338. Star Knight

338. Star Knight aka El caballero del dragón (1985)
Director: Fernando Colomo
Writers: Fernando Colomo and Andreu Martín from a story by Andreu Martín and Miguel Ángel Nieto
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (the last one!)

An alien spaceship visits a medieval land and is mistaken for a dragon.

The movie stars Klaus Kinski and Harvey Keitel. It’s everything I can do to not write this whole post in a Werner Herzog voice.

Opens with a scroll invoking alchemy and the pursuit of “The Secret of Secrets.” Then we cut to Kinski, the alchemist, calling for an angel to arrive and show him said Secret of Secrets. What luck, an alien spaceship passes overhead right at that moment! Many people see it and the story of its passing evolves into that of a dragon harrying the countryside. The people refuse to pay their taxes unless the count and his knights (led by Keitel) do something about the dragon.

Within the castle, there’s a powerplay being orchestrated by the priest who resents Kinski’s presence and closeness to the Count. Likewise, Keitel is angling to be made a knight and marry the Count’s daughter. The princess is chafing against her father’s overprotectiveness and keeps trying to sneak out to experience the world. Now you have all the background.

The princess sneaks out, is captured by the spaceship, and then returns in a catatonic state. Kinski brings her out of it and gets her story about being inside the vessel and falling in love with the man piloting it. Kinski goes to where the ship is and is given a crystal ball (a computer for all intents and purposes) that has instructions on how to make the elixir of immortality.

The alien comes to the castle, leaves with the princess, and the Count promises her hand and half his land to whoever saves her. Kinski manufactures the elixir, but the priest and Keitel have organized a coup inside the castle and kidnap him. They all go to the ship where Keitel challenges the alien to a duel for the princess’ hand. She wants the alien to accept to prove his love, but he instead lets her leave. The ship flies off and the group head back to the castle.

On the way, the alien arrives with a horse and weapons to face Keitel. They fight, but Keitel removes the alien’s spacesuit by using a code he learned from the crystal. The suit transports onto Keitel’s body and the alien dies. Keitel and the priest return to the ship hoping to seize control of it, but it closes up once they board and flies into space. Kinski gives the little of the elixir that he has to the alien which resurrects him and allows him to breathe Earth air. The three return to the castle, the alien periodically manifests a halo causing him to be seen as a saint, and he’s given the princess’ hand and half the country. Meanwhile, Keitel and the priest are flying through space headed to parts unknown. THE END

So everything in the movie is said in Ye Olde English which gives the piece a strange, goofy tone. This isn’t helped by the fact that, in terms of content, it feels like the movie is trying to be a comedy, like it’s aping Monty Python and the Holy Grail except with one central plot. Even worse, Keitel can’t pull off the accent. He sounds like he’s trying to cover up a Brooklyn accent, like Stallone moonlighting at Medieval Times.

The comic effect is problematic because, in terms of production, the movie feels like it’s trying to be serious, like it wants to be a good, sincere fantasy movie that’s maybe even making a political statement. The priest is mean-spirited and conniving, ranting to Keitel at the end about how difficult it will be to convince a whole new group of people to give up part of their income for no reason whatsoever. I have no beef with religious criticism, but I don’t quite see how it factors into your alien and dragon movie.

Beyond the religious angle, I had the sense that the movie was trying to satirize chivalry and medieval governance, which, so? Golly, you really stuck it to those 14th-century monarchists. Since I could never put my finger on what the movie was trying to do, I never really got engaged by it.

None of this, by the way, was helped by the fact that the alien communicated telepathically so he never speaks. He only gives goggling, fish-eyed stares at everyone. Imagine Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, except mute. It wasn’t fun.

Which is unfortunate. I was excited when I saw the cast list and the basic plot synopsis. I think it’s a neat idea, a particularly good one for a D&D game. People in the region start spreading stories about a dragon and a strange magician menacing their lands, but it turns out to be an alien here for its own inscrutable purposes. Is it exploring, taking samples, planning an invasion? How do the characters find out about it, encounter it, react to it? What are the alien’s powers—does it have its own magic, psychic abilities, high technology? You can do a lot with the idea. This movie, I think, wanted to, but didn’t pull it off. I’d recommend skipping it. There is some fun to be had riffing it, but because it seems to be trying to be funny on its own, you’d be spending a lot of time noting how jokes fall flat.

332. Future Women

332. Future Women aka Rio 70 aka Die sieben Männer der Sumuru (1969)
Director: Jesús Franco
Writers: Harry Alan Towers based on characters created by Sax Rohmer
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 1 remains!)

A spy has to infiltrate the matriarchal Femina to rescue a kidnapped girl, but finds himself becoming the center of an even larger plot.

In some undefined future period, the battle of the sexes has been won in one nation, Femina, by women who have turned it into a fascist matriarchy. In writing that sentence, I’ve gained 100,000 YouTube subscribers and many generous Patreon backers even though I have neither a YouTube nor Patreon.

A spy is on the run after having stolen $10 million dollars. However, as the manicurist he hooks up with reminds him, the easiest thing to steal is stolen money, so he decides to leave town. They flee to the airport, but are pursued by agents of a crime lord who wants the money. At the airport, the manicurist is kidnapped by the crime lord’s agents and the spy is kidnapped on the plane by Feminians, Feminines, Feministaniskis… obvious plants. He’s kidnapped by obvious plants since everyone on the plane except him is a woman wearing thigh-highs and black rubber bibs that don’t cover their tits.

Not gonna lie, folks, this one’s pretty strange.

So he’s taken to Femina, a place, as its leader Sumitra says was built with the labor and money of men. 1969 and it’s the same talking points MRA’s are trotting out today. Why won’t anyone debate you? Because your shit is 50 years old and tired. It ain’t convinced anyone in half-a-century and it ain’t gonna.

