Often, I refer to movies as having an all-star cast, which is really a misnomer. After all, what I consider A-list talent certainly does not fit the rest of the world. The Last Match, however, has the very definition of what I consider an all-star cast. Let’s take a look at the lineup:

Ernest Borgnine: Amongst the 211 credits Mr. Borgnine amassed on his IMDB list, none other have him leading a football team against an unnamed Caribbean island to save his assistant coach’s little girl. He was, however, in four Dirty Dozen movies and The Wild Bunch, not to mention playing Coach Vince Lombardi in a TV movie. One assumes that he took this role to get away from his wife Tova and her incessant cosmetics shilling. 

Charles Napier: As the American consul in this movie, Napier cuts a familiar path, which he set after appearing in the monster hit Rambo: First Blood Part II. For him, it was either playing bureaucrats or cops, thankless roles that he always brought a little something extra to. The exception to his typecasting is when he played Baxter Wolfe, the man who rocks Susan Lakes’ loins in the beyond essential Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. 

Henry Silva: If you need a dependable jerk and you have the budget of, well, an Italian movie about a football team that also does military operations, call Mr. Silva. He admirably performed the role of the heel — or antihero at other times in movies like Megaforce, Battle of the Godfathers, Cry of a Prostitute (in which he plays the Yojimbo role but in a mafia film; he also pushes Barbara Bouchet’s face inside a dead pig’s carcass while making love to her and he’s the good guy), Escape from the Bronx and so many more movies.

Martin Balsam: Perhaps best known for Psycho, Balsam shows up in all manner of movies that keep me up at 4 AM on nights when I know work will come sooner than I fear. He’s so interested in acting up a storm in this movie that he is visibly reading off cue cards.

They’ve all joined up for a movie that finds the coach’s daughter get Midnight Express-ed as drugs are thrown in her bag at the airport on the way home from a vacation with her hapless jerk of a boyfriend. At least he’s smart enough to call assistant coach Cliff Gaylor (Oliver Tobias), the father of the daughter whose life he has just ruined. And luckily for this film, Tobias was in a movie called Operation Nam nearly a decade before, which meant that they could recycle footage of him in combat. He also was The Stud and serviced Joan Collins, so he has my eternal jealousy going for him, too.

Who could dream up a movie like this? Oh, only Larry Ludman, but we see through that fake name and know that it’s Fabrizio De Angelis steering this ship, the maker of beloved trash such as Killer Crocodile, five Karate Warrior movies and three Thunder movies that star the beloved Mark Gregory as a stiff legged Native American warrior who pretty much cosplays as Rambo. And don’t forget — this is the man who produced Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond and New York Ripper!

In this outing, he’s relying on Cannibal Holocaust scribe Gianfranco Clerici and House on the Edge of the Park writer Vincenzo Mannino to get the job done. For some reason, despite this being an Italian exploitation movie, we never see the coach’s daughter in jail. Instead, we’re treated to what seems like Borgnine in a totally different movie than everyone else, barking orders into his headphones as if he was commanding the team in a playoff game. 

To make matters even more psychotic, the football players show up in full uniform instead of, you know, commando gear. One wonders, by showing up in such conspicuous costumes, how could they avoid an international incident? This is my lesson to you, if you’re a nascent Italian scumtastic cinema viewer: shut off your brain, because these movies don’t have plot holes. They’d have to have actual plots for that to be possible. 

I say this with the fondest of feelings, because you haven’t lived until you witness a football player dropkick a grenade into a helicopter. Supposedly this was written by Gary Kent for Bo Svenson, who sold the script to De Angelis unbeknownst to the stuntman until years later. It was originally about a soccer team!

Former Buffalo Bills QB Jim Kelly* is in this, which amuses me to no end, as does the ending, where — spoiler warning — Borgnine coaches the team from beyond the grave!

You know how conservative folks have quit watching the NFL as of late? This is the movie to bring ‘em back, a film where the offensive line has fully automatic machine guns and refuses to kneel for anything. No matter what your politics, I think we can all agree on one thing: no matter how dumb an idea seems, Italian cinema always tries to pull it off. 

*Other pros include Florida State and arena football player Bart Schuchts and USFL player Mark Rush, as well as Dolphins Jim Jensen, Mike Kozlowsky, Elmer Bailey and Jim Kiick. It’s kind of astounding that at one point, these players could just end up in a movie without the NFL knowing. This would never happen today.

