Super Movies! The one with zombies on a plane and aliens in New York

 

Title: Heavy Metal

What Year?: 1981

Classification: Improbable Experiment/ Mashup/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

With this review, I’m getting to one that has felt simply inevitable. It’s a film that by my normal standards would be set aside simply because of its own success. It was well-reviewed and profitable in its own time; continually available and well-known on home video formats; and above all enduring and influential in multiple genres. Still, I have thought on and off of covering it in one of my features, particularly for the Revenant Review, but as with Creepshow, I was never satisfied it fit in there. So, I am once again turning to this feature, and I had to remind myself after that it was in fact based on a comic all along, albeit one very far from the usual comic book fare. Here at last is Heavy Metal, an animated film made from a pioneering American comic publications aimed at adults.

Our story begins with a father returning home in a 1950s muscle car launched from a space shuttle without further explanation. Unfortunately, an artifact he has brought home to his daughter turns out to be the Loc Nar, a malevolent supernatural orb representing the sum of all evils. The orb disintegrates him, then corners the kid, who is tormented with visions of others who have encountered it through time and space. We meet a cab driver who rescues a damsel from a gangster after the orb; a traveler from Earth who gets caught on a swords-and-sorcery world where two rulers fight control over the object; a renegade space captain whose trial goes awry; a stricken bomber infested by the undead; and a romance between an Earthwoman and a robot. Then we see a world where the orb unleashes a horde of irradiated barbarians on a peace-loving city, leaving the last of a race of warriors to avenge the fallen. It will all end with the confrontation between the Loc Nar and the child, and can innocence prevail over evil?

Heavy Metal was a 1981 animated film produced by Ivan Reitman based on the magazine of the same name. It was among the first animated film to be rated R, ending a period when even animated films with significant nudity and/ or violence were usually rated PG (see Allegro Non Troppo), though Fritz the Cat had received an X rating in 1972. The movie had a range of high-profile talent, including stories from Alien creator Dan O’Bannon (see Dark Star), voice acting by John Candy, Eugene Levy and Harold Ramis, and a score composed by Elmer Bernstein (see… An American Werewolf In London?). Veteran Percy Rodriguez (see… Galaxina???) voiced the Loc Nar without credit. Two of the major characters, Den and Lincoln Sterrn, had appeared in both Heavy Metal and other publications. The film had a budget of $9 million, possibly the highest for an animated film before Disney’s $44M The Black Cauldron in 1985. Unlike the latter film, it was an unquestioned box office success, with a box office of $20.1M.

For my experiences, this is one of those movies that is like an “ex” you never quite break up with. I’ve rented it on tape, bought it on used DVD, watched it on streaming, and most recently bought new on Blu Ray, and I still have trouble saying just how I feel about it. Of course, it is very historically important. Obviously, the animation is great, among other things. The sci fi/ fantasy is very high grade, augmented by a high-energy vibe and sheer audacity. The soundtrack is top-notch, with excellent orchestral music as well as a wide assortment of ‘70s/ 80s rock. Still, it has never quite connected with me on the level it clearly does for others, and I can’t quite say why. Many aspects of the animation (especially, and politely, the female characters) are awkward or entirely grotesque. Most of the storylines feel condensed and oddly stylized. Most fundamentally, there’s just not much we haven’t seen done as well or better, and not just in later adult-oriented animation that it laid the way for, but in earlier cartoons and comics like Wizards, Watership Down, and even the original Marvel Star Wars comic.

For the movie’s better points, one need look no further than my two favorite segments, “Sternn” and “B-17”, shown back to back as the third and fourth of six major storylines. The first of the two starts with an establishing shot of a space station, followed by a scrawny guy finding the Loc Nar as a small marble, which so far has been lethal on contact. The story then jumps to the courtroom, where the title character Lincoln Sternn is listening to the long list of charges against him. It’s a perfect skewering of the long tradition of the romantic rogue. Just as intriguing is the view of the courtroom, an assortment of aliens, robots and other misfits that are neither wholly realistic not openly comical. It makes me think of nothing so much as the art of Gahan Wilson, which I was introduced through in kid-friendly publications before learning of the full and raunchy extent of his work. There’s funny dialogue between Sterrn and his lawyer as the wimp takes the stand, still fidgeting with the orb, and then it all unravels. In the second segment, we see the bomber savaging and being savaged as the crew drop their bombs. As the surviving crew assess the damage, the Loc Nar arrives, and the tight, machined spaces of the plane become a deathtrap, with one brief outside view that is as horrific as the ghouls themselves.

The “other side” of this is that there are many times when the discerning genre buff will notice the movie drawing on sources much older than itself. This is most blatant in the Den segment, by my assessment the weakest, openly based on Burroughs’ John Carter saga, by my assessment with a potentially more direct debt to the proto-psychedelic Venusian tales of Leigh Brackett. The old-school approach is also very much in evidence, albeit very effective, in the Lincoln Sternn and opening Harry Canyon segments, which I find about right for the fiction of Henry Kuttner or C.M. Kornbluth. When we get to Tarrna, the final segment, the feel is like a cross between a Robert E. Howard tale, a spaghetti western and a zombie movie, with more than a hint of the much-ridiculed “space western” sci-fi subgenre. One more comparison I can’t shake, especially for the fifth segment I haven’t commented on, is the very underrated fiction of Ron Goulart, who was writing genre pastiche/ parodies throughout the proceeding decade. These tributes supply many of the movie’s best moments, but they quickly wear down its reputation as being bold or innovative for its own or any other time.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and the one that has stayed with me is from the Tarrna sequence. In the most obvious of many western references, the Terakian warrior (in my opinion the only woman in the whole movie portrayed realistically enough to be attractive) finds several of the bat-creatures used by the barbarians hitched outside the space saloon. She then witnesses one of the green-skinned goons pummel another patron just outside. The music, an incongruous number I picked out in Sky High (maybe… probably), gets louder as she enters. We then get a look at the band onstage, an assortment of robots and/or cyborgs that in some cases seem fused with their instruments. She orders a flask at the counter and takes a seat by herself. She quickly attracts the attention of the barbarians, who close in. When they go through the motions of hitting on her, she undoes a fastening on the scabbard of her sword, captured in closeup like many gestures through the movie. When the barbarians persist, she finally strikes. The music not only stops, but we see a blindfolded cyborg uncover his eyes to see what’s happening. It’s tense, nuanced and low key, at least as effective as the stylized combat that follows, exactly the kind of moment that works well enough to forget the movie’s ample flaws.

