Raid on Entebbe

In cooperation with some of the finest movie blogs I know, Lost Video Archive is proud to contribute this post to Kotto Week, an event focusing on the long, extensive and diverse career of this underappreciated actor. A full list of participants follows this post.

Raid on Entebbe

United States - 1976

Director - Irvin Kershner

Thorn EMI Home Viedo, 1984, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 53 minutes

Raid On Entebbe is a made for television historical dramatization of Operation Entebbe/Thunderbolt which took place on 4 July, 1976.  Seven days earlier a group of 4 hijackers had taken over a plane headed from Athens to Tel Aviv Israel and flew it to Lybia and subsequently to a Uganda suffering through its fifth year of Idi Amin’s dictatorship. Israeli commandos flew all the way to Entebbe to pull a surprise raid on the airport where the remaining hostages were being held.

Contrary to what I’m sure was a tense situation in reality, it is pretty dull here, and at 40 minutes I feel like a hostage of a thinly scripted glorification of Israeli military valor and absolution from responsibility for violence. With an excessively hefty cast that includes Charles Bronson, John Saxon, Peter Finch, James Woods, Martin Balsam, Horst Bucholtz and yes, Yaphet Kotto, there is enough time to parade each actor across the screen, but not enough to give any of their characters depth. Raid on Entebbe is a film that is a prisoner of its precise moment in time, for without a knowledge of the events, it makes little sense. Nevertheless, Kotto manages well with his few minutes of screen time as Idi Amin.

Unfortunately this seems to be typical of the roles played by Kotto. His talents are restricted to supporting characters (where he nevertheless frequently outperforms the leads). Historians of blacks in film have repeatedly pointed out that Hollywood has had a very difficult time coping with a fully humanized strong black male lead. This may be why Kotto took to television, where the work was more frequent if not more empowering for his roles, but that’s only my theory. It’s simply sad that Kotto so rarely had a chance to apply his skill to a character with real human depth. Subsequently, I think there is an interesting theoretical connection between Kotto and his role here as Idi Amin. Amin was perhaps the perfect dramatic foil for the period in the mid 70’s. He was a crazy black man at a time when American culture had just exhausted itself on the Civil Rights movement and The Great Society. White people needed a reason to believe they had, and to be seen as having "done enough", to feel that they had atoned for their guilt, and that anyone who wasn't satisfied, who still wanted more, or who simply refused to be quiet were baaaaad niggers.

I’m not trying to recast Amin as merely a victim of bad press, he was very much a real tyrant. However, because his sociopathic egotism was largely meted out upon his own people it made him easier to dismiss in the West. He could be treated as a pitiable, posturing “martinet”, and exemplified as a "type". The white status quo didn’t (and still doesn’t) know how to deal with forceful and assertive black characters who act bigger than the britches they have been given, so it continues to disempower, mock and stereotype them, including by relegating them supporting or comedic roles in film and history.

Aside from pointing out that Israeli commandos are good (and they were, but  even that is boring in this film), Raid on Entebbe manages to not say much at all except that Idi Amin was unstable and vindictive. Any film about Amin practically begs comparison to other performances of this unique and bizarre historical figure. Joseph Olita’s in Amin: The Rise and Fall, Julius Harris’s in Victory at Entebbe, Forest Whittaker’s in Last King of Scotland, and the real deal himself in Barbet Schroeder's documentary Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait which feels as much like an elaborate put-on as any of the others. In the few minutes of screen time he is afforded as Amin (this film is really about Israels political image), Yaphet Kotto manages to better the first two and come damn close to the second two. It is ironic that Yaphet Kotto makes Amin the most interesting and complex character in an otherwise boring film.

This VHS cover (?) comes from Amazon U.K

This poster I got from The Warsaw Jewish Film Festival site is the creation of artist John Solie, his signature appears on the far left next to the C-130 aircraft. Solie was responsible for innumerable posters in the golden age of poster art. You can read my blurb about him here.

This poster courtesy NYCJunta.

Visit these other participants as Kotto Week progresses:

Monday Nov. 15th
Unflinching Eye - Alien
Raculfright 13's Blogo Trasho - Truck Turner
Tuesday Nov. 16th
Lost Video Archive - Raid on Entebbe
Manchester Morgue - Friday Foster

Wednesday Nov. 17th
Booksteve's Library - Live and Let Die

Thursday Nov. 18th
Mondo 70 - Drum
B Movies and Beyond - The Monkey Hu$tle
Cinema Gonzo - Report to the Commissioner

Friday Nov. 19th
Illogical Contraption - Eye of the Tiger 
Ninja Dixon - Across 110th St.
Lines That Make Things - The A Team (TV episode)
Things That Don't Suck - Blue Collar
Saturday Nov. 20th
Breakfast In the Ruins - Bone
Lost Video Archive -  The Park Is Mine

Cannibal Apocalypse

A nice VHS cover from It's Only A Movie(.co.uk).

Cannibal Apocalypse

Italy - 1980

Director - Antonio Margheriti (Anthony M Dawson)

Various distributors, various dates, various formats, but pretty much gone.

Run Time approx. 1 hour, 36 min. (according to IMDB)

Don't fault me for posting on this movie just because it had a DVD release (which is now out of print I gather). I'm bringing it up so that I can gather a bunch of VHS and poster images in one place and because I'm going to reference this film in an upcoming write-up. One of the reasons I've never done full writeups for movies like this is because they are well known and popular, cult-classics if you will. Plenty of people have written/spoken about these high-profile exploitation films. I still love 'em, but it doesn't give you any new information to hear me ramble. In any case...

Though he's had a long string of exploitation successes, for my tastes, Antonio Margheriti really hit home with this Cannibal Apocalypse. A bunch of soldiers in Vietnam