April 5: Roger Corman’s birthday — Whether he produced or directed the movie, share a movie for Corman’s birthday.
Using pieces of past Roger Corman-produced science fiction films, Android had a team that believed in it so much that even when Corman said that it wasn’t exploitable, Barry Opper (brother of writer and actor Don, who is in this as the android Max 404) and producer Rupert Harvey bought the rights. It still didn’t really break through, but there you go.
After the Munich Rebellion, all androids on Earth were outlawed. That’s why Dr. Daniel (Klaus Kinski) has goen to space to work on Max 404, his young male android who is already getting too curious and insubordinate. He’s already working on the next level of AI called Cassandra One (Kendra Kirchner). Meanwhile, Max has allowed a prison transport filled with criminals in disguise — Maggie (Brie Howard-Darling, who was in the all-female band Fanny, which predate The Runaways), Keller (Norbert Weisser) and Mendes (Crofton Hardester) — which upsets Dr. Daniel, but once he sees Maggie, he allows them to stay.
There’s a love triangle here kind of, because Max is showing signs of Munich Syndrome and becoming anti-human and Dr. Daniel needs to sexually stimulate Maggie and add the details of her love life into Cassandra One. When the cops show up, Max destroys their ship and tells Maggie that he saved her. They start to make love before Mendes interrupts and Cassandra reveals that Max is also an android. Before you know it, Maggie has been killed and it’s a mystery as to who did it as more cops start to arrive at the space station.
This gets very twist and turn at the end and has a pretty great reveal. It’s not necessarily a great movie, as it tells more than it shows and is quite talky, but any movie where Klaus Kinski is coming on too strong to both human and robotic women is one that I’m going to like.
Director Aaron Lipstadt is still working in streaming TV and podcasts. He also directed City Limitsand episodes of everything from Miami Vice to Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. This was written by Opper (Charlie from the Critters movies), James Regle (who was the set construction supervisor for Corman’s Forbidden World) and Will Regle.
April 5: Roger Corman’s birthday — Whether he produced or directed the movie, share a movie for Corman’s birthday.
It Conquered the World was released by American-International Pictures as a double feature with The She-Creature and has perhaps the goofiest monster ever, The Venusian. It was originally written by Lou Rusoff, who had to leave for Canada when he learned that his brother was dying. Charles Griffith did a rewrite two days before filming started and told Fangoria that the script “was incomprehensible which was strange because he was quite meticulous. Lou’s brother was dying at the time which most likely had something to do with it.” He also admitted that the final movie was terrible.
Paul Blaisdell created The Venusian and figured that is Venus was a big planet, it had heavy gravity so it needed to be bottom heavy and low to the ground. Beveraly Garland, who plays Claire Anderson in the film, said that when she first saw it, she said knocked it over, telling Fangoria, “I could bop that monster over the head with my handbag! This thing was no monster, it was a table ornament!”
Her husband in the movie, Dr. Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef!) has brought the creature to Earth to help humanity deal with its problems, except that it does what aliens in Roger Corman movies do and that’s enslave humanity. Anderson deals with that by using a blowtorch to the face of the monster, which temporarily earned it an X rating in the UK as they deemed it cruelty to animals until AIP producer Samuel Z. Arkoff explained that, well, it’s not an animal. It was an alien.
This was an early heroic role for Peter Graves and I’d like to think this comes from the same cinematic universe where his brother James Arness was The Thing from Another World.
April 5: Roger Corman’s birthday — Whether he produced or directed the movie, share a movie for Corman’s birthday.
PS: Thanks to Joe Sherlock for pointing out that — like always — I confused Bloody Mama with Crazy Mama.
Gene Siskel gave Bloody Mama 1 star and said that it was “92 minutes of sado-masochism, incest, satyrism and voyeurism woven into a disgraceful screenplay. In fact, the whole treatment might be called embarrassed Bonnie and Clyde.”
Whatever.
