Wopsploitation

"Project A"(1983)d/Jackie Chan

2012-01-26T08:25:00.000-08:00

The first visible signs of Hong Kong martial arts movies evolving into viable international action hits can be seen in tonight's review, the first of several movies that would feature all three Peking Opera stars, Chan, who wrote, directed, and choreographed the fights while performing all his own most treacherous stunts himself(though Mars doubles for him in spots), the rotund Sammo Hung, who also choreographed fights and stunts while directing in an uncredited capacity here, and acrobatic Yuen Biao, who also earned a choreography and stunt credit on the groundbreaking film, also known as Pirate Patrol.While the Shaw Brothers set the standard with their incredibly intricate sets and cost efficient productions in the seventies, Project A would raise the bar to a height that the former genre giants found great difficulty in matching, effectively signalling a permanent changing of the guard at the top.Though a period piece on a truly epic scale like this would certainly have broken the American market at the time for Chan(this unfounded credit I give you Americans, you must cherish and protect always), it wouldn't be re-released here until well after Jackie had finally achieved recognition over a decade later.I've heard some crazy talk from jaded action fans who've been weaned on a steady diet of the film's wirework and greenscreen-driven successors that involves words like "boring" and "overrated" when discussing tonight's entry, but to these and any detractors of the movie's effectiveness or historical importance, I say:Had you seen the film in 1983(as I did, courtesy of a rental VHS from Happy Sound in Chinatown), you'd be singing a different tune entirely.This one's packed to bursting with jaw-dropping fights, life-gamble stunts, physical comedy, and adrenaline pumping action from start to finish like no movie had ever showcased before it.Go ahead and stack it up against 48 Hours(1982), I triple dog dare you.Onwards.

You're a silly, silly man, Jackie Chan.
Somewhere between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century(In HK film, the more vague the timeline, the better), the Hong Kong Marines and Police Force find themselves at competetive odds, while the port's ships have been under siege by a particularly foul army of pirates, as led by San-po(Dick Wei), a privateer as tattooed as he is malignant.Cue: Glass-smashingly/chair-breakingly elaborate bar fight between both services to the tune of a nearby victrolla that jumps off when the cocky young son of a police captain named Hong Tin-tsu(Yuen Biao) dumps his lager on the lid of one Dragon Ma(Jackie Chan), a young Marine, resulting in the consequent arrest of all the seamen, who are released just in time for a suicide mission to topple the pirates, the titular 'Project A'.Before any of them can become martyrs, two of their ships are sunk, forcing the entire force to disband and integrate into the police, leaving them at the mercy of prickish Hong, who teaches them how to take sixty second showers and how to avoid live grenades in the field, among other things.Meanwhile, the pirates have allied with local gangsters, who, in turn, have approached Fei(Sammo Hung), a chubby hustler, about procuring a hundred rifles illegally for the scurvy sea dogs, when the gangster's club is suddenly raided by Hong, Dragon, and associates.Cue: Window-shatteringly/table-pulverizingly amazing ruckus with men swan diving off of balconies, through tables, and into walls and steps.Afterwards, when the police captain demands that the men release their collars, Dragon turns in his badge, weary of the corruption roadblocking any true justice to be had.Fei, an old friend of Dragon's, divulges the arms deal info to the ex-cop, and both men sabotage the exchange, with several double-cross attempts to follow.

K.T.F.O.ed by a bicycle tire, how humiliating for you.
The empty-handed gangsters put the squeeze on Fei, who gives up Dragon, leading the thugs to chase the former officer and the Admiral's daughter, Winnie(Isabella Wong), all over town, up steep brick walls, jousting on bicycles, and finally, handcuffed and hanging from one of the hands of the Kowloon Canton Railway Clock tower, from which Dragon plunges sixty feet through several awning canopies to the ground(you'll want to see this a few times, believe me) head first.After overhearing the Colonel negotiating guns for the hostages(the Admiral included) that were taken by the gunless pirates with Mr. Chow, Dragon(remember him?Yeah, he survived that clock tower fall earlier as evidenced by the single take of him getting up and walking away moments later.Drink that all in for a second, would you) confronts the Colonel, arguing that men who are as morally bankrupt as the pirates and gangsters will never fear the police force if they are corrupt, themselves.Good point.Dragon then accepts all responsibility for the upcoming rescue attempt/ pirate base dismantling so long as the Colonel okays the Marines return to full strength for the ressurected Project A.Dragon infiltrates the pirate base masquerading as the top hat-and-monacled Chow while Hong waits in the wings with his men at the ready.The sneaky Fei dons pirate garb and tags along, with designs on helping his old friend and blagging some pirate treasure along the way, if he can help it.When Mr. Lee(Lee Hoi-San) recognizes Dragon from the fight in the clock tower, it sets off a frantic finale of fights, dynamite-explosions, and a tremendous three-way battle between Dragon, Fei, Hong, and San-po, the pirate king, the result of which you'll have to experience when you snag a copy of this highly recommended kung fu classic for yourselves.

Clock tower fall, take three.Go ahead and let go again, Jackie, we're rolling...
Before we wrap up tonight's review, I wanted to take a moment to thank those of you who've been regularly checking in during Chan-uary, making this one of the biggest months the site has experienced, traffic-wise, in quite a while(and traffic's always choice 'round these parts, don't you know).We'll have to try and pull off some different themed months in the future, no?In any case, we'll be tornado-kicking Chan-uary into the history books with one last entry to come, so keep your eyes peeled for that martial morsel, grasshoppers.Detail-attentive fans of cinematic pugilism will instantly recognize Dick Wei, who plays the main antagonist/inked-up sea dog, as the old master soaking in the cauldron at the outset of Chang Cheh's Five Venoms(1978).It'd be four years before Chan would reprise his Dragon Ma role in attempting a sequel, Project A II(1987), which, for the record, was also an enormous hit, winning two HKFA's for best choreography and editing, while netting over 30 million HKD at the box office.I'm sure we'll tackle that one sometime in the future, but as for tonight's review?Essential viewing, and top five all-time material, without question.Four Wops.

What your favorite action star's wet dreams are made of.

"Police Story"(1985)d/Jackie Chan

2012-01-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

For those of you that might be pondering which movie singlehandedly revolutionized the modern action film, tax your grey stuff no longer, we're about to cover it here in Chan-uary at the Wop.If you've been captivated by breathtaking, mile-a-minute action accomplished through wirework or computer generated-means in recent action fare, there's a solid chance that whoever coordinated those sequences drew inspiration in some way from tonight's review, the film that Chan himself declared would be the ultimate cop movie that his Hollywood failure, The Protector(1985) should have been.One-upping himself after already broadening the scope of Hong Kong action standards with Project A(1983) might have proved a tall order for anyone else in the world, but Chan makes it look nearly effortless here, were it not for the brutal blooper reel during the end credits that reveal the inevitable contusions and fractures that come with serving up stunts that border on certifiable insanity, the like the world had never seen before.A far cry from the budget-heavy explosion fests Hollywood was showing audiences at the time(yet influential to movies like Tango and Cash and Bad Boys II), the hugely successful film(and Jackie's personal favorite), a Best Film and Best Action Choreography winner at the 1986 Hong Kong Film Awards, has spawned four sequels to date.Sharing the marquee with Chan this time around are Brigitte Lin, Maggie Cheung, and Feng Ko An, among others.This one saw regular airplay at my place in the VHS days of yesteryear, as my co-conspiritors will attest to, and stands as my personal favorite modern Chan-man flick, bar none.Forwards.

No CGI or wirework here, folks.
During an early morning shantytown drug raid, botched by Inspector Man, a crooked cop on the take, his partner, Kevin Chan(Jackie Chan), orchestrates a car chase through a mountainside full of collapsing huts and exploding gas cannisters, then traverses the entire mountain when his suspect, a drug lord named Chu Tao (Yuen Chor), hijacks a double decker bus in a rush to avoid justice.Chan hooks a ride on the speeding bus with his umbrella, gets knocked off in traffic, and still somehow manages to get in front of the vehicle and send it to a screeching, glass-shattering halt just inches from him, as he collars his disbelieving perpetrator.Afterwards, Chan is awarded a spot as a media representative of the police force, then given the task of bodyguarding Chu Tao's secretary, Selina(Brigitte Lin), who's scheduled to testify for the prosecution against her former boss.One of Chan's buddies(Mars) on the force breaks into her apartment in a mock attempt to silence her(comedy ensues), and on the way out to her car, they're attacked by real bat-wielding thugs, barely escaping in one piece due to Chan's amazing fighting skills.When they arrive at Chan's apartment, his girlfriend May(Maggie Cheung) and her friends surprise him with a birthday party, but a nightie-rocking Selina on Chan's arm causes the jealous squeeze to smoosh the cake into his moosh.Scooter hijinks, false bravado, more cake-facedness.Selina, who notices the face of her earlier attacker in a police academy photo, tampers with Chan's tape recorded testimony and breaks the fuck out like a yeast infection in the middle of the night, leaving Chan to embarrass himself in court with a cassette full of sexual innuendo between he and the missing witness.Chan loses face, Chu gets bail.

I bet there's a lotta broads who'd rather jump off a roof than put up with another second's worth of my shit.Just sayin'.
Chan later arrives to rescue Selina, who's feigning having been kidnapped, only to get framed in the murder of Inspector Man by a vengeful Chu.When he's placed under arrest at the station, he snaps, temporarily taking the Superintendent(Lam Kwok-Hung) hostage at gunpoint to buy himself enough time to clear his name and apprehend Chu.When the gangster's men botch rubbing out Selina, she spitefully downloads all of Chu's incriminating computer data at an office in a large indoor mall, alerting his thugs to the sudden theft, and ushering in a violently adaptive martial finale inside the shopping center between Chan and Chu's thugs, who take turns smashing each other into various perishables and belt-driven interfloor transportation in the quest for Selina's briefcase.In the melee, the valise plummets several stories to the ground floor, where May retrieves it, only to get roughhoused by Chu and his men.In the "Holy Fuck" moment of the movie, which is ripe with several to begin with, from the top floor, Chan jumps from the ledge onto an electrified pole and slides down through and ocean of breaking bulbs and raw electricity, smashing through a glass ceiling before reaching the ground level, where he's finally able to cuff Chu.His fellow officers turn a blind eye as he punches up the druglord's silver-tongued lawyer, and kicks Chu through a glass display case.We freeze frame on Chan in mid-attack, being held back by his associates.Cue theme song and blooper reel over end credits.

"No thanks, I was just window shopping...with my face."
As always, avoid the New Line redubbed, re-edited cut on dvd or bluray, and spend the extra scratch on a Chinese or Japanese print(Dragon Dynasty, if you can snare one), which oughta include anywhere from ten to sixteen extra minutes of footage, if that's your bag, man.Chan would cameo in Kara Hui's Naughty Boys(1986) vehicle, before tackling Armor of God the following year.Brigitte Lin would again share the spotlight with Chan in Peking Opera Blues in 1986, before landing roles in genre staples like The Bride With the White Hair(1993) and it's sequel a year later, and Chungking Express(1994).Cheung would reprise her role as Chan's girlfriend in Police Story 2(1988) and 1992's Supercop, the third in the series, before appearing opposite Jet Li and Donnie Yen in Hero(2002).Chan's epic pole slide resulted in burned mitts, breaking two vertebrae in his spine, and dislocating his pelvis.I honestly don't know how anybody could ever settle for less in an action star after pondering such amazing footnotes.On a note of much lesser importance, Chan also croons the theme here, which was a huge hit, borrowed by a HK tv series, the HK police in recruitment commercials, and finally, New Line for their later Chan vehicle, First Strike(1994), the fourth of the series.This one should be on your shelves in some format.A perfect four Wops.See it now!

I would have taken the escalator, but that's just me.

"Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin"(1978)d/Chen Chi Hwa

2012-01-20T01:42:00.000-08:00

Here's one of the more likable Chan efforts while under Lo Wei, around the time the uber-serious Dragon Fist(1978) was completed and utilizing much of the same cast, though this production doesn't take itself nearly as seriously, a plus, in this case.With Chan handling much of the fight choreography in tonight's period gung fu mystery that plays like Hercule Poirot with crane beak strikes, the action is mostly top notch, save for a few less-than-stellar contests between the so-called clan grandmasters.The original English dub as featured on the VHS(the longest cut of the movie available to date, thus far) or the early Simitar dvd is a real fuckin' hoot, with some of the most memorable martial one-liners you're liable to encounter on your genre travels.Regardless of the format you can track it down on, it's definitely a title that'd benefit from an exhaustive treatment from Dragon Dynasty or the like in future.The cast showcases the talents of Bruce Lee regular Nora Miao, who previously shared the screen with Chan in Wei's New Fist of Fury(1976), and looks good here, Kam Kong, a student of leg fighter Tan Tao Liang who appeared in sixty less-than-amazing titles imho, the best of which were his Chan works, and Tung Lam, a familiar face in the Shaw epics of the early seventies.It should be duly noted that, though Jackie's a cocky wiseass throughout here, most of the humor, or Lo Wei-flavored attempts at such, comes from Korean pipsqueak Kim Jeong-Nam and Lee Man-Tai, who plays one of those familiar dusty beggar-types.Did I mention the film begins with a dramatic form sequence?This one's right up there for those panning for early Chan-man gold; there may not be enough to scrape into an ingot here, but you'll score a little brilliant flake, none-the-less.Onwards.

"It's fun to stay at the...wait, where are C and A?!!?"
Some time ago, the top eight Shaolin masters of their respective gung fu styles got together and created the ultimate technique, The Eight Steps of the Snake and Crane, and managed to document the movements in a training manual, which disappeared, as did the martial artists responsible for it.Enter Hsu Yin-Feng(Jackie Chan), a mysterious stranger in town, who cockily flaunts the knowledge that he possesses the book, when he isn't dispatching opponents with brief and vulgar displays of martial power.The local clan heads seek out Hsu to try and test the Snake/Crane style against their own skills, believing he has personally killed off all the grandmasters in gaining the book for himself.Among the folks constantly pestering Hsu is one Tang Ping-Er(Nora Miao), who's looking for her missing father, and who offers him her fleshy wares for access to the manual, to which he responds, "Women are just like children. Too vague and indecisive." Amen, brother.Also perpetually on Hsu's jock is the miniature Hung Chu(Kim Jeong-Nam), a daughter to a local clan leader who's taken to gearing up like an unconvincing beggar and nagging Hsu about the book herself.Hsu offers very little information to the interested parties, instead lambasting anybody who's fool enough to challenge him along his travels, and the fights keep mounting.He defeats all comers with a cocky finesse and economy of movement(only displaying the Snake/Crane technique towards the end of the fights, after he's well perturbed by the challenges), haughtily remarking, "Having that book gives me a certain charm, though.", all the while searching for an elusively mysterious scar on the bodies of his opponents...The plot thickens.

"Just you nine lousy bastards? You must be tired of living!", says Hsu(Jackie Chan).
After much backstabbery, where clans flip sides quicker than an orangish Jersey Shore terrone baking under a sun lamp, eventually, Hsu reveals that he's been trained in the secret style by the eight grandmasters in question, one of which, Master Huang(Tung Lam) having survived the attack, sends Hsu out into the martial world with a fake manual to lure out the real killer of his colleagues, equipped with the knowledge that said killer bore a unique scar on his body.It turns out that Master Chien(Kam Kong), the head of the Black Dragon clan, has just such an identifying mark, and what's more, is the very unscrupulous sonuvabitch that Hsu has been seeking all along.The local clans band together with Hsu, and Tang follows suit as well, after the Black Dragons manage to kill off waif-esque little Hung.What unbridled unscrupulosity.Driven by a desire for revenge and to save face for his honorable teachers(and anyone who's lost it to this point, really), Hsu goes toe-to-toe with Chien, who seeks to gain the manual, and ruthlessly rule the world of pugilism with an iron fist(what else would he want the damned thing for, I ask you).Hsu comes out on top, of course, after a lengthy final battle, restoring harmony, justice, and gung fu for all practitioners everywhere.Freeze frame, please.

"Hung Chu(Kim Jeong-Nam), who dressed you, the Manson girls?"
Chan also helped coordinate stunts for this one; a well-trained eye will detect slight flares of vintage Jackie in the multitude of fights that pass before the lens during the film.I can only imagine old Lo visiting the set and schitzing out over all the film being wasted on fight choreography.Chan'd follow this entry up with the 3D period flop, Magnificent Bodyguards(1978), before embarking on his historic loan to Seasonal Films the same year.Kong also appeared in villainous garb in Jackie's Shaolin Wooden Men(1976) and Half a Loaf of Kung Fu(1978), as well as generic kung foolerly like Shaolin Kung Fu Mystagogue(1976), The 18 Bronze Girls of Shaolin(1978), and Shaolin Invincible Sticks(1979).Besides her co-starring roles in Bruce Lee's first three movies, Nora Miao also scored credits in Bruce's Deadly Fingers(1976), To Kill a Jaguar(1977), and The Kung Fu Kid(1977), later appearing in Jackie Chan's Dragon Lord(1982), as well.After directing Chan in Half a Loaf of Kung Fu(1978) also, Chen would later go on to become executive director on such epic martial fare as titles like Police Story(1984), Project A II(1987), and Police Story Part II(1988) with the actor.Like I said, this is about as solid a Lo Wei Chan-man feature as you're liable to find, though nowhere near as entertaining as Jackie's later efforts.On the scale, two Wops.Worth a look.

"Here is my handle and here is my spout!"

