253. Escape From Galaxy 3

253. Escape From Galaxy 3 aka Giochi erotici nella terza galassia (1981)
Director: Bitto Albertini
Writer: John Thomas
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

A princess and captain, fleeing a despotic intergalactic warlord, set off across the galaxy to rally forces to their side. They land on a primitive planet with strange customs, a planet called… Earth?

A film that’s more interesting for its production choices rather than any narrative or creative element. It’s a post-Star Wars, post-Battlestar Italian sci-fi cheepy, and even that sets the bar too high. I’ve just watched it, but I’ve already forgotten the names of the characters. Apparently those names weren’t particularly important, though since even IMDB doesn’t list all the actors or give the characters’ full names.

Anyway, the story is this peaceful group of people is being threatened by an evil galactic overlord. He looks like George Clinton with a trimmed and glitter-bombed beard. While it’s easy to read racial overtones into the evil black villain attacking the peaceful white people, it comes across more as the Mothership delivering funk to a planet that keeps insisting on broadcasting Pat Boone.

As our funk overlord blows up the planet and all the people, a Princess and a Captain escape to contact the other kings of the galaxy to unite against the galactic overlord. Their ship gets damaged in the escape and they end up landing on a planet unlike any they’ve seen before. It’s all green and blue and… it’s Earth. This comes up later, but it’s Earth. When the funk overlord tracks them there, he says it’s Earth and that it destroyed itself centuries before in a nuclear war. [psst! Do you get the subtext? It’s the text]

So the pair land on Earth to repair their ship and return to their mission of uniting forces against the funk. Only they run into the primitive people of Earth, amaze and terrify them with alien technology, and get fascinated by water. Yeah. Water. The Princess had read about it, but never encountered it.

The pair get captured, sentenced to death, then forgiven when the Captain saves a child. They get introduced to sex by the people, cause apparently they don’t have that elsewhere in the universe, and spend the rest of the movie trying to figure that out. I mean, “erotici” is in the original title. What did you think the movie was going to be about? Sure, they’re on a mission to defeat intergalactic tyranny, but, hey, humpy-humpy.

Funklord returns, captures them, but is destroyed by the powers granted to them by sex. All the peoples trapped under his funky thumb are freed and the pair return to Earth to screw as many people as they possibly can. THE END.

I mean, if you want Star Wars but more fucky, fill your boots. Just do it, though. Don’t go through all the contortions of getting there. You have the funk overlord, the chase across the galaxy, crashing on a planet, and then it all grinds to a halt. Suddenly the characters aren’t concerned with saving their planet or people, finding the other kings, or even repairing their ship. Instead, they’re amazed by water and have to learn what kissing is. It’s real stupid.

On top of that, a lot of the movie looks familiar because all the model and spaceship shots were taken from Starcrash. You may be familiar with that movie from season 11 of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s not a great flick.

So you have a sci-fi movie that’s ripping off a sci-fi movie that itself is a rip-off of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. AND is trying to be a softcore porno.

How can I not recommend a trainwreck like this?

Well, part of the reason is that it’s pretty boring. Not only do the various plots get introduced and dropped, the movie keeps throwing in details for no apparent reason. We randomly learn in the middle of the movie that the Princess and Captain are immortal, but will lose their immortality once they taste the pleasures of living. You could say there’s an Adam and Eve allegory at play there, but nothing’s done with it, and “the pleasures of living” include eating and drinking. These interstellar immortals literally don’t know how food works and you can bet that's played for laughs!

It turns out, though, that it’s not sex or eating that will cost them their immortality—indeed, it’s the fucking that makes them truly super-powered—but living outside the confederation of galaxies that they were a part of. If they don’t go back to Earth, which is some mix of stone-age and ancient Greek culture, they can live forever. But they still go back. Because reasons?

By the way, the superpowers they get from sex come up at the very end. Lord Funk of the Funk Reich claims the Princess as his slave. She kisses him and the Captain, somehow, is able to shoot lasers from his eyes and the combination turns Emperor Funk into a pile of ash.

What even is this?

While it’d probably be great fun to riff and watch with others, solo, it’s a confusing sci-fi rip-off of a rip-off that decides to almost try to be a softcore movie in its final third. The insistence upon the lead pair’s innocence and ignorance is immediately tiring and just makes you wonder how easily distracted they’re supposed to be. This can be a lot of fun if you have the right people with you, otherwise give it a pass.

