Bad Movie Bunker: Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)
Highlander works because it never explains itself. Immortals, swords, beheadings, there can be only one, and a Queen song on the soundtrack telling you it's a kind of magic. Ask why and the film winks and moves on. That vagueness is the entire trick, and it is why a quirky 1986 B-movie spawned four more films, six seasons of television, an animated series and an anime. Highlander II is what happens when somebody decides to answer the question.
The answer is that they are aliens. From a planet called Zeist. Exiled to Earth as a prison sentence, immortal here until only one of them is left, at which point the winner can go home. Connor MacLeod remembers all of this while sitting at the opera, roughly forty minutes into a film in which he has already grown old, lost his powers and built a shield over the planet to replace the ozone layer.
You can see the engineering behind it. The first film ends with Connor mortal, ageing and spiritually fulfilled, which is a lovely ending and a terrible foundation for a sequel. Somebody had to find a route back to swords and beheadings, and back to Sean Connery, who was dead. Zeist is that route. It is also the single worst idea in the franchise, and the studio spent the next fifteen years quietly pretending it never happened.
In this episode we get into whether any of the rules survive contact with the sequel, the production in Argentina that ran into hyperinflation and lost its budget mid-shoot, the completion bond company that seized the edit and locked the director out, Michael Ironside giving the most unhinged performance in a film full of them, John C. McGinley auditioning for Doctor Cox without knowing it, and the Renegade cut that deletes every reference to Zeist and replaces an alien planet with time travel, making a confusing film genuinely incoherent. Then we decide whether it earns a place in the bunker, with a little help from Roger Ebert.
Mind the porcupine men, hold on to your earring, and do not let him drive the train.
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Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films at a time.
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