"The Young Master"(1980)d/Jackie Chan

2012-01-07T00:20:00.000-08:00

In 1980, Jackie Chan kicked off a long-standing relationship with Golden Harvest studios with tonight's entry, having just come off a disappointing initial Hollywood star bid with The Battlecreek Brawl(1979) and out of a creativity-stifling contract with Lo Wei after Raymond Chow and Wang Yu('Jimmy', not Yung, mind you) finally convinced the angry old man to call off his Triad muscle and let the blossoming young star venture out on his own.For his first feature, Chan assembled an impressive supporting cast that included Shih Kien, aka/ "Mr. Han" from Enter the Dragon(1973), Peking Opera classmate, Yuen Biao, lovely shadow kickstress extraordinaire, Lily Li Li-Li(Clones of Bruce Lee(1978) didn't offer as many Lee's in succession, I'd imagine), and not least of all, Hapkido grandmaster Whang Ing Sik, ruthless and sinister, as always, as the negatively charged obstacle in Chan's path towards martial harmony.Without Lo to hold him back, Chan effectively crafts a period piece unlike any that came prior(and most that came afterwards), injecting a broad range of physical comedy into elaborate fight choreography that includes a historic finale square off with Master Whang that runs upwards of fifteen minutes in length(!) and is entirely unique for the time in that it often resembles a real brawl between the two actors, foreshadowing things to come in Chan's later modern vehicles.Thirty-plus years later, Young Master remains one of Jackie's best films to date, packed full of fists, feet, and folly enough to keep the eyes of any self-respecting kung fu movie enthusiast well glued to the non-stop action, and the smirk-inducing hijinks in between.The whole thing starts out with a critical Lion Dance...

Yuen Biao's benchmark bench skills come up short against Jackie's poleplay.
With top student Lo(Wei Pai) suffering from a leg injury that leaves him out of a competitive lion dance with the rival school, a desperate Master Tien(Tin Fung) is forced to rely on Lung(Jackie Chan) to control the head, instead.Midway through, Lung discovers that the rival lionhead is being controlled by Lo himself, in a treacherous turn to score cash towards a slut from the local brothel he's taken a shine to(Pussy over pugilism?Preposterous!).The broken-hearted Lung stays tight-lipped concerning his elder brother in defeat, and even covers for him when he tries to lay the concubine down on his spacious floor mat(!), but Tien uncovers the fiendish plot and banishes Lo, later sending Lung off to find him after his better judgment takes over.Meanwhile, Lo finds work with the rival school, freeing a career criminal/martial murderer named Kam(Whang Ing Sik) from an enshackled procession to jail on a desolate country road.The authorities identify Lo's white fan and offer reward money for his capture, unaware that Lung also has a white fan in his possession.Mistaken for the man he's been sent to find, Lung crosses paths with the son(Yuen Biao) of the local Marshall, Sang Kung(Shih Kien), who tries to aprehend him using his bench-centered kung fu, and later the Marshall himself, who anonymously helps Lung defeat his own son before springing his identity on him (but after Lung has pimpslapped the son's grill and verbally abused the pair). Hilarious quicksand hijinks ensue with Lung and Sang repeatedly tossing each other into the quagmire, and Lung eventually evading Sang's bracelets and the subsequent arrest.

"You're his 'dumb ape of a father'??!!Ooof!" laments big-mouthed Lung(Jackie Chan).
Lung inadvertently wanders to Sang's home, covered in mud, and asks his daughter(Lily Li) for use of the family rainbox while she goes out shopping.Sang, also dirtier than a hedonist's chastity belt, wanders into the showers, unaware that the man he's been trying to aprehend is on the other side.After some soapy ass-grabbin' slapstick, Lung uses the Marshall's antique pipe as leverage in a prop-heavy fight with the lawman before his daughter returns(Does mistaken identity ever stop being funny?No?Well, have some more, then) and takes Lung out using her billowy skirt to execute shadow kicks on him.Elsewhere, in a greedy instant, Kam, weary of Lo and looking to lessen the gang's loot-divvy by one, frames him during a bank heist.Lung, now free of all criminal suspicion by default, throws himself on the mercy of Sang to release his fellow schoolmate, but to no avail, until he remembers the effectiveness of blackmail through the Marshall's delicate pipe.Reluctantly, Sang agrees to free Lo from the local jail only if Lung singlehandedly apprehends Kam and his gang in the young man's place.After improvising some fabric into a flowing skirt, a disguised Lung humiliatingly defeats Kam's henchmen(Fung Hak On, Lee Hoi San)in the center of town, first mimicking the shadow kicks of Sang's daughter, then pasodoble-ing them like a matador would charging bulls.Against Kam in the countryside, Lung finds himself hopelessly outmatched, as refereed by the rival school's stroke-faced boss(that the overlord was about to cut out of the split when Lung showed up).Kam repeatedly punishes the young fighter with devastating kicks and punches until Lung is accidentally given opium pipe water in between rounds, which transforms him into an unstoppably furious attacker.He carries the bodies of both men slumped over a bo staff back into town, keeping good on his promise.In the end, we see Lung in a body cast as a result of the fight, covered head to toe in bandages, save for two fingers, which he waves bye-bye with.Credits...

"Look at these bulging veins!I'm having an acute myocardial infarction!"
Chan would revisit the concept of using berserker strength to tip the odds in his own favor again in the finale of Liu Chia Liang's Drunken Master II(1994), even injecting a similar sense of comedic realism when the final reel ends(his character ends up retarded from drinking industrial alcohol in Drunken, and broken everywhere but two fingers in bandage-wrapped mummy-style traction in Young).Young Master also marks the first of many instances where Chan provides vocals for the theme song, in this case, "Kung Fu Fighting Man", himself.He followed this hit up with a sequel, Young Master in Love(1982) aka/Dragon Lord, after the film surpassed all previous box office records held by Bruce Lee, establishing Chan as Hong Kong's top draw.His second bout with the director's chair(after Fearless Hyena(1979), which we just took a look at), a perfect introduction to real Chan-man fare for newcomers to his often-imitated style of action film.In my estimation, the only thing missing here is a training sequence of some great degree of difficulty, or form display on a dramatically lit stage, to showcase the techniques he was going to ride to ultimate victory, the kind that viewers had come to expect from kung fu movies of the era.But I'm not gonna punish the movie for going against the grain; on the contrary, it stands as one more three Wop Jackie Chan kung fu movie on the scale.As we've seen thus far in Chan-uary, he's got quite a few of these in his filmography, and the month's not nearly over, just yet.Highly recommended.

"Heaaaavy metaaaal or no metal at aaaall, all wimps and posers leaaaaave the haaaaaall!"

"The Protector"(1985)d/James Glickenhaus

2012-01-05T12:02:00.000-08:00

Tonight's review marks the second time(or fourth time if you count both Cannonball Run movies, but I try not to, at all costs) that Hollywood attempted to unleash the Jackie Chan phenomenon upon the unsuspecting American moviegoing public, with much the same indifference, in the form of a box-office shit sandwich, it received five years earlier, with the release of The(mostly unspectacular) Battlecreek Brawl.Try to keep in mind that the rest of the civilized world had already seen and loved Jackie Chan in period piece epics like Drunk Monkey in a Tiger's Eye(1979) and recent modern adventures like Police Story(1984).I sat in a theater that was empty, save for about seven seats, most of which were occupied by cats who weren't terribly impressed with Chan's unique brand of fight choreography and stuntwork.In fact, the only chuckles out of them came when Chan choppily delivered dialogue, showing that his English had actually regressed since Brawl.A week later, there was another movie on the marquee, with the feature netting less than one million in U.S. ticket sales when the smoke had cleared.So what went wrong this time?Well, firstly, the material was pedestrian buddy cop fare with precious little on-screen chemistry between Chan and his co-star, Danny Aiello(Danny friggin' Aiello, really? He and Jackie go together like a parmesan pu-pu platter).Most detrimental to the project, I think, was Glickenhaus' refusal to let Jackie handle the fight choreography or stunts himself, and insistance that Chan's character mirror Dirty Harry, with loads of excessive nudity and profanity, none of which would fly in the average Chan movie.Comparing the slow-moving U.S. theatrical cut to the much sleeker HK version that a frustrated Chan re-shot and re-edited afterwards, I'm gonna go ahead and say that Jackie was right all along.

That's a mighty Studd-ly bump o' hubba yer insufflatin' there, Big John.
After watching a post-apocalyptic punk gang elaborately jack up an out-of-town trucker of his shipment of computers at a red light, we're introduced to officers Wong(Jackie Chan) and Alexander, who stop at a bar after work, unaware that a gang of coked-up bad guys are about to rob the place.Wong does some mighty fine slo-mo divin' and shootin', but his partner catches a fatal one in the melee.Not content to let backup hunt down the last fleeing robber, Wong chases the wounded gunman across a marina on foot, then borrows a speedboat to spectacularly crash into the yacht the criminal has stolen, with an air unit lifting him to safety at the last possible second.We've had enough of your cowboy antics, Billy Wong.It's back to crowd control with Officer Garoni(Danny Aiello) for you.Only, on their first undercover assignment together, they manage to allow Laura Shapiro(Saun Ellis) to get abducted from under their noses.On the belief that she may have been kidnapped by Hong Kong crimelord Harold Ko(Roy Chiao) as leverage against her father as evidenced by phonecalls Shapiro's bodyguard, Garrucci(Bill "Superfoot" Wallace), made to a massage parlour there, the two cops make for Hong Kong.At the massage parlour they namedrop Garrucci, and are abruptly attacked by knife-wielding happy ending girls while sprawled out on rubdown tables.Cue breathtaking-yet-funny fight between Wong and the entire establishment, complete with jump spinning crescent kicks off of walls and tiddly-dipping in overly hot sauna.After a stern talking to by the HK authorities and a visit to Lee Hing(Kwan Yeung)'s supply boat to cash in a favor owed, and another lengthy chase sequence, the boys return to their hotel room to find a suitcase full of cash and two plane tickets, before a failed snipe attempt results in two more dead bodies and totalled burning vehicles in the street.Garucci pays Hing a visit, and kicks the snot out of one of his friends(Lee Hoi San) before giving him the same treatment.Hing is found dead, his tortured body hanging off of his own burned-out boat, sinking in the harbor.

Parkour was created in the nineties, eh?I wonder...
Not so easily swayed by death threats or warnings from authoritative figures, Garoni and Wong make an appearance at Ko's press conference to announce the purchase of a new race horse, and disrupt it, chucking his briefcase of money into the air.Garoni and Hing's black buddy follow Gurucci to one of Ko's makeshift opium labs, where, depending on the cut of the film, fully dressed or totally nude brawds stuff opium into hollowed out melons, and rescue Laura Shapiro, with Garoni, wounded, and abducted in her place.Wong sends Laura to the authorities, then descends upon the shipyard where Ko has demanded the switch(Laura for Garoni) take place, only to find it crawling with thugs, not least of which, being Gurucci, who jumps into battle with the cop, trying to shear him in half with a miter saw and electrocuting himself in the process.Wong fights his way through the underlings, video game-style, ultimately squaring off against a box-throwing Chinese musclehead on a high platform suspended by crane.Meanwhile, Ko is in his private helicopter, hovering around with his Mac-10, and trying to pick Wong off.That Harold Ko...is a real snake.Naturally, Garoni gets his hands on a 20 mm cannon and blows a sniper's tower away in slo-mo, before Wong manages to drop the crane's contents onto Ko's chopper, transforming it into a badly edited fireball, and ending the boss's reign of terror once and for all.Back home, the two grinning cops are halfheartedly awarded medals of honor as the credits roll.

Garrucci(Bill "Superfoot" Wallace) could hardly wait for Officer Wong(Jackie Chan) to don his safety goggles and work gloves to start cutting pallets down for his wood stove.
Glickenhaus, who helmed the 1980 cult classic, The Exterminator, claimed that his effort would always be Chan's biggest success on this side of the pond, reasoning that American audiences would never sit still for Chan's style of action.Insert your "Wah wah wah WAAAAAAAH" Price is Right buzzer right here.Though Jim's cut of the film is widely accepted as lethargic, exploitative garbage and a failure selling tickets, the Hong Kong version achieved moderate success afterall, and is a much better time to be had, believe you me.Besides, there's a lot less Danny Aiello running around in boxers in the latter version, and that should seal the deal for anybody reading this entry, besides maybe Mrs. Aiello.Chan would follow this one up with 1985's sequels to Winners and Sinners, My Lucky Stars and Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Stars, before moving on to do Armour of God(1987), while Aiello would later declare the video for Madonna's 'Papa Don't Preach' he would appear in was "crap"(!).Interestingly, the late Butler, Pennsylvania native and reverse bearhugger extraordinaire, John Minton, aka/"Big John Studd" would go on to appear in several more movies like Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man(1991) and Shock 'Em Dead(1991), before succumbing to liver cancer four years later.Our string of three Wop movies for Chan-uary is broken by this mostly average effort that merits two.If we're talking about the U.S. theatrical cut, subtract one more of those and avoid like Grady "Lobster Boy" Stiles did pinky rings.

"Departmental medals of honor??!It really does pay to recklessly play by your own rules afterall!"

"Fearless Hyena"(1979)d/Jackie Chan, Kenneth Tsang

2012-01-04T17:21:00.000-08:00

Here's a favorite Chan-man flick of mine, a glorious return to Lo Wei's studio from a highly successful two picture loan to Seasonal Films that yielded both Snake in Eagle's Shadow(1978) and Drunk Monkey in a Tiger's Eye(1979), a charmingly rough variation on those two films co-directed by Jackie himself, his debut.Before the departure, Chan's unmistakable flair in front of and behind the lens was becoming more and more obvious to old Wei, and with each new picture he was given more creative license than the last.Though Hyena certainly offers nothing new or innovative concerning plot("You killed my teacher!"), it serves up boatloads of fight choreography, techniques, and slapstick comedy that was hitherto unheard of in the martial movie world.The film stands as one of the vehicles Chan used to change the face of said world forevermore, and though kung movies have evolved several times since then, it makes for an enjoyable look back to when Jackie singlehandedly got the ball rolling.Along for the ride here are James Tien in old age makeup and wig, Once Upon a Time in China's Yen Shi Kwan as the main heavy, Tien Chi Cheng of Five Element Ninja(1982) fame, Hui Lou Chen, and wiry Dean Shek as a coffin seller.The soundtrack ...ahem, borrows from The Pink Panther and Superman:The Movie, but you won't dwell on the larceny for very long whenever Chan fills the frame, especially the finale here, lengthy as it is fucking awesome, trust me on that.Classic martial mayhem as only Jackie Chan could deliver it.Onwards.

Pssst, that bumpkin on the left? Yeah, that's Jackie.
Shing Lung(Jackie Chan) lives a meager existence with his overbearing grandfather/sifu(James Tien), whose rules are simple:Don't show your martial skills in public, and don't gamble, or I'll thrash you.Lung, unaware that the reason his grandfather demands pugilistic modesty, is that a caped bastard named Yen Chuen-Wong(Yen Shi Kwan) has been tirelessly scouring the countryside for all proponents of that particular style of kung fu, and snuffing their candles, immediately, if not sooner.Looking to make some extra money after a stint at the funeral parlour goes instantly sour with the director(Dean Shek) getting trapped inside one of his own second-hand coffins(!), Lung offers his services to a local would-be gym as run by 'Tee Cha'(Lee Kwan), a conniving weasel and friend to three bumbling idiots(Great Bear, Iron Head, Stoney Egg) that Lung easily defeats, and who doesn't know a lick of martial arts, naturally, fighting all challengers and drawing potential new students to the school in the process.To avoid news of his pugilistic contests getting back to Grandpa, he poses as various disguised characters, battling "The Willow Sword"(Tien Chi Cheng)(who he calls 'Shit Sword', mind you) and others, first as a simpleton in a foppish hat, then as a hairy Chinese schnoz-heavy broad(!!), clobbering a fat womanizer repeatedly in the face with bricks.As per usual, Yen stumbles upon the school, now dubbed "The Everything Clan", fights with Lung, recognizes the style, and uses the young man's naivete to lead him directly to his grandfather, who he pulverizes into a corpse in minutes.Lung is prevented from aiding his pummeled pops by an elderly cripple, who also foils his attempts to run off and exact revenge in revealing himself as 'The Unicorn'(Hui Lou Chen), one of his grandfather's old classmates.

"Is that a monk's spade in your pants, Fatty, or are you just glad to see me?"
The Unicorn becomes Lung's sadistic interim sifu, plaguing him during dinner by keeping the meat off of his chopsticks in a show of hand skills, and torturing him with impossibly difficult training exercises, like pulling huge sacks tied to ropes(sometimes with the Unicorn on top), and upside down situps.For the special purpose of vengeance, Lung is taught 'Emotional Kung Fu'(seriously), where Joy, Sorrow, Happiness, and Anger are separate techniques to be utilized in discovering an opponent's 'emotional weak spot'.After busting out a nifty form montage showcasing each of the styles with Unicorn narrating over the top, Lung is finally prepared to avenge his grandfather's death(yeah, I know) and return prestige to the Sien Yi clan by issuing a hearty beatdown to Yen and whoever else he's got in his corner.First up, Lung squares off against three of Yen's associates, who are armed with folding bladed staves, trying to dice up Lung's teacher with them.After getting some hair cut in the acrobatic process of whooping their asses, Lung turns to Yen for the big finale.At first, the caped bastard in the ponytail gets the better of Lung, mocking him and any techniques he utilizes as ones "he learned as a small baby"(how's that done, then?).Then Lung unleashes the secret Emotional style on him and the tide instantly turns, with the older fighter unable to figure out his younger opponent's attacks, which fly at him with riotous laughter in one instant, and uncontrollable sobbing the next.In the end, Lung does the villain in with a flurry of Anger style, exhaustedly turning to his injured sifu as the movie reaches it's end.

