Author Archives: bandsaboutmovies

Cisco Kid Movie Collection: Cisco Kid In Old New Mexico (1945)

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Cisco (Duncan Renaldo) and Pancho (Martin Garralaga) are bandits who hold up a stagecoach and take Ellen Roth (Gwen Kenyon). Yet she wins them over by telling them that she’s a nurse who has been framed for murder. They decide to help her in their own way, demanding a ransom for her that the killer has — Will Hastings (Norman Willis) — has to pay so he doesn’t seem like the killer of his aunt. Cisco then implicates Roth by meeting with him and offering to kill her for money. Oh Cisco.

Director Phil Rosen also made It Could Happen to You, The Shadow Returns, Return of the Ape Man, Spooks Run Wild and more than a hundred other movies. Writer Betty Burburdge was the daughter of Civil War Major General Stephen G. Burbridge and Mabel Burbidge, an advice columnist. She acted in a ton of silent films before becoming a writer, specializing in Westerns. Of the 124 movies he wrote, 14 starred Gene Autry.

This is one of the three movies with the Cisco Kid made in 1945.

The Cisco Kid Western Movie Collection is available from VCI Entertainment. It has 13 movies and extras like two Cisco Kid TV episodes, interviews with Duncan Renaldo and Colonel Tim McCoy, and photo and poster galleries. You can get it from MVD.

Spagvemberfest 2023: Duck, You Sucker! (1971)

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According to Peter Bogdanovich, the original title for this movie — Duck, You Sucker! — was meant by Leone as a close translation of the Italian title Giù la testa, coglione! which means Duck your head, balls!

For some reason, Leone thought that this was a common phrase in America.

That’s why this is also called A Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon a Time … the Revolution.

In America, a lot of the movie was cut, as it was too violent, profane or politically sensitive. The movie starts with a quote from Mao Zedong that says, “The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing, or an embroidery; it cannot be done with elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of violence…” Moments later, a man’s bare ass is on screen.

This was sold in America as a light-hearted follow-up to Leone’s Dollars movies.

It is not.

Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger) leads a gang that is mostly made up of his children, robbing rich people in a train and not part of any revolution at all. John H. Mallory (James Coburn) is an Irish man in Mexico to be a silver prospector. Juan wants him to be part of his crew that robs a bank. John refuses and gets set up as a murderer, so he has to come along.

John is working for Dr. Villega (Romolo Valli) as an explosives expert, something he did as an Irish Republican. They blow up the bank that Juan wanted to rob. It has no cash, instead being used to hold prisoners. This makes Juan a hero of the revolution.

Colonel Günther Reza (Antoine Saint-John) kills nearly everyone, including so many of Juan’s family members, including his dad. He runs into their headquarters and is nearly killed before being captured and sent to a firing squad. John learns that Dr. Villega was tortured and gave them up. This reminds him of how he and his friend Nolan (David Warbeck) had a similar thing happen, as he gave up John to British soldiers. John killed them all and left Ireland. He saves Juan by racing in on his motorcycle, yelling for him to duck and blowing every soldier to chunks.

This is a film of how people see heroes. Juan isn’t someone for the revolution and becomes one. John is someone who believed in a cause and love and now just blows things up. Dr. Villega is destroyed by realizing that he saved himself instead of those he rallied to the cause.

Oh yeah — I know it goes without saying that Morricone’s music is always making these movies epic, but here it is somehow even more glorious.

The end of this destroys me, as John is shot in the back and Juan destroys Reza with bursts from a gigantic gun. It’s not a heroic action like Django but a man in pain just obliterating someone when that’s all he has left. As John lies near death, he remembers when times were different, when he and Nolan were close, when they both loved Coleen (Vivienne Chandler, who is in Hammer’s Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil; she was also in Asia’s video for The Smile Has Left Your Eyes” and was rebel pilot Dorovio Bold in Return of the Jedi; she was in a relationship and had a son and daughter with Kate Bush’s brother John Carder Bush and influenced the photos that he did on her album covers. She styled Kate on her artwork for Hounds of Love).

Then everything explodes.

You can watch this on Tubi.

MILL CREEK SCI-FI CLASSICS: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nate B. is the man who loved Cat Dancing and the boy with green hair. He has seen too many bad movies and not nearly enough good ones. He is the last active member of the Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kids Fanclub, and he is currently working on writing a better bio.

