Vietnam: The 10,000 Day War vol. 3

Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War

Book Three: The Weapons of War

Canada - 1980

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 38 minutes

While interesting, this long and well made documentary from the Canadian Broadcasting Company lacks the perspective that would allow for a less biased understanding of the war. It is worth watching as an artifact of both the war itself, and the coming to terms that the U.S. underwent in the 80's.

See also at LVA:

Hearts and Minds

Winter Soldier

and the umbrella labels 'Namsploitation and Vietnam Vets

Prime Risk

I love the burning Capitol Building and rocket blasted Washington Monument.

Prime Risk

United States – 1984

Director – Michael Farkas

Lightning Video, 1985, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 38 minutes

Prime Risk is yet another movie that is completely at the mercy of history, but what film that hinges around a specific technological marvel isn’t similarly parochial? Without some historical awareness of the profound leaps in computer science that occurred in the 1980’s and 90’s you would be justifiably confused and or bored by this film whose plot relies so completely on magnetic information storage and retrieval methods. You might also have no idea that is quite literally the mold from which 1995’s Hackers was crudely squeezed. While Prime Risk features neither the cool topical pseudonyms like “Crash Override” nor the thrilling and absolutely timeless rollerblading scenes of its successor, it does have a doofus-male/ hot-female whiz kid team-up on the run from the Feds while simultaneously trying to stop a dastardly computerized plot to rule the world.

In the same manner as the atomic monster films of the 50’s, Prime Risk relies on the public’s sketchy knowledge of the subject to orchestrate a cacophony of both fear and intrigue. In this case it is computers, those dastardly machines that are slowly (in the 80's) encroaching on our lives with all their menacing and mysterious bleeps and bloops. Ahhhh, the great fear of new technology; that in embracing it for our convenience or security before we fully understand it, we open the door for all kinds of unpredictable malicious mayhem. This theme is driven home in the opening sequence of Prime Risk when a jamming-signal broadcast by some as-yet-unknown source causes televisions, remote control cars and escalators in a shopping mall to go haywire. See!? If they can threaten our catatonic communal consumption experience, the very fabric of our society is clearly threatened with a fundamental and catastrophic unraveling!

One notable break with its postwar predecessors is the use of a female science-whiz as the protagonist (despite this she still plays second synthesizer to the much less interesting male lead). Julie (Toni Hudson) is still in high school but she is already a brilliant computer engineer. Because she is a woman however, her application for an IT job at the local bank is rejected. Vowing revenge, she uses an oscilloscope to read the magnetic pulses from an ATM computer at the bank, and coverts the electromagnetic cycles into a tone frequency -sound notes- which she uses to determine the PIN numbers for people's bank accounts. Somehow she teams up with a depressed classmate Mike (Lee Montgomery) who needs raw cash because his authoritarian father won’t pay for anything but law school. In the process of manufacturing fake ATM cards and fleecing the bank however, Mike and Julie stumble upon a terrorist organization that is doing the same thing, intending to crash the Federal Reserve computer system and bring the world, and U.S. financial systems to their respective knees.

Just as the shit is hitting the fan, Julie and Mike turn to the Feds whose agents Minsky (Clu Gulager), and Yeoman (Sam Bottoms) don’t believe a word of it because there’s absolutely no way the fate of the totally invulnerable and monolithic U.S. government could be in the hands of a couple of punk kids. But we know better. We know it happens all the time because by the dawn of the Reagan era we’ve become cynical about American omnipotence, (thank you Vietnam!) and because we saw War Games last year.

A Spanish Embassy Home Entertainment VHS insert from someplace. 

French poster from Movie Poster Database

The Supernaturals

The Supernaturals

United States - 1985

Director - Armand Mastroianni

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1986, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 25 minutes

I came across this film while looking for another civil war zombie film I saw years ago called Curse of the Screaming Dead. The Supernaturals itself has little to recommend it. Beginning with the cover art which features a historical discrepancy so glaring I won't even begin. Furthermore, although set in the 1980's when the US military was entirely volunteer, the characters whine and bicker and laze about as if they were draftees. And finally, there is no gore whatsoever. A perfect opportunity in the golden age of American splatter cinema to cash in on the ubiquitous confederate catchphrase of the modern era "The South Will Rise Again," and they went and wasted it. Curse of the Screaming Dead used it, but that movie is also terrible so it was more or less squandered.
 On the plus side, The Supernaturals does have original music by Robert O. Ragland, and it co-stars LeVar Burton of Reading Rainbow and TNG.

