Highlander

Even in its longer, so-called International Cut, Russell Mulachy's Highlander is a fragmented experience. Characters - and their subplots - come and go, briefly touched upon but always just out of our reach. This structural collapse isn't a failure of plotting though, it's a mode of communication explicitly tied to the film's lead character: an immortal swordsman named Connor MacLeod. We meet MacLeod during a wrestling match in Madison Square Garden. The camera's viewpoint becomes untangled from the ground-level brawling, lifting into the air then surging upwards towards the balcony seats, before crashing into Christopher Lambert's lulled observer. While the in-ring action works an ugly Southern pride angle, MacLeod disassociates, dreaming of a youth spent fighting for a 16th century Scottish clan. 

Connor MacLeod has over four hundred years of memories behind him. Desperate battles on muddy fields mingle with a long, blissful, relationship with a woman who adored him. There's even a brief interlude in occupied Europe of the 1940s that sees MacLeod rescue a child then machinegun a Nazi officer to death. It makes sense that this immortal is untethered from this pantomime present and therefore a firm narrative procession. MacLeod's daydreaming overwhelms, not just him, but the film itself. Flashbacks are not only geared to dole out the exposition required to make sense of an apocalyptic battle of multinational immortals, they also put us in the headspace of someone grappling with their own massively extended lifespan - the friends and lovers that they have buried, the thwarted human connections that he hopelessly clings to. This sadness underlines Lambert's blurry-eyed performance. As the cosmic competition that he finds himself a part of begins to wrap up, what does he actually have left? 

MacLeod and the film's other undying swordsmen battle for a vague power known as The Prize. When one man fells another by decapitation the winner is consumed by light and fire; an ejaculatory possession that mingles the strain of crucifixion with an almighty, building-shaking, orgasm. Sean Connery's Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramirez, whose primary function in Highlander is that of a knowledgeable mentor, is a Christian despite the fact that his birth comfortably pre-dates that of the faith's founders. Run through and close to death, following a castle-toppling fight with Clancy Brown's unstoppable Kurgan, Ramirez drops to his knees and raises his hands in prayer. A supplication seemingly rooted in the only rule that all of the game's participants, good or irredeemably evil, will not break: battle cannot be joined on holy ground. 

These notes lend Highlander a strange, semi-religious aspect. MacLeod's declaration upon vanquishing his final enemy - that he not only knows and feels everything but that he actually is everything - positions the character as a kind of bloodied Messiah. This supernatural survival of the fittest has facilitated the rise of an all-knowing leader for mankind, one who has built himself out of centuries of toil and torment. It makes you wonder about what sort of Creator inhabits this universe? Certainly not a merciful one. The Prize was anyone's to claim. MacLeod's eventual victory was hard-fought rather than pre-ordained. Indeed at the moment of his ascension, MacLeod is lifted up and consumed not by heavenly apparitions but by smoking phantoms and regurgitating beasts; visions of rot that try to take hold of his body before they are, themselves, absorbed. This incredible power is portrayed as violent and ugly, a crashing wave to be tamed by someone worthy. In the film's epilogue MacLeod chats merrily with the spirits of his departed friends about his Godhood. He sits with his new love, Roxanne Hart's Brenda, on a Scottish hillside, finally at peace. This unshakable connection with the land that birthed him is deployed in the reassuring, picturesque, terms of a romantic picnic but it also underlines something human and imperfect about MacLeod: his greatest dream was to live in his memories. 

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

A far cry from the expensive, Richard Donner end of the superhero spectrum, Sidney J Furie's Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is content to cheerily motor along, striving to portray Silver Age situations and ideas that far outstrip the film's meagre budget. Following the mixed-to-negative reactions to Superman III and Supergirl, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind unloaded the ailing franchise onto nonsense specialists, The Cannon Group. Lumbered with less than half the cost of Helen Slater's adventure, Quest for Peace is forced to take significant shortcuts, resulting in - amongst other signs of an impoverished production - crumbling, partially transparent special effects and a frame permanently cluttered up with cheap theatrical props.

