My distrust at the direct to DVD sequels of the 90s and 00s used to be the hill I would happily die on as the attempts of studios to bestow certain cult movies a second life usually ended in low budget disaster. Tremors, Darkman, From Dusk Till Dawn, Lake Placid, Anaconda, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scanners and may more all cluttered the shelves of rental shops like swarming bugs in a desperate effort to bang out a quick buck off the name of a famous name.
For me, the main issue was usually because the films being sequelized were usually cult films for a reason and had achieved good, but not great box office returns due to a certain level of eccentricity or just out and out strangeness that no cash-in could possibly hope to capture – so why bother?
A chief example of this is Sony’s attempts to follow on from Paul Verhoeven’s gloriously satirical Starship Troopers that broached its sardonic views on fascism by shielding it behind a bold facade of right wing action.
Could a direct to DVD sequel possibly match up the insanity of one of the most unhinged, sci-fi war movies ever made? Maybe I’m getting old, but it certainly goes at it like a trooper…
Even after nailing the brain bug on planet P and providing the Mobile Infantry some fancy new weaponry, the forces of earth are still finding the intergalactic battle against marauding Arachnids fairly hard going. Cool laser guns are pretty nifty, admittedly, but they prove to be rather ineffectual as hordes of infamous stabby warrior bugs insist on cleaving them limb from limb in open warfare and we join proceedings while this exact thing is occuring to a hapless squad of grunts.
While General Shepherd leads a last stand in order for the remainder of his men to escape, the gaggle of survivors make it to an abandoned post and proceed to barricade themselves in, but tempers are flaring high and psychic acting commander, Lieutenant Dill, starts to take his loses out on Private Sahara in acts of frustration. Matters are made a little more complicated by the discovery of Captain V.J. Dax, a soldier whose bitter views of the Federation led to him killing his commanding officer and being imprisoned within this foreboding structure, but after he is released, he immediately proves his worth by getting the defences back on line and turning back the sea of Arachnids that lay at their door.
So far, so good; but when Shepherd somehow returns with three survivors in tow, things start to get somewhat sinister – you see, lurking within the brain pans of some (or all) of these survivors are a brand new bug threat that crawls inside your mouth and nestles in your brain, making you do its bidding. Soon, they’re infecting everyone else with the endgame being to get a one of these body hijacking parasites into Federation high command in order to end the war from within.
Can Sahara count on Dax, a man who despises the Federation and their fascist ways, to help her save it?
Right from the get-go, it’s important to remember that Starship Troopers 2: Hero Of The Federation is not unlike the poor saps that are being puppeteered by the Control Bugs that have taken up residence in their noggins; it may look like Starship Troopers, it may sound like Starship Troopers, but when the chips are down, it ends up being a pale imitation of the spirit of the original. Much like the Robocop sequels that followed, no one has ever been able to quite nail that right-wing-action-for-a-left-wing tone harder than Verhoeven and past results have given us grotesquely cartoonish sci-fi actioners that are never able to get the humor right.
In response, legendary effects-guru turned director Phil Tippett decides not to try, giving us instead a dark, comic-book, horror thriller more in the vein of The Thing than anything else and if you don’t mind taking the movie on these levels, Hero Of The Federation actually proves to be something of a fun ride. For a start, while the budget obviously isn’t here for huge, epic, bug battles in broad daylight, Sony coughed up enough cash to keep those happy, slashy Warrior Bugs on the front line for the surprisingly ambitious opening battle that looks pretty, damn good – even though a lot of of is obscured by night and a cost-saving sand storm. However, once everybody takes shelter and the pace slows down, we enter John Carpenter territory as we retreat to darker, more claustrophobic surroundings as the script drops any planet-hopping sci-fi satire in favour of more familiar horror beats.
Way back when, this is the exact thing I penalised cheapjack follow ups for, as I believe that evoking the previous tone is one of the most important aspects of sequelizing that exists, however, these days I guess I’m way more forgiving as I found the thing to be pretty diverting.
Ok, sure, the characters are mostly bone-head cardboard cutouts either yelling military rhetoric or uttering mercilessly camp dialogue without irony – but that was the joke that Verhoven was playing on us (not to mention the cast and the producers) in the first film, he was just doing it ironically. Secondly, the notion of having a bug in your skull is not only grim as hell; but Tippett makes it a gooey as possible thanks to a bunch of gnarly gore gags that retains the bloodthirsty nature of the series. Whether it’s a bug-controlled trooper who is literally rotting to pieces under everyone’s nose or an awesome moment where once of the creepy crawlies vacates a freshly severed head, you certainly get your money’s worth even if you don’t get the scale.
Weirdly enough, while the joke of the first movie was that no one overtly mentioned that the good guys were technically nazis (even when Neil Patrick Harris showed up practically dressed as an officer of the fucking Schutzstaffel), Hero Of The Federation chooses to not only address it, but outright denounce it in the form of Richard Burgi’s two-fisted Dax who has been left to die for his anti-Federation attitude. While this leads to the movie’s final twist (spoiler: the Federation uses Dax’s sacrifice as an aid for future recruitment, retconning his past, views and even his final words), it still feels somewhat too on the nose compared to Verhoeven’s scorched-earth sarcasm, yet if you lower you expectations accordingly, Starship Troopers 2 goes down far more smoothly than it should if you focus less on the big picture and more on the bang-bang and impressively messy splatter.
Did I want to know more? Well, not particularly, but I had fun watching anyways.
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