# 600 - Breathing Fire

Yes it's true folks, this is officially our six-hundredth post on Lost Video Archive.

To commemorate I'm dropping a review that I've been sitting on for almost a year, something both representative -it is random and generally "low quality" (by normative standards, not mine)- but also atypical -it's on DVD and martial artsy. I love you all so much I give you this gift.

So please, raise a glass to Lost Video Archive and peruse my babblings on the nugget of 90's that is:

Breathing Fire

United States – 1991

Director – Lou Kennedy, Brandon Pender, Brandon De-Wilde

Echo Bridge Home Entertainment, 2004, DVD

Run Time - 1 hour, 26 minutes

Lesh do shome training....

When Uncle David comes to their father’s home in search of sanctuary, two brothers, Tony and Charlie (Jonathan Ke Quan) discover that the washed-up drunk is another in the long and vaunted cinematic tradition of expert martial-artist Vietnam veterans. Uncle David has taken custody of a young woman, the daughter of a war buddy who was killed by a ruthless criminal gang of (other) martial artists. When the thugs, including the ever-bulging Bolo Yeung come looking for the girl, the brothers want to help, but find that Uncle David is reticent to get them involved. When the thugs prove to be too much for David to handle, (even with the help of a pint of whiskey,) he reluctantly takes Tony and Charlie under his tutelage. In an inspiring and epic montage of choreographed grimaces, sincere grunts and underage shirtless-boy backslapping, Tony and Charlie become a hypothetically formidable low-rent recreation of Double Dragon.

Fortunately for the plot up to this point, the helpless female token has completely failed to recognize that her own host, Tony and Charlie’s father Mike is the leader of the very gang that smashed down her door and murdered her parents. Of course it helps that everyone else has also remained happily oblivious to Mike’s glaring sleaziness and casual indifference toward the pugnacious goons who keep dropping by to smash things and snatch the girl away. But that was before Charlie and Tony were green berets. Once they have tested their mad skills against some bartender-karate-midgets they have a revelation just in time for the big showdown with dad. Of course, as we’ve known all along thanks to some extremely convincing flashbacks, Mike is also the sociopathic, racist kung-fu ‘Nam vet who murdered Charlie’s Vietnamese mother during the war. Guilt-tripped by his brother into adopting the orphan, Mike got his revenge with the kid's name. The child will always be an enemy.  Nevertheless, this revelation comes just in time to unburden our spectatorial minds for the unambiguous third act climax.

With all of this historical mayhem revealed, the multigenerational camaraderie that has sustained tension until now predictably falters. Mike and Tony go their own ways and David and Charlie bitterly follow suit. But this premature bifurcation is not to last, for there remains a final reunification, a coming to terms which in the presence of anything “’Nam” must symbolically, if only superficially, represent the healing of the American nation itself. In a scene typical of the heartwarming coming of-age watered-down karate film that was so popular at the time, Charlie and Tony spar out their differences at the California State Tae Kwon Do Championships and all returns to normalcy in a moving fraternal-love-conquers-all freeze-frame embrace as the credits roll up and the salty eyeball liquid of joy rolls down.

Now that you're done with that, go read my friend Karl Brezdin's review of this fucker at his wonderful blog Fist of B-List. He's got better screen caps than me! Go!

Unforgiven

Unforgiven

1992

Director – Clint Eastwood

Starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman, Unforgiven is possibly the ideal candidate for a retrospective because the film itself is a re-assessment of western mythology and something of a protest against its contemporaries.

Mainstream film of the 1990’s saw the ascendance of two extremes; graphic violence and political correctness. The first, often in the service of realism, combined with the latter to produce moralistic and easily digested stories which looked “real” and tugged at the heartstrings, but avoided the complexities of history and culture. The western genre in particularly has long had a penchant for historical romanticism in the service of moral simplicity, but Unforgiven intentionally muddies those waters. Despite ample opportunity it avoids extreme violence, but more importantly, virtually all of its characters are morally ambiguous.

