Baby Born With Full Beard! BBQ Of The Dead! Killer Vacuum Destroys Town! Tabloid promises to bring the good old days of the black and white National Enquirer — and then the Weekly World News, which was printed on the old black and white press when the more socially redeemable Enquirer went full color — to life*.
This was directed by Glen Coburn (Blood Suckers from Outer Space), Matt Devil (Ozone: The Attack of the Redneck Mutants) and Bret McCormick (his The Abomination is one of the most incredibly upsetting in the best way movies I’ve seen).
Despite this having an awesome concept, the execution fails. When your movie starts with aliens attacking an aerobics class and it leads to yawns instead of excitement, you really are struggling. The stories aren’t even really stories, just scenes jammed together. A gun battle between rednecks leads to the birth of the bearded baby. Zombies have a cookout. And a tornado comes out of a vacuum. Otherwise, reporters discuss how they get these stories.
A tabloid horror anthology is a great idea. This isn’t it.
And yes, that is Lisa Loeb in the third story.
*The tabloid also inspired David Byrne’s True Stories.
If their work in Jungle Rats (reviewed this week, look for it) wasn’t enough to satiate your Philippines-based, Rambo-inspired Namsploitation . . . Jim Gaines, Teddy “Chiu” Page, and Romano “Rom” Kristoff are back in Black Fire. (Go ahead, make fun. But I loved renting these Rom-Rambo knockoffs back in the day. My Rom-ness is only matched by my Michael Sopkiw-ness and my Mark Gregory-ness.)
Kristoff is Sgt. Frank Johnson — aka, Code Name: Black Fire — who is not just a lethal Vietnam killing machine: he’s a lethal ninja warrior killing machine: a skill the bulky Stallone didn’t know and couldn’t do if he tried. But our favorite Spanish expatriate martial artist can! But Agent Black Fire is so skilled that he’s become not only a danger to the ‘Gong, but to his own men: his commanding officers mark him for termination. And beware of Black Fire’s special ops, missile-equipped crossbow!
After suffering a concussion from a grenade blast in ‘Nam, Sgt. Frank experiences childhood flashbacks as a ninja in those dreams: he’s tapped back into is inner Qi — and he’s gonna need it. Upon recouping, Sgt. Frank is sent to San Sebastian with his buddy Sgt. Jim Anderson (yep, Jim Gaines) to work as U.S. military advisers . . . or investigate “something” (does it really matter; we’re not here for plot points). And the duo stumble into the (white-suited, natch) base commander’s illegal weapons ring. Yep: Black Fire must be terminated.
This one’s got it all: bad guys in eyepatches, exploding huts, exploding towers, “dramatic” slo-motion scenes of screaming as the bullets fly, and the ubiquitous, out-of-sync bad dubbing. Are there suspicious stock scenes you’ve seen before? Is the music muddy-familiar?
Uh, is this your first time watching a Silver Star Film production? Quick asking stupid questions and enjoy the “Rambo” of it all.
And, remember our “Ancient Future Week” of old computer-based movies from the ’80s and ’90s? Check out the very cute Chantal Mansfield (In her only movie role? Why?) banging out the data on the green-on-black MS-DOS CRT helping our Sgts. Frank and Jim solve the war crimes.
You have to feel bad for the Vietnam vets in this movie. They go back to Nam with the best of intentions, hoping to destroy the Golden Triangle’s drug empires, but when they get there they learn that their fellow soldiers are the ones behind it all.
How did they get there? Well, Chris Mitchum had a gas station that he stopped some criminals from robbing, so they responded by killing his adopted son and assaulting his wife. Instead of, you know, going through counseling and working through it, she decides that the best thing she can do is kill herself while he’s calling the cops. I’m not one to tell anyone how to deal with their grief, but somewhere between anger and bargaining and acceptance and hope is drawing up the plans for a mobile battle RV and building motorcycles with rockets on them.
I mean, this movie starts out as Death Wish, has our hero get arrested and then the authorities tell him to get together with his old commandos and go do some real killing. This feels like the kind of movie a bunch of strange children with too many G.I. Joes and perhaps too much knowledge of cocaine would film on their parent’s camcorder in stop motion. Inside their mind, the movie looks like the stuff of dreams. To adults, it looks like an action figure just standing there while children scream things about adopting babies in flashback sequences.
This is a movie that has a commando unit named the Rat Bastards and an adopted Vietnamese child named Charlie. If you can commit to that — and you love John Phillip Law as much as I do — then you really can’t lose.
