Duke “Captain Yankee” Howard (Christopher Connelly) and Gin Fizz (Luciano Pigozzi) sell fake jungle adventure dreams to rich foreigners who want a story to brag about when they get back home. But one day, U.S. government man Warren (Lee Van Cleef) tells them that he’ll expose their scan if they don’t guide museum curator Lansky (Mike Monty) and Maria (Marina Costa, who is also in The Final Executioner, another Italian movie that Cannon released; she has Carolynn De Fonseca’s voice) and find the Ruby of Doom. Or Gloom. Sometimes both. To get it, they’ll have to fight some river pirates, led by Tiger (Protacio Dee). Luckily, Captain Yankee has a child in his crew that has a near-psychic rapport with a deadly cobra, which is something you don’t see in many Raiders redux movies.
So yes, this might be Raiders of the Lost Ark, but so are two other movies Margheriti made, Ark of the Sun God and Hunters of the Golden Cobra. Video store shelves were starving for more treasure hunting rogues and he was the man to film these ripoffs, remixes and remakes.
Also: the use of miniatures and action figures to get big explosions in this movie is utterly charming. If you’re the kind of person that finds that cheap and off-putting, perhaps stop watching Italian 80s exploitation movies now. Or never start.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Quiet Earth was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by them. For another take on this movie, read this.
Loosely based on the novel by Craig Harrison and kind of, sort of a remake of The World, the Flesh and the Devil, this movie has the world end on 6:12 a.m. on July 5. Hmm…that’s the same time the clock stopped in the Twilight Zone episode “Where Is Everybody?”
Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) is a scientist working on Project Flashlight for Delenco, part of a United States-led international consortium. The goal? A wireless global energy grid that can power military equipment anywhere. He wakes up and is the only person alive. There are no bodies, even when he finds a burning airplane. There are no animals. There’s just him.
No bodies, that is, until he finds the corpse of his boss. The mass disappearance of everything alive was caused by activating Flashlight. He hears his own voice saying: “One: there has been a malfunction in Project Flashlight with devastating results. Two: it seems I am the only person left on Earth.”
Zac then goes insane, declaring himself President of this Quiet Earth and performing for a crowd of cardboard figures before blasting Jesus off the cross within a church. He nearly kills himself — that’s what he was doing before, an overdose of sleeping pills kept him asleep during the Flashlight effect — and it’s good he stays alive, because he soon meets Joanne (Alison Routledge) and Api (Pete Smith). There’s a love triangle, as the ways of the old world continue into the new, but Zac decides that he should sacrifice himself to ensure that the effect doesn’t destroy any more of the Earth; it’s then that he goes on an entirely new journey into another even more quiet world.
Director Geoff Murphy would go on from this art take on the end of the world and make movies like Young Guns II, Freejack and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Laurence not only starred in this, he also wrote the script with Bill Baer.
Yes, two Tales from the Darkside episodes in a row have now had a corny pun for a title, but at least this episode presents a truly horrific concept that today’s audience might not understand: TV screenwriter Leon (Harry Anderson) has his life taken from him by the voice of his answering machine.
One of eight episodes directed by Frank De Palma — he also worked on the spiritual sequel series Monsters — and written by Haskell Barkin (who wrote the other punnily titled “Djinn, No Chaser“), this episode starts with that strong premise and then works to a silly conclusion, one of the things outside of budget that holds this series back from being thought of in the same breath as The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery.
That said — this one does have Dick Miller in it, playing Leon’s agent. Marcie Barkin from Fade to Blackand Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws is also in this as Leon’s long-suffering partner.
Based on a Harlan Ellison story, directed by Shelley Levinson and written by Haskell Barkin, this episode has Danny Squires (Charles Levin) in a lunatic wing explaining how his wife Connie (Coleen Camp) had bought an old lamp that brought a djinn (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) into their lives. Nothing good has happened since that day.