The film pits Will (Eastwood) a reformed gunfighter now sober and raising pigs, against Little Bill (Hackman) another retired gunslinger turned small town Sherriff. Neither of them is entirely comfortable in their newfound roles and the film explores the complex mix of guilt and pride that leads each man to act in completely different ways. In generic terms, it is still very much a man-movie (the female characters lack depth), but the stakes are significantly less concrete than usual.

There is much symbolism in the film, from Wills’ pigs’ “fever,” to Little Bills’ leaky hand-built house, all of which push back against any simple reading of Unforgiven. Even the title begs the question, “whom,” for contrary to what other Oscar winning films of that decade may have implied, there are no easy answers.

(This review was used as a pitch to a local newspaper for a film review column concerned with independent movie houses and theaters like The Grand Illusion Cinema and Northwest Film Forum)

Tightrope

Tightrope

United States – 1984

Director – Richard Tuggle

Following a decade of race-riots, hippies and touchy-feely progressive politics, 1971's Dirty Harry, was the reactionary tale of a white cop incensed at a justice system that cared more for so called “rights” and “due process” than it did for the “law.” The film was a huge hit spawning several sequels and its own genre of reactionary angry-white-male films. (Reasserting masculinity after the ‘emasculating’ loss in Vietnam.) Poor guys.

At the same time the Feminist movement and yes, rape revenge films are forcing the previously taboo subject of sexual violence into the public discourse in low-budget films like Ms. 45 and I Spit on Your Grave. In 1983 just a few years after I Spit on Your Grave, the fourth installment of Dirty Harry, Sudden Impact is released. The main character is also named Jennifer and also a rape victim out for revenge. But instead of encouraging us to sympathize with her, this Jennifer is painted as a criminal for operating outside the confines of legality. She is after all a she and thus not allowed to engage in the same extralegal punitive justice as our hero Harry.

Thus, facing criticism for yet another reactionary plot in which a rugged man of action saves everyone else in the service of the status quo, Eastwood decides to get behind a clone script engineered to explicitly address the issue of his stone-age out-of-touchness.

Enter 1984’s Tightrope in which Eastwood plays (Dirty Harry playing) Wes Block, a callous and sarcastic New Orleans cop on the case of a serial rapist/murderer. Great and crude effort is made to give Harry, err…Wes, a veneer of empathy. A single father of two young daughters (one Eastwood’s own,) Wes also becomes romantically involved with Beryl (Genevieve Bujold), a womens’ self-defense teacher and rape-counselor who doesn’t wear a bra. Although he never acts it, the mere proximity of females (something Harry generally lacked) is meant to give Wes a mild guilt-by-association "sensitivity."

But Tightrope's message is more than simple retrenchment, it is an attempt to work out the dimensions of the "New Man" predicated by feminism's demands and successes. The film intentionally draws a parallel between Wes and the killer by confusing their psychology, by making them sides of the same coin.

The clearest indicator to my mind is the use of handcuffs as a motif of power and submission. Used for domination in both sex games and the law, their repeated appearance in the film (and promotional materials) highlights the way that public and private power are often intertwined and mutually justifying. Struggling with these conflicting notions of morality, Wes suffers from nightmares in which he is the killer misogynist strangling the "liberated" Beryl. “I’m gonna get you motherfucker!” Wes yells after the killer violates his home. Sure, he’s yelling at the absent killer (an ex-cop no less), but Wes is looking at himself in the mirror, implying that his hypothetical good side is determined to catch and contain his bad side.

Although it makes a strong case for the possibility of shared power, that is, over none-but-ones-self, Tightrope is bound by the conventions of genre and its star's image. The struggle is a private one, and on the surface Wes must play the same old Harry. When he visits Beryl's self-defense class and she knees a practice dummy in the balls, it mechanically groans and sticks its tongue out while Wes grins bemusedly. And as if to demonstrate the one-sidedness of this whole paradigm shift,  Beryl is attacked but fails to employ any of her own training, instead feebly stabbing the killer with a pair of sewing scissors before Wes comes to her aid. Woman it would seem, is still bound by the traditional rules of conduct even if man isn't.

