At long last an action movie that articulates why its climax is taking place at the old abandoned cement factory outside of town. Too often, it seems like everyone just magically teleports to the docks for a final shootout (lots of shipping containers can get blown up and bad guys can end up dramatically floating in the water) or mindlessly cruises over to a power plant because all the catwalks can provide a lot of suspenseful chasing (and bad guys falling to their deaths) and steam valves can get ruptured, filling the area with smoke (and burn bad guys in the face), but without any logical explanation why the action had to shift from where it was happening to these locales. Continue reading “Return of the Kickfighter (1987)”
Category: Action
Wartime (1987)
Following the collapse of the cannibals and barbarian film genres in the early 1980s, director Umberto Lenzi took a brief detour before finishing off the decade with a bounty of no less than six cheap and cheesy horror movies. A detour right into the heart of war-torn Yugoslavia!
Was Umberto documenting the ethnic cleansing that wracked the region following the fall of the Soviet empire? Was he leading a campaign of underemployed Italian exploitation movie directors to provide aid and comfort to displaced refugees by holding charity screenings of Nightmare City and Eaten Alive?
Are you nuts? Who cares about that war? I’m talking about a real war! World War II! The one where a handful of Johnny Yanks could take on the entire German army and carry out impossible suicide missions on an almost weekly basis! Continue reading “Wartime (1987)”
Ten Zan – Ultimate Mission (1988)
Let’s say you’re a closed off society. Due to minimal contacts with the outside world, you end up quite backward in most areas. Your economy sucks. Technological advance is stymied. Millions of your people starve because your agricultural efforts can’t feed the populace. Worst of all, your action movie industry is non-existent!
What’s a totalitarian government desiring to show the rest of the world that it’s a force to be reckoned with in the arena of kick ass movies to do? You assemble the greatest array of talent that ration coupons and promises of a week’s worth of work in beautiful North Korea can buy! Continue reading “Ten Zan – Ultimate Mission (1988)”
Just a Damned Soldier (1988)
Whenever one of us lovers of Italian trash cinema talks up Mark Gregory as an icon of that world, non fans are prone to write it off as just so much irony. He’s got a big perm in his most visible roles, can’t stand, pose, or walk convincingly, has gorgeous pouty lips, and is most famous for appearing as a guy named Trash. It’s like we’re just trying to be funny about how important he is by pointing out how ill-suited he was to acting. And that’s true – something like Adam and Eve is going to be pretty challenging to sit through if you don’t go into it with the right attitude. Continue reading “Just a Damned Soldier (1988)”
Empire of the Dark (1990)
Empire of the Dark is like what would happen if your fat, out-of-shape, middle-aged dad who liked to stand around in the yard on the weekends with his douche friends waving swords at each other ever decided that merely being the embarrassment of the neighborhood was insufficient when there was a whole home video market he could be humiliating his relatives in. Hopefully any family members would be smart enough to steer clear of any involvement. After all, the only thing worse than one man having delusions about a career in film is passing those delusions on to his child. In some of our more liberal states, such antics may even amount to child abuse! Continue reading “Empire of the Dark (1990)”
Brothers in Blood (1987)
A lot of guys who kicked ass over in Nam got a dose of that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that good old sneaky Charlie was lacing their tunnels with. The severity of the PTSD varies, but it can be so bad that you turn to self-medicating yourself like Steel did in this movie, causing him to get liquored up and beat down the cowards in the bars who didn’t have the balls to go to Nam! That’s some pretty cool PTSD! Or at least it would be if we actually got to see it instead of just having Steel’s whiny wife recount it for us and Steel when she’s picking him up outside the police station. Continue reading “Brothers in Blood (1987)”
Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World (1961)
This is another one of those muscleman epics that seems alternately obsessed with displaying the rippling back muscles of star Gordon Scott (Hercules Vs. The Moloch) and with the palace intrigue in old time China.
The fact that the version I saw only ran 77 minutes was both a blessing and a curse. Cursed because everything happened in a rather hasty manner with entire sequences that could have explained exactly how characters went from doing one thing to the next mysteriously missing. Blessed though since it was still 77 minutes of Gordon perpetually greased up and standing around posing like an adult baby in a red diaper whose next appearance would be on Sean Connery in Zardoz. Continue reading “Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World (1961)”