Sci-fighters

This really is a great B-movie. Roddy Piper delivers his best performance as an actor to date, ranging from comical to serious to romantic to heartbroken.

The story is very straightforward, but extremely fun and watchable. Considering the budget they had to work with, you really have to admire what they pulled off in this film.

It's very similar thematically to "The Hidden," from 1987. There's a great "unstoppable alien" thing going on here. The chemistry between Piper and the extremely beautiful Jayne Heitmeyer is great. She is fantastic as Dr. Kirbie Younger.

I'll be honest...if you're in to serious A-list films, this is no "Citizen Kane." But if you like great B-movie fun, you could do a whole lot worse than Sci-Fighters. It's B-science fiction gold!

You'd think that a film like this would really suck, but to be honest, it's really pretty good. Billy Drago is terrific in this role, and has a lot of presence. Roddy Piper is fine. The rest of the cast is made up of homegrown talent from here in Montreal.

There's nothing terrible about the film, and nothing magnificent either. Sets look fake, acting is fine, script is a tad weak, but overall this film really delivers on action.

6.5/10

This is a low budget B movie with three interesting actors as its main attraction: Piper (who established himself well in They Live), Drago (who unfortunately never seems to get a role worthy of his abilities) and Heitmeyer (though inconsistent, she had her moments in TV's Earth Final Conflict). Piper and Heitmeyer must find a way to work around their differences and their sexual tension to defeat Drago and the army of alien virus carriers he is spawning through rape and murder.

The film starts out strong - with Drago getting into a fight with a fellow prisoner in a lunar prison and introducing the audience to his nihilism, sadism and psychosis. He dies in prison, but has been infected with an intelligent alien virus which reactivates his nervous system and uses him as a host to spread itself. Piper plays a member of an elite security force, and Heitmeyer plays a microbiologist brought in to study the virus as Drago begins his killing spree. The plot becomes more elaborate as the film progresses, and eventually takes on some details which really challenge believability. For example, it turns out that Heitmeyer vaguely resembes somebody who had been between Drago and Piper when they were in the academy together, and this is used as a device to permit a few gratuitous and silly bra scenes where Heitmeyer distracts Drago from his murderous intentions. Although the actors pull off their performances well enough, and the cinematography is relatively good for the genre, the plot is too thin to be sustained.

The bottom line is that this is not a suitable film for anybody who is NOT a fan of Piper or Drago. Heitmeyer fans will likely find this disappointing. It has little going for it besides decent acting, a reasonable script and a reasonable action-pace.

Picture a bleached out, acid washed dime-store version of Blade Runner on a shoestring, bargain budget and you'll have some notion of Sci Fighters, a silly futuristic flick starring lovable wrestler 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper and B Movie stock villain Billy Drago. By most standards it's a miserable little exercise in schlock, but if that's your thing to begin with, it's a pearl. So it's set in 2009, and the film was made in 96', which going by a combination of the math and the severely bleak atmosphere, the filmmakers didn't even stretch their timeline barely past twenty years from their date, showing either amusing carelessness in writing or even more amusing cynicism for where we're headed, and how fast. The setting is Boston, and it's a goddamn slum, with perpetually overcast skies, garbage heaps everywhere and a general sense that people have given up. Piper is Grayson, a hard boiled detective on the trail of a somewhat unusual killer. Far above earth in a filthy off-world prison on the moon, criminal Dunn (Drago) has encountered some weird alien parasite which hijacks his gaunt frame and torpedos back stateside to start a murder spree. Drago vs Piper in a sad-sack, disease ridden Boston is pretty much the suitable logline, and it's not half bad. Piper makes a more grounded leading man than the film deserves, while Drago is straight up certifiable (nothing new) especially when the extraterrestrial, who has a garbled and endearing speech impediment, is controlling him. Effort is put into the atmosphere to some degree, but I feel like the success in achieving mood was probably also by accident of just leaving shit lying around set. A true peculiarity, worth it only for fans of the two actors and schlock-hounds alike.

Yeah, pretty much the same plot we've seen in a dozen other such films in the past ten years; but if we know those films, it's because we watched them and enjoyed them; perhaps with some sense of guilt, like there ought to be something better to with our lives, but let's admit we were entertained.

Certainly this film is not among the worst of its ilk. In fact, it is generally well made, with sharp performances from all the actors, including the Rowdy One; and the script doesn't rub our noses in sci-fi-techno-babble, it just gets on with the story.

The big disappointment is the ending; it is rushed, badly directed, badly edited. It feels like it comes looping out of another film, there's no build-up to it at all.

Too bad; if the ending had been as impressive as the rest of the film, I would have given this 8 stars, if only for effort; now it has to live with 6.

That makes it a time waster, like most of the other films of its type - not bad, just not good enough to be memorable.