252. Assassin

252. Assassin (1986)
Director: Sandor Stern
Writer: Sandor Stern
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

Ex-CIA agent Henry Stanton is brought back on board to hunt down a killer android that’s turned on its masters.

A CIA agent goes into the agency’s secret regional office in St. Louis and kills everyone there. In LA, Dr. Mary Casallas is picked up by other members of the agency and flown by helicopter to the isolated ranch of former agent Henry Stanton. They tell him that the CIA needs him now, more than ever, because he was the best CIA agent that the CIA ever had, but he told those honkies from the CIA that Henry Stanton was out of the game.

Wait… no… that’s Black Dynamite. I’m thinking of Black Dynamite. Ah, if only there was a Western version of Black Dynamite.

Anyway, this isn’t Black Dynamite, it’s Henry Stanton, aka Beige Powder, and he’s the agency’s best hope for stopping rogue agent Robert Golem. Golem’s memorized the records of every agent from the past six years, but Stanton left eight years ago which gives him the advantage of surprise. They suspect Golem will go after Casallas next so send Stanton to her apartment.

Stanton searches the apartment, finds it abandoned, and invites Casallas in. He, as he says, searched everywhere “except that locked door.”

Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

Of course Golem pops out, gets shot up, and jumps out the window without being harmed. Turns out he’s an android that was co-designed by Casallas. When she realized he was being used for assassinations, she quit the agency. The other co-designer has since committed suicide leaving no records of who the android is aiming to kill or why.

Turns out the dead designer was a John Bircher-type (a Brightbark alt-reicher in modern parlance) and had programmed the android with a list of “traitors,” ie. Congresscritters and bureaucrats who were less than 110% in favor of empire and colonialism. Stanton learns this when investigating the dead scientist’s house and uncovering his secret journals. Casallas keeps one volume hidden because the movie wants to pretend to have intrigue.

Speaking of foolish ambitions, the movie tries to make Stanton a character, which is a mistake. He has trouble sleeping because he slipped a bomb into the luggage of some foreign baddie and it blew up a passenger plane killing everyone on board. The target was supposed to be on a private plane, but changed plans at the last minute. The guilt over that ended Stanton’s marriage and led to him quitting the agency. Also, I said above that it’s the CIA, but they only ever call it “the agency.”

So Stanton figures out that Golem’s next target is Stanton’s boss and sets up an ambush. There are only three ways to kill the android: shoot him in the stomach (which he covered with metal plating after his first encounter with Stanton), attack him during his 30-minute every 72-hours recharge cycle (which the team botched), or trap him which will initiate his self-destruct sequence to prevent enemy agents from finding him.

Golem wades through the ambush easily, tells Stanton the truth about his boss setting Stanton up to bomb the passenger plane as revealed in the secret journal, and gets the boss alone in a shed. They manage to seal the exits and Golem self-destructs. Stanton hugs Casallas and asks her if there are any other androids. She says Golem was the only one, but we push in for a close-up on her unsure face. THE END.

This was a TV movie that was obviously aiming to become a series. “Robert Conrad is Henry Stanton, on the hunt each week for robotic assassins intent on overthrowing our government from within!” Only it didn’t work out that way. Because this movie is garbage.

The twist at the end is that Golem may not be the only robot running around and I wonder if a good portion of the cast read the script and decided they would be secret robots as well. What if, super-twist, Henry Stanton himself is a robot! That would explain his wooden, deadpan delivery and absolutely inert chemistry with Casallas. He keeps asking her if she was dating the other scientist, then if she’s dating anyone at all, I think he even asks if she’s into men since she never seems to take the opportunity to jump him—the ever charmless Beige Powder. Being romanced by Beige Powder feels like being taken with all the force of a polite clearing of the throat.

The movie itself is bland an inoffensive—it’s an 80’s made-for-TV movie, it only ever aspired to fill some time. For that reason itself, it provides a bit of ironic fun. I mean, Golem is programmed, like Data, to be “fully-functional” and ends up seducing a woman. Golem is being played as a 100% affectless robot the entire time, yet this woman is head-over-heels for him. That he is more charming than our hero is sort of funny in its own right as well.

