Pathos: Segreta Inquietudine, the original Italian title for this movie, means Passion: Secret Anxiety. That pretty much sums it up, as this giallo feels closer to one of those Cinemax After Dark films that mixes up murder with softcore sex. Well, this movie also has Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue” in it, which is a first for any giallo I’ve seen.
This is the only movie that writer/director Piccio Raffianini’s ever made, which is pretty astounding, because the guy obviously had talent.
Diane (Virginia Hay, The Road Warrior and also the blue skinned Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan from Farscape) is a photographer whose favorite model — and lover — Tegan (Teagan Clive, who was also The Alienator) shows up bound and dead, just like the adult photos that our heroine is famous for. Imagine — a Skinemax The Eyes of Laura Mars and you’re not far off.
Lieutenant Arnold (Dario Parisini) is on the case and suspects both Diane and her ex-husband, particularly after other people close to her are tied up and stabbed, as if they were doing some knifeplay and then gave their lives up.
Eva Grimaldi, who was in Demons 5 and Ratman, is in this. And look out! There’s Kid Creole, from Kid Creole and the Coconuts, probably the last dude I expected to see walk on to a giallo film*. What is happening?
I love the first club that shows up in this film, with little people dancing, muscular folks dancing, mirrors covered with coke, quick cuts and improbably synth Gershwin songs.
Obsession: A Taste for Fear is a completely deranged film, one that supposes a world where everyone wears sunglasses at night, where colors come straight out of the brainstem of Dario Argento, where softcore porn photographers are huge celebrities, cops shoot laser guns, hovering cars are a dime a dozen and no one bats an eye.
Imagine if Rinse Dream made a giallo and had the money to get legitimate recording artists to appear on the soundtrack. Now, do some lines. And then, you will have just some of the strangeness that is this movie, which demands to get a release from a boutique label so that maniacs other than just me can obsess over it.
*To be fair, Kid Creole is also in Cattive ragazze, which is at least an Italian movie with hints of giallo made at the same time.
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Colin Childress (Jeffrey Combs) is a Johnny Craig or Reed Crandall E.C. Comics-style artist who is inspired by a book that he found of evil artwork called the Book of the Ancient Dead, which says “To contemplate evil, is to ask evil home.” By the way, the artwork of Childress was created by Frank Brunner, who is best-known for his Dr. Strange artwork. He also designed the characters for Fox’s X-Men cartoon. Ironically, as the book in this movie is kind of like the Necronomicon, he did the artwork for the metal band Necronomicon’s Escalation album cover.
Back to Childress. Somehow, while drawing one rainy and foreboding evening, he conjures up one of those spirits and disappears. Years later, his home has become an art school run by Mrs. Briggs (Yvonne De Carlo) and where Whitney Taylor (Debrah Farentino) comes to continue working on her comic book art, which is influenced by Childress.
The other artists at the school include love interest Philip (Brian Robbins, Head of the Class), performance artist Lisa (Miranda Wilson), detective fiction writer — huh? — who likes to fire guns and act out his stories named Norman (Vince Edwards) and Whitney’s art school rival Amanda (Pamela Bellwood), who conspires with Mrs. Briggs to ruin our heroine’s life. Whitney finds the book in the basement — get the title now? — and unleashes it on the school. At first, it only kills her rivals, but soon it starts taking out all of her friends.
It’s silly, but in the best of ways, and looks great thanks to it being shot by Sergio Salvati, who was also the cinematographer or director of photography on Puppet Master, Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond and so many more. And its writer, listed as Kit DuBois, is really Child’s Play creator Don Mancini.
In summation, though, I love any movie that has a giant wolf monkey creature with a pentagram sliced into its chest that lives as long as creativity does.