Anyway, he’s been kidnapped because Sumitra wants his $10 million. Only he doesn’t have the money. It’s all a front so he can rescue the daughter of a rich man who’s being held for ransom. Sumitra’s agents use torture to try to extract the information from him, and when I say “torture,” I mean “orgy,” but, curiously, it doesn’t work. When they threaten the girl, he spills the beans.

Inevitably, he escapes with the girl and gets captured by the crime lord. The crime lord wants the spy’s help invading Femina since the spy is the only person to ever escape the country and Femina has all sorts of money. Sumitra comes to the mainland, kidnaps the spy, the girl, and someone else, takes them back to Femina, which is then invaded by the crime lord. The spy and the women with him escape again, meet the manicurist (who was working for Femina), and she joins them as well. The crime lord confronts Sumitra, but she decides to blow up the country instead of letting men control it. Heroes escape, villains die, and Femina explodes.

Cut to a cruise liner being boarded by a line of women all in black. The woman at the head of the line lifts her veil revealing, I think, Sumitra? I’m not sure. This is one of those flicks where all the women intentionally all look alike, but that seems like the kind of twist this movie would have. Right? Oh yeah, and THE END. The closing credits end with a title card with “Mothers of America” in big letters underneath something I can’t read.

Wait, what? I... what? Is this a bit?

I don’t get this movie. I can try offering some background, but I’m not sure it would help. Sumitra is actually the character Sumuru created by Sax Rohmer, a pulp novelist most famous for his character Fu Manchu. Sumuru is the kind of villain you’d expect from cranked-out pulp novels of the early to mid-twentieth century: megalomaniac with globe-spanning plans that always end up thwarted in the end. Her plan is to have a world ruled by women. This movie is a sequel to The Million Eyes of Sumuru (which was riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 on local station KTMA) where Sumuru’s plan was to have her women infiltrate various governments, kill their heads of state, and take over. In this movie, her plan is to kidnap wealthy people and steal all their money.

Honestly, that’s fine for a plot. Our hero has to infiltrate the city to rescue someone being held for ransom and you have a criminal force trying to rob Femina as well. These all sound like the right ingredients for a campy 60’s spy thriller. The movie should just be silly.

Instead, it feels like it’s a hair’s breadth away from being a surrealistic sci-fi piece. The movie has a lot of downtime, strange shots and angles, and the pieces never come together. To make matters worse, my copy had a strange rising and falling buzz throughout most of it, and I don’t know if that was intentional. The movie is that kind of strange.

So I don’t recommend it. I feel like I should be saying something more, but this movie, as a final product, just leaves me confused. I’ve given you all the plot points, I’ve made reference to the strange costumes (think Barbarella meets latex-fetish), I haven’t mentioned the torture scenes. I mean, I mentioned one that’s just an orgy. All the others involve people laying on black plastic platforms and writhing. Yeah. It’s a movie that makes you say, on more than one occasion, “Am I watching someone’s fetish? I think I’m watching someone’s fetish.” While I did laugh out loud at several points in the movie, it was not, overall, funny or fun.

It’s a weird, boring flick, folks. Give it a pass.

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.

314. Trapped By Television

314. Trapped By Television (1936)
Director: Del Lord
Writers: Lee Loeb and Harold Buchman from a story by Sherman L. Lowe and Al Martin
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 3 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

An inventor seeking investment for a new form of television has to deal with saboteurs trying to undermine him.

For something called Trapped By Television on the Sci-Fi Invasion set, you’d expect something more, well, sci-fi. Instead this is a pretty low-key studio one-off. The movie doesn’t have much drama or plot and is just a hair over an hour long so it feels like it was made to fill time at movie theaters.

Rocky is a bill collector with an interest in science. He’s sent to collect a debt from Fred, an inventor working on a new form of broadcast camera and television. Rocky is so enamored with the idea of Fred being an inventor that he doesn’t collect the debt and instead gets Fred a job as a bill collector himself. Fred then goes to collect a debt from Ms. Bobby Blake, a, for lack of a better term, venture capitalist. He accidentally hands her a schematic for his invention and she decides to become an investor. She takes the proposal over to Mr. Curtis at the Paragon Broadcasting Corporation to get him to invest in finishing costs. Mr. Curtis is in a bad way because the engineers he’s been paying to develop broadcasting equipment for him have gone missing. One has kidnapped (then murdered) the other and is working with two people inside the company to make sure Curtis buys their equipment instead.

It sounds more complicated than it is and more complicated than how it plays out on-screen. Basically, Fred is the honest man at the root of a series of grifts.

I’m inclined to leave the description there because I enjoyed this movie—I found it charmingly ridiculous—but I’m not sure if it’s possible to spoil something like this. It’s a movie from 1936. The villains interfere with the inventor, he has a falling out with Blake who he’s started to fall in love with, and he’s both materially and romantically triumphant by THE END.

As I noted, the movie’s only just over an hour and there’s not a lot of drama. You’d expect the villains to play a larger role in the piece, but they really only show up for two scenes: one to explain and enact their plan and one to try to sabotage and assault our leads. Otherwise, it’s just the protagonists working toward their goal and worrying about whether they’ve placed their faith in the right people.

And I found the movie charming. It’s a simple bit of fluff with actors who know what they’re doing. Everything has the look of a cheap noir, the actors even sound like parodies of those kinds of figures, but everyone’s tongue is firmly in their cheek, no one more so than Rocky. He’s the tough bill collector who keeps repeating, “Science is my hobby.” He’s the tough guy easily distracted by a shiny bauble, always toeing the line of being cartoonish without ever crossing it. I mean, the movie has a scene where he’s in a cab demanding the cabbie drive faster. The cabbie responds, “If you think you can do better, you drive.” Next shot, Rocky’s driving.

It’s such a simple, stupid moment and the movie included it because that moment is precisely the tone and ethic of the film. I don’t say this about a lot of movies, but it charmed me, I was legitimately charmed by this movie. So I recommend it. It just makes things feel a little nicer.

To make things even better, the movie is in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here. You should give it a peek.

