344. The Guy With the Secret Kung Fu

344. The Guy With the Secret Kung Fu aka Cai yang nu bang zhu (1980)
Director: Chi Lo
Writer: Ji-Shang Lu
From: Cult Cinema (the final film!)
Watch: archive.org

Two fighters take on the vicious Dragon Gang, but find they may be in over their heads as they face off against a sorcerer, a demon, and official betrayal.

Ladies, blokes, and non-binary folks, this is the final movie in the Misery Mill! And we’re ending on a public domain flick that I’ve added to the Internet Archive for others to download and reuse in their own way. It’s what I always wanted: to not be watching these movies anymore.

Terrible foley work, bad wigs, and a soundtrack alternately cribbed from other PD works or composed exclusively on a Casio keyboard—and not a good one. Dubbing is awful even down to dubbed laughing that’s exactly like a parody of a kung fu movie. So you don’t even need a summary: it’s an obvious recommend!

I mean, not quite. This is one of those flicks that I could go into minute detail about because there’s a lot of stuff that happens, but little of it makes sense. Instead, I’ll offer a quick gloss:

Two of the leading members of the revolution are caught by the corrupt ruling party, but released to take out the Dragon Gang. Various action set pieces occur—they infiltrate the gang by pretending to be the female leader’s betrothed, get a special powder to defeat the half-vampire/half-human demon the gang has summoned, and, of course, battle courtyards filled with armed guards—until we get to the final battles. Turns out the corrupt official who released them to fight the Dragon Gang is actually the Dragon Gang’s leader (and is curiously comfortable with so many of his underlings being killed. Bad manager or best manager?). The woman who’d been running the gang in his absence gets defeated by one of the guys and then the pair team up to defeat the big boss, ultimately by knocking him into a coffin and hurling it across the field of battle. THE END

Yeah, the movie gets pretty silly. I mean, a recurring character is the coffin-maker who thanks the pair for drumming up business by killing so many members of the gang. You also have a sorcerer, an imprisoned butcher who’s too fat to escape, and many moments of slapstick. This isn’t, by any means, a good movie. However, it feels like a perfect example of a bad kung fu movie. The character’s movements have sound effects. The fight scenes descend into cacophonies of canned grunts. The sorcerer’s laugh is literally someone reading “ha ha ha ha ha” regardless of what his laughing lines up with.

The movie isn’t good, but it’s great for those looking for something that’s enjoyably bad. This piece is absurd and seems designed for riffing. I’d suggest getting snacks and friends and settling in with this one. As I said above, it’s in the public domain and I’d added my copy to archive.org here. This feels like a fitting piece with which to end the Misery Mill.

Now that I’m done with the Misery Mill, I’m going to move on to watching what I want at the pace that I want and writing or not writing about them as I choose. What would that even be like? Do people even do that? Inconceivable.

343. Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold

343. Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold aka Yellow Hair and the Pecos Kid (1984)
Director: Matt Climber
Writers: John Kershaw and Matt Climber from a story by Matt Climber
From: Cult Cinema (only 1 remains!)

A Western adventure of of Yellow Hair and the Pecos Kids searching for fabled gold mine of a lost tribe.

From the writer/director of Hundra and Single Room Furnished, I initially thought this would be a sequel to Hundra. The title, as a reviewer on IMDB notes, suggests a sword-and-sorcery story and the glace I had at the capsule description made me think it was following up that movie. Instead this is trying to style itself as an homage/pastiche of the old western serials. That seems like an odd choice for a film in 1984, but remember that Star Wars had mad all kinds of money by revamping the Flash Gordon serials as full features and Indiana Jones, based on post-WWII adventure serials, was about to come out with its second feature. Mining the nostalgia for serials looked like a money-making prospect. What the producers failed to recognize was those movies featured, in some combination, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fischer, Steven Spielberg, John Williams, and amazing special effects.

This movie does not, although the action set pieces do feature some nice stunt work. Too bad they weren’t filmed with any panache. Also too bad that the hero (who shouldn’t be the hero) is dressed to look like Han Solo minus the vest.

We see you movie. We know what you’re trying to do. It’s not working.

Since this movie is trying to ape Star Wars’ serial affectation, it has to invoke the same genre. Star Wars uses the crawl. This has the silhouettes and sounds of a rowdy crowd of kids in a movie theater sitting down to watch the Yellow Hair and the Pecos Kid serial. The main characters are introduced on-screen as we hear the crowd reacting (including uproarious laughter at one of the villains being coded as gay). After watching the movie, this opening added nothing. We don’t have any additional necessary context especially since the character notes in the opening are all personality traits. We can tell what the characters are like by the actors’ performances. Telling us someone’s “charming” doesn’t tell us they’re charming. Seeing them be charming does.

Anyway, I’m descending into a rant which would be at once easy in response to many aspects of this movie as well as unwarranted—the movie isn’t substantial enough to maintain a good rage. In other words, there’s plenty to get mad at, but what’s the point?

We open with some bandits trying to find the lost tribe. The tribe instead finds them, injures the bandit leader, and captures everyone else (doing real injury to horses in the process. Not stunts, actual horses actually getting hurt. Fuck you movie). Two of the men are tortured in pretty grisly ways and then have their heads dipped in molten gold while still alive.

The bandit leader returns to the Mexican base where the evil gay Colonel is holding the Pecos Kid, our hero (cause he’s the white guy). The three of them were in cahoots to steal all the gold, but had locked the Kid up in an act of betrayal.