Shing Lung(Jackie Chan) leaves 'em all slicing at air.
Chan followed this one up with Lo Wei's Dragon Fist(1979), a period piece that's unusually serious for a Jackie Chan movie, and 1980's The Young Master, which we'll be looking at this month.The first exposure to Hyena, for me, was as a 'Crazy Monkey' trailer with a disco pop theme song sung by girls(!!!) on another rental VHS from Chinatown, with no English subs.Years later, I scored the Columbia TriStar dvd, which, despite the goofy box art that has zero to do with the movie inside, provides the best print I've seen of the movie to date.I doubt it'd set you back more than a couple of bucks, at most.Though it might not match up to the apex films of the genre after forty-plus years, it more than displays a glimpse at everything that set Chan apart from the rest of the pack at the time.The fourth three Wop movie in a row.Will the streak continue, my pugilistic pals? Time will tell.

Jackie be nimble, Jackie be quick, Jackie go undah de limbo kick.

"Wheels on Meals"(1984)d/Sammo Hung

2012-01-04T09:57:00.000-08:00

Tonight's feature is a legendary Sammo Hung modern action/comedy filmed on location in Barcelona, Spain, that unites all three Peking Opera classmates, Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, and Sammo himself(rocking a drip kit, ferchrissakes!) for the third time to date, after Project A(1983) and Hung's own Winners and Sinners(1983); also on board are former Miss Spain, Lola Forner, Herb Edelman, fellow "Lucky Stars" Richard Ng and John Shum, Black Belt Magazine's 1981 Fighter of the Year, Keith Vitali, and Basque/Blackfoot kickboxing champion, Benny "The Jet" Urquidez, who, with Chan, provides a fight sequence towards the end of the film that many rank high on their all-time favorite movie fight lists.Add to the mix a wacky banana-yellow fast food restaurant on wheels, kidnappings, a motorcycle gang, inherited legacies, a mental hospital, trademark mind-blowing car chase, and a knock down, drag out finale set in a freaking castle, and it's not difficult to see why this one, which dates back for me to a stickered up Video World rental VHS under it's alternate title, Spartan X(more about that later), is still such a wildly popular entry in the Chan filmography.According to Chan, Golden Harvest switched the order of letters in the title to avoid the recent bad luck the studio had experienced with movie titles that started with 'M'(!).Unhampered by the usual difficulty when filming in Hong Kong, Sammo enjoyed full compliance from the Spanish authorities while shooting, even during the intricate car stunts.For those of you who like your kung fu without so much long white eyebrows and elaborate sets in it, this one's got slapstick and jump spinning wheel kicks in a modern setting, though most of the actors' brightly colored eighties-wear here looks like somebody fused an episode of Punky Brewster into a taping of Dance Party U.S.A.It just adds to the laughter you're bound to encounter, trust me on this one.

"Ménage à trois???!!!"
Thomas and David(Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao) are two expatriated Chinese roommates who peddle fast food out of a tricked out yellow van they like to call, "Everybody's Kitchen(or 'Cocina Para Todos', since they're in Spain)", in the center of Barcelona.Thomas takes and delivers orders viz skateboard, while David, a nearsighted/goodhearted nerd with awful fashion sense and a father who's flipped his lid in the local nuthouse, cooks them up on grills inside the vehicle, which has been equipped with an automated control panel complete with Atari 2600 level sound effects for when the benches, seats, and awnings slide out.Occasionally, they're forced to display their kung fu skills, like when a multicultural dirt bike gang(they're everywhere, the bastards) tries to ruin their business with exhaust fumes and loud engine buzz.Their friend Moby(Sammo Hung) is a rotund Chinese secretary(with a jheri curl) to Detective Matt(Herb Edelman), who's behind the monetary eight ball to some unsavory types and in going into hiding, turns the business over to his assistant.While Moby plays private detective in the office, his very first client strolls in, unbeknownst to the oblivious fatso.Meanwhile, a beautiful young whore named Sylvia(Lola Forner) who's been purloining the pockets of her tricks, seeks refuge with our two spring roll-slinging heroes, who she repays by rapaciously jacking their dough, then making off with the vehicle(and wallet) of the adulterous Italian stereotype-ah who-ah shares the building-ah with them.She gets into a fender bender with Moby, who's seeking a woman who worked as a maid for the estate of a man named Mondale and her twenty-something daughter who stands to inherit his vast fortune and property.She falsely gives him the Italian's information and jacks his wallet before driving off.This broad is good.

This thug(Keith Vitali) wasn't looking for a glass of water, so David(Yuen Biao) gives him a pitcher instead.
It isn't long before Mondale's nephew(Jose Sancho) is sending out blazer-sporting miscreants(Benny Urquidez, Keith Vitali) to hunt down the heir and her mother, who happens to be a nymphomaniac institutionalized with David's father(!), and kidnap them so that Sylvia's inheritance is transferred to Mondale instead.Moby takes David and Thomas out for drinks at a disco so he can ask for their help with the case, but they hoodwink him into shouting anti-Spaniard sentiments to the mostly Spanish crowd.When the boys next encounter Sylvia, she's being pursued by Mondale's thugs, who prove to be tougher than they originally expected.There's a death-defying van chase all over Barcelona, then a hideout in a mountain of smelly stumblebums, and a showdown at the asylum which leaves Thomas, David, and Moby temporarily defeated and the girl and her mother abducted back to the villain's sizeable castle.The martial trio bands together to infiltrate the fortress and rescue the women, but all three eventually get themselves captured through every silly fault of their own.At the dinner table, Mondale loses face, cuing a battle royale between his two henchmen and the boys, with Moby himself squaring off against the head honcho, who proves to be quite an adept fencer, indeed.Meanwhile a Muay Thai flying knee from Thomas nearly sends his opponent out a castle window in defeat after a tense battle that saw the thug-in-braces(and visible flak jacket) kicking out a row of candles with a single kick.Elsewhere, David's dizzying acrobatics prove mostly ineffective against his hard-kicking foe, so he simply smashes a pitcher off of his dome, rendering him unconscious.In the catacombs, they find Moby barely holding off the attacks of Mondale's foil, until they combine skills and force him to concede.We then see the boys working the food beat again, first dropped in on by Sylvia, now a limo passenger, who asks for waitress work for the summer, then Moby, who asks the boys to help him on an Eskimo case.They kick him in the ass.Freeze frame.

"My fist's got first dibs on your grill and ribs, Buh-buh-buh Benny the Jet!", says Thomas(Jackie Chan).
Strangely enough, the aforementioned VHS copy of tonight's review, which was nominated for a Best Action Choreography award in the 1985 HKFA's, turned out to be the only format with Jackie's signature blooper reel during the credits left intact, apart from the later Japanese laserdisc release.A year later, all three friends would reunite for My Lucky Stars and Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars, both semi-sequels to Winners and Sinners.Not my favorite three showcases for the actors by a long shot.Forner would appear with Chan again in Armour of God(1987), while Urquidez would again square off against him in Dragons Forever(1988).Though the duo's dynamic show of pugilist skill is certainly praise-worthy, I'm kinda left flat by the other two final fights.I've seen Yuen Biao defy gravity on many occasions throughout his career, his match with Vitali just seems lazy and uninspired, and the same goes for the brief Hung duel afterwards.That's probably me just spoiled by decades of quality fight features, but I'll do that if you aren't careful.Other than my slight chafe, this is mostly flawless martial arts action with enjoyably silly comedy that you'll probably dig.On the scale, each star merits a Wop for his performance, for an impressive total score of three Wops.Highly recommended.

What's with the Chinese fire drill, guys.

"Armour of God"(1987)d/Jackie Chan

2012-01-03T08:25:00.000-08:00

For our next entry in Chan-uary, we look back to the year 1987, which saw the release of tonight's review, Chan's box office record breaking hit filmed entirely in the former Yugoslavia(because of their lax insurance policies for motion picture stuntmen, no doubt), and his biggest to date.Chan's legendary d.i.y. approach to stuntwork nearly got him killed this time around, after misjudging a jump from a high wall across to a tree branch and falling fifteen feet to the ground below, with cameramen rushing to salvage the expensive camera equipment before tending to the seriously injured action star(!), who required cranial surgery to remove pressure from a fractured piece of skull lodged against his brain, leaving him temporarily comatose, with a permanent plastic plate in his head and partial hearing loss in one of his ears.That he survived proves he must've been wearing the titular armour of uppercase G during the shot.Content-wise this time around, Chan crafts an often hilarious, always entertaining James Bond-meets-Indiana Jones adventure one-upping his previous high watermark for excellence in comedy, fight choreography(helmed by middle Liu, Chia Yung here), and gravity-mocking physical stunts that defy the realm of possibility for any human being on the planet not named Chan Kong Sang.Sharing the spotlight with Jackie here are the delectable Miss Spain 1979, Lola Forner, who also appeared in his earlier Wheels on Meals(1984), Cantopop sensation Alan Tam, whose late seventies musical outfit, "The Wynners", is parodied in tonight's script, and Rosamund Kwan, who'd appeared alongside Chan in Sammo Hung's Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Stars in 1985.Years later, Miramax Pictures, after acquiring the U.S. distribution rights, would re-release the film's 1991 sequel, Armour of God II:Operation Condor, re-edited, re-dubbed, and simply re-titled Operation Condor, then give tonight's review the same treatment, re-titling it, Operation Condor 2:The Armour of Gods.Let's see, that effectively makes the first movie of the series it's own sequel, and vice versa.Wait...huh?Let's just get to it already, sheesh.

Asian Hawk(Jackie Chan) introduces the joys of chugging slavic pilsner to some angry primitives.
We first meet international adventurer/mercenary-for-hire, Asian Hawk(Jackie Chan), as he plunders an ancient sword from some African-ish natives, dazzling them with a technological okiedoke before somersaulting, flipping, sliding, and diving to safety; barely avoiding the indigenous folk and their sharpened speartips and taking to the skies in a nifty getaway glider strategically hidden in the bushes, both his pilfered booty, and his own Asian booty, intact, once again.In Italy, he attends the public auction of the recently stolen treasure where a planted phantom bidder boosts the final price for Hawk's benefit, but the artifact is ultimately snagged with an extravagant bid by a sultry brunette named May Bannon(Lola Forner).Back at his hotel room, he's besieged by a mountain of messages noting the arrival of Alan(Alan Tam), who he'd been in an embarrassingly dated seventies pop band called 'The Losers' with, until his jealous buddy ousted him from the group to have female band member, Lorelei(Rosamund Kwan), all to himself.In the years that have passed, Alan maintains his high profile singing career while the girl that came between them has become a major fashion designer.At one of her shows, she's set upon by machine gun-wielding kidnappers, who mow down throngs of innocent attendees in a violent hail of lead before abducting her, demanding the three remaining pieces of the legendary "Armour of God" set as a ransom for her life.Desperate, Alan convinces a reluctant Hawk to help him break into Bannon's mansion and steal back the relic for use to barter with the kidnappers, but May's father, the Count(Bozidar Smiljanic), easily foils their half-baked robbery plan.They convince him to loan them the three pieces of the fabled armour in his collection on the promise that Hawk will return them intact, with the two missing pieces as payment, and on the condition that his daughter can tag along.

"Mitsubishi two-wheeling it down the steps?!!?My shouldered basket of perishables!!!"
The three effortlessly infiltrate the remote monastery of a brotherhood of some particularly unhip and evil monks in the mountains, and rescue Lorelei from the stronghold, thanks to the fists, feet, and acrobatics of Hawk, unaware she's been drugged by the monks and re-programmed to gaffle back all five pieces of the Armour of God for the sinister cultists, which she does, slipping Alan a mickey and hijacking him back to hideout, in the process.Hawk is forced to re-infiltrate the stronghold to rescue his friends and steal back the relics for the wealthy count, staving off coming hordes of the brown hooded brothers with an enormous flaming pole(there's even a food fight in here somewhere) before sneaking off to snatch the armour.The only problem is there happens to be a personal bodyguard of high-kicking steroid-ripped kung fu soul sistas with metal heels standing between him and the treasure.Hawk takes quite a licking from the ladies before he manages to use the wooden construction of the balconies to break off their deadly heels and give them the hearty ass-beating they'd been so begging for.Afterwards, he's once again set upon by the entire brotherhood, but he tears open his coat to reveal that he's strapped himself with explosives, threatening to blow everything and everyone to smithereens with them(hey, that's not very gung fu of you, Hawk).After a melee of chucking sticks of dynamite in every direction, inadvertently destroying the entire ball of wax, he somehow manages to escape in the nick of time by diving from the high mountain cliff onto a hot air balloon piloted by his three friends.Roll credits over the signature Jackie Chan blooper reel and this one's in the can, boys.

A martial negress' steel heels would tear Hawk asunder... if he didn't sting like he was hymenopterous and float like a Gandaberunda.
Interestingly, Bo "Snowbeast" Svenson scores an uncredited cameo here as one of the monks.Chan would follow up his massive success here with a return to another lucrative series, Project A, Pt. 2(1987), and Dragons Forever and follow up to yet another of his popular series', Police Story 2, the following year.Rather than subjecting yourself to the inferior Miramax cut of the film, you're much better off seeking out Fortune Star's Armour of God boxset or Hong Kong Legends' Region 2 PAL disc instead.The featured mayhem in tonight's entry makes the action in most Bond films look like a leisurely walk to the grocery store with your grandmother in comparison.Though much of the comedy is of Chan's usual hokey variety, and the fights don't really take off until the last third of the film, there oughta be plenty of incredible stuntwork to keep your glassies glued to, in between.An excellent modern era Chan film, recommendable to any and all enthusiasts of such.Three Wops.

"Dining hall full of evil monks right behind me?I'm not falling for that old one."

"Twin Dragons"(1992)d/Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam

2012-01-02T08:13:00.000-08:00

We'll spinning wheel kick-off the martial month of Chan-uary with a choice chunk of chopsocky comedy co-directed by the able duo of Ringo Lam, of City on Fire/Prison on Fire(both 1987)fame, and Tsui Hark, the man who gave you We're Going to Eat You(1980), among others.With all proceeds from the film benefitting the Hong Kong Director's Guild, the men assembled an impressive list of co-stars for Chan(who was coming off the international success of Armour of God II a year earlier), including genre vets like David Chiang, Maggie Cheung, Nina Li Chi(who would go on to marry Jet Li), Wang Lung Wei and an assload of cameos from directors like Hark and Lam themselves, John Woo, Ng See Yuen, Kirk Wong, Wong Jing, and even Liu Chia Liang himself.The plot, sort of a kung fu Corsican Brothers, allows for Jackie to showcase his mastery of physical comedy a la Buster Keaton while supplying the viewer with multiple rewind-worthy "Holy Fuck!" stunts and smoothly choreographed fights, as was par for the course by this point in Chan's career.The result is a dizzying, laugh-packed joyride that you're bound to enjoy, heads and tails over Jean Claude Van Damme's similar Double Impact(1991) with a lot less denim-wrapped cazzies hitting the floor(Van Damme never passed up an opportunity to throw a side split into a scene that didn't need one), despite some shoddy blue screen effects work when attempting to frame Chan's twins in the same shot.This one might not rank in the top five Chan films of all-time, but it's not a bad hundred minutes full of fight scenes, pretty girls, car chases, explosions, and comedy, and besides, where else are you gonna find a bulky fro-sporting asian named Rocky in a spiked up vest with an Iron Maiden back patch?Nowhere but here, I'm here to tell you.And compared to frown-inducing recent Chan wirefests like The Medallion(2003) or The Tuxedo(2002), this may as well be Project A(1983), ferchrissakes.Onwards!

Prince(Jackie Chan) helps Ah Wei(Wang Lung Wei) inspect a sheet of coffee table glass for imperfections.
A big nosed Chinese family's twin boys are separated when Crazy Keung(Kirk Wong) attempts a daring hospital escape in a black and white flashback, and one of the twins ends up on the doorstep of a booze-chugging party girl(Mabel Cheung), while the other is raised by the natural parents.Ma(Jackie Chan) becomes a critically acclaimed concert pianist, while his brother Prince(also Jackie) becomes a street-wise petty criminal/ automechanic/race car driver with a twisted midget sidekick named Tarzan(Teddy Robin).Tarzan, always getting his pal into trouble, barges in on a private karaoke session at Boss Wing(Alfred Cheung)'s place, cueing a massive nightclub scrap between Prince and all of Wing's thugs, led by Ah Wei(Wang Lung Wei), that culminates in a failed rescue of a blue-wigged singer(Maggie Cheung) and Prince's reluctant agreeance to race for big money stakes.Meanwhile, Ma prepares for a high profile recital, mostly unreceptive to the busty charms of a childhood sweetheart named Tong Sum(Nina Li Chi), who's been sneaking around on her brutish boyfriend, Rocky, behind his back, adorned with obligatory Maiden back patch, naturally.Both twins, totally unaware of the other's existence, find themselves compelled to act out each other's own motions and gestures, with the pianist cranking invisible monkey wrenches and the criminal fingering out arpeggios on an invisible keyboard at odd moments.Inevitably, they bump into each other in a hotel restroom and get switched, with side-splitting results.Ma takes an instant shine to Barbara, the nightclub singer, who sings a tender ballad while he accompanies her on piano, while Prince provides the muscle necessary to send Tong into a tizzy when he upgrades her backrub to full-blown intercourse.

