TRANSFORMATIONS – An old Empire flick set in a penal colony, where a guy has crash-landed after a calamitous deep-space shag with an interstellar succubus. Stuff happens, then more stuff, and it all builds to an extremely dull escape attempt made by a trio of utterly nondescript thugs. What about the good bits? Can’t really remember, there’s more shagging, some people milling about in futuristic corridors, a stab at romance, and some monstery transformation bits which blossom into the form of a scaley space gargoyle (or similar). If there had been more of the latter then I might have better memories of ‘Transformations’, which however still manages to appeal in that ‘typical end of the shelf video flotsam of the eighties’ kind of way. You could file it next to the slightly wilder and more rancid ‘Breeders’ and I wouldn’t mind.
THE AFTERMATH – Well this is quite a strange film really, and I get the impression that it was perhaps one of those ‘one-man-labours-of-love’, which automatically makes me think of the most notorious example of those in (my) recent memory, ‘Champagne and Bullets’. ‘The Aftermath’ isn’t anywhere near as joltingly deranged as that cinematic shitstorm, but in some ways it might be scaling towards (or maybe even sliding down) the same filmic ladder. ‘The Aftermath’ was written and directed by its ‘star’ – a stocky, moustachioed guy who looks like he’d be more at home on a construction site than the world’s stage after an apocalypse. He guides us through his oddly macho vision of The End, in which he fancies himself as an upholder of basic family truths / avenger of violations of same; this feels somehow slightly personal and heartfelt, but it might all be just a set-up so that bad guy gang leader Sid Haig can rape women and shoot kids with gusto. Apart from tangles with gangs, there are random zombie attacks (nice looking undead, by the way) and an unusual sequence set in a dinosaur museum(!) seemingly slipped in to convince us that we’d all nodded off and started to dream. The only truly cinematic presence in it of course belongs to Sid Haig – the rest is disjointed, silly pap, but the kind that manages to keep the likes of yours truly glued to their sets.
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