331. Little Laura and Big John

331. Little Laura and Big John (1973)
Director: Luke Moberly
Writers: Luke Moberly and Bob Woodburn from a story by Philip Weidling
From:Cult Cinema

The story of John Ashley, a rum runner in 1920’s Florida.

Um… actually, that’s it. The blurb is the whole movie. We have a voiceover describing Prohibition and then the details of John Ashley’s birth and upbringing (which we don’t need). Then we cut to Laura’s mother who then tells us the story of John and Laura’s relationship, only it’s not. Instead, it’s the story of John’s career as a gangster. Only it’s not. Most crime movies focus either on one big score (think The Sting) or on the rise and fall of a criminal (think Scarface). Little Laura and Big John is trying to be the latter, but just doesn’t.

The story, what there is of it, is that John shoots his Seminole business partner in the stomach. The movie portrays this as an accident, although who knows? This is told, rather than shown, by the way. He and Laura go on the lamb to avoid getting arrested for the murder, but he finally turns himself in. His defense keeps vacillating between “I didn’t do nothin’” and “Who cares about a damn Indian?” which is really charming, and he’s convicted of the murder. Or of the bank robbery he pulls after he breaks out of jail before the trial. It’s not clear what the sentence is for. Anyway, he breaks out of jail again and starts running liquor in the Everglades.

Things escalate—the gang gets big enough that they start robbing the other bootleggers—and a rivalry is established between John and Sheriff Baker, the sheriff of somewhere that has a personal grudge against John I guess. It’s reciprocated and John decides he’s going to murder the sheriff. A snitch rats him out, though, and we have a big but undramatic shoot-out where the Ashley gang all get killed. Laura is left alone in a hotel room, drunk on whiskey, singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” We return to her mother telling the story and end on a shot of John and Laura as children playing together. THE END.

The movie has no throughline and no rising action. All the plot and connective tissue is told by Laura’s mother, and even she vanishes from the final third/half. So little is going on that the middle of the movie stops for a music video of “Player Pianna Man.” This flick is deep in “is this a movie?” territory.

While this is trying to be a Scarface or Bonnie and Clyde-style crime flick, you never get a sense of risk, consequence, or time. The gang robs a bank and… so… what? We don’t know why they rob it except that they want to rob it, the job goes off without any particular planning or problems, and we don’t see what they do with the money. They don’t go crazy with it or invest in material for the next job or seem to have the money at all. Not only do we not see them spend it, we don’t see them counting or reveling in it. Now that I think about it, while there are several bank robbery scenes in the movie, I don’t think I ever saw cash at all.

I don’t have much to say about this movie because, like so many others in these sets, there’s nothing here. The one point of interest is that the sheriff is played by Paul Gleason, the principal from The Breakfast Club as well as many other films. You should watch his other films. He was awesome. This movie sucks. Skip it.

330. Four Robbers

330. Four Robbers aka Si da tian wang (1987)
Director: Chin-Lai Sung
Writers: Kuo Chiang Li and Chin-Lai Sung
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A gang of four robbers work their way up the ranks of the Hong Kong criminal world.

Four robbers interrupt a drug deal stealing both the money and the drugs. This brings them to the attention of one of the Hong Kong kingpins. Initially, he wants them killed. However, when they not only manage to survive a setup that was put together to kill them, but actually kill a bunch of the kingpin’s men, he’s interested in bringing them in to work for him.

And what follows doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Of the four, the gang leader is the responsible one with the other three making short-sighted choices that lead to trouble. That is until the leader gets caught in a police sting because he’s offered slightly more money for stolen watches than the kingpin is offering. He escapes, but needs to accept the kingpin’s help hiding out in Thailand.

Once in Thailand, they keep seemingly ingratiating themselves to the crime lords only to have those crime lords betray them, but have the betrayal thwarted by how badass the four robbers are. In the end, the four robbers end up in a shootout with the cops. They all get shot up pretty bad, but the leader says, “we’ll all die together,” and they go out in a blaze of glory. THE END

Just as it appears apropos of nothing in the movie, let me note here that the movie has nipple licking.

