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The Chain Reaction (1980)

Dir: Ian Barry

Rural Australia, an earthquake causes a dangerous leak at a ‘Western
Atomic Long term Dumping Operation‘ (WALDO), a nuclear waste storage facility.

An engineer named Heinrich Schmidt (Ross Thompson) receives a lethal overdose and has only days to live but he knows that the leak will poison the groundwater and wants to warn the public.
His employers though are only interested in covering it all up so Schmidt escapes.
He contacts an environmental activist named Eagle (Hugh Keys-Byrne) but is chased and hurt before he can give Eagle all the details.

Suffering from amnesia Heinrich is rescued by Larry (Steve Bisley), a mechanic on vacation with his wife, Carmel (Arna-Maria Winchester), who take him to the cabin they are staying at.
As Heinrich tries to piece together his memories and Larry tries to get the local Cops to help, WALDO sends out a team led by ruthless assassin Gray (Ralph Cotterill) to find Schmidt and lock down the information leak, even as the radiation leak slowly pollutes the water supply….

 

Despite what the documentary “Not Quite Hollywood” led me to believe there is actually very little of the promised “Mad Max” car action/violence here as I had hoped.
In fact, 66 minutes in (yes I was watching the clock) and we have had only one short car chase, no action to speak of and not much plot progression either.
It’s just been people sitting/walking around talking about the interesting plot idea we wish the film itself would actually do something with.
Although definitely cinematic in its look the film still often plays like a two part TV conspiracy thriller with added nudity (which is occasionally very open but narratively valid and un-exploitative) and a bit of late in the day violence.

But what’s really frustrating is that this long downtime between the action is not spent upping the tension or ramping up the threat.
We have no scenes of townsfolk consuming polluted water, not townsfolk feeling a bit ill or anything like that.
Basically except for one (very effective) scene of Larry and Carmel swimming in a river we know may be contaminated with the nuclear waste, the threat only exists as dialogue and thus becomes as invisible, visually, to the film’s narrative as actual nuclear pollution itself.
There is a slight air of doom that clouds the stunning sun drenched landscape, but it’s never pushed enough.

No, instead of threat, action and dramatic tension we instead spend far too much time with Carmel and Schmidt as they go for walks and sit around the house as Schmidt tries to remember everything, Something the audience is hoping he will do soon so we don’t have to spend any more time watching him look wistfully into the distance.
It does make for a quite interesting relationship set-up though as, as far as the film goes, Carmel seems to have a closer relationship with Schmidt than Larry at this point .
As such a pretty effective emotional strand runs through the film that adds definite humanity to the many cold, calculated sequences of the blonde haired, sharp suit and a smirk wearing WALDO (a really name for a sinister organisation) guys.

Sadly though even when we are not watching Carmel and Schmidt walk around talking we have to watch Larry and Eagle sitting around talking in the police cell instead for what seems like half the film!
Literally nothing happens.
You can’t help be feel that the production troubles the film was caught up in has hurt the end product.

Luckily Hugh Keys-Byrne is nearly as weird and off the wall here as a good guy, environmental activist as he was in "Mad Max" as a bad guy, biker gang, psycho so he livens the film up a bit when it needs it the most.
Bisley is as rough, tough but likeable as ever and has a real everyman feel about him, as poor old Larry just wants to have some quality time away from his job and kids with Carmel, but gets lumbered with a mysterious stranger, false arrest and people trying to run him off the road!

Thompson (putting on a German accent) is good despite being stuck with such a dull character in Schmidt and it also has to be noted that he is fittest man with about two days to live from extreme radiation poisoning you’ve ever seen.
As such his decline into radiation sickness mess-up seems all the more rushed and spontaneous when it does finally come just in time for the finale.

Arna-Maria Winchester is fine as his Wife (and like Bisley bares all for the cause) and Ralph Cotterill is theatrical and campy as all hell as the suited and booted killer and his men, in their delightfully creepy looking radiation suits, are an impressive sight.
Comedic relief is supplied by the local Deputy Piggott (Richard Moir) a wannabe fascist version of Bisley’s Goose character from “Mad Max”, but with non of the actual talent needed for the job.
And look out for a one scene, one sentence, cameo by Mel Gibson and a slightly bigger, opening, support role for hard man Roger Ward ("Mad Max", "Turkey Shoot") looking all wrong with his wave of ginger curls!

We can give much thanks to the Cinematic Lord above that Bisley (and the movie) finally deliver the action goods 80 (yes, count ‘em) minutes in when we finally get some more growling, super fast, super skilled car driving/stunt work and a little bit of shotgun bloodshed., although to be frank that shotgun violence is only one scene and it was shown in the trailer. Ho hum.

But even now some sadness creeps into this rare action scene as much of it looks exactly the same as the earlier chase scene because it’s the same two vehicles involved, doing basically the same thing, on the same stretch of road!
In fact I’m not sure that some shots of the two vehicles side by side is not indeed the exact same footage in both sequences!
There’s also too many inserts of the actors in the cars, thus breaking up the flow of the action as well as taking up screen-time that could have been spent filming the cars from outside, showing us more of the superlative, slam bang, skills of the stunt drivers in full flow.

Much of this action was helmed by “Mad Max” guru George Miller, meaning the blame for the general stodgy pace and uninteresting content more than ever falls at the feet of Director/writer Ian Barry.
Though to be fair I kind of get the feeling that Barry was happy just making a nuclear conspiracy drama, but producer Miller pushed to make it into an action thriller as well (and when Barry fell behind in the shooting schedule Miller took the opportunity to do just that)…thus giving us a hybrid that falls between these two ideas but satisfies neither.
It wants to be “Mad Max” but lacks the action, grit and violence, it wants to be “The China Syndrome” but lacks the dramatic tension, expert plot structure and serious acting chops and it also wants to wrap all that up in a worthy eco drama but that too lacks the essential pall of impending doom.

At least if the screenplay had moved the film on from the amnesia/stuck in a cell portion of the film and into this action thriller territory earlier we could have had one or two more action scenes to add variety an excitement as our heroes go on the run, instead of what we are given, which is our heroes sitting around chatting and running nowhere at all.

The dated electronic score is also petty dire more often than not and when it does work it works more in a cheesy retro way than as a seriously effective score. Some of the miscellaneous ‘electro noises of impending doom’ and the end credits guitar based noodling are fun though.

The ending, perhaps because we have moved out of the 70‘s, is also not the ending I think most people would be expecting and although that’s not a bad thing (or a bad ending in itself) it does rather add to the ‘oh, right, is this it then’ feeling the rest of the film gave us.
So overall “The Chain Reaction” is a missed opportunity.
Its intentions are good, it’s technically solid, well enough acted and has the very, very occasional exciting moment.
But it’s extremely drawn out and static for much of the running time and far from the exciting action thriller it could and should have been and ultimately feels like two genres stuck together, with the joins painfully visible.
Has some worth, but was ultimately a rather big let down sadly.