Bargain Bin: A Savage Journey into the Heart of 1994's 'The Force'
Some poor bastard cranked this celluloid fever dream out in the hazy, bygone era of '94, a time when the digital beast was but a mewling kitten and real cinematic grit came etched on 35mm, crackling through a bootleg VHS, or shimmering off a Laserdisc the size of a hubcap. We were savages then, hunched in the glow of our tube TVs, mainlining these forgotten pulp fantasies. The Force is a prime specimen of this lost tribe of movies, a glorious, straight-to-video psychic-cop-revenge-thriller that feels less like a coherent narrative and more like a fever dream cooked up after a three-day bender on cheap tequila and a stack of dog-eared crime paperbacks. It’s the kind of flick you’d find misplaced in the wrong clamshell case at a Blockbuster, a beautiful, flawed artifact from a time when ambition and a shoestring budget could still get a man somewhere in Hollywood, even if that somewhere was the 2-for-$5 bin.
The sheer, unadulterated lunacy of the plot is its own reward. We're not talking about some high-minded exploration of the human condition here; this is a goddamn ghost cop jumping into a rookie's meat-suit to solve his own murder. It's a premise so brilliantly unhinged you have to respect the stones on the men who greenlit it. The film rides that razor's edge between "so bad it's good" and just plain bad, a high-wire act of pulp nostalgia that, in our current age of sterile, committee-approved blockbusters, feels like a breath of beautifully polluted air. It’s a messy, glorious, and utterly forgettable trip, a reminder that sometimes the most memorable cinematic journeys are the ones that lead straight to the bottom of the barrel, where the real gems are often hiding.
Director: Mark Rosman.
Cast: Jason Gedrick, Kim Delaney, Gary Hudson, Cyndi Pass, and Yasmine Bleeth.
Special Info/Trivia: The film's unique premise of a dead cop's spirit entering a rookie's body to solve his own murder was considered novel for its time in the action genre. In a particularly memorable scene, a perpetrator is subdued by having a ginseng root thrown at him. Baywatch star Yasmine Bleeth makes a brief appearance as a prostitute who is killed off within the first five minutes of the film.