Robot Jox is part of the Enter the Video Store — Empire of Screams box set. Extras include new audio commentary by special make-up effects artist Michael Dea, moderated by film critics Matty Budrewicz and Dave Wain from The Schlock Pit, a video appreciation of special make-up effects artist John Carl Buechler, a new interview with special make-up effects artist Michael Deak, the original sales sheet and production notes, a VHS trailer, an Empire Pictures trailer reel and image galleries, including behind-the-scenes photos courtesy of special make-up effects artist Michael Deak. You can get this set from MVD.
After defeating his opponent Quino in the Philippines, Anthony Scott (Kim Rossi Stuart) returns to America for college. He makes friends with Luke (Winston Haynes) and tries to remember his promise to Master Kimura (now played by Leon Elalout) to not fight ever again. That doesn’t stop the Tigers — a martial arts gang so bad ass that they have their own mascot wearing a suit — and their leader Dick (Christopher Alan) from living up to his name and making Anthony’s life rough. Well, Anthony always kind of brings these things on himself, as he has his choice of, you know, thousands of girls at college and picks Dick’s ex-girlfriend Patty (Amy Lynn Baxter, who was Penthouse magazine’s Pet of the Month for June 1990 and the woman Ed Begley Jr. left Annette Benning for).
Obviously, Anthony has forgotten his girlfriend in the Philippines, Maria, in days.
Maybe having a gang of toughs ruin your new car and needing to be rescued by a fan boat will do that to you.
Finally, after an entire movie of haranguing, Anthony and Dick battle. This is a fight that’s been brewing for over twenty years, as Anthony’s father stopped Dick’s dad and his friends from assaulting a woman, which got them all expelled. Anthony will only fight in a real match with scoring and officials, so Luke and his friends put on a show and get an entire audience to show up and I wonder, “Are they the good guys?” They certainly are industrious for neighborhood toughs.
Dick nearly beats Anthony when he pays off his corner man and has him spray some kind of chemical into his eyes and blinding him. He didn’t count on the Stroke of the Dragon, which Anthony uses to win the match. He gets the girl, he wins over the crowd and…we have thirty minute left?
Yep. That’s because Dick seeks out the man who started the Tigers, Mark Sanders (Ted Prior, Deadly Prey) and gives him five grand to beat his enemy senseless in front of the high school. For being a ripoff of The Karate Kid, this kind of goes backward, with Johnny finding Kreese in the sequel. It’s kind of a Cannon movie.
Master Kimura comes to town and teaches Anthony some new moves. The same Anthony who, when asked what he wants to eat, says “Hot dogs, hamburgers or rib food.” The bad guys also use a Ben & Jerry’s location as their hangout, which seems to be a strange place for “karate fanatics” to congregate. This movie is in some strange universe where college classes have bells for classes, an idea that I believed was true when I was 12.
It’s hard to be on Anthony’s side. He’s a rich kid who lives on his own yacht and seems to be getting a free ride to college, as well as the gift of a car. The Tiger, while rude and kind of bullies, are also middle to lower class kids who have the gumption to put on a karate show even with no ring and just throw it up on a stage like it’s a class play. I cheered when they beat up Anthony’s friend Luke, because all these dudes do is drink champagne and caviar. The Tigers are lucky to get government cheese and off-brand Mountain Dew.
That said, I love the ending where yet another fighter shows up spoiling for a fight and our hero, his sensei and the girl he stole drive off laughing.
June 11: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 80s Horror! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
I feel like I haven’t really given Lambverto Bava a fair chance. Then again, whenever I say that, people always remark that I’m always mentioning that I like his movies. Demons is a near-perfect movie but I’ve always qualified that by saying that he had Argento, Franco Ferrin and Dardano Sacchetti on board along with Michele Soavi as assistant director. And then I think, well, you know, I kind of really like Macabre and it has some really grimy stuff in it. A Blade In the Dark, Blastfighter, Dinner with a Vampire, Graveyard Disturbance, The Ogre, Demons 2 and Midnight Ripper all have charms. I’ve even come around to liking Delirium e foto di Gioia, Maybe not Monster Shark. But the more I think about it, I really do like Lamberto Bava.
This is the movie that put me over the edge into perhaps even love.
