Michael Gold (Brandon Lee) tries to convince Dr. Braun (Ernest Borgnine) to defect to the U.S. before the KGB takes him and his stolen diamond to create a laser. He doesn’t go with him and is captured, which means that a rescue must happen. Gold and Braun’s daughter Alissa (Debi A. Monahan) must find Col. Kalishnakov (Graham Clarke) and get back the weapon, the diamond and the scientist.
Director BJ Davis is a stuntman who has been in so many movies — he did stunts in this — as well as the director of the video for Meat Loaf’s “I’d Lie for You (and That’s the Truth),” which is kind of cool. This has the worst accent ever coming out of Borgnine’s character to the point that I thought he was dubbed. He’s not.
This movie has the most sexist dialogue ever.
Alissa: “What do you want me to do? Get on my knees?”
Gold: “That would be nice.”
This would have been a forgotten movie if Lee hadn’t died. Then it was all over the place on VHS, as it was public domain in the U.S. It’s better than a lot of the other bargain bin action movies from then, but Lee would improve quite a bit by the time he starred in his last movie, The Crow.
I love this movie because I know that it upset people so much. It was titled King of Kong Island and there’s no King Kong, there’s barely an island and it’s so Italian that you know that I was yelling things in pure joy throughout the entire movie. Eva, la Venere selvaggia didn’t even know that in America people expected it to be something it couldn’t be.
Albert Muller (Marc Lawrence, the man who would make Pigs) is putting radios into the heads of gorillas to control them. These apes kidnap Diana (Ursula Davis, An Angel for Satan, Crypt of the Vampire) and Burt Dawson (Brad Harris) attempts to save her before being abducted by natives who are led by a white girl because that’s how movies work.
She’s Eva (Esmeralda Barros, God Is My Colt 45) and she doesn’t fall in love with Burt. No, she’s just kind of there. He’s into Diana. I’m also making this sound way more action-filled than it is because it’s packed with long moments of talking yet the beat up print and fuzzy noises that approximate a soundtrack on the Mill Creek box set that I viewed this on made me feel like I was lying in a sleeping bag with my feet under a warm old Zenith TV as a kid and I had no responsibility or anywhere to be.
Director Roberto Mauri also made He Was Called Holy Ghost.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Apologies. I know this was just part of Chiller Theater month but it’s also on the Mill Creek box set I’m writing about.
W. Lee Wilder and Planet Teleplays were just cranking out science fiction movies in the 50s and we’re all the better for it today.
Dr. Douglas Martin (Peter Graves) is a scientist studying nuclear blasts at Soledad Flats. As he flies over the area, his plane crashes and he wakes up healed yet with a large scar on his chest. He starts acting so weird that the FBI gets called in. Once he’s given truth serum, he lets it be known that he’s being controlled by aliens from Astron Delta under the command of The Tala.
These aliens have some wild plans that involve mutant lizards and bugs that will wipe out the people of Earth. Using a slide rule, Martin figures out that if he can shut down Soledad Flats for ten seconds, he’ll overload the alien base and kill all of them. You know how good U.S. military men are at that and yes, he blows them up real good.
UFO skeptic Dr. Aaron Sakulich thinks that many alien abduction stories contain the same elements, such as medical testing, strange scars, memory being erased, aliens with giant eyes and the feeling of being kind controlled. He feels that the initial articles about UFOs and abductions were influenced by this movie and that they entered the collective unconsciousness. Fiction influencing reality or the subconscious.
As for those big eyes, they’re egg cartons.
In 2002, this movie was redubbed by director Doug Miles and writer Tex Hauser as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The plot of that movie is about alien invaders that have a machine that can turn people gay and Operation Manhole, a government project that will lure gay people to one location and drop a bomb on them. The tagline: “They came from outer space… and they’re fabulous!”
Cisco (Duncan Renaldo) and Pancho (Leo Carrillo) have to prove their innocence after robberies made by two thugs (David Sharpe and Edmund Cobb) who look just like them. Our heroic dup gets jailed, but the outlaws have one more big score and need to free Cisco and Pancho to have an alibi.
Director Derwin Abrahams worked in serials and TV, while writer Ford Beebe directed a hundred movies. These guys moved fast back then, making entertaining adventure and Western movies. The same year, there would be the first of 156 episodes of The Cisco Kid TV series.