"Take a backfist into the wall and call me in the morning!", prescribes the doctor(Liu Chia Liang).
Meanwhile, Ma is forced to drive a getaway bus at gunpoint during Crazy Keung's latest escape attempt, with asphalt-based mayhem resulting, and Prince has no choice but to conduct Ma's recital, cigarette dangling from his lip, as he stumbles, backflips, and horseybacks around the auditorium full of shocked music lovers and compliant musicians who are following his frenetic baton.With all involved parties ignorant to the fact that there are two identical brothers, the men learn to use their uncanny resemblance to each other to their benefit; Prince makes short work of Rocky in a department store, causing the brute to later kautau to Ma(thinking that he's Prince) and beg to be taken on as a student.In the hotel room, the confusion reaches boiling point as Tong interrupts the men to take a relaxing bath, unaware that she's naked as nature intended in front of both of them, as both playfully share the tub with her.When a jilted Barbara barges in, they are forced to reveal themselves to the girls, who faint at the sight of them together.After the thugs kidnap Tarzan, Ma and Prince pool their resources with a daring rescue scheme involving a Hong Kong pier and a magnetic crane, before ending up in a nearby auto-testing facility.After much gravity-defying martial action in temperature-controlled climate rooms and in and around crash test vehicles transpires, the twins end up victorious, with the mob boss slamming head first into a wall inside a car with no seatbelt at a speed conducive to instant concrete and twisted metal death.We later see the twins' father passing out at the first sight of his long lost son, Prince, as he's about to be married to Tong in a dual ceremony with his brother Ma marrying Barbara, except Prince gets cold feet and tries to duck out the side door.When the wedding party rushes outside to catch up with him, neither woman can identify her husband-to-be, with Barbara noting that it doesn't matter afterall, to the freeze-framed horror of both men.

"Why yes, Jet Li, I am in a bathtub with your wife.Very observant of you."
The movie earned over HK $33 million upon release, but just over 8 million when re-released to North American audiences by Dimension Pictures, this cut being eleven minutes shorter, with a different musical score, and different ADR provided by Chan himself five years later, the least successful of Chan's movies re-edited for American moviegoers, torn to pieces by fickle critics on this side of the pond who most likely knew nothing about the guy before 1995's Rumble in the Bronx anyway.Hell, most hardcore genre nuts only turned on to Jackie after his episode of The Incredibly Strange Film show aired, while those of us in the know saw his worldwide success coming at least twelve years prior to any of that mainstream exposure.We'll be covering films from each of Chan's different periods this month, of course, so stay the course with the Wop and acquire the martial movie knowledge to maintain the daily levels of smartassery necessary to loom titan-sized over all your ignorant friends.The proceeds for tonight's entry were originally intended to be used for construction of a headquarters for the Hong Kong Director's Guild, but never got off the ground.Don't let the visible matte lines scare you away from checking this one out, with light comedy and some breath-taking action sequences and stunts(though Chan would top everything he does here several times over before he was finished), Dragons scores an impressive three Wops on the scale, and comes recommended.

"Look closely at this shoe!"

Buon anno!

2011-12-31T13:48:00.000-08:00

Catch you jive turkeys on the flipside, in 2012.Don't overdo it tonight.

Wicked as Always,

B-Dub

"Killdozer!"(1974)d/Jerry London

2011-12-26T21:51:00.000-08:00

For the sake of made-for-television horror movies of the seventies, should an unknown alien intelligence possess a man-made instrument for diabolical purposes towards wiping out humankind on the planet Earth, it only stands to reason that it would inhabit the nearest diesel-powered D-9 bulldozer, capable of speeds upwards of twelve miles per hour...I'm guessing the producers of said entry had probably gone through several bottles of 1974 Cristal Brut Millesime and quaaludes by the handful to arrive at the idea of transforming a thirty year old Theodore Sturgeon novella into the 'Saturday Suspense Movie' on ABC, hoping modern audiences would stay glued to the wood grain floor model Zenith, buying into the idea that tv's macho types like Clint Walker and Robert Urich could be terrorized by a killer bulldozer.Yeah, a bulldozer, the bulky, immobile piece of machinery most people should be able to briskly power walk away from, only a damned fool would be unable to see the immeasurable genre potential here.Alan Alda and Randolph Mantooth simply didn't measure up against this blockbuster in the 8:30 pm timeslot.In all honesty, I probably appreciated the production more as a four year old in footie pajamas watching with my parents from the living room rug.In fact, I know I did, having christened my Tonka 'Killdozer' directly afterwards and forevermore.I don't think I even bothered with it much before I realized I could play-kill everyone in my imaginatively dark adventures with the damned thing.If you're currently laughing at how retarded the premise sounds, but thought nothing of buying a ticket to Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive twelve years later, give yourself a crackin' headbutt in the face from me, would you.

The plummetting meteor hurled towards the prop globe at breakneck speed...
...it's destination, a remote island in the Pacific where some caterwauling hardhats attempt to shift it with their D9, awakening an alien intelligence inside the hunk of space rock, which then possesses the excavator as evidenced by the blue glow of each.Mack(Robert Urich) screams in terror, but for him, it's already too late, as his hardhat and ironic working-class name are no match for the radiation poisoning he's been fatally dosed with.He sputteringly manages to warn Kelly(Clint Walker), the foreman, about the bulldozer before his curtain drops.Naturally, Kelly initially scoffs at the notion that he and his crew are currently being systematically stalked by an evil bulldozer...or killdozer, if you will, but that's exactly what's happenin', Jackson.Forget that the earthmover's already slow traction is further prohibited by the island's sand, or that diesel fuel evaporates with usage, or that the loud-assed engine doesn't really allow for stealthy ops, these guys are effed with a capital F and there ain't no two ways about it.In the workers' favor, is the fact that when the killdozer is on the hunt, it's twin headlights eerily flash like animate eyes and an appropriately wacky synth-based Killdozer theme is played.Now, how could you miss something like that, I ask you.It's virtually impossible to fall prey to a big, clunky machine, right?Right??

Paying the bills isn't all Judy Landers' sequined mam-missiles and red '57 T-Birds afterall, eh, Urich?
The black dude, Al(James Watson, Jr.), unwittingly finds himself hiding from Killdozer inside some metal piping directly in the evil earthmover's bloody path.Nice one, homeboy.Never to be outdone, Clyde stalls his car out, and instead of bailing out and making a run for it, he remains in the vehicle(right in front of the bulldozer) and repeatedly tries to turn the engine over.Gonna miss you guys.Finally, with just Kelly and Holvig(Carl Betz) still breathing, the men put aside their differences and combine their vast intellects in combatting the big 'dozer together, after an uninspiring square-off with the crane proves fruitless, with dialogue like:"Heeeey, wait a minute.Of course ya can't kill a machine! Don'tcha see our mistake??""Yeaaaaah."They decide that electrocution is the ticket for ol' Killy, then lure it into the generator-rigged trap, flicking the switch and watching it burst into flames as its devilish headlights finally flicker out for the last time.Got 'im!Afterwards, Holvig suggests that they tell the authorities their co-workers perished in a landslide, but Kelly nixes that idea."Nope.", he says."You gotta tell the truth."The truth of the matter is, I'm pretty relieved that this whole affair is finally over.Roll credits.

The bulldozer turns in the best performance here.Just look at the grim pathos on it's face.
Director London helmed episodes of Kojak, Marcus Welby, Baretta, Six Million Dollar Man, Harry O, Police Woman, Hawaii Five-O, and any other seventies shows worth mentioning, as well as the Shogun miniseries, which he bagged Emmys for.Killdozer remains unrecognized to this day.Walker would turn up in the made-for-tv Scream of the Wolf the same year, as well as 1977's Snowbeast, also a tv production.Urich went on to marry Heather Menzies of Sssssss(1974) and Piranha(1978) fame, and had a lengthy television career on shows like Vega$ and Spenser:For Hire before succumbing to cancer in 2002.Let's just hope everyone involved with this production moved on to bigger and better things.Of course, everybody knows there's nothing to be afraid of where construction equipment is concerned, unless you happen to be operating it under the influence of potentially deadly lithium crystals, or something.Emptyheaded(To call a Caterpillar sneaking up on somebody a stretch is an understatement, for sure) and lethargic in delivering the grainy VHS-ripped goods, 'dozer's brisk running time(just 74 minutes) allows for a singular stomp down memory lane, if nothing else.On the scale, it earns just one Wop from your favorite Terex Titan of genre reviews.Late!

"Die from cigarettes?There's more chance of a bulldozer sneaking up on me..."

"Eaten Alive"(1976)d/Tobe Hooper

2011-12-26T11:05:00.000-08:00

R.I.P. Arbogast on Film.
Two years after giving the world nightmares with his brilliant cinematic portrait of a deranged family of unemployed cannibalistic cattle slaughterers, director Tobe Hooper served up tonight's entry as a sophomore effort, though not without some merit, it ultimately falls well short of its predecessor's dizzying levels of excellence.Hooper assembled an able cast of B-movie vets comprised of glorious villain Neville Brand, fresh off the success of the critically acclaimed 1974 telepic, Killdozer(okay, I'm kidding), Robert Englund(pre-cornball Freddy Krueger antics), Carolyn Jones(The Addams Family's Morticia in a late appearance), Kyle Richards, Mel Ferrer, Marilyn Burns, Roberta Collins, and Stuart Whitman to an atmospheric (and blatantly obvious)soundstage dressed to resemble an ominous backwoods fleabag motel on swamps that house an enormous African crocodile(also blatantly fake as nuts).Though tonight's feature, also known as 'Starlight Slaughter' and 'Death Trap' among other alternate titles, holds its own in the scare department, it also holds the dubious honor of being Hooper's follow up to TCM, perhaps accounting for audiences' tepid reception over the years.Despite a bigger budget than his previous effort, Eaten still has a phony 'television special' look about it that, for me, adds a certain stylish ambience to the formulaic blood n' boobs production that might turn other viewers off when they experience it.Don't let the fact that there are no screencaps of a shithouse rat-crazy Neville Brand waving a farmer's scythe around in the entry give you the wrong idea, his performance is incoherent mumbling lunacy that you oughta experience at least once in your life.Let's get to it...

Clara(Roberta Collins) leaks some claret.
Clara(Roberta Collins) is too prim and proper of a prostitute to let Buck(Robert Englund) access her back door, resulting in her madam, Miss Hattie(Carolyn Jones), showing her the front door, instead.Clara trudges through the woods to a dilapidated shack on the edge of the swamp that passes for the Starlight Hotel, as run by Judd(Neville Brand), a mumbling mental deficient with a wooden leg who's petting zoo is starving to death around him out of neglect(we watch a monkey give up the ghost inside its dirty cage).Once Judd identifies Clara as one of 'Miss Hattie's girls', he flips the fuck out and labonza-shanks her repeatedly with a pitchfork before chucking her remains over the porch railing to the waiting jaws of a huge African crocodile he keeps as a pet in the swamp behind the fence.Soon afterwards, a bickering, dysfunctional family and their pet dog pull up outside, in desperate need of lodging for the night, but Judd's croc swallows the pooch alive in front of the little girl's disbelieving eyes.After some heated arguing upstairs, the girl's father, Roy(William Finley), pledges to go out and shoot the croc(after mocking his daughter with pantomime dog barks and croc jaw snaps!), but Judd lays a righteous scythe upon him outside, and the croc, anxious for its next meal, smashes through the porch railing to snare the dying gent.Judd then interrupts the girl's mother, Faye(Marilyn Chambers), who's about to enjoy a relaxing bath in the unkempt washroom, with a hearty ass-beating before tying her to a bed.Little Angie(Kyle Richards) manages to escape the clutches of the hotel's psycho gimp and hide quietly among the rats and creepy crawlies under the darkened porch.

There is no joy for annoying Roy(William Finley), now resigned to be a croc's chew toy.
Meanwhile, Harvey(Mel Ferrer) arrives on the scene with Libby in tow, seeking the whereabouts of his other daughter, Clara, when Judd points the inquisitive family members towards Miss Hattie's brothel, which they pay a fruitless visit to with the local sheriff(Stuart Whitman).Libby accompanies the sheriff to the local drinking establishment for a bite to eat before backtracking to the hotel, but their meal is interrupted by an aniebriated Buck and his curvy arm decoration, Lynette(Janus Blythe), when a fight breaks out.Libby's father returns to the hotel and gets face-scythed after hearing the little girl under the porch crying for help.After the sheriff kicks the couple out, they pay the Starlight a visit, but when Buck hears Angie's whimpers and cries from under the porch, he goes out to investigate and gets pushed into the murky drink by Judd, who watches as his croc feeds once again.Lynette eludes the proprietor's scythe of judgment, and escapes into the woods, managing to flag down a passing car in the nick of time.Libby returns to discover Faye gagged and bound to the bed and frees her while Judd is busy opening the gate downstairs to allow his crocodile access to its next prepubescent meal under the place.Faye and Libby make a break for it but get chased back upstairs by a howling, scythe-wielding Judd, who wounds Faye with the farming tool and throws her off the balcony.Meanwhile, Libby has helped Angie to get out of the swamp, and when Judd tries to push her back in, he gets flipped in himself by Faye, who watches as the hillbilly's homicidal pet clamps down on the final victim of the evening, and a prosthetic leg floats to the surface.Roll credits.

So glad you decided to stay, Faye(Marilyn Burns).
Brand would later turn up in Without Warning(1980), and Evils of the Night(1985).Janus Blythe, who looks especially backwoods-delectable here, would next appear in Wes Craven's cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes(1977), as the memorable Ruby character.Englund, another favorite, is entertaining to watch, long before being typecast as a supernatural burn-scarred serial killer who spouts corny one-liners as he pops out of your dreams.Jones would only act in one more movie, doing some television work before succumbing to cancer in 1983.Exploitation staple, Roberta Collins went on to appear in things like Whiskey Mountain(1977), Saturday the 14th(1981), and Death Wish II(1982).Marilyn Burns, always luscious lens candy in every role, doesn't purvey fear as intensely here, as opposed to TCM.There I go, making that inevitable, unfair comparison again.I really don't think this one's as bad as some folks would have you believe; what it is, is standard stalk 'em n' kill 'em fare, an average follow up to a masterpiece, which only further pales it in comparison and detracts from its overall popularity.As such, two Wops sounds about right when laying down the verdict from the glorious scale.Worth a look.

Plucked from a righteous jailbait date, Buck(Robert Englund), out of luck, gets (proper)fucked.

"To All A Goodnight"(1980)d/David Hess

2011-12-24T17:25:00.000-08:00

Whether you've been nice or naughty(which is nicer than nice in my book, anyways) thus far this year is irrelevant, as I've got a shabby little low-budgeted goodie for that busted tube sock precariously draped over your faux fireplace mantle from the seventies, as directed by none other than the late genre icon, David A. Hess himself.Now, before you go rushing to hand me off that prohibition-era fruitcake that's been evolving in the darkness of your cupboard in return, let me first state for the record:To All a Goodnight isn't one of the better Christmas-based slashers ever made; in fact, it's low end all the way, with precious little holiday feel(Sorry, Cali, but your palm trees and sunshine don't exactly evoke visions of Anderson's Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne for me at all), zero suspense, choppy uneven pacing, a gratingly rotten musical score, and even worse lighting.It's no wonder that Hess never took the director's chair again during his long career in film and television, it looks like Murphy's Law took hold of this production from the start, strangling it until it was hardly discernible from hundreds of other pedestrian slashers.Of course, if you're up for bearing witness to a spate of pedantic-yet-pulchritudinous people biting the dust(at the hands of FX goremeister, Mark Shostrom) and little else, you might come away from this one less dissappointed than I was the first time I sat through it.Contrary to popular interwebs tube legend, Hess doesn't appear in front of the lens here, though legendary porn cocksmith Harry Reems turns up briefly as an airplane pilot and Hess' sister Judy cameos as Mrs. Ronsoni.The derivative script(think Prom Night over the Christmas holiday), was penned by Alex Rebar, the star of 1977's Incredible Melting Man.Like the impatient streetwalker says to the john fumbling with his button flys, "Let's make it, already!"

"I got your fuckin' smart phone...right here!"
The girls of Calvin Finishing School plan to spend their Christmas break getting laid, slipping their housemother a mickeyed milk and inviting a throng of fuck-starved males over for some decadent eighties-style partying, except, at this very house two years earlier, also over Christmas break, a young initiate lost her life during a hazing-gone-wrong doing a concrete swandive(in front of a lens gooped up with enough Vaseline to make Bob Guccione blush) off of a balcony to incidental disco synths.I just bet those gloved hands holding a knife and a framed picture of the dead chick are gonna be involved in an upcoming bloody plot of vengeance against the callous, superficial bitches responsible for her wrongful death.Cynthia breaks out her bobblers before getting knifed in the breadbasket when she goes out to meet her boyfriend, who'd joined the choir invisible himself just moments earlier, off-camera.That which might pass for dialogue if delivered by actual actors in another, better movie gets further diced into incoherence by an amateur editor.A gardener(Fast Ralph, mind you, not Crazy Ralph) who carries hedge shears professes his love for cherry pie and Nancy(Jennifer Runyon), too.A piper cub touches down in a day-for-night sequence bringing male victims who pull rank on the pilot(Harry Reems), forcing him to stay with the plane and miss out on the festivities.One jagoff croons an off-key tune while strumming an acoustic twanger and his nearsighted dork-pal spews medical inanities as a thick slut gets her throat slit by the refrigerator light from a Santa-suited psychopath.Fast Ralph warns Nancy to go to bed and lock her door, because "the devil's here"(I think he meant 'boredom').