Brain of Blood/Brainwaves

Brain of Blood

United States - 1971

Director - Al Adamson

Magnum Entertainment, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 47 minutes

Brainwaves

United States - 1983

Director Ulli Lommel

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1983, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 23 minutes

Each of these films is remarkable in its own way, but I find Brainwaves particularly so because of all the connections. The original music was composed by Robert O. Ragland who has done music for numerous other low budget action and horror films including The Supernaturals. I can never forgive star Tony Curtis for cock-blocking my homeboy Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, nor can I forgive director Ulli Lommel for the painfully sycophantic Blank Generation. Fortunately both of them did plenty more trashy films to make fun of so I can't take it too seriously.

UK video sleeve from ItsOnlyAMovie.co.uk 

Hungarian VHS insert from Deliria Hungaria

Death Ship

Death Ship

UK/Canada – 1980

Director – Alvin Rakof

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1986, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 31 minutes

Death Ship is a film best watched alone, for it is explicitly about the sudden, nauseating horror of helplessness and loneliness. George Kennedy is the perfect actor for this; he looks drunk already. Kennedy captains a cruise ship, a veritable city-sized floating metaphor for emotional isolation. It's no surprise that he opts to drown his bitterness with drink, a cruise is the ultimate in manufactured socialization. A group of people who have little in common voluntarily remove themselves from their comfortable home environment and force themselves to engage in staged, scheduled group activities. Kennedy rants at length about the hateful cruise-ship life while sweating out pure distilled gin. He is a man alone, the uranium rod in the reactor of misanthropic solitude.

That very night when his cruise ship is rammed by a mysterious and persistent radar blip, it is literally the collapse of manufactured polite society with explosions, crashing walls of water, and falling pianos. So why is it that the main characters are always the ones who survive the opening scene cataclysm? Why, even the quasi-suicidal George Kennedy was unlucky or drunk enough to survive his own ship’s sinking and be hauled aboard a tiny raft with the other survivors. When their colossal rusting adversary drifts out of the mist, they row their tiny raft around and around it screaming up the battered sides for help. None is forthcoming, but they soon find a gangplank, and the first thing they do is to send the children up first.

A plot about an evil ship should be corny, particularly coupled with a second-thought Nazi back-story. It’s just like a haunted house with some stupid historical plot: a lot scarier without a boring reason. Explicable terror is, in its lack of mystery, much less terrifying than inexplicable terror. Anything else just adds mood-killing logic, and grounds the experience far too much in the real world for it to be any fun. But despite this aside, and because the Death Ship literally “needs blood”, and takes it, it persists. Each and every death is such a bleak solitary thing, yet filled with so much screaming, shrieking and wailing, that it’s unnerving. Like life, it is a prolonged screaming solitary struggle, unassisted by friends who sometimes add to the horror by standing there unable to help and screaming right along with you as you sink. And if fighting alone against a giant evil ship doesn’t get you, no problem. Here comes George Kennedy, drunk again, and now he has a gun!

Escape 2000

Escape 2000

Australia - 1981

Director - Brian Trenchard- Smith

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1983, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 20 minutes

I'm not entirely sure why, but it may be the alternate title for Escape 2000, "Turkey Shoot" which has garnered it attention on several different blogs at this particular time of year. Primarily I would like to point out The Scandy Factory's nice writeup of a Turkey Shoot DVD which includes some cool video clips (his box scan is also much nicer than mine.) I picked up this tape years ago on the merits of its cover art, realizing only later that Smith directed numerous other awesome B-movies that I already knew, most notably Siege of Firebase Gloria.

Years ago I initially began recording my impressions of films on VHS (call them reviews if you like) because I wanted to remember the forgettable details that connected them; no-name actors, voice actors, stolen music etc. An interesting factoid about Escape 2000 that has always brought a smile to my face is that the monologue recited by Steve Railsback in his pirate radio truck at the beginning of the movie, is sampled by the militant Islamic Wu-Tang spinoff group Killarmy on their 1998 sophmore album Dirty Weaponry. It apears in the breakdown of the third song, "5 Stages of Consciousness."
So there ya go, obscure history in music and film collide once again.

