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| Courtesy of Severin Films |
Lasting 53 days, the strike was eventually amicably resolved but the
concept of police officers hanging their hats while the city around them
crumbles under the weight of criminal activities proved more than enough to
mount a film around it while also utilizing some of the only known footage of
the strike to exist. The resulting Canuxploitation
simmer cooker Siege treads a fine line between Assault on Precinct 13
by way of Tenement as far as doling out rough and ragged thrills in
a most bumpy rollercoaster ride.
During the strike, a fascist group of sadistic thugs who call
themselves New Order led by skillful hitman Cabe (Doug Lennox) terrorize and
shoot up a gay bar, murdering several people but not before a patron escapes
the scene of the crime and seeks refuge in a group home for people suffering
from blindness. The gang catches up to
the premises and demands the tenant hand over the patron, the only surviving
witness to the crime, a request Horatio (Tom Nardini) and his girlfriend Barbara
(Brenda Bazinet) as well as their fellow houseguests aren’t ready to comply. The gang retreats but not before returning
with military weaponry including assault rifles with silencers and infrared
snipers, besieging the home with bullets and teargas grenades. Things seem grim for the survivors barricaded
inside, but these mostly blind people with acute senses of hearing aren’t ready
to go down without a major fight.
A claustrophobic pot boiler that keeps heating up until its
nerve-wracking blood-soaked conclusion, Paul Donovan and Maura O’Connell’s Siege
or Self-Defense depending on the territory is the closest thing 1983
has to grimy grindhouse cheap thrills filmmaking with a more-than-overqualified
cast at its disposal. Featuring Doug
Lennox from the Police Academy movies, Tom Nardini from Cat Ballou,
Jack Blum from Happy Birthday to Me and Keith Knight from My Bloody
Valentine, this tightly compacted mean lean Canadian indie sports more than
a few familiar faces across its dark deeply nighttime blue lit vistas. Despite the obvious budgetary limitations (shot
in a breakneck speed fourteen days) and exploitative nature of the piece, Siege
nevertheless packs a punch that still somehow or another manages to
resonate with audiences in today’s current sociopolitical climate.
Tense, violent and startlingly raw including but not limited
to the use of real guns on set with the cast and crew crammed into the tiny
apartment setting for most of the picture, Siege is a slick-blue-streaked
little number lensed handsomely by DEFCON-4 cinematographer Les
Krizsan. What really gives the film its
deathly dark grindhouse flavor however is the electronic score by Peter Jermyn
and Drew King. With Peter Jermyn having
worked on the sound departments for both Heavy Metal and Scanners while
Drew King would go on to edit the music for Iron Eagle II, the score all
but rolls out the blueprints for what would or would not become Sky Wikluh’s
score for A Serbian Film.
Comprised of atonal sonic abrasions that send chills down the listener’s
spine, cold bass rumblings that sound like distant explosions and an overall
sense of doom, the gloomy moody score perfectly suits the terrifying world of Siege.
The cast across the board is generally good though most
viewers are going to come away remembering the psychotic murderous adversary
Goose (Jeff Pustil) who second to Cabe (Doug Lennox in chilly cool form) is the
leader of this pack of miscreants. Tom
Nardini makes an excellent leading man here in over his head but nevertheless
sticking to the will to survive and not bow to pressure. Jack Blum is mostly known for his comic role
of Spaz in Meatballs so seeing him thrown into the firestorm here was
startling if not eye opening. Also
notable is Brenda Bazinet as the hero’s girlfriend Barbara who initially
displays fear and defeat but gradually also starts to take up arms against the
invaders.
Distributed by New Line Cinema theatrically before slipping
into B-movie obscurity and subsequent reappraisal as a Canuxploitation classic
by Severin Films, Siege is a little iron fist of a movie proudly wearing
calluses, cuts and bruises on its injured knuckles. Startling prescient as well as progressive,
taking particular aim at the still-ongoing problem of homophobia cultivated by
mob mentality, the synonymousness of crime and crimefighting and the prospect
such a calamity could be unleashed all over again, Siege while aiming
low winds up kind of soaring for what it is.
Even if you come away eluded by what it means to say, you’ll be gripping
the edges of your seat as this home invasion saga unfolds, functioning as entertainment
and as a warning about what can happen when the law no longer abides.
--Andrew Kotwicki