In July of 1986, Lamberto was hired to create five TV movies under the title Brivido Giallo (Yellow Thrill). Of course, none of these were giallo and only four got made: The Ogre, Dinner with a Vampire, Graveyard Disturbance and Until Death.
There were some hurt feelings about this movie when it was made. It was based on an older script by Dardano Sacchetti, but Lucio Fulci went on record saying that he was planning on making an adaption of The Postman Always Rings Twice with the title Evil Comes Back. Fulci said that Sacchetti wrote it up and sent it to several producers and later found out that when Luciano Martino bought it, his name wasn’t on it. Fulci said, “…because of our friendship I decided not to sue Sacchetti, but I did break off all relations with him.” Sacchetti responded, “The producer of Evil Comes Back didn’t have the budget required, and he gave up to do the film. That’s it. Years later, as the screenplay was mine, I sold it to another producer who used it for a b-movie with Lamberto Bava.”
Gioia Scola really could have been a remembered giallo queen if she’d come along 15 years early. As it is, she was in some of my favorite late 80s films in the genre, including Obsession: A Taste for Fear, Too Beautiful to Die, Suggestionata and Evil Senses.
In this film, she plays Linda, a woman whose husband Luca (Roberto Pedicini) left her eight years ago. All the men of the small village wondered why he’d leave behind such a stunning woman. In fact, this movie could have been called Ogni uomo vuole scopare Linda. She gave birth to Luca’s son and unknown to the town, has since become the wife of the man who helped kill her husband, Carlo (David Brandon).
Together, they run a small hotel near the lake. During one rainy night, Marco (Urbano Barberini) arrives to stay. And it seems like he knows way too much about what’s going on. Her son Alex (Marco Vivio) may as well, as he wakes up every night screaming, dreaming of his father clawing his way out of a muddy grave. She hires Marco as the handyman, but Carlo thinks they’re sleeping together. In no way can this turn out well.
How does Marco know where all the old clothes are kept? How does he already know the family recipes? And why is he so close so quickly with Alex?
What’s intriguing is how close this is in story and tone, yet goes off on its own path, to Bava’s father’s film Shock. The difference is where the father would use camera tricks and tone to create a mood of dread, his son will put you directly into the middle of the muck and grue with comic book lighting and great looking effects from Angelo Mattei. And keeping the family tradition going, Lamberto’s son Fabrizio was the assistant director. How wild that Mario’s grandson was AD on movies like Zoolander 2 and Argento’s Giallo and The Card Player, using the name Roy Bava for those last two movies.
My favorite fact about this movie is that it was released on VHS as The Changeling 2: The Revenge. Trust me, it has nothing to do with The Changeling.
You can watch a gorgeous version of this thanks to Dr. Sapirstein on YouTube.
How amazing is it that when Godfrey Ho rips something off, he goes harder at ripping a movie off than anyone else? Like Bruno Mattei probably looked at him with some level of admiration. This one goes so far that the Spanish VHS box even steals the art from the stolen so many times movie Hands of Steel.
When there aren’t ninjas in this — there are no demons — you get a hero who shoots someone in every limb while two women cheer him on and a bad guy who wants to talk about politics even on his wedding night.
Robinson Collins (Stuart Smith) is only here because of Godfrey Ho’s new footage. He’s hunting Willy, a Thai gangster who is so bad that he sells American secrets to the Russians. Hopefully Robinson’s agent Max — who exists in a totally different movie — can solve it all. He’s played by Sorapong Chatri, who was one of the biggest movie stars in Thailand.
There are a lot of ninja fights here that have swords being used with no blood which is a bit disconcerting.
This time around, the music is taken from some different sources, like the Lalo Schifrin soundtracks to Sudden Impact and Cool Hand Luke, as well as Alan Silvestri’s soundtrack to Cat’s Eye.
