The Italian exploitation industry is one of the joys of my life because just when it feels like you’re running out of films from one genre, you find another one to fall in love with, often with many of the same directors, writers and actors. Can’t find any new poliziotteschi you love? Get back into giallo. Nothing in peplum for you? Dive into post-apocalyptic or Westerns or commedia sexy all’italiana.

Or how about a war movie, much less one influenced by what’s been happening in Hollywood, like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now?

Antonio Margheriti (AKA Anthony Dawson) started his directing career making science fiction films like Space-Men and Battle of the Worlds before moving on to what was hot next. Peplum, with The Golden Arrow, The Fall of Rome and Giants of Rome made over the next three years. If there’s a genre, Margheriti worked in it, like horror (Castle of Blood, The Long Hair of Death, The Virgin of Nuremberg, The Unnaturals), Eurospy (Bob Fleming… Mission Casablanca, Operazione Goldman), Western (Take a Hard Ride, And God Said to Cain), more science fiction (Wild, Wild Planet; War of the Planets, Alien from the Abyss), giallo (The Young, the Evil and the Savage; Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye), comic books (Mr. Superinvisible, Yor Hunter from the Future), cannibals (Cannibal Apocalypse) and even Raiders of the Lost Ark remake remix ripoffs (Hunters of the Golden Cobra, The Ark of the Sun God).

If you could shoot it, Margheriti did it. He was quick, he was cheap and often, he’s pretty incredible. Not always, but more often than not.

And this is one of his war pictures.

Saigon isn’t a fun time to be alive for an American soldier. Captain Henry Morris (David Warbeck) is introduced in this film when he watches his friend shoot another soldier in a brother and then turn the gun on himself. After that, Captain Henry is given a mission. Fly into Cambodia and shut down a radicalized radio station broadcasting Viet Cong messages. He’ll have nearly no help other than a few soldiers. And after years at war, does he even care anymore?

The soldiers under his command include Sgt. George Washington (Tony King) and Carlos (Bobby Rhodes). They barely make it into the jungle when traps shred one of the men nearly in half and later, water snakes emerge and make a meal of another. Italian wartime isn’t pretty. That’s why this movie is on Section 3 of the video nasties list.

As the men make their way through the jungles of the Philippines, they’re joined by a photojournalist named Jane Foster, played by Tisa Farrow. Remember what I said earlier about finding people across genre? Ms. Farrow showed up in just a few Italian movies, but all are memorable and each is in its own genre: slasher (Antropophagus), zombies (Zombi), this war film and one that crosses into both giallo and the poliziotteschi (Strange Shadows In an Empty Room).

There are also some crazy moments along the way, including Major William Cash (John Steiner) having a secret cave base that has a full bar staffed by Luciano Pigozzi, as well as an array of porn mags and working pinball machines. Cash’s favorite music is the sound of gunfire and he barely stops his men from assaulting Foster when she tries to get a beer. His quick thinking is to send one of them across enemy lines to steal a coconut from a tree while being shot at.

There’s a reason for scenes like that. According to the documentary Margheriti and The Last Hunter, the man known in America as Anthony Dawson didn’t want to make a political film for or against the Vietnam War. He just wanted to make a movie that was 100% behind one thing: being entertaining.

In Italy, this was released as Cacciatore 2, as The Deer Hunter was called Il Cacciatore. The only thing this movie has in common with its inspiration is Vietnam and it’s more of a ripoff of Apocalypse Now as it was shot in the exact same locations and dealt with the same issues that Coppola dealt with except with a much, much smaller budget.

Throughout the movie, Morris keeps thinking back to New York City and that girl back home, who is played by Margie Newton (Aphrodite from The Adventures of Hercules, the painted-up Lia Rousseau from Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead). As they get closer to that anti-American radio tower and the voice of the Tokyo Rose-style woman telling the U.S. soldiers just to lie down their arms as we hear easy listening tunes and Viet Cong kill the drugged out and hazed American boys, we come to realize that this love waiting at home and the one Morris has to kill are one and the same, which is an astounding coincidence but says a lot about the end of U.S. innocence in the 1970s.

Over the score by Franco Micalizzi, whose song “The Puzzle” will be familiar to fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm, we get a great ending, as Morris gets Foster on the last helicopter out of Hell and just kneels as the napalm starts to rain down, a visual similar to Platoon six years before that movie would be made.

Known as Fuga dall’arcipelago maledetto (Escape from the Cursed Archipelago) in Italy, this Antonio Margheriti-directed and Tito Capri-written film stars David Warbeck as Tiger Joe, a former US Army Special Forces Vietnam Veteran who works with “Midnight” Washington (Tony King, Atlantis Interceptors) and Lenny (Luciano Pigozzi) to airlift all sorts of cargo but mostly guns.

