Friday 9 March 2018

Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe (1990)



Abraxas is a Finder; an intergalactic peace keeper, gifted with extended lifespan and superhuman strength and toughness.  Alas, his former partner Secundus has now gone rogue.  Secundus plans to father a child with a human woman.  He calculates that this child will then spontaneously discover the Anti-Life Equation, which Secundus can rip from the kid's mind and use to make himself immortal and omnipotent.

So what we have is a pair of superhuman aliens battling over the fate of a mother and child, with the future of the universe at stake.  Replace 'aliens' with 'cyborgs' and you may feel like you've heard that premise before.  And I suspect it is in fact no accident that this film came out a few months before Terminator 2.

Yep, Abraxas is pretty much the 1990 equivalent of The Asylum's "mockbuster" films, absent only the deliberately easy-to-confuse name and the air of almost spiteful incompetence.  Not that this movie isn't incompetent.  It absolutely is: badly acted, badly written, cheap effects.  It has the whole trifecta.  It even goes for extra credit by stunt casting its heart out: ex-wrestler Jesse Ventura, ex-strongman Sven-Ole Thorsen are the hero and villain respectively, and an evidently desperate-for-cash James Belushi has a cameo as a school principal.

But at least this film feels earnestly like an attempt to make a "real" movie, no matter how ineptly, whereas few Asylum productions show any ambition to be anything other than a cynical cash grab.

Still, this is one only for those who are desperately yearning for the old days of straight to video (as opposed to "straight to SyFy") movie schlock.

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