Night of the Bloody Apes

Night of the Bloody Apes

Mexico - 1972

Director - Rene Cardona

Something Weird Video, 2002, DVD

Run Time - 1 hour, 24 minutes

Hollywood is so prolific, churning out such a tremendous volume of visual distraction that it’s impossible to keep up. Even less so to follow foreign cinema. Hence it may come as a surprise to many United Statesians to discover that Mexico also has a film industry. Actually they have for quite some time. Many other countries do, but the American Academy only acknowledges one a year and those have been overwhelmingly European. But it’s true, Mexico has a film industry, and like its contemporaries, Mexican cinema has its own genre conventions. They have their classy commercial films and their grimy low budget exploitationers, both of which may or may not make the treacherous journey north. If the metaphor serves for what types of Mexicana are acceptable in Gringolandia then it should come as no surprise that the latter circulates somewhat under the radar. My own introduction to Cine Mexicano was not gentle. I was cast bodily into a grimy pit of vice from the get go, and while my experience remains limited (less and less so), it is forever colored by my first Night of the Bloody Apes.

Coming just under a decade after Blood Feast uncorked the gore-film upon unsuspecting Gringos, Night of the Bloody Apes went further and faster, taking cues from the then current European Mondo fad and mixing it up with a generous dose of nudity and Mexicana. The story concerns the distraught Doctor Krallman (a suitably ‘German’ name*) whose son Julio is dying of Leukemia. In an attempt to save him, the good doctor and his lurching, half-blind henchman replace the son’s heart with that of a gorilla. This gives ample opportunity for the showcase gross-out scene in the film; footage of an actual open heart surgery complete with squirting blood and still beating organ.

But what curative medical procedure ever works in horror? It is around this very failed operation that our film is also given a lease on life. The heart proves “too strong” for poor Julio, unleashing his deep animalistic urges during spells of apparent catatonia. When Julio passes out, the inner ape stirs and smashes his way onto the streets of Mexico City in search of men to kill and women whose clothes are easily torn off.

In a pursuit one would be hard-pressed to call ‘hot’, follows police Lt. Martinez. Still, his enthusiasm lies predominantly in chasing something that is; Lucy, a sturdy Luchadora who dresses in a red-devil costume before kicking ass. If it wasn’t for Lucy’s overzealousness in the ring, Lt. Martinez might not have been trying to solve the Ape-man murders at all. During a bout Lucy severely injures her opponent who ends up in the same hospital where Krallman works. A second grisly operation using the heart of Lucy’s comatose opponent coincides neatly with another violent-disrobing right across the street from Krallman’s home/basement-laboratory and the jig is up for his erstwhile eugenics project.

While its debt to H.G. Lewis et al. is evident, Cardona is also in some ways the Mexican version of Italy’s Mario Bava. After working on his father’s films (they co-wrote this one) Rene Cardona Jr. went on to direct his own low (and not so low) budget horror films, some of which, Beaks and Tintorera, we’ve covered here at LVA. I hate to make apple/orange comparisons that rob films of their individuality. If doing so will make the Cardona legacy and Mexican Cinema tangible and hopefully more accessible however, then the overgeneralization is worth it. Night of the Bloody Apes is among my favorite monster/splatter films. It is a beautiful example of the ‘serious’ exploitation filmmaking that is all but impossible in our current age of post-Scream meta-irony. Loaded with budgetary shibboleths and logic loopholes, it plows earnestly ahead with little more than coincidental interest in "art."

 This sleeve comes courtesy of Itsonlyamovie.co.uk

This one from Lars Jacobsson

A poster from Radio Magma

*Mexican movies of this and earlier eras (see LVA's coverage of the Aztec Mummy) loved to give the bad-guys European names. This was part of a larger project to establish a distinctly Mexican national identity as separate from European or American influence which then, as now, was often considered more ‘pure’ and important because it was whiter. Night of the Bloody Apes (a remake of Cardona’s own 1962 film Doctor of Doom) would seem to suggest that these dangerous foreign influences are just going to fuck Mexico up.

The Last Circus

It had been almost a decade since I saw any of the films Spanish writer/director Alex de la Iglesia had made. When I read that Balada Triste de Trompeta, A.K.A. The Last Circus was playing in town I was super excited, but like too many things, it slipped my mind and I missed it. Fortunately thanks to this amazing thing called "home-video" I was able to track it down and give it a watch. Much to my delight and horror, it was fucking amazing. I recommend that you read what I wrote about it at Paracinema, and then watch the damn thing, it's soooo good.

