Shadowchaser

Nothing wraps up a long Thanksgiving Weekend better than a bad movie from the ‘90’s.  For this purpose I recommend Project: Shadowchaser.  (Please note that I’m NOT referring to Shadowchaser II.  That’s the sequel to Shadowchaser.  I have never seen Shadowchaser II, nor will I, because I already saw Shadowchaser, the original project.  And that’s enough Shadowchaser for one lifetime.)

And while this movie isn’t as good for quoting awful quotes twenty + years on the way Steven Seagal’s Hard to Kill is…and you can take THAT to the bank, the blood bank…it does still have all the makings of awful, really just terrible, cinematics.

Firstly, there’s an android.  Named Romulus.  You can tell The Romster is an android because they gave him white blond eyebrows and matching white blond hair à la Billy Idol.  They also apparently gave him plenty of steroids.  (Romulus, not Billy.)

RommyRom* takes over a hospital where the president’s daughter has been coincidentally admitted for food poisoning.  WHAT a weird coincidence!   

Enter our intrepid hero, who is rumored-to-be-the-hospital’s-architect-who-died-and-then-needed-to-be-thawed-out-from-his-cryogenically-preserved state so he could share the floor plans of the food poisoning ward.  This is fun, right?

Hubby claims he recognized the intrepid hero as the bad guy from the Karate Kid movies.  I?  Didn’t recognize any of the play-ahs.  Although at one point I thought I spotted Sean Penn’s heavyset brother.  But then he got the ol’ defibrillator paddle treatment to his face, so I couldn’t be sure after that.

Anyway, the hero (who looked like McGuyver’s feathered hair married Gordon Ramsey’s Yorkshire ruffian nose) rescues the president’s daughter who is inexplicably dressed in a karate gi the first time he meets her.  Not knowing who he is, she tries to take him down with some awesome karate moves.  Or maybe she DID know who he was, and knew he was from The Karate Kid, and was trying to impress him and therefore get more amazing movie roles?   Eventually they get it all sorted out whereupon she changes into an evening gown which is much better suited for running around the hospital avoiding androids. 

They then spend the rest of the movie scrambling through the HVAC system and down dark elevator shafts shooting spark guns at the bad guys, who shoot spark guns back.  You know spark guns, they don’t shoot bullets, they just shoot sparks. Which are way better in terms of special effects than real guns ever could be.  Unless you’re the one bald guy wearing glasses in the whole movie.  In which case you’re the only one who gets shot at by a real gun.  And killed.  But only after you pop back up and get killed again, but for real this time.

I’m not really sure how it all ends; I fell asleep.  I do know that the hero gets a blood trickle in the corner of his mouth which Hubby thought looked like an unsightly cold sore.  But other than the cold sore, I’m assuming everyone gets out ok.  There is a Shadowchaser II after all.  Maybe that just means Romulus gets out ok.  The truth of the matter is that I was kindof dozing during the entire movie until I fell asleep, so excuse me if I got any of this wrong.  If you do want more details, please go to Wikipedia.  There’s a great write-up: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowchaser.

*I was gonna tell you that in the movie, Romulus is under the control of terrorists.  But then I thought better of it.  Because the mention of “terrorists” and “guns” and “president’s daughter” all in one blog post seemed like it might be accidentally misconstrued as “internet chatter” and could therefore bring the CIA down on me at any minute – which all seemed like a bad idea, so I decided not to tell you who was controlling Romulus.  But now I really do have to go.  Someone’s at the door.