THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE.
by Jarrod Jones. Movies set in the far-flung future seem to decide humanity’s fate by the flip of a coin: lawless chaos or totalitarian rule? In Álex de la Iglesia’s 1993 debut feature, Acción mutante — Mutant Action en inglés — Earth lands in some nebulous middle-ground. The police are brutal, the news media lustily broadcasts atrocities and sex, and the elite are hedonistic health-nut dopes. While Mutant Action doesn’t exactly say how the world came to this — tragically, it doesn’t take a leap of imagination to figure that out — it does show perverse, Verhoevenesque glee in telling us who this future belongs to. Of course, it’s the beautiful and wealthy. Stop me if any of this begins to sound familiar.
Luckily for us, De la Iglesia’s gonzo antiauthoritarian sci-fi, which drops on Film Movement Plus this weekend, isn’t about the flush, aesthetically blessed hoi polloi but a rowdy faction of disabled terrorists cruelly ostracized from society and looking for a bit of karmic payback. The film’s band of misfits — cobbled together by wild prosthetics and manic performances — is led by Ramón (Antonio Resines), who at times resembles Michael Ironside if he’d been a resident on Mars in Total Recall instead of an Earthbound suit. You’ll remember that Ironside was a hard-ass in Recall; fittingly, Ramón is no pussycat.
Mutant Action opens with a tight close-up of a musclebound Fabio type who screams into the camera as the “Acción Mutante” do their grody work. These self-styled “mutants” are supposed to kidnap this fitness guru for ransom — they may resent society, but the retirement they collectively dream of isn’t cheap. Without Ramón’s steady hand, their sloppiness makes a corpse of him.
Later, they reunite with their grim leader (he was locked up for a five-year stretch), and the mutants, emboldened by a renewed sense of direction and brotherhood, waste no time hatching a plot to kidnap the young heiress to a wholewheat buns fortune, Patricia Orujo (Frédérique Fede). Because Ramón and his motley crew are radicals, they decide to make a statement with their crime by snatching Patricia during her gaudy, high-profile wedding. What follows is a vibrant, violent display where De la Iglesia flexes his knack for action and crude humor: bloody squibs explode from all manner of ostentatious costumes, and freshly dead faces fall into the frame with ridiculous expressions on their faces. Sometimes, they fall into the crotches of the terrified living. The scene, like a lot of Mutant Action, is mayhem.
There’s a whiff of Troma in the way Mutant Action doles out its hyper-caffeinated, gleefully unsubtle class warfare. Its assortment of body-builders, fashionistas, and other grinning snobs is ridiculous and severe, like the jocks in The Toxic Avenger or the coke-sniffing Wall Street types of Sgt. Kabukiman, NYPD. As found in quite a bit of Lloyd Kaufman’s oeuvre, its antiheroes take a fuck-you stance towards the elite: “We’ve had enough cologne, car commercials, mineral water!” Ramón bellows to his fellow self-styled mutants. “We don’t want to smell good! We don’t want to lose weight!”
De la Iglesia, who wrote the screenplay with longtime collaborator Jorge Guerricaechevarría, isn’t satisfied with provocation and shocks alone, so he tosses a bit of dramatic oomph further into the proceedings. Patricia’s presence on the mutant’s ship creates confused feelings for conjoined twins Alex and Juan (Álex Angulo and Juan Viadas), who, like their comrades, see her as a part of the enemy gentry. Soon after, one of the mutants decides to keep the proceeds from Patricia’s kidnapping for himself — if they ever get it, that is. Even among the zealous, the siren song of cash — and the possibility of love — is enough to flub one’s devotion to the cause.
The film’s production design, a twisted future-shock vision of industrial blight and flesh-torn carnage, reminded me of Spanish artist Carlos Ezquerra, whose work on the Judge Dredd strip wrought some of that character’s most enduring imagery. The film’s latter half takes place on a faraway planet that looks oddly similar to that of Dredd’s Cursed Earth, a barren waste populated by pirates, cannibals, and other fiends. Appropriately, Mutant Action doesn’t spare the random violence and brutality of such a place; at one point, Ramón and Patricia are at the mercy of the locals’ vicious hospitality. There’s an amazingly designed outpost that serves as a watering hole for all these enemies and is the location of the film’s final nuclear-grade standoff.
The speedball energy of Mutant Action might come in waves, but its vision of a broken future, where the randomness of human cruelty is doled out to the just and the unjust alike, never relents. Its humor may be broad and blunt, but its fusion of social critique and gnarly body horror is assembled with an artist’s touch. (Did I mention Pedro Almodóvar produced this?) Three decades on, Álex de la Iglesia’s grody sci-fi stunner entertains on a scale that trounces most sleepy Hollywood blockbusters — Mutant Action was made in 1993 and looks incredible even now. For the sake of movies, where is De la Iglesia & Guerricaechevarría’s modern genre epic?
8 out of 10
Mutant Action is now available to stream on Film Movement Plus.
Directed by Álex de la Iglesia.
Written by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and Álex de la Iglesia.
Cinematography by Carles Gusi.
Starring Antonio Resines, Álex Angulo, and Frédérique Feder.
Produced by Agustín Almodóvar, Pedro Almodóvar, and Esther García.
Not rated. Includes bursts of slaughter, rent limbs, geysers of blood, and quite a bit of pornography.
More DoomRocket Reviews:
Junk Head: Oddly relatable mutant-horror dystopia from Takahide Hori
The scope of Zack Snyder’s frustrating Man of Steel shames modern superhero movies
Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s peak-powers rumination on the destroyer of worlds