I’m amazed that people talk about superhero fatigue. They should look back and see how many Western movies and shows there were in 1950.
The Cisco Kid Western Movie Collection is available from VCI Entertainment. It has 13 movies and extras like two Cisco Kid TV episodes, interviews with Duncan Renaldo and Colonel Tim McCoy, and photo and poster galleries. You can get it from MVD.
Look, I know this is directed by the British Terence Young and has a cast that is multinational, but this movie is so great I’m inclined to overlook such things.
It stars one of the Magnificent Seven, Charles Bronson, and one of the Seven Samurai, Toshiro Mifune. At the time, Bronson was a huge deal everywhere but the U.S. In fact, in Japan, he was known as the face of the Mandom cologne (and still is, I have friends who only know him as that) in commercials directed by the man who made Hausu, Nobuhiko Obayashi.
Link Stuart (Bronson) and Gauche (Alain Delon, can this movie have any more suave dudes in it?) have robbed a train of about $400,000. That should be enough to set them up for life, but then they discover that a Japanese ambassador is on his way to Washington to give the President a gold sword. Gauche kills one of the bodyguards and blows up the train car, injuring Link. He’s left for dead but nursed back to help by the Japanese. The surviving bodyguard, Kuroda Jubei (Mifune), takes a blood oath to get the sword back and kill Gauche. Otherwise, both Japanese will have to commit ritual seppuku and kill themselves for their loss of honor. Link is asked to lead Kuroda to Gauche but keeps trying to lose him.
Gauche has killed all of the men and buried the money. So if he dies, Link won’t learn where his rightful stolen money is. Over time, he comes to respect the honor that Kuroda has, a man who feels that he is the last of his time as such things as duty and having a moral code are dying. The plan to get the sword and the money isn’t honorable at all. They kidnap Gauche’s lover Cristina (Ursula Andress) and offer to switch her for what they want. An attack by Commanches delays things, but Cristian soon learns that Gauche isn’t the honorable criminal she thought he was.
By the end, only Gauche, Link, Kuroda and Cristina are left alive. Kuroda realizes that he needs to kill Gauche to get his honor, but Link also needs what is his. That hesitation costs him his life, a fact that places his friend’s need above money, as Link blasts Gauche and promises — and fulfills that promise, even if being caught will see him lynched — to return the sword.
I love this IMDB fact: Mifune entertained the cast and crew throughout the entire production with his refined culinary skills, bringing over a supply of Japanese meats, watercress, seaweed and other ingredients. He would also exchange recipes for French and Italian dishes, including spaghetti.
This movie is pretty much everything I love. The swagger of Bronson, the detached cool of Mifune, the cockiness of Delon and Andress looking incredible even when fighting inside a burning field. Even Cappucine is in it!
Jerry Warren sat on this movie for two years before playing it with Teenage Zombies. Shot in Colossal Cave in Tucson, Arizona, the monster costume looked so bad that Warren didn’t use it. Let’s think on that for a minute. An effect so bad that Jerry Warren wouldn’t use it.
Professor Millard Wyman (John Carradine) has sent Paul Whitmore (Allen Windsor), Craig Randall (Robert Clarke), Lauri Talbott (Sheila Noonan) and Dale Marshall (Phyllis Coates) to the bottom of the ocean but their vehicle becomes lost. They swim — in scuba suits at crushing depths — into a cave where only Matheny (George Skaff), an old sailor, is still alive.
Professor Wyman’s brother Jim (Joe Maierhauser) has luckily built another vehicle, because Matheny is looking at the ladies like a man who is been in a cave for more than a decade and suddenly has a gypsy girl from Beast from the Haunted Cave and Lois Lane right within staring distance. Before he can say, “You know, I killed a man,” a volcano goes live, he dies under some rocks and all the white scientists celebrate their good fortune above the surface and no one gets the bends.
Warren sold this with “A Nightmare of Terror in the Center of the Earth with Forgotten Men, Monsters, Earthquakes and Boiling Volcanos!” I mean, yes, it has those things, but it’s…maybe not as exciting as the ads make it sound. The petrified world is the movie itself.
Also known as Ein Toter Hing im Netz or A Corpse Hung in the Web, this West German horror film is all about Gary, a nightclub manager who invites several pretty ladies to strip dance in Singapore. They crash land on the way, make it to an island and find a giant spider web. Soon, Gary is bitten by the spider and becomes a mutant.