When you look at either poster for this movie, you may think that you’re getting something amazing. You are and you aren’t. You must open your mind to Godfrey Ho’s films in the same way that you need to vibe with Jess Franco. You get to know the worlds that they create, how they keep going back to the same ideas, how the same shots will appear — this one is very Franco with the shots of planes that last forever and cameras gazing into the skyline for even longer — and then it all starts to become very comfortable and welcoming. You see the same faces as welcome sights that bring you sheer joy.
You may know this movie as Thunderbolt Angels but I saw it as Ninja Powerforce, which sounds like the kind of dumb genre classification some neckbeard that slavishly masturbates over Decibel would give to a band that nine people have listened to.
This is yet another Joseph Lai and Godfrey Ho — which may be the same person depending on who you read — ninja movie made from two movies, this time that the same footage of Richard Harrison dressed as a yellow ninja with a red headband that says “ninja” that was for one movie and ended up in so many films and a Cheung Chi-Chiu movie The Return. That movie is about gangsters who grow up and one trying to go straight. The ninjas work their way into that movie and unlike the stealth experts they are meant to be, they just barge right through the narrative.
Within the movie stolen for this, Frankie is a gangster who kills a friend named Albert and does the time. When he gets out, his old friend Matthew has gone legit and also married his woman Mandy. He also finds a world where Albert’s wife has to become a sex worker to pay for their child after his death. The actual movie is pretty good, but it’s really odd when everyone suddenly develops ninja connections that exist only in thee dubbed dialogue for Ninja Powerforce because otherwise this movie goes ninja free for long stretches.
There’s a lot of dialogue about chivalry to the point that every mention of the word would start to make me laugh. This is something you’d never have in your life if it wasn’t for these ninja films.
The music in this one also goes a bit off script, with Windham Hill artist Mark Isham’s “Many Chinas” and “On the Threshold of Liberty;” Romanelli’s “Connecting Flight;” “Six Pianos” by American minimalist composer Steve Reich; Jean-Michael Jarre’s “Second Rendez-Vouz;” The Alan Parsons Project’s “Psychobabble,” “Silence and I,” “Children of the Moon,” Mammagamma” and “Sirius;” OMD’s “Electricity;” Clan of Xymox’s “Masquerade” and Mark Knopler’s “Going Home (Theme of the Local Hero).”
Also known as American Force Ninja, the boss of this movie is Gordon, a ninja master who has renounced the ways of the ninja and is more concerned with selling heroin. You know he’s the bad guy because he has a swastika on his ninja mask.
His enemy is the so-called Lady Detective — what, is this like Suzy Bannion being called the American Girl? — who is being protected by the CIA Action Men and a ninja — a tame ninja at that — named Captain Scott.
Much of this movie takes place in a disco, which I’m good with, except that it has nothing to do with anything else in the film. Also: this reinforces one of the rules of the Godfrey Ho/Filmark Cinematic Universe: only a ninja can kill a ninja. This goes even further to prove that a ninja can shrug off bullets and grenades, unless thrown by a ninja.
The box art, however, is a million times better than this movie. I want to make whatever movie that it’s for so that I can watch that a million times.
Sadly, this doesn’t have much of the typical awesome bootleg songs on the soundtrack. But if one Godfrey Ho movie lets you down, he has like ten more. Or twenty. Maybe even more.
Shout out to the AAV Creative Unit. They came up with the story here, along with Bill Hu, and they gifted this to Godfrey Ho. Also buried inside it is a completely other movie, 1979’s Young Dragon, which was made by Joseph Velasco who is also Kong Hung and Joseph Kong. His movies were mainly Brucesploitation films with titles like, yes, Young Dragon, but also Bruce and the Shaolin Bronzemen, Enter the Game of Death, Enter the Game of Shaolin Bronzemen and The Clones of Bruce Lee.
We have entered a lawless land, a place where things like intellectual property and copyright no longer matter, where films can unseamlessly blend into one uncohesive narrative, where music from across genre can appear without warning, where characters and storylines float about you. These movies are the closest thing to capturing my dreams and my dreams are often horrifying vistas of being following, chased and taunted by aliens, so just imagine.
