MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE WATERWORLD

This month's Foyeurism was inspired by the immense oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico currently threatening the shorelines just a few blocks from my home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. At the time this went to press the enormity of the oil spill had been upgraded from the size of Puerto Rico to the size of Bill Maher's ego, an unfathomable measurement to say the least. I had a completely different Foyeurism almost good to go when "oilmageddon" occurred, and being that I am nothing if not topical like a "Ripped from the Headlines" episode of "Law & Order", I made the editorial decision that this month's Foyeurism needed to go green. Not literally, mind you, I learned years ago readers hated it when I used the green font. April showers usually bring May flowers but the way things are going those flowers are either going to wither and die first or rise up against us like the plants in THE HAPPENING or the radioactive killer mutant tree roots terrorizing the Alaskan wilderness in THE CRAWLERS.

You remember THE CRAWLERS, don't you? Okay, maybe not. Not a terribly well known film - with good reason. I first reviewed THE CRAWLERS for Dread Central as part of the "From Here to Obscurity" series I have unfortunately let slide due to time constraints and can also be found in the Foywonder.com archives section (CLICK HERE). I bring up THE CRAWLERS for two reasons: it fits this month's theme and I recently found the rare trailer for this 1990 gem in my VHS collection and digitized it for YouTube.

This month's Foyeurism will go from the air to the sea and back to dry land with an eco-conscious triple feature. I begin with my review of the new modern bad movie masterpiece BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR. Yes, I know this review originally appeared at Dread Central. It's called recycling and it's good for the planet. Then I dive into Disney's OCEANS. Not even nature documentaries from Disney are safe. Rounding out the month is a true rarity, DARK BEFORE DAWN, an oddball 1988 direct-to-video motion picture I have dubbed the world's first "farmsploitation" flick. If I've done my job properly May's Foyeurism should leave you in an Earth Daze and have you chanting "Spill, baby, spill!" and maybe even "Death to the enemies of our God... VENU!!!"

 

EARTH DAZE

 

Words fail. Language fails. Descriptions fail. If ever there was a movie that had to be seen and heard to be believed, to which only your own eyes and ears can do justice, it would most certainly be BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR. Should have been subtitled "Shock and Awe" because that is the state it will leave you in. Everything about this movie is wrong and that is not an exaggeration. The acting is wrong. The directing is wrong. The screenwriting is wrong. The cinematography is wrong. The color correction is wrong. The sound is wrong. The sound mixing is wrong. The special effects are wrong. Everything is wrong. James Nguyen takes the basic fundamentals of filmmaking and annihilates them over and over again until his avian epic comes to a mindblowing conclusion. Nothing about this movie has been done properly, and keep in mind this is Nguyen's third stab at filmmaking and he was so proud of the finished product he arrived at the Sundance Film Festival touting his "romantic thriller" as a motion picture with value outside of being hailed as this generation's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, a comparison I do not consider apt because I dare say Ed Wood's bad movie masterpiece was a more competently composed work of cinema.

BIRDEMIC is simply beyond film criticism. You cannot critique it as you would a normal film. I cannot even in good conscience label BIRDEMIC so bad it's good. It's not good on any possible level. Is it entertaining? Absolutely. But not because it's so bad it's good. BIRDEMIC's only redeeming quality is like that of sideshow spectacle. If PT Barnum were alive today he would put this movie on display in a traveling carnival of freaks to be gawked at, to inspire mockery, revulsion, and even pity. Let me assure you that everything I am about to tell you is merely a drop in the bucket of what you can expect when you watch BIRDEMIC - AND YOU MUST WATCH BIRDEMIC! I viewed it four times over the course of four days, each time exposing a new set of friends, family, and coworkers to it and all of them coming away from the experience delirious for a variety of reasons.