306. Extra Terrestrial Visitors

306. Extra Terrestrial Visitors aka Los nuevos extraterrestres (1983)
Director: Juan Piquer Simón
Writers: Joaquín Grau and Juan Piquer Simón
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 4 remain!)

A meteor carrying alien eggs crashes on Earth. Two aliens emerge—one befriends a young boy while the other starts killing everyone it meets.

So it’s Pod People. You ever see that episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000? “It stinks!” That’s this movie. And for that reason it holds a special place in my heart.

Even though I’m on the border of being a Millennial (the start time keeps sliding backwards. I think the official definition now is, “Have you been fucked over by the Baby Boomers’?”), I do remember a time before the Internet. When I was growing up in Northern Indiana, I lived in a neighborhood that didn’t have access to cable. Even if we had had access, we wouldn’t have had access to Comedy Central, the then home of Mystery Science Theater 3000. All we had was over-the-air TV and Entertainment Weekly talking about all this brilliant television that we couldn’t see.

Then came the Mystery Science Theater Hour, a syndicated version of MST3k that broke each episode into two one-hour parts (hence the name). That show was picked up by one of our local networks, but it didn’t air until, I think, 3 AM on Saturday night. On top of that, the network only seemed to show four episodes (so two complete MST3k episodes) over and over. One was Cave Dwellers (“Miles and miles O’Keefe!”) and the other was Pod People. I still remember and constantly go back to the jokes “Little wing-ed potatoes” and “Trumpy! You can do stupid things!” In other words, my introduction to MST3k, a show that’s been pretty important to me in terms of introducing me to paracinema, horror hosts, camp culture, and copyright theory, began with a weird little kid raising a gross puppet that hatched from an egg. What can I say about it?

“It stinks!”

The movie opens with an explosion in space that drives a meteor to Earth. It crashes and is eventually found by one of a trio of poachers looking for rare birds eggs. Upon finding the stash of alien eggs, the egg poacher, curiously, just starts smashing all of them. An alien emerges and kills him. His partners are now left stranded in the woods with a bad storm coming in.

Meanwhile, a band is recording an album. The lead singer is a dick. They all leave to go camping for the weekend, but a groupie the singer had been schmoozing with earlier invites herself along. The singer can’t tell her no because she’s related to one of the label execs. Her coming, though, really pisses off the singer’s girlfriend.

While stopping to cook some food over a fire, the groupie gets offended and bullied to the point that she runs away. She finds the two poachers who threaten her, leading her to run and fall off a cliff. The alien comes by and marks her. Her friends find her, take her back to the RV, and start looking for help.

They arrive at a cabin where a family, the third part of the movie is living. It’s a man, his sister, and her son. The man used to work with the poachers and the son collects animals—including one of the alien eggs! The band arrives, takes shelter hoping the phone will start working the next day, and the groupie dies. Meanwhile, the kid’s egg has hatched and he starts raising the alien as his friend Trumpy.

Things proceed. Two people leave the house to try to call for help, end up at a ranger station where they find the corpse of one of the poachers, and get attacked by the alien themselves. Back at the house, the alien somehow arrives before the survivor of the ranger station attack and kills another of the people. The kid thinks Trumpy did it, then realizes there’s a second monster. Folks find Trumpy, kid prevents them from killing it, asshole singer sees both aliens together with the kid and realizes they’re not a threat. Uncle opens fire, killing the evil alien but getting killed in the process, and the singer takes the kid home, lying so Trumpy can live on. THE END.

The movie was supposed to be a generic alien invasion monster movie, but then ET happened so they had to rewrite the script to insert Trumpy and the lovable kid. It was a mistake. One of the most memorable riffs is, “Trumpy! You can do stupid things!” for a reason. I don’t know what the movie would have been if it was just the straight-up monster thriller, but shoehorning the ET angle in just kills any kind of tension and makes a lot of things strange. I already mentioned the alien somehow getting to the cabin on foot before the people at the ranger station can drive back, but there’s also the disappearance of the poachers. One is just found dead in the ranger station, but we don’t see him die. The other is just no longer in the film.

I don’t have much to say about the movie beyond its MST3k connection. That’s a classic episode and I recommend watching that. The uncut version of the movie though begs you to give it a pass no matter how catchy the song.

273. Rocket Attack U.S.A.

273. Rocket Attack U.S.A. (1961)
Director: Barry Mahon
From: Sci-Fi Invasion (only 5 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

An American spy tries to get details on the Soviet missile program while a general back in the States works with an industrialist to develop an ICBM.

This movie might be best summed up by the riff from Mystery Science Theater 3000: “Wow. This is really dull.” The movie’s so dull, in fact, that despite being only 64 minutes long, MST3k cut whole sequences because they were too boring. The show that featured Manos: The Hands of Fate edited an already whisper thin movie down further because there was too much padding.

So, the movie. The USSR has put a satellite into space. US intelligence fears the satellite may be collecting scientific data for the purposes of developing an ICBM. A spy is sent to Moscow to meet an asset who’s sleeping with a minister of something. The spy moves into her apartment to monitor her and the minister when they have their *ahem* liaisons and get information about the missile program. Eventually they learn that the program has a working missile and there are plans to launch it against the US. The pair try to sabotage the missile, but get killed instead. The launch happens and New York is hit, killing upwards of 3 million people. A voice-over comes in demanding that we not let this be THE END.

Painfully dull Cold War propaganda. Even though the basic plot allows for some drama and tension, the movie instead just has characters chat about plot developments that happen off-screen. The funniest part is the spy has to hide in the asset’s closet while the Soviet minister is meeting up with her. It’s like a cuckolded James Bond: instead of Bond bedding the villain’s love, he watches the villain bed his.