As far as a hero in this movie, I guess it would be Ma Barker (Shelley Winters), a woman so damaged by the constant assaults of her brothers and father that she’s emerged as a woman constantly in demand of new lovers and attacking everyone around her. She leaves her husband George (Alex Nicol) and takes her sons Lloyd (Robert De Niro), Arthur (Clint Kimbrough), Herman (Don Stroud) and Fred (Robert Walden) on a murder-filled crime spree across America.
Herman and Fred get busted, so the gang adds gunman — and new lover for Ma — Kevin Dirkman (Bruce Dern) and prostitute Mona Gibson (Diane Varsi). But Kevin and Fred were once in a prison relationship, so this makes him resent his mom. Lloyd starts feeling the same way after a girl he’s fallen for — and by fallen for, I mean raped several times — named Rembrandt (Pamela Dunlap) gets drowned in a tub by Ma. Things get even worse when the boys see Sam Pendlebury (Pat Hingle) — a millionaire they’ve kidnapped — as their father figure and when they release him, Herman takes over, punching Ma in the face.
Stroud punched Winters so hard that he put her in the hospital for a day.
As the family makes its way to the Everglades, Lloyd overdoses, Mona runs and the remaining gang shoot an alligator with a tommy gun, which brings everyone and anyone the law has their way. Spoiler. No gang member makes it out alive, with Herman horrifyingly blowing his brains out with a machine gun and Ma dying on the porch, screaming and shooting and taking as many cops with her as she can.
The credits say that any similarity to anyone living or dead is coincidental, but the final title says that any similarity to Kate Barker is intentional. Was Ma Barker really in charge of her gang? J. Edgar Hoover stated that she was “the most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade.” Others claim that he said that because his agents went wild when capturing the gang and killed them all, even their innocent mother.
In the book John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920–1936, it’s stated that “Her age and apparent respectability permitted the gang to hide out disguised as a family. As Mrs. Hunter and Mrs. Anderson, she rented houses, paid bills, shopped and did household errands. Alvin Karpis was probably the real leader of the gang, and he later said that Ma was just “an old-fashioned homebody from the Ozarks.” She was superstitious, gullible, simple, cantankerous and, well, generally law-abiding.”
April 5: Roger Corman’s birthday — Whether he produced or directed the movie, share a movie for Corman’s birthday.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: When Frederick Burdsall isn’t at work or watching movies while covered in cats, you can find Fred in the front seat of Knoebels’ Phoenix.
Earlier I offered a review of the Roger Corman-produced outer space shocker Galaxy of Terror, so for the final half of my salute to Roger I’m tackling my favorite Corman production: 1982’s Forbidden World, directed by Allan Holzman and starring Jesse Vint, June Chadwick and the spectacular Dawn Dunlap.
Bounty hunter Mike Colby (Vint) is called to Xarbia to check out Subject 20, which was created in hopes of curing a galaxy-wide food crisis. Too bad they didn’t explain that to Subject 20. After an opening segment with Colby awakening from cryo-sleep to fight off raiders, he receives orders to go to Xarbia where he is met by Doctor Hauser (Linden Chiles) and geneticist Barbara Glaser (Chadwick). They show him to the Biohazard chamber, where he sees the remains of various animals killed when Subject 20 got loose. It has now cocooned itself in the incubator and despite Colby’s insistence on destroying it, they convince him to sleep on it. While they go to dinner, Jimmy (Mike Bowen) is left to clean up the mess and after opening the incubator for a better look gets a face full of Subject 20 for his trouble (They never learn.).
At dinner it’s explained that their discovery, Proto B, can be spliced with anything to make it grow larger, but the scientists refuse to tell Colby what Subject 20 was before it got spliced. Meanwhile, Tracy Baxter (Dunlap) has now discovered what’s left of her boyfriend Jimmy. Doctor Cal Timbergen (played perfectly by Fox Harris) wheels off the body and everyone gets ready for bed (Apparently, they don’t care about the murderous creature running loose.).
