Over The Top

Over The Top

United States - 1987

Director - Menahem Golan

Warner Home Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 34 minutes

Well before I ever saw Over The Top I had been witness to its long lasting impact. Any time anybody ever had an arm wrestling contest, drunk or sober someone inevitably yelled "Over the top!" If someone included the phrase "over the top" in the conversation, chances were good someone else would mutter approvingly. Directed by Israeli expatriate Menahem Golan, Over the Top is really an attempt to re-legitimize working class morality in an era of accelerating hyper-wealth.

This is the "arm warmer-less" version of the promotional artwork which can be found at The Movie Database, an open-source Wiki-style alternative to IMDB. It's actually rather nicer than the arm-warmer version seen above on my VHS tape and fortunately with the additional material, namely smashed gate and chrome sky ripples, it also includes the artists signature. One "R. Casaro", or Renato Casaro who I believe is responsible for the Conan the Barbarian poster below.

I found a few other posters attributed to Casaro, but other than these two, they're all too low resolution to confirm the artists signature.If you visit Imp Awards where I got this Running Man poster you'll find a number of other Casaro pieces. I just couldn't help but keep the tough guy theme rolling here.
 

Enter the Ninja

Enter the Ninja
United States - 1981
Director - Menahem Golan
MGM/UA, 1991, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 41 minutes

I've referred to this film in several prior posts about Sho Kosugi films, 9 Deaths of The Ninja and Pray for Death. This is the first movie in the classic Sho Kosugi ninja trilogy. I love the international flavor of this film. Director Menahem Golan is an Israeli, half of Golan/Globus and the venerable 80's exploitation powerhouse Cannon Pictures. Star Franco Nero is of course Italian, co-star Kosugi is Japanese, and the film itself was shot on location in the Philippines. If you're feeling brave and want to watch two ninjas fight in a cockfighting ring, you can watch the trailer for Enter the Ninja at Cult Trailers, and the whole movie free on IMDB.

If not entirely believable, which you shouldn't expect anyway, it is pretty fun. As I recall, Nero is called out to the Philippines to help out an old war buddy and some poor campesinos. They are being harassed by the mafia who has discovered oil on the farmers banana plantation. The mafia hires Kosigi I guess because a ninja is more frightening to a bunch of peasants than 50 guys with uzi's?... Yes, uzi's (or something similar), Menahem Golan loves to include high volumes of automatic weapons fire in all his movies. It makes them more, more...shooty.

A UK VHS insert from the awesome Cannon Films.org

The full poster from impawards.com

Kazablan

Kazablan

Israel - 1974

Director- Menahem Golan

Cannon Films, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 2 Hours, 3 min.

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

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

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

The Delta Force

Nice cut-n'-paste job on Lee Marvin's head

The Delta Force

United States – 1986

Director – Menahem Golan

MGM Home Entertainment, 1998, VHS

Run time – 2 hours, 8 min.

Director Menahem Golan: one-half of the defunct Israeli power production duo Golan-Globus, owners of the belly-up Cannon Pictures Group and purveyors of slash and burn 80’s action cinema. From the meat-cleaver-to-the-face political subtlety in this and some other films directed by Golan, one might go so far as to consider him a gung-ho Arab-villifying Jewsploitation predecessor to Steven Spielberg.

Really, The Delta Force is two movies, who like reluctant lovers, slowly test the waters, coyly wooing each other until finally they mate in a cacophony of exploding grenades and video game music.

The first "movie" is a shock to behold, and really deserves custody of the offspring of this unholy and awkward union. Robert Forster (Vigilante, Alligator) plays Abdul, leader of a cell of Lebanese terrorists who hijack a plane departing Athens (based on the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847). Forster has the role pegged down to a science: he made my skin crawl pistol-whipping whimpering American-Pig-Dog capitalist passengers with the sickening and deeply satisfying wet crack of vindication. (also look for staple B-actors Martin Balsam, George Kennedy and "stone free" Bo Svenson on this flight)

Meanwhile, in doo-poop land, a general, encrusted with so many ribbons he needs to be taken into dry dock and scraped, orders up the magical Delta Force in one of those "Oooooo, WOW!" moments I think you're supposed to get awed and wide-eyed about – if you're 8. Led by the withered husk of Lee Marvin (his last screen appearance before he died a year later), the dopey ass-slapping extras playing Delta Force (including Chuck’s son Eric) wait on board their code named secret aircraft "Delta 1". Just as they’re about to depart, whew, retired DF Captain Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris) shows up to join the boy-scouts, and the sausage fest is airborne for a field trip in Beirut.

The coming conflict is glaringly predictable, and few of the details need to be fleshed out. Forster continues to dominate this picture, and the cuts from hijacking scenes to thinly-veiled patriotic cock-stroking, become less and less jarring, if only because the two forces - evil, brilliant Forster, and righteous, pallid Norris (and crew) - overlap with more and more screen time. Finally, with all the hot flying lead and NES music we’ve been dipping our feet into, it comes crashing down in a deluge of predictable mediocrity, until we slip all the way into the pot to have the flesh boiled from our bones. His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Norris’s piercing “American justice” glare is at head-exploding intensity here, and strikes fear in the hearts of all. Best of all, he gets to ride a dirt-bike with automatically reloading missles and machine guns on the front and grenade launchers on the back. I think the grenades are a metaphor for a deluge of fecal spray; they shoot out of the "exhaust pipe", and in any case I am sure that unlike real grenades, these ones are super grenades that explode instantly on target, all the time.

Now, with a conveniently placed ramp, Norris can dramatically leap and wheelie his way into the sunset, coating everything in his path with a fine spray of human waste; talented supporting actors unlucky enough to be caught in his shadow, and my poor weeping eyes, included.

Poster art from Film Cynic.

Soundtrack cover art from Ruthless Reviews.