"I wanna hold ya, 'til the fear in me subsiiiiiiiiiiiides!"
One of the jagoffs goes off on his own and gets himself smooshed by a huge Santa-powered boulder, while the nerd scores a piece of charity puss from Melody("That's one interesting tune", he later remarks) and the virginal Nancy sips milk while peep-tomming one of the copulating couples from outside their bedroom window.Santa jams an arrow through the back of the skull of one lad, mid-fuck, before chopping his lady's domepiece off directly afterwards.Bloop, bloop, bloop goes the head.Ralph pays Nancy a midnight bedroom visit, and, fearing for her safety, pitches her a bible.The next day brings a picnic in the grass featuring the surviving partiers, where Ralph turns up deceased with a bloody forehead.Sheriff Polansky(!) makes the scene, leaving two horny cops behind to watch over the doomed, talky kids.One inquisitive cop takes an axe to the skull.The nerd and the virgin form a search party and explore the shadows together.Then he tries boring her to death with his back story by the fireplace.Another moralistic lass named Leia dukes the remaining cop then finds her girlfriend's decapitated dome stuck on the shower head while her lover stumbles around with a Bowie knife jutting out of his back.Another sorry bastard gets an extra mouth from Santa for Christmas as his girl escapes in time to team up with the virgin/dork and discover the carnage upstairs in the bed and bath, bumping into Leia, who's in shock, pirouetting around in circles and humming incessantly.Santa shows up and reveals himself to be Mrs. Jackson(!!), the middle-aged mother of the dead girl from the...yeah, her.She purees Tricia and the pilot with the airplane propellor(cue:juicy sack of innards splashing the windshield) and after a suspenseless five minutes of cat n' mouse with Nancy in the shadows, manages to take a flopper off the exact same balcony that snuffed her daughter two years earlier.Her husband carries her broken body inside(note:he's also in a Santa suit), but gets crossbowed in the kidneys by Alex the nerd before he can take revenge for his wife and daughter.The wallflowers run off into the night, leaving Leia madly dancing on the balcony.

I'm always up for some head in the showers, but this is ridiculous.
I could tell Hess didn't hold tonight's entry very high on his lifetime accomplishment list when I brought the idea of covering Goodnight here at the Wop up to him, some two years or so ago, and he responded with: "Let's talk football tonight, Stefano.What do you think about Milan's chances this season?"Let it be known that Orgasma, my naked porcelain water pipe/sweetheart had to be packed and repacked multiple times to offset the migraine headache I was getting from straining my eyes to see the action that may or may not have transpired in front of Hess' lens tonight.As therapeutic as my medication sessions usually are, they didn't change my outlook on this one all that much.Dreadfully standard in approach, execution, and angle, the one saving grace for Hess completists is the tell-tale David-esque dialogue, probably his own script re-writes, that comes out of the characters throughout the picture.Even Shostrom's effects work is marred by shitty lighting and dull axe-edits.On the scale, Goodnight finds a single Wop under it's Christmas tree, a boring cinematic coal lump.

"They say you always remember your first time, and you will remember Santa, won't you!"

"Xanadu"(1980)d/Robert Greenwald

2011-12-21T12:00:00.000-08:00

When it comes to dancing, I'm pretty indifferent about it unless it involves a circle pit or a private lap dance, but that's just me... a single voice adrift in an ocean full of motherfuckers who think they can dance with the stars, leaping across the stage like a vasectomized Errol Flynn on Christopher Street.Though thirty plus million of you might entertain a difference of opinion on the subject, I'm sticking to my guns over here.Thirty years ago, dancing was just as big as the silk butterfly collars and platform heels guys would throw on in hopes of scoring some trim from a hot-to-trot chick with a Dorothy Hamill hairdo and a rayon jumpsuit, and disco still hadn't officially flatlined at the outset of the decade, enjoying a late surge with the 'roller disco' phenomenon, as evidenced by Linda Blair's Roller Boogie(1979) effort and Skatetown U.S.A. the same year.Tonight's entry started out as a cash-in attempt on that particular craze, but veered off into fantasy/musical waters before the project's completion instead, and the rest, as they say, is a failure of truly epic fucking proportions.With Travolta unavailable for the lead male role, the producers turned to Michael Beck, of The Warriors(1979) fame.Also lending his legendary twinkletoes to the production was singer/dancer extraordinaire, Gene Kelly, who shakes his aging groove thing to a soundtrack(an admittedly pretty killer one) provided by E.L.O. frontman Jeff Lynne, whose afro was not a thing easily scoffed at.I'm overjoyed at the fact that I was too young to have had to bear witness to this ham-fisted craptacular on a date/feelings endurance test with some eager makeout recipient, and I pass on to you that, unless you're a skirt-wearing Mary or some other such frail pansy, you're not gonna enjoy Xanadu's hokey Tron-esque neon visual effects or roller disco romance very much.

By Crom, what manner of neon-aura surrounds you as you boogie, Valeria?!!
A starving artist named Sonny(Michael Beck) chucks his latest failure out a window where the wind catches and carries it into an alleyway adorned by an intricate mural of the Nine Greek Muses that suddenly comes to neon-enshrouded life to Solid Gold-style boogie to E.L.O. tunes.Among these inspirational beauties is Kira(Olivia Newton-John), who teleports into Sonny's life as a ball of light, appearing to him as a roller skater on the boardwalk and the subject of album art he's been hired on to reproduce and enlarge.While beachcombing, he bumps into a clarinet-blowing dotard with a gleam in his eye, named Danny McGuire(Gene Kelly), before spotting his rollerskating reverie, and stalking her to the condemned Pan Pacific Auditorium, where he can observe her practicing her skate routines from the shadows, all creepy-like.Before too long, the old guy is inviting Sonny back to his mansion to listen to records and reminisce about his glory days in the big band jazz era, segueing into a musical number where Danny cuts the choreographed rug with some transparent ghosts, one of which bears a striking resemblance to Sonny's love interest, Kira.If that sequence didn't give you diabetes mellitus, Kira soon accompanies Sonny to a soundstage dressed with various hokey props for use in a Peter Pannishly embarrassing display of rollerskateage-on-wires.They return to the Auditorium, where Kira suggests the building could be the perfect location for the nightclub the old man's been kicking ideas of opening up around."I think this place could be anything you want it to be.", she says, although I must have missed the part where she adds, "...even a gaudy roller disco!"

I've got my mallet raised, the gong's in plain sight...
When Sonny shows the place to Danny, it cues another lengthy musical number, this time a forties big band is contrasted against an eighties new wave outfit, headed by Tubes frontman Fee Waybill in an orange jumpsuit, before the whole event turns up into a crazy mixed-up party exactly how you thought it might have!Kira suggests the name Xanadu and the couple goes off to celebrate Sonny's new partnership with Danny, and when they kiss they're magically transformed into Don Bluth-style animated fish and lovebirds after frollicking atop a rosebud.One musical ridiculous outfit-changing montage for Danny later, and Xanadu is open for business.Kira confesses that she's a Greek Muse who's fallen in love with a mortal then teleports back to Olympus.Sonny discovers the alley with the mural from the opening while rollerskating, and skates directly through it, a portal to the gods that preside over Neon Heaven, where Zeus denies Sonny's pleas for one more night of mortality for his love.Back at the club, the geryatric Danny leads a rollerskate chorus line of jagoffs around the place while jugglers chuck bowling pins at him amidst the heavy boogieing of surrounding disco dancers.Kira emerges, apparently on heavenly reprieve, to sing several songs complete with intricate costume change gamut(why is it, that any Olivia Newton-John movie of the era felt it necessary to transform her from wholesome sweetheart to skeevy slut by the final reel?Any ideas?) run from eighties satin baseball jacket to fringey cowgirl to cheap prostitute, before being abruptly zapped back to Olympus.Bummed that his muse chose to boogie in a beaded wig rather than lay the otherworldly snatch on him on her final night on earth, Sonny is alerted to a cocktail waitress who looks like...no, it couldn't be.Awwwww, isn't that a cute story?Yeah, I'll be french-kissing a pail over in the corner, if you're looking for me.

He's professing eternal love to you from atop a rose's petals, that pussy.
After directing this stink-loaf, Greenwald helmed the legendary 1984 NBC spousal abuse telepic, The Burning Bed, with Farrah Fawcett and Paul Le Mat, before spinning off out of control in a tragically left-wing documentary sort of way.Newton-John would pair up again with Travolta in 1983's Two of a Kind, another romantic fantasy movie I don't care if I ever see, to be honest with you.Pittsburgh native Kelly would follow up his return to the marquee here with a two part episode of the Love Boat.Four years later.Beck would reprise his role as Swan in The Warriors in 2005 voicing the part for the movie-based video game.This was the first time I'd seen this thing since the cable box days, and even under severely altered states, it hurt like a bitch to get all the way through.On the scale, one lousy Wop for the groovy soundtrack.There's not even one stinking boob in the whole movie.Steer clear.

This screencap takes me back to certain booze-drenched 80's dance-offs in Emmaus.

"Urotsukidoji:Legend of the Overfiend"(1989)d/Hideki Takayama

2011-12-19T18:51:00.000-08:00

Though the Japanese use 'hentai' as slang meaning pervert, and rarely ever to describe the type of offering we're examining here tonight(ero anime, some would label it), it doesn't hurt to be a massive pervert yourself if you're going to check out Takayama's classic early animated mixture of explicit bloodshed and sex.Even if you were, chances are, you'd still be understandably mind-blown coming away from such a carnally corrupt cartoon as this.Think Dragonball Z, except it's got bespectacled schoolmarms sprouting hundreds of forty foot long tentacle cocks that suspend a spreadeagle cheerleader in mid-air while poking, prodding, and raping her in every orifice in her body before pulling out and spurting glowering demon-spunk all over her face, instead of kung fu kids and dragon orbs.I can still remember how my buddies and I got ripped up watching a bootlegged Japanese language vhs with no English subs back then, then splitting a side hearing voice actors boldly declare "You fucking monster, not only do I have your sperm I've got your blood too!" in the Central Park Media edited movie release, until in 2000, when a copy of UROTSUKIDOJI Perfect Collection turned up at a Kim's Video in the city and ended up in my bookbag full of shwag from the evening.Said out-of-print collection includes the three original OAV's, Birth of the Overfiend, Curse of the Overfiend, and Final Inferno, as well as the two follow-ups, Legend of the Demon Womb and Battle at the Shinjuku Skyscrapers, for two hundred-fifty minutes of cartoon chaos, though the latter two episodes are censor-fogged and shabbily animated in comparison to the original three, all in Japanese with English subtitles.

Late for class and facially splashed with day glo tentacle cock goo, it must be one of those days.
Over some literally hellacious fucking(I noticed one succubus with about six tits), we're told how every three thousand years, the three worlds of demons, beast-men, and humans are united by the birth of the overfiend or Chōjin, not a very nice chappie at all.Sent by the beast-men to ensure the safety of the worlds is Amano Jyaku, sort of a whiskered Johnny Depp-looking cat that can fly.Accompanied by his nymphomaniacal sister, Megumo, and Kuroko, a little roundheaded bastard that can also hover, the three converge on Myōjin University with a vibe that the apocalyptic god is near.Amano thinks that Ozaki, a homoerotic jock meathead that cuts through the local girls three at a clip, is the mortal host in question, while Megumo bets that it's Nagumo, a harmless panty-sniffing dork who's in love with Akemi, the pig-tailed cheerleader with massive mams.Ozaki's latest ménage à quatre is rudely interrupted by demons who slaughter his fuck toys before transforming him into one, in the process(helped along when he licks Nagumo's blood after braining him with a basketball in the gymansium).Amano destroys the lupine beast in a rooftop battle, also putting his suspicions to rest.Meanwhile, Akemi is being tentacle raped by a demon disguised as one of the teachers, rescued after the fact by Amano and Nagumo, her new beau and protector.After using a pair of ice cream cones to unwittingly remind his girlfriend that she was violated in every hole by a horny monster, Nagumo gets himself smashed by an oncoming vehicle in traffic and dies.In the hospital morgue, his corpse reanimates and rapes a night nurse, his ejaculate causing her body to explode in a downpour of organs(!), before matamorphosizing into the massive, winged Chōjin, whose tentacled dicks swallow people whole and shoot laserbeams from the cockholes(!!), destroying everything in sight, as Amano, Megumo, and Kuroko witness from the safety of an orb of energy in the sky above.

"It's a fucking class ring, it's gotta be in here...can't just vanish into thin air!!"
In a flashback, we see Amano squaring off against his rival, the boyfriend of the Queen of Demons, Suikakujū, who's looking to destroy the Chōjin, but is ultimately defeated.We're then introduced to another terminal wally named Niki, who's abused by his parents and pale foot fetishistic dames alike, until some demons make the scene and offer him some real man action if only he kills his dysfunctional folks, and, uh, chops off his own cock with a butcher knife.Yeaaaah, skip that, fellas.Anyway, he does the deeds and is rewarded with a massive, flashing, prehensile techno-demon wang but when he testdrives it with some local sluts, it melts off(!).Meanwhile, the beast-siblings fly Akemi and Nagumo to their world to consult with the Elder who foresees the coming devastation and banishes the group back to the human realm.Niki cockblocks Nagumo as he's trying to finally consumate his relationship, and steals his girl, licking Nagumo's sperm off of Akemi's face(bleech), which causes his dick to grow back to powerhose length as he uses it to swing away with(!!).At a construction site, Niki and Nagumo go toe to toe in monster form, but Niki is no match for the Overfiend, and gets himself eviscerated.Akemi is suddenly overcome with emotion over the dead nerd, who, it turns out, also had a crush on her.Amano returns to his realm, where the Elder shows him the prophetic images of the coming of the Chōjin, and the catastrophe in his wake.How is Chōjin supposed to unite the three worlds by destroying them?Will the ever-horny Megumi ever meet a demon that doesn't explode into smoldering flesh-chunks upon her orgasm?Will Nagumo and Akemi ever get the chance to simply get laid with no crazy stuff attached?All these questions and more will be answered when you check this one out!

"Casting a spell, leather and Hell, black metaaal gods' rock n' rolllllll!"
Overfiend spawned a whole new generation of hellish hentai titles from the Rising Sun, like Angel of Darkness, Demon Beast Invasion, Venus 5, and one of my favorites, Oni-Tensei, where a broad's ogre back piece tattoo comes to life, splattering anyone who'd dare fuck with her, and raping the chicks up, large style, as well as six new Urotsukidoji series since.Apparently, the anime are far more depraved and graphic than the manga they're based upon.As staggeringly sex-drenched as these affairs are, I honestly doubt anybody'd let a lubed-suzie rip watching them, apart from your random sloppily overweight forty-eight year old anime dork/virgin subsisting on Mt. Dew Game Fuel and fapping off in his momma's basement to photoshopped nude jpegs of Slave Leia, but that's just meanspirited conjecture from yours cruelly, over here.Take the head mic off, oxy-cute that face fulla zits, and do some push ups, Eggbert, and you might even score a real live human female someday.Just sayin'.As excessive as the decade it came from, Overfiend makes for a pretty good viewing experience, especially if you've never seen it before, and merits three Wops on the scale, missing out on perfection due to the inclusion of the two lesser episodes on the disc that actually detract from the greatness of the first three.If you're half as twisted as I am, you'll love it.If you're a prudish, skirt-wearing Nancy, you'll be well-offended.Recommended.

"Time to destroy the world with my laser-penises...time to destroy the world with my laser-penises..."

"Sweet Movie"(1974)d/Dušan Makavejev

2011-12-16T04:32:00.000-08:00

During my adolescent years, I first got wind of this strange and controversial Yugoslavian rarity through one of the VHS bootleggers I used to deal with, and my curiosity was further sparked by later mentions from trusted genre writers in various publications I regularly flipped through.It wasn't until last night, though, when I finally got the opportunity to screen this one for myself, thanks to the folks at Criterion and Doc's all-encompassing current NetFlix queue.If you're not into all the footage of exhumation of the 22,000 estimated mass graves containing Polish nationals executed by Russian troops on the order of Joseph Stalin contained within, there's always plenty of simulated and unsimulated coprophilia, emetophilia, genital fondling, teat-suckling, and implied paedophilia for you to wrap your glassies around, and if there's one thing that enhances a movie experience, it's seeing John "Animal House" Vernon pissing on-camera out of his erect dick, painted gold for effect.Yeah, not really.Anna Prucnal, the blonde actress who's center of the second narrative, which Makavejev was forced to write when lead actress Carol Laure up and quit after having to fondle a guy's bare uncircumsized junk on-screen (the last straw for her, after enduring several unsavory acts her character performs in the script), was banned from re-entering her native Poland for years after authorities deemed the movie both pornographic and anti-communist in nature.C'mon fellas, those are two of my own finest qualities.Though I was mostly unimpressed with the movie, there are some brilliant sequences with rich visual style contained herein that I'd be upset about never getting to experience if I hadn't watched in the first place.So effective, they are, that I'd revisit them separately in the future.Forwards towards, me hearties.

"Why you gotta flash me yer beaver, lady?Can't you see I'm on the shoe?"
First, we're introduced to Miss Canada(Carol Laure), as she wins a Most Virginal contest, as determined by a gynecologist on stage(Miss Yugoslavia is a burly broad who body slams him into the examination chair), winning a lucrative marriage to an eccentric milk tycoon named Mr. Kapital(John Vernon) who introduces her to the joys of matrimony on their wedding night by whipping out his gold-painted hard on and taking a whiz on her while his creepy old mother and a band of hippes garbed like religious leaders serenade the couple from outside.Embarrassed by Dean Wormser's weiner, she relates a desire to split to Kapital's mom who nearly drowns her before leaving her to the black musclehead(Roy Callender) who serves as family bodyguard.He jumps rope naked and stuffs her into a suitcase(!), which ends up on the Eiffel Tower, where a film starring a Latin lothario named El Macho(Sami Frey) is being filmed.She soon falls prey to his animal magnetism and they have sex right there on the landmark, but a group of touring nuns interrupt their coitus and scare them into a state of penis captivus(he gets stuck inside her!!).After being freed from the ahem, liplock, by French painter/writer Roland Topor, she finds herself in a therapy commune of artists led by Otto Muehl, where she breastfeeds from a lactating hippie, and after a particularly gross meal sans utensils, one of the other members experiences a rebirth of sorts, crying like a baby, pissing and shitting while the others pamper him.Finally, we see her writhing naked in a pool of liquid chocolate for a film crew.Clearly, this is not an ad for Godiva chocolates...or is it.