Midnight Movies

Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream

United States – 2005

Director – Stuart Samuels

Starz Home Entertainment, 2005, DVD

Run Time – 1 hour, 26 minutes

I was much too young to have any firsthand experience with the Cult, B and more recently Grindhouse movie phenomena, so it took me a long time to figure out what the designations meant in practical terms. These days they are used to give films a false cultural cache. But I understand that new meanings have been created by consumerism and marketing. Just like the meaning of an image or a icon can evolve as history slips by, so can a word. A B-movie is no longer the cheap movie on a double bill, it’s just anything with a low budget. Grindhouse no longer refers to the venue, but to the general class of graphic exploitation movies that might have shown in one.

But new meanings have no real weight unless we understand their inspirations. Midnight Movies bridges the gap between the use of “Cult Film” in the fast and loose marketing sense, and its original meaning in the pre-video world. In interviews with directors of seven films that became cultural phenomena, the closest thing to a “certified” cult film, Midnight Movies explains what made those films what they were. Their claim, and even several distributors and producers agree, is that all of these films became popular in spite of their peculiarities and counter-cultural aesthetic, not because of them. Often, as in the case of Alejandro Jodorowski’s El Topo, they suffered from a near total lack of distribution. Yet nevertheless they became literal “cult” films, with a rabid local following that went religiously, sometimes for years. When their cultural cache was discovered and they finally got popular distribution, these cults vanished. It was a classic case of an art that is no longer appealing once it is commodified and everyone knows about it.

Unfortunately, with the arrival of home video all of that changed. As much as I deign to criticize the video format I so love, history tells us (as does John Waters in Midnight Movies) that it was largely responsible for the death of true cult cinema. There are occasionally films like Troll II that develop a following despite the inherent solitude of home video, but it’s a different creature. In interviews with Jodorowsky, Waters (Pink Flamingos), George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), Perry Henzell (The Harder They Come), David Lynch (Eraserhead) and Richard O’Brien (Rocky Horror Picture Show), Midnight Movies makes it perfectly clear what “cult film” means and why as a category it no longer truly exists. A cult film simply cannot be made with intention and it cannot be made on BluRay or Netflix. As sad as that is for those of us unfortunate enough to have been born in the post video age, we have been lucky in one respect. Video has made it possible to preserve both the movies and the history that we missed. I can think of no better example than Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream.

Night of the Lepus

 

Night of the Lepus

United States – 1972

Director – William F. Claxton

Monster movies come in all sorts of forms, subgenres and species. Monsters both in literature and in cinema are almost always a symbol for something more than just a monster. Night of the Lepus ranks alongside such trash classics as Them! , Slithis and Godmonster of Indian Flats as one of my favorite among the nature twisted by science flicks. Fear of atomic power, industrial pollution and even computers have all become cultural boogeymen reformulated as screen monsters. “Progress” is scary because it’s unpredictable, and because man’s intellectual reach outdistances his ethical grasp, and so on and so forth….

It wasn’t until a second watch through of Night of the Lepus that it suddenly dawned on me that the film is a not so thinly veiled parable for the issue of Mexican immigration that has repeatedly proven anathema to deluded United Statesian racists since at least the 19th Century. The rabbit metaphor should be a familiar one, although parallels between “breeding like rabbits” and well established stereotypes about low income ethnic groups are rarely drawn explicitly. “Takeover” by the exponentially reproducing vermin, which threatens to subsume their typical hardworking all-American victims and ruin their good cultural traditions is clear enough. In Night of the Lepus the growth of the rabbits to human proportions and their proclivity for fresh blood and flesh remains mysteriously unexplained leading me to believe that not only are regular sized rabbits just not scary, but that these Lepus are meant to be even more like their analogues, making them still scarier.

