075. African Safari and 076. Going Steady

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073. The Firing Line and 074. The Mistress of Atlantis

Jump to The Mistress of Atlantis (1932)

073. The Firing Line (1988)
Director: Jun Gallardo
Writers: Jun Gallardo and Sonny Sanders
From: Cult Cinema and Drive-In

A mercenary helps take out the leader of a rebel insurgency, but when he finds he's been betrayed by his superiors, he joins the rebels forces.

This one's delicious and I either don't know how to describe it or I don't want to describe it. Just go find it. I mean, my first note about this film is, “'Starring Shannon Tweed.' So it's that kind of movie,” and when I say “that kind of movie,” I'm thinking in terms of The Flophouse Podcast where they discuss films requiring a sex tarp, which is incorrect. The Firing Line is, instead, this kind of movie.

That's right. More than starring Shannon Tweed, this stars Reb Brown as Mark Hardin, one of the names I'm sure the Mystery Science Theater 3000 writers rejected as too stupid for their list.

So we open on two military groups, both wearing vaguely gray uniforms, shooting at each other. I don't know which side is which, but I do know there are several sequences where a member of gray team 1 shots a member of gray team 2 only to be shot himself, and then his shooter shot, and then that shooter shot, and this pattern continuing like a series of human dominoes set off by bullets. This happens several times throughout the movie and it never stops being funny.

We finally come to the end of the battle where the rebel leader and a female subordinate are captured. Our hero, Mark Hardin, tells the leader how much he respects his ideals, but they're on opposite sides this time. After Mark Hardin leaves, the leader is killed and the subordinate is raped and killed.

So, sidenote, it's that movie too. To their credit, the rape happens off-screen and is done by the villains so it's more of a definitional moment—they're these kinds of monsters—rather than an entertainment/voyeurism one. It also leads to a nice payoff toward the end of the film where her sister, now the leader of the resistance, finds the rapist and shoots him in the dick.

Oh God, you guys, I love this movie!

Mark Hardin returns to his hotel where he meets Shannon Tweed in the bar, flirts with her, and then leaves to talk to his superior where he learns about the rebel leader getting killed. As a mercenary/American soldier (I'm not making a political statement, it's actually not clear which he is), I don't know why this would bother him, but he freaks out, attacks his superior, the liaison to the non-specific Latin American country they're working in, and is captured and tortured.

It's essential he be oiled before questioning

Torture involves him being asked questioned by a German and an Australian for some unknown reason and he has phone cords running to his nipples so he can call his pecs. Of course, he escapes, the baddies try to grab Tweed because she was seen with him, he brings her along in his escape, and they go join the rebels.

There isn't much plot from this point on. Tweed and Mark Hardin are both listed as enemies of the state so can't cross the border until the rebels win or without their help or something. There's a vague villain who refers to Mark Hardin as, “Christlike. A peasant Messiah,” as Mark Hardin is murdering people left and right. And it's all just silly.

I mean, after Mark Hardin and Tweed find the rebel camp, the military swoops in and starts massacring everyone, which is fine plot-wise, but there's stirring, triumphant action music playing the whole time. And the whole thing looks like it was shot either in the woods outside town or in the community rec center. Sure, it gets baggy in the middle, the big villain is neither present nor hammy enough, and Mark Hardin's superior looks like a deflated Andy Richter.

Conan, I don't like my hat.

Okay, that last part is kind of fantastic.

One curious element of the film is the politics. This is a late-80's Rambo knock-off and those tend to be relatively conservative, pro-military, and anti-Communist. The US Army and its client states, though, are the villains here working against the Communist rebels. The movie, of course, doesn't actually have or articulate any political views—it's just people taking turns shooting at each other and dying—but it's still a curious element.

Obviously, this is a huge recommend. It's dumb b-movie 80's action in all the right ways. Definitely something to share with friends.


074. The Mistress of Atlantis aka The Lost Atlantis (1932)
Director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Writer: Hermann Oberländer and Ladislaus Vajda, English dialogue by Miles Mander, based on the novel by Pierre Benoît
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A member of the French Foreign Legion reminisces about a mission that led him to the lost city of Atlantis and the enrapturing Queen he finds ruling there.

