Let us now turn to 1999's Murdercycle, a science fiction film in which an alien entity possesses and converts a motorcycle and its rider to terrorize a group of Marines and CIA agents in the Colorado (not California) desert.
Of course, some people in your universe don't appreciate action films of Murdercycle's quality. Reviewer parca writes simply, "Everything in this movie is bad." Reviewer bkoganbing writes, "Murdercycle is one truly lame science fiction film. It rates at the bottom of all categories, acting, writing, directing and laughable special effecs [sic]." And reviewer marko210 writes, "Words can not describe the strength it took to watch it all the way through."
Read on for an appreciation of Murdercycle...
The film opens in a cabin in a swamp. Like most swamp cabins, the building is filled with high-tech electronic equipment. A young man named Vicent Colletta watches video monitors, then leans into a microphone not dissimilar to Gene Rayburn’s Match Game mike. “This is Agent Vincent Colletta, audio log entry at 2100 hours and…uh…two minutes.” (The reason he doesn’t state the time as 2102 is not addressed.) After he reports nothing is going on, he sees a motorcycle on one of his video monitors. “What the hell is that?” he asks himself.
As Colletta (characters in the film are subtly named after comic book artists; Colletta’s partner is named Ditko) watches the monitor, he sees something flash out of the sky and fall to the ground with an explosion. He goes outside to investigate, unaware that the motorcycle rider is also investigating. Before Colletta arrives, the fallen meteor opens and transforms both the rider and his motorcycle into a murdercycle.
Colletta, meanwhile, drives what appears to be a delivery truck for a local appliance store through a desert landscape that looks little like the area where his swamp cabin is located. He finds a breached fence where the murdercycle escaped the perimeter.
Suddenly the murdercycle appears. It fires lasers that knock Colletta down and blow up his delivery truck. The murdercycle chases Colletta through an old Western ghost town before running him over.
After this prologue, we are introduced to a mysteriously shirtless man in a mobile home named Sergeant Kirby. A military policeman knocks on the door and tells Kirby that General Kubert wants to see him. (You can see how subtle the comic book references are in the film, a tribute to the writer’s skills.) Sergeant Kirby is assigned to a new mission by General Kubert, who says, “This mission does not exist, understand?” (In another tribute to the writer’s skills, the nature of the mission is not mentioned, either to the audience or to Kirby.)
In the next scene, Kirby meets his mission team. One of the team members, Private Frazetta, tells another recruit, Private Buscema, as he reads a comic book, “You know, if you think about it, it’s like we’re our own Fantastic Four. You see, you’re like Johnny Storm. Fire on the outside, a little punk kid on the inside.” He continues comparing people to comic book characters, which nobody finds unusual. The other team members are Dr. Lee (the only woman), Dr. Adams, and Mr. Wood, a CIA agent. They are all assigned to investigate the disappearance of Colletta and his partner Ditko in the old ghost town.
The team walks through a riverbed on their way to the ghost town. Typical for a woman, Dr. Lee trips and needs to be helped up by Sergeant Kirby. When he touches her hand, she has a psychic flash of a battle Sergeant Kirby was part of, but she doesn’t mention it to him. Soon, they find Colletta’s cabin, unaware they are being watched by the murdercycle.
Suspiciously, one of the team (the CIA agent) enters the cabin, finds a VHS tape cued up to show the murdercycle killing Colletta, and then burns the tape so nobody sees what happened.
Meanwhile, Dr. Lee explains her telepathic superpowers. “Impressions of an individual can be transmitted to an object which that person has in his possession. Those impressions can be transmitted to other persons or even objects. When I touch an object, I receive those impressions. It’s as though I were a television receiver. I see the recorded events like watching a TV show.”
Suddenly, Dr. Lee hears something psychically, but before she can identify it the murdercycle drives among the group. They fire but their automatic weapons are no match for the murdercycle’s lasers.
After shooting Private Buscema, the murdercycle drives away.
The squad barricades itself in Colletta’s shack and Sergeant Kirby confronts Mr. Wood, the CIA operative, telling him they need to know what’s going on. Mr. Wood asks, “What makes you think I know any more than you?”
“Three words,” Kirby says. “C-I-A.”
Mr. Wood relents, perhaps because of Kirby’s clever rejoinder. “Okay. This is a listening post, and we tapped into very confidential transmissions.” Mr. Wood believes the murdercycle is a foreign agent they need to capture or kill.
Somewhat confusingly, Sergeant Kirby takes over the mission from Mr. Wood, forcing the CIA agent to stay in the shack guarded by the privates while Kirby and the others go to a nearby town to see what is going on. Mr. Wood does not resist.
As soon as Kirby, Frazetta, Adams, and Lee reach the ghost town, the murdercycle somewhat inefficiently explodes out of a window and begins driving around. After several minutes of Marines sneaking around the ghost town, unable to find an alien motorcycle, the murdercycle drives down the main street, allowing the soldiers to fire their weapons at him. Kirby even throws a grenade at the cycle, but nothing stops it. It drives off into the forest, fading into invisibility as it goes (a superpower which is never mentioned by the soldiers).
After the attack, Dr. Adams finds a deposit of liquid in the dirt. “It smells like motor oil, but it’s not oil,” he says helpfully.