In closing, I am going to give an anecdote of just how far this movie creeps into the mind without you really thinking about it (see also my Transformers review). In later 2019 or early 2020, I was on a bus to work when I tried listening to “The Mob Rules”, a song I had figured out was used for the destruction of the city in “Tarrna”. In the midst of it, I looked around, and realized that there was somebody on the bus carrying/ guarding a quite large television set. It was a strange sight, even for a 20-year veteran of the public transportation system, the kind of thing you would expect to see in footage from a disaster area or a war zone rather than in broad daylight major metropolitan area. (The thought of taking a picture got as far as “Hell, NO”; as I said I’m a veteran.) With the lyrics of the song playing, it was downright eerie, enough to get me thinking about the movie, and start the further train of thought that the apocalypse doesn’t have to start with a horde of barbarians or a plague of zombies. It’s experiences like this that keep a wildly self-dating movie like this relevant and thought-provoking long after you’ve seen it. And with that, I’m done.

Rogues' Roundup: Sidekick Carl and friends (and enemies)

 

Over the last few months, I've been doing a lot more with the action figures I actually played with the toys I actually played with as a kid. As previously seen, the stars of my playtimes were Husky and Sidekick Carl, first seen in the original Roundup. We've also met some of the the rogues' gallery that built up in their adventures, like generic Godzilla, the big red Robotech guy, the mystery Cylon wrestler and the Toxo Warriors. This time, I'm going to give a more comprehensive lineup of my toy shared universe and just how wonky it was. To start with, here's their arch enemy, played by Bossk, with some of his minions.

Per my mythos, the character Bossk represented was the Master Mutant. As far as I can recall, he was created in the same top secret project or toxic waste spill that gave Husky his super powers. He could create other mutants at will, and also had the ability to turn into a puddle of ooze when defeated. Of course, his goons were other Star Wars aliens that I cycled through. I'm sure the group shown here were the ones I used most frequently. One extra memory is that the Hammerhead (second from left) was the last original Star Wars figure I got on card, as a prize in school in either 1986 or 1987. Of course, I didn't quite understand at that point that the Kenner line had ended in the first place, so I didn't see it as a big deal, particularly since this wasn't even the last time I saw a packaged figure in the wild.

Because economy was always a driving factor, the next most featured villain was a super villain named Dr. Hydro, who actually created Carl. The figure I used for him was a mixed and matched GI Joe figure long since lost, made mainly from the second incarnation of Deep Six and the Toxo Viper. In practice, he was the same as the Master Mutant, except his deal was to make robots instead of monsters. I did get some variety with those. The Star Wars stormtroopers turned up regularly, and I'm sure I used Transformers and other bots. But most of his minions were various Cobra Vipers, as I had decided that anyone with a mask could be a robot in a pinch. Alas, most of the ones I still have around have long since succumbed to rubber band rot. Here's a lineup of the ones that are relatively intact, including a very late Flak Viper.

Then there were the Playmobil figures, already represented by the Toxo Warriors and in the girl action figure special. They typically showed up as bystanders and generic goons, but several developed into  leading villains. The one that hit the big time was a character called the Black Raven, I think the third most frequently featured villain. What stands out in hindsight was that I only used a Playmobil figure because I had nothing like what he was supposed to be, a sort of human/ bird hybrid monster. Despite that either lazy or breathtakingly imaginative measure, I still customized a figure to represent him by putting a black hair piece on a black body. Here he is, along with a pair of evil clowns who appeared once or twice.

As mentioned in the girls' special, the Playmobil figures weren't all bad guys. They were my go-to for any female character, which came to include a daughter who tagged along with Husky once in a while. Then there was a time-travelling knight who was kind of neutral, plus a motorcycle cop and a Wild West sheriff I had too long not to have appeared. I recall there was also a recurring character who was a kind of rebel or secret agent in a dictatorship that I think one of the mutants had set up. It's one of a number of things I now find amazing. Here's a lineup of the good guys.

Inevitably, there were times when I used a lot less imposing toys. Here's a lineup of probably the lamest toys I used for "lead" villains that I can still find.

For what I can remember of the back stories, the guy on the right (a Panosh Place Combat Commando last seen on Mystery Monday) was supposed to be a renegade military officer, which at least fit what he looks like. The one on the left is a Lego Fabuland figure, which I probably still have more of in one place or another. To my recollection, she was supposed to be a mutant minion who set out on her own. I called her Audrey, and I liked her well enough that I'm pretty sure I brought her back a few times. The middle one, I can't quite explain. Yes, that's Donald Duck, riding what I understand is supposed to be a float. To me, however, he was an alien with a machine that could control gravity. (I know I did read an old Avengers comic with Graviton.) As you are probably deducing, such transformations were fairly typical for me. My pick for weirdest of all was an ancient Fisher Price Big Bird figure I couldn't find on short notice, which I turned into an interdimensional god-powered entity. In my defense, the thing was so worn out that the eyes turned red, which genuinely freaked kid me out. I had no trouble finding pictures of the same figure, but still none that looked the same way.