Here’s how the hiearchy of renting movies worked in the 80s: Are all the Stallone, Arnold and Van Damme movies out? Then reach for some Michael Dudikoff. Oh, those are out? Does the store have any Cirio Santiago stuff? Good deal. No? They’re all out? Well, I guess Bobby A. Suarez will do. I recommend Cleopatra Wong and another movie he wroteBionic Boy.
Based on the first two books in The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, this movie had been in production since 1973 — twelve years! — before it got released by a Disney that wasn’t looking to play it safe. Actual production may not have started until 1980, but man — talk about a movie that was long in the making.
Another reason why the movie took so long to get to theaters was because of a horrific test screening of the rough cut inside Disney’s private theater in Burbank, California. The “cauldron born” sequence was so intense that most of the children in the theater literally ran out, which led to new Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg ordering them to be cut. When producer Joe Hale objected, Katzenberg got an edit suite and did it himself. Hale went to Disney CEO Michael Eisner and put a stop to that, but the new edits causes a seven month delay and you can still see noticable jumps in what was removed.
The release of the film was a major loss for Walt Disney Studios and put the future of the animation department in jeopardy, giving The Black Cauldron the nickname “the film that almost killed Disney.” I guess that means that we’ll never see the other three novels in The Chronicles of Prydain huh?
Katezenberg would later say that the film lacked “the humor, pathos, and the fantasy which had been so strong in Lloyd Alexander’s work. The story had been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it was heartbreaking to see such wonderful material wasted.” As for the author, he claimed, “First, I have to say, there is no resemblance between the movie and the book. Having said that, the movie in itself, purely as a movie, I found to be very enjoyable. I had fun watching it. What I would hope is that anyone who sees the movie would certainly enjoy it, but I’d also hope that they’d actually read the book.”
Look — it’s a movie with John Hurt’s voice of a gigantic Satanic Horned King, as well as voiceovers by John Huston as the narrator and John Byner as the heroic Gurgi. Of course I’m going to be inclined to like this, even if it came nowhere near my small town in 1985 and wasn’t released on video for more than a decade.
The film is all about the adventures of Taran who has dreams of becoming a famous warrior. A sorceror named Dallben worries that the Horned King will use his psychic pig — yes really — Hen Wen — double yes really — to locate the Black Cauldron, an occult tool that can create an invicible army of the dead. Why was this made? Who would have such a use for it? And why wasn’t it destroyed?
Well, we wouldn’t have a movie otherwise.
I had to step away from our live Disney week and make an exception for this film. I’d never seen it and it was high time I changed that.
It’s kind of amazing that after 2.5 million total drawings, 400 gallons of paint, 15,000 pencils, 300 erasers, 400 paint brushes, 1,165 different hues and colors and over 34 miles of film stock — according to Disney News Magazine Summer 1985 — that Disney buried this movie.
The legend of this movie has moved on past its failure. There’s a rumor that Legend of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto based a lot of that game on this movie, which makes a lot of sense.
Ran means chaos or turmoil and that’s what’s at the heart of Akira Kurosawa’s take on King Lear and Mōri Motonari. The director had been planning to make this film for decades and this was the realitization of a decade of painting the storyboards for this film. It would be his last epic and the most expensive film that he would ever make.
Beyond the autobiographical nature of this story, Kurosawa also saw the battle scenes as metaphor for nuclear warfare and the high anxiety after Hiroshima. There’s also the influence of Japanese Noh theater for two of the protagonists, Hidetora and Lady Kaede, whose single-mindedness stand in contrast to the rest of the cast of characters.
Hidetora is a powerful warlord at the close of his life who has decided to divide up his kingdom amongst his sons, with Taro gaining the First Castle and the leadership of their family, while his brothers Jiro and Saburo are to support him and live in the lesser castles.
The wise old man explains unity using three arrows. It is easy to snap one arrow but three together are more durable. Saburo snaps all three arrows and calls his father a fool, which leads to him and a servant named Tango being exiled. Fujimaki, a visiting leader who watches all of this, agrees with the brash young man and offers him his daughter in marriage.
Taro’s wife Lady Kaede also demands that her husband go to war, still angry that her entire family was killed by Hidetora. The constant battles — gunfire has replaced swords and arrows — drives the old man mad as he wanders the wilderness, haunted by visions of those he has destroyed in his journey to power.