First off, this isn’t even a sequel. There is no Zodiac America that came before it. Supposedly, it’s part of a trilogy with Zombie vs. Ninja and Kickboxer from Hell, but this movie doesn’t just not make sense when compared to those films, it doesn’t make sense within the confines of itself.
But let’s try.
Mr. Wu and Blackstone are running opium into Hong Kong. Only the robotic Catholic priest Father Luke Daniels and the Young Dragon can stop them. Or maybe a group of the dorkiest white guys can. Also know that Father Luke and Young Dragon come from different films, different stories, different film stock and different years of creation, all spread across a chasm of storytelling madness.
For some reason — they wanted me to watch this and this is all part of a conspiracy to get me to write about it thirty years later so you watch it and it unlocks your third eye — hopping vampires and clown ninjas also make appearances.
I’m not going to make it seem like you’re going to learn the secrets of your existence watching these movis, but to be honest, you just might. They’re the height of exploitation, made simply to sell movies with strange phrases and keywords like ninja and hopping vampire to people like, well, me. And they all do that well, proving that movies can be made with what seems like no plan, no endgame and no narrative cohesion and I’ll become fascinated and start trying to watch every single movie by the people who made them.
It goes without saying that hardly anything on the poster for this movie happens.
Mel Simons (Marko Ritchie) — a ninja in pink — and the evil boss of all ninjas — he’s the one in yellow — (Mike Abbott) are fighting over the ownership of the manual that allows one to become the ultimate ninja. The evil ninja pulls out a gun and kills Mel, but it was all a dream.
That said, the dream makes him think that he should get rid of the ninja manual.
For some reason, Mel gives it to his ex-wife Cindy (Morna Lee), who needs the help of another ninja named Steve, who kindly ties her up for the night, then unties her. She makes him breakfast. They fall in love. These things happen.
But then Cindy’s friend Winnie breaks into this romance and reminds Cindy that she’s not yet divorced from Mel. This leads to a game of badmitton and that’s not a sexual euphamism. A game of badmitton in which ninajs attack, no less.
Also: Steve is only hiding in Cindy’s house because he attacked the man who is sleeping with his wife. Who knew ninjas had this much drama? Well, when you wear pajamas all day, you can’t stay out of trouble in bed, I figure.
My notes for this movie are comical in their scattered chicken scratch, but foremost among them is a sentence all in caps: FIND THIS DISCO E.T. REMIX. Thanks to Ninjas All the Way Down, I can happily tell you that it’s by the Italian disco band EGO.
If you like trying to learn what music is in Godfrey Ho movies — and I do — you’ll be happy to know that “A Day” by Clan of Xymox and “Sirius” by Alan Parsons Project are in this.
The ending of this movie is so abrupt that you may be tempted to watch it over and over again. In no way does it pay off the movie you watched or answer any questions that you may have. Godfrey Ho’s movies do not cast you in the role of omniscient narrator. Instead, you only have the most limited of power over what you see and you may wonder forever what you lost the opportunity to experience in the lives of people you barely get to know.
I have no idea if you will like this movie. I love it because I watched three of them in a row in a state of barely being awake and I feel that this may be the best way to watch Godfrey Ho’s work, as if you are just a new blank page for him to tell you a story that makes no sense, that never adds up and that somehow combines two movies into seven eighths of one.
Cauldron Films has outdone themselves with three mind melting Italian blu ray releases. Do you need them? You fucking NEED them. In fact, I’m going to spend the rest of this post explaining to you in great detail why you need these movies.
You can get the bundle of all three from Cauldron.
Off Balance (AKA Phantom of Death) (1988): Ruggero Deodato, how I love you. I love that you somehow convinced a real actor, Michael York, to be in an insane film about a man getting progeria and murdering people left and right. I can get how you got Donald Pleasence. I can even sort of understand how you got Edwige Fenech. But Michael York?
