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Thursday, November 20, 2008Shiva Ka Insaaf Release Year: 1985Country: India Starring: Jackie Shroff, Shakti Kapoor, Poonam Dhillon, Vinod Mehra, Mazhar Khan, Parikshat Sahni, Gulshan Grover, Birbal, Satish Kaul, Nandita Thakur Writers: Ravi Kapoor, Mohan Kaul, Kader Khan Director: Raj N. Sippy Cinematographer: Ashok Mehta Music: R.D Burman Producer: Romu N. Sippy Until the mid eighties, the costumed superhero as we know him in the West was a figure largely absent from Indian cinema. The primary exceptions were those intermittent attempts to appropriate the Superman character that seem to dot the history of modern South Asian film, such as the competing attempts by directors Mohammed Hussain and Manmohan Sabir, Superman and Return of Mr. Superman, which were both released in 1960 and , curiously, starred the same actor, Jairaj, in the title role. Yet in the neon decade the industry seemed to see something of a mini renaissance in the appearance of such characters. Superstar Amitabh Bachchan's attempts to revive his career after his less-than-stellar turn in Indian politics, perhaps by way of overcompensation, included not one, but two portrayals of uber-abled caped crusaders, first in the relatively well received Shahenshah and then in the dreadful Toofan. In addition, 1987 saw yet another pass at the Man of Steel in the form of the infamous Superman, aka Indian Superman. And, most famously, there was that same year's mega-hit, Mr. India, in which Anil Kapoor portrayed a humble citizen who, granted the ability to become invisible at will, used his powers to defeat the enemies of his country. But before all of these there came another film based around the exploits of a costumed hero of superhuman abilities, 1985's Shiva Ka Insaaf.     The absence of traditional superheroes in Bollywood up to this point might well be explained by the fact that, despite that absence, the nation's screens saw no shortage of colorful figures fighting for the cause of justice and virtue with the aid of superhuman powers. These figures appeared in those films known as "Mythologicals", a staple of Indian cinema since its very inception, based on the religious epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Indeed, even Hollywood might have seen religious-based films become more of a staple genre had the tracts of Western religion been populated by such fanciful deities as the monkey god Hanuman, a fearless and cheekily charismatic hero who in modern times has even proven himself worthy of fighting alongside Ultraman. In fact, when, in the 1960s, India began to produce its own indigenous comic books, it was the heroes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata that featured in their pages. This is not to say that comics had not been produced in the country prior to that, but up to that time they had only been comprised of reprints of popular Western comics, such as Mandrake the Magician, Lee Falk's The Phantom, and, of course, Superman. It was only in the 1970s that bona fide and uniquely Indian superheroes began to see print, and it is perhaps due to those characters gradually making their way into the larger public consciousness that we saw films such as those mentioned above being released in the following decade. Still, the connection between India's superheroes and its cherished religious figures remained strong, as many of these films clearly evidence. In Toofan for instance, Amitabh's character is granted his powers by Hanuman, and in Shiva Ka Insaaf, our hero, Shiva, derives his powers from... well, the name pretty much says it all. (This practice can be seen even in more recent Bollywood superhero films, such as 2006's Krrish, in which the hero derives his name from that of Krishna.)     It was not the presence of a masked superhero alone upon which the movie Shiva Ka Insaaf depended for its novelty, however. The film is, in fact, sometimes mistakenly identified as being India's first film made in 3D, though that honor actually goes to 1984's My Dear Kuttichaathan, an enormously popular children's fantasy shot in the Malayalam language. Still, Shiva Ka Insaaf followed hot on the heels on My Dear Kuttichaathan, and can -- and did -- rightfully make the claim to being the first Hindi film shot in 3D. In India, the 3D process ran pretty much the same course that it does periodically throughout the rest of the world, making a big initial splash. which, in turn, inspired a short run of increasingly less successful films trumpeting its use (which included, in addition to Shiva Ka Insaaf, Indian cheapy horror maestros the Ramsay Brothers' 3D Saamri, aka Purana Mandir 2) before the industry abandoned it due to its financial returns not justifying the added expense of labor and capital that it required. In keeping with that familiar trend, Shiva Ka Insaaf contains within it all of those gimmicks that you'd expect from a movie riding a brief wave of 3D-mania, loaded with "gotcha" moments in which all manner of things are thrust at the camera in the hope of inspiring startled gasps on the part of the audience. Shiva Ka Insaaf features as its titular hero the actor Jackie Shroff, at the time a freshly-minted superstar thanks to his lead role in the blockbuster hit Hero the previous year. I have to admit that, prior to seeing Shiva Ka Insaaf, I had only seen Shroff in films of more recent vintage, and, while he has obviously aged into a beefy and appropriately craggy-faced picture of Bollywood machismo in the interim, it was shocking to see him here so fresh-faced and comparatively scrawny. Even his mustache looked undernourished to me. And, when suited up as Shiva, his heroic demeanor is undermined by a comportment that I can only describe as being a bit on the slouchy side. Of course, as many movie stars throughout the world have had the sad opportunity to learn, superhero movies, with their frequently ridiculous-looking costumes and over-hyped expectations, are an invitation for unflattering comparisons. We can't all be John Phillip Law in Diabolik, after all. In fact, none of us can, save John Phillip Law -- and God help the poor, pear-shaped everyman who tries to pour himself into a painted-on leather catsuit to prove otherwise. So simply add Shroff to the long line of thespians whose run-in with a form-fitting, head-to-toe leather superhero uniform left them looking more deflated than ennobled.     Anyone who has watched a lot of Bollywood action films knows that in them the parents of young boys are something of an endangered species, and that, if a pair of them are introduced during the first five minutes, odds are pretty high that they will soon be gunned down by a cackling villain while little Junior watches from some hiding place he's squirreled himself away in. Now, I've seen enough Spaghetti Westerns to know that this particular trope is not the exclusive property of Indian cinema, but it is only in Bollywood that it sees such steady repetition as to seem like the observance of some kind of ritual. In any case, Shiva Ka Insaaf makes admirably short work of this set-up, seeing that little Bhola's lawyer father and doting mother are dispatched by the ruthless bandit Jagan (Shakti Kapoor) within mere minutes of the opening credits. Of course, from his hiding place, Bhola can only see the telltale scar on Jagan's hand as these vicious acts play out, and thus are the seeds of vengeance and its lifelong pursuit sown. With his dying breath, Bhola's father tells the boy to seek out one of three men -- the names and photographs of whom are provided in a diary he keeps -- to take him in and give him a proper upbringing. Fortunately for Bhola, it turns out that all three men -- whose relation to Bhola's dad is never made clear -- live under one roof, Full House style. These men are Ram, Robert and Rahim (Vinod Mehra, Parikshat Sahni and Mazhar Khan), whose names echo the idealized vision of harmony between Hindu, Catholic and Muslim seen in numerous masala films -- especially those directed by Manmohan Desai, such as, most famously, Amar Akbar Anthony. Perhaps what unites Uncles Ram, Robert and Rahim, despite their different faiths, is the fact that they are all hirsute macho men and that each, in his own way, is a raging badass. To illustrate this, we are shown a series of vignettes, the first of which shows Ram wielding his fists and a pair of bamboo sticks that he uses like nunchucks with fearsome effectiveness, sending a bad guy flying through a wall and leaving a perfect man-shaped hole in his wake. Next we see Robert practicing a unique skill in which he launches little metal balls -- directly at the camera, naturally -- from little cups located on the tips of his shoes, hitting his targets with startling accuracy. Finally Rahim demonstrates that he is very good with a whip. All three, it seems, are ideal candidates to prime Bhola for the task of avenging his parents' deaths, and so follows a training montage taken directly from a Liu Chia-Liang movie (seriously, Bhola even has to run across those floating logs like in 36 Chambers of Shaolin), during which Bhola goes from being portrayed by a child actor to being portrayed by twenty-eight-year-old Jackie Shroff, despite the fact that his adopted uncles only age in that typically Bollywood, mild-graying-at-the-temples way.     Finally, Bhola's uncles take him to a temple to the god Shiva, where they bestow upon him his leather-heavy costume, a ring in the shape of Shiva's third eye (all the better to leave a distinctive mark on those he punches) and a replica of Shiva's weapon, the trishul -- or trident -- which he is to use to announce his arrival, striking terror into the hearts of those evildoers who are about to be on the receiving end of his wrath. At this, an eerie wind sweeps through the shrine, and his uncles tell him that the power he will be wielding will not be his own, but rather that of Shiva working through him. Now, whether this means that Bhola is now blessed with superpowers is unclear, as most of the crimefighting abilities he will display from this point on are in the form of the type of exaggerated punching and leaping around that we normally see from Indian action heroes -- only in their case without them being burdened with masks, capes and constricting head-to-toe leather uniforms -- though there are a couple of instances in which it appears that Bhola/Shiva can fly. Whatever his abilities may be, however, there is no doubt in my mind that Bhola/Shiva's most super power of all is his poetic way with a mortal threat, aided greatly by the fact that, whenever he puts on his costume, his voice automatically becomes equipped with its own echo unit. Thus is made even more grimly authoritative such pronouncements as "I will make you writhe so much that death will shiver looking at you." Or when, on another occasion, while trying to extract information from a recalcitrant goon, he intones ominously, "Even if Shiva goes to a cemetery, the corpses there get up and tell their names and addresses." Still, while generally a man of few words, Shiva does at times prove long-winded, as you'll no doubt find after hearing his little introductory speech being delivered for the umpteenth time. This, in response to his prey's panicked queries as to his identity, goes as follows: "The breeze that will extinguish the fire of injustice... The cure to poor men's pains... I am Shiva!"     Given the typically intricate plotting of Bollywood films, you might think of my above summarization of Shiva Ka Insaaf''s first act as being somewhat glib. But Shiva Ka Insaaf is far from typical in that regard, and shows an economy in its approach to storytelling that, unless you consider the circumstances, is a little surprising. Few Indian films of its era clock in, as Shiva does, at a mere two hours, but I imagine that this truncated length represents an attempt on the part of its producers to limit, to some extent, the expenses and technical complications involved in filming a movie in 3D. The resulting need to cram all of its business into what, to its makers, must have seemed like a very brief running time leads to a narrative that is uncharacteristically lean, and free of those many subplots and parallel storylines that make up the normal masala film. Now, I'd be lying if I said I didn't think the film could benefit from the introduction of some of those elements, but we should perhaps be grateful for what we have. After all, director Raj N. Sippy might not have been able to integrate those disparate elements as expertly as, say, Shekhar Kapur did with Mr. India, and we might have instead ended up with something as sprawling and unfocused as Toofan, a superhero movie so overburdened with plot that its superhero ends up being crowded off-screen for most of its length. Shiva Ka Insaaf may indeed boast a story that is little more than rote superhero boilerplate, but, as a frequent viewer of Indian films, I have to confess that it's nice to on occasion be let off easy: to part ways with a film after a non seat-numbing investment of time and without having to have kept track of all of its characters and tangents by way of copious notes. Anyway, with Bhola's superheroic transformation now complete, his uncles determine that it is time for him to go to The Big City, for that is where they have determined his parents' killer has migrated, despite them having no clue as to his identity. (Hey, my praising the movie's brevity doesn't mean that it doesn't sometimes come at the expense of sense.) To this end, they provide him with an entre to a job at a big city newspaper, where he is to work in the guise of a bespectacled, mild mannered reporter. Mind you, Jackie Shroff's take on this oft-essayed role ends up being an insult to bespectacled, mild-mannered reporters everywhere, as it involves a stuttering caricature of simple-mindedness and social retardation that borders on cretinism. Still, this somehow does not prevent the newspaper's beautiful female editor, Rekha (Poonam Dhillon) from giving him a job, thus setting us up for the inevitable triangle between Bhola, who falls hard for Rekha, and Rekha, who ends up falling even harder for Shiva. Now, as to the root of Rekha's attraction, I'd love to quote Batman and say "It's the car", but Shiva doesn't even have one, as evidenced in a later chase scene where he takes after a carload of thugs on a bicycle. (One article that I read about this film, written by a South Asian writer, cited this scene as singling out Shiva as being the most Indian of superheroes.) Must be the leather, then.     Meanwhile, we find that the intervening years have seen considerable upward mobility on the part of our old friend Jagan, as his relocation to the city has been accompanied by a transformation from grubby, scarf-wearing dacoit to white-suited, highball-swilling underworld kingpin, and has in turn necessitated him being re-christened with the cryptic but suitably sophisticated-sounding appellation "The Doctor". (No, he doesn't have a Tardis. Nerd.) Once Shiva has made his presence known around town, striking the appropriate amount of fear into its criminal underbelly, Jagan and his son, Vikram (Gulshan Grover), take it as their first order of business to eliminate him. And so begins the series of free-wheeling, violent encounters between Shiva and Jagan's army of goons that are essentially the very type of business you would presumably be watching a movie like Shiva Ka Insaaf for in the first place. And, unless you have expectations of gritty realism, you shouldn't be disappointed, as these scenes come replete with loads of unnecessary acrobatics, loudly resounding punches thrown directly at the camera, and Shiva skewering his adversaries with little mini trishuls that he throws with deadly accuracy. One of these aforementioned action set pieces involves Shiva being lured by Jagan's men to a warehouse filled with packing crates, where they then try to kill him by running him over with their cars. Inserted, at certain points, into the footage of real cars crashing through stacks of real crates -- I'm guessing, in order to somehow achieve the desired 3D effect -- are poorly matched shots of what are obviously toy cars crashing through stacks of miniature crates, which then fly out toward the camera. In like fashion, during the fight that ensues, whenever one of Jagan's henchmen is hurled or falls from the rafters, it is represented by an -- again, very obvious and, by all appearances, pocket-sized -- doll being dropped onto the camera. These are both pretty typical examples of the caliber of miniature work you see in older Bollywood movies -- going back as far as such methods were employed and extending forward to as late as the mid-nineties -- and it's something that, by virtue of its naive charms, I've found myself becoming completely obsessed with. Nothing makes me happier these days than to be watching some old Indian movie and suddenly see a scene such as those that I've described above play across the screen, and the shoddier it looks, the better.     I should point out, however, that the crudeness of those effects is not due to them being primitive by necessity. It wouldn't have required that much greater of an expenditure of cash or resources, if any, to make those models slightly more detailed, or to film them from an angle that would have created an illusion of scale. Nor, in my opinion, is it a matter of Bollywood effects crews of the day simply being inept. Rather, it's the result, I think, of a particular approach to special effects that puts less of a premium on realism, preferring instead to simply suggest the thing represented, while letting the effect itself be seen by the audience for the ingenious bit of trickery that it is. It's a self referential form of movie magic that, by its very obviousness, invites the audience to be gleeful participants in their own deception. It also both exemplifies and enables that promise of escape into a totally fabricated reality that, for many of us, makes Indian commercial cinema so irresistible. As for Shiva Ka Insaaf's most important special effect -- that is, its attempted illusion of three dimensionality -- I cannot offer an evaluation. The only way the movie can be viewed these days is in the stubbornly two dimensional format of cheapo Indian DVD, and, even if it were to generate enough interest to merit a screen revival in all its intended glory, that wouldn't be likely to occur on my shores. Still, anyone attempting to watch the movie even in its current format will do best to be advised of its origins, otherwise the near constant thrusting and hurling of objects into the camera with little or no narrative justification will prove pretty perplexing.     For myself, what was most interesting about all of that was how, unlike other 3D movies that I've seen, in which the effect was generally used to provoke in the audience a feeling of physical threat (ooh, watch out for that ping pong ball!), Shiva ka Insaaf is just as likely to tease its audience with temptation. There are any number of nasty looking weapons brandished at the viewer, but he or she is just as often -- or even more often -- tantalized with the offer of a plateful of tasty looking food, a handful of candy, or even a fistful of cash. When you consider that the majority of the film's audience would have come from the lower economic strata of Indian society, you have to wonder if Shiva Ka Insaaf didn't perhaps cross some line beyond Bollywood's mandate to provide wish fulfillment and enter territory where it could have been perceived as taunting, or even cruel. Still, I have to admit that the first thing that came to mind upon seeing one of those handfuls of colorful sweets being launched toward my face was the image of a theater full of shrieking kids joyfully leaping with arms outstretched toward the screen. And I imagine any parent would feel safe letting their child accept candy from Shiva ka Insaaf, as, aside from a couple of bloody moments and a very well-placed use of the word "shit" by Gulshan Grover, it's decidedly kid friendly. The drama never gets too intense, the overall look is bathed in that inimitable bright 1980s glow, and the score happily percolates with songs by R.D. Burman at his most lightweight and catchy. In other words, The Dark Knight this is not, and if you're looking for depth, you should have seen it when it was in 3D. However, if you're in the mood for some good-natured, if unremarkable, costumed horseplay with that ineffable whiff of spice peculiar to Bollywood, you could do much worse. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Bollywood, Stars: Jackie Shroff, Year: 1985 posted by Todd at 9:56 AM | 13 Comments 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 Friday, August 17, 2007American Ninja
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1985, United States. Starring Michael Dudikoff, Steve James, Judie Aronson, Guich Koock, John Fujioka, Don Stewart, John LaMotta, Tadashi Yamashita. Directed by Sam Firstenberg. Buy it from Amazon