Sadly, this episode is one of the sillier episodes and not in the best of ways. It’s wacky humor with a payoff that is an even bigger groaner. It’s as if all the issues of Danny in a straihtjacket don’t matter because of how easily everything comes together at the end.
Look, they can’t all be winners on Tales from the Darkside.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on July 14, 2020. If you want even more Commando love, read my interview with Vernon Wells.
Do you remember that feeling where you wanted to be a character in a movie? As we grow up, that feeling goes away. Well let me tell you, I can still feel the yearning to be John Matrix that I felt as a 13-year-old. Sure, Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator made many take notice of Arnold. This is the movie that — to me — put him over the top.
Director Mark Lester told Empire, “It’s the granddaddy of action films as we know them today. And Arnold was the reason it got made.”
Who knew that it was originally a movie all about a soldier turning his back on violence? Well, that wasn’t what ended up on the screen. Instead, we have Arnold gleefully getting revenge on all manner of soldiers, thugs, mercs and habitual linesteppers for around 90 minutes of rip-roaring fun.
Yet when the movie starts, John Matrix is happy. He’s in the woods, feeding deer by hand, hanging out with his daughter Alyssa Milano and carrying trees around by himself. Then, after turning down an offer to come back in, a bunch of no-goodniks come on in and take his daughter. Even worse, his old best friend Bennett (Vernon Wells!) is their leader.
Also: Bennett dresses like, well, no one who has ever lived on this earth before. A chain mail sleeveless shirt would be enough, but then he has leather pants and fingerless gloves. It’s as if the entire design staff of Capcom, Data East, Konami and SNK all looked at the screen and said, “This is the blueprint for every fighting game we will ever make.”
Wells is legitimately unhinged in this movie. In that same Empire article, he said “.. I was so hyped to be in the movie, they could have asked me to jump off the Empire State Building and I probably would have. Making Commando was better than anything you could have smoked.”
Wings Hauser was going to play Bennett, which probably would have been awesome too.
This is a movie where Arnold murders between 81-102 people in twenty minutes. There’s a rocket launcher scene that sends me into a fit of hysteria. The hanging dudes off cliffs by their feet. All the wonderous one-liners. And oh yeah, “Let off some steam, Bennett!” You have no clue how many times that scene was rewound while we all screamed the line to one another.
Arnold made two films at Sherman Oaks and that place should have a gold statue of him that we can all genuflect in front of. This movie is a piece of cinema that no one would have the audacity to make today.
Look, when Dan Heyada is the big bad of your film, you’re doing it right.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally was on the site on December 2, 2020 and has been updated for Arnold Week.
I am sorry, Red Sonja. For years, I have doubted you. Surely you cannot be as good as Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. You have to be a weaker sister, I always thought, so I avoided you.
I was wrong. So wrong.
Today, dear reader, I am here to tell you that while this film is not as good as the first two Conan romps, it’s still an astounding sword and sorcery adventure filled with plenty of great effects, well-shot battles and a cast of some of my favorite actors.
Oddly enough, Red Sonja may be owned by the Robert E. Howard estate, but the character itself was really created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith, who used Howard’s Red Sonya of Rogatino as inspiration. But man, those 70’s Conan comics were monsters and people fell in love with the idea that Sonja could be as tough as Conan and had promised the goddess Scáthach that in exchange for heightened strength, stamina, agility and fighting skills that she would never lie with a man until he could defeat her in fair combat.
Let’s not debate how the survivor of sexual assault must pretty much get beat up to enjoy lovemaking, because that’s the kind of complex argument that won’t be solved inside a movie that’s really about stabbing people. I’m not saying it’s an important discussion to have, but I’m an expert in exploitation movies, not humanity.
Directed by Richard Fleischer, whose career goes from the heights of Soylent Green and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to the depths of The Jazz Singerand Amityville 3-D — not to mention Mandingo — this moves quick, looks good and is just plain fun.
