The Demolitionist

What does being alive really mean? If it means that the blood pumps around your veins, your lungs suck in air, and your eyes help you to aim your gun to blow away your enemies, then Alyssa Lloyd is certainly alive. But in dying and being brought back did she lose something important along the way? Alyssa Lloyd (played by Nicole Eggert) is the Demolishionist, a police officer brutally murdered, and brought back from the dead in true comic-book form. Every night she is forced to undergo horrific scientific procedures which keep her alive and deadly.

The scientist seems to forget that his prize specimen was (and still is?) a woman, with very human feelings.

This film has been likened to RoboCop, and there are some superficial similarities, but Demolishionist is a lot darker, the humour has more 'edge', and the final scenes bring the narrative to a brilliant conclusion!

Recently I noticed that for some reason I seem to be really into mid-90's action B-movies, or maybe I just got lucky with the ones I saw. A few days ago I watched 'The Demolitionist' which can easily be written off as a Robocop rip-off and while the basic idea certainly is taken from Robocop it is very much its own film.

The psychological main conflict is that the resurrected female cop (who still has full control over herself) isn't comfortable with the fact that she is dead yet functioning better than ever thanks to her new high-tech blood. It's the kind of film in which every single character is morally degenerated and capable of anything, they all just have different motivations and enemies.

It's totally over the top, which goes for the performances as well as for the visual style. Half the movie is shot with tilted camera angles and other crazy perspectives, the light often is extremely artificial looking (usually blue).

It's mindless and the moment is more important than the whole but it does have a story and a sense of progress which keeps the ball rolling until the end (where it eventually falls apart, unfortunately). One interesting touch is how bullet impacts are visualized. Instead of blood spurting a fine red dust comes out of the guy who gets hit, so that he goes down in a red cloud. Cheap? Well, it's expressionistic.

Most interestingly I found out that all those mid-90's action B-movies I like have a common staff member - supervising sound editor Patrick M. Griffith. If you liked 'The Demolitionist' I guess I can recommend other films I enjoyed as much and in which making this man happens to have been involved: Mean Guns, Retroactive, Omega Doom, and Death Machine, which are all much better enjoyed in their original aspect ratio but can be difficult to find this way on purchasable data storage devices.

Plot Synopsis: In the not-too-distant future, the mayor of Metro City introduces a law banning all guns in the city. Her mortal enemy, Mad Dog Burns, escapes from Death Row & stages an unsuccessful attempt to kill her. He then exposes an undercover police officer, Alyssa Lloyd, & kills her. A police scientist resurrects her as an invincible zombie warrior, gives her weapons & a motorcycle & sets her loose on Mad Dog & his gang.

Film Review: It is probably an unwritten rule that any genre film directed by someone who is better known for producing visual effects is going to be a dud. The Demolitionist comes from the mind of Robert Kurtzman, one of the founders of KNB EFX Group, a prominent makeup effects company. Following in the footsteps of Chris Walas (THE FLY II), Gary J. Tunnicliffe (WITHIN THE ROCK), Bob Keen (PROTEUS), the Brothers Strause (ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM), Tom Savini (the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD remake) & the late great Stan Winston (PUMPKINHEAD), Kurtzman tries his hand at directing.

Of those films, only three actually stood out from the pack. Savini's remake of NOTLD was the best of the bunch, while not beating the original, it was still a good zombie film. Within the Rock was a passable monster film that had the indignity of having half its plot stolen by a certain Michael Bay flick the following year. And the most notorious of them all, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, despite all the crap poured on it by practically everybody, was slightly better than the first AVP, mainly by delivering on the action that the original failed to do (although its biggest mistake was not having a fully-fleshed out plot & having the monster attacks being shot in the dark).

Which brings us to the $62, 500 question: is The Demolitionist a good film or is it a bad one? Well, to be honest, the film is one of the shoddiest genre actioners ever to come out of the 1990s. I don't think it even had a theatrical release. Anyway, the film has a slightly interesting premise – female cop is killed by a wanted terrorist, resurrected from the dead as a cyborg zombie super-warrior, goes after the bad guys with a vengeance. But the poor script does it no favours.

The Demolitionist does have the occasional moment where it looks halfway promising – Richard Grieco conducts a business negotiation between his police mole & a guard dog – but the poor plotting, atrocious dialogue & under-cooked action scenes conspire to weaken it considerably. Not to mention the fact that the visual effects, despite being produced by a top-shelf EFX group, look very cheap.

On the acting front, the performances range from the okay to the very bad – Richard Grieco overacts wildly (though you can't fault him for not having any fun) but the real worst actor here is Susan Tyrell – her relentless mugging of the stage causes any scene with her in it to collapse to the ground in a heap of flames. Look out for Tom Savini as one of Grieco's fellow gang members & Joe Pilato (Captain Rhodes from the original DAY OF THE DEAD) as a drunken gangbanger.

Nicole Eggert of 'Charles in Charge' fame plays detective Alyssa Lloyd, working undercover in the gang of rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth criminal mastermind Mad Dog Burne (Richard Grieco, '21 Jump Street'). Her cover is blown, her partner murdered, and she's tortured and left for dead - only to be biologically engineered into a super-human super crime fighter by "professor" Jack Crowley (Bruce Abbott, "Re-Animator") and his "Lazarus" project. Clad in a form-fitting, sleek black outfit, this super-human cop comes gunning for revenge.

Decent comic-book nonsense is obviously derivative of "RoboCop", but it works fairly well as a B level variation on that more famous futuristic action flick. There's lots of gunfire, a fair amount of low-budget atmosphere, and a good score by Shawn Patterson - not to mention some real eye candy shots of the sexy Eggert.

The principal value with "The Demolitionist" is a first-rate cast. Any aficionado of low-budget genre flicks will have a high old time playing Spot the Familiar Face - including an amusing surprise cameo (albeit uncredited) by a longtime veteran of this kind of thing, right near the end. Eggert does a good job as the heroine struggling to retain her emotions & humanity, while Grieco is obviously having fun as the greasy bad guy.

You could do a lot worse than this. It makes for agreeable (if unmemorable) entertainment for a Sunday afternoon.

This marked the directorial debut for veteran effects notable Robert Kurtzman.

Six out of 10.

Decent B-scifi/actioner with a fast pace and definite comic book sense about it. The most fascinating thing about it is that nearly every single scene has a well-known face from the late 70s/early 80s horror genre. Kurtzman called in a number of favors from actors he had worked make-up on in various films for this one. Nicole Eggert is in top physical form and rather pleasing on the eye as the heroine, and Richard Grieco is gloriously hammy as the villain.

The flaw that really got me was that "The Demolitionist" (a title which is never actually used in the movie to describe the "Lazarus project") had a pair of guns that fired hundreds of rounds per minute, yet the bad guys only got a few wounds even at point-blank range. I suppose if you can get past this minor detail, it's worth a quick viewing.