Gunmen is a movie without plan, inspiration, or originality—and to that list I would add coherence, except that I am not sure this movie would place much value on a plot that hangs together. The film’s ambitions are simple: To give us a lot of action, a lot of violence, a few ironic lines of dialogue, and some very familiar characters. To call the characters in Gunmen clichés would be a kindness; my notion is that they’ve been wandering in actionpic cyberspace for years, occasionally surfacing in our dimension as B-movie heroes.
The movie stars Christopher Lambert (he eats the fly in the opening scene) and Mario Van Peebles, in a murky tale of drugs and revenge south of the border. Van Peebles plays Cole, a New York–based drug enforcement agent, who is in an unnamed South American country to mop up illegal drug profits and avenge his father’s death. Lambert plays Servigo, a drug runner who may have information that can help him.
The idea is that these two men will have a love-hate relationship throughout the movie, and we will find it amusing. I can’t argue with the first half of the idea. In one of the movie’s less plausible developments, they actually shoot each other in the leg, and then we get allegedly hilarious scenes in which they limp in unison. Anyone who has ever been shot in the leg and tried to walk immediately afterward was not hired as the technical consultant on this movie.
The dialogue is hard to describe. Imagine the worst spaghetti Western you ever saw, shot in Italian and then dubbed into English by actors familiar only with the most basic movie clichés. Now imagine a film shot in English in which people talk the same way. You’ve got it. Then imagine them talking that way while inhabiting familiar moments from old movies. Not just the scenes I’ve already mentioned, but the jump off the cliff from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the gag about being handcuffed together from The Defiant Ones, among many other films.
Several years ago, in Ebert’s Little Glossary of Movie Terms, I first formulated the Cole Rule. This is the motion picture production rule that states: No movie made since 1977 containing a character with the first name “Cole” has been any good. There may, of course, be exceptions to that rule. Gunmen is not one of them.
Guyana—Cult of the Damned
(Directed by Rene Cardona, Jr.; starring Stuart Whitman, Gene Barry, Joseph Cotten; 1980)
Guyana—Cult of the Damned has crawled out from under a rock and into local theaters, and will do nicely as this week’s example of the depths to which people will plunge in search of a dollar. The movie is a gruesome version of the Jonestown massacre of 1978, so badly written and directed it illustrates a simple rule of movie exhibition: If a film is nauseating and reprehensible enough in the first place, it doesn’t matter how badly it’s made—people will go anyway.
The film was produced, directed, and cowritten by one Rene Cardona, Jr., whose credits in the movie’s press release portray him as a ghoulish retailer of human misery. He is the producer of Survival, about the cannibalism of the Andes survivors, and of The Bermuda Triangle, and now of the disquieting story of the Guyana massacre. “At least fifteen film producers went after the story,” the release says, “but Cardona got there first.”
Good old Cardona. He got there first with a film that mixes fact, fiction, and speculation with complete indifference, and that contains an amazing absence of any real curiosity about the bizarre deaths in Jonestown. It presents them as a horror story, but it doesn’t really probe for reasons or motivations.
“This story is true,” we’re promised at the outset. “Only the names have been changed.” The story may be true, but the research sure isn’t original; the screenplay seems to have been written at typing speed and based on wire service stories of the massacre. The movie’s held together with a voice-over narration (handy if you’re planning to dub into several languages), and the characters are almost always seen from the outside: We get no scenes attempting to probe the personalities of the cult members.
Instead, there are lots of sermons in which Stuart Whitman, as “Reverend James Johnson,” seems to be trying to cross Hitler with Elmer Gantry, as he exhorts his cult members to follow him from San Francisco to Guyana—and to permit his dictatorship there. Whitman plays the cult leader as so rabid and fanatic—such a complete bad guy—that it’s difficult to believe anyone would have followed him anywhere. Surely the real Jim Jones must have been somewhat more charismatic?
The scenes in Guyana show crowds of extras herded here and there in the jungle camp and forced to listen to more fanatic sermons. For variety, we get scenes showing cult members being publicly humiliated and tortured; one scene involves electric shocks to the genitals of a young boy. Meanwhile, the narrator introduces such supporting characters as Whitman’s mistress (Jennifer Ashley), public relations expert (Yvonne De Carlo), and lawyer (Joseph Cotten). They all appear in a few scenes, look thoroughly ill at ease and embarrassed, and are dispensed with.
During all the garbage that precedes it, we’re waiting uncomfortably for the film’s climax, the massacre with the cyanide in the soft drink. The movie spares no details. The cult members line up and drink their poison or have it forced down their throats, and then they stagger around, clutch their stomachs, and scream in pain. Later, the film shows actual photographs of the real victims, while we are solemnly reminded that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” So remember: Don’t drink cyanide.
All of this is disgusting, and all of it is sad. Why did a reputable studio (Universal) pick up this vile garbage for national release? Because there is money to be made from it, I suppose. The movie brings absolutely no insights to Guyana. It exploits human suffering for profit. It is a geek show. Universal and its exhibitors should be ashamed.
Gymkata
(Directed by Robert Clouse; starring Kurt Thomas, Richard Norton; 1985)
I’m not sure Gymkata is the movie it was intended to be—not if they intended to make a straightforward action picture. You know you’re in trouble when you get to the big scene and the audience is supposed to scream and it laughs. This is one of the most ridiculous movies I’ve seen in a while, but make of this what you wilclass="underline" I heard more genuine laughter during the screening than at three or four so-called comedies I’ve seen lately. I was even toying with praising the movie as a comedy, but I’m not sure the filmmakers would take that as a compliment.
The movie stars Kurt Thomas, in real life a world-champion gymnast, as a young man who is recruited by the U.S. government to break into the obscure Asian mountain kingdom of Parmistan and bring out his father, who is a captive there. Here’s the catch: To enter Parmistan, all foreigners have to play The Game, which means running a deadly obstacle course. “In the last 900 years, no foreigner has survived The Game,” the lad is informed ominously. In that case, how did the father get into Parmistan? Never mind. Logic will get you nowhere with this movie. That becomes apparent when we meet the Khan of Parmistan, who is played by Buck Kartalian as a cross between a used-car salesman and a counterman in a deli. This man is roughly as Asian as Groucho Marx. The Khan has a beautiful daughter (Tetchie Agbayani) who does indeed look Asian, and one of the several inexplicable lines of dialogue about her is, “Don’t worry—her mother is Indonesian.” What a relief.