After surviving the death of her family and being attacked by the soldiers of Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman*, who seems to relish the opportunity to play a villain instead of the female sidekick), Sonja trains to become a legendary warrior.
Meanwhile, her sister Varna (Janet Agren, Hands of Steel, City of the Living Dead) has become a priestess in an order of women who plan on banishing the Talisman, which created the world but could now destroy it. If any man touches it, he disappears, so of course Gedren wants to use it for her own ends. Led by Ikol (Ronald Lacey, Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark), her army kills the priestesses and takes the Talisman for their queen.
Lord Kalidor** (Arnold Schwarzenegger) finds Varna and brings Sonja to her, where she learns of the Talisman and how she can kill two birds with one stone by destroying it and Gedren. Her adventures take her to meet Prince Tarn (Ernie Reyes, Jr.), a young king of a land destroyed by Gedren, and his bodyguard Falkon (Paul L. Smith, who the handyman in Pieces and Bluto in Popeye). She also defeats the ominous Lord Brytag (Pat Roach, the former pro wrestler who shows up as a major bad guy in so many movies, from the mechanic that Indiana Jones knocks into a Flying Wing in Raiders of the Lost Ark to Hephaestus in Clash of the Titans, Toth-Amon in Conan the Destroyerand General Kael in Willow) before an awesome duel with Kalidor for the right to aardvark*** and then another battle against Gedren as her castle explodes with lava flowing everywhere.
Speaking of that great cast, this also has a third Indiana Jones alumni, Terry Richards, who played the Arabian swordsman that Indy so memorable shot after a long flourish of sword swinging. Plus, Tutte Lemkow, best known as the Fiddler on the Roof is a wizard and The Swordmaster that trains Sonja is Tad Horino, who was also Confucius in Bill and Red’s Bogus Journey. Erik Holmey, who played the soldier who asked “What is best in life?”, and replied, “The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair!” is in this. And of course, Arnold’s buddy Sven-Ole Thorsen shows up.
Plus, how can you be let down by an Ennio Morricone score?
Again, I’m sorry, Red Sonja. You’re actually pretty darn good.
*Bergman was offered the role of Red Sonja, but turned it down, choosing instead to play Queen Gedren. Producer Dino De Laurentiis met with actress Laurene Landon and was set to offer her the role until he learned that she had pretty much already played the same part in Hundra. He spent a year looking for an actress who looked like an Amazon, almost picking Eileen Davidson (The House On Sorority Row) before discovering Brigitte Nielsen on the cover of a magazine.
**There’s a fan theory that Kalidor is really Conan, as some heroes would use “adventuring names” while they were in other counties, like how Gandalf was also known as Mithrandir. De Laurentiis didn’t have the rights to use Conan again, which explains this financially. Speaking of money, Arnold signed up for a cameo as a favor to the producer, but one week turned into four and when he saw a rough cut of the movie, he realized that he was really a co-star. This is why he terminated his 10-year deal with De Laurentiis.
***They totally did, for real, according to Arnold in his book Total Recall – My Unbelievably True Life Story. Neilsen confirmed this in her book You Only Get One Life, saying that they had “no restrictions” in their lovemaking. You know, while some of us debated whether Stallone or Schwarzenegger was the best action hero, Neisen had Biblical knowledge.
June 16: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 80s action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
I have no idea what genre this movie is and I’ll bet it has no idea either. It is an example of one of my favorite microgenre: Italian filmmakers in America, further subset Italian filmmakers in Florida*.
Alberto De Martino doesn’t get mentioned in the same conversation as Argento or Fulci. He’s not even in the Lenzi, Martino or Deodato world either. But he did direct The Antichristand Holocaust 2000, two examples of the Xerox 70s occult boom that I have a particular fondness for. And he also made the shot in Canada poliziotteschi/giallo hybrid Strange Shadows In an Empty Room, which is a movie more people should watch and the downright weird superhero film The Pumaman. Also — and how can I forget this — he made the wildest Eurospy movie, Operation Kid Brother, which uses Sean Connery’s kid brother and everyone else that has ever been in a Bond film, daring Cubby Brocoli to repeat the violence — and yes, murder allegedly — that he unleashed on Ted Healy.
