In space no one can hear Cliff Twemlow kicking your ass. Journeying beyond their usual Mancunian settings, Firestar: First Contact finds the GBH double act of director David Kent-Watson and lead man/writer Cliff Twemlow looking up to the stars (and Ridley Scott's Alien) for inspiration.
Currently only available on DVD in Germany, where presumably the sight of North West observatory Jodrell Bank being passed off as a NASA style space base 'Solar Command' will go unnoticed, Firestar: First Contact stars Twemlow (acting under his latter day pseudonym Mike Sullivan) and Oliver Tobias as world weary astronauts who spend the working week blasting UFOs in space and their days off partying hard in Manchester. In a cheeky move Twemlow gives himself an "and introducing" credit, even though he had first appeared in front of the camera nearly thirty years earlier as an extra on Coronation Street.
On a return trip to Earth, John D. Trooper (Twemlow) and Captain Bremner (Tobias) receive a dressing down from their boss Commander Vandross (Charles Gray) who never the less takes an interest in the star shaped object the pair have discovered in space. Despite grounding Bremner on earth, Vandross soon sends the rest of Trooper's motley crew back into space, where a none too pleasant extra terrestrial surprise awaits them. Slow to start, with lots of earthbound dead air (there to get the money's worth out of name actors Gray and Tobias) Firestar is a bit of a slog until an Alien finally makes an appearance and starts dispatching the crew in nasty ways. Firestar is by far the bloodiest of all the Twemlow/Watson films, hearts are ripped out, arms pulled off, faces are shredded with glass, and flying metallic objects embed themselves in people, suggesting that Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm might also have been an influence.
Firestar's cast is rounded out with familiar faces like Brett Paul (a.k.a. GBH's Brett Sinclair) and one time Bond villain John Wyman (who once portrayed Twemlow in the 1982 film Tuxedo Warrior). However it is left to everyone's favourite former bouncer and library music composer to square off against the green, bug-faced alien, who sports secondary mouths in the palms of its hands.
In retrospect Kent-Watson and Twemlow really didn’t have the budget to do this outer space scenario justice, all that early 1990s CGI hasn't aged well, to put it mildly. Firestar: First Contact capitalized on the era’s craze for Laser Quest, the indoor laser tag game. The entrepreneurial Twemlow persuaded the owners of the local branch of Laser Quest to let them film in there, and an instant sci-fi movie set was born. Financing for the film partly came from the notorious Dutch millionaire Ger Visser (convicted of forgery and bankruptcy fraud in 2016).
Twemlow is his usual charismatic self, but his script is uncharastically banal. Maybe Twemlow was out of his comfort zone writing a sci-fi movie, or maybe the script was written in a hurry to take advantage of the availability of Laser Quest, but his personality and sense of humour is largely lacking here, save for a couple of witty scenes between Trooper and the ship’s female computer. It’s the only one of his films that I’ve never really connected with. The ultra gory last half hour partly reprieves it and since the production gave the cast an excuse to run around Laser Quest, swear, and end up dunked in slime and Kensington gore, a good time seems to have been had by all. Well, apart from the chap that played the alien, who suffered an on-set groin injury after an explosion left him with a shard of plastic embedded in one of his testicles. Literally and figuratively, Firestar truly is a film that took balls to make.
Although it isn’t my favourite of the Twemlow films, this is undoubtedly one of his most popular and well travelled offerings. Firestar: First Contact played on UK cable channel ‘HVC’ in the 1990s, was released on VHS in Japan and Germany and has turned up twice on DVD in Germany (once under its original title then later as ‘Spaceship Firestar’)
No comments:
Post a Comment