The solution in Night of the Lepus, as parroted time and again in real life immigration paranoia rhetoric and literally realized along the large portions of the U.S. Mexico border, is a giant fence. Not only does this one keep them out of “our” territory, but it's also electrified such that any invaders attempting to cross it are thoroughly electrocuted to crispy death.

It is likely true that we often find the evidence we’re looking for. The fact that the film was set in Arizona although based on a novel (Year of the Angry Rabbit) set in Australia, and that it so clearly reproduces established stereotypes about Mexican immigrants in an era immediately following the end of the Bracero Program (and new immigration legislation) is too much coincidence for me to bear! Night of the Lepus is nothing more than a hilarious and ludicrous reification of United Statesian white supremacist paranoia, but damned if it doesn’t make for some entertaining cinema.

Once you know what the movie is about, the posters become even more awesome.
This one is from The League of Dead Films

Is the tagline in this ad meant to mimic the 1967 race-film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

 Ads from Criticonline.

18 Year Old Virgin

18 Year Old Virgin

United States – 2009

Director – Tamara Olson

Video Company, 1989, DVD

Run Time –1 hour, 26 minutes

It didn’t hit me until about a third of the way in that this film is unlike almost every other teen/highschool sex comedy. As a whole, the genre is infused by one simple concept; the act of sex as a rite of manhood for the teenage boy, and the woman as the means to that end. In essence the entire genre revolves around the objectification of women and their instrumental value. It is not normally part of my repertoire to write about contemporary films, even if they had been isolated in the VHS format, but 18 Year Old Virgin was intriguing to me because its different perspective on this "classic" plot has really stuck with me for the last week. Not because of its titular star Olivia Alaina May, but because of what it says about “becoming a woman”. 

18 Year Old Virgin was written and directed by women, Naomi Selfman and Tamara Olson respectively which may explain the different angle on the genre, but if the end result tells us anything, it’s that a different perspective on the same paradigm doesn’t change the paradigm. Twenty five years earlier a couple of women, director Martha Coolidge and writer Kathleen Rowell made a goofier and tamer film, 1984’s The Joy of Sex (from which 18YOV appears to lift its plot) and came to a similar “conclusion” with somewhat less irony and bare breasts.

Typically the focus in the teen sex comedy is on the teen boy’s attempt to lose his virginity, not as an experience to be had, but in order to prove his nascent manhood and heterosexuality to his friends. He has to prove that he can fit in and behave as men are "supposed" to. In 18 Year Old Virgin the lead protagonist is a woman however, and the film goes some distance towards illuminating, with rather dopey humor, what that experience might be like for her. The story follows slightly nerdy Katie’s repeatedly awkward attempts, mostly at the behest of her “friend” to lose her virginity and attached pariah status. Although the film points vaguely at the banality of what Katie feels she is supposed to do to be accepted by her peers and acceptable to a man, it does so rather uncritically. Even its simplistic (if accurate) send up of men’s shallow posturing and self-serving manipulation is done with a knowing complicity as if, while tiresome and often predictable, it is still just part of the game. Through all of this persists the basic plotline that Katie must prove her womanhood (and also like her male peers in other films, her heterosexuality) by putting out. While her male predecessors proved themselves by objectifying and taking women by hook or crook, Katie effectively does the same, to herself, and in the end takes her appropriate place as a “normal woman”.

Women it appears are also caught up in, and complicit with socialized patterns of gender normative behavior and patriarchy. Though it makes light of Katie’s attempt and eventual “success” in conforming to patriarchal standards, it doesn’t seriously challenge them. Nor does it illustrate the absurdity of her socialized “need” (or "our" social requirement) to be acknowledged as an acceptable hetero-woman by actively seeking and willingly stepping into subjugation.

La Momia Azteca & Friends

La Momia Azteca

Mexico - 1957

Director -Rafael Portillo
BCI Entertainment, 2008, DVD
Run Time -1 hour, 20 minutes

These movies have been popping up on my radar for at least fifteen years, probably longer. If my memory serves, they have never really been favorably compared to U.S. films of the same time or genre. Because of that I always remained reluctant to see for myself, assuming the prejudicial conclusions of U.S. writers were "true" rather than simply opinions. I let someone else make up my mind for me, thinking I would be disappointed and/or bored.

