SPOILERS
Lord knows I have no problem with double-genre crossover films. My script
for Loan Wolf ("mortgage broker by day, werewolf by night") makes me proudest
of anything I have ever written. In fact, I hear it may be back up on the front burner
again because of its timeliness during the current mortgage crisis. It gives
Americans real comfort to know that the meltdown of their lending institutions
is not caused by their own sloth, the corruption of their leaders, or the
avarice of their corporations, but rather by werewolves.
I am having some script problems with the sequel, though, since the wolf
gets killed in the first film and the mortgage crisis is averted at the end of
the film by government
intervention. I'm thinking of having him come back to life as a zombie
werewolf, but he'll obviously need a new profession. Maybe I'll make him a
maverick cop who doesn't play by the rules. And by that I mean the cop rules,
not the werewolf or zombie rules, which are actually quite flexible. It makes sense
for him to balk at filing all of his arrest reports, because zombies hate to
fill out paperwork.
Particularly when they can smell fresh brains nearby.
Having established my sympathy for multi-genre entertainment, however, I still think it's kinda silly when
a film which spends its first half developing a plot about the U.S. military's
struggle against the top al-Qaeda terrorist then makes a crazy 180 in the middle when
the Americans free the terrorist so they can team up with him against an
immortal Nazi ghost. I mean, would Hulk Hogan have teamed up with the Iron
Sheik?
The Americans, by the way, are confident of victory in this quixotic
struggle because "even ghosts have to follow the rules of nature and physics."
Er ... like, for example, human mortality?
That gives me another script idea. What if he is a maverick immortal
Nazi ghost who doesn't play by the rules of physics?
I think you have probably already determined that this film is pretty far-fetched. It's also quite
claustrophobic since it takes place almost entirely within the hull of a
disabled WW2-era battleship. You see, the CIA can't really get any good
torturing done any more, not even in Gitmo, because of those pesky liberals, so
they re-commission a floating museum to active service and keep it permanently
at sea as a base for black ops, far from the prying eyes of the press and
Democratic legislators. This naval museum turned interrogation chamber is the
very same ship which once transported a German super-soldier, who was the
result of the medical experiment gone awry toward the end of the great war.
The super-soldier was tortured on this very ship, and the new round of torture
...
Oh, I don't know. Does it matter?
The important thing is that the immortal Nazi goes on a brutal slaying
rampage, the ship goes incommunicado, and a rescue team is sent on board,
headed by rugged Lance Henriksen. Ol' Lance is sent on the mission with the
knowledge that his own son, a naval enlisted man, was assigned to the crew of
this very ship. Lance's swabbie son turns out to be unconscious, but
alive, and the weird part is that he's a 40-year-old British guy! (I'm not
kidding.)
One of the rescuers is a woman
(Katherine Randolph). She gets covered in the blood of one of the victims, so
she does what I think any of us would do on a disabled ship filled with
brutally eviscerated bodies, the most dangerous al-Qaeda terrorist, and an immortal Nazi ghost.
She isolates herself from her colleagues, sets down her weapons, gets naked
and takes a shower.
And it's probably a very cold shower, since the ship was drifting and
powerless.
I have to be honest and admit that this film actually looks pretty good and Henriksen brings some laconic, world-weary macho credibility to the special
ops team, so it's not an incompetent film by any means. By the standards of
straight-to-vid actioners, the acting and direction are above the norm.
But, damn, is it a silly idea.