Choleric over her character's on-camera uncut cock-coddling, Carole was compelled to quit.
The second intercut narrative deals with a failed communist revolutionary named Anna Planeta(Anna Prucnal), who captains a massive, gaudy boat full of candy (with an enormous papier-mache Karl Marx head on the prow, mind you) down a river, where she spots a sailor named Potemkin(Pierre Clémenti) pissing in broad daylight on the shore and opts to give him a lift.After they reminisce and joyously sing old commie songs together, she warns him not to fall in love with her, else she'll be forced to kill him.Potemkin ignores her warnings and pleas to leave the ship, and ends up putting the blocks to her in a hanging nest full of sugar, after which she bites his granule-covered skin, drawing blood, and shanks him in the labonza repeatedly, twirling the blade and mixing the sweet substance with his red red kroovy.She warned you, pal.Her next passengers are a group of adolescent boys who she seduces with candy, stripping off her garments and teasing them with her nakedness.In the end, she's apprehended and hauled off by the authorities as police officers lay plastic sacks containing the childrens' lifeless bodies on the shore in front of a crowd of terrified onlookers.Later, when the crowd has dispersed, we see the children rising from the plastic like butterflies from their cocoons, reborn.

Potemkin(Pierre Clémenti)'s pelvis is promptly perforated while plunged in a cistern of sugar.
Say what you will about Sweet Movie, but you could never accuse it of being boring.A little excessive, like locking yourself in the hall closet with a box of candy bars, but those aforementioned sequences make it a worthwhile viewing, both visually stunning and thought provoking(I got a kick out of the vintage stock footage of baby gymnastics.Baby gymnastics, really?), truly a tightrope balance of exploitative elements and museum quality art.Definitely not for everyone, especially not those individuals whose minds are on lockdown from the bizarre, perverse, and the absurd.Laure's choco-nudity is liable to leave you Yugo-slobberin' for more, while Prucnal's scene with the boys will most likely disturb you deeply.Or leave you itchy, one or the other.Both women have gone on to successful singing careers, with Laure continuing to act in French television and films all along.On the scale, it earns two Wops, mainly because I can't see myself ever compelled to watch it again for any reason.After seeing it once, I can't imagine many of you will either.

If they made this outta chocolate, I'd be in a hyperosmolar nonketotic coma by now.

"Yeti - il gigante del 20. secolo"(1977)d/Gianfranco Parolini

2011-12-15T14:34:00.000-08:00

Only in glorious Italy, my friends.Only in Italy.On several occasions in the past, we've examined several Jaws rip-off paroxysms from the boot, but tonight, we'll be looking at a King Kong rip-off instead, a mediterranean movie miscarriage so farcically inept, it almost makes the turgid-budgeted 1976 DeLaurentiis remake seem exceptional in comparison.Overseeing the project from the director's chair was Gianfranco Parolini, whose previous spaghetti western and sword and sandal credits included the impressive Sabata(1969), Adios Sabata(1971), and La furia di Ercole(1962), and who duplicated DeLaurentiis' construction of a massive and expensive animatronic robot that ends up seeing precious little screen time in the finished product.Instead, Parolini enlists Italian television actor Mimmo Crao to portray the titular snowman, who kind of looks like E.L.O. frontman Jeff Lynne circa the On the Third Day(1973) album, wearing only spirit-gummed crepe wool and a smile.The entire production is plagued with ubiquitous hokey movie scientifics and ineffective blue screen effects, where the yeti(who's got his own horrible, dated disco theme, as performed by the Yetians, mind you)can be anywhere from ten to a thousand feet tall, depending on the shot composition.Continuity?We don't need no stinkin' continuity.Add a supporting cast of bad dialogue-spewing comic book characters, headed by Antonella Interlenghi, who would later turn up as a teenaged teleporting flesh-chewer in Lucio Fulci's Paura nella città dei morti viventi(1980), and who really shoulda known better here, to be honest.Can't blame her for going by the screen name 'Phoenix Grant' on this one.More embarrassingly bad than those checked polyester curtain pants my parents had the balls to dress me in towards the end of the seventies, and though pictures of those babies may have thankfully disappeared over time, prints of this cinematic eyesore are still out there, floating around, and causing riotous unintentional laughter among the audiences ridiculous enough to sit through it, your humble narrator included.Onwards!

"He is sooo big, the man of snow.But he won't harm you, the yeee-tiii!"Come on, you know the words, people.
After watching some modestly impressive stock footage of glacial ice breaking off and being carried off into the sea, we meet Professor Wasserman(John Stacy), who's asked by an industrialist named Hunnicut(Eddie Faye) to head off an expedition to the coast of Newfoundland to humanely study the enigmatic Yeti(Mimmo Crao), discovered lodged in a capacious chunk of ice."An avalanche probably caught him while he was sleeping on the ice millions of years ago...then perhaps an earthquake caused the ice to break up and fall into the Arctic Ocean.", surmizes the professor, while Hunnicut declares the frozen fella to be the new Hunnicut Enterprises trademark, since nothing says 1970's multi-national corporation like an ice-encrusted crypto-hominid giant, really.Hunnicut's grandkids, Jane(Antonella Interlenghi) and her effeminate mute brother, Herbie, also oversee 'Operation Yeti', which, after extensive flamethrowers melt the bulk of the outer layers of ice off of the snowman, escalates to packing him into a massive plexiglas phone booth as towed by helicopter to 10,000 feet, where he can thaw the rest of the way, and comfortably at that, at the altitude of his native Himalayas.After several obvious shots of a model helicopter flying with a miniature yeti doll hanging below, the missing link grumpily awakens from his million year slumber with a booming scream that almost knocks his toy airlift out of the sky.Back on terra firma, Yeti breaks the fuck out like the shingles to the stupefaction of onlooking media types and lab coats in attendance, carrying off Jane and Herbie into the Canadian wilderness in the process.Jane's touch gives the Yeti an erect nipple(!), and he repays her by catching fish for them to eat, while Herbie's collie, Indio, trots off to find the professor.When he arrives, he sees the yeti using fish bones to comb Jane's hair while she uses hairspray to tend to the beast's wounds."Yeti, come!", she says, and the big lug bats his eyelashes at her flirtingly, apparently comprehending a language like English perfectly already.Phew...

Put it on a hanger right next to your "I'm With Stupid" tee in the nostalgia closet.
Not wasting a moment, Hunnicut launches a huge publicity campaign, consisting of cheap iron-on "Kiss Me Yeti" t-shirts and drivers refueling their vehicles being encouraged to "Put a Yeti in your tank and you'll have giant power!".In Toronto, Yeti is greeted by a parade(cue:awful disco theme), then makes his media debut atop one of Hunnicut's hotels where paparazzi flashbulbs whip him into a Kong-style frenzy where the ensuing chaos traps Jane in a glass observation elevator, which Yeti plays with like a yo-yo(!) by yanking the cables from above, before saving her from plummetting to her demise and strolling off through the city streets with the girl(or an unreasonable toy facsimile thereof) in his massive mitt.“If the Yeti doesn’t get oxygen within the next ten minutes he’ll die!”, Wasserman surmises, before being beaten to death by a couple of thugs paid by one of Hunnicut's rivals(Tony Kendall) in front of the Yeti's eyes, as he's ducked into a warehouse away from the local police force.Not content to stomp these bastards, Yeti uses his toes to strangle one of the men instead(!!).Herbie is held at gunpoint(Who's he going to tell, the kid's a mute, remember?) and his dog Indio is shanked while trying to guard the children.Yeti smashes through the warehouse wall just as the head baddie is about to C.T.F.O. Jane, forcing him to drive off with Herbie as a hostage.Yeti throws trees and boulders to nullify the other goons in cars, and scares the final carload of cohorts into falling off a cliff(!!!).After rescuing Herbie, he's attacked by a construction crane(or a Tonka-produced facsimile thereof) which he flips over, finally putting the fatal boot, extra large-style, to the last evildoer."This world is not for you. Go back to the wilderness, to the mountains, where life is like you knew it.”, Jane tells the Yeti, who sheds a single tear as he lumbers off into the forest as a bark is heard in the distance.You guessed it, Indio pulled through, afterall, and the movie ends with the boy and his dog running at each other in slow motion like a couple of love-smitten fools.Somebody fetch me a bucket.

"Eh!C'è ne di voi leccapiedi quello è giù là hanno soldi per il telefono?"
Recorded off of a late Saturday night television broadcast on Channel 29(shoulda left the eighties commercials in, might have been more entertaining), as evidenced by the tracking problems in the screencaps, and ripped to dvd, I'm sure my copy of this epic failure could be upgraded by now with a Pal region special edition or some such nonsense, but I'd rather spend my dough on smokes, choice hallucinogenics, or rad inked up women of low moral fiber at this point.I know how to live, motherfuckers.Asie from the aforementioned titles, Parolini also directed things like Diamante Lobo(1975), È tornato Sabata... hai chiuso un'altra volta(1971), and Se incontri Sartana prega per la tua morte(1968).In fact, eleven years would pass before he took the chair again after this movie, and that adventure, Alla ricerca dell'impero sepolto(1988), would be his last to date.Interlenghi would keep busy throughout the eighties, in fare like La Cage aux Folles 3: The Wedding(1985), but most recently appeared in an Italian television mini-series a few years ago.Crau, who would appear as Thaddeus in the Jesus of Nazareth mini-series the same year, has also enjoyed extended success on Italian television ever since.Let's hope he's gotten a haircut and put some clothes on in the years that followed.Kendall, born Luciano Stella, scored genre credits in movies like The Whip and the Body(1963), El ataque de los muertos sin ojos for Amando De Ossorio in 1973, and Las garras de Lorelei the following year.On the scale, Yeti's a one Wopper all the way, but as you can probably tell, it makes for pretty entertaining one-off viewing under the right circumstances.

"Lynyrd who just crashed a Convair CV-300 into my sauce bag??!!".

"The Vampire Lovers"(1970)d/Roy Ward Baker

2011-12-13T02:50:00.000-08:00

With their studio doing erratic business as the sixties drew to a close, Hammer turned to a former rival, American International, to finance their latest production, a gothic mix of vampires and lesbianism based upon a novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu called Carmilla, first published in 1872(predating Stoker's Dracula by a quarter century).The end result being The Vampire Lovers, the first of the studio's Karnstein vampire trilogy, starring exotic Polish beauty, Ingrid Pitt, of Hammer's Countess Dracula(1970) fame, as the pale-skinned temptress who, like in the book, takes the form of a massive cat and prefers bare breasts to exposed throats.In tackling controversial material with such sensual undertones, Hammer moved away from implied violence and sexuality to keep up with the rest of European cinema, enlisting several breathtaking buxom actresses in their genre stable to emphasize their point, like Kate O'Mara, Madeline Smith, Pippa Steel, and Kirsten Lindholm.Also on board are familiar faces like Peter Cushing in a breviloquent supporting capacity, John Forbes-Robertson, and Ferdy Mayne.In the director's chair is Roy Ward Baker, who had previously helmed the studio's excellent Quartermass and the Pit(1967), and would go on to direct several genre films for Hammer afterwards.As it stands, the movie remains surprisingly devoted to Le Fanu's oft-interpreted text, mixing some good atmosphere and scares with even better skin, fast pacing, a classic orchestral score, and impressive set designs.Though the MGM double feature dvd with Countess Dracula has since gone out-of-print, there is a region 2 Italian PAL disc available that utilizes the same transfer you might want to look into.As far as I'm concerned, Lovers is classic Hammer fare, with everything that fans have come to expect out of one of their productions.You should have this one on your shelves already.Let's get to it.

"...cause this is it, and I'm hot roooooockiiiiiiiiiiin!"
After Baron Hartog(Douglas Wilmer) exacted righteous sword-decapitory vengeance upon the last of the evil Karnsteins some years ago in Stiria, General von Spielsdorf(Peter Cushing) has his blueblood ball gatecrashed by an enigmatic countess and her statuesque daughter, Marcilla(Ingrid Pitt), who proceeds to charm the broadfall breeches off of every gent in attendance.When her mother is suddenly called away on urgent matters, she imposes upon Spieldorf to watch over Marcilla until she returns, to which he chivalrously agrees.Bad move, herr general.It's not long before Marcilla and Laura(Pippa Steel), his daughter, enter into a friendship with benefits together, and an equally brief time before Laura turns her toes up with a tell-tale fang-hickey on one of her cones, and before the general can question the elusive Marcilla, she breaks the fuck out like impetigo, forcing him to ride off in search of answers from a man named...Hartog.Shortly afterwards, Roger Morton(George Cole) and his doe-eyed offspring, Emma(Madeline Smith) encounter the very same countess with daughter-in-tow after their carriage breaks down, with Morton agreeing to watch over Carmilla(see what they did there?) until she can retrieve her.Carmilla is instantly taken with the busty ginger, imposing her will upon her through ample hypno-charms until a groggy, anemic Emma finds herself frequently haunted by nightmares involving a giant cat that creeps into her bedchamber and wounds her ninnies in the process.Carmilla traipses around naked or next to it, an awful lot.Not to be outdone, Emma breaks 'em out on several occasions herself.

Jumpin' Jee-zus! Those are some impressive chest circles.
Emma's governess, Mme. Perrodot(Kate O'Mara), soon finds herself under the woman's spell, concealing fangholes in her neck from an inquisitive butler who brings the local doctor(Ferdy Mayne) in on his suspicions as the local townsfolk have begun dropping like flies with the same m.o. In the distance, what looks like Casey Kasem in a pilgrim's hat on a horse, grins approvingly.Carmilla is repulsed to find Emma's bedroom adorned with garlic flower bouquets, but convinces the butler that Perrodot must be the vampire, then seduces him into removing them so that she can again cross the threshold.Once inside, she tells a fading Emma that she must leave, but that her young lover/meal will accompany her.Before they can vacate the premises, a clingy, sickly Perrodot pleads with Carmilla to take her on the journey.Instead, the vampire speeds the governess into the afterlife in front of Emma's disbelieving wide eyes.Carl(Jon Finch),a local courter vying for Emma's attention, breaks in in the nick of time, using his dagger as a makeshift cross, temporarily neutralizing the blood drinker long enough to rescue his fancy, while Carmilla flees to the ruins of her ancestral tomb.At this point, Spieldorf, Morton, and Hartog, now an old man, make the scene with stake-driven retribution in mind.When the general drives the wooden plank in Carmilla's busom, Emma somehow feels it from the safety of her bedroom.Spieldorf then beheads the vampire for good measure, as a vintage portrait of the beauty on the crypt wall begins to decay into a skeleton with some impressive eye teeth...

"You say you came to Baltimore from Ole Miss, a class of '7-4 gold ring."
Lovers is a noticeably more solid and satisfying effort than it's two sequels, Lust for a Vampire(1971) and Twins of Evil(1972), more balanced with stronger characterizations, better direction, and more blood n' boobs, of course.Baker would direct Scars of Dracula the same year, then Doctor Jeckyll and Sister Hyde(1971), Asylum(1972), The Vault of Horror(1973),...And Now The Screaming Starts!(1973), and Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires(1974), genre-wise, while Cushing would go on to appear in The House That Dripped Blood(1971) and Twins of Evil(1971) the following year.O'Mara would contribute one helluva bustier in Horror of Frankenstein(1970) as a swan song to her work in horror, whereas Smith would next appear in Roddy McDowall's The Devil's Widow(1970) before lending her ample assets to Vincent Price vehicle Theatre of Blood in 1973.The exhilarating Pitt, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 73, would appear in 37 movies all told, with her last genre role coming in 1973's The Wicker Man, as a librarian(!).Naturally, Lovers scores three B-Dubs on the scale and comes very highly recommended.Sexy.

"Hand me the breasts, uhh, errr, mallet and stake, Hartog(Douglas Wilmer)."

"Love Me Deadly"(1973)d/Jacque LaCerte

2011-12-10T16:54:00.000-08:00

"Cadaver eyes upon me see...nothing." If only The Coop knew then how his tongue-in-cheek paen to necrophilia, I Love the Dead(Rolling Stone magazine called the track "predictable"!), off of the number one 1973 Billion Dollar Babies album, would parallel a strange, rarely-seen horror movie produced for the price of a completely restored 1965 Chevy Malibu(roughly 42 grand, if you're keeping score at home) featuring one of the regulars from The Carol Burnett Show(think about that for a second) tackling the same taboo subject that very same year.Though the one-sheet for LaCerte's directorial debut(and swan song, consequently) warns against viewing by the "emotionally immature", this guy sure got a kick out of it.If the production wasn't mostly hindered by sub-soap opera level dramatics, bow-legged plotholes, over-reliance on montages, and an unintentionally riotous score with obligatory Shirley Bassey-esque/007-ish titular track about necrophilia, it might have been that much more effective in delivering the ghoulish goods as an early, understandably less graphic precursor to Buttgereit's Nekromantik 2:Return of the Loving Dead nineteen years later.For the morally bankrupt perverts that groove on graverobbing to the extremest of examples, Deadly will seem a bit subdued and tame, but it still manages more than it's fair share of uncomfortable moments and maybe even a shock or two if you've let your guard down long enough.I can remember passing by the big non-clamshell Video Gems vhs on the shelves just about every time I rented from Video World in Kingston back in the day, thinking it just didn't look promising enough to drop almost four clams for a rental on.Only when the outlet finally turned its toes up did I snag it up during a clearance sale, and I still only screened the damned thing once or twice until Something Weird came along and released a dvd-r of an unrestored source print years later.Forwards!

