Kazablan

Kazablan

Israel - 1974

Director- Menahem Golan

Cannon Films, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 2 Hours, 3 min.

Holy shit, this is really quite unbelievable. It’s an Israeli musical! The credit sequence itself is full of alternating shots of an old fisherman telling the sorrowful tale of the Jews and the little town of Jaffa, and shots of a gang of young men in 70’s couture dancing in the streets and raising a ruckus. Casablan is a Moroccan Jew from Casablanca (really?) whose real name is Joseph Shiman-Tov, has a thing for Rachel, the beautiful young daughter of a Polish Jew family. Although they all live in the same slummy part of Jaffa, Rachel’s parents disapprove of the carousing Casa and his friends and their penchant for tight bell-bottoms. Now come the songs.
· Casa sings a song about self-respect.
· All the Jews of Jaffa sing a song about the diversity of Jewish culture.
Casa confronts Rachel’s parents and demands that Rachel come out of the house and bid him good morning. Reluctantly she acquiesces.
· Casa sings about home and unrequited love.

Soon, the government authority shows up in the slums of Jaffa to inform the residents of their intent to raze the condemned and apparently unlivable homes. The neighborhood gets together and has a big vote on what to do about it, deciding to pool their income and fix the ‘hood up.
· Ensemble song about voting and the beauty of the democratic process.
Casa comes across Rachel at the store of the lascivious local shoe salesman and saves her from the salesman’s impertinent advances. Casa tells his friends who have been constantly follow him around like a pack of dancing hippie vultures to beat it, and he walks Rachel home alone.
· Casa’s pals sing about having fun and ogling girls.
After leaving Rachel at her home, Casa is accosted and beaten by the shoe salesman’s hired muscle.
· Song about how Jaffa is really great because even though the hood aint pretty, it is in a Jewish gangsta’s blood.
At the local bar, Rosa’s, Casa and his pals commiserate.
· Song about how much they love Rosa and her bar.
Rachel, who actually really does like Casa, invites him over for lunch with her parents. He reluctantly goes, and has an unfortunate experience with gefilte fish because that’s a funny joke for Ashkenazi Jews to play on all the other Jews. Afterwards, Rachel and Casa take a day trip to Jerusalem where they visit all the hopping tourist destinations. Meanwhile, the shoe salesman pays a visit to Rachel’s pops to try and get him to consent to their marriage, but Rachel’s father denies him. Somewhere during the course of the days visits to Rachel’s household, the community moneybox, which is in her fathers care, disappears. Of course, everyone suspects Casa, not because he’s brown no, but because he sings and dances in the street with a pack of , uh well, singing dancing hoods. For this crime he is arrested.
· Rachel’s love song about Casa in jail.
Casa’s old army buddy, now working as chief of police gets him out of the clink simply on the basis of their previous friendship. Showered with racism from his fellow Jews, Casa seeks the same hypocritical retribution that his tormentors have visited upon him for their own previous sufferings, and hey, that’s considered a happy ending in the Promised Land. Which brings us to the final soaring tune;
· A song about making peace with yourself.

This is a bizarre and dated spinoff of Shakespeare via West Side Story via Zionistic Judaism and opens a brief window into a different cultural era. Entertaining enough and highly amusing for a completely detached young American to watch 32 years after the fact particularly considering the subsequent legacy of director Golan who went on to found Cannon Films with Yoram Globus and produce some of the finest American schlock ever to grace the screen. Here the aspiring Golan reveals some of his future sleazegrinder with various scenes of funky disco beats and gratuitous shots of girls asses and crotches and naked men running about. And of course what Israeli romantic-musical-comedy would be complete without a bris?

American Cyborg: Steel Warrior

American Cyborg: Steel Warrior

United States - 1993

Director- Boaz Davidson

Cannon Video, 1994, VHS

In a post apocalyptical U.S of A the remaining hetero population has been herded into a big slum where a gay machine imbued with artificial intelligence keeps them under control with the use of heavy metal cyborgs. Naturally, as under any sinister state Electric Eye, a group of underground resistance fighters is just waiting in the wings to jam up the gears of the man’s machine with a little vaginal intercourse. The scratch here is that since the end of the war women have been infertile, and it's suggested that the birth of a child however freakish and messianic will somehow change everything. In a secret breeder base under the ruins of the city, that very thing is taking place, in a fashion.

In a squirt of not so subtle metaphoric genius, The baby's mother is named Mary (this probably should tell all of us hopelessly aberrant heteros that she will not be showing any skin in this film) and in a budget aphorism which simultaneously enhances the sciency part of this fiction, the baby is kept alive in a jar. Mary must transport the rubber rugrat 10 miles through the anarchic city to the ocean, where a legendary boat from Europe will come to pick it up and raise it to adulthood at which point something dramatic is going to happen. Just as Mary and and her two escorts are about to leave the secret base, a Rob Halford cyborg clad in a leather jacket studded with English steel bursts into the lab and starts enforcing homogenaety.

Ramming the rubber baby down in her backpack, Mary is the only one to escape alive and finds herself alone in the city. She quickly runs afoul of some of the crusty denizens of the ruins only to be saved at the last moment by Austin, a rugged but feminine featured macho warrior with a glistening well-groomed mane of Kenny G hair and well powdered face. Halford smashes up the happy encounter demanding that Austin stop living a lie.

Mary and her new slightly uncomfortable looking and standoffish protector, the romance-novel-cover rugged Austin flee, but time and again are hounded by that hellion Halford-borg, determined to ram denial down. Austin repeatedly, but only temporarily stops him, finding each time that he has another thing coming. He even slashes Halford's throat open releasing a gout of strange white fluid, but this bizarre solution only helps the cyborg regenerate the wound. In a final confrontation, just as he himself is snuffed out, the ruthlessly tyrant Halford-borg rips off Austins arm. Weeping uncontrollably like an elderly Polish widow -in fear and a measure of relief- Austin clutches his bloody stump, discovering on close inspection that he too is a cyborg, a Red Blooded American Cyborg! Stitching Halfords own severed arm onto his own stump in posthumous tribute, Austin takes Mary the last few blocks to the ocean where she passes the rubber rugrat to some French guys in a rotting wooden dinghy who plop the sucker into a big maraschino cherry jar at the very last minute.

Knowing he must now do all his living after midnight, Austin decides that he's destined to remain in the city, and in a graceful farewell to a former lifestyle turns his back on Mary and walks away knowing that his personal liberation has somehow helped save humanity. As a parting shot Mary promises to name the rubber baby Austin.

If this whole plotline sounds somehow familiar, you're not alone, just let the comedic effect sink in and enhance the experience. Above are some alternate covers for the American Cyborg story.