285. My Chauffeur

285. My Chauffeur (1986)
Director: David Beaird
Writer: David Beaird
From: Cult Cinema

A woman is hired to be a chauffeur despite the other drivers’ objections. While her freewheeling attitude irks her employer, it wins her the admiration, and maybe even love, of her customers.

A Marimark Production so I was coming into this one angry. And it’s all right. It’s all right for an 80’s film. The jokes that don’t age badly—like the homophobia of her first client—land well and the pacing is pretty good throughout.

So the rich and elderly Mr. Witherspoon has a message delivered to Casey Meadows, our heroine, telling her to report to Witherspoon’s limo service the next morning for work. She arrives, looking very Cyndi Lauper, while the boss is giving a speech to the aging male drivers about how it’s their job to keep the forces of modernism and hedonism at bay. Timing *whomp whomp*

The slobs vs. snobs set-up is already laid out and really when the movie’s at its best. Boss gives her unpleasant assignments, she handles them in unexpected ways, and if the movie had just followed that path of her as a driver with various comic set pieces and her co-workers coming around to respect her, I’d have liked it more. In fact, my favorite scene is pretty much a throwaway sequence in that context that doesn’t impact the plot at all.

Casey is at a hot dog stand at the end of her shift and overhears a couple arguing. The girl is chewing the guy out for not having a car. We learn, through the dressing down, that they're supposed to be going to a classy party, he works as a janitor at a school, and he’s taking night classes on his way to being a lawyer. Casey comes up with the Rolls Royce and says she’s his driver, apologizing for being late. The scene never comes up again and it’s an obvious one for this kind of plot, but it has heart and, more than any other scene, reveals the core of Casey’s character. Otherwise she’s generally a bit manic and mugging for comedy.

However, that’s not the plot of the movie. Casey is hired to drive the boss’ business-obsessed asshole banker son to wine country. The car breaks down, they have to walk a long way while bickering, and end up hooking up that night. That transition to them making out doesn’t work because there’s been no chemistry between them, but whatever. The movie wants to be this movie.

The next morning, he asks her to marry him and she says “no” because she doesn’t know his name. They go back and forth over this for the rest of the movie with him not revealing his identity till the end. When dad finds out, he gets very nervous as did I because now the specter of incest is hanging over this picture.

Then Penn & Teller show up. Yes. That Penn & Teller. Teller is playing a Saudi ambassador (*sigh* why?) and Penn is a grifter who sneaks into the limo and takes Teller out for a night on the town. He gets all of Teller’s money, takes both him and Casey clubbing, and pays a few women to fool around with Teller in the limo. Teller gets dropped off back at his hotel and Penn sneaks away.

The scene doesn’t work because we’re not seeing Penn doing the interesting sleight-of-hand that the duo is known for and the whole sequence just runs kind of long. It couldn’t be cut, though, because Casey gets fired the next morning for “kidnapping the ambassador.” Asshole banker, who has become a much kinder boss to his employees in the interim, finds her and takes her to meet dad.

Dad reveals that she grew up in the house because she’s the daughter of his former housemaid. And that he’s her father.

There it is, there’s that incest.

The couple gets giddy over this with a, “we did something naughty” reaction, which is not the right reaction. However, the boss’ driver comes in with another driver that’s been particularly salty to Casey, and reveals that this driver is actually Casey’s father, not the boss. So it’s not incest and they can get married.

These revelations, by the way, come within a minute of each other in the last five minutes of the film.

Anyway, they get married, get in the limo, and Casey tells the driver to take them home. It’s her former boss from the limo company who says “Yes ma’am.” THE END

I could do without the incest and the love story in general. My big complaint with the love story is that the two don’t have any chemistry and there’s no transition from them bickering and blaming each other for being stranded to hooking up. I would have liked more comedic set pieces maybe culminating in some chauffeur’s challenge between her and one of the other drivers. I don’t know what that would look like, but it would have been more fun.