As the entire family follows him into some level of insanity, with war, intrigue and double crosses throughout, it seems as if every castle will crumble into nothingness.
How important was Ran to Kurosawa? His wife of 39 years Yôko Yaguchi, died during the production and he only mourned for one day. His eyesight had also completely deteriorated by the time principal photography began, so his assistants used his paintings as guides to frame each scene.
A new 4K scanned release of Ran is now available from Lionsgate. If you are a lover of film, I urder you to add this to your collection.
This movie feels like it belongs to no set time and space. I can freely admit that it’s not good, but also that I’m fascinated by it. If asked to describe it in ten words or less, I’d say, “Imagine if Cafe Flesh was about comedy and not good.”
It’s set in a fascist police set of the future, but shot on the sets of Freddie Francis’ The Doctor and the Devils. Nobody bothered to clean those sets, so they are covered with straw. This movie is to straw as Conquest is to fog.
Sam Coex (Steve Munroe) is a stand-up comedian who can’t get booked, so he kills — not like you kill on stage — his rival Joey Myers, buries him in his garden and takes over his career, becoming a big success. He starts sleeping with stripper named Ann all while the zombified Joey starts to haunt him An American Werewolf in London-style.
You have to wonder what the Welsh miners and doctors whose hard-earned money went to funding this thought when they saw the final result. As for its writer and director, Richard Driscoll, he was found guilty of a $2.3 million tax fraud over the invoices for his movie Eldorado, which starred Daryl Hannah, Caroline Munro, Brigitte Nielsen, Peter O’Toole, Rik Mayall, David Carradine, Jeff Fahey, Steve Guttenberg and Michael Madsen. He served three years in jail for the crime. Some would say his worst offenses would be the films that he makes, which are Bruno Mattei-esque jabs at recreating other films like Kannibal (Silence of the Lambs) and at least two movies with a title close to Grindhouse.
Man, now I have a whole new thing to be obsessed about and yet, I know in my heart that the films of Driscoll are not in any way good. Such is how it goes. Also, the lovemaking scenes in this movie disturbed me and I grew up watching the Dark Brothers films, so just imagine the things that I have seen.
Editor’s Note: As if we don’t have enough movies to review! An anonymous reader confessed their love for this movie and baffled how we never included it as part of our endless apoc-love at B&S About Movies. You know the drill, ye reader: Strap on the popcorn bucket, let’s apoc this mother, Texas-style!
And it just goes to show you: Reviewing VHS junk like Cybernator— a film not reissued on DVD that’s being promoted by a studio shingle, reviewed for the simple passion of the film itself — pays off.In fact, another reader’s suggestion inspired our review of Robo Warriors, posting later today.
When it comes to the ‘80s video fringe, we not only expect the bizarre—we demand the bizarre. Austin, Texas, filmmaker Ronald W. Moore—in his only feature film writing and directing effort—answered that challenge with a sci-fi black-comedic pastiche of the Italian apocalypse rip-offs of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York and the “snob vs. slobs” rip-offs of Animal House. Only the slobs have been replaced by Reagan-era nuclear punks overlorded by Splatter, a plastic-cum-cardboard Robocop on a Terminator tear.
While it looks ’80s Italian apocalyptic, it’s not. This is a Texas-styled apoc, but not as cool as 2020: Texas Gladiators.
If you’ve watched the nondescript, post-apocalyptic ramblings of City Limits, the punk-rock apoc-drivel of Radioactive Dreams and the rad n’ gnarly post-apoc shenanigans of Night of the Comet, then you’ve traveled these low-budget streets before; streets that—outside of a few techno-trinkets to make the proceedings seem like the future—look just like our present-day streets. And when that “present-day” apocalypse arrives, be it via “The Big One” or by plague or by comet or by whatever nuclear deus ex machina falls from above, the “mutants,” depending on the film’s budget, raid the local S&M leather boutique or Reagan-era Mohawk-and-heavy mascara emporium. And at a reported $250,000 budget, Future-Kill raids the latter retailer to give us gangs of disenfranchised punks—punks who got lost on the set of Enzo G. Castellari’s The Bronx Warriors and Escape from the Bronx while on the way to their background acting gigs for Suburbia and Repo Man. And Lord Cyrus help them if they stumbled onto the set of The Warriors (Future-Kill’s most obvious model), for these MTV video punks won’t stand a chance against the Baseball Furies, the Electric Eliminators, the Gramercy Riffs, and Turnbull AC’s*.
