United States - 1989
RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1991, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 37 minutes
The list of mostly forgettable science-fiction popcorn films produced by
Charles Band’s
Empire Pictures in the ‘80’s is for the most part an unchallenging intellectual vacuum. In many cases that is what makes them so mindlessly entertaining. With a naïve innocence that can only come from sincerity and a (relatively) low budget,
Arena is a shining example. It doesn’t require any mental acrobatics or ask any hard moral questions, but it was a little better made than most of the Empire Pictures catalog.
Arena is at some six years distance, clearly riding on the coat-tails of
Star Wars. It is not surprising then that in addition to its Empire pedigree,
Arena should suffer from many of the same philosophical shortcomings as its source material.
With nowhere else to go after losing his job on a space-station somewhere in the universe, Steve Armstrong (
Paul Satterfield) bunks with his former coworker Shorty in the slums. Here he meets a destitute bum, the last human champion of the Arena, an intergalactic boxing competition that has been dominated by aliens for the last five decades. He anoints Steve as the next human champion of the Arena making him quite literally the
Great White Hope in space.
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| The man in the Sloth suit is future director Steve Wang |
There are two categories of aliens that populate
Arena and highlight Steve’s messianic status. Both are visibly differentiated from the protagonists. The first are helpers, house-aliens who are silly and or dumb but totally harmless. To remove any ambiguity, the second group, Steve’s rivals, are not only visibly different but especially hideous, making them even more clearly unsympathetic and evil, and giving the good aliens excuse to support the collective restoration of a properly ordered hierarchy without appearing overtly
Uncle Tomish. Steve’s final opponent, the present champion Horn is also a cyborg. As such he is not only a direct threat to and reaffirmation of human physical purity, but a confirmation of the physical corruption and immorality of the non-human which has to “cheat” in order to win. And in fact, that’s precisely what Horn’s manager Rogor does when it becomes clear that Steve is going to beat his fighter.
Jade (
Sharri Shattuck) a sultry nightclub performer (Shattuck actually performs several of
Richard Band's songs) and Rogor’s lapdog is sent to seduce and poison Steve before the championship fight. Yet despite a romp through the futuristic spacy mylar sheets in Jade’s cat-box, her eroticism does not bode well for the normative settled family relationship. Instead, there is Quinn (
Claudia Christian,) a reserved, practical woman carrying on her father’s legacy as a boxing manager. It is with her faithful encouragement and training that Steve will restore hetero normative values to the universe. Can there be any doubt that our ubermensch will succeed in setting all of this straight when the distinction between right and wrong is so clear-cut?
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| The ultimate Buck? |
Despite all of this 50’s era conservative paranoia,
Arena is still enjoyable for a number of reasons. The practical special effects provided by
Screaming Mad George are better done than most of Band’s films.
Arena is also distinctly more working-class than its big budget franchise predecessor. Boxing, which is really all the Arena fights are, has always been viewed as a proletarian sport. Related to this is my final assertion that
Arena’s settings capture perfectly the appeal of the mundane. From the diner of the opening sequence, to the slums where Steve is verbally identified as the hero (it’s always been visually obvious), to the contest itself where order is restored,
Arena is fiction made tangible. Without throwaway details like burned eggs and garbage, it would be just another space movie. Narrative details that speak to perceived experience are what make good fiction. Unfortunately that’s why audiences rarely question such obviously reactionary symbolism when couched in throwaway sci-fi fluff.
The list of mostly forgettable science-fiction popcorn films produced by Charles Band’s Empire Pictures in the ‘80’s is for the most part an unchallenging intellectual vacuum. In many cases that is what makes them so mindlessly entertaining. With a naïve innocence that can only come from sincerity and a (relatively) low budget, Arena is a shining example. It doesn’t require any mental acrobatics or ask any hard moral questions, but it was a little better made than most of the Empire Pictures catalog. Arena is at some six years distance, clearly riding on the coat-tails of Star Wars. It is not surprising then that in addition to its Empire pedigree, Arena should suffer from many of the same philosophical shortcomings as its source material. 
Tommy, Bill and the new neighborhood arrival Freddie are not quite old enough to be totally concerned with chasing girls. Instead they remain focused on candy and comic books. However, their tiny sugar and newsprint utopia is repeatedly harassed by an older generation in the persons of Eddie and The Vipers, a cheap not-quite-adult street-gang striving to assert its status as something no longer juvenile. Having suffered enough of their abuse, our nerdy heroes decide to document the Viper’s petty criminal activities and submit the evidence to the police. But the Vipers have their own niche in the generational pecking order and at the behest of their transgender crime boss Big Moe (Meg Foster) they haul the boys in for a discussion on “how the real world works,” which as we all know really means “how I, the adult, say the world works” and boils down to a brief delineation of the inevitable, dream crushing pragmatism of adulthood. To quote one of the babysitters of my own horrific childhood, “There are no what-ifs!” A truism she repeatedly drilled into our optimistic eight–year-old brains whenever we waxed fantastic.
To revenge the innocence of youth upon the responsibilities that crushed it, he attends the tripartite funeral of our heroes, saws off their heads then "boils and lovingly dries them." But it’s only starting to get good, for he also reanimates them and trains each of them to use a special power with which to punish malefactors. Furthermore, their deceased victims revive as pants-shitting zombies compelled to perform community service. From start to finish it is a send-up of a whole mosaic of social taboos; death, race, underage sexuality and poop jokes, adult themes within a framework of childhood fantasy, the merging of Sumatra’s disregard for convention and the boys desire to keep from falling into it.
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn
Normally this would not be a problem, I have repaired many broken and damaged VHS tapes. Sadly in this case the magnetic part of the tape itself was flaking off of the plastic part in brittle fragments of sorrow all over my fingers as I gingerly removed it from the VCR. (you can see this in the top right of the photo)
In the 80’s TV options exploded when satellite television began entering the average American home and access to all that untapped brain-rot was considered a mark of affluence and modernity. Never mind that in those early days of satellite (and cable) TV most of it was totally banal crap, that didn’t stop (and still doesn’t I guess) uptight moral tyrants from blaming the tube for societies perceived ills.
swinger’s party leaving raving bloodthirsty war-vet Grandpa and their son Sherman on the couch watching an old horror movie show (including the epic Giant Claw) hosted by a well-endowed floozy dressed as Medusa. Grandpa who lives in a fully stocked, fully armed fallout shelter says “war stories and horror movies are educational, they’re survival stories and they always neutralize the enemy in the end.” Hmmmm, only in a literal sense…
Social corruption, manifested as alien monster stares out from the TV then steps off the screen into the house, quickly consuming the least hip, Grandpa and reducing him to an appealing 2-dimensional caricature of “Grandpa”, kindof like on you would expect on TV. Mom and Dad replete with ascot and high heels return home with another couple with whom they intend to share the decadent luxury of the pool/satellite setup. They soon meet the same fate as Grandpa, but in the interim Sherman, his punk sister and her metal boyfriend "O.D." (Jon Gries) befriend the monster and teach it to love junk food and television (that’s too much of a mind-fuck metaphor for me to describe in this space). It spends the rest of the film hanging out in the Putterman’s pool watching Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.