 .It almost seems moot for me to review this film, seeing as how I already reviewed the Mithun masterpiece Commando, which is basically this movie with some crazy shit tacked onto the beginning and end, and a fat guy in a magical flying car. But sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and I live the sort of life where, "write a long, rambling review of American Ninja" is something I just have to do. My relationship with both ninjas and ninja movies is pretty deep. Enter the Ninja? Yeah, saw it. Revenge of the Ninja? About a million times, buddy. I plan to go to my grave watching Revenge of the Ninja (or Gymkata). Pray for Death, Nine Deaths of the Ninja, Ninja III: The Domination? But of course. I'd even seen about eight billion different Godfrey Ho/Thomas Tang/Joseph Lai ninja films. While I was inflicting the Bollywood ninja film, Commando, on Teleport City's friends over at The Ninja Consultants, Ninja Consultant Noah commented that the movie was pretty much an exact copy of American Ninja. The weird fact was, I had never seen American Ninja. I have no idea why. Maybe the title wasn't exotic enough. I didn't, in my youth, want to watch a movie full of guys in weight lifter pants and American flag bandannas showing off their numchuck skills. Of course, if you gave me that movie now, I'd probably weep with joy Shamed by my lack of knowledge in this aspect -- because I live the sort of life where you can be shamed by not knowing enough about American Ninja -- I decided it was high time that I sit down and educate myself about this action-packed, true-story documentary film. Now, keep in mind that reviewing ninja movies is incredibly dangerous, and that may be part of the reason I hesitated to review American Ninja. Because all of them are documentaries that reflect 100% true and factual events, you are always in danger of accidentally divulging secret ninja secrets, and divulging secret ninja secrets can result in you walking out the front door to drop off your dry cleaning (I'm a grown up; I have dry cleaning to drop off), and suddenly you have a shuriken (that's a throwing star to you, son) in your face. In the ten years or so that I've been doing Teleport City, I have encountered a number of ninjas who sought me out purely because I wrote a review of one ninja movie or another. Rarely have they attempted to assassinate me, but remember that just because something hasn't happened doesn't mean that it couldn't happen. Since I started Teleport City many moons ago, I've gotten a lot of email from people claiming to be ninjas. One was so batshit insane that I had to break confidence and send it around to other people. I've since lost it, but maybe someone still has it. It's the one where a single sentence goes on for a full page. There was also a guy who used to write all the time and tell me about how he was a member of a secret ninja society that guarded Washington, D.C. But my favorite email is probably from a ninja who believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was Jim Kelly. The first time he wrote me, telling me how he loved my movies and wanting to know if I had any merchandise for sale, I did my best to let him down politely and tell him I'm not Jim Kelly without making him feel stupid. Then a few months later he wrote me, addressing me as "Mr. Jim Kelly" again. This time he was asking me what I'd been up to and when I was going to make another movie. For this time, I just didn't reply, figuring that would cause him to lose interest. I still get email from him, maybe two or three times a year, and he is still convinced that I am Jim Kelly, international martial arts champion and star of such films as Black Belt Jones and Enter the Dragon. I guess I should just roll with it. I mean, it's easy to understand the misunderstanding. I have reviewed some Jim Kelly films in the past. Both Jim and I are from Kentucky. And frankly, I have to admit that the physical similarity is pretty striking:   From time to time, I think about pitching a reality show to E! in which I get to fly this guy over from Germany, and the two of us go on a road trip to try and track down the elusive and reclusive Jim Kelly. But I'm full of ideas best categorized as "things only I want to actually see." Like how if I won the lottery, I would blow millions on making remastered, widescreen, uncut DVDs of various Eurospy films just so I could watch them. But before all that, before Teleport City and ninjas who prowl the rooftops of Washington, I already had a long and interesting association with the shadowy warriors known as ninja, starting when I was but a young lad. When I was young and interested in karate classes to make up for my rather slight build, I went to a martial arts expo at the Kentucky State Fair just outside of Louisville. I think in this same year, I saw Weird Al Yankovic play at the Redbirds Stadium, which was better than the year before, which I think is the year I saw Eddie Rabbit perform on the back of a flatbed trailer in Broadbendt Arena. That man sure did love a rainy night. I'd go to the fair every year with my uncle and grandfather, who would enter the various horse shows going on as part of the festivities. It was a pretty slick set-up. You got to sleep in horse stalls out back with the horses and had the run of the fairgrounds and expo center. What could beat sleeping in the dirt and then sneaking onto the midway at two in the morning in hopes of catching gypsy rituals, freaks being lead about on leashes, accordion-playing midgets, and other Something Wicked This Way Comes shady goings-on? I never did see any of that stuff, but I did find my uncle and his friends hunkered down in the shadows smoking doobies (they were doobies back then and forever), and this carny did let me into the inflatable moonwalk once after hours, and he didn't even try to molest me in return. Anyway, the martial arts expo that year was part of the big expo where you learn about livestock and jellies and stain removal pastes as you wander the display tables in search of free stickers and patches. You could also buy lots of martial arts stuff, like numchucks (saying "nunchuka" is for suckers and Japanese people), ninja stars, pictures of Bruce Lee, and that poster of the guy raising one arm above his head that was meant to teach you about strike points.  And there was always at least one karate school with a name like "Soaring Shotokan Eagle Dojo USA Eagles America...Eagle" putting on a demonstration. At this time in life, everything I knew about martial arts I'd learned from watching Bruce Lee and ninja movies. That Kung Fu TV show had always been way too boring to hold my attention. But even as a relatively ignorant little kid, I could tell more than half these guys were overstuffed karate hacks who'd had about as much real martial arts training as I'd received by watching Ultraman. But the crowd ate it up, and the more superfluous American flag paraphernalia in which you draped yourself, the more the crowd loved you. That way they could love this crazy "oriental fighting" while still being a proud American. This hit its most illogical and awesome extreme when a dude with a big thick 70s mustache peeking out from the top of his mask came out to do his kata while wearing a red, white, and blue ninja uniform (I think someone probably wore the same thing in Alexander Lou's Ninja in the USA). When the tubby guy in a gi with a bald eagle and American flag airbrushed on the back came out to do a series of half-assed judo throws and blocks, the place erupted. I'm almost certain he did it all to "Eye of the Tiger." Over the years, I had the pleasure of watching a lot of these guys perform, and I was amused and shocked by how similar their presentations always were. All you had to do was have an authoritative delivery of your motivational speech (which was usually better than a middle school gym teacher, if nothing else), and people were ready to throw money at you to train them to be invincible fighting machines. No matter how lame the show of skill, people generally bought it because, well, if you can't trust a karate guy in an American flag bandanna, who can you trust in this crazy world of ours? Never mind that most of these masters knew nothing, or only knew about bar fights or enough so that when they tried to teach other people, they'd get that other person seriously hurt if they ever tried to whip out their skills. Now one caveat: most of these guys were over six feet tall. They had pretty solid builds in the arms and legs and were, to a man, a little doughy around the midsection. Basically, they were built like Joe Don Baker. And it's entirely likely that any single one of them could walk up and kick my ass. I might get a lucky blow or two in, but it wouldn't make much difference. Being well-versed in winning bar fights and street brawls makes you a bad-ass. It doesn't make you a martial artist, though, and it doesn't necessarily mean people should be paying you a monthly fee to have you make them stand in the horse stance and punch the air for thirty minutes, twice a week. These guys were more or less the prime target audience for a movie like American Ninja. Ninjas made their big screen American debut in James Bond's jaunty Japanese adventure, You Only Live Twice. Now those guys were pretty cool, and they were led into battle by Emperor of the Universe Tetsuro Tanba, but the James Bond ninjas had one fatal flaw: they acted sort of like real ninjas might. Meaning that they dressed for the occasion. They dressed to blend in to whatever surroundings they found themselves. They did not run around in the signature black clothes and hood. And when assaulting a vast, space-age compound inside a hollowed-out volcano, even the female ninja wore the most sensible outfit: a small white bikini and canvas sneakers. And so they became nothing more than a cultural footnote. It wasn't until the late 1970s that the ninjas as we now know them made their big push to emerge from the shadows. We covered much of this history, as well as the actual history of the ninja, in our reviews of Enter the Ninja and The Octagon, so if you need to know that stuff -- and who doesn't -- you best cruise on over to that review and see how well we did with accuracy (OK, I think). Now the first ninja exploitation films out of the gate were pretty fun, but the problem with banner ninja movie star Sho Kosugi was apparent: he was kind of, you know, not white. And the 80s were the decade of the big, tough, white action hero, with Action Jackson sort of hanging out on the corners, depressed that he missed the more colorful and diverse action decade of the 70s by a few years. Sure, Enter the Ninja starred a white guy, but that was a foreign white guy, and foreign white guys were even worse than black American guys, who were perfectly acceptable second bananas. What we really needed was an American white guy ninja, someone who could wear an American flag bandanna and pose in front of a big-ass American flag while wearing his ninja uniform. Someone that the guys at the state fair could rally behind and model themselves after. We needed an American ninja. In 1985, Cannon gave these guys their hero. These guys, however, were just a primer for later events in my life and my ever advancing experiences with the ninja. Specifically, 7th grade. It was the year 1984. Visions of a soul-crushing totalitarian regime as predicted by George Orwell had not come to pass, though Ronald Reagan did have a fair number of people convinced that we were all going to be nuked by Commies day after tomorrow, or sometime round about then. My friends and I, inspired by Red Dawn, built a bomb shelter in the woods down by Harrod's Creek (it was a foot deep hole, covered by some plywood, with a rusty canteen full of brackish water in it). The year's top songs included Ratt's "Round and Round," "Sister Christian" by Night Ranger, "Wake me Up Before You Go-Go" by Wham, and a little something called "Thriller." At the roller rink, we held hands with girls and skated to "Hold Me Now" by the Thompson Twins, and at the movies we went to watch a young Kevin Bacon stand up against the oppression of right wing Christianity by dancing in barns. And at night, once a week, the nation gathered around the television set to watch a guy wearing white loafers and pastel t-shirts catch drug dealers in neon-soaked Miami. It was my seventh grade year, and things were OK. I was head over heels for this neighborhood girl named Dani; I was in the middle of the home economics class we all had to make, where I made green jell-o with Vienna sausages suspended in it; and I was just beginning to discover my knack for math was nearing its end. At my school, inventively named Oldham County Middle School, life revolved around skate parties, school dances, and hanging out in the gym and the hallways before class. They used to make us all gather in the gym in the morning, either so they could keep track of which buses had arrived or so they could keep up out of the bathrooms and hallways before the teachers arrived. Maybe both. Anyway, sitting in the bleachers in the morning is when you made all the plans with your friends for what you were going to do when you got out of the gym and could wander around the halls for twenty minutes before class. Who liked who, who broke up, what you watched last night on television, whether or not you'd been able to find the new Storm Shadow figure at Airway. Or maybe it had become Target by then. Can't remember exactly, and any time I look up something like "When did Airway become Target," I get lots of information about the effect of bronchial thermoplasty on airway distensibility. One of the kids that sat with our large group most mornings was named Wojo. Wojo got heavier into the Miami Vice than anyone else, and would often show up to school decked out in full Crockett attire -- white blazer, white pants, white canvas loafers with no socks, and of course, some confectionery colored pastel t-shirt. On multiple occasions he'd come in, glance around nervously, and mutter half-audible curses under his breath. He'd continue this until someone else would get fed up, roll their eyes, and despite the fact that everyone already knew what was coming, would have to ask, "What's going on, Wojo?" Wojo would glance around a little more, then say, "Well you can't tell anyone, but last night I found out my girlfriend's dad was involved in some major shit. Some bad shit with Colombians. One of them found out I knew, and I think they might be trying to kill me." "This would be the girlfriend no one has ever met?" "I told you, she goes to private school. I think she and I might have to run," Wojo would continue, unfazed. "I heard one of them talking to someone on the phone in Spanish. I think they're calling in a hitman from Colombia." "Wojo, you can't speak Spanish." "Didn't that happen on Miami Vice last week?" Wojo's ongoing shadow war with Colombian gangs running their operation out of LaGrange, Kentucky, stood out even among my friends, which included among others, a guy who had memorized the entire "Robin Williams Live at the Met" stand up comedy routine and constantly tried to pass it off as his own material despite the fact that everyone had already seen "Robin Williams Live at the Met." "What?" he'd stammer. "Robin Williams made that same joke? Man, that's weird, huh?" The thing that really made Wojo stand out from the crowd, besides his commitment to every detail of his stories, was that his best friend and running mate was a kid named Sean who was a total freak about ninjas. I mean a total freak. We all loved ninjas, and the coolest kids in the group were the ones who had seen movies like Enter the Ninja or, even better, Revenge of the Ninja. I remember the first time I saw it. I was at my grandparent's house for the weekend. They just got cable TV, and I was up late watching HBO, hoping to catch a glimpse of some boobs or something. Revenge of the Ninja gave me that and so much more. I was going wild, and although I didn't go out and buy a headband that said "Ninja" on it in that jagged "oriental" typeface, I was definitely hooked on gory ninja films. I might have even bought a couple throwing stars at the state fair one fall, but I stopped short of owning a full ninja uniform. Not only did Sean own a ninja uniform, he frequently wore it to school, tabi boots and all. The school wouldn't allow him to wear the hood since it covered his identity -- as if there were other kids walking around the halls gussied up in full ninja regalia and talking about sai and bo staffs in a lilting Southern accent. Like his friend Wojo, Sean would often come into the gym in the morning and sit down ready to tell a story about how the Black Dragon Ninja Society was after him for revealing their secrets to the White Heron style or something like that, but Sean had betrayed the Black Dragons because, although they may have trained him, their leader had turned his back on what it meant to be a true ninja and was now in league with villains, presumably the same Colombian drug cartel that was gunning for Wojo (remember -- Edward James Olmos' character in Miami Vice was always alluding to his own spooky ninja past, so the pieces all fall into place). Suffice it to say, the sight of Wojo and Sean, the ninja and the Miami Vice cop, prowling the halls of the middle school was enough to strike most people dumb. Who knew that beneath the veneer of cows, grain silos, and Future Farmers of America champions, Oldham County was a seething cauldron of murderous South American drug cartels and ancient ninja secret societies. Sean was often asked by classmates to demonstrate his ninja prowess during gym class, and though he'd favor us with a stance or two, he'd never show off any of his true skills. "Maybe when you're better prepared," he'd admonish us in his spooky ninja talk. Then he'd strike that weird "one finger upraised on one upraised hand with arms folded in front of my body" stance that so many ninjas do. Sadly, he never disappeared into a puff of multi-colored smoke. Years later, while in college, my interest in the deadly arts was renewed. There was this guy in Gainesville named Grandmaster Philip Holder. I knew his name before he came to town, because I'd always sees his ads in Inside Kungfu. Yes, I was dorky enough to read that magazine, but where else are you going to learn about important things like Chuck Norris brand karate stretch denim jeans with that extra little bit of spandex mixed in so you can deliver a roundhouse kick without feeling all constrained. And need you even ask? They were boot cut, for Chuck.  The reason everyone noticed the Grandmaster Philip Holder ads wasn't just because there seemed to be about three of them in every issue. It was because my friend Bill once pointed out to everyone that in tiny, tiny print above the words "Grand Master" were the words, "Self-Proclaimed." Well, you know, they're always teaching you that the true master is inside, and Bruce Leroy could only get The Glow once he understood this, so I can only assume that Grandmaster Philip Holder must have been blinded by the glow of his own ego. I mean martial arts prowess. I can't remember where he was based out of at the time, but we all rejoiced the day flyers started popping up around town announcing -- or proclaiming, if you will -- his intention to grace the greater Gainesville area with his presence. "Grandmaster Philip Holder's Self Defense Dojo and Bodyguard Training" said one. "Grandmaster Philip Holder's Self Defense Dojo and Ninja Training Camp" said another. I can only imagine that all of north Florida's weightlifter-pant-wearing meatheads and fat chicks who liked anime were chomping at the bit to see if they had the skill and the inner fire (and the clearable checks) it would take to become a pupil of the legendary Grandmaster Philip Holder. When Philip Holder moved his global training center to Gainesville, Florida, he put signs up everywhere looking for students who wanted to be trained by "the world's third deadliest man." No one ever explained that title to me. I guess there is some international governing body that hands out "deadliest man" rankings, but that still doesn't explain the exact nature of Holder's claim. Is he the third man to hold the title "world's deadliest man," or is it that in the race to be the world's deadliest man, there are two men in the world deadlier than Phillip Holder? Anyway, we all know who the world's deadliest man truly is:  I can't say at the time I that I was actively applying myself to the martial arts. It was my last year at school, and besides, you know. It was hard and all. But from time to time I'd show up down at a place called Whirling Tiger, a kungfu studio where they had some top notch teachers, including a certain Sifu Dez, who was among the most serious people I'd ever met regarding martial arts training. I mean, the guy had a Bruce Lee body. Normal people don't have those. We have the bodies of the various sidekicks in Bruce Lee films. Besides being the type of kungfu practitioner who could knock your socks off (literally and figuratively), Dez was a gentle artistic soul, as we found out the day a couple people wandered upstairs into his room and found a painting he'd done of his girlfriend standing in front of a pool of water. Out of the water arose a mighty whirlwind water spout, the spiraling waves of which eventually formed Dez. Any van would have been proud to call it its side door art. Anyway, Dez is probably the only true bad-ass I've ever met. Powerful and quiet and humble, yet confident, as one can be when one can whup the ass of pretty much anyone one meets. If only he could have inspired the same in me. I was and forever shall be the bad student, the one in the movies who is always finding ways to cheat training or whining, "But master! Why do I have to catch these frogs?" So one day, some of the Whirling Tiger guys decided to drive out to Grandmaster Philip Holder's compound, since he apparently had something like that. It was a courtesy call. No challenges were to be issued. Folks just wanted to check out the new guy in town and offer a hand of friendship on behalf of unifying the martial world of north Florida. Dez was always big on that sort of thing. So out we went. It took a while, and we got lost a couple times because this was back in the days before Google Maps. By and by, we realized our mistake was in searching for something that looked like a bunch of wooden buildings with guys in black masks throwing down smoke bombs and jumping on trampolines or running backwards up walls in fast motion. You know, ninja camp stuff. Instead, we had to turn into the lot of one of those sprawling storage garage places and search for Grandmaster Philip Holder's suite numbers, which actually meant his warehouse numbers. Eventually we found them, or it, because there was only one. It was full of those usual redneck guys -- big and out of shape, but in a way that makes them perfectly suited for pounding me into the ground as easy as they'd pound a six pack of Pabst before it became the irritating hipster beer of choice and everyone went back to Natural Light. Actually, I don't know if any hipsters actually drink PBR, or if they just talk about it and go to hipster bars that ironically offer PBR 2-for-1's. These big guys (this camp was too bad-ass for the fat chicks who liked anime; they would have to stick to classes at the university gym) were sweating it out in the July heat in some rental garage on the outskirts of town, doing the usual half-assed horse stance and punch thing with battle cries while Grandmaster Philip Holder sat at the far end of the warehouse on his giant throne.
