Frame By Frame: Def-Con 4 (1985)

Year – 1985
Decade – 1980s
Director – Paul Donovan
Director of Photography – Lez Krizsan and Douglas Connell
Genre – Sci Fi
Keywords – 1980s sci-fi; Canadian movies; Canuxploitation; Post Apocalypse
Studio – New World
Shooting Location – Halifax, Nova Scotia
Aspect Ratio – 1.85
Format – 35mm film with spherical lenses

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The Movie
One of the classic examples of VHS box cover art that overpromised and underdelivered.

That cover art (which borrows heavily from an illustration by Angus McKie, shown below) features the skeletal remains of an astronaut marooned in the desert, with futuristic high rises and a massive space craft in the distance. None of that is in the film, whose primary terrestrial location is a Canadian junkyard.

The plot finds a trio of astronauts orbiting Earth aboard a nuclear-armed space station when War War III breaks out. They return to the surface a few months later and battle a militarized group of survivors in order to reach an uncontaminated safe zone.

Def-Con 4 was put together by brothers Michael (producer) and Paul (writer/director) Donovan in their native Halifax, Nova Scotia. The siblings’ previous effort, Siege, took advantage of its low-budget trappings for a tense Assault on Precinct 13-esque thriller, but with the post-apocalyptic Def-Con 4 their reach exceeded their grasp.

Thanks in no small part to its epic cover art, the film was a big money maker for distributor New World Pictures. By the time the Donovan brothers were featured in a Chicago Tribune piece in the summer of 1986, Def-Con 4 had already grossed $5.5 million in theaters and video sales and rental on a budget of $800,000.

Here’s an excerpt from the March 1986 issue of Cinefantastique about the making of the film:

Shooting began in October 1983 in Nova Scotia, Canada, long before Mad Max III got off the ground. But two weeks into the projected eight week schedule production stopped for what Donovan described as a “wide variety of reasons. We weren’t happy with certain technical aspects of what we were doing. There was also some problems with the script, so we took some time off and did some rewriting.

We also had a problem with the way things looked in Canada at that time of year,” continued Donovan. “In Nova Scotia in October the leaves are still on the trees and everything looks real pretty. We couldn’t have that. What we wanted was the appearance of a nuclear winter, so we stopped production and started up again in November when things didn’t look quite as resplendent.”

After scrapping the first two weeks of shooting, and not being able to raise additional funds, the already Spartan production managed to complete shooting in the remaining six weeks….Def-Con 4 was picked up for distribution by New World Pictures in September 1984. New World pumped in an additional $200,000 into post-production work and cut what Donovan admits was on occasionally talky 136 minute version of the film down to its current streamline 85 minute length.