Equalizer 2000

Equalizer 2000

Philippines – 1987

Director – Cirio Santiago

MGM/UA Home Video, 1987,VHS

Run Time – 1 hour 25 minutes.

I’m going to spend a little time with the cover of Equalizer 2000 here because no matter now old I get and how many times I “fall for it” I will always be a sucker for this kind of box. I’m also a sucker for films with a number in the title and especially (I know, we’re getting real esoteric here) numbers that are round thousands. They practically scream out “The future is going to be awesome! Come see!” And especially when the date in question has already passed by the time I see the film. That’s how I picked this movie. From the cover of Equalizer 2000, a cover which I might add is one of the most amazing pieces of modern pop-art ever created, one immediately assumes it’s going to be about Richard Norton and his breasts. The painting (because this was originally painted, by a person, with a brush) perfectly captures the look of slightly melancholy disinterest which, from Gymkata (1985) to Road House 2 (2006), Norton consistently brings to his performances. I realize that’s just how his face is shaped, but it is beautifully captured here and perfectly suited to this film. So intimidating and so confident is he that this whole endeavor is quite literally boring. So too does the woman at his side appear nonplussed by the battle that’s just begun in both word and deed on the cover. She is after all sheltered by the considerable bulk of Norton and his tool. In fact, she almost looks tired. Like a Southern California roller-skate waitress who’s been working all day and just wants you to quit staring at her chest and order your fucking burgers. Her boyfriend is here now and you are sooo not interesting.



But this movie isn’t really about Richard Norton or breasts. It’s not Richard Norton’s undeniable physical prowess which is the subject of that line on the back of the box. He is not the ultimate weapon although you would be excused for thinking so. No, the entire movie, from the title to the endless squabbling of the plot is about that rifle-grenade-launcher, rocket-launcher, laser, shotgun he’s carrying. That is the Equalizer, and they’re hanging a hell of a lot on that weapon. After some kind of apocalypse the world has been reduced to a parched desert landscape marked intermittently only by the cardboard and canvas forts of scattered scavenger cliques. Norton however, known here as Slade (the most popular boys name after the apocalypse it would seem) is a roving unaligned loner. As various

factions attack and defend against other factions, Slade is wounded and rescued by Karen who drives them back to her “good” guys. It is here that Slade discovers them welding a bunch of extra barrels onto an M-16. Upon completion Slade simply takes it. No one argues. Karen (Corrine Wahl) stares longingly at Slade. More assaults follow and the Equalizer changes hands several times until the “good” guys win and Slade drives off into the sunset to be alone with his thoughts. The purpose of this presumably is to build tension as “the ultimate weapon” tilts the delicate balance of post-apocalyptic society one way, then another. It doesn’t.

For as badass as it may be, the Equalizer is lost in the political squabbling that poses as this film’s “action,” its result as predictable as it is tedious. Corrine Wahl, nee Alphen does hang lustily upon Slade’s body, but from afar, with her eyes. She’s come a long way from Hot T-Shirts after all. In his second screen role ever, Robert Patrick makes an appearance as a minor character. His first film had been Santiago’s supremely nutty Future Hunters in which he starred as "Slade" with the supporting talents of, you guessed it, Richard Norton who looked predictably bored. Further lifting the costumes straight from Bobby Suarez’s Warrior’s of the Apocalypse, Equalizer 2000 discards the drug addled lunacy of both earlier films in favor of a monotonous back and forth exchange of small arms fire. Cheap Filipino post apocalypse films could hardly be more different. Slade and Karen’s thousand yard stares on that gorgeous cover would seem to be more disappointment than confidence.

For the box completist...

GLO Friends Save Christmas

GLO Friends Save Christmas

United States - 1986

Children's Video Library, 1985, VHS

Run Time - 30 minutes

Rental Store - Peters Video Center

This label for a shop in St. Helena or Calistoga, California was stuck to my VHS copy of the epically bad Zombie vs Ninja.

Silk

Silk

Philippines - 1986

Director – Cirio H.Santiago

MGM/UA Home Video, 198?, VHS

Run Time: 1 hour, 24 minutes

For a movie named after its lead protagonist, Silk is infuriatingly coy about using her. Few action films are so audacious as to be named after the key protagonist but in such cases there is no hesitancy to demonstrate the reasoning behind this decision. Both Dirty Harry and Cobra open their films with an explosive introduction that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Perhaps it is because Silk is a woman that director Santiago didn’t feel that people would buy the idea of a tough, trigger happy female cop. Perhaps it’s because the name doesn’t make any sense considering the character’s lack of personal suavity and the film’s dearth of nudity.

