Doctor Movie: Episode 299: Split Second

Show Notes

Doctor Movie is back with another overlooked classic. We go into the near future with Split Second. This movie has it all from a psychotic killer, a dark and flooded London and a buddy cop set up that is bound to please.

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Cinematic oddities and awesomeness under the watchful of the all-powerful Ming and Doctor Movie!

Wait a minute, I hear something.

What's going on, everybody?

Welcome back to Doctor Movie, your favorite show that's on the road, all the time, unfortunately.

People say, well, how do you crank out, you know, three to five movies every week?

Well, I'm on the road a lot.

So there you go, there's your reasoning.

Got a good one for you today.

We are talking about Split Second.

So, hey, what do we need to make a movie work?

Well, how about Rude Gerhauer?

Man, that's it, that's all you need.

Ha ha ha.

Man, and you want to talk about a good performance by Rude Gerhauer?

This is a good one.

He's everything that you kind of want Rude to be.

So, we are talking about Split Second from 1992.

It's a horror slash sci-fi.

It does kind of tie into the alien world.

You can throw this, you can probably do this and maybe like I come to peace or something like that.

Come in, peace.

Come to peace.

Come to peace, and you leave in pieces.

This is an interesting one because here's the thing.

This is back in my VHS, just grabbing whatever based off the cover art kind of day, days, and I remember taking this one home, being really disappointed in it.

And there's still some opportunities here because the thing that this story is based around, well, I'll talk about it as we go along, but I remember being disappointed in this as a 22-year-old.

Watching it now, I really appreciate this movie.

I needed to watch it more often, I believe.

So like said in 92, let's do a synopsis.

A policeman hunts a slimy monster ripping out hearts in the streets of the city of London in 2008.

They jump to the future of 2008, which is wet from global warming.

What?

Yeah.

The city is so flooded that some of the police squads even using hovercrafts to get around.

So it's pretty wet there in London, foggy old London.

And so there, there's your background of what's going on.

This is directed by Tony Malam.

What else has he done?

The burning.

That's all you need to know.

He did the burning.

That's all I need to know.

Which if you want to listen to the episode I did about the burning, you can find it for yourself, because it's been probably 100 movies or so back.

Let's see.

We've got some wide-o watches on here.

Wide-o watch, it's violent, futuristic and gloomy.

Well, yeah, it's London, hello.

It's a flooded London, hello.

Yeah, and it's futuristic.

It is kind of going for a Blade Runner kind of feel, which is ironic because of Ruger Hauer.

But he's kind of playing the other character.

It says, very entertaining to watch, not really scary or good, but it is so creative and has a nice atmosphere to it.

Yeah, that captures a lot of what I think about it too.

Yeah, it's more of a cop drama than anything else.

Let's see, kind of like Terminator 1, small budgeted, but great idea and decent cinematography to make it big time.

Yeah, maybe.

Maybe it's pretty fast paced with the camera work, is energetic, if not particularly memorable or...

If not particularly memorable, huh, okay.

Well, I think that kind of goes back to what I was talking about while I go.

This is a manhunt movie, if you want to call it a man.

This is one of those that maybe would have helped with a little more information, because you never really get a breakdown of what it is he's after.

All you know is, as the movie goes on, you find out it's about 10 foot tall and has large alien-type teeth and wears a sun visor or sunglasses or ski glasses or, you know, something where you don't see its eyes.

And you got Ruger Hauer chasing it with a cigar in his mouth and a long trench coat dressed like Danny Bennett, my partner from Hell Ming Power Hour.

When I met Danny, besides the cigar, this is kind of how Danny dressed.

I mean, it's pretty much dead on of his attire of the time.

And which is not a bad thing.

Let's talk about our cast.

Well, we said Ruger Hauer.

Come on, take your pick.

And how about Kim Cattrall in this?

Worst haircut of her career, and she's still stunning.

Wow, yeah, it works.

She plays Michelle MacLaine.

And then we got Michael J.

Pollard in this, who plays the Rat Catcher, who's in the movie for a whole, I don't know, two minutes.

And I'm gonna screw this name up, but we got Pete Postlewaith in this, who was in, gosh, Alien 3, what else here?

The Usual Suspects.

Been in a ton of stuff, right?

Alistair Duncan's in this, plays Dick Durkin, who ends up being the new partner that has to work with Ruger Hauer.

He was in, da, well, I don't really, I don't see a list of movies.

Here we go.

Looks like he did a lot of the Batman animated stuff.

A bunch of it.

So there you go.

That's pretty much your main cast.

And, sorry, I'm trying to get around some cars here in traffic.

Let's get into this one.

Ruger Hauer plays Harley Stone.

He's a renegade cop.

He's lost his mind because he killed the bad guy a long time ago, but now he's back.

