Category: Action

Charge of the Black Lancers (1962)

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It’s the Polish versus the Tartars! Obviously, I had no idea who to root for before the movie started. The Polish are best known for their delicious sausage, but the Tartars have that secret sauce that makes fish tolerable!

A toss up in the culinary department to be sure, so I would have wait and actually watch the movie, though that wasn’t much help since the good guy was a simpering blonde Polish dude played by Mel Ferrer named Andre while the barbarians (specifically identified as the Kyrgyz) are ruled by an evil queen who somehow is so unpleasant she makes Andre’s scuzzy traitor brother Sergei seem not so bad. Continue reading “Charge of the Black Lancers (1962)” →

Robin Hood and the Pirates (1960)

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Robin Hood and the Pirates Poster ResizeWhat could possibly be better than Robin Hood battling some filthy, scurvy-ridden pirates? Teaming up with some filthy, scurvy-ridden pirates to fight the evil douche who killed his dad and stole the Earldom of Sherwood!

And while no one can deny that trading Little John for a eye-patch wearing pirate called One Eye who actually has two good eyes is a monster upgrade, the movie would have been merely been solidly entertaining if it had stuck solely to its “pirates standing in for the Merry Men” angle.

But it in a stroke of either genius or complete tastelessness, this Italian version of Robin Hood (with German film legend and former Tarzan Lex Barker) adds a bit of sauce to the mix by giving us Sweet Pea, a sassy full-figured black woman, prone to singing spirituals and alternately beating on One Eye and declaring her love for him! Continue reading “Robin Hood and the Pirates (1960)” →

Sword in the Shadows (1961)

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Sword in the Shadow Poster ResizeI didn’t need any of the gypsy queen’s gift of prophecy to know that when her clan swiped a bunch of horses that belonged to the evil della Rocca family that there would be a level of hell to pay that not even the evil eye of the bosomy she-tiger gypsy hussy who may or may not be a traitor could counter!

That these della Rocca roaches were also the same family that cold-bloodedly wiped out the ruling Altavila family fifteen years before and that the dude who actually did the horse thieving was Fabrizio, the only surviving member of the Altavilla family, but who doesn’t know his true identity, only served to amp up the tension at the castle were so many people suffered from unrequited love when they weren’t out relieving that tension by burning down gypsy encampments!

I guess I was supposed to be sympathetic to the gypsies and Fabrizio. After all, they weren’t out murdering families, including little kids, but they did stupidly stir up a hornet’s nest when they went and stole those horses. Continue reading “Sword in the Shadows (1961)” →

The Sender (1998)

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Sender DVD CoverSend it back please! Way back! All the way back to the darkest parts of the known universe! Or at least to co-stars Dyan Cannon or Robert Vaughn’s mansions!

The Sender is idiotic on an interstellar level and is so awful it doesn’t know when to end insisting instead to aimlessly ramble on for ten minutes after Area 51 has been blown to smithereens! You would think that director Richard Pepin would be itching to bail out since the movie’s story only putrefied more and more as it went along, but there he is giving us scenes of poorly realized aliens waving and endless reunion and goodbye moments like he was getting paid a bonus for surpassing the 90 minute mark! Continue reading “The Sender (1998)” →

Son of the Red Corsair (1959)

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Son of the Red Corsair PosterIf I wanted to see a real butch he-man like Lex Barker dressed in his satiny finest and wearing a powdered wig, I would go to that premium members only web site that’s discreetly billed to my credit card at $29.98 month!

But it wasn’t as if the transgendered appearance of one our great Tarzans was the only thing marring my enjoyment of what should have been an easy sell to someone as indiscriminate as me when it comes to Italian adventure films. There was the nasal and simpering voice used to dub Lex’s no doubt brawny real life voice, the fact that Lex fought sword fights while undercover with a blade that had his real name on it, and of course the pansified dance scene Lex and the audience were forced to endure during one of the movie’s numerous bouts of action anorexia. Continue reading “Son of the Red Corsair (1959)” →

Tiger of the Seven Seas (1962)

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Tiger of the 7 Seas Poster ResizeIs there a love strong enough that can withstand one pirate believing that her boyfriend pirate murdered her father in an effort to get revenge on her and her father because she bested him in humiliating fashion during their epic sword fight to determine who the new captain of the Santa Maria would be?

Of course the answer is normally, “fudge no!” What sort of pirate gets beat by his girlfriend and then mocked by her father and doesn’t come back later on and burn their entire freaking village to the ground and then salt the earth just to make sure they get the message? Some receipts just have to be issued in bloody triplicate!

But this isn’t a normal pirate love affair between a swarthy, lice-ridden, insecure brute and his barrel-chested, toothless 17th Century version of a used up biker mama! Continue reading “Tiger of the Seven Seas (1962)” →

Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969)

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Though Senator Robert Fraser tells Captain Nemo that he can’t possibly stay in his underwater city of Templemere because of pressing government business topside involving European arms sales, it’s safe to say that after the tedious tours of his undersea kingdom that see Nemo harassing his pet octopus, preaching his unrealistic isolationist philosophy, and showing the models of his future projects that Fraser was more likely just simply bored out of his mind by this salt water addled old fogey!

Fraser meets Nemo after Nemo’s men rescue him from a sinking ship along with a few other passengers. Fraser and company are taken to Nemo’s secret underwater city where Nemo advises that they will spend the rest of their lives there because he can’t risk one of them tattling on him to the surface dwellers about Templemere. Continue reading “Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969)” →