Nor can one spoil a movie like this. I could tell you about how the lead's best friend utters the line "A day without sex is like a day wasted" but print does not do justice to actually hearing the flatness of how the line is delivered or the half-hearted fist-pumping action that accompanies it. I could tell you how the leads take a romantic walk on the beach during which you can barely comprehend a word they are saying drowned out by the deafening roar of the ocean but that does not compare to witnessing this for yourself and trying to resist the urge to yell "What!?" back at the screen. I could tell you about the one-dimensional flash animation visual effects of killer eagles barely flapping their wings as they hover in place superimposed over moving footage or the kamikaze airplane noises they tend to make as they dive bomb targets and explode into fiery Photoshopped balls of fire or how when how the visuals of the birds getting shot down make you feel like you're playing a light gun video game (If only a snickering dog popped up whenever they missed) but none of that is a substitution for actually bearing witness to these moments yourself. It's just not the same reading about how frequently shots are out of focus or improperly framed or feature jarring edits mid-sentence or close-ups are edited to feel like jump cuts or reaction shots either have or lack background noise not matching the previous shot or how the handicam sometimes jitters or how the actors are shown standing in place before the action begins or how panning to the right appeared to be Nguyen's favorite cinematography technique and so on and so on. BIRDEMIC can only be seen to be believed and, yes, you owe it to yourself to see it. You will laugh uproariously. You will hurt unequivocally. You will be left dumbstruck. You will be rendered speechless.

Nguyen fancies BIRDEMIC a romantic thriller. That means the first half focuses entirely on the budding romance between environmentally conscious software salesman Rod and Nathalie, a fashion model who does photoshoots at small town one-hour photo-mats and then gets word that she has been offered the cover of the next Victoria's Secret catalogue.

They meet on the street when Rod recognizes Nathalie. After establishing that they attended high school together, Rod then asks Nathalie where she is from. Shouldn't he already know that if they went to school together? Rod will go on to give Nathalie compliments on her physical beauty that would give any real woman a sense that this guy is creepy stalker material, not boyfriend material. To be fair, that also has as much to do with the horrible acting as it does the horrible screenwriting.

Leading man Alan Bagh may be the single worst actor of all time and that includes pornography. To stand out head and shoulders as the worst actor in a movie so rife with bad actors is an astounding feat. For the record, I only use the word "actors" because it is much easier to write than "people that awkwardly and unconvincingly say and do stuff".

Lead actress Whitney Moore is easy on the eyes but hard on the ears. She at least sounds like she might have a teeny tiny smidgen of acting ability or it could just be when you're performing opposite Alan Bagh even a corpse could sound lifelike.

If you think their acting is bad then just wait until you see them dance. You know the old jokes about white people having no rhythm? You have no idea. No one should ever try dancing"The Robot" to R&B music.

A boardroom applauds at news that their tech company has been sold for a billion dollars. Everyone claps. Then they stop clapping. Then Nguyen cuts to another section of the table and they begin clapping again. Their clapping dies down and Nguyen cuts to more people seated around the table as they begin clapping. Their clapping ceases and he cuts to another section of the table as they too begin clapping. Nguyen is trying to create the impression of prolonged clapping but incompetently edits the scene that it appears more as if their applause is circling the table like fans at a sporting event doing the wave. This begs for audience participation.

About halfway in is when a flock of eagles go on the attack and spend the remainder of the movie seemingly following Rod and Nathalie, the ex-marine and his girlfriend they meet up with, and the two children they rescue from the side of the road during another bird attack as everyday motorists unaware they are appearing in a movie casually drive past in the background.

The first encounter has them fighting the birds with coat hangers. I am not making this up. Back-to-back, vigorously swatting at a flock of flash animated birds with motel room metal coat hangers as they desperately seek to make their way to an escape vehicle. Joan Crawford would have kicked ass in this movie.

Constantly being attacked by a flock of birds everywhere you go? They go on a picnic out in the open with no shelter.

"I'm hungry. I was under that car a long time."

A gunman tries to rob of them of their last only can of gasoline. After the gunman is dealt with they proceed to drive off and leave the gas can on the side of the road.

Tippi Hedren, star of Alfred Hitchcock's classic THE BIRDS, is billed in the credits as a co-star even though her only appearance in BIRDEMIC is in the form of a footage from another movie playing on a television set Nathalie stands next to for five seconds.

From James Nguyen, the self-professed "master of romantic thrillers."

