Movies Seen Recently: Django Shoots First, Cameron’s Closet, Trancers 4

Django Shoots First (1966) – Glenn (Glenn Saxson), aka Django (and I suspect that that name was added in the dubbing, because it contributes nothing) is a wandering gunslinger who happens to encounter a bounty hunter returning to collect the reward on the corpse slung over his horse. Unfortunately, that body is of Glenn’s dad.  Long estranged and not terribly missed, granted, but Glenn plugs the bounty hunter anyway… and then instead of burying the body as is his first impulse, Glenn takes it into town and collects the reward.  In town, he discovers that ol’ Dad was actually part owner of the bank and half the town, and the price on his head was trumped up by his partner Kluster (oh hey, it’s Nando Gazzolo, whom we just saw as a similarly cowardly villain in The Hills Run Red).  Glenn thus ends getting target and shot at by all kinds of people, accompanied by town drunk and comic relief Gordon (Fernando Sancho) and Lucy (Erika Blanc), the barmaid with a thing for him.

Kind of like The Hills Run Red, this movie oddly keeps the dramatic potential at arm’s length.  Glenn’s not motivated by a fiery passion for vengeance, or even for justice; he’s completely unbothered by the death of a father who was practically a stranger to him, and he just sanguinely decides that he might make money off the whole thing.

Nothing wrong with it, I suppose, but surprisingly easy to forget.

Cameron’s Closet (1988) – One of the “Nooo don’t take in orphans!!!” horror movies of the ’80s. Cameron is a kid with psychic powers, whose divorced father (Tab Hunter!) experimented with him. Unfortunately, that summoned a major demon, and Tab Hunter gets out of the movie.  Cameron gets to move in with his estranged mother, whose boyfriend is a douche — that’s to be expected in these movies — but he’s douchy in a particularly Hollywoodish way, which is at least a novelty.  Anyway, it takes a pretty-boy police detective and a hawt child psychologist to figure out what’s going on, and even that only happens when a completely detailed and accurate antique mythology book shows up in their laps to spell it out.

I somehow thought, with the inclusion of Tab Hunter and all of the hair mousse on display, that the “Closet” of the title might have at least the shadow of a double entendre.  Silly me; this film is laboring to get a single entendre on screen.

Trancers 4: Jack of Swords (1994) – Answering the question nobody asked: “Just how far can we push the Romanian shooting locations on the pre-existing Empire/Full Moon franchises?”  The answer is, “Just shy of this movie.”  Jack Deth, hardboiled time-traveling cop, ends up through Stupid Script Machinations in some parallel universe or some damned thing in which the locals are beset upon by energy vampires, which just happen to be close enough to the “trancers” Jack has fought before that he identifies them as such and that’s that.  Never mind the fact that all previous iterations of trancers were mind control victims of some sort, not dark lord wanna-bes.

Everyone involved in the production knows it’s not working, and it shows.  Watching Tim Thomerson as Jack Death is always a pleasure, but even he outsources half of his performance to his overcoat.  The ending isn’t so much a cliffhanger as Charlie Band thinking, “Hey, this movie’s long enough I can split it into two short features and get twice the video rental bucks!”

(Yes, I saw this originally years ago, but never went on and watched Trancers 5. I figured I ought to finally get T5 off my list of lingering franchise entries, so I watched T4 to refresh myself on where it left off… but having rewatched this, I’m just as unenthused about continuing to the sequel as I was all those decades ago.)