Finally, here's a lineup with the big red guy, now with a weapon I rediscovered that I modified for his hand. How could swords and giant robots ever go out of style?

That's all for now, more to come!

Revenge of the Revenant Review 20: The one made from actual found footage

 

Title: Hell of the Living Dead aka Night of the Zombies, Virus, Zombie Creeping Flesh, etc.

What Year?: 1980 (Spanish release)/ 1983 (US release)

Classification: Ripoff/ Evil Twin/ Unnatural Experiment

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I’m back with one more entry for this feature before the end of my monthly obsessive cycle. Because irony is dead, it happens that last time, I reviewed Hard Rock Zombies and ended ranting that it was the worst movie I had covered here, while alluding to the possibility that there might be worse to come. Now, the time is here, as it turned out that the one I really had in mind was already incoming, and there was no way I was going to wait to get it out of the way. So here is Hell of the Living Dead, the one movie that could break the rating scale just for being bad.

Our story begins in a nuclear power plant when an inspection finds a rat, literally. Somehow, the irradiated rodent kills and zombifies the workers who discover it, unleashing an outbreak that quickly wipes out the crew. We then jump to a group of radicals trying to stop abuse of the island nation’s native population, and a SWAT-style team that promptly wipes them out. For reasons that definitely aren’t worth trying to sort out, the same team end up escorting a pair of reporters who have been caught in the spreading epidemic. The pair turn out to be a cameraman with a suicidal dedication to his craft and an enlightened lady who knows from long experience that she can make friends with the natives by taking her clothes off. The adventure takes them through a landscape of jungle stock footage and lame anthropological films that will end back at the plant, where all will be revealed… and if you can figure out any of it, you have missed the point.

Hell of the Living Dead was a Spanish/ Italian coproduction (see City of the Walking Dead and Horror Express) directed by Bruno Mattei. The film starred Italian actress/ model Margit Evelyn Newton as the reporter/ anthropologist Lia, with a supporting cast that include Jose Lluis Fonoll of Wheels on Meals. The movie was filmed mainly in Spain, with extensive use of stock footage to represent its stated setting of New Guinea. The score was credited to Goblin, fresh off Dawn of the Dead; the music is believed to have been in fact reused from that and the horror/ sci fi film Alien Contamination. It was first released in Spain in late 1981 and in Italy the following year. Hell of the Living Dead appears to be a direct translation of its Italian title, while English reference works like The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia more often refer to it as Night of the Zombies; its additional title Virus is the same as a better-known Japanese film also from 1980. The movie is mentioned by Max Brooks in Closure, Limited as an inspiration for his zombie series.

For my personal experiences, I didn’t really catch wind of this one until I read Max Brooks’ citation, though I figured out very quickly that I had heard of it previously. I looked it up not long after, and found it largely interchangeable with other movies that are no better or worse. The one thing that made it memorable at all was its completely surreal cannibalization of obviously preexisting footage (apparently mainly from a documentary with the charming title “Island of the Cannibals” filmed in the old, savage days of 1974). I could easily have recognized this as a standard trick of much older jungle movies, such as the semi-lost pornographic film Ngagi which I’ve had a mind to write about since long before anything on this blog. Even so, it stood out to me as exceptional in its brazenness and the strange results. It feels like the cinematic equivalent of a child’s collage, pasted together crudely with limited understanding and a deeper naivete toward the source material. I thought of it on and off in the course of this feature, and finally decided to get to it as I considered a lineup to end it with. I include it not just for its own odd qualities, but as representative of many more I passed over as not good or weird enough to be interesting.

Going back in for this review, the first thing I realized was that the jungle movie footage was the least of this movie’s thefts. Almost from the start, it flatly copies Romero far more blatantly than Zombie/ Zombi 2 ever did, complete with the music and the blue-clad (and blindingly white) commandos. The two together easily supply the best moments of the movie, notably a second-act sequence in an infested plantation house; it feels like watching Dawn of the Dead, until you remember you could be watching Dawn of the Dead. Things get jarring when they get to scenes with the natives, which I realized actually contain a lot less appropriated footage than I thought. That, in turn, means that the filmmakers went to the trouble of building village sets and hiring a substantial number of people of color just to keep up the jungle conceit. The colonial baggage gets heavier with the big “reveal” that the zombies are somehow part of a population control experiment, which might be tolerated as an editorial if anyone had unpacked the racial component of that vintage panic. Then there’s an extra cringe a purportedly unscripted “cringe” moment when a commando starts dancing to “The Old Folks At Home” (aka “Swannee River”), an actual minstrel show standard. Per the lore, it’s a reference to Singing In The Rain, but it’s still the last thing a movie like this needs.

Then, of course, there are the zombies themselves. For anyone as versed in the genre as I am, it would be easy to write off the lot of them. In fact, there are some effective and even creative moments, albeit in proportion to what the law of averages would dictate. For the most part, the revenants are in the no-tech style, except for frequent shots of faces or limbs selectively chewed or rotted away. The best sequence by a wide margin is an early attack where a zombie child lunches his father, actually improving on the Romero scene it obviously imitates. (By comparison, the opening rat attack, with its shades of Dead Alive, is just as well left to the imagination.) There’s several more effective moments in the plantation house, particularly the discovery of an elderly matron and a cat where cats definitely should not be. The finale at the power plant has some more good action/ gore sequences, with the exception of the comically bad death of the main character. Things improve with the inevitable epilogue of zombies on the mainland, ending with an unsettling shot of a pack silently closing in from behind a man as he watches his lady friend get eaten.