The movie is passably fun as it is, though, and I have to give it credit for that. The music is a little weak, which seems like an odd thing to note, but it reminded me how I would honestly buy a compilation of the soundtracks from these Marimark films. As much as I hate the movies, the songs are uniformly solid and catchy. The songs, frankly, even the title songs, sound like they have more effort and craft put into them than the movies they’re in. This flick, though, was the outlier. I found myself forgetting the songs as they were playing. Maybe it’s the fact that this movie legitimately felt like a movie and is a good time so the songs had a higher bar to warrant my attention. I’d say it’s a recommend.

284. Pick-Up

284. Pick-Up (1975)
Director: Bernard Hirschenson
Writer: John R. Winter
From: Cult Cinema

Carol and Maureen climb onto Chuck’s RV only to get stranded in a swamp and have, respectively, a romantic and spiritual experience.

We open with an extreme close up of a thumb on a belt buckle that pulls back to reveal a fly being unbuttoned. Chuck starts pissing against the RV that he's supposed to be delivering for a company. Lovely start. The initial shot is aesthetically interesting: blurry close-up on the belt buckle and the slow focus-pull makes for an interesting and unique image. The cinematography in the film is pretty solid and inventive. That the film imagines that its cinematography communicates something deep and meaningful instead of an overly-long stream of piss is also a wholly appropriate reading.

Carol and Maureen are sitting in a field watching. Carol gets his attention and asks for a ride while Maureen keeps meditating. Maureen says they shouldn’t get on the RV because Chuck is an Aries and it’ll be a “bad trip.” I immediately started repeating, “Please, please, please be a comedy.”

Then nothing happens until the last minute of the film.

I’m being both inaccurate and unfair. Nothing interesting or worth watching happens, but everything that does happen returns at the end in a way that’s both pointless and galling.

They drive, Carol gets the attention of some guys riding in the back of a pick-up truck and dances for them in the front window of the RV. Bad weather comes, the RV is sent down several detours, and gets stuck in the swamp. Chuck doesn’t call his boss to relate the problem or try to find someone nearby for help. Instead, he and Carol go traipsing through the swamp and hook up. Maureen stays with the RV reading the Tarot.

Several scenes focus on Maureen and visions she may be having. They may also be actual incidents. The confusion is because it's that kind of movie--you know, inept.

First, she’s told she’s the servant of Apollo. She finds an altar in the swamp, lies on it naked, and comes. Later there’s a flashback to her as a child playing the organ in a church (played by the adult Maureen except with pigtails). The priest comes in and molests her. (As the scene went on, I was less and less bothered that they put this adult woman in pigtails and had her play a child instead of casting a child). Then a senator seeking reelection finds the RV and tries to convince Maureen to vote for him. He has small placards in front of him that say he’s both 1000% for and against each issue. I’m not sure if the scene’s trying to make some political statement or be a moment of broad comedy, but it fails at both. To be fair, the scene did make me devolve into giggles repeating, “What the fuck is this movie?” Finally, Maureen sees a clown in the swamp with a bunch of balloons. She laughs at it, receives a balloon, and then is horrified and runs away when it takes off its mask.

Between all these strange sequences are a variety of sex scenes between Carol and Chuck. We do get one flashback of Carol as a 16-year-old (again played by the adult in pigtails). It’s another hook-up scene. While this one’s consensual, it’s still creepy. You have an adult woman pretending to be a child hooking up with someone who looks like he may actually be 16. Pick the part you find most unnerving.

Approaching the end, Maureen finally hooks up with Chuck. She imagines it happening at the altar she came on before. The three figures—the priest, the clown, and the politician—all menace her but are driven away by Chuck’s fuck eyes. Meanwhile, Carol wakes up, starts dancing around the fire, and the guys from the pick-up truck at the start find her. It goes how you’d expect since, don’t you know, sexual assault means it’s a serious movie with themes.

