GANGLAND

2000

Directed by Art Comancho

A.K.A. Too many cooks spoil the dystopian wasteland

Plot I'll tell you what the real plot is. It's to drive me mad everytime I accept a challenge to review a movie, that's what. First, let's take a look at the cover to this fine film. It's a pretty common activiity in low-budget, straight-to-video fare to include a nameable actor who appears in a small part, only to hype him as the big star. When you make a movie, and use that scheme with names like Tim Thomerson or Coolio, you're probably in the wrong business to begin with. The film begins with a brief explanation that in the year 2010, world war III occurs, ending with an atomic blast. This unleases a super-plague on the world, with flesh-eating bacteria symptoms, leaving chaos in its wake. And of course, as we all learned in school, chaos is the perfect breeding ground for street gangs to unite and form an empire. That's cause they're all just really biding their time until The Man is weak to a full frontal assault. We then get to see a vignette in which Coolio and Ice T are a team of good cop/bad cop investigating a crime scene. They improvise some F-bombs, mess with some dead bodies, and get killed themselves. All without actually interacting with any of the principle actors of the film, or contributing to the plot. That's right, they had nothing to do with the rest of this movie. At all. Moving on, we cut to about a week later, and meet Tim Thomerson. He apparently is named "Dr. Adams" in this movie, but I'll be damned if he's named, so I'll stick with "Tim Thomerson". See, he's in his living room in Atlanta, concocting a vaccine for the plague. He can see the problem with working out of the home in his profession as much as we can, so he starts packing up his family for Pheonix, apparently the last bastion of truth, justice, and the American way. Too bad the gang has other plans. Lucifer (Vincent Klyn), the gang leader who wears feathers on his shoulders and has red contacts in for no reason, kidnaps TT and his family, so that he'll be the one in control of the vaccine. Take that Pheonix! Next we cut ahead yet again, to LA (incidently the home base of the gang) and meet Derek (Sasha Miller of TV's "Step by step") as he's heading home from military service back in Pheonix. He and his brother have some car trouble just at the same moment that a gang patrol happens upon them. After a lengthy and unconvincing fight sequence, Derek ends up imprisoned, and his brother ends up dead. In prison, Derek meets Jared (Costas Mandylor, the real star of this film, finally) and the two break out together, earning the ire of Damien (played by the film's writer, David DeFalco), Lucifer's annoying brother that spends the whole movie showing off his oiled-up chest. Oh, and apparently he killed Jared's wife and daughter, too. He's evil, y'know. Derek and Jared ramble through the countryside, getting into random fights, until they run into Alexis (Kathleen Kinmont), a woman who had her sister killed by Lucifer's thugs. Now we have three heroes. They decide together to break into Lucefer's lair, defeat him, and save Tim Thomerson and the vaccine all at once. Despite them having any reason to know that Tim Thomerson even actually exists. Meanwhile, ol' scratch has some plans up his sleeve himself. He unveils his secret weapon, Hellion (Michael Feichtner, the film's executive producer). Apparently Lucifer made him by gathering the DNA of all the world's top fighters, plus regularly injecting the outcome with more steroids than Mark Maguire's ever seen in his life. Hellion never wears a shirt, has bleach-blond hair, and has crappy cgi flames in his eyes for no real reason. Best not to think to hard about science here folks, that path leads to madness. Our heroes' plans go about as well as a plan thought that much through would, and Jared ends up getting the crap smacked out of him by Hellion before getting captured and tortured. Derek and Alexis come up with a better plan: Same as before, only now there's two of them, and they're bringing a big bomb. As they're breaking in, a mysterious woman with a fake accent named "Angel" frees all the prisoners. The bomb then goes off, apparently saving the day. The end, right? Wrong. There's still at least another twenty damn minutes of random crappy fighting in this film. I honestly started fast forwarding after a while because I was so damned bored. And I certainly didn't stick around for the behind the scenes footage. This movie is such a mess. I get the impression from all the loose ends not dealt with that the writer, director, and editor all had their own ideas of what to do with the plot. It ends up being confusing and boring. At the same time. Never a good sign.

Rating I give Gangland One Rotting Shambling Corpse out of Five What a waste.

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