Welcome to Blood City

A muddled attempt at an interesting premise - people are trained to perfect killers in a Wild West environment - which plays its trump card too early by revealing that Keir Dullea & friends are in a VR situation at the start, when it would have been more of a surprise to reveal it nearer the end, and we could have done with more of an explanation as to WHY the scientists are doing what they're doing and why the people involved have been selected. That said, the film just about keeps the viewer interested throughout, with the best performances coming from Dullea & Palance. It's all very similar, by the way, to "The Prisoner" episode "Living in Harmony", which also had its hero thrown into a VR wild-west scenario.

Always enjoy a film in which Jack Palance,(Frendlander) appears in and know that it will be a great film to view and this film was a big surprise for a 1977 film and I enjoyed it from beginning to end. This film starts out with a large group of men who were chained and pounding on rocks in a place that looked like a desert. Keir Dullea, (Lewis) was one of these men pounding rocks and all of a sudden he is being released by a proclamation from the President of the U.S. The next scene shows Lewis laying on the ground and wakes up and cannot remember anything at all and joins a group of other people in the same situation. These people eventually are met by Jack Palance, (Frendlander) who brings them to his town and they soon find out that they are going to become slaves in his town and have no future to be able to think for themselves. This is a Sci-Fi film and at this point, I cannot say anymore, except, don't miss this film, it is a great 1977 Classic.

Some folks say that's there the best movie from director Peter Sasby, who worked for Hammer films in the seventies. This is an ambitious feature, no doubt, and Sasby shows here another face of his career. Many folks too could compare this with WESTWORLD, and I understand why, because myself thought about the Michael Crichton's film where Yul Brynner had more or less the Jack Palance's place; however both plots are quite different, just the overall atmosphere, scheme and settings are rather close. Good cast too. The problem is that I saw the film in an awful pan f...scan frame instead its genuine original LBX. That upsets me very much.

You know what this film reminded me of? The Cabin in the Woods. If you've seen that, you'll know what I mean when the film totally takes you out of the 'moment' and twists things up a bit.

Keir Dullea wakes up somewhere with no memory except a card in his pocket that tells him how many people he's killed. Not that he reads it mind. His other buddies at the time do, but by the time the plot gets going most of them are dead.

He finds himself in some sort of Cowboy world where life is cheap and terrible clothes are even cheaper, but who can he trust? Probably not Jack Palance. And is this world even trustworthy anyway? It's a very early take on Virtual Reality, this one. But then it's another film where you shouldn't really reveal much of the plot, because that's where the enjoyment lies. P'ting

Jack Palance was the main reason to see this, and while he doesn't disappoint the film in general does. An interesting concept here, but not enough is done with it and the low budget really hinders it.

Palance's performance is also the best thing about the film, he is so much fun while keeping his dignity intact, he resists the temptation also to overact like he sometimes did in similar roles. In fact, the acting is the component that comes off the least badly here, Keir Dullea is decent and Samantha Eggar while deserving more to do gives the film's second best performance, being quite thoughtful and with a good deal of authority. Roy Budd provides an appropriately eerie and thrilling music score without intruding too much. There are also some charmingly offbeat parts in the script.

Welcome to Blood City however is badly let down by being so lifelessly directed by Peter Sasdy, who has shown before that he is a competent director, and the painfully obvious low budget, especially in the choppy editing, dizzying camera angles and dreadfully fuzzy picture quality. The settings are also pretty limited and never feel authentic. Apart from some offbeat moments, the script is completely devoid of tension, while the story is often very dull and the suspense is marred by the virtual reality concept being revealed far too early. There are some interesting ideas here, but nowhere near enough is done with them. The characters are very one-dimensional, and despite Dulleas' performance any empathy towards his character's plight was rarely on this viewer's mind.

All in all, a very odd film that had potential but executes it pretty badly. 4/10 Bethany Cox