How many romantic thrillers can lay claim that the bulk of their finale is built around a guy fishing for food, a girl scrounging for seaweed to cook with the fish, and kids whining they'd rather eat Happy Meals? When Rod finds a fishing rod in the back of the van; "There's a fishing rod back here. I can go catch us some fish." It was with that lifeless line reading that I began to wonder if BIRDEMIC wasn't really some crackpot movie version of the old Oregon Trail computer game. The boy had previously injured his leg and their transportation had just broken down; only thing missing was for the little girl to die from dysentery.

And then the very end - I couldn't accurately describe it even if I wanted to. An astonishing mix of utter bewilderment and epic staring - the most epic stare-a-thon in the history of cinema. Not even Andy Warhol in his most drugged up experimental cinema phase would have put together an ending like that of BIRDEMIC.

No explanation is ever given as to why the birds attack. All we know is that global warming is in some way, some form, somehow responsible. How do we know this? Because darn near everything in BIRDEMIC in some way, some form, somehow ties into global warming. AN INCONVINIENT TRUTH is less preachy about global warming than BIRDEMIC. This film even includes a scene in which characters go on a double date to see Al Gore's documentary, declare it a great film afterwards, and make vows to switch to more environmentally friendly vehicles. Rod even starts a green tech company.

An ornithologist they happen upon, the only person who provides any inkling as to why the birds have gone berserk - I was not aware that global warming was responsible for bird flu and SARS and by being responsible for the loss of krill in the ocean could cause eagles to regress to their prehistoric predatory behavior. This scientist ends his speech declaring that man is the true monster for trashing the planet.

Later they meet a hippie treehugger living in a treehouse in the forest; his hilarious diatribe incoherently rambles about the glory of the California Redwoods and how tragic it is that global warming is killing them off by causing the proliferation of the destructive bark beetle. Then they all get runoff by the growl of a mountain lion - a loud grumbling growl that sounds more like it would be coming out of the mouth of Sasquatch or possibly Frankenstein's monster. A pity it wasn't Frankenstein because he could have walked onto the screen, waved his arm disapprovingly, and grunted out "Global warming baaaaaaaaaaad!"

Nguyen also tosses in some anti-war propaganda with a near sex scene staged in front a bedroom wall decorated only with a piece of white cardboard paper and the URL for a pacifist website. He also makes a heck of a statement by having that ex-marine explain the reason he left the military was because he could no longer take all the senseless killing in Iraq, also perfectly explaining why he now travels around with a loaded machine gun and multiple handguns in his van.

So as with everything other aspect of his magnum opus, even Nguyen's sincere attempts at making political statements lead us down the road to cinematic hell.

You know who I really feel sorry in the wake of BIRDEMIC? TROLL 2. Here that wretched excuse of a movie has been waging a campaign to be hailed the new best worst movie ever made and right as it was beginning to gain some respect for its astonishing badness along comes BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR to blow it out of the water. The bar is now so low I cannot fathom anything ever unseating it. If something does, God help us. God help us all.

To do my part for Earth Day I decided to go see Disney's OCEANS. That seemed a much better way of helping out Earth than, you know, actually doing something to clean up the environment. I'm a lazy bastard. There was that one year I decided to recycle by naturally fertilizing my front lawn, at least that's what I told the cops; they still charged me with public lewdness and drunk & disorderly. This year I did my part to help Mother Earth by sitting in a movie theater and watching a documentary about some of her creatures that we are going out of our way to obliterate. Up yours, nature!

Now this is not just OCEANS - this is Disney's OCEANS. I knew this corporation was powerful but had no idea they had subsidized the oceans. First Marvel Comics; now they have staked their claim to Earth's oceans and all that dwell within. Surprised the whales weren't shown with mouse ears or Michael Eisner as Poseidon introducing the film proclaiming dominance over his new watery domain. Seriously though, I was disappointed a bit because this being Disney's OCEANS I figured it was going to be full of Disney oceanic characters. Where was the singing Jamaican crab from THE LITTLE MERMAID? Heck, where was the Little Mermaid? No whale swallowing old Italian puppeteers. No Captain Nemo. No FINDING NEMO. Nowhere near as Disneyfied as I was anticipating. OCEANS is just like watching an IMAX documentary except it's twice as long as the typical IMAX documentary and it's not in IMAX. 80-minutes of James Cameron porn comprised of scenic watery nature footage, cute aquatic life (some that looked mighty tasty), ferocious sea life that would eat us if they got a chance and various other sea animals that Sig Hansen would kill in a heartbeat for looking at cock-eyed.