Even more than the state fair guys, these were the target audience and eventual spawns of American Ninja, a movie that exists in that cultural limbo that exists in every culture: that stuff from someone else's culture is cool, but it's even cooler when someone from my culture does it. That's why there are so many movies where white guys and black guys -- American guys -- emerge as the absolute best martial artists in the world. Yeah, all that Asian stuff is pretty bad-ass, but it's even more bad-ass when Americans do it, probably whilst accompanied by that military marching band drum music. I suppose there are a lot of Chinese and Japanese movies where Asians kick the ass of Americans at traditionally American things, like...I don't know. Eating hoagies and suing each other. So yeah -- there are racial and cultural issues that can be addressed via an analysis of a movie like American Ninja, but some things are just too silly to warrant serious discussion, and Lord knows this is one of them. Besides, the flip of the "Americans are more awesomest" jingoism is always that, misguided though it may be in many places, these movies also increase awareness and appreciation of other cultures, even if it's somewhat silly aspects of other cultures. Since the silly parts of other cultures are usually the most fun parts, I have no beef with this. So with that brought up and off-handedly dismissed, it's time to take a closer look at American Ninja and see what I'd been missing. What I discovered pretty much from the very first couple of minutes is that American Ninja is undoubtedly one of the all-time greatest movies ever made, ever. It wastes absolutely no time, getting to the black-clad ninja madness almost immediately. American forces in the Philippines are being preyed upon by slobby rebels who keep hijacking their arms shipments and CO's daughter shipments. Despite this, no one higher up in the army thinks that maybe something is wrong, like that trained American soldiers should be able to whoop ass on anyone who attacks them whilst wearing a sweat-stained Aloha shirt. Or maybe that if armament shipments keep getting stolen, we should take a different route, or quit stopping for obvious ambushes. I mean, in the history of action films, when your convoy gets held up by unexpected road work, that road work has never been anything but an ambush. The only legitimate road work that happens in action films happens at the very edge of an interstate ramp that drops off into nothing but affords you a chance to jump the chasm and land on another section of road beyond the gap. Also, you would assume that American soldiers getting attacked by an army of ninjas would be the sort of thing that makes the news. Usually, when one American soldier gets killed somewhere, it at least gets a mention. Now if several are killed, and killed by ninjas no less, I'm saying that it should attract at least a little attention. No one at the base seems to mind much, though. Nor does anyone think that the commanding officer's policy of "just let them take what they want and go," is anything out of the ordinary. Why the hell send an armed escort if you are going to forbid them to defend the thing they are there to defend? You might as well have your convoy driven by Eddie Deezen. I know the military has all sorts of screw-ups, but I think even at its worst point, someone would still have taken notice of the commanding officer who routinely hands all his weapons over to ninjas without so much as a fight.
That is, until mysterious loner G.I., Joe (Michael Dudikoff, in his first starring role), shows up and starts kicking hijacker ass and throwing screwdrivers and tire changing tools at them, which results in ninjas positively pouring out of the jungle to jump on trampolines and do cartwheels over trucks! Although the commanding officer urges his men to stand down and just let the ninjas take what they want, Joe is unwilling to stand by and let these ninjas get away with highway robbery -- especially when they start menacing the colonel's hot daughter (Judie Aronson). That calls for some kungfu bad-assery, followed by a long trek through the jungle, during which the chick will go from bitching about her hair and Gucci shoes to falling in love with stoic man of action. Joe, for his bravery in the face of attack, finds himself ostracized by his fellow soldiers, hated by his superiors, and marked by the mysterious ninja leader named Black Star Ninja, who wants to kill Joe...permanently! This also means that Joe will have to fight ninjas pretty much every scene. It turns out the hijacking is facilitated by the corrupt base...guy (John LaMotta). The chain of command here seems pretty questionable and includes the colonel's hot daughter in a position of significant authority, as well as a chauffeur with big poofy 80s hair. But the base commanding guy is dastardly and working with the even more dastardly French terrorist, Ortega. Judging from his name, bad fake accent, and line of do-it-yourself taco making kits, I'm pretty sure Ortega is just a Mexican guy pretending to be a French guy in order to mess with people. His chief weapon in the fight against, well, no one really, is the mysterious Japanese guy named Black Star Ninja. Anyway, I think his name is Black Star Ninja. Maybe that's his rank. Similar confusion arose in Commando, when the head ninja was named Ninja. Black Star Ninja kills a lot of his own ninjas, which is common among evil villains but never makes much sense. for starters, who is going to want to work for you if they know you kill your own people for no reason? And second, I assume that, even though there are like eleven million ninjas in this movie, ninjas are actually hard to come by, and if you have an army of them, you should practice ninja conservation and try to conserve the ones you've found. Anyway, thus the whup-ass begins, and it doesn't really end until the final credits roll, unless Joe is stopping to cut some chick's dress shorter so she can more effectively run through the jungle with him. Along the way, we will spend a bit of time exploring Joe's mysterious past he can't remember but is somehow responsible for him being well-versed in the craft of the wily ninja. Here's a hint: he's a ninja. A mysterious Japanese dude (John Fujioka) will wander in from time to time and yammer on about the truth being revealed when Joe is ready -- much like Sean the Middle School Ninja.
With so many ninjas and so much ninja action crammed into this film, the story is easy to ignore. It's also easy to ignore because it's pretty dumb. I said when I reviewed Commando -- which again, is almost a shot-for-shot remake of American Ninja, only with the added bonus of a finale featuring dudes in Michael Jackson jackets shooting grenade launchers -- I find it hard to believe that ninjas and greasy thugs in Hawaiian shirts routinely rob American military convoys, and no one thinks that's a bad thing. But since we're quickly up to our armpits in ninjas, who really cares about the plot, which is really more of a series of loosely connected action scenes strung together haphazardly by some scenes of the bad guys talking and hanging out at the ninja training camp, which is one of those training camps like Al Quaeda uses, all full of monkey bars and flaming hoops and trampolines. At least the ninjas will use the Gymboree skills they acquire. I've never understood the Al Quaeda training video where the guys are doing monkey bars and jumping over stuff and doing kickboxing. Dude, you assholes strap bombs to yourselves and blow up innocent people. When are you going to need your monkey bar skills? When has Al Quaeda ever battled anyone in a kickboxing fight? Damn, if this was 1985 and we weren't as sensitive, you know that shit would be a movie, where the only way to beat Al Quaeda is to send Michael Dudikoff deep into the heart of Afghanistan to fight the supreme Al Quaeda kickboxer in a deadly underground martial arts tournament. American Ninja features more ninjas per minute (NPM -- you can immediately tell whether or not a movie is any good if it has high NPM) than probably any other ninja movie ever made -- a claim I do not make lightly. If anyone can think of a movie with more ninjas in it, let me know. It also has a colossal body count, in the gloriously violent grand tradition of 80s action films. These days, the carnage is largely property-related, with a few token deaths here and there. But American Ninja kills like a hundred dudes, no exaggeration. Only Arnold in Commando kills more (as opposed to Mithun in Commando). Leading the ninjas into battle, and occasionally killing them for no real reason, is Tadashi Yamashita as Black Star Ninja. While watching Commando, I kept thinking that Danny Dengpongza looked a lot like Tadashi Yamashita. In fact, at first I thought Ninja the ninja actually was being played by Yamashita. I didn't even know at the time that Yamashita played the exact same role in American Ninja, which means the producers of Commando probably combed India looking for a guy who looked like Tadashi Yamashita, which is probably the first and last time anyone anywhere in the world has combed a country looking for a guy who looked like Tadashi Yamashita. Yamashita -- who was also known for a brief period as Bronson Lee (Champion!) -- was the go-to guy whenever an American movie needed an Asian ninja guy and Sho Kosugi was nowhere to be found (which was often, as finding a ninja is hard, and Sho had to finish Black Eagle). Yamashita did an episode of Knight Rider (where he starred as "Ninja Assassin"), which is probably an episode I'm going to have to track down and see. And although Edward James Olmos' captain dude in Miami Vice never fully copped to his secret ninja training background (no wonder Wojo and Sean got along so well), I think we can assume that, if they'd ever followed through with it, he would have ended up fighting Tadashi Yamashita at some point. Yamashita's most recognizable, at least to people like me, for his appearance in a holy trinity of American martial arts movies. He's the "Eastern Trainer" in Gymkata, where he taught Kurt Thomas the ultimate martial arts skill (walking up stairs on your hands -- we know this is the ultimate skill, because Chiun made Remo Williams do the same thing, though thankfully Fred ward was not wearing the same microshorts as Kurt Thomas). Then he's the treacherous Sakura in Chuck Norris's The Octagon, where the ultimate ninja skill is thinking to yourself in loud whispers (and where he runs a ninja training camp that is, I assume, very similar to the one run by Grandmaster Phillip Holder). And then there was American Ninja, where he runs another ninja training camp and helps a French guy named Ortega steal weapons from the U.S. military, which doesn't seem to bother anyone except for Joe. And eventually Joe's buddy Curtis, played by bad action movie stalwart Steve James.
Steve James -- has this guy ever NOT been enthusiastic? Steve James was awesome. I don't think he was in a good movie his entire career, with the exception of I'm Gonna Git You, Sucka, but you'd never know that from the amount of zeal and energy he maintained no matter how awful the cinema surrounding him. James is one of those actors where whether he's good or bad becomes moot, because he seems to naturally adapt to the one role he always plays, sort of like Fred Williamson or Patrick Swayze. Say what you will about Swayze, but it's rare you ever find him not fully committing himself to a role. In a movie where main villain Tadashi Yamashita speaks in stilted, stammering English and main star Michael Dudikoff shows all the emotion of, well, an emotionless ninja killing machine, the job of turning in a performance actual humans can relate to falls on the square shoulders of James, who is up to the task, as he always was. Bad action movies lost a great asset the day he passed away. As goofy as American Ninja's plot may be, that didn't stop it from needing four writers. Seriously? Four people to write American Ninja? I mean, I love American Ninja, but this is the sort of concept movie a producer tosses off to a writer to start and finish in a single coke-fueled weekend. "Hey buddy, Globus wants to make a movie called American Ninja. Have the script on my desk by tomorrow." Done deal. Instead, we have four cats putting their two cents in: Gideon Amir, Paul De Mielche, Avi Kleinberger, and James R. Silke. Of those guys, only Silke had any actual writing credentials. The other three were Israeli television producers, and American Ninja is the first and last writing credit for all of them, except for the guys who also get credit for American Ninja II. Silke, on the other hand, is not only named Silke, but he also wrote Revenge of the Ninja and Ninja III: The Domination, so you know the man is a solid source of verified lore when it comes to ninjas. Plus, later in life he went on to write Barbarians, a documentary about twin barbarian bodybuilders who defend jugglers from an evil warlord. I think it was made for Discovery Channel. Anyway, I assume that Silke did all the writing, and those other jokers leaned in to his squalid Tijuana hotel room (because I assume all movies are written while drunk in a squalid Tijuana hotel room with a passed out, possible dead, hooker in the bed) from time to time and said something like, "I think he should put a bucket on his head. Now give me writing credit," while Silke was busy trying to write gold like American Ninja throwing a screwdriver through a guy's sternum. Anyway, the story isn't all that great, but whatever. It's not like Silke probably didn't know that, and to make up for it, he crammed his movie to bursting with ninja action and trucks knocking over fruit carts.
Bringing to life Silke's bold vision of a world chock full of ninjas running around in multi-colored ninja outfits in the middle of the day is our good buddy, director Sam Firstenberg. Firstenberg was the go-to guy whenever Cannon Films needed a cheap action film or movie about plucky, neon-clad breakdancers saving the community center. Firstenberg directed two of the best ninja movies ever made -- this one and Revenge of the Ninja. He also did Ninja III: The Domination, but honestly, all I remember from that movie is Lucinda Dickey straddling some dude while she pours V8 juice down her chest, a scene that is grosser than it is sexy, possibly because although I love Lucinda Dickey, I don't like V8 and feel that she should have just stuck with the more traditional champagne. Granted, the scene happens at the end of her work-out, but who hasn't drunk champagne during their work-out? I know I have. Seriously. I have. Oh, and a ninja kills a telephone pole repairman in the movie. It was probably the son of the telephone repairman who got killed in Assault on Precinct 13. Firstenberg also gave the world Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo with Lucinda Dickey in a tasty array of neon leotards (Lord, the debt I owe Firstenberg is huge), American Ninja II (not Electric Boogaloo), Delta Force III, and a couple Cyborg Cop movies, so if you're guessing he's a director I approve of, then you know me well. And I am not ashamed that I know far more about Sam Firstenberg's directorial career than I do that of Luis Bunuel. Maybe if Bunuel had been making movies like Breakdancing Barbarian Cyborg Ninja, I'd have been more interested in him. Instead, he wasted his career making movies about, you know, whatever the hell The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie was about. Firstenberg's direction is, as with pretty much any Cannon Studio production, competent without standing out. He shoots martial arts action better than most modern directors, primarily because he sets a camera up a slight distance and lets guys fight, rather than shaking the camera around and doing lots of fast edits and close-ups of Jet Li's ear. Speaking of the martial arts, you can't really review a ninja film without mentioning the stunts and fight choreography. Stunts and fights here were coordinated by a guy named Steven Lambert, who still gets work as a stuntman and choreographer for some pretty huge movies. But back in American Ninja days, he was fresh off Revenge of the Ninja and Tuff Turf, where he had the unenviable task of making James Spader seem like a street wise bad-ass. Lambert works in conjunction with fight choreographer Mike Stone, a regular fixture in Cannon's ninja movies despite the bad blood that arose between the would-be actor and studio heads Golan and Globus. Stone was the guy who developed the Enter the Ninja project that launched the entire ninja craze of the 1980s. Mike Stone brought them the project with a lead actor already in mind: Mike Stone. He was already an accomplished martial artist and understood how to adapt actual martial arts to movie martial arts choreography. I mean, he was no Sammo Hung, but he was all right. Cannon was excited about the project and threw the full force of their mighty cinematic empire behind the project -- oh, except they fired everyone they hired.