Chuck and Maureen spot a plane flying overhead the next morning and, when trying to wave it down, find Carol’s body. Suddenly we cut back to the beginning of the movie. Maureen opens her eyes as though the entire film was a vision she had when meditating. This time, though, Maureen is happy that Chuck is an Aries and eagerly gets in the RV. The RV drives off as the clown’s balloons fly up from behind it. THE END.

“Interminable” would be one of the words I’d use to describe this movie. Also “ill-conceived.” The people involved clearly watched too much of the new American underground and misunderstood what made those movies good. This tries to have the same subversion of form and narrative that films like Easy Rider have, but not the sense of what is communicated by subverting those forms. So the movie imagines itself as an imagistic spiritual meditation on America while throwing the culture’s hang-ups with religion, property, and sex back in its face. Only it doesn’t. This is a film by the edgelords of hippiedom who imagined that free love and free drugs would destroy the system. Coincidentally, I’m about to reread Brave New World, you know, the dystopian novel about a population kept under the thumb of the ruling class through hedonistic indulgence of sex and drugs? The novel written in 1932?

The movie’s neither clever, nor interesting and the cinematography, while nice, isn’t nice enough to entertain for the seventy-seven minute runtime. Skip it.

283. Nabonga

283. Nabonga (1944)
Director: Sam Newfield
Writer: Fred Myton
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org here

A man searches the jungles of Africa for a crashed plane containing money stolen from a bank.

A man and his daughter crash in Africa. The man kills the pilot when the pilot sees all the jewels and money the man’s carrying. Meanwhile, the daughter has found an injured gorilla.

Cut to many years later (without any indication of it being later) to a small village where several white people are gathering. A stranger has arrived and the other visitors are trying to figure out why he’s there. After he saves local man Tobo, Tobo draws him a map to the “house with wings” and the “white witch.” One of the other visitors finds out the stranger is looking for a crooked banker who went missing in the jungle with stolen goods. The visitor and his partner decide to follow the stranger and Tobo.

The connection between the stranger and the man from the beginning, as he tells Tobo, is that the man had been the stranger’s father’s banking partner. When the man ran off with the bank’s money, the stranger’s dad was blamed for it. The suspicion, guilt, and shame eventually led to the father committing suicide. The stranger wants to get the money back to the people it was stolen from to clear his dad’s name and set things right. Even though it’s gotta be at least a decade later. Plus getting to Africa and embarking on this search can’t have been cheap. I mean, sometimes you gotta take the L.

Anyway, nothing much happens. For a film that’s only a hair over 71 minutes, there’s a lot of padding. Tobo and the stranger go through the jungle, don’t face much peril, and Tobo gets killed by the gorilla the girl befriended years before.

The “white witch,” no surprise, is the girl all grown up. She’s called a “witch” because she can command the jungle creatures. The stranger tells her he wants to take her jewels, she says no, he says she doesn’t know right from wrong. The other visitor and his partner track the stranger down, trap the gorilla, and steal the money. Gorilla escapes, kills the villains, and stranger tells the girl she’ll like it in America. THE END

Quick note: the villain is going to kidnap the girl, take her back to America, and keep the money for himself. The hero, the stranger, also unilaterally decides to take her back to America and take all her money. I’ve seen a lot of movies where the good guys are the good guys because the movie says they’re the good guys, but you wouldn’t know it from their actions, but I’ve rarely seen movies where, in the final moment, the hero announces his plans to do exactly what the villain was going to do, except be handsome while doing it.

I don’t have much commentary to offer because there’s really nothing to the film. Nothing much happens, then they walk through the jungle without too much going on, and then the hero gets beat up and watches the gorilla murder the villain. I’d say it’s Walking: The Motion Picture, but that would imply more action. There’s not even anything to get mad about in this movie. It’s a null property.
However, it is at least in the public domain and you can grab a copy from archive.org here, but that print’s kind of dark (though slightly better than my copy) and it’s just not a visually interesting movie. Sure, it has a guy in a gorilla suit which always lands in the positive collumn of a film, but it’s otherwise flat and listless. There’s not much you can make fun of and I don’t think it’d be useful for editing or recontextualizing projects.

