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Wednesday, October 08, 2008Warriors of the Apocalypse Release Year: 1985Country: The Philippines and United States Starring: Michael James, Deborah Moore, Ken Metcalfe, Michael Cohen, Robert Marius, David Brass, Charlotte Cain, David Light, Steve Rogers, Franco Guerrero. Writer: Bobby Suarez Director: Bobby Suarez Cinematographer: Jun Pereira Music: Ole Hoyer Producer: Bobby Suarez Alternate Titles: Searchers of the Voodoo Mountain; Time Raiders I think I'm detecting a pattern here. When I first decided to do Project VHS, reviewing a stack of old VHS tapes I have still cluttering up the shelves, I didn't intend for it to also be a celebration of the Filipino film industry, but it seems to be shaping up that way thanks in large part to the number of cheapjack genre films that used The Philippines and local Filipino crews and extras during the 80s and 90s. Need to make a cheap Rambo rip-off? Let the lush jungle landscape of The Philippines stand in for Vietnam. Need to make a crappy movie about a martial arts tournament that features bare-breasted female fighters? Don't worry; The Philippines is the place for you. Want to make a post-apocalyptic adventure film featuring nude Amazons and kabuki midgets? Even then you need not fear, for The Philippines truly is the Promised Land, so long as your vision of Paradise includes nude Amazons, kabuki midgets, topless kickboxing, and lots of slow motion explosions. And that damn well better be your vision of Paradise. The Filipino film industry is one well worth investigating. It's full of completely insane action and adventure movies, usually crudely made but with spirit to spare. Th Philippines produced a pretty huge number of espionage, superhero, horror, and action films for its domestic market throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Then, in the 1970s, American producers looking to save money while still giving their film an air of the exotic headed to The Philippines, producing four, five, sometimes even more movies in a very short amount of time and in conjunction with the locals. More times than not, and as we have learned, the American producer was Roger Corman and the local was Cirio Santiago. Using Santiago as the man on the ground and Corman as the pipeline to U.S. distribution, a lot of these co-productions found purely Filipino films piggybacking on them all the way to America. While it's great that a number of Filipino films took advantage of this partnership to get themselves dubbed and released in the United States, I really wish more of them had been picked up. Like Turkey, The Philippines is probably one of the great, largely untapped goldmines of zany genre films waiting to find some sort of attention in the DVD market. Unfortunately, also like Turkey, there seems to have been little care taken with preserving the movies, and even less care taken not to trample international copyright law. Thus, as much as we'd like to see them get proper treatment, I think we're relegated to the ranks of fuzzy VCDs and bootlegs for the foreseeable future.
Corman was not the only man looking to The Philippines as a home away from home. And just as Corman had Cirio Santiago, others had a man named Bobby Suarez. Suarez' career is so similar to Cirio Santiago's that I sometimes have a hard time believing they're not the same man, or that somewhere in an underground lab beneath Manila there isn't just some big supercomputer named Santiago Suarez. It was a brilliant artificial intelligence at one point, but the constant humidity of the hot Filipino summers eventually drove it mad, causing it to split into two distinct entities that, despite being distinct entities, emerged with the same prime directive: make as many shitty martial arts and post apocalypse action films as possible. Suarez was the storybook kid who came from nothing and made something of his life, even if that something was The One-Armed Executioner. After scoring a job with a film company, which I assume he did while talking all fast style and while wearing a newsie cap like they did in movies from the 1940s, Suarez worked his way up into the sales office, and through the sales office and into an eventual gig as a writer, producer, and director. Though nowhere near as prolific as fellow Filipino b-movie impresario Cirio Santiago, Suarez never the less contributed a number of gems to the world of cult cinema, including The One-Armed Executioner, about an Interpol agent out for revenge either against the men who chopped off his arm and killed his family or against the salon stylist who convinced him to get that horrible punch perm. Suarez also made They Call Her Cleopatra Wong, a low budget martial arts movie that dared ask the question, "What would happen if we took a really hot chick, dressed her up in a nun's outfit, and gave her a bad-ass double barrel sawed-off shotgun?" I think we can all answer that question pretty easily.
If there's anything that sets the films of Bobby Suarez apart from the films of Cirio Santiago, it's that most of them make some sort of sense, at least relative to the universe about which we're talking. But even Suarez was unable to resist the siren song of making a batshit insane post-apocalyptic action movie. And so where Santiago gave the world Future Hunters, which featured a leather-clad future hero, a tribe of midgets, Robert Patrick in his tighty whities, and a lost society of Filipino Amazons, Bobby Suarez gives us Warriors of the Apocalypse, which featured a leather-clad future hero, a tribe of midgets, and a lost society of sexy multi-ethnic Amazons. What it lacks in Robert Patrick buffalo shots, however, it certainly makes up for with what has to be the very final word in post-apocalypse shoulderpad jackets. So you know the score. In the 1980s, the Australians went and made Road Warrior, the wild sequel to a relatively more modest affair called Mad Max, both starring an unknown actor named Mel something (I think he used to be a lounge singer) and made in, according to American distributors who bought the film for the US market and had it redubbed, an unintelligible moon man language spoken only by the Elder Gods, or by people drunk on big-ass cans of Fosters. The unexpected position of Road Warrior as one of the most popular films of the early 1980s meant that it also became one of the most imitated, especially in Italy. Although everyone was busy cranking out post-apocalypse films, no one seized on the Road Warrior aesthetic quite like the Italians. Theoretically, the Italians should have been able to crank out pretty competent Road Warrior rip-offs. The usual excuses -- low budgets, inexperienced actors -- didn't apply. Road Warrior was a low budget film itself, and though star Mel Gibson was on the fast track to a requisite DUI and calling a female cop "sugar tits" whilst driving in the Hollywood Hills, the cast was comprised largely of untested new faces with minimal film acting experience. VErnon Wells had yet to undergo one of the most remarkable transformations of all time, and in this film was still a hot, lean, muscular bad-ass. How, just a couple years later, he turned into a pasty, doughy, Freddie Mercury looking mercenary is a question I don't think any of us can answer. But one thing is for certain. In neither Road Warrior nor Commando does he need the gun, John! He doesn't need the gun!
Of course, the one thing the Australians had over pretty much everyone who came in the wake of Road Warrior was talent. So while Road Warrior remains one of the tensest, most exciting sci-fi films around, the rip-offs were generally plodding, incompetent affairs. There's very little energy in most of them, even when they're good. I don't know what it was about Road Warrior -- maybe it was because the Aussies are more or less the only other people in the world who have the same sort of car culture we Americans have. Maybe they just cared more about the film. Maybe they had more wide-open space and better drivers. I know the Italians have good drivers, but that's a totally different kind of driving. As cool as you may think they are now, no one wants to be saddled with a Ferrari come the apocalypse. You can't even jump that shit over a sand dune, man, and we all know that, one way or another, the apocalypse is going to make the whole world look like the Australian Outback. Speaking of which, one thing the Road Warrior rip-offs seem to miss is that the collapse of society didn't turn the world into a desert. The guys in that movie chose to go out and run wild in a place that was already a desert. However, in defense of the Italian Road Warrior clones, several of them featured Fred Williamson in a variety of silky shirts, so those we can forgive.
So let's assume that as a reader of Teleport City you are at least familiar with Italian Road Warrior knock-offs. Now imagine an even cheaper Filipino knock-off of those knock-offs. Like xeroxing a xerox, the quality plummets precipitously, and when your starting point is something like New Barbarians or Exterminators of the Year 3000, you would assume that you wouldn't have very far to plummet. And yet still it proved possible. And like the copy of a copy, the final product becomes more and more abstract, its original form more and more intangible, until you get to the point where you are staring at a scratchy amorphous blob and trying to make sense of what it might once have been. In the end, though, all you can see is a Rorschach style image of something that might be a midget in a feathered headdress and Kabuki war paint. Bobby Suarez' entry in the post-apocalypse sweepstakes seems to be operating from the standpoint that Road Warrior wasn't nearly incomprehensible enough. Like Cirio Santiago's Future Hunters, Warriors of the Apocalypse has the feel of a movie assembled more or less at random out of several different movies. And to its credit, it's really only a Road Warrior rip-off for the first twenty minutes or so. It then veers off wildly into territory that seems as likely to have been inspired by Beneath the Planet of the Apes as anything else, delving into the combined territory of a cult that draws its power from a lost atomic reactor and movies about any number of lost civilizations. Basically, "lost" is an adjective that applies pretty heavily to this film.
We start off in fairly familiar post-apocalyptic territory: nuclear war has decimated the world and turned it into a sprawling rock quarry inhabited by nomadic bands of violent men who, despite the fact that the world has collapsed, seem to have no problem finding a variety of rich leather outfits. Let me pause right here, before I've hardly even begun, and address the concept of leather. And this applies not just to films like this, but also to modern films, many of which envision a future or alternate world in which the warriors are all clad in skintight PVC and leather. As far movies are concerned, the armies of the future will all be clad in tight fitting leather, with matching leather jackets of varying length, though ankle-length and cinched in tightly at the waist seems to be the dominant trend. So answer me this: in the last, say, hundred years or so, how any armies have marched into combat clad head to toe in leather? And more specifically, how many armies engaged in combat in the desert have decked themselves out in leather? OK, so Gestapo goons wore those long leather trenchcoats, but other than them, the armies of the world decided at some point that lightweight, camouflaged fatigues made of easily repairable material were the way to go. I'm not sure what happens in the future that causes the world's armies to re-evaluate this stance and go for tight, constricting, squeaky leather and PVC, but I'm interested in finding out. So the particular leather-clad band of survivors in which we are interested are lead by Trapper, played by a guy who is apparently the guy you hire when your film is too cheap to shell out for John Saxon. Trapper's crew was lucky enough to raid a West Village leather queen shop before the world ended, and as such they are decked out in a variety of swanky outfits that were acquired, I can only assume, via a montage consisting of scenes of each man emerging from a dressing room wearing a jacket that tries to outdo the last guy's in terms of the size of its shoulderpads, until finally the last guy comes out and his shoulderpads are actually like two yards across, causing everyone else to groan at the overkill while he shrugs and goes, "What? What? What's wrong with this? Ahh, screw you guys."
Of course, there's the non-conformist who puts less effort into his shoulderpads and concentrates instead on reassembling the outfit from some biker film starring Peter Fonda, and then there's the guy who stumbles onto the box of mesh tank tops and thinks to himself, "Oh yeah, I'm having those." And let me ask you this -- what's the point of a shirt that is mesh and open-front? Each of these outfits is also accented by a number of metal studs, because there's nothing you want more when you're a soldier in the desert than to adorn yourself with random bits of shiny metal. Rounding out the crew is a guy who looks like he might have almost sensibly started trying to dress like a Central Asian, figuring that Afghans must have a pretty good idea by this point about how to dress if you live in a place that is mostly a shithole gravel pit. But at some point, he started giving in to peer pressure and was like, "OK, I'll put on, umm, let's say some goggles and tie some bandannas around my thigh, but that's it!" And then there's the old guy, because you need an old guy so people can complain about how he's slowing everyone down. He may look familiar to some of you, and if so, there's a reason. That's Mike Cohen, and you probably saw his ass getting rescued by a three foot tall midget bad-ass in For Y'ur Height Only.
Trapper's gang spends most of their time wandering aimlessly through the desert and fighting with other leather-clad scavengers over food and water. In terms of fighting, Trapper and his men have the decided advantage, armed as they are with guns that cause stuff a couple feet away from the people they're aimed at to blow up, which then causes the target to fall out of a nearby tree or off a boulder. During one such skirmish, the men encounter a mysterious Filipino guy who might also look familiar if you are a connoisseur of Filipino action films. It's the one-armed executioner himself, Franco Guerrero. He tells the men of a fabulous paradise where you can live forever, eat mangos, whatever else it is people do in Paradise. He admits that he himself is over a hundred and fifty years old. The land lies through the jungle on the slopes of a forested mountain. Wait. There's a jungle? What kind of world reduced to a desert wasteland has a jungle? And furthermore, if there's a jungle, all full of fruits and nuts and bubbling streams of crystal clear water, don't you have a better chance of surviving if you live, I don't know, like on its outskirts? I mean, what with the rain and all that must fall to sustain it. And the abundant food and water we see in evidence. I know living in the actual jungle could be dangerous, but loitering around the edge has got to be better than squabbling with a fat guy in bondage clothes over a few drops of water.
