The Savage Stack: PHOBE - THE XENOPHOBIC EXPERIMENTS (1995)
There’s always going to be – for lack of a better term – a stack of films we’ve been meaning to get to. Whether it’s a pile of DVDs and Blu-rays haphazardly amassed atop our television stands, or a seemingly endless digital queue on our respective streaming accounts, there’s simply more movies than time to watch them. This column is here to make that problem worse. Ostensibly an extension of Everybody’s Into Weirdness (may that series rest in peace), The Savage Stack is a compilation of the odd and magnificent motion pictures you probably should be watching instead of popping in The Avengers for the 2,000th time. Not that there’s anything wrong with filmic “comfort food” (God knows we all have titles we frequently return to when we crave that warm and fuzzy feeling), but if you love movies, you should never stop searching for the next title that’s going to make your “To Watch” list that much more insurmountable. Some will be favorites, others oddities, with esoteric eccentricities thrown in for good measure. All in all, a mountain of movies to conquer.
The eighth entry into this unbroken backlog is the Canadian SOV alien bounty hunter TV Movie oddity, Phobe: The Xenophobic Experiments…
There are levels to low-budget filmmaking. Most viewers don’t venture beyond mainstream studio or independent B-movies; action and horror fare churned out on the cheap and envisioned as counter-programming to the latest tent pole man in tights snooze. More adventurous audience members find themselves navigating the DTV realm – a subsection that’s been around since VHS’s home video reign. These movies don’t even aspire to hit theater screens (though there is some cross over these days on the festival circuit); instead opting to beam thrills straight into the viewer’s living room. During the '80s and '90s, they were often shot on 16 or 35mm (though it’s almost all digital now), and a two-night rental at your local tape hut could act as a portal into a dimension of schlock and awe. Below that niche arena was a sub-subgenre that often didn’t even feel fit for human consumption. Shot on Video (SOV for short) titles were also distributed straight to the mom and pop shops (or out of car trunks); the product of artists with zero dollars and consumer grade camcorders. Wacko coke nose freak outs like Boardinghouse and Sledgehammer (the granddaddy of the format) spoke to only the hardest core sleaze enthusiast – mutants who weren’t afraid to wade into the ickiest corners of the genre swamp. With SOV, 1% of the time you received a legit work of outsider art (such as James Robert Baker’s EZTV-produced Blonde Death). The other 99%? Untainted trash mayhem.
In 1994, writer/producer/director Erica Benedikty was a part-time employee at Maclean Hunter Cable TV, a local access channel in Niagara, Ontario. While learning the ropes at this homegrown institution, she was dreaming up a sci-fi/horror fantasy that was going to be the low-budget cousin to James Cameron’s Terminator and John McTiernan’s Predator. Phobe: The Xenophobic Experiments was originally shot by Benedikty as a Super 8 college short in 1989. During the five years since that student film incarnation, she’d expanded the script and even drawn up a budget of $500,000. The aspiring hometown hero was a hair away from securing financing when her investor walked and the project fell through. A year later, Maclean Hunter greenlit the movie for regional broadcast. Only now her budget was $250 (Canadian), the script had to be altered for family audiences, and she was going to have to utilize borrowed Beta equipment. In tried and true DIY filmmaking tradition, Benedikty shot and edited Phobe over the course of a year, working on it over weekends with friends and colleagues from the station. However, that didn’t stop her from showcasing light saber duels, laser fights, firework explosions, and mucho smoke bombs. Once the final cut was complete, Phobe aired in March of 1995 and, over a two year period of constant rotation, became a local sensation. Like that, an SOV legend was born.
Out of necessity, Benedikty kept the plot threadbare, excising the more horrific elements of her original script and reducing Phobe to a chase film through a Canadian blue collar neighborhood. Sgt. Greg Dapp (John Rubick) is a Blade Runner style hunter, called by his superiors to track the titular escaped test tube killer to Earth. Once there, the tracker participates in a series of pew pew quick draws with the hulking beast, while suburban student Jennifer (Tina Dumoulin) gets caught in the crossfire after meeting Greg on the train tracks. That's it, really -- a constant switch between ruddy SOV cinematography and the infrared POV of the Phobe as it stalks new prey. Our heroes and the monster are continuously on the move, stopping occasionally to catch their breath in wood paneled living rooms and sterile office buildings before the film’s climax in an old, abandoned factory. Its bargain basement ingenuity, the picture's multi-hyphenate creator knowing she can't go completely "epic", yet still engages our eyes the entire time.