Back at the Apache camp, Yellow Hair is talking to her mother. Yellow is so named because she’s blonde, born as a result of a white man raping her mother. Or so her mother told her. Later we learn that Yellow is actually the lost princess of the lost tribe, product of the union between the tribe’s princess and a Texan, kidnapped by her Apache mother. I don’t know how the rape figures into it—if it’s just part of her cover story or something that also happened. The movie invoking it and shrugging it off is kind of gross.

Yellow’s mother reveals that the Kid, who she also raised as a son, is in jail. She asks Yellow to save him and Yellow agrees when her mother realizes the Kid stole a deer horn with a map to the tribe and a gold nugget that she needs to pass into the other world upon her death.

To be clear, our hero stole not only a relic from an old woman who raised him as her own but also a religious item that she needs for her funeral ceremony. What a dick.

Yellow saves him while the bandit leader sneaks into the Apache camp and kills Yellow’s mother. The Kid gave the gold to a prostitute at some saloon so the pair head there to retrieve it. Stuff that’s supposed to be exciting but instead is aggravating goes down and Yellow learns that she’s actually the lost tribe’s lost princess and the pair set out to find them. Eventually Yellow gets captured, the Kid finds his way into the temple, and Yellow tells him she’s going to marry the leader. The Kid can take his gold and leave. He does, but then Yellow learns that she’s going to be sacrificed. Just before her heart is cut out, the Kid returns, shoots the gun out of the leader’s hand, and the underground temple starts to cave in.

By the way, all those action set pieces that got kind of aggravating were aggravating because of the Kid. He’s useless and Yellow is a badass. Constantly. So of course the end of the movie has to correct for that by having him save her because she wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise. She’s completely incapable of saving herself up to and including sitting up and getting off the altar before a rock falls and crushes it. This is an example of ideology. There’s nothing wrong with her getting into a situation she didn’t anticipate and him coming to save her. Earlier there’s a sequence where she falls off a stage coach and is balancing herself between some of the horses. The Kid helps her up (and then falls into the same space himself). That’s not ideology, that’s an action scene. Where ideology comes in is that final sequence where she can’t do anything herself. Cause she’s not the hero cause she’s not the guy. Her being threatened by the tribe and him coming back to initiate the escape scene is fine. Again, that’s just an action scene. That she can’t even sit up and then be a party in her own escape is where the ideology becomes plain: women need men to save them.

Remember when I said it’d be easy to rant? I’m leaving out the killing of snakes on screen and the problematic elements of the Western in general. If I were inclined to write a longer piece about this movie, which I’m not, I’d be focusing on how it’s sort of critical of colonialism, but paints white people—the colonizers—as the victims of colonialism, but not in a Kipling-esque White Man’s Burden way. The movie’s a mish-mash of odd concepts that they didn’t intend to have there. You can read this flick as being a series of Freudian slips.

But, yeah, they get away, get cornered by the Colonel and the bandit leader (who’s constantly getting injured and persisting in increased states of disrepair. It’s something that’s obviously supposed to be a joke but never comes off as a joke, which is strange in and of itself. It’s never an issue of the joke failing, it just never seems like it’s supposed to be a joke even though it’s obviously a joke a la the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail). The movie ends on a serial-style cliffhanger showing scenes from the next episode and asking variations of “Will our heroes…?” THE END

Obviously this was not the worst movie I’ve seen. It moved along well enough and the action sequences, as I said, had some good stunt work. The movie just missed the mark in so many ways and in such strange ways. Like the running gag of the bandit leader never being played as a gag. I spent a lot of the movie watching with a tilted head and raised eyebrow—I was just confused.

This wasn’t helped by the Kid who’s supposed to be a roguish poker-playing, gun-slinging, swindler. I have no beef with that kind of character; I like a lovable rogue. However he’s responsible for the plot’s inciting incident: robbing his surrogate mother of part of her funeral rite for the sake of a deal that leads to her murder. And he’s never called out for this. Yellow never jumps down his throat to tell him he stole mom’s crucifix and got her killed! Characters can make morally reprehensible choices and even be heroes after making those choices, but they gotta show remorse and work to make things right. He’s never even told he’s a piece of shit—and then he rides his horse through her funeral!

I’m not recommending this movie because it’s just not that special, but I also need to emphasize that it’s not worth seeing even for shock value. Despite what I’ve written here and how I am gobsmacked by a lot of what I’m thinking about, the movie is not full of WTF moments. This isn’t a case of seeing-is-believing, it’s a competently-made Crown production designed to run as a B-feature in drive-ins and cheap theaters. It’s nothing special. Upon reflection, there’s plenty of “wait, what?” going on, but that doesn’t make for a fun viewing experience, just fun ranting with friends after you’ve finished watching. Don’t take the time, though. See something good instead.

342. Kung Fu Kids Break Away

342. Kung Fu Kids Break Away aka San mao liu lang ji (1980)
Director: Kan Ping Yu
Writer: Kan Ping Yu
From: Cult Cinema (only 2 remain!)

Two homeless boys use cleverness and kung fu to outwit the criminal boss that runs their town and eventually defeat him.

A pretty simple plot. San Mao is an orphan looking for his mother. He had been training at a monastery, but his master was assassinated by traveling soldiers. He’s headed to the city in hopes of finding his mother. Once there, he starts using his (admittedly impressive) acrobatic kung fu skills to make money. He’s seen by Kou Pu, another homeless kid who’s constantly working a scam from pretending to be blind to collect donations to straight-up theft. After a few contentious encounters, the two team up and Kou Pu takes San Mao to his “secret hideout” where he stays with the slightly older Zsa Zsa. These are, then, your titular “Kung Fu Kids” (although they’re never called that in the movie. It’s just convenient to refer to them as such).

