Directed by
Don Coscarelli
Cast
Lance Henriksen ………. Hank
Mark Rolston ………. Jake
Steve Antin ………. Raider
Michael Allen Ryder ………. Harper
Paul Provenza ………. Joey
Ben Hammer ………. Hal
Dominic Hoffman ………. Jeff
Traci Lind ………. Olivia
Dermot Mulroney ………. Gray
Catherine Keener ………. Cheryl
Ken Daly ………. Chocker
Reggie Bannister ………. Pilot
Running Time: 90 minutes
Rated R
DVD Release date: April 10, 2007
His name is Lance Henriksen, and he is a B-movie institution. If you go to his IMDB profile, and start scrolling, you’ll hit 47 credits just since the year 2000. Whether he’s shooting Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, getting ripped in half by an Alien Queen, talking to Sarah Conner about PCP addicts, profiling serial killers for the Millennium organization, or just starring in another direct-to-video flick, Henriksen is always worth watching.
Directed by Don “Phantasm” Coscarelli, 1989’s Survival Quest can loosely be described as a Lance Henriksen delivery system. Henriksen stars as Hank, a rugged mountain man set to teach a ragtag bunch of city folk the value of teamwork and trust by means of camping, hiking and various adventure gym style tasks. Included in this group is: stand-up comic/director of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza; A Different World‘s Dominic Hoffman; cello player/Brad Pitt friend, Dermot Mulroney; and Mrs. Dermot Mulroney, Being John Malkovich‘s Catherine Keener.
Whilst Lance is busy team-building, nearby rival survivalists espouse the virtues of self-reliance and attacking your enemy from behind. Eventually things change from Karate Kid in the woods to The Most Dangerous Game, when a rogue member of the evil survivalist school accidently shoots Lance and purposefully stabs his own teacher. Hank’s students must use everything that they have learned in order to survive this, uh, quest.
Survival Quest is a fun little movie that manages to fill out 90 minutes nicely. It’s evocative of many other ’80s/early ’90s films, save with slightly older characters. Survival Quest is very much a simple morality play. In fact, it would be the sort of movie that a gym teacher would show his Health Class, were it not for a couple of F-bombs and the perky breasts of Traci Lind.
Plus it features Lance Henriksen saying things like, “Survival in the wilderness is a matter of heart, not hardware.”
The DVD
The DVD is almost bare of extras. There is a Behind the Scenery featurette, which is basically a home movie containing some actor hijinks and such.
Other than that there are trailers. We get trailers for Survival Quest, a couple other Coscarelli pictures, and two trailers for other Lance Henriksen movies.