Here we go…a jewel in the crown that is postwar Americana kitsch – Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Released in 1964 at the height of the space race, this film captures that time period in all the right ways. Not only were we gonna beat the Russians to Mars, not only would we come into contact with alien life, but we would win them over to our side! Not with guns or diplomacy, but with a jolly fat man in a red suit who epitomizes consumerism and capitalism!  It’s the kind of naive innocence from a bygone era that’s charming in its sincerity, especially because it’s a children’s movie. Unlike countless other children’s movies, this one is watchable for the older crowd, too. For a different reason, of course.

The children of Mars are sad. So a daring group of Martians take it upon themselves to abduct Old Saint Nick and have him start up his toy building and distribution enterprise for them. They pick up two Earth children in the process, and after everyone gets back to Mars they have to contend with a disgruntled jerk Martian who wants to destroy Santa because he believes he’ll make the Martian children soft (of course).

Now, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians may not be quite as technically woeful as Ed Wood films, as the filmmakers had a budget that was higher than $20 (dig that retro-futuristic Martian home!). But it shares the same genuine earnestness to thrill and entertain, which I think is what helped keep it “in circulation” in cult film circles all these years, so to speak. It has a dismally low rating on both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, but what do they know? I can’t find it in me to dislike a movie with a line about how the UN plans to save Santa as “the lights burn until dawn.” Not to mention Torg the robot. Or the amazing Polar Bear. Or the stock footage sourced from some Air Force training film. Or the stupidly infectious theme song that opens and closes the movie. Hooray for Santy Claus!

The acting in this movie is surprisingly decent. John Call is as good as you can expect a Santa to be, smoking a pipe (!) and ho-ho-hoing all the way. The guy who plays Kimar is stoic and wooden, which ends up working for an alien character devoid of emotions. Voldar, the anti-Santa Martian mentioned earlier, is great too when he drips with contempt for human concepts like ‘fun’ and’ happiness’, plus he has a terrific mustache. And Droppo, is well, Droppo. Of course, one of the reasons this movie is known is that Pia Zadora is in it.  It was her debut, and for a long while, her swan song until she resurfaced in Butterfly, a movie not as infamous as this one but still reviled in its own right. Oh well, at least she has her cameo in Naked Gun 3 to fall back on. Actually, looking up Pia Zadora on IMDB, apparently she did a movie with Telly Savalas called Fakeout. Now there’s a film that’s going straight to the top of my watch list.

Some people have made it a tradition to watch Die Hard as part of their holiday season. If you’re one of those, why not go old school this year? Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is as low on budget as it is on logic but it’s a great example of why sometimes, despite all reasons not to, a movie just strikes a chord with you through sheer audacity. Plus, it’s in the public domain! There’s a lovely Blu Ray available, but I personally prefer the lower quality prints in this case. Maybe it’s because that’s how I first saw it, and maybe because it adds to the overall vintage vibe and fits the movie’s low budget roots.

MILL CREEK SCI-FI CLASSICS: Gammera the Invincible (1966)

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Directed by Sandy Howard and Noriaki Yuasa, this is the American version of Gamera. The footage was provided to Howard by Daiei and he was free to move it around however he wanted for Western eyes.

Gammera the Invincible was the only film in the original Gamera series to receive a theatrical release in the United States. It was sent to theaters and drive-ins by World Entertainment Corp. and Harris Associates, Inc. Amazingly, it played double features with Knives of the Avenger. The rest of the movies went directly to TV and were distributed by American International Television.

All of the romantic plots are forgotten, Gamera being from Atlantis is ignored and new footage of Gen. Terry Arnold (Brian Donlev) and the Secretary of Defense (Albert Dekker) has been added, so that it seems like Americans are in Japan. There’s also footage that wasn’t used in the original movie to add a little more to the movie.