Because it’s not that inventive, never goes off the rails in an interesting way, and doesn’t achieve any high levels of camp, I’m not recommending it. However, I’m not going to discourage anyone from seeing it either. It’s 95 minutes and passes the time competently enough. It just doesn’t have anything to really grab you during that time either.

251. The Brother From Another Planet

251. The Brother From Another Planet (1984)
Director: John Sayles
Writer: John Sayles
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

A mute alien that looks like an African-American man lands in New York in an allegory of the immigrant and outsider experience.

The titular Brother crashes in the water outside Ellis Island at night. He makes his way to shore, but is missing a foot. As he touches the walls of the entryway to the US, voices ring out. He’s an empath and can hear and experience the memories imprinted in surfaces and objects. By the next morning, his three-toed foot has grown back.

What follows doesn’t have a plot, per se, although there are attempts at one which are the weakest parts of the movie. The Brother finds his way to Harlem and the film serves as a picaresque of the neighborhood in the early ‘80’s. Since he’s mute, everyone else does all the talking presenting us with visions of despair and hope, isolation and emancipation, all the things grand and banal of these people's lives. There’s prejudice and responses to prejudice, people offering mystical visions and people desperate just to have someone who’ll listen, ecstasy and death. You’ve given a picture of a community that doesn’t necessarily stick together, but does what it can not to sell others out.

The Brother has supernatural abilities. Not only can he sense the emotional ghosts in objects, he can heal—both people and electronics—by laying on hands and the latter skill earns him some money. However, he’s an escaped slave from his home planet and two white aliens, claiming to be INS, are hunting him down. This is where the movie is weakest, oddly enough because that’s where there’s a story. The pleasure of this film is just watching the Brother encounter other people and getting a glimpse of their lives.

In addition to the white aliens hunting him, the Brother is on his own mission. He finds the body of a junkie from his building in an abandoned lot. The Brother tracks the junk back to the source, an anonymous corporate type downtown, who the Brother then kills. The idea behind the subplot makes sense, but, as with the aliens hunting the Brother, it’s not as strong as the parts of the movie that are just about the people themselves.

To wrap up the plot, the white aliens finally catch up to the Brother, a chase ensues, and they all run into a group of aliens like the Brother—former slaves that have escaped to New York to begin new lives. They collectively chase off the white aliens who end up disappearing (either vaporizing themselves or teleporting back to wherever they came from) and put the Brother on the A train. The final shot is him staring out the back window as the train pulls away. THE END

This was one of the movies I was really looking forward to seeing. I knew the name and a bit of the reputation behind it, but had never really been exposed to it. And it’s solid. The parts I described above are the weakest bits, what some of the sites I referenced described as “the super-hero plot.” The stronger parts are the Brother staying with a white single mother with a biracial child, falling in love with a lounge singer, being protected by the bureaucracy of social services—the movie is endlessly inventive and never didactic. I never had a sense that it was trying to speak to any culture or group’s experiences, only these individual characters. Each of them has their own situation and is dealing with it in a way particular to them.

While the movie can be a little uneven—it does feel at times like an exceptional college film—it’s also hands-down one of the best movies I’ve seen while doing this project. Other movies have been fun, some are good in a goofy or nostalgic way, but this is the first one that really stands out for having style and ambition. The movie is trying something and is really sharp in its execution. Of course it’s a recommend. More than just being fun on a weekend, this film is deeply satisfying.

250. The Specialist

250. The Specialist (1975)
Director: Howard Avedis
Writers: Ralph B. Potts, Howard Avedis, and Marlene Schmidt, based on the book by Ralph B. Potts
From: Cult Cinema

A spiteful lawyer hires a woman to seduce his legal opponent leading to unintended consequences for both sides.

The movie stars Adam West and opens with a titular theme song sung by Lou Rawls. So you know we've peaked in the first five minutes and can just jump to the end.

Pike Smith is the former lawyer for the local water company. He’s outraged at being replaced by the new hotshot Jerry Bounds (Adam West). Smith’s family has long held control over the town and is responsible for a lot of its current state. The water company firing him is a move to wrest control from the family and start letting the town develop on its own. Smith, of course, objects, and takes the water company to court to try to have it dissolved.

Which is the first curious point about this movie. The IMDB synopsis says the court battle is over the use of a local lake when it’s about dominance. On the other hand, IMDB says this is a “thriller” so it’s clear I’m the first person to have ever actually watched this movie.