Petitioned by a schoolboy to rid the world of nuclear weapons, Superman scours the Earth, scooping up missiles from either side of The Iron Curtain. Following Kal-El's modern labours, this ballistic haul is then jammed into an enormous steel net before being hurled into the Sun. Thanks to a spot of scheming by Gene Hackman's criminal mastermind Lex Luthor, this disposal method inadvertently creates Mark Pillow's permatanned Nuclear Man. Rather than the decaying, flummoxed Bizarro seen in umpteen comics, Nuclear Man is Superman by way of hair spray rock and pro-wrestling. He's a grimacing vein-popper, completely unable to control the unfathomable powers he's inherited from his clone parent - which, for this instalment, includes an eye blast that spontaneously reassembles shattered historical monuments.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Cyborg: Director's Cut / Slinger

Although not in the same league as a full-on control freak like Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme was nevertheless given plenty of opportunity to put his own authorial stamp on his 1980s releases. Following a disastrous test screening for Bloodsport, The Cannon Group allowed the star to supervise the film's re-edit - how much worse could it get? Healthy box office returns ensured that this benefit was soon extended to the rest of the company's collaborations with the actor, including 1989's Cyborg. To give him his due, Van Damme had a clear and consistent methodology when assembling all of these features: they are vehicles for his body to be pored over and admired. Plot concerns rank a distant second.

Slinger is Albert Pyun's attempt to reconstruct his vision of Cyborg, freed from studio notes and a film star who jealously guarded his brand. Thanks to a diligent collaborator, Pyun had an 88 minute VHS workprint to excavate anything absent from the theatrical release. Newly recorded voice overs and dialogue loops were used to paper over missing or unfilmed scenes, framing a story that diverges on several key details. Objectives are more clearly delineated in this alternative cut, characters act with specific, stated purpose. The analog video assembly also predates any MPAA censorship, giving Pyun one or two more instances of violence to grab attention with.

This Director's Cut doesn't simply rescue a preexisting piece, it goes further with Pyun adding and subtracting from his film, eagerly working towards an impressionistic draft that simulates what could have been, had he been allowed full creative control and a greater financial freedom. In terms of form, it's clear from this new edit that Pyun wanted to hold on his images longer, to let them sink into his audience and expand in their minds. Lacking the coverage to actually amplify these moments, Pyun switches back and forth between the blotchy, deteriorating analog signal and a pristine theatrical source, effectively replaying the beat. In truly dire editorial predicaments he simply turns what little footage he has into self-contained loops.

These primitive techniques, coupled with an excretable epilogue sequence, threaten to shake the viewer out of the film but, thankfully, Slinger has one more ace up its sleeve, Tony Riparetti and Jim Saad's brand new soundtrack. Indeed, this Director's Cut is an object lesson in how much of an impact music can have on a film. As released, Cyborg was saddled with a reedy, synthetic score by Kevin Bassinson. Despite the striking apocalyptic imagery, the audio accompaniment was painfully low rent, a supermarket keyboard's approximation of an orchestra, piped out to tinnily underscore the futuristic action. By comparison, Riparetti and Saad's suite is a blazing catalyst, full of wailing, heroic guitars and the kind of pounding, electronic beats Chu Ishikawa wove into the Tetsuo films.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Cyborg

One of the more intriguing ideas in Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog (adapted for the screen in 1975 by LQ Jones) is that cinema-going has survived into the wasteland, taking the form of mouldy old pornography - these snippets projected up on shattered walls to placate the roaming gangs of shell-shocked rapists. In that scenario film explicitly functions as escapism, providing a glimpse of the soft female bodies denied to that world's gibbering, starving men. Albert Pyun's Cyborg goes one better, imagining the kind of art that a society coping with an extinction event might actually produce. Cyborg is monosyllabic and cruel; its characters defeated.