The town is run by the evil Mr. Chu whose thugs intimidate and shake down the residents for money constantly. They keep running into the Kung Fu Kids, but Mr. Chu’s son keeps intervening to save them since he’s falling for Zsa Zsa.

About halfway through the movie, Kou Pu gets the idea, basically, of busking while doing kung fu. In other words, it takes half the movie for the characters to figure out they could be making money doing the very thing San Mao was doing for money when Kou Pu met him. Performance goes well, but Mr. Chu’s men break it up because they haven’t paid him a bribe.

Then a representative from the General (no, I don’t know either) arrives and is murdered by Eagle, a Korean kung fu master who is then captured by Mr. Chu’s men. The Kung Fu Kids help him escape and he reveals that the General was going to give control of the entire region to Mr. Chu and that he’s there to stop that from happening. They all set up various traps around their hideout, Mr. Chu’s men come for a final showdown, and it comes down to a fight between Mr. Chu and Eagle. Just as Mr. Chu’s about to deliver the killing blow, his son jumps in and takes the hit himself. Eagle is then able to defeat and kill Mr. Chu. As Zsa Zsa is weeping over the body of Chu’s son, Eagle and the boys walk off laughing. THE END

What?

No, wait, seriously, what?

This is one of those flicks that’s confusing before it even gets confusing. The basic plot should be simple: scrappy down-on-their-luck kids using their wits and skills to get by. Grifter kid sees talented kid and they team up so grifter can take advantage of talented kid’s talent. That would be the kung fu street show. Only it takes them forever to figure that out as an option even though, as I said, they’d already seen it work. Then the plot about overthrowing the town’s leader because he’s evil and part of a larger political plot doesn’t come up until the very end. Yes, Eagle has appeared previously in the film, but it’s not clear until the assassination that he’s going to be part of the plot and there’s no indication that this will be the plot. So you have odd story choices going on even before you get to the cheery ending of the boys laughing while their friend cries over the body of a man who stood up for and saved them multiple times.

What?

I wouldn’t encourage or discourage anyone from watching this. The kung fu is really impressive. Normally I’d find movies like this insufferable. They tend to play out, in the US, as smirking, self-righteous kids pulling pranks on the idiot adults who won’t respect their Kid Power! This could easily have fallen into that, but sidesteps it by having the kids be good at kung fu. You don’t need to suspend your disbelief to think this child who’s clearly very skilled at what they do was able to defeat these adults. And the action sequences are worth seeing. Like I said, wouldn’t say avoid it, I’m just not sold enough to recommend it.

I think the movie is in the public domain, but I haven’t uploaded a copy to the Internet Archive because there is a fleeting shot of child nudity. The boys are bathing in a river and one stands up. The shot isn’t pornographic, is about as short as it can be, but it’s still kiddie bits on screen and I’m going to assume that’s a line that you don’t cross.

339. Weekend With the Babysitter

339. Weekend With the Babysitter (1970)
Director: Don Henderson
Writers: James E. McLarty from a story by George E. Carey and Don Henderson
From: Cult Cinema (only 3 Cult Cinema remain; only 5 overall!)

A man hooks up with his kid's babysitter while his wife gets entangled in a drug-smuggling run.

From the makers of The Babysitter comes the same plot again. The titular babysitter shows up on a night when she hasn’t been called (“night” despite all the establishing shots clearly being in the middle of the day) and the husband suggests to his wife that they take advantage of the mix-up and go out to dinner. Wife immediately gets angry because she has to be unreasonable and shrewish to justify everything the husband’s going to do for the rest of the movie and we can’t blame him for the choices he makes.

Sorry, that’s the practical reason. The narrative reason is that the wife is going to take the kids to spend time with their grandmother and they’ve been planning this for a while. She resents the husband asking her to change everyone’s plans to accommodate his passing whim.

What then transpires is the husband spending the weekend with the babysitter while the wife gets entangled in a drug-smuggling plot because she’s a junkie. Yeah, while the husband is fooling around with a teenager, the wife goes through b-grade Requiem for a Dream crap. She has to take her dealer and his team onto the husband’s boat so he can bring in a drug shipment from Mexico. We’re about 50 minutes into the movie when both of these stories really pick up steam, by the way. Until then we’re watching the husband, a director about to make a movie about youth culture, get introduced to the “real” youth culture, ie. he gets high once and screws a teenager.

The husband finds out the wife took the boat instead of going to see her family and then gets word that the authorities are searching every boat that comes into harbor. He gets into his private plane (fuck this guy and this movie) and finds his boat en route to the harbor. The man piloting the boat decides to dock at an abandoned pier, but the dealer kills him. Then the wife pilots the boat to the abandoned pier. That’s essential for the morality of the ending, which I’ll get to later.

Husband calls up the babysitter’s biker friends and they all head down to the pier where the dealer is getting off. The gang corners the dealer, chains him up, and dumps all his heroin. The husband swims to the boat and sails off with the wife. The babysitter watches from a cliff and says, “Ciao.” THE END

My big complaint with The Babysitter was that it’s was the writer/producer/lead’s sexual fantasy put on screen. In other words, he made us pay to watch his kink and that movie had the expected leering, exploitation tone such a project would have. Weekend With the Babysitter is an attempt to do the same thing but as a legitimate movie. The production is better and it eschews a lot of the exploitation elements. The reason that’s a problem is the movie hasn’t changed its central purpose: old man creeping on young girls. I mean, we get a shower scene where he’s soaping up her ass. You’re not fooling anyone George.

