ENDLESS DESCENT aka THE RIFT
(Spain - 1990; US release 1991) Directed by J.P. Simon (Juan Piquer Simon). Written by David Coleman. Cast: Jack Scalia, R. Lee Ermey, Ray Wise, Deborah Adair, John Toles-Bey, Ely Pouget, Edmund Purdom, Emilio Linder, Tony Isbert, Alvara Labra, Frank Brana, J. Martinez Bordiu, Garrick Hagon, Luis Lorenzo. (R, 83 mins) Around the time of James Cameron's 1989 sci-fi/adventure epic THE ABYSS, underwater monster movies became a trend over the next year. In the first three months of 1989, moviegoers were offered Sean S. Cunningham's DEEPSTAR SIX and George P. Cosmatos' LEVIATHAN, with lowly, cost-cutting stragglers like the abysmal Roger Corman-produced LORDS OF THE DEEP, the Wayne Crawford-starring THE EVIL BELOW, and Antonio Margheriti's Italian ripoff ALIEN FROM THE DEEP also stepping up to meet a demand that didn't exist. Shot in 1989 as THE RIFT but unreleased in the US until it turned up on video stores in early 1991 as ENDLESS DESCENT, this Spanish contribution to the unlikely craze was ghost-produced by Dino DeLaurentiis, whose brother Luigi and nephew Aurelio produced LEVIATHAN. A legendary mega-budget showman, Dino apparently found some loose change in between his couch cushions and gave it to his aspiring producer daughter Francesca to help finance a pair of films with her then-husband Juan Piquer Simon (the other was 1988's molluscsploitation classic SLUGS). No stranger to fans of bad movies, Simon (1935-2011) was also the man behind the MST3K favorite POD PEOPLE (1983), but will forever be best known for the indescribable chainsaw killer/waterbed/bad chop suey masterpiece PIECES (1983). ENDLESS DESCENT follows the same template as its influences, with a Navy-led research team heading to unfathomable depths to investigate the disappearance of a state-of-the-art submarine. The missing sub, Siren 1, was designed by feathered-hair nautical wunderkind Wick Hayes (Jack Scalia), who was thrown under the bus by the US government when they took his initial design and co-opted it as their own. Drunk and disgruntled, Hayes is ordered by a D.C. bureaucrat (Edmund Purdom) to accompany the crew of the Siren II as an advisor in their search for Siren I.
Jack Scalia IS Wick Hayes
The crew is the usual ragtag group of miscreants, including the weaselly Robbins (Ray Wise, right before TWIN PEAKS); black stereotype comic relief (cue copious exclamations of "Aw, dayyyyum!" and "Aw, sheeeeeeiiit!") Kane (John Toles-Bey); just-one-of-the-guys Ana Rivera (Ely Pouget), and some cartoonish European types speaking with overdone dubbed voices, including Spanish Simon regular Frank Brana sporting a bizarre beard and revoiced with a ridiculous German accent as Muller. Complicating matters for the bountifully-coiffed Hayes is the presence of two Navy officers--his ex-wife Nina (Deborah Adair), and the commander of the mission, Captain Phillips, played by R. Lee Ermey, cast radically against type as "R. Lee Ermey." Plunging 35,000 feet into the ocean off the coast of Norway, the Siren II follows the black box signal of the Siren I, and loses a crew member along the way when Swedish diver Sven (played by Spanish J. Martinez Bordiu) is killed by a tentacled creature while collecting a strange seaweed sample and taking photographs. Soon, the Siren II is attacked by another creature that they fight off with an electroshock defense mechanism built into the exterior. Heading deeper into the ocean to trace the signal, the Siren II discovers an unlikely "naturally pressurized" subterranean cavern--35,000 feet below the ocean, mind you--where they find a secret laboratory and some dead members of the Siren I. They're also attacked ALIENS-style by creatures who start coming out of the rocks in a nicely-done splatter sequence. The seaweed sample sent back by Sven before he was devoured also starts to mutate into some kind of toxic life form, causing anyone who touches it to go full "Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" and mutate into pus-oozing, plant-like vegetation.