None of that matters, though, because the real heroes of the piece are the industrialists taking US tax dollars to develop the technology that will help us win the missile race (which we lose). When we’re not watching the spy talk to the asset, we’re watching the General talk to the industrialist about how missile development is going, constantly apologizing for not putting more public money into his pockets. How dare the government spend its citizens’ tax dollars on food subsidies and price stabilization—real complaints the film makes, by the way. We wouldn’t have to worry about this Soviet threat if we didn’t waste all that money on feeding people.

In fact, it’s curious (meaning, “not curious at all”) that this propaganda picture is so focused on valorizing industry and waggling its finger at individuals and civil society. Our tax dollars being directed to our immediate needs is a sin that leads to us being hit with a nuclear weapon. Our press reporting on the failure of our ICBM experiments is a sin that leads to the Soviets being emboldened to launch a first strike. Our citizens’ dismissal of air raids and their civic responsibility to take them seriously is a sin that leads to them getting nuked. Why oh why didn’t we just give the military and Northrup Grummun a blank check?

Coincidentally, I’m currently reading Gore Vidal’s essay collection, The Last Empire, where he makes the argument that Truman, post-WWII, kept the country on a permanent war footing in hopes of maintaining a certain level of economic prosperity. To do that, though, the citizens had to be convinced of a threat since a permanent war economy meant permanent war-level taxes. The threat, then, was the Soviets. I was familiar with that argument, but it was surprising to see it so nakedly embodied by a movie. The thesis of Rocket Attack U.S.A. is that efforts toward civil society, in fact any economic effort that’s not directed at expanding the military-industrial complex will get us killed.

I could go on, but I’ve already gone on too long about this garbage fire. While it’s in the public domain and I’ve added my (very muddy) copy to archive.org, I’d recommend against watching it. Find something by Ed Wood instead. It’ll have both more integrity and quality.

257. Mission Stardust

257. Mission Stardust aka … 4… 3… 2… 1… morte (1967)
Director: Primo Zeglio
Writers: Kurt Vogelmann, Sergio Donati, and Primo Zeglio, based on novels by Clark Dalton
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

A mission to the moon encounters alien life in need of assistance, but finds their efforts to help being stymied by a crimelord.

More Italian sci-fi. Ugh. At least this doesn’t feel like a rip-off of a rip-off of Star Wars the way Escape From Galaxy 3 did. However this movie, if possible, is even weirder.

The titular Mission Stardust is flying to the moon on some pretense. Its secret mission is to collect a heretofore undiscovered mineral that’s just beneath the moon’s surface. A villainous crimelord learns of the mission’s real goal and is making preparations to steal the minerals upon the ship’s return. However, something on the moon short circuits all the ship’s electronics. It turns out it’s an alien race genetically identical to humans, but far advanced in terms of society and technology (as they ceaselessly remind us).

The aliens’ ship is in need of repair and one of the two aliens on board is sick. Turns out he has leukemia. Fortunately one of the astronauts know of a doctor in Africa who can treat him. So the alien ship goes to Earth, but is spotted by the African military that tries to attack it. Also, a traitor among the astronauts alerts the crimelord to what’s going on. This, somehow, doesn’t interfere with his plan.

Two of the astronauts set out to find the doctor while the healthy alien keeps the army at bay. The astronauts find the doctor, but are pursued by the army and the crimelord on their way back to the ship. The astronaut the healthy alien is in love with jumps from the car to stop the army and is captured by the crimelord. Meanwhile, on the ship, it turns out the doctor and his nurses are plants sent by the crimelord. They give the sick alien a transfusion, then try to take over the ship. The healthy alien activates the robot guards though, and the doctor and nurses are killed. The astronaut traitor takes the healthy alien and meets up with the crimelord.

Hero astronaut has escaped the crimelord at this point and returns to the ship. They track the healthy alien, rescue her, and pick up the real doctor. During the rescue, the traitor gets killed and the crimelord escapes. However, once back on the ship, the healthy alien blows up the crimelord’s island. In a twist, the crimelord is already on the ship. He holds everyone at gunpoint, but they all advance on him and the healthy alien kicks him out an airlock and into space.

Back on the moon, both the aliens’ and the astronauts’ ships are repaired and preparing to leave. The now-no-longer-sick alien expresses his hope that our two species might someday interact more closely. An astronaut goes looking for hero astronaut and finds him making out with the healthy alien. He returns to the no-longer-sick alien and says he may get his wish. THE END.

It’s just confusing, you know? Right from Jump Street I had no idea what was going on. It’s a moon mission, but that’s a front for mineral extraction. However a crimelord has the details about that secret mission and is planning a heist around it. And once all that gets sidelined by the aliens, it still doesn’t derail the crimelord’s plans. This is one of those movies where I’m not 100% sure the people dubbing it had a script beforehand.

Despite all the craziness of the plot, it’s boring. The movie is really boring. Maybe that’s because of the complicated plot. None of the events matter so there’s never any throughline. The one plot that’s consistent almost throughout the movie is getting a doctor for the alien, and even that’s barely held to. That plot feels like an afterthought every time it comes up.

To the good, this is highly riffable. The movie’s really stupid with mustache-twirling villainy and a nonsensical plot. Add to that terrible effects and a print so bad that it looks like experimental collage making fun of films from this period and you have a real laugh riot. If you have enough people in the room, I guarantee at least one person will start shouting, “What?! What?!” at the screen. Beyond that, give it a pass. None of the characters stand out and it’s never particularly interesting.

256. The Raiders of Atlantis

256. The Raiders of Atlantis aka I predatori di Atlantide (1983)
Director: Ruggero Deodato
Writers: Tito Carpi and Vincenzo Mannino
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

A mission to raise a nuclear sub from the bottom of the ocean inadvertently brings forth Atlantis. Now roving gangs of Atlanteans are wantonly killing people while searching for one woman.

We open with our heroes, Mike and Washington (who insists on being called “Mohammed” through this opening sequence and then never again), breaking into a house, killing all the guards and killing the owner. He’s sealed in a body bag and delivered to their employer who refuses to show his face. He pays the pair and they announce their intention to travel to Trinidad.