Now that's what OCEANS needed - "Deadliest Catch" crab fisherman hunting some of these creatures to make things a little more sporting. Sig Hansen after six hours of nicotine withdrawal fighting a great white shark with a baseball bat; now that's something I'd pay top dollar to hear Morgan Freeman narrate. Have the crew of the Time Bandit battle the Kraken from PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. That's the kind of entertainment you won't find in MARCH OF THE PENGUINS.

My other complain about OCEANS is that it's not even in 3D. If I'm going to watch all this breathtaking nature footage of underwater life can't I at least have that full emersion feeling of being submerged along with them? If you're going to get in these animals faces with cameras shouldn't I experience the sensation that they are coming out of the screen into my face? I wanted the AVATAR experience. I wanted to be so immersed in the ocean that I came away so depressed about not being able to live in this beautiful alien underwater world that go out afterwards and commit suicide hoping to be reincarnated as Mr. Limpet.

I do find the creatures of the sea far more interesting than their counterparts on land. I prefer crabs to spiders, eels to snakes, porcupine fish to porcupines, octopus to elephants, sharks to zebras, jellyfish to jaguars, stingrays to pigs... Are these are the stupidest animal analogies or what? The point is I find animals of the aquatic kingdom more interesting than land dwellers. That could be because I've lived the majority of my life about 6 blocks from the ocean. Except for the day of Hurricane Katrina; on that day I lived 3 blocks from the ocean. Do I have to turn in my geek credentials because I found a fight to the death between a crab and a mantis shrimp and baby sea turtles making a desperate sprint across the beach to the safety of the surf as hungry gulls pick them off from the air more thrilling than anything Hit Girl did in KICK ASS? Probably.

Entertaining for a nature documentary if a bit scattershot in how it's put together. One moment we're treated to satellite imagery showing how the oceans are being polluted and then it jumps to the North Pole to show us the penguins, polar bears, manatees, and whales. One second we're watching oceanic bottom feeders hunt one another and then it's back to the blue whale. Hordes of spider crabs crash into one another like dueling columns of Roman soldiers and then suddenly back to the whales. A bit all over the place and no matter what place it goes it eventually ends up back with the whales.

"A whale of a good time!" - Jeffrey Lyons, QuoteWhore.com

I appreciated that they didn't totally softball the vicious predatory side of nature. We spend a few minutes with cuddly sea lions that bark with the same grumbling baritone as an Al Bundy belch (BELCH OF THE SEA LIONS narrated by Ogre from REVENGE OF THE NERDS; make this documentary happen DisneyNature!) going through their cycle of life. No sooner are we being moved by the cuteness of the sea lions along come great white sharks and killer whales to devour them in spectacular fashion. All of it is treated as just another act of nature the way it ought to be.

On the other hand, the narration uses the phrases "adapted" and "rising temperatures" but not "evolution" or "global warming"; no doubt in fear of offending more off-kilter conservative viewers that still believe HAPPY FEET was anti-human, pro-gay propaganda in disguise. If you're going to bring up the subject matter then be honest about what you're saying instead of straddling the fence.

I guess Morgan Freeman must have been too busy gearing up for WANTED 2: THE LOOM OF DOOM to lend his voice so ex-007 Pierce Brosnan narrates OCEANS often sounding zonked out on Xanax and occasionally forced to recite scripted lines that make no sense at all. For example, this actual quote that has stuck in my head ever since:

"If dragons exist, this is where the narwhals live, unicorns of the sea."

Huh? What the heck does that mean? It just sounds like utterly incoherent word salad. Two can play this game.

"If chupacabras exist, this is where lampreys live, bloodsuckers of the sea."

The lame narration also has a bad habit of being needlessly vague. Have a look at this odd fish with what looks like legs; we're not going to tell you the name of this unusual undersea animal in case you'd like to go home and learn more. Every single time they show us a whale they have to remind us we're looking at whales as if we're idiots that don't know what a whale looks like even after we've been shown one a dozen times, but when it comes to some of the lesser known sea creatures we frequently get left in the dark.