My wife!My best friend!!My formaldehyde!!!
In the back row at the funeral of a bearded, James Brolin-esque motherfucker, we first see Lindsey(Mary Wilcox), all decked out in her finest mourning-wear, but after refusing an escort up to the casket for last respects, and once the service has ended, she finds herself staring at the stiff with love in her eyes, before leaning down to lasciviously kiss his dead lips(!).Cue:Creepy sepia-toned childhood flashback sequence with Lindsey as a youngster spending quality "Courtship of Eddie's Father"-time with daddy to strains of the aforementioned title track.We next see the blonde grown up again and grooving away at an outta sight get-together playing quarters and exchanging flirtatious repartee with Wade(Christopher Stone), before slipping away to mix amphetamines and that brown liquor upstairs, and ending up mattress-wrasslin' with ol' Wade in the process.Negative vibes soon turn the sensual session into a rapetastic struggle and Lindsey is forced to fingernail the beejeezus outta Wade's facepiece when he forgets exactly what "No!" means.She clutches at a teddy bear, a gift from her father as evidenced by more beige flashback footage, weeping uncontrollably.Meanwhile, Fred the mortician(Timothy Scott) solicits himself a male pay-per-screw for a measly twenty-five bucks and takes him back to his office after hearing the trick doesn't live nearby and has no immediate family(serial killer shit if I've ever heard it!).Lindsey's circling promising obits in the paper and pulling repeat offenses at another funeral, but when she leans in for some live-on-dead action, the corpse's nose crumbles like fresh coffee cake at her touch(!), being the product of some nifty mortician's wax(!!), causing her to rush out into the arms of the dead man's brother, Alex(Lyle Waggoner), who remarks about what a good work they had done on his bro's rotten car crash-grill.Back at Fred's, he's convinces his piece of action to get stripped and strapped to his work table, where he fills the terrified screamer with formaldehyde and opens his neck with a scalpel to position the exit needle, effectively embalming him alive.

"Nooo!Don't slice open the ketchup pack hidden in the camera's blind spot!"
When Fred recognizes Lindsey at a later funeral, he asks her to begin to dig her acute necrophilia with his private group, inviting her to join in anytime.Wade's second chance with his blonde interest ends awkwardly, while Fred embalms a female hooker this time when Lindsey, wracked with desire, decides to take him up on his invite, only to get freaked out by a gaggle of swingers in their birthday suits grooving off a cadaver that's been partially autopsied.At this point, Lindsey tries to put her stiff-fucking ways behind her in exchange for conventional love, as provided by Alex through a hokey wordless romantic montage that ends with the couple newly engaged.Lindsey still finds herself staring down hearses and unable to perform in the sack with Alex, and when Fred calls to tell her he's got her a new deceased love doll to play with, Wade follows her to the mortician's office, Barnaby Jones-style, earning himself an embalming tool-shank in the labonza.When next we see him, he's been hoisted dead in the middle of the cult of nude corpse-fiddlers, who ritually strip his body, and groove off of it in double exposure as Lindesy abruptly wakes up.On their honeymoon with Alex, she's again unable to break him off a piece, and later he finds her dancing around her father's grave, reciting nursery rhymes and vowing to be a good girl, while decked out pigtails(!).She pleads with him to go visit his mother, which he agrees to, but doubles back and follows her instead, headed to the familiar mortuary.Inside he discovers his bride straddling a corpse while her necro-pals chant and hold candles, earning himself a hearty stabbing from the secretive Fred.We then see Fred telling her that he's brought her husband home and prepared him to be hers always and forever.Don't like where this is going, one bit.After some tranquilizers lead to a flashback about her father's death, she happily climbs under the covers with a dead, embalmed Alex; this time, ready for some serious action.Yeah, bleeech.

Rubbin' sticks n' stones together, makin' sparks ignite and the thought of lovin' you is gettin' sooo excitin'...
Wilcox, who's body bangs like Moe Howard's haircut, also appeared in genre flicks like Beast of the Yellow Night and The Psychic Killer.Waggoner who played several characters as a regular on Carol Burnett(it still blows my mind that the producers of tonight's review got him to be in this), enjoyed a long career on television, most notably on shows like The New Adventures of Wonder Woman, The Love Boat, and Fantasy Island.You'll remember the late Christopher Stone as Dee Wallace's infidelitous husband in The Howling(1981), also co-starring with her in Cujo(1983).She was married to him for fifteen years in real life until he died of a heart attack in 1995.Code Red/Shriek Show has since released the most definitive disc of tonight's review to date, so if you're interested in checking it out, that's the one to hunt for.On the scale, Deadly merits two Wops, an interesting oddity from the "Me" decade that you'll probably flip a coin over seeing on some monotonous Wednesday evening.I'm guessing there's at least a small handful of brawds out there who'd love to see me dead, though post-croak sex probably isn't on their minds afterwards.A charmer, I am.

"I hope somebody brought the ABBA 8-track, the quaaludes, and the beer steins to piss in..."

"Thank God it's Friday"(1978)d/Robert Klane

2011-12-09T19:18:00.000-08:00

Long before "Thank God it's Friday" became an end of the week mantra for the work-weary or the name of an overpriced restaurant chain with servers decked out in more pins and badges than an eighties voc tech student's jean vest, it was the title of this particular movie, a disjointed tribute to dance culture of the 1970s that probably unwittingly drove the last nail into disco's coffin instead.Growing up smack dab in the middle of said phenomenon, I have to admit, I haaaaated disco as a grade schooler, having already sold my soul for rock n' roll around the time Donna Summer first felt love.Of course, being faced with the improbable mess that is today's pop culture has me nostalgic for most things seventies these days, including some pumping disco tunes of the era, as evidenced by all the boogie fever one might encounter should my 70's mp3 mix fall into their hands.I'd first forced myself all the way through tonight's movie in the cable box days, hoping to glimpse some sexual situations or a stray boob while my parents were changing guardwatch on protecting my innocence, and of course, I ended up hating the fucking thing, and even hating myself a little for sitting through it.
So, last week, while zooted at the bar and challenged to scribble down some movies for the Netflix queue, I decided to give this one another look, thinking my judgment might be less harsh the second time around, thirty-plus years later.It just so happens that Friday is a cinematic atrocity, less a movie than a series of unfunny vignettes involving headache-inducingly annoying characters whose grating personalities are only matched by their atrocious, dated seventies fashions, with appearances by funk/soul outfit Commodores and disco diva Donna Summer not helping matters at all.Also sinking with the spinning mirrored ball and tacky polyester slacks here are Berlin's frontwoman, Terri Nunn, Mews Small, who you'll remember as Jack Nicholson's lady friend, Candy, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest(1975), John "The Wanderers" Friedrich, Debra "Officer and a Gentleman" Winger, and lanky schnoz Jeff Goldblum as a Porsche-driving, disco owner/lothario.Think about that for a second.

Columbia's Torch Lady loves the nightlife and has got to boogie on the disco rooooooound, oh yeah.Wait, what?
After watching an animated version of Columbia's logo disco dancing(!), we're introduced to lots of characters, all tied together by an LA discotheque called "The Zoo", none of them particularly interesting.Tony(Jeff Goldblum), the owner, looks like a Jewish Tony Manero after being stretched on a rack and/or starved half to death, trying to put the moves on a young married woman with a Dorothy Hamill hairdo named Sue(Andrea Howard), who's looking for some fun with a half-buttoned top, and win a money bet with the DJ, to the dismay of her uptight accountant-husband, Dave(Mark Lonow), who, in turn, is being fed various drugs and re-dubbed "Babakazoo" by a dental hygienist-in-a-bright-red-Chaka-Khan-lookin' wig named Jackie(Mews Small), in attempt to loosen him up and get his boogie on.Then there's aspiring singer, Nicole(Donna Summer), who just wants to get up there on the miniscule stage and sing her little heart out, dammit.Frannie and Jeannie(Valerie Landsburg, Terri Nunn) are two high school girls trying to sneak their way into the club so they can win the dance contest and use the prize money to buy tickets to a KISS concert.Want more?Bobby Speed(Ray Vitte) is the first-time DJ copping radio airtime by booking Commodores to play the dance contest, only their equipment is in a van driven by "Wrong Way" Floyd(DeWayne Jessie), and that cat is m.i.a.!Jennifer(Debra Winger) is a new girl in town being shown the nightlife by her friend Maddy(Robin Menken) who warns her to stay away from creeps in polyester, before, you guessed it, breaking camp with a couple of polyester creeps herself.Carl and Ken(Paul Jabara, John Friedrich) arrive in a beat up VW convertible after toking a jib and smashing into Tony's Porsche.Everybody's smashing into the Porsche, get it?

"Yeah, Das Black Milk.Don't even try to tell me you've never heard of us..."
Add to the equation a couple of star-crossed computer dating misfits(she's a stiltish grade school teacher, he's a punchy fat garbage collector) and Marv Gomez(Chick Vennera), a guy who's only concern is "danseeng!Everytheeng else is boolsheet!", and who goes by the nickname:Leatherman.Sue recognizes Tony for the slimy shitbag liar he is, but her husband's preoccupied with Jackie, and banged out of his mind on drugs, judging by his mid-dance floor swandive onto a high trapeze holding a guy in a Tarzan costume, during which he accidentally removes the dude's loincloth with his head and takes a faceful of bare male ass before plummetting to the ground in front of his wife.Maybe the most unintentionally funny thing I've ever seen, rewound several times.Nicole finally gets her shot, sings "Last Dance"(Evidentally thirty years of not hearing that song hasn't warmed me up to it very much), and hooks up with the DJ.Frannie gets Leatherman to be her dance partner, and they win the prize money.Jennifer, a clumsy oaf as evidenced by several unfunny pratfalls throughout the production, stumbles into Ken(who's been taught to dance by Leatherman outside the club, through a clumsy and awkward solo disco dance sequence on the top of parked cars) and they hit it off.Carl, the nearsighted dork with the Jew-fro, ends up locked on a stairwell with one of Tony's scantily dressed throwaways.They boogie.Wrong Way finally makes it to the club with the instruments after having to pretend to play them over piped-in music to various police officers who keep pulling him over for speeding.Stop, you're killing me.The Commodores play a couple of songs while decked out in freaky astronaut costumes.Lionel Richie's 'fro is woofin'.So yeah, all's well that ends well, I guess.Except I'll never get that hour and twenty-plus minutes back that I just wasted.Get down, muthafuckas!

Possibly the least impressive dance choreography sequence ever filmed.Nice moves, jagoff.
You may have seen director Klane's other work, apart for his rejected Grease sequel("Greasier".I shit you not.), like Weekend at Bernies II(1993) and, uh, yeah that's it.After testing for the role of Princess Leia in Star Wars(1977), the ever-gorgeous Terri Nunn appeared on television a whole lot before singing "The Metro" with her aforementioned band.Chick "Leatherman" Vennera did voice work on Pinky and the Brain and Animaniacs.Andrea Howard also appeared in The Nude Bomb(1980).Jeff Goldblum, who got his start in Hollywood as "Freak No. 1" in Death Wish(1974), also scored genre work in movies like The Fly(1986) and The Fly II(1989), The Sentinel(1976), and the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.I'm actually surprised anyone involved here went on to have any semblance of a career in movies afterwards.On the scale, it earns a single Wop for that pisser of a stunt mistake above, and some of the soundtrack, perhaps.You'll do better reminiscing upon the booty-shaking decade elsewhere, I'm sure.Avoid like a post-show couch with G.G. Allin.

The only thing worse than accidentally smashing your face into some dude's bare ass during a stunt in a disco movie, is ending up here as a screenshot as a result.

"King Kong Escapes"(1967)d/Ishirō Honda

2011-12-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

Burned into my childhood memories forever, thanks to WWOR channel nine's annual monkey day in the seventies and early eighties, and my mom's insistance in parroting every one of Linda Miller's lines as obnoxiously overdubbed by what sounds like Glinda the Good Witch on a sherm-blowing PCP bender(and my old man yelling at the screen from his couch,"Look at that!Goddamned fake shit!"), tonight's Japanese/American co-production is faketastic rubbery kaiju goodness from Eiji Tsuburaya, the gent behind the mint miniatures mauled medium-style by Gojira and countless other suitmated beasts, and the folks who gave us stop-motion classics like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus is Coming to Town.Sure, the shoddy Kong suit makes Willis O'Brien's 1933 stop-motion simian look like state of the art cgi, but as a little boy, this was must-see tv whenever it aired, no apologies to NBC'S Thursday night lineup in the nineties.Besides American model Miller's butterscotch locks and miniskirted gams on display, there's also Japanese dish Mie Hama, who appeared in King Kong vs. Godzilla five years earlier, as well as a turn as "Kissy" in the Bond film, You Only Live Twice(1967).Add to the mix long time television staple, Rhodes Reason, and Hideyo Amamoto(who goes by Eisei here) as Dr. Hu, the bad guy with even worse teeth, and you've got yourself a pretty good time in front of you.Coincidentally, Amamoto was dubbed by American voice actor, Paul Frees, who voiced Boo-Berry in the monster cereal commercials(second to Frankenberry, says I), among thousands of other credits.Onwards!

"A broken jaw-piece and a yap fulla soap suds?!!I'd like to see you try, motherfucker."
Carl Nelson(Rhodes Reason), commander of the UN submarine Explorer, is forced to stop off at Mondo Island when an underwater rock slide kiboshes the sub's engines while it searches for oil.Accompanying Commander Nelson are his XO, Jiro(Akira Takarada), and ship's nurse/gams, Susan Watson(Linda Miller).Nelson, a long standing "Kong" legend buff, doesn't have to wait too long to glimpse the massive simian, as he witnesses Kong square off against Gorosaurus with Lt. Watson daintily placed in a high tree as the grand prize.The apex ape makes short work of the dinosaur, snapping its jawbone and leaving it to lifelessly billow soap suds on the jungle floor.Kong instantly digs the blonde and understands her perfectly, so long as she speaks verrrry sloooooooowwwwly as she shouts condescendingly at him.Enter Dr. Hu(Eisei Amamoto), who's set up an arctic base around a huge deposit of lucratively destructive 'Element X', in between brushing his rotten teeth with candy, apparently.He's aided by Madame Piranha(Mie Hama), his liason with an unnamed nation that finds the concept of owning all the Element X a very sexy one, indeed.Hu has built a giant mechanical ape off of Nelson's stolen diagram to dig through the ice and snow and retrieve the mystery element, that somewhat resembles flashing lucite, but exposure to X short circuits the metal monster, and leaves Hu's designs dead in the water.Piranha is perturbed that the doctor has wasted resources from her anonymous country on metal monkeys(a crane might have done the trick instead), that is, until the dastardly duo hears news of Nelson's brush with the real deal on Mondo via press conference.

"Happiness I cannot feel and love to me is so unreal!" exclaims Dr. Hu(Eisei Amamoto).
As part of Hu's despicable plan b, he goes ashore on Mondo, puts hot lead in the labonza of an elderly native(read:Japanese painted orange), slips Kong a roofie, and kidnaps the ape to mine the ore out of the ice for him, through the power of hypno-lights.As insurance, he also kidnaps Nelson, Jiro, and Susan and throws them in a sub-zero dungeon until the blonde agrees to force the ape to dig with annoyingly slow shouting.Kong escapes the doctor's evil clutches and swims to Japan, while Piranha uses her groovy wardrobe to put the moves on Nelson, later helping he and his friends to escape, and catching a hot lead beatdown from Dr. Hu as a result.Hu sends his repaired Mechani-Kong to Japan to square off against the real deal in Tokyo, with Lt. Watson in tow as the two behemoths climb the side of the massive Tokyo Tower, where Kong sends his metal twin groundward with a well-placed kick in the chops, smashing the robot to pieces on the street below.Hu, realizing he's failed again, tries making a break for it, but Watson shoutingly convinces Kong to chase after Hu's ship, and, with percious little effort from the oversized gorilla, sink it in the harbor where it floats.Having had enough of what we humans foolhardily call "civilization", Kong swims back to Mondo Island as the protagonists watch from the distance, giving Watson the opportunity to annoyingly shout the ape's name several more times before the end credits roll.

"Just put your hand on it before you go below, is all I'm asking here."
The late yuck-mouthed Amamoto appeared in several kaiju films, from Matango and Atragon in 1963, Dagora the Space Monster(1964), Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster(1964), Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster(1966), and Godzilla's Revenge(1969), to his final appearance in Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack(2001), before passing away in 2003.Director Honda sat in the chair for most of the genre's entries during the fifties and sixties, most notably Godzilla(1954), Rodan(1956), Mothra(1961), King Kong vs. Godzilla(1962), War of the Gargantuas(1968), Destroy All Monsters(1968), and Terror of Mechagodzilla(1975), though he arguably helmed 'em all, or at least, any worth seeing.Linda Miller would turn up the following year in The Green Slime(1968), and work with exploitation king Ron Ormond in the curiously named If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?(1971), an anti-communist, pro-fundamentalist rarity that I'm gonna have to snag a copy of, one of these days, dammit.Hama, the first Asian Bond girl, known as "the Japanese Brigitte Bardot", also bared it all in a Bond pictorial for Playboy in 1967.Toho studios would revisit their terrible Kong suit in 1974 tv show, Go!Greenman, as they did with many movie costumes that had become dilapidated with age, but fearing lawsuits due to expired licensing rights, called him "Gorilla" in the three episodes he appeared in.On the scale, Escapes earns a modest two Wop score, but is a lot more fun to watch than that, really, especially if you're in an altered state.Worth a look.

