The First Power and the Perplexing Enigma of Action-Horror

 

The First Power (1990)

Dir. and written by David Resnikoff

Starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Tracy Griffith, Jeff Kober

 

Ah, here we have a rare thing, an entry into the action-horror canon. That small body of films that attempt the unlikely feat of melding together two great but very different genre film traditions: action, with its badass protagonists, gun battles, car chases and explosions, and horror, with its ghoulies, ghosties, Chuckys, Amityvilles, and things that go “bump” in the night. In theory, of course, there is at least some crossover here; the visceral threat of bodily destruction, a shared bent towards simmering, adrenaline-pumping tension, perhaps a shared sense of a brittle, bipartite moral universe built around a struggle between good and evil. But while there might be some superficial similarities, I think the preponderance of the experimental evidence suggests that there are some fundamental differences between the mechanics of these two genres, which more often than not render any attempt to combine them a confused and self-defeating affair. It will probably not surprise you terribly to learn that 1990’s THE FIRST POWER does not buck that trend, though it has its charms nonetheless. Still, it will serve nicely as an entrée by which to consider the ways that these two venerable genres interact, and to try and parse why they have more often glanced off each other than successfully melded.

Specifically, I think the way that both genres tend to revolve around power makes them fundamentally incompatible. For the most part, Action movies offer a power fantasy; at their most archetypal, they’re about a rivalry between a lone man –much more rarely a woman—and another party (usually a rival man or group of men), pitted against each other in a battle for control. Whether a scrappy underdog like Bruce in DIE HARD, or an unstoppable Ubermensch like Seagal in OUT FOR JUSTICE (and all his other movies), the fundamental structure is the same: to invite the audience to indulge in the fantasy of being just too God Damn Tough to push around. Exactly what is being contested is mostly unimportant; though our hero may use the language of morality and justice, it’s the challenge itself that powers the story. Most of us spend most of our lives, starting as children, getting pushed around and frustrated by factors beyond our control – bosses, petty bullies, the government, the economy, what have you—so it’s little wonder that this kind of empowerment fantasy is appealing. What if you just didn’t have to take their shit? Man, wouldn’t it be great to be so badass you could just strut around, live by your own rules, teach the bullies of the world a lesson they won’t soon forget?

Horror, on the other hand, inverts the power dynamic. Fear is about a loss of control – about being up against unstoppable, perhaps incomprehensible forces that threaten, pollute, transmogrify the safe and familiar into something threatening and alien. Though the protagonist of a horror movie might –might—get the upper hand in the end, they’re still going to spend most of the runtime in dire peril, often barely able to understand, let alone effectively oppose, the danger facing them. In perhaps the most elemental horror setup, the only thing to do may be to run – to acknowledge that your only hope is to try to escape a force too powerful to even attempt to defend against. Even when a “final girl” prevails over a Jason or a Freddy in the end --in effect regaining the control and personal autonomy that has been denied during her travails-- there’s likely to be a final stinger (Jason suddenly leaping out of the water, say) which snatches back that hard-earned empowerment and suggests that her restored sense of control is only temporary and illusory, a delusional vanity in the face of a chaotic universe which can arbitrarily crush you at any moment.

Consequently, the basic storytelling formulas which define these two genres seem mutually incompatible. A movie can’t be simultaneously a power fantasy and about loss of control, and so maybe it shouldn’t be exactly shocking that there are so few illustrative examples for us to consider. Or, anyway, few examples which are genuinely both. It’s not incredibly unusual to have an action movie with some horror elements in it – the BLADE or UNDERWORLD movies, for example, are clearly structured as action movies but feature strong horror elements. Likewise the RESIDENT EVIL movies, GHOSTS OF MARS, COBRA, THE MUMMY (2017), PRIEST, that sort of thing. You could call those “horror movies” because they have zombies or vampires or what have you, but they’re all clearly build on an action framework, they simply have villains who are slightly more outré than your typical bad guys.