In all this, there is truly “one scene” that seemed strangest to me from my previous viewing, a scene that baffles and vexes me even now… and it’s one guy talking. A little past the hour mark, a “native” addresses what appears to be the United Nations, interspersed with random images of tribal life, poverty and civil disorder to represent the “outbreak”. The nearly nonsensical speech is obviously dubbed, in an accent that seems more Midwest than anything else. Given the nature of the rest of the movie, it’s very safe to assume the well-groomed guy in the Black Power hat had no idea he was going to “appear” in this movie. What I can’t figure out is that there’s several establishing shots of the meeting chamber, complete with the flags of different nations at the various seats… and it’s empty. These are the kinds of moments that turn a routine knockoff like this into a surreal spectacle, far more than any of its already egregious violence and gore.

In conclusion, all I can add is that I have given this movie an “unrated” rating simply because if I really rated it by comparison with other movies I have covered in this feature, it simply wouldn’t be here. Even compared to the likes of City of the Walking Dead, this is a low point for the genre, or would be if there weren’t many more that were as bad or worse. What makes it worthy of note, at least as a representative case, is that even at this level, there are sparks of imagination and outright audacity, however unintentionally. This is the true power of the genre for those who love it, that even a very bad zombie movie can still entertain.

Space 1979 Extra: The ripoff of the remake nobody remembers

 

Title: Mighty Peking Man aka Goliathon

What Year?: 1977 (Mandarin language release)/ 1980 (US/ dubbed release)

Classification: Knockoff

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (2/5)

 

In the course of this feature, I have had a fair number of movies that I thought of at the very beginning but took a long time to get to. Some were very hard to obtain, like Silent Running. Some didn’t quite fit in with what I set out to do but eventually found their way in, like Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Then there were ones that I just kept putting off, like The Shape of Things To Come. With this review, I’m finally getting to the one that has waited the longest. As a further milestone, it’s a ripoff/ knockoff of a movie that was notorious enough that I considered it for inclusion in its own right. Here is Mighty Peking Man, a foreign imitation of the 1976 remake of King Kong.

Our story begins with a giant ape-like monster devastating a village. In the aftermath, certain civil and scientific authorities send an expedition to capture the creature, led by an adventurer trying to stay ahead of trouble at home. In the jungles and mountains of mainland Asia, they discover a secluded realm where elephants, tigers and leopards still roam with no fear of man, ruled by a giant called Utam. They also discover a stranded, feralized blonde woman living on friendly terms with the creature and the rest of the fauna, who swings through the trees in a fur bikini that makes Raquel Welch’s in One Million BC look modest but still keeps her legs immaculately smooth. With her help, they lead the giant on a voyage back to civilization, and naturally, a romance blooms between the girl and the adventurer. But those who want to capture the creature plan to make a profit, and the demands of society won’t be any easier for the adventurer than for the jungle woman. When the giant breaks loose, they must choose between saving him or themselves!

Mighty Peking Man was a production of Shaw Brothers, a Hong Kong studio also responsible for funding Inseminoid. While the movie was universally considered a knockoff of Dino Delaurentiis’ 1976 King Kong remake (see also Flash Gordon and… Transformers?), it was also more broadly part of a wave of new interest in the character, arguably beginning with the 1962 Toho production King Kong Vs. Godzilla. The movie was reportedly made for $6 million over a period of 1 year, indicating that the movie was in production and possibly relatively complete by the time Delaurentiis’ film was released. The film starred the late Evelynne Kraft as the jungle woman Samantha and Shaw Bros regular Danny Lee as the adventurer. Assistant director Koichi Kawakita went on to work for Toho on productions such as Gunhed (maybe..,). A version of the film was released in Asian markets by April 1977, reportedly 100 minutes long. A significantly shorter dubbed version was released in the US in 1980 under the title Goliathon. The movie’s rating is sometimes listed as PG-13, which was not introduced until 1985, possibly given during a 1999 rerelease.

For my personal experiences, I find it difficult to separate this movie from the 1976 Kong and especially the very frustrating experience of finding it instead of the original at the ‘90s video store. With two more remakes/ reboots in the rear view mirror and vastly improved access to older movies, the 1976 version is now the one sliding into obscurity, which I no longer consider quite what it deserved. In the midst of this reversal of fortune, it’s been all the more surprising to see the rising profile of Mighty Peking Man, which by now is better liked and conceivably even better known than the remake it imitated. Around the time I thought of this feature, I watched it when it was available for streaming, and it came up a number of times on my preliminary lists. Still, I didn’t get back to it until the present review, after deciding to put together a little additional material before retooling for another phase of the feature, and I still do not quite understand what others have seen in it.

Moving to the movie itself, there is still room for argument about classification. With the facts in order, my assessment is that it is an early example of what would now be called a “mockbuster”, a ripoff/ knockoff intended to hit theaters (or video racks) at about the same time as the property being imitated. As such, it remains solidly in knockoff territory, but can at least be credited with assuming a measure of risk, especially considering how mixed the reception of the actual remake was. This is very much reflected in the design choices of the movie, which in the best knockoff/ runnerup tradition look less like a direct copy than an eccentric reverse engineering. This especially shows in the design of the creature, more like the Brown Gargantua than Kong, which loremasters will recognize as akin to “half ape/ half human” concepts that were considered both for the original King Kong and the ’76 version. There’s a further intriguing twist in the shift to Asia, which could have worked better in a 1930s setting. Then there’s a whole pile of random in the jungle woman, which makes it feel like a copy of the Tarzan movies (also subject of a minor ‘70s revival) as much as Kong.