Meanwhile, Dr. Cathy Rollins, an expert in pre-Columbian languages, is flown out to an ocean rig. The crew there is trying to surface a derelict Russian nuclear sub. In the process, somehow, they’ve found a tablet with runes they don’t recognize. While she examines that, the crew brings up the sub, but something goes wrong at the last minute. The ocean gets super choppy and everyone abandons the rig before it's destroyed. Mike and Washington are at sea at this point and rescue the crew.

The disturbance has been caused by Atlantis returning from the ocean floor. With its rise, gangs emerge from the cities—not from Atlantis—and start murdering everyone. Mike et al sail to the nearest shore and find themselves almost immediately under attack: first, by their friend on the boat who tries to kidnap Dr. Rollins, then by the Mad Max-esque gangs on land.

There isn’t much plot from this point. The gangs are after Rollins. Mike, Washington, and the ragtag group they assemble (and then lose, one by one) fight the gangs. We get several nice action set pieces including two separate instances of a man on fire. Then Rollins is captured and taken to the island. The group goes to find her and split up once they get to Atlantis: one team to find Rollins, the other to disable the sub and sink the island. Everyone dies except Mike, Rollins, and Washington.

Mike and Washington go to the heart of the island where they find Rollins turned into an Atlantean. The islanders wanted her because she figured out what the tablet said and believe she can restore them to their former glory. When she sees Mike, she changes her mind, and sinks the island instead. Mike and Washington rush back to their helicopter and find Rollins on board. They all escape and Rollins starts making out with Mike. THE END.

This intrepid 1983 sci-fi actioner is set in the far-off future of 1994 for no reason whatsoever. Why set your movie eleven years in the future? This reminds me that I’ve been thinking of doing a bad movie podcast called “It Was the Year” that focuses on movies set in a future that’s already past and how entertainingly wrong they got everything. This movie, though, announces that it’s set in the future and then doesn’t have anything to do with any sort of future whatsoever.

Anyway, I was primed for this because I’d already seen it reviewed on Best of the Worst. I’d forgotten most of what they said apart from this being a Mad Max rip-off and a few details about the conclusion. I didn’t remember any details about how fundamentally silly it all is.

And it is silly. I don’t know what the opening sequence with the murder is supposed to be about. It never comes up again and we never get any conflict in the movie arising from Mike and Washington being murderers for hire. Plus there’s the strange fact of the titular Raiders. They’re not from Atlantis. The way the movie’s cut, it’s very clear that when Atlantis rises, these people who are already on land get the signal and start raiding. Who are they and where did they come from? And how would they know anything about Rollins?

Who cares? Stuff sure does blow up good. And that’s the proper attitude to have going into this. The acting is over-the-top, the set-ups are downright silly, and the various set pieces are kind of inventive. An early scene of a hanging body bumping against a jukebox and causing the record to skip is well-conceived and pleasantly creepy. More often though, the movie descends into people shooting at other people.

I’d give it a recommend. It never trips over itself by entering super-uncomfortable spaces and it’s pretty relentlessly goofy. The flick’s only just over ninety minutes and it moves through that time well enough from its toy models in a bathtub to its hilariously-timed deaths. While it’d be best enjoyed with friends, I think it’s silly enough to entertain even if you’re alone.

255. Welcome to Blood City

255. Welcome to Blood City (1977)
Director: Peter Sasdy
Writers: Stephen Schneck and Michael Winder
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

Five people with no memory awaken to find themselves in a wild west town where your place is determined by how many people you kill.

Open in a city where a voice over a loudspeaker is announcing a bombing and directing people to a rally point. A man is stopped in his car by officials.

Cut to a sandy landscape where Lewis, in blue coveralls, is just waking up. Martine and 3 men, dressed just like him, are also there asking what he can remember. He doesn’t remember anything and neither do they. All they know is what’s written on a little card in their pockets: their name, the number of people they killed, and how. Lewis looks at his card, tears it up, and throws it away.

They start walking and get ambushed by two rednecks with guns. The rednecks kill one of the group, steal everyone’s boots, and then rape Martine. Way to go, movie. You’ve lost me before the ten-minute mark. Can you win me back over?

Nope.

Cause the movie never engages with the subject seriously; it’s just there to demonstrate how awful this setting is. The movie is so ambivalent about its own portrayal of sexual assault that it never mentions the event again even though one of the big motivating factors for the characters is escaping sex slavery.

Oh yeah, it goes there too.

So I’ll just speed through this. The now quartet is found by Jack Palance, sheriff in these parts (although he didn’t intervene in the rape), and he takes them to the titular Blood City. Everyone here is a citizen or a slave. Newcomers, like the quartet, are kept in arrivals and then sold off to citizens to work for one year before earning their freedom. One citizen has called dibs on Martine.

Lewis isn’t willing to accept the situation so strikes off into town on his own. He’s almost killed, but ends up killing a citizen instead after the mysterious citizen Katherine tosses him a shotgun. Having killed a citizen, Lewis is now a citizen and learns the rules of the place: kill twenty people and no one can touch you.

Meanwhile, we keep cutting to scientists in a lab monitoring what’s happening in Blood City. The whole situation is a game designed to find ideal recruits to work as part of the government’s elite killer corps. Katherine is one of the scientists and she’s taken a fancy to Lewis, both romantically and as her pet project in the experiment.

Anyway, Lewis faces off against the guy who wants to claim Martine, kills him, but finds Martine’s vanished. Katherine took her away and handed her off to the rednecks from the beginning. Lewis goes to save her, Katherine sends reenforcements to help, and then Katherine herself shoots Martine. Since Lewis is angry about it, Katherine sets up Palance to kill him, but Lewis ultimately wins. Katherine then gives the only other surviving member of Lewis’ initial group a gun and Lewis is shot. The supervisor of the project, though, likes Lewis’ performance and brings him out of the game.