When he gets shot down, he joins up with Kia (Annie Belle, who started her acting career appearing in Jean Rollin’s Lips of Blood and Bacchanales Sexuelles; she’s in so many movies by directors and personalities I’m obsessed with: Deodato’s House On the Edge of the Park, D’Amato’s Absurd and L’alcova, the supposed Emmanuelle Arsan-directed Forever Emmanuelle, Marco Antonio Andolfi’s Cross of the Seven Jewels and the Cannon film Nana) and her companion Datu (Abadeza) to get out of the jungle alive.

This has a lot of cast, crew and shots from the much better The Last Hunter, but I just love Antonio Margheriti. He brings something extra to every movie. Sadly, cinematographer Riccardo Pallottini lost his life in a plane crash while filming the final shot of the film.

May I never ever get tired of seeing bamboo huts in the Philippines blow up. If you want more Margherti in the jungle, check out Tornado: The Last Blood, Code Name: Wild Geese, The Last Hunter, Commando Leopard, The Commander, Indio and Indio 2: The Revolt.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on July 14, 2017. It’s back as it’s now part of the Enter the Video Store — Empire of Screams box set, which has three different versions of the film via seamless branching: the US theatrical version (The Dungeonmaster), the pre-release version and the international version (Ragewar) plus extras like new audio commentary with star Jeffrey Byron, moderated by film critics Matty Budrewicz and Dave Wain from The Schlock Pit, a new interview with Byron, trailers and an image gallery. You can get this set from MVD.

Let’s face it. I love portmanteau movies. From Tales from the Crypt to Asylum, The House that Dripped Blood and The Monster Club, a good part of our DVD collection is devoted to these films (mostly of the Amicus variety). 1984’s The Dungeonmaster attempts to be both a narrative and portmanteau all at the same time — to sometimes uneven results.

Also known as Ragewar: The Challenges of Excalibrate and Digital Knights, this Charles Band-produced effort (Puppet Master, Subspecies, Re-Animator) is made up of seven different segments, all connected by the battle between Paul Bradford (Jeffrey Byron, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn) and Mestema (Richard Moll, who played Bull from TV’s Night Court, as well as The Sword and the Sorcerer, House, Wicked Stepmother and more). Again, it’s a film that struggles to find a tone — it wants to be Tron as much as it wants to be a filmed version of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Paul may not be able to balance a checkbook, but he loves to jog and he’s great at fixing computers. In fact, the dude is so good, he has 2017 iPhone tech that tracks his jogging. If you watch the film today, you’ll be like, “Yeah, so what.” But keep in mind, this is a 33-year-old movie.

At some point, Paul did a neural net experiment that allows him to talk to X-CaliBR, his female personal computer. This is the only futuristic tech in this world, so I guess we all have to accept that people’s brains can be wired to their CPUs.

Paul keeps having dreams where he is making love to a beautiful woman. The more knowledgeable of you out there will realize that this scene doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the movie. It was probably to secure foreign distribution with the amount of flesh on display.

Paul lives with his girlfriend Gwen live together, but she’s super jealous of how close he is to his computer. None of that has anything else to do with what happens next — the sorcerer Mestema — who has spent thousands of years looking for a worthy opponent — kidnaps both of them.

What follows are the portmanteau segments, where Paul and his laser wristband must travel through different dimensions and time to battle Mestema and win back Gwen.

PART 1: ICE GALLERY

Ever seen Waxwork? It seems like everyone working on this may have. That said — the visuals are pretty nice here, with various monsters and killers throughout history all frozen inside a giant cave. Why is Albert Einstein there? Is it a comment on his role in the nuclear bomb? No one ever really explains that — this is a movie that you either damn for being stupid or fill in the narrative gaps yourself.

PART 2: DEMONS OF THE DEAD

I originally learned of this film from the Alamo Drafthouse’s Trailer War compilation. This scene is prominently featured in the trailer, with Fulci-like zombies being dispatched with laser beams. It is, as I am often heard to yell, “Fucking awesome.” It’s written and directed by John Carl Buechler, who was Jack Cracker in the first two Hatchet movies.

PART 3: HEAVY METAL

In this segment, directed by Charles Band, our heroes battle 80s metal kings W.A.S.P. If you love Blackie Lawless, well, this is the movie for you, as he is front and center and menacing Gwen. Sadly, Chris Holmes does not appear with his mother in this scene.

PART 4: STONE CANYON GIANT

Stop motion style fun here, with a giant canyon monster blocking Paul from progress. This segment was written and directed by Dave Allen, who got his start with Equinox and worked on a huge variety of films from Flesh Gordon, Laserblast and The Howling to *batteries not included, Willow, the Puppet Master series, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and so much more. Sadly, he died from cancer in 1999.