This poster comes from IMPAwards

A Thai poster I got from Bearded Movie Afficionado, and another from a retail site.

Australian DVD cover from Flinders Students.

An Eye For An Eye

I know this is the DVD art, but it's the same as my VHS box.

An Eye for an Eye

United States – 1981

Director – Steve Carver

MGM Home Entertainment, 1998, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 46 minutes

In his second Steve Carver helmed movie (the other being Lone Wolf McQuade), The Norris plays another bull-headed, single-minded good-cop with little tolerance for any way but the "my-way". Everybody else gets round-housed down the "hi-way". All the better, supporting actors just drain attention away from The Norris. If you've ever wanted to see The Norris kick serious drug-peddler ass in a bright-red Members Only jacket or a puffy lumberjack-chic vest you get to see it here. Isn't that dandy. I also think this might be only the second movie in which I've seen The Norris crack a smile. It can be a little bit frightening, but don't let that deter you, it doesn't last for long. Even if it's completely formulaic, An Eye For An Eye doesn't pull any punches, just do not take it on an empty stomach.

On a big time undercover investigation, The Norris, here named Sean, and his over-the-hill partner, who's so unimportant I forgot his name, are set up, and partner is burned to death while pinned by a car. Sean resigns, throwing a hissy fit to Police Capitan Richard Roundtree. Partner's 26-year-old wife, Linda, a local news anchor, fake-cries on The Norris' shoulder and immediately does a long boring TV expose on the drug problem in San Francisco. As if this is something that is going to ruin their enterprise, "The Drug Business" sends some thugs after her. Just before they mercifully stifle her forced and wooden shrieking, she calls Sean, and tells him she found "something".

Later, Right before Roundtree kicks him out of Linda's apartment Sean encounters the deceased's neighbor/best-friend/coworker Heather. CAUTION: Weepy plain-looking ear and eye irritant. Sean goes to Linda's dad's house, a diminutive asian fellow (Mako) named…James. Duuuhhhhh. Okay then. Grrr, James want's revenge for his daughter's death so he ordered home delivery thugs, and he and Sean team up Double Dragon style.

Sean takes Heather to his wharf-side display home to add to his collection of emotionally dependent accumulate. There, she dramatically increases the stomach turning "Queasy Factor" of Sean's ratty dog as they frolic gaily about in his gilded cage. At his sizzling sweaty sexiest after waking up from a "flashback-to-the-first-scene" nightmare, Heather runs her fingers through Sean's dewy moist chest carpet and gradually sinks below the surface into Stockholm Syndrome. Retch.

The uncomfortableness of this quaint warm moment is quickly replaced by reaffirming masculine brutality when Sean and James team up again, first at the TV station where they discover the not very surprising heavy-handed truth about the powers behind the San Francisco drug trade. And finally with a tender moment on a grassy hillside outside the kingpin's decadent mansion. Disappointed with Sean's performance, sensei James quips, "I do not think this is going very well!" in his best wise Chinese guy sidekick voice.
The subsequent massacre of nearly every moving thing in the mansion has no effect on their chipper moods, Heather included, and they stroll gaily away from the bloodbath arm in arm, smiling and laughing in socially acceptable racist comic relief, apparently unconcerned that they just took something like 80 eyes for an eye.

Where's the dog? I need some playful yapping. Do not crush or chew, swallow whole. In case of ingestion, induce whiskey.

Some classic Embassy clamshell VHS box art.

Nice poster art I found at Atomic Pulp

Breaker, Breaker!

Breaker! Breaker!

United States – 1977

Director – Don Hulette

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1984, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 26 min.

In this one, Chuck Norris plays John David Dawes, affectionately known as JD to his pals, and John David to the single mothers he picks up along his path, an 18 wheel truck driver - and known collectively the nation over as a "trucker". Although we only see Chuck, or JD rather, behind the wheel of his rig for something like a minute of total screen-time, his realistic lingo and friendly peaceful demeanor are sure indicators of his lengthy and well-established membership in that interstate cargo-transportation elite. Returning from a long cargo haul, JD catches up with his younger brother Billy, a promising upstart trucker himself, who also enjoys the hip new sport of riding his dirt bike around.

