Originally titled El Sueño del Mono Loco (The Dream of the Mad Monkey), this is based on the Christopher Frank book. While it has the 90’s genre of erotic thriller attached to it, this is very much in the world of the giallo.

To wit: Jeff Goldblum’s Dan Gillis is a stranger in a strange land, one of the key tropes of the giallo, a writer in Paris who has been left behind by his wife and suddenly a single father to his son Danny. A writer by trade, he’s brought in by a producer to work with an enfant terrible young director named Malcolm Greene on a script.

Ironically, the actor playing that young director — Dexter Fletcher — would grow up and move on from acting (he was Baby Face in the absurd and wonderful child gangster musical Bugsy Malone) to directing some of today’s biggest films, such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman.

What draws us closer to the psychosexual domain of the giallo is that Gillis soon becomes obsessed by Malcolm’s sister Jenny (Liza Walker from Hackers in her first film). While presented as somewhere in her teens, she’s also a lolita who possesses the sexual attention of every man she meets, from our protagonist to her brother.

Miranda Richardson also figures in as Dan’s disabled agent who, like everyone in this movie, just wants to get horizontal with one of West Homestead’s favorite sons.

I’m not saying this is a good movie. I’m just saying that it’s interesting that somehow Goldblum made two movies one after the other — this and Mister Frost  — that are borderline bonkers horror experimentations that no one really talks about. This is after he was a star from The Fly and yet here he is, making really strange movies in foreign lands. Leave it to a Mill Creek box set to bring this to my attention.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rob Brown is one of the two or three people who write for us that has his own IMDB page. He also has a cool Dragon Sound t-shirt.

Laser Mission is a 1989 action film starring Brandon Lee, Ernest Borgnine, and Debi Monohan. Lee plays Michael Gold, a mercenary hired by the CIA to bring in laser expert Dr. Braun (Borgnine), who is in danger of being captured and forced to build diamond-powered laser weaponry by a corrupt Soviet Colonel and a psychotic German soldier of fortune. The first attempt to get Braun to defect is thwarted when both men are captured and separated. Gold soon escapes and enlists the help of Braun’s daughter Alissa (Monohan) to find the doctor and prevent World War III.

I first saw this film in the mid-90s, probably around the time that The Crow was coming out or hitting home video, and sadly, that’s probably the only reason that anyone really bothered to check Laser Mission out. Brandon Lee had been appearing in films for several years, but had only recently emerged as a leading man before his untimely death. As was tradition pre-Internet, when an actor died, any distributors that had movies he appeared in cranked out cheap tapes with box art that wasn’t even for the movie that you were about to watch, with hopes that the newfound notoriety would get you to shell out $0.49 for that one-night rental. I specifically remember that the copy I picked up from the Hastings in Idaho Falls featured the same picture from the poster for Lee’s 1992 actioner Rapid Fire.

Was it any good, though? Even at the time, when I was 16 and would watch absolutely anything with a ninja or kickboxer in it (American or otherwise), I didn’t think it was “good”, but it was fun and memorable enough to want to revisit and talk about a quarter century later. I think I could appreciate a lot more about it this time around.

In the canon of 80s action movies, this one is sub-Cannon in its production values, but it’s just as absurd as its bigger-budgeted contemporaries and shows the same lack of regard for the lives of its performers as many of those same films that were just far enough under the mainstream radar to get away with it if they were able to shoot somewhere where they’d never be found.  In this film’s case, we spend much of our time in Namibia.  I was confused at first, as the characters in this film seem to come from all over the world (A Russian and German are running the show, supported by Cuban and African soldiers) and a lot of the signage in this movie is in Portuguese, but a little Googling revealed to me that most of the countries that use it as their official language are right there in that part of Africa.

Oh, and there are no lasers. Not a single one. Lots of talk of lasers and preventing the creation of laser weaponry, but none to be seen. It’s probably better that way, as I can’t imagine what that effect would look like in this movie. After all, when we see the theft of the Verbig Diamond in the film’s prolog (“Larger than the Hope, more spectacular than the Cullinan”), the place looks less like a museum and more like an Olive Garden that got shut down early for a private work party.  A bunch of goons get armed up in a Commando-like gearing-up scene, but they end up just gassing the whole room and walking out with the diamond without any shots fired or casualties, like in an episode of Batman. Aside from not using lasers or real diamonds, a lot of the sets are very sparse. Half the interiors look the same, whether it’s supposed to be a hotel, university, airport, or an apartment building. At one point during his escape from an African prison, where he was sentenced to die the next day by guillotine (a gift from the Belgian king in 1907), Gold knocks a guard unconscious and leaves through a door, only to enter the next shot through the SAME door, complete with unconscious guard still slumped over in the corner, running back down the same hallway that he just came from. I could go on and on about the cheapness of the film all day, but it’s more of a “seeing is believing” (or not believing you’re hearing the same song for the fifth time) kind of thing that’s more fun to discover for yourself.

