America 3000 (1986)

In the far future, escaped male slaves use ancient 20th century technology to rebel against their female overlords. I'm assuming from gaps in footage and little dialogue in the first half, we get narration in post explaining everything that's happening like it's The Gods Must be Crazy. Plotted as post-apocalyptic action but largely played for laughs, it never commits in either direction, but would have failed at both. Starring the guy from Automan.

From Amazon

Attention, The Kids Are Watching (1978)

 

Some rich kids accidentally kill their babysitter while their parents are on vacation.  They eat a lot of candy and avoid grown ups, until scummy drifter Alain Delon invites himself in.  Not funny like Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead is supposed to be funny, and not suspenseful and creepy like The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane.  Not much of anything, unless you like to watch Delon being a slob.

Unusual for a French film, there is no child sex, going so far as a having a scene with Delon pointedly refusing to have sex with a child.  There were such close similarities, I looked up the source material to see if this influenced Little Girl or vice versa, to find that The Children Are Watching and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane were both written by Laird Koenig just four years apart.

Creepers (1993)

Creepers (1993) aka Crawlers aka Contamination .7 aka Troll 3
Directed by Fabrizio Laurenti and Joe D'Amato

Radioactive waste turns tree roots into killers, kind of a less rapey version of Evil Dead.

Low budget science fiction horror which combines the nadir of Canadian tax shelter cinema and Troll II era low point of Italian exploitation.  The setting is Canadian as hell.  Small town despair looms large, with the town prostitute playing heavily into the plot, and most of the characters are drunk, if not the actors.  Bad performances and special effects, but there's a certain earnestness you can't help but admire, reminding me of other regional film making masterpieces like Time Chasers.

The Italian connection surprised me - I wasn't familiar with Laurenti, but it looks like he hasn't done much else (though I need to check out Hasselhoff and Linda Blair in Witchery).

Available on blu-ray from Amazon

Five Golden Dragons (1967)

A bubblegum salesman accidentally receives a secret message about Five Golden Dragons and gets chased around Hong Kong.  Bob Cummings is our comic lead, bringing all the charm of a 57 year old meth addict.  Christopher Lee and Klaus Kinski have about a minute of screen time.  Worth skipping forward for Margaret Lee's cleavage.  Produced by Harry Alan Towers and filmed at Shaw Brothers Studios.

DVD from Amazon

The Cat Creature (1973)

The Cat Creature (1973)

Tepid thriller about a stolen Egyptian amulet and a series of murders around a mystic cat or something.  A partial tribute to movies like the Cat People, notable only for its casting.  We've got Kent Smith, Peter Lorre Jr., John Carradine, and Keye Luke all in cameos.  Meredith Baxter does well, aside from being the love interest for twice as old Felix Leiter.  Written by Robert Bloch.

Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (1988)

Also called Zombi 3, the fake sequel to Zombi 2, itself the fake sequel to Dawn of the Dead, the real sequel to Night of the Living Dead.  Many, many other films share that title.  Lucio Fulci directed some, Bruno Mattei directed some, nobody's going to want to take credit for this.

There's a zombie outbreak in the Philippines.  The military contains the situation, killing zombie and human alike.  A few so-so gore effects, but mostly just people waving M16s around and people falling over.

Mildly interesting that it cribs some elements from 1985's The Return of the Living Dead, namely a tarman zombie and the spread by incineration smoke.  It's also got these hazmat suited soldiers, a trademark of Mattei's.

DVD from Amazon

Final Justice (1988)

Dull cop drama, of the running-gun-battle-through-street-markets variety, missing all the elements of good Hong Kong action that were starting to emerge during this time.  Steven Chow's first film role.  All the good parts are in the trailer.

Blood Sisters (1987)

Sorority Girls spend the night in a haunted former brothel.  They dick around for the first two-thirds before being mildly killed off in the last.

Roberta Findlay is held in some esteem as an exploitation filmmaker, but here she comes across as a poor man's Rick Sloane.

DVD from Amazon.

The Man With the Icy Eyes (1971)

Directed by Alberto de Martino, starring Antonio Sabàto (senior, not the tramp stamped disgrace), Keenan Wynn, and 33-year-old Victor Buono.  Wynn did his own ADR, while Buono is dubbed by the same guy that did every Italian movie in the 70s.

An Italian journalist in New Mexico investigates a senator's murder.  Actionless, and the most stylish shots are of downtown Albuquerque. Tepid thriller, neither poliziottesco nor giallo, and not much of anything else.

Designated Victim (1971)

After Strangers on a Train, but before Throw Momma From the Train - no train, but same plot.  A rich Tomas Milian wants to leave his wife after ripping off her fortune, and a Count wants his brother dead.  Some gay overtones and telegraphed twist ending, and almost nothing else.

DVD from Amazon

Satan War (1979)

Satan War (1979) aka Satanwar

I just finished the Amityville Horror audiobook yesterday, and in a piece of synchronicity that defies coincidence, I picked this 1979 rip-off to watch, thinking it was probably a Filipino 70s action movie.

This is an Amityville copy book-ended by two lengthy dance sequences posing as documentary footage of the occult. It starts straight off with spinning crucifixes and oozing slime right out of the gate.  After that, it's people puttering around poorly lit rooms, the repetitive moog soundtrack obscuring any dialogue.

So inept it can't even be classified as a movie.  A waste of a good title.  I felt sorry for it until it tried to pad out the run time with a fifteen minute voodoo dance sequence.