Maybe if Future-Kill were as entertaining as any of those films and not the apoc-swill that is America 3000 and Robot Holocaust (okay, maybe it’s a wee bit better than those two swillers: a wee bit). Maybe if the proceedings were more Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics (“Butcher Baby“) and less Dale Bozzio and Missing Persons (“Words“) roamin’ those Austin mean streets and the gangs were more Walter Hill-inspired, Future-Kill could have lived up to its faux H.R Giger packaging. Yeah, at the time, we thought the artwork was a bogus H.R Giger rip-off hawking another R.O.T.O.R artwork-hiding-a-shitty-film scam, so we avoided renting Future-Kill during its VHS heyday.
Then Ronald W. Moore’s apoc-meets-frat comedy boondoggle became connected to Oscar gold.
John Hawkes, one of Future-Kill’s minor support actors, ended up at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards held in 2011 and rubbed elbows with Tom Hanks—who has his own ‘80s VHS debut-acting bone in the closet with He Knows You’re Alone. So, its Texas Chainsaw and H.R Giger faux-connections aside, how can one not want to watch Future-Kill, once learning that one of its actors earned multiple “Best Actor” nominations and awards between 2010 to 2012 for the films Winter’s Bone, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and The Sessions? (Another of John’s early, minor support roles was working with Gregory Hines in the 1994 radio-set thriller, Dead Air.)
However, before the mainstream success of John Hawkes inspiring us to seek out copies of Future-Kill, the truth behind that “bogus” H.R. Giger artwork was finally told in an audio commentary by director/writer Ronald W. Moore and producer/star Edwin Neal—courtesy of a 2006 Subversive Cinema DVD reissue that included reproductions of Giger’s original artwork for the film.
While H.R Giger famously provided production drawings for Alien (as well as 1995’s Species), the Swiss surrealist rebuffed several studio offers to design theatrical one-sheets, including overtures from 20th Century Fox, the studio that brought his work to a mass audience (with an honorable mention to ‘70s prog-rockers Emerson, Lake and Palmer; the band used Giger’s work on their 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery**). So, it’s a shock to discover that the artwork for Future-Kill is, in fact, a real Giger, titled “Future Kill 1,” painted in 1984 specifically for the film.
According to the Alien Explorations, which chronicles the works of Giger, Giger was a fan of Tobe Hooper’s film; since Future-Kill featured two actors from Texas Chainsaw, he agreed to design the poster. At the time, Ronald W. Moore completed filming and was in the editing process when he approached the artist at a Zurich exhibition and begged Giger to design the poster (Giger has stated Moore was in tears at one point)—based on the fact Moore prematurely promised investors a theatrical one-sheet by Giger, so to secure film financing. Now Moore had to pay up, figuratively speaking. Also enticing Giger to design the poster: Giger and Kathy Hogan—the make-up and costume designer who developed Splatter’s bat wing and Mohawk-styled shoulder and helmet armor, which served as the model for Giger’s artwork—came into a sexual relationship.
While Hawkes was only a minor support player, the real “stars” of Future-Kill were Edwin Neal and Marilyn Burns, each who appeared in Texas Chainsaw. However, even with that “star power,” the film still lacked “major stars” and received its limited, regional theatrical release solely based on the fact that “the artist who did Alien” designed the poster (and the film looked nothing like Alien, natch). Also of note: Edwin Neal didn’t “star” in Texas Chainsaw; he had an extended cameo as a self-cutting hitchhiker; meanwhile, Marilyn Burns, who starred in Texas Chainsaw, only has an extended cameo in Future-Kill. The film’s Texas Chainsaw-connection also goes a bit deeper, as Ronald W. Moore got his start in the business as a soundman on Mongrel; the film also served as the lone directing effort by art director Robert A. Burns, who worked in that capacity on The Hills Have Eyes, Don’t Go Near the Park, and The Howling—as well as the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; Burns was responsible for the “bone furniture” and its related “bone room” scene.