When Lewis wakes up, he sees the monitors with the game as well as the room next to his own where everyone he’d seen die in-game is walking around lobotomized. He overhears the supervisor’s plans for him and injects himself back into the game, seemingly killing himself in the real world. THE END.

If the movie hadn’t been cavalier with the subject of rape, I’d like it a lot more. Granted, it feels a bit like Westworld meets The Prisoner, but it’s interesting for that very mash-up. The characters are dropped in a surreal space that doesn’t make sense to them as their memories of their past lives try to intrude. Palance tells Lewis, “I never killed anyone,” and then has a flash of himself as a minister. Lewis keeps having flashbacks to himself as a track-and-field coach. I kept expecting those parts of the story to expand, for the gaps in this fake world to be pried open as the characters realize what’s going on.

Instead Lewis just wakes up and hears it all told to him. A little less interesting and the central twist of the piece is given away by cutting back to the scientists all the time. Cabin In the Woods did this, and I think to good effect, but was more up front about both aspects. The kids in the cabin are both experiencing the genre story while also starting to question the set-up, and that’s a big part of why that movie works.

One thing holding the piece back is the quality of the print. A lot of these movies are the VHS edits (tracking errors and all) so there’s plenty of pan-and-scan. This movie feels cropped beyond that, though. Like they zoomed in on the widescreen print and then zoomed in one step further. Not only do you get the normal pan-and-scan artifacts of people clearly being cut out of the shot, it’s exacerbated with the tops of people’s heads being sliced off by the framing.

I’m going to be honest, I’m a little bummed to not be able to recommend this movie. The premise is interesting if not executed as well as it could be. The acting is pretty solid—Jack Palance is clearly enjoying himself and there’s a lot of talent on-screen. When you open with an act of violence like sexual assault, though, and the extent of your reaction is a shrugging, “sucks to be you,” you’ve lost me.

Yes, these are exploitation films and I’m not going to bag on them for having extreme content. When you have it, though, you have to acknowledge that it’s there, not just sprinkle it across your movie for a bit of spice. Once you add a pinch of rape, nothing else is going to come through.

254. Life Returns

254. Life Returns (1935)
Directors: Eugene Frenke and James P. Hogan
Writers: L. Wolfe Gilbert, John F. Goodrich, Arthur T. Horman, and Mary McCarthy, from a story by Eugene Frenke and James P. Hogan
From: Sci-Fi Invasion
Watch: archive.org

A scientist intent on developing a formula to bring the dead back to life gradually loses sight of the important things in his own life.

Opening title cards inform us that this movie is based on True Events! The feature you’re about to see includes the Real Dr. Cornish who may have Conquered Death Itself! Of course it has Dr. Cornish present in the first few moments of the movie and then detours into its inane melodrama.

To be fair, the movie’s not blowing smoke when it says it’s based on the work of the real-life Robert Cornish. Wikipedia has more, but the basics are that Cornish was working on a way to resuscitate the recently dead and managed it successfully with two dogs. His process was using a “teeter board” to keep blood moving through the body and injecting it with a mixture of adrenaline and anti-coagulants. If that sounds familiar, it’s pretty similar to what John Travolta does to Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction after she OD’s.

Anyway, the point is Cornish wasn’t an obsessive nut pursuing some mad whim. He was a respected scientist who’d managed to demonstrate some of his theories. Narratively, this presents a problem. While Cornish’s story, 80-some years later, is interesting on its own, “scientist works hard, makes marginal progress on project” isn’t a compelling story for 1935. What audiences wanted, or what producers assumed audiences wanted, was a story of an obsessive nut pursuing some mad whim and the terrible consequences thereof.

Enter Dr. Kendrick in Life Returns.

We open with a trio of med students: Kendrick, Stone, and the actual Dr. Cornish. They’re pursuing their goal of bringing back the dead and working through all the social events of college. This is communicated through a montage of college sports and dances intercut with the trio in the lab. I won’t mention it beyond this point, but this movie loves its montages. Everything in the first half is communicated through montage and it’s exhausting.

They graduate and Kendrick tells them they have an offer from Arnold Research. It’s a non-profit that develops goods for sale (so not a non-profit). Stone and Cornish don’t want to go because Arnold will want to monetize their work and take all the credit. Kendrick doesn’t care about the money or credit, he just wants to get the research done and Arnold’s equipment will make it easier. The trio split up and Kendrick goes to Arnold.

Time passes, Kendrick gets married, has a son, and has his project canceled by Arnold because it’s not producing any marketable results. He presents his findings to the scientific community and is laughed out of the room. Then he’s working on his experiments on his own in a barn while his precocious son Insufferable Child is there. Insufferable Child, of course, now becomes the focus of the film.

Kendrick’s wife dies, off-screen, of something, and that’s the final blow to Kendrick’s sanity. He becomes a shell of a man and the court rules, since he doesn’t have a job, that Insufferable Child will have to be sent to juvie. IC runs away with his dog and is taken in by a group of kids with their own clubhouse. IC’s dog gets taken by the pound, gets gassed, and IC confronts Kendrick about being a bad dad. Kendrick swallows his pride, gets the dog’s corpse, calls Cornish, and Cornish brings the dog back to life. IC’s happy, Kendrick is validated, and he gives all credit to Cornish. THE END

It’s pretty stupid. I mean, it’s a movie about a guy trying to develop a resurrection serum that gives very little time to developing a resurrection serum. Once IC is introduced it’s his movie and, golly, isn’t is sad that a boy like that don’t got no mom? Gee mister, how could you say anything negative about a movie like that?

Easily.

The movie’s hilariously bad in terms of its own self-importance and in its constant digressions. We spend a good minute on several screens of text telling us about the amazing work of Dr. Cornish and then the movie runs as quickly as it can away from Cornish and anything to do with his work. Imagine watching the opening crawl to Star Wars and then cutting to a high school in suburban Newark. That’s what’s going on here. On top of that, the movie loses its nerve halfway through following Kendrick and telling the tale of a genius driven to destitution and turns instead into a low-rent version of Our Gang.