(David Knopfler’s “Mercenary Man” plays.)

The action in the film is totally fine, with a few standout stunts that really go for it that mostly involve out-of-control vehicles and people being launched from them, as well as some impressive falls, a full body burn at one point, and guys really selling the hell out of the beatings they’re taking. Brandon Lee’s father was Bruce Lee, of course, and he’s quite a martial artist on his own, but they seem to make him more of a traditional American action hero here.  He has more of a brawling style that works better when you’re being attacked in the middle of a desert by a variety of hired guns, including probably the only white guy in a karate gi on the entire African continent.  The film’s director, Beau Smith, only made a handful of films before finding his niche in directing documentary specials and shows, but he has had a very extensive career performing and coordinating stunts in nearly 150 projects, most recently in 2014’s Amazing Spider-Man 2.

The performances are not bad, but they do get sketchy once you get away from the main characters. Lee is a lot of fun and is certainly charismatic and makes the most of what he’s given. As far as Michael Gold is concerned, I think they were shooting more for a Bond-like character, but he comes off as more of a sarcastic smartass. He has good chemistry with his co-stars and doesn’t seem to be phoning it in, but his one-liners don’t seem to rise very far above a “See ya, but I wouldn’t want to be ya”. I don’t know if he thought that this role would propel him to bigger and better things quite yet, but he’s trying.  Ernest Borgnine has just a handful of scenes, and while he appears happy to be there, he doesn’t seem to be putting a lot of effort into trying to pass for German, aside from saying “Liebchen” a lot. Debi Monohan is someone I didn’t recognize that would go on to have a pretty solid run of guest appearances on sitcoms and action shows throughout the 90s, and she’s pretty solid in this part as someone that could have easily been a damsel in distress that ends up being as much a part of the action as anyone else. Her and Lee have a good rapport and a back-and-forth that doesn’t feel too scripted or forced. The actors portraying the Russian Colonel and German villain also play those types well, but it gets kind of weird the further down the call sheet you go. Early on, we’re introduced to a pair of bumbling Cuban soldiers that serve as comic relief in a film that doesn’t really need it that somehow manage to Forrest Gump their way into all of the important events of the film after first encountering the very not-Hispanic Michael Gold impersonating their commanding officer. After that, it’s mostly extras with a few words here and there that don’t seem to understand the lines they’re deadpanning, which doesn’t really help sell Lee’s lame one-liners any better, but they all appear to be local hires that probably don’t speak English as a first or second language, so good for them.

Overall, Laser Mission is a quick, goofy way to spend eighty minutes.  It’s probably exactly the same movie that my 11-year-old self would have cooked up in 1989 if everything I knew about action was based on the twenty minutes I remembered from A View To A Kill, A-Team reruns, and a hundred episodes or so of GI Joe, all on what appeared to be a Nollywood budget. It’s rated R, I’m guessing for violence and very brief semi-nudity, but could probably pass for PG-13, as the violence is mostly bloodless and there isn’t any gore that I can remember.  This film can be found in the “Excellent Eighties” DVD collection from Mill Creek Entertainment.

(David Knopfler’s “Mercenary Man” plays…again.)

Editor’s Note: The first time we unpacked this film, on November 12, 2019, it was for its inclusion on Mill Creek’s Pure Terror set, in a review written by Melody Vena.

We first read Melody Vena’s writing in last year’s Horror and Sons Halloween Horrors 2018 event and learned that she won the 2017 and 2018 Monster Movie Maniac “Monster Movie Marathon” contest by watching the most movies in one month. She also wrote about Man In the Attic for us last year. And when you learn that director Michael Fischa, he of the epic Death Spa, made his film debut with a werewolf comedy, well, Sam reviewed it a second time. And Mill Creek, never letting a cool obscurity be forgotten, have reissued it again, as part of their B-Movie Blast 50-Film set that we’re reviewing this month.

Enjoy this repost of Melody’s take on the film!