Maybe, if Moore hired Robert A. Burns to work on the set of Future-Kill, we’d have a film that looked as good as those films—and its chief protagonist, Splatter, would have been the Gigeresque biomechanical xenomorph promised and not the low-rent Godfrey Ho wannabe we got; if you’ve seen Ho’s Pacific Rim cyborg romp Robo Vampire (1988), then you understand that analogy to the canons of “Hong Kong’s Ed Wood.” Godfrey Ho, as with ‘60s U.S. drive-in purveyor Al Adamson before him, was infamous for splicing two or three unrelated films into a new product. And, at first watch and without knowing the backstory of Future Kill, it looks as if Ronald W. Moore assembled his own portmanteau poo akin to Night Train to Terror (which is three movies spliced into one) and Evil Town (which is a four-director junkfest rooted in a mid-‘70s horror dumpster-fire called God Bless Dr. Shagetz).
Now, that’s not the case with Future-Kill, but it sure seems like two, unrelated, spliced scripts or unfinished films: one a failed frat-house comedy; the other a failed post-apocalyptic tale. And thanks to the ‘80s frat house hi-jinks and the Philippines-cum-Italian future world we’re watching, we have no idea what the hell is going on or where we are. The “destination,” to paraphrase the lyrics of Missing Persons, is “unknown.”
Oh, Wendy! Are we beyond the valley of 1984? Will extras show up in monkey suits? When does this future-world of Future-Kill take place? What’s the Orwellian masterplan, dag gummit!?
Well, it must be in an alternate universe or timeline or a future stuck in a DeLorean time loop where technology has afforded us the ability to create cyborgs—while everything else looks ‘80s “snobs vs. slobs” comedic. And since we’re on the cheap, our “mutants” aren’t so much nuc-deformed; they’re just a bunch of snotty, Reagan-era punks with an anti-nuclear chip on their shoulders. You know the punk-type: As with my ex, Dawn, she listened to a couple of Black Flag and Dead Kennedy records, went to spoken word concerts by Henry Rollins and Jello Biafra, then raised the flags against Halliburton and rallied about “Blood for Oil” through the puffs of her clove cigarettes, its scented fumes clinging to the fibers of her faded, Hot Topic Clash tee-shirt.
Anyway, in Ronald W. Moore’s future world, those errant punk rock scamps have—in an eerie foreshadow of the sociopolitical upheavals of 2020—formed their own CHOP/CHAZ perimeter in downtown Austin, Texas, as part of an anti-nuclear movement. The most feared of all of the nuc-mutants is Splatter (Texas Chainsaw’s Edwin Neal), the aforementioned Robocop-cum-Terminator, whose radiated mutations have turned him into a metal-and-spiked covered madman.
Okay, so that takes care of the “slobs” portion of the film.
Meanwhile, back on the campus of Faber College in snobby Porkyville, out in the ritzy, unaffected Austin environs, our perpetually partying preppy a-holes live a carefree life of booze, boobs, and pranks where rich parents get them out of their Hunter Bidenesque jams. When one of their pranks risks the shutdown of their frat, our frat-lads are forced to dress “punk” by a rival frat and venture into slobby Punkville to kidnap one of the mutants for an end-all-be-all of all pranks. Of course, they run afoul of the metal-clad n’ spiked Splatter. Oops.
Okay, so begins The Warriors portion of our film.
Once Splatter (our “Luther,” if you will) settles his Alpha-Male dispute (i.e., murder) with Eddie Pain (our “Cyrus,” natch), the anti-nuke movement’s ‘60s-inspired hippie-punk leader (uniting the gangs, natch), our Robonator is off-the-chain with a Termicop chip on his shoulder—and he’s framed our prep-boys (i.e., The Warriors) for Pain’s murder. As our Delta House rejects make their “Escape from Austin,” they save a hot mutant punk chick from pervert cop rape because, well, as usual, when the apocalypse arrives, man’s inner “rape genes” mutate, so as to preserve the species. And preppy boy falls for punky girl. And we hear a few tunes—in the best part of the film—from real life Austin band Max and the Make-Ups (but we wished The Plamastics showed up to do do “Black Leather Monster“) as we (finally) meet Texas Chainsaw’s Marilyn Burns in her under 20-minutes role as Dorothy Grimm, the revenge-seeking girlfriend of Eddie Pain.
Is it a plot-spoiler telling you Splatter dies and the preps Escape from Austin? And it all plays as if Universal ripped this for Judgement Night, their 1993 suburbanites-lost-in-the-underbelly-of-the-mean city starring Emilio Estevez pursued by Denis Leary?