You know what; I've turned a corner. OCEANS has convinced me to become more eco-friendly and I already know what I can do to help. Next year's Earth Day I'm going to New Mexico and digging up that landfill of E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL Atari 2600 game cartridges and shipping them down to earthquake-ravaged Haiti to be recycled as bricks for housing. It's the least I can do.

For the most part there's a good reason why you'll be hard-pressed to find any reviews about DARK BEFORE DAWN even on IMDB. Made in 1988, looks like it could have been made in 1978, this forgotten obscurity came into my possession at a Movie Gallery VHS "Buy 4, Get 4" closeout sale. The box art intrigued me just as I suspect it probably intrigued many a person over the years scouring video store shelves for something to rent. I suspect many spotted the box art and thought, "Hey, this ought to be pretty good. It's even got Ron Howard's dad. Oh, and Doug McClure, too, that always sweetens the pot." But by the time they finished reading the synopsis on the back and realizing what the movie was really about I strongly suspect many then thought, "No. Just no." And why wouldn't they change their minds? Who wouldn't want to spend 90-minutes of their life watching a motion picture based entirely around the world of grain?

You read that correctly - grain. From the farming of grain to the greedy corporations manipulating and monopolizing the grain market, every single aspect of DARK BEFORE DAWN has to do with grain.

I am fully prepared to proclaim DARK BEFORE DAWN to be the world's first "farmsploitation" flick. An entirely new subgenre born just for this one motion picture, a film so far ahead of its time I don't think there's ever been another true "farmsploitation" flick since. It's a conspiracy thriller about the biggest agricultural corporation in America (fictional Farmcor standing in for what is no doubt meant to be Archer Daniels Midland) engaging in illegal practices in their quest to corner the global grain market. It's a murder mystery about the big city reporter girlfriend of a slain investigative journalist heading to America's heartland trying to unravel the truth he uncovered that led to his demise. It's a hard-hitting drama about the psychological toll American farmers face as banks foreclose on their farms and corporations gobble up their livelihood. It's an industrial educational film paying homage to the hard work, dedication, and patriotism of those private citizens that make their living tilling the soil. There is also this one other strange element that starts veering the film into semi-horror territory; more on that momentarily.

The makers of DARK BEFORE DAWN clearly had an agenda and the chip on their shoulder was big enough to block out the rays of the sun so vital in the cultivating of wheat. Not just preachy, we're talking Sunday morning proselytizing, one giant sermon deifying the American farmer and preaching fire and brimstone about how that American farmer is being run out of business by scheming corporations swindling them out of their privately-owned farmlands and illegally manipulating the agricultural market for the own financial windfall and how bankers are assisting these corporations in stealing the farmlands, bureaucrats in turn are assisting the bankers and the corporations in stealing the farmlands, and the media is also doing its part to aid the corporations, the bankers, and the bureaucrats in stealing the all-mighty sacred farmlands. Verbal condemnation of this great Satan (corporate farming) and the unholy trinity that enables it (bankers, bureaucrats, reporters) are spoken at every opportunity.

Like Yoda once said, "Bankers lead to reporters. Reporters lead to bureaucrats. Bureaucrats lead to suffering."

This film opens and closes with Senate hearings discussing (Surprise!) how the farming corporations are destroying the American farmer. These farmers are begging the federal government to step in and help them, a tad hypocritical given their whole argument is that the government is foreclosing on farms by not giving them the loans they need allowing the farming corporations to run them out of business and seize their property. The muddled prevailing message of DARK BEFORE DAWN could best be summed up as "Help us, government, you bastards!"

The villain of DARK BEFORE DAWN is JB Watson, the unscrupulous CEO of Farmcor. Looking like Lorne Greene's diabolical second cousin in a seersucker suit to die for, JB Watson has a rapacious scheme to cozen international grain buyers by mixing it with sand to falsify the weight being sold, filing these things called "ghost reports" that lie about the actual surplus of grain stored in silos, manipulating the stock market to make billions while gaining a monopoly on grain commodities for years to come, and even illegally selling grain to terrorist states like Libya and Iran. All part of Watson's multi-billion dollar dream of one day living in a world in which a loaf of bread costs six bucks. Watson will do anything to make this happen even if he has to have snooping reporters, meddling farmers, and potential whistleblowers killed to cover his tracks. Is there no end to J.B. Watson's agricultural treachery?

