Firehead

My review was written in January 1991 after watching the movie on Pyramid video cassette.

"Firehead" is an unusual cold war thriller with sci-fi overtones. Mobile, Alabama-lensed indie opened recently in southern territories with springtime video release to come.

Chris Lemmon, again mirroring dad Jack's mannerisms and delivery, is cast as a government science whiz whose latest experiment is out of control. He has converted Soviet defector Brett Porter into a sort of a superman with telekinetic powers who shoots deadly laser beams from his eyes (hence his nickname, "Firehead"). Porter is busily destroying American factories recently awarded defense contracts.

Lemmon is assigned by his slimy bureaucrat boss (Christopher Plummer) to stop the freak, and beautiful blonde Gretchen Becker is made his teammate. Not surprisingly, Porter teams up with Lemmon to go after the real bad guys.

Screenplay by Jeff Mandel and helmer Peter Yual does a good job of maintaining interest while convincingly extrapolating the reaction of hardliners to the current spirit of glasnost. A subplot involving biological warfare plans is timely but not pursued in depth.

A prolog set in Estonia but filmed in Mobile is unconvincing, but pic otherwise is technically up to par. Becker is a personable leading lady and even gets to sing the rather silly title song over the end credits.

As a retired admiral who helps Lemmon, Martin Landau proves that recent upscale stints with Francis Coppola and Woody Allendo not preclude a sincere B-movie performance.

I purchased Firehead because I like bad movies and, well it's called Firehead, isn't it? It's terrible. Inexcusably bad. But you probably already guessed that or, heaven forbid, watched it and knew.

It concerns a Russian super-soldier with telekinetic abilities who defects to the US ("I'm going to find a free country") and eventually turns on his American handler as well. Christopher Plummer plays his former boss, Vaughn, who is part of a shadowy secret group that wishes to rule the world. I'd explain more of the plot, but it's a fun combination of dumb and nonsensical, so I won't. It doesn't matter anyway. Suffice to say that Vaughn decides it's a good idea to enlist a chemist to track down a rampaging super-powered defector blowing up factories. But fear not! He has assigned an assassin to tag along and take out this raging Russian. An assassin who frequently gets surprised by people sneaking up on her, sure, but an assassin no less. It goes pretty steadily downhill from there.

The only reason this movie gets even two stars out of me is wholly because of the performances of Martin Landau and Christopher Plummer, who manage to prove they can float on top of sewage. I suspect they owed somebody favors. Big, big favors. They're good enough, in fact, to be part of the problem. They'd raise the bar back up off the ground, and I'd foolishly start expecting good things only to be hit upside the head again with, for instance, a government-trained professional gunman shooting down a very narrow hallway at our protagonists walking side by side and missing. That sort of thing.

Such a vast, uncountable amount of bullets are fired at our two (sometimes three) protagonists that I started to be concerned with the quantities of wasted metal that would go unrecycled when said bullets inevitably missed. This movie features perhaps the worst gunfights I've seen in a movie. If you kinda run and then maybe duck and then sort of look the other way when someone's unloading their clip at you, even if you're completely out in the open, you'll be just fine in the world of Firehead.

If you come to Firehead hoping for a good movie, then seriously, what's wrong with you? It's called Firehead. If you're hoping for a hilarious bad movie, then you're headed in the right direction. It's not one of the best of the worst or anything--there are some slow moments, but it seriously shines in spots. It has awful, awful gunfights. Constantly. It has probably the worst little girl actress I've encountered delivering some inspired lines. In also has an ending so dumb, tangential and inexplicable that I was amazed. And it has enough little unexpected bad moments, one of which involves a squeaky toy, to keep you interested.

2/10 for quality. 6/10 as bad movies go.

As far as the production itself: 2 stars, only for the presence of the classy Plummer (at least you can watch him and reflect on all the good movies he's been in) and ever-intense Landau (whose acting job here does him no favors.) Elsewise, this truly is an awful picture, thus made for Rifftrax. The mocking 'Trax team--I suspect when they were young, they made life miserable for a lot of unpopular kids who will no doubt come back as zombies to execute vengeance---have plenty to ridicule in this amateur spy shoot-em-up. Some of the riffs aren't their best level, but there are still plenty that hit the mark. The grade-school acting, plot, and dialogue give them a lot to work with. An amusing watch.

This movie is one of those films where you are watching and you feel as if you missed something. This movie just feels off, especially at the start where it just seems like Ivan, the one known as Firehead has been featured in another film. Unfortunately, he has not been, but I guess you could say that is a good thing too as this film was just a very weak action film made on a shoestring budget. How that got Plummer and Landau is beyond me, but I am guessing their salaries made up most of the budget because the shootouts are boring and there is not all that much destruction going on within the film.

The story as I said plays like a sequel as we see Ivan walk away from his Russian duties showing off his eye laser powers. He apparently does telekinesis, but the synopsis here incorrectly refers to him as a Russian cyborg. Well, in USA he begins blowing up stuff and soon Chris Lemon is whining and trying to find him while being paired with a lady we later learn is a top assassin, yet she displays absolutely no skill whatsoever. They all must go against this secret society of rectangle people who are planning to stoke the fires of war, but do not worry, there was not enough in the budget to depict that.

The acting is about what you would expect as Chris Lemon overacts in every scene while the guy playing Ivan mimics a Russian accent with a lot of gusto and little girl shrieks all her lines loudly and obnoxiously. Meanwhile, Plummer takes his role serious while Landau is most likely regretting being in the movie. The action is boring, Ivan's powers are not used much at all making them seem almost pointless to what is going on and no nudity to speak of. All this adds up to a very bland action film.

So, this is a pretty bad film. Watched a film called Samurai Cop and it was bad too, but it was an awesomely bad film, while this one is just a dull bad which is way worse! That film still managed to entertain, while this one made me wonder when it was going to be over! Once again, I am not sure why they had the Russian dude have powers if they were going to be used the minimal number of times and he does nothing in the final scenes, and the film is titled after him, not Lemon's character!

I bought this movie for the cover. Unfortunately, I had to take the whole thing. I used to think you could never go wrong buying movies sporting a flaming hammer and sickle, but apparently my logic is flawed. It opens as our hero, an obvious reject for the HeMan live action movie, helps a russian woman and her children evade certain death by moving them five feet to the left. The movie after this point kind of degenerates. For some reason, the military hire a chemist to track down this ne'er do well, who is in America blowing stuff up with his eyes which, coincedentally, shoot lightning bolts. Apparently, he only does this on days that are prime numbers and this ability doesn't work on shoddily assembled chain link fences. Not that he was in any real danger, the only person in this movie who could shoot straight was me, and I'll miss that TV. The most interesting part of this movie was the 15 minutes after the credits, where I stared at a blank screen expecting an apology. If you decide to watch this movie, The Bull recommends doing it drunk, preferably on vodka, and far enough over the hill you won't remember it.