I won’t say that it’s all downhill from there, it’s not a bad movie per-se, but neither is it very memorable. Cec Verill (you wouldn’t know her from anything else) plays Silk, a hard-ass cop who busts drug smugglers in Hawaii (actually the Philippines.) Trouble is, much of the film seems to be about her male coworkers arguing amongst each other and fighting over money. Through a meandering plot Silk tracks down baddies and blasts ‘em, uncovers nefarious plots and blows ‘em up, gets captured, escapes and does it all again, but despite claiming to be “so fucking smooth,” her primary function appears to be fucking up dude’s plans. With a name like that I expected a veritable cacophony of one-liners or a sea of sweat slicked skin. I’m guessing the movie was named after the fact (as often happens) in order to create as false an impression as the cover. An image which, though titillating in the extreme, is about as egregious as the movie gets.

Santiago didn’t often waste a chance to get the women out of their clothes, (his earliest efforts included numerous Women In Prison films) but I can’t understand it here. I do appreciate the fact that her value to the film is not purely sexual (her outfits do make this claim dubious) but her hard ass attitude is as much a sensationalization of her gender (in it’s “unusualness”) as T & A, but the extra skin would have cheapened its appeal even more. Perhaps that’s the irony of Silk. In all it’s unreasonableness it upsets our expectations and reminds us not to make assumptions. Or not. Maybe I’m trying to validate what’s really just a bunch of crap.

Go read the review at Comeuppance!

The Jolson Story

The Jolson Story

United States - 1946

Director - Alfred E. Green

RCA/Columbia Pictures, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 2 Hours, 9 Minutes

Ghetto Blaster

 Ghetto Blaster

United States – 1989

Director – Alan Stewart

Prism Entertainment, 1990, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 19 minutes

So are you like, Rambo or somethin'?

Watching 80’s exploitation cinema one begins to tire of all the lamentation about Vietnam. Between the vets wracked by guilt for what they did, or haunted by flashbacks of the horrors and unable to reasimilate into civilian life you would think the cottage industry in ‘Nam vet characters was a symptom of some kind of national trauma. It was as if by cinematic proxy the U.S. was trying to come to terms with what had happened. Yet easily as common as the Regret Vet was his cinematic contemporary, the Vengeance Vet. He reclaimed all that was lost, fixed everything that was broken and righted all that was wrong about post-Vietnam America (lord knows the government couldn’t do it.) If the war had taught us national humility, Vengeance Vet hadn’t gotten that memo.

Ghetto Blaster’s Travis is not the kind of ‘Nam vet who needs to commiserate. Like his eponymous 1976 predecessor Travis Bickle, he’s more interested in talking about cures. The film opens with Travis’s return to his childhood home in Los Angeles where he reunites with his estranged father for the first time after returning from The ‘Nam. In search of some sense of normalcy after the loss of his wife, Travis and his daughter find that the familiar old neighborhood has instead become a "hood." But if routine has taught us anything, the very war Travis is trying to put behind him is where he learned the same esoteric martial-arts combat skills that will enable him to fight it all over again in the streets of America.

Who you trying to get crazy with ese?

Within minutes of arrival, Travis finds himself at odds with The Hammers, a movie-tough gang of Chicanos who promptly murder Travis’s father. Despite a desire to quickly sell his dad’s corner-store and re-leave L.A. just as fast as he came, Travis makes the same mistake as his dad; he refuses to pay The Hammers for protection. But it takes the death of his most loyal customer (how’s that for American prioritizing!) for Travis to revert once again to his “urban warfare, extractions” training and hit The Hammers back as if he were, as his rivals mockingly suggest in a moment of fourth-wall-shattering clairvoyance, “some kind of Rambo.”

As a matter of fact… Camouflaging himself in what clearly is the urban equivalent to mud and leaves; a clown suit, Travis hijacks a shipment of cocaine from the Hammers, leading to the reciprocal and banal hostage/chase/shootout-in-the-abandoned-warehouse climax all too common in low budget drug-crime action films. Still, re-waging the entire war (racial demarcations included) in the ghetto not only reinvigorates Travis and America’s masculinity, it does the tough and morally burdensome job of drawing a clear line between who has the right (and might) to dictate the rules. Set to that wiggy-wiggy wild rap beat all the kids love these days, Ghetto Blaster mixes roughly equal parts of The Exterminator (1980) and Colors (1988) in an almost flawless agglomeration of the ‘Nam Vet revenge/vigilante trope that re-invigorated 80’s exceptionalism and the ghetto-drug-crime genre that would scare the piss out of white people in the 90’s. And as if spoken by former president George H. W. Bush himself, Ghetto Blaster proves without a doubt that we’ve finally defeated the Vietnam Syndrome.