I was just looking at the poster for this movie and had a sense memory. I was eight-years-old and it was a Saturday afternoon. Even on the weekends, I was nervous, anxious, worried for school to come Monday. I regularly got attacked on the playground and my teacher told me it was my fault. I talked too much. I studied too hard. And I never slept, which is where it all began, this lifelong insomnia. But Gamera was my escape. The idea of Gamera, a giant turtle throwing up fire, turning into a shell and spinning around, sure that might seem silly to you today. But I sat in class and knew I’d be beaten into unconsciousness in two hours and I’d just draw Gamera setting a city on fire. He and Godzilla and the rest of the monsters were so fantastic, so wonderful, so perfect, not like the kind of world where a little frightened fat kid threw up all night and tried to round off infinity and had OCD and could barely leave a room without trying to do even steps or flip light switches over and over again. I was a prisoner of my mind and all that helped me forget it, even if just for a few moments was movies like this. So here’s to you, Gamera. Thank you, Johnny Sokko. God bless you, well, Godzilla. I still never sleep, I have never stopped worrying, but you have always been here for me, smashing cities so that I can escape.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Door II: Tokyo Diary (1991)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Banmei Takahashi, who, as Sam Panico wrote in his review of the director’s Door for this site,“has a career filled with movies that infuse sex and violence.” I think Door is a terrific thriller, and although Takahashi’s Door II: Tokyo Diary is a sequel in name only (supposedly executives wanted him to change the film’s title after Door found some financial success) and by no means a thriller or horror film, it does serve up plenty of the director’s two aforementioned calling cards. 

There’s no stalker after a housewife here, and no returning characters from Door. Instead, we follow some days in the life of Ai (Chikako Aoyama in an outstanding lead performance), whose name means “love.” She’s a call girl who works on her own, which a madam (Keiko Takahashi) warns her about in a threatening manner. Ai falls for one of her johns, an art dealer (Joe Yamanaka), which leads to certain emotional adventures. There’s plenty of self-reflecting going on in Ai’s mind throughout Door II: Tokyo Diary, which leads to, in my opinion, the film’s two strongest set pieces: a violent encounter with a sadistic john that should have even the most hardened of fear-fare fans feeling squeamish, and a climactic, jaw-dropping speech at the wedding of two mutual friends.

Door II: Tokyo Diary is a highly offbeat drama with some dark overtones, plenty of R-rated–style sexual encounters including a variety of kinks, lots of existential musing about life along with doors and what happens to men once they get behind them, and some poignant musing. Is Ai an empowered young woman or an exploited one? Takahashi’s nicely directed, wonderfully choreographed, and well acted food-for-thought softcore-style drama will have viewers pondering that question.

Door II: Tokyo Diary is available as a bonus feature on the Blu-ray release of Door from Third Window Films as part of its Director’s Company Collection.

MILL CREEK SCI-FI CLASSICS: Queen of the Amazons (1946)

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Directed by Edward Finnery and written by Roger Merton, this movie begins when Jean Preston (Patricia Morison) heads into the jungle to find her fiancee Greg Jones (Bruce Edwards). She goes to Akbar, India with Colonel Jones (John Miljan) who is Greg’s dad, along with Wayne Monroe (Keith Richards) and the Professor (Wilson Benge).

While Jean unpacks, Tondra (Vida Aldana) knocks on her door. She tells Jean that a safari was just attacked by a tiger and her husband Moya (Hassam Kayyam) lets slip that Jones was with ivory hunters. Then, he’s shot.

Everyone goes into the jungle on a boat along with Gary Lambert (Robert Lowery), who believes that women are bad luck. That is, until Jean shows him her gun skills. They also have a safari cook named Gabby (J. Edward Bromberg) who has a pet monkey. They’re out to stop the ivory poachers and hopefully find Jones.

It turns out that Jones is now with Zita, the queen of the Amazons (Amira Moustafa) but that’s fine. Everyone is swapping in the vines so to speak and Jean and Gary have obviously become a couple. For 1946, everyone is surprisingly cool with this switchery of couples. Way to be progressive.

Don’t have the box set? You can download this from the Internet Archive.

MILL CREEK SCI-FI CLASSICS: Prehistoric Women (1950)

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Gregg G. Tallas started his career working with Fritz Lang, which does not explain how his career took him to some crazy places, such as Espionage in Tangiers, Assignment Skybolt and the movie he’d make 12 years later, Cataclysm, which is, of course, “The Case of Claire Hansen” in Night Train to Terror.

So yeah. He made this bit of insanity too, which stars 1950’s tabloid star Laurette Luez, who was also in D.O.A. She’s Tigri in this film, one of the Amazons who hate all men. That said, they still need to kidnap them and use them to get pregnant, but otherwise, they hate the gender.

You know who wins them over? Engor.

