In the future, society will be divided into a strict class structure. The undesireables known as Subgrades will not be allowed to hold jobs. They will not be allowed to marry or have children. Their basest desires must be satisfied with a futuristic concept known as…whores!
To be caught outside of the futuristic structure where the whores are kept known as a House of Pleasure means certain death! Police suspecting a Subgrade of cavorting illegally with a woman will demand to see their junk to make sure its not suspiciously engorged!
It goes without saying that this new world we all have to look forward to is a paradise! These restrictions on the class of people most prone to breaking them (young, unemployed, horny, single guys) inevitably leads to zero crime! It’s true! David Carradine even says so!
Carradine is in fine form during this particular cheap sci-fi phase of his career (see also Warlords, Dune Warriors, Karate Cop) as the enigmatic Jason, a cigar chomping, suit wearing guy who recruits Bone and Helen to pull off a heist for him.
Bone is a guy who was just fired from his job which means he’s busted back down to Subgrade. He hangs out with a couple of his loser Subgrade friends including Creon (Michael Shaner, the serial killer from The Expert) and J.D.
Helen (Sherilyn Fenn in a pre-Twin Peaks role) is a whore who catches Bone’s eye. After beating Creon at some futurisitc pool game (the balls looked different) and fending off his advances, Helen hooks up with Bone and begins an illegal love affair with him.
Jason appears and offers to help them escape their city (Soleil) if they’ll just steal a computer disc with some information on it for him. They do this and immediately become Soleil’s most wanted criminals.
When they meet with Jason to find out about their escape, he explains that they need to pull off one more job for him and then they can go to the rival city that Soleil is currently at war with.
So they rob a bank and screw that up, but they were already public enemey number one, so it’s not like the tension is exactly ratcheted up any.
In the first twist of the movie that comes as a surprise only to a Subgrade named Bone, Jason turns out to be one of the head cops! He explains that since the cops are so freaking great, there’s no crime in Soleil anymore so he has to create crime! And Bone and Helen are his greatest creations to date!
I can’t say that I really understood why he willingly put himself in harm’s way so that he could explain his devious dealings, but perhaps it was just a way to really get his criminal superstars over to the public. Still, seems a bit risky.
In the meantime, Creon’s grudge against Bone and Helen has really blossomed and it isn’t long before Jason approaches him with an offer for vengeance!
Bone and Helen, having escaped Jason and his police, have hooked up with their old military pilot buddy Alexi and cooked up a plot to steal a helicopter and fly to Soleil’s mortal enemy and seek sanctuary there.
But first, Bone and Helen are going to pull one last job! How many “one last jobs” are they going to pull? Thankfully, this one is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Except in a really cheap, cruddy, sci-fi movie.
It takes place at the cryogenic facility where the rich people are housed. There’s about three or four of them and they’re just standing up inside plastic tubes with a little lighted collar on. It’s less than great.
Bone does get to confront his old boss and trade lots of unconvincing cuss words with him before Helen plugs him in the back. Then Creon shows up and wreaks a little havoc before everyone escapes Jason and the cops.
A race to the helicopter ensues and our heroes fly to freedom! Or do they? I suppose that if you’re a Subgrade who hasn’t gotten laid regulary, you would be shocked at the shock ending they lay on us, but really I would have been shocked if it had ended any other way.
Landing in the territory of Soleil’s enemy, all they find is a decayed airfield with skeletons lying all over. But who is that waiting in the hangar? Holy crud! There’s a guy in there that looks exactly like Jason! Oh wait, it is Jason.
For the second time in the movie Jason reveals his secret agenda. This time he explains for no real reason that Soleil defeated their enemey 20 or 30 years ago, but they needed to pretend the enemey was still around to keep the military budget up.
Then he started complaining about how radiation doesn’t stay where you want it, that the stolen computer disc would ensure that he wouldn’t be the next criminal of the month and that by telling everyone that Bone and Helen had gotten away and might someday come back to attack them, things would continue to be really great in Soleil.
You don’t need to be a pent up Subgrade to tell that Crime Zone is comfortably sucky. Combining no new twists with one of those dystopias that don’t make any sense (what was the entire point of the whole Subgrade system? And how did that eliminate crime instead of make it skyrocket? Especially since everyone lived in squalor much worse than anything most people live in today?) with the expected production values of a Roger Corman produced movie, Crime Zone will sparodically make you wince with its non-existent peformance by Bone and over-the-top mugging by Creon (the exact sort of mugging that actually worked for him in The Expert).
Mostly though, it will bore you with its trash-strewn set decorating, cops decked out in umpire chest protectors, and all sorts of boring scenes of Creon, Bone, and Helen arguing with each other. Say what you want about the onerous life of the Subgrade, but at least they never had to watch this.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