 Conversely, I’d argue there are some horror movies --or at least borderline horror movies— which don’t utilize traditional horror conceits, and lean towards horror entirely through tone and structure; THE RAID, for example, which despite being basically nothing but wall-to-wall fighting, works up such a sense of hopeless, faceless persecution, and is so unremittingly bleak in its presentation, that at least referencing horror seems essential to properly describing the experience. Likewise ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, or GREEN ROOM. All feature purely human antagonists and setups which could reasonably be construed as action movies – is GREEN ROOM really all that different a scenario than DIE HARD?—but crucially, the impetus is on the protagonists’ lack of control of the situation; even if they prevail in the end, there’s no sense of conquering triumph; they limp away, exhausted, broken, just glad to somehow be alive. Their journeys are harrowing rather than exciting; the word “victory” does not suggest itself so much as “survival,” augmented by a pronounced emphasis on the grotesque, gruesome nature of the violence.

Though both genres feature violence, they use it differently, trying to provoke different reactions. One prompts you to cover your eyes, the other to pump your fist – even though the violence itself may be virtually identical. And violence is not the only shared content. Horror movies are not above the louche pleasures of a huge fiery explosion, or a leering, horny sex scene for that matter, but the context is going to be entirely different than in an action film. The sex scene in a horror movie is not evidence of our hero’s awesome virality (as it would be in an action film), but of the profound physical vulnerability we expose ourselves to when we’re naked and unaware.

The difference, I suppose, is one of framing – the way the story encourages us to interpret and emotionally invest in the many genre elements which could be (and often are) common to both genres. And power –or control, if you prefer-- is, I think, at the center of those contrasting framings: whether the lead is ultimately empowered or disempowered for most of the story. There is an explicitly gendered reading of this; it’s no coincidence that Action films tend towards male protagonists, while Horror features a preponderance of women. Tough guys, final girls. Rightly or wrongly, there is the assumption that audiences will perceive women as more inherently vulnerable, and less able to control a situation than a man -- a potentially disruptive problem for an action movie, but an obvious advantage for horror. The Italian Gialli and Poliziotteschi genres (one universally regarded as Horror, the other leaning heavily towards Action), for instance, often have a tremendous overlap in terms of content and in pedigree; the defining difference is located in the nature of the protagonist, which in the case of a Giallo is very likely to be female, and in particular a woman with very little inherent control over her situation, a vulnerable, youthful outsider who doesn’t fully grasp the nuances and mechanics of the world she’s entering. By contrast, the protagonist of a Poliziottesco is nearly always male, and almost by definition a powerful male of some stripe, usually a square-jawed cop or a canny tough guy – someone confident, used to being in-control; indeed, I think one may say without lapsing into arbitrary Freudianism that this protagonist may implicitly consider the actions of the antagonist a direct challenge to his assertive masculinity. There are, needless to say, plentiful exceptions to these trends, but the trends themselves –and their underlying narrative logic—seem to me both inescapable and nakedly revealing about the underlying mechanics behind the two respective genres.*

Poliziottescho vs Giallo

The two approaches are, in a word, incompatible. With all that in mind, then, let us consider the strange and disruptive subset of films which directly mash together key elements of each genre in ways which might be provocative… or merely wrong-headed. A key strand of such films (including our subject for today, THE FIRST POWER) breaks a usually hard-and-fast barrier between action and horror films by inserting a tough guy protagonist into a story which would typically feature a more vulnerable lead. Specimens of this particular sub-subgenre are not abundant, but they do exist. An illustrative example would be 10 TO MIDNIGHT, which features the imperturbably tough Charles Bronson going up against some smarmy, perverted serial killer. You could argue it’s more Crime flick than Action or Horror, but serial killers are a staple of horror, and the strangeness of the central matchup paints a clear picture of the unusual mechanics at work here: the sleazy nudist killer is no match for Bronson’s laconic masculinity; he’s soft, weak, boyish, sexually frustrated. Sending Charles Fucking Bronson after this pathetic narcissist seems almost like a waste, the two combatants are so wildly incommensurate. But the killer is clever enough to hide behind the power of the law, effectively making it impossible for Bronson to stop him, and turning what would typically be a mano a mano fight for supremacy into a grueling exercise in frustration. It sort of works, fueled entirely by our simmering rage at this despicable sadist, but I think it’s noteworthy that is does so in spite of generally undercutting both the strength of the tough guy hero and the unknowable, anxious menace typical of the serial killer genre.

