Space 1979: The one with the coolest VHS art

 

Title: Defcon 4

What Year?: 1985

Classification: Knockoff/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Downright Decent! (4/5)

 

Something that comes up often in discussions of ‘80s movies that I’ve so far generally avoided is nostalgia around Blockbuster and other video stores. I myself have plenty of memories about picking up movies at the video store (even the nostalgia junkies seem to have forgotten Hollywood Video), but it was never central to my experiences or recollections. The one thing where I can join with others in their fond memories is the VHS box art, especially in the 1980s and early 1990s. At its best, this was an art form as intriguing as the movies themselves, vivid, colorful and often flat-out fraudulent. And if there’s one example embedded in everyone’s brains, whether or not they ever watched the movie, it’s the charmingly macabre image above. Here is Defcon 4, the one that was seemingly in every video store that hardly anyone seems to remember watching.

Our story begins with shots of a space station that definitely isn’t up to the budget of 2001 (or for that matter The Green Slime). We then meet the motley crew, including a woman and our protagonist, a guy with a wife and a kid on the way back home. It’s soon revealed that this is not a peaceful research facility but an armed nuclear platform, just before they witness World War 3 break out below. They manage to get through Armageddon by firing only one missile to defend themselves, and soon receive heartbreaking news of the fate of the wife left behind. While they are still arguing their next move, a mysterious signal causes their living module to descend to Earth. On arrival, they discover a standard post-apocalyptic landscape that’s a little more nuanced than usual, including “terminals” that lunch the first astronaut out the hatch and several factions of relatively sophisticated raiders and hoarders. They soon run into the biggest player of all, an outwardly mild-mannered youth named Gideon who seems to treat his rise to power as a chance to reorder the world to his own liking. With help from the warlord’s old classmate, the astronauts discover his real power and his weaknesses, but to make their own play, they must first escape execution!

Defcon 4 was a Canadian film produced by Salter Street Films and distributed by the infamous Roger Corman and his outfit New World Pictures. The movie was written and directed by SSF cofounder Paul Donovan, who went on to create the cult TV series LEXX. The movie starred the late Tim Choate, a Texas-born Broadway star, as the astronaut Howe, with a Canadian supporting cast that included Kate Lynch as his female crewmate and Maury Chaykin (d. 2010) as survivalist Vinny. Lenore Zann, previously known for the slasher movie Happy Birthday To Me, went on to a career in politics beginning in 2009. The film’s famous poster and later VHS art was created by Rudy Obrero, an artist whose previous credits included package art for Masters of the Universe.  While the movie made a reported box office of only $1.5 million, it went on to evident success as a video rental title, and remained available on disc, including a 2-pack release with Hell Comes To Frogtown. More recent reviews have been almost universally unfavorable.

Like most people who have heard of this movie at all, my experiences with it begin with repeated sightings at the video stores. This is striking in itself, because as I have mentioned a number of times, my family didn’t have a TV until the start of the 1990s. I can only guess just how long this venerable title stayed there, though the only movie I have stronger or later recollections of is Creature. Even now, that artwork is a masterpiece, so vivid I’m tempted to wonder if Corman got hold of the poster first and then tried to find o a movie to attach it to. I’ve also increasingly pondered whether the art created expectations no movie could live up to. For my own part, I gave it a viewing not too long after starting this feature, after more than a year on the shelf with the Hell Comes To Frogtown pack. (Dear Logos, I still have no idea what to do with that one.) The result was another one for the “maybe” pile, not because it was bad, but because I needed time to take a closer look.

On any amount of consideration, what stands out about this movie is paradoxically that there’s nothing extreme or egregious. The violence is limited to a few sequences, with even less gore. Nudity and sexual content only come up in passing, and then mainly in a painful conversation between two male characters. Even the music by Christopher Young (also credited for… Spiderman 2?!), one of the few things to receive favorable comment, is very low-key, dominated by metallic tones that fit the jury-rigged look of the production design. The immediate result is that the already threadbare film lacks the shock value and general energy that made many post-apocalyptic movies either beloved or notorious, including many of Corman’s own offerings. I strongly suspect this is a major reason why so few people seem to remember watching the damn thing in the VHS era; quite a few who succumbed to the appeal of the artwork may well have flat-out forgotten the movie. On consideration, however, it lends a certain element of realism to the proceedings that makes the plight of the characters more compelling. If the movie looks colorless, dull, and cheap, it at least captures the feel of what the world it portrays would be like.

Even with that marginal virtue, the film owes most of its watchability to the characters of Vinny and Gideon. The former character starts out obviously despicable, and doesn’t really improve despite significant effort put into a redemption arc. That doesn’t make the performance by the quite prolific Chaykin any less entertaining, and one gradually gets a sense at least of rational villainy, no more or less petty and opportunistic than the setting demands. There’s a further sense of his character in the unfortunately short sequences with his improvised armored vehicle, the one bit of Mad Max-style fun in the film. By comparison, the villain Gideon is uniquely unnerving, thanks in no small part to a performance by Kevin King, whose highest-profile credit was a supporting role in Iron Eagle the following year. His character arc, as further revealed by Zann’s character, feels like the kind of improbable transformation that might well occur in the collapse of civilization. His speech and mannerisms are on the level of an awkward, pseudo-intellectual college student, but it very quickly becomes clear that his version of rationalism is the fanaticism of Stalin or Robespierre, with barely veiled sadism underneath. One can bargain with the likes of Vinny, but trying to stay on his good side would be like trying to keep the Alien as a pet.

That still leaves the one scene, and I’m going with an early scene still in space. About 10 minutes in, we have already had a number of shots of the station, which tend to make it look like a flying crowbar with a 20-sided dice on either end. On the upside, we have spent enough time with the crew to get a sense of the crew as characters. It’s Howe who is watching news of a convoluted crisis on Earth when the TV station goes dead. Within literal moments, they have detected missile launches on Earth, but still argue whether a general war is under way. While the other crew members chart the devastation, Howe sees one TV channel after another go to static, with distress palpable enough that it could easily be assumed he’s as upset by the loss of programming as much as anything else. In an understated twist, it’s the lady astronaut who argues for launching their own nukes, while a very masculine commander who won’t last much longer insists on sitting it out. Then they detect an object aimed at them, and the commander fires the only shot that will matter. It’s a scene with tension and real emotional weight that was already going by the wayside in more successful post-apocalyptic fair, and credit enough for a film whose limitations will remain all too clear.

In conclusion, I will say a little more not about the movie but about the video stores. In full hindsight, I think a major reason I have never been nostalgic for them is that I was frequenting them well after others were moving on. For anyone like me, their death was like the frog in a pot. As time went on, the VHS covers went through the same degeneration as the movie poster (see my Deep Rising soundtrack rant), from imaginative creations in their own right to slick, interchangeable advertising that did little more than show off the highest-billed actors. Meanwhile, the old and obscure titles that had been most interesting to me steadily dropped off the shelves, especially after the DVD takeover started. I finally moved on when I reached a point where the movies I still wanted to watch became easier to find elsewhere. I can still appreciate the stores that are still out there selling videos (almost certainly as good as Blockbuster ever was), but I could do what I do without them. With that, I finish my tribute to a medium and an era, and once again move on.

Image credit Video Collector.co.uk, I've been using them quite a bit. I also highly recommend a post by 2 Warps to Neptune covering the artwork and the artist responsible. As always, more to come!