NOTE: I have included the endings of some of these films if I deemed them virtually impossible to find, or when it mattered little to the overall feel of the film.
Italy 1978
B/W
Starring: Laura Gemser
Here is an intersting film- cut 2 different ways, with 2 different titles.
Both are quite good.
The Dirty Seven is from Simitar DVD and is a good, letterboxed transfer of
the film. It is an adaptation of the Italian novel 'Night of the Beasts'
and directed by the author himself.
The film begins with a "Dogs of War" type commando raid against a well-guarded
compound. After completing the mission, the group is double crossed.
Left on their own, they have to walk with their wounded to safety across
enemy territory.
They take shelter and food with a family and end up killing them in a
drunken rage. For this they are pursued by the surviving sister, played
by Laura Gemser, who became famous playing 'Black Emmanuelle'.
(This is odd, since she is in fact Indonesian/Chinese- born Moira Chen.)
She alternately infiltrates, seduces, and kills the men, destroying their
unit cohesion. This is really well done.
Obviously, the Dirty Seven didn't make a lot of money. Somebody in
distribution obviously noted Gemser's name in the cast- and with
a re-ordering of the film 'Emmanuelle, Queen of the Desert' was
born. I bought it as part of the 'Women Who Kick Butt' 10-DVD
cheapo pack at Best Buy, released by Brentwood Home Video.
The film starts 42 minutes in from the former beginning.
Gemser's character is introduced seducing, then killing an
isolated member of the group. Then we meet the tattered remains
of the military unit, fighting amongst each other for mysterious
reasons. This mystery adds something to all the killing and
sexual tension that has already worked in the original version.
Just as the group is whittled down to a few desperate men, one
man in her custody deduces that she is related to the slain
family. This happened in the original, towards the end of the
film, but here it initiates a flashback that (of course)
is the first 42 minutes of the original film!
It is a great structure, and I am glad I saw that version
first. This is not to say that the original film is bad.
In fact I own and will keep them both. It afforded me the
opportunity to see how story structure could be changed
to produce different effects.
Very instructive.
Mexico (US re-edit and new scenes) 1950s
B/W
Starring: Rock Madison
Horrible mangling of what was probably a good Eurohorror flick on the 'Dr. Orloff' level. But since I got it for $3.99 at Sam Goody,
I'll be a little kinder than if I ordered it from Sinister Cinema. The fact is that after you get through the longest and most incomprehensible spoken intro (all the while looking at the same damn shot of a house) the story is pretty good an there are some great visuals when the main character (Dr. Malthus, a great historical reference and a great name) is hung for his hideous crimes. And what crimes, you ask? He captures beautiful young women and drains their life substance for his own immortality elixir. Stupid clod- if he stuck with a fetus-derived elixir, he'd get a hefty research grant. Anyhow, he doesn't really die (suprise!) and is back 100 years later to pick up where he left off, implicating his identical twin great-grandson (Rock Madison). Not bad, actually. Great visuals (I'm talking about the original parts of the film).
The problem is that the film will really get going, careening towards 'classic' territory, then....
The US part starts. Unrelated 'characters' start talking about what happened in the Mexican part of the film as if it was some kind of past event. Or they talk for a few minutes about something unrelated. These are like 10-minute commercial blocks in the film. These segments are boring, dead boring. Thank God I have fast-forward. Then we go back to the action. Then back to the unrelated filler scenes. Then back to the action.....
I wouldn't mind seeing the original, even with subtitles, since I guess they probably cut some great stuff if the American release had such a long intro. Actually, even the intro is pretty funny after a few drinks.
West Germany, late ‘70s
Color
Starring: Jurgen Prochnow
Low-budget, slow but well-scripted and imaginative, this realistic space drama begins with news that the Jupiter mission of 3 spaceships has been launched, then later news that all contact had been lost for a year and the astronauts of the international mission declared dead at the U.N.. Fast forward to the date 900 days after the mission was supposed to return to Earth. The one suriviving ship has staggered back to earth, instruments failing, fuel exhausted, and unable to contact ANY ground station. Prochnow, in an early role, plays the Soviet deputy commander under a gung-ho American astronaut. They decide on an emergency landing in the cargo hold. The chief scientist is told to get the medical supplies cases but empties these into the weightless hold, replacing the contents with soil samples from the moon Ganymede. They pile into a cramped compartment and fall to Earth.
Their craft falls into the churning ocean and the men wait for rescue, sure that re-entry of the craft has been detected. After a few hours they leave on a raft for the coast not far away. The coast begins an arid desert journey during which no life is found.