Despite the lean story, Benedikty injects a solid amount of mythos and theme into the proceedings. Dapp’s supervisors are shady suits – giving orders we’re clearly supposed to question along with the reluctant Sergeant. Their motivations may not be entirely pure, as corporate greed rears its ugly head. A late in the game reveal about Dapp’s identity exposes why he’s hooked into this world, and how it’s always affected his existence. The newly tweaked computer animated scenes of rocket ships flying through the cosmos may look like cut screens from a lost desktop adventure game, but they still indicate a desire for scope Benedikty obviously had when conceiving the project. She was balling on a budget, but that didn’t mean the filmmaker wasn’t fully invested in trying to establish a unique sci-fi universe for her archetypical characters to inhabit. When accompanied by Jeff Egerter’s hair metal influenced score, even the crudest attempts at back patio mythologizing possess an affable charm.
While many argue against the artistic merits of SOV movies in general, it's really about how you watch them. There's an art to observing SOV in that you can't approach these works utilizing the same criteria you would some 35mm Technicolor melodrama. The composition is almost always going to be off-kilter (partially due to the boxy camcorder frame), and the grainy, blown out colors will render even the most meticulous attempts at lighting a scene harsh and abrasive. Aesthetically, appreciation is derived out of how each environment is explored with the roaming handheld lens. For example, Boardinghouse is claustrophobic and hallucinatory, shot with looming, intrusive close-ups, placing us in showers and hot tubs with models being hunted by an unseen specter. On the other hand, Phobe takes a similar route as Michael J. Murphy’s Death Run, the camera staying wide and playing with brightly lit exteriors for much of the run time. When it does duck indoors, the corridors of office buildings are filled with blue shadow and creeping blackness. In essence, these movies were never going to be highbrow, but that doesn't mean they're lowly in their basic construction.
John Rubick had never been in a film before Phobe (though he’d appear in Benedikty’s next TV Movie – the fantasy RPG epic Kobblestone, the Journey Begins) and hasn’t been in another since his director put down her Betacam. But that doesn’t stop him and Tina Dumoulin (who counts Phobe as her only onscreen credit) from sharing a rather easy-going onscreen chemistry. Rubick looks and sounds like he was recruited at a minor league hockey tryout – his mullet perfectly coiffed as a grey and white camo shirt hugs his lumpy body beneath a rumpled army surplus jacket. Dumoulin casually rocks a Toronto Blue Jays tee and neon pink knockoff Ray Bans, straining to appear like a student (despite looking like a mother in her early 30s) chatting with friends about getting together for a few brews after classes let out. None of it is believable, but there’s a distinct community theater “try hard” attitude that endears you to their every interaction. These weren’t hardened performers, but rather buddies pitching in to make a local dream a reality.
Recently, Film Crit Hulk profiled Wakaliwood – a subsection of lo-fi action movies being produced in Uganda that act as a window into a film culture based almost entirely around a joyous self-representation of its people living out their greatest fantasies, budget and economic limitations be damned. While Phobe isn’t exactly operating on the same level of national insight as Who Killed Captain Alex? or Bad Black (though, to be fair, you do learn that Canadians love the shit out of beer and bad hairstyles), the primary fuel the picture runs off of is the ecstasy of seeing one’s self onscreen. This is a backyard bonanza of rocket launchers, laser beams, goofy alien prosthetic effects, and the most polite action hero to ever grace a screen, big or small. Anyone searching for soul penetrating subtext should probably look elsewhere. Nevertheless, the energetic sincerity and genuine love of genre that fills every frame is an inspiration unto itself. Erica Benedikty and her cast are inviting you into their homes to fuck off and play dress up for eighty minutes. So crack a Molson and kick back. This is Canada. Would you like some poutine while this trash masterwork plays?
Phobe: The Xenophobic Experiments is available now on DVD thanks to Intervision Pictures.