While Barbara and Colby “get acquainted,” security chief Earl (Scott Paulin) has a close encounter with Subject 20. Early next morning, Tracy heads to the sauna (Thank You!) and is soon joined by Colby (She apparently wasn’t very bothered by the death of her boyfriend) and Subject 20, who escapes through the air shaft, forcing a search outside the ship. They discover an empty cocoon and head back to the research center, arriving in time to see the mutant head back into the shaft taking Hauser with him. Cal discovers that Jimmy is still alive, if only on a molecular level, and is being morphed into pure protein.
Once back inside, they learn the truth about Subject 20 and they figure out why they have been left alive until now. After a visit from a not quite dead Hauser, the girls hit the shower in a scene that would have gotten me through puberty if it had been made about 10 years earlier. They decide to communicate with it. Barbara has a nice quick chat via computer before being invited to dinner, and as the menfolk come running to the rescue, Cal discovers the solution to the problem. How many more have to die? Will ANYONE survive? Watch, enjoy and find out for yourself.
Not wanting to leave out anyone, I’ll also mention the film also starred Raymond Oliver as Brian. The opening sequence of the movie was shot just after Galaxy of Terror using that picture’s Quest set. The ever-thrifty Roger had rented the property until the weekend and still had a few days remaining, so he had the scene shot and added on to Forbidden World, even though the rest of it wasn’t filmed until about four months later. Gotta love it. They also used the skeleton of the giant maggot for the final shots of the film where you see the mutant barreling through the corridors chasing Tracy (Can’t say I blame him.).
In any event, this is pure cheesy sci-fi at it’s best. Chadwick was smoldering and Dunlap looks magnificent with or without clothes, but the star of this for me was Harris as Doctor Timbergen. He looked and sounded like the proverbial mad scientist and, even though I couldn’t name anything else he was in without looking it up, I will always remember him for this film. Great job. As for Dunlap, she would go on to make only a few more films before leaving the biz and heading back to Texas. Hope she’s doing well.
And as for the rest of you: watch out for missing test subjects and I’ll see you at Knoebels.
April 5: Roger Corman’s birthday — Whether he produced or directed the movie, share a movie for Corman’s birthday.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: When Frederick Burdsall isn’t at work or watching movies while covered in cats, you can find Fred in the front seat of Knoebels’ Phoenix.
If I were to make a list of my favorite directors it would look like this: 1. Alfred Hitchcock 2. Dario Argento 3. Ridley Scott 4. Lucio Fulci and 5. Roger Corman. Why Roger Corman? If you hand him half a mil and say “I need this pic by the end of the week,” he’ll deliver. Let’s see the almighty Spielberg do that. Corman is the king of making something for nothing and we are the better for it because his movies are what movies should be…FUN. I would love to see what he could do with a budget and a solid script, but that won’t happen, so let’s accept him as the low budget God he is.
The list of people who have worked for him is ridiculous. Nicholson, Scorsese, Cameron, Coppola and a boatload of actors who’ve all made a mark on the industry and they all learned how to do it from Roger. His adaptations of some Poe stories starring Vincent Price for AIP in the ’60s are genre classics, with The Fall of the House of Usher being a favorite of mine, as well as The Tomb of Ligeia.
Quick, true story….Vincent Price was a frequent visitor to the Poe house here in Philadelphia. On one occasion a woman asked him how could he, as a Poe aficionado, make movies that were not very true to the original story, and he told her with a smile, “Because they pay me very well.”
These films introduced me to Roger but the two that really cemented my love for his films were the two I saw one Saturday afternoon back in 1984, Galaxy of Terror and Forbidden World. Shot almost back to back in typical Corman style (Move that corridor over here, rearrange those two rooms and voila!, a brand new ship), I raved about these two no-budget gems for years and I welcome them happily into my DVD collection.
Let’s look back at Galaxy of Terror from 1981, starring Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Ray Walston, Sid Haig and Robert Englund. The members of the Quest are heading to Morganthus to find the missing crewman from the starship Remus. Anyone else think this is going to end badly?