To fall back on an old aphorism, my tastes have matured, and these days I can better appreciate the subtle differences that contextually flavor old films.  Hence, when I spotted this set for 6 dollars brand new, I snatched it up instantly. The box itself is pretty sorely lacking in the design department, but once you open it up and see the three amazing slim DVD cases, it's worth it just for the art. The cases are clear and have the poster on the front (top and below) and the one sheet on the inside under the disc (right). A great deal of my movie lust is built upon an appreciation for packaging (hence all the box scans), and despite a general lack of special features, this DVD set has it in spades.

La Maldicion de la Momia Azteca (Curse of the Aztec Mummy)

Mexico - 1957

Director - Rafael Portillo
Run Time - 1 hour, 5 minutes

The first film was pretty slow, just like U.S. monster movies at the time, but the audio and picture quality in this case was pretty bad too, mostly the outcome of a bad source I suspect, but the sequel has both a higher production value and better reproduction on the DVD.
In Maldicion I detected a number of elements of the Mexican social climate of the 1950's, particularly the philosophy of Jose Vascocelos. The Mexican national identity was envisioned as one of "mestizaje," the mixing of races which Vasconcelos posited was the "La Raza Cosmica," (The Cosmic Race) an ideal people which incorporated all the best elements of the Mexican people from indigenous to Spanish.

The primary antagonist of the Momia Azteca films is "El Murcielago," or The Bat, whose true identity is that of Dr. Krupp, a man who was disbarred from practicing medicine for conducting inhuman hybridization experiments on animals and people. His medical practices, and even his name (Krupp munitions) reflect a heavy prejudice against the German and European conceptions of eugenics in which darker races could "pollute" whiter races. In Mexico as I mentioned, the Cosmic Race was closer to perfection because it incorporated all the best elements of all races in the nation. In La Momia Azteca this is clearly the case, as the protagonists are Mexican scientists with a healthy respect for modernity ("objective scientific inquiry") and indigenous culture (the mummy). They are true liberals in the classic sense.

La Momia Azteca Contra El Robot Humano

Mexico - 1958

Director - Rafael Portillo

Run Time - 1 hour, 5 minutes

In La Momia Azteca Contra El Robot Humano we get the lengthy recap footage that is typical of cut-budget horror sequels. Of course, here, La Momia is pushed even further toward symbolism when he must directly confront Dr. Krupp and his diabolical creation El Robot Humano. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to assume that the mummy has become something of a symbol of Mexican identity, while Krupp's robot has become the embodiment of foreign imperialism. The robot after all was created explicitly to rob the mummy of its riches.
But I still find it important to occasionally remind myself that these broad social ideas were probably not present in films because the director or writer was sitting there thinking, "Lets make the bad guy an amoral European to contrast the earthy practicality of out nationalist Mexican hero." But they were making their movies at a time when these ideas of national character were stirring in the popular consciousness. After all, it was roughly around this time that the ruins of the Templo Mayor were first being "discovered" beneath modern Ciudad Mexico.

So, considering all of this, La Momia bears a much closer resemblance to Godzilla than to any Universal Monster because he becomes symbolic of his homeland, and hence the "monster hero". I'm giving nothing away by pointing out that, like Godzilla, La Momia actually wins in the end, defeating Krupp and El Robot and returning, treasures in hand to his tomb with the cheers of the audience, and the blessings of our Mexican scientists to send him on his way.

After almost two decades I finally got to see La Momia Azteca in action, and the timing couldn't have been better. Old Popoca damn near looks like he's smiling.