To compensate for the exploitation roots of the picture, the movie tries to include some moralizing and self-awareness. The former is not that surprising. Only a fine line separates exploitation films and morality plays in general—think of scare-mongering propaganda films like Reefer Madness or Sex Madness. The purpose of these movies was to profit from salacious and taboo material but to get around censors and local outrage groups by presenting them as warnings or cautionary tales: you get to see some titty, and that dirty titty gets punished for showing itself therefore you’re absolved. Likewise, I can’t find the quote now, but there’s that old adage that you can have as much sex and violence in your picture as long as its a religious epic. I mean, Passion of the Christ is straight-up torture porn, but it’s about Jesus so take the kids.

Anyway, the moralizing comes through the wife’s story. She’s a junkie forced into withdrawal by her dealer, has to steal the husband’s boat, and, while there, is forced into a three-way with the dealer and his girlfriend. This final moment is contrasted with the husband hooking up with the babysitter. Literally. The two scenes are intercut with the scores for both being different so you really feel the effect: the husband, who is good, gets to have fun fulfilling sex while the wife, who is bad, has to suffer through a lesbian experience for her next fix.

Let’s not unpack lesbianism as punishment trope nor the dealer shouting racial slurs at one of his underlings. Hopefully what’s wrong with all that is obvious.

The morality part climaxes with the dealer murdering the ships pilot. He has to for the ending to carry the proper moral weight. Like I said, the biker gang chains up the dealer and dumps out his stash. What I left out is his underling, who’s a junkie, is there as well and left sitting in all the spilled and spoiled heroin. He’s not physically restrained like the dealer, but he’s metaphorically chained to the junk and just as undone. The man piloting the ship had been a junkie, but is currently clean and, more importantly, kind to the wife. He’s morally tainted, though, by having been a junkie and being involved in the smuggling. We’re getting kind of Old Testament here, but as I’ve said in other reviews, exploitation movies tend to do that. Having sinned, he has to be punished so he’s thrown overboard and killed by the dealer even though, in terms of plot, his death doesn’t mean anything. They still pilot the boat to the place he was planning to take it. All it does is clean up the final punishments. If he were still alive he couldn’t justifiably be punished by the gang, he couldn’t remain on the boat because the husband has to come and save that, and he couldn’t just walk away. So he’s killed because you can’t even flirt with the underground.

So, here’s a shock: I hated it. I did laugh out loud a few times at how ham-fisted and awkward the movie was, like when one of the hippies is explaining weed to the husband. Those moments were too few and far between, though, and what is there is, as I note throughout this review, pretty awful on every level. On top of that, like The Babysitter, this is boring while also trying to be salacious. What it has over that film is a lighter touch, a less leery tone. The Babysitter felt like it could turn into a snuff film at any time; Weekend With the Babysitter feels like corporate remake of that exploitation content. Unfortunately, once you remove the exploitation edge, you lose a lot of the narrative energy. Since the movie’s not willing to push boundaries or break taboos, nothing seems to carry that much weight. I hope I don’t have to say this, but don’t see this movie about an elderly man hooking up with a teenager.

335. Van Nuys Blvd.

335. Van Nuys Blvd. (1979)
Director: William Sachs
Writer: William Sachs
From: Cult Cinema (only 4 remain!)

A group of people meet each other around Van Nuys Blvd. and form relationships.

The final entry in the “Vansploitation” trilogy that includes The Van and Malibu Beach and, I think, the final Marimark production. I haven’t watched it yet, but I can tell you it sucks and you should skip it.

Now I’ve watched it and I can say… I didn’t hate it. The two previous entries in this sort-of trilogy, frankly, were pretty rapey and encouraged you to root for the creepiest characters in the picture. This one still makes the mistake of rooting for the creep, but sidesteps rape by having *shock* consent!, those ignoring consent being coded as the villains, and the creep being called a creep. If anything holds the movie back, it’s that there’s no plot. We just watch these people hang out for a few days.

Anyway, here’s what happens. Bobby likes drag racing his van, but there’s no competition in his town so he heads out to Van Nuys Blvd. to live it up there. As soon as he arrives, he hooks up with Wanda, a waitress at a drive-in. Moon pulls up next to Bobby in her van and challenges him to a drag race. Unfortunately, they’re stopped by the cops before they can figure out who won. Camille is riding with Moon and also gets arrested.

In the jail cell, they meet Chooch, an older guy who drives his hot rod up and down the strip. He’s been arrested by the primary asshole cop, Zass, who he grew up with. Also arrested is Greg, the creep. He saw Camille earlier and told her he’d dreamt of her. This leads to a fight between him and the guy she’s with that ends with them destroying each other’s cars. Greg continues to be a creep in the jail cell, suggesting they all go to the amusement park the next day once they get out since that was part of his dream too.

To be fair, Greg is not as much of a creep as some of the other guys in these Marimark productions. It’s just that his inciting incident of having dreamed of Camille and feeling entitled to tell her this and expect that she’ll throw over the guy she’s with to be with him feels like a not-great variation on the “nice guy” trope. “He dreamed of her so he doesn’t have to do the work of actually appealing to or attracting her.”

The five of them do go to the amusement park the next day, though, and generally start pairing off—Greg with Camille, Bobby with Moon. Greg keeps giving Chooch grief because he’s not a fan of roller coasters and that leads to Camille and Moon calling him a creep.

Meanwhile, Officer Zass has picked up Wanda, driven her to an isolated stretch of beach, and is trying to rape her in the back of the cop car. She suddenly starts being into it and I was about to say, “Fuck this movie,” but it’s a ploy to screw over Zass. She ends up handcuffing him to his car wearing just his boxer shorts and abandons him. He’s there for the rest of the movie begin tormented by various passers-by.