And other, similar movies have tended to fare much worse; Seagal’s two bouts with serial killers in THE GLIMMER MAN and KILL SWITCH waste the juggernaut-like wrath of his on-screen persona on drab, barely-articulated clichés that don’t benefit from the kind of overkill he provides (plus everything else terrible about those two movies); the synopsis for Stallone’s COBRA reads like a horror movie, with its conspiracy of satanic serial killers, but it cranks them (and everything else) up so much they might as well be comic book supervillains, more or less losing all but the most vestigial bits of Horror in the process. SILENT RAGE, which in theory pits Chuck Norris against an undead slasher, seems more aware of the potential incompatibility of these two competing forces, but resolves the dilemma simply by dodging it: Norris and the undead killer meet up only in the film’s climax, and otherwise their two subplots are connected in only the most tangential way.

Perhaps the most interesting attempt to unnaturally graft tough guy cinema onto a horror structure would be PREDATOR. It has, in fact, something like a PSYCHO-style bit of brazen misdirection to it: though the first thing we see is a mysterious spaceship, the movie pretends for a surprisingly long time that it’s some kind of men-on-a-mission jungle action tale, even indulging in a huge gun battle setpiece before gradually teasing out the truth: it is actually a FRIDAY THE 13th-style slasher, where our cast is going to be picked off one by one by a mysterious, unstoppable killer. But in this case, that killer is a superpowered alien, and the horny teens are 'roided-up supersoldiers. This is, at least, a provocative substitution: the movie operates by the standard slasher playbook, but ups the ante by stacking the cast with testosterone-addled musclemen who we don't expect to see so vulnerable and powerless against their tormenter. An interesting idea, maybe, but not one which ends up being very productive in practice, at least as a genre experiment. The characters are so cartoonish and one-dimensional that shifting them to this unfamiliar context doesn't really bring anything interesting out in them; mostly, they just respond to being threatened by becoming even more macho, which sort of undercuts the sense of menace the movie seems to be trying to build. All that outrageously hyper-concentrated machismo is simply more potent than the horror trappings, tilting the balance so decisively that I doubt almost anyone thinks of PREDATOR as a horror film, despite the many specific elements of horror in its structure and execution that you might be able to identify. For proof of that, just look at the sequels; with the arguable exception of PREDATOR 2, they all lean hard on action cliches, adopting the structure of tough guy movies, not single-location slashers.

The problem that all these movies encounter, essentially, is that the fantasy of the tough guy has to do with his effectiveness. An action hero may face setbacks, but ultimately it’s about winning, about individual skill, gumption, and pure raw power overcoming seemingly impossible odds. By definition, the hero needs to be able to take action, to consistently strike back at his antagonists. And of course, the structure of a typical horror film demands exactly the opposite: a protagonist who is outmatched, out of control, oppressed, without any obvious recourse. A hero who can effectively contest his plight, even if facing very long odds, has at least the comfort of purpose, with its accompanying sense of autonomy. It’s when we are directionless, utterly out of control, that we begin to feel fear. It’s why ALIEN is a horror movie, and ALIENS is an action movie. The threat is the same, but once the humans have shown they are capable of fighting back (even with very long odds), the entire dynamic changes.

Except when it doesn’t. Which brings us, at long last, to THE FIRST POWER, a very strange and possibly completely unique movie which simply rams a tough guy cop flick into a supernatural killer flick and refuses to notice that they are working at cross-purposes.