De Martino was also smart to cast David Warbeck and Laura Trotter as the leads. If I had my way, this would say “The stars of The Beyond and Nightmare City are back together for the first time!”
Warbeck is Craig Milford, a local reporter sent to a college — let’s assume it’s the University of Miami — to interview a professor cloning a cell from DNA that was found inside a meteorite. This seems like the worst of ideas, but you know how movie science works. As Milford leaves, gunmen break in, kill everyone and take the alien cells. They start erasing anyone who knows anything about the experiment and as that includes Milford, he goes on the run.
Somehow, Milford becomes our backwoods planet’s only savior as telekinetic businessman Anderson (John Ireland, who was in great stuff like Spartacus and Red River but I know him as King Arthur from Waxwork II: Lost in Time) wants to use that alien DNA, which is already growing into a quite honestly freaking me out looking alien fetus. He has help from another psychic extraterrestrial, Joanna Fitzgerald (Trotter), who he of course is going to do some reading under the covers with just as my wife walks in, angrily looks at the TV and says, “Why does this happen all the time in Italian movies?” and “That woman’s body hair is upsetting.”
The aliens left a message on the videotape for Milford that the alien baby is bad, baby, and we’re going to have to do something about it. That means that we’re going to watch Milford get launched around a room by a tentacled fetus, which I had no idea just how much I’d love. Also, by aliens, I mean that they are ghosts and one of them is just a big giant hand.
Between the score by Detto Mariano that approximates Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F” and Jan Hammer’s synth beats**, this movie’s title — and alternative version Miami Horror — are supposed to make us think Crockett and Tubbs. De Martino going by the name Martin Herbert is also supposed to fool us into thinking this is an American movie. Thankfully, it is deliriously Italian, filled with swamp boats, assassins and conspiracy. It makes a great double feature for the similarly goofball UFO quasi-gialo Eyes Behind the Stars.
Compounding the fact that this is an action movie is that the poster has three helicopters and an airboat all racing away from a gigantic explosion while Werbeck holds a revolver and a woman who is not in this movie in any way wears an outfit that Vampirella would think is kind of uncomfortable.
Also: Werbeck shoots a helicopter out of the air with a handgun, the kind of lunacy that only Jack Nicholson in whiteface gets away with.
In Jess Franco: From the Margins to Auteur Cinema. Analysis of the Cinematographic Story, he said “I started doing a movie that was titled Gente del Rio, in which appeared Mengele who was hidden there, and was wonderfully played by Howard Vernon. Gente del Rio was a film about some fishermen who live in a town in Central America and know that Mengele lives there, but nobody dares to come up to him. Until some of them attempt to catch him. The movie is their fight to get hold of that bastard. And they get him. It was based on persons I met in Brazil, former Nazis who lived like gods on some fucking rural estates, and what I wanted was to show the clash between these people and the humble people of the river. But the producer wanted to give more importance to the character of Mengele, but in Andrea Bianchi’s shabby action movie way. I did not want to do that with that character, who is a sinister and sordid type, but who must be given another treatment, not as if he was a street whore. So I abandoned the film, and in the end I left it. I did not finish it, nor did I want to finish it, because it was wrong, and I did not want it to appear out there on video. Almost all the material that I did with the Italians is like this, they did me a thousand dirty tricks, everything went wrong, and that’s why I have never admitted the film as mine.”
