a drinking game, taking a drink every time Dear says something along the lines of, “The script needed more work.” I counted about a half-dozen times he said that, without even listening for it. (Gotta disagree with him on one of those: he wished they’d put more background into Potter’s revenge story. As I implied before, if there’s one thing about this movie I wouldn’t change, it’s Potter’s story and its denouement. It did exactly what it needed to do, no more, no less.) Dear also mentions that they had a lot of trouble getting Belinda Bauer to be believable as a woman in the 1870’s. All things considered, Lauter, Walter, and Masur give as good performances as anyone would have a right to expect. Coyote goes over the top, but he has moments where he plays the cold-blooded killer pretty well. Bauer, though, comes across as what she was here: a late-20th Century woman pretending to be someone from a hundred years ago (I’ll talk about Fred Ward in a moment). Anyway, Dear’s commentary was a pleasant surprise. While he doesn’t come out and admit it, you get flashes here and there that he realizes he may have dropped the ball in a big way. (It’d be interesting to hear a commentary from Michael Nesmith, seeing what he had to say for himself.) He also notes that if he were to remake Timerider (which he says is not very likely), he'd do a lot of things differently. Also, Dear comes across as quite charming and friendly. He’ll never be one of the great directors, but I could imagine having a beer and shooting the bull with the guy, and that’s more than I could say about some directors. Right, Uwe?
Anyway, that’s problem #2: a script that needed some serious re-writing.
Problem #3: Lyle Swann himself. First off, I think Fred Ward was badly miscast as a motocross biker. I would imagine a younger, more vulnerable lead might have made this work slightly better. (Dear mentioned in the commentary that Andrew Stevens also tried out for the part.) But even an actor of Ward’s talent can’t pull off a character this dunderheaded. I read a review of this movie (and if I can find it, I’ll post the link) that stated that Lyle may be the single most idiotic character in the history of motion pictures. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but this guy is dumber than a sack of hair. Again, to his credit, Dear now acknowledges this in the commentary.
He also voices regret over throwing in Problem #4: that ludicrous twist ending. This is a mind-boggler, all right. Um, lemme ask a question: how old is that medallion now? Wouldn’t it get more faded each time Lyle went back and perpetuated his line? Did an earlier version of his mom go and buy it in a flea market in some incarnation way back when?
Actually, this twist would explain one thing: if this is the third or fourth time Lyle has gone back and impregnated the Great Matriarch of the Swann clan, he’s gettin’ pretty inbred by now. (Go ahead and scrunch up your face in disgust.)
But wait! When did this happen the first time? Was there ever a first time? Will Lyle continue to go back in time with each time-travel pass? What happens when he gets to be too dumb to ride a bike? Will he suddenly disappear? But where did he come from in the first place if there was a first time Lyle went back in time?! God help us! The paradoxes and back and-forth in time are going out of control! The universe may collapse on itself! I can’t take it! It’s too much!
Take cover, everybody!!! I think my brain is about to explo—
BOOOOOOOM!!!
(Management: Sigh. There he goes again. Sorry about this, ladies and gentlemen. We promise that the next time Brad writes one of these things, it’ll be a contemporary thriller. No more time travel movies for him. Okay, let’s get this mess cleaned up. Louie, could you hose the floor down over here?) |
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Gristle McThornbody
Preeminent Apostolic Prelate of the Discipleship of Jabootu
Germany
186 Posts |
Posted - 12/04/2007 : 2:31:17 PM
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Great review, BradH812. I also saw Timerider back in the early '80's on HBO (multiple times), and remembered thinking "COOL!". I haven't seen the film since then - and have no plans to see it any time soon - but I imagine my thoughts would be in line with your review. A 13-year old is much more forgiving of the films he watches...
One thing I will say: even as a youngun seeing this film, I remember thinking "This Swann guy is kind of dumb." If I were to see the film today, I think I'd sprain an ocular muscle from all the eye rolling I'd be doing.
And that whole inter-generational incest paradox sub-plot/shocking twist...EWWWWWWWW!
"Hi, I'm Bob Evil!" |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 12/04/2007 : 8:45:44 PM
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Fun review, Brad, that was good stuff! And I wouldn't sweat the length of the review none; as long as you're interesting, which you are, lengthy is good.
And I was flattered by your appropriation of Anal Blood. May it soon become a staple phrase.
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BradH812
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1294 Posts |
Posted - 12/04/2007 : 10:09:09 PM
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Thanks to both of ya.
Food, I don't remember using the term "anal blood" in the review. Though now I wish I did. |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 12/04/2007 : 11:27:15 PM
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It's about halfway down the first post. This paragraph:
"Dr. Sam’s team is able to view what’s going on there on their monitors. This means they have cameras in the 19th Century transmitting the image 100 plus years forward into the bunker. As Food would say, Anal Blood! Anyway, they see the motorcycle on the monitor, and they figure they need to yank it back. Problem is, the one-minute timer is locked in; they can’t pull back until the timer hits zero. Again, anal blood." |
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BradH812
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1294 Posts |
Posted - 12/05/2007 : 05:18:50 AM
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Food, ya know how to coin a phrase. Wasn't even thinking about the term when I typed it; that's how insidious it is. Congrats and thanks!
So, Food managed to creep into my brain. Who should be more frightned, me or Food? |
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Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann
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