Before we talk about that, though, let’s pause and set the stage. THE FIRST POWER presents us with Lou "The Rough" Diamond Phillips (his Wikipedia page claims he has an uncredited cameo in DEMON WIND?!) as tough guy cop Russ Logan, squaring off against a supernatural serial killer who just won't stay dead. In that sense, a lot like SILENT RAGE, except the gimmick here is that the killer (reliable character actor Jeff Kober, dripping smarmy menace), having been liberated from his body by the overzealous LDP early in the proceedings, is now some kind of evil spirit capable of possessing others to continue his murderous rampage, more like THE FALLEN.

He can do this because he has, you see, "The First Power." What the heck does that mean? I'll let Conspiracy Nun Sister Marguerite (Elizabeth Arlen**, NATIONAL LAMPOON'S EUROPEAN VACATION) explain:

 

SISTER MARGEURITE: There are three powers that can be bestowed by God or Satan. The Third Power is the ability to take over another person's body. Your friend [Tracy Griffith, SLEEPAWAY CAP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND] is a psychic, she has the Second Power: the gift of knowing the future. The First Power is resurrection. Immortality.

 

DETECTIVE RUSS LOGAN: Look sister, I don't understand these things.

 

SISTER MARGEURITE: There's just one way [to defeat the killer]... Through the only soul in history who had all three powers!***

 

[holds out a crucifix, to LDP's obvious disappointment. Then she pulls a knife out of it!] Woah! ‘Brother Maynard, bring out the holy shank of Antioch!’ I’m honestly not sure if this knife was built specifically for killin’ First-Power-havin’ sumnabitches, or she just assumes because of the crucifix it’ll have a little extra kick, but I appreciate this nun’s moxie. Also based on her description it seems like this movie would be more accurately titled THE FIRST AND THIRD POWER AND ANOTHER LADY WITH THE SECOND POWER, but admittedly I guess there would be no problem if this particular guy didn’t have the First one.

(I never heard any of this in Catholic school, by the way, but to be fair Sister Marguerite claims that "the church doesn't allow us to discuss [the First Power]" so I guess you have to be hip to some religious secrets? In fact, the whole thing actually opens with a bunch of old Church Authority types [including David Gale from RE-ANIMATOR!] fretting, “Sister, this is the 20th century… so one mustn’t mention Satan in polite company.” I guess they must not have considered my first-grade Catholic School religion class to be “polite company,” because I recollect they did mention Satan quite a bit, exactly in 1990. My memory is that they also very much do allow, and in fact encourage and even require quite a bit of discission of resurrection, but I guess I'm gonna have to trust THE FIRST POWER to have done its research.)

 

Anyway, the movie has a long way to go before it gets into the dense theological weeds of crucifixes which double as knives, BBQ tongs, beveling hammers, etc. In fact, it’s a very long time before our protagonist is even willing to admit that more exotic methods may be required, although he is, I feel, much slower on the uptake than you or I would be. It turns out that the problem with being a tough-guy detective who is absolutely capable of smoking a cigarette while wearing a trench coat and aviators is that while you may be great at catching criminals (and in fact, it seems like he is; we hear via a news report that “this is the third time in less than five years that Logan has been responsible for the death or capture of a serial killer.” This shit’s getting pretty routine for him!) that does not necessarily make you the right person to fight a disembodied supernatural entity who rocks both the First and Third Power. Russ Logan is great at chases where he leaps over obstacles, his cool-guy black trench coat billowing in the wind behind him like a cape. But what do you do when the perp just laughs off bullets and can easily leap 10 stories to the street and run off? Not a whole lot. But he keeps trying. At one point he pulls out a box of grenades -- “buddy on the bomb squad gave me this stuff for a rainy day” he explains, which in my opinion raises a lot more questions than it answers—and has to be gently reminded again that this is basically an immortal spirit and explosions aren’t going to work any better than gunfire.