Naturally, the interior of the jungle is fraught with peril, mostly in the form of stone-age tribes of natives and, later, stone-age tribes of midget natives who can be resurrected, none the worse for wear aside from the remnant sof a few ultra-bloddy squibs. Braving these terrors means that Trapper and his men can join their new pal in his Utopian society. Oh, and did we mention it's populated almost entirely by hot, topless women? Things look pretty good for Trapper, but some things are simply too good to be true. As the men frolic and prepare for the upcoming fertility rite orgy, the old guy begins to uncover the sinister secret of the society and the apparent immortality of its inhabitants. By the time things are sorted out, there will be a revolt by enslaved blue zombie guys, a war between the queen of the Amazons and her high priest fought with nothing but lasers they shoot out of their eyes with "pew pew pew" laser noises, the inevitable fiery destruction of the Amazon city, a fight between cut-rate John Saxon and the one-armed executioner, and a lot of the cornball philosophizing about the nature of man that makes these films so entertaining. At some point you may wonder why the secret zombie slaves of the Amazons all get to carry laser guns while the Amazons themselves carry spears. You'd think if you had a huge cache of futuristic laser weapons, you'd opt for those instead of bows and arrows. Or at the very least, you'd lock them up so the slaves can't get to them. But then, you probably don't understand about style and achieving a look. If you have a bunch of Amazons in fur bikinis carrying around laser guns -- man, that's like wearing a zoot suit and clipping a Blackberry onto the belt. There's not much point in undertaking the usual points of criticism one might look at in a movie. The dialog is dubbed, after all, and the only guy who really seems to be doing any acting is the dude who wears the yacht captain hat and the flip-up sunglasses. His acting style seems to be to channel the most irritating character from a biker film and combine that with that soldier from Hell of the Living Dead who decided to dress up in a tutu and tapdance even though they were in the middle of raiding a zombie-infested factory. I think this guy is supposed to be "the cool one," but he's about as cool as "the cool guy" in crappy 1980s teen sex comedies always was. However, he does still carry around a bag of pot, so I guess the future isn't all bad.
Suarez' direction is nondescript, but he manages to capture plenty of gratuitous boobies and explosions in the frame, and that's pretty much all I demand from a director. He keeps the movie moving at a decent enough pace for a movie that seems like it has no idea where it's going. And I guess there's a plot twist, sort of, though I think it was more o an oversight than an honest twist. One assumes than a band of scruffy, virile men being lead to a kingdom of sexy nude women with whom they must have sex means that some sinister consequence will occur, like everyone gets flayed alive afterward, or in the middle of sex, all the women reveal that they actually look like Martin Van Buren. But in this movie, the guys have their orgy, and then hey! Everything is cool afterward. Well, except for the zombie revolt and the eye laser battle, but that had nothing to do with the sex. So I guess bravo to Bobby Suarez for daring to posit that in a bleak and hopeless future, there's still a chance for guilt-free orgy sex with a city full of horny Amazon women. Warriors of the Apocalypse manages to be just as weird as Future Hunters, its sort of kindred spirit, but in a very different way. Although it still has the feeling of a film pieced together out of bits of other films, it's not nearly as incoherent or schizophrenic as Future Hunters. Within the context of the film, the plot actually makes some degree of sense, though in the real world, the logic to which Warriors of the Apocalypse adheres to is dubious, at best. I'm not sure what it is about nuclear war that causes, some 150 years later, half the world to become leather-clad extras from a Roger Corman biker film while the other half decide to revert to stone-age tribalism and spears. And the idea that a hidden nuclear reactor has made two people immortal, and they in turn make other people immortal (and would chose for one of those groups to be an army of pygmies in face paint) I think takes certain liberties with nuclear science.
But then, who the heck wants to watch a scientifically or socially accurate post apocalyptic movie when the alternative is full of nude Amazons, immortal kabuki midgets, exploding lost civilizations, and laser beam eye warfare? There's enough idiotic action and bizarre turns of events in this movie to make it one of the more enjoyable post apocalypse films that isn't Road Warrior. And you know it's all quality, because Bobby Suarez has won multiple awards for his work in Filipino cinema. Among those awards? The Cirio Santiago Memorial Award for introducing Filipino-produced movies in the international market.
Labels: Director: Bobby Suarez, Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Series: Project VHS, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 6:19 PM | 1 Comments Monday, September 29, 2008Angelfist Release Year: 1993Country: Philippines and United States Starring: Cat Sassoon, Melissa Moore, Michael Shaner, Sibel Birzag, Tony Carreon, John Crank, Roland Dantes, Sheila Lintan, Ken Metcalfe. Writer: Anthony Greene Director: Cirio Santiago Cinematographer: Joe Batac Music: Stephen Cohn Producer: Cirio Santiago and Roger Corman Alternate Titles: Fatal Angel Angelfist, aside from being a nonsensical title, was a video box cover that haunted my friends and I for many years. It was perched right up at the front entrance of Pick of the Flicks in Gainesville, Florida, and featured a blonde chick in an ugly leotard doing what has to be one of the most awkward high kicks I've ever seen, while holding her arms in this weird little curled-up T-Rex position. It was perhaps the single most ludicrous martial arts movie box cover pose I'd ever seen, at least until those Matrix movies made that completely silly looking Spiderman-meets-chicken jump/pose/kick inexplicably popular. I know guys did it in old kungfu films too, and it looked just as silly then, unless they happen to be wearing one of those silver wigs that is supposed to make you look like an old master even if you have the face of a guy in his twenties. Also, if you do that kick, the only way to get any power from such an awkward position is if a foley artist loops in the screech of a hawk or an eagle right as you jump Anyway, as much as we pointed and laughed at Angelfist, which also triumphantly proclaimed "Starring Eight Billion Time American Karate Champion Cat Sassoon" or something to that effect, we never actually got around to renting it. At the time, we had so many old Shaw Bros. and Ocean Shores releases to work through that piddling around with a Roger Corman karate movie seemed rather a poor use of our time. Alas, I was so young and naive back then, and in my then recently discovered fervor for Hong Kong action cinema, I turned my nose up at so many films that deserved to have noses turned up around them. But now I know better and willingly embrace such films. Thus, back when skinnyguy.com was still around and you buy 50 crappy VHS action and kungfu films for like five bucks, I ended up with my very own copy of Angelfist, along with about a hundred Godfrey Ho/Thomas Tang/Joseph Lai ninja movies starring Richard Harrison. So whenever I complain to you about financial woes, you can always respond by going, "Don't you own copies of Ninja Phantom Heroes and Diamond Ninja Force?" And I will have to hang my head in shame, even if deep inside I am secretly proud of owning such movies.
Just as I was pleased that "post apocalyptic rollerskating movie" is not a description of a single film but of an entire genre, so too am I happy that "movies featuring nude kickboxing" yields expansive enough results that I can sit back and say, "You know, I think I'm going to become an expert in films that feature nude kickboxing." Angelfist certainly doesn't fail to deliver in the nude kickboxing arena, though it does fail to deliver in just about every aspect that a movie might otherwise strive to achieve. It joins a storied list of films that includes Angel of Destruction, Redline, Girls on the Run, Rolls Royce Baby, and Kungfu Leung Strikes Emanuelle in my collection of nude kickboxing movies. Rolls Royce Baby in particular teaches us that there's nothing appealing about watching a sleazy Eurotrash lounge lizard do full frontal nude katas. In general, nude karate is not a sport that lends itself to the male anatomy, though I don't begrudge any man who chooses to make it his chosen form of exercise. If only they'd had the good sense to accompany his workout with a similar scene of Lina Romay, but she's spending too much time in that movie standing on her head while nude for no good reason other than it never hurts to feature Lina Romay nude and standing on her head. I know there are plenty of other films out there featuring nude martial arts, and I intend, one by one and while dressed like Coffin Joe, to possess them all. So it turns out the awkward looking blonde on the video box isn't Cat Sassoon at all. We'll get to the blonde later. It turns out Cat Sassoon is the daughter (in real life, that is) of shampoo empire tyrant Vidal Sassoon, who I assume achieved his high rank in society through liberal use of karate fighting thugs, and even now he forces hobos and prostitutes to fight in underground martial arts tournaments where the combat takes place in huge pools of mousse. Catya's biography is one of a typical "live fast, die young" (she did both) Hollywood kid, and I'm not sure at what point she picked up the various karate championships the movie celebrates as being in her possession. She seems to have spent most of her short life doing drugs and being a supermodel thanks, in large part, to the fact that she was the daughter of Vidal Sassoon and Beverly Adams. At some point, she parlayed her modeling and "daughter of Vidal Sassoon and Beverly Adams" gig into a movie career and appeared in the film Tuff Turf, the movie that had the unenviable task of making James Spader seem like a bad-ass. From there, it was straight to the bottom of the barrel, and before too long she found herself in The Philippines working in films by our main man, Cirio Santiago.
As far as authentic martial arts bad-assery, and despite the claims made on the cover of this movie, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Cat Sassoon was possibly one of the very worst of the many "next female martial arts superstars" that surfaced in the 80s and 90s with dubious claims about winning international tournaments and Vidal Sassoon Hair Mousse Kumutes. She's definitely not to be measured alongside actual bad-asses like Cynthia Rothrock and Karen Shepherd, both of whom made awesome movies in Hong Kong before coming back to America to make movies that were just awesomely bad. But they both knew their stuff, cut their teeth in Hong Kong, and had easy to verify martial arts careers. The waters get murky really quickly beyond them, though. I'm ranking Sassoon -- who must have been slapped on the back while eating lemons, thus freezing her face in an expression of pouty disgust (Joe Bob Briggs described her as having "the fist of an angel and the face of a fist") -- below Mimi Lesseos (who at least worked as pro wrestler before trying her hand at being the next direct-to-video female martial arts superstar), although Angelfist is remarkably better than anything Mimi Lesseos ever starred in. Probably above Maria Ford, who did time in her own bargain basement Filipino nude kickboxing movie, Angel of Destruction). It's a hard call. And maybe above some of the women who tried to do martial arts in various Andy Sidaris T&A masterpieces. But whatever the case, when you're locked in a battle for last with Maria Ford and former Playboy Playmates, well, you're a long way from the surface. Plus, the trailer for Angel of Destruction has the narrator saying "She gets caught between a rock...and a hard place!" as they show Maria Ford kicking a rapist in the balls.
The claim is that she's a "WKA North American Forms and Weapons champion," but if this is true, the WKA doesn't seem aware of it. Of course, I suppose Cirio Santiago could have created a different WKA than the World Kickboxing Association. Maybe it stands for "Women Kick Ass" or "Wonderfully Krappy Awfulness." I think everyone who ever starred in a martial arts movie got to be the champion of some organization or tournament. In 1992, my friends and I shot about two minutes of an epic we were going to make about a Misfits-loving zombie who returns from the grave, is disillusioned by how punk went all hippie-crusty or metal, and so decides to destroy the world, with only the staff of a local Chinese restaurant to stop him. I think as a result of filming those two minutes, which consisted I think of footage of me jumping over a railing in a parking garage, I became de facto two time world champion in forms and combat for the Global Regional Karate Union of North Florida, twice removed. So if we're going to drown at the bottom of the barrel with the late Cat Sassoon, we might as well do it in the company of another daft movie by Cirio Santiago. Of course, this movie, with its gratuitous martial arts tournament footage, is positively rational compared to some of his more feverish efforts, but that still leaves plenty of room for you to shake your head and say, "No! No. Wait, what?" The gist of the thing is this: while either vacationing or working as a photographer or participating in a karate tournament, a woman named Kristie (Sibel Birzag, who appeared in Angelfist and...oh, just Angelfist) catches an assassination on film. Although she phones the American embassy with news that one of their top generals has just been murdered by dudes with pantyhose on their head, and that she has photographic evidence, no one seems to consider it all that big a deal. Must be the same army as we saw in American Ninja, where the continuous slaughter of American soldiers at the hands of Filipino ninja hijackers didn't really raise much of an eyebrow. So rather than go into the embassy or the police or anything, she goes and competes in a round or two at a karate tournament where all the women wear sexy leotards, halter tops, and thongs instead of actual martial arts clothing. She then has the film delivered not to the embassy or the police, but to a friend who works as a nude dancer at a club that specializes in the world's least enthusiastic stripping. And then, of course, she gets murdered.