It was standard operating procedure for Cannon to hire a crew, then immediately fire them all and replace them with cheaper labor and nepotistic associations from Israel. If you look at the credits for American Ninja, you'll see that it looks like pretty much the same thing happened. Among the Enter the Ninja casualties was Mike Stone, who was bumped from the lead in favor of Italian tough guy actor Franco Nero. Stone's consolation prize was that he was kept on as the movie's martial arts choreographer and as the ninja double for Nero, who may have been able to box in the ears of young Italian street punks but was hardly passable as a martial artist. In order to soothe Stone's bruised ego, Cannon promised him the lead in their next ninja movie, which would also feature Enter the Ninja co-star Sho Kosugi, who swore he would not do the movie unless Cannon made good on their promise to Mike Stone. That movie was Revenge of the Ninja, and you might notice that it stars Sho Kosugi, but Mike Stone is nowhere to be found. Even if he'd been relegated to supporting star status, Stone could have played the role of Kosugi's martial artist cop buddy, but that role went to Keith Vitali (who squared off with the big three in Jackie, Sammo, and Yuen Biao's Wheels on Meals). Lambert was back as stunt choreographer, but the fights themselves were coordinated by Sho Kosugi, which means after promising Stone he wouldn't do the movie without him -- according to Mike Stone, mind you -- Kosugi went on to take both the lead role and the fight choreography from Stone. Much of this story depends on earlier stories told by Mike Stone, so true accounts may vary. And since Sho Kosugi is meditating in a mist-filled temple built deep within an active volcano until mankind needs him once again, we may never know or really care. For all I know, as bad as much of the acting is in Cannon films, Stone could have been that much worse, and it was for the best that he was never the lead. Whatever happened between Stone and Cannon couldn't have been that awful, because Stone was back in action, if not on the screen, for American Ninja, and he stuck around for American Ninja II and American Ninja III. Since then, he's gotten bit parts here and there, usually sans spoken lines, and still does stunt and choreography work from time to time. Guys like Stone are the types of guys I wish more people interviewed. Stars and directors have their experiences, but these dudes, working in the trenches often in bizarre circumstances, always have the best stories. Hey Stone, if you are out there searching Google for your own name and you run across this review, get in touch. I won't promise to cast you in the lead of my upcoming ninja film, though, because that role is already reserved for Rosario Dawson. Since the screenplay is tentatively titled Sexy Ninja Shows Her Big Boobs Often (it sounds more elegant in Japanese), you probably don't want the lead anyway. And I'd bet good money there is already a Japanese movie called Sexy Ninja Shows Her Big Boobs Often.
Anyway, Stone's work here ain't half bad, which is something, considering Dudikoff is barely passable as a martial artist. Luckily, Stone gets the services of Steve James and a whole slew of stuntmen who had nothing to do but wear ninja outfits and do somersaults, so there's plenty of stuff to help carry Dudikoff. Fights are better than average for an American martial arts film, and American Ninja proves that sometimes quantity can be better than quality. The final duel between Joe and the Black Star Ninja (who probably gave himself that name because his real name was Corey or something -- no one is afraid of Corey the Ninja) is pretty awesome, because rather than just fight each other, they first run through the entire gauntlet of toys at Black Star's ninja camp. And then Black Star starts whipping out all sorts of crazy ninja gadgets, culminating in his deft employment of a ninja laser! I mean, it's not as cool as the brightly colored smoke bombs ninjas disappear into all the time, but a ninja laser is pretty good. American Ninja: the greatest ninja movie ever made? I guess I still have to give the edge to Revenge of the Ninja, but American Ninja runs a pretty damn close second. Dudikoff may not be much of an actor, but he's not so bad that you'd be shocked by how bad he is. He's well-suited for the role, and he has Steve James on hand to provide some actual charisma. Anyway, you hardly need to worry about character development and such when your characters are attacked by armies of ninjas like every thirty seconds. How Cannon never got around to pairing American Ninja with Sho Kosugi, I do not know. American Ninja -- man, I can't believe I waited so long to see this movie, but I'm glad it was out there, crouched in the shadows like Sean the Middle School Ninja, waiting for the time when I was ready. Labels: Martial Arts: Ninjas, Series: American Ninja, Studio: Cannon, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 5:01 PM | 9 Comments Monday, March 05, 2007Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1985, United States/some Eastern European country. Starring Christopher Lee, Annie McEnroe, Reb Brown, Marsha Hunt, Sybil Danning, Judd Omen. Directed by Phillipe Mora. Written by Gary Brandner and Robert Sarno. Buy it from Amazon
 . There are those among us who, in a moment of moral weakness, find themselves unwilling or unable to turn away from a grisly situation. As to the psychological motivations behind this tendency, they are legion and vary from person to person. Perhaps it is a desire to affirm that someone is worse off than you, that even though your rent is overdue and your daughter is hopped up on the goofballs, at least you're not a corpse being yanked out of some twisted, smoldering wreckage along the interstate. Perhaps, instead, it is little more than a reflex reaction symptomatic of the seemingly insatiable human hunger for spectacle, however grim it may be. Perhaps, in some, it is a genuine perversity, a wicked satisfaction gleaned from witnessing the suffering of others. And finally, it may be that some of us look out of guilt -- that we are torn between not making a gawking spectacle of suffering and ignoring suffering. Whatever the case may be, the urge is there, commonplace, and hardly solely the purview of the misanthropic. It manifests itself in a variety of forms, everything from slowing down to stare at a traffic accident to gathering on the street corner to gawk at a crime scene to greedily devouring the sensationalist news about the sordid downfall of a celebrity. Or, in my own peculiar case, it manifests itself in a complete inability to not watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf every single time I run across it on television.
I have no reasonable explanation for my addiction. At least heroin makes you feel good for a little while. I garner no pleasure from my addiction to Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. There is no benefit to me in staying up until three in the morning yet again just because Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf happens to be on. And yet there I am, never the less, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf on the television, a tumbler of bourbon in my hand to help dull the pain, and a deep-seated loathing of myself gnawing away at my very soul as I catch myself tapping my foot in time with that horrid pseudo new wave band that appears in the opening scene. But as much as my hate myself in the morning, as much as my addiction may cripple me socially and bankrupt me morally, I can still go to bed at night with a single dab of salve to soothe my troubled conscience: at least I wasn't in the movie, which is more than venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee can say.
In 1981, up and coming horror film luminary Joe Dante (who would give the world one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time in 1984, and had already given the world Piranha) teamed up with writers Terence Winkless and John Sayles (of all people!) to direct The Howling, an updated werewolf tale released at roughly the same time as John Landis' An American Werewolf in London. It was a good year to be a werewolf (better than the year in which Van Helsing was released, anyway), because both films were greeted with enthusiasm by fans and praise from a number of hot shot critics. Sequels were in order, but while Landis' film had to wait roughly sixteen years to get its first godawful sequel, Dante's own werewolf film wasted no time. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, also known as Stirba: Werewolf Bitch, was released in 1985 and quickly went down in history (and flames) as one of the worst goddamned movies anyone had ever seen. I'm not really one to argue -- almost nothing about this film resembles anything remotely close to competence. The script by Robert Sarno and Gary Brandner (who's never written anything but Howling scripts) is dreadful. Direction by Phillipe Mora is passable, but there's a reason he didn't go on from here to direct movies that weren't Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills. The acting is almost uniformly awful, anchored as it is by none other than our good friend Reb Brown, last seen on Teleport City back when we reviewed Yor, The Hunter from the Future, and an embarrassed venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, who must have been thinking that all those Dracula roles he bitched about his whole career were looking pretty good now that he had appear in movies like this or the one where he fights Chuck Norris. Oh, there's also Sybil Danning as the alternate title titular werewolf queen (or bitch), Stirba. And some chick named Annie McEnroe who was in Warlords of the 21st Century.
And yet, as undeniably bad as it all is, there I am, every time it's on television. And what makes it worse is that I own the DVD! I own the goddamn DVD, and still I watch it whenever it's on television. Let this be a lesson to anyone who ever takes my advice on anything; if you ever find yourself faced with a difficult decision and ask yourself, "What would Keith from Teleport City do?" then your immediate next thought should be, "Who cares? That guy watches Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf all the time." Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is one of those early movies, alongside classics such as Beastmaster and Revenge of the Ninja that I got to see thanks to a friend with cable television (I couldn't just have him tape them for me though, because while he had a newfangled VHS machine, my family went Betamax). But even nostalgia can't excuse my adoration of this truly unwatchable film. Things start out OK. Venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee shows up to harass Ben (Reb Brown), who is supposed to be the brother of one of the chicks who turned into a werewolf in the first movie. Ben and and his girlfriend Jenny Templeton (Annie McEnroe) don't take too kindly to this nine-foot-tall guy lurking around the cemetery during the sister's funeral, constantly walking up to them and, in gravest tone imaginable, delivering the line, "Your sister is a werewolf," over and over. When, during the next full moon, the sister does spring forth from her tomb and make with the lycanthropy, they are more disposed toward believing venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, whose character is named Stefan Crosscoe (oh good grief -- did a spooky high schooler come up with that name? At least it wasn't Chris I. Fixtion or something).
Somehow through a series of events I don't care about, they all end up going to Transylvania together, because it is the heart of werewolf power. But they don't do that before venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee gets to go to the punky club and put on a pair of those plastic wrap-around new wave sunglasses. If any scene justifies watching this movie, this is it. But when, "venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses" is the high point of your movie, you know you're in trouble. Actually, pretty much everyone agrees that if there is a high point in this movie, it's "werewolf orgy," but we haven't gotten to that part yet, and honestly, it's not as good as " venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses." When "werewolf orgy" isn't as good as "venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses," you're in ever deeper trouble than you were when it was just " venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses."
So next we're in one of those secret warehouse clubs where the usual assortment of movie punks/new wavers/dominatrixes/neon freaks are hanging out listening to a crummy band called Babel -- and by "crummy," I mean, yes, I did search around for mp3s. I couldn't help myself. While the band goes through their wolfy song about howling (what a coincidence!), a hot chick named Mariana picks up a couple of typical goofball movie punks who I'm sure had names like Razor and Chainlink and Puke. She shows them her boobs (quite nice of her), then turns into...I guess it's a werewolf. It looks more like one of those monkey men from 2001 though. Anyway, she gets all hairy and toothy and rips them apart. When The Rolling Stones wrote the song "Brown Sugar," it was about Marsha Hunt, the actress who plays Mariana. I bet they didn't envision her turning into a hairy monkey-woman werewolf, but then, maybe they did. I mean, it is the Stones, after all. Whatever, she's still dead sexy, had a huge 'fro in the 1970s, and we all saw her die in Dracula A.D. 1972, though I doubt she and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee looked upon Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf as a grade-A reunion. It turns out that Stirba, the queen bitch of the werewolves, lives in a castle in Transylvania, which in this movie is a country rather than a region or town, and the seat of werewolfery (which I prefer over lycanthropy) rather than the seat of vampirism -- but whatever, man. Any chance to needle venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee about the Dracula movies is worth taking. Venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, Ben, and Jenny must unite to destroy Stirba and her werewolf legion, which includes Brown Sugar and Mickey the escaped con who hung out with Pee Wee Herman. That actor's name is Judd Omen. Seriously, man, if they had named one of the characters Judd Omen I would have complained about that, but then it turns out there's really a guy named Judd Omen. I hope he hung out at some point with Thurl Ravenscroft. When Stirba and her minions aren't messing around with punker dudes at new wave clubs in Los Angeles, they're busy having werewolf orgies where they all grow lots of hair but don't quite turn into werewolves, then writhe about on the big ornate bed in Stirba's antechamber. It's sort of like watching a bunch of hirsute hippies makin' out, except with more growling.
While this is going on, our trio of half-assed vampire killers, err, werewolf hunters, show up and, in one of the movie's most nonsensical scenes, stumble upon a car wreck out in the middle of nowhere. While all the colorful, toothless local peasants vanish into thin air, Jenny, Ben, and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee are attacked by werewolves. In broad daylight. And after venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee battles the murderous locals, he sort of just randomly wanders off and says, "We'll meet back in the village." But aren't they all going to the village right now? Why the hell does venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee wander off at random, except to go weep quietly behind a nearby tree? Sure enough, as soon as he's gone, one of the dead daylight werewolf things springs back to life to menace our remaining heroes for a little while. When we finally get to the town, it's one of those typical bad Eastern European movie towns where everyone is a medieval peasant clad in a colorful array of rags and potato sacks and ill-fitting wool suits, and they all spend every waking hour cackling insanely and making "crazy eyes." We spend a lot of time watching people wander around the town square or chase midgets in disturbing Punchinello masks. I'd say it's pointless, but this movie pretty much lost any point it might have had right after venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee took off those sunglasses. So basically, after some random town nonsense, some lame werewolf ambushes, and that werewolf orgy seemingly playing on loop, we discover that Stirba and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee are brother and sister (oh SNAP Stefan Crisco or whatever your name is -- your sister is a werewolf, too!), and it is his destiny to put an end to her reign of terror, which seems to consist largely of killing jerks at new wave clubs and inconveniencing the local fall festival or whatever it was that was going on in that town. Eastern European towns are always having some sort of festival in the town square, complete with medieval era puppet shows instead of discotheques and David Hasselhoff concerts like actual Eastern Europeans like. No matter what year it is, they're always watching medieval puppet shows, and no matter what time of year it is, they're having a festival. It's sort of how any film that has a chase scene through a Chinatown will run into a lion dance or dragon parade or something, no matter what time of year it is, like they have those things every day in Chinatown.
Oh folks, it's just terrible. And when I sit down and try to write about this film, it becomes even more evident just how bad it really is. And when the true depths to which this film plummets become thusly crystal clear, my fondness for it is only amplified. In fact, right now, I'm sitting here, writing this, and thinking to myself, "Man, this movie really is horrible. I wish I was watching it right now." This week, I will have the choice to either go out and get a lapdance from a cute Cuban chick or stay home and watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, and right now I can't decide!!! I guess we should go step by step, and start with the acting. I don't think I really need to even comment on Reb Brown. I'm pretty sure the big lug might not even know he ever had a film career. He goes through pretty much every film with the same dazed look of confusion on his face, and he doesn't stretch his acting chops here. Man, I wish someone had put him, Sam Jones, and Miles O'Keefe in the same movie. That would have been a classic. And as for Annie McEnroe -- really, do you even care? She looks like Jamie Lee Curtis' little sister, and neither she nor Reb serve any real purpose than to spout lines like, "What's going on?" and "Stefan!" Similarly, Brown Sugar and Mickey from Pee Wee's Big Adventure are mostly there to wear a leather catsuit (what self-respecting canine would wear a catsuit???) and a jaunty circus knife-thrower gypsy outfit respectively. Sybil Danning is in the film primarily to preside over her werewolf court, then rip her bodice open. Oh, and she wears possibly one of the worst outfits ever made -- the pointy-hipped baggy leather catsuit covered in angular mirrors. What in the the hell???
Sybil Danning has never really done it for me. From all I hear, she's a spectacularly friendly and charming person, and I would love to hang out with her for hours on end and listen to ridiculous stories about the making of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf or Panther Squad. But I'd like to do that with David F. Freidman, too, and I certainly don't think of him as a sex symbol. But as a sex object to fawn over, I think I was turned off by her frizzy blonde 80s hair. No matter how nice the boobs and legs may be -- and on Sybil, they are both spectacular -- frizzy blonde 80s hair will kill it for me. I'm sure Sybil Danning stayed up crying late into the night because some twelve-year-old kid thought to himself, "No, I would rather jerk off to Marsha Hunt." But still, the makers of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf must have known that Sybil's boobs were a much bigger potential attraction than her flashy animated laser beam showdown with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, because her bodice-ripping scene (or whatever you call a leather halter top plastered with giant mirrors) is repeated over and over in the movie -- twice during the end credits alone. I guess they paid her for a boob flash, and this was their way of getting their money's worth out of that couple of seconds of upper nudity. And if it seems like I'm base and degrading because I'm talking about Sybil's boobs instead of her acting in this movie -- trust me. I am doing her a favor. And then there's venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, who intones every single line with -- well, honestly, it's pretty much the same acting job he always does. No more, but no less, even though the material isn't just below him -- it's also below Reb Brown. "Material not worthy of Reb Brown" is really something, but venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee still gives it the ol' college try and treats every single line, no matter how ludicrous, as if it was the single most important line of dialogue ever uttered. That said, venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee's acting style is not well-suited to making this movie more tolerable, and here in lies the big difference between him and fellow venerated horror film icon Vincent Price. Price would have had a field day with this movie. Lee is way too solemn, which is my polite "I respect venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee" way of saying he's boring. In the right role, his booming voice and towering presence is extremely effective. But it's pretty much the only trick he has. He lacks the versatility of Price, or even of fellow Hammer horror alumnus and venerated horror film icon Peter Cushing.
