VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the September 13, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.
Hong Kong, Las Vegas, Tokyo, Manila, Mexico and Los Angeles. These are the cities that director Efren C. Piñon takes this action-packed film to. Those are the cities where a gang of blind men has been recruited to become a bank robbing team, all trained by Sally (Leila Hermosa). All working for Johnny Duran (Charlie Davao), they’re being tracked down by Jesse Crowder (Fred Williamson).
The gang of blind men is made up of blinded mobster out for revenge Willie Black (D’Urville Martin), doublecrossed gangster Lin Wang (Leo Fong), former matador who lost his eyes to a bull Hector Lopez (Darnell Garcia), blind from birth magician Amazing Anderson (Dick Adair) and safecracker Ben Guevara (Tony Ferrer). The wild part of this scheme is that the money that is being taken is meant to stop the Domino Theory in Vietnam when the criminals take it from under the government’s nose.
There’s one great reason to watch this all and it’s a line of dialogue that made me laugh more than any other so far this year: “Unit Two to Unit One—it’s going down at the International House of Pancakes!”
Williamson would play the same character in Death Journey and No Way Back, but you don’t need to see either of those movies to enjoy this. I mean, what other movie has a bunch of multiracial blind men all training over and over for a big heist like it’s a lights out Ocean’s 11?
Jason Palmer (Robert Foxworth, Frankenstein) has been having issues with stress and his doctor recommends a vacation. Hawaii sounds nice. Except, well, Hawaii is here Jason’s grandfather once worked there and got cursed by a coven and now, all of the Palmer males become werewolves.
It could happen.
Directed by Bruce Kessler (tons of TV work, including Cruise Into Terror) and written by Jay Benson and George Schenck (The Phantom of Hollywood), this movie mixes werewolves — without leis — with Joe Penny as a hotel detective and Palmer’s romance with Diane May (Barbara Trentham).
Not into it yet? What if I tell you that Debralee Scott of Welcome Back, Kotter and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman took a shower in it? A made for TV shower, you pervert! And for the ladies, Dolph Sweet, the gruff dad from Gimme a Break!
This has a fine time lapse transformation, but come on. We needed a scene where Palmer has a I Was a Teenage Werewolf freakout while wearing a Hawaiian shirt. That’s the kind of insanity I demand. That said, for a TV movie, this is fun.
Here’s a drink to go with the movie.
Cubby’s Cove
1 1/2 oz. vodka
1/2 oz. orgeat (or you can substitute almond syrup)
1 tsp. grenadine
1/2 oz. lime juice
1/2 oz. lemon juice
Shake with ice in a cocktail shaker. Strain into a chilled glass and get ready to howl.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was posted on January 16, 2023 but I want to call attention to the new mass market, non-slipcase release of this movie. You can get it from MVD.
Maurizio Merli is, for me, the face of poliziotteschi, taking on a similar role as Clint Eastwood as a judge, jury and executioner of criminals that lives by his own strict code and must follow it, no matter how much it destroys his life. Whether he’s Commissario Betti in Violent Rome, Violent Naples and Special Cop in Action or Inspector Leonardo Tanzi in The Tough Ones and The Cynic, The Rat and The Fist or out of the badge roles in Mannaja and Highway Racer, Merli comes across as a man of action and principle.
In Convoy Busters, he plays Inspector Olmi, a rough cop who uses brutish methods to discover who killed a young girl with a professional-looking slash to the throat and dumped her in the river. His case leads him to the highest chambers of the corrupt Rome government, which outs him in the crosshairs of those officials, organized crime and the media. An attempt to take him out leads to the death of an innocent bystander, which is enough for the powers that be to send him away to a small fishing town and out of their lives.
Olmi, of course, can’t shut off his need to be a cop and soon discovers that there’s a smuggling operation going down right in his new home. That’s when the real title of this movie — Un Poliziotto Scomodo (An Uncontrolled Cop) — makes more sense, but one assumes that Convoy was a big deal in 1978 and if it got more people to see this movie, then that’s the name in foreign markets.
There’s a great brawl in a bar, a helicopter chase and plenty of great scenery between the two halves of this story, which nearly feel like they give you two films. The beginning, as the girl is taken from the water, feels almost giallo.
The Cauldron Films blu ray of Convoy Busters features a 2K restoration from the original camera negative with both English and Italian audio options as well as new featurettes like Maurizio Merli: A Lethal Hunter of Subtle Variation with tough-guy film expert Mike Malloy and interviews with Maurizio Matteo Merli and Danilo Massi, who also has a Stelvio Massi video tribute. Archival extras include the alternate Convoy Busters, interviews with journalist Eolo Capacci, Ruggero Deodato, Enzo G Castellari , Maurizio Matteo and Enio Girolami, plus an image gallery, trailer and a poster, all inside a gorgeous slipcase with artwork by Haunt Love. Get it from MVD.
