Of all the sci-fi flicks to rip-off, filled with a lone alien, multiple guttings, large explosions and little to no story, one of the best is Predator. But, thinking outside that pine box, Split Second decided to go a different route and do Predator 2. Well, okay.
Sometime in the near future — and now far past! — Great Britain of 2008, prescient global warming has turned the isles into one big, dirty swimming pool. Puffy Rutger Hauer is burnt-out cop Harley Stone, a foreign-exchange officer who lives on chocolates, coffee and the long-lasting regret of his partner dying at the hands of a 10-foot-tall beast with a taste for human hearts. But can you blame him?
Armed with psychic powers left unexplored, he’s partnered with pencil-pushing nerd Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan). This mismatched duo slogs through a soggy England with generous hand cannons and shotguns, trying to protect the vapid Kim Cattrall from what turns out to be a rat-loving, tide-drenched version of Satan, here an ineffectual representation of absolute evil, but a great clone of a Xenomorph.
Also, at one point, Stone refers to a dog as a “dickhead” and then questions it as the witness to a murder in a nightclub that rock legend Ian Dury runs. Maybe that should have been the movie …
For years, I mistook this flick for the Dolph Lundgren favorite I Come in Peace (“You go in pieces …”), like a cinematic idiot. And while I was sure I would be disappointed by this, I happy to report that Split Second is unapologetic in its constant writhing in wet trash, an art form that only Tony Maylam, director of the equally trashy The Burning, could ever achieve. —Louis Fowler