Shock Value

High Voltage Cranks It Up

 By Morgan P Salvo

 Crank High Voltage is a ridiculous adrenalin rollercoaster ride done in overtly stylized hyper-surrealism. It’s what the remakes of Death Race and Fast and Furious strived to be. Make sure you leave all need for believability at the door because this movie is WAY over the top from the get-goThe original Crank lifted its concept from the classic DOA starring Edmund O’Brien. The hitman, Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), mysteriously poisoned by a “Beijing Cocktail”, races against time to find his perpetrators. If Chev’s heart rate slowed down he’d croak. To keep his adrenaline up, he was off and running, punching anyone in his path. Well apparently he lived. Taking over from his fall from a helicopter, splattering onto pavement in Crank, CHV has him literally scooped away by some evil Chinese gangsters who want to harvest his super organs. They replace his heart with a plastic one that needs a battery charge every hour or so. When they start to harvest Chelios’ well endowed man-part, he spurs back to life and the pummeling begins. His battery pack is ruined in a car crash so for the rest of the movie is he must electrically shock himself any way possible, jump-starting his heart so he can run, bash and shoot people at will.
When demented bad guy Johnny Vang (Art Hsu) blows smoke and hurls a loogie in Chelios’ guts while on the operating table, you know that no punches will be pulled.
Crank has something for everyone…to be insulted by. The racial slurs fly, the f-bomb is dropped more than Glengarry Glen Ross and The Sopranos combined. I have never seen so may f-words spelled out in subtitles. The overkill use of sexism and racism is unbelievable. There’s an avalanche of extremely bad jokes centered on genitalia, nipples and anuses.

CHV’s action is all about tricks; the jumpy camera-work, grainy fish-eye lens, dizzying 360 degrees shots, kooky use of cutting to animated diagrams to help explain what’s going on. There’s even homage to Godzilla movies when Chelios and Vang become slow moving fake monsters battling on a stage of miniatures. Along with a Transporter in-joke you get car chases, bullets flying, strippers, hookers in hot pants and high heels, an all black gay-biker S&M club and Corey Haim in a mullet… what else do you want?
There are so many out of the moment movie detours that it ceases to be any kind of coherent movie and becomes parody on top of action on top of more parody. CHV is so immersed in gimmicks it resembles one big music video. I caught myself fascinated by the soundtrack and no wonder. Turns out the musical soundtrack was provided by none other that Mike Patton of Mr. Bungle and Fantomas fame.
I think there’s a total of 5 minutes without action. Think Van Helsing in East LA. The blood spewing gunplay never stops. At a strip club the flying bullets results in implant reduction. Innocent bystander casualties figure in the hundreds.
Everyone is back even if they died in the first one .Venus (Efren Ramirez of Napoleon Dynamite) replaces his twin as an out of costume transvestite with “full body Tourette’s Syndrome” (like that’s real) .Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo) the initial bad guy, returns only as a life-supported head (as in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die). Amy Smart is back as Eve, Chelios’ girlfriend, now inexplicably a stripper—she spends a lot if time with duct-taped x’s on her nipples. And Dwight Yoakum returns as the sleazy Doc dishing out nuggets of cursing medical advice for Chev over the phone while ridiculing his “slut”. A cameo by David Carradine playing a blithering Chinese drug lord is just weird. There’s even gratuitous Ron Jeremy and a nod to Troma with Lloyd Kaufman showing up.

You gotta give credit to directors Mark Nedveldine and Brian Taylor (responsible for the first Crank) as they truly pulled out all the stops. It seems that each scene is designed to outdo the former. CHV is a mixed bag of very revolting tricks. Sometimes the music doesn’t even match the scene as when Chev and Eve perform sex in frenetic energy ON the race track while horses and jockeys run by, the crowd cheering, accompanied by “Heard it in Love
Song” by Marshall Tucker. But that just adds to the insanity that is Crank 2.
The unbelievable ending runs through the credits as more of the “story” is told. I do not pretend to know what the filmmakers were thinking but it seems that they just want to come from left field, hitting the audience with everything but the kitchen sink. This is an ultra-violent, bad taste comedy destined to offend almost everyone. Through its whirlwind of psychedelic torrents Crank High Voltage is wrong on every level. I liked it a lot.




Crank: High Voltage
Starring: Jason Statham, Dwight Yoakum, Bai Ling, Clifton Collins Jr., Amy Smart
Directed by Mark Nedveldine and Brian Taylor
 3 stars