Death Warrant
Another extremely homoerotic Van Damme film, it’s almost Black Mama White Mama. But this is more bisexual, the female lead is no beard. And this music, it’s preposterous!
There’s a baby’s first horror into, where our protagonist goes checkout some crack den. Dispatch says “This is LA, not Canada, we have rules”, a couple of years before the killing of Rodney King, laughable. The protagonist gets fucked by Sandman, a mythical criminal cop-killer. He empties his six-shooter into his chest.
The horror intro swerves directly to upbeat electro pop music, what a whiplash.
After the cold open, we have the proper plot: someone is murdering prisoners, so our protagonist needs to go undercover into the giant prison to find out more. He’s a cop from Québec (since Van Damme can’t not do the accent). As backup, sole hotshot lawyer will pose as his wife, debrief and feed him whatever he needs. Not sure what exactly does he need, but he wants that poontang!
Anyway, he goes there, and it’s the most generic prison setting known to men, this is not Face/Off. Everything is hyper-racialized, he is supposed to only interact with his “kind”, which in this case is the Aryan Brotherhood.
But he befriends some black guy instead, and gets to know Priest, the underground cross dresser go-getter. He’s alright, with his kept twinks, about as offensive as Carjack Malone.
The lawyer on the outside and our burly dude in the inside do their investigation swiftly. There’s a nerdy teenager doing the hacking, making the kind of passes that she dismisses easily. He even looks inside her blouse, then she switches to a baggy t-shirt. He eventually gets her pager number, for professional reasons.
They stumble into a conspiracy to murder healthy inmates and steal their organs. The guards are in on the scheme, this is fully corrupt. The police chief is a Temu Ben Gazzara, of course there’s a twist where he’s the bad guy all along, and not the other dude giving her shit the whole film.
She starts getting the hots for our protagonist for baffling reasons, since he’s a lowly undercover cop literally in jail, and she is an upper class aristo, always playing tennis or driver her convertible around. There’s even a conjugal visit where she is sexually assaulted by the guards on the way there, and this is what makes her get really horny for burly muscular men.
When it’s all out in the open, they want to murder our protagonist, but the shiv dudes are not good enough. The warden brings in the Sandman, not sure how he’s still alive. The protagonist is fucked up, again. The Sandman is torturing our protagonist and says “bring me a dream!”.
For some reason, the prison turns into an industrial setting, like the end of Terminator 2. The protagonist taunts the Sandman, and gets a massive wrench thrown in his face. The set will eventually turn into a mall central square, with prisoners cheering from the ramparts.
The Sandman survives being kicked into a lit furnace and turning into the dude from the end of RoboCop, but doesn’t survive being impaled in the brain. Well, technically he does, but then our protagonist taps him in the head and he actually dies.
Wait, David “Blade” S. Goyer wrote this?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.