Wanda is picked up by Chooch and they fall in love. When he introduces her to the other four, there’s a hint that there may be trouble since Bobby hooked up with her, but everyone keeps their mouths shut and just giggles about it to themselves. At the end of the movie, Chooch and Wanda announce they’re going to get married and move to his dad’s ranch in Tennessee.

Greg and Camille hook up, but there are “hilarious” shenanigans in the process. He’s supposed to sneak in through her bedroom window, but goes into her parents’ instead and starts making out with her mom. Later, Camille smuggles him in dressed in drag claiming he’s one of her friends. The dad gets excited and sneaks into the guest room while Greg and Camille are both there, and starts molesting Greg. The characters are acting like they think it’s hilarious even though the idea is that Camille’s dad would try to molest one of her friends.

Finally, Bobby and Moon hook up, but still need to resolve the drag race from earlier. They race, Bobby wins, but Moon is mad that he took the race seriously, that, implicitly, he cares about his van more than her. So he pushes it off a cliff. Everyone leaves together and we close with a montage of Van Nuys Blvd. that we saw earlier in the movie, except Zass has bought Chooch’s hot rod and is now being pulled over by the cops. THE END.

So, yeah, not terrible, but not much of a point to any of it either. The movie was written and directed by the guy behind Galaxina which likewise felt like it had some promising ideas but just didn’t do anything. Also, like Galaxina, this had lots of pointless nudity right from the start. In a way it was nice because it’s the movie giving you its raison d'être. Why does this movie exist? Titties. If you’re going, “Titties and…?” this is not the movie for you.

And I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. While it was better than I expected, I expected something really awful. To put it in perspective, when I sat down to watch this, I planned to see the re-release of Schindler’s List immediately afterwards to wash the horror of this movie out of my head. In other words, I expected this to be so bad that I’d need a Holocaust film as a pick-me-up. I was wrong (although it was nice to see Schindler’s List again, a movie that’s legitimately good and done well). Van Nuys Blvd. isn’t good, but it’s neither terrible nor particularly offensive either. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but, unlike a lot of Marimark productions, it didn’t make me angry. That’s the highest note I’m going to end on for those bastards.

Oh Fuck You!

334. Las Vegas Lady

334. Las Vegas Lady (1975)
Director: Noel Nosseck
Writer: Walter Dallenbach
From: Cult Cinema (only 5 remain!)

A trio of women plan a heist in the Circus Circus Casino.

Three women plan to rob Eversull, the manager of the Circus Circus Casino, who’s running guns and girls through the place (girls that he apparently assaults). The women are Lucky-the ringleader in a relationship with one of the guards; Carol-the magician’s assistant who owes $15,000 to bookies; Lisa-the trapeze artist who’s going to be sneaked into the office. The whole enterprise is being organized by a shadowy figure.

Not quite enough happens in the run-up to the heist. Carol is attacked by her bookie who then breaks into her place and finds the floorplan for the office they’re going to rob. You’d expect that to result in him betraying Carol to the guy she’s going to rob, but he instead threatens her on the night of the heist by accusing her of planning to skip town. Lisa is there, though, and incapacitates him.

The heist itself is relatively simple: during a special high-rollers’ night on the upper floor of the casino, Lucky will lower a rope from the bathroom window that will allow Lisa to scale the casino and climb into Eversull’s office. Eversull has just received a down payment on some automatic weapons, money that’s hidden in a secret drawer in his office. Once Lisa has the money, she’ll climb into a modified buffet cart being pushed by Carol who’s picked up the shift from one of her friends in the kitchen.

The plan generally works. Lisa slips a bit climbing the rope, but doesn’t fall. A sniper on a billboard across from the casino shoots out a car’s tire causing an accident and then a fight in front of the place to serve as a distraction. Carol, though, gets groped by one of the high-rollers. When she tells him “no,” he accuses her of stealing from him and she gets grabbed by security. Lucky has to run to the office and get the cart out which she manages to do just before Eversull arrives with her boyfriend.

Eversull realizes he’s been robbed and guesses Carol was part of it. While Lucky and Lisa go to the rendezvous point, an Old West amusement park, Eversull beats the details out of Carol. He has her take him to the park where he ambushes the other two, but he gets ambushed by the boyfriend—the mastermind of the heist. A minor shoot-out ensues that ends when Eversull takes Lucky hostage. The boyfriend says to shoot her, but, if Eversull does, there’s nothing to protect him from the boyfriend. Lucky goes free and they let Eversull go even though he’ll have to answer to all the crime syndicates that are being ripped off right now. Lucky and her boyfriend embrace and leave together for Montana. THE END

The movie’s not bad, it’s just a bit thin. We start with Lucky being told she has two days to pull off the heist and then gradually meet the rest of her team and learn about their situations and motivations. Only her team is two people and their situations and motivations are pretty straightforward: Carol is a gambler who owes a lot of money to violent bookies and Lisa is a trapeze artist who’s becoming afraid of heights. If anyone’s role and motivation is unclear, it’s Lucky’s, but we never get much about her. Her job is to be the good-luck girl for high-rollers at the casino--essentially a professional gambler who gambles with other people’s money. I think. I don’t know much about Vegas or gambling. That’s what it looked like from the movie.

I wanted more character, more incident. The modern touchstones for heist movies is the Oceans franchise, and with those you not only have teams of 8, 11, 12, and 13, respectively, you also have the failure of the heist getting flipped into having been part of the plan all along. In other words, the movies have twists. This movie is just a straight line.

