MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Survival’: Fighting It Out in the Wilderness

“Survival Quest” (AMC Century 14) is set in the wilderness, in a breathtaking stretch of the Sierra that includes valleys, snowy peaks, waterfalls and rushing rapids--but its real location seems to be the eternal Saturday afternoon matinee of the mind.

It’s a movie full of big bright movie images, cliff-hangers, clowns and pretty girls and people about to shoot off the edge of a waterfall. There are dastardly villains and snakes and romping bears, and though everything cuts together well--writer/director Don Coscarelli is a Jack-of-all-trades who also does his own editing--the story has no psychological verisimilitude. It has no density or weight, it’s untied to the real world.

As such, it’s occasionally fun; a shallow but perky little fable about two competing sets of survivalists battling it out in the Sierras--the good, equal-opportunity survivalists who accept all races, classes, ages and sexes, and the bad Hitlerjugend survivalists who play macho war games, go crazy and try to kill people.

The good survivalists--run by rangy paterfamilias Hank Chambers (Lance Henriksen)--are taught to pull together, never leave anyone behind, be self-sufficient and respect nature; they’re also taught to eat worms for their high protein value, which may give gourmands a twinge. The bad survivalists are taught to swagger around with guns and knives, illegally kill deer. They haze each other like drunken frat boys--a plot twist which gets puzzlingly lost in the shuffle--and constantly scowl, sneer and yell.

“The penalty for failure is death,” screams their hyper-tense leader, Jake (Marl Rolston), and pretty soon, he’s got everybody whipped up into such a froth of paranoia that one psycho student, Steve Antin’s Raider, flips out, shoots his hand and tries to cut Jake’s throat. This madness escalates like rabies giving the good survivalists yet another woodland problem to solve.

When Cathleen Keener assumes control, it’s less a function of character than comment on adventure movie sexism but archetypes and cliches are still the biggest weapon in their arsenal. The poor psycho Raider was doomed to flip out, doomed to kill; the only surprise is that all the old cadets join his rampage so automatically. Perhaps they all got whipped up before the trip by watching “Southern Comfort.”

“Survival Quest” is sheer movie athleticism, and the best performances in the picture are the most athletic ones: Henriksen’s lithe, super-confident Hank and Dermot Mulroney’s surly, good-bad boy Gray. The worst performances seem to come straight out of old sitcoms or kitchen cleanser commercials.

It’s interesting that “Survival Quest” is being released the same time as the new, bad movie version of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.” The stories are actually distant cousins. This is the Day-Glo cartoon version of “Flies’ ” theme: it’s about going back to nature and facing yourself, about civilization vs. murder, the humanists vs. the bullies. But Coscarelli--who wrote and directed his first film, “Jim, the World’s Greatest,” at 19, is still in many ways a movie kid. He’s refashioned everything in movie-movie terms. Even though the whole film was shot in the wilderness, the images look so clean and bright, weightless and keen, that they’re somehow empty of danger or the rapt mysticism of man’s communion with nature. “Survival Quest” is a long way from either “Deliverance” or “Walkabout”--though it’s certainly more enjoyable than the second “Lord of the Flies.”