When submitted to the ratings board for its limited, regional theatrical run in and around its native Austin, Future-Kill received an “X” rating for extreme violence. One minor edit was made to secure an “R” rating in the U.S. Meanwhile, across the ocean, while the puritanical purveyors of philth (know your Motorhead) in the U.K. didn’t toss Future-Kill onto their “Video Nasties” list, they forced a title change to Night of the Alien (in other overseas quarters the title Splatter was used) and two-and-half minutes were cut—which eliminated a neck breaking, the killing of Clint (one of the preps), portions of Splatter’s stabbing, a woman’s fondling by Splatter, and Splatter’s sexual encounter with a street girl—all of which were restored on the subsequent DVD released by Subversive Cinema.
You can watch VHS rips of Future-Kill on You Tube HERE and HERE. You can also learn more about the film with this behind the scenes, 30-minute featurette created for the Subversive DVD. The trailers come and go, but we got the TV trailer and the VHS trailer on You Tube.
Oh, we almost forgot about the pinball machine!
More imagines of the machine are at pinside.com/multiple sites.
The infamous Deep Throat pinball machine, custom made by Robert A. Burns, which made its debut in Mongrel, also appears in Future Kill. The history of the game is discussed on the pinside.com message boards, your source for all things pinball. After we posted our October 2020 review of Mongrel, Joe ‘O Donnell, feverishly working on his Rondo Hatton documentary Rondo and Bob, let us know he is no longer in possession of the pinball machine. It was sold to help fund the production of Rondo and Bob and is now with a private collector. The good news is that Rondo and Bob, the story of Robert A. Burns’s fandom of Rondo Hatton, is completed and heading to film festival circuit.
* Oh, the mighty QWERTY’in warriors of the Internet, you gotta love ’em. Jennifer M. Wood, over at Mental Floss, took up the challenge to chronicle all of the street gangs in 1978’s The Warriors in her feature “21 Street Gangs Features in The Warriors.” Nice!
** H.R Giger’s work will be incorporated into the currently-in-development film Karn Evil 9 based on the rock-suite of the same name from Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s rock-opera Brain Salad Surgery.
Be sure to check out our Atomic Dustbin blowout tribute to apoc-films of the ’70s and ’80s. Part 1 will get you started.
Note 1: As always, thanks to Paul Z. over at VHS Collector.com, once again, for the artwork assist. Be sure to check out his reviews for the latest DVD and Blu-ray reissues of our favorite VHS classics at his Analog Archivist You Tube portal.
Note 2: We’ve since received a copy of and reviewed Rondo and Bob.
Note 3: If you have a favorite film that we’ve missed, you’re welcome to let us know via our contact form. We’re always hearing from our many, ever-growing readers and welcome you to join in the fun. We’re united in film! And thanks for thinking of us to review your favorites. We try our best. Keep those suggestions coming. When you’re nice to us, we return the favor!
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.
Phew. We did it! Twelve Ron Marchini films in two days. You know the drill! Yee-haw, let’s round ’em up!
Born in California and rising through the U.S. Army’s ranks to become a drill sergeant, in his civilian life, Ron Marchini earned the distinction as the best defensive fighter in the U.S.; by 1972, he was ranked the third best fighter in the country. Upon winning several worldwide tournaments, and with Robert Clouse’s directing success igniting a worldwide martial arts film craze with Enter the Dragon (1973), the South Asian film industry beckoned.
After making his debut in 1974’s Murder in the Orient, Marchini began a long friendship with filmmaker Paul Kyriazi, who directed Ron in his next film, the epic Death Machines, then later, in the first of Ron’s two appearances as post-apoc law officer John Travis, in Omega Cop.
Ron also began a long friendship with Leo Fong (Kill Point) after their co-staring in Murder in the Orient; after his retirement from the film industry — after making eleven dramatic-action films and one documentary — Ron concentrated on training and writing martial arts books with Leo, as well as becoming a go-to arts teacher. Today, he’s a successful California almond farmer.
In the annals of martial arts tournaments, Marchini is remembered as Chuck Norris’s first tournament win (The May 1964 Takayuki Kubota’s All-Stars Tournament in Los Angeles, California) by defeating Marchini by a half a point. Another of Chuck’s old opponents, Tony Tullener, who beat Norris in the ring three times, pursued his own acting career with the William Riead-directed Scorpion.
You can learn more about Ron Marchini with his biography at USAdojo.com. An interview at The Action Elite, with Ron’s friend and Death Machines director Paul Kyriazi, also offers deeper insights.
Ron, second from right, with Chuck Norris, shaking hands, 1965. Courtesy of Ken Osbourne/Facebook.