St. Ives

St. Ives

United States - 1976

Director - J. Lee Thompson

Warner Home Video, 2005, DVD

Run Time – 1 hour, 43 minutes

Separating the art from the artist is no easy task, particularly in the case of an artist you admire so dearly as I do Charles Bronson. His is a time when many a macho American actor went abroad to seek work in Europe or Asia when the roles for type-cast tough-guys were slim in the States. It was a time of peace, love and like, getting mellow, man. Only in places like France and Italy could craggy faced actors like Bronson get decent work, earning himself the nicknames Monstre Sacre (Holy Monster) and Il Brutto (The Ugly) in each of those countries respectively. Sadly, many of these foreign films lack the bluntness of American narrative and are pretty boring and difficult to watch. Still, this was also a time that earned Bronson several roles that would catapult him to fame; The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Sergio Leoni’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

It wasn’t until the counterrevolution of the 70's put those dirty hippies back into their proper place that tough guys could make it again in American film. It was the opening of a floodgate that resulted in some of the best films of both Eastwood’s and Bronson’s careers. But before I take this metaphor too far, this post is really about Charles Bronson’s 1976 film St. Ives. After the success of Death Wish in 1974, Bronson could not be stopped. It was to be the dawn of his golden age.

The following year he starred in Walter Hill’s classic first film Hard Times, and a year after that in St. Ives which has Bronson in a much more subdued role. Forgive me if I draw a parallel to Raymond Chandler, but St. Ives centers around a caper in the Marlowe tradition but carries the narrative and setting into a modern (1976) setting rather than trying to update the theme. Thomas wrote a series of novels centered on the Philip St. Ives character, of which the third, The Procane Chronicle was the basis for this film. If it’s any indication of the quality of Thomas’ writing (which some critics deny) It would be unfair to compare him to Chandler apart from their shared genre.

I always got the impression that in the long run, Marlowe thought he was better than everyone else, and was bitter because his lifestyle didn’t reflect it. St. Ives atmosphere is much seedier than anything Marlowe encountered. The lunch counters and residential hotels have continued to accumulate all the wear and detritus of the three decades since the 40's without repair. St. Ives himself seems much more pragmatic than his predecessor, and perfectly at home in the shabbiness.
Returning to the Chandler comparison, St. Ives is a much more tactile and working class way of re-looking at classic noir than was Altman's The Long Goodbye. Bronson is after all a the people's hero.

The still above this spanish one-sheet is from a scene in which St. Ives is attacked by a bunch of goons among whom is Robert Englund as you can see, but also Jeff Goldblum rehashing his role from Death Wish.

Spacehunter: Adventures In the Forbidden Zone

Spacehunter

United States - 1983

Director - Lamont Johnson

Columbia Pictures, 2001, DVD

Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

Here's a little DVD interlude simply because I'm watching a fun and somewhat forgotten movie that I wanted to pass along. I'll drop a few posters to make it legit.

Spacehunter has the Buck-Rogers style epic serial story arc that was re-popularized by Spielberg and Lucas and ran rampant through the 80's. It most closely resembles a PG mutant offspring of Beyond Thunderdome and Aliens and even more "mature" fantasy titles like Gwendoline (released a year later.) Spacehunter manages despite a slightly derivative story to be an effective combination of space-adventure and post-apocalypse narratives that is quite entertaining.
Remarkably, what it lacks in plot originality and  "mature situations", is more than made up for by visuals, from set design to vehicle design to costumes which make Spacehunter an awesome and satisfying surprise. It's such a visually beautiful film that I originally thought it must be more modern, my first guess was early 90's, but it was made a decade earlier during my favorite period in American film. This is the first I had ever heard of it, probably because it was so similar to other contemporary films in narrative content that it was buried, and forgotten (at least by me) but it's much more entertaining than this would lead you to believe, in fact, it's fantastic.
I picked up a copy of Spacehunter: Adventures In the Forbidden Zone from Netflix, after which I immediately bought it, but you can also watch all of it on YouTube in multiple segments.

Poster at the top is from Moviegoods, this poster is from Wrong Side of the Art.

The Beast In Space

Beast In Space

Italy- 1980

Director - Alfonso Brescia

Severin Films, 2008, DVD

Run Time - 1 hour, 32 minutes

I couldn't help but watch Alfonso Brescia's Beast In Space after having my mind totally exploded by his Trilogy of Pain. I wish I could go back and watch them again for the first time and feel violated all over again. That is why these days I watch whatever other Brescia trash I come across. I no longer feel surprised, but I want to recreate that feeling of shock and awe. The last one I found entirely by accident, realizing that Amazons vs. Supermen was a Brescia film only because the music had been recycled, and because it was such a unique flavor of terrible. I bought it because it was co-produced by the Shaw Bros. Studio and I was hoping for some bizarre kung-fu. What I got was a godawful emotional hangover.