The new Cauldron Films blu ray release of The Last Match is limited to 1500 copies and the film itself has a 2K restoration from the original negative. Extras include an interview with special effects artist Roberto Ricci; American Actors in a Declining Italian Cinema, a minidoc by EUROCRIME! director Mike Malloy; Understanding the Cobra, a video essay by Italian film expert Eugenio Ercolani and commentary by Italian exploitation movie critic Michael A. Martinez.

You can get this from MVD, Diabolik DVD and Cauldron Films.

 Man, was Nello Rossati dating Franco Nero’s daughter or something? Not only did he get him into this movie, but a year later he would be the person — well, his pseudonym Ted Archer did, but you get the point — to finally get him to come back to his most famous role in Django Strikes Again. He also made the giallo La gatta in calore (assistant directed by Lamberto Bava and shot by Aristide Massaccesi!), a Napoleon-sploitation film called Bona parte di Paolina, a sex comedy called The Sensuous Nurse with Ursula Andress and Jack Palance, the poliziotteschi Don’t Touch the Children!, another sex comedy called Io zombo, tu zombi, lei zomba about four zombies running a hotel, a giallo-esque film named Le mani di una donna sola in which a lesbian countess seduces married women until insane asylum escapees chop her hands off, and an I Spit On Your Grave revengeomatic called Fuga scabrosamente pericolosa that stars Andy Sidaris villain Rodrigo Obregón.

Needless to say, I’m a fan.

Ted Angelo (Nero) starts the movie off literally telling a woman that he’s too tired to make love. Is this the great hero of Italian cinema? He seems exhausted throughout but it works; he’s a writer fallen on hard times and harder drinking. He’s supposed to be writing a book on pre-Columbian civilizations, but he’s falling deeper and deeper into depression and drunken days to the point that he’s fired by his publisher — and ex-wife — Maureen De Havilland (Miss World 1977 Mary Stävin, who by this point had already appeared in Adam Ant’s “Strip” video, Octopussy and A View to a Kill, as well as releasing the exercise album Shape Up and Dance with footballer George Best).

It seems like Ted’s luck is changing when he’s shown a ton of writings that came from a shipwreck of Spanish conquistadores. Except that the ship isn’t on the bottom of the ocean. It’s in a cave. And maybe that luck’s bad, because everyone connected with the ship, like art dealer Alonso Quintero (William Berger) is dying under mysterious circumstances. And oh yeah. That shipwreck in a cave is also inside a UFO.

The only real good luck that Ted gets is when an art historian and friend of Quintero named June (Deborah Barrymore, who is not related to Drew, but is instead of the daughter of Roger Moore and Italian actress Luisa Mattioli) helps him out.

What follows is a delirious descent into madness to the point that if you told me this was all a drug trip, I’d believe you. First, Ted is almost run over by former Nazi Heinrich Holzmann (George Kennedy, who is only in the movie for this one scene), then the camera crew he hires ends up being CIA spooks who want to murder him, then the KGB gets involved and then things get really weird.

Ted gets the idea that Maureen has the kind of connections that can save him and June. As they wait for her, a cyborg Rodrigo Obregón attacks them and only stops when he’s hit by a bull. He gets torn apart and sounds like he’s trying to say the words to “Humpty Dumpty” and man, I literallyjumped aout of my chair in the middle of the night I was so excited. He looks like Johnny Craig drew him!

Somehow, the movie then decides to top itself as another Rodrigo Obregón cyborg that looks exactly the same shows up with Maureen, who removes her skin to show us that she’s one of the aliens that have been on Earth for twelve thousand years and now are in control of most countries and multinational corporations.

At this point, is there any hope for any of us?

Yes, this is a movie where a gorgeous Swedish woman takes off all of her epidermis — of course we see her breasts, this is an Italian movie — to reveal that she’s a lizard alien that fulfills the worries of David Icke, then she vomits slime all over herself and tries to kill Franco Nero with her giant tongue.

If you told me this was an actual alien, I would believe you.

The first few times I’ve tried to watch this, I couldn’t get into it. It was too slow and felt too downbeat with Nero’s character feeling hopeless. So don’t be like me. I beg you, stick with this for an hour. Just an hour, because it’s not bad. I mean, yes, Franco Nero survives a car chase by throwing eggs, but it’s just slow, not badly made.

But the last thirty minutes make it all worth it.

When you get there, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

This is a movie all about the foreplay and then when it’s time to get to the actual sex, it’s the weirdest and best Penthouse Forum sex you’ve ever had and you feel like there’s no way that it happened and no one will ever believe you.

Also: Franco Nero screams almost every line and I respect that.

