AFTERSHOCK (1990)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*                                                                                                                           AFTERSHOCK-- whose title seems like a reference to nothing at all-- may be rare among apocaflicks in also being a "first contact" story. And it's got kung fu also, so it's a first-contact chop-apocaflick! Also, it's got almost ten familiar faces spread throughout the movie, though some of the performers are in the story for only a handful of scenes, like Richard Lynch and Christopher (son of Robert) Mitchum.                                                                                       

Writer Michael Standing (who also has a small acting role in AFTERSHOCK) comes up with a basic concept that almost has satirical possibilities. What if all the societies of Earth fall into apocalyptic chaos thanks to a repressive military regime, and then a beneficent ET pays Earth a visit, having heard from our outer-space satellites that we're a happening kind of world? A writer with a head for satire might have come up with all sorts of little jabs at human mediocrity while the hero of the story tried to help the aggrieved alien phone home. But Standing had no such head. His idea of satire was to say that the repressive military faction, represented by enforcers John Saxon and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, likes to control subjects by somehow affixing "bar codes" to their persons. Stop me, I'm laughing.                                                                                               

  At first AFTERSHOCK looks like it's going to be a "soldiers vs rebels" story. Saxon and his goons arrest two young guys, one of whom is a member of the rebel movement (Chuck Jeffreys) while the other, Willie (Jay Roberts Jr.), is a sort of rebel against the rebels. When the two guys break out of their confinement-- both of them doing so much kung-fu that it seems like they're going to be a salt-and-pepper team-- they also break out a young blonde woman named Sabina (Elizabeth Kaitan). Sabina is an alien visitor who, as I said, came with the idea of contacting a rational civilization, but she can't speak except by imitating the words of others. Naturally, there's no point in having an alien visitor who can't talk, so in jig time she assimilates enough Earth-lingo to communicate. In order to return to her own planet, Sabina desperately needs to return to the point where she first teleported to Earth. The nasty soldiers want to take Sabina into custody in order to profit from her advanced alien knowledge, so the good rebels largely put aside their own concerns to help out this sister from another planet.                                                                                     

  With this setup out of the way, the last hour of the film is just one fight after another, and since Jeffreys' character disappears, most of the heroic action is performed by super-rebel Willie, who's just a bleeding altruist at heart. Roberts is nowhere near the best at either acting or fighting, but he's adequate for this sort of routine future-chopsocky. Kaitan provides okay humor support: her jokes aren't especially funny, but she sells the innocent-ET thing well enough. Most of the name performers just say their lines and collect their paychecks. However, the best acting comes from Chris de Rose, whom I at least had never heard of. He plays an "apprehender," a bounty hunter who goes looking for Willie and his alien charge at the behest of Bad John Saxon. But for reasons never very clear, he begins to feel like he wants to wash his hands of the military dictatorship. He turns on Saxon and makes possible Willie's triumph and Sabina's escape from Earth. A concluding curiosity: the name of the hero and that of the Chris Mitchum character, "Colonel Slater," both appeared for other characters in Roberts' first movie, the 1987 ninja-flick WHITE PHANTOM, though that film and AFTERSHOCK shared no personnel except Roberts.