When the woman's Los Angeles cop sister (Cat Sassoon) gets wind of the murder, she travels to the Philippines to solve the case and deal out plodding kungfu justice to those responsible, even though the local authorities use the "I know you're a cop back in LA, but this is Manila. We do things different here," shtick, which has never deterred a single rogue cop ever. It's no more effective than "I just spent the entire morning getting my ass chewed out by the mayor," or "your methods are too extreme, Inspector Nico!" Along the way, Cat will enter the martial arts tournament in place of her sister, since movies have taught us that all gangsters and would-be revolutionaries are also shady martial arts tournament promoters. Ostensibly, this has something to do with getting close to...I don't know. There were some Mexican drug dealers, or something, and some of the revolutionaries responsible for the murder are involved. Look, I srt of lost track, so I'm going to say that Cat enters the tournament so that she can keep land developers from knocking down the local community center in order to make room for a shopping mall. The primary purpose of the tournament really is to pad out the film's running time with lots of really bad martial arts bouts and only slightly more interesting shower scenes in which Cat Sassoon proves that no amount of shampoo empire money can buy you decent martial arts skills or a decent pair of fake boobs in the early 1990s. I'm sure hers, which she shows often in this film, cost a lot of money, but that doesn't stop them from looking like someone took a couple honeydews, wrapped them in those pointy little knit caps worn by Tibetans and hippies, then strapped them to Cat's chest. There's just nothing right about them, and this is one of those extremely rare moments where the nudity comes and I say, "You know, why don't we just put those away for now?" I mean, they're not Minka absurd -- not that I know who Minka is or know anything about her ludicrously gigantic novelty breasts -- but seriously. Knocker-related technology still had a long way to go when young Catya bought hers. Anyway, you better get used to them, because as I said, she pulls them out pretty often, God bless 'er, including during a scene where she is attacked in her hotel room by a bunch of ninjas and has to fight them off while wearing nothing but a pair of panties. The two most striking things about this scene are how awful Cat's martial arts are, and how no matter how much she tumbles and stumble around, her breasts remain completely motionless, like a couple of gyroscopes with a fake tan.
And she's not alone. Joining her in her quest to showcase gratuitous boob shots and astoundingly awful karate fights is lovely Melissa Moore and her much more natural breasts, a Versailles (that's vur-sails to y'all -- if the French didn't want you to pronounce the "L's" then they shouldn't have put them in the word), Kentucky native who found herself slumming it in all sorts of movies like Hard to Die, Vampire Cop, and Sorority House Massacre 2, among many others. She's the one who gets to do the silly pose that so intrigues me on the box cover, and the martial arts she showcases in the film don't look any less awkward. You know, though, maybe it's me. I mean, I'm no kungfu master, so maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe the proper fighting stance for the martial art they're using is indeed to curl your arms up like an Incan ice mummy and mash them against your boobs. Whatever the case, I like Melissa regardless, even though her part consists mostly of sitting in the audience and watching Cat fight while nodding to herself. Well, when she's not busy taking showers. And apparently someone else likes her too, because there's a comic book about her, Melissa Moore, Bodyguard from Draculina Publishing. I'm not a big reader of comic books, so I don't know too much about it. Somehow, I think that even if I was a big reader of comic books, I still wouldn't know too much about it. Never the less, I'm still glad it exists. So now that I've had some fun ribbing the ladies, let me say that I love that both of them are willing to give their all, however much that may be, for a movie like this. I mean, good or bad, Moore and Sassoon are in there, taking their lumps, showing the goods, and starring in crummy kungfu films. I love 'em both for it. Working the Corman-Santiago Manila circuit can't be steak and onions, as stories from the likes of Walter Hill and Pam Grier attest to. And I don't know about Melissa Moore, but Cat Sassoon certainly didn't have to do anything more than sit back and live off the sudsy wealth of her family. Instead, she went to the Philippines and made low budget action films. Good for her! And as for Moore -- what can I say? I have a soft spot for Kentucky girls. I'd love to do a long interview with her or pay to have her write a book. As I've said many times before and will doubtless say as long as I keep reviewing crappy low budget Roger Corman productions shot in the Philippines, the stories behind these films is probably way more interesting than both the film itself and the making of stories behind the standard Hollywood project. So if I poke fun at the ladies, it's done out of love and with nothing but good nature.
Not so much, though, for the comedy relief male sidekick and the usual host of "You kicked their ass? But...but...you're a woman!" and "That was amazing! Could you teach me some of that kungfu jazz?" shtick that invariably follows him and his Chess King wardrobe around. And since I've cracked jokes at the expense of poor Cat Sassoon, who wanted nothing more than to make shitty kungfu films and show us her fake boobs as often as possible (and don't think I don't appreciate her for that), I might as well mention that actor Michael Shaner looks like someone mashed Matthew Modine and John Malkovich together. There's something not quite human about him, like he's a clay-faced shape shifter doing its best to approximate what a human douchebag looks like. The big difference between Shaner and Sassoon is that by the end of the movie, Sassoon's crappy acting, terrible martial arts, willingness to show off her weird fake boobs, and her overall strange appearance won me over. Heck, I'm ready to buy more Cat Sassoon action films on 50 cent VHS. Conversely, I want to punch Shaner in the face, even though I know it's sculpted out of clay and butterscotch pudding, or whatever shape shifters are made of. You know what, Shaner? Your wardrobe isn't even good enough to be Chess King. Both Moore and Sassoon turn in nude kickboxing scenes, though I think Moore's only counts half a point since it's just a ripped shirt. But Sassoon goes full on, in just her lacy red panties, showing off her otherworldly fake boobs and accompanying fake tan that, coupled with the oily misting job they did on her to give her that fresh out of the shower appearance, makes her look like a particularly aggressive Nathan's brand hot dog. This is without a doubt the second finest nude kickboxing scene I've witnessed (it's going to be hard to beat the scene from Girls on the Run, though, because that's a nude kickboxing scene directed by Cory Yuen Kwai). But Cat Sassoon holds nothing back. She throws all her energy into the scene, jumping around awkwardly, growling, yelling, and a few times doing spinning kicks while her face is obscured by a huge dollop of Vaseline or something on the lens.
I think they might have been trying to obscure the fact that a male stuntman with fake orange boobs attached to him was standing in for Sassoon. If that's the case, oh man! What must that guy's day have been like? One stuntman shows up and hears, "Well, you're in the fight, and Cat Sassoon is going to be all greased up and naked, and she's going to kick you then straddle your face." And yeah, Cat may look a little weird, but she has an odd sort of cuteness about her, and if she's nude and straddling my face then I still call that a good day at work. So the other stuntman is like, "This is gonna be an awesome day!" until he finds out that his job is to grease up, put on fake boobs and a pair of red lace panties, and be a stand-in for a nude kickboxing woman. And then his children will ask, "What did you do at work today, daddy?" The rest of the cast seems comprised largely of Filipino kickboxing women who show up for matches and disappear again during the shower scenes (I've never seen a Filipino martial arts tournament locker room with so many white women in it). I guess most of these women have some actual martial arts background, but that doesn't matter all that much since real life tournament martial arts are pretty boring to watch if you're not an avid practitioner. They're not any better here and are probably somewhat worse. There are also a couple rebels, and the usual assortment of white guys playing generals, diplomats, and other figures of authority. None of them are really worth mentioning. There is a guy named Mr. Carrion, which I suppose is a slightly better name than Mr. Rottin' Guts McGee, but just barely.
This is one of the films, one of the many films, that force me to grapple with an assortment of moral questions related to passing judgment. Because this is a terrible, terrible movie, and I like it. It's completely idiotic, and I like it. I have no justification for this adoration, and certainly I hesitate to tell others they should check it out. The acting is bad, the martial arts are worse, and the direction is nondescript. But like Cat Sassoon herself, somehow all the negatives add up to a decently dumb and entertaining 80 minutes. The action may indeed be bad, but there's a lot of it. Like Melissa Moore and Cat Sassoon, all this movie wants to do is entertain you. And like its stars, the results are pretty feeble even if the effort is enthusiastic. Liking bad movies is pretty common. Liking bad martial arts movies is a much more, let's say exclusive, calling. They're still way easier to like than bad comedies and bad Steven Seagal films, but in a genre where bad stories and acting are glossed over in light of good action scenes, you better have good action scenes. When you don't, there's not much going on. Except, you know, nude kickboxing. Odd that movies like this are why, in the 1990s, I would write long screeds about how dreadful American martial arts movies are and how it's a shame the US isn't paying more attention to Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Now that the US is paying more attention to those guys -- a bit too late for them to really deliver much that is worth paying attention to, sadly -- I find that the crummy little low-budget productions from America and the Philippines have grown more attractive to me. And isn't it funny that a number of the Hong Kong action stars of the 80s and 90s, once the action boom faded, sought to ply their trade in The Philippines. Somewhere in Hong Kong, the Chinese Roger Corman has Yuen Biao and Yukari Oshima in his office and is, no doubt, reaching for the bright red rotary dial phone that connects all producers in the world directly to Cirio Santiago.   Labels: Director: Cirio Santiago, Martial Arts: Karate, Series: Project VHS, Year: 1993 posted by Keith at 3:42 PM | 10 Comments Tuesday, September 09, 2008Future Hunters Release Year: 1986Country: United States Starring: Robert Patrick, Linda Carol, Ed Crick, Bob Schott, David Light, Paul Holmes, Peter Shilton, Ursula Marquez, Elizabeth Oropesa, Bruce Le, Hwang Jang Lee, Richard Norton. Writer: J. Lee Thompson Director: Cirio Santiago Cinematographer: Ricardo Remias Music: Ron Jones Producer: Anthony Maharaj Alternate Titles: Spear of Destiny; Deadly Quest Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us It can't be! It just can't be! I'm only a couple films into my Project VHS reviews, in which I take a written tour of some of my strangest old VHS tapes, and I'm finding that the common thread running through all the films I've selected for this treatment is that they lead me almost instantly to refer to them as Lovecraftian horrors that cannot be processed by the feeble mind of man, and thus merely witnessing them will destroy you and turn you mad. And it turns out, that comparison can easily be sustained in our next foray into video cassette nostalgia. Although not nearly as batshit bizarre as Roller Blade, Cirio Santiago's Future Hunters still resembles some ancient horror buried for millions of years at the bottom of a pit beneath some black and unnamed ruin of a city comprised primarily of forms and colors that have no corresponding point of reference in our own universe. In fact, when first I purchased this tape, I ended up returning it as defective. I bought it used from a video store that was liquidating its stock back in 1995 or so, and a few days later, I popped it in the VCR and set about watching it while I did some simple household chores. The film started out as a Road Warrior rip-off, with occasional Hong Kong action film villain Richard Norton tearing around the post-apocalyptic wasteland in a muscle car. Familiar enough territory. Then I got distracted, possibly by the discovery that our refrigerator had been leaking, and the leakage had turned into a putrid yellowish goo underneath the crisper drawers (man, talk about unspeakable Lovecraftian horrors). When I finished toweling up the gelatinous gloop and throwing the towel onto the roof of the credit union across the parking lot, I returned to the living room and found that someone had recorded a different movie over the one I'd purchased. Because there on my massive ten-inch screen was a Bruce Le kungfu film, with the famous Bruce Lee imitator locked in mortal kicking combat with Hwang Jang Lee wearing a silver wig.
I took the movie back, told them of the error, and had my $3.00 returned to me. Oddly, a couple weeks later, I found the film for sale again at a different video store, and for some reason or other, I purchased it. It was like unwittingly being saved from purchasing some accursed item only to equally unwittingly acquire the item again. It was destiny. So once again, I went home and popped it in the VCR to watch while taking care of some chores. It was around this time that I discovered some hamsters had escaped their twisting tube universe and had gone feral, living in the walls of our duplex. This revelation came shortly after noticing that the area we used to clean out our various aquariums -- a flower garden owned by the aforementioned credit union -- had been turned by uneaten hamster trail mix into a garden of sunflowers and corn stalks, which we eventually harvested and ate while the poor guy in charge of that small plot of flora was wondering how the hell his flower garden turned into a corn field. Anyway, after I gave up trying to corner one of the wily rodents and resigned myself at last to being the guy who destroyed the north Florida ecosystem by introducing wild hamsters into its delicate balance, I returned to the movie only to find out, son of a bitch! It was that damn Bruce Le movie again! Although I flirted with the idea that somehow the film had been purchased by someone who promptly resold it to a different video store that then put it on sale for me to end up purchasing a second time, the more logical theory emerged that this movie was just really schizophrenic, and what had started out as a Mad Max movie morphed at some point into a film about Bruce Le wearing a modern track suit and fighting a guy who looks to have stepped out of the Chinese middle ages. So I decided that I was going to have to sit down and actually pay attention to this movie if I hoped to ever unravel its tantalizing mysteries. What I discovered was even more bizarre than initially I suspected.