The Planet Master has just been told the fate of the Remus. He orders a military official to take over the Quest and go find out what happened. He is told by an old woman, “Death will surround you.” He should have listened. The Quest crew consists of Cabren (Albert), Baelon (Zalman King), Alluma (Moran), Kore the cook (Walston), Quuhod (Haig), Ranger (Englund) and Dameia (Taaffe O’Connell) along with Commander Ilvar (Bernard Behrens) and Captain Trantor (Grace Zabriskie). A quick, risky hyper-jump lands them right by Morganthus and after a more risky landing on the planet they find the remains of the Remus and its crew….with one lone survivor. They return to the Quest where the Remus survivor locks himself in a room and is killed.
Wanting to avoid a similar fate they send out a group to look around and find a huge pyramid which they believe will help them in understanding what happened to the Remus. Finally gaining access, Baelon, Cabren, Alluma and Dameia go exploring, leaving Quuhod to stand guard. Back at the ship Ranger and Kore go looking for the Captain who’s gone missing.
As crew members die in the pyramid, chaos reigns in the ship as the Captain fries trying to fight an imaginary enemy. The survivors regroup back at the Quest and decide to give the pyramid another try. NOT what I would have done. They venture deeper into it eventually being separated and done in by their own fears except for Ranger and Cabren, who go on to play the final game of the pyramid and become the new Planet Master.
Several notable names worked behind the scenes on production and sets: James Cameron, Bill Paxton and Don Opper. Unfortunately, it was vilified by the critics and let’s be honest…not surprisingly. This is not Shakespeare. It is what it is, a low budget, sometimes over the top sci-film with a semi-talented cast who gave it their all. It is mostly remembered for the scene of O’ Connell getting raped by a giant maggot, but sometimes….that’s just enough. So give it a watch and enjoy it as I always have and ready yourself for Forbidden World.
April 4: Remake, remix, ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).
Also known as Savior of the Earth or its Western remix Space Thunder Kids — which also has parts of The CosmosConqueror (which takes from Giant Robo), Raiders of Galaxy, Protectors ofUniverse, Savior of the Earth, Solar Adventure, Space Transformer, Cheolin samchongsa and Defenders of Space — this movie may claim that it’s about Dr. Kim, Sheila and Keith saving the world from Dr. Butler, but a casual watch will tell you that this is Tron.
The English dub of this is incredible, because it feels like it was made by two guys in a tunnel, as it’s somehow too loud and too quiet all at the same time.
Keith is kind of the hero, despite being very annoying, and spends much of the movie playing a version of Galaxian before being blasted into the video game grid and being beat on by Joe, who is probably the most characterized black man that’s been in a cartoon since the 1930s. Joe whips everyone around him and forces them to play Go, Asteroids, Pac-Man and other video games but just like the world of Bridges and Boxleitner, these games are real.
Keith — or Ki, I mean, who knows with this dub — escapes into the desert as he battles Joe in a racing game, which ends up with them drinking in an oasis together, captured by the tiny and annoying Bbik Soo-ni or Princess Sandy who falls for our protagonist and wants to keep him all for himself, but then he explains that he has to save the world, so she introduces him to her eyepatch-wearing pirate sister Odin who for some reason has a submarine that would not look out of place on Space Battleship Yamato and at the very same time, it looks like Nintendo’s Radar Scope, a game that failed in the U.S. and was replaced with the reason we probably still know Nintendo thanks to its success, Donkey Kong.
Maybe they’ve also ripped off Captain Harlock‘s Arcadia. Who knows. Because Odin, beyond being the sister of the miniature princess, could also be the twin sister of Space Adventure Cobra‘s Sandra. The movie does get the Japanese influence right, because characters either look realistic or absolutely cartoony beyond belief and the two animation styles, when mixed, are very jarring. Oh yeah — the Saviors costumes also look like they come from Lensman.