The cost of these choices is that nobody involved seems to have understood when or how to hold back. To me, the whole thing feels like an over-restored painting, with shading and texture wiped away until only the basic outline and colors remain. The violence is jarring and brutal, with a fair amount of gore and a gratuitous volume of pyrotechnics. The already wobbly proportions of Kong get blown up to kaiju proportions, albeit with some decent and consistent reference shots that put him in the 50-100 foot range. The hubris of Carl Denham is replaced with a caricature of the entitled businessman, while the exploitation of the creature is a literal monster truck rally. The romance is mostly watered down to bad soap opera, though Samantha’s “fish out of water” arc makes for some satisfying moments (especially the fate of the expensive outfit she’s provided with). Then there is the outlandish montage of the pair in the jungle, set to a song so egregiously yet generically 1970s that I literally assumed it had been added as a joke when I saw isolated clips. This sequence also begins the pattern of pushing Utam off camera in his own movie.

For the “one scene”, my choice had to be an early moment between the adventurer and  Samantha. Since it’s obvious she’s not a local, he asks her about her family. She responds to “mamma” and “pappa”, and promptly leads him away. One would expect this to lead to a somber and subdued graveside scene, but anyone familiar with this operation will know subtlety isn’t in their vocabulary. Instead, we get the actual wreckage of a plane, rather inexplicably intact considering it must have been here at least a decade. You might still figure the jungle woman has buried the others, as humans have been doing since Neandertals were still around, but nope, there’s “Mamma” and “Pappa” still in the cockpit. Samantha starts to get distressed, which is genuinely poignant, so of course the scene is interrupted by a flashback of the plane crashing in enough flames to burn a waterpark to the ground. This is the true pinnacle of the Shaw Brothers’ approach to the material, overwrought, overdone, totally nonsensical, yet still impressive.

In closing, I have a little more to say about the rating. With the way I apply my ratings, 2 out of 5 can mean very different things, and it’s pretty much in inverse proportion to the budget. For a big-budget movie with genuine potential like Star Trek The Motion Picture or Superman 3, it’s a harsh indictment; for no-budget messes like Planet of Dinosaurs, it can mean a reprieve for a movie I genuinely enjoy. In this context, Mighty Peking Man falls in the middle. It’s not nearly as bad as many of the movies to receive the rating, but I can’t quite find the “so bad it’s good” spark others find in it. Sure, there’s plenty of good laughs, some of them even intentional. But there’s plenty of other movies in the Kong lineage far more worthy of reappraisal, particularly the 1976 version that inspired it. I would go so far as to recommend the Toho sequel King Kong Escapes over this; at the very least, it at least manages the light-hearted, self-aware approach that most people are really thinking of when talk of “so bad it’s good” comes up. By comparison, this one is strange enough to be interesting, but not nearly enough to be great.

Movie Mania! Lanard Alien/ Predator unboxing update

 

I've been trying out a new format for how often I make posts, and today will be this week's toy blog. This time around, I'll be catching up on a few things I've been running down leads for, as part of the ongoing saga of the Lanard direct-to-Walmart Alien/ Predator line. To start with, here's something I've had backlogged for a little while, an Alien "runner" clearly based on Alien 3.

For the background, this was one of the first of the Lanard line to reappear after the scalpers cleaned out the stores. I came close to passing on it, but decided it was worth picking up. It's a good figure, with joints a lot more solid than the previous, smaller-scale quadrupedal alien. The articulation is still a little random, one of the hind legs is wonky, and it doesn't stand upright. On the other hand, it's almost certainly the biggest alien in the line short of the Queen. The fairly surreal part is that it actually came with the dog (which we now know was a late addition to the movie), which is well-done enough that it wouldn't stand out with anything else. Here's some more pics from the unboxing, taken with my phone, with the Truckstop Queen.

"Who's a good boy, definitely not infected with a parasitoid?"

"And you can play outside..."

The one that turned out to be a lot harder to get was a 7" Predator. For that, I finally gave in and paid off a scalper, for what ended up being about the same price I paid for the 12-inch one minus shipping; I at least managed to cover it all with bonus points. I finally got it over the weekend. Here's some pics.

As will be evident from the photos, this is meant to be the Predator from the second film, complete with the spear and murder-frisbee (see also Krull). His articulation is about the same as the giant-sized figure, and they also share certain defects in the paint which I noticed are left out on the box. It's worth paying extra just to be sure to get the accessories included. Here's more detail pics, including one with the Gas Station Duchess/ Connie.

"Actually, it turns out the ones who hunt are female."

When it was time to do this post, I tried to take some additional pics with my computer; alas, the lighting was off because a dead bulb that definitely wasn't getting fixed in time. I finally tried bringing in an extra light. The results were... different. To start with, here's the first 7" alien, non-threatening as always.

"I demand to speak to your manager!"

Hey, it kind of worked!

"Get along, little dogburster!"

And it wouldn't be complete without a little more drama from Connie...

"Sorry, but fur is murder. And collecting human heads is definitely murder."

"No. Just no... And that reminds me, I have got to give the Rogun Cap Rifle bot my real phone number."

That's all for now, more to come!