So as I saw the first time around, the movie opens in the near future. Society has crumbled and the earth has been ravaged by nuclear war which, in the 1980s, was as versatile an explanation for pretty much anything as "hacking" is today. Depending on the movie, nuclear war could turn the world into a desert wasteland populated by S&M punks or a lush jungle populated by Amazons, or it could somehow cause dinosaurs to come back. Similarly, if your movie requires someone to get some piece of information or control over some device they couldn't possibly achieve, all you need to do is write the following line of dialogue: "If I can just hack in through the back door...we're in!" then you can do pretty much any damn thing you want. So it's the future. A guy named Matthew (Richard Norton), is speeding around in the desert looking for the fabled Spear of Longinus, the weapon that pierced the side of Christ during his crucifixion. According to this film, the loosely defined good guys of the future need the spear so they can travel back in time and prevent nuclear obliteration from ever having happened. Unfortunately, Matthew is pursued by the bad guys, lead by someone named Zaar (unfortunately not played by Robert Z'Dar), and where as Matthew has a cool car, awesome hair, and the same gun I think Richard Norton had last time he was a post-apocalyptic hero (that being in the film Equalizer 2000), Zaar has tanks and wears a gratuitous cape. They capture Matthew, bring him to within a stone's throw of where he was going anyway, then let him escape. Then they chase Matthew to some crumbling temple where he finds the mythical spear with relative ease, only to have the full brunt of Zaar's armored divisions brought down on his head. Then we cut to 1986, where college student Michelle (Linda Carol) is randomly poking around the ruins of the very same temple of the future with her boyfriend, Terminator 2 (Robert Patrick) because her "big exam is coming up." Once again I have to question the colleges attended by people in B-movies. In what class can you prepare for your test by driving out to an old church frequented, as we will soon learn, by rapist biker gangs, and looking at it with no real defined purpose? And if it's archaeology or art history or something, wouldn't other members of the class be out there as well, or at the very least, shouldn't you be doing something a little more scientific than wandering aimlessly while a Terminator 2 sits on the steps and complains about being bored and needing to get back to town so he can kill John Conner? Or shouldn't the professor at least have warned his female students that the deserted site is routinely patrolled by vicious gangs of rapists? This is as unacademic as the classrooms in movies like Gor where the entire curriculum seems to be based around listening to a professor make random proclamations about some ridiculous pet theory of his, or the grad student in Cannibal Ferox whose thesis was "Cannibals don't exist any more" when everyone else had to write thesis papers like "Aspects on Process Engineering in the Finnish Pulp and Paper Industry."
Michelle's investigative archaeology is accompanied by that 80s direct-to-video action film music that is so hard to explain yet so familiar as soon as you hear it. It's a playful little number, and the sound isn't straight synth nor is it a mimic of the piano, exactly. But in pretty much every 80s direct-to-video action film, they used this style of theme for the "makin' love" scene or the "just horsin' around" scene. I'm a bit surprised that there is no Future Hunters soundtrack on Varese Sarabande, as "Soundtrack on Varese Sarabande" is the single most repeated phrase in the entire Psychotronic Video Guide. The world is a darker place for not having a CD quality recording of "Love Theme from Future Hunters." After this goes on a spell, Michelle and Terminator 2 are randomly attacked by a biker gang who, for some reason or another, like to troll the ruins of out in the middle of nowhere churches looking for loving young college couples to terrorize. I guess they didn't realize they were messing with Terminator 2, who I assumed would instantly turn his pinky finger into a long silver spike and stick it in someone's shoulders (a painful sensation not unlike the one you'll feel watching most of this movie), then follow it up with that very determined "running after the vehicle" shtick all Terminator 2's are wont to do. But then this was 1986, and we were barely done with Terminator 1, so I guess Robert Patrick didn't have his Terminator 2 powers yet (though later in the film he does do a determined run after a jeep in a scene I'm sure he included on his highlight reel to get the T2 job). As a result, he gets his ass kicked and is forced to soothe his bruised ego with the knowledge that it won't be too long before he's strong enough to beat up the gaunt, corpse-like Edward Furlong, who would achieve the dubious honor in his twenties of looking less vital and more deathly than Peter Cushing (whose picture is in the dictionary next to the word "gaunt") did a month after he died.
Michelle is about to be on the bad end of an 80s action film style raping when Richard Norton wanders up out of nowhere and beats the tar out of the bikers before getting shot and handing the Spear of Longinus over to Michelle, stammering that she must use it to prevent the apocalypse. So I guess the time travel thing works, even though they later explain that the spear can't possibly work unless you have both halves of it (the shaft is elsewhere). He also stammers a few names, all of whom, conveniently, are related in some way to the community college (or Touro) Michelle attends. And then Matthew dies and goes off to get more use out of his costume in Equalizer 2000. As is often the case with these types of films, I realize that I'm straying a bit too far into the realm of plot synopsis, but once again I feel it's justified, as there's not much hope otherwise of explaining just how cracked in the head a film like Future Hunters can manage to be. Because before too long, Michelle and T2 are on the run from a secret society of Nazis who want to get the Spear and use it to cause the apocalypse we saw before the credits. Which is kind of odd, as they couldn't possibly have possessed the spear the first time they caused the future apocalypse -- which is the first and only time I'll mention the underlying stupidity of the entire time travel plotline, since for starters is gets dropped almost immediately, but mostly because no one should bend themselves out of shape worrying about shoddy time travel threads in Future Hunters, a movie that, soon enough, will present us with everything from an impromptu kungfu film to an army of stone age midgets to a secret society of sexy Filipina Amazons in the jungles of South Asia.
Also, if Matthew retrieved the Spear from it's ancient resting place half an hour outside of Los Angeles (how the hell did it get there?), then traveled back in time to that same location, isn't the 1986 Spear of Longinus still in the temple? Maybe the Nazi bad guys should just use that one instead of the future Spear of Longinus. Michelle and T2, whose name in this movie is actually Slade (and I mention this only because Robert Patrick and Richard Norton appear together in Equalizer 2000, where Norton's character is named Slade -- Santiago apparently has a fetish for the name) must find the elusive Professor Hightower, and doing so leads them to Hong Kong. I guess her big test wasn't that important after all. Also, I guess she's incredibly rich to be able to close up her crappy desert diner and fly to Hong Kong that same day. But then I expect no less from a naive young college girl who, for some inexplicable reason is able to outdrive, outfox, and outshoot the various trained killers sent after her. Robert Patrick spends most of the movie being believably beaten up, on the other hand. I hope you like the sight of him lying on his back with a dumb look on his face, because you're going to get it a lot. T2 has a friend who is a taxi driver in Hong Kong, but more importantly, he has a friend who is a taxi driver and is also Bruce Le, though as was his lot in life, he's often miscredited as Bruce Li. Because a random taxi driver in Hong Kong will obviously be in tune with rumors surrounding missing anthropology professors from small American colleges, he informs our duo that Hightower's last reported location was at the Forbidden Pagoda, a tourist attraction which no one is allowed to enter lest they incur the wrath of high kicking kungfu warrior Hwang Jang Lee, dressed like he just came from the set of the latest Seasonal Films production, or possibly from a kungfu film themed amusement park. When T2 tries to enter the pagoda, he gets whupped, which leads to a lengthy fight scene between Le and Hwang, complete with the sudden introduction of kungfu film sound effects. When the monk is finally dispatched -- not via the fight, but because a sniper attempts to kill T2 and kills the monk instead -- Le and T2 enter the pagoda, look around for for a few seconds, then testily proclaim, "Nothing!" Then they walk away. Shouldn't they report the murder to the police or something? Worst tourist attraction in Hong Kong!
Oddly, this isn't the first time Bruce Le has found himself randomly inserted into a film for a gratuitous if not unwelcome fight scene. A while back, I was wondering if Bollywood, always quick to exploit a trend, had ever produced any Bruce Lee exploitation films (films that cast someone with a similar name or haircut in an attempt to sucker people into thinking they're going to see the real Bruce Lee). Eventually, I came across Katilon Ke Kaatil starring Dharmendra and featuring a scene were he randomly walks by Bruce Le -- who hasn't been in the film before and won't appear again -- and a fight breaks out. I mean, I assume that if Dharmendra and Bruce Le swagger by each other, a fight is going to break out, but it had nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie. I guess there was a period in the 1980s when directors in need of some extra action and running time could put in an order for Bruce Le, and they'd just ship him from Hong Kong in a wooden crate to wherever they needed him. Today, he remains in a huge warehouse full of crates like the one in Indiana Jones, stored alongside the likes of Sho Kosugi, patiently meditating until the day their services are once more required to save the world from the awakening of Cthulhu. So having now seen exactly how the film suddenly becomes a kungfu film for ten minutes, it still doesn't make any more sense than when I thought someone had mistakenly recorded Eagle vs. Silver Fox over part of Future Hunters. I mean, all that for absolutely no reason? I was about to swear that this whole film was assembled piecemeal out of other equally bad but less nonsensical films, but that isn't the case. I mean, I saw Hwang Jang Lee and Robert Patrick in the same shot together, and this was before the world possessed the technology to digitally insert Robert Patrick into every movie ever made, which I assume we're going to do. And even though I knew it wasn't the case, the rest of the movie caused the same feeling. Things get no less logical when Michelle and T2 follow the trail to South Asia with a band of Nazis hot on their trail. There, in the jungles, they encounter a tribe of stone-age midgets who aid them in their quest to recover the shaft of the spear, which is in a cave guarded by a city of scantily clad Amazons. And when one of these movies ends up in an Amazon city, you know you're going to get at least one really awkwardly staged catfight. In the end, an earthquake happens for no reason, foam rocks bounce harmlessly off people who show up bloody and dead in the next shot, and Michelle randomly holds up the spear, causing all the midgets to cheer and the film to end.
Before we go much further, like talking about how the Spear doesn't even do anything in the end, let's discuss the career of one Cirio Santiago, the Roger Corman of The Philippines -- though I suspect them of actually being the same man. Understanding a film like Future Hunters may be as impossible as understanding the full implications of quantum mechanics, but understanding a little about Santiago might help us at least grasp a film like this on some elementary, superficial level. Future Hunters and the many films like it bearing Santiago's name are lasting monuments to nepotism. Santiago is the son of a studio founder, which might help explain how Santiago got his first jobs. And those jobs were as producer on a film called Cavalry Command in 1963 and as director of 1964's Darna and the Tree Monster, an entry in a popular pulp superheroine adventure series. It was in the 1970s, however, that Santiago really came into his own. Roger Corman, always on the prowl for ways to save money, hit upon The Philippines as the ideal location for many of his productions. The sprawling island-nation has long been and continues to be the stand-in for a variety of places populated by chubby guys with thick mustaches and Hawaiian shirts. It was the go-to place for any film set in Vietnam or Cambodia, at least until Thailand became a more viable option. Future Hunters is one of the few movies to actually attempt -- and fail -- to pass the streets of Manila off as downtown Los Angeles, but hey, you gotta respect the moxie. Corman most famously produced a series of sweaty, lesbian-filled women in prison films in The Philippines, and it's probably around this time that he struck up his relationship with Cirio Santiago. Although he still produced and directed local fare during that time, Santiago became the go-to guy for American co-productions slumming it in Manila. He produced and/or directed a number of blaxploitation films throughout the 70s, and in the 80s he split his time between cheapjack action films -- mostly set in Vietnam -- and cheapjack post apocalypse scifi, almost all of which got distributed by one Roger Corman company or another in the United States, much to the delight and puzzlement of people like me who prowled video store shelves in search of anything with a title like Machete Maidens of Mora Tao.
