Terminus

• Directed by Pierre-William Glenn
• January 28, 1987 (France)

A driver of a computerized truck must drive cross-country to a terminus and not be stopped by other vehicles.

Terminus is a movie I heard about on Blue Sky. I never saw it in the bargain bin or viewed it late at night on Cinemax. Is that even still around? Despite its age it was brand new to me. Based on minimal knowledge I went into this with very low expectations and from the start they were easily met. This is one of many Mad Max rip-offs that came in the wake of movies like the Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome. Often they failed to understand what made Mad Max successful. Instead they chose to engage in surface level similarities. 

This drops the viewer right in the middle of the reality they created. No opening narration. No dialogue to explain to the audience what exactly is going on in this fictional world. All the viewer knows is that there are a lot of very European individuals in some kind of bunker with a boy who is very important and they’re behind this truck trying to get across the country.

Jürgen Prochnow pulls double (and in the end triple) duty as the caretaker (called ‘Sir’) of the boy genius Mati (Gabriel Damon) along with playing the Doctor. Then he does some OT as a hostile truck driver but that is after things really go off the rails. Terminus tells us about part of a plot to overthrow the government and use superior clones to rule. Writing this I do not know how the truck connects.

Karen Allen shows up in Terminus obviously at a point she was desperate for a paycheck as Gus who initially drives the monster truck named, well, Monster. Think KITT but with lips for when it talks. You are left thinking Gus will be the center of it all, but you would be wrong because Gus dies when captured by some generic post-apocalyptic baddies. Then a platinum blonde dude named Stump (Johnny Hallyday) with a cool metal hand becomes the main character.

When Gus is captured it is then that we get an idea of what is going on. At least a little bit. This involves cloning and genetic experimentation for reasons to make the ruling class clone race. The young Mati who programmed the truck Monster and came up with the game is a clone. There’s also a young girl named Princess who is a clone of both too but was considered a failure so fast I think it broke the speed of light.

There is heavy use of early computer graphics which were probably mildly edgy for the day. The stuff in Tron looked better but they needed to solve some issues. I guess you can’t trash dozens of trucks so using graphics to say the trucks were trashed was much cheaper. And it works. It is a technique wisely used sparingly.

Not sure if the ending was meant as artful or their money ran out. Monster crashes through a wall and then there are explosions because the villain is killing himself? I was confused well before the credits. I thought he was escaping to fight another day.

Terminus is just weird. It’s poorly made. The dialogue is clunky and the pacing is reminiscent of a codeine induced stupor. There’s plenty here to make a guilty pleasure with but all it does is get to very weird. Jürgen Prochnow alone in everything he does in his three parts is hypnotically awful. Generally there are interesting shots and odd performances. I guess you can call the feel European. Unfortunately it’s on a shoestring budget.

Terminus could have been a guilty pleasure of a Mad Max rip-off but instead it’s just a freaking mess. I can’t suggest you should watch this. Move on.