Dead Weekend (1995 TV Movie)
3/10
A bizarre B-grader.
26 August 2015
Warning: Spoilers
In the near future, the successor to the US National Guard, the TWF (True World Force) declares a state of emergency in a US metropolitan city due to impending earthquake & declares martial law, stating that anyone found on the streets without permission will be considered a looter & shot on sight. But there is no impending earthquake – a female alien has arrived on Earth for a vacation & is being hunted by the TWF, who are seeking to establish themselves as an authoritarian force. Two TWF soldiers, Weed & Payne, discover the alien, named Amelia, who looks human but has a genetic condition that causes her to change appearance every time she has sex, which she must do often since her species use sexual intercourse as nourishment in the same way that humans need food & that they are practically immortal. Weed falls in love with Amelia despite her polymorphic nature & being physically drained from the continuous sex, but the TWF's troops are getting closer to finding her. At the same time, a pirate DJ running an underground radio station discovers the TWF's plans for the alien & decides to marshal up all of his listeners – the street gangs prowling the city – to stop them.

Dead Weekend is one of the more obscure entries in actor Stephen Baldwin's career, during the time before he became a born-again Christian & retired from this kind of schlock. The film also stars Tom Kenny as an underground DJ who acts as a sort of narrator (of sorts) on the situation & Nicholas Worth as the brash leader of the TWF.

Dead Weekend is, when you come down to it, a softcore erotic drama / comedy / action thriller with an underground vibe that makes it interesting of sorts. But the film's script is frustratingly vague. We never learn what city the action is taking place in or even the exact time it is supposed to be occurring in, only that it's in the "near future". Joel Rose's script is also full of some howlers in the plausibility department – there is no humanly way that the National Guard would be replaced by some silly outfit calling itself the "True World Force" – the name alone would be laughed out of existence. It is also never clear how the TWF's scientists could detect an alien spacecraft entering the city or even what the alien looks like (I also found it hilarious that an underground radio station could accidentally hack into the TWF's communications network & overhear their leader's orders). Instead of displaying any superhuman abilities, the alien (named Amelia) only has the ability to feed off sexual intercourse & change her appearance every time she makes love. There is also a badly fumbled ending where Amelia carries her wounded lover to her spaceship before returning to the TWF soldiers standing in front of her & making some grand speech of how her people gain power from pleasure instead of destruction (which, if handled right, would be the closest the film gets to being profound).

Having said that, Dead Weekend does have its uses. The film's low budget means that transformation effects are out of the question, even CGI morphing – instead the film simply changes actresses from one scene to another, a move that actually works better for the film since the continual replacement of Amelia's actress has an unnerving effect. The humour is a little on the haphazard side but Tom Kenny's motormouth delivery has its amusements.
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