York plays Robert Dominici, a pianist who suffers from that previously mentioned genetic condition that causes him to rapidly age, and by that, I mean that his face starts looking like Klaus Kinski at age 200. To make up for the bad hand he’s been dealt, he starts killing people, including targeting Inspector Datti ‘s (Pleasence) daughter Gloria (Antonella Ponziani).
Deodato would later say, “I did Phantom of Death because it was based on a true element — the idea of growing old. And I got to work with Michael York and Donald Pleasence.” He also threw in that the producer demanded Fenech, who was miscast. This is also one of the few movies where she isn’t dubbed, so you get to hear her real voice.
I have a real weakness for post 1980 giallo so this movie is like the sweetest Galatine milk candies.
This movie was written by Gianfranco Clerici and Vincenzo Mannino in the early 80s and became the start of The New York Ripper. According to Clerici, he and Mannino were offended by how their script was changed, so they kept editing it until giving it to Deodato. Several pieces of what Fulci used are in this movie, including York’s character disguising his voice and taunting the police.
Beyond Giovanni Lombardo Radice and Marino Mase showing up, this movie is notable because Pleasence is pretty much playing Dr. Loomis’ Italian cousin, ranting and raving as he stalks a ninja-like York through the streets of Venice, yelling the word bastard over and over again. All this scene needs is Jack Sayer in his truck, rumbling up smelling of booze and lamenting, “You’re huntin’ it, ain’t ya? Yeah, you’re huntin’ it, all right.”
The new Cauldron Films blu ray release of Off Balance is limited to 1500 copies and the film itself has a 2K restoration from the original negative. Extras include one of the final interviews with Deodato, commentary with film historians Eugenio Ercolani and Troy Howarth, Italian and English trailers, a CD of the Pino Donaggio soundtrack, a double-sided poster, a slipcase with artwork by Eric Adrian Lee and a reversible wrap with alternate artwork.
Top Line (AKA Alien Termintor) (1988): Man, was Nello Rossati dating Franco Nero’s daughter or something? Not only did he get him into this movie, but a year later he would be the person — well, his pseudonym Ted Archer did, but you get the point — to finally get him to come back to his most famous role in Django Strikes Again. He also made the giallo La gatta in calore(assistant directed by Lamberto Bava and shot by Aristide Massaccesi!), a Napoleon-sploitation film called Bona parte di Paolina, a sex comedy called The Sensuous Nurse with Ursula Andress and Jack Palance, the poliziotteschi Don’t Touch the Children!, another sex comedy called Io zombo, tu zombi, lei zomba about four zombies running a hotel, a giallo-esque film named Le mani di una donna sola in which a lesbian countess seduces married women until insane asylum escapees chop her hands off, and an I Spit On Your Grave revengeomatic called Fuga scabrosamente pericolosa that stars Andy Sidaris villain Rodrigo Obregón.
Needless to say, I’m a fan.
Ted Angelo (Nero) starts the movie off literally telling a woman that he’s too tired to make love. Is this the great hero of Italian cinema? He seems exhausted throughout but it works; he’s a writer fallen on hard times and harder drinking. He’s supposed to be writing a book on pre-Columbian civilizations, but he’s falling deeper and deeper into depression and drunken days to the point that he’s fired by his publisher — and ex-wife — Maureen De Havilland (Miss World 1977 Mary Stävin, who by this point had already appeared in Adam Ant’s “Strip” video, Octopussyand A View to a Kill, as well as releasing the exercise album Shape Up and Dance with footballer George Best).
It seems like Ted’s luck is changing when he’s shown a ton of writings that came from a shipwreck of Spanish conquistadores. Except that the ship isn’t on the bottom of the ocean. It’s in a cave. And maybe that luck’s bad, because everyone connected with the ship, like art dealer Alonso Quintero (Willian Berger) is dying under mysterious circumstances. And oh yeah. That shipwreck in a cave is also inside a UFO.