Black tee-shirt image courtesy of Spreadshirt.Art work/text by B&S About Movies.
We love ya, Ron!
About the Review Authors: Sam Panico is the founder, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, and editor-in-chief of B&S About Movies. You can visit him on Lettebox’d and Twitter. R.D Francis is the grease bit scrubber, dumpster pad technician, and staff writer at B&S About Movies. You canvisit him on Facebook.
After making his debut in Murder in the Orient(1974) with Leo Fong (Kill Point) and finding a home in our public domain hearts with Death Machines (1976), Ron Marchini retreated from the film industry to concentrate on training and writing martial arts books with Leo Fong, as well as becoming a go-to arts teacher. He returned to our drive-in screens for his third film, Dragon’s Quest (1983). Sadly, as with Arctic Warriors (1989), Ron’s third film is a Marchini title lost to the analog ages. There’s no VHS tape images on the web and the blogs dedicated to Ron’s career make no mention of the film.
So, in desperation . . . and in the grand tradition of low-budget studios recycling artwork (know your Michael Sopkiw vs. Mark Gregory movies), we made our own (it must be cheesy) Dragon’s Quest VHS sleeve with the Mexican-distributed artwork from Ninja Warriors. Oh, what might have been. . . .
Image courtesy of Todo Coleccion Online books, art, and collectibles/design R.D Francis/text PicFont.
Courtesy of the digital catalogers at the IMDb, all we know about Dragon’s Quest is that the film was shot in the native Filipino and Tagalog languages of the Philippines and that Ron portrayed a character named Dragon. Director Celso Ad. Castillo has 65 directing credits and 50 writing credits (he only directs Dragon’s Quest). His career led to his winning the “Cinema Original Award” at the 6th Cinema One Originals Digital Film Festival 2010 for the horror film 666.
As with much of the East and South Asian films cataloged at the IMDb, most of Castillo’s resume entries, as with Dragon’s Quest and his award-winner 666, are barren, dead pages. While most of Castillo’s films were Philippine-only distributed, several have English-language titles, so, most likely, they received distribution outside of his homeland: Dr. Yes (1965), Zebra (1965), The Tall, Dark, and the Handsome (1968), Dirty Face Max (1968), Inside Job (1970), The Virgin (1971), Isabel of the Islands (1975), Virgin People (1984), Snake Sisters (1984), Isla (1985), Paradise Inn (1985), and Virgin People 2 (1996). Unless your willing to explore the Filipino online marketplace for any possible VHS issues or grey DVDs, we’ll just have to let Castillo’s Dragon’s Quest go and live in the now.
The VHS I remember. It feels like home.
AKA Ninja Commandos and American Ninja — Distributor hornswoggling to convince us Arnie or Michael Dudikoff will appear as a ninja warrior
That brings us to Ron’s fourth film — and his first of four appearance as Steve Parrish: Ninja Warriors. At the time, Cannon was swimming in cash with their initiating a new wave of martial arts films in the ’80s with the likes of Michael Dudikoff in every derivative of “American” and “Ninja” and “Warrior” in the title — and with Ron’s old tournament mate, Chuck Norris. As with most of the Ninja-cum-Kung fu flicks of the Filipino variety, you’re getting lots of action adrift in the seas of no plot: but who watches these movies for their plots or character development? And the acting stinks, but the fights are great: but who watches these films for their acting; we came for the fights, the acrobatics, and the stunts. Look, let’s be honest: it’s action porn. We watch porn for the porn and ninja movies for ninjas. And President Reagan — via photographs — is all over the place, just so we know that, while this was shot in the Philippines, the action takes place in America — although nothing in this film looks like America.
So . . . this film rolls out the old “secret formula” trope (this time: mind control) that can either save or destroy the world — depending on who possesses said formula. Baddie Ninja Kurado (Ken Watanabe; not that one, the other one) and his evil scientist boss, Dr. Anderson (Mike Cohen), want the formula. So Kurado’s seven-man, cartwheeling gas-masked paramilitary ninja unit storms the government lab (“Top Secret” stenciled on the cover, natch) and dispatches the ubiquitously feeble security guards by fire, throwing stars, grappling hooks, swords, and ball bearings/marbles; attack-by-trees is their forte. The ninjas, led by Kurado’s best warrior (Romano Kristoff), have succeed. But they only secured half of the formula.