Flashbacks to the mission periodically are shown where the scientist is shown to have caused the death of a fellow astronaut while obtaining samples of life near an alien lake. The contrast of finding life on Jupiter’s moons and none on their return to Earth is clear to the viewer as the film progresses.
The crew wanders to an abandoned town, where they find a map in the schoolhouse. The commander guesses that the most worn spot on the map will be their location, which is shown to be in Baja California Norte, about 50 miles from San Diego. They also find a stagnant, foul well. They want to decontaminate the water with tablets from the medical kit, but find the scientist has substituted the alien samples. Enraged, they force the murky, fishy well water down this throat until he vomits.
The find the highway north to California but it is mostly covered by the shifting desert sands. No one has obviously used the road for some time, and no cars are seen. They take shelter near a ruined prop plane and begin hypothesizing about their situation. Prochnow observes that their skin is peeling badly, and since they are near San Diego, a major naval base, there may have been a nuclear strike by his nation, the Soviet Union. At this, one of the American crewmen attacks him and is shot dead with a flare gun by the commander. Prochnow’s character is fatally injured by the attack and dies.
Another crew member observes that since they have been walking in the desert sun for days the peeling and scabbing is natural, and that they shouldn’t jump to conclusions. The scientist is cracking up at this point, and all the men are having visions of being feted at a tickertape parade, celebrating their return. We also see the scientist during training, where he was the weakest and only barely qualified physically for the mission. After a long flashback to the mission (all the space action is very slow) we return to find only the scientist still alive. In his delusions he is received back at the mission headquarters and subjected to a press conference without being given food or water. The first few questions are normal but soon the questioning become perverse. He is asked if the men turned homosexual during the long voyage, which he denies. The crass and juvenile attitude of the press towards important events is evident, as they are totally uninterested in the discovery of life on other worlds, but fascinated by the sexual possibilities of the mission.
Finally he brings his samples, the only evidence for life on Ganymede, to a small Mexican town, where we see our first sign of Earthly life. Children play around him and old men watch without interest as he walks jauntily down the main street. Here the movie ends. I like movies that don’t try to explain everything. We don’t really know if the Mexican town is real, so far is our scientist lost in delusion. Yet he is happy at the end, and if a nuclear catastrophe has occurred, at least it has not disturbed the age-old traditional life of the little peasant town. On the other hand, maybe only the ship’s radio receivers were damaged, and he will find civilization intact! Or perhaps is he hallucinating alone in the desert. The movie doesn’t give you an easy answer. The VHS transfer I rented was from a bad print, or perhaps the movie was shot in 8mm color. I would be interested in finding a better copy. The production values were pretty good, and the special effects were chosen well and didn’t give away the obviously low budget. Acting was first class, even through the dubbing. The slow pace and odd dialogue will put off most people, but fans of European film will probably enjoy this. Jurgen Prochnow fans may be disappointed by the small amount of screen time he receives, but here he displays the qualities that he brought to even greater life in DAS BOOT.
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Paul Naschy plays a heartless bastard businessman. He and some other big shots gather in secret to celebrate the Marquis De Sade with an orgy in an old castle. The men are all political and business moguls, and the women are beautiful. Everyone dons a hideous mask and toasts the Marquis. Just as the fun is about to begin the building shakes. A nuclear war has come and gone. Now the de Sade devotees must secure their own survival in a world ruined. An army of those blinded by radiation besieges the castle after one of the men kills a helpless refugee. Their leader is the blind beggar from the villiage! Great action, with hunting rifles and shotguns and an automobile used as a battering ram. The fat man is reduced to the state of a mute animal and crawls around naked on all fours. They fight amongst each other. I can’t place all of the actors, but Sergio Leone has used a few of them. Like ‘The Omega Man’ and the first ‘Mad Max’, the post-nuclear world is not a comic book parody but truly a bleaker version of our present. Some of the scenes are truly chilling, because the are filmed in so ‘matter of fact’ a manner. The death of a dove, the first casualty seen by the viewer, is particularly touching. Leon Klimovsky directs this like he gives a damn. (He also directed Naschy’s ‘Waldemar Daninsky’ Polish werewolf films). Real emotion comes through, and the ending is downer. No film on nuclear war should end any other way.
Midnight Video now offers a DVD of this film!
