Note: This is a very WIP page; see the section index for an explanation. However, the caption files are (more-or-less) final.
A 1985 post-apocalyptic action–comedy flick written and directed by Albert Pyun, following two goofs (played by John Stockwell and Michael Dudikoff) who were locked up underground as toddlers with nothing but 1940s detective pulps for culture. Years later they get loose and inadvertently raise havoc in the post-nuke world.
The film's supposedly a major inspiration for the original Fallout games, but for a long time it was hard to find. I noticed there were no good captions available anywhere online, so I decided to make some—my very first captioning project.
This was the first time I put together subs or captions of any kind, and it took forever and a day for a bunch of reasons (beyond inexperience):
I went with a kinda silly and maximalist style. Lots of snappy, fun SFX descriptions like [giggling and scurrying]
and [slap! cuts the music]
, and as much of the song lyrics as I could fit alongside the dialogue. That added a lot more work, but I think it was worth it.
In total I've probably spent at least 12 hours working on this file. Some of that can be explained away by it being the first time I tried subtitling/captioning, but not all. It really just is that messy, fuzzy, and dense with references. Despite how long it took I'm pretty happy with the outcome!
Almost every major character's name comes from some noir detective story or writer from the 1940s.
Named after the fictional detective Philip Marlowe (note the one “l”, not two like this film's Phillip, maybe a mistake on Pyun's part) created by the writer Raymond Chandler. When Phil gets annoyed with Marlowe when they're walking to Edge City, he seems to refer to the original Philip Marlowe when saying “Sure ‘Marlowe’ wouldn't act this way”, so I put the name in quotes there. Finally, Phil refers to Philip Marlowe by full name in his monologue after escaping Miles.
The thinner, hairier crook's probably named for the detective fiction writer Samuel Dashiell Hammett, often simply called Dashiell Hammett. The bulkier, balder crook's probably named for Dashiell Hammet's fictional detective Sam Spade, plus Raymond Chandler (see above). The two leads inherit their surnames.
Incidentally, while looking up sources for the names I found out Hammett got hauled before a McCarthyite judge and refused to snitch on any of his comrades even at the cost of going to prison despite decades of chronic illness (tuberculosis)… that takes guts.
This is literally just the name of fictional detective Sam Spade's private eye partner from The Maltese Falcon whose death kicks off the plot.
This might be a reference to General Sternwood, the character who hires Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep.
The disco mutants' names really feel like references, but I couldn't find anything concrete. Maybe they're just kinda funny names for two pre-teen shit-talking gun-toting Elvis-looking greaser types. That said, “Chester” might be a reference to detective fiction writer Chester Himes.
The only big names I couldn't find clear references for were Rusty Mars and Brick Bardo, but then I'm not super well-read in noir detective fiction anyway. However, I did find out that Pyun really likes the name Brick Bardo and re-used it for characters in Cyborg (1989) and Dollman (1991) and maybe other films he wrote, I dunno. The fact that he reused it so many times means it's probably not a direct reference to anything and is more just a satisfying name to say.
Besides the names, there's a bunch of slang and other colour in the dialogue referencing several decades of USAmerican subculture (the film basically goes decade by decade: 40s noir detectives and musicals, 50s greasers, 60s hippies, 70s punks, 80s video and pop). Here's a selection:
When the disco mutants run away after Phil and Marlowe take their guns, I think they mention Chandler and Hammer by name, but since the lines are indistinct and Phil and Marlowe are yelling, AND it feels too early in the film to clearly reveal that kinda thing, I covered it with [drowned out by PHIL and MARLOWE yelling]
.
I'm not 100% sure what Phil says when he pisses off Sternwood. It sounds like “Altoona”, the name of a Pennsylvanian town. I'm guessing it's just meant to represent a distant, remote, obscure place (since a lot of famous noir fiction was set in big cities on the west coast). There was a noir fiction writer active in the 1940s, Dorothy B. Hughes, who wrote a few pieces for an Altoona newspaper, one of which may have been a crime story, but the connection's real tenuous there.
It sounds to me like Marlowe calls Brick Bardo “Bart” one time, maybe a short form or mishearing of his surname.
Marlowe mumbles a lot when he's hunting down the disco mutants and Phil. A lot of it's barely intelligible (I think intentionally), so I didn't write captions for much of it.
Sometimes the editors duplicated dialogue to pad the soundscape, e.g. the dialogue between Chester and the kidnappers when Marlowe rescues Phil. I didn't include the duplicates, since they're not really included as intelligible dialogue anyway.
There's a brief bit of a different song before Guilty Pleasures; it's very short and not listed in the soundtrack, so I didn't add lyrics.
The opening text is just too fast for its own good, but I didn't want to paraphrase and still wanted to include the text in the captions in case someone translates my file. The second part of the opening text also takes up a lot of the screen, so I split it into several shorter two-line captions to avoid blocking the screen as far as possible.
The lines just before and early during the car chase with the red-haired mutants at the start are a bit tough to tease out, especially the ones as Phil and Marlowe are approaching and getting into their car. Luckily these lines don't really matter much, since there doesn't seem to be any slang and it's all said in haste and confusion anyway.
The lyrics for Guilty Pleasures by Sue Saad and the Next have one really tough part that I just couldn't figure out from the film rip alone: the line it will be sheer delight, I know
. All the lyrics sites are confident this is “shaky light” or “shifty light” and I couldn't believe either was right, but I couldn't figure it out myself from either the rip, the official soundtrack, or the alternate studio version I found (largely because the bad lyrics site versions poisoned the well, mentally, and I was pretty fatigued from listening to the film for so long). Eventually I was able to kind of unfocus from the words and piece together the syllables, at which point it resolved into “sheer delight”, which makes a lot more sense.
The line the New Wave Punk says to Miles when he ambushes her during Guilty Pleasures is also kinda indistinct and I just had to take my best guess at the general meaning.