April 21: Gone Legitimate — A movie featuring an adult film actor in a mainstream role.
Marco Ferreri is probably best known for his film La Grande Bouffe. Here, he sets a film in an end-of-the-world-feeling New York City, a place of only the strange and the rats, a place where Gerard Lafayette (Gérard Depardieu) lives in the basement of Andreas Flaxman’s (James Coco) wax museum, which is all about the Roman Empire.
He also volunteers at an all-female theater group, which has Mimsy Farmer, Francesca De Sapio (The Godfather Part II) and Stefania Casini (Sara from Suspiria) as members. Their latest play is about how women could easily overpower men and rape them. To prove their theory, Gerard is knocked out with a bottle of Coke and Angelica (adult actress Abigail Clayton, billed as Gail Lawrence; she was in 7 Into Snowy, Sexworld and Alex de Renzy’s Femmes de Sade. After going into legitimate movies, she played Rita in Maniac) volunteers to be the one to take him.
Meanwhile, in Battery Park, Gerard finds a baby monkey in the arms of a King Kong sculpture — or is it Kong, fallen from the Twin Towers? — and a group of eccentrics led by Luigi (Marcello Mastroianni). He takes his new simian child home but Andreas tells him that the baby will destroy his dreams. Angelica moves in as she’s pregnant, possibly with their child of rape, but when he doesn’t care about their child being born, she leaves and while the baby ape is alone, the rats eat him.
Gerard responds by breaking into the wax museum and causing a fire that kills both he and Andreas, while Angelica sits on the shore with her new child.
Ferreri wrote this with Gerard Brach (Wonderwall, Frantic, Repulsion, The Tenant) and Rafael Azcona. It has some interesting imagery — Kong washed up on the beach — but ultimately goes nowhere. Still, just the idea it was made is somewhat intriguing. Also, the baby is named for Cornelius from Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
April 20: Screw the Medveds — Here’s a list of the movies that the Medveds had in their Golden Turkey Awards books. What do they know? Defend one of the movies they needlessly bashed.
In The Golden Turkey Awards, the Medveds said of this movie: “Initially intended as a straightforward film biography of Aristotle Onassis, this project began life with the working title The Tycoon. The producer, a former Athens journalist named Bico Mastorakis, anticipated full cooperation from the Onassis family and even offered Jacqueline Kennedy $1 million to play herself. When Christina Onassis, Ari’s daughter and heiress, denied legal consent for the film to proceed, the ingenious Masorakis simply changed the names in his script and altered minor details to create a work of “fiction.” He also changed the title to The Greek Tycoon. “We’re not making a movie about Aristotle Onassis,” Mastronikas explained. “It’s a personification of all Greek tycoons.””
Directed by J. Lee Thompson and written by Morton S. Fine from a story by Fine, Wim Wells and Mastronikas, this has Theo Tomasis (Anthony Quinn, forever trying to be my least favorite actor) as a Greek businessman who went from rags to riches before marrying Liz Cassidy (Jacqueline Bisset), the wife of assassinated U.S. President James Cassidy (James Franciscus).
So, yeah. Just like any other Greek tycoon.
Speaking of Anthony Quinn, he met Onassis six months before the man who married Jackie O’s death and the tycoon gave his blessing to Quinn’s casting. Then, Jackie Kennedy asked him to not make the movie and he said that he wouldn’t, but then, you know, she acted like she didn’t know him in a restaurant, which is a hilarious reason to make a movie that is a total smear on someone’s two dead husbands.
Ebert gave it two stars, Siskel three and a half and audiences made it the top movie for a few weeks. Ebert said that it was like watching the National Enquirer, which is possibly why it did so well.
April 20: Screw the Medveds — Here’s a list of the movies that the Medveds had in their Golden Turkey Awards books. What do they know? Defend one of the movies they needlessly bashed.
Based on the Harold Robbins book, directed by Daniel Petrie (Bronco and Billie, Six Pack, Fort Apache the Bronx) and written by William Bast and Walter Bernstein, this is the story of Loren Hardeman Sr. (Laurence Olivier) and the car that will bring his company back to glory, named for his great-granddaughter (Kathleen Beller). This goes against what his grandson (Robert Duvall) thinks the company’s future is. It’s also about the loves of race driver Angelo Perino (Tommy Lee Jones) and a special fuel that will power The Betsy.