Also, the movie had the opportunity to be bigger, to do more. As I noted in the description, Eversull is hiring sex workers and then assaulting them. This happens off-screen (thank you movie), but is a moment that isn’t followed up on. I guess it’s supposed to establish him as violent toward women so we aren’t surprised when he beats Carol at the end, but I wanted some payoff from the sex workers themselves—that they’re part of the plot, or their madame organizes some sort of revenge for him, something. Instead, the role of the sex worker in the plot is her same role within the world of the movie: to be an object that communicates another character’s identity, not a character herself.

I’m just saying, if this guy is victimizing people, have the victims be part of the plot to ruin him. That’s a really satisfying thing to have in stories.

Anyway, the movie’s all right, neither great nor terrible. I wouldn’t recommend seeking it out, but if you stumble across it somehow, I wouldn’t recommend turning it off either.

333. Lena's Holiday

333. Lena’s Holiday (1991)
Director: Michael Keusch
Writers: Deborah Tilton and Michael Keusch
From: Cult Cinema

Lena, on holiday from Germany, has her luggage switched with someone being hunted by criminals and has to sort out what’s happened before the thugs catch up with her.

WHY?

A Marimark production. The second-to-last one I believe. This one’s from the director of Night Club which I described as “A dull, dull film that imagines you’ll endure its endless white boy whining for the thoroughly un-tittilating repetition of nudity. It’s not offensive, merely interminable.” Clearly, I had very high expectations going into this one, expectations that were not met.

The movie opens with archival footage of the Berlin Wall going up and being torn down over a hilariously bad song about the Wall coming down. I found the song on YouTube. The official video is pretty close to the opening of the movie and, honestly, more campy fun than anything the next 95 minutes of movie have to offer. You want a recommend, watch the video, laugh at them, and never look back.

The rest of the movie, by the way, has nothing to do with the Berlin Wall. Way to go guys! You added another standard by which to fail.

Anyway, Lena has just gotten off her plane in LA and is waiting for a cab. Julie walks up next to her with an identical bag, sees some men coming after her, and switches her bag for Lena’s. “Hilarious” hijinks ensue with Lena trying to get to her hotel without her reservation letter (one of the thugs has picked it up). Nothing matters because nothing happens. How have I managed to avoid nihilism after watching all these pointless movies?

She ends up at a photographer’s place, realizes she has the wrong bag (28 minutes into the movie), and stashes a box of condoms from the bag in the photographer’s house. For no reason except to make it narratively necessary for her to return later. She orders a cab which happens to be driven by the same cabbie that took her to the photographer’s place. They figure out where Julie lives, go there, and Lena finds her body. When she brings the cabbie in, the body is gone and he doesn’t believe her.

Then it’s her and the cabbie hanging out until the hour and 12 minute mark when they hook up and the cabbie finds a diamond in one of the two condoms that had remained in the bag. The next day Lena sees the cabbie handing over the diamond and other material to an armed man and getting a videotape in return. When she plays it, it’s surveillance footage of her from the moment of her arrival in LA. The thugs break in, take her to the photographer’s place, and have her hand over the condoms. As they’re leaving, the cabbie shows up, reveals he’s a cop, and arrests the villain. At the station, she’s angry with him for using her and he tries to apologize when they’re interrupted by a representative from the condom company. The bust has given them such great press that they want to reward the two of them with a lifetime supply of condoms and a vacation package. Lena takes the money instead, and then drives off to spend the rest of her Hollywood vacation with the cabbie/cop. THE END

Pat Morita’s in this movie. It’s a nothing part, but I was at once excited and disappointed to see him. Cause he’s fantastic and this is garbage.

This is such a simple plot, a very 80’s plot in fact. Swapped luggage gets our hero enmeshed in a diamond smuggling operation. The hero realizes something’s up, the villains have several near misses before realizing that the hero has the goods, and you have various set pieces that ramp up the risk. Adventures in Babysitting is an example. It’s a very simple formula.

Lena’s Holiday instead decides to eschew all of that and just have Lena hanging out in Hollywood at a cabbie’s place talking about how much she likes James Dean and Rebel Without a Cause. They go to the observatory from that movie. It’s bad enough taking time out of your bad movie to remind me of a better movie, don’t go to locations from that movie and have whole sequences dedicated to saying, “Remember that movie? That was a good movie. I really like that movie.”

The movie wants to be a comedy, but often fails to have jokes. Stuff just doesn’t happen. For 100 minutes. There isn’t even any music. Yes, there’s the opening song and a godawful amount of montages with music over them, but no general background music. Whenever there’s a scene with characters talking, it’s silent. So, as an audience, we’re not getting any cues of what the emotional tenor of the situation is supposed to be. I’ve mentioned other movies getting the tone wrong with their musical cues, but this one doesn’t use any at all. The effect is every scene is imbued with an accidental tension, especially the light and frivolous ones. All the silence made me worry that something was about to happen, that some grim revelation was about to come forth, and then nothing happens. Because it’s not a tense scene, it’s a comic scene.

Like so many Marimark productions, they took something promising and just ground it into nothing through a tireless dedication to mediocrity. Diamond smuggling in condoms is a good plot hook that you could do so much with—and not even just bawdy comedy. Instead, the plot isn’t used until the final half hour of the movie. That’s when we get all the stuff about smuggling and the villains coming for Lena. This felt like one of the longest movies I’ve watched for this project, and I watched the two-and-a-half hour cut of Virus. I had high hopes for this one, thinking that Marimark might have another Hunk within them. IMDB has this rated 5.5/10. I thought it might be an actual movie. I was wrong. Don’t make the mistake I did; don’t watch this movie.