Also also: This is like a budget They Live by people who never saw that movie.

Also also also: This ends with Franco Nero living in a Cannibal Holocaust paradise and a song that sounds like something Disney characters would sing to.

The Cauldron Films blu ray release of Top Line has a 2K restoration from the original negative. Extras include interviews with Nero and Ercolani, a featurette on the alien theories of the film by parapolitics researcher Robert Skvarla and an in-depth audio commentary by film historian Eric Zaldivar including audio interviews from cast members, Deborah Moore and Robert Redcross, as well as additional insight on Italian cult films with actors Brett Halsey and Richard Harrison.

You can get this from MVD, Diabolik DVD and Cauldron Films.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the December 10, 2024 episode of the Video Archives podcast. 

Millionaire Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) needs a new fix. He’s moved on from fast cars and boardroom deals to putting together a bank robbery just because, well, he needs adrenaline.

Investigator Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway) is promised 10% of the stolen money by the bank if she can get it back and learn who stole it. She quickly decides that Crown is the only person who could have pulled off this job. Along with detective Eddy Malone (Paul Burke), she closes in, but starts to be enticed by the roguish Crown.

It’s literally — and in a scene, actually — a game of chess.

Sean Connery and Johnny Carson both turned down the lead but only McQueen could pull this off. I’m not certain that audiences today can estimate his level of cool or the breakthrough moments of this movie, like how Vicky drives one of ten Ferrari 275 GTB/4S NART Spiders ever made, has 29 costume changes or that director Norman Jewison made one of the first mainstream uses of Christopher Chapman’s multi-dynamic image technique to show multiple screens of the robbery happening all at once.

Still, Roger Ebert said that this movie was “possibly the most under-plotted, underwritten, over-photographed film of the year. Which is not to say it isn’t great to look at. It is.”

I love the poster line: “McQueen, together with this Bonnie and Clyde Gal…and the slickest gang that ever robbed a bank!”

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the November 26, 2024 episode of the Video Archives podcast. 

An Italian Spanish co-production, this was directed by Eugenio Martín and produced by Philip Yordan as part of three movies they’d make together, which also include Bad Man’s River and Horror Express.

After being double-crossed in an arms deal by a gun merchant McDermott (Luis Dávila) from New Mexico, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (Telly Savalas) and his American lieutenant Scotty (Clint Walker) attack a U.S. Army weapons depot and seize McDermott.

Colonel Wilcox (Chuck Conners) is stationed on the American side of the border and is assigned to rescue the shady McDermott, who is as bad or worse than the Mexican revolutionaries.

In his book Hollywood Exile, or, How I Learned to Love the Blacklist: A Memoir, producer Bernard Gordon goes into how little Telly Savalas and Clint Walker liked one another. Savalas made attempts to upstage Walker while — unlike their characters in the movie — Anne Francis and Walker got along quite well. Walker was also not far from a near-death experience. The actor Walker skied out of control and had his heart stabbed with a ski poke. He was pronounced dead until a doctor heard a faint sign of life and performed life-saving surgery.

Walker is pretty much Rick Dalton. He was the lead on Cheyenne before getting into Western and war movies. He eventually moved into TV movies, several of which are pretty good, including Killdozer! and Snowbeast.

Pancho Villa even has a song, We All End Up the Same”, which was written by John Cacavas and Don Black and sung by Savalas. This feels very Vietnam-era, in that Connors has a scene where the entire army can’t kill one fly. It ends as all movies should with a train on train head to head crash.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the November 26, 2024 episode of the Video Archives podcast. 

Gilbert Cates is mostly known for producing the Academy Awards, but he also made several movies. Written by Garry Michael White and Fred Weintraub from a story by Paul Heller, this was novelized by Danielle Steel.

Rich college student Michael Hillyard (Stephen Collins) and much poorer Nancy McAllister (Kathleen Quinlan) are in love and leave a piece of costume jewelry under a rock, making a promise that they will always be in love as long as it remains undisturbed.

Michael tells his mother Marion (Beatrice Straight), who as you can imagine is upset. He decides to elope, taking along his friend Ben Avery (Michael O’Hare) to be the best man. However, all three are in a car crash, with Michael being put into a coma and Nancy’s face being destroyed. His mother makes her a deal, that she will pay for her surgery from Dr. Peter Gregson (Laurence Luckinbill) as long as she never gets in touch with her son again. She thinks Michael will find her, but his mother tells him that she is dead.