In a strange moment of Wiki research, I learned that Allen used to be married to a woman named Donita Woodruff. She learned that Allen had an ex-girlfriend named Valerie Taylor, which led to a fight between the two women. Woodruff suspected that Taylor had a criminal past and found enough evidence to get the police to arrest her in 1996 for a 1979 South Carolina murder. Taylor pleaded self-defense and served two years, while Allen and Woodruff would divorce two years later. There’s even a book about it — Deadly Masquerade: A True Story of Illicit Passion, Buried Secrets, and Murder.

Check this out — “Donita, a young, single mother of two lives in the day-to-day confinement of a small town in rural Oklahoma. Hungering for a second chance and the bustle of the big city, she decides to move her family back home to Los Angeles. Still hurting from previous romantic relationships, Donita is hesitant to start anything new; anything until she meets Academy Award nominee David Allen—successful, handsome and charming. The two are quickly swept up in a whirlwind romance. Life seems too good to be true but even wedding bells can’t hide the secrets her new husband has. Suddenly, Donita and her children are caught in a Deadly Masquerade, a world of vicious lies and double lives, where nothing is as it appears.

Mysterious phone calls, a questionable ex-lover, an unsolved murder, all begin to unravel in Donita Woodruff’s true-life account, Deadly Masquerade. When the perfect man reveals a sordid, double life, she is forced into a series of stunning revelations. Now, she only has one choice—to take matters into her own hands.”

Seriously — they should have just film this book NOW. Because I just learned that Valerie Taylor used to be a man. And that’s why Woodruff was so freaked out! AGAIN –Wikipedia will lead you down some crazy wormholes.

PART 5 – SLASHER

All of a sudden, the film becomes a cross between Quantum Leap and a horror movie. It’s written by lead actor Jeffrey Byron and directed by Steven Ford (the son of former U.S. President Gerald Ford — fuck, this movie has a veritable rogue’s gallery of backstories). Paul has to escape from the police to rescue Glen from a serial killer.

PART 6 – CAVE BEAST

A cave beast blocks the way and Paul must fight his way past it. Look — not all of The Dungeonmaster has to be complicated.

PART 7 – DESERT PURSUIT

Mad Max style racing across the desert that seems to end with our characters dying in a head-on collision in a sequence written and directed by Ted Nicolaou (Bad Channels, TerrorVision). In case you’re wondering, yes, these are the same vehicles from Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn.

Finally, Paul challenges Mestema to a one on one battle, which ends when Paul throws the sorcerer into a pit of lava. At this point, Gwen decides that X-CaliBR8 isn’t so bad and that she can finally marry Paul.

Like any portmanteau, there are some good and bad parts in equal measure. Richard Moll is awesome in this, just chewing scenery and blasting out some insane dialogue. The zombie scene is good, as is the giant. But your life won’t change watching this film. If you’re looking for something to put on as a soundtrack to a party or some great visuals, it’s certainly good for that.

PS – A sequel segment was filmed for the anthology Pulse Pounders and only shown once, but since Empire Pictures closed, no one is sure as to when it will be released. Moll and Byron came back for this sequel — which I’d love to see.

Pulse Ponders was to be another portmanteau with three stories: The Evil Clergyman, Trancers: City of Lost Angels and The Dungeonmaster II: A Sorcerer’s Nightmare. Some of it has come out, so here’s to the full release!

Edwige Fenech — who was only just a giallo queen but a star of commedia sexy all’italiana movies — and Pippo Franco had been a success in 1972 in Mariano Laurenti’s Quel gran pezzo dell’Ubalda tutta nuda e tutta calda which was released around the world as Ubalda, All Naked and Warm.

Franco is Ragionier Mario Albertini who has been asked by his boss Commendatore La Noce (Gigi Ballista) to find him a fake wife so that he can get the philandering judge who closed the cheese factory to get in a scandal and reverse his decision. Albertini hires Giovannona “Cocò” Coscialunga (Fenech), a prostitute who looks pure but has the filthiest of mouths.

Directed by Sergio Martino, this was written by Franco Mercuri, Francesco Milizia and Carlo Veo from a story by Tito Carpi and Sergio’s brother Luciano, who was married to Fenech for a time. The cinematographer was Stelvio Massi, who went on to direct Arabella the Black Angel and Convoy Busters.

Italian sex comedies don’t always translate all that well, especially because so many of them are fifty years old. But you know, you get to look at Edwige Fenech for the entire movie. It can’t be that bad.

Florinda Bolkan excels at the role of a woman losing her mind. She’s a force of nature in A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Footprints on the Moon, two films that are placed in the giallo genre but that are centered around her and her fragmented psyche.

She plays Flavia, a young girl who watched her father — who loudly complains that he didn’t have a son but instead a daughter, a curse as he says — cut a man’s head off his shoulders. He locks her up in a convent where she’s abused by the other nuns. Things get worse when she tries to escape. But when she meets Ahmed (Anthony Higgins), the Muslim warrior who has taken over the city, she decides to get her horrific revenge on her former sisters.

This being an Italian movie, there’s an actual horse castration and a naked man climbing inside the hung and torn-apart body of a dead cow as well as a fake nipple slicing that’s pretty stomach upsetting. The real nausea comes from the fact that nearly every man in this movie is the worst person ever. And then Flavia gets skinned alive and we learn, well, that humanity is uniformly terrible.

Director Gianfranco Mingozzi was the second unit director on La Dolce Vita, so this is a bit artier than you may be expecting. It’s still repellant, however. And women have never had a fair shake but hopefully they don’t have to go through all this for much longer to get what’s only right.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can read another review of this movie here.

I can’t even tell you how excited I was about Robot Jox in 1990. It seemed like it was in every issue of Starlog and I kept wondering, when would one of the video stores in my hometown get it? It seemed like a live action Transformers movie and according to director Stuart Gordon, that was the idea: “While there have been animated cartoons based on these giant robots, no one has ever attempted a live-action feature about them. It struck me that it was a natural fantasy for the big screen–and a terrific opportunity to take advantage of the special effects that are available today.”

Gordon worked with special effects artist David W. Allen to create test footage for the investors for this movie and that ended up becoming the opening title sequence. Initially budgeted at $7 million — it grew to $10 million — Robot Jox was the most expensive film Empire Pictures production.

Science fiction author Joe Haldeman wrote the story with Gordon but the two battled throughout. The writer wanted a serious movie about embattled soldiers and the director wanted a Cold War movie with big special effects. Even the title was debated, as Haldeman wanted The Mechanics and Gordon wanted Robojox.

Haldeman wrote that Gordon later recognized that the author was “writing a movie for adults that children can enjoy” while Gordon had been “directing a movie for children that adults can enjoy.”

Despite those issues and Empire’s bankruptcy causing delays, I still fondly remember this film, as when I finally got to see it, I really enjoyed it. Obviously, Guillermo del Toro did, as the way the robots are controlled and how the pilots are trained are so close to his Pacific Rim.

Only the American Market and the Russian Confederation have survived fifty years after a nuclear war. They decide all conflicts by having giant robots battle as robot jox control them. Alexander (Paul Koslo) is the villain and has murdered his last nine opponents thanks to a spy giving him special weak points. But now he comes up against another fighter who is at his tenth match — when robot jox can retire — Achilles (Gary Graham). Their battle will be for the rights to Alaska and there’s plenty of pressure.

Achilles trains while studying with robot designer Doc Matsumoto (Danny Kamekona, Sato from The Karate Kid Part II) and strategist Tex Conway (Michael Alldredge), the only robot jox to win all ten of his fights. There’s also an entire training center where new genetically engineered robot jox like Athena (Anne-Marie Johnson) are training to replace Achilles.

During the battle, Alexander goes wild and fires a weapon into the audience. Alexander tries to stop it but his mech crashes into the stands, killing three hundred or more of the fans. Shaken by this, he refuses to come back and fight again when the match is ruled a draw.

All sorts of chicanery ensures and Athena drugs Achilles, who comes back for that one big fight, and she gets decimated by Alexander. That leads to a second battle between Alexander and Achilles, who comes back. It even ends up in a one on one fistfight and after all the horror that the Russian pilot has visited on, well, the entire cast of this movie, they bump fists to show sportsmanship.

This was followed by Robot Wars and footage — Full Moon is big on recycling — is also in Crash and Burn.

In the world of Robot Jox, you never say “Good luck.” You say, “Crash and burn.”

I just want 15 year old me to know that in the future, I own this movie and we can watch it any time that we want.

Robot Jox is part of the Enter the Video Store — Empire of Screams box set. Extras include two archive audio commentaries (one with director Stuart Gordon and a second with associate effects director Paul Gentry, mechanical effects artist Mark Rappaport and stop-motion animator Paul Jessell), new interviews with Gary Graham and Anne-Marie Johnson as well as a new appreciation of stop motion animator David Allen, an archival interview with actor Paul Koslo, the original sales sheet and production notes, a trailer and image galleries, including behind-the-scenes stills courtesy of associate effects director Paul Gentry. You can get this set from MVD.