The Demolitionist

Submitted by the dauntless Danimal

THE STORY: What IS this crap? All I can say for sure is that it's the sort of asinine movie this site is made for. At times it seems to be pure cornball spoof, but its "tender" and "touching" moments
are played absolutely straight, which made me groan, and left me absolutely mystified as to what
the movie-makers intended.

Mad Dog Burn and his brother Henry are on death row for a random massacre. They are being
strapped into the electric chair when confederates among the witnesses break them loose, and
they electrocute the warden instead! Mad Dog escapes to rejoin his gang, although Henry
accidentally electrocutes himself (don't ask).

Mad Dog thanks the men who ran the gang in his absence, and then murders them. He announces that the next move will be to kill Mayor Eleanor Grimbaum, who he blames (for reasons too silly to explain) for ordering himself and his brother executed.

But luckily for the Mayor, undercover agent Alyssa Lloyd is posing as a gang girl. She warns
her partner and fiancée, Dan Dupre, of the plot on the Mayor's life, using a secret transmitter in
her earring. Dupre receives her transmissions in a surveillance van nearby. Unfortunately for the
Mayor, the screenwriter completely forgot to have Dupre pass the warning on to the Mayor. So the gang ends up attacking the Mayor with complete surprise.

Cut to the Mayor's office, where Professor Crowley is trying to get the Mayor to approve the
"Lazarus Project," to boost her sagging popularity. She refuses. The gangsters break in through
the windows and start shooting, but Crowley blows them all away. The Mayor instantly changes
her mind and approves the "Lazarus Project," which we soon find out is a project to turn a dead
or dying human being into a kind of cyborg/Captain-America type thing.

Back at Gang Central, Mad Dog is furious at the failure of the assassination attempt and figures it
must be due to an informer. Somehow, he clues in that the informer is Alyssa. He rips the transmitter earring out of her ear and destroys her secret surveillance camera (which is implanted in her eyelashes, I kid you not). Dupre, a bit slow on the uptake, doesn't drive his van away while all this is happening, so he's captured when Mad Dog sends his bully-boys to look for the surveillance van.

Now comes a boring intimidation scene where Mad Dog tries to scare the bejeezus out of his two
captives by making them play Russian Roulette. Alyssa just shoots one of the gangsters with the
single round in the revolver Mad Dog gives her, but Dupre shoots himself. The gang tortures Alyssa, mortally wounds her and ties her to a fence as a warning to the Mayor.

Alyssa is found and rushed to the hospital. The doctor looks at the massive bullet wound in Alyssa's abdomen and sagely observes, "Penetrating trauma." Shrewd diagnosis there, Doc. A lesser mortal might have mistaken it for Spontaneous Hole-Generating Syndrome. Crowley comes to the hospital and orders Alyssa seized for the Lazarus Project. When Alyssa goes into cardiac arrest, he orders the doctor to let her die, which the doctor does (??!!).

A bogus funeral is held for Alyssa, but in fact Crowley has taken her to his lab and injected her with Super Special Formula, which brings her back to life, makes her super-strong, super-fast, and capable of instantly healing any injuries. He sticks a knife through Alyssa's hand to prove it, and the wound seals right up. Crowley tells Alyssa she's his new Secret Weapon. Alyssa demurs and says she's retiring now that she's dead. No, Crowley smirks, she agreed to donate her body to science after she died, and He Is Science! So her ass is his, literally! JEEZ THIS IS STUPID! GAWD HOW I LOVE IT!

So Alyssa trains to become The Demolitionist. She must be regularly injected with the Super Special Formula, or she'll rot. She shows how much she hates it in a number of maudlin self-pitying scenes. She tries to run away, starts to rot, and comes back. Crowley acts like a real arrogant jerk about the whole project. Alyssa is given an armored bulletproof, fireproof suit (does she really need that, since her bullet wounds close right up?), and a number of exotic weapons.

Then Crowley unleashes her on the unsuspecting criminal public. She foils a hijacking, blowing half the criminals away with her machine pistols. Then a thug hits her in the back, making her drop her pistols. Instead of picking up her pistols, which are about six inches away, she turns around and takes the poor sap on with a stick which TURNS INTO A ROTO-ROOTER MACHINE!!! At first I thought this was because her pistols' 150-round clips had been exhausted, but later in the scene she shoots the last criminal without reloading. Come on, the film-makers are only human; how could they resist showing us a black-leather-clad enforcer taking on a hardened criminal with a Roto-Rooter machine?

Crime rates quickly drop with the Demolitionist in action. But Mad Dog is undeterred, for he has the Chief of Police in his pocket and will fear no evil. Soon the Chief will deliver a load of confiscated weapons to Mad Dog and then Everybody Will Pay. In the meantime, Mad Dog robs a bank and takes several hostages. Alyssa arrives in her black bodysuit and perforates the bad guys like computer paper. Mad Dog runs away, unhurt, and Alyssa chases after him, leaving behind a little girl who is holding two silly-looking props (oops, I mean live grenades) that Mad Dog forced into her hands. Egad! The cyborgization* process has robbed Alyssa of her humanity! Fortunately, the cops rescue the little girl.

The public is stunned by Alyssa's heartlessness, and the Mayor orders the Lazarus Project canceled. Fortunately for Alyssa, Crowley has his own stock of Super Special Formula, so she can survive a while longer without rotting. She tricks one of Mad Dog's gang into leading her to his headquarters, then leaps into their midst and shoots every mother's son of them except Mad Dog. She then feigns helplessness to lure Mad Dog close to her. Mad Dog, who isn't a Rhodes Scholar, comes up to her and threatens her, and Alyssa injects him with the Super Special Formula. This makes him rot immediately for some reason, and he dies horribly.