This makes for a kind of amusingly frustrating cop movie. Everything that makes him a good super-cop is kind of useless in this scenario, but it’s all he’s got, and also it’s the only story template that the movie can think of, so he just has to keep doing standard super-cop stuff and it just keeps not working. He still goes about the basic super-cop routine, getting a sexy sidekick, shaking down suspects, chasing the killer in a variety of exciting variations. Normal cop movie basics, except that they already know who the killer is and he’s a superpowered ghost, so there isn’t much to investigate, and every time he chases him down the guy just laughs and flies away or something. In retrospect, it kind of explains why SILENT RAGE had to keep Chuck Norris unaware of the killer’s existence for pretty much the entire runtime. When Chuck puts you down, you stay down. A Chuck Norris movie where Chuck keeps catching the killer, but then he just vanishes with an evil laugh and goes about his business while Chuck stands there in impotent disbelief is drifting pretty far off-brand. (Speaking of which, Brian Libby, who played the killer in SILENT RAGE, gets a little cameo here as an undercover cop who notes, “Even a psycho fucking killer is smart enough to stay out of the rain.” A nice touch! There’s also a Bill Mosely cameo in case you had any doubt this was definitely, officially, a horror movie.)

Love that he wears this mask, even though they know who he is and, in fact, he can look like anyone.

This would be a lot more interesting if the movie leaned into it a little more, unfortunately. I would count myself as a Lou Diamond Phillips fan, but he’s the wrong fit for material this nutty and potentially subversive. The movie is at its best when it embraces its eccentric, twitchy energy, and neither Lou nor co-star Tracey Griffiths is able to meet it there. Both are offering pretty bland cop movie cliches when the material probably needed more of a Nic Cage freakout vibe, especially since Kober is cheerfully hamming it up as the smugly taunting killer. Lou, in particular, is frustratingly unrattled by all this, budging not one inch from his cynical, smart-mouthed cool guy routine during the entire runtime, even as he’s easily thwarted again and again. Which makes him seem less like a confident tough guy and more like a brittle phony who can’t acknowledge that this situation has gotten way out of his control.

Fortunately, the situation does get pretty far out of control. Though the script is pretty bedrock-standard for this kind of thing in its totality, it’s full of the kind of little quirky bits that impart it a lot of personality. The killer pulls out a ceiling fan --which keeps spinning somehow-- to menace our heroes, and uses it to deflect bullets (a nice touch, especially since he doesn’t even care if he gets shot). A cop gets murdered by an evil horse-and-buggy, driven by a ghost wearing a sombrero. And they have an exciting (?) car-vs-horse-and-buggy chase right after! There’s a crazy bag lady who gets possessed and gleefully flies around and practically goes full EVIL DEAD. They use a bed to block a door that still has a sleeping guy in it! There’s a huge car stunt where they launch this thing what must be fifty feet in the air and crash it. They commandeer a civilian car, only to find that the driver is almost too enthusiastic to assist, scootching to the middle seat instead of getting out and shouting “No! Look, I’m not one of those anti-cop types!” and effusively offering his assistance “if you need help with some creep!” After a lengthy demolition derby where Lou smashes up his car trying to shake a supernatural masked killer clinging to the roof, he may come to regret this hardline pro-cop stance.

