The Ohio filmmakers behind ENEMY deserve credit for trying to tackle an incendiary topic--open racial warfare on American soil. It's a tall order, and the 16mm production staggers under the weight of its own big ideas about prejudice, propaganda, and the media.
Daniel Justin (Veryl Jones), a popular black American presidental frontrunner, is slain in mid-speech by masked gunmen. The incident triggers a virtual second Civil War. As United Nations troops patrol at a distance, all-black and all-white militias tear each other to pieces. Television reporter
Laura Nemaco (Chloe Hopson) accompanies a white brigade into battle, armed only with her remote-uplink camera. Straightaway a firefight kills almost all the bloodthirsty Caucasians and belligerent blacks. Survivor Laura is discovered first by Hadid (William Moore), a black guerilla who speaks in
Biblical aphorisms and is offended to learn Laura is actually a light-skinned black. Laura's camera catches Hadid being bushwacked by Morgan (Richard Lasky), a leftover white warrior who later grants Laura terse interviews about his hatred for blacks. Back at the studio, bureaucratic censors
representing both black and white interests squabble over the news transmissions of Hadid vs. Morgan. Everyone is stunned when Hadid, on the verge of bashing his enemy with a steel pipe, spares Morgan's life instead. This inspires a temporary cease-fire, but general hostilities soon resume. Laura
discovers Morgan was actually a Daniel Justin supporter who personally witnessed the assassination--and believes the shooters were militant and power-hungry Afro-Americans who opposed Justin's conciliatory tone. When Morgan confronts Hadid a second time, now with a gun, the angry white male
refuses to fire. The gesture, widely broadcast despite the censors, ends the race war for good.
Reducing a momentous war down to just two combatants is a familiar movie gimmick (perhaps done to best effect in John Boorman's 1968 WWII drama HELL IN THE PACIFIC) that not only saves money but invites a lot of pretentious allegory. Both of these aspects are in abundant evidence in ENEMY. Shot
with some visual panache on a shoestring budget in the industrial valley of Cleveland, Ohio, and neighboring Lorain, ENEMY avoids any costly crowd shots, and the sets for the offices of Laura's "World News Network'" are laughably skimpy. What really hurts, however, are the awkward dialogue
exchanges that make this ultimate societal nightmare seem more like a moralizing community-theatre play. For example, Morgan's monosyllabic explanation for his antipathy toward blacks: "Because they're different." While it's commendable that the regional filmmakers (producer/actor Lasky was a
former Cleveland Police Officer) didn't go for straight action-exploitation--when Chloe takes a long, lyrical shower in the ruins, she modestly keeps her bra and panties on. But their ambitions far outstrip their ability to depict a powder-keg premise that even most Hollywood schlockmeisters
wouldn't have dared confront head-on. Despite the simplification, one notion that hits home is a comparison between the script's fictional American race war and the ethnic skirmishes in Eastern Europe that dominated the evening news in the 1990s. "Let them kill each other off, just like
Yugoslavia," says one character. "Then we'll take the survivors out." Completed in 1995, ENEMY had to wait until 1998 for a low-level video distributor to give it a nationwide relase. (Violence, adult situations, profanity.) leave a comment