In The Golden Turkey Awards, Harry and Michael Medved said of this movie: “Another Harold Robbins book bites the dust as a wretched, melodramatic film. Lord Laurence Olivier’s attempt at a Texas twang is a hilarious flop, as is his incestuous relationship with his daughter-in-law, Katharine Ross.”
Jokes on you, Medveds, that’s just cucking your son, not incest. It’s also a scene where the homosexual son of the elder Loren shoots himself in the head while the young version of the grandson Loren watches, then goes upstairs to tell his mom, who has grandpa between her thighs.
That’s Harold Robbins, right?
Well, in the world of this movie, it’s an actual choice between Kathleen Beller and Lesley-Anne Down. Come on, Tommy Lee Jones!
April 10: Nightmare USA — Celebrate Stephen Thrower’s book by picking a movie from it. Here’s all of them in a list.
Also known as Slipping Into Darkness and Bloodshed and shot as The Paranoiac, this movie is like a young and scrappy cover band playing Psycho in a small club and you’re like, well, they’re derivative, but that’s a totally different bass part and that singer has some charm, you know? It’s ramshackle and cheap in the best of ways, set in a boardinghouse, as so many of the best horror movies are — particularly regional and low budget examples — where aspiring journalist Karen (Beverly Ross) gets a cheap from Mrs. Brewer (Belle Mitchell). Yet, as always, everything comes at a price, as her new neighbor Grahame (Laszlo Papas) is beyond obsessed with her.
Grahame spies on her through the ventilation system and we soon learn that he was molested not once, but twice in his formative years, leading to him being quite off today. The kind of off where — spoiler, except that by me saying this is so very close to Psycho you should know what’s coming but this goes further — when Karen drowns in the tub, he keeps her body in his room and tries to preserve what little he has of her, all while her ex-boyfriend and a classmate she’s grown biblically close to try to find out where she’s gone.
There’s a detail early on where it’s revealed that Karen is diabetic and suffers from seizures and by the time she’s in her death throes in a bathtub, you realize that this isn’t a movie that just throws out small details. It’s a movie that forces you to empathize with its killer — again, third mention, Psycho — while having its main female character neither be the final girl nor the heroine.
Either you’re going to feel that this is way too long and drawn out or you’ll be fascinated by it, feeling like you’re just like Grahame, watching lives that are not our own, seeing damaged people attempt to escape their dismal fates. In a different story, the way that life has turned both of the leads into shells of people — Grahame haunted by multiple moments of childhood trauma and a lack of being able to connect to anything resembling intimacy and Karen unable to even face her ex-boyfriend as she leaves him and continually being inappropriately approached by nearly every man in this movie — who in a different story may have met cute and worked together to solve their issues.
Instead, the one moment when Grahame’s voyeurism could have been used for good and saved Karen, he’s called away by Mrs. Brewer and misses out on his would-be love’s lonely demise. For a movie that seems to present itself as a slasher, that’s a big idea.
Director and writer Richard Cassidy sadly didn’t do much after this, directing and writing — before being removed and replaced by editor Adrian Carr — the 1983 Danielle Steele adaption Now and Forever, as well as writing The Edge of Power and directing The Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Bible Unravelled, which his based on Dr. Barbara Thiering’s book, The Qumran Origins of the Christian Church, which introduces the theory that the unnamed figures in the Dead Sea Scrolls are John the Baptist and Jesus.
An even bigger shame is that this hasn’t been released on blu ray, as there are plenty less deserving movies that have been given plenty more attention.
As a storm tears through Manhattan, four convicts narrowly escape the crash of their prison transport. Bomber Christie (Robert Carradine), sex criminal Eddy (Terry Haig), murderer Marcus (Victor B. Tyler) and arsonist Chico (Don Granbery) are free to take over a building, steal some money, find a getaway car and oh yeah, assault Annie (Belinda Montgomery) and destroy the Picasso of Richard (Ray Milland). What they didn’t count on was police officer Dan Evans (Jim Mitchum) finding them.
There are also roles for June Allyson, Jean-Pierre Aumont, John Wildman, Vlasta Vrana and Peter MacNeill. If you watched your share of Canadian exploitation movies, you’d recognize Wildman from Skullduggery and Humongous.