At the end, as Keith leaves, he’s given a computer disk or frisbee — or come on, it’s an identity disk — by Bbik Soo-ni and that’s what destroys Sark — or you know, Dr. Butler — and that’s how we get through this 70 minutes of Korean animation.
Director Su-yong Jeong also worked on Transformers The Movie and the TV series. He also directed a Bible-based TV series, Jesus: A Kingdom Without Frontiers and the movie Yesu, which one imagines comes from that show. IMDB lists Roy Thomas as the other director and that’s linked to the comic book writer and I call IMDB kayfabe on that.
This is definitely something, I’ll tell you that much.
I learned about this movie from Ed Glaser, author of How the World Remade Hollywood, which you can buy from McFarland Books. Here’s a fun video he made about it.
April 4: Remake, remix, ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).
If you’re going to make a female revenge movie, you can’t get a better inspiration than Ms. 45. Except that this movie, directed by Yao-Chi Chen and written by Chia Lau isn’t just inspired, it’s literally the same movie — it’s by Taiwanese talent but set in Hong Kong — with some minor changes.
Hsia Yin is Liang Pi-Ho, a mute worker in the garment industry who is the Thana or this movie, but she has so much to live up to, as Zoë Tamerlis is perhaps one of the most untouchable actresses ever for connecting with a role and making you believe in it. Liang Pi-Ho has to deal with the same indignities, like street gangs accosting her and a photographer who keeps touching her and the man who comes into her apartment to defile her. She deals with things the same way, blasting them with dispassion. Yet Hong Kong doesn’t seem like the end of the world that Abel Ferrara showed off in his film. And when it gets really grisly, the movie deals with censorship by going to inversed white on black.
It also begins with news stories about attacks on the homeless and gives a backstory to Liang Pi-Ho, showing how she’s mute because of the death of her parents. The film also closes with her receiving treatment instead of her decimating a party while dressed as a nun, then being cut down and yelling, “Sister!” See — I somehow spoiled two movies at once.
According to Girls With Guns, Godfrey Ho — yes, you knew somehow he would get involved — released a Westernized version called American Commando 5: Fury in Red and Crackdown Mission that has some white faces and a Satanic cult randomly thrown in.
Also known as Fury In Red, this also has the landlady’s dog replaced with a cat who our heroine feeds parts of her first victim to as well as a nightclub scene with the Human League’s “Love Action” playing on the soundtrack. The Ocean Shores VCD version of the film also has the theme from Ghostbustersand Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and I can promise you none of those songs were legally obtained.
In case you’re wondering, at no time does the lead dress as a nun, but the cop on the case does.
I learned about this movie from Ed Glaser, author of How the World Remade Hollywood, which you can buy from McFarland Books. Here’s a fun video he made about it.
April 4: Remake, remix, ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).
The true joy of Italian exploitation cinema is that sometimes, you expect a complete ripoff and are instead rewarded with something if not better than the original, then at least different. Shocking Dark AKA Terminator 2 seems like it’s going to be one James Cameron movie and ends up being another. Night Killer was sold in Italy as a sequel to Texas Chainsaw Massacre— it was released using that film’s Italian title, Non Aprite Quella Porta 3 (Don’t Open the Door 3) — and has elements of A Nightmare On Elm Street yet at heart it’s a very deranged portrait of a marriage gone wrong and a woman on the verge. One only has to look at perhaps the most successful ripoff ever, Zombi 2, to see how Lucio Fulci took the basic idea of ripping off Zombi AKA Dawn of the Dead yet somehow going further and stranger than George Romero.
Alien from the Abyss AKA Alien from the Deep has a poster that might make you believe that you’re about to see one of the many remix remake and ripoff versions of Ridley Scott’s Alien (there are a whole bunch in this article).
Yet this movie does what the Italian genre directors do best and get inspiration and then go their own way.