Since the film is heavily inspired by ALIENS, they also find a nest filled with eggs and amniotic sacs, overseen by a pissed off mother mutant who isn't happy about her space being invaded. It becomes clear to Hayes that someone aboard the Siren II is sabotaging the mission Paul Reiser-style, deeming the mutant life form more vital than the expendable crew. ENDLESS DESCENT is laughably cheap at times, with shots of a miniature sub that look pretty embarrassing coming out anywhere near the vicinity of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. But the gore is plentiful and gushes with enthusiasm, and the cast actually seems to be taking it somewhat seriously. It's strange seeing Ermey in such a junky Eurotrash ripoff just a couple of years after FULL METAL JACKET and MISSISSIPPI BURNING, but as he explains in an interview on Kino Lorber's new Blu-ray (released under the title THE RIFT), "you gotta pay your dues." As in the Vietnam cult classic THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA, it's quite probable that Ermey wrote--or at least spruced up--his own dialogue to suit his persona, especially in scenes where he's butting heads with Scalia's Wick Hayes, a man whose name is as amazing as his hair. Scalia and Wise also have interviews on the Blu-ray and are a bit more kind to the film than Ermey, who flat-out calls it a piece of shit and doesn't pull punches about his co-stars (he liked Scalia very much, while derisively referring to Wise as a "whiner," a "belly-acher," and a "pussy"), but concedes that had an alright time making it. Looking at it today, ENDLESS DESCENT/THE RIFT is a well-assembled, fast-paced, low-budget, lowbrow B-movie that doesn't quite achieve the ludicrous delights of Simon's PIECES or SLUGS, but still has plenty of head-scratching plot elements and ample splatter and slime to please nostalgic fans of the video store heyday.
Directed by J. Piquer Simon. Written by Dick Randall and John Shadow. Cast: Christopher George, Paul Smith, Edmund Purdom, Lynda Day George, Ian Sera, Jack Taylor, Frank Brana, Gerard Tichy, Isabelle Luque, Hilda Fuchs, May Heatherly. (Unrated, 85 mins)
I love PIECES. I love PIECES so much that if I was told I had 24 hours left to live, I'd be sure to set aside 1.5 of those 24 hours to watch PIECES one last time. It has everything: extreme gore, gratuitous nudity; slumming actors; bad dubbing; a complete disregard for logic and common sense; and no sense of restraint or decency whatsoever. It is pure Bad Movie joy of the highest order.
The plot? Well, for what it's worth, the film opens in 1942 Boston with a child putting together a nudie jigsaw puzzle, prompting his mother to throw an hysterical fit. Not to be outdone, the kid kills Mom with an axe. Cut to 1982, and a chainsaw killer, using that same jigsaw puzzle as his inspiration, is killing girls on a Boston college campus and collecting the body parts to piece together a real-life puzzle. Get it? PIECES!
On the case are Lt. Bracken (Christopher George) and Sgt. Holden (Frank Brana, best known to MST3K fans as the butt of the "Leslie Nielsen! Leslie Nielsen! Leslie Nielsen!" jokes from POD PEOPLE), seeking the cooperation of the Dean (Edmund Purdom), who understandably doesn't want a panic. As what's left of the bodies continue to pile up, Bracken enlists the aid of Kendall (Ian Sera), the unlikely BMOC, a smirking twerp who scares easily and inexplicably has all of the campus hotties succumbing to his Horshackian charms despite owning an alarming number of Cosby sweaters.
As the mayhem continues, Bracken, cementing his place as the laziest detective in cinema history, has Kendall keep an eye on tennis pro-turned-cop Mary Riggs (George's wife Lynda Day George, strangely billed as "Linda Day" even though she'd been going by "Lynda Day George" since their 1970 nuptuals), who's undercover as...wait for it...the new tennis coach! The list of suspects is seemingly endless: is the killer Kendall? Is it the Dean? Is it grumbling, stink-eyed groundskeeper Willard (Paul Smith)? Or is it the mysterious Professor Brown (Jack Taylor)? The Dean seems to think so, as he snottily informs Bracken that Brown is "unmarried and lives with his mother."
"Agatha Christie got nothin' on Juan Piquer Simon!" - Tomb It May Concern's David Zuzelo
Directed by Spanish hack Juan Piquer Simon, PIECES was destined for grindhouse glory. It was produced by Dick Randall, an American exploitation vet who spent most of the 1960s and 1970s working between Italy and Hong Kong. Randall co-wrote the script with one "John Shadow," generally assumed to be one of the countless pseudonyms of legendary Italian sleaze merchant Aristide Massaccesi, best known as "Joe D'Amato." Also involved in this and a few future Randall projects was American producer Steve Minasian, who was peripherally involved in getting the original FRIDAY THE 13TH made.