And, no, they never explain why it’s called Nabonga. I guess, from the title, it means gorilla? Maybe? But it’s never said in the movie. So, yeah. Skip it.

282. Tomboy

282. Tomboy (1985)
Director: Herb Freed
Writer: Bud Zelig
From: Cult Cinema

Tommy is a female mechanic who has to prove that her experimental stock car can beat the car of the professional team that patronizes her.

Another Marimark Production. Entitled Tomboy. Boy, do I have high hopes for this one.

I’m less than 10 minutes in and there’s a hint of Poochie here: she’s awesome at everything she does, including pick-up games of basketball and car repair. Also, everyone seems to like her and she seems happy with her life. None of this is a problem on its own, but it suggests the plot is going to revolve around her not properly conforming to expected gender norms and the happy ending will come when she gets all femmed up making her a fitting reward for whatever guy comes along liking her for who she is as the titular Tomboy.

I mean, I’m guessing.

The more interesting move, and the one I’d prefer, would be the outside forces insisting upon gender norms interfering with her life and the community ultimately rallying around her. Sort of like what happens in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (which I’ve been wanting to rewatch. There’s a nice kindness at the core of that movie despite its moments of 80’s “boys will be boys” hand-waving). In essence, I want the kind of plot we always get in nerd-focused movies: characters are happy with themselves, get bullied over what makes them unique, and then get validated for not changing while the bullies get rejected. Simple plot, but fun. Only when the protagonist is a woman, she’s not allowed to be fully vindicated. She has to change to become appropriately feminine.

Think of all those “ugly duckling” type movies. Guy asks the Plain Jane to the prom as a dare or a prank, but when she puts effort into her appearance, *gasp,* why this woman who’s been conventionally attractive but with glasses and slightly disheveled clothes has in fact been conventionally attractive all the time! How wrong we were to ever doubt that she was different from us and thus less deserving of dignity.

An implicit argument of those movies, and one of the reasons they’re not very satisfying, is that the conclusion, the revelation of the woman as beautiful by everyone’s standards, validates the villains’ position. Were the woman still ugly by their standards after the make-over, would the villains still be denounced for having treated the woman poorly? The villains’ mistake isn’t treating this person poorly because they’re different, it’s mistakenly seeing the person as being different and thus treating one of their own poorly.

Another reason the trope is boring and not what I want to see is that it’s an easily recognizable trope. I’ve seen this movie, even when I haven’t, and I want to see the other movie. Where’s the flick where the jock asks the nerd to prom and then skips prom to instead hang out with the nerd and their friends doing what they want to do? In other words, a flick that argues that their differences, their particularities, are precisely what makes them interesting and someone the jock (and jock as audience surrogate) would want to be partners with.

All of this before I’m ten minutes in, so I’ll watch and tell you how right/wrong I was.

ONE MOVIE LATER:

So, that’s a thing.

Like a lot of these Marimark productions, the movie approaches having a plot and then just doesn’t. Tommy is the titular tomboy. Her father was a decorated astronaut although that doesn’t come up at all. In fact, just about everything in the movie doesn’t really come to anything. She’s a mechanic. One of her customers is an asshole rich playboy who owns a race car company. She has a crush on his driver who has a name but who I’ll just refer to as “racecar.” Cause he sucks.

So after a lot of racecar being charmless and unlikable, they start dating and we arrive at the real plot of the movie… with thirty minutes left. Rich asshole is trying to get someone to invest in his company. Shows off his latest car, except Tommy’s driving. Investor is impressed by Tommy and learns that she’s not a professional driver but, in fact, is building her own experimental racer. Racecar patronizes her in front of the investor and she says her car could beat his. Investor wants to see the race so it happens.

