ACCION MUTANTE (1993)

In the future, the world will be ruled by attractive people, so a group of unattractive (very unattractive) terrorists kidnap the daughter of a billionaire and ask for a $10 million ransom. Then the gang sees a news report saying it’s actually $100 million! Their boss lied to them! They start fighting among themselves and crash their hooptie spaceship onto a mining planet that looks a lot like the mining planet of Pandora in 2009’s Borderlands video game. More stuff happens, but it’s all really sweaty and gnarly-looking. And not in a good way. It’s not often that I find myself watching an (entire) movie that’s gross to physically look at twice, but I wanted to revisit ACCION MUTANTE because I remember buying a VHS bootleg of it back in the 1990’s (from Blackest Heart Media, I think) and I disliked it. Watching it again on a crystal clear Blu-ray…it still looks like shit.

Undercooked story, boring acting, illogical senses of pain and healing that make pretty much everything meaningless, lots of sweaty unwashed people everywhere, dumb gunfights where everybody is shooting hundreds of bullets all over the places willy-nilly, zero characters that I felt any connection or empathy with, dumb ending that resolves nothing.

Watch ACCION MUTANTE if you want, I just felt the entire thing to be meh. That said, I do appreciate any inspiration it had on the Borderlands series. Those first few games were amazing. Part 4 was a snoozer though. Yawn!

Writer and Director Alex de la Iglesia would go on to make 2013’s WITCHING AND BITCHING which I really enjoyed.

Pointless side note: I found a newspaper article saying that ACCION MUTANTE was set in 2092, but I don't remember that being stated in the actual movie.

INTO THE ABYSS (2022)

Aliens have landed and things have turned to crap.  Lone survivor Bannon wanders aimlessly around a large city.  Rain falls and massive slow-moving crab-like monsters can been seen walking in the darkened skyline.  Down at the street level, there are human-sized creatures picking through the rubble looking for survivors.  I don’t think it ever says what Bannon did before the fall of humanity, but since he’s an idiot and completely clueless about pretty much everything, I can only guess that he was in middle management.  How this doofus lived this long is a mystery, cause when we’re introduced to him he’s bumbling around alleys and empty buildings making so much racket that you would think he was trying to get discovered.  After many minutes of this nap-inducing excitement Bannon finds a walkie-talkie.  Somehow forgetting that 100% of humanity is populated by lying, backstabbing monsters he calls out for help.  I’m sure that will turn out well for him.

The artwork on the DVD cover for INTO THE ABYSS is dope as fuck.  Unfortunately, the film doesn’t even deliver 0.666% of the awesomeness promised by that artwork.  Slow pace, boring smaller monsters that never brought a ruckus, zero interaction at all with the larger creatures, lots of dark scenes, disappointing ending, very little action, lots of talking, lots of bad decisions, zero gore, a few surreal touches (he backwards running man, the crusty-looking shaman dude in the woods) that I did enjoy.  It’s easy to see that director Matías Xavier Rispau has talent, he just needs to find a better script.

INTO THE ABYSS is watchable, but the 104 minutes you would spend watching this film would be better spent watching the first few episodes of the 2019 series “War of the Worlds” or playing Generation Zero (solo on Guerrilla difficulty) or reading Robert McCammon’s “The Border”.

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT (1972)

Patty wakes up to news on the radio that millions of people have disappeared overnight.  She goes to find her husband, but that motherfucker is gone!  Oh, shit.  The viewer is then treated to an extended flashback that shows Patty attending some kind of bummed out youth ministry where a teenage speaker is droning on about death.  She wisely leaves to go to a carnival.  While there, she meets her future husband.  Fast-forward and he gets saved (a.k.a. becomes a Christian), but Patty never does.

So now Patty is stuck in this post-Rapture shitshow time period called the Tribulation where everything is, I'm guessing...terrible, but unfortunately the budget is so low and the storytelling so poor that all we know for sure is the government is now forcing people to get an identification mark on their body and that Patty refuses to get the mark.

Overall, I was severely disappointed in A THIEF IN THE NIGHT.  I was seriously hoping for it to be 1) a hard-hitting story about Christians getting persecuted and shit-talked nonstop before getting zipped up into Heaven and then the shit talkers see the folly of their ways and getting saved only to be tortured 24/7 by an evil worldwide government. -or-  2) so goddamn cheesy that I hurt myself laughing at it.  Either way would have been cool, but instead we get 3) a slow-moving, poorly written story that can't even fill the 69-minute runtime.

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT was reportedly made for a budget of $68,000 and it definitely shows.  Small cast of non-actors, slow story that goes nowhere, zero special effects, poor lighting, high school play level sets, "a super evil credit card" and a big action scene composed of a lone woman running through the empty streets of Des Moines, Iowa while two guys in a van drive around looking lost.  Exciting stuff. 

As far as the evangelical Christian scare film genre goes, A THIEF IN THE NIGHT is important (and worth watching) because it's one of earliest examples of the genre, but it is painfully boring to get through nowadays.  That said, from what I can tell, it traumatized entire generations of children who were forced to watch it in church back in the day.

[Update 7/2022: I was adding some pictures to the PINK FLAMINGOS review and I realized that it was released in 1972 also. The same year as A THIEF IN THE NIGHT, but with a budget of only $12,000!]

Part 2 - A Distant Thunder (1978)
Part 2 - Image of the Beast (1981)
Part 3 - The Prodigal Planet (1983)