Robert Harmon is a director who deserved a FAR more notable career in Hollywood than he ended up with, in my humble opinion.
For a man with a truly distinct and oddly mature cinematic vision, much of his career is woefully bargain-basement (at a glance), with much of it seemingly devoted to some dumped-on-cable series of likely C-level thrillers starring Tom Selleck as some edgy cop character named ‘Jesse Stone’ (I’m the first to admit that I shouldn’t pre-judge the end result based on how it was released…but still.).
There are a couple attempted Big Screen titles on the man’s resume’, non-hits like Nowhere to Run (1993) and They (2002), but nothing comes close to the splash he made with his first feature, 1986’s ambitious serial killer masterpiece The Hitcher, written by Eric Red (Near Dark) and starring Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner), C. Thomas Howell (Red Dawn) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Hateful Eight).
I absolutely and unapologetically love The Hitcher (easily has a home in my Top 10 Films Ever list), going back to when I first saw it on VHS in the late ‘80s and have long wanted this terrifically cinematic film to get the proper restoration and HD release that it rightfully deserves.
For years, decades even, all that was available was a piss-poor, heavily pixilated (especially during night scenes) copy shat out onto DVD and then…nothing.
Until this year.
*OK, in all fairness, this has been released on Blu Ray before, as a German-only edition titled Hitcher Der Highway Killer, which I took a chance on many months back, before I knew of Second Sight’s impending release. I need to do a true side-by-side comparison, but I remember being highly impressed with whatever restoration attempts had been made by the lone German company oddly granted licensing, satisfied if that was to be the best version I ever got.
But then…
Prestige release studio Second Sight Films, based in the UK, thankfully acquired the rights to do a full restoration and re-release…and they hit it out of the motherfucking park! They did a simply beautiful job and it’s well worth the money.
The $80 (CAD) box set that I ordered, and just received at the time of this writing, is gorgeous (I’m super happy with it and can easily recommend it to fans), and the overall presentation is the heartfelt apology this film has long deserved.
In filling out the Special Features for this release, Second Sight also got their grubby lil mitts on the original elements for Harmon’s first ever directorial effort, the 34 minute, self-financed, self-shot short film China Lake, that he put together as his calling card to Hollywood in 1983, after having spent years working as a stills photographer on various film sets.
Allegedly shot over 11 days in 1981 (incidentally the same shooting length as Spielberg’s first feature, 1971’s grossly overlooked and similarly themed Duel), Harmon spent two more years fine-tuning this captivating little thriller in Post, with what little resources he was able to scare up, before finally releasing it on the North American film festival circuit of ‘83.
Normally, I’m not one to devote mention of short films to this platform, despite deeply appreciating a good one when I see it, plus having wrote and directed a couple zero-budget short flicks myself (links can be found in this blog).
Hell, all of my completed written stories are in the ‘short’ format, so clearly there’s an appreciation from my end of things.
But this one was something different and it genuinely made me sit up and pay attention, all the while lamenting a cruel universe that won’t gift me the cash, resources and time to craft my own cinematic short stories of this ilk.
Feeling strangely ahead of its time (especially if actually lensed in the way-back of ’81), China Lake opens with a very Hill Street Blues-like intro scene (same grit and detail, only R Rated here) with a bunch of LA cops milling about in a bustling, smoky Ready Room, going through the morning’s Roll Call. During this sequence, it’s noticed that one cop, someone named ‘Donnelly’, has suddenly taken some vacation time, his seat the only empty one.
Cutting to the wide sandy plains and low craggy mountains of central California, just bordering the Mojave Desert, we see a uniformed LAPD motorcycle cop pull over a lone woman in a convertible, far from LA. This is ‘Donnelly’ (Charles Napier) and he is out of his jurisdiction, though his demeanor wouldn’t suggest it.
With a disarmingly friendly but firm approach, this uniformed police officer announces suspicions of impaired driving and puts the clearly sober woman through a series of questionable sobriety tests, before suddenly handcuffing her and tossing her kicking and screaming into her own trunk, locking it and throwing away the key, leaving her to most likely die cooking in the desert sun or freezing in the night, as he drives off self-satisfied, prowling again on his Harley.