With little more character development that a boyish homoerotic grapple in the dirt, JD sends Billy off on his first solo-run, head full of lofty glory-filled dreams of driving a reefer full of TV-dinners from one place to another. Billy's fantasies are cut short however by some lawless drunken hillbillies, the crazy occupants of a rural old-time mining village movie set. The hillbillies steal Billy's truck, and throw him in jail. Meanwhile, JD arm-wrestles a fat guy in a cozy inviting trucker bar/diner, and his attractive friends fill his head with all sorts of wild rumors about the lawless and criminal hillbillies. JD gets in his van, a four wheeled patriotic Ford erection, emblazoned from top to bottom on both sides with a giant fierce eagle painting, and goes hillbilly hunting.

Upon arrival in hillbilly-ville, (known by the state of California, by charter, as Texas City,) JD befriends the retarded kid Arney, played with stunning eloquence in the "mentally disabled" equivalent to blackface and naïve after-school-special offensiveness by John Di Fusco, doing double duty on top of his steep responsibilities as casting director for Breaker! Breaker! If Di Fusco's own acting ability isn't enough of a testament to his ability to judge quality, and director Hulette's excellent judgment of the same, then Hulette's own original knee-slapping banjo-laden action music score for Breaker Breaker! surely drives the point home.

His big heart worn prominently on his fists, JD tries friendly reasoning with the drunk recalcitrant mayor, but his hand is forced and he spends the rest of the film beating up Texas City’s entire population (every one a stone dumb redneck.) Slipping out of town just as they all come to for a second go-around, JD finds time to hook up with the mayor's widowed daughter-in-law. After a quick reinvigorating romp between the sheets and a TV dinner, wait a second…


JD returns with a vengeance to resoundingly whoop every hollerin’, up-‘n’-down- inflatable jerk in the entire town. Don't let the parallels to G.I. Joe cartoons and episodes of the A-Team that end with a complete lack of dead bodies or grievous bodily injury put you off. Life lessons can also be taught through the age-old "well intentioned kick-in-the-teeth-with-your-own-medicine" approach - espoused eloquently by Arney, embodiment of helpful and innocent humility, dying in his reticent hillbilly brother's arms. Like a sort of vindicating roadway deliveryman, JD’s utterances are expectedly sparse and curt, and his mere presence exudes enough morally ambiguous brow-beating good-guy jingoism to smooth over any confused nonsensical ending; let that be a lesson to you.
A more dumbpelling crusade there never was.

Some other Breaker Breaker art, a poster and a british DVD and VHS cover. There's lots of other art for this movie, it is Chuck "monotonous asshole" Norris afterall, but I'm pretty much over it.

Hunter's Blood

Hunter’s Blood

United Statesl – 1986

Director – Robert C. Hughes

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 42 min.

Surprisingly comfortable within the warm fold of 80’s exploitation, Hunters Blood, with all the B names behind it, has a lot to go on, and with little hesitation it sets to work. The cover, and box synopsis immediately invoke Deliverance, an association I am surely not the first to draw (and in fact the reason I bought it). Nevertheless, Hunters Blood quickly sidesteps any chance at class with an instant shower scene, an asexual one, but the point is that we establish this as exploitation right away.

David (Samuel Bottoms, Lance the surfer in Apocalypse Now) and his dad (Clu Gulager) don flannel & vests and hop into his uncles rumbling Bronco and rip up the road on their yearly hunting trip. Picking up dads brother and his New York lawyer buddy Marty (Joey Travolta) they back slap their way up to a beer joint in the Apilachians where loudmouth Marty plays the boorish tourist and gets the vengeance ball rolling. After sexually harassing the barmaid, they get in a knife fight with some more hillbillies, and take flight in the Bronco.
With sheer stupid blundering luck propelling them from here on, the protagonists run into the redneck’s poaching operation. Time after time they are self-trippingly lucky enough to escape, capture, be captured by and escape again the bloodthirsty filth encrusted hillbillies. Yet, despite prolific flayed and crucified warnings from skittish Game Wardens, the group resorts to positive thinking.
Thanks to good old fashioned yankee naivete, they continue the hunting trip. It is this very stubborn determination to die that makes the horror films of this generation so watchable.

Somebody has to get shot, yes, there will be blood in this movie. Between a fair mix of shrieking idiocy and meat-headed obstinacy, the surviving civilised guys will, after a few dramatic personnel cutbacks, surely catch the last meat wagon back to town .

VHS sleeve from Backwoods Horror

  The poster whence came the artwork. Courtesy of 123 Nonstop as is the one below.