A radio announcer says Atlantis isn't a continent sunken beneath the ocean, but rather a city buried in the midst of the Sahara. Two members of the French Foreign Legion are listening to the broadcast and one of them says that he's not only been there, but he killed his friend Morhange there for the love of the Queen. The rest of the movie is a flashback to the mission Saint-Avit and Morhange were on that landed them in Atlantis.

A movie that lacks much plot but makes up for it by being about tone. It's an adventure piece without the adventure, but, unlike a Monogram Pictures or Sam Newfield production, this isn't dull or poorly done. It's about the desert as a space of obsession and despair, passion and guilt. Saint-Avit meets Antinea, the titular Mistress of Atlantis, and becomes obsessed with her, but she's in love with, or pretending to be in love with, Morhange. Meanwhile, Morhange and Saint-Avit are being denied access to each other, neither sure of the other's fate, and it's helping to drive them mad.

It's difficult to describe this movie because every term I want to use I have to immediately contradict. The movie's dream-like and ardently concrete. There are echoes of German Expressionism among the studio product. It's an early talkie, but already playing with multimedia and nested narratives: the story is started by a radio broadcast that leads to a flashback that includes dream sequences and its own flashback before coming back out into the frame narrative.

This is also a definite recommend, although, obviously, for different reasons than The Firing Line. I'd say this is actually a good movie and worth watching if you like early cinema. The movie is in the public domain, but my copy has a copyright mark for 1999 because someone replaced the opening titles with different titles in a slightly different font.

I'm not making that up. Compare the title card I have on this review to the beginning of the copy on archive.org. That's the extent of the “new material” that they're claiming, but it's enough to prevent me from sharing a copy of this print. That's why I seem so angry when I mention the Mill Creek logo being burned into films—it means that specific copy of a public domain work has been locked out of our culture. Mill Creek didn't do anything to make these movies, isn't doing any special restoration work (like the Criterion Collection does), they've just scrawled “mine” across the movie so they can sue if someone else uses that now-identifiable copy. “Copy,” by the way, is the key word. They've copied it from another public domain source but then took a special effort to make sure no one else could copy it the same way they did. It's petty, it's cheap, and it does a real disservice to our culture.

071. Galaxina and 072. Death Warmed Up

Jump to Death Warmed up (1984)

071. Galaxina (1980)
Director: William Sachs
Writer: William Sachs
From: Cult Cinema; Sci-Fi Invasion

A police ship piloted by the android Galaxina is sent on a mission to recover the “Blue Star,” but the crew will have to face a variety of challenges before they can safely return home.

The movie opens with a nice widescreen shot—rare on these Mill Creek sets—with good color, a crisp print and a card reading “A Marimark Production.”

Noooooooooooo!

Oh no.

So we open with a crawl, like Spaceballs, and get a little background on this sci-fi future that doesn't matter. We're introduced to our heroes—a crew on a police ship that's mostly responsible for handing out interstellar parking tickets. The ship is run by Galaxina, an android modeled after a beautiful woman that can't speak. She also serves the crew dinner while wearing a French Maid outfit. Because this is what passes as clever in a Marimark production.

There's no plot for most of the first half, just weak send-ups of other sci-fi movies. There's an obligatory Alien parody with a chest-burster, a Star Trek parody with a captain's log (read by Captain Butt. Yeah), and just general sci-fi tropes. The sergeant on the ship is in love with Galaxina even though she constantly rebuffs him, hits him, and electrocutes him in response to his advances. Obviously, that just means keep trying.

So the crew is sent on a mission to pick up the “Blue Star,” a gem that will do something important for space travel. Getting it will take 27 years, each way, so the crew spends one last night of freedom at an alien brothel. Galaxina watches the sergeant's cavorting via video, and then the crew comes back and goes into cryosleep. During the 27 year, Galaxina reprograms herself to be able to speak because she's actually in love with the creeper.

