The Jolson Story

The Jolson Story

United States - 1946

Director - Alfred E. Green

RCA/Columbia Pictures, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 2 Hours, 9 Minutes

Yor: The Hunter From the Future

Yor: The Hunter from the Future

Italy, 1983

Director – Antonio Margheriti

RCA/Columbia Home Entertainment, VHS, 1983

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes 

We first posted Yor's nifty tab/flap RCA box way back HERE, but it seemed time to give it a more thorough treatment and by chance, our friends over at Ed's Pop Culture Shack did the same thing....

Not content merely to skim the profits off the still cooling carcass of the sword and sandal cum caveman cycle, Italian director Anthony M. Dawson or Antonio Margheriti as he was sometimes known, decided to weave his ridiculous half-baked story arc into another popular genre, this one culled from the tattered edges of an epic space opera franchise that would later be consumed by a giant evil mouse.



Utilizing the last-minute-generic change of heart for which the Italians held a peculiar affection, Dawson does his countryman and contemporary Bruno Mattei one better by filming a kind of what-if version of Planet of the Apes in which Taylor hits his head during the crash and wanders the planet searching for his identity. (The opening scenes of Beneath the Planet of the Apes suggest that this is precisely what happened since the first film.) Of course, its nearly twenty years and four sequels late, but so were Yor’s special effects, resembling more the homemade, rubber-bat stylings of another late sixties sci-fi television franchise than anything out of the relatively more technological 80’s.


But that’s par for the course with Yor. Even the man behind the mullet-wig, Reb Brown himself was a couple of decades out of step, detouring through European cinema just like Bronson, Eastwood and others did when jobs were scarce in the States. Again though, that was in the late sixties, and those guys had comebacks in the 70's and 80’s when tough-guys were in style along with the president. So those jobs weren’t scarce in the 80’s, Reb just never had what it took to be a tough guy. He’s hard not to love as the scenery-chewing whatever he’s playing, but in spite of his paucity of emotion, he’s simply too cuddly to cut it. His jaunt across the screen as Captain America in the 70’s being perhaps his most memorable domestic role, was nevertheless laughable because the guy lacked the steely ex-paratrooper chutzpa that the character demanded. That’s probably why they deliberately wrote him as the son of the original Captain; plausible deniability.

Yep, its Luciano Pigozzi, the old guy from ExY3K

So too is Reb as Yor, way, and I mean waaaaaaayyyyyyy behind the times. Ostensibly a caveman in the Fiction-olithic era, the film opens with a bang, but quickly devolves into a monotonous whine. By the end we discover that indeed, like its better known simian predecessor, Yor’s planet shared the same fate, and a present that looks like the past is actually a dystopian, post-nuke future. By now, precisely thirty years after Yor’s release in the States it would be superfluous to describe or validate the film, nor do I feel masochistic enough to try. Others have already done so, and better. People familiar with the type of product Margheriti produces, Last Hunter, Cannibal Apocalypse, will not be surprised by Yor’s rambling, sleep-inducing middle act. For the blissfully ignorant in search of something so-bad-it’s-good (as I was, many years ago when I found Yor,) it should be noted that euphemism is highly subjective. Legendary among fans of bad and Italian and particularly bad-Italian, which is a distinct flavor, Yor represents a particular depth of ridiculously inept filmmaking. I can think of other shitty movies that I enjoy more, but few that try so hard.

This French poster art comes courtesy of www.golobthehumanoid.com. I could be wrong, but it looks very much as if it was painted by master comics artist Philippe Druillet.

Other image credits from top:

That's my VHS box

She Blogged by Night

University of Alaska Southeast

Naturalistic, Uncanny Marvelous

 

Marjoe

Marjoe

United States – 1971

 Director – Sarah Kernochan and Howard Smith

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1983, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 25 minutes

The first impression one gets while watching Marjoe – the man, not the movie- is that you’re being conned. Marjoe the film is about the man of the same name, Marjoe Gortner, whom I was introduced to, as I suspect most people within ten or so years on either side of 30 who watch movies were, by way of Starcrash. He was in a few other choice exploitation films of the late 70’s, but the Luigi Cozzi Star Wars rip off is probably his greatest work (and Cozzi’s.) Before he entered low budget cinema however, Gortner was a Pentacostal revival preacher from the age of four.

