Category: 1980s

Ator: The Fighting Eagle (1982)

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Ator, an amazon, and a bear walk into a bar. Is that the opening line to perhaps the greatest joke ever told in the ancient world? Or is it merely one of about fifty great moments in the film biography of the greatest warrior to never have lived?

Let’s let it play out and then make the call. The amazon tries to steal some money for horses and gets into a confrontation with the bar patrons (calling it a bar fight would be much too generous), Ator sees a guy he knows and wanders away, and the bear just continues to eat. So it was both the greatest joke ever and one of Ator’s greatest adventures! Those ancients were tricky devils! Continue reading “Ator: The Fighting Eagle (1982)” →

Nukie (1987)

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For much of Nukie, a tale of a pair of extraterrestrial brothers separated and stranded on Earth, I was convinced what I was seeing was the culmination of days, if not just hours, of work by people who themselves had just landed from another world and had never seen a movie in their life.

While it clearly, desperately wanted to rip off E.T. the Extraterrestrial (there’s a little ugly brown alien with giant eyes just like E.T., but even better, there are two of them!), the film’s seemingly random melange of characters and storylines (there’s a witch doctor who wants to kill the village twins, a nun who simultaneously tries to civilize the natives while complaining to a NASA doctor about the dangers of bringing the modern world to the village, a computer AI who develops a heart with feelings and a NASA administrator who wants to be a clown) will leave the unsuspecting viewer feeling like she was exposed to some alien brain devouring microbe. (Did Nukie just accidentally cause an earthquake because he wished the earth would devour him and somehow it did so that when he wakes up and busts out of the ground everything in the village is trashed? Or did I somehow get trashed and just didn’t know it?) Continue reading “Nukie (1987)” →

The Brother from Space (1988)

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A priest, a blind psychic, her seeing eye dog and a midget alien all walk into a church. What sounds like the beginnings of a bad joke turns out be exactly that.

Though presumably made by adults who should have known better, The Brother from Space feels like what would happen if a little depressed kid who saw E.T. the Extraterrestrial wanted to make his own version. Little dude gets lost on our planet, kindly folks give him shelter and befriend him, and surly military guy tries to capture him. The movie of course contains none of the drama or tension you get from reading that E.T. rip-off to-do list. Continue reading “The Brother from Space (1988)” →

The Final Executioner (1984)

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It’s another Italian stock footage apocalypse! Culled from the most routine of public domain clips of black and white mushroom clouds, model cities getting blown away, and most inexplicably of all, erupting volcanoes and bright red lava flows, the beginning of The Final Executioner not only marks the end of the world as we know it, but also the most professional part of the film, too!

Thank god! Just bring on the narrator for 20 seconds of exposition explaining the crazy illogical world that rose from the ashes so that we can get on with watching the stud decked out in black leather and white scarf bad assing around the wasteland just like was promised on the poster! Continue reading “The Final Executioner (1984)” →

Urban Warriors (1987)

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What took man centuries to build, Italian film director Giuseppe Vari takes seconds to destroy through a barrage of mushroom cloud stock footage! Even more terrifying is that Vari apparently got a buy one, get one free deal on stock footage because he follows up his mushroom clouds with shots of volcanoes erupting!

There’s no need to fret though that he’s going to use the volcanoes to do something silly like having Earth overrun by lava monsters. Vari knows that what will happen following an apocalyptic nuclear war is an immediate rise in the population of mutant biker gangs! Continue reading “Urban Warriors (1987)” →

The Prince of Terror (1988)

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What does a family man do when he’s pushed to the limit by a pair of home invading lunatics? How far will he go to protect his wife and daughter? Will society turn a blind eye to the retribution he seeks after getting a prank phone call that makes fun of his last name? What sort of payback is justified when his toilet is clogged up with the script from his latest movie?

These are just some of the heavy-duty nut scratching philosophical questions horror director Lamberto Bava poses in this Italian TV movie about a horror director who is shooting what looks to be an Italian TV movie. But could questions so fundamental be possibly addressed in such a piece of entertainment so trashy that one actress starts talking about orgasms at the dinner table while a child is present? Continue reading “The Prince of Terror (1988)” →

A Man Called Rage (1984)

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It’s really like any other post-apocalypse. It begins with all manner of stock footage depicting modern life and mushroom clouds right down to the same shots of houses being blown away in an atomic blast we’ve seen since they were first shot in the 1960s by the US government.

And then it’s time for Director Tonino Ricci to bring his uniquely personal vision to the aftermath! A personal vision that looks like a Cirio H. Santiago movie (think endless shots of rock strewn desert), but without all the colorful mutants, midgets, and guys dressed up like they were into Mad Max cosplay. In short, the terrifying unimaginative (and by extension, quite budget friendly) vision we saw from Tonino the year before in his film Rush! But now we’ve upgraded our hero from a bad ass named Rush to a raging bad ass named Rage! Continue reading “A Man Called Rage (1984)” →