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.

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.

319. Terror in the Jungle

319. Terror in the Jungle (1968)
Directors: Andrew Janczak, Tom DeSimone, and Alex Graton
Writers: Richard Ogilvie and Enrique Torres Tudela
From: Cult Cinema, Pure Terror (only 4 remain!)

A boy flying to see his mother in Rio becomes the center of several adventures as the plane crashes and he’s rescued by villagers who think he’s the son of their god.

Opens with a precocious child running across a beach and waving good-bye to a duck. Oh boy, am I going to love this flick?! No. No I’m not.

I’d complain about the child, because he’s pretty annoying, but I can’t really blame him. He looks to be about four years old, which by definition means he can't act, but he's crying in just about every shot. I sincerely suspect the producers smacked him just before every take. Keep that image in your head because it sums up the moral tone of this picture.

Yes. It is Christian propaganda. How did you guess?

Anyway, the kid is flying on a plane to Rio to see his mom because his parents might be getting a divorce. Shock and horror! How could such a thing happen? I don’t know because the mother never appears in the film. A series of wa-acky personalities are also on board—an aspiring actress, a groovy band, and a woman who allegedly murdered her husband and stole all his money. Also two nuns with a coffin, one of whom comforts the alleged murderess.

We get a little bit of these characters talking to each other on the plane, but that doesn’t matter because the plane is going to crash and I hope y’all are ready for high comedy! This is hands-down the best part of the movie. People are tossing luggage to help the plane stay airborne and one of the nuns falls out of the plane! But we’re not done! The plane crashes in the Amazon, everyone starts jumping in the water, but they’re all attacked by alligators! The kid is thrown into the river by the staff who promise they’ll follow in a moment, but the plane explodes killing them all! Of the entire flight, all that’s left is this little kid floating down the river in a coffin with his stuffed tiger. Sobbing and calling out for his daddy.

I was laughing and laughing and thought I would never stop.

Unfortunately the movie hits the brakes hard at this point. The kid flags down a plane, but his would-be rescuers are attacked by locals who take the kid instead. One faction wants to sacrifice him to their god. The other faction thinks, because of his blond hair, that he’s the son of their god. The king agrees with the second faction when he sees a halo around the boy’s head. The leader of the first faction really wants to sacrifice him, though, so he keeps working on the king until he agrees to maybe think about agreeing to it. Dude takes that as a yes and arranges to have the kid sacrificed. Just before the priest is about to put the knife in, he sees the halo around the kid’s head and refuses. So the faction leader kills the priest.

At this point, members of the second faction arrive and set the village and temple on fire. Someone escapes with the kid and the king refuses to do anything because he’s found a god stronger than INTI, somehow. So he gets killed. Meanwhile, leader of the first faction is chasing after the kid.

While all this is going on, the dad has flown down, visited the local Catholic church, and asked them for help—not the government or airline. He’s eventually led to a village the day before his son is supposed to be sacrificed and sees the villagers seemingly convert to Catholicism and agree to help find his son. Then they hit a certain point in the jungle and the villagers tell him and his priest friends that they’re on their own.

So the kid is being chased, drops his stuffed tiger, and the man chasing him finds it. The tiger transforms—first into a different stuffed tiger and then into a giant stuffed cheetah which, depending on the shot periodically transforms into a real cheetah. The man is attacked and killed by the beast, declaring with his dying breathe that the boy is the son of god. INTI, not Jehovah. That'd be blasphemous.

Kid is running, falls into quicksand, and calls for dad. Dad hears him, finds him, and saves him. As the two walk away, the pilot and priest who’d been traveling with them marvel at the fact that everyone on the plane except the kid died. The priest says, “The lord moves in mysterious ways to perform his miracles.” THE END

HOW MANY DIED SO THIS BOY COULD LIVE? It’s sort of like people talking about “God-incidences” in regard to 9/11. “I was supposed to work in the towers that day, but slept through my alarm. God specifically saved me while letting 3,000 of my friends and co-workers die in a horrifying way. Truly God is good.” By the way, I’m not making that up.

The movie is saying, directly, that God specifically reached out to protect this child (and none of the other people in the movie including the two priests who died in their effort to save him), but protect him from what? Living with his divorced mother? Quelle horreur.

The movie is just dull and weird for it’s final hour. Sure, you can laugh at the production values—all the actors look like recruits from a community theater troupe whose only membership requirement was “BYO shitty wig”—but that’s such a short, fleeting pleasure. Really, there’s about 15 solid minutes in this movie: minutes 15-30. That’s when they start making preparations for the plane to crash and all the hilarious deaths occur. After that, it’s just the locals sitting around giving the kid dirty looks and the dad traveling to find the priest who knows where the village is. If you can find a copy, just jump to the 15 minute mark and turn it off when the kid is weeping in the coffin. I doubt you’ll have a more joyful cinematic experience this year than that. Beyond that chunk, skip it.

313. Prehistoric Women

313. Prehistoric Women (1950)
Director: Gregg G. Tallas
Writers: Sam X. Abarbanel and Gregg G. Tallas
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A narrated tale of prehistoric women finding husbands.

I also watched this just over ten years ago as part of the Sci-Fi set and, frankly, didn’t like it any better back then. The entire movie is narrated including having the narrator describe action occurring on-screen. When the narrator isn’t talking, we instead get dialogue in prehistoric gibberish. It’s all a bit much. I mean, the first ten minutes are the narrator telling us about the wise woman of the tribe telling the story of how the tribe was founded. So it’s someone telling us a story of someone telling a story.

It’s not meta if it’s stupid.