The difficulty, if it can be called that, for it is something more akin to suspicion and contagion, is in deciphering which of Gortner’s personalities is real; the speaking in tounges version, or the turned on tie-dye version, for each seems equally genuine. True, it’s unlikely that many of us has been to a revival the likes of those seen in Marjoe, but they bear a striking resemblance to the stories, and if the conviction and feeling of the attendees is anything to go on, Gortner is both effective and affective. Gortner is as convincing in his spasmic and gesticulating Haleilujah’s as he is counting the cash afterwards and explaining the intricacies of the faith healing scam to the documentary crew. Therein lies what I suspect is the convincing factor for so many fans of Marjoe (The Academy deemed it Best Documentary, 1972); its protagonists bizarre lack of duality. There is no difference outside context.

Gortner is not at one time a preacher and at another a hippie, but at all times Marjoe. To me this is what reveals the great lie in religion, for the pious man, the mouthpiece of God, the very conduit of the Holy Spirit (and thus the source of experiential faith) is merely a skilled and practiced (and it appears, weary) man at a job. He preaches because he knows how and it is lucrative, called to it as much as a plumber is “called” to fit pipe. The devout need him to confirm their faith in God as much as his long-haired pals need him to confirm their belief that it’s a sham. And of course, Gortner needs Marjoe in order to prove that he has a moral soul. It is fortunate for us, and I assume for Gortner that he can see and point to the difference between truth and fiction. It’s even more so to those like myself who are unbelievers, that Marjoe (the man and the movie) doesn’t clearly distinguish between the two because to do otherwise would be to rely on a common, but false dichotomy. Whether or not religion or science can be empirically proven is, for most of us, irrelevant. Each exists primarily to affirm through varying methods, our desires rather than any objective reality.

 We're gonna save this here pup, show him the kingdom of the almighty and bring him to Jesus!

Image 2 from MOMA
Image 3 from Jarrett's Blog
Image 4 from Awkwardboyhero

Band of the Hand

Band of the Hand

United States - 1986

Director - Paul Michael Glaser

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1986, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 49 minutes

Band of the Hand is a somewhat forgotten classic of the mid-80's. Having been conceived as a television show by the creators of Miami Vice, the pilot went on to become this film when the idea wasn't picked up.Wikipedia has more to say about this than I care to add to, it should be noted however that it features an early performance by John Cameron Mitchell the writer,director and star of Hedwig and The Angry Inch, and a relatively early appearance of Laurence Fishburne (when he still went by Larry.)
As noted before, Band of the Hand is also an instance of a couple of notable phenomenon rolled into one; the Vietnam Vet and the Medicine Man. And look, one of those cool side-loader boxes from RCA/Columbia!

Christine

Christine

United States - 1983

Director - John Carpenter

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1984, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 50 minutes

My Demon Lover

My Demon Lover

United States - 1987

Director - Charlie Loventhal

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

It's been some time since I saw My Demon Lover, and I watched it then almost as an afterthought. In retrospect after a little bit of research, that cool side-opening VHS box from RCA is not necessarily the coolest thing about this movie.

The primary sales pitch on the box focuses on Scott Valentine, then a supporting actor on the show Family Ties (Michael J. Fox was the star,) but My Demon Lover is much more about the lead female, Denny played by Michele Little. Women writers do not of necessity write films for a female audience, but they can certainly add a depth of character to women's roles that male writers tend to lack. And, despite the pitch on the box, Leslie Ray a woman who has written mostly for TV sitcoms managed to make My Demon Lover far more about Denny than it is about Kaz.

Starship Video Hoopla

Starship: Video Hoopla

United States - 1986

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 14 minutes

Arena

Arena

United States - 1989

Director - Peter Manoogian

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1991, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 37 minutes

The list of mostly forgettable science-fiction popcorn films produced by Charles Band’s Empire Pictures in the ‘80’s is for the most part an unchallenging intellectual vacuum. In many cases that is what makes them so mindlessly entertaining. With a naïve innocence that can only come from sincerity and a (relatively) low budget, Arena is a shining example. It doesn’t require any mental acrobatics or ask any hard moral questions, but it was a little better made than most of the Empire Pictures catalog. Arena is at some six years distance, clearly riding on the coat-tails of Star Wars. It is not surprising then that in addition to its Empire pedigree, Arena should suffer from many of the same philosophical shortcomings as its source material.

With nowhere else to go after losing his job on a space-station somewhere in the universe, Steve Armstrong (Paul Satterfield) bunks with his former coworker Shorty in the slums. Here he meets a destitute bum, the last human champion of the Arena, an intergalactic boxing competition that has been dominated by aliens for the last five decades. He anoints Steve as the next human champion of the Arena making him quite literally the Great White Hope in space.

