"Welcome To Blood City" came out of a 50 pack of sci-fi movie I recently bought at Wal-Mart so that means 2 things: 1) I'm going to be reviewing a lot of sci fi movies and 2) A lot of them are going to be bad.
"Welcome To Blood City" or "WTBC" is an odd bird of a movie. It's a western/sci-fi/mystery film and it succeeds and fails on different levels depending on what genre is currently on screen.
The movie starts off in seemingly modern times, then it cuts to a group of five people stranded in the middle of nowhere with no idea of how they got there, just a note in their pocket.
That tells them how many people they've already killed.
From the get go, the mystery element is handled extremely well. That's a classic set up and a great way to introduce the protagonist, Lewis, because while the others share the info on their card he takes one look at it and tears it up.
One thing I should say before going on: the aspect ratio for this movie is terrible at least on this DVD so if you can't stand watching a few scenes framed like this:
then this movie may not be for you. It's not a big deal for me and I was engaged enough in the story to ignore it, but it did make me laugh every once in awhile.
The strangers then gets attacked by hillbillies who proceed to rape the female member of the group in what has to be (thankfully) the shortest rape in cinematic history. They are soon rescued by the sheriff of Blood City but it turns out they would have been better off with the hillbillies.
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| Ain't no love in Blood City. |
And they earn their freedom by killing a Citizen.
The town is tense. Everyone kills everyone but even killers have rules. You can kill your slave but not someone else's. You can only kill a Citizen if they have deliberately dishonored you. Survive 20 gunfights and you gain the status of "Immortal." You no longer fear death and you can challenge the Sheriff himself, played amazingly by the legendary Jack Palance as a disturbingly calm man who ignores the misfortune as those beneath him.
As a Western, this movie is great. It's tense, there's lots of backstabbing, shoot-outs, bar maids, and other Western moments to keep this movie going till the end.
But the sci-fi stuff . . .that's where the film slips. It doesn't get bad, it just seems to falter.
Without giving too much away, the story keeps cutting away to two scientist in a lab somewhere who are watching the events unfold in Blood City and they are keeping tabs on the latest group of strangers. One of them starts to fall in love with Lewis to the point where she is watching him have sex while her co-worker berates her.
(It's a crap shoot trying to get captions to work for me in Blogger, as you might have notice with past posts, so let's just pretend that picture had a witty caption and move on.)
Halfway through the movie I came to the conclusion that some producer probably had access to a Western town set but wanted to make a sci-fi film so someone whipped this script up. It's not a bad combo and there are some interesting elements to it, especially when people and weapons begin teleporting around Blood City, but the payoff is weak. I won't ruin it but it would be similar to trying to find the best surfer in the world by asking them to fly a plane. It doesn't really make sense.
"Welcome to Blood City" is definitely one to watch though, warts and all. It's a good start to search through my 50 sci-fi movie pack.
BONUS: Oh dude, I totally almost forgot this. I'm always looking on Youtube for clips and every so often I find something even better.
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