Future Hunters may be his crowning achievement, a film of such stunning incompetence, with such total disregard for making even the least bit of sense, that one can hardly process it. Seriously, by the time ancient Mongol horsemen attack the 1986 Nazi camp in The Philippines, you're not even going to care any more. This film contains more individual movies and genres than most Bollywood films. All it lacks is a song and dance number, but what it lacks in terms of item numbers by Helen it more than makes up for with shots of young Robert Patrick lying spread eagle on a bed in his tighty whities. By the time we got to the end and realized that the Spear of Longinus serves no purpose whatsoever, all I was capable of doing was lying in the corner, giggling uncontrollably and scrawling esoteric runes from floor to ceiling on every wall in my padded cell. Seriously, what the hell were we thinking in the 1980s? I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm happy that amazingly freakish crap like this got made, but that doesn't mean I don't wonder how the hell it happened. Cirio Santiago has, in his career, flirted with competence; Future Warriors doesn't even flirt with coherence. This film simply shouldn't be, and like I said, even though the footage is original, it feels like the entire movie was pasted together out of other shot-in-The-Philippines movies. Both the Amazons and the midget tribe ideas would return in Warriors of the Apocalypse, directed by Bobby Suarez, who on some days I would swear is just the third part of the unholy trinity formed along with Corman and Santiago. Richard Norton driving around in the post-apocalyptic wasteland would show up again in Santiago's own Equalizer 2000.
But perhaps weirdest of all is that a few years after this, Robert Patrick would appear in another "time travelin' to save the future" movie, albeit one with a considerably larger profile. I can only assume that young James Cameron was sitting around one day and, much like me, popped a copy of Future Hunters into the VCR and, mere minutes later, thought to himself, "I have to get this guy to be the terminator in my next movie!" But as the guy who plays the king of the caveman midgets wasn't available, Cameron did the next best thing and cast the annoying redneck prone to lying around in his man panties as an unstoppable killing machine from the future. Patrick's performance, like that of his co-star Linda Carol, consists entirely of plaintive whining. "We have to protect the spear!" "Aww, dang, Ah don' wanna protect tha spear!" "Oh come on! Help me protect the spear!" After spending a few minutes with them, nuclear apocalypse is suddenly looking like the preferable choice. When watching the endless banter, when watching him get beat up by Hwang Jang Lee, when watching the T2000 buffalo shots, remember that this guy somehow, despite being in Future Hunters, went on to star in not one, but two of the hugest franchises of all time, although one of those came after the characters people actually gave a damn about had already left the show. Still, the rest of the cast wasn't nearly as lucky. Well, except for Hwang and Le, but I'm pretty sure they're only in this movie because Cirio accidentally stumbled onto the set of a film they were already filming and decided to work it into his own movie. I mean, you never really need an excuse to pad your film with a fight scene between Hwang Jang Lee and Bruce Le.
Linda Carol had a smattering of film and television appearances of little consequence, the highest profile of which was the women in prison spoof Reform School Girls. Everyone in that movie had the misfortune of having to compete with half naked Wendy O. Williams of The Plasmatics as she howled like a banshee and rode a school bus to hell. Everyone else had solid careers in TV shows you only pretend to like but never actually watched (I don't care what they say on VH1 specials or what the camp appeal of William Shatner may be; you did not watch T.J. Hooker) and films like Bloodfist VI, but they must all be watching Robert Patrick in Terminator 2 and thinking, "Holy shit, I once hit that guy with a floor lamp while he was in his underwear." And Aussie ass-kicker Richard Norton, it goes without saying, is awesome, even though almost everything he's ever made stinks to high heaven. Of course, the end of the day means admitting that the individual pieces of this film are far more entertaining than the whole. For every minute we spend with bikini clad Amazons and warrior midgets, we spend twice as much time with Slade and Michelle as they bicker with each other. Still, this movie is just weird enough to make it fascinating so long as you are a viewer possessed of some high degree of constitution. It's no Roller Blade, but where else are you going to get a movie where a guy time travels back to 1986 to give the spear of destiny to Terminator 2 so he can show it to Bruce Le while running from Nazis who get attacked by Genghis Khan's hordes while they are surrounded by caveman midgets and Filipina Amazons? I'm a sucker for movies like this, and Future Hunters won me over. If Fantasy Mission Force has a kindred spirit, this film is it. Oh, and what ever became of ol' Cirio Santiago you may ask? Well, in 1995 he was appointed by none other than Filipino President Fidel Ramos as head of the Philippines Film Development Fund. The Fund's purpose? "To improve the quality of Filipino films." Labels: Director: Cirio Santiago, Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Series: Project VHS, Year: 1986 posted by Keith at 12:44 AM | 4 Comments Friday, September 05, 2008Roller Blade Release Year: 1986Country: United States Starring: Suzanne Solari, Jeff Hutchinson, Shaun Michelle, Katina Garner, Sam Mann, Robby Taylor, Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray, Erin Michael, Michael Cofield, Pat McClung. Writer: Donald Jackson Director: Donald Jackson Cinematographer: Donald Jackson Music: Robert Garrett Producer: Donald Jackson Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us You know what I love? I love that "post apocalyptic rollerskating movie" isn't a description of a movie, but instead of an entire genre. Granted it's a genre created almost entirely by a single man, but when the man is dedicated and prolific enough, suddenly you have a whole section in the old time video store with sun-bleached VHS boxes on the shelves dedicated to movies where chicks on rollerskates gingerly navigate the rubble-strewn parking lots of post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, which is invariably going to be referred to as Lost Angeles, as it has been in so many of the crappy direct to video post-apoc films from the 1980s. That genre-creating, film making machine was Donald G. Jackson, and it is thanks entirely to him that we have the post-apocalypse rollerskating genre comprised of films like Roller Blade, Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force, The Rollerblade 7 and its inexplicably large number of sequels, and something called Rollergator, which is probably a different movie than the one I write in my head when I hear the name Rollergator. Assisting Jackson in fleshing out this strange little genre were Rick King (Prayer of the Rollerboys) and Alan Johnson (Solarbabies), but while their entries are merely stupid, Jackson's first contribution, the film that kicked off the genre, is so mind-bendingly strange and incompetent that it threatens to cease being a movie and become some entirely new and terrifying form of art that man was not meant to behold. Even after more viewings of Roller Blade than a grown man should admit to, the film still has the power to stun me in my tracks and leave me sitting in the corner, twitching uncontrollably and rocking back and forth with a trail of drool dangling from the corner of my mouth.
My inability to be anything other than struck dumb starts at the very first frame. The credits appear over an 80s style lens flare as, slowly, a teased-hair warrior from the future roller skates into view while being mirrored on the other side of the screen. It's at this precise moment that I said to myself, "I wonder what Donald Jackson would have to say about this film." So before I get too far into the film -- remembering that wandering into this film could mean that you will never emerge -- let's travel back in time to the 1980s, a decade many of you are too young to remember as anything but a misrepresented decade on assorted VH1 specials where people born in 1988 reminisce fondly about 1984. While I have memories of the 1970s, my formative years were spent in the neon-drenched, chrome-trimmed decade of the 1980s. One of the most popular ways to pass the time back then, especially in the days before I could drive and do cool punk rock stuff like stand around in a parking lot with a few other people, was to go to skating parties. There, at Champs Rollerdrome in historic Crestwood, Kentucky, you could strap on those tan rental skates with the orange laces and hit the giant wood oval while the DJ ran through a series of 80s skating hits like "Rockit," "Thriller," Van Halen's "Jump," and for the couples only skate, "Hold Me Now" by The Thompson Twins. In between, you could hang in the video arcade and show off your Centipede skills, mack on chicks at the concession stand, or find a carpeted bench in a dark corner of the expansive "drome" and make out with the girl of your choice. You could also purchase from vending machines stickers for your sticker album or a sequined Michael Jackson glove. "No re-entry" meant that would-be hoods couldn't go out to the parking lot and have a smoke without having to pay again if they wanted to come back in.
Into this fray I entered, and while many writers would like to cast their childhood as a dark, abused period full of alcoholic parents, social alienation, and brutal bullies, the fact is I had a lot of fun as a kid, and I loved 7th grade skating parties. Being small in stature and possessed of decent agility honed I assume from years of climbing trees and haystacks, I was pretty good as skating. Not world class, but I could go forward, backward, slow, fast, and do a few tricks, like when you squat down and hold one leg out in front of you. For some reason, we thought that was pretty awesome. I couldn't do the thing where you pulled someone behind you under your legs so they were suddenly in front of you, but no one was really doing that anyway. And in 7th grade, I had decent luck with the ladies, so there were plenty of opportunities for me to put the movies on some young honey, maybe buy her an Orange Whip or some fries at the concession stand, maybe impress her by convincing the DJ to play us a song he was probably going to play anyway. And then you hear the first little bit of "Hold Me Now," ask the girl to skate, take her hand, and for the next three minutes or so yo roll through a swirling snowstorm of colored lights and raging hormones that can only be assuaged by letting go of her hand as the song ends and "Play Guitar" by John Cougar Mellencamp comes on and affords you a chance to fast skate off some of that pent up sexual energy -- especially if the DJ is edgy and doesn't blank out the "Forget all about that macho shit and learn how to play guitar" line. Anyway, point is, I liked roller skating. When I went again in college at the behest of a group of Cuban gang girls from Miami (you do what they say, and you like it), I found that it isn't really a skill you can pick right up again after not doing it for the past ten years. But while I still liked the idea of roller skating (though not as much as I liked Cuba gang girls), even I recognized the fundamental stupidity of using it as a means of locomotion across a post-apocalyptic wasteland (or PAW). Hell, it's not even that convenient now is a world that is only marginally strewn with the rubble of bygone eras. In a future full of ultimate weapon motorcycles and dudes in dune buggies, woe be unto the person that shows up for the fight wearing rollerskates.
Luckily, rollerskating futurist Donald Jackson didn't let my skepticism stand in the way, and so he delivers this tale of a world pushed past the brink, crumbling and decaying, where the only hope for humanity is an order of rollerskating nuns in various combinations of red and blue robes and hoods, black panties, black spandex bodystockings, and nudity. Using the power of a blinking light-up smiley face button, the nuns battle the guy from the cover of Quiet Riot's Metal Health album and his ugly rubber puppet. Oh yeah, the nuns also possess the secret of the future's ultimate weapon: the butterfly knife, known in future parlance as the roller blade. When combined with the skill of rollerskating, the butterfly knife is the deadliest art since gymkata. Let that plot synopsis roll over you for a second. It's a good one, isn't it? And in the hands of someone less committed to the vision of a future in which we all roller skate, even on the beach, even when the streets are choked with rubble and uneven surfaces, this probably would have ended up looking like some jokey, desperate "see, it's bad on purpose!" type of film like you get from Troma. But Jackson handles this insane scenario with all the gravitas of a man making a film about the Iran hostage crisis. At no point does he flirt with self-awareness or irony. At no point is he telling you anything other than the single greatest story ever told. And that is the saving grace of this and all films this terrible. When they try to excuse themselves after the fact by layering on the, "See? We get it! It's bad on purpose!" nonsense, they lose me. I just don't appreciate that sort of lack of commitment, especially since more times than not, it's used to excuse mere laziness. That's why Troma films, though they have their audience, have never worked for me. But Jackson isn't here to joke around or poke fun at himself, and he's nothing if not dedicated to his vision of the film. Jackson wrote, directed, and produced the film. He did the cinematography, the set design, and the costuming. He was involved in the special effects and make-up. If there had been a way for him to be his own second unit director, or if he had even been able to afford a second unit, he probably would have done that, too. What you are seeing when you pop in your ratty old Roller Blade VHS tape is the purest presentation of Donald Jackson's vision of the future as could be achieved. To laugh at it is easy. To understand it is more challenging, perhaps less rewarding, and probably requires that you have been at least a teenager or a half-nude rollerskating nun with a knife during the 1980s.