Alyssa staggers away. Crowley runs up to her and tells her he can give her more Super Secret
Formula, but she refuses and asks him to let her die. The Mayor gives Crowley a super-futuristic
lab. Then we cut back to Alyssa, inexplicably alive and unrotted, sentimentally looking over her
personal effects and memorials from her earlier bogus "funeral." The end.

Nicole Eggert, a veteran of "Baywatch," plays Alyssa. Surprisingly, she isn't half bad. She can
act upset and self-pitying really well, although that just calls attention to how hokey her character's reasons for self-pity are. Her life has been saved against all odds, for chrissakes! Richard Grieco's Mad Dog is just plain dull; he acts like he's there to show off his pretty face more than actually scare anyone or make anyone hate him. Crowley is played by Bruce Abbott, who stinks up the set. He mumbles some of his lines so badly I couldn't understand them no matter how many times I rewound the tape. Susan Tyrell plays a really nasty, arrogant, and pointlessly unpleasant Mayor; nobody that rude and un-telegenic could ever have won a major election. Famous F/X specialist Tom Savini has a bit part. His fans will be relieved to know he had nothing to do with the horrendous special effects in this movie.

I don't know what director Robert Kurtzman was going for here. When you hear a newscaster
saying, "President Bono described yesterday's mortar attack on the White House as, 'Sad, very sad, and kind of freaky,'" I can't help but think he meant the whole thing as a parody. But if it's a parody, why inflict these stupid emotional conflict scenes between Alyssa and Crowley, or the
whole white rose schtick, or the rest of the pseudo-dramatic garbage that I've left out of the
review for the sake of your mental health? It's like Kurtzman wanted to have his cake and eat it
too. I ended up laughing at the film instead of with it.

BEST LINES: "I'm retired, okay? And I think that option comes right along with death."-Alyssa explains her employee benefits package.

"Use of excessive force is at your discretion."-Crowley explains the rules of engagement to
Alyssa.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?:

1.) Say again, Mission Control? Your last transmission sounded like, "he electrocuted himself."
Over.

2.) When Crowley tells the doctor to let Alyssa die, the doctor reluctantly cooperates. I want
that doctor fired now!!!

3.) Nobody bleeds in this movie. Every time somebody gets shot, silly pink powder flies out!
Whatever they paid for these squibs, it was too much.

4.) While Crowley watches Alyssa doing handsprings, she is silhouetted in the bright sunlight
that streams through the windows, so you can barely see her. Later, some hooligans are trying to
rape a woman and drag her behind a kind of canvas awning, so we only see Alyssa's silhouette as
she beats them to a pulp. Hmm. Do you get the feeling that Nicole Eggert's stunt double didn't look very much like her?

5.) Overcome by emotion on seeing a mannequin in bridal costume in a shop window, Alyssa
pulls out her gun and fires at the mannequin. The window shatters, but the mannequin is untouched! Don't tell me she missed, she was four feet away!

6.) Mad Dog and his gang come to rob a bank, in full view of surveillance cameras, without wearing masks!

7.) One word: Roto-Rooter.

8.) Alyssa shoots a criminal in the rump with a bullet that has a built-in transmitter, which she
uses to follow him to Mad Dog's lair! I am not making this up, I swear!

9.) Giving new meaning to the word "overkill" . . . When Alyssa foils the bomb plotters she
sends some kind of decoy to their room to say "Room service." Since nobody ordered room
service, the bombers pour this incredible fusillade of bullets into the door. Anybody behind the
door would have been killed almost instantly, but they keep shooting for twenty seconds (I timed
it), pumping scores of bullets through the door. I have no idea if this scene was meant to be as
funny as it was, but I was laughing like a maniac by the 10-second mark.

NUDITY AND SEX: The gang girls do lots of topless dances, and if you enjoy them . . . well, to
each his own. Eggert strips down at one point, but isn't shown.

HUH?: A newscaster shows a film of the Burn brothers massacring the bystanders; the
cameraman gets shot and the camera falls over, just like at the end of a certain low-budget
picture released last year!

About half of Bruce Abbott's lines made me think "huh?" Speak up, fool, I can't hear you!

The video box has no description of the movie, not even some meaningless hype like "Don't
miss the hottest action flick since Fair Game!"* It doesn't even have a tagline! It has the title, the names of the two stars, the obligatory credits boilerplate, and nothing else. I suspect the
functionally illiterate were this movie's target market.

THE TALLY: This movie is mostly silly, comic-book style fun. But the ersatz "drama" and the
sheer boredom-factor of the villain left me rolling my eyes and tapping my foot. And Kurtzman
seems to think that filming every third shot from a tilted angle makes him a genius director. Pfft!
This movie is said to be a blatant ripoff of Robocop, which I have not seen, so no comment.
Recommended by this Assistant Demon for three devils.

*Don't even THINK of looking up "cyborgization" in the dictionary! This website is based in
Germany, where people are ALLOWED to make up words out of thin air, dammit! (Note From The Head Demon: This site is not only run out of Germany but from a military base...and the military has made up enough words to fill a dictionary! Think "Jeep" and "Fubar")

**  I've never seen Fair Game but theres a review for it at Jabootu's Bad Movie dimension....and it sounds really really bad!