Yes, actually, and it comes from a surprising source. The ultimate downfall of JB Watson stems not so much from vigilant reporting or dedicated farmers or government oversight or whistleblowers spilling their guts to feds; Farmcor's fatal error proves to be their inability to stop the mail. A murdered reporter mailed a letter revealing some of his findings to his reporter girlfriend minutes before he was assassinated giving her a head's start as to where to begin with her own investigation and a Farmcor whistleblower FedEx's a package containing damning evidence of Farmcor's wrongdoings mere minutes before hitmen gun him down. Corporate corruption proves no match for proper postage.

The final scene of DARK BEFORE DAWN has JB Watson sitting in his darkened office illuminated only by the light emanating from a slide projector displaying photos of farmland he intends to make his own when federal agents barge in to arrest him for his crimes. Backlit for maximum evil, Watson sternly chides his unseen secretary to "Get my lawyers" as the film fades to the end credits displayed over a backdrop of sunrise farm country scenery - the dawn preceded by the dark referenced in the film's title. Kind of an uneventful climax if you ask me. It was probably asking too much to hope the finale would have been built around JB Watson with a dead man's switch just seconds away from blowing up a Farm-Aid concert when Willie Nelson rides in to save the day on a hemp-powered tractor armed with machine guns and a pumpkin catapult.

No way the budget would have allowed that given we are talking about a film so cheap they could not afford to show us a speeding truck smashing into a tree. I suspect most of the budget went to smashing a tractor through a bank wall, setting a wheat field ablaze, and probably the hiring Doug McClure. McClure appears briefly as a Farmcor exec turned whistleblower after attending JB Watson's top secret board meeting where the soulless mogul laid out the whole dastardly agenda. McClure gets a heck of a death scene when hired guns pay him a hotel room visit. Too bad he didn't try to talk them out of assassinating him with the line, "Hi! I'm Doug McClure. You might know me from TV shows like "The Virginian" and "Out of the World" as well as movies such as WARLORDS OF ATLANTIS, HUMANOIDS OF THE DEEP, and FIREBIRD 2015 AD. Please don't kill me."

This "farmsploitation" epic follows the investigation of a pair of reporters digging into Farmcor's dirty dealings in the small farming town of Milo, Kansas where the farmers are facing hard times and are not too friendly to outsiders. Newspaper reporter Roger Crandall arrives first, uncovers the entire conspiracy after perambulating the community for about five minutes, and is promptly murdered by being lightly shoved to death off a grain silo catwalk. Shoved implies more physical force than actually went into the shoulder tap that sent him reeling over the railing to his death. A moment of great hilarity if I say so myself.

His reporter girlfriend, Jessica (the actress also being the screenwriter, her first and last film credits), picks up where he left off. Farmcor employees stonewall, naturally, and the locals don't much like fancy city-slickin' liberal media types sullying their tranquil community. Her only assistance comes from a local farmer named Billy, a guy that looks like a country bumpkin version of the Big Ragu from "Laverne & Shirley". No romance between the two. After all, she's in mourning and the land is his only mistress.

Let the record show that DARK BEFORE DAWN boasts the most trucker hats I have ever seen in a motion picture not actually about truckers.

Jessica at first lies to Billy claiming she's there to do a profile on the modern American farmer and would like to interview him. He proceeds to walk her about his farm and proudly explain every last single piece of farming equipment to her before going on about the glory of farm life voiced over random shots of windmills set against the backdrop of the sun, dandelions and wheat fields as far the eye can see, and other farming scenery worthy of a John Deere calendar. DARK BEFORE DAWN comes to a grinding halt for nearly ten whole minutes as we all get educated on the basic uses of farming equipment and why farming is Americana at its finest. This informational love letter to farming is precisely like one of those old educational short subjects designed for school children that "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" would ridicule before the feature began. "All hail the truck farmer!"

The mystery is not much of a mystery and the investigation is not much of an investigation. The truth comes out when characters engage in brief conversations about things they've discovered via the easiest of means (or off-camera) and nearly all conversations seem to harken back to the prevailing theme of farmers being in deep economic peril and always getting screwed by corporations, the banks, and/or the media. Again, a tad ironic given two reporters, a corporate insider, and a Congressman will be the key figures in bringing down Farmcor's corruption.

