Weekend with Uncle Lance
Survival Quest (1989)
directed by Don Coscarelli
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Imagine Lance Henriksen as the leader of an Outward Bound-like program for young convicts, kids with low self-esteem, and Bucket List sexagenarians. It's the softer side of Lance; he speaks of lightning as Nature's way of starting over and asks everyone to keep a journal of his or her thoughts on a three-day solo hike through Angeles National Forest. "Survival in the wilderness is a matter of heart, not hardware," he says, not long after conducting a trust fall from the roof of his cabin.
Now imagine that a paramilitary group led by a gun-crazy commando starts picking on the Survival Quest team for fun. Meatballs, meet First Blood. Dermot Mulroney even looks like Stallone, except Sly doesn't crack wise about eating snakes ("I hear these things taste kind of like chicken") or take time out from his post-traumatic paranoia to spy on a blonde campmate at the river.
Coscarelli's affection for relationships between old men and young men is earnest to a fault, and his commitment to the theme of adolescent self-reliance is so strong that Lance bows out just when you want him to bring the hurt. But openness is exactly what Hank is after, miss him though we do. The upside to so tonally inconsistent a drama is something for everyone, though the "something" I'd prefer in the second half is action.
Oh well. In an interview yesterday, David Lynch said that his Eagle Scout award reminded him of his father, and the memory was a happy one. Lance gets a line a lot like that, and sitting beside Reggie Bannister in a twin engine turbo prop built out of chrome, the fatherless Lance is as present and as kind as dads should always be. If The Walking Dead were anything like Survival Quest, The Walking Dead would be a great show.
directed by Don Coscarelli
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Imagine Lance Henriksen as the leader of an Outward Bound-like program for young convicts, kids with low self-esteem, and Bucket List sexagenarians. It's the softer side of Lance; he speaks of lightning as Nature's way of starting over and asks everyone to keep a journal of his or her thoughts on a three-day solo hike through Angeles National Forest. "Survival in the wilderness is a matter of heart, not hardware," he says, not long after conducting a trust fall from the roof of his cabin.
Now imagine that a paramilitary group led by a gun-crazy commando starts picking on the Survival Quest team for fun. Meatballs, meet First Blood. Dermot Mulroney even looks like Stallone, except Sly doesn't crack wise about eating snakes ("I hear these things taste kind of like chicken") or take time out from his post-traumatic paranoia to spy on a blonde campmate at the river.
Coscarelli's affection for relationships between old men and young men is earnest to a fault, and his commitment to the theme of adolescent self-reliance is so strong that Lance bows out just when you want him to bring the hurt. But openness is exactly what Hank is after, miss him though we do. The upside to so tonally inconsistent a drama is something for everyone, though the "something" I'd prefer in the second half is action.
Oh well. In an interview yesterday, David Lynch said that his Eagle Scout award reminded him of his father, and the memory was a happy one. Lance gets a line a lot like that, and sitting beside Reggie Bannister in a twin engine turbo prop built out of chrome, the fatherless Lance is as present and as kind as dads should always be. If The Walking Dead were anything like Survival Quest, The Walking Dead would be a great show.
posted by NPK at 1:58 PM
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