Nazi hunters Aaron Horner (Jack Taylor) and Marc Logan (Antonio Mayans, who was in nearly all of Franco’s later movies) have hunted down the escaped Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele (Howard Vernon) to South America, where he and his assistant Gertrud (Shirley Knight) have created a Fourth Reich, which mostly seems to involve experiments that created a monkey man and starting an army trained by crippled Vietnam veteran Wolfgang von Backey (Christopher Mitchum). Luckily, Horner and Logan have an army that includes kung fu experts, a crossbow shooting soldier, an acrobat named Mr. Agility and a female spy named Eva (Suzanne Andrews) already on the inside.
So yeah, while Franco wrote and started this, the aforementioned Bianchi (Burial Ground) finished it. It has little to none of the sleaze you expect from Jess Franco making a movie where soldiers face off against neo-Nazis who experiment on humans. Even Fernando Rey showing up for a cameo can’t make this any better and that’s a shame. This is being sold on the Franco name and it isn’t a Franco film.
The name Commando Mengele is better, though. I also feel that Jess Franco is like pizza or sex. Even if its bad, it’s still pizza or sex.
Also known as Ninja in the U.S.A., Ninja U.S.A. but not American Ninja — but if you told someone to get you that movie at the store and they brought you this the name did its job — this movie knows what you want right off the bo staff, showing Jerry Wong (Alexander Lou) fighting tons of ninjas to the death while also beating the absolute bark out of a tree for no reason at all. This movie gets the message that Ninja 3: The Domination laid bare for us all to never forget: start your movie with ninjas killing people and don’t connect it at all to the plot and you will be better for this experience.
Tyger McPherson has put together an army of ninjas to wipe out any witnesses to his drug dealings and the NYPD is stumped. This ninjitsu army follows Tyger so devoutly that they will die for him no questions asked. But Tyger has another side. He’s a Vietnam vet who adopted two kids, Jerry (who grew up to be the Jerry the ninja we already met) and NYPD cop Ronny (Alex Yip), who is devoted to putting drug dealers in jail. To add insult to injury, Jerry is getting married to Penny (Rosaline Li), a reporter also out to expose her new father-in-law and somehow, she gets evidence on the wedding day and gets kidnapped. Man, I thought the cops coming to my first wedding was bad.
If you hate your dad, at least he never kidnapped your wife, had some thugs assault her, videotaped it for you and then sent it to your house.
You can watch this on YouTube and see if it makes any sense to you, I guess.
If you owned a Korean film called The Uninvited Guest Of The Star Ferry, it probably wouldn’t sell in the west. But what if you shot new footage of Supreme Ninja having his three greatest warriors — Ninja Masters Tamashi, Baron and Harry MacQueen (Richard Harrison) — celebrate the second decade of his power by assembling the Golden Ninja Warrior and making him impervious from swords, well, then you’d be able to sell that.
Godfrey Ho. Genius or madman? Maybe both?
Two years after the three ninjas took each part of the statue to keep their master from becoming too strong, Karada has killed the ninja Tamashi and Baron and Harry have been manipulated into battling one another. Will Supreme Ninja take the statue and reign forever?
So yes, that’s the basic plot. What I have not captured — I really don’t know if I can — is just how lunatic this movie gets, constantly introducing new characters and ideas and rarely following up on them, like if someone introduced Jack Kirby to manga and then slipped him some amphetamines. I also am writing this under the influence of COVID-19 and the way my brain has been going from lucid to foggy to sleep to pain to being exhausted in a matter of seconds feels exactly like this movie but in a way better way than not being able to breathe and needing to sanitize my hands every ten seconds.
Richard Harrison is a hero. I mean, yes, his career probably was ruined by Godfrey Ho repeatedly re-editing him into movies. I wish there was a way I could send him some cash by Paypal to make up for that because in this movie he wears a camouflage ninja suit and talks on a Garfield phone and honestly, I’ve never seen Robert Deniro do that.
There’s also a scene where one ninja can shoot fire out of his hands and another shoots ice and you know, that’s no CGI, it’s two dudes putting their lives on the line to entertain you thirty some years in the digital future. Also: sex scenes that refine the word gratuitous.
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