Where to start in listing the many highlights of PIECES? Is the stupidity of the plot enough? The ease at figuring out the killer's identity? The inept direction? The way two actresses in a tennis match have clearly never played tennis before? The way Simon can't get the extras watching the tennis match to follow the ball in unison? The way the CSI guys find a sawed-up body and put one arm in a plastic bag, and the rest of the body parts in one giant bag, while perpetually useless Bracken asks if the killing could've been done by the blood-splattered chainsaw left next to the body? The way Bracken emphatically tells the Dean that the killer "is someone on...or near the campus"? The way Bracken keeps pawning his work off on a college student? The way the killer hides his chainsaw behind his back while on an elevator with his next victim? The way Holden forgoes a holster and just puts his gun in the waist of his pants? The completely uncoordinated aerobics class? One of the most ludicrous final shots in all of horror cinema? The out-of-nowhere attack on Mary by Kendall's "kung-fu professor"?
Or how about the quotes?
--"We're just buying clothes without labels and trying them on for size."
--"The most beautiful thing in the world is...smoking pot and...fucking on a waterbed!"
--"So I'm slayed by a withering look. Who gives a shit?"
--"One, two, three...OK!"
--"Get me a plastic bag! I'm gonna burn everything!"
--"Hey, it's my kung-fu professor! What's the story, Chow?"
--"Bad chop suey! So long!"
--"I just love the cream!"
--"Take some uppers or something!"
--"I'll send you a case of lollipops!"
--"Casanova!"
And, of course....
Somehow, Oscar ignored Lynda Day George.
I've had a strange obsession with PIECES since June 1984, when it belatedly opened in the Toledo area and I saw a couple of ads for it on TV. Back then, the idea of straight-to-video wasn't as prevalent as it would become in just a few years, and things took longer to come out on home video. With drive-in schlock like PIECES, the plan in many cases would be to open it slowly and, with a limited number of prints, it would make its way around the country slowly as opposed to opening wide. PIECES opened in the US in September 1983, and took uncommonly long to reach my area. So long, in fact, that Christopher George was dead by the time the film hit Toledo. George died of a heart attack in November 1983, and PIECES was the veteran actor's next-to-last film.
The great Christopher George (1931-1983)
There was something captivating about the bluntness of the TV spot and the luridness of the newspaper ads ("You don't have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!"), and, of course, the tell-tale sign that it was the real deal for gorehounds: it was unrated, with the warning "Absolutely no one under 17 admitted!" which was usually reserved for the likes of Lucio Fulci films and stuff like MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY. It took me a couple of years, but I eventually caught up with PIECES via the Vestron Video VHS. And what child of '80s trash cinema doesn't get misty over the old Vestron logo?
And even as a teenager, it was easy to laugh at PIECES. But damn...this was a sick movie. For all its controversy, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE really isn't that gory. But PIECES was a different beast. It showed everything. Pig carcasses were used for the chainsaw-slicing closeups. The shot of a scared victim wetting herself seemed a little too real (because it was). As terrible as PIECES is--and it is indeed a terrible, horrible, laughable movie--my love for it knows no bounds. I've lost count of how many times I've seen it, especially since the definitive two-disc special edition DVD was released by Grindhouse in 2008 (packed with bonus features, this also includes the Spanish audio track with a completely different score by Librado Pastor that doesn't work at all; the US version had CAM library tracks that are an infinitely better fit), with a really nice 1.66 anamorphic transfer.
PIECES probably isn't the funniest bad movie ever, and the rampant sleaze and extremely graphic violence will likely be a major turn-off for some, but something about this has just clicked with me since I first saw those TV commercials back in 1984 when I was 11. This actually opened at an eight-screen cinema at the then-biggest mall in the city. I'm just trying to imagine seeing PIECES in a mall cinema. What else can I say? The hipsters can have their prefab bad movies like BIRDEMIC. For me, PIECES is the gift that keeps on giving and shows no signs of stopping.