Despite being named for Dayle Haddon's automaton and starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Cyborg's most important character is Vincent Klyn's Fender. The film opens with his narration, filling the audience in on the catastrophes that have facilitated Fantasy II's meticulously detailed establishing shots. Fender enjoys this new milieu, the rampant lawlessness allowing him to grow into his psychosis and actually thrive. While the weak hole up in the rubble, Fender and his gang of bodybuilders crash over the ruins, gobbling up anything or anyone that takes their fancy. Pyun can't help but betray his allegiance in these moments. Klyn's face is framed in a series of extreme close-ups, the actor's eyes blazing while he preaches his apocalyptic nihilism directly to the audience. Cyborg belongs to Fender.

Cyborg is subsistence filmmaking. Sets and costumes inherited from a cancelled Masters of the Universe sequel, the shoot itself costing a quarter of the pre-production outlay for that failed He-Man project. Van Damme plays Gibson, a post-apocalyptic mercenary who takes his payment in canned goods. This destitution is reflected in the stark, basic plotting. There's a listless quality to the film, a pervading sense that everything is being made up on the spot. Probably because it was. Cyborg motors on a baggy, improvised game of chase, complete with a viciousness that reflects a population who have grown up insular and surrounded by extreme violence.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Bloodsport

Frank Dux is a very interesting person. As well as being a super important ex-CIA agent and a noted ninja historian, Black Belt magazine favourite Mr Dux spent the late seventies fighting in hundreds of underground, full-contact martial arts matches before retiring completely undefeated. Contrary to what the Los Angeles Times would have you believe, these entirely credible events definitely happened. Dux's stories so impressed Cannon Group moguls Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan that they stumped up the cash to turn his life story into a film.

Macho fantasist Dux found his perfect big screen avatar in Jean-Claude Van Damme, both men defined by their desire to be regarded as some sort of exciting object. Dux used tall tales to attract gullible marks to his ninjustsu McDojos. Van Damme, thanks to disastrous test screenings that deemed an early assembly unwatchable, was given carte blanche to edit the rhythms and shape of Bloodsport around centrefold spreads of his muscled physique.

Schwarzenegger's frame was oversized and lightly comical, his brawn presented as the machinery required to become a human gun platform. Stallone was smaller but steely, his body a work-in-progress that seemed to be unconsciously stressing the flayed elegance of rejected messiahs. Compared to his peers, Van Damme's mission is simple. He wants to be appraised and desired, explicitly linking glimpses of his engorged figure with the the act of sex. Van Damme fucks women and he wants you to know it. Viewed in this context, Bloodsport's fights are more about the graceful slow-motion arc of a perfectly chiselled leg than any sense of genuine conflict.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Over the Top

Sylvester Stallone's brief dalliance with The Cannon Group concludes with Over the Top, a picturesque, would-be tearjerker direct from company head Menahem Golan. Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk, an absentee father looking to reconnect with his son before the film's climax press-gangs him into an all-consuming arm-wrestling contest. Over the Top does little to tap into Stallone The Star, his take on Hawk is reserved bordering on flat. Golan instead uses the actor as the personification of inexpressive masculinity.

Despite a few airbrushed posters focused around Stallone's steely, action-ready musculature, Over the Top takes a different tact for the majority of its runtime, unspooling from the perspective of his onscreen son. David Mendenhall's Michael is a child trapped in the company of a parent he doesn't know or really understand. Hawk is a wandering trucker obsessed with bicep expanding repetition, Michael is a hesitant, fragile little boy boxed off to a military academy by his mobbed-up Grandfather so he can learn how to sneer at poor people.

Like all remote, emotionally cool movie fathers, Hawk struggles to comprehend a child that is an individual rather than an extension of himself. Hawk pushes his son into emotional and physical arenas that he has himself mastered with the intention of stressing their innate, biological kinship. Conflict demands Michael fail outright but in the end an ill-advised arm-wrestling contest with a diner tough becomes a confidence builder for the son rather than an opportunity for the father to manage his peculiar expectations. Disappointingly, Over the Top isn't interested in Michael failing or Hawk growing.