Now, for their next mission: storm a country mansion to kidnap the tennis pro daughter of a wealthy scientist (the ‘ol chloroform n’ burlap sack trope; I was going to use the word “gag,” but I like trope, better, for its reader-irritation levels and to display my thesaurus-ignorance in finding non-repetitive words in my writing) as leverage to secure the second half of the formula. And the ground’s guards, as well as the cops, are, once again, dispatched in quick succession, but a policewoman is kidnapped; in a prisoner exchange gone bad with a captured ninja, the ninjas murder their cop hostage. To paraphase Tommy Wiseau: Is plot twist . . . of no consequence.
Well, it’s time to call in Steve Parrish: Ninja Warrior. And, while Steve has no last name here, in interviews over the years, Marchini has stated — as well as MarchiniHeads more fanboy-manic than I — that Ninja Warriors is the first Steve Parrish adventure. Of course, there’s no character development regarding Steve’s past to confirm his Parrishness. For he just is: a lone wolf wrapped in a puzzle sandwiched in an even-fewer-dollars spaghetti, uh, noodles western, enigma. (How’s that for a non-trope laden sentence? R.D has mad skills.)
Anyway, Lt. Kevin Washington (Paul Vance), lost amid this ninja tomfoolery, knows Steve better than anybody; he calls in his old buddy for schoolin’ of his Japan-based martial arts knowledge in the ways the ninja. But Parrish soon realizes “knowing” the ninja ways isn’t enough: to defeat them, he must become . . . a Ninja Warrior.
Romano Kristoff pops up often in our Marchini reviews this week. Amid his 30 films, he worked with Mark “Trash” Gregory in Just a Damned Soldier (1988) and Tan Zan: Ultimate Mission (1988). Ken Watanabe, who also penned Ninja Warriors, also stars in our favorite Brent Huff film of all time (Hey, Sho Kosugi, we love you too.): Nine Deaths of the Ninja (1985).
Paul Vance made his acting debut as Praxis in the batshite-all-over-the-place wonder that is W Is War (1983) and Mad Warrior (1984) for Willy Milan, and Slash Exterminator (1984, with Romano Kristoff) for Jun Gallardo. In addition, Vance wrote Slash Exterminator and SFX Retailator for Gallardo. Romano Kristoff, starring here for director Teddy Chiu/Teddy Page, also worked on two of Page’s best: Black Fire (1985) and Jungle Rats (1988) (that we seriously need to rewatch and review . . . for a “Philippine War Week” blowout).
If you’re a frequent visitor to the Pasta and Philippine Apocalypses and Vietnam war zones, you’ll recognize the support cast of Mike Cohen, Mike Monty, and Nick Nicholas, each who could easily have a month-long B&S About Movies tribute month based on their respective resumes.
So . . . yeah, Ninja Warriors is bad. But it’s awesome bad because it’s better made than most Rambo and Arnie Commando pasta and noodle rips. Director Teddy Page, averaging a Woody Allen-inspired one film a year across 30-plus credits, ranks right up their with Cirio H. Santiago (Equalizer 2000) in terms of quality-against-the-budget and could teach a thing or two, or three, to Godfrey Ho (Devil’s Dynamite) and Jun Gallardo (Desert Warrior).
You can stream the majesty of Ninja Warriors on You Tube. It’s a kick!’
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies
If you had basic cable at any time in the 80s and 90s, there’s a good chance you’ve seen this movie, which strangely enough is based on the Bard’s Twelfth Night. It was written by Dennis Feldman, who went on to write The Golden Child and the first two Species movies, and Jeff Franklin, who wrote Summer School, Love Stinks and then created Full House.
Pretty much any kid who grew up in the 80s can tell you the story of Terri Griffith (Joyce Hyser), who becomes Terry Griffith as another school, all to write a story that proves that men get better treatment than women. She takes on Rick Morehouse (Clayton Rohner, April Fools Day and I, Madman) as her project, transforming him from geek into someone girls are interested in before falling for him herself.
She already has a boyfriend — it’s Leigh McCloskey from Inferno! — and gets fixed up with Sherilyn Fenn, which is pretty much the best fix-up of all time, and runs afoul of perennial bad teen Billy Zapka. Seriously, Zapka was the ultimate 80s heel between The Karate Kid, Back to School and this movie.
I’m not sure that this movie could come out today. The idea of a girl being a guy for comedic value would have to rub someone the wrong way. But maybe people could watch it and think, “My parents sure liked some silly films,” to which point they’d get the reply, “That was on Comedy Central all the time.”
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