Meanwhile, Dr. Lee uses her psychic powers to investigate some keys Kirby found in town. She believes the owner of the keys, Colletta, is still alive. However, a minute later, they find Colletta’s dead body, which is gripping what appears to be an audiocassette but which Dr. Lee identifies as some kind of key. Also, they suddenly find a steel door leading into the ground.
After another attack by the murdercycle (i.e., the cycle drives back and forth down the road, occasionally shooting lasers into the background), Frazetta is killed after leaping into the air, flipping over the cycle, and being struck by what appears to be a photon torpedo. (More specifically, Frazetta is mildly injured but inexplicably begs to be killed, so Kirby shoots him and zips him into a body bag.)
After an intense psychic showdown between Dr. Lee and Mr. Wood (i.e., they stare at each other intensely), they find a geeky (i.e., bespectacled) young man hiding in a barn who says he is a freedom fighter named Ditko defending Earth against aliens.
Everyone, including Ditko, returns to the door in the ground. Kirby asks Wood what is behind the door but Wood refuses to say, prompting an intense standoff during which Wood reveals that Kirby was suspended from duty for leading his men into an ambush. During their confrontation, Dr. Lee uses her psychic powers to identify that Wood has another part of the electronic key in his pocket, and she also learns the code to open the door in the ground, which Kirby does, leading the film into its exciting third act.
Kirby, Lee, and Wood climb down into a massive underground bunker. Kirby walks ahead, allowing Dr. Lee and Mr. Wood to speak. Referring to their psychic showdown in which Mr. Wood put an image of rape into Dr. Lee’s mind, Mr. Wood says casually, “You don’t like the idea of being raped.”
She replies, just as casually, “I suppose I don’t.”
“Well, that’s funny. What do you call what you do? Every time you violate the privacy of somebody else’s mind against their will. You’re lucky there weren’t any laws about that.”
Eventually, they find the secret of the bunker. Mr. Wood explains that a glowing green ball is PETER — Prototype Extraterrestrial Tachyon Energy Regulator. It was recovered from a UFO crash site.
Once they have found the secret PETER, Dr. Lee senses someone is nearby. Fearing the murdercycle, Kirby decides to buy them some time with his weapon while he tells Dr. Lee and Mr. Wood to escape through the back entrance of the bunker, which leads to Colletta’s shack. However, the presence Dr. Lee sensed is actually Dr. Adams, who sneaked into the bunker.
After another exciting attack by the murdercycle, which the Marines continue to fire at, despite the ineffectiveness of their weapons, everyone returns to Colletta’s shack. In the film’s most heartfelt scene, Kirby and Lee share a moment on the porch of the shack. “There’s a difference between good guys and bad guys,” Kirby asserts.
“There is, Kirby,” Lee replies. “You still believe that, don’t you?”
“Maybe, but it doesn’t seem to matter. You can do your job and still lose in the end, because of people like Wood in there.”
“Then we don’t let him win.”
“Maybe you’re right. I’m gonna walk the perimeter.”
After Kirby leads, Dr. Adams approaches Dr. Lee and reveals he is the true traitor in the team. At gunpoint, he leads Dr. Lee back to the door in the ground, revealing he has stolen part of the alien key.
In the thrilling (and more than a little confusing) climactic sequence, Mr. Wood blows up the shack in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the murdercycle while Dr. Adams attempts to steal the alien PETER, only to be thwarted by Dr. Lee, who grabs the device and runs through the bunker, holding the alien contraption like a football. Also, the murdercycle appears in the bunker and chases Adams and Lee to the secret back door. Adams is run over by the murdercycle. In the ghost town, Lee realizes she can kill the murdercycle using the PETER, but they are all surprised when the murdercycle begins speaking telepathically with everyone. “Do not attack,” it says. “I want to communicate with you.” It explains, “Integration with the host’s brain requires some time.”
Fortunately for the humans involved, Dr. Lee throws the PETER to the murdercycle. The rider catches it, but Kirby fires his weapon at the PETER and the entire murdercycle explodes.
In an amusing denouement, Kirby and Lee hear a motorcycle, but it turns out to be Ditko’s own motorcycle, equipped with a big sidecar.
Kirby, Lee, and Ditko decide to allow the military to conduct an airstrike on the area, effectively faking their own deaths. “Where are you headed, Mr. Ditko?” Kirby asks.
“I kinda had my heart set on Anywhere But Here, U.S.A.,” Ditko replies.
Kirby and Lee pile awkwardly into the sidecar and Ditko drives away — all three are unaware that a piece of the exploded murdercycle begins to twitch on the ground in the ghost town.
Murdercycle is a directorial effort by Thomas L. Callaway, an accomplished cinematographer and director of two episodes of a TV series called The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys, and was produced by prolific producer Charles Band. As a lighthearted, high-concept film with some budgetary limitations, Murdercycle excels, and it is unfortunate the potential sequel set up by the finale never materialized. It would be interesting if the filmmakers explained various aspects of the first film that are never explored in detail, such as why the murdercycle fades in and out of reality when it wants to, why the Marines continue to fire their weapons at it even though they are useless (until the climax), and what the CIA is doing with the PETER they have hidden in a vast, empty underground bunker complex. Nevertheless, the film is a gem that wears its identity as light fantasy entertainment on its sleeve, and given the sometimes troubled history of Marvel Comics it can only be considered uplifting to have characters named Lee, Kirby, and Ditko riding off together happily into the sunset.