So, very briefly, because there’s nothing to say about this movie, we start with a tribe of prehistoric women—only women. Their tribe was founded when their former leader attacked the chief of their tribe that was using all the women as slave labor. The new matriarchal tribe thrived, but was attacked by the monstrous caveman Guadi who stole a few members and killed the leader. Now, fifteen years later, all the children have grown up and are ready to get married.

What follows is what you’d expect: The women capture men, fight over one of them, then the men escape using fire and kidnap all the women. Proper order is restored of women doing back-breaking labor in service of men. On the way back to the men’s tribe, Guadi attacks. The men burn Guadi to death and agree to return to the women’s tribe and marry them. THE END

Another one of those flicks you can’t even get mad at. I spent the whole time knitting, checkng Twitter, and wondering if it was done yet. I could go into plot holes like somehow the women are stymied by these men even though their tribe was founded by women overpowering men and their tribe has thrived by collectively acting against the men. Then the men are all isolated and yet the women don’t organize against them. And if I wanted to get snarky-political, I’d say this is a film that dares to ask what the world would be like if you don’t take the red pill, but it doesn’t even warrant that kind of effort, not that kind of scorn.

I mean the narration gets a little obnoxious talking about the “weaker sex” even though the women here are consistently kicking the men’s asses, but I’m not willing to say the flick was being willfully ironic. I’m not willing to say the flick was being willfully anything. Plus it’s hard to imagine it’s saying anything about men and women at all, that it’s interested in women at all. Like all those sword & sandal pics, this is about having buff young men run around shirtless and oiled up. I don’t think the intended audience was too interested in anything “between” sexes, let alone battle.

Unless you’re into the idea of femdommed cavemen (and I’m sure somebody is), there’s just not much in this movie to recommend it. Even if you want beefcake, the print is too washed out to really provide any visuals. Let me emphasize any. This movie made the bold choice to forego day-for-night shots and just shoot at night without any lighting. The women are doing an ecstatic ritual dance, but good luck making any of it out in that inky black frame.

The movie is in the public domain and I’ve added a copy to archive.org here, just be warned that there’s not much to it. The movie is easily riffable, but just becomes a bit of a slog because there’s nothing going on.

311. Separate Ways

311. Separate Ways (1981)
Director: Howard Avedis
Writers: Leah Appet from a story by Leah Appet, Howard Avedis, and Marlene Schmidt
From: Cult Cinema

A drama about a couple facing the disintegration of their marriage and their business.

From the director of the pedophilic The Teacher and the tonally inconsistent The Specialist comes a domestic drama handled with all the subtlety and care you’d expect. Honestly, it’s not so bad as that, nor is it as good either.

Ken and Valentine Colby are in a bit of a rut in their marriage. Their first child is starting school and Valentine wants to get out of the house and become more active, either through joining Ken at the car dealership he inherited or by going back to school. Ken is trying to keep the dealership afloat through a new ad campaign and by giving the bank the runaround about a loan he’s been mismanaging.

Valentine catches Ken having an affair and then hooks up with someone herself. She confronts Ken with what she knows and tells him about her indiscretion as well, and leaves him to prove she can fend for herself. She picks up a job as a cocktail waitress at a burlesque bar and finds that she can manage it. Meanwhile, Ken loses the shop.

Valentine quits her job around the same time and comes back home. The couple try to work it out and the whole family goes to the race track that weekend to see Ken race in a car he built with his friend. Ken wins the race and the family walks off together, happy. THE END

I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m so down on this movie, and certainly part of it is because so very little happens. There’s very little struggle or sense of weight to anything. Ken is straight-up lying to the bank about how many cars he has on the lot, but the fact that this action could lead to the business being foreclosed upon never comes up. Likewise Valentine’s job at the cocktail bar is, I think, supposed to be read as sordid or degrading, but it comes across as a job in an environment that she, despite herself, kind of enjoys. The bouncer flirts with her a little bit, but the moment she tells him “no,” he leaves her alone with no animosity.

She enters a sordid world with a thorough and nonchalant respect for consent. I mean, I was really happy to see that, but also disappointed because it sidestepped any opportunity for drama. Which is when I realized the issue I take with this movie:

Separate Ways has an exploitation film sensibility while not being an exploitation film. The movie is a domestic drama but has the leering tone of impending titillation. “Hey, she’s working at a burlesque bar. You know what that means!” “What’s this have to do with her husband lying to their son about where she is?” “Oh, yeah, we did foreground that as an issue, didn’t we?”

That’s an issue as well: the husband isn’t that villainous, or at least isn’t played up as being villainous. Losing the business is a concern and something to explore in a dramatic narrative, but the movie keeps him and his issues in the background. Then he has the affair, is never fully communicative with Valentine, and lies to the kid about where mom is—a move, of which she accuses him, that turns the kid into a pawn in the argument between them. Only he’s not trying to make any abusive moves, he’s someone muddling his way through a bad situation.

And that’s fine. You can have a movie without villains that doesn’t try to make every decision life-or-death or carry some moral weight, but you do need to fully realize and expand upon these characters and their situation. I spent a good chunk of the movie just wandering what it was supposed to be about. Once the separation finally came, there wasn’t much time left in the movie to resolve it in any meaningful way.

So I wouldn’t recommend the movie. It didn’t offend me the way some of these others have. In fact, I was surprised at how much the movie showed characters respecting consent. I even started to wonder if I don’t want to see movies that respect consent because, if this movie’s an example, it seems to strip all of the drama. It doesn’t, though. You just need to make sure the drama of your piece is in the foreground. This movie didn’t do that. You should let it remain in the background as well.