See, not only did we love rollerskating, but we were also pretty confident that the world was going to get blown up as a result of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. That's what we called Russia before it was called Russia but after it was called Russia. As kids, we knew this destruction was inevitable, and all we could do was rest assured that we, at the very least, would survive the nuclear apocalypse, along with all our friends and whatever girls we might have had crushes on at the time. You know, because we're going to have to repopulate the earth and all. But it would be a savage world into which we would emerge from the protection of our homemade nuclear bomb and fallout shelter -- which for my group of friends was a foot deep hole and a cave we covered with a piece of warped plywood and stocked with a first aid kit and some tins of Dinty Moore beef stew which, to the best of my knowledge, are still stashed in the cave waiting for the day we will need them. Such a world is the one envisioned by Roller Blade. The war has happened. Society has crumbled. Amid the chaos and the mayhem we find the Holy Order of the Roller Blade, a society of sexy nuns who love to wear black panties, bathe each other in the hot tub, and hone their butterfly knife skills with less dedication and fewer results than one might expect from a hood hanging out in the parking lot trying to impress the people who might catch a glimpse of him flippin' around his butterfly knife and thus think him dark and dangerous. The nuns are lorded over by wheelchair bound Mother Speed (Katina Garner, who you probably know from Cannibal Hookers, The Tomb, or A Polish Vampire in Burbank -- right?), and hot Sister Sharon Cross (Suzanne Solari -- a Donald Jackson regular, if you can accept that such a thing exists) seems to be the star nun, or acolyte, or whatever the ranks are in this crazy future. Sharon is plagued by a nightmare about an ugly monster in some goo or bubbling water lit with green neon or something, and this results in her frequently stripping down to just her big red KKK hood and a black thong to pray to their image of God: a light-up smiley face button.
Now the first thing that leaps to mind is that Jackson is making a clever comment on how, in a cultural vacuum and divorced of their original benign and shallow meaning, even the most commonplace of items can be mistakenly infused with some sort of sacred importance and meaning. When I go to the Egyptian wing of The Met and look at all those little figurines accompanied by a placard explaining their religious significance, am I really looking at religious icons, or am I looking at some ancient Egyptian nine-year-old's collection of action figures? When the nuns of this blighted future gather to pray and soap up each other's lithesome, nude bodies in front of the glowing smiley face, is it really any different than praying to any other icon, especially within the reference frame of the 1980s, when consumer culture was elevated to a religion? Well, yes, it is different, because it features naked nuns with gigantic teased hair fondling each other's boobs, and I don't know about you, but I never got to see that in the few times I went to Methodist church. But from what I know about Catholicism -- and what I know I learned from looking at Catholic schoolgirls and sleazy Italian nun sexploitation films, so I know what I'm talking about -- this isn't all that unusual. Although doing it while wearing roller skates might be unique. And it doesn't matter anyway, because the sheer absurdity of this movie undercuts any attempt Jackson might have been making about religion or consumerism. It comes across instead more like the sort of "I'm gonna write an awesome dystopian scifi story" you'd get from a sixteen-year-old who just finished reading Brave New World and wants to basically rip that off while blending it with 80s pop apocalypse and clumsy punk rock references. In other words, it's about as stupid as something I wrote in 1987, only no one gave me $5,000 and actresses willing to do full frontal in order to realize my dream.
But again, I genuinely admire that the film takes itself so seriously, that Jackson was writing this and thinking it was awesome and deep, or so I assume. I also assume that it was written in an acid-induced haze as Jackson drank bottle after bottle of cheap tequila while holed up in a Juarez fleapit hotel room with a plump Mexican whore, doing his best to stay one step ahead of a murderous pimp to whom he owed $5,000 that was stolen to make Roller Blade. Unfortunately, we'll never know for sure. The nuns are aided in whatever their quest is by the roller rangers, or something like that. Basically, it's a black guy and white dude in a cowboy hat who insists on speaking like someone who might have read part of a Shakespeare play at some point, with lots of "thou" and "verily." Oddly, not the first or last time that post-apocalyptic scifi would assume that one of the side-effects of nuclear fallout was that it makes you speak like you're in a high school production of Richard III. Also, these guys use guns, which would seem like a better weapon than a butterfly knife, but what do I know? I don't even understand why you'd keep your skates on while engaging in a fight that involves ladders and narrow catwalks.
Opposing the nuns is Saticoy, a mad warlord accompanied by his rubber hand puppet which may or may not be sentient (was it supposed to be a mutation or something? Or was he just wearing a hand puppet?). They dream of stealing the secret of the roller blade's power and using it to power a rocket car over the wall into Mecca Co., where they will pilfer an armory and...well, I don't know. Kill the nuns or something. I don't think Saticoy thought much about the plan beyond that point. To realize his nefarious scheme, Saticoy employs a legion of end-of-the-world street punks he culled from the local BMX stores and wherever Suicidal Tendencies was playing. Also working for Saticoy is a freelance killer named Hunter, clad in spandex and played by Shaun Michelle. You probably know her as the star of films like Watch My Lips, Erotic Aerobics, and Flesh Pond, among many other titles of an adult nature. Shaun trades her deadly skills with a butterfly knife for batteries to power her cassette tape walkman. Oh, how cheap is life in this hellish future that it can be traded for a handful of AA's? I assume she listens to Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" on a loop, and I know from experience that doing that all day will burn through batteries pretty quickly. Saticoy wants her to infiltrate the Holy Order and steal the power crystal for him. He also arranges to kidnap righteous Marshall Goodman's son, though exactly what the point of this was is never entirely clear. Hunter gets herself beat up a little so the nuns will take her in, but she also gets to kick the asses of some "spikers," which she does with both hands tied behind her back and while wearing roller skates.
Before too long Sister Sharon has taken the young woman under her wing and dubbed her Sister Fortune. Hunter/Fortune accomplishes her mission, but while she was under the protection of the nuns...is it possible...just maybe...that she learned a little something about respect and friendship? Only time and a procession of nude rollerskate catfights can tell. Throw in roller samurai, more nude rituals, and a dude who looks like Ted Nugent after being bitten by a radioactive Alice Cooper, and you have...umm...well, you have Roller Blade. Oh yeah, also, the butterfly knives can heal the sick, wounded, and even the partially beheaded. Wait, did I mention that even though Mother Speed is wheelchair-bound, she still wears roller skates? And did I mention how the awkward fitting costumes look like they were put together by a particularly challenged 6th grade home ec class? No? Well, I probably didn't need to, did I? Oh wait, I never got to the henchman in the checkerboard Cheap Trick painter's cap. Can you believe we made painter's caps a trend in the 80s? That's about as believable as the scene where the ugly rubber puppet fondles a nude woman who has random parts of her body wrapped for some reason in aluminum foil.
Exactly why everyone decided to wear rollerskates all the time is never explained, and I dare say it couldn't be explained. Most of the time, the roller skates are an obvious detriment to the person wearing them. Hey, backwards skating may be fun, but rollerskates are not exactly the world's most versatile form of transportation. A few people switch it up and have skateboards, but no matter what skate punks tell you, that's really not much better, though with all the rubble lying around after the fall of society, I bet there are plenty of places to do some sweet grinds and acid drops. Mostly, though, it's roller skates -- and keep in mind that these are classic 80s style roller skates, and the "roller blade" of the title is not the brand of inline skates that would debut shortly after the release of this film. At some point, Marshall Goodman (played by Jeff Hutchinson, who was almost as involved behind the camera as was Donald Jackson himself), catches his son playing outside and chastises the lad -- not for wandering off into a post-nuke hell populated by sneering, murderous DRI fans, but for wandering off into a post-nuke hell populated by sneering, murderous DRI fans while not wearing his rollerskates. When the central conceit of your film is entirely nonsensical and idiotic, complaining that everything else in the film doesn't make a lick of sense seems petty.
If it sounds like Jackson and his crew were just making shit up as they went along, that's because they were. Jackson and his friends Scott Shaw called what they did Zen Filmmaking, which translates to the Western mind as "making shit up as they went." No scripts, only the vaguest of scenarios, and then off you go. Who can you hire that day? What new idea presents itself? Why tie yourself to the outdated concept of planning everything out on paper ahead of time, man? Why restrict your creativity to such a high degree? Just let it flow, man, and do whatever comes to mind. And what came to Jackson's mind was futuristic sex nuns on rollerskates. I gotta say, as much as I might poke fun at this movie, that's probably not too far off from what I would have come up with. Describing the end result as bizarre hardly does justice to Roller Blade. Believe me when I say I have seen some weird stuff. I don't mean standard, run of the mill weird stuff. I mean "Ho hum, is it Salo: 120 Days of Sodom and Nekromantik again? How dull and mainstream" weird stuff. Although independent filmmakers have always existed, the 80s represent a major boom in the accessibility of filmmaking to any and damn near everyone. And because you didn't have to do something like send reels of film away to be developed by some stranger who would sit in judgment of your amateur super 8 porn, you could be a lot more liberal with what you were willing to shoot. So every bizarre fetish, every dark recess of the mind, every warped idea born from being locked in a closet as a child and force fed LSD and rat droppings became grist for the video mill. And I have seen a lot of them. Hell, I've even seen my fair share of rollerskate-based porno from the 70s (what Donald Jackson is to the post-apocalypse rollerskating movie, Ray Dennis Steckler was to 70s rollerskating themed porn). And even within that larger world of low/no budget madness resembling a Lovecraftian ancient horror, I have to say that Roller Blade is pretty goddamn weird. It's a perfect storm of crackpot ideas, lack of talent, meandering weirdness, strange synthesizer doodling, and chicks willing to get naked and wrestle in their rollerskates. That it is is all presented with such solemn determination makes it beautiful.
Donald, Donald, Donald. Taken too soon from us. How did your career...well, how did it happen? And when it did, how did it go so strange so quickly? For years, Jackson was laboring unsuccessfully in an auto factory, trying to jump start a movie making career. He finally managed to score a couple modestly successful (or infamous, depending on your understanding of the English language) films in Demon Lover and the pro wrestling documentary I Like to Hurt People. He used that money to move to L.A., and the next thing you know, the dude has made Hell Comes to Frogtown and Roller Blade. Have you seen Hell Comes to Frogtown? That's not a bad movie, and he managed to hire Rowdy Roddy Piper when Piper was actually a bankable commodity. How that film was made by the same guy at pretty much the same time as Roller Blade isn't exactly a mystery as much as it is an interesting study in what happens when a man is given free reign over a budget of $5,000 and told "You have Michelle Bauer for an hour; try to make her wrestle nude in rollerskates." Mission accomplished! Hell Comes to Frogtown isn't entirely dissimilar to Roller Blade; it's simply a lot more competent. It still possesses the same fanfic level of post-apocalyptic scenario creation, but because of the humor in the film, it isn't nearly as clumsy. But then, the absolute warped, freeform nature of Roller Blade makes it such a puzzle, such a stunning piece of...is it art?...that in the end, I know a lot more about it than I do Frogtown. Both concepts (post-nuke rollerskating hot chicks and post-nuke wasteland populated by frog guys) pretty much defined the remainder of Jackson's career, though in 1998 he did find time to make a movie called Lingerie Kickboxer, which I probably need to see as part of my quest to become an expert on all movies that feature naked women kickboxing (I already own four). In 2003, Jackson died of Leukemia, leaving behind a legacy of films that can best be described as, "What the fuck was that?" I really would have loved to hear him talk about these movies, but sadly, that will never come to pass. Left to carry on the tradition of zen filmmaking and movies about rollerskating nuns in thongs was Jackson's frequent collaborator, Scott Shaw. The acting in the movie isn't even worth discussing. It was shot without sound anyway, so most of the performances were looped in during post-production, with the voice work being handled by two or three people. Judging from the blank faces on most of the cast, though, it's no stretch to guess the caliber of acting we would have enjoyed had Jackson been able to afford to record sound. Shaun does have a wicked bad girl sneer, though. Billy Idol would be impressed. When your only real actor is Michelle Bauer, you're in trouble. When your only real actor is Michelle Bauer and she's only in one scene and she doesn't speak, you're in even bigger trouble. But when your only real actor is Michelle Bauer and she's only in one scene and she doesn't speak, but she does do nude lesbian wrestling while wearing rollerskates, then there is at least a glimmer of hope that the world is gonna be OK. After Bauer, the next most famous person in this movie is only famous because he's the child of Fred Olen Ray, the infamous producer/director of more direct to video scifi/fantasy tits and ass films than I can count, though I don't seem to have much trouble purchasing them.