One car-building montage later, it’s race day. Racecar is worried about the condition of the track and that Tommy might get hurt. The movie, even this late in the game, can’t decide if he’s the lover or the louse. They race, she wins, investor convinces asshole rich to buy her car. They’ll race it in Daytona with racecar driving (even though he just got beaten in a one-on-one by a completely untrained amateur). Will she go to Daytona with racecar? “Maybe” THE END

I mentioned a certain giddiness when watching Weekend Pass, and it was sort of the sense of preparing to flinch in anticipation of something that hasn’t arrived but you know is coming. The movie is predictable and you’re just waiting for the inevitable moment to arrive. That’s true of most these Marimark films. That’s what I mean when I call them “perfunctory.” They’re relentlessly predictable.

This was not predictable.

I mean, a lot of the beats are there: she’s dismissed because she’s a woman and then proves herself, catches the love interest’s attention through her competence then wins him over by femming up, beats the bullies by joining forces with her old friends and family. However, none of that gets into the weird gender stuff in the movie.

No, I mean weird. If you’re rolling your eyes and thinking “SJW,” fuck you. Also, even you would find it weird.

For instance, when she goes to the party, rich asshole is acting like a procurer and passing women off to the various men there. The scene honestly feels like he’s hired a bunch of sex workers to staff an orgy. Asshole takes Tommy to meet racecar while Tommy’s friend hangs out in the front room to “entertain” the guests. Tommy navigating the house is intercut with the friend stripping for everyone as well as a sequence of a woman alone in a hallway with a man taking off all his clothes. She keeps telling him if he doesn’t stop, she’s going to leave. When he’s finally naked, she laughs and hugs him.

These three scenes are happening at the same time, do not make sense, and are not referenced again.

When Tommy finds racecar, he’s in a room with a bunch of people watching a porno. When she leaves because she’s disgusted by it, he chases her down and chastises her. He’s caught in the embarrassing situation, but talks down to her because of her reaction. Then he says, “Tommy, I like you,” as if that’s an argument for anything. He likes her so she should… what? Date him despite who he is and how he treats her? They start boxing, she lands some good hits on him, and then he punches her in the face knocking her to the ground. Then they start hooking up and they’re dating.

All this is one sequence. Everything I’ve described happens in the party scene. At this point, I was just going “what?” I had the sense that I knew where the plot was going, but it made every wrong move to get there.

I mentioned before that these movies usually introduce the character who’s interested in the hero at the start and wins them over at the end. Tomboy halfway has that in the form of Harold. He shows up at the beginning as a customer of Tommy’s. He asks Tommy’s friend out, gets turned down. Then he immediately turns to Tommy and asks her out only to be turned down. He says, “But I gotta date somebody and soon!”

He disappears for the next hour of movie only to return when Tommy is in a bar feeling bad about racecar. He asks her to go home with him and she says yes. They go to her place where Tommy’s friend pops up and they send Harold home. “But I just got here.” He starts hitchhiking and immediately gets picked up by a woman who flashes her breasts at him. Lightning flashes behind him as he gets in the car and it speeds away.

Look, I watched the thing and I don’t understand what happened. All I can say is the Nice Guy™ is strong with this one.

The movie sucks. It’s confoundingly bad and the only reason I’m not lumping it in with the truly terrible ones I’ve watched like Cavegirl or Going Steady is that it’s not constantly invoking and championing sexual assault. It is a goddamn weird flick, though, and I do not recommend watching it.

281. Weekend Pass

281. Weekend Pass (1984)
Director: Lawrence Bassoff
Writer: Lawrence Bassoff
From: Cult Cinema

Four sailors go to LA for a weekend after completing basic training.

It’s Marimark so everything is as expected and perfunctory.

