Nomads (1986) - August 18, 2015

[Aclea]

Originally Posted by Todd Tomorrow

I only watched this for the first time recently and it truly is a stinker. When you read the synopsis it almost sounds like it could be interesting with an original mythology. Unfortunately nothing about it works, from the incessant Ted Nugent heavy metal noodling on the soundtrack, to the unnecessary thought transference flashback structure, to the supernatural threat which turns out to be a bunch of mystical New Wave hipsters, to Lesley-Anne Down's horrible hairstyle. She looks like she's been dragged through a hedge backwards. The only reason Brosnan got film offers after this wretched film is because nobody saw it or his awful performance. And it's never remotely scary.

Ain't that the truth. I can only assume no-one at 20th Century Fox saw it either when they hired John McTiernan for Predator.



Every other movie star or director has a horror movie or straight to video turkey in their past, and Nomads is John McTiernan’s skeleton in the closet and one of many for Pierce Brosnan in those wilderness years between losing out on playing Bond to Timothy Dalton and finally getting the part a decade later. It’s a very silly, very 80s number that has an interesting malignant supernatural threat it doesn’t really know how to weave into a story beyond presenting it in the style of a bad Adam Ant music video. Which isn’t too surprising since Adam Ant is one of the film’s evil entities, along with Josie Cotton and Mary Woronov looking disturbingly like an ageing drag queen. The results ain’t pretty.

Lesley-Ann Down is an overworked doctor who gets her ear bitten by a manic Brosnan who promptly expires in E.R. after saying something in French and in next to no time she’s having nightmarish flashbacks to being a French house hunter in Los Angeles. From here on Down’s part largely consists of falling down, lying unconscious while various tests are run on her or retracing her patient’s footsteps in a daze, the bulk of the film being taken up with the last week of Brosnan’s life as he and his outrayjuss Fronch axe-ent discover that the new house he and his wife have moved into is the scene of a brutal murder that attracts a gang of homicidal leather-clad neo-punk Inuit spirits drawn to scenes of great calamity who hang around Santa Monica in their black van dancing to Ted Nugent songs and beating up people in parking lots. No, really.

After breathlessly, terrifyingly explaining to his wife that they have no fixed address so “Zhey are Nomads! Just like zee ones we ‘ave zeen everywhere we ‘ave been!” (oh yes, he’s an anthropologist) as if people living out of a car in LA was the most horrifying discovery mortal man could make, he naturally becomes obsessed with following and documenting them. Thanks to a convenient phone call from Irving the Explainer (actually the writer-director desperately trying to shoehorn in some exposition) and a helpful nun in a dream who makes him a nice cup of tea before the rest of her order suddenly appear to maniacally run around one of their hanging sisters while flashing their breasts we discover that they’re not just any old gang of homicidal leather-clad neo-punk Inuit spirits but ones who not only can’t be photographed because they died the wrong way but also bring calamity to anyone who looks too closely at them, drawing them into another world where they become bikers who can’t pass the California state line. The moral of the tale? Never buy a house from Nina Foch, never photograph Mary Woronov when she’s dancing on a car and never let a French anthropologist bite your ear just before he dies.

The germ of the idea is not without potential, but the film has no idea what to do with it leaving the biggest mystery quite how John McTiernan went from this to Predator in just one year.