There’s a bit of a fun, “try-anything” vibe here, and movie doesn’t seem particularly interested in establishing rules. I understand the First Power well enough, but I’m not really sure how the Third Power part –the possession one, which gets a good bit more play—works, exactly. The killer is a spirit, and sometimes he does stuff like impossibly move around a room so wherever you turn he’s there. But then he’ll leap through a window and smash it as though he’s solid? It’s explicitly mentioned that he can’t directly affect anything unless he possesses a human body, but when he does he’s still able to do all kinds of blatantly supernatural shit like fly and shake off multiple bullet wounds? To compound matters, while he’s possessing people he still looks like himself to Logan, except that also sometimes he doesn’t? Presumably, he must be possessing a body every time he physically interacts with our protagonists, which means Logan kills a lot of innocent people who just happen to be temporarily possessed, but he sure doesn’t seem too broken up about it, or, in fact, to notice or consider this fact at all. Well, except once: At one point, the killer (still looking like Jeff Kober) is temporarily defeated by hurling him off the railing of an abandoned industrial tower. But then they get down to the bottom, and suddenly they see the mutilated corpse, impaled on some scaffolding after falling hundreds of feet, and it turns out to be… Logan’s asshole boss (Dennis Lipscomb, UNDER SEIGE). Oops. This prompts his other boss to angrily say “All right, yeah, yeah, he was a drunk and a total prick… but he was also a lieutenant in the LAPD and I do NOT BELIEVE… [pauses, collects himself] and I do not believe that he suddenly went FUCKING insane, or was secretly a member of some FUCKING cult.” Which is a pretty reasonable reaction, except that Lou just blithely says, “You gotta give me some more time, Al.” And he does! He just sighs and says “All right.” Man, I feel like if I’d impaled my boss, who I had a well-established fractious relationship with, after flinging him off the top of a huge industrial tower, they’d at least bring me down to the station and get a statement. This guy doesn’t even get a “your gun and your badge” moment! Makes you think this isn’t the first time he’s done this.

All this is laudable, and makes this a much more entertaining watch than you’d have any reason to expect. Unfortunately it’s also kind of badly structured, taking nearly 40 minutes to finally get the main scenario with the disembodied killer going in earnest, and struggling to generate much narrative momentum after that since, you know, there’s not really a whole lot that Detective Russel Logan can do about this situation except have an action scene, which is quickly established to be a very ineffective response. There’s a lot of wheel-spinning, and even if that wheel-spinning is sometimes pretty entertaining in its own right, it makes for slower going than a movie this daffy needs. And the non-action detective parts are pretty unbearable, since it’s not like there’s really a big mystery here.****  

Still, not too often you end up with something which is both of great academic interest and has two or three banger car stunts even though it’s arguably a horror movie. As far as movies which are most notable for their unique kind of brokenness go, this at least offers a generous helping of the goods. Though these two flavors of genre spectacle might not taste great together, the portions of both are ample enough to make for a fulfilling, if not exactly satisfying, meal. It’s a shame that making a solid genre-bending horror-action hybrid is not one of the three powers that can be bestowed on man by God or Satan, but as long as genre fans remain undiscriminating, I imagine someone or other will keep trying.

 

* In fact, though you needn’t look far to find exceptions to the usual genre setups, they’re rather more likely to be explained by the general blundering incompetence of the people making the films than they are to be cases of well-developed narrative plotting exploring different dynamics. Sure, plenty of horror movies have male protagonists, but is that, like on purpose to curate a different power dynamic, or is the writer just a hack who hasn’t really thought through the genre mechanics at work here? Female action heroes do strike one as more purposeful, though more in the sense that the filmmakers often seem to consider them a eccentric gimmick rather than a mode worth seriously exploring.

 

** If you wish to experience peak cringe, I encourage you to read the book-length, obviously-written-by-her IMDB Bio, which describes her in the very first paragraph as: "An ageless beauty with the face and figure of a woman decades younger, on-screen and off, it doesn't take long to find yourself under her spell. She possesses an intensity, sharp wit, a penchant for bucking traditional gender roles, and a wild spark of passion for life that's evident in her every action. An empathetic, self-aware woman with a compelling personality and a strong voice; Arlen is all this, and more." Lady, this is IMDB, not Tinder.

 

*** I missed the part of the Bible where Jesus went around taking over people's bodies, but I guess just because he could doesn't mean he wanted to.

 

**** The one big bombshell they reveal is that the killer was either molested as a kid or had to watch his mother get molested by his grandfather (I’m a little unclear if it was both or just the latter), which is a fact I’d just as soon not know, actually, if it’s all the same to you. It’s not like the killer has a single redeeming quality, so making us consider his miserable, abusive childhood does not seem like a productive direction to take this material in. Plus it doesn’t exactly help them any, except that they use it to taunt the killer in the climax, which is actually pretty fucked up IMHO.