Review

Danger After Dark:
So…why should you watch a film once voted the worst Australian film of all time by that country’s critics? A film described by its director in the opening moments of this DVD’s commentary track as “a train wreck”? A film actress Lynda Stoner, in an interview on this DVD, references as the low point of her career? A movie described in its own DVD liner notes as a “craptacular”? Why, you should want to watch the film for all of the aforementioned reasons, and more just like them, of course! Escape 2000 (originally titled Turkey Shoot) is a 1981 science-fiction/action film set in a reeducation prison camp located in some Orwellian future ruled by a totalitarian government (and, no, we don’t mean contemporary America); a group of prisoners (led by slumming stars Steve Railsback and Olivia Hussey) are set free by the sadistic warden to be hunted down by wealthy society magnates in a dystopian hybrid of 1984 and The Most Dangerous Game. Or at least that’s the type of film the cast and crew thought they were making, but as the interviews and commentary track on this DVD reveal, things quickly began to go horribly wrong: two weeks before filming was to begin, a major investor pulled out of the production, the budget was slashed in half, the shoot was reduced from 44 to 30 days, the first 15 pages of the script were discarded, a major climactic action sequence was eliminated, and the cast watched in disgust as the ambitious allegorical science-fiction epic for which they signed on, soon transformed into a ghastly, gory exploitation picture. Director Brian Trenchard-Smith remarks that since major action setpieces were no longer affordable, he went for another approach: over-the-top gore, and this is why the film has sustained a cult following over the years, as machetes chop off hands and bisect craniums, bulldozers cut people in half, bodies explode, and someone’s little toe is eaten by a half-man/half-ape circus freak. Really. Even if one didn’t have knowledge of the film’s complicated production history, Escape 2000 would still be riotously entertaining in its excesses, but this DVD also affords an unsparing look at the causes behind this wild cinematic “train wreck.”

 -- Travis Crawford