The only real good luck that Ted gets is when an art historian and friend of Quintero named June (Deborah Barrymore, who is not related to Drew, but is instead of the daughter of Roger Moore and Italian actress Luisa Mattioli) helps him out.
What follows is a delirious descent into madness to the point that if you told me this was all a drug trip, I’d believe you. First, Ted is almost run over by former Nazi Heinrich Holzmann (George Kennedy, who is only in the movie for this one scene), then the camera crew he hires ends up being CIA spooks who want to murder him, then the KGB gets involved and then things get really weird.
Ted gets the idea that Maureen has the kind of connections that can save him and June. As they wait for her, a cyborg Rodrigo Obregón attacks them and only stops when he’s hit by a bull. He gets torn apart and sounds like he’s trying to say the words to “Humpty Dumpty” and man, I literallyjumped aout of my chair in the middle of the night I was so excited. He looks like Johnny Craig drew him!
Somehow, the movie then decides to top itself as another Rodrigo Obregón cyborg that looks exactly the same shows up with Maureen, who removes her skin to show us that she’s one of the aliens that have been on Earth for twelve thousand years and now are in control of most countries and multinational corporations.
At this point, is there any hope for any of us?
Yes, this is a movie where a gorgeous Swedish woman takes off all of her epidermis — of course we see her breasts, this is an Italian movie — to reveal that she’s a lizard alien that fulfills the worries of David Icke, then she vomits slime all over herself and tries to kill Franco Nero with her giant tongue.
If you told me this was an actual alien, I would believe you.
The first few times I’ve tried to watch this, I couldn’t get into it. It was too slow and felt too downbeat with Nero’s character feeling hopeless. So don’t be like me. I beg you, stick with this for an hour. Just an hour, because it’s not bad. I mean, yes, Franco Nero survives a car chase by throwing eggs, but it’s just slow, not badly made.
But the last thirty minutes make it all worth it.
When you get there, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
This is a movie all about the foreplay and then when it’s time to get to the actual sex, it’s the weirdest and best Penthouse Forum sex you’ve ever had and you feel like there’s no way that it happened and no one will ever believe you.
Also: Franco Nero screams almost every line and I respect that.
Also also: This is like a budget They Live by people who never saw that movie.
Also also also: This ends with Franco Nero living in a Cannibal Holocaustparadise and a song that sounds like something Disney characters would sing to.
The new Cauldron Films blu ray release of Top Line is limited to 1500 copies and the film itself has a 2K restoration from the original negative. Extras include interviews with Nero and Ercolani, a featurette on the alien theories of the film by parapolitics researcher Robert Skvarla and an in-depth audio commentary by film historian Eric Zaldivar including audio interviews from cast members, Deborah Moore and Robert Redcross, as well as additional insight on Italian cult films with actors Brett Halsey and Richard Harrison. There’s also a booklet, a double-sided poster and a high quality slipcase with artwork by Ghanaian artist Farika in conjunction with Deadly Prey Gallery.
The Last Match (1991): Often, I refer to movies as having an all-star cast, which is really a misnomer. After all, what I consider A-list talent certainly does not fit the rest of the world. The Last Match, however, has the very definition of what I consider an all-star cast. Let’s take a look at the lineup:
Ernest Borgnine: Amongst the 211 credits Mr. Borgnine amassed on his IMDB list, none other have him leading a football team against an unnamed Caribbean island to save his assistant coach’s little girl. He was, however, in four Dirty Dozen movies and The Wild Bunch, not to mention playing Coach Vince Lombardi in a TV movie. One assumes that he took this role to get away from his wife Tova and her incessant cosmetics shilling.
Charles Napier: As the American consul in this movie, Napier cuts a familiar path, which he set after appearing in the monster hit Rambo: First Blood Part II. For him, it was either playing bureaucrats or cops, thankless roles that he always brought a little something extra to. The exception to his typecasting is when he played Baxter Wolfe, the man who rocks Susan Lakes’ loins in the beyond essential Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Henry Silva: If you need a dependable jerk and you have the budget of, well, an Italian movie about a football team that also does military operations, call Mr. Silva. He admirably performed the role of the heel — or antihero at other times in movies like Megaforce, Battle of the Godfathers, Cry of a Prostitute (in which he plays the Yojimbo role but in a mafia film; he also pushes Barbara Bouchet’s face inside a dead pig’s carcass while making love to her and he’s the good guy), Escape from the Bronx and so many more movies.