Revenge of the Revenant Review 19: The one that started as another movie's joke

 

Title: Hard Rock Zombies

What Year?: 1985

Classification: Unnatural Experiment/ Evil Twin

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

I’m back with another zombie movie review, closer together than they’ve been since I did the first 12 for my “main” list. Because coincidence is a harsh mistress, I have another one I “had” to do, and it’s one that genuinely made me wonder if I was too hard on The Beyond. (No, I wasn’t.) It is one of the strangest I have considered for the feature, with an even stranger production history, but it has the unfortunate further distinction of failing to translate this into a relatively good movie. With that, I present Hard Rock Zombies, a movie where the zombies do indeed rock, but whether they do it hard is open for debate.

Our story begins with a rocker named Jessie and his band that is clearly never getting off the ground on the way to their next gig, despite a warning from a teenish admirer. As it turns out, the townspeople are haters who murder the lot of them, without considering that this is probably doing the artform a favor. However, their admirer Cassie plays a recording at their graves that brings them back to life. Naturally, they take their revenge on their murderers, including  patriarch who turns out to be none other than Hitler. More surprisingly, they still show up to perform for a talent scout. Meanwhile, the Nazis they dispatch come back to life and start munching on townspeople, who are helpless despite (if not because of) advice from several inexplicably well-read experts on the undead. Soon, the zombies are after Cassie, for reasons that are best written off as incoherent. It’s up to Jessie and the band to save her from the disaster they started!

Hard Rock Zombies was directed and cowritten by Krishna Shah, a Bombay-born émigré who worked mainly in TV and documentaries. The film was made in 1983 an expansion of a “movie within a movie” originally filmed for his own film American Drive-In; both were ultimately released in 1985. The role of Jessie was given to E.J. Curse, a bassist for the band Silent Rage. Midget Phil Fondacaro appeared in both Hard Rock Zombies and American Drive-In, with the latter film referencing his role as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi.  The finished film was distributed by the Cannon Group (why do I bother?). It was released on DVD in 2004, by an operation identified as Blue Laser; this version is in “full screen” format and may be a transfer from VHS. As of this writing, it remains available in Netflix’s disc catalog.

For my experiences, I heard of this one from the Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, but didn’t get to it until well within the last 3 or 4 years. In hindsight, a big part of this was that it never felt appealing to me. I was so far out of the ‘80s music scene that I literally hear more of it now than in the actual 1980s, and I still have only ever gotten into a few artists. (The Pretenders and Blondie rule.) As for the zombies, it was clear from casual descriptions that this was the opposite of what I got into the genre for. As I keep saying, the kind of zombie movie I appreciate most are the ones with tight, “traditional” narratives, whereas this one is willful chaos. Once I got a look at it, I quickly concluded that even compared to other movies in this general style, especially Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and the eerily similar Chopper Chicks In Zombietown, this is inferior in both coherence and overall quality, to the point that I debated whether I had finally found a movie “too bad” for this feature. I forged ahead because this is the one that I simply couldn’t leave out, based on oddity alone, and because this is one you simply don’t go through without telling the tale.

To give this movie a proper appraisal, it’s necessary to start with the story and the main characters, which in a movie like this is practically counterintuitive. Plenty has already been said about whether the band qualifies as “hard rock” or for that matter “rock”. For me, it will be sufficient to say that even I can tell their style owes more to the 1970s and even the ‘60s than contemporary “heavy metal”, and I consider this the main reason the music is at least intermittently listenable. (To really understand, you would have to have survived the ‘90s rap craze...) Of the band members, only Jessie really emerges as a character, and he’s likable enough, with his most redeeming quality being his obviously sincere belief in both his own talent and that of his band mates. The conflict set up with the puritanical townsfolk (effectively the same as Chopper Chicks, not that it’s a novelty) is handled effectively enough to root for the band, if only because their act is about as threatening as a pet rock. It’s all the more amusing to see the undead rockers glide through the streets, with more choreographed finesse than we have seen from them on stage. Unfortunately, things take a very bad turn with the relationship between Jessie and Cassie, which in itself could be accepted as Platonic or nearly so, but keeps getting cringier and cringier as his ballade to her is repeated.

On the other side is what always really gets talked about, the zombies and the totally surreal visuals. It is here that the movie has the strongest similarities to Chopper Chicks, and most clearly shows how much that film improved on the premise. What should be most telling here is that, on viewing the film with its history in mind, I had no trouble making several guesses about which scenes were originally in American Drive-In. The slippery slope actually starts with a random murder in the opening scene, by a blonde siren who will account for fewer casualties after she comes back from the dead. Once the Nazis start reanimating, we get a range of strange sight gags and sequences, egregiously a dwarf who literally eats himself. The most unfortunate part is that when played straight, these are grim ghouls with a range of responses, including a bizarre posited fear of the brains of the living that actually allows the townspeople to push them back temporarily. When the story tries to get laughs out of them, things usually go downhill. In many ways, the strangest and most entertaining moments are from the living, notably a talent scout who praises the band after liberal self-medication and a young woman who continues to converse with her boyfriend’s severed head. The most truly surreal character is that of the siren, who spends much of the time dancing in place while mayhem unfolds around her.