"Mechani-keezy up in da heezy fo' reezy.Whut uuuuup, bitches!"

"Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan"(1989)d/Rob Hedden

2011-12-07T03:59:00.000-08:00

One time, back in 1982, my old man, overcome by anxiety and frustration, attempted a U-turn on the lower level of the George Washington bridge while driving us to a Tigers-Yankees game and somehow managed to get the car trapped on the shuddering concrete divider as bumper-to-bumper traffic pinned us there for almost two hours.My buddies giggled from the back seat as a steady deluge of racial epithets and vulgarities flowed out of my dad's mouth as the flash of non-courteous headlights shot past the '79 Impala windows, cracked open just wide enough to fill the Chevy with the stench of the Harlem River outside.Me, I just sat up front, pushing all of his buttons and whipping him into a snarling frenzy like some cornered Mediterranean wolverine facing the electric flash of an impending cattle prod until he finally managed to scrape down on the right side of the bridge.Adding insult to injury, we missed Detroit ace Jack Morris' start by one day in the rotation, leaving me to scream insults and abuse down at Howard Johnson from behind third base as the Tigers got whooped.It wouldn't be until eight years or so later that something New York-related left an even worse taste in my mouth, with the inevitable vhs rental(I'd stopped wasting money seeing them in the movies three sequels back) of tonight's legendarily lousy mess.
Let's give director Rob Hedden an iota of credit here, it's no easy task to craft a logic-oblivious, discontinuous, unintentionally hilarious cakehole as lame as this, the least successful(and least popular) of the series, is.Horror websites have been teeing off on this joke for years about its misleading title, which, for all intents and purposes should probably be called "Friday the 13th Pt. VIII:Jason Takes Manhattan, if by 'Manhattan' you mean 'Vancouver, Canada', and the word 'Takes' signifies 'spending twenty or so uninspired minutes in'", and then Hedden could at least boast of a film title that rivals the length of earlier cult pioneer Ray Dennis Steckler's "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies"(1968), which, for the record, is a whole lot more fucking fun to watch than this movie, if you're keeping score at home.From Manhattan's apparent nightly release of toxic waste in it's sewer systems(that doesn't explain the giant, mutated albino alligators worth a lick) to getting the side of Jason's face that's deformed wrong, Manhattan's an altogether stale piece of fruit that even the Manson girls couldn't rescue from the grocery dumpster.Forwards!

Townsend did it first, Big J(Kane Hodder).Just sayin'.
When last we left Jason Voorhees(Kane Hodder), he lay dormant at the bottom of Crystal Lake, chained to a massive boulder by a psychokinetic broad's dead father(!).When two sex-minded teens on a boat drop anchor in the lake, it snags an underwater powerline, shocking the big lug back into his usual routine.He scores himself a new hockey mask and dispatches the hormonal couple with a spear gun.The senior class of Lakeview High twenty-somethings just so happens to have their luxury cruise to the Big Apple aboard the SS Lazarus scheduled(are they departing out of Crystal Lake?If that's the case, said lake isn't one by definition, no?), unaware of their homicidal stowaway that's hitched a ride on the anchor below.On deck is a smörgåsbord of unlikable cardboard standees masquerading as human beings; the tight-assed biology teacher, Charles(Peter Mark Richman) and his niece Rennie(Jensen Daggett), who's prone to flashbacks of a sloppily made-up boy drowning from her childhood(Timeline?We don't recognize no stinking timelines!).J.J.(Saffron Henderson) is an embarrassing Joan Jett/Lita Ford reject that gets her domepiece caved in with a flying V axe.Next to eat it, a young boxer relaxing in the ship's sauna room gets a hot sauna rock punched into his chest(liked that).On a roll, Jason de-towels a floozy in the showers then shanks her ass with a piece of broken glass.The captain and his chief engineer soon join the victim ranks, as well as an oriental chick that gets C.T.F.O. on a disco floor and a boy that gets chucked onto a deck post.When he tosses another lad into a control panel, causing a fire that ignites the fuel tanks and blows a sinkhole in the hull of the boat, it's soon to be women and children first, Andrea Doria lifeboat-style.Hey, what about Manhattan, fellas?

"If you're just gonna lay around and get stoned the whole cruise, I'm gonna leave you to it."
Still on the fucking boat, Jason effs with Rennie's throat, involving his murderous mitts, and takes a pen in his eye for the thought.Then, she, the two adult chaperones, the captain's Luke Perry-lite-esque son(Scott Reeves), Julius(V. C. Dupree) the token brothah, two other students and a dog abandon ship(the way I oughta have done, during the opening credits) for a rowboat.Missing his new playthings, Voorhees walks across the ocean-bottom and emerges in the New York harbor just downstream from them, as they arrive themselves, shagged and fagged from half-heartedly selling the row to safety.Two skeevy street rats immediately mug the survivors, kidnapping Rennie and fixing her up with some tar in a back alley, as if her weekend wasn't bad enough already.Jason shows up on the scene and dispatches the gangbangers with a discarded works and a well-placed faceplant into a pipe.After chasing Julius onto a rooftop, our gruesome goalie allows the aspiring boxer to wear himself out, repeatedly jabbing and uppercutting the killer until he returns a single blow, knocking his head off his shoulders.The unlikely high schoolers are reunited, flagging down a cop who Jason gets rid of, off-camera, while the group discovers Julius' head in the police cruiser.Rennie, all banged out on junk, takes the wheel and drives over Voorhees and directly into a brick wall, killing Colleen, the other chaperone, when the wreck explodes.The opiates cause Rennie to recall why she's been having visions of Jason in the first place:Uncle Charlie threw her into Crystal Lake as a little girl in a lugheaded attempt to teach her to swim, where she first encountered the drowned tard, somehow.Jason flips the teacher ass-side up and dunks him in an open barrel of toxic waste.Goalie-puss pursues Rennie and Sean(the captain's son)onto the subway, where the young man manages to electrocute the brute on the third rail.They emerge in Times Square, where Jason smashes some punks n' skins' ghettoblaster, lifting his mask and scaring them off with his fucked up grill when they get the notion to ratpack him.The teens(ahem) eventually end up in the sewer system, where they're informed that toxic waste is flushed through nightly at midnight(!!) by a worker that Jason does away with, moments later.The corrosive fluid rapidly eats through the cheap latex comprising Jason's costume, leaving the drowned sped in his swimtrunks in its wake, inexplicably.The teens emerge from the sewers into a new day, and join back up with their dog.I'm not even kidding.

Obviously, these young scenesters never saw Joey without his Ramone wig before.
Leonard Maltin once called this one the "highlight" of the series, proving once again that mainstream Hollywood propagandists like Maltie should probably steer clear of genres they don't understand, like horror, and stick to snooze-worthy drama instead.The potential was definitely present to create an original and entertaining sequel here: a hulking, deformed, serial killing zombie in a goalie mask terrorizing a bustling, metropolitan hub that's almost too self-absorbed to notice him in the first place.Jason interacting with Wall St. investors, gangbangers, homeless bums, arabic cab drivers?Endless possibilities presented themselves, and instead we get a brief, unrealistic visit to a make-believe Big Apple where industrial barrels of toxic waste are stored(open, mind you) in alleyways.On top of that, you've got a bad script, embarrassing makeup effects(in the climax, Jason kinda looks like a Yuckmouth muppet), uninventive kills(for the most part, I dug the sauna rock and the guitar, for what that's worth), and a cast of characters I didn't give a Wednesday night three-pump suzie about.An insult to fans of the series and horror proponents everywhere, Manhattan manages to whiff at the plate, securing not one single blessed Wop to call it's own.Garbage like this should be avoided, at all costs.Almost worse than Waterworld.

Jason is surprised by a billboard that isn't defaced by illegible graffiti tags.

Benvenuto a dicembre!

2011-12-05T23:11:00.000-08:00

Bet your ass I wouldn't return presents like these for the cash.

'Twas X-Mas month at Wop's pleasure palace,
and Doc was still salty that the Lions whooped Dallas.
Tatted brunettes tongued earlobe, their massive busoms all bare
as they ran fingers through his scalp, unburdoned by hair

Woprophiles were nestled in front of the 50 inch plasma
since Hollywood remakes left them breathing miasma
And mama in her knickers, and I in the buff,
tried watching Rob Zombie's latest, so bad, it was tough.

When out in the alley there arose such charivari,
wafting in through the window like fried calamari.
Away to the front door I sprung like a Kenyan in joggers,
to see who fate had added to our genre film bloggers.

Self-proclaimed horror queens did battle in mud,
to live hardcore music played by Blood for Blood.
When, what appeared in this, unlikeliest of sectors
But a Roman chariot, pulled by horses named after directors.

With an Italian on the reins, so dashing and witty,
he puffed on a Newport and squeezed one girl's D titty.
More rapid than Makos his coursers they came,
And he cursed, obscene gestured, and called them by name!

"Now Argento! Now, Fulci! Now, Soavi ...Henenlotter!
Eh, Franco! Eh, Jodorowsky! On Meyer and Waters!
To the top of 8th Ave! To the late Forty-deuce!
Now dash away! Dash away! Let's all get loose!"

They popped outta sight like one a' Frigga's oculars
'cept for Wop's junk which intrigued bitches spied via binoculars.
So up to the house-top the nutters they flew,
With the chariot full of reviews, and Ol' Wopifex too.

Invite me to your big hoity-toity holiday feast, c'mon, you know you wanna!(Seriously though, don't.)

On the roof of the building a clatter arose
as neighborhood sex kittens all stripped off their clothes
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
The back door came unhinged and in Wop came with a bound.

He was dressed like a praetorian, from proud head down to foot,
And his toga was all tarnished with resin and soot.
A bundle of reviews he had flung on his back,
a righteous cult peddler, in Doc Martens of black.

His eyes-batshit crazy! His dimples, adorable!
His temples inked up, Roman nose unignorable!
His signature smirk was drawn up like a dandy,
And on the goat on his chin was some choice nostril candy.

The carb of a glass piece he covered with thumb,
inhaling a cloud that made his brain numb.
Despite being stoned, a true word virtuoso,
with a chin of Fascism just like ol' Emme Rosso!

A writer, a devil, or a violent-prone thug,
Made more capricious by constant intake of drugs!
His fist in my eye and a butt from his head,
Soon gave me to know I had to shave off my gay dreads.

He took note of the big screen and it's current state of duress,
"What this shindig could use is some classic Dave Hess!"
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
while inhaling a shneezer, his toga impressively rose!

He sprang to his chariot, to his crew gave a whistle,
And away they all grooved to Dippy's Epistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
"They say I'm the best, and those fuckers are right!!!"

"Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell"(1974)d/Terence Fisher

2011-11-29T23:10:00.000-08:00

We'll close out November tonight by taking a closer look at director Terence Fisher's final effort, the sixth in Hammer's Frankenstein series and fifth and final appearance by the iconic Peter Cushing as the Baron.As such, it's a steadfast effort from a studio on the wane from its former genre success, so long as you can get around the absolutely lamentable creature makeup work from Eddie Knight, which kinda resembles an old Sicilian woman's grill slapped on top of a rubbery caveman jumpsuit.You gotta feel bad for poor David "Darth Vader" Prowse under all that bad latex, his second go as Frankenstein's monster for Hammer, 1970's Horror of, being his initial appearance.On the positive side, you've got the rare beauty of a mostly silent Madeline Smith to dress up your frame, and an emasciated-looking Peter Cushing rocking one of the more embarrassing dandy wigs ever committed to celluloid, truly a rupture-inducing blow to cinematic masculinity if ever there was such a thing.Watching him leap on Prowse's back the first time, I was pretty sure the wind might have taken him before he touched down.All joking aside, apart from the unfortunate makeup effects, the movie is actually pretty estimable, unique and atypical from the other series entries, with solid performances from Cushing, BBC staple John Stratton, Smith, Patrick "Second Doctor" Troughton as a bodysnatcher(!) with a taste for schnapps, and Shane Briant as Victor's unscrupulous young understudy.Fisher, who helmed all but two of the Frankenstein series for the studio, shrouds the film in a gothic and lugubrious tone, with more claret-splatter than the earlier productions(and even a few laughably out-of-scale miniatures).All-in-all, a fitting send off for Hammer(who would barely produce a genre ripple in the pond from here on out), the franchise(despite the painfully miserable pittance afforded to the budget), and the director, whose stringent framing and vigorous edits are on display for the last time.Onward!

I'd need hosing down, too, if I had to share the nuthouse with Madeline Smith.
A constable investigating the criminal enterprises of a shaky graverobber(Patrick Troughton) is lead to the quarters of one Simon Helder(Shane Briant), a young surgeon who's been unsuccessfully recreating the ungodly experiments of Baron Frankenstein.When the court sentences him to five years in the same insane asylum that once housed his mad inspiration, he's not exactly troubled by the concept.And when the asylum director's(John Stratton) two thuggish orderlies welcome him with continuous blasts from a power hose, he's rescued by Doctor Victor(Peter Cushing), the resident surgeon, who Helder immediately recognizes as Frankenstein himself.It seems the Baron has been blackmailing the perfidious director for a priviledged stay that includes the same uninterrupted forays into the scientific unknown that bought him the imprisonment in the first place.When Victor hears of Helder's admiration and surgical skills, the young man is quickly implanted as his personal assistant, making rounds to all the resident lunatics and even lending his steady hand in surgery, due to Frankenstein's burn-scarred mitts, replacing Sarah(Madeline Smith), the beautiful mute girl that most of the inmates are enamored with, and refer to as "The Angel".Helder doesn't take long to uncover the Baron's secret work, a pet project involving a homicidal prisoner named Schneider(David Prowse) who fancies jabbing people in the face with shards of broken glass(!), and whose bone-breaking suicide jump from a high window was thwarted by Frankenstein, who's been adding body parts to the hulking eyeless psychopath while subtracting them from previously living inmates, like a harmless old sculptor's(Bernard "M from the Bond movies" Lee) hands.The understudy improves upon Sarah's amateur stitch-job, unaware of the lengths Victor has gone and will go to see his work to come to fruition.

"Does Victor Frankenstein(Peter Cushing) have to look directly into the camera, Richard Dreyfuss-style, while wearing a dandy wig...well, does he?!!"
Before too long, the men are giving the brutish creature new eyes, and after Victor drives the resident mathematical genius/violinist,Professor Durendel(Charles Lloyd-Pack), to hang himself in his cell with his own violin strings, a new brain.Frankenstein coldly discards Herr Schneider's old grey matter, clumsily kicking it across the floor after stepping on it(!!).The creature, implanted with a new intellect, has little use for his fiddle and abruptly smashes it to pieces, but instantly recognizes his Angel, who's been assisting all along.The Baron becomes increasingly frustrated by the disdain his patchwork creation shows for the lessons he imposes upon it, treating it less like a human being than a disobedient pet, rushing to tranquilize the thing the instant it trashes equipment or picks up a broken glass container, lapsing into the original fiend it was built from.Victor tells Helder the unfortunate incidents surrounding Durendel's violent outbursts, which stemmed from bursting in on the director as he molested Sarah, the knowledge of such events the foundation for Frankenstein's blackmail plot.With Durendel's brain inside the bulky neanderthal frame, the creature turns again to bloody vengeance, wounding Victor during his escape, and finally throat-shanking the perverted director with a broken bottle the way he always wanted to.With the entire asylum in an uproar as the misshapen monster digs up the fresh graves in the graveyard outside, Sarah breaks her film-long silence as the orderlies fill the thing's belly with hot lead before the other inmates tear it asunder amidst screams and laughter.Though Helder is shaken by the turn of events and the duo's failure, Frankenstein optimistically suggests that they will persevere and carry on their experiments, regardless of this blood-soaked setback.I love happy endings.

Mitt-less in a pine box, too ignominious of an end for me, personally.
To Fisher's credentials, you'll find his name in the directorial credits of all the finest Hammer genre movies ever produced:Horror of Dracula(1958), Curse of Frankenstein(1957), Revenge of Frankenstein(1958), The Mummy(1959), The Hound of the Baskervilles(1959), The Brides of Dracula(1960), Curse of the Werewolf(1961), Phantom of the Opera(1962), The Gorgon(1964), Dracula:Prince of Darkness(1966), Frankenstein Created Woman(1967), The Devil Rides Out(1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed(1969), and tonight's entry.Cushing, who worked with Fisher no less than fourteen times(a distant second place to Tim Burton and Johnny Depp...why don't you guys marry each other already) in his long and prestigious acting career that dated back to 1939(!), has to be firmly cemented into any self-respecting horror nut's all-time top five actors, period.Smith, who you might remember as Sean Connery's Italian bed decoration in Live and Let Die(1973), has an impressive genre resume herself, appearing in movies like Taste the Blood of Dracula(1970), The Vampire Lovers(1970), and Theater of Blood(1973).On the scale, Monster From Hell checks in with two respectable bigguns, an entertaining epitaph, indeed.Recommended.

"Does the Frankenstein monster(David Prowse) have to shank a loonie in the labonza with a broken bottle...Does he?!!"

R.I.P. Ken Russell

2011-11-28T06:42:00.000-08:00

3 July 1927 – 27 November 2011