Nancy changes her name to Marie Adamson and becomes a photographer while Michael designs skyscrapers. They end up meeting and he doesn’t recognize her, yet feels drawn to her. But she’s dating the doctor who fixed her face! The drama! This is a soap opera, a throwback to women’s pictures and totally ridiculous yet it isn’t boring.

Video Archives has picked this movie and Ice Castles, both movies that had theme songs by Melissa Manchester that were nominated for an Academy Award in the same year.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Patreon for the Video Archives podcast. You can hear a preview here.

My parents were both teachers and I think they would have been offended, as hippie pacificists, by this but they would come around to love it.

Director Robert Mandel also made F/X and School Ties, as well as episodes of Lost and Prison Break. The script comes from Roy Frumkes, who made Document of the Dead and wrote Street Trash. He was joined by Rocco Simonelli and Alan Ormsby, whose career is filled with magic, such as Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Deathdream, Deranged, the movies within a movie in Popcorn and so much more.

Jonathan Shale (Tom Berenger) is a black ops killing machine, forced to return home after a mission gone bad. He meets up with his girlfriend, Jane Hetzco (Diane Venora), who works as a teacher at Miami’s Columbus High School and all seems good for a little rest and relaxation. Except that one of the Kings of Destruction gang has followed her while jogging and broke her leg.

You or I would call the police.

Shale goes to war.

By the end of the first day, he’s beaten several students down and earned the ire of Principal Claude Rolle (Ernie Hudson) but begins to bond with teachers and students, as they have been in a war zone, just like him. Everyone is seeming to get along except the KOD and their leader, Juan Lacas (Marc Anthony, pre-singing days). It turns out that Rolle is dealing cocaine through the gang, which means that Shale beings his mercenary team to battle it out in the high school against the gang, a rival merc squad led by Janus (Willis Sparks) and gangster Johnny Glades (Rodney A. Grant).

Roger Ebert hated this movie. Hated it. “”I am so very tired of this movie. I see it at least once a month. The title changes, the actors change, and the superficial details of the story change, but it is always about exactly the same thing: heavily armed men shooting at one another. Even the order of their deaths is preordained: First the extras die, then the bit players, then the featured actors, until finally only the hero and the villain are left.”

Lovers of action movies, however, adored it, leading to three sequels: The Substitute 2: School’s Out,  The Substitute 3: Winner Takes All and The Substitute: Failure Is Not an Option. Berenger did not come back for those, as Treat Williams played Carl Thomasson (Karl in movies 3 and 4), a man who is friends with the sole survivor of Shale’s mercenary group, Joey Six (Angel David, taking over for Raymond Cruz). As for Shale and Jane, they are married and teach in foreign nations as part of the Peace Corps.

This was filmed in the summer in Miami, where kids stuck in summer school ended up being extras, getting served Papa John’s Pizza every day.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Patreon for the Video Archives podcast. You can hear a preview here.

You have to feel bad for the Vietnam vets in this movie. They go back to Nam with the best of intentions, hoping to destroy the Golden Triangle’s drug empires, but when they get there they learn that their fellow soldiers are the ones behind it all.

How did they get there? Well, Chris Mitchum had a gas station that he stopped some criminals from robbing, so they responded by killing his adopted son and assaulting his wife. Instead of, you know, going through counseling and working through it, she decides that the best thing she can do is kill herself while he’s calling the cops. I’m not one to tell anyone how to deal with their grief, but somewhere between anger and bargaining and acceptance and hope is drawing up the plans for a mobile battle RV and building motorcycles with rockets on them.

I mean, this movie starts out as Death Wish, has our hero get arrested and then the authorities tell him to get together with his old commandos and go do some real killing. This feels like the kind of movie a bunch of strange children with too many G.I. Joes and perhaps too much knowledge of cocaine would film on their parent’s camcorder in stop motion. Inside their mind, the movie looks like the stuff of dreams. To adults, it looks like an action figure just standing there while children scream things about adopting babies in flashback sequences.

This is a movie that has a commando unit named the Rat Bastards and an adopted Vietnamese child named Charlie. If you can commit to that — and you love John Phillip Law as much as I do — then you really can’t lose.

Here’s how the hierarchy of renting movies worked in the 80s: Are all the Stallone, Arnold and Van Damme movies out? Then reach for some Michael Dudikoff. Oh, those are out? Does the store have any Cirio Santiago stuff? Good deal. No? They’re all out? Well, I guess Bobby A. Suarez will do. I recommend Cleopatra Wong and another movie he wrote, Bionic Boy.

And this movie obviously.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Patreon for the Video Archives podcast. You can hear a preview here.