For the “one scene”, this is the part where I came closest to giving up entirely. Nonetheless, there was an early sequence that caught my attention, in no small part because it actually advances what plot there is in this movie. While the townspeople are complaining and scheming, we find Jessie alone, grooving with his guitar. All the more surprisingly, he actually sounds pretty good, about right for the edgy side of late ‘60s-early ‘70s rock. While he strums, a tarantula comes along, seemingly drawn by the beat. When it starts to climb on Jessie’s hand, he promptly knocks it aside and squashes it, then resumes playing. Somehow, the music not only reanimates the spider but makes it whole enough to keep coming. This time, Jessie smashes it more gruesomely than before, with no immediate reaction. Before he starts strumming, however, he puts a glass over the creature. As the riffs keep coming, the spider’s legs again begin to move, in a rhythm that could be in time with the elemental chords. It all makes next to no sense, but for this brief moment and a few more like it, the movie works on its own anarchic terms.

In closing, I will not mince words: I consider this absolutely the worst movie I have reviewed for this feature, though I still have one or two under consideration that could give it a run for its money. In fact, the difference in quality compared to other movies is great enough that I considered giving it the “unrated” rating, previously given to Cemetery Man and Dead Alive. What stopped me is that there is little if anything here that can be considered willfully extreme or controversial, as those movies clearly were. That is truly the problem here. Despite some trappings of social commentary, this is a movie that does not offend (at least on purpose) simply because it has no point to make. Even if it is allowed to be no worse as a movie than other films covered here, which I can grant for Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and maybe Video Dead, it would still fall far behind them in effectiveness. If anything, it is the borderline-pretentious self-awareness of the former film that could have pulled this one through. Instead, it lets its potential slip away in a final act that only ramps up the random, right where Chopper Chicks pulls through. As usual, there are still far worse zombie movies out there that were never on my radar for inclusion here, but one would be hard pressed to find one that’s more disappointing.

Space 1979: The one that put Charles Band out of business

 

Title: Robot Jox

What Year?: 1987 (live action filming)/ 1989 (copyright)/ 1990 (US release)

Classification: Runnerup/ Mashup

Rating: Pretty Good! (5/5)

 

At this writing, I’m up to 75 reviews for this feature (or about 101 for my blog), yet another milestone I had considered for ending the whole thing, and I’ve long since planned on something special for this one. And for all the obsessing I usually put into choosing these things, there’s one I’ve had in mind all along. It’s one of the latest of the movies I’ve considered for the feature, yet at the same time one of purest embodiments of what it’s been about all along. Here is Robot Jox, the last film released by one of the most famous/ notorious studios of the 1970s-80s era.

Our story begins with an exposition title crawl, introducing us to a world where war has been replaced by single combat, except as a grim scene that follows reveals, these are not individual warriors but giant machines. We then meet Achilles, champion of an alliance simply called the Market, and his crew, including a veteran fighter named Tex and a scientist referred to as Doc. They prepare for the next match, a fight for Alaska with the rival Confederation’s own hot-headed fighter Alexander. When the match ends inconclusively despite the deaths of a bleacher full of spectators, the crew suspects a spy in their own midst. Meanwhile, a genetically-engineered newcomer named Athena is gunning to take Achilles’ place. But the real bombshell comes when Achilles announces that he is quitting after completing 10 fights, enraging both his fans and Alexander. Will Athena take the field, or will Achilles return for the final fight? Will the traitor be revealed? Will anyone fight by the rules? Do these questions ever need an answer??? Not really, but there will be some twists in the details, which is what movies like this are all about.

Robot Jox was the last major release from Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, the most over-represented crew of chronic offenders on this feature or blog short of Roger Corman and the country of Italy. In fact, the movie was largely completed in 1987, while the officially acknowledged “final” Empire film The Catacombs was filmed the following year. The film was directed by Stuart Gordon from a script by Joe Haldeman, best known for the award-winning ‘70s science fiction novel The Forever War; there were many reported creative differences between the two, with Haldeman favoring a more serious tone. The film starred  Gary Graham as Achilles and Paul Koslo of The Omega Man as Alexander, with Anne-Marie Johnson as Athena. Extensive stop-motion and other effects for the robot battles were provided by David Allen, based on designs from Alien production designer Ron Cobb (see Doctor Mordrid and Dark Star respectively). The movie’s unprecedented $10 million budget contributed to financial problems that ultimately resulted in Empire’s bankruptcy. Because of these and other problems, the movie only received a limited theatrical release in 1990 with a gross of $1.27M, a year after a novelization was released. It became a cult hit on home video, with a Blu Ray release in 2015.

For my experiences, I can just remember being aware of this movie when it came out, including a sighting of the novel. Given my usual pop culture tunnel vision, I never questioned that it had been an outright hit. By the late ‘90s, I picked it up as a video rental, after recognizing Haldeman’s name on the damn thing. At some point, I picked up a VHS tape, and finally bought the Blu Ray when I tried to phase out my tapes a few years pack. Along the way, I have learned a lot more about its history, and the one thing I find truly interesting is that it is and was the kind of movie people tend to assume to be a ripoff/ knockoff when there were really few if any movies like it. It was obviously and admittedly based on animation/ anime like Voltron and Transformers (the movie version of which couldn’t have helped matters), but the conversion to a live-action feature was an honest tribute made well before the West’s on-again-off-again bandwagon started. It can be said to build on The Terminator and other robot and/ or post-apocalyptic movies, but that’s a big tent to build a criticism off of. What I really find it closest to is Total Recall, though I can’t exactly say why. To me, the two “feel” like spiritual kindred, even if they differ in most ways one could list off, and that’s enough for me to put this in the “runnerup” category.