Not to say that it isn't amusing to watch venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee go about the role of Stefan with the same approach, method, and gravitas as he did that of Sauruman in The Lord of the Rings. And I will always appreciate that whenever I watch one of those pompous interviews where Lee drones on and on about literary tradition and the craft of acting, or about the tragedy of being typecast as Dracula, I can always let out some of the hot air by remembering fondly his time spent getting kicked in the face by Chuck Norris or shooting glowing beams at Sybil Danning, who is wearing a suit of leather and mirrors. Lee's acting actually works well with the movie's overall tone. Where Joe Dante's original was fused with his usual tongue-in-cheek humor, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf plays it completely straight. As far as Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is concerned, this is nothing short of the greatest story ever told, and it goes about the whole nutty affair with a seriousness and complete lack of humor generally only found in adaptations of the various books of the Bible (of which, this might be one, as the whole film opens with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee solemnly reading from a giant leather-bound tome while he and that skeleton from the old House on Haunted Hill float around in space).
As goofy as the acting may be, the sets and special effects are even worse. The Howling was famous for its revolutionary (within the world of special effects, anyway) werewolf transformation scenes, which may have been overshadowed by the same in An American Werewolf in London but remain impressive never the less. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf achieves its transformation scenes by showing Sybil Danning making "growly face," then cutting to someone else making growly face, then cutting back to Sybil, only this time they've pasted some mangy hair to her chest. There's almost no effort put into making any of these werewolves look like werewolves. They mostly look like humans with some fake hair pasted to them. The town/country/region of Transylvania is realized via a painting of some hills and a castle, then one street carnival set. An annoying guy does get his eyes gouged out, but other than that, we're in pretty shoddy special effects territory this time out. And the werewolf lore is almost as jumbled and hodge-podge as Underworld, which may or may not be a worse film than Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. It's really a toss-up. Silver bullets, it turns out, are not what kills werewolves. No, you have to use titanium bullets. Isn't titanium an alloy? I'm no metallurgist, but isn't it not a naturally occurring material? How can a werewolf's fatal weakness be something that didn't even exist prior to whenever the hell some guy mixed some stuff together and said, "Hey! Titanium!" But no fear, because if the grubby peasants of yore had no titanium bullets with which to dispatch the werewolves, they could always use the trusty old wooden stakes. I guess a wooden stake will kill pretty much anything in Transylvania. Oh yeah -- garlic wards off all evil, too. And there's apparently a full moon every night. As bad as all this may be, at least the werewolves just go out and see crappy bands that only have two songs in their entire set, then they go have hairball orgies. I'll take that any day over yet another scene of Larry Talbot looking dejected and moaning about his terrible curse.
As bad as Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is, it's also strangely compelling. Lots of people try to make films this flaky and weird on purpose, and it never works. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is one of those rare occurrences where a tremendous lack of care, talent, and sanity combined to make a completely warped and absolutely awful movie that never the less has immense entertainment value, provided werewolf orgies and midgets getting thrown out of windows are what you consider entertaining (and why wouldn't you?). Mora pads out his film with inexplicable cut-aways to puppets, people in masks, fake werewolf heads, owls, some complex grim reaper clockwork scene, and whatever the hell else he found lying around the place. It gives the film a completely bonkers sense of surrealism, though I will bet good money it was less an artistic decision and more an "I really don't give a crap" decision. Whatever the case, the end result is an off-kilter weirdness I find endearing. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf isn't the worst movie ever made, but it's pretty bad. Still, I really enjoy it. I know I try to cover for the fact by pretending that it is in some way painful for me to watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, but that's not true. I lied. I experience no pain. Partially, this is because I died inside a long time ago. But also it's because I just like Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf despite its being a truly odious example of filmmaking. And I like that as bad and as goofy as it is, this isn't the worst movie in Sybil Danning's filmography. Hell, it's not even the worst movie in venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee's filmography. And yes -- as much as I have insulted the film, as much as I have poked fun at it and told you how awful it is, rest assured the next time I'm flipping through my DirecTV programming guide and see that Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is on, I will be on that channel, bourbon in hand, giddy with the anticipation of seeing werewolf orgies, mirror-plate jodhpurs, and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee in plastic wrap-around new wave sunglasses. Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Horror: Werewolves, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Reb Brown, Stars: Sybil Danning, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 3:56 PM | 11 Comments Tuesday, February 28, 2006The Dark Power
1985, United States. Starring Lash LaRue, Anna Lane Tatum, Cynthia Bailey, Mary Dalton, Paul Holman, Cynthia Farbman, Marc Matney, Tony Shaw, Robert Bushyhead, Suzie Martin, Dean Jones, Steve Templeton, Page Elizabeth Ray, Eric Mikesall, Tony Elwood. Written by Phil Smoot. Directed by Phil Smoot.
If there's one Western film genre above all others with which I'm unfamiliar, it is, and I mean no pun by it, that of Westerns. I've watched precious few Westerns--though I now own one or two starring Cuneyt Arkin which I haven't yet watched--and most of the ones I have seen have been recently-made low-budget horror flicks, or complete oddballs like El Topo, which I suspect is about as typical a Western as, say, Brazil is a science fiction film. Mind you, The Dark Power isn't a science fiction film. But its main claim to fame, and very likely the only reason that it was ever made, is that it features a B-Western star known as Lash LaRue. I'll try to steer clear of value judgments on this one, mainly because they're kind of beside the point. Writer/director Phil Smoot wrote and directed one other feature after this, Alien Outlaw (also starring LaRue), and thereafter worked only as a production manager or "miscellaneous crew" member, according to IMDB. This script appears to have been his first (at least professionally), and he states on the DVD that he wrote it in four days. And it was clearly written around Lash LaRue almost the same way that Ed Wood nearly did backflips (of course, that guy was an adept acrobat of logic anyway) just to work Lugosi footage indispensably into Plan 9. LaRue played some bit parts in a couple of films about, respectively, Nazis and a circus. But he got his big break through a bit of prevarication, pretending that he was an expert with a whip so that he could play a black-clad villain who would have a change of heart before the end of Song of Old Wyoming. In the process of learning to use the whip, he cut himself up pretty badly--he even contended that some of those scars never went away. The producer, however, was amused, and so they found a professional to train him to use a whip more effectively. It turned out to be a good career move. His whip-wielding character, The Cheyenne Kid, was so popular in Song of Old Wyoming that LaRue got fanmail from people who didn't even remember his name, addressed to "The Cheyenne Kid" or "That guy in black." It wasn't too long after that he took the name "Lash." Thus began a career that stretched from the late 40s to the early 70s wherein he starred in countless Westerns, some of which were, in B- tradition, so strapped for cash that they re-used footage from earlier films to pad out their running time. The general consensus is that his best film was 1950's King of the Bullwhip, praised for unique camerawork and imaginative fight choreography (both the hero and the villain used whips), and when I finally obtain and watch that film, I'm likely to post my thoughts here. I haven't found much in terms of detailed non-cinematic biographical information on Lash, but it seems that his life outside of film was a bit rocky. He had a staggering number of failed marriages, and developed a drinking problem that he finally cleaned up sometime between the 70s and the 80s. I gather that he was a bit low on money in the 80s, which may explain why he ended up as a warden in the '84 film Chain Gang. Phil Smoot was a camera operator on the same film, and did what almost any aspiring filmmaker would want to do: he talked to the former star and found a way to put him in a picture. I don't suppose it was hard to talk Lash into it. He may have had his troubles in life, but by all accounts he was very friendly and gracious with his fans. He sounds almost like the David Warbeck of the Western circuit. Plus, the gaffer from The Dark Power has a comment on IMDB stating that, when nothing else was going on, Lash used to be able to idly whip individual squares of toilet paper off of a roll with just a flick of his wrist; and frankly, that's hard not to admire in and of itself. Smoot's film with Lash was apparently a pretty big deal; locally, it made headline and front-page news, it seems. It seems that people really liked the guy. I've even read that Lash was part of the inspiration for Indiana Jones. So far I haven't read anything to confirm that, but obviously that inspiration would have come from a film made earlier than The Dark Power. Honestly, I don't see much of his talent in The Dark Power that's inspiring so much as suggestive of inspiration... and so I guess the one gripe I will make about the film here is that they could have showcased their star more effectively. To be fair, that would have been pretty tough on their budget. Smoot avers that when Lash cracked a bullwhip, the sheer power and resonation of the sound was incredible, and like nothing that their sound equipment could come close to capturing. Of course, some better camera angles might have at least captured the form more evocatively; the first segment of the film shows some chunky kid being chased down by a pack of seemingly feral dogs just patrolling the woods before Ranger Girard (Lash) cracks his whip about a million times in the air and scares them off. The problem is that each camera angle feels like part of a mosaic; you can see bits and pieces of what's going on, but mostly it's frustrating and disorienting, kind of like a college art film. You see the tip of a whip cracking, then part of a dog's head, then a hand with a whip handle, then a couple of canine shoulderblades, then that kid's face in the dirt, then Lash thrusting forward, ad nauseam (and that doesn't take long with this camerawork), all while constant whip cracks play on the soundtrack. I guess it was meant to be sort of a slow, building tribute, but it's mostly grating and confusing. Anyway, I'd just as soon not dissect The Dark Power. However, since, upon review, this post was a bit too light on anything even resembling summary, I'll throw in something. An old Native American man, John Cody, dies in the beginning of the film during the last stages of a local news focus on living wills, unfortunately before he's ever able to dictate that will. The reporter, Mary Dalton (whose actual name is Mary Dalton and in real life had worked as a reporter), decides to focus on some of Cody's beliefs. It turns out that he had ancestral claim to all of the land that he owned, but didn't claim it until the people who were buying it up refused to obey his strange directives in cleansing the land. Basically, it transpires that Cody believed that four ancient Toltec sorcerors, who practiced some kind of blood-drinking black magic not unlike that of Amando Ossorio's Knights Templar, somehow peregrinated their way up into the Carolinas. They believed that by being buried alive, they would somehow become immortal (obviously, they didn't have much influence on Poe). The rest of the plot involves Cody's son leasing out the land to a bunch of college girls. One of them is racist, and another whom the other girls invite is black, so the racist brings her brother in, which enables the film to have one of those "bad college kid" parties which consist of he and his drunken redneck friends drinking something that's probably like Natty Light, yelling derogatory terms at the black girl, and listening to crappy 80s music. Anyone who gets naked, almost gets naked, uses any racist language, gets needlessly violent, or otherwise does something which one can construe as being "bad" ends up dying, reinforcing that whole argument relating to punitive character-killing in horror films. Of course, they get killed by four Toltecs whose direction and makeup kind of reminds me of various Full Moon films, and those Toltecs in turn are destroyed by the surviving college girls and Lash LaRue, who ends up in what I guess is a King of the Bullwhip-esque whip duel with one of the Toltecs (as one reviewer commented elsewhere, "If you're going to duel with whips, don't challenge a guy named Lash"). Now, if you know anything about the Toltecs, or even Mesoamerican religion in general, then there are certain dubious aspects to this script. If you happen to know that in the time of the Toltecs, there were a couple of large and probably warlike civilizations in the Southern and Southeastern U.S., well, then it's even harder to believe that four sorcerors not strong enough to just survive persecution in Mexico ended up wandering for hundreds of miles just to bury themselves alive on the East Coast. Plus, the racial issues are treated in discomfiting ways here. Ranger Girard, for instance, apparently had a chip on his shoulder about Cody reclaiming ancestral lands until he learned that it was to keep evil sorcerors from crawling out of them. And y'know... in an age where the Western Shoshone are still struggling to maintain ownership of even a fraction of the vast tracts of land which technically unbroken treaties promised to them, well... I dunno, it's kind of hard to empathize with Ranger Girard. And while I'm sure that racism is a continuing problem to this day in southern college living, let alone the South at large, it's not really treated intelligently or compellingly here. It just kind of pops out of the script, and then it's stuck there until ancient evil happens by to clean the slate with the blood of the unworthy. Of course, there's also a scene in which Mary Dalton talks to a grad student she meets and talks about setting him up with one of the girls renting a room in John Cody's place. This happens near the middle of the film. After it, those characters never enter into the film again. So perhaps all of the insensitivity relates to Phil Smoot just trying to come up with character complexity on the fly as he scrabbled together something resembling a script in four days. Almost every word of this movie feels unfinished, like a block of wood that an artisan never quite transformed into his vision, or, if you will, a jpeg file that never quite finishes downloading, remaining forever blurred with just a hint of what it might have contained. Sure, it's got fun elements. But it's not a particularly great movie, even by the standards set by the genre of "something evil kills college co-eds." This film's not quite crazy enough to be, say, a Gymkata or a Strike Commando, and honestly, I'm unlikely to really want to watch it again anytime soon. So be it. At least the film has no pretensions and seems to move toward an express purpose, if not exactly unerringly. Regardless of its flaws, and they're legion even by B-movie standards, it's hard not to sympathize on some level with a film in which a bunch of locals made a movie with an old legend. Lash LaRue isn't just in this movie. He's the heart of this movie. And it's hard to go too far astray with that. Labels: Horror: Zombies, Year: 1985 posted by Ryan at 2:08 PM | 0 Comments Friday, August 27, 2004Flesh + Blood
1985, United States/Spain. Starring Rutger Hauer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Burlinson, Jack Thompson, Fernando Hilbeck, Susan Tyrrell, Ronald Lacey, Brion James, John Dennis Johnston, Bruno Kirby, Kitty Courbois, Marina Saura, Hans Veerman, Jake Wood. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Buy it from Amazon
 .Ah yes, Paul Verhoeven. What a director. Before he became famous/infamous with big budget sci-fi hits like Robocop and Total Recall or the low-concept, low-intelligence Showgirls that has somehow managed to become a cultural icon, he was plying his trade in this grim, gritty, and sometimes awkward medieval adventure that showcases all his favorite traits: political commentary surrounded by tons and tons of gratuitous nudity and gore. It also continues his knack for directing movies that tell you exactly what the film is full of. Robocop was full of Robocop. Showgirls was full of showgirls. And Flesh + Blood is full of flesh and blood. It's also full of some entirely ludicrous scenes, awful "ancient meets modern" dialogue, and Rutger Hauer's strange '80s hairdo. But these things only serve to ingratiate the film to the viewer, while the greater portion of the film remains a taut if extreme experience. Rutger Hauer -- Remember when he was the coolest actor on the face of the planet. I mean, he was never as big a name as previous coolest actors, and frankly he was never really as cool as we thought he was, but he still etched out his little niche thanks in large part to a quality turn as the determined and occasionally murderous android in Blade Runner. Then what happened to him? He made some films that disappeared quickly, gave C. Thomas Howell a bag of fries with human fingers in it, and then apparently discovered pie and started eating a lot of it with Steven Seagal, who was never the coolest actor on the face of the planet at any point in his career, though he could make some headway if he gave it up and started doing comedy (and I don't mean The Glimmer Man). Men loved Rutger Hauer because he was cool and would eventually get big and fat like them. Women loved him because he was hot and weird and dangerous and they didn't realize he was going to eat so much ham later on down the line.
He's on and off, as he often was, in this film as the leader of a ruthless and dirt-smeared band of mercenaries and whores in 1501. After helping lay siege to a castle, Hauer's Martin and his men find themselves betrayed, cheated out of their pay and spoils, and cast out into the rain. A good rule of thumb for kings and conquerors is that if the strongest part of your army consists of mercenaries, and they're the only reason you win a battle, you probably shouldn't just go and cast them out a couple days after the battle is won because chances are they'll take it hard and make trouble. It's hardly worth retaining the few silver pitchers and baubles you'll save. And sure enough, Martin and the gang ambush the king and his son shortly after the caravan has picked up the son's bride-to-be, played by a very young and frequently naked Jennifer Jason Leigh. Martin's band hole up inside a keep while Tom Burlingson as Steven lays siege to the castle in attempt to rescue the bride he'd only known for an hour or so before she was kidnapped. There are plenty of adjectives that readily lend themselves to an accurate description of this movie. Depraved. Bawdy. Mean-spirited and offensive. These are leap immediately to mind, as they tend to do with most any Verhoeven film. But the film is also intelligent, satirical, and lyrically beautiful in a sick and twisted sort of way. Verhoeven does, after all, possess a wicked sense of humor to match his overall pessimism about the nature of man, best represented here by the "storybook romance" scene in which Steven and Agnes discuss love and flirt with one another in a rolling, lush green field. Only here, they're doing their flirting beneath the hideous, graphically rendered rotting corpses of two hanged criminals. The thing that has always kept Verhoeven as something of an acquired taste, or more accurately an acquired tastelessness, is the fact that he takes perfectly intelligent and well-written scripts and drapes them in overwhelming amounts of sadism and perversion. What brain there is behind Flesh + Blood is often obscured by all the raping, nudity, and gore.