Meanwhile, on the Country Music Television Afterschool Special, a subplot emerges around a young farmer having his farm and pretty much everything he owns being foreclosed upon by a merciless banker. The banker informing him that he, his wife and baby are going to lose everything is played for maximum melodrama. Then, a few scenes later, cue the zany music worthy of a Yogi Bear cartoon as the young farmer drunkenly crashes his tractor through the banker's office in a scene played for cheap laughs. Later in the film, that young farmer hits rock bottom and decides the only way he can provide for his family is to wrap his pick-up truck around a tree going 85mph so they can collect the insurance money. Isn't suicide usually excluded from life insurance claims? I think this guy may have just let his family down in more ways than one.

The very next scene following that lightly comedic tractor crashing through the banker's office will see the old sheriff (veteran character actor Ben Johnson in one of the most thankless roles of his long career) getting an urgent phone call at the local bar and racing to his vehicle. Is it in regard to a drunk going on a tractor rampage? Nope. He has to rescue the banker from being executed by a crazed militant cult called the "Cavalistas" (sp?). I told you there was a horror element and here it is.

Thirty-five minutes in: overactor extraordinaire Billy Drago makes his first appearance as the David Koresh of a farming cult leading his flock gathered in a barn hoisting their fists and guns to the sky chanting the name of their pagan god Venu (Vanu?) while cursing the United States government, bankers, corporations, and the liberal media for conspiring to destroy their way of life. What the hell? It's like the Children of the Corn grew up and formed their own Tea Party movement.

"What is the law?"
"Death to the enemies of our God... VENU!!!"

One of the darndest, most surreal movie scenes I have ever seen because it comes from completely out of the blue and feels completely out of place given the storyline. It does make me wonder how much of this was based in reality. Were there and are there still anti-establishment pagan farming cults operating in America's heartland? If so, drop me an email and tell me more.

So the banker foreclosing on everyone's farm finds himself strung up by his arms in that same barn about to meet his maker at the hands of ever sneering Billy Drago and his cornfed cult. Astounding, no torches or pitchforks are wielded in one of the few occasions when you would expect to see such from an angry mob. The sheriff holds them off at gunpoint while Billy drags the bloodied banker to safety. Later the sheriff will bemoan never being able to arrest any of these "Cavalistas". Say again? The sheriff had them all red-handed in the barn about to murder a guy and he saw their faces; what's preventing him from making arrests. This is the worst sheriff ever. More like the town drunk pretending to be the sheriff; no wonder he spends all his time hanging out in a bar.

Disappointed to say the cult doesn't factor into the plot much from this point on. Back to Jessica and Billy piecing together the lame conspiracy - yawn. A bad old boy in flannel even hog-ties Jessica and leaves her in a wheat field where she nearly gets plowed to death, the farm country film version of a villain in black cape tying a damsel in distress to the railroad. That hayseed henchman will meet his maker via a similar wheat thresher in the most contrived manner possible.

Important safety tip: if you're trying to escape capture inside a barn during a shootout don't turn on a giant thresher and then attempt to flee across the narrow walkway above it unless you're just begging to get mulched.

What's really noteworthy about that guy's death is that when he falls into the thresher he explodes into what looks like a puddle of wheat. Nothing red or viscous or meaty went flying; he appeared to be a human being composed of wheat. That's when you know you've lived in the country too long.

Made in 1988 but shot like a 1970's drive-in feature; at times tedious, at times laughable, at times too strange to look away; DARK BEFORE DAWN entertains more as a curio than as a well-rounded motion picture. Yeah, I think I can tell why this garrulous "farmsploitation" flick has fallen into the abyss of cinema obscura. Still beats wasting 90-minutes of your life playing Farmville on Facebook. You know who you are. Stop that!

Since chances are DARK BEFORE DAWN will never see the light of day on DVD and can't imagine any of you going out of your way to locate a VHS copy of this rarity I thought I would conclude this month's Foyeurism with a highlight reel from this "farmsploitation" masterpiece.

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE

ON DEADLY GROUND