Frank Harris has been featured plenty on this site — Killpoint has been written about once before, as well as Low Blow, The Patriot and Aftershock — and he’s movie’s director, producer, screenwriter and cinematographer. Harris was once a news reporter who personally witnessed street violence and also worked on police training films, so he hired real cops and gang members to make this.

What it has going for it is Cameron Mitchell as big bad Joe Marks and Stack Pierce as his henchman Nighthawk. They’re stealing military weapons and selling them to gangs and this leads to a gangbanger having a weapon of mass destruction in his hands that kills the wife of Lt. James Wong (Leo Fong).

And oh yeah, this is 1984, so she was also sexually assaulted before she was killed.

Teaming up with FBI Agent Bill Bryant (Richard Roundtree), they start to track down where the guns are coming from. Meanwhile, Cameron Mitchell is killing hookers, shooting up TV sets, smoking in bed and lavishing attention on his dog Sparky, even trying to teach him how to smoke just like dad. Later, he puts flowers in his hair and soaks in a hot tub, along with grabbing a machine gun and shooting every teenager inside a Chinese restaurant.

Leo Fong has facial paralysis of a sort and a charisma void inside him, as he just stares into you as his dead eyes find the red light on the camera and he listlessly does martial arts montages that have nothing to do with the rest of the movie. He also would come back to play the same role in Showdown, a movie that he didn’t just star in, he directed. He also squares off with Richard Lynch, so you know I’m looking for this movie now, which is not the other Showdown from 1993 which has Billy Blanks in it.

But seriously: Cameron Mitchell should be worshipped for this movie.

Bill “Superfoot” Wallace is in it and the Chuck Norris school gets thanked. What else do you want?

You can watch this on YouTube.

In the video game Elf Bowling, the elves of Santa’s Workshop are on strike so Santa abuses them by using them as bowling pins as they yell, “Is that all the balls you got, Santa?” The perfect game to adapt into a kid movie! I mean, just look at this fact about the game: It became an internet sensation in 1999 when people originally thought it was a computer virus.

This movie even gets the sequel in, where Dingle Kringle — Santa’s brother — hooks up with Mrs. Claus as they all go to a tropical island and meet the Moai statues of Easter Island. There were eight of these games, including Elf Bowling – Bocce Style and Elf Bowling 6: Air Biscuits, in which the elves could fly by way of flatulence.

So…this movie. Take it away, Wikipedia.

“The film was panned by critics for its writing, animation, directing, humor, plot, musical numbers, voice acting, characterizations and for having little to nothing to do with the premise of the game.”

Santa Claus (Joe Alaskey, who voiced many of the Looney Tunes and Droopy the Dog) started in life as a pirate captain. He redeemed himself somewhat by taking took toys from the rich and giving them to orphanages. He battles his half-brother Dingle Kringle (Tom Kenny, yes, Sponge Bob) and like Holmes and Moriarty, they’ve both taken off the board. But you know, instead of the Reichenbach Falls, they get frozen into blocks of ice. Lex the elf sees them and thinking like the Eskimos did to Sub-Mariner, the elves start to worship Santa as some kind of god who will fulfill a prophecy of leadership, at which points he starts bowling with them once he’s thawed out.

Unlike the game, the elves in this love being smashed by a bowling ball. Dingle takes them to Fiji and Santa has to rescue everyone. The Moai also show up, despite Fiji being 4,600 miles from Easter Island. This is topped by dialogue that is quite intelligent, such as “I have a teensy question for you…who pooped in the peanut barrel?”

At least Tom Kenny got his wife Jill Talley (Karen the Computer Wife on Sponge Bob) a job as Mrs. Claus. He would later say that hen he got a call to do the project, he’d never heard of the recording location, which led to him driving around LA and ending up in a bad neighborhood where the recording took place inside a rundown apartment building.

A U.S./Fiji/South Korea co-production directed by Dave Kim with Rex Piano as co-director, this had animated outsourced to South Korea with the editing happening inside a Simi Valley house owned by Kim’s mother. Kim was so hands on that he did the motion capture for the dance scenes.

The credits tell you that Elf Bowling 2: The Great Halloween Pumpkin Heist is coming. Somehow, the world was not ready for that and it was cancelled.

I warn you: this is the kind of CGI that makes strike and spare animation at a bowling alley look like Katsuhiro Otomo by comparison. There are theories the world ended in the 2000s and we’re just the residual memories of dead souls, floating through a lifeless galaxy. This movie is a real argument for the truth of that presumption.

You can watch this on YouTube.