They wake up, send Galaxina to the inhospitable planet to get the gem, she meets the villain who ends up taking over the ship. The crew all band together and save the day. The end, kill me.

As with all the Marimark movies I've watched so far, this walks that fine line of, “This could be good if you'd try. Oh, you're not going to try at all.” As I said at the top, this looks like an actual movie. There's a budget, multiple sets, and an intelligence behind putting things together. Plus the captain is played by Avery Schreiber who's good. He should be the lead and given a lot more material to riff on, but instead they focus on the rapey sergeant and his relationship with Galaxina.

To be fair, there is one good gag in the movie. Every time someone says “Blue Star,” an angelic chorus briefly breaks out and everyone looks around to see where the noise came from. As a running gag, it's not great, but there's a moment where someone says “Blue Star” and nothing happens. Everyone waits a second, then the character says it again and the chorus catches up. It legitimately made me laugh.

Overall, this feels like a 1980's sci-fi version of the Scary Movie franchise, but not as funny or carefully crafted. Yeah, exactly. So a big thumbs-down on this. It's interesting as a historical document as it was released shortly before Dorothy Stratten, Galaxina, was murdered by her estranged husband.


072. Death Warmed Up aka Death Warmed Over (1984)
Director: David Blyth
Writers: David Blyth and Michael Heath
From: Cult Cinema; Pure Terror

A group of friends take a trip to a remote island where an evil scientist is doing experiments on people's brains. What one of the friends is keeping secret, though, is that he has a history with the scientist and very personal reasons for going to the island.

Dr. Howell is trying to push his research into the realm of human testing, but his colleague objects, saying the current results aren't conclusive enough. Howell bristles at the response as he's trying, in his words, to “make death obsolete.” That evening, Howell finds his colleague's son, Michael, and injects him with a serum that leads him to kill his parents.

When exactly?

Seven years later, Dr. Howell is doing experiments on an isolated island and Michael has just been released from a psychiatric institution. “Now...” we see Dr. Howell doing brain surgery on a patient who ultimately dies while Michael and his friends are taking a ferry over to the doctor's island. The boat's first mate clearly has issues and is complaining of a headache. The other passengers on the ferry are two goons that work for the doctor, waiting in a bus. Michael and his friends get into an altercation with the goons, but eventually escape.

Michael and his friends explore some WWII tunnels on the island where they discover the body of the first mate who had died while visiting the doctor. The goons show up on motorcycles and chase Michael and his friends through the tunnels. One of the friends gets a serious head injury, but another manages to severely injure one of the goons. The doctor is unsympathetic to the goon's injury so the other one goes into a rage and releases all the patients at the hospital. They go into town looking for Micheal and his friends.

They find the group holed up in a pub trying to find medical help. The goons descend, but are put off by the hospital staff that comes and kidnaps Michael et al. When they get to the hospital, it's overrun, Michael and his friends are immediately fending for themselves, which ultimately leads to Michaels' injured friend dying in an explosion and her boyfriend getting killed by one of the goons. Michael manages to kill Dr. Howell after he explains his plan for world domination which doesn't explain anything, and Michael and his girlfriend leave.

Outside, the island is in chaos as the doctor had been experimenting on everyone. Michael gets out of the car they're in, walks a little bit, and gets electrocuted by a falling power line. His girlfriend runs away in slow motion, weeping and terrified.

An interesting piece of Ozploitation with obvious influences from Mad Max and Bad Taste that don't marry as well as they could. The movie's low-budget, but does a good job working within those constraints as opposed to be stymied by them, and has a good sense of humor about its plethora of gore effects. The Bad Taste influences are clearest there. There's just a fundamental problem of clarity—I was never sure what the doctor's evil plan was or why Michael had gone to that island.

Otherwise the movie's pretty okay. It moves well enough, has silly 80's action tropes, and is the right mix of intentionally and unintentionally funny. I wouldn't say it needs to enter the bad movie canon, but it's pretty good as a hangover film or something to have on in the background with friends.