It’s directed by Antonio Margheriti AKA Anthony M. Dawson. He made plenty of movies that cashed in on other films’ successes, including Codename: Wild Geese (The Wild Geese), The Last Hunter (The Deer Hunter), Hunters of the Golden Cobra, Jungle Raidersand The Ark of the Sun God (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Lightning Bolt (a James Bond-style movie) and Tornado: The Last Blood (Rambo: First Blood Part II). He also made Castle of Blood and its remake Web of the Spider, And God Said to Cain(which inversely was pretty much remade in America as High Plains Drifter and inspired Eastwood’s Unforgiven), the giallo Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye, Yul Brynner’s last movie Death Rage, the John Saxon shocker Cannibal Apocalypse. And, of course, he made Yor, Hunter from the Future.
Margheriti was the master of lighting, which he needed as he would set up multiple cameras to get shots from every angle, as well as different levels of close-up, giving him coverage faster so he could shoot fast. He was also great with miniatures and, as you can tell from this movie, he seemed to just love exploding things.
Instead of space, this movie is quite earthbound. Jane (Marina Giulia Cavalli, billed here as Julia McCay; she was born in Portland, Oregon but found fame in Italian movies like Fashion Crimes and Complicazioni nella notte) and Lee (Robert Marius, Cop Game, Warriors of the Apocalypse) are ecological activists trying to discover why E-Chem is dumping toxic waste into a volcano. Colonel Kovacks (Charles Napier!), the man running the show, tries to take them out with his henchmen and helicopters. Lee gets captured, but Lee runs into the jungle where she meets Bob (Daniel Bosch), a snake farmer who falls for her and gets rebuffed quickly. He literally milks snakes of their venom for a living, a fact that really makes her upset.
While all this is going on, Dr. Geoffrey (Luciano Pigozzi, using his Alan Collins name; if you’ve seen any number of Italian exploitation you’ve seen Luciano) tries to warn everyone that the toxic waste and magma are combining to send a message into space that’s soon answered by a ball of fire that falls from the sky. Inside that burning bit of cosmic comet is an alien that looks like HR Giger but made from elements you can discover at your local Rome — or the Philippines, this was made there — Home Depot. Don’t take that as an insult. I absolutely love the monster in this movie and am obsessed with his gigantic lobster claw.
Just when the movie is getting a little too Romancing the Stone between Jane and Bob — they flirt like no two human beings ever have before, saying dialogue that feels alien and insane like “Don’t you touch me, you snake squeezer!” and man, they’re either going to kill one another or have the best sex anyone ever has had in a jungle movie that forgets that it’s supposed to be Alien — the M-16 carrying bad guys bust in and his trained snakes attack, leaping out all over the place and wasting bad guys left and right. Did I cheer? You know I did.
Keep in mind that the alien doesn’t show up until an hour into the movie, which would have upset me when I was young but old me finds that absolutely perfect. And by alien, we mostly just see his oozing black claw bathed in Italian horror lighting and so much fog. Instead of having a cool suit to fight the alien in, like the Power Loader Ripley wore in Aliens, our heroes just have construction equipment. Oh yeah, and a flamethrower, which Dr. Geoffrey delivers just in time to get stepped on by the xeroxomorph.
The word balls gets thrown around like, well, balls and the monster is more like a puppet, plus there’s a obvious mannequin death scene as all good Italian movies must possess. Napier is a real life special effect, starting the movie at eleven and going into numbers beyond the charts, eating scenery as if he’s Donald Pleasence in an Italian Wendy’s.
Man, how can you not be entertained by this? There’s a scene where Jane literally does a laundry list, saying “I’m singlw. Catholic. Angelo Saxon. And I don’t trust men who milk snakes” which made me laugh out loud. Cavalli is really spunky and cute in this and Margheriti is the least scummy of Italian genre directors as she just teases nudity whereas Mattei would have had her running through the jungle nude and reenacting that worm scene from Galaxy of Terror.
I’m so excited that Severin has re-released this on blu ray. Their new version has a 4K scan from the original negative, interviews with Margheriti’s son Edoardo and the North American debut of the documentary he made about his father, The Outsider – The Cinema of Antonio Margheriti. Order it now from Severin.