Go read my friends review over at Explosive Action!

Rental Store - Video Station

Long ago, in a city far, far away in Wisconsin, Video Station carried a VHS copy of that spectacular film 9 1/2 Ninjas.

Rental Store - Southampton Video

Southamton Video was a shop somewhere in the States that once carried my VHS tape of Gumby for President. Where was Southampton?

Rental Store - The Video Palace

This label, from one or the other of the Alexandria or Manassas, Virginia Video Palace storefronts, was securely adhered to the side of my Murder Weapon VHS tape...

Banzai Runner

After an absence of nearly three months as we moved our headquarters from a secret mountain bunker to a lakeside chalet at the center of the world, Lost Video Archive is more or less back in action. We re-open our acute dissection of forgettable and often shitty cinema with just such an entry from the annals of the Reagan Era:

Banzai Runner

United States - 1987

Director - John G. Thomas

Vidmark Entertainment, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 26 minutes

The wonderful thing about the American Southwest is that it is largely empty of human made infrastructure save one thing; highways. Over vast distances of desolate and unforgiving terrain there is literally nothing but a strip of asphalt stretching to the horizon. This makes the Southwest, an area I personally know well, a great for location shooting both post-apocalyptic sci-fi and road racing movies on the cheap. Some of this has changed over the years of course, development has encroached on the desert and the various state’s chambers of commerce have learned to take advantage of these things. In the latter half of the 20th Century though, the southwest was still a veritable blank slate. Take for example 1987’s Banzai Runner, shot on location in California City, California. Boasting at present a population somewhere near 16 thousand, it was at the time of filming an as-yet undetonated boom-town with a mere four thousand souls living at the center a vast network of hot, empty pavement.

I’ve previously railed about comparing little unknown films to larger well-known titles. It’s generally unfair I think and neither requires nor expects much intellectual capacity from audience or writer. I am inclined however to point out the similarities, other than titular, between another recent LVA acquisition, Nomad Riders, and Banzai Runner. Though you mightn’t initially guess it, both films share an affinity for the open road, and in particular, the dusty barren open road of the southwest. They also share a thematic similarity that goes beyond the title screen to a plot about a guy driven to exact revenge on the nefarious highway-rogues who murdered his family.

Meh.

Our protagonist Billy Baxter (Dean Stockwell) staggers into vengeance like a Sunday morning drunk into chapel. He was a cop out to bust high-speed, thrill-seeking Runners on the highway, but when his zeal proved excessive he was fired and now mopes about the house, aimless and distant. He only decides to avenge the hit and run murder of his brother as an afterthought when he stumbles across the murderer Syszek (Billy Drago) during a drug-sting, and then only after he takes that job to save his own house from a bitter ex-wife. Hey, if the opportunity presents itself, just twist his arm.

I might be displeased, but I'll let it slide this time!

This less than pressing vigilante justice nearly comes at the expense of Billy’s humanity, but when the rubber meets the road, Banzai Runner is really one of those old frontier fantasies that preceded the internal combustion engine into the mythical West. The rich jerks who flaunt the law will surely get their comeuppance when that magical (and effective) force of objective moral justice floating around out there inevitably sets things right for the downtrodden little guy. In classical fantasy tradition as the emotionally garbled lawman reluctantly pursues vindication he will learn to love and trust again and all will be right with the universe as class is once again carefully shorn of its relationship to power and smothered in a dose of corn sap fit to choke a small horse.

All fluffy feel-good stuff to be sure, but not very convincing. In Nomad Riders, the protagonist was an vigilante too, and an unlikable one at that, but he knew what he was up against. He was not encumbered by any delusions of an external morality to whom all must answer. Steve Thrust, that unpleasant bastard, knew that he had to make justice, to take it himself if there was to be any at all. Plus, he did it to a better soundtrack. 

This picture is about as clear as my  feelings about Banzai Runner are going to get.

Rental Store - Sigma Video

Retrospectively speaking, Sigma Video carried a copy of the Canadian boxing action flick Half the Action which is where I found this label.

Rental Store - Video Time II

Not that long ago, Hampstead, New Hampshire video shop Video Time II carried a copy of the low-budget gorror flick Death Row Diner.