Four sailors—a womanizer, a comic, a black guy, and a nerd (yes, they have names, but that’s as much as they’re defined in the movie and, yes, the black guy’s blackness is the entirety of his character)—leave on the titular weekend pass to go to LA before being deployed. Each has their own goals in the city—the womanizer is meeting his girlfriend, the nerd has a blind date, the comic is going to premiere at a comedy club, and the black guy is… also there. He has less of an itinerary than the other three, but is from LA and runs into his old gang while taking the other three out for soul food and… Yeah. Do you see where I’m going?

The movie is a Marimark comedy so that means it’s not funny and nothing happens for ninety minutes. Rather than try to describe a plot, here are what goes down with each character.

Let’s start with the comedian because he sucks. He’s not funny, and not just because men aren’t funny. This is confusing because we’re talking about a Marimark comedy, which itself isn’t funny. So is he not funny because that’s the joke, or is he not funny because the whole movie’s not funny?

He does his set at the club. The late Phil Hartman makes a cameo as the MC, which gave me a mournful shock. I thought, You’re so much better than this, Mr. Hartman. Then he does an anti-Arab joke and, well, some material you elevate with your presence and some you let drag you down. Anyway, the comedian meets a female comedian, and they hit it off. She bombs, then he bombs, but they’re a couple now so whatever.

The womanizer meets up with his girlfriend who’s become very “LA” and “industry.” They go to a chichi restaurant where she ignores him. Then they go back to her place where she pulls out a vibrator that intimidates him and her general sexual aggressiveness makes him run away. In the end, he meets up with the cousin of the nerd’s blind date and they hit it off.

The nerd’s blind date is also a nerd so I guess that’s his whole arc.

Meanwhile the black guy is the closest this film gets to a character. He’s pursuing a fitness instructor throughout the movie. When the group arrives in LA, he sees her giving a demonstration on the beach. He participates, then goes to her class, then calls her for a date, and she rebuffs him each time until the phone call. She invites him and the other three to a party her gym is throwing and that’s where everyone ultimately hooks up with their partners.

The weekend ends, the sailors say goodbye to their lady friends and then goodbye to each other since they’re all shipping off in different directions. THE END

I laughed at this more than I do at most good comedies because it’s just so bad. I was filled with a strange giddiness while watching the movie because I was just cringing the whole time. This is ninety minutes of being embarrassed for someone else.

And that’s a quality unique to Marimark films, that constant question, “How are you screwing this up so badly?” The movie’s competently shot, no technical flubs, and the actors are fine. They aren’t being asked to do anything major, but they rise to the material given to them. It’s just that there’s nothing here.

Which is a shame because it felt like there could have been something a little sharper. The characters face challenges, have moments of self-reflection, and seemingly change because of them, but nothing feels like it has weight and they’re not real characters so I can’t care. I mean, the nerd and his date look at themselves in a mirror and she asks, “Why do they call us ‘nerds’?” like they’ve been enduring this oppression, this bullying, this pain of being nerds throughout the movie. Only it’s the first and only time it comes up.

The end of the movie is as inevitable as the end of the weekend, but that should operate as a ticking clock, as something adding pressure to this final weekend they all have. Instead, sure as Monday follows Sunday, the movie just ticks along to the end of its ninety minutes.

So it’s not a recommend. I mean, I haven’t even gotten into the casual racism that pops up throughout, and, yeah, I know I’m saying that despite referring to the black character in the movie as “the black guy.” The writer/director of this also did Hunk, a Marimark film I liked, but was just a bit quicker and more willfully silly. Ultimately, Weekend Pass needed to be more camp. Instead it feels like it’s trying to be something sincere, but cannot possibly achieve that goal. Skip it.

280. The Four Shaolin Challengers

280. The Four Shaolin Challengers aka Huang fei hong si da di zi (1977)
Director: Hai-Feng Wei
Writer: Hai-Feng Wei
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A merchant opens a kung-fu school in his town, angering the local gangsters.