It’s a mean movie made by the director of one of my favorite films. Yes, Eddy Matalon made Cathy’s Curse before this and he hasn’t lost his edge, putting man, woman, child and dogs in harm’s way. It was written by John C.W. Saxton, who wrote Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS under the name Jonah Royston as well as Happy Birthday to Me and Class of 1984. The story was inspired by an idea from John Dunning, who has just as wild of a resume, as he wrote all three Snake Eater movies and produced Daughters of Darkness, The Possession of Virginia, Shivers, Rabid, The House by the Lake, Meatballs, The Surrogate, The Vindicator and wow, Buffalo ’66. He was also responsible for one of Canada’s first erotic movies, Valérie.
Psychiatrist C.J. Arnold (Richard Crenna) has bought an abandoned Civil War mansion that was built over hot sulfur pits, which seems like it may instantly be an issue beyond the fact that, you know, the house is totally haunted. But sure, why not turn it into a place where drug addicts can cold turkey sweat out all the stuff in their systems.
His wife Dr. Caroline Arnold (Joanna Pettet, who had lunch with Sharon Tate the afternoon of her death) is able to sense that there’s something wrong, so she heads to the basement and unleashes it because, well, we wouldn’t have a movie otherwise.
And what a movie we have, with people spontaneously combusting, dogs suicidally knocking Cassie Yates (Rolling Thunder, Sarah Curtis on Dynasty) off a balcony, people sawing off their own hands, Mandy Pepperidge being abducted by some kind of ghostly entity, bodies coming back from the dead, said entities ripping clothes off of women, Andrew Prine drowning in quicksand and Victor Buono as the devil.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was on the site on September 10, 2019 but has new info added from my interview with Allan Arkush.
Deathsport unites everything I love about late 1970’s junk film all in one place. It’s set after a nuclear war. It has David Carradine in it. Claudia Jennings, too. Throw in Richard Lynch, motorcycles, lucite swords and strange religion and you’ve discovered the most perfect of all movies for 5:44 AM on a Thursday.
This was supposed to be a sequel to Death Race 2000 with motorcycles instead of cars. Seems simple, right? After all, Corman had a five-picture commitment with David Carradine and already had Charles B. Griffith writing the script.
Corman was unhappy with the script and Nicholas Niciphor, a recent graduate of USC, got the job of writing and directing the film. He had two weeks to write and pre-produce it. And to top it off, Carradine had no real interest in being in the movie and would only give three weeks of his time to the production.
It didn’t get any easier once production began. Niciphor would later say, “The script was too ambitious, the shooting schedule too tight and…the crew and the cast were largely sodden with drugs.” He was including both Carradine and Jennings in that statement. Indeed — this was one of her last films before she died in a car crash at the age of 29.
Years later, Carradine would tell Psychotronic Video that Niciphor was “a very talented and crazy guy. As a director, he was erratic and unknowing…The picture, which was brilliantly written, was unable to overcome the madness of the shoot.” He elaborated that his “direction seemed to me to mainly consist of hysteria and episodic tantrums,” including an incident where Niciphor physically attacked Jennings and got his ass kicked by Carradine in response.
For his part, Niciphor did admit to physically removing Jennings from a motorcycle because of how high she was and that Carradine routinely roughed him up on set, including breaking his nose. He had to hurry back from the hospital and finish the actor’s scenes before he left to film Circle of Iron.
After all that madness, Corman ordered reshoots. That’s kind of amazing given his stingy nature. But then the director wouldn’t work with Carradine, so Allan Arkush stepped in. He told Trailers from Hell about this experience, remembering: “Mostly we just blew up motorcycles. Lots of them. We also set some mutants on fire. And the stunning Claudia Jennings got naked. David Carradine…smoked a lot of high-grade weed and helped us to blow stuff up…Sad to say, I couldn’t save the picture.”
One of those scenes added in was a nude scene where Jennings was tortured. Why? Well, Corman felt like this movie needed more nudity. Despite plans for a third film, Deathworld, the movie didn’t perform and Carradine claimed that his career never recovered.
So what’s it all about?
A thousand years from tomorrow, after the Neutron Wars, the world is made up of city states — ala Judge Dredd — surrounded by wastelands populated by cannibal mutants and policed by the Range Guides.
Two cities — Helix and Tritan — are about to go to war with one another with their Death Machines, which are laser-equipped motorcycles. Yes, that’s the absolute furthest technology has taken us.
Meanwhile, the death penalty has been replaced by Deathsport, where criminals battle each other to the death for their freedom. Lord Zirpola (David McLean, one of the two Marlboro men to suffer from cancer) yearns to use his Death Machines on the Range Guides, but the two best, Kaz Oshay (Carradine) and Deneer (Jennings) escape.