Ew.

Moving on, as I’ve said of other movies in these sets, if your characters don’t have motivations, you don’t have a movie. I was never clear on what these characters wanted. The only one of the four robbers that stands out is the leader, and that’s because he’s making decisions and reacting to things. He had a junkie brother who killed himself (in a hilarious flashback), and that’s about all we know about him. He has some principles—he won’t accept money until he’s handing over the goods—and seems to have a preternatural ability to stay one step ahead of the people plotting against him, but there’s no sense of what his endgame is. Does he want to be a crimelord? Does he want revenge on the syndicates for what happened to his brother? The only motivation I can glean for any of the characters is they want to be criminals. That’s not a lot.

So we have various setpieces with unclear stakes where the characters aren’t clearly differentiated. There are a series of betrayals, but because the leader is so smart, the betrayals fail. Instead of an escalation on the parts of the antagonists, every failure leads to them liking the titular robbers more which mitigates any sense of tension. As the movie went on, I found myself asking more and more often, “Does this even matter?” A lot of the time the answer was, “no.”

The movie does offer some entertainment. The voices for the dub are terrible, just hilariously awful, and there is more than a bit of a Poochie element to the heroes: they’re on screen all the time, and when they’re not, everyone’s asking, “Where’s Poochie?” I don’t know if that’s enough to make it a recommendation, though, even for riffing. It just never grabbed me on any level.

The movie is in the public domain so you can see if it meets your standards. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here so you can judge for yourself.

329. Santee

329. Santee (1973)
Director: Gary Nelson
Writer: Brand Bell
From: Cult Cinema

A bounty hunter takes in the son of one of his targets and raises him as his own.

Holy crow, Glenn Ford! I’ve seen some big names in some of these movies, but none quite as big as that. How did a Glenn Ford movie end up on one of these cheapie sets?

Oh. Well. That would do it.

We open on Jody, a young man waiting in a small town for word from his father. Meanwhile, his father and his small gang are riding toward the town. After six minutes, they finally meet and the opening credits begin.

Just to reiterate, the first six minutes of the movie are a guy’s dad picks him up. Now you have the movie in miniature as every part of it moves with that same lack of alacrity.

The titular Santee is Glenn Ford, a bounty hunter on the trail of the father and his gang for unspecified crimes. Santee kills all of them except Jody who, having promised to kill Santee, follows him neither secretly nor at any special distance. Eventually Santee heads back to his ranch, the Three Arrows Ranch, and hires Jody as a ranch hand. The only rule is no one talks about Santee’s bounty hunter work at the ranch and Jody agrees to those terms, although he's still promising to kill Santee.

Over the next eight months (eight months!), Jody learns that Santee used to be the local sheriff until the Banner Gang came to town, shot him up, and killed his son. That’s why the Three Arrows Ranch only has two arrows on its brand. During those months, Jody loses his taste for revenge. He tells Santee as much and asks to be trained as a bounty hunter. Santee agrees since he and his wife see Jody as a sort of surrogate son.

The current sheriff, on the cusp of handing the badge over to another man and retiring (uh oh, we got a Sheriff Dead Meat) comes to the ranch with news that the Banner Gang is coming through town on their way to the border. Santee decides to leave it be and promises his wife he won’t go out bounty hunting again. Of course, two scenes later after the Banner Gang has shot up the town and killed the sheriff, Jody and Santee leave to kill the gang.

