Dead Man Walking

like every post apocalyse movie this one have the scenes into a junkyard, with garbage cars (I mean a pacer-buggy!!) and very very bad special effects. The only good actor for the psicopatic conduct is Brion James, a classic actor of the doomed future of mankind. If this movie have a big evaluation by IMDb users is for his homolog "Dead Man Walking" with Sean Penn and Susan sarandon, not for itself.

I thought this movie looked kind of geeky, but I'd heard good things from a friend, and it had Jeffrey Combs, so I gave it a chance. I was pleasantly surprised. The story held my interest and the dialogue was fun and interesting. There is a touching scene (thanks to Mr. Combs' fabulous acting skills) with the main character that made me almost want to cry. It was sort of like "Blade Runner Lite." The news casts interspersed between the action are worth the rental fee alone. They're really hilarious and some are right on target! Brion James was great as the evil Decker and Wings Hauser did well as the Zero Man hero. I might be just in a really, really good mood, but I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It's fun afternoon viewing.

Obviously, this "Dead Man Walking" is not to be confused with the 1995 Susan Sarandon movie of the same name. That movie was a quality production, for one thing, and this movie isn't. I should mention that I don't automatically look down at B movies - I watch them all the time, and I find some of them to be enjoyable. But there's pretty much nothing to enjoy in this movie. It's very cheap - it looks like it was filmed in junkyards and boring desert locations with nothing done to spruce these locations up. The low budget also means a lot of stuff happens off camera (check the scenes where someone gets shot, for example.) The screenplay doesn't feel like much thought was put into it - it seems at times they were making it up as they went along. The movie does boast a somewhat impressive B movie cast - Hauser, James, and Combs - but they all seem to be running on autopilot. The only moment of interest in the movie is the sequence where two people play Russian roulette with a chainsaw, but the promising consequences of that are spoiled by the movie's previously mentioned habit of stuff happening off camera.

You absolutely must see every Wings Hauser, Brion James, or Jeffrey Combs film, could be the only three possible reasons to see "Dead Man Walking". The whole thing looks like it was shot in a Newark junk yard. The kidnapped girl is so unsympathetic, you will regret that Brion James keeps her alive. Speaking of Brion, he is fanatical and memorable as the villain . Other than a Russian Roulette game with chainsaws, everything else is forgettable. The meaningless and totally "not funny" newscasts that are spaced throughout the film are nothing but padding for a script that could have been thought up in fifteen minutes. Believe me, unless you are a fan of the actors, this is to be avoided like the plague (pun intended). - MERK

My review was written in June 1988 after watching the film on Republic Pictures video cassette.

A direct-to-video feature film, "Dead Man Walking" is a tongue-in-cheek sci-fi adventure that lays on the satire a bit much. It marks the mainstream film debut for filmmakers Gregory Brown and Walter Gernert, previously working in documentaries and as The Dark Brothers in the Adult film and video field.

Story is set in 2004, ten years after a plague virus annihilates half the U. S. population. (Repeated references make it clear that the AIDS epidemic is being treated metaphorically here.) Wings Hauser, well cast, starts as devil-may-care John Luger, one of the zero men, who has only one or two years left to live due to the plague.

He is hired by Chaz (Jeffrey Combs, star of "Re-Animator") to trek after a trio of nutty prison escapees (Brion James with orange hair, Sy Richardson and Joseph d'Angelo) who have kidnapped young Lelia (Pamela Ludwig), daughter of Chaz' boss. Enemy of the piece is the new world power Unitus, which is working on creating housing projects in which to quarantine the contaminated people.

Scripters John Weidner and Rick Marx have trouble keeping the pot boiling in the film's road movie format that features too many confrontations, but satirical dialog (often delivered in the form of update tv newscasts) is effective. Acting, especially by Hauser and James, is fine. Rushed happy ending, which phones in Hauser's fate, does not satisfy.