It’s nice to know that cocaine was alive and well in 2003.
In the depths of hell, Dominator (a guitar-shredding warrior who wears a metal mask), steals a magic key from Desecrator (a skull with tentacles for a body). Soon after, Dominator is zapped to Earth when an all-female band called Crowcut plays a song with a Satanic chord in it. Desecrator is furious! He must have the key! Desecrator sends three bounty hunters after Dominator. Their names are Decimator, Extricator, and Lady Violator. The rest of the movie is filled with fights, guitar solos, battle tanks made out of skulls, explosions, stolen audio from Karate Kid, and sex scenes that look like people blasting squats in slow motion.
This is a good time to point out that Dominator is an 80-minute movie composed entirely of CGI that looks like it was barfed out by a PlayStation 2 after a 48-hour acid binge at Hot Topic.
Simultaneously invigorating and nauseating, Dominator is an incredible artifact. The movie was made by actual humans (including writer/comic book legend Alan Grant and producer Doug “Pinhead from Hellraiser” Bradley), and based on a British comic book series created by director Tony Luke. But nothing about it comes close to approximating real-life or humanity.
Dominator is a scumbag opera of the highest order, a numbing experience that’s awash in Mountain Dew tears and Novocaine dreams. The hallucinatory iMac G3 animation is perfectly paired with the incomprehensible script, which was either stolen from a few issues of Todd McFarlane’s Spawn or a 12-year-old having a seizure. Every character is horny, excessively sexualized, and dressed in bondage gear. The prog-metal soundtrack pairs drop-C bass licks with bedroom techno beats. Dominator himself is like a mall goth Austin Powers on steroids. Almost every line of his dialogue is ridiculous; when a reporter asks him for an interview after a concert, Dominator replies, “Sure, right after you take your clothes off, babe!” Around the 50-minute point, I realized that I had zoned out due to sheer sensory overload. But then Dominator blew up a demon with his guitar, which shoots lightning bolts. Back in the game.
But this movie isn’t all fun and games and skeletons with mohawks. During the second half, Decimator and Extricator are portrayed as two drunk bros in a pub. Every time they talked about their dicks or farted, I wanted to die from embarrassment. Luckily, their scenes only accounted for a few minutes of screentime (and a questionable wrap-up at the end). I started daydreaming about making a recut of the movie without these scenes. And maybe I will!
I felt like a mouthbreather while watching Dominator. I can’t wait to watch it again.