April 4: Remake, remix, ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).
In Mumbai, Tatya Vinchu (Dilip Prabhavalkar) and his henchman Kubdya Khavis (Bipin Varti) enter the cave of Baba Chamatkar (Raghavendra Kadkol), a wizard who knows the Mrutyunjay Mantra, a mantra that can place someone’s soul into another body or object. They’re being tailed by Inspector Mahesh Jadhav (Mahesh Kothare), who has been obsessed with catching Tatya Vinchu. He tracks him down to his warehouse headquarters and they get into a shootout, at which point Mahesh fatally wounds Tatya Vinchu. Before he passes on, the criminal uses the Mrutyunjay Mantra to transfer his soul into the closest thing nearby: a doll.
Yes, that’s right. This Indian Marathi-language film, directed by Kothare, is Child’s Play.
Mahesh’s boss Superintendent Jairam Ghatge (Jairam Kulkarni) has a daughter who has just Gauri (Kishori Ambiye) who just came back from the U.S. And she has another relative — seriously, this gets a little confusing keeping track of who is family with who — called Lakshya (Laxmikant Berde) who is a ventriloquist. He’s in love with Aavadi (Pooja Pawar), whose father Constable Tukaram (Ravindra Berde) has already arranged her marriage to another cop, Constable Sakharam (Vijay Chavan). As you can imagine, the doll with the spirit of Tatya Vinchu ends up being owned by Lakshya.
He starts his reign of terror by killing Lakshya’s evil landlord Dhanajirao Dhanavate, a crime that lands our protagonist in jail. He’s cleared of all charges, but Tatya Vinchu leaves for Mumbai, where he discovers that the only way out of the body of the doll is to possess the first person he revealed himself to, who would by Lakshya, who has now been sent to a mental institution as he can’t stop screaming about the possessed doll. Mahesh and Gauri also learn from the wizard that the only way to stop the killer is to shoot the doll directly between the eyes.
Mahesh Kothare wrote the movie in a few days — I mean, he pretty much just remade Child’s Play, so while this is impressive, is it? And he named Tatya Vinchu as an amalgamation of his make-up man’s name Tatya and the translated name for a movie he loved, Red Scorpion. Seeing as how the Dolph Lundgren Red Scorpion was only five years old when this was made, I assume that it was not the movie he was referring to.
In 2013, there was a 3D sequel made called Zapatlela 2. It was also remade as Ammo Bomma, which is kind of funny because it’s a remake of a ripoff. I mean, Dolly Dearest and M3GAN did the same thing and no one really was all that upset, right?
April 4: Remake, remix, ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).
Mikhail Porechenkov is Ivan, who let’s face it, is John Matrix, because this movie is pretty much a shot for shot remake of Commando minus, you know, being made in America. Instead of Sherman Oaks Mall, it’s a beach resort and instead of a car chase, you get snowmobiles. But still, this is still the same movie and you know, if you’re going to steal, at least they steal from the right movie, you know?
As Matrix just wants to retire with his daughter Jenny, Ivan wants to do the same with Zhenya ( Varvara Porechenkova). Instead, terrorists attack, kidnap her and force him to kill a world leader if he ever wants to see her again. You’ve seen it all before, but…well, you’ve seen it all before.
FilmReporter.de had a line about this movie that made me laugh out loud, saying that Porechenkov had all the one-man fighting techniques of a Bud Spencer, so this movie has a lot of slaps, if no beans. If you got that one, congrats. You’ve seen as many Italian movies as I have. Actually, both German websites I found info on this movie from compare Porechenkov to Spencer. He also directed the movie and I think he’d rather be compared to Schwarzenegger.
Well, in Germany, this was called Die Ruckkehr or Phantom Commando. That makes sense.
I learned about this movie from Ed Glaser, author of How the World Remade Hollywood, which you can buy from McFarland Books. Here’s a fun video he made about D-Day.
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