The YouTube version below has a black mass scene not included in the VHS version.

Coweb aka Ninja Masters (2009)

Coweb aka Ninja Masters (2009)

Jiang Lui Xia starts work as a bodyguard only to have her charge kidnapping on her first day.

Not a good movie, and worse yet, a very frustrating one for the missed opportunities.  90s Hong Kong action mixed with modern direct to streaming editing and camerawork.  The DTS stuff points the camera at anything except the action to hide the fact that people are just waving their arms around.  Here, we see just enough to know that there was competent martial arts direction and stunt work somewhere, most just out of frame.

The whole thing is currently free with ads on YouTube.  There are no Ninjas.

Daughters of Satan (1972)

Daughters of Satan (1972)

Tom Selleck buys a painting of witches being burned at the stake because one of them bares an uncanny resemblance to his wife.  Figures start disappearing from the painting and entering their lives.  Has the vibe of made for TV combined with Filipino exploitation.  Slow moving and not much happens, then all of a sudden there is nude torture and a creepy as scene of a mortician taking spicy photos of a corpse.



Available in multiple formats from Amazon

The Unseen (1980)

Some journalists stay at a creepy house and get pulled into heating vents.  Sydney Lassick is like a psychotic Joe Besser and the back story is creepy as hell, but not a ton going on here.  The first half is Barbara Bach breaking up with her boyfriend and the second is her crawling around in a basement.

DVD from Amazon

Beneath Still Waters (2005)

Forty years ago a Spanish town is flooded in the creation of a reservoir in order to bury the supernatural forces awakened by an evil cult.  Now there are a series of deaths and disappearances around the reservoir, accelerating until the entire town goes mad.

Good concept, pretty original and unpredictable, unfortunately ruined by poor dubbing and overambitious CGI.

Good enough to make you imagine a better mad movie with the same material.  On the plus side, I'm looking forward to reading the book by Matthew J. Costello, which you can get on kindle from Amazon.

Apache Kid (1987)

Apache Kid (1987)
Dir: Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso

Mattei and Fragasso made a couple of very late westerns in 1987, this and Scalps.  Both are brutal and gory for westerns, but neither really cross the line into horror like Cut-Throats Nine.  Apache Kid is some silliness about a blonde boy saved and raised by natives.  It does contain Mattei's patented "small child awkwardly slumps to the ground after being shot" scenes like in Hell of the Living Dead.

Currently on Amazon Prime.

Robowar (1988)

Robowar is a Bruno Mattei copy of Predator starring Reb Brown from Space Mutiny.

Mad Dog (1984)

Mad Dog aka Manhunt (1984)

Southern outlaws, Italian style!  A cowboy has his horses stolen by crooked rancher Ernest Borgnine.  He gets arrested and jailed by corrupt warden Henry Silva, escapes, crashes cars, and is recaptured over several occasions.

I wasn't sure what the cowboy's motivations were, seeing as the charges for escape, evading, destruction of property, kidnapping, and aggravated assault would get him much more than the year and a half he was originally sentenced to.  Turns out that's how the law works in Oklahoma - he shows the corrupt warden his receipt and his sentence is commuted and all other charges are dropped.

I'm sure there's more, but this is the only Italian copy of the rednecks-crashing-cars genre I can think of.  I miss car crashes.

On Amazon video

Deathstalker (1983)

Deathstalker (1983)

The boobiest, rapiest adventure of them all.

Deathstalker goes on a quest to gain three enchanted items to defeat the wizard Munkar and become the power.

Mud wrestling, topless swordfights, gender swapping spells, chain mail half shirts, buffalo shots, pig-headed men, and Hee Haw Honey Barbi Benton.

The was the first of a series of films Roger Corman produced in Argentina.

Shin Godzilla

Shin Godzilla
2016

The twelve years between Godzilla: Final Wars and Shin Godzilla is the longest Japan has gone between Godzilla films since 1954.  The continuity of Godzilla films is complex, with at least six reboots being a direct sequel to the original, much like the Halloween films.  This is the first time the series has been rebooted to the very beginning, to the point that a character googles Godzilla to see what it means.

The keys to any good Godzilla movie are:

• Monster fights
• The parts that aren't monsters fighting are spies or aliens, preferably alien spies.

Instead we get endless scenes of men in suits being serious in command centers and maybe fifteen minutes total of monster.  There's a love/hate thing going on with the US military and some kind of commentary about government bureaucracy - themes that are in lots of other disaster or kaiju movies while still being entertaining.  Here it's just people talking fast while looking at laptops.  There's an "American" character, Ms. Patterson, who speaks worse English than the Japanese speaking characters.

The effects were serviceable, with the rubber suits holding up better than the CGI.  Where they really drop the ball is in monster design, something Japan used to be good at.  He (or she, like in the superior Broderick version) looks rigodamndiculous.  He's a warty pile of molten lava with button eyes and a giant snake tail twice as high as his body that shoots lasers.  When he breathes radioactive flame his mouth opens twice the size of his head.

Godzilla is stopped by feeding him blood coagulant from cranes, which turns him into a block of ice, which is what happens when your blood gets too thick.

This is the worst Godzilla movie.  Worse than All Monsters Attack.  Worse than the 1998 American version, which didn't even have Godzilla in it.  On the other hand, it was a big hit in Japan, likely for consciously invoking the memory of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent nuclear disasters.  That and the the usual strain of nationalist militarism, a bit absurd given that the Civil Defense Forces in Godzilla movies are the Washington Generals of the military.

DVD from Amazon