But this is the Middle Ages about which we're talking, and such things were as much a fact of life as they remain today, only without as much of the added social sensitivity about them. Verhoeven wallows gleefully in the filth of the era, and if his film is not entirely historically accurate, it is at least successful in accurately creating the atmosphere of the 16th century. A film that was willing to indulge in the grim realities of medieval life and warfare was still a rare thing in 1985. Boorman's Excalibur tread there to a degree but was still a movie steeped in hypnotic and fantastic poetry. Flesh + Blood is just harsh, gory reality, a move in the opposite direction perhaps as extreme as Camelot was in the musical dandyland direction, a snapshot of a world in which people were hardened beyond compassion and would do whatever they had to do, degrade others or themselves, to stay alive. There are basically no likable or sympathetic characters in the film. Martin is a certifiable scumbag and rapist, as are his men, but the king who betrays them and the captain he forces to abet him in the treachery are equally despicable. And yet, all of them showcase moments of tenderness and bravery. They are, in effect, humans. Dumb, mean, kind, hateful, emotionally stunted, forgiving, and prone to acts of unspeakable cruelty. The captain who betrays Martin does so against his will and ultimately only because he wants to be over and done with the business of war as quickly as possible so he can retire to a life of peace and penance. Martin is callous and vicious, but something inside him is brought out that makes him yearn to improve himself, to become the more heroic man he wants to be. Circumstance simply never allows it to blossom. Jennifer Jason Leigh's Agnes fares better, though one can't help but wince as she submits to every one of Martin's sexual whims in order to win his trust and save her own life. As Steven, Tom Burlinson is the closest thing the film has to a good-guy. He's a man of science, disgusted by his father's betrayal of the mercenaries but also quick to forgive him. His obsessive pursuit of Agnes seems born less out of love (they don't even know one another) than out of the sense that something that belongs to him has been taken. Still, he's generally an agreeable person, a voice of Renaissance reason amid people who are still steeped in the superstitions and cruelties of the Dark Ages. Of course, when a man gets blown up by one of his inventions, he seems less concerned about the life lost than he is about the fact that the fuse burned too quickly. But then, I guess when you're standing in the middle of a siege, that sort of thing can happen. The other "main" character in this grotesque Shakespearian play isn't an actual person, but its presence is felt in every scene and motivates much of the action, and that's our old friend the Black Death. Bubonic Plague. Call it what you will, you just don't want hairy warriors flinging pieces of dog infected with it over your castle walls and into your drinking water. The Plague exists as a specter looming over everything that happens in the film and represents the gulf between the old ways (as represented by a stubborn doctor who refuses to acknowledge advances in plague treatment simply because they come from Arabic research) and the enlightened (as represented by Steven, who understands how simple it is to treat the disease if only people would stop being so superstitious). As he often does in this film, Hauer's Martin stands somewhere in the middle. He understands something of the plague and the realities of what causes it, but he's also not completely divorced from the old way of thinking if for no other reason than he has used it so many times to his advantage. Where as most people in this film are stupid, Martin only pretends to be stupid, but sometimes you can engage in the masquerade so long that it starts to become reality.
Verhoeven's two biggest enemies in the world seem to be corporate greed and religion. He has stated, I believe, that he believes in God but not religion, and it's religion that is on the skewering end of Flesh + Blood's awl pike of criticism. Religious men are seen as either backwards and "so Dark Ages" or as charlatans using religion as a means to enrich themselves. Martin himself is a grand manipulator of religion and the superstitions of those around him. His advising cardinal is a true believer in Christianity, but to such a degree that he fails to question anything at all that is invested with supposed religious significance. To him, everything is a sign. The direction is tight. Even if you're not a fan of Verhoeven's films, at the very least you have to admit him to be a tight and competent director. He knows what he's doing back there, and he manages to make Flesh + Blood poetically gorgeous, lush, and hideous at the same time. His pacing is good, and his action scenes are what I'd call solidly 1980s. They lack the "cast of thousands" grandness of the 1960s but also lack the over-directed, over-choreographed, "everything must look absolutely cool" sickness of the post wire-fu/CGI era in which we currently reside. Fight scenes are not epic in scale, but they are realistic. Instead of slick and polished, they seem awkward, confused, and brutal. In other words, a lot more realistic. This was the film that introduced him to American audiences, and it must have been quite a shock. Distributor Orion was so appalled by the movie that they shuffled it in and out of theaters without a peep. It hardly even ever showed up on cable and was more or less MIA fromt he home video market for years, and even then only in a badly washed out transfer. Their gamble would pay off later, though, when Verhoeven started becoming a blockbuster machine, but they just couldn't see trumpeting Flesh + Blood, no matter how good it was, at a time when even Conan was being kinder and gentler. Realism as I said permeates this film, so it is that much more jarring when Verhoeven's script slips up. From time to time, dialogue sounds a little overly modern, less for what's being said than for the way it's said. When Bruno Kirby says anything at all, I can't hear anything but "that squeaky guy from City Slickers" or "that squeaky guy from Good Morning, Vietnam." A lot of the cast members can't seem to make up their minds whether or not they have accents, even though acting jobs beyond those inconsistencies are generally "workmanlike" to "above average." However, script credibility really takes a blow when, in what seems like a day, Steven and a small crew of men with no scientific background erect a siege machine of a complexity that would dazzle Leonardo De Vinci himself. It's utterly fantastic and absurd and feels completely out of place in a film that otherwise strives to maintain a high degree of period accuracy. But then, this is a Verhoeven film, so you sometimes just have to roll with the eccentricities. Luckily, the surrounding film is good enough to help you overlook the improbability of such a machine. And it does succeed in further the film's ongoing theme of the Renaissance versus the Dark Ages while keeping Martin as a man with one foot in both worlds. He's not smart enough, like Steven, to conceive of such a device, but he is smart enough to use something else Steven tried out. Barring the occasional awkward accent (or lack there of) and bit of over-ripe dialogue, peformances are uniformly grand. Jennifer Jason Leigh performs admirably in what was surely a difficult role made no easier by the fact that she does about half her screen time completely naked. Hauer remains one of the most underrated actors of the 1980s, probably because he starred in so many awful films. But the thing is he made so many awful films watchable. This seems almost to be his answer to his role in Ladyhawke, another medieval film but with more fantasy and a much friendlier cast. I think Hauer has some off lines here but on the whole he carries the film admirably and conveys a man who is enchanted by the notions of enlightened society but ultimately unable to divorce himself from the crudeness of the Dark Ages. The supporting cast includes a number of familiar faces and character actors, all of whom perform well. Brion James will be the most recognizable of the bunch, seeing as how he's made eleven million films and starred alongside Rutger Hauer in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner -- another violent film, incidentally, that was reviled upon release but has since become considered a modern classic. I don't know if I'd consider Flesh + Blood a classic, but it certainly deserves more recognition than it receives. Flesh + Blood is a smartly written, well-paced, well-directed piece of period action. It's not really an easy film to like because of the cruelty and sadism on display in certain scenes, but if you can get over that and accept that these things happened (and continue to happen), then you'll find a sharp adventure tale with a lot going on. It's not perfect, but it's well enough crafted to set it apart from the crowd, especially if you figure the crowd was mostly dim-witted sword and sorcery barbarian movies. As long as you don't mind the blood, gore, rape, nudity, festering boil lancing, and bloody chunks of dog meat being flung around, Flesh + Blood is one hell of a good film. Labels: Fantasy: Sword and Sorcery, Historical Epics, Netflix Diary, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 6:40 PM | 1 Comments Monday, April 15, 2002Phenomena
1985, Italy. Starring Jennifer Connelly, Daria Nicolodi, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Patrick Bauchau, Donald Pleasence, Fiore Argento, Federica Mastroianni, Fiorenza Tessari, Mario Donatone, Francesca Ottaviani, Michele Soavi, Franco Trevisi. Directed by Dario Argento.
Phenomena is often regarded as something of a turning point in the career of Italian thriller director Dario Argento. Unfortunately for him, the direction it is most often cited as turning is down. After Phenomena, the influential director had one more good film in him - the mean-spirited and sadistic Opera -- and then it was all downhill from there. In many ways, Argento's career seemed to reflect that of another highly creative, important director: Tsui Hark. Both men revolutionized film making in their respective countries and inspired (and continue to inspire) countless other writers and directors. Both men brought a highly stylized vision to the screen. And both men have spent the better half of the last decade trying to live up to their own reputations. Like Hark, at least when Argento fails he fails in a spectacular and interesting fashion. Trauma and Stendahl Syndrome are both wildly uneven works, but each film has moments of brilliance and macabre beauty where you can see the Argento of old shining through. Even if those films are disappointing, they're still worth taking a look at. Dario's Phantom of the Opera is such a deliriously bad mess that it becomes entertaining for all the wrong reasons. As for his more recent Sleepless, I will reserve judgment until such time as I have seen the film. It could be nothing more than a tired rehash of Deep Red, or it could be for Argento what Time and Tide was for Tsui Hark - proof that he still has it in him, even if it hasn't been tapped too much recently. Phenomena gets a bad rap for a lot of reasons, but much of it is lingering hostility based not on Phenomena itself, but on its drastically truncated American release, which was retitled Creepers. The negative reaction to that little experiment continues to color people's perception of Phenomena, and those opinions are sometimes perpetuated by critics (and fans) too lazy to revisit the original, uncut film and instead rely on past critics who bashed Creepers. They lazily figure it's more or less the same movie, so the same criticisms will apply. In some cases, that might be true, but it's hardly in the spirit of giving Phenomena a fair shake as a stand-alone work. Certainly the film is not immune to criticism, nor is everyone who reacts negatively to the film merely mimicking those who came before them. There are plenty of things that can be legitimately dissected even in the uncut version of Phenomena, especially if the viewer is not predisposed toward understanding - or at least excusing and tolerating - some of the peculiarities of Italian horror films in general and Dario Argento in particular. Like most people in the United States, my initial exposure to Phenomena was through Creepers, which was one of a dozen or so foreign titles stocked in the local video store I frequented with horror film cohorts Dave and Rob back in the day. The place was surprisingly well stocked for a mom and pop video store in tiny LaGrange, Kentucky circa 1987, but mom and pop shops always seem more open to weird movies, or at least more ignorant of how offensive the contents might prove. As rabid horror fans with a very limited menu from which to chose, we devoured every title we could get our hand son no matter how abysmal it may have been. Zero Boys? Okay, why not? The Hills Have Eyes II? Yeah, that works. Even at a relatively young age, though, we learned to treasure films from Italy. They were special. They offered a little something extra that was lacking in many of the contemporary films from America, most of which were simply operating on the Friday the 13th model. Sure, we had late-night monster movies on television, but even I can only watch Brice of Frankenstein so many times before I start thinking about maybe watching something else. The Italian films had a certain exotic appeal, a curious flash, style, and willingness to push the boundaries even in a genre of film where the boundaries were often pretty liberal. Okay, so mostly it was the gore and sex. What do you want? We were fourteen, fifteen years old and not exactly the most sophisticated viewers in the world. Hell, we couldn't afford to be sophisticated or picky about what we watched, because there just wasn't that much around. Even if we'd had the intellectual development needed to be discerning viewers, you can't do much when all you have to chose from is Screamers and Ghoulies. Compared to those, event he most idiotic Italian films were godsends, if for no other reason than they took things to such extremes and did it with gusto. No one is going to call Demons a work of art, but at least it tried to entertain you and did something a little different than the usual "killer in the woods" routine. When we found and watched a copy of Suspiria for the first time in high school, it was a definite banner moment for me and my taste in films. I'd never seen anything quite like it; never even knew that a horror film could be so sumptuous, surreal, and otherworldly. Parts of it didn't make any sense to me, but I was willing to roll with the hallucination simply because it was such a wild, unique trip. At the time, I'd never heard of pioneering directors like Mario Bava so the wild use of color was still all new to me, and it was my first brush with Dario Argento. Creepers would be my second. As a youngun, I thought Creepers was all right. It wasn't the masterpiece I expected after seeing Suspiria, but it wasn't bad, especially since we watched it on the same night we watched Screamers -- the movie that promises people turned inside out and then delivers naught but tedium and yawns. It also didn't hurt that I had a wicked crush on Jennifer Connelly (and I say "had" as if I still don't have it). I didn't see what was so special about it, and the film was indeed a bit of a mess. Of course, I didn't know how badly it had been edited at the time. Creepers jettisons over twenty minutes of material, shearing down the running time from 110 minutes to an anemic 82. Some of the gore was trimmed, as it always seems to be, and a lot of plot and character interaction. Even in its uncut form, there's no denying that Argento's film was not entirely logical. Missing almost half an hour, it becomes well nigh incomprehensible. Certain aspects of the plot, including the rather crucial revelation about the killer, are altered as well by the edits. For me, it was pretty much an "in one ear and out the other" affair as we moved on to the more visceral and less ambitious Zombie. Years later and more familiar with the back catalog of Argento and other Italian genre directors, I decided it would be worth my time to track down an uncut copy of Phenomena and refamiliarize myself with the film, or do the proverbial "getting to know it again for the first time." This was in the days before companies like Anchor Bay it possible to just waltz on down to any store and pick up a widescreen, uncut copy of such a film. I had to engage in fairly complex video trading gymnastics with a guy who kept insisting on telling me about all the Japanese rape porn he could send me. Man, I don't want to watch that crap! I just want to see something normal, like Jennifer Connelly, Donald Pleasance, and a razor-wielding chimp. After finally convincing this less than savory fellow that I didn't need any rape movies, I managed to complete the trade and get myself a really horrid looking God-knows-what-generation dupe of the uncut film. I was in college at this time, and though I was expanding my horizons, I was still pretty naive about a lot of particulars and not well-versed enough in Italian horror films to keep my opinion completely uncolored by the flood of negative commentary regarding the film. Once again, I watched it and dismissed it. It was kind of goofy. In parts, the plot was outlandish to the point of absurdity. It just didn't strike me as a very good movie, and I was comfortable agreeing with those who counted the movie as the beginning of the end for Dario Argento. Once again, years passed. Things changed. Phenomena was released on DVD, and all of a sudden I really wanted to see it again. Why? I mean, I didn't like the movie, right? So why had it become so captivating? Why did pieces of it stick so firmly in my mind and work so diligently on my desires? I suspected that my conscience had missed something in the movie that my sub-conscience had picked up and filed away for such a time as I was ready to understand it. So it was late one night that I sat down for my third look at Phenomena -- the look that would answer all my questions about the film. It was on this third viewing that I realized I'd fallen in love with the movie. Phenomena finds Argento straddling two worlds, with one foot firmly planted in the more-or-less logical giallo films like Deep Red and the other kicking around in the free-form phantasmagoria of supernatural fantasies like Suspiria. There is a logic to the film, but it becomes warped as Argento revels in the Italian horror film's philosophy that a horror film should be approached less like waking life and more like a nightmare. It is this philosophy that confounds so many people since it allows the director to meander in and out of sense without distinguishing between the two. It also affords fans of the films a rather sturdy aegis, as damn near any stupid idea can be defended with the simple statement, "You don't get it. It isn't supposed to make sense." Well, sometimes even things that aren't supposed to make sense can still stink, but that's neither here nor there. A young and somewhat awkward Jennifer Connelly stars as Jennifer Corvino, the daughter of an American movie star who has shipped his daughter off to a boarding school in Zurich. In a rotten bit of parenting, the father has neglected to research the area, lest he would have discovered that a serial killer has been stalking the countryside and preying on girls his daughter's age, including it seems at least one student at the school. I know parents can't be perfect, but sending your daughter to a school besieged by a serial killer just seems to be a bad idea. Oh well, you know how those movie stars can be. What really sets Jennifer apart from the other students is her curious ability to communicate, and in some cases even summon and control, insects. I'm guessing that the average bug rarely has anything interesting on its pinpoint-sized mind. You know, just stuff about "I gotta lift this leaf" or "Mmm, pollen," but even if the conversation is lacking, being able to control the bugs is a pretty good power to have, unless you're the kind of person who gets creeped out by bugs. In that case, you're probably not going to appreciate beetles dropping by all the time and asking if they can roll some dung for you or something. I've always thought horror films about bugs were a bit of a cheat. I mean, it's easy to creep people out with bugs because people are already afraid of them. You don't have to work very hard to make someone think a bug is icky. If a giant cockroach eats someone, the fact that it is eating someone is a distant second on the shock-o-meter than the simple fact that it's a big cockroach. However weird Phenomena and Creepers may have been, I was always happy that Argento never took the cheap way out. The bugs are around, and sure he trots out the maggots, but for the most part their application in the film is fairly subdued, and the fact that they more or less play the role