One great moment is the conclusion where the dog’s being brought back to life. IC runs into operating room and is held back by his dad so as not to interfere in the experiment. The looks on IC's face in both the wide and close-up shots are hilarious for how wrong they are. He looks like the guy from Un Chien Andalou rooting for the androgyne to get hit by a car. His face isn’t communicating hope that his dog will come back to life, it’s hope that he’s going to see some real blood. His demonic countenance is glorious.

One interesting note is that Insufferable Child is played by George P. Breakston who went on to become a director. One of the films he did was The Manster, a movie I featured here almost exactly a year ago. That movie isn’t great either, but I’d watch it a dozen times over rather than return to this.

Life Returns is in the public domain and I’ve added an MPEG-2 version to archive.org here. While I don’t think there’s a lot of fun to be had editing the film, except for the final sequence with the dog, it is highly riffable. Melodrama lends itself to easy mockery and this film is at once so self-serious and so saccharine that you can’t help but laugh. On that level, check it out. For watching on its own, stay away.

253. Escape From Galaxy 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can I not recommend a trainwreck like this?

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

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

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

What even is this?

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

252. Assassin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

251. The Brother From Another Planet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

247. Hundra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

243. Robo Vampire

243. Robo Vampire (1988)
Director: Godfrey Ho
Writer: William Palmer
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

An anti-drug team turns one of its fallen members into a cyborg to combat drug dealers smuggling drugs in vampires. Meanwhile, one of the agents is kidnapped by the cartel and a team of mercenaries is dispatched to save her.

I know that capsule synopsis makes no sense and I’ll be straight with you: the movie doesn’t clarify it. I have a job to do, though, and that’s to describe this movie!

Sooooooooo… yeah.

Cold open on a man being led somewhere at gun point by two white men in US Army uniforms. They disturb a coffin and a Chinese hopping vampire jumps out. The unarmed man runs away as the two uniform-wearing men shoot at the vampire and eventually get killed by it. Title card!

Cut to Ko, the drug lord who looks like Matthew McConaughey’s greasy cousin (no images provided, you have to find and confirm for yourself), who tells his underlings that he’s ordered the Daoist to train vampires to fight the drug agents.

I rewound that part several times to see if I was hearing right.

Cut to the cellar of the vampires where a couple of lackeys are placing drugs in the coffins. Vampires awaken, Daoist monk comes in and puts them back in their place. Later, when he’s going to demonstrate the vampires’ powers, the ghost of a woman attacks him because she was betrothed to one of the vampires before he died and, since the monk has brought him back as a vampire, they’ve been denied the opportunity to spend eternity together. She fights the monk, the monk raises her vampire ex who refuses to attack her, and the monk agrees to marry the two to each other.

Between those two vampire scenes with the monk, the monk is transporting some drugs and gets caught in an ambush by the drug agents. He summons some vampires who kill the agents and one of the bodies is used in an experiment to create a mechanized human.

I was watching this alone and still shouted, “What the fuck?” as though someone would answer my question.

The scientist glues together discarded mannequin parts and the cut-rate RoboCop rises looking like samurai cosplay made from disposable baking tins and duct tape.

Meanwhile, or later, or elsewhere, I don’t even know at this point, the drug dealers break into a church and demand the priest tell them where he’s hiding the drugs. He says there aren’t any and, in the process of wrecking the place, they find the drugs stashed in the cross hanging over the altar. They kill him, but a woman jumps out from the back and shoots nearly all the thugs. She’s captured though and it turns out she’s a drug agent (but then why was she in the church that was hiding drugs?). The cartel subjects her to water torture to make her reveal the names of the other agents.

How am I still describing this movie? I’m not even at the halfway point!

All right. A mercenary is hired to bring the agent back. He meets up with people he knows who have their own grudges against the drug dealers and, through the standard action movie events, ends up saving the agents and killing all the gang members at the hideout. THE END for that part and, no, vampires and robots never play a part in it.

The vampires and the robot face off several times to no great effect. Bullets don’t hurt the vampires and the robot can’t get killed so those sequences just happen then peter out. Ultimately the monk is betrayed by the woman’s ghost and the robot sets the monk's body on fire. No real resolution for the robot, ghost, or vampires, but the movie’s hit the ninety-minute mark, so THE END.

Ah, Godfrey Ho, where even the English-language footage is dubbed by voices that don’t match. I’d always heard Ho constructed his movies from bits and pieces of other films, but the other movies I’d watched of his were at once more subtle and more overt than this. Ninja Champion and Ninja Empire were largely their own movies with an extraneous ninja plot filmed and spliced in. You could take those moments out and have essentially the same film.

This movie, though, is almost a masterpiece of editing. You don’t just have the separate RoboCop vs. vampires and rescue mission action movies, you have scenes that are clearly composed of shots from at least two different movies. Intellectually, it was compelling because I kept looking for the seams and trying to figure out what shot was from which movie. Narratively, it’s incomprehensible.

With all the cutting, a lot of content gets lost. I don’t know if my attention wandered (I was getting into some knitting while watching this flick, yo), but at some point in the rescue plot the drug dealer’s thug that kidnapped the agent went rogue and started helping the drug agents. Also, characters got separated from the group, they arrived in inexplicable locations, and I never knew what was going on. Then we’d cut back to hopping vampires and JiffyPop RoboCop. What was any of this?

The movie is absurd and I found it laugh-out-loud funny so it’s a recommend on that level. The movie is not, in any way, good, but it’s serviceable for a bad movie fix or as something to make fun of. Apart from that it’s a little too disjointed for watching on its own.

237. It's Alive

237. It’s Alive (1969)
Director: Larry Buchanan
From: Sci-Fi Invasion
Watch: archive.org

Three people are captured by a backwoods trapper who plans to feed them to the prehistoric creature he discovered.