Midnight Video
Made-for-TV production values and directing, but what a concept! In order to climb the corporate ladder 5 couples, whose husbands work at a fashion firm, subject themselves to a psychological torture regimen run at a secluded estate by the sexy female CEO. Each person is forced to face the thing he or she most fears so they can become wholly ruthless in the corporate world. This entails humiliating the subject in front of the others. A fat man is stripped ,placed in a cage and forced to eat like a pig. Another man is buried alive to ‘cure’ him of his alcoholism. A man who considers himself a Christian and tries to emulate Jesus is brutalized and strapped to a crucifix. Over time, the subjects are willing to do increasingly vile things for ever smaller rewards. In the final act, our hero is set up to run a gauntlet of his co-workers, in order to prevent his sexy wife from being violated by one of the ‘counselors’. The others are promised that if they succeed in preventing her rescue, the will be rewarded with a two minute break to use the bathroom. They give it their all. While all this occurs, the black servants at the estate debate the validity of the ‘training’. They have more sense than the damn ‘professionals’ do! Of course there is a happy ending, but man! Who comes up with this stuff? Keep an eye out for the young Leo Rossi as a manager on the make.
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AnnJeanette Comer is in this one, and so is Hugo Stiglitz. They both went on to do better things. She’s an attractive lonely housewife whose Joe-Don Baker-looking husband is always out. Hugo’s rich. He looks at her from one of those M*A*S*H type helicopters. He invites women to his castle so he can collect their heads in jars of formaldehyde. (What’s next, stamp collecting?) A bald, fat Mexican guy dressed in a red sheet grinds up the bodies. Then he feeds them to –you guessed it- a thousand cats. That part of the film is chilling. The rest is just slow and stupid. Some great early-70s eurofashion cheese for the people, though, and tight pants on the leading lady. She later starred in ‘The Baby’, the ultimate white-trash weirdo welfare flick about a grown man in a crib. He went on to do the astounding ‘City of The Walking Dead’ (Update: Sold on DVD as 'Nightmare City'. Get it). The cats hopefully went on to eat Science Diet and shed all over the couch.
Update: Formerly this review identified the male lead as Mel Ferrer. My apologies to the Ferrer family and friends. Really.
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A.K.A. ‘Kiss and Kill’, ‘Blood of Fu Manchu’ 1968
Christopher Lee stars (as Sax Rohmer villain Fu Manchu), Jesse Franco directs. Suggested Awards: ‘Best Laughing Latin Bandit of 1968’! . ‘Best Corrupt Provincial Governor of ‘68’! ‘Best Peasant Girl Dance of ‘68’! You eventually stop caring who wins and just start enjoying the visuals and acting. Fu de Man. Female abductees are bullwhipped (unfortunately not a by a masked dwarf- damn!) and subjected to repeated cobra bites so that their kiss will be venomous. Then the women are sent from Fu’s Andean mountain abode to kiss (and kill) the world’s leaders. Before the Lewinsky affair I thought this was ridiculous, but now I see the genius behind it. .Nayland Smith, Fu’s arch nemesis and all-around good guy, is on the chase, but not before he is kissed. So his team (Task Force Smith?) have to drag him through the jungle in a cart while he lays dying. Fu’s multi-ethnic kung-fu soldiers fight the bandit chief. I’ll have to read Sax Rohmer’s books sometime, after I make my way through H.Rider Haggard. Apparently Lee starred in a whole slew of Fu movies in the mid-late ‘60s, alternating big budget US releases with some less endowed Euro product like this. Some of the direction is indifferent but Franco is obviously interested in the bandit sequences and the lazy atmosphere of the isolated village.
Directed by Tim Kinkaid
Kincaid directed a bunch of stuff for the direct-to-video market without spending one heck of a lot of money. Or hiring real actors. Or going on location. The end result is real bargain-basement in approach, but after watching it again for the first time in years, I think it compares favorably to Star Wars- Episode One. Here's the lowdown:
Sidekick: Jar Jar Binks was irritating and over-merchandised. On the other hand, the cowardly 'Freebot' in RH has better lines, can fight, and when the movie is over, you never had to see him again.
Battle Scenes: Episode One used the latest technology to bore the crap out of us. Tim K. did it for TEN BUCKS.
Plot/Character: I didn't give a rat's patootie what happened to the Vaderkind or that princess. I was kind of interested just how RH would end, given that there was no budget for a big explosion or a space battle. There was an element of MYSTERY...
OK. OK. So I'm trying too hard to be clever. Still, not a bad party tape for the MST3K-oriented.
