Warning labels and stacked zombies

Peacock films is an aussie distributor of straight-to-dvd crap. If you want shitty production values, digi-cam quality cinematography and CGI effects belted out on your nephew's macbook, then be sure to look for the Peacock icon on the back of the cover next time you hit the vid store. I've seen dozens of these efforts, and they're all painfully poor rip-offs of something that may only be B grade to begin with. The thing is, some of the scripts are probably pretty good, but you'll never really know, what with the horrible casting and grade-school production. I realise that the good people at Peacock films have nothing to do with the actual making of crap like Adam & Evil, When Thugs Cry, or Killer Flood: The Day The Dam Broke, but by gods their label serves as a signal flare to anyone who doesn't want to waste $3 on an visual enema. Ever wondered where Corbin Bernsen, Stacy Keach or The Hoff ended up? Neither did I, but I now know anyway, thanks to Raptor, Frozen Impact and Fugitives Run.

The good news is that if you're struggling to get your $12 000 vampire/natural disaster/sci-fi epic distributed just give the 'Cocks a call.

Now that I've got that off my chest, let me tell you about a sci-fi horror called Plaguers. I usually check imdb before downloading any film, and when I read their page on this pulp Aliens tribute it had scored 5.1. Two days later it was rated 4.6 and falling. The first few votes obviously came from Brad Sykes and his extended family, and even they could not, in all conscience, give it more than 5 out of 10. Take a look at Mr Sykes Filmography and you'll soon see he set on becoming the Ed Wood of our age, only without the girlish charm or ironic appreciation from his fans.

Here's the premise: a spaceship called Pandora (uh-huh) is returning to Earth in an attempt to smuggle a glowing alien artifact called Thanatos (uh-oh) which is apparently a powerful yet unconfirmed new energy source. Enroute the ship responds to a distress call and rescues 4 nubile space nurses. BUT, the nurses turn out to be sexy space pirates instead and they set about taking over the Pandora. During the ensuing struggle the green, glowing fishbowl artifact gets cracked and starts turning the dead or dying into space zombies. The surviving crew and pirates team up to vainly fight their undead comrades. The cheerleader-looking ship's captain finally escapes via a lifepod, only to find that the glowy bowlingball thing has inexplicably snuck into the pod with her. And, yep, the ill-fated pod is tumbling towards Earth as the credits roll.

That's the plot. The entire thing is shot on stage - the same gritty corridor accounting for most of the ship's interior in between pianted plywood cabins and bridge (all weirdly different paint styles). External shots of the simple model ships, superimposed over a starscape, come complete with maneuvring jets that hiss smoke in random, contradictory directions, or lazily overlayed CGI lighting for the main drive ports. I love Blake's 7 and it's '70's, low budget space effects, but even that shits all over this.

Now for the Aliens references:

Initial Suspense: 5 minutes in the Pandora's pilot uses his Bluetooth earpiece to call Capt Cheerleader on her 1960's apartment intercom to report: "I've picked something up on the screen - it's a ship 30 000 clicks south-east of here." I had to replay that bit three times. 'South-east?' In fucking space? The same way that the moon is north-west of Canada, right? The computer screen testifying to this contact has all the detail and colour display of an Atari 2600. Anyway, their ship docks with the other ship and the crew's two creepy space janitors (or something, their job titles are never mentioned but they do look like a couple of stoners in overalls) are sent on board with Dolphin flashlights and breathing gear similar to (but less cool than) that worn by Han Solo when he was cleaning Mynochs off the 'Falcon. Tension and suspense apparently ensues until the 4 mini-skirted, high-heeled space nurses/pirates are found and rescued. These two creepy dicks really pissed me off, not because of their creeping dickiness, but because they constantly mumbled their repartee. As far as I cared they couldn't die soon enough.

Tense Combat: When the teen-stripper characters aren't engaging in gratuitous catfights with each other, they're fighting latex and cornsyrup zombies. Hand-to-hand choreography is limited to flailing around or waving sharp things at the undead. There are guns available too, but the props department must have been unfamiliar with the genre because two of the three guns to be had in far future space consist of a Glock semi-auto with half a clip, and the typr of snub-nosed .38 historically popular with 1950's federal agents. Luckily the Glock is enchanted because despite being lost in a fight halfway through it magically reappears in the hands of its owner three scenes later. Only the nubile captain has a real blaster pistol, but the SFX money ran out after the third shot so she has to discard it. And that brings me to the next Aliens tribute.

Welding Stuff in Desperation: remember in Aliens when the survivors of the initial sortie have to hurriedly weld up a barricade with those cool little plasma torches? Well, in Plaguers, two of the characters attempt something similar with equally shrunken versions of oxy-acetylene welders. Only, and this is the kicker, the torch flames are CGI'd. Whether used to pretend weld inconsequential airduct hatches or to wave in the face of unimpressed zombies, the three inch sparkly flames are post-edited on instead of simply using a blowtorch for the same effect. The entire CGI effort was consumed by this, along with three blaster shots, spaceship ion trails, and making an alien snowglobe glow green for a few seconds.

Synthoid: Say hi to Tarver. He's not an aging, blatant Bishop-the-android rip-off. He makes that clear by announcing that, despite trying to emulate the Lance Henriksen character in every way, he's a 'synthoid'. Oh, and the scene where he has to crawl along airducts is extremely different in every way to Bishop's crawl along an access tunnel. To be fair, he doesn't share the complex, bio-mechanical circulatory fluid system of Mr Bishop. Instead when you cut him open you'll only see brightly insulated copper wiring and maybe a valve. Tarver plays a very important role in the film - crap merchant. During a 90 second gap in the action he explains the back-story of the evil, Day-Glo basket ball that's causing all the trouble.

"We found it in a crate that had a letter written on the side in an unknown language. It roughly translates as 'Thanatos'."

Huh? Not only do you somehow translate an unknown language using a single letter sample, but you do so into Greek instead of English? Maybe if you bothered to go all the way and tell the crew that this mysterious, evilish artifact was conveniently labelled 'anthropomorphisation of Death' a shitload of grief could have been avoided. Especially as it's about to be loaded into a ship called Pandora! You'd be better off hopping aboard the spaceliner Titanic for a round trip to an icefield asteroid belt.

But seeing as Steve Railsback won a Science Fiction Genre Award for this role, I now know that this tribute was ultimately a deliberate act of irony. Or not.

Conclusion: open ended, like I said before. The life pod hurtles towards Earth with its blonde, nicely-racked captain screaming at glowing, spherical zombie maker rolling around her feet. There could be a sequel, but only if the perspex pod survives re-entry and a terminal velocity impact. Or maybe a space coastguard will pick it up and, through a chain of well-intentioned yet fateful events, unleash hell.

Like the movie's tag says: In space, nothing stays dead forever.

I can't wait to find out, so I won't.

UPDATE (5 May 2010): Plaguers has now fallen to 2.3 out of 10 on IMDB.