Another movie where the blurb really sums it all up. A couple is driving across the country on a road trip because the wife hasn’t been outside of New York City. Her husband, Norman, is a prick. Not just to her, to everyone, so at least he’s consistent. He dies, which is not unexpected or unenjoyable. Before we get there, though, they take a wrong turn while heading for a national park. As they’re running low on gas, they get directions to a farm down the way. When they arrive, the owner says his drum is dry, but the truck will be by any time and invites them in.

And I’m not going to detail this because you know how it goes. The owner is a master trapper and has caught a prehistoric creature. He imprisons the couple and the man who gave them directions, in the cave that leads to the creature’s lair. Norman gets et which, as I noted above, is pleasant so I decided to mention it again, and the other two try to figure out how to escape.

Part of their plan involves Stella, a woman the owner has kept in a state of servile terror for the past two years. She overhears the owner tell the new woman that he might let her take Stella’s place, which is the proverbial straw. Stella tells her story in an extended flashback that only has narration and bed music, no dialogue, not even when Stella and the owner are talking. She agrees to smuggle in dynamite to help them escape, the owner realizes something’s up and doses their coffee, but Stella manage to stand up to the owner as the creature approaches, lights the dynamite, and the couple escapes as the cave collapses. Stella and the owner are dead and the fate of the creature is unknown as the words “THE END?” appear on screen.

So it’s a bad movie. That’s not impressive. What is impressive is just how bad it is. The pleasure of this movie is its incompetence. There’s the long opening sequence of people driving with narration over it. There’s the long middle section that’s a flashback with only narration and bed music. And there’s the monster. Oh my, the monster. It’s the Creature’s nerdy little brother. This monster isn’t threatening the characters, it’s looking for its inhaler.

The movie is a made-for-TV piece by Larry Buchanan who made several low-budget goofball TV horror films, among them Attack of the Eye Creatures, Zontar: The Thing From Venus, and Curse of the Swamp Creature. He’s a seminal figure in the so-bad-it’s-good canon and it feels like he’s a poor man’s Roger Corman.

And if you’re thinking, Roger Corman ain’t pricey, you’re right. Still, generally speaking, Buchanan’s pictures are small, simple affairs that are competent enough to entertain for 80 minutes. It’s Alive is really low-budget, really stripped back, and is a hairsbreadth away from being Manos: The Hands of Fate. In fact, it’s probably films like Buchanan’s that made Harold P. Warren think he could pull off Manos. However, that hairsbreadth matters and it’s the difference of being watchable or unwatchable. This movie gets pretty close to the latter, especially during that extended flashback, but remains on the side of the angels. As a bonus, it’s in the public domain. Unfortunately, my copy has a BS copyright claim stamped on it by Mill Creek claiming it as the “Retromedia Special Edition.” There’s nothing special about this edition. However, someone else found a copy without that vandalism on it and uploaded it to archive.org here. I wouldn’t recommend this for casual viewing because it does get so dull, but it’d be a hoot to riff and maybe even do some interesting editing projects with.

209. Silver Needle in the Sky

209. Silver Needle in the Sky (1954)
Director: Hollingsworth Morse
Writer: Fritz Blocki
From: Sci-Fi Invasion

Rocky Jones, Space Ranger blah blah blah blah. His crew yadda yadda yadda until phhhbt phhhbt, phhhbt-phhhbt-phhhbt. Cleolanta dispatches argle bargle poot poot poot, but they don’t realize Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Zzzzzzzzzzzzz ZZZZZZZzzzzzzz and thus the day is saved.

I can’t pretend to care about Rocky Jones movies anymore, and I was barely pretending to care the last time I wrote about them. This is the sixth Rocky Jones movie I’ve watched, and the fifth in the series, not that watching them out of order makes any difference. The production order, by the way, is Beyond the Moon, Gypsy Moon, Menace From Outer Space, Manhunt in Space, Silver Needle in the Sky, and Crash of the Moons. I hope there aren’t any more in these sets because I honestly don’t know if I can take another one.

The plot is pretty meaningless: the United Worlds sets up a conference of scientists, Cleolanta’s planet isn’t invited and she takes it as an insult so she sends her loyal servant to kidnap the head scientist. He does and manages to capture Rocky Jones as well, but one of Cleolanta’s other flunkies screws things up by trying to double-cross Cleolanta’s second and make him look bad.

Rocky and the scientists are trapped in a conference room with a timed lock so they’ll escape in three hours. The flunky, though, turns off the air supply so they’ll all suffocate. “Fortunately,” Bobby, the junior adventurekateer who’s always traveling with Rocky, is able to fit through the air vent, knock the grate in the control room free with his head (yeah, a major plot point involves a child banging his own head against a wall), and save the day. Cleolanta locks both her servant and the flunky up together for a few months so they can fight it out. THE END.

The more I watch these movies, the less there is to see. This one dragged even though I was literally watching it on fast-forward. I set VLC to play it back at the fastest speed where I could still understand the dialogue, and, even then, scenes dragged with nothing going on. My criticisms, by the way, aren’t an issue of elements not aging well or the movie being made in a different culture, the producers themselves didn’t try.

The movie opens, not with the movie’s title card, but the serial’s title card including the “Chapter 1” subtitle. At the end, the announcer, who was presumably present in every TV broadcast but hasn’t been present in any of these movie edits, pops in to encourage kids to tune in again next week. They didn’t even bother to sort that out.

Obviously, this isn’t a recommend. I’m trying to figure out if it’s the worst Rocky Jones movie I’ve seen so far. It has its fair share of “the goddamn kid,” but I’m not sure it’s as annoying as The Gypsy Moon which is framed around Bobby not wanting to read and then seeing parallels to The Odyssey in everything. As slow as this movie is, that one grinds to a halt over and over again to let Bobby monologue about The Odyssey and how it compares to their own adventure. As with all the others, this is under copyright protecting us all from accidentally coming across it.