Smith wants to guarantee his victory so he hires Alec Sharkey to spy on West. Sharkey says it’ll be difficult because West is pretty on-the-level. However, Sharkey does know a woman, the titular Specialist, who excels at seducing men. If Smith can get her on the jury, she can seduce West, opening him up to charges of jury tampering and getting him disbarred. Smith agrees and Londa Wyeth is brought to town.

She gets on the jury, aggressively pursues West, and is photographed “frolicking” with him on the lakeshore. West is off the case, but he and his wife pursue information about Londa and eventually track her down. They file disbarment charges against Smith for setting this whole thing up. Londa and Sharkey are both subpoenaed and Sharkey goes to Smith to work out a price for Sharkey and Londa to disappear. He pulls a gun on Smith, but Smith manages to choke him to death.

Londa testifies at the disbarment hearing that West didn’t initiate contact and refused to discuss issues related to the case. Since she never met Smith, she doesn’t say anything about him. West gets disbarred, it seems like Smith has won, but on the steps to the building West yells at Smith, “I’m not a lawyer anymore,” and shoots him. THE END

I wanted to write about how middling and goofy this movie is. I mean, it’s not sure if it’s a sex comedy without any sex or an erotic thriller without any eroticism so it ends up being nothing. Plus it has the additional problem of having an unsympathetic villain who’s right. When Smith hires the Specialist, he says that if West is the kind of person who’d have an affair with a juror then it’s best for everyone if he get exposed. Granted, Smith is doing it for purely selfish and petty reasons, but he’s not wrong. In the end, West is disbarred because he did exactly what he’s accused of.

So I was going to write about all of that, but then I read deeper into the IMDB pages of the people involved with this movie and oh my golly! This is six degrees of “possibly Nazi? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

Okay, okay, okay, so the director Howard Avedis has two other movies on these box sets that I still haven’t seen yet. He cast himself as the PI/fixer Alec Sharkey so you get to see him on-screen, but so what?

Avedis is married to his co-writer, Marlene Schmidt, who appears in all of Avedis’ movies. Here she plays West’s loyal and dedicated wife. She’s also where things get, narratively, interesting. According to her IMDB bio, she was raised in Soviet East Germany and fled in 1960 to the West. She became an electronics engineer, then Miss Germany and Miss Universe.

Sidenote, how isn’t that a movie?

After becoming Miss Universe, Schmidt married Ty Hardin, a beefcake player in Western movies and tv shows. They divorced after a few years and she ended up with Avedis. I’m not sure if this is pettiness or coincidence (I want to believe it’s pettiness), but in this movie, Smith’s idiot son who ends up causing everything to come crashing down on Smith is named “Hardin.” They named the hippie-dippie, half-smart, poseur artist after her ex. In retrospect, a pretty bold move since, according to IMDB, Hardin

became a self-proclaimed "freedom fighter" in the 1970s, and led a radical right-wing group called The Arizona Patriots, an anti-Semitic/anti-immigrant/anti-black group with a penchant for stockpiling weapons and baiting public officials.

It goes on from there! Seriously, skip this movie, it’s a merely passable mediocrity that “ehs” its way through its uninspired plot. However, I highly recommend reading the entire IMDB bio page for Ty Hardin and check out The Nizkor Project page for the Arizona Patriots. That stuff is terrifying and wild.

249. Terror

249. Terror (1978)
Director: Norman J. Warren
Writers: David McGillivray from a story by Les Young and Moira Young
From: Cult Cinema

A witch cursed the Garrick family centuries ago. Now, people close to the last two descendants of the family start dying in brutal ways.

One of the IMDB user reviews of this movie notes similarities to Argento’s Suspiria, and I think that’s a good starting point. Terror isn’t as strange as Suspiria or as visually ambitious, but they feel like aesthetic neighbors. The makers of Terror saw Suspiria and went, “that’s nice, but a bit much.” Where Suspiria’s bright and lurid with an unrelenting fable/nightmare logic, Terror mutes the colors and, when it doesn’t try to offer an explanation for what’s happening, tries to trick you into thinking there is one.