069. Death Machines and 070. The Devil's Hand

Jump to The Devil’s Hand (1962)

069. Death Machines (1976)
Director: Paul Kyriazi
Writer: Joe Walders and Paul Kyriazi from a story by Joe Walders
From: Cult Cinema; Sci-Fi Invasion
Watch: archive.org

A trio of assassins, known as the Death Machines, are dispatched to kill members of a rival gang to shore up Madame Lee’s criminal control of the city.

From Paul Kyriazi, writer/director of Weapons of Death comes another, “This is pretty fun oh why would you do that?” film.

We open with three racially-segregated pairs of fighters sparring with weapons—a white pair, an Asian pair, and a black pair. Yes, they are racially segregated. Turns out they’re all involved in fights to the death with the white guy literally shooting his opponent. Not even five minutes in and we’re already at genius levels of what-the-hell?

All of this is a display for Madame Lee, whose wig I kept expecting to sprout eyes and shout, “Manamana!” She hires the Death Machines to become her personal assassins, but first they have to take out the assassins of the stereotypical Italian mobsters in her city.

This leads to a sequence of the Death Machines being the least subtle assassins ever, which is surprising considering one of their targets drives a car into the middle of a park, unrolls a blanket to reveal a rifle, and balances it on the hood of his car. No cover, no hiding, just pointing a rifle in a park at a jogger. The Death Machines trump this by driving up behind him and shooting him with a bazooka.

The movie goes to some strange places. I did start wondering if there were any good guys at all. Until the Death Machines attack a dojo run by a drug dealer (and kill everyone except Frank, who just loses a hand), it’s just zombie assassins versus the mob. Half-an-hour in, the homicide detectives show up, but they don’t stick around long.

They get the case, blow off the paperwork and training they’re supposed to do, catch the white Death Machine when the trio goes to the hospital to try to kill Frank, and get kicked off the case for not doing their job. Standard trope of “good” cops being stymied by all these pesky “rules” and “regulations” and “laws.” That message of, “we’re all better off if we just let cops be vigilantes,” is undercut a bit, though, by the Captain chewing them out for not doing the paperwork because that lack of paperwork left him completely in the dark about a mass murder case that he has to inform the public about. It’s almost like the Captain has a point and they’re terrible cops.

Don’t worry, the correct order reasserts itself. The “incompetent” cops who do their job end up getting beat up by the Death Machine. He escapes to a diner where the owner tries to make him come to Jesus and then a biker gang shows up. They give the owner grief, start picking on the Death Machine, and then the other two members of the trio show up. Bikers get a stomping and the trio leaves.

The trio’s next job is to sexually assault the daughter of a bank manager, pictures of which are used to try to blackmail him into quitting his job. The man making the threat soothes the bank manager by reassuring him that the girl wasn’t conscious for most of it. The banker still refuses so the man handcuffs him to a filing cabinet and leaves a bomb in the office. The explosion is reminiscent of the end of Twin Peaks.

Yeah. It’s a big, “Why is this in this movie?” They could have just kidnapped the daughter, taken pictures to imply that they could find and attack her, but instead the movie goes for rape. It doesn’t show it, but it makes a plot point rape. And then it doesn’t even do anything to the story! The banker isn’t moved and it never comes up again. The whole sequence could be cut and you’d never know.

Except for that scene, the movie is entertainingly bad. Frank returns to the movie after his nurse, who’s inexplicably interested in him, tracks him down to unload some exposition and force a love interest. They get together, decide to go on vacation, and, while driving, happen to pass the trio in another car and decide to track them.

That’s right, the pursuit of the killers hinges on a meet-cute.

Stare at it. Let it seep into your soul.

So Frank keeps making really stupid decisions that would make even Scooby and the Gang say, “Jinkies, you’re begging for death,” the cops show up at the last minute to do nothing of consequence, and the trio heads to the airport for a potential sequel that was never going to happen. Best part of that final sequence: they freeze on the Death Machines for at least a solid minute. No credits, no dialogue or sound collage of news reports about them, just that one picture and the entirety of the backing track.