And that’s how ‘Donnelly’ spends his so-called ‘vacation’ among the desolation surrounding the famous weapons testing facility of China Lake, taking out his sadistic impulses on those poor people that run afoul of his twisted sensibilities as they pass through the area.
Having now seen this little unknown gem, it’s easy to believe the story that this project landed The Hitcher on Harmon’s plate. The ugly-but-intriguing subject matter: a lone, unbalanced antagonist prowling the empty desert highways of America for helpless victims, share unmistakable parallels with Red’s original Hitcher script and Harmon’s cinematic ‘fingerprint’, that would later add so much to The Hitcher, is plain to see in this early example of style and method.
First things first.
For a self-financed short film, this one looks great! There is effort and care put in, and I’m sure ALL of whatever this project’s modest budget ended up being is ably shown onscreen. I’m also sure that the top-to-bottom restoration by Second Sight helps with that impression, but just considering when it was shot (again, allegedly sometime in 1981), this material feels WAY ahead of its time, with certain camera moves and lighting schemes looking like films shot today, not 44 years ago. There’s a ‘polished grit’ to everything; a rugged, lived-in ambience that was perfectly echoed three years later in The Hitcher, that also had me thinking of select titles by Ridley and Tony Scott, Adrian Lyne, Dominic Sena and Richard Stanley.
Next up, props have got to be given to the casting. Charles Napier, who most people will probably most easily recognize as the ill-fated prison guard ‘Lt. Boyle’ in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), despite having variously-sized roles in tons of other films, was an inspired choice for ‘Donnelly’; with his larger frame, deep voice and shark-like grin adding an element of quiet threat to every word he utters and every move he makes. He feels like a force of nature fueled by his own reserves of barely checked aggression and anger, rendering him incapable of being reasoned with once he sets himself on a path (sorta like The Hitcher’s murderous ‘John Ryder’), as is cruelly demonstrated a couple times here.
This is entirely Napier’s show, but the modest supporting cast bring a certain ‘real world’ feel to the cinematic universe ‘Donnelly’ prowls, with one other familiar face turning up to play ‘victim’, William Sanderson, who people will recognize from Blade Runner (1982), Last Man Standing (1996) and Deadwood (2004-2006). That man does ‘hysterical’ well…as also seen here.
Like I scribbled earlier, I haven’t used this silly lil blog for short films , but now I’m strongly reconsidering that, given how much I enjoyed this particular one, and how much I truly feel that the filmmakers who toil to craft these compelling little slices of motion picture fiction deserve the mention, and the audience.
I had a feeling China Lake might be something special, just given my long-standing appreciation for Harmon’s style, as employed so deftly in The Hitcher, but I didn’t anticipate wanting to know more, to see more, when the credits finally rolled on ‘Donnelly’s cruel shenanigans.
It made me think of the awesome shorts put out by Neill Blomkamp (District 9) via his inventive Oats Studios label, where they suck you in, with a seemingly Big Screen budget and production design, prime you for the immersive worlds depicted and…credits roll, acting as elaborate trailers for features we’ll ultimately never see (as sad as that is). This one definitely has an ‘end’, using the LAPD Ready Room briefings to book-end the narrative but there was so much more to potentially see, as all that had come before it was so slickly and richly realized.
In short, good on Robert Harmon for showing his determination and skill back in the day, to bring this tense, genuinely entertaining little tale to audiences both then and now, and in conjunction, good on Second Sight Films for showing this little gem some love and rescuing it from obscurity by granting it a very satisfying restoration and re-release (very appropriately as a deserving companion piece to The Hitcher) after so long.
If you can appreciate the work and creativity that can be found scattered throughout the larger-than-you-may-realize world of short-format cinematic fiction, then I can easily recommend you feast your eyeballs upon this nasty little flick, if you can find it (and you should). The end result feels strangely timeless and forward-thinking (again, the stellar print restoration on what I saw may contribute to this impression), despite the period in film history that it’s definitively a product of, that it’s also depicting. There’s an unexpected slickness to China Lake…and I thought it was cool.
You might too.
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