First released here as an adults’ only nudie cutie called It’s Hot in Paradise, it was re-released without nudity as Horrors of Spider Island. Your enjoyment of this film depends on how much you like watching women wrestle one another and pull hair. I mean, who amongst us can say no to that?
Maybe just look at the awesome German poster, hmm?
When I first saw this, I was way too dismissive of it. It has the same cinematographer as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Georg Krause, shooting a movie with nearly nude women menaced by spiders. Was I in a bad mood the first time I wrote about this? What was wrong with me?
In Italy, this movie is known as Ercole e la Regina di Lidia (Hercules and the Queen of Lydia) and it’s loosely based upon various Greek myths and the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, as envisioned by co-writers Ennio De Concini and Pietro Francisci, who also directed. It’s also the second — and last — Hercules movie with Steve Reeves in the lead.
Hercules has been brought in to settle the battle over who should rule Thebes between brothers Eteocles and Polynices. However, a magic spring looks so refreshing and Hercules is hypnotized by a harem girl and becomes the kept man of Queen Omphale of Lydia (Sylvia Lopez, who sadly died the same year this movie was made), who plans on sleeping with our hero until she gets bored and turns him into a statue.
Luckily, Ulysses is on hand to help him get his memory back, just in time to decimate three wild tigers in order to rescue his wife beloved Iole (Sylvia Koscina). Then, our hero realizes that he should just let the two brothers kill one another.
Wrestling fans will be happy to see Primo Carnera (he was also a boxer and known as the Ambling Alp) show up as Antaeus.
Mario Bava served as special effects supervisor on this film (he was the cinematographer for Hercules and Hercules Conquers Atlantis; he would then direct the incredible Hercules In the Haunted World), which you can definitely see in the foggy dream sequences.
While Reeves would leave the series to Reg Park, the two Hercules files he was in would be successful all over the world.
You can watch this on Tubi with Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing or check out the original on YouTube.
Asparia (Anna-Maria Polani) is the Queen of the Hellenes, and has been captured by the Babylonians. Somehow, she has hidden her royalty and is living as a common slave in Babylon. Hercules (Rock Stevens, who is really Peter Lupus, who played Flex Martian in Muscle Beach Party, Goliath in Goliath at the Conquest of Damascus and Superman in a series of Air Force commercials, a job he lost when he posed fully nude in Playgirl) is on his way to save her.
King Phaleg of Assyria (Mario Petri) comes to Babylon hoping to marry Asparia and unite their kingdoms. That’s stopped by the rulers of the country, Taneal (Helga Line), Salmanassar (Livio Lorenzon) and Azzur (Tullio Altamura). Hercules saves him and continues to Babylon.
When he gets there, the brothers are fighting over who gets to marry Asparia while Taneal destroys her own nation to get its riches. Brother kills brother, King Phaleg shows his true colors and Hercules does what he does best.
This was directed by Domenico Paolella, who directed his first movie, Gli ultimi della strada, in 1940 and wrote his last, Power and Lovers, in 1994. He also wrote the story with Luciano Martino.
The problem I have with this is that Helga Line, as a murderous maniac, is so much more attractive than Polani. If I had the power of Hercules, I know that my decisions would not be as godly.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
There were three Cisco Kid movies made in 1945. That’s how popular the character was. This one, directed by Lambert Hillyer (who made so many movies, including Dracula’s Daughter) and written by Victor Hammond and Ralph Bettinson, is unlike many of the other movies in the series as its a musical. It starts with Cisco (Duncan Renaldo) singing to a potential girlfriend. Then, he and Pancho (Martin Garralaga) head to Mexico to stop the corrupt Miguel Sanchez (George J. Lewis) and romance the ladies like Pepita (Armida) and Dolores Gonzales (Lillian Molieri) who work in a cantina.
Sixty-two minutes long, this Monogram Pictures series joined Charlie Chan and Palooka Joe as their dependable features. They kept making them and audiences kept going to see them.
The Cisco Kid Western Movie Collection is available from VCI Entertainment. It has 13 movies and extras like two Cisco Kid TV episodes, interviews with Duncan Renaldo and Colonel Tim McCoy, and photo and poster galleries. You can get it from MVD.
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