of heroes rather than villains makes Phenomena unique among all "bug attack" movies. Jennifer's quirks don't end with insect telekinesis, however. She's also a somnambulist, prone to taking long and dangerous walks in her sleep. One such walk sees her witness a murder, then even more horrifying, get picked up by a couple of sleazy German guys in a sports car. When she does not share their love of Kraftwerk, they dump her down a hill where she finally wakes up and meets kindly wheelchair-bound entomologist Professor John McGregor, played with class by horror film mainstay Donald Pleasance. McGregor is accompanied by an ultra-intelligent chimp who helps him around. By this point, the chimp isn't even going to phase you. As more girls begin to disappear, McGregor and Jennifer hatch a wild scheme in which she will team up with a Great Sarcophagus Fly (they only feed on dead bodies) to track down the killer. Complicating matters is the fact that Jennifer's sleepwalking and general weirdness has put her at odds with the rest of the school, who constantly mock her while the head mistress demands the poor girl be subjected to a variety of pointless brain scans and medical tests. If hyper-intelligent chimps, detective flies, mind-melding with a maggot, sleepwalking, decapitations, and blasts of heavy metal at completely inappropriate moments don't mark this film as a bizarre one, that's because you've yet to get to the final act. That's where things really go off the deep end. For me, at least, there is something spellbinding about Phenomena. Argento's stylistic approach to the direction keeps the film fascinating to look at from beginning to end. His use of color, so prominent in Suspiria and Inferno, is more subdued here but no less effective. Cinematographer Romano Albani paints a simply sumptuous and terrifying picture with every movie of the camera. Fans of Lucio Fulci (and yep, I am one) like to celebrate the director's ability to paint an eerie cinematic picture, but Alabni (who also worked for Argento on the astoundingly beautiful Inferno) really sets the bar high with this one. The use of simple effects really give the film its power. The opening sequence in which a young girl (Dario's daughter, Fiore - the first but not last time I can think of where he menaces one of his daughters on screen) is left behind by a tour bus and wanders through the windswept, lush green hills until finally coming to the home of the killer, is an incredible sequence that draws a great deal of atmosphere and creepiness from the simplest of things. Like one of those old fairy tales that turns deadly sinister and macabre, the viewer knows that these idyllic grassy hills are a lie. Even though we've not been introduced to the plot yet, we know there is a killer hiding somewhere amongst the windswept beauty. Another of Phenomena's best moments comes when Jennifer finally has enough of the taunting of her classmates, who are making fun of her after they find a letter in which she discusses her ability to control insects. Although she goes through the initial head-clutching histrionics, Argento wisely pulls back from the cliché "angry school girl psychic attack" a la Carrie. Instead, Jennifer backs away calmly. She smiles, and suddenly a simple white light illuminates her face as a supernatural wind blows back her hair and she says simply, politely, "I love you. I love you all." The other students are confounded by her bizarre reaction to their torture, not to mention the fact that there's wind blowing through the inside of the school all of a sudden, but their confusion soon turns to shock and terrified comprehension as they realize that she's not talking to them. She's talking to the thousands upon thousands of flies that she summons. In a great cloud, they swarm around and envelope the school. But she never sends them to attack. They're only present as a show of her power while Goblin's masterful, haunting theme highlights the supernatural insect shenanigans. Description can't really communicate the bizarre beauty and power of the scene. Characters in Italian horror films are often flat and single-dimensional - if they're even that thick. Certainly Argento's film is populated by the stock characters we'd expect. There's the gruff cop, the creepy demanding head mistress, and an assembly of no-name schoolgirls who are only there to stick out their tongues and taunt our heroine. At the same time, however, the development of Jennifer and McGregor is engaging. Jennifer Connelly was an acting novice at the time, and a good many of her lines are delivered with a degree of flat awkwardness. Luckily, her character is so strange that the delivery doesn't really detract. In fact, it enhances the weirdness. Had she had more experience, she might have gone over the top and been less interesting. As is, she is reserved, aloof, and exactly as one would need to be for such a character. At the same time, the young actress has an undeniable charm and charisma that draws you in. In many ways, her off-kilter performance mirrors the off-kilter appeal of the film itself. Pleasance is, of course, a master of the genre, and he is as good here as he's ever been. The conversations between he and Jennifer are good, and weirdly enough, the interaction between he and his chimp are just as touching. One of the mot heart-wrenching scenes comes when McGregor becomes the inevitable target of the killer and his chimpanzee sidekick, locked outside but witness to the danger McGregor is in, howls desperately as it struggles to break into the house and come to the rescue. It's a completely ludicrous scene that is, within the supernatural universe of Phenomena, oddly tear-jerking. The chimp puts in a heck of a performance. Rounding out the main cast is Argento regular Daria Nicolodi as the only understanding face in the whole school. As the film enters it's final act, she gets to chew some major scenery and deliver one of the film's darkly humorous moments when Jennifer's guardian from American runs to her rescue, gun in hand. Of course, it wouldn't be an Argento film without some brutal special effects and scenes of vioelnce. He certainly doesn't let us down. From the opening murder to the disgusting pit of corpses to the final razor attack on the killer, and even for the blade piercing the neck and protruding from the mouth (an effect he liked so much he used again to even nastier effect in Opera), Argento and special effects supervisor Sergio Stivaletti (Demons, Dellamorte Dellamore) don't let us down. Where as goremeister Lucio Fulci often delivered violence and grue so over-the-top as to be cartoonish, Argento restrains the onslaught just enough to keep things shocking and unnerving. The bugs are a curious aspect of the movie. Like I said, for once they aren't there just to provide the gross-out factor or menace teenagers in hot rods. Other than a few maggots, the bugs aren't really that gross. Just flies, for the most part, and a bee here or there. They are not products of the atomic age, nor is Jennifer's ability to communicate with and control them explained away as some mutation from radiation. In fact, it's not explained at all other than a bit where McGregor reflects on the rather common occurrence of "ESP" -- or at least the ability to communicate without visual or audio aids -- among insects. Although their involvement in the plot is almost tangential, they do a play a key role in the film's completely off-its-rocker finale, in which Jennifer discovers the true identity of the killer(s), falls into a pit of gooey corpse muck, is menaced by the killer on a boat, and finally summons the insects to protect her, this time allowing them to do more than just make a show of it. It's rare in film that the bugs get to save the day, even rarer when the day has to be saved again, but this time by a vengeful razor-wielding chimp. Even with the various hints dropped in this review regarding the nature of the finale, it's still a serious mind warp. As gorgeous as the film is, it is not without its flaws. Chief among them are the many contrivances thrown at us to propel things along. It's convenient, for instance, that the girl with the psychic link to bugs rolls down a hill and wanders in her sleep to the home of a determined entomologist who has a grudge against the local serial killer. It's also convenient that the chimpanzee, while searching for sustenance in a public park, finds a brand new straight razor just lying in the garbage can. Character stupidity often contributes to some exasperation with the movie as well. In the most obvious scene, Jennifer is trapped in the killer's home and struggles desperately to fish a telephone out of an adjoining room. Rather than just crawling through the opening at the top of the door, she hangs there and tries to snag the phone with some sort of curtain rod. Who would do that? Just grab the dang phone! And then there's the heavy metal. From time to time, it almost works, but at other times it has absolutely no connection to anything going on in the movie. Why would an ambulance crew be blasting Motorhead as they cart away a murder victim? Add to that the lack of any real police presence and a "killer's identity" bait-and-switch not unlike the one in DeepRed, and there's certainly enough targets in Phenomena to keep critics of the movie busy. But none of that really matters to me, because the film takes on a logic all its own. I know that may sound like a weak defense of the film, and I'll grant you that seeing Phenomena as a great movie relies heavily on your ability to suspend not just your disbelief, but your rational sense of logic as well. I mean, we are dealing with a movie in whic a girl can commune with bugs, and a vicious, deformed little kid plays a prominent role in the finale. If you go into a plot like that expecting rationality, then you're lost before you begin. I think movies like Suspiria are more successful among people because it plays one side of the field It's a supernatural fantasy, so we willingly accept that our expectations for the real world do not apply. Phenomena, on the other hand, complicates matters by being equal parts supernatural fantasy and concrete whodunit. The mix is what keeps a lot of people uneasy about the film. Just as you settle into it being a murder mystery, Jennifer Connelly starts forming psychic links with maggots and summoning great clouds of angry flies to do her bidding. From its inauspicious role as one of my least favorite Dario Argento films, Phenomena has emerged as one of my very favorites, right alongside Suspiria and even inching out Deep Red and Inferno. It asks certain concessions be made on the part of the viewer, but if you are willing to make those, it's truly one of the most mesmerizing, fantastic films around. When I finished watching it for the third time, I was awestruck and more than a bit embarrassed by my previous dismissal of the film and failure to grasp what I was seeing. Every scene is constructed perfectly to pull you in and keep you feeling uneasy. As trite as this may sound, Phenomena exceeds the expectations of what a movie is and becomes a deliriously gorgeous work of art. Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Horror: Giallo, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 11:16 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, December 23, 2001Pray for Death
1985, United States. Starring Sho Kosugi, Kane Kosugi, Shane Kosugi, James Booth, Donna Kei Benz, Norman Burton, Matthew Faison, Parley Baer, Robert Ito, Michael Constantine, Alan Amiel, Woody Watson, Charles Grueber, Nik Hagler, Chris Wycliff. Directed by Gordon Hessler.
Just when you thought America's cities were getting safer (as our suburbs and rural towns get more dangerous), you leave the house to walk down to the corner bodego and catch sight of a bunch of cops fighting with a ninja. It's more than likely that at some point the ninja throws down an eggshell grenade and disappears into a puff of red smoke. Or maybe you stumble upon a couple of ninjas all fighting each other in the middle of 2nd Avenue. It may sound weird to our late 1990s ears, but way back in the 1980s, this is how things were. America's cities were infested with ninjas, usually wearing the traditional black ninja suit, but sometimes also wearing shiny gold, red, green, or purple outfits. The urban ninja is not above a fashion statement, after all. Statistics estimate that in the early- to mid-1980s, for every thousand cockroaches in a city, there were also five ninjas. Since every American city has a cockroach population numbering in the hundreds of millions, you can bet that's quite a few ninjas along for the ride. With so many ninjas doing backflips down Broadway or scaling our gleaming skyscrapers, it was only a matter of time before they started organizing and demanding recognition and certain rights that the rest of us take for granted. The urban ninja movement was championed by one man. One man who mysteriously appeared when the ninjas became a noticeable force. One man who, like his brothers and sisters in ninjitsu, disappeared just as mysteriously as he appeared. One man who, from time to time, could be seen hosting his own martial arts workout show complete with a team of skimpily-clad "ninjettes." The man was Sho Kosugi. Yes, in the 1980s, this man crapped ninja movies with the regularity of an octogenarian addicted to bran muffins and bean soda. Usually, the results were about the same. However, he did manage to squeeze out a couple decent films amid the flurry of cinematic Mr. Hankies for which we love him so dearly. Kosugi first came to national prominence the same time the ninja became a household word and little middle schoolers started wearing tabi boots and ninja headbands to class. The film was Enter the Ninja starring meaty Italian action star Franco Nero as the first white ninja and a man who has the power to magically loose 25 or 30 pounds every time he puts on his ninja suit or does some martial arts. Kosugi's best film is Revenge of the Ninja, and he must have felt the same way, because that's the film he chose to make again, calling it Pray for Death. The plots are almost identical, though Kosugi's ninja suit is much sillier in this film, comprised of a metal helmet with chainlink face cover. Not exactly the best apparel for slinking around in the shadows and doing back flips, but it beats the shiny gold suits some ninjas got. Since Pray for Death rips off Kosugi's best film, it can't help but be at least sorta decent. And that's just what it is, though maybe even a little bit better. Kosugi reprises his role as a Japanese immigrant to the United States. He has a shady past as a ninja, obviously, but these days is committed to putting his demons behind him and being a man of peace. Are there really still secret ninja training camps in Japan? I mean, what are ninjas up to these days? Somehow, I think the only ninja training camps are here in America. Self-proclaimed Grand Master Philip Holder moved his ninja training camp to Gainesville when I lived there, bringing hours of countless amusement to the locals. Myself, my friends Eric and Bill, and many other martial arts students around town wondered who went to ninja summer camp (we later found out it was mostly fat guys and guys who claimed to be former Navy SEALS), and we amused ourselves with mental images of ninjas sitting around a fire roasting marshmallows and swapping ghost stories, or hiking through the woods singing "Rainbow Connection." Anyway, I don't know if Sho Kosugi ever made a guest appearance at Grand Master Philip Holder's ninja summer camp, or if they scored the out-of-work Ninjettes (I'd like to see them fight the WCW Nitro Girls) for motivation. Ninja summer camp was shrouded in secrecy, and you had to do some rite of ninja passage/test of will thing before Grand Master Philip Holder would accept you (I'm pretty sure the test of will was waiting seven business days for Grand Master Philip Holder to see if your check cleared. If it did, you could then be a ninja). Forgive me if I confuse some of the elements of Pray for Death with stuff that was actually in Revenge of the Ninja. Sometimes, I can't keep track of the two, sort of like my inability to ever remember what happens in Friday the 13th parts six and seven. Of course, it's probably sad that I can remember what happens in parts 1-5 and 8. Kosugi's life in America is okay. He has a happy family (including his real sons, Shane and Kane) and a nice house. Unfortunately, the house he bought is a traditional drop-off and pick-up point for the local crime ring, whose main enforcer is some fat-ass British guy named Limehouse. Always having mobsters sneaking around his property makes Sho suspicious, and eventually he crosses them and they take revenge by attacking his family. The man of peace is once again pushed to turn to his violent past, don his goofy helmet, and chop the shit out of the men who wronged his family. This movie has everything you have come to expect from a Sho Kosugi ninja movie. Kane is picked on by the neighborhood kids and must kick their asses. Also, any movie that stars a little martial arts kid is required to have scenes in which he runs through the bad guys' legs and either kicks or headbutts the thugs in the balls. Satisfyingly, Kane Kosugi delivers on all counts. The villains are all ridiculously over the top, just as they should be. Sho is in good form. The only thing hurting this movie is what hurts any martial arts film about masters kicking ass on American thugs: there's no real competition. Sure, Limehouse is a big chub who gets some ham-fisted blows in, but for the most part, without this gang being able to call in their own ninja like the gang in Revenge of the Ninja, it's pretty much Sho all the way. In general, when gambling on fights like this, one should always put their chips on the pissed off master ninja rather than on the bumbling thugs who shot his wife. A little advice on games of chance involving ninjas, just in case it ever comes up. With no viable opponents to really provide cool martial arts scenes, most of the action involves Sho jumping, slicing, and being shot at. It's all pretty good stuff, and the film seems to have stepped the violence up a notch, though much of it was excised in one of the video releases I came across (another had it all there). This film is historic in exactly the opposite way Enter the Ninja was historic. Enter the Ninja was the beginning of the whole trend and marked the point at which sho Kosugi's career was born. Pray for Death is pretty much the American ninja film's last hurrah, and Sho Kosugi dropped off the radar shortly after its release. Plenty of other American ninja movies were made after Pray for Death, but none of them were part of the heyday of ninja films. None of them got to play in actual movie theaters like this and Sho's previous films. After Pray for Death, the ninja movement in America was dead, relegated to the direct-to-video realm in which so many shitty movies thrive. Sho's career had to end at some time, and at least he managed to deliver a pretty enjoyable, if not ludicrous (and aren't they all), final film. Of course, he would stretch the ninja line as much as possible, appearing as a host on late night movies, video releases, and of course, as the instructor in those workout videos with the Ninjettes. I really miss the aspect of the 1980s that saw low budget weirdness in mainstream theaters. You don't see films like Pray for Death these days. Big budget blockbusters are so busy being inane and awful that there's no room left for goofy little lowbrow pleasures like ninja or barbarian films. It's sad, this passing of an era. It's sad, this loss of the days when ninjas roamed the streets of our cities. It's sad, this passing of the era of true bad film, of nights spent sneaking peaks at it on late night cable television after the parents had gone to sleep. Like heavy metal, I'm sure we shall one day return to this simpler, more enjoyable time. A man shall arise to lead us away from the glitz and glamour of boring, obnoxious billion dollar movies and back into the promised land of small, simple, enjoyable bad film, preferably peppered with nudity and ninjas and little kids whacking big fat guys in the balls (this staple of America's Funniest Home Videos is just one of the many cinematic treasures given to us by ninja movies). One man will emerge to champion the cause, to serve as the (somewhat homely) face of hope in these trying times. One man shall deliver us back to the days when films like Pray for Death and Krull and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn and that movie starring Molly Ringwald as the cute space ragamuffin graced our movie theaters. One man will teach us how to once again love movies centered around ninjas or "space cowboys." One man... And I think that man will be Sho Kosugi. Labels: Martial Arts: Ninjas, Stars: Sho Kosugi, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 12:51 AM | 0 Comments Tuesday, November 20, 2001Fantasy Mission Force
1985, Hong Kong. Starring Jimmy Wang Yu, Jackie Chan, Pearl Cheung, Brigette Lin Ching-hsia, Adam Cheng, Chang Ling. Directed by Chu Yin-Ping.
