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.