The man in the Sloth suit is future director Steve Wang

There are two categories of aliens that populate Arena and highlight Steve’s messianic status. Both are visibly differentiated from the protagonists. The first are helpers, house-aliens who are silly and or dumb but totally harmless. To remove any ambiguity, the second group, Steve’s rivals, are not only visibly different but especially hideous, making them even more clearly unsympathetic and evil, and giving the good aliens excuse to support the collective restoration of a properly ordered hierarchy  without appearing overtly Uncle Tomish. Steve’s final opponent, the present champion Horn is also a cyborg. As such he is not only a direct threat to and reaffirmation of human physical purity, but a confirmation of the physical corruption and immorality of the non-human which has to “cheat” in order to win. And in fact, that’s precisely what Horn’s manager Rogor does when it becomes clear that Steve is going to beat his fighter.

Jade (Sharri Shattuck) a sultry nightclub performer (Shattuck actually performs several of Richard Band's songs) and Rogor’s lapdog is sent to seduce and poison Steve before the championship fight. Yet despite a romp through the futuristic spacy mylar sheets in Jade’s cat-box, her eroticism does not bode well for the normative settled family relationship. Instead, there is Quinn (Claudia Christian,) a reserved, practical woman carrying on her father’s legacy as a boxing manager. It is with her faithful encouragement and training that Steve will restore hetero normative values to the universe. Can there be any doubt that our ubermensch will succeed in setting all of this straight when the distinction between right and wrong is so clear-cut?

The ultimate Buck?

Despite all of this 50’s era conservative paranoia, Arena is still enjoyable for a number of reasons. The practical special effects provided by Screaming Mad George are better done than most of Band’s films. Arena is also distinctly more working-class than its big budget franchise predecessor. Boxing, which is really all the Arena fights are, has always been viewed as a proletarian sport. Related to this is my final assertion that Arena’s settings capture perfectly the appeal of the mundane. From the diner of the opening sequence, to the slums where Steve is verbally identified as the hero (it’s always been visually obvious), to the contest itself where order is restored, Arena is fiction made tangible. Without throwaway details like burned eggs and garbage, it would be just another space movie. Narrative details that speak to perceived experience are what make good fiction. Unfortunately that’s why audiences rarely question such obviously reactionary symbolism when couched in throwaway sci-fi fluff.

This beautiful VHS insert comes from Japanese VHS Hell, go visit 'em!

Willow

Willow

United States - 1987

Director - Ron Howard

RCA Home Video, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 2 hours, 10 minutes

Hey, I know it's a pretty mainstream video that's readily available on DVD, but if you notice the red border on the box there, it may bring back memories of other boxes with a similar motif. RCA/Columbia kept the same design for a long ass time, a vestige of the early days of VHS when the quality of the physical product was judged on the reputation of the studio.

The cover/poster artwork for Willow was created by John Alvin, the man responsible for the promo art of such classics as Bladerunner and Rhinestone among many, many other films.

Casualties of War

Casualties of War

United States - 1989

Driector - Brian De Palma

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 2 Hours

Coming at the tail end of the last wave of popular 'Nam films DePalma's Casualties of War is difficult to take seriously for a number of reasons. I personally am unable to separate Michael J. Fox from his "self" simply because he has done little else as remarkable and memorable to me as Marty McFly. Back to The Future came at a crucial moment in my brain's formative years and for better or worse is frozen there. Sean Penn has done much more significant work since his role as Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High that I am able to mentally separate the actor from his character here.

The Casualties of War story is itself much too simplified. The plot here is too separated from the context of the war. It feels as if it could have taken place anywhere and Vietnam was just a convenient and popular cinematic trope at the time. Despite its basis in a true story, the Meserve (Penn) and Eriksson (Fox) characters are too flat, too uniformly bad and good respectively to really buy as real. This was particularly noticeable because the war itself has little role in the film, it doesn't motivate the actions of the characters as it should and thus there is little rationale for their actions, hence why use Vietnam except that it was in the source material?

Don't get me wrong it is an entertaining if not encouraging film, and it is notable for the screen debuts of John C. Reilly and John Leguizamo, (an another appearance by Dale Dye) but the story lacked the depth and worldliness I had hoped for and failed to analyze the role of the war itself in the actions of the people it affected.

Yorythmics: Sweet Hunter From the Video Future

What do Yor The Hunter From the Future and the Eurythmics: Sweet Dreams the Video Album have in common?

Why, those crazy tab-boxes from RCA/Columbia Home Video of course!
Allow me to wax nerdy for a second; these boxes are super cool, even more so than those crazy double-flap boxes that VCII was putting out in the early 80's. What can I say, I like technical packaging. I also like that the brand was identified by the similar package design. This was typical of the period when home video was still a new concept and studios wanted people to associate a certain level of quality with their brand. Branding and trademarking took place in packaged food products in the late 1800's in exactly the same way. Of course, when home video took off they realized it was a big waste of money to have to make thousands of fancy die-cut boxes like this and everybody switched to the standard single flap-top/open bottom. And who said the future would be better?