We end up with a shootout in a brothel where only Jody, Santee, and the gang leader are left. All three shoot at the same time and we freeze frame on a triple-split-screen of each of them firing. At night, a carriage comes to the Three Arrows Ranch (whose symbol now has three arrows!) carrying a coffin. Who’s in the coffin and who’s driving the carriage? The movie drags out the reveal until we see Santee sitting on the carriage. The coffin contains Jody. THE END

The movie just drags everything out. This plot of a young man seeking revenge against someone who wasn’t quite in the wrong and ending up, depending on your interpretation, either with Stockholm Syndrome or with a better understanding of the moral order of the world they lived in would have worked as a novel. You have time to let this nuanced change happen. I mean, this movie hand waves eight months away and just tells us that Jody has let go of his revenge fantasy. There’s so little going on in this movie that you’d be forgiven for thinking he gave up on vengeance the moment he got to the ranch.

The movie’s not actively bad—it looks nice enough and the acting is all right—there’s just nothing going on. You get no sense of tension or even an idea of what the plot is going to be. Who, precisely, is the protagonist and what, exactly, is their goal? If you don’t have that sense of who the focal character is and what they want, then your movie doesn’t have an engine, doesn’t have a motive force, and we’re left with people just dressing up like cowboys and hanging out on a ranch. It’s just a whole lot of nothing. I wouldn't tell anyone to skip it, but I can't imagine anyone making the effort to find it.

328. Star Pilot

328. Star Pilot aka 2+5: Missione Hydra (1966)
Director: Pietro Francisci
Writers: Pietro Francisci, English version by Ian Danby, from a story by Fernando Paolo Girolami
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 2 remain!)

A scientist and his team discover an alien ship beneath a strange piece of ground. The team is shanghaied by the aliens and set off on an intergalactic adventure.

Oh, Italy. This is going to be delicious hot garbage. And only 80 minutes long! For further background on what to expect from this movie, Wikipedia says, “In the fall of 1977, to quickly capitalize on the public's fervor for sci-fi movies following the unexpected success of Star Wars, the film was dubbed in English and released in the United States under a new title.” So it’s going to be cheesy and deceptive!

The scientist is asked to examine a curious geologic event—an area of ground that shows the same effects land over radioactive deposits shows, but the effect is growing. He gathers his team and his moviestar daughter and heads to the site. However, they’re followed by spies. The daughter notices this, but is mocked and ignored. Get used to that trope of her being right and being ignored.

They examine the ground, dig a tunnel, and discover the spaceship. Even though it’s obviously a spaceship and the daughter says it’s obviously a spaceship, they don’t realize it’s a spaceship until they’re taken back down to it by not-quite Chinese spies who insist the doctor is working on a new super weapon and, while down there, encounter the aliens.

No, look, if I stop to explain all the bits that don’t make sense we’ll be here all day. It’s going to take me long enough just to describe this everything-in-a-blender sci-fi smoothie as it is.

The aliens need their help to repair the ship, kidnap everyone once the ship is repaired because they need the help to take off, and start heading for home—the star system Hydra. Are they taking the humans to be guinea pigs as one of the spies overheard or will they be returned safely once the aliens are back home? That’s one of the arguments on the ship as they’re being pursued by the spaceforce (aka stock footage from Toho and The Doomsday Machine) that the world, somehow, suddenly has. One spy pulls a gun, shoots two of the aliens, and part of the ship is damaged.

There’s no going anywhere unless they all work together so they table the discussion of where they’re going and focus on healing the wounded aliens and fixing the ship. They land on a planet where the movie switches over into being about intergalactic romance. Only the flirting is interrupted by an attack of ape men who run off with the two spies as the ship takes off, leaving them to their fate.

They find an abandoned Russian craft with two corpses in it. After reviewing recordings on the craft, they realize that, due to the theory of relativity, an incalculable amount of time has passed on Earth and it’s been destroyed in a nuclear war. The ship’s captain doses everyone with knockout gas, heads home to Hydra, but finds the planet abandoned and in ruins. They find a monolith that reveals the fate of their star system: increased radiation from other sources (Earth and its nuclear weapons which is what led the ship to investigate the planet in the first place) has driven all the inhabitants away to colonize other planets THE END. “THE END” literally comes up while the explanation is still being offered, like even the movie couldn’t wait to get the hell away from itself.

So, yeah. That’s a whole lot of movie without a lick of sense. As I referenced above, it’s just a bunch of plots all tossed together without anything that actually links them. You have The Day The Earth Stood Still with aliens visiting to judge our militarism and the effects that might have on them, Star Trek language with warp drives and whatnot, a vaguely Flash Gordon look to a lot of the costumes, and on and on.

That said, all that chaos just ups the goofy factor and makes the movie kind of fun. It’s not good. In fact it’s a little draggy since nothing’s ever moving forward or resolved. All of that just adds to how very, very silly it all is. This is a highly riffable movie and I’d recommend it on that level. It’s just so silly in all the right ways.

327. The Stepmother

327. The Stepmother (1972)
Director: Howard Avedis
Writer: Howard Avedis
From: Cult Cinema

A man’s life spirals out of control after he murders a client he catches raping his wife.

Back to Howard Avedis, director of Separate Ways, The Teacher and The Specialist. This is the final film of his that I have on these sets so just going to pull the band-aid off here quick as I can. And I will admit here that it took two hours to start watching this after writing that sentence. And then another day to finish it after writing that sentence.

So the movie starts with marital rape. Oh, it’s not marital, it’s someone who’s having an affair with her. Wait, no, we learn later in the movie that it was rape, but the movie’s both brushing it off as nothing and playing it as an infidelity. It’s… strange. Big surprise I took so long to finish this.

Her husband comes home, sees the naked silhouettes in the window, and murders the guy as he leaves. As the husband leaves to bury the body, an upbeat salsa-inflected song starts up over the credits. Yeah, cause we need to set a peppy tone for this movie. Also, as he finishes burying the body, a couple shows up, she tells her partner she doesn’t want to have sex, so he starts beating her. The husband drives away. What a cheery piece. The woman gets strangled, just like the husband’s victim, and the cops find both bodies the next day and are trying to figure out the case.

Despite being called The Stepmother, we don’t even learn that the wife is a stepmother until about 45, 50 minutes into the movie. The movie poster says, “She forced her husband’s son to commit the ultimate sin!!” giving the impression that the movie is about step-cest (and why I was so disinclined to watch it). Instead, it’s a variation on Crime and Punishment with the husband being hounded by both the police and his own guilt.

As the movie goes on, he suspects his business partner of having an affair with his wife and accidentally kills him. The partner’s widow, against the husband’s wishes, joins him on a trip to Mexico where they hook up. Meanwhile, back in the house, the wife rapes the stepson.

When the husband comes home, the cop confronts him with the shovel that was used to bury the body. The husband heads up to the cabin where he catches his wife in bed with his son. He gets a gun from the glove compartment of the car, his son asks for forgiveness, and the husband admits to murdering the rapist from the start. He’s decided to turn himself in and, as he’s handing the gun to his son, the cops show up, see him with a gun, and shoot him to death. THE END

The high point of the film for me was the husband accidentally killing his friend by shoving him off a roof. I laughed out loud at that. Also, earlier in the film, the husband is haunted by visions of his first murder victim constantly approaching from behind sand dunes and the ocean. If I made GIFs, I’d make a GIF of that sequence to share as, “Whenever a woman posts to the Internet,” and have “Well actually” hovering over the guy.

I will admit to not giving this movie a fair shake. The plot is fine, even interesting in its own way, and the movie handles it well enough. Except for raping the stepson, all the characters’ actions make sense. You can see they’re making mistakes, but it’s clear who’s lacking which bits of information. They aren’t making poor choices, they’re being undone by the situation. Also, the problem can’t be solved by talking it out. All the issues are difficult and fraught and there’s really no way that this won’t end in disaster.

However, that movie poster (and Avedis’ previous films) had me in a preparatory cringe the entire movie waiting for that, “Yeah, nope!” moment that does eventually arrive. Only it’s not what the movie’s about or even that major an incident within the film. Much like Separate Ways, this is being presented as an exploitation film when it’s just a straightforward drama.

The sexual politics are pretty frustrating. I mean, the inciting incident is a rape and that’s never quite taken seriously. Even when the husband is told that, yes, she had sex with his murder victim but that it was rape, he still says she killed his pride. Given that the murder victim is killed before he has any real lines, we don’t get a sense of who he was as a character and the movie never tells us how to feel. The murder victims are neither mourned nor condemned, they just vanish. If there’d been just one moment of characters talking about the rapist and saying, “that prick,” we’d know the movie wasn’t on his side. Instead it’d be clear that the morality of the movie is focused on the tragedy being inflicted on this couple by this rapist.

Instead the mom rapes her stepson and the husband is shot by the cops so… justice? Skip it.

326. Idaho Transfer

326. Idaho Transfer (1973)
Director: Peter Fonda
Writer: Thomas Matthiesen
From: Cult Cinema

A group of scientists secretly develop a way to travel through time and start sending young people to a post-disaster future to start a new world.

Yes, directed by the Peter Fonda. I think the only reason the movie is on this set is that some people think it’s in the public domain. I don’t believe it is. Instead, the movie is a curiously low-key sci-fi time travel story.

Isa returns from a trip to the future to lead her sister Karen through orientation. Their dad is running the project so they’re both going to be involved with transferring to the post-disaster world. No one knows what the nature of the disaster was, only that 56 years in the future, everyone is gone. On Karen’s first trip, Isa slips and hits her head. They go home and Isa dies while Karen is looking for help.

Some time later, Karen is just living at the camp site in the future, ignoring all correspondence from her dad. Government agents raid the facility and the teens involved in the project load what they can into the machines and transfer to the future. Shortly thereafter, the transfer machines on the future side stop working, implying that they’ve been disconnected in the past. They’s stuck.

The teens split into groups and head to a common point, encountering various things along the way. When they meet back up, Karen announces that she’s pregnant, but the others tell her that’s impossible since using the transfer devices renders them all sterile. This begs the question, why send young people, or anyone, at all? The plan seems to be to start a new civilization post-apocalypse, but they won’t, in any way, be able to perpetuate the species. So what is the end goal here?

Karen gets up early, heads back to the original camp on her own, and finds the people their dead. One of their number went nuts, murdered them, and then attacks Karen. Karen manages to hide in the transfer station which starts to power up. She returns to the present, finds the guards, and flees back to the future after changing the settings on the machine. She walks around a bit, grows faint, and then is picked up by people driving a futuristic car. They load her into the trunk where she’s consumed as fuel for the vehicle. A little girl riding inside asks how long before they, the people arriving from the past, run out and how long before they start using each other to run their cars.

Final text at the end of the credits: “Esto Perpetua” which, roughly translated, means “Let it be perpetual" or "It is forever." THE END

So, yeah, that’s a flick. Content aside, the movie has a strange tone. The acting is all naturalistic to the point of seemingly being done by non-actors. The result is most of the movie is communicated in a low monotone. Until Isa dies, it’s difficult to tell her voice from Karen’s. Also the nature of the future world and the horror that the characters are encountering is alluded to more than shown. One of the groups finds a tribe of humans who survived whatever disaster, but they’re all mentally impaired, living short lives like dumb beasts. We don’t see this group. Instead we’re told about it after all the travelers meet up to explain the new person they’ve found. Another character finds an abandoned train filled with people in body bags. We don’t see the body bags, we just see him opening the door to the boxcar and then returning to Karen.

Normally a movie dealing with a post-apocalypse, when not concerned with the apocalypse, leans on the “post” part, showing us the world the characters find, face, or try to create. Idaho Transfer doesn’t do that either, though. Instead it’s a lot of the characters just walking across the badlands and not seeing anyone. In other words, I don’t really get it.

I did kind of like it, though. Except for the very final end point (which is a cheap way of trying to make this a message movie), it’s quietly meditative in an interesting way. Everyone on the expedition, except Karen, is really excited about it and about how they’ll set things up to create the new world. They tend to treat Karen as naive if not a bit of a whiner, but Karen is the only one that seems to have a clear understanding of what’s going on and what’s at stake. Because her sister dies during Karen’s introduction to the situation, she’s the only one that sees how much everything they’re doing is tied to death—the death of the world and the attempt to counteract that. Only the project is futile. A group of a dozen or so kids can’t recreate society or the population. It’s just not possible. And once Karen learns about all of them being sterile, she sees how futile it’s been on every level. She’s treated as immature, but she’s the only one that recognizes that this is all a kids’ game.

And then she gets eaten by a car.

I think this would make for an interesting double feature with Virus, another post-apocalyptic movie that focuses on there just not being any people left. Virus is a little more focused on the world ending, but both do a good job of telling a different kind of apocalypse story than I’m used to seeing. With that in mind, I’d give this a recommend. The ending is just garbage, but the whole low-key approach to everything kind of works and lets the movie follow some interesting character choices.

And then she gets eaten by a car.

325. The Snake, The Tiger, The Crane

325. The Snake, The Tiger, The Crane aka Emperor of Shaolin Kung Fu aka Chuang wang li zi cheng (1980)
Directors: Hsi-Chieh Lai and Sung Pe Liu
Writers: Liang Chin and Sung Pe Liu
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A one-armed princess searches for patriots to help her kill the bandit king that has murdered the Emperor and spuriously claimed the throne.

Opens with text on screen and a voice over telling the same story but clearly reading a different text. Could we be on the cusp of watching my most beloved movie ever?

A bandit leader has gathered a personal army and is finally assaulting the walls of the Ming Emperor’s castle. Rather than be captured and humiliated, the Emperor orders all the castle residents to kill themselves as he himself is about to. His daughter, the third princess, refuses, saying they can flee into the countryside and rally an army of loyalists. He says there’s no honor in this and personally tries to cut her down, but only cutting her arm off in the process. The bandits raid the castle, find everyone dead, and the princess escaped. The bandit leader orders a search for her since she can challenge the legitimacy of his claim.

The rest of the movie is the princess trying to rally loyalists to her cause, taking them to challenge the bandit leader, and failing, usually at the cost of the loyalist who joined her. There are a variety of double-crosses and double-crosses of double-crossers and the hilarious repetition of the people who’ve aligned themselves with the princess realizing the cause is lost, telling her to flee, and her refusing as the loyalist gets pincushioned trying to protect her.

The pattern continues until the very end where things do and do not go as you’d expect from this kind of movie and the princess retires to a Buddhist monastery to become a nun. THE END

I very slightly loved this movie, and I’m not sure it that’s due to an error on my part. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a comedy or if it becomes comedy through the act of translation. I mean, I’m not even sure if the voices aren’t all dubbed by one person trying to sound like different people throughout. So the movie’s hilarious on just a technical level, but I’m not sure if the original film itself wasn’t meant to be a comedy.

As I said in the synopsis, the movie repeats the pattern of “Let’s slay the bandit king! Oh, we’re no match for the bandit king! Flee, princess! I won’t leave you! *Stab* Ow! Flee princess! *Stab* Ow! Flee princess! *Stab* Ow! Flee princess! *Stab* Ow! I won’t leave you! GTFO princess! I flee! *Dead*” Even the final confrontation follows that model. There are also scenes like the princess’ first encounter with a loyalist where she thinks he’s an agent of the bandit leader following her. She hides in a field, he approaches and shouts, “Show yourselves!,” and a bunch of ninja jump out and fight him. Once he defeats them, he again shouts, “Show yourself!,” and another samurai emerges. They fight, he wins, and, again, shouts, “Show yourself!” The movie cuts to the princess hiding in the weeds wondering if anyone else is there until he says he means her and there’s nobody else hiding in the weeds.

That had to be a joke in the original Chinese, right? That can’t be something added in the translation process, right? Part of the final battle involves the bandit king using his carriage as a weapon by shifting in his seat. This has to be a joke.

So, yes, I highly recommend this movie. I was not eager to watch it because, as I’ve said in other reviews, I don’t know kung-fu films well enough to say what makes one good or bad, but this one surprised and delighted me throughout. I believe it’s in the public domain so have added a copy to archive.org here. Give it a watch. It’s silly fun.

324. Dangerous Charter

324. Dangerous Charter (1962)
Director: Robert Gottschalk
Writers: Paul Strait from a story by Robert Gottschalk
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: YouTube

After finding an abandoned ship, a fishing crew turns it into a charter vessel. Only the drug smugglers who previously owned the boat want it—and its cargo—back.

The first thing I’ll say about this movie is that it’s tonally strange. We open with a trio of fishermen, our heroes, stumbling across an abandoned yacht. As they explore the ship, they find it’s very chi-chi and also that it looks like the owners left in a hurry. Near the mast, they find the corpse of a sailor who died in the midst of trying to raise a flag upside-down to indicate distress. The ship’s name: Medusa.

Nice set-up, right? Sounds kind of spooky, kind of curious, and has plenty of hooks to make you go, “What next?” Even as I write it out I’m thinking this would be a great set-up for a role-playing game in just about any setting or genre. What’s problematic is the movie never surrenders it’s semi-goofy tone, nor does the movie commit to it. Push things a little further and you have Abbott and Costello Meet Davy Jones. Dial it back and you have a seafaring film noir. The movie, despite ramping up the risk, never sticks the tone.

Anyway, they bring the ship back to shore, turn it in to the Coast Guard and claim it as salvage. The Coast Guard gives the ship to them on the condition that the trio let the authorities run ads in the newspaper for the trio’s new charter service. The suspicion is that the boat belongs to the notorious smuggler Anselmo and the plan is to use the trio as bait.

Things go as you’d expect: someone rents the boat, they get hijacked, and it turns out their customer was working for Anselmo. They now have to take Anselmo and his goons to a new location where Anselmo promises to leave them with the boat and never bother them again. There are, of course, double-crosses, the captain of the boat figures out Anselmo is smuggling heroin, and that’s a bridge too far for him. Anselmo and his team leave the ship as promised, but he’s planted a bomb. The customer who betrayed the crew has since fallen in love with the captain’s fiancee and passed her a message warning of the bomb. Captain finds it, saves the ship, but Anselmo tries to shoot everyone on board. The customer turns on Anselmo, ramming their speedboat into the ship, killing them both. Crew leave with their ship and return safely to port. THE END.

Ultimately it’s not a bad movie, but, as I said, it never quite finds its tone. There’s also the problem of the characters doing a whole lot of sitting still in the face of danger. They don’t try to escape their situation or make plans to get away. Instead, they do as their told and otherwise don’t make any dramatic choices… in this semi-dramatic film. Also, in classic MST3k-fashion, the hero, the captain of the ship, is a doughy white guy that doesn’t do anything. It’s his colleague who previously has been the comic relief in the film who kills one of the gangsters and it’s the customer working for Anselmo who kills himself and the big boss. I guess his strategy of sitting still, of, no pun intended, not rocking the boat, worked in the end, but it wasn’t what I expected from a movie.

Overall, it’s a perfectly watchable film, which is ironic since my copy was literally unwatchable. Of the 500 movies I have on these Mill Creek sets, this is the only one I couldn’t rip to my computer. Luckily, someone posted a copy to YouTube, which I’ve linked above. That’s the version I watched. The flick is harmless and fine to have on in the background and has enough space and curious choices to leave itself open to riffing as well.

It’s an okay flick. Not much more to say than that.