We open with a woman running through a forest pursued by a torch-wielding mob. She’s captured after stepping in a bear trap. The local lord and lady are alerted and arrive to watch the woman get tied to a stake. She calls on Satan to protect her and one of the townsfolk catches fire. Pretty nice man-on-fire, to be honest. She dies, but her ghost kills the lord and lady in their house and curses their family until the end of time. “THE END” flashes on screen because this has all been a movie within the movie.

Cut to the people watching the movie in the house where the film is set. The film’s been produced by James Garrick and the film is about his own family. The group breaks up to drink and chat and one of the friends says he can do hypnotism. As he starts, a wind rises outside and breaks a window. While James is looking for something to cover the hole, the friend hypnotizes James’ sister Ann. In the kitchen, James finds all the glassware broken including a pitcher that is sliced through, but still in one piece until he touches it. When he returns to the party, Ann is stuck in a trance. She takes the family’s ancestral sword from the wall and tries to kill James. She’s brought to and runs out of the house in horror. A friend follows shortly thereafter and is stalked and murdered with a blade by someone in the woods.

Are these supernatural murders? The work of Ann in a psychotic fugue? James attempting to drum up publicity for his film? The movie doesn’t do a good job of making you wonder. There are various victims, but the one I’ll highlight that demonstrates the problem with the film isn’t a victim at all.

So Ann lives with a bunch of other young woman in a hostel. The night of the murder, Ann comes home with blood all over her hands and is seen by her roommate. Later, her roommate mentions it to Ann, but Ann acts like she doesn’t remember. The roommate leaves, her car breaks down in the middle of the woods, and she finds an abandoned cottage. She finds a phone, calls a mechanic, someone arrives outside, and… it’s the mechanic who gives her a tow.

The bait-and-switch is fine, we’re used to that in movies, but what is the bait-and-switch trying to distract us from? Are we supposed to suspect Ann? There’s no way for Ann to be near her roommate or to have sabotaged the car. Are we supposed to suspect James? He’s less likely to be there than Ann. Are we supposed to think it’s the witch’s curse? Then why would people who aren’t part of the family be endangered? The people who die are, a family friend who’s a cousin (so curse maybe), a guy bothering Ann at work, a director who annoys James at the studio James owns, the actress from that shoot who lives with Ann, James’ co-worker at the studio, a cop trying to question Ann, and then James and Ann themselves because, surprise, it was the witch all along. THE END.

The movie doesn’t make sense on its own terms or in the sense of it trying to follow an Argento-esque nightmare logic. Characters appear largely to get killed and, since there’s no context for who they are to start with, there’s no sense of shock when they die. In fact, the whole time I kept wondering why these were the characters that died (when I was able to tell them apart). If it had been James doing it for whatever reason, that’d fit with the horror trope of “everything in the movie tells you it’s this person, but, twist, it’s not!” but it’s the witch’s curse. Why would the witch, whose only goal is to make the family suffer, kill people that antagonize or suspect the family?

To the movie’s credit, it’s a passable semi-gothic creepie. The cinematography is fine and the set-ups are strange enough. Once it abandons the pretense that there’s an actual killer committing the murders, the set pieces become much more interesting—one character is engulfed in film, another is threatened by a levitating car. It’s fine for a rainy afternoon or to have on in the background at a Halloween party. Since none of it lines up, you don’t have to pay close attention. Plus there’s a weird S&M-inflected stripper scene in the middle that’s odd enough on its own to be worth a few giggles. While the movie’s nothing fantastic, it’s watchable enough.

248. The Wild Rebels

248. The Wild Rebels (1967)
Director: William Grefé
Writer: William Grefé
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: Mystery Science Theater 3000

A race car driver joins a bank-robbing motorcycle gang at the request of the police to help take the gang down.

I saw that there was an MST3k version of this movie and you bet your ass I watched that instead. This flick is pure MST fare: overly loquacious thugs, a plot that adamantly refuses to move, and a hero that’s a doughy white guy who does nothing. In fact, I think I just summed up the movie. I’m going to get drunk.

Okay, the “plot.” We open on stock car superstar Rod Tillman wrecking his car in a race. He’s so mad about the wreck that he decides to quit racing entirely and auctions off all his equipment. Shades of Burnout, although this movie does more than just have the whiny driver have everything handed to him. Rod catches a ride to a bar with just the bag on his back and his trusty guitar. Is he going to sing later? Do you believe in a just and loving God? Well you’re wrong because of course he sings later and it’s awful.

At the bar, the “Satan’s Angels” biker gang recognizes Rod and asks him to visit their “pad” to hear a “proposition.” While these are the exact words they use, everything they say sounds like there’s a non-zero chance they’re inviting him to participate in a three-way. Rod leaves with Linda, the woman in the gang, while the three other gang members, Banjo, Jeeter, and Fats, hang back to beat up some college boys at the bar for having danced with Linda. (This is how you know they’re bad. Because the swastikas all over their jackets weren’t enough of a clue. Let’s not be presumptuous though. Let’s reserve judgment until the third fawning New York Times profile on the group.)

Back at the gang’s shack, Linda and Rod are making out in front of a giant Nazi flag.

Jesus fuck… Give me a minute… Okay.

He calls a stop to it just before the gang arrive. Turns out they’re bank robbers and want Rod to drive the getaway car for them. He refuses, leaves, and is immediately arrested by the cops. They convince him to flip and work as the getaway driver so they can successfully arrest the gang. Apparently they know the gang is involved in all sorts of crimes, but can’t prove any of it because the gang is too smart.

Sure.

Anyway, Rod agrees. The gang keeps him in the dark about the details, but the cops are constantly watching. Tensions rise when Banjo catches Rod making out with Linda leading to a minor fight that doesn’t go anywhere. They steal some guns from a pawn shop and then get ready for the bank robbery itself. The cops follow them, but the gang manages to give them the slip. Since the cops don’t know which bank is going to be robbed, they’re left trying to follow Rod who gives them the slip pretty easily.

At the bank, Rod flashes his brights at some passing cops who stop to talk to him. He tells them there’s a bank robbery going on, but Banjo sees the whole thing. The cops get shot and Rod has to drive the gang away. Cops start following them, they get cornered at a lighthouse, cops shoot Banjo and Fats, and Rod tries to run up the stairs to escape. Jeeter follows, corners Rod, but is then shot in the back by Linda. Cops come in, arrest Linda, and walk away with Rod. THE END.

That’s right, the hero of the piece flashes his brights and that’s it. That’s the extent of his heroic action. Linda kills Jeeter, the leader of the gang, for no explicable reason. Also, there’s no explanation for why the cops don’t arrest them after the gun heist. That’s armed robbery and they have the stolen guns in their possession. Isn’t that enough for an arrest? Then again, what do you expect from a police force that can’t pin any crimes to the swastika-wearing biker gang that doesn’t wear masks during robberies? Yeah, right, forgot, the gang’s too smart. Brutally stupid.

Watching the MST3k version was so much more fun. This was a season 2 episode so still pretty early in the show’s run. Joel has a small chin beard, like an inverse soul patch, and the host segments largely focus on Gypsy’s emotional state. A solid enough episode, though.

As for the movie itself, catch the MST3k version or just skip it. It’s not terrible, but very little happens and it’s pretty cheaply made. One of the jokes they make constantly in the episode is how bright everything is. Despite most of the movie taking place at night, everything is shot in the middle of the day. We’re not talking day-for-night, we’re talking daylight with a motorcycle’s headlights on to indicate that it’s dark out. Hilariously bad on that level. Otherwise, pretty dull.

247. Hundra

247. Hundra (1983)
Director: Matt Cimber
Writers: John F. Goff and Matt Cimber
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

The last survivor of an all-female tribe must go out into the world to rebuild her nation. However, she’ll face many challenges from the men of the surrounding cultures.

A barbarian fantasy flick where Hundra is a warrior in an all-female tribe. A narrator tells us that the tribe has expelled all men and struck out on their own to create a life more pleasing to them. They have everything they need except the ability to “plant the seed from which to create new life.” So members periodically go out to get pregnant. The movie opens with one member giving birth, unfortunately, to a boy. The child will be handed off to someone somewhere and the woman will try again.

Hundra is preparing to go hunting and gets teased for not having tried to get pregnant yet. She says no sword or man will ever pierce her and goes on her way. Of course, a gang of raiders from an opposing tribe is surrounding the camp and attacks just as she leaves. She returns to find her tribe wiped out and she, in turn, kills all the tribesmen that attacked her camp. She goes to see the matriarch of her tribe who tells her to seek out a man to get pregnant and thus continue the people.

Which is the first misstep in the film for me. With the film being made in 1983 and being about an all-female tribe (and being in these box sets), there was a better-than-even chance it was going to descend into farce or some terrible gender-essentialist nonsense. Hell, there was a better-than-even chance that it was going to use its setting as an excuse for lots of rape-tinged nudity. To the movie’s credit, it doesn’t do that, mostly. Hence the misstep here.

The more interesting plot, to my mind, is Hundra rebuilding her nation by being a leader and converting women (and men) to her way of thinking. That plot would be doubly interesting because the story eventually takes Hundra into a city ruled by a High Priest and his lackeys who kidnap women from the town, train them to be sex slaves, and then sell them off to the chieftains of the surrounding clans. If the movie had a more explicit agenda, that setup would be a pretty didactic condemnation of patriarchy. Not only is it exploitative and inherently corrupt, no one is benefiting from it. The movie has presented a setting begging for a revolution.

Instead, Hundra needs a man to knock her up. I mean, if this was a Conan movie and he were the last member of his people, he wouldn’t be tasked with finding a wife, he’d set out to conquer an empire and turn that into his people. Considering my concerns about the movie, to see it doing all right and then make this move was disappointing.

Anyway, back in the city, she fights the priests a bit, falls through a roof into a doctor’s home, and falls in love with him. She then decides to allow herself to be taken to the temple because she believes she’ll get pregnant there. The expected, “we’ll break your will,” “you’ll never break me” stuff happens and Hundra makes a deal with the woman who’s supposed to teach her to be feminine: Hundra will learn the lessons to get one over on their oppressors in exchange for teaching her teacher how to fight.

Once feminine, Hundra returns to the doctor, becomes pregnant, and gives birth to their daughter. She decides to leave the day that the chieftains expect her to submit, but her teacher betrays her/gets caught (happens off-screen so unclear), and the high priest has kidnapped her daughter. Hundra bows to the chieftains, but her teacher has slipped away and saved the baby. When Hundra sees her child and the doctor throws her her sword, she massacres all the chieftains. The High Priest tries to murder the baby, but gets attacked by Hundra’s dog (who’s been a coward throughout the movie as a running gag, but saves the day here. It’s a whole thing). The High Priest is then attacked by all the women in the temple. They dogpile him and sit on his face until he suffocates.

Did I mention the High Priest was a neat freak? So that’s part of his death. I’m saying it’s not 100% “are we seeing someone’s fetish here?” It’s 97-98% "we're seeing someone's fetish here."

So, temple falls, Hundra leaves with baby, everything happy. THE END.

I mean, it’s all right. It’s not great, not terrible, and does slightly better than I expected it to. Even before we get into the gender stuff, the movie faces the challenges all fantasy movies face and that’s world-building. The joy of fantasy novels is how expansive, strange, and fantastic their settings and events can be. This is shot in the hills of Spain. The cast are people running around in animal skins. I’m saying it doesn’t grab the imagination.

Then there’s the gender stuff. As I mentioned above, I was really worried and the movie largely side-steps my concerns. What nudity there is is fleeting, the violent sexual situations get shut down real quick, and the attack on the village at the beginning could have gone either way. The women fight back and kick a lot of ass. Nowhere, besides the dialogue of the obvious villains, is the idea floated that women can’t take care of things for themselves.

Which is what makes the direction of the rest of the film a little odd. Rather than seek revenge or lead a revolution, Hundra is sent out to fulfill her destiny as a woman and get pregnant. Rather than train all the women in the temple and ultimately lead a slave revolt, she only teaches the one. It feels like the movie imagines itself as more progressive than it is, which only serves to highlight how it falls short.

The acting is bad, but not hilariously so and there are attempts at humor that fall real flat. I mentioned the dog above, but there are others. Before Hundra gets to the town, she finds a guy who’s keeping 4-5 women as slaves. The sound design around him, and throughout the movie, is pretty atrocious. His belches and farts are amplified to the level of low roars and I’m left going, wait, is this movie doing fart jokes?

The movie is what it is. I’m not recommending it, but not saying to avoid it either. You might get some fun out of riffing it if you’re so inclined, but it didn't seem to be lending itself to jokes. It avoids some pitfalls and does some things well, however, IMDB rates this a 4.6/10 at the moment and that seems about right. The movie’s pulling a C- in my estimation, but I may be feeling generous after the slog that was Burnout. I at least liked some of the characters in this.

246. Burnout

246. Burnout (1979)
Director: Graham Meech-Burkestone
Writer: Martin J. Rosen
From: Cult Cinema

A rich man’s son enters the world of drag racing with his father’s help only to give up and try to work his way up from the bottom.

The movie opens with our “hero,” Scott, being put on trial. Via flashbacks and a later expository conversation with his girlfriend, we learn that Scott was drag racing and there was an accident. The editing makes it seem like Scott killed an old lady, but he tells his girlfriend that he killed a dog instead.

Great way to introduce your lead character movie: start with him killing a dog. Is there any way to top this? Well…

The judge in the trial calls Scott’s dad back to his chambers to have a chat about how to sentence Scott. That’s right, the movie opens with our lead killing a dog and then getting off because his dad is rich and chummy with the judge. People ask how Brock Turner happens—this his how Brock Turner happens.

Scott’s dad runs a company. Some sort of firm of manufacturing business inc engineering llc associates & son. The company is never defined. What is defined is Scott’s unwillingness to follow in his dad’s footsteps even though his dad doesn’t pressure him to do that at all. He asks Scott what he’d like to do and Scott says drag race. So dad drops $40,000 on a top-of-the-line drag racer and team to make Scott a driver. Scott blows it on his first three races and quits because he’s a brat. However, Scott says it’s because his dad’s putting too much pressure on him and is the reason he’s losing. So he runs away from home, signs on as a pit boy with the team that had been working for his dad (and who are out a lot of money because of Scott’s tantrum), and tries to learn the trade from the bottom up.

After the team loses a few races, they finally do well in Vegas and Scott takes the driver out drinking. The driver suggests ending the night, but Scott insists on one more and then convinces the driver to flirt with one of the waitresses. Scott leaves and, the next morning, the driver isn’t there. The team puts Scott in the car instead and he wins. Turns out the driver got assaulted by the waitress’ boyfriend so Scott has to drive for the rest of the season.

Another driver, who put his driving career on hold to be part of Scott’s team and is pissed that his job evaporated due to Scott’s brattiness is now pissed at Scott’s team leader for not hiring him as the driver. They’d been wanting to work together for years and now that an opportunity opens up, Scott gets the slot. It’s almost like this driver who has dedicated his life to the sport is resentful of this entitled little shit having every opportunity handed to him and then squandering it at the expense of the people around him.

Scott continues to do well, ends up in the finals against the driver who’s angry at him, and ultimately loses. The driver wins the trophy and Scott gets the second-place puppy. Someone asks him what he plans to do with it and Scott says he’s going to give it to the old woman from the beginning. Scott’s dad and girlfriend walk up to congratulate him because they’d secretly been watching the whole time. THE END.

Credit must be given to a film that so deftly combines loathsomeness and vacuity in such a short span. Burnout is only 75 minutes in my cut, but boy does it feel longer. On top of that, it feels like they’re constantly padding the film. While what I describe above sounds like a plot, it’s merely a summary of the few scenes where something happens. The first fifteen minutes are dedicated to “shooting the rodeo” as Scott and his dad go to various drag races and we watch footage of people racing. Scott’s dad buys Scott’s way into the sport which just leads to a car building montage and then Scott is on the track. He qualifies to race, gets disqualified from his first two races for starting before the green light goes, and then his engine blows out on the third race. So he quits because his dad is ruining everything for him.

Thirty minutes in now, by the way. All the rest is padded with stock footage of drag racing. That’s it. That’s the entire movie. Poorly-shot footage of drag races that never communicates what’s exciting about drag racing. And then it ends.

Almost a year ago, I watched Hell On Wheels, a movie about a country superstar/Formula One champion that faces off against moonshiners. It’s not as good as that makes it sound, but it’s leaps and bounds better than this. I said of that movie that the director wasn’t “padding his movies with stock footage, he’s padding his stock footage with a movie,” and I should have saved that statement. This movie is Stock Footage: the Motion Picture. It has no pretense of a plot or motion or character development. It doesn’t even do a good job showcasing the drag racing. All it has is the face-like-a-slapped-ass hero who is the root of all his own problems whining that people aren’t catering to him enough.

So, yes, it’s the Donald Trump Jr. story, but in drag racing. That’s just more reason to stay away, though.