As they search for Deneer’s missing child, Oshay must battle the man who turned on the code of the Range Guides and killed his mother, Ankar Moor (Lynch). Of course, they’re destined to battle one another in combat using their Whistler swords. If you’ve always wanted to see Richard Lynch get decapitated, well, this is the movie for you.
Someday, mark my words, I’m going to do a Letterboxd list of Hardboiled Haggarty’s many roles. The ex-pro wrestler is in this as a jailer.
Brenda Venus also appears as Adriann and her life could totally be a Roger Corman movie. When she was in college, Venus purchased a book at an auction that contained an envelope with the address of famed writer Henry Miller. She wrote to the ailing author and soon, the two became romantic pen pals with over 1,500 letters exchanged between the two of them. This relationship led to Miller becoming her mentor and Venus his muse.
Ed Millis wrote, “Venus was a source of inspiration to the aging and ailing Miller. Brenda was all of 24 years of age, Henry was 84. She was a beautiful Southern belle, “The Botticelli of Mississippi” — he called her. Henry, the renegade intellectual, the writer, had taken millions of us to the sexy Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. Now he was sick and slowly recuperating. He needed a lift in spirits… Brenda the Muse breathed life into her mortal charge and gave him reason to live.”
After appearing in the June 1997 issue of Playboy, Venus wrote a column for the magazine called “Centerfolds on Sex.” She also wrote the books Secrets of Seduction and Secrets of Seduction for Women, which have been translated into 37 languages.
In 2002, prime minister Vladimir Putin requested that Venus visit Moscow as his guest to attend the opening performance of Venus, a play about her life. I can only imagine how bonkers that play was.
Even stranger, the music in this movie comes from the film was scored by Andy Stein (A Prairie Home Companion’s Guys All-Star Shoe Band and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen) and Jerry Garcia.
My favorite part of this movie would be the strange speeches that the Range Guides give to one another. They also heal one another through sex, which is very 1970s. Carradine wrote in his memoirs that when the time came to shoot those scenes, Niciphor told him he hadn’t slept with a woman in six months, so he couldn’t trust himself to be naked in the same room as Jennings. Carradine directed those scenes instead. He also probably punched Niciphor in the face afterward.
In true Roger Corman fashion, some of the footage from this film was sold to the TV show The Fall Guy, where it appears in the episode “Baker’s Dozen.”
You can get this on a double disc with Battletruck from Shout! Factory. It’s also free on Tubi.
I asked Allan Arkush several questions about this movie.
B&S: Another IMDB trivia note that maybe you can dispel: Is that the Deathsportbike in the hallways scene near the end of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School?
ALLAN: No. Those were bigger road bikes and that was the problem. Shooting them for that film, they weren’t really the right bikes for going across a rough landscape. But Roger got a deal on those bikes and we used them…
B&S: What happened with Nicholas Niciphor directing that movie?
ALLAN: Well, Nick had gone to UCLA and he was really good, but he was brought up in Europe and he had never seen a Roger Corman movie. And he hadn’t seen the kinds of movies that we were making, he’d seen art films.
Everyone working with Corman had turned down Deathsport. It had a bad, bad script. We were desperate to do our first picture and we still all turned it down!
One of the problems Nick had was that we’d all been working for Corman for three or four years and had built this network of people. Nick was an outsider. And he’s working for Corman, who was so cheap that he didn’t want to rent out a screening room to show him Death Race 2000 and he’s making the sequel to that movie!
He didn’t know anyone like we did, the people you could turn to to get these done. Making a Corman movie took a certain amount of camaraderie and he was walking into it blind. And his experience wasn’t enough. I don’t want to say anything about him as a person. He was a stranger in a strange land.
It wasn’t going to work, so nothing was working right. If you look at the Trailers from Hell, I summed up all of the things that were wrong about the movie. I worked on it for another six weeks afterward trying to save it. Nothing changed. It still was awful.
Roger was like, put aside Disco High — which was what he wanted Rock ‘n Roll High Schoolto be — and come blow up motorcycles and then I’ll let you make your musical.
The story was so vague and strange. I had to spend a lot of time correcting screen direction and so forth. And I was editing and writing and shooting it was a disaster. The preview was so bad that just before the sword fight, the projectionist closed the curtain.
B&S: Well, the poster sells the movie. And Claudia Jennings. You can’t look away from her.
ALLAN: Ali Larter, who was on Heroes, is the same way. There’s no time of the day or night where she doesn’t look perfect.
In 2010, Blue Water Comics released a four issue miniseries with more stories from the universe of this movie.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.