In the end, offering up any sort of criticism of this film seems moot. Pointless. Nigh impossible. It's like trying to write sensibly about Alejandro Jodoworsky at his most insane. This is the rare film that is so poorly made, so absolutely weird, that it becomes a form of outsider art. Centuries from now, future generations will discover this VHS tape as they mine old landfills for relics of the past, and they will not need to ask themselves any further why 21st century man faded from this realm. This film has a hypnotic effect on me. Like some ancient Stygian evil, it terrifies me beyond the capacity for rational thought, and in doing so, it makes it impossible for me to turn away. Rest assured that when those future archaeologists excavate Roller Blade, they will find whatever skeletal remnants of my hand that remains still clutching it dearly. Of all the crappy old VHS tapes I own, this is one of my most cherished. As of this writing, this movie and its even more elusive sequel, Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force, remain unrepresented in the DVD market. How is this possible? This movie spawned too many other movies to be so ignored, from Return of the Rollerblade 7 to that scene in Hackers where they all rollerblade around. Where is the justice in this world? Looking back on this film, it's hard to believe just how insanely fucking weird it was. Actually, watching it in 1987 or so when I first saw it, it was just as hard to believe how insanely fucking weird it was. Labels: Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Series: Project VHS, Year: 1986 posted by Keith at 12:43 AM | 5 Comments Monday, September 01, 2008Deathsport Release Year: 1978Country: United States Starring: David Carradine, Claudia Jennings, Richard Lynch, William Smithers, Will Walker, David McLean, Jesse Vint. Writer: Nicholas Niciphor, Donald Stewart Director: Nicholas Niciphor Cinematographer: Gary Graver Music: Andy Stein Producer: Roger Corman Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Sure, I love a challenge. Anyway, that's what I tell myself. Actually, I think I only love challenges that I am pretty sure ahead of time I can conquer. Stuff like, "Well, sir, I believe I can eat half a dozen red velvet cupcake in a single sitting!" And as to that challenge: mission accomplished! There are other challenges, however, that I am more hesitant to accept. When I recently set about the task of converting all my old VHS tapes to DVD-R, I started rediscovering a lot of films I hadn't watched in years, not since first I plucked them out of the dollar bin at whatever video store was trying to get rid of them. It was a big chore, because I had a lot of VHS tapes, and some of them were copyguarded for reasons I will never fathom. Who in the hell copyguards Gor or Jungle Raiders or Archer: Fugitive from the Empire? You should be happy that I watched that crap at all, let alone bought it. I think the least you can do so long after the fact is let me save a little shelf space by copying them to DVD-R. Half those tapes are so old and worn at this point that they could snap at any moment, and what then? Sure, a lot of junk I was copying came out on DVD during the process. In those instances, even when I was reminding myself how much I hated the movie, I still bought the DVD. Because, you know, who doesn't need movies like Kill Zone starring David Carradine or Future Force, also starring David Carradine, on DVD? I spent money on that shit, people. I'm 36 years old, have -$45 to my name right now, and haven't eaten in a day because I have to make it to pay day, but you can bet your ass I own a copy of Future Force on DVD. But what happens when Archer: Fugitive from the Empire finally gets eaten by my aging VCR? What happens when The Barbarians can't be played anymore? You haven't put that stuff out on DVD for me, and you won't let me back up my old VHS. Do you know what the world will lose when a movie in which two twin bodybuilders defend a band of jugglers vanishes from memory? Do you want to shoulder the responsibility? Would anyone even want to live in a world where Jungle Raiders starring Lee Van Cleef is naught but a legend, whispered about by aborigines huddled around a campfire?
Still, there were many more films I was able to copy over for posterity's sake, doing my part to preserve cinematic history in the form of The One-Armed Executioner and Warriors of the Apocalypse. And recently I started watching them all again, enjoying the same crappy VHS quality with tracking problems and picture flaws caused by wrinkles in the tape, but now on DVD, ready to be preserved digitally for future generations who might one day wander up to their parents, provided such primitive family units still exist, and ask them, "Mummy, whatever became of Solar Force starring Michael Pare?" And this future parental units will be able to blow some dust off an old CD/DVD storage album, extract that shining gold disc from its sleeve, and tell your young one, "Luckily, some asshole backed up his VHS copy of it, so here you go." So I decided to take my holy assignment one step forward and make sure I reviewed as many of these films as possible, because the internet is going to last forever, and one day we will create sentient computers by downloading the whole of human knowledge as represented by the contents of the world wide web into it's databases. At that time, the computer will become a living, thinking creature. It will also be an idiot, thanks to the fact that most of what's on the internet is blogs written from the viewpoint of someone's cat or reviews of movies like Solar Force starring Michael Pare. What I wasn't prepared for, but what I was delightful to be reminded of, was just how incredibly bent many of the movies -- most of which come from those heady Reagen years -- ended up being. Writing about some of them was really going to put me to the test. So many of them just don't make a lick of sense. Dare one even wander into the minefield of dissecting a film where nuns in bikinis roller skate across a post-apocalyptic wasteland and fight a rubber puppet? I mean, you can still get stuff like that these days, but it's done with intentional camp and irony. What a difference it makes when you have a movie like the one I just described, but it's totally serious!
Well, I am nothing if not a trooper, willing to bleed for my art. So I assembled what is, to me, an impressive line-up of goofball awesomeness from the late 70s and entire 1980s, maybe with a smattering of the 90s for good measure. Call it Project VHS. Some of these films have indeed come out on DVD since I initially copied my old tapes. Many remain missing in action. Some are more competent than others. A surprisingly large number of them star David Carradine. And while there are some movies that remain absent because I simply didn't have a chance to buy them on discounted VHS and they aren't currently on DVD -- when, O Lord, will I finally own a copy of Rollerblade Warriors: Taken By Force starring Kathleen Kinmont or Ultra Warrior starring Dack Rambo -- I feel that there is more than enough meat here to keep us all happy and reeling about in neon-drenched memories like one of those dogs who decides suddenly for reasons known only unto canines to lie on its back and squirm around in the grass, all the while grunting with some pleasure we humans will never fully comprehend. Sometimes I may be at a loss for words. I may falter and get distracted -- the summer of 2008 has already seen me launch then abruptly abandon plans for another Netflix Diary and a series about movies in which people from the ocean attack us landlubbers. But I shall do my best.
And I can think of no more appropriate a fashion to start things off than with a VHS tape I used to cherish and recently upgraded to the special edition DVD just this week. It has everything you'd want and wouldn't want in a movie of this type. Roger Corman? Check. Claudia Jennings in the nude? Check. Stupid looking futuristic motorcycles? Check. Richard Lynch? Check. Random explosions? Check. David Carradine in a loincloth, frequently shot from a low angle so that his scantily clad crotch fills the whole screen? Check! I bet your 57 inch plasma screen HDTV isn't as cool to you now as it was before David Carradine's crotch was displayed on it, is it? In 1975, exploitation film master Roger Corman produced one of his very best films. Combining a wicked sense of campy humor, a healthy dose of violence, and an angry satirical edge, Death Race 2000, directed by Paul Bartel, was the best things to bear Corman's name (as producer) since Corman himself was directing cool horror films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories for AIP. Always keen to make a buck, Corman immediately set about creating another vehicle-based futuristic fling, albeit one with a lot less of a budget -- even for a Corman flick -- and a much less talented writer and director. Corman would do his best to make people think it was related in some way to Death Race 2000 by calling the new film Deathsport and casting David Carradine in the lead. But the similarities end there, and while Death Race 2000 is a genuinely good, enjoyable, and even smart film, Deathsport is an incompetent piece of junk with almost nothing to offer humanity. Predictably, I do not own Death Race 2000 and have only seen it once. I do, however, own Deathsport in two different formats now and have watched it at least half a dozen times.
We find ourselves in "the future," something like a thousand years from now, after the wars have turned the world into a vast tract of scrubland and desert. The remnants of the human race live in fortress style city-states and are called statesmen, leaving the majority of the blighted world to be the domain of mutant cannibals and a race of mystic wanderers known as range guides. Machines are rare, used only by the "statesmen" -- people who live in the cities. So, wait. Didn't you just tell us that pretty much everyone lives in the city and is a statesman? Now I haven't been good at math or logic since sixth grade, but I'm pretty sure that if almost everyone is a statesmen, and only statesmen use machines, then almost everyone uses machines. So I don't see what's so special about it. The mad leader of Helix City, Lord Zirpola (David McClean), wants to attack a neighboring city for no real reason we can understand other than he is mad and evil. To accomplish this act of war, he has invented the future's ultimate weapon: a motorcycle with some aluminum attached to the front end, and two lasers on the side that are of the same power as lasers people carry and fire by hand, only the lasers on the so-called "death machines" are more awesome because they are a hell of a lot harder to aim. Zirpola wants to prove to his people that the death machines are super bad-ass, so he decides to capture some range guides and showcase their obliteration by death machine in the city's gladiatorial "deathsport." This will convince the population that an unjustified war with the other city will be fun and easy, so long as everyone is riding a death machine.
The future as projected by the cheap sci-fi films of the 70s and 80s is jam packed with incredibly lame ultimate weapons. The death machines are pretty high up on the list, though they will pale in comparison to some of the other ultimate weapons we'll be seeing later in this series of reviews. The death machines may be stupid and unwieldy as weapons, but at least they are still motorcycles. At the very least, you can ride them around and have fun up until Barry Bostwick shows up on his own futuristic motorcycle with crap attached to the front end and brags about how his can also fly. But still, when we first see the death machines in action, a couple female range guides, one of whom is the late Gator Bait herself, Claudia Jennings, take them out with no real problem. Range guide Kaz Oshay (Carradine) will also take a few out all by himself -- and range guides are armed with nothing but clear plastic swords that whistle when you swing them around. I'm pretty sure I had a toy that did the same thing. That's all it takes to make a death machine explode? At no point, though, does the army of Helix City think that the death machines are a stupid idea, let alone an especially stupid idea in a world with lots of tall, steep rock formations people have no problem scurrying up to escape the death machines. Oh if only Lord Zirpola has listened to Barry Bostwick and put rocket wings on the motorcycles! Eventually Carradine's Kaz and Jenning's Deneer are captured, though that has less to do with the death machines than it does sheer force of numbers. They come face to face with the leader of Helix City's army, the black-clad Richard Lynch. Yes, his character has a name (Ankar Moor), but anyone who knows Richard Lynch knows that he plays the same evil guy character in every movie, so we might as well just call him Richard Lynch. I guess the same could be said of David Carradine as well. Lynch has the sinister air of a young Rutger Hauer crossbred with the condescending sneer of William Atherton and the hair of Gladiator Malibu from the 80s version of American Gladiators. Can even David Carradine stand up to such a foe?
It turns out that not only is Richard Lynch evil, but he's also a former range guide who betrayed The Code and killed the most powerful of all range guides, who just happens to be Kaz Oshay's mom. Deneer and Kaz don't take too kindly to being caged like animals. While Kaz kicks the wall a lot and yells "I am my only master," Deneer is made to wander around nude in a room full of neon tubes that shake around, howl, and electrocute people. Don't ask me, man. I didn't write it. Eventually, the two guides are forced to compete against the death machines in deathsport, an event that takes up about ten minutes of the film's running time and has almost no real bearing on the plot, but is never the less the source of the title. Earlier in the film, Zirpola was angry that Ankor Moor lost a couple death machines whilst pursuing Claudia Jennings, yet here he seems unphased by the fact that the two captive rangers take out like a dozen of the infernal contraptions. Maybe if he'd put trained soldiers on the machines instead of chumps he just picked out of jail, his little dog and pony show would have gone better. The two rangers escape along with a couple hangers on, thus ending the deathsport portion of Deathsport. All that's left now is for the bad guys to chase the good guys across the barren wasteland until we get a final showdown between Kaz Oshay and Ankor Moor. All in all, Zirpola's death machine coming out party went over about as well as one of those corporate seminars where the presenter has all his stuff stored online and then can't get an internet connection (possibly because the internet has become sentient and is too preoccupied with cataloging its vast store of Naruto slashfic). To enumerate the various points at which the plot doesn't make any sense would be to wandering into a Minotaur's labyrinth from which there is no real hope of emerging alive. The death machines having already been covered as being idiotic, we could turn to how much is made of Carradine's ability to sense the coming of dangerous weather, which leads to him predicting the coming of dangerous weather, which leads to a scene of people going "The dangerous weather is coming," which then leads immediately to a scene of people coming out of a cave and going, "Whew, I sure am glad that dangerous weather is over." Cannibal mutants kidnap a little girl, and one assumes that the reason cannibal mutants would kidnap a little girl is to eat her. But weeks later, when Kaz and Deneer finally show up to rescue her, she's still there. I guess they wanted to soften up the meat. The cannibal mutants had her in a little cage, after all, so I reckon that the world may have collapsed but our love of veal has not. There are also multiple scenes were someone who is supposed to get killed stands right in front of a death machine, but instead of shooting the person with the lasers, the guy on the death machine just does a little wheelie or jumps over a convenient dirt pile next to the person. And then usually the death machine explodes. You may not have realized that hitting a motorcycle with a clear plastic sword would make it explode, but that's why you're not a range guide.
