Deadly Reactor

• Directed by David Heavener
• March 8, 1989 (Portugal)

In a post-apocalypse world a roving gang makes life miserable for some peaceful Amish and only one lone gunfighter dares to stand in their way.

Many post apocalyptic films are essentially science-fiction Westerns. Deadly Reactor is perhaps a bit more overt in that area than others are. Either that or they decided it would be too difficult to hide powerlines where they were going to shoot at so they just made a tweak.

When you watch a movie, you expect there to be mostly SOMETHING. This is 90 or so minutes of almost nothing. It’s flashbacks and teaching montages creating a movie that feels like it’s about to get going but never does. The basics of the film are not bad with a setting in a post-apocalyptic landscape is good. Combine that with repetitive music and poor sound quality you harm the whole thing.

Montages and flashbacks blur together making the story hard to follow. You never know when something is happening chronologically. It is like they filmed a lot of movie and stopped for some reason forcing them to pull a John Ford and fix it all in editing, The problem here is there is nothing that can be fixed. Perhaps that was the point of Heavener’s voiceover narration.

The music is practically incidental music. The kind you will see during a scene with a lone hero riding across the desert. It fits poorly with the film itself when used again and again and again becoming almost a running gag. It only serves to accentuate the awful pacing of this film by director (and star) David Heavener.

Heavener stars as Cody who is trained by an old man named Duke (Stuart Whitman) after losing his family to a roving gang lead by the portly Hog (Darwyn Swalve). During his quest he finds a town OF AMISH in need of help because of those same bad men. It is practically a post apocalyptic Spaghetti Western with Heavener doing his best Man With No Name.

Cody is an ex-cop/preacher who is irresistible to the only woman in the film. It is like Steven Seagal but without the morbid obesity and the need for characters to sit around discussing how awesome you are before you do anything.

Stuart Whitman easily outshines everyone. The man had some talent but was not one of the greats. Here though he looks like Olivier in comparison to everybody else in this movie. I am not insulting the late Whitman but rather highlighting the inability of the entire cast to convincingly deliver a single basic line of dialogue.

Our hero tells the townsfolk to make every shot count after which they proceed to have worse accuracy than a stormtrooper! Copious explosions and bullets (despite them stating they are limited) fail to make the climax climactic. It is the A-Team without the caveat of being an adventure.

Cody saves the town of peaceniks at great physical cost to him. The ending implies another gang is about to torment the locals leaving the viewer to ask: having expended all their ammo not long before, what are they going to do now? Did Cody teach these Amish to fight? Is he going to quickly heal and save the day again?

This should have been a guilty pleasure of a good time. It just wasn’t anything other than bad. Despite the number of bodies, it felt very inconsequential. That acting made people sound like they didn’t really care. If your characters don’t care, then why should you? With only a handful of supporting characters I couldn’t tell you much about any of them. Characterization, even for central figures, is virtually nonexistent.

Our hero gets called a deadly reactor. Why? He is trained by Duke to watch the other man and react to what they are doing. Given the title I honestly thought Deadly Reactor had something to do with the nuclear apocalypse and not the main character.

The score wants to sound like it is by Ennio Morricone but it’s more like a Casio keyboard demo. No imagination. It’s one size fits all no matter if that one size is an extra large for an extra small. It is the same notes presented repeatedly. That I hated most of all.

Despite having enough to be fun, Deadly Reactor is among the worst movies I have seen. It is a plodding vehicle for the star/director to live out his dream of being a Western hero.