I don't know if any of you out there have ever actually felt your brain melt, but if you have, you know what it's like to experience the acid trip that is Fantasy Mission Force. Jimmy was definitely on that brown acid when he dreamed up this crackpot film, and thank god for whatever drugs the man was doing. I love this film! Some people can't seem to get it through their little pea brains that it is a slapstick comedy, and they laugh at how the film-makers thought they were making a serious action-adventure film. But it has flying Amazons, vampires, and Abraham Lincoln in it! Anyway, almost as wacky and convoluted as the film itself is the story of how up and coming martial arts star Jackie Chan came to be in the film. Keep in mind that much of this is conjecture, wild accusation, conspiracy theory, and half-truth. It sure is interesting though. Back in the day, Jackie was working for Seasonal Entertainment and director Lo Wei. Lo Wei was the guy who directed Bruce Lee's three films before Enter the Dragon. Wild rumor had it that Lo Wei, a notorious thug and triad member, was furious that Lee dissed him to go to America and make Enter the Dragon. Thus more than a few people believe that Lee was murdered and Wei's goons were responsible. So fast forward a few years. Jackie Chan is saddled with the task of being "the next Bruce Lee," despite the fact that lee and he are totally different types of fighters making totally different types of movies. But they both worked for Lo Wei. Chan was getting sick of toiling away in Seasonal flops like To Kill With Intrigue, though he did make some great films at the time. Lo Wei's vehicles simply were not taking the young star where he wanted to go. When Chan was approached by a Taiwanese company with the chance to work with Yuen Wo-ping on Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master, he jumped at it, and jumped ship. Once again, Lo Wei's star had ditched him for greener pastures, and once again, Lo Wei was fuming. Again, speculation claims that Lo Wei sent thugs to Hong Kong to kill Jackie Chan, but Jackie was protected by the local movie star triad thug of Taiwan, Jimmy Wang Yu. Yep, they claim that the ol' one-armed swordsman, who of course has two arms, fought off a whole bunch of Lo Wei's men. Chan now owed his life to Wang Yu, and Jimmy took it out in trade, calling on Jackie's growing name to inflate interest in some of Jimmy Wang Yu's own films. Jimmy's star was well down the path toward waning, so adding Jackie to the list of cast members was a sure-fire way to guarantee the aging Jimmy Wang Yu a decent return on his films. Thus, you get Jackie showing up in Wang Yu films like this and Island of Fire. Like I said, take that shit with however many gains of salt you devote to the tabloids. One thing is for certain, and that's that Chan must have owed something pretty heavy to Jimmy Wang Yu to show up in some of those films. Fantasy Mission Force is the best of the bunch, and definitely the weirdest damn thing Chan has ever done. He's not exactly a member of the main cast, but he keeps popping up, along with Cheung Ling, as a whimsical con-man. He shows up in the end to have a grand duel with Jimmy Wang Yu and his army of Chevy-driving neo-Nazi Chinese skinheads. That right there should clue you in on what sort of movie this is. Plot? Jimmy Wang Yu is a super soldier who assembles a team of misfits and renegades for a suicide mission. Yeah, familiar plot. Their mission is to rescue the leaders of the Allied Powers during World War II, all of whom have been captured by Nazis. One of the leaders is Abraham Lincoln. They are being held in Luxemborg, Canada. Jimmy Wang Yu has to go because Rambo, Snake Plisskin, and Baldy (Karl Maka's character from the Aces Go Places films) were all busy. Jimmy soon fakes his death and is revealed to secretly be the leader of the Nazis, all of whom drive long pimpmobile Caddies or something with swastikas spray-painted all over them. Curiously enough, Chinese nazi skinheads also figure prominently into the plot of Flash Future Kungfu. I don't know if that's a whole subgenre, but you can bet your ass I will investigate further. Along the way to saving the leaders, the ragtag band (one of whom is a young Brigette Lin Ching-hsia) encounters flying Amazons with magic powers, vampires and ghosts, and other things you would typically think of when you think about World War II films. There are frequent battles, Jackie Chan shows up to do some kungfu, and in the end he and Cheung Ling drive some bulldozers around. By the time this film was over, I was weeping sweet tears of joy. I mean, someone thought of this. Even in the dead of summer in Florida, living in a squalid apartment on the edge of a swamp with no air conditioning, my nightmarish heat hallucinations never even came close to the level of pure nirvana this film helps me attain. Screw drugs. All you need is Fantasy Mission Force. Were you thinking of piercing your nipples with buffalo bones, taking peyote, and seeing visions in the sweat lodge? Why bother when you can watch Fantasy Mission Force? I've seen a lot of shit. I've seen movies featuring muppets doing hardcore sex scenes and cumshots. I've seen movies where an evil dwarf kidnaps young virgins and chains them in his attic while his mom belts out old cabaret tunes. I've seen movies where the romantic triangle is between a man, a woman, and a corpse. I've seen damn close to everything this crazy world has to offer, but Fantasy Mission Force still makes me scratch my head. If I watch it along with Young Taoism Fighter, I can actually travel through time and Sun Ra begins to make sense. Fantasy Mission Force is a source of great and dangerous power. You will either learn to wield it and thus experience all the earthly delights, or it will kill you. Possibly both. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Jackie Chan, stars: Jimmy Wang Yu, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 12:50 PM | 2 Comments Wednesday, January 03, 2001Gymkata 1985, United States. Starring Kurt Thomas, Tetchie Agbayani, Richard Norton, Edward Bell, John Barrett, Conan Lee, Bob Schott, Buck Kartalian, Eric Lawson, Sonny Barnes, Tadashi Yamashita. Directed by Robert Clouse. Buy it from Amazon .Lately, I've been curating (at least in my own mind), a retrospective film series entitled "The Most Important Films of the Reagan Era." This ongoing series, which is currently in regular rotation in my living room and not really anywhere else (museums and arthouse theaters -- call me) eschews the predictable mainstream Oscar winners of the decade and focuses instead on forgotten, obscure, and misunderstood, preferably ones in which ninjas spit spikey jacks into gangsters' faces. The series includes most of the films that I feel defined the decade, or at least defined me during that decade. Streets of Fire, Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, Flash Gordon, Commando, Howling II, Breakin', Krull -- the roster is deep, to say the least, and even the bench warmers could be starters on any other team. If you are familiar either with me or with my work on this site, it probably comes as no shock that I rank Gymkata as one of the most valuable players on this amazing and occasionally sparkly team. I've been pushing this movie on people for decades, armed at first with little more than my cherished VHS copy in it's oversized gray MGM/UA box. Since then, and much to my delight, Gymkata has become a touchstone of pop culture references. People know it, even if they haven't seen it, and knowing, as you know, is half the battle. And while some people get irritated when something they've been name-dropping for years suddenly gets embraced by the larger mainstream non-mainstream society (Chuck Norris karate jeans being the most recent example), I bear no ill will toward those who are late in coming to Gymkata. Lord knows there are plenty of things for which I showed up late. I don't consider it to be some secret to be guarded jealously and to the death by fanatic soldiers armed with weird masks, AK-47s, and scimitars. As far as I'm concerned, the more people who have the word "gymkata" on their lips, the better. I saw Gymkata when it first made the rounds on cable television, a glorious belle epoque during which you could expect to see Beastmaster, Revenge of the Ninja, and Sword and the Sorcerer on an almost daily basis -- and in fact, you would even enjoy watching them on a daily basis. I didn't know a whole lot about the sort of films I would one day grow to obsess about -- or at least, I didn't know about them as a viable academic field of study where one could obtain a PhD from a number of unaccredited but well-respected institutions of higher learning located in the various former Soviet republics. I knew it was something special then, and even when I went through that phase where I was discovering Hong Kong action films and thus turning my nose up at anything from the United States, Gymkata remained entirely free from criticism. The world of American-made martial arts films has never been a bastion of quality filmmaking or fight choreography. And yet, I am mysteriously drawn to them. Like bloody scenes of carnage as I pass by a car wreck on the interstate, no matter how hard I try, I cannot avert my eyes from films like Marked for Death or any of the eleven thousand Bolo Yeung films that were made during the 1980s. I could seek counseling, try to find help for this problem I have, for my vast knowledge of Dale "Apollo" Cook films or ability to recount the plots, however thin, of Don "The Dragon" Wilson's five hundred or so Bloodfist films. I can't remember which Friday the 13th is which after part three, yet I can tell you all about Bloodfist IV: Die Trying. But in the end, no counseling need be sought. These days, I have made my peace with American martial arts films, accepting that I like them just because I like them, and not trying to justify in any ironic "so bad they're good" way. At the end of the day, even though the acting is terrible and the martial arts are often worse, I just like them. And I think I first contracted this affliction in the mid 1980s after watching Gymkata, even if it remained in a dormant state throughout the early half of the 1990s when I was busy getting hip to Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. Gymkata absolutely enthralled me. I mean, here was a movie that was bad. Really bad. No one else in the world but me liked it, let alone continued to watch it and recommend it to people, who invariably come back to me with looks of anger permanently etched upon their faces. Doubters to a man, and who was proven right in the end? Now, in the era of DVD and throw-away pop culture references, we have become legion enough that, during a public vote held through Amazon, MGM found themselves compelled by the voices of freedom, democracy, and anyone who likes pommel horse fight scenes to put Gymkata out on DVD. Now, instead of being met with curious glances and mutters of, “He seemed like such a nice boy,” when I profess my love for Gymkata, people instead rally round me, and clad in Haggar comfort-fit slacks and nylon windbreakers, we run through the streets in victory, stopping only when we see a set of parallel bars on which we need to swing and twirl about. The action of Gymkata revolves around 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas -- or so we assumed him to be. Honestly, I can't remember if Kurt ever won gold, but we always assumed he did and thus referred to him as such. In retrospect, he might not have even been on the 1984 Olympic gymnastics team. Does it really matter, I mean to anyone except people who are interested in the basic concepts of factual accuracy and journalistic fundamentals? In Gymkata, he plays a gymnast (wow!), in much the same way that 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Mitch Gaylord (now I'm pretty sure he did win gold in 1984 -- but mostly I'm just sure that for months after that, it was common to homophobically insult someone by calling them a "Mitch Gay-lord") played a gymnast in his one and only film (that I know of), American Anthem. Now if you want to see a bad gymnastics movie, there's your movie for the night. The government recruits 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas to compete in a deadly game where the price of failure could be your life. This game is creatively called The Game. The nations of the world each send their best athletes to the small mountain nation of Kabrastan or some such fake place populated by people who are vaguely Arabic, vaguely Nepalese, vaguely Tibetan, and, well, at least a little bit Australian since Richard Norton is among them. Whoever wins the game -- if anyone at all wins -- will have their one wish granted. Not a wish like for the ability to teleport or turn into a sexy woman whenever you feel like it (my two main wishes). No, they are just lame favors. Like the US wants to build a radar station or something. Great wish, guys. We really need another radar station. The trick, however, is that in the history of The Game, no one has ever successfully completed it. 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas wants to go because his dad competed in the game before, and mysteriously disappeared. Actually, if people who lose the game all get killed, it's really not that mysterious a disappearance, I suppose. To prepare, 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas must endure the most rigorous training regiment ever devised by man, so that he may create the martial arts form known as "gymkata" -- a blend of karate and 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas's own special brand of impressive floor exercise and tumbling techniques. Most o the most intense training ever involves hanging out in the woods with Tadashi Yamashita, who forces 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas to do things like backflip into a pile of leaves. Seriously -- are you training to take on the world's greatest athletes in a deadly game where the cost of failure could be your life, or are you just warming up for the Fall Harvest festival? Scenes of Yamashita serving 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas some delicious hot cider on a hayride were not included, unfortunately. The true test of skill, however, consists of 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas having to walk up some stairs on his hands. I'm not saying that being able to do that isn't impressive, but I'm not sure how useful a skill it's going to be in The Game. Heck, even backflipping into a pile of leaves could be seen to have some practical application if, say, you needed to quickly hide in a nearby pile of leaves or you were Dennis the Menace and wanted to mess up the leaves Mr. Wilson has been diligently raking all morning. For some reason, the cute daughter of the Kabrastani king decides to help 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas train for the games. She suspects treachery perpetrated by Richard Norton, who goes through the entire movie wearing a furry bathroom mat. He's supposed to be evil because he wants to overthrow the king, and because he cheats when serving as one of The Game's primary obstacles, but considering that the king regularly hosts horrific bloodsports for his own amusements, it's entirely possible that Richard Norton is a courageous freedom fighter around whom the whole of the population would gather as he lead them out of this barbaric dark age and into an era of peace and freedom. At the same time, though, he wears a furry bathmat vest, so I guess the king, whatever his penchant for staging elaborate atrocity shows, gets the edge. Intrigue faces our heroic duo at every turn, as people shoot at them and randomly throw spears in their direction as they wander down the crowded streets of more vaguely Arabic nations. There are so many bizarrely staged encounters with "the locals" that the film at times takes on a purely hallucinogenic air, not entirely unlike that surreal sense of weirdness that permeates every frame of that other great pillar of classic 80s cinema, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. Luckily, the cities of the Middle East and Asia are littered with gymnastics equipment, allowing 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas to use nonparallel bars randomly located in alleys to his advantage as he fights using the deadly art of gymkata, which consists mostly of flipping back and forth and spinning around on bars until assassins politely and slowly walk toward you so you can eventually kick them in the face as your spinning around. Kurt, aided by the princess, also has to get into Kabrastan, as no roads lead to the nation, and no planes fly there. This is a good excuse for one of those five-second shots of someone rafting down a river, which are surprisingly commonplace in action films of the 1980s. When the game finally gets going, 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas and the princess quickly uncover Richard Norton's heinous plot to free Kabrastan from what I now assume to be the iron grip of terror in which the current king holds it. But never mind that. He wears that stupid vest, and the king has a cute daughter. Maybe if Norton called frequent co-star Cynthia Rothrock in as reinforcements, he'd be faring better. As it is, his army is comprised almost entirely of guys whose sole skill seems to be standing at the edge of cliff, getting shot with an arrow, then yelping and falling over the cliff, clutching wherever they need to hold the arrow in place. The greatest athletes from the four corners of the globe are, for the most part, doughy middle aged-businessmen looking losers in bad 1980s nylon jogging suits and even worse hairpieces. No wonder no one has ever survived The Game. I mean, this is the best the world has to offer? With the exception of 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas and Hong Kong action actor and notable egomaniac Conan Lee in a small role as a guy who dies pretty quickly, these dumpy nobodies remind of those yuppie guys who used to powerwalk through the mall on their lunch breaks for exercise. These goofy out-of-shape 40-somethings with headbands, jogging suits, and a giant 1980s cell phone speed walking through the mall -- your town had them too, right? Anyway, they have to do stuff like climb ropes and run through a town of crazy cannibals while Richard Norton and his army of ninjas shoot arrows at them. 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Gymnast Kurt Thomas almost dies in the Town of Crazies, but luckily, there is a pommel horse in the town square that he can incorporate into his fight against the 80 year old senior citizens trying to poke him with pitchforks and other implements often carried by crazed cannibalistic peasants from 1172 AD. That alone is worth the price of admission, but think of all that other good stuff we got to watch! Random gym equipment, an army on Ninjas led by a man in a furry jacket, martial arts, gymkata fury, a princess who strips down to a form fitting black bodysuit, cold war paranoia, super intense training where the ultimate test of skill is the ability to tumble in leaves and walk up the stairs on your hands (didn't Remo Williams have to do that, too?), and all sorts of wild action and exotic locations modeled after Pakistan and that place from The Man Who Would Be King. Labels: Action: Adventure, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 3:28 PM | 0 Comments |
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