And then there's the matter of Lord Zirpola's neon tube torture forest. Seriously, just what the hell? I mean, I can understand having a chamber where people dance naked for you. And I can understand that in the future, poledancer poles will need to be more futuristic, and thus making them transparent tubes filled with flashing neon lights is inevitable. But what kind of torture is it to then make them shake all around and howl? That's not torture; that's just ugly windchimes, and you can get those all over the place down South. Still, at least the movie does right by us and has not one but two gratuitous scenes of nude dancing in the neon tube forest, one of which goes on for a while and features a woman (Valerie Rae Clark, star of...ummm...Breast Orgy and Breast Orgy 2) we've never seen before and will never see again but, for some reason, apart from dancing nude, also gets to kill Lord Zirpola by...umm...offering her hand to him while he's busy making the tubes shock her or whatever it is they do. Zirpola also has a torture tunnel where he straps you down and flashes lights at you, causing you to scream. This requires Claudia Jennings to be nude for the torture to work. Luckily, it does not require the same of David Carradine. So let me address this right here. David Carradine in his youth -- not really a bad looking guy. In pretty good shape. But the loincloth simply does not become him. It becomes very few men, especially when they are shot from such awkward angles, like leaping spread legged through the air or rolling around on their back with their legs stuck up. It's just not a good angle. That's why you don't see male strippers constantly jumping all spread eagle off the backs of chairs and stuff. They know that it looks goofy. They'll straddle a chair, but they'll never jump awkwardly off it. And when it comes to rolling around on their backs in a crouching position, they're going to skip that and fill the time with a little trick I like to call "around the world." So while we get to see plenty of David Carradine flesh, most of it is unwelcome because it just ends up looking so goofy. Still, I suppose we should be happy he wasn't forced to do full frontal nude dancing in the forest of shaking, howling neon tubes.
Probably my favorite part of the movie is when Kaz Oshay leads Ankor and his minions on a motorcycle race through a fuel depot which has no reason to exist out in the middle of the desert. The depot is full of gasoline barrels stacked apparently at random throughout the facility, sometimes in front of ramps so that people can jump their motorcycles through flames once the barrels have inevitably exploded. In classic Corman fashion, scenes of jumping motorcycles are recycled a few times to increase the number of times we get to watch a guy jump a motorcycle over some candy cane colored barrels. This fuel depot was apparently built by the same people who were doing the construction on the building where Jackie Chan has his final fight scene in Mr. Nice Guy. If you don't recall or never saw the film, that building features a framed-up but not entirely drywalled floor that was apparently comprised of nothing but hundreds of 5x5 rooms with doors in every wall. It was fun for a fight scene, but really, what the hell were they building? Watching Deathsport is mind-bending enough on its own right, but where the film really shines is in the backstage drama. The movie was written by Nicholas Niciphor. Though he had no experience as a director, Niciphor was also hired to direct -- presumably because the vision for Deathsport was so grand and amazing that only the film's writer could hope to fully realize it, or something. Now, who you believe about what has a lot to do with sorting out what happened, but I'm going mostly with David Carradine's version. According to Carradine, Niciphor was not only inexperienced, he was also unstable. He was so clueless about directing that he didn't even now what it meant to set up a camera. He was prone to freak out, especially at Claudia Jennings or whenever anyone had trouble maneuvering the awkward death machines. According to Niciphor, this was often because the cast was drunk, stoned, and unruly, especially Jennings. I don't really doubt it. Carradine himself admits that there was a bit of partying going on. Former Playboy Playmate Claudia Jennings was well known as a wild child anyway. But then, you're making Deathsport. What the hell is there to be so serious about? Niciphor, however, was deadly serious about his film, and if the cast was clowning around, it only served to push him further over the edge. If things didn't go right on the first take, he would throw a fit and throw out the entire scene and brood about it.
Things came to a head when he tore into Jennings over her inability to effectively handle the clunky death machines. Everyone was having problems with the front-heavy contraptions, but Jennings in particular irked him. It got so heated that Niciphor allegedly struck Jennings, though David Carradine says he can't verify this since he was down at the other end of a gully waiting to do a take. Jennings was ready to quit the movie, and it was only after speaking with the producer who then spoke to Roger Corman that she was convinced to stay on. Niciphor was eventually phased out, spending most of his time skulking in the background, and Alan Arkush was brought in to complete the film -- but not before Niciphor got his nose broken by David Carradine when he walked too close to a fight scene rehearsal in progress. Niciphor claims it might not have been an accident. But that's nothing, since apparently the temperamental (or perhaps just mental) writer-director also berated Jennings and Carradine to the point where David actually just hauled off and kicked the guy's ass. Niciphor refutes many of the claims without actually refuting them. According to his side of things, the altercation between he and Claudia Jennings happened because Jennings was coked out while trying to operate the death machine, and that's why she was having a hard time. I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility. Jenning's cocaine addiction was well known. Niciphor further claims that Carradine was smoking hashish the whole time. Again, I don't think this is outside the realm of believability -- especially when you witness how stoned Carradine looks for most of the movie. But none of this really counters any of what Carradine said, either. The entire thing sounds like a snobs versus slobs teen sex comedy, with Carradine and Jennings cast and the lovable freewheelin' slobs and Niciphor as the stuffy dean who hates fun. Assuming that the truth is to be found in some mix of all sides of the story, the final verdict is that the the making of Deathsport would probably be a much better film than Deathsport itself. Things like that are why I like movies like this so much -- apart from the fact that this movie is just plain weird. It's handled with such seriousness, with such earnestness. You can feel that poor Nicholas Niciphor really believed in every line, really wanted this film to have meaning and depth. Does a film this lousy really deserve that much behind the scenes drama? I would love for the DVD to have had some commentary attached to it, either by Carradine or Niciphor -- or hell, put 'em both in the room and let them duke it out. This was the first and last time poor Nick directed a film, though he did go on to work as a writer for a few more films, including Alejandro Jodorowski's Tusk. Beyond that, he's been relegated to the realm of writing irate letters to Psychotronic magazine, complaining about David Carradine's doobie habits in 1978.
Carradine, of course, needs no real introduction here. A dancer who sprung into the American consciousness courtesy of the show Kung-Fu, Carradine went on to become one of the mainstays of exploitation cinema, especially when it was produced by Roger Corman. Carradine could be quite good in a role, and when he was bad, he mostly seemed harmlessly sleepy and stoned. That's how he plays it here, meandering through Niciphor's ponderous faux-mystic dialogue with the laid back style of a dude who was eating a lot of pot brownies. His fight scenes are awkward, but that's more the fault of the movie itself. What can you do when you're forced to swing around a huge plastic sword? His nemesis in Richard Lynch is...well, Lynch is actually understated compared to some of his other performances, but it's still the exact same performance you expect and always want from Lynch. I can't say much more than that. Claudia Jennings is another well known, albeit far more tragic, figure in B-Movie history. Jennings became one of the most recognizable faces in exploitation cinema when she appeared in the film Gator Bait, which is well known not so much because the movie is worth being well known, but more because every single video store in the universe seemed to have a sun bleached copy of the VHS tape sitting on the shelf. Jennings isn't a great actress, and she has a sort of sleepy eyed beauty that makes her seem like she was stoned the entire time -- which she apparently was. Between her and Carradine, the munchies-related catering bill must have eaten up half the film's budget. She had her moments of glory in film, though. Unholy Rollers, for example, and Moonshine County Express. Deathsport really isn't one of those moments, though she does get to wander naked through that neon tube room. This film comes at the end of her career, when she was heavy into drug and alcohol abuse and had a tumultuous relationship with some real estate guy (though rumors have her connected to Deathsport co-star Jesse Vint, and someone -- Niciphor I think -- also claimed she was attached to David Carradine, a claim that Carradine laughs off as preposterous). She cleaned up her act shortly thereafter, but amid a breakup with the realtor, fell asleep at the wheel of her car and was killed in the ensuing wreck. But even if Jennings and Carradine were whooping it up, smoking pot, drinking whiskey, and arranging huge Deathsport orgies, nothing in their performance can come close to being as awkward or awful as that of young Will Walker, who plays one of the guys who breaks out of the deathsport competition with the range guides. This is one of those performances that is so weird and horrible that it deserves far more attention than it receives. He looks kind of like Miles O'Keefe in Sword of the Valiant, with the blond page boy haircut and the same dazed thousand yard stare. But Miles is a much better actor than Walker, believe it or not. Walker's character of Marcus spends most of his time yelling "Kaz! Help me!" in a bland monotone. If the film has an humor at all, it's to be found in Kaz's flashes of annoyance at having to carry this load around on his awesome adventure with Claudia Jennings. She was totally willing to go all the way, but then Marcus kept showing up and ruining the mood. Post apocalyptic cinema from the 1970s was often slow and ponderous, not to mention incredibly self-important and pretentious. Sometimes the results are pretty great, sometimes they were ridiculous, and often they were just dull. Deathsport is sort of a missing link between the post apocalyptic films of the 70s and those that would come in the wake of Mad Max and, more importantly, its sequel, The Road Warrior. Those films featured much less cornball philosophizing and much more high octane action. Or at least attempts at high octane action. Deathsport has plenty of the corny mysticism and dime store attempts at Zen koans that one expects from 1970s sci-fi, but it also has lots of exploding motorcycles and...well...it has lots of exploding motorcycles. And it is one of the first post-apocalypse films to save itself some cash by predicting that, in the future, the world would mostly look like scrubland dotted with matte paintings of distant cities. It's pretty fair to draw the line from this movie directly to Mad Max, Road Warrior, and from there you quickly find yourself in the domain of Warriors of the Lost World and Warlords of the 21st Century -- movies that, many years after Deathsport, manage to be just as cheap and goofy as it was, but not nearly as much fun. I mean, those later movies have practically no David Carradine crotch at all!
Deathsport presents us with a loopy sort of myticism not unlike The Force as presented in Star Wars and before George Lucas turned it into some sort of genetic disease, but more accurately, it reflects the same sort of New Age filtered half understanding of Buddhism and spirituality that you find in a movie like Circle of Iron (also featuring David Carradine in a loin cloth) or in pretty much any pow wow held by some white dude claiming to be enlightened. Our range guides speak in monotone a lot about consciousness and spiritual union, and we know they are wise because they do not use contractions, but it all sounds pretty much like what a high schooler might come up with. Circle of Iron covers much of the same ground but in a more effective way and with a greater grounding in actual Zen philosophy rather than Zen as filtered through some hippie who read a couple pamphlets and then set himself up with an American ashram. But we'll come to that movie in good time, and if nothing else, it's probably safe to say that as many hashish brownies went into its making as went into the making of Deathsport. Star Wars must also have had some effect on this film, though, because the foley artist thought enough of it to take the TIE fighter sound effect and use them whenever David Carradine drives his motorcycle through a tunnel. Deathsport is a pretty clumsy film, full of bad writing, plot points that make no sense, ominous talk about things that end up never happening, and a titular event that ends up being, at best, a footnote in the film's action. The acting is lazy, the writing is ridiculous, and the props are laughable. And it's all worth seeing, just for the sheer spectacle of it. Ill advised motorcycles as ultimate weapons movies wouldn't have it this good again until Megaforce rolled off the assembly line. The fact that a movie this bad generated so much behind the scenes drama fills me with a sick sense of giddiness, as does the thought that Carradine and Jennings were toking up while an uptight German guy yelled at them to take his film more seriously. I don't even know if Nick was German. I just like imagining him that way, possibly dressed in the monocle and jodhpurs get up all good directors wear. It may not be a shining example of 70s scifi, or even a shining example of a middling roger Corman production, but it is pretty entertaining. Plus, neon disco windchime nude dancing, and so many David Carradine buffalo shots per minute that to merely gaze upon them is enough to drive sane men mad. Perhaps that's what happened to poor old Lord Zirpola. Labels: Science Fiction: Post Apocalypse, Series: Project VHS, Stars: David Carradine, Year: 1978 posted by Keith at 1:59 AM | 9 Comments |
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