The debate surrounding Canada's plummeting crime rate is an essential one in today's fractious world. What turns Canada's collective ear to the better angels of its nature? Perhaps its universal demi-socialism has convinced citizens at all social strata that a life within the law can lead to personal fulfillment. Perhaps its icy climate eases the sting of jealousy and recrimination. Perhaps the Canadian Film Board's generous system of grants has attracted so many crappy, washed-out action films to the Great White North that social category of "hoodlum" has been replaced by "best boy electric".

Direct Action, a crappy, washed-out action film starring box office super-Swede Dolph Lundgren, suggests yet another source of Canadian peace: a relentless shower of merciless kickings, delivered by a burly, brooding police officer. Lundgren plays Frank Gannon, the most broad-chested member of the Direct Action Unit of the Metropolitan Police Department. "If it wasn't for us, there'd be chaos," one DAU officer opines. "We're holding the streets together like fucking Superglue." The film draws much of its dramatic tension from this image of Canada as a nation perpetually leaning over the brink of total anarchy, restrained only by a grim, Scandinavian supercop. The sense of dread is most palpable in the film's long scenes of car travel, set in the sunny, uncluttered suburbs of Ontario.

No one ever quite explains whether the Direct Action Unit is focused on drug dealers or gangs or unlicensed nail salons, although at one point Dolph does brutally kick a black man in a leather pageboy cap. It is perfectly clear, though, that our hero is the only clean cop in the unit, and the film follows the last afternoon before he testifies against his own in front of a grand jury. In addition, he's paired on this day with a new partner, with whom he is woefully mismatched; who does not appreciate that he does not play by the rules; and who resents the fact that long dedication to his job has left him emotionally distant. Can Dolph survive the onslaught of four distinct cop movie tropes? The surprise will not be ruined here, although it is derailed in the film itself by the late arrival of sinister Asian drug dealers, a crooked DA, and an "Afghani-style" throat slitting. Moreover, the film makes some feeble attempts to soften its indictment of Canadian society by the late inclusion of some American flags, a CIA agent, and a claim on the DVD case that the whole tale is actually about the LAPD.

It is difficult to completely dismiss Direct Action as entertainment. Sidney J. Furie (Iron Eagle, Iron Eagle II, Iron Eagle IV) is a veteran, if uncelebrated, action director, and Lundgren has done what he must to evolve from scowling, dead-eyed killer (as seen in Rocky IV and Universal Soldier, for example) to hulking, unwavering hero. For ninety minutes, dirty cops and canuck thugs get a little rough Nordic justice kicked into them in an agreeably kinetic fashion. But placed on the shelf next to Mosquito Man and Vampires on Bikini Beach, it's clear that Direct Action has missed the higher calling of its more disreputable brethren.

The Canadian-made Direct-to-DVD release, Blood Angels is a great example of what can happen when sharp people are put in charge of B-tier pictures. I think most of us know that Direct-to-DVD films are not necessarily B-films. Aside from the occasional foreign release not booked to theatres or independent art house picture deprived of theatrical distribution, there is also a breed of Direct-to-DVD release that revels in its status as a good-bad picture. The beauty of Blood Angels lies in its skillful management of content and themes that not only reflect the position of the film in its good-bad market, but the status of being good-bad to begin with.

Blood Angels or Thralls (Canadian title) are the self-proclaimed "white trash of vampires" (truly, this couldn't be more exploitatively marketed if it were a Saturday morning cartoon). The literally shackled, sexy slaves of their powerful vampire master Lorenzo Lamas, these half-vampires are proven to be products of their environment. The world of the film is littered with references to the in-betweenness of the characters. The punny angle of the film -- its unique brand of exploitation cum camp humor -- is mirrored in so many of the film's chosen motifs: half-beasts, half-dead men, half-shirts, half-limbs, half-bats, even the depiction of a night club's transvestite investors reiterates the theme.

The characters responsible for comic relief are those whose identities are particularly insecure. The vampiric comic relief (dressed in white, the film's coded color of bondage) desperately wants to enter the realm of the undead. Though he's impermanently killed multiple times in the film, his only means of getting close to vampirism involves plastic teeth.

Alternately, the human comic relief is an Asian college student who desperately wants to be a homey. While coming surprisingly close to getting his "ho", the fate that becomes him is more of a cautionary tale than a bit of tail. But then, the way this film conflates its themes, the cautionary tale and the bit of tail are hard to divorce.

The most elaborate and profound mixtures of themes arise in the conflicts in which the thralls themselves are involved. Having escaped their master, they use their business savvy and underworld connections to build a rave. Awash in hedonism, the marvelously intemperate rave energy is broken only occasionally for moments of kung-fu crowd control on part of the vixen-businesswomen.

The major fight of the film occurs when the master arrives at the rave and shows the thralls that the ancient Latin text they have been guarding since their escape contains a guide to demon invocation -- though seemingly their salvation, the thralls never tried to translate it. Instantly the rave, at once a secular den of base pleasures, is transformed into a ritual site. Complete with pagan symbols, this bastardization of faith finally draws a conclusion to the good-bad binaries which, all movie long, have been bound by comical confusion. The feeding pattern of the thrall is based on sexual lure, so their sexuality eventually reveals itself as a one complicated by violence. The kung-fu, suggestive as it is, appears to be a dance complicated by injury. And most notably, the rave becomes a hedonistic event complicated by demon invocation.

Sandwiched between business savvy and nymphomania the thralls are characters in limbo. As our navigators through their universe, they defile the innocent and the not-so-innocent with a similar "devil may care" attitude, the result of which is a subversion of the role of the vampire. No longer a walking blaspheme of sacrilegious horror, the undead really do seem to have it good.

« Previous Next »