It’s been a little bit since one of the martial arts movies popped up in my queue and, I have to admit, they’re not my favorites. I think I’ve mentioned this in other reviews, but I don’t know the genre well enough to say what makes these movies good or bad. Generally the ones in these sets follow the same format: gangsters push their criminality a little too far, someone finally stands up to them, gangsters bring in outside forces as reinforcements join the hero, several fights ensue leading to a climatic final battle where the hero’s kung fu ultimately defeats the villain’s.

Same thing happens here.

The mob is collecting their protection money from stalls in the market, try to attack a merchant, and another merchant then fights off all the goons. The locals ask the merchant to open a gym and teach them all kung fu. The crime boss finds out, hires some famous hitmen, and the plot goes as you’d expect.

Except things seem a bit out of order. The crime boss says they can pressure the hero because they’ve kidnapped a woman who doesn’t seem connected to him. Only they haven’t kidnapped her yet. That happens in the next scene. Then she’s forced to work in a brothel, escapes, is sexually assaulted, and then rescued by the hero’s brothers who’ve just arrived in town.

The sense of, “Wait, did I miss something?,” pervades the entire movie right up till the very end. One of the big battles ends with one character asking the hero to kill him. The hero tells the man that he’s been working for a notorious criminal. Hearing this, the loser of the fight says he’s not going to fight for that man anymore and leaves. The battle ends with, “Oh, well I’ll be going then.”

I don’t know why the movie feels that way, but it’s what makes the movie so entertaining. The translation, the dubbing, and the odd plot choices make this a lot of fun. If you can get past the sexual assault, and that’s a big ask, this movie offers a lot of entertainment potential just on the level of confused laughter.

So it’s a recommend. I don’t think it’s great, but I did laugh at it enough to wish I was sharing the experience with others. Like many of the martial arts films in these sets, I think this is in the public domain. I’m not 100% sure. However, I’m guessing yes and have uploaded a copy to archive.org here. Watch it with friends and enjoy the shared confusion.

279. Voodoo Black Exorcist

279. Voodoo Black Exorcist aka Vudú sangriento (1974)
Director: Manuel Caño
Writer: Santiago Moncada
From: Cult Cinema, Drive-In

A voodoo priest sealed in a sarcophagus 1000 years prior awakens on a cruise ship bound for Jamaica.

I know I’m in for a hurting cause this was the third movie in a row that I kind of liked. The other shoe is going to fall and fall hard.

Open on Guedé rowing to shore to meet his lover. However, another man comes out, they fight, and the other man dies. That night, Guedé is standing in the center of a ritual. His lover is beheaded and he’s stabbed in the neck with an asp ring. His body is placed in a sarcophagus.

1000 years later, that sarcophagus is hauled onto a cruise ship that’s headed across the South Seas. What could possibly go wrong?!

Obviously Guedé wakes up. He steals some clothes, but upon seeing Sylvia, the secretary/lover of the archaeologist who brought the sarcophagus on board, he reverts to his mummy form. He sees her as the reincarnation of his lover from back then (who was, I think, played by the same woman in blackface. So, yeah).

These are the only characters you really need to know about. A few others are introduced who are either clearly deadmeats or intended to be comic relief. They, of course, aren’t funny, but the movie itself is. We’re in pure good-bad territory here with hilarious dubbing and just strange lines. When a detective comes on board to investigate a murder, he says, “When I don’t have a lead, I drink gin,” then raises his glass. When the mummy leaves a severed head in a woman’s bed, he runs from the scene with an “oh jeez, oh jeez” look on his face.

Unfortunately the energy peters out in the third act. The movie shifts from the mummy running amok on the ship to the mummy pretending to be an expert on Voodoo and then the detective leading the investigation. While the mummy does kill the expert whose identity he's stolen in a hilarious way, the story really should have stayed on the boat with a gradually increasing body count and passengers beginning to panic.

Still, the first hour is very funny and I’d give this movie a light recommend for that reason. Also, the concluding moments really lit me up and it’s worth sticking around for. The movie’s not hard to find so do yourself a favor, gather some friends and snacks and go to town.