As for the movie itself, almost anything I can say is positive. The acting is decent, the dialogue is good, the music is pitch perfect and the effects are among the best of the very best. What’s important is that the movie fleshes out its characters and their assumed world, warts and all. (In that, at least, it can certainly be compared to Total Recall.) It is worth particular note that we never see much of this posited future beyond the duels, yet we still get quite intricate detail out of establishing shots and incidental dialogue. The fans are poor and “gritty”, but still happy to be there. The jocks are as larger-than-life as they are clearly expected to be, with plenty of human failings in the mix. The bots and the facilities that support them are sleek and clean, with an already old-school feel, which I freely admit is pretty close to my own exotroopers. One extra detail I will mention is that the cockpits the jocks are in are quite functional, an issue I was just recently ranting about in one of my toy blogs. They’re no bigger than they need to be to hold a pilot, with a glass framework that actually gives an excellent field of view, and they’re positioned around the center of mass for a good compromise between protection and visibility. It’s exactly the kind of detail far later examples get wrong, I’m sure a part of Cobb’s contribution to the project.

Of course, all of this builds up to the final battle. It’s all wildly over-the-top, complete with a Freudian giant chainsaw. At the same time, it becomes a thought experiment for the premise of gladiatorial combat as a substitute for warfare, and perhaps the whole concept of “rules” of war. There’s also an intriguingly nuanced “slippery slope” in effect. It’s Alexander who obviously goes over the line, starting well before the end; when he really snaps, the surprise is that the referees don’t get hit with the full force of his guns rather than a symbolic stomp. But Achilles and for that matter Athena are clearly on their way down the same curve. As the battle becomes a brawl, there’s a sense of history starting over, inviting the question whether the duels of our myth-shrouded past went out of favor for the same reason. The devolution becomes literal as the combatants reduce each other to hand-to-hand amidst the wreckage of the machines, culminating in the movie’s genuinely poignant final lines.

In all this, you might expect I would be struggling for the “one scene”, and I’ll admit you wouldn’t be wrong. Nevertheless, there was indeed one segment that caught my attention during viewing for this review. As often happens, it’s one of the scenes furthest from the action, as Achilles visits his brother after quitting the games. He’s met at the door by a woman with a child in her arms and another clearly on the way. During casual greetings, she remarks, “We do our part,” and then adds, “With six kids, we get three bedrooms.” As they gather at the table, the phone rings. When the lady answers, we hear a threat against Achilles, to which she responds, “Up yours too.” As she brings dinner to the table, the brother says, “We’ve had a few calls like that.” Then his wife lifts the lid to reveal the meal, enthusiastically endorsed as “real meat!” The scene closes with a brief, pitiful shot before the camera cuts away. It’s our longest and most intriguing glimpse of their day-to-day world, with an unsettling preview of the incoming age of the internet.

In conclusion, all I can say is that this is a movie that’s almost above criticism simply because it is never anything more or less than what it clearly set out to be. Detractors can pick out its flaws from orbit, and usually they’ll be right. But at the end of the day, the objections are like criticizing Reanimator for being too gory, Terrorvision for being too silly or The Day Time Ended for being too much like a bad acid trip. The Band crew’s specialty was following through with an idea, not asking if it was a good one, and this was their masterpiece. It’s all the more fitting that it saw the light of day right when the ‘80s gave way to the ‘90s. Band and his associates would forge on, but their true heyday was done, and the world was poorer for it.

Miniature Giants Part 10: More cowboys!

 

In my latest round of online impulse buys, I was reminded that it had been a while since I checked on Marx figures, with my last acquisition being the Mexican Scooper astronaut figure. I looked up a few things and ended up making a couple purchases. For today, I'm covering the second of these to arrive, two more specimens from the Wild West line. It was a nice acquisition, with a few surprises I'll get to momentarily. As usual, here they are with the Truckstop Queen.

"If you boys are done, I need to pay for my gas."

While this pair came together, the first thing that stands out is that they are quite different, not just in color but in the plastic (already a driving force in my interest in Marx figures). The darker-colored figure was unsurprising, as the plastic was almost exactly the same color and texture of Western figures I had previously obtained and confidently accepted as "original". He was also more roughed up than usual, complete with a very prominent scratch on the face, though nothing seems to have been broken off. One more detail is that they didn't completely sculpt the top of the cowboy hat, presumably because of the usual issues with the molds. Here's a comparison shot of the new arrivals with what I'm satisfied to be a 1960s figure, and a closeup of the old-timer.

"Why so serious?"

The other guy was something different than I had seen before. He's made of a harder plastic with a slightly rough surface, which seems to bring out detail more sharply. It immediately made me think of the Mexican figures, enough that I got somewhat suspicious. However, the figure has the Marx imprint, and I was quickly satisfied that this wasn't quite the same as the "clacky" plastic on the Japanese soldiers. Here's a comparison with the Mexican copy and original rifleman.

And another with the maybe-'70s Indian that started all this; not the same, either.

What this made me think of is the bagged Mexican cowboys and Indians that apparently lasted into the '80s at least. The examples I've seen photographed have figures that are tan and a darker brown or red (something to bear in mind when buying based on online pics), but they would have had either the Plastimarx imprint or the plain "Made In Mexico" sticker. So, the odds are this is a Marx figure, and there were 15 years between the 1964 date for the mold and the 1979 bankruptcy of the company for a figure with a different (and almost certainly cheaper) kind of plastic to have been made. And, as with most of these mysteries, anybody who would have known probably wouldn't have cared. At any rate, here's one more lineup pic with the Ukrainian cowboy thrown in.

While I'm at it, one more shot of the old-timer with the Truckstop Queen plus the Duchess. It the pose was fully upright, he might be as tall as they are.

"Leave the gun at the door, and you can come to my place for coffee..."

And finally, the one you knew was coming...

"That's what you get for showing French films in this town!"

That's all for now, more to come!