Martin Balsam: Perhaps best known for Psycho, Balsam shows up in all manner of movies that keep me up at 4 AM on nights when I know work will come sooner than I fear. He’s so interested in acting up a storm in this movie that he is visibly reading off cue cards.
They’ve all joined up for a movie that finds the coach’s daughter get Midnight Express-ed as drugs are thrown in her bag at the airport on the way home from a vacation with her hapless jerk of a boyfriend. At least he’s smart enough to call assistant coach Cliff Gaylor (Oliver Tobias), the father of the daughter whose life he has just ruined. And luckily for this film, Tobias was in a movie called Operation Nam nearly a decade before, which meant that they could recycle footage of him in combat. He also was The Stud and serviced Joan Collins, so he has my eternal jealousy going for him, too.
Who could dream up a movie like this? Oh, only Larry Ludman, but we see through that fake name and know that it’s Fabrizio De Angelis steering this ship, the maker of beloved trash such as Killer Crocodile, five Karate Warrior movies and three Thunder movies that star the beloved Mark Gregory as a stiff legged Native American warrior who pretty much cosplays as Rambo. And don’t forget — this is the man who produced Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond and New York Ripper!
In this outing, he’s relying on Cannibal Holocaust scribe Gianfranco Clerici and House on the Edge of the Park writer Vincenzo Mannino to get the job done. For some reason, despite this being an Italian exploitation movie, we never see the coach’s daughter in jail. Instead, we’re treated to what seems like Borgnine in a totally different movie than everyone else, barking orders into his headphones as if he was commanding the team in a playoff game.
To make matters even more psychotic, the football players show up in full uniform instead of, you know, commando gear. One wonders, by showing up in such conspicuous costumes, how could they avoid an international incident? This is my lesson to you, if you’re a nascent Italian scumtastic cinema viewer: shut off your brain, because these movies don’t have plot holes. They’d have to have actual plots for that to be possible.
I say this with the fondest of feelings, because you haven’t lived until you witness a football player dropkick a grenade into a helicopter. Supposedly this was written by Gary Kent for Bo Svenson, who sold the script to De Angelis unbeknownst to the stuntman until years later. It was originally about a soccer team!
Former Buffalo Bills QB Jim Kelly* is in this, which amuses me to no end, as does the ending, where — spoiler warning — Borgnine coaches the team from beyond the grave!
You know how conservative folks have quit watching the NFL as of late? This is the movie to bring ‘em back, a film where the offensive line has fully automatic machine guns and refuses to kneel for anything. No matter what your politics, I think we can all agree on one thing: no matter how dumb an idea seems, Italian cinema always tries to pull it off.
*Other pros include Florida State and arena football player Bart Schuchts and USFL player Mark Rush, as well as Dolphins Jim Jensen, Mike Kozlowsky, Elmer Bailey and Jim Kiick. It’s kind of astounding that at one point, these players could just end up in a movie without the NFL knowing. This would never happen today.
The new Cauldron Films blu ray release of The Last Match is limited to 1500 copies and the film itself has a 2K restoration from the original negative. Extras include an interview with special effects artist Roberto Ricci; American Actors in a Declining Italian Cinema, a minidoc by EUROCRIME! director Mike Malloy; Understanding the Cobra, a video essay by Italian film expert Eugenio Ercolani and commentary by Italian exploitation movie critic Michael A. Martinez. You also get a trailer, an image gallery, a booklet with writings from Jacob Knight and David Zuzelo, a double-sided poster, a high quality slipcase featuring original artwork and a reversible Blu-ray wrap with alternate artwork.
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