Over the Top has the constituent parts to create something quite interesting. Stallone was living, breathing pop culture at this point while Mendenhall is able to communicate a real sense of desperation - although the child star displays a relentlessly toothy smile, his eyes are wide with real mania. Whether or not this is actual acting or simply the boy's physical reaction to playing against Rocky is irrelevant. It works for the character. Unfortunately, Stallone isn't asked to do anything as taxing as love a child that doesn't measure up to his own brawny standards. Over the Top is all the poorer for that.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Cobra

Sylvester Stallone and his regular fall guy George P Cosmatos join forces with Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan's Cannon Group to deliver Cobra, an 87 minute splatterfest that finds connective tissue between straight-to-video slashers and street-sweeping law enforcement. Stallone plays Marion Cobretti terminally cool, like Arthur Fonzarelli starring in his very own European violence comic. Cobra stands as the LAPD's last resort, a Zombie Squad stick-up man who's happy flashing Giallo blades when he's not steaming around in a battleship grey Mercury Eight, hunting wrongdoers.

In Cobra's world regular cops are ineffectual wimps with limp pistols and even limper politics. Only Cobra has the stones - not to the mention the cavalier regard for due process - to really muck in and get the job done. Cobra is Dirty Harry's mutant offspring, an unrestrained avenger driven by simplistic, knee-jerk posturing and supermarket tabloid headlines. Callahan cleaned up San Francisco with a fetishised six shot revolver, Cobretti's task is so great he requires a misshapen Finnish sub-machine gun that fires explosive, car shredding, bullets.

Stallone's narrow, insistent focus compliments the more deranged aspects of Cobra's future-shocked premise. Although barely explored, the film's central threat is a wave of hysteria that has penetrated every level of society, compelling construction workers, yuppies and even police officers to meet in concrete pits to bang axes together. Stallone isn't interested in the logistics or thought processes behind this mania, it's just an interesting image he can match to a foreboding percussive beat.

As with Staying Alive and the last two Rocky films Stallone is generating mood and excitement out of abstracted movement, the aesthetic jumble of MTV's emotional editing as a method of pure narrative delivery. Stallone, ever the populist, is using this language to compartmentalise the elements of film that don't interest him - motivations are fixed, pat even. Good is good and evil is just evil. In this universe, Cobretti's fascistic hatred of lawbreakers is positioned as the only sane response to a society that is happy to gnaw its own leg off.

The film is a lark, Stallone and Cosmatos have built themselves a towering, two hour monument to eradication, then hacked it down to the bone to appease ratings boards, greedy distributors and, most importantly, Stallone's own ego. Asked to deliver a sub-90 minute wheeze for the Top Gun crowd, Stallone dialled into that film's sweaty regard for the muscled male as a desirable object. Despite Brigette Nielsen's presence, no-one here is shot more adoringly than Stallone.

Cobra pores over its subject, not so much as the kind of efficient, muscled machinery that drives the rival Schwarzenegger films but as a cool, aspirational personality. The film lingers on Stallone. Every gesture, every discursive bit of waffle the actor employs to wrestle the audience's attention back to him is up there on the screen. Stallone warps the basic mechanics of police procedurals, rendering every building block but himself brief, if not elliptical.

This narcissism doesn't actually harm Cobra though. If anything it elevates it, transforming a landfill policer into a brisk, energetic horror show. Cobra iterates on Nighthawks, solving a lot of that film's problems in the process - LA-LA Land is a more conducive environment for Stallone's ego trip, while Brian Thompson's performance as The Night Slasher never overwhelms Stallone they way Rutger Hauer did. Cobra signals a sea change for Stallone, he's no longer retreating from the larger-than-life status that Rocky and Rambo have conferred, he's embracing it, seeing if he can apply himself to a different formula.

MASTER BLASTER

After a couple of years of radio silence the He-Man documentary Toy Masters is finally being screened during August in Chicago. With any luck a wider release will soon follow. This preview reel details the making of the Masters of the Universe movie, a pretty nifty attempt to map cosmic Kirby ideas onto a flagging toy. Masters The Movie turned up in late '87, six years after the line launched and two years after they knocked the cartoon series on the head. Even as a kid I remember thinking Mattel had missed the boat.