I kindof found this one in the same way except that I spotted Brescia's pseudonym, "Al Bradley" in the opening credits. Beast In Space is a more "modern" spin on the French arthouse bestiality porno La Bete (The Beast, 1975). In Brescia's "space" version the Beast is a guy with goat legs (pants with hair glued on), ostensibly a satyr with a giant cock and a preference for human astronaut women. The rest of the plot is a barely connected mess of recycled garbage from the Trilogy, which to be perfectly honest was pretty much just recycling itself already.

This has the exact same feel as the Trilogy, foggy ethereal, and very low budget with an underlying foundation of swinger innuendo. The difference of course is that in this case, they follow through on the innuendo. There is an X rated version of Beast In Space, but I watched the soft version. Plain old grinding is fine with me, I have a hard time with the clinical body-double penetration shots typical of this era and genre, they're gross. (Like Thriller: A Cruel Picture) But it leaves me wondering if there are dirty versions of the Trilogy. Sleaze certainly fits the atmosphere set in those earlier films (and copied in this film), and it seems likely that the feel of the film, regardless of the plot/context should give us an indication of the film-makers true passion. Either Brescia's spaceships look like cheap nightclubs, or cheap nightclubs look like Brescia's spaceships. For all intents and purposes, they're the same thing.


Witness if you dare my intoxicated, stream of consciousness Brescia deflowering with the Trilogy of Pain. You've been warned:
Cosmos: War of the Planets
Star Odessey
War of the Robots

The DVD cover of the hardcore version.

Bells of Innocence

I had to buy all of these Norris movies when I was journeying through The Many Circles of Norris Hell, but I've since disposed of most of them so I got this cover image from Amazon.

Bells of Innocence

2003 – United States

Director – Ali Bijan

Good Times Video, DVD, 2004

Run time – 1 hour, 50 minutes

Two members of a Texas church, Oren and Conrad are headed to Mexico with a planeload of bibles for the peasants. "They couldn't ask for a better gift" one guy says. I'm thinking that they probably could ask you to keep your misguided gringo imperialism to yourself, or at the very least to deliver bibles in Spanish. Anyway, Oren and Conrad are joined by a third, troubled quasi-suicidal alcoholic, Jux (Mike Norris, yes, the offspring) who, after a bender the night before, is their acting "pilot".

On the way to Mexico they are forced to land in a field. A field surrounded by infinite sand dunes up every one of which Oren whines his big fat mouth. Just as I am about to press eject, they stumble upon a small prop "old west" town inhabited by stiff awkward extras (read members of the church that funded this movie). The town is evil, the mayor is even a minor demon or something, all this obviated by the fact that there is no municipal or economic infrastructure to speak of. God bless commerce, and the people walking back and forth across screen repeatedly clearly aren’t doing business, or anything else.

But, our three intrepid heroes are stuck there, so mongoloid Oren staggers around town, loud fat and cringingly friendly. Jux fawns over a little girl who reminds him of his deceased daughter. Conrad, I don't know what that loony fucker is up to, I think he's trying to seem smart and really "together," like the moral anchor to Oren’s charisma ball & chain. The town invites the three amigos to a harvest festival (read “Halloween is evil”) where they are given boozy tropical punch, and the children start playing satanic chanting games. Clearly, you’re either with us or you’re openly worshipping the devil in the streets.

Our three "faith based" heroes escape the demonic rituals to the home of Michael; Michael the archangel; Michael the Archangel played by stringy old homeless Chuck Norris. With the help of some banal faithy hard-rock theme music Michael mumbles something about the three of them being sent to Ceres to save it.

There is a stereotype of crass American tourists in which, unwilling to learn even some of the most basic local language, they yell English in people’s faces. The less the natives understand the slower and louder the Americans yell. Evangelists have embraced this principle because redeeming Satanists requires a similar narcissistic arrogance. The eviler folks are the louder and simpler you need to yell about the love of Jesus to make any progress. Actually, I hear that all foreigners are evil, so it follows.