And he happened to kill his partner, who was married to Kim Control, her character Michelle.

But there's maybe a love triangle going on here because Ruger Hauer's character and Kim Control's character obviously have feelings for each other, and he becomes protective of her.

But he still misses and loves his ex-partner that was taken away by this bad guy.

And this creature has attacked Harley and scarred him.

When this creature does anything to you, it consumes you.

You become part of it, so it gets your DNA.

They actually get a sample of this beast later on, and it's got all this DNA from all of the victims that it's laid waste to, which is kind of an interesting concept.

But Rudger Hauer, because he's been attacked by it, he can sense when it's around.

He knows when it's around.

He can hear the heartbeat of the thing, and it's part of that thing of, this creature is very intelligent.

It knows what it's doing.

It's not just a creature on a rampage.

It is a vengeful, thought-out, processed killer.

And it reaps people's hearts out and takes a bite out of them.

And again, consuming the soul, the old saying about what we learn from Red Dawn, right?

And so that's kind of the base of all this.

And you set that in an over-flooded, miserable setting of London in 2008.

And you've got you a modernized, kind of blade-runner, but low-budget style flick that works really well.

And my complaint back in the day was, you don't see this creature till the very end, which by the 90s is a very old hat, right?

We got used to seeing the creature at least the last 30 minutes or so, right?

Instead of in the last five minutes.

And this thing is pretty much unstoppable.

And there's some great scenes with the creature.

They just happened so late in the movie that you're just like, well, but what I have learned to appreciate, and I guess it's because on the cover you see Ruder Hauer standing there, and you see the big figure behind him, and you're thinking this is going to be this big showdown throughout the movie.

But really, it doesn't play out that way.

It's more of just a manhunt kind of thing, which is perfectly fine now when I watch it.

Ruder Hauer saves this movie, no doubt about it.

And I will give it credit.

There is some cool concepts of the way this plays out, the smart things this creature does.

You know, again, it's tinkering with people.

So again, that's what makes this thing so sinister, because it's not just a, I want to kill you and eat you just because.

There's a total purpose for it.

Even satanic, right?

Because there's this whole thing about the Scorpio, the sign of the Scorpio on the ceiling.

And the new partner that gets assigned to Ruger Hauer has a background in all this psychology and murderers and all this stuff.

And of course, you know, Ruger Hauer's character is just, he's going off the edge.

He's pretty much the Mel Gibson character in all the Lethal Weapon movies.

He is, he is gone.

And he deals with all of this by smoking cigars and drinking lots of coffee with sugar in it.

And you know, that's, that's kind of how he gets through all this.

It's a fantastic performance by him.

Kim Control is great in it.

We do get a shower scene with Kim Control.

This is the first time I remember ever seeing her topless.

And, you know, I ain't gonna say much about that.

But yeah, okay.

Maybe that's worth watching the movie on its own.

Just saying.

But yeah, it all leads down to the, the kidnapping of Kim Control, because he knows this is how he's gonna get to Harley, and come down to a big final battle, which is pretty awesome.

It's an old abandoned subway, or actually the actual subway carts itself, the cars.

And it's got some cool stuff in it.

It just takes way too long to get to it.

But at the same time, we're doing character development, and between Ruger Hauer, who hates his new partner, to appreciating his new partner, the learning more and more of our antagonist as we go along.

I don't know, man.

This thing is paced out really well.

And all the supporting acting, too.

I think it really works.

So I'm glad I gave this one another shot.

I think the name hurts the movie, because the name doesn't really attach itself to anything.

So I wonder what the original idea for the name was, because it couldn't have been Split Second, because there's nothing that ties itself to that title whatsoever.

But that's okay.

That happens sometimes.

But I just think it's one of those things that hurt it.

But overall, this is a good flick.

And so if you like kind of Murder Mystery, Manhunter, kind of loose cannon cop on the run kind of movies, this plays as well as really any of them.

It's just set in a futuristic 2008 in London.

That's the only real difference.

And again, you can't go wrong with Rugerhauer.

You just can't.

So I actually recommend this one.

It moves a lot faster than I remember it moving.

Maybe because I paid more attention to what's actually going on instead of going, well, where's the creature?

Where's the creature?

And I think it's because we just came out of the age of aliens.

We're getting to the Alien 3 area.

So waiting till the last five minutes to see the creature just kind of hurt it, I think, for the time.

But I think I appreciate it more now because of that, because it's a continuing building of the character that makes this thing work.

So take that for what you want.

I give this a solid 3.5 out of 5 for me.

So you can check it out on Tubi.

And why don't you do that?

So check it out.

Let me know what you think.

All right, folks, that's it for this one.

We will see you on the flip side.

Bye-bye.