My moms a werewolf hit the screen in May of 1989, a comedy/horror film much like Teen Wolf. With a cast starring John Saxon, John Schuck,Susan Blakely and Ruth Buzzi, and being directed by Michael Fischa the film has that classic 1980s cheesy vibe that we all know and somewhat love.

The movie focuses on an average kind of ditzy housewife (Susan Blakely) who is fed up with her boring doing the same thing every day kind of life, and the situation gets worse by the fact that she is being continually ignored by her husband, Howard (John Schuck). She often finds herself watching TV with the family dog instead of being included in things with the family. Meanwhile her daughter, Jennifer is being dragged to a horror convention by her horror obsessed friend, Stacey. Jennifer finds the whole convention boring. Very disinterested and skeptical by the whole scene, she agrees to have her fortune told by a palm reader at the convention. The fortune teller seems pretty phony at first, but then tells Jennifer that she sees the sign of the pentagram on her face, and warns her that she will “struggle with an unholy evil over the next few days.” Jennifer jokes that she must mean the Halloween party she’s been planning.

Meanwhile, Leslie leaves the house in a huff to go shopping, after being ignored by her husband once again. She goes to a local pet store to buy a flea-collar for her dog but is surprised by the mysterious owner, Harry Thropen (John Saxon), who offers to give her the collar for free. Taken back by the generous offer, she leaves the store and the camera focuses on Thropen as he sneakily eats one of the white mice he has for sale. As the she enters the street a thief grabs her bag, flipping her off before running away. Thropen, sees what happens and is able to catch the purse snatcher by appearing suddenly in front of him and throwing him onto a pickup truck full of eggs. Leslie is befuddled at how he was able to do this but offers to buy Thropen lunch in for his troubles. Worried about her parents’ marriage (all of a sudden), Jennifer goes with Stacey to the restaurant her mother frequents with a bunch of flowers, she has made a plan to tell her mother that the flowers are from her father.

Unfortunately she sees Leslie eating with a strange man and assumes that she is having an affair (I mean she is ignored A LOT). Although Leslie asserts to Thropen that she is a married woman, he goes right ahead and  kisses her anyway. 

The kiss ends abruptly when dessert arrives en flambe, and the flames scare him away.  Leslie chases him back to his shop ( all of a sudden full of courage) with Jennifer and Stacey following close behind. While in the shop Leslie continues to avoid his advances until Thropen removes the sunglasses he has been wearing, revealing disturbing orange irises which hold the ability to hypnotize her. Meanwhile outside Jennifer and Stacey are shooed away from the pet shop door by a policeman who catches them snooping outside, then he proceeds to look in the cracks himself. 

After a few cocktails (some with goldfish swimming in them) Leslie and Thropen start fooling around on a bed covered in animal skins. Leslie seems to be enjoying herself with the strange pet shop owner until he bites her big toe, which causes her to jump up and leave hurry (not the fact that she was about to go full blown affair with a stranger) Thropen allows her to go, saying that she would be back because he would “be in her thoughts.” (cause that’s not weird)

When she arrives back home the family dog, and her only friend, growls at Leslie. Then Jennifer attempts to confront her about the affair, a matter of which Leslie is genuinely ignorant, thanks to the glowing eyes of hypnotism. Howard also notices a change in Leslie, both in the way she cooks meat for dinner despite being vegetarian and more importantly the way she acts in the bedroom (because now all of a sudden he wants to have sex with the wife he has constantly been ignoring…must have been the meat). The next morning Leslie is horrified to learn her teeth have become fangs. She attempts to hide her deformity from her daughter who assumes she is nervous because of the presumed affair. Leslie goes to see the suggestively named dentist, Dr. Rod (and yes, the name fits the persona and behavior of doctor and nurses), to have her fangs filed down, which only results in a broken file and some lewd sounds of frustration from Dr. Rod. (think a lot of moaning and groaning)

Driven by cravings for meat, she stops at a butchery and gets a snack, Leslie drives back home eating raw meat, milk bones, and singing loudly to rock music (apparent werewolf behavior). When an elderly couple pull up next to her at a stoplight and the old man remarks: “Look Edna, a singing werewolf. We don’t see many of those nowadays, do we?”

My Mom’s A Werewolf is such a good time to watch, with its underlying sexual tones, and quick one liners, it’s surprising that it does not have much of a cult following. I will not give away any spoilers, I enjoy leaving you all wanting more, so I highly suggest giving this one a good watch. I mean is a horror comedy with a moral at heart – Men, don’t ignore your ladies because you never know where a furry beast may be waiting to pounce.