This movie, despite raising the specter of rape (and how’s that for a caveat?), is pretty fun. So many elements are hilariously bad because it’s clear that they’re present only because “these sorts of things happen in these movies.” For instance, every victim of the Death Machines is sent a red Buddha, but they get murdered so there’s no way for them to know what the statue means and the statue doesn’t act as a homing device for the Death Machines. They’re literally pointless.

There are no copyright marks on my print at all (maybe they were supposed to be in the closing credits that weren’t there), so I think it’s public domain. I’ve added a copy to the Internet Archive here that you can check out yourself.


070. The Devil’s Hand (1962)
Director: William J. Hole Jr.
Writer: Jo Heims
From: Cult Cinema; Chilling
Watch: archive.org, Rifftrax (buy), Rifftrax (Hulu stream)

Rick finds a doll that looks exactly like a woman who’s been appearing in his dreams. When he investigates further, he finds himself ensorceled and drawn into the machinations of an evil cult.

The movie opens with a nice, peppy, lounge instrumental which strikes the absolute wrong tone for a film about a man seduced into an evil cult. Or maybe it's exactly the right tone. “Hey, get with these sexy, swinging, Satanists. They've got groovy sacrifices and solid investment advice!” From the credits we cut to a park where Rick is meeting his fiancée Donna for lunch. She's feeding the ducks because he's twenty minutes late. He's smarmy and condescending about standing her up, and then he tells her that he quit his job. . . several days before.

This is sounding like the start of a Lifetime Original Movie.

Why was he late, they don't say. It couldn't have been the job he quit, but he has been having trouble sleeping because he's haunted by the specter of a beautiful dancing woman. That night, he wakes up from the nightmare and goes for a walk where he finds a shop with a doll in the window that looks exactly like the woman from his dreams.

The next day, he takes Donna there to show her the doll and the proprietor says Rick had ordered it to resemble Bianca Milan. When shown a picture, Rick identifies her as the woman, but insists he's never been to the store. Donna then finds her own doll, designed to look just like Donna, but the proprietor says it doesn't look like her and belongs to another customer. The couple leave, confused, and the proprietor puts a needle through Donna's doll, sending her to the hospital with a heart condition.

So there are elements of Voodoo without Voodoo ever being invoked. To speed things up, the proprietor is a high priest of Gamba, an evil devil-god, and Bianca, his girlfriend/second, has become infatuated with Rick and is using magic to make him fall in love with her. He does, joins the cult, and life immediately becomes The Great Gatsby even though it's 1962.

Various challenges arise—a cultist comes to Rick asking for help getting her soul back, but it's a test to prove his loyalty; Rick removes the needle from Donna's doll and has pangs of guilt over getting her involved; a journalist infiltrates the cult, but is found out and killed. These are all fine, but the problem is that they tend to arise and get resolved as quickly as I've described here. There's no sense of mounting tension or forces closing in on Rick, there are just things that come up and then sort themselves out.

Bianca finds out Rick cured Donna and so has Donna kidnapped to be the next sacrifice. When Donna's brought in to be killed, Rick rebels, saves Donna, and inadvertently starts a fire that kills all the cultists except Bianca. Rick flees with Donna while Bianca, superimposed on the film, holds his doll and laughs.

If the movie had been structured a little differently, it would have been more interesting. As it is, it feels a lot like a filmed version of a radio play. There's narration, the characters explain what they're looking at all the time, and there's very little going on visually. The movie's very perfunctory. That said, it's not awful. Overall, it's a competently-made product, but that doesn't inspire much enthusiasm.

I'm actually surprised I haven't seen this on more horror host shows. As far as I know, only Rifftrax has taken a stab at it, and it's certainly highly riffable. So I'd recommend it in that context: if you want to make fun of something with friends or with your kids, this is a good choice. For pure camp fun, though, it falls a bit short. Since it's PD, you can do what you like. I uploaded this to archive.org a while ago, but have replaced it with a sharper copy.