He’s played by Allan Nixon, speaking of tabloid stars. He became an informant for Confidential magazine after years of being out of control, getting arrested for drunk driving and getting in fights. And, well, pure crazy stuff. That’s because in 1958, he got in a heck of a battle with his third wife Velda May Paulsen after she visited her ex-boyfriend Burt Lancaster in the hospital. He hit her, she stabbed him with the kitchen knives he gave her for Christmas. He didn’t press charges, they got back together and she died before the year was over because of burns she suffered in an explosion. Nixon — a Ron Ormond star — would eventually become a writer under his own name and using the pen names Nick Allen and Don Romano for the Shaft paperbacks.

Engor is such a man here that not only does he figure out fire — screw you Prometheus — he also kills a big lizard. After that, all the ladies — who include Joan Shawlee from The Apartment and the vamp in Singin’ In the Rain‘s Judy Landon — decide that it’s time to get married.

There’s also a commentator who says inane things like, “And Engor called it Firee, which was his word for Fire.” He’s really the best thing in this whole movie.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to angryoldguy for letting me know I was using the poster from the 1968 movie, not the 1950 movie.

UNEARTHED BLU RAY RELEASE: Suburra (2015)

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Based on the novel by Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De Cataldo, this movie is about the connections between organized crime and politics in Rome. A real estate project is going to turn the neighborhood in Rome into Las Vegas, but it creates a web connecting politicians like Filippo Malgradi (Pierfrancesco Favino) and criminals like neo-fascist terrorist turned crime boss Samurai (Claudio Amendola).

It also doesn’t make things any less dirty when Filippo parties with two sex workers. The underaged one, Jelena, overdoses and the politician has to bring in Alberto “Spadino” Anacleti (Giacomo Ferrara) to dispose of the body. Sapdino begins to blackmail him before he’s murdered by another criminal, Aureliano (Alessandro Borghi), which starts a war between him and Manfredi Anacleti (Adamo Dionisi).

Directed by Stefano Sollima, this has so many characters and so much happens in a little over two hours. It was expanded as two miniseries on Netflix, Suburra: Blood on Rome and Suburræterna, which start on Netflix on November 14, 2023.

It’s also pretty astounding how much of this was based on real life.

The Unearthed Films blu ray of this movie comes with a 2-hour making of feature and a trailer. You can get it from MVD.

88 FILMS BLU RAY RELEASE: The Last Blood (1990)

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Released in the Philippines as Police Protectors, the UK as Hard Boiled 2 and with an original title that means 12 Hours of Terror, The Last Blood has Interpol officer Lui Tai (Andy Tam) and Big B (Alan Tam), a gangster on vacation get caught up in the Japanese Red Army trying to kill the Daka Lama (Law Shu-kei). It turns out that he has the same blood type as Big B’s girlfriend May (May Lo), a type that only three people in all of Hong Kong have. Those three people must be found to save their lives while the terrorist cell led by Kama Kura (Chin Lo) must be defeated.

The JRA kills two of them, but the last one is Fatty (Eric Tsang), who doesn’t want to help a gangster or the police. But when his girlfriend and nearly all of his family are murdered by the terror cell, he decides that he needs revenge.

Directed and written by Jing Wong, this has the gunplay and violence that you’d expect from a movie that is trying to live up to Hard Boiled. I guess they both have lots of weapons and a hospital setting, so it makes sense.

The 88 Films blu ray of this movie has commentary by Frank Djeng and a trailer. You can get it from MVD.

CULT EPICS BLU RAY RELEASE: The Last Island (1990)

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Cult Epics has released several Marleen Gorris movies, including Broken Mirrors and A Question of Silence. This is the best of the three that I have watched.

The world has ended and seemingly the only survivors are those who escape from a plane crash: Sean (Paul Freeman), Frank (Mark Hembrow), military man Nick (Kenneth Colley), naturalist Pierre (Marc Berman), Jack (Ian Tracey), Joanna (Shelagh McLeod) and Mrs. Godame (Patricia Hayes). They figure that if they’re the last one left, every man should impregnate Joanna, which doesn’t seem like something she’s interested in.

Produced by Alex Maas and shot by cinematographer Marc Felperlaa, who filmed his Amsterdamned, this gets dark as Nick tries to impose religion on the island. When faced with some of the men being gay or becoming gay as the days become months and years, something bad has to happen. But man, it gets really horrible for everyone. This is a bigger movie from Gorris but it’s also really well done.

The Cult Epics blu ray has a new 2K HD Transfer from the original 35mm print, commentary by Peter Verstraten, behind the scenes footage, news footage, a trailer, a promotional gallery and an audio introduction by Dick Maas. You can get it from MVD.