Remember before climate change, when everybody was so concerned about the ozone layer? Funny how you don’t hear about that much anymore. It is apparently the destruction of that which led to the post-apocalyptic world of 2053 as portrayed in 1991’s Neon City.
The more remote areas around Salt Lake were shot in winter to represent that desolate, spartan world. The starting location is the outpost of Jericho, which is really the most recent incarnation of the Saltair Palace, after the previous two were each destroyed by fire. Some people mistakenly state it is the same place where Carnival of Souls was filmed, which is only partly true, as what we see here is the second incarnation of the venue.
The bulk of the movie has a variety of characters making the trip from Jericho to the titular city. Threats along the way include not just lack of water and other amenities, but bands of marauders called “Skins”. That these face-painted warriors largely ride motorcycles belie the intention here to be a low-budget The Road Warrior, a goal it seems to pursue only half-heartedly.
Instead, it wants to be a character-driven drama with various conflicts between the passengers, almost all of whom are engaged in some degree of duplicity. In that regard, it reflects the original inspiration of Ann Lewis Hamilton’s script (under the pseudonym Buck Finch), and that was John Ford’s Stagecoach.
A character we know will be trouble from the get-go is Nick Klar, a serial killer under the guise of the doctor he murdered back in Jericho. He is, in a way, not the only person with a deadly secret, as WKRP in Cincinnati’s Richard Sanders is a deeply horrible comedian who makes a living peddling vials of poison with which he assists suicides. I guess if you can’t slay ‘em from the stage, you can kill them from your suitcase. The elderly Arsenio ‘Sonny’ Trinidad is Secret Asian Man. The privileged and spoiled Juliet Landau has a resemblance, and expressions similar to, Chris Elliott, despite her being the daughter of Martin Landau. I felt her character was not entirely unlike that of Elliott’s in Cabin Boy, and so I think of her as a “fancy lass”. Valerie Wildman is a lounge singer and lady of the evening who is off to get married.
She was once married to fellow passenger Michael Ironside. They had a son together, who was mistaken for a mutant by the authorities and euthanized. They also sterilized Wildman. But, as we learn from her late in the runtime, the baby wasn’t a mutant—just blind and born with a cleft palette. The experience soured Ironside on the rangers with whom he served, and he changes careers to bounty hunter. It is in that capacity he has taken Vanity into custody, and she rounds out our passenger list, as Jericho’s jails are full up. That, and marshal Monte Markham (who also directs) had Ironside’s truck torched, so as to force Ironside to be security for that transport to Neon. I guess truck manufacturing is still a going concern in this fractured world of the future, given they opted to destroy, and not just seize, Ironside’s transportation.
The driver is Lyle Alzado, in his last film before his death from a brain tumor. Like some others on the trip, he has a connection to Ironside, as the man had busted fellow ranger Alzado for beating a man to death. When learning this story, some of the characters seem to pass judgment on Ironside for ratting on a friend. Call me old fashioned, but
I would say pummeling a person to death crosses a line.
These characters pose various threats to each other, and there are even worse things on the road they’ll travel than the murderous “Skins”. There are “brights”, which are intense bursts of and heat and light caused by water, tiny particles and pollutants in the air, acting like a giant magnifying glass and incinerating things at random. Then there are radioactive “Xander” clouds which, when encountered, people only need to breathe canned air to survive. To my considerable doubt, they don’t need to worry about any other parts of their bodies being exposed to it, including eyes. One scene takes place in a building with a sign outside warning “asbestos dust hazard”. Seems to me that probably poses a greater threat than a Xander cloud.
Those clouds are named for the mysterious Xander, who somehow decimated the ozone layer through his experiments with lasers. I can’t begin to imagine how lasers destroyed the ozone layer. I’m also confused by why clouds of radiation would be named after him. Yes, a depleted ozone layer would greatly increase the amount of UV radiation to reach the planet’s surface, but clouds of it make me think there was a nuclear war, which doesn’t seem to be the case.
Something else that misled me into thinking this was a nuclear apocalypse is Landau’s recounting of how she came to be so ignorant of how the world functions in this time. Her father had sent her to a private school in Switzerland before the calamity and she has been living in massive fallout shelter there since.
The picture takes its sweet time (roughly about an hour and seven minutes) getting around to any action scenes even remotely like something from the Mad Max series. And, once it does, it doesn’t even do much except have a successful payoff for the Chekhov’s explosives introduced when loading the trailer back in Jericho. That trailer will be detached from the truck and set on fire in a moment of respectable pyrotechnics.
If only the performances were as impressive. It isn’t like anybody is completely unbelievable, but I wasn’t completely sold on any of the performances. Ironside earns his paycheck, but in the kind of role we have already seen him in so many times that he could likely do it in his sleep. Vanity turns in a serviceable characterization, at best, and I wonder what even drew her to this project. Surely, she couldn’t have been inspired so much by Prince that the song “1999” made her want to be in a post-apocalyptic film. The actors who fares best is Alzado who, while rarely fully believable, has a certain charm other beefy athletes like Andre the Giant brought to the screen. I have the feeling he was a good guy to know. Also, it is a bit weird how he resembles, and has expressions similar to, Sylvester Stallone. Between my mistaking him for the other actor and Landau for Chris Elliott, I spent a great deal of time confused. One performer I will give bad marks to is Nick Klar, who I believed neither as a straight-up serial killer nor as such a person impersonating a doctor. In a film with largely mediocre performances, it is the subpar standout.
Something which may have better sold me on the acting is if the few indoor settings we see were more believable. Jericho feels as dangerous as a shopping mall, and looks like nothing less than the set of many a music video of the time. The people there who are supposedly eking out a meagre existence appear to be awfully clean, and so are their clothes. I guess that’s what happens when the end of the world comes to Utah, what with the clean living and all. Neon doesn’t fare any better when we finally see it, as it is like getting a glimpse of a different, though slightly better, shopping mall. If Jericho looked like a set of a music video by Duran Duran side project Arcadia, Neon looks like a set from one from their Rio period. I wondered if this place is the gated community from Land of the Dead in its first days. A last place is all pitch black and light rays shooting through mist, usually through slowly churning fan blades, as mandated by the law of 80’s action cinema.
One of the weirdest aspects of this R-rated picture is how tame it is. At the most, I would rate this PG-13, as the only profanity of which I was aware was very mild and there is no nudity. There is even a scene with the characters frolicking in a hot spring and they all have towels covering their naughty bits while they’re in the water. Once again, I suspect the influence of Utah on the production.
Neon City aspires to do more than other action films of its ilk, which is noble. Alas, it comes up short both in drama and action. I wonder what the original script was like, as we know at least one major change was that of the chief protagonist from female to male. Something I suspect was originally in Hamilton’s script was a line of Ironside’s where he tells Wildman he has learned a lot since they parted ways, and he even apologizes to her. You know that if a man is apologizing to a woman, it is highly unlikely a man wrote the script. She also may have written this line Vanity says to him, “Even for an asshole, you’re an asshole.”
Dir: Monte Markham
Starring Michael Ironside, Vanity, Lyle Alzado
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray