ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sean Mitus grew up watching Chiller Theater from Pittsburgh and has been a drive-in enthusiast for the last six years. Sean enjoys all genres but has become interested in Italian horror, thriller and action movies most recently.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of Sam’s favorite movies to write about. As such, it’s appeared on the site before, first appearing on June 24, 2018, and then again as part of our Mill Creek Pure Terror Month on November 5, 2019.

Hands of Steel (1986) is the tale of two films divided by the sad death of actor Claudio Cassinelli. By 1986, the copycat Italian film industry was in full swing. A major influence was Terminator spawning many sci-fi actioners. Hands of Steel was directed by Sergio Martino and produced by his brother Luciano Martino under Dania Film. To capture American audiences the Martino brothers were credited under pseudonyms – directed by Martin Dolman and produced by Frank Cook.  A major sign of the schizophrenic nature of the script is that Hands of Steel had 7 credited screenwriters. The budget was largely spent on location shooting and stuntwork.

So first the story: Hands of Steel begins in a dystopian future New York City, shades of Soylent Green. Daniel Greene in one of his first starring film roles, after many TV appearances, portrays a cyborg assassin sent to kill a leading pollical candidate. Greene begins to feel emotions and flees the city. Big corporate bad John Saxon sics his top agent portrayed by Robert Bisacco after the cyborg. Here the film shifts to location shooting in a sparse Arizona setting.

After failing to capture Greene’s cyborg, John Saxon orders Bisacco’s assassin “fired” (killed) and new corporate hunter played by Claudio Cassinelli is now sent out to kill the cyborg. Along the way Greene becomes entangled with a bar owner played by Janet Agren which further awakens his emotions and memories. In addition to being chased by a corporate assassin, Greene runs afoul of George Eastman’s evil truck driver. After Cassellini fails to kill Greene’s cyborg, John Saxon’s character comes to Arizona to “fire” Cassellini and take care of the cyborg himself.  A tense showdown with many chases and explosions eventually leads to the film’s final showdown between Greene’s cyborg and Saxon’s big bad. Admirably, Martino ends with an unresolved situation between Greene’s cyborg and Agren’s bar owner.

So what happened? Due to scheduling and/or budgeting, the outdoor and action set-pieces were shot first on location in Arizona. Tragically, Claudio Castellini and his Helicopter Pilot were killed during filming the stunt of flying their helicopter under a high-span bridge. Their craft hit the steel span of the bridge and plummeted over 500 feet into the Colorado River below. The Pilot was never recovered but prescribed drug (appetite suppressant) was found in his room. Controversial to this day, is why Cassellini was in the aircraft. Director Sergio Martino insists Cassellini wanted to impress his son.  Whereas actors George Eastman and Daniel Greene challenged the need for Cassellini to be in the helicopter for such a long shot.

Castellini’s death left all the early New York City scenes unfilmed. It led to Martino and the 7 screenwriters to overhaul the script by creating the Bisacco corporate assassin first, have him replaced by Castellini, and then have John Saxon take over for the conclusion.  Sharp observers will note the rapid cutting of the medium shot of Cassellini’s “firing” with an apparent double. Hands of Steel makes the most of its low budget with some decent action set pieces. Sadly, Claudio Castellini didn’t live to finish the film and go on to continued success. Daniel Greene went on to a prosperous career in action films, many more with Director Sergio Martino.  In a surprising turnabout, Hands of Steel may have influenced an American film in return. Universal Soldier (1992) anyone?

Recommended!

References

1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091166/reference
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendetta_dal_futuro
3. http://www.arizonawrecks.com/wrecksfrombradgray/pagechopper.html

Again, we’ve previously reviewed Hands of Steel as part of Mill Creek’s Pure Terror Set, as well as part of Mill Creek’s Sci-Fi Invasion Set and our “Fucked Up Futures” feature chronicle of post-apoc films. We also reviewed the ripoffs of the ripoff that is Hands of Steel with Top Line, aka Alien Terminator, and Cy-Warrior, aka The New Terminator (check out that art work!).

They might say that this was directed by Roy Garrett, but that’s really the Americanized name for Mario Gariazzo, who directed Enter the Devil, AKA The Sexorcist, AKA The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, which is perhaps the scummiest of all Italian sexualized ripoffs of The Exorcist (and also the most awesome). He also made Play Motel, which is a giallo complete with hardcore inserts.

If you’re reading this and suddenly got a little flush, you’re my kind of people. I feel the same way about as I am about to watch Gariazzo make the first of two Close Encounters of the Third Kind cash-in films that he’d direct in 1978 (the other is Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, in which three nerds dress up like bondage-loving aliens to get their astronomy teacher into bed.

Peter Collins (Franco Garofalo, The Return of the Exorcist) is a photographer who cuts a session short with model Karin Hale (Sherry Buchanan, who was Emanuelle in Emanuelle and Joanna and is also in The Last House on the Beach, Dr. Butcher M.D. and played Belle Starr in Escape from Galaxy 3) after they both start to feel like they were being watched. When he develops the photos, he discovers evidence of alien creatures, which puts them both into a nascent X-Files conspiracy plot.

This being an Italian film, you need some more star power, so Monica Stiles is played by Nathalie Delon (A Whisper In the Dark, Bluebeard; she was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world at one point and dated Richard Burton and Eddie Fisher after both divorced Elizabeth Taylor, which is pretty odd when you think about it), Robert Hoffman (Naked Girl Killed in the Park, Death Carries a Cane) is in this as Tony Harris and Martin Balsam appears as Inspector Jim Grant. And The Silencers, a government organization, soon are on his trail, led by Sergio Rossi, who was the narrator of Africa Blood and Guts, who has Mario Novelli (the engineer from Beyond the Door III/Amok Train and Tango from Fulci’s Warriors of the Year 2072) and George Ardisson (Theseus from Hercules In the Haunted World) under his command.

The poster and giallo sounding title of this movie have always placed it on my watchlist and that’s why I love Mill Creek month. It’s an opportunity to finally get to watch movies that I keep saying, “I need to get to that” and then for some reason always overlook.

It has aliens that wear full-body suits with mylar faces and the cleanest space ship you’ve ever seen and the ability to blind dogs, as well as Hoffman and Stiles pretty much playing Mulder and Scully* 15 years before the show even existed while also ripping off Gerry Anderson’s UFO, a soundtrack of drones and buzzes, plenty of alien point of view shots and a movie that switches protagonists midway through, which is ironic when you consider that Martin Balsam is in this.**

This movie has more twists and turns than any giallo and isn’t afraid to change gears quickly, going from alien movie to conspiracy tale to bringing in psychic and then remembering that it was made in the 1970’s and the rule that all seventies science fiction must have a downer ending.

Plenty of the reviews that I’ve read for this movie hate it. Perhaps they haven’t watched hundreds of Italian genre cinema and want everything to be paced normally and make sense. For those of you who have given up on movies that are sane and are thrilled by warming up leftovers from another era that don’t always taste as good as they once did, you’re going to really love this one.

Everybody smokes. Everybody punches one another in the face. The aliens are barely in it. The soundtrack is atonal and annoying. These are things that would chase off the hardiest of film watchers. To me, it’s the bread and butter that I dip into the sauce after devouring the cinematic pasta.

To make things that much better, it ends with a “this really happened” title card. I didn’t know I could be so happy.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

*Ardisson is pretty much playing the Cigarette Smoking Man, when you come to think of it.

**Sometimes when you explain the joke it is no longer funny. However, for the non-watchers of ten movies a day, this is the exact same thing that happens in the movie that Balsam is best known for, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Dustin Fallon from Horror and Sons has returned to write this entry. He’s always been a big promoter of our site and has been instrumental when it comes to getting writers for this project. I’ve always had fun writing for his Halloween projects — I wrote about CHiPs this year — and love any time he comes to write for our site.

The Day Time Ended is a 1980 science fiction film released by Compass International Pictures. As I’m sure you know, Compass were also the distributor for John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978, and producer Charles Band’s Tourist Trap in 1979.  As I’m sure you also know, both of those films are much better remembered than this film, and for a multitude of good reasons.

Band would also serve as the producer of The Day Time Ended, with former stuntman John “Bud” Cardos (The Dark, Kingdom of the Spiders) taking directing duties. Fans of Band’s Empire Pictures and Full Moon Features presentations will undoubtedly notice quite a few regulars among the crew, such as David Schmoeller (director of Tourist Trap and Puppet Master) and Ted Nicolaou (Terrorvision, Subspecies series), as well as Oscar-winning make-up artist Ve Neill!

The Day Time Ended was seemingly produced to cash-in on the still lingering success of Star Wars in 1976, a wave of science fiction hysteria that allowed filmmakers and distributors of the time to drop any genre-related turd upon a presumably unsuspecting, yet still eager audience. If you were a young male during this era, chances are that the presence of spaceships, aliens, laser guns, and other intergalactic trappings was generally all it took to get your butt in the seat.

In The Day Time Ended, a young couple (played by Robert Mitchum’s son, Chris and Marcy Lafferty, who had previously appeared in Kingdom of the Spiders) and their daughter move to the middle of the desert in order to take up residence with the husband’s parents (or, at least I think they are his parents) and younger brother in their solar-powered home that looks far too small for all these people. The elder couple, played by Western star Jim Davis and Peyton Place‘s Dorothy Malone, have seemingly “dropped off the grid”, retreating from the modern world.

As we learn from a radio broadcast playing as the film opens, this move coincides with the occurrence of a triple-supernova. Almost immediately upon arriving at the desert home, the young child, Jenny, finds a strange, glowing structure while tending to a new pony that her grandfather has purchased. She runs off to tell her family, who find themselves distracted by the fact that the house appears to have been ransacked. The structure, about the same size as the horse, disappears before anyone else can see it. Once her family has left her side, believing the young child to be lost in childish fantasy, Jenny again finds the glowing structure, now no bigger than a large sugar cube or game die.

Other strange events begin to occur around little Jenny, but of course, no one takes any notice for an extended period of time. The grandparents soon witness two UFOs that fly over their heads as they walk the property, but think little of the incident other than being a little creeped out. Later that evening, when the family is in their beds, Jenny is visited by a tiny extraterrestrial creature. The mute creature jumps and spins around the room, but soon flees when another alien craft, also quite small, appears in Jenny’s bedroom. The grandmother also has an encounter with one of the small alien creatures.

In time, more alien craft of varying size and shape converge upon the home. The family is unable to flee due to the car acting erratically, and any attempts to call in or out on the phone line are either cut short or garbled with static, thanks to “atmospheric interference”, an “electrical storm”, or whatever you choose to call the electromagnetic disturbance caused by all this alien activity.

The Day Time Ended continues along with all sorts of extraterrestrial shenanigans occurring both within, as well as outside of, the home. Eventually, large monstrous creatures appear outside the house, further preventing any attempts at escape as they fight and maul each other to death. While these early examples of David Allen’s stop-motion work do show the early-stages of his abilities, they undeniably feel dated by today’s standards, and are far from “ideal” demonstrations of the talent that has made him a considerable legend by many and that earned him an Oscar nomination in later years for his work on 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes. Overall, it’s still a fairly neat sight to behold by those of us still fascinated with cinematic monsters and aliens.

The film’s multiple effects are clearly on showcase here and are the obvious “star” of the film, covering up for (and at times, highlighting) the film’s thread thin and wildly incoherent plot. Sure, there’s some late-night, braindead entertainment to be found here if you aren’t looking for anything too deep or thought-consuming, but even the film’s veteran actors occasionally look bewildered and lost at times.

The Day Time Ended finally reaches its conclusion, only to become even more confusing. Drowning in visual nonsense, the finale presents endless questions with no clear answers given, other than what we interpret them to mean. Honestly, the whole thing just feels tacked on and more than a little rushed.

While I personally enjoy the stop-motion effects on display in The Day Time Ended, they are unfortunately an aspect of the film that many critics trashed upon its release, as well as in the years following. To further exemplify that just maybe I have no clue what I’m talking about, I personally felt that Lafferty wildly over-acted her way through her entire performance as “Beth”, the young mother. However, others clearly must have disagreed with my assessment as she was nominated for “Best Supporting Actress” at 1980’s 7th Annual Saturn Awards, losing to Alien‘s Veronica Cartwright. I can’t imagine there were many other viable competitors.

The Day Time Ended received a blu-ray release from Full Moon Features in early 2019. While the film, as well as Allen’s stop-motion effects, do benefit from a visual upgrade (well, the effects are debatable) thanks to the HD transfer, there’s really little to recommend here if you aren’t already an avid fan of Allen’s work or aren’t into watching painfully dull vintage sci-fi just for the sake of it.

“The body is gone…but The Head lives on!” That’s what brought them out in theaters in 1960 to see this on a double bill with The City of the Dead, I guess. What they got was a German film — originally known as Die Nackte und der Satan (The Naked and the Satan) — redubbed and made ready for American viewing. 

A scientist named Professor Dr. Abel (Michel Simon) — and if you need two titles like that then yes, you are a genius — has invented a serum that keeps a dog’s head alive even after the body has died. So when he dies, his assistant (Horst Frank, The Dead Are Alive) cuts off his head and keeps it alive so that he can give the hunchbacked nurse a new body. Hijinks ensue.

Someone should have made a movie of the life of Simon. The son of a Catholic sausage maker and a Protestant housewife, he left home at an early age, living on the streets and giving boxing lessons for money before becoming a clown, an acrobat and a Swiss soldier before applying his bizarre looks to a life as an actor. He was also the man who tried out the new call girls for France’s most elite brothel owner, Madame Claude, as well as being the owner of one of the world’s foremost collections of erotica, housed within a weed-covered home that was interconnected by tunnels and patrolled by an army of pet monkeys. 

At the time of making this, Simon had had the left side of his face and most of his body paralyzed after a bad reaction to some stage makeup. He needed money and wanted to work, but didn’t want many to know just how bad he was. The producers of this film assured him it would only play in Germany, yet it ended up playing all over the world. Luckily, he’d recover and end up being in plenty of plays and movies afterward.

Now what can we do about fixing up Professor Dr. Abel with Jan Compton?

You can watch this Trans-Lux Release public domain ditty on Tubi and YouTube.

Jerry Sangiuliano was born and died in Scranton, PA. He left behind four short films and one full-length movie, which will be the one we discuss today. It’s a movie that says, “WARNING! An experiment in mind control is out of control … and the body count is building!”

Laurie Stevens (Farrah Forke, Hitman’s Run) is one of several college students who have signed up to improve the world of video games and end up becoming killers when flashes of light begin to reprogram their brains.

Yes, it’s Polybius all over again, with the games that kids love being the cause of everything evil in the world, just like they always warned us they would be. They probably shouldn’t have sat so close to the TV while they were at it.

Sangiuliano re-released this movie in 2013 as Fractals, which is an amazing piece of carny hucksterism, because as far as I know, video game graphics do not improve over the course of 22 years.

I’ve never understood movies where evil video game companies try to kill off their main target audience. It’s the same reason why I never understood why Judas Priest and Ozzy wanted me to kill myself. Who else was going to buy their records?

You can watch this Crown International release on so many Mill Creek sets, including the one we’re featuring this month (Sci-Fi Invasion), the Gore House Greats 12-movie set, Drive-In Cult Classics Volume 4 and the Drive-In Cult Cinema 200 Classics box and the B Movie Blasts set. I am certain that it just might be a bonus feature on everything Mill Creek has ever and will ever release. It’s also on YouTube.