Yor The Hunter From The Future

Italy - 1983

Director - Antonio Margheritti

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1983, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

Eurithmics: Sweet Dreams The Video Album

United Kingdom - 1983

Director - Derek Burbidge

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1983, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 2 minutes

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.

Machine Gun Kelly

Machine Gun Kelly

United States - 1958

Director – Roger Corman

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1991, VHS

With a repertoire as long as both your arms, it is impossible to stand outside of the shadow of the megalithic and unforgettable Charles Bronson (can you tell I’m a fan?). He’d been playing bit parts in TV shows and movies since 1951, many under his given name Charles Buchinski before Corman gave him his first starring role as superstitious 30’s bank robber Machine Gun Kelly. This was pulp film history in the making.

This flick starts off with a bank robbery in which Kelly and his gang, a bunch of heavies and whiners, just like you’d expect from an old gangster-era film, grab a bunch of loot and, with a complex series of simple tricks, evade a police dragnet and get away with a large amount of cash. In the process though, Kelly ruffles the feathers of some of his colleagues. This guy is really kindof a jerk, beating up on his boys and generally being an unattractive personage.


Kelly’s girl is something else entirely. Ok, she might not exactly be an angel, but I wasn’t looking at her wings, and Flo (Susan Cabot of Corman's The Wasp Woman) can talk shit to me anytime. She acts as Kelly's co-conspirator and sultry yes-woman, assuaging his damged ego when he starts to spiral into self pity, and as the friendly palatable liason between the coarse hostile Kelly and everyone else. Kelly himself is actually a whimpering superstitious coward who lashes out like a caged animal when threatened and, getting courage from his tommy-gun and Flo’s pep talks. It’s her manipulative charisma and sycophantic encouragement that make Kelly what he is, and hell, I’d turn to a life of crime too for a woman that could throw her weight around like that.

The job that does them in is a botched kidnapping, but the real cause is Kelly’s bad attitude, and their mimeographic adherence to the romanticized myth of Bonnie and Clyde which has to make the woman the evil corruptive force of mans ruin. Unless you count the swing of Flo’s hips, there’s not much action here, really it’s a picture about Machine Gun Kelly’s cowardice, and Bronson does a pretty good job of pulling it off, with a gun a grimace, and an armful of girl.

It Conquered the World

It Conquered the World

United States -1956

Director – Roger Corman

RCA Columbia Pictures Home Video 1991

I used to hate this crap. Because I was such a splatter fan, with the exception of The Creature, these old black and white monster movies bored the piss out of me until about 2 years ago. I don't know what it was that changed, but I'm glad it did. And It Conquered the World has all the best things I could ask for from a Cold War classic.

The first scene says it all. A bunch of scientists in a lab discuss grandiose space-experiments in all seriousness while turning big knobs on the wall. A meeting between several military men and a sinister looking Dr. Tom Anderson played by Lee Van Cleef ends in hostility and dark prediction. Returning home to his hot wife Claire (Beverly Garland) he pours a drink and talks via ham radio to a otherworldly electronical voice. Later he shows it to his buddy Nelson (Peter Graves), who doesn't believe a word. Anderson becomes more recalcitrant and speaks more bitterly with his electro-voice buddy.

Claire is despondent, she's starting to think that Tom is going off the deep end. The way he glares out from under a dark furrowed brow making stark threatening predictions about the human race, and sleeping next to the radio, one can't blame her for stalking the room in frustration. 

Shortly enough, the voice, attributed to a Venutian alien, comes to earth and magically shuts down the power of everything, a la The Day the Earth Stood Still. Now even less convinced of the creatures benevolence, Nelson tells Anderson as much over a drink.

Soon rubber alien larva are winging through the sky and zombifying the population. With little else to do while the power is out, Nelson argues with Anderson some more, and neither make any headway. Nelson's Hausfrau is zombified and in a rage of patriotic scientificality he guns her down. Returning again to Anderson's castle of aloofity, they argue again, but shortly realize that Claire is missing. Showing her true colors, she's taken a shotgun and gone in search of the Venutian, a giant rubber cone with crab claws and fangs.
Alas, she fails, but her death has finally convinced Anderson that he's an asshole, and he bravely gives his life to redeem his soul.

The point is thereby proven that isolationism and suspicion are the cornerstones of scientifical and social success in the face of Communistical alien ideology. Nelson has this shit-cold, deadpan, earnest grimace as he recites bland social "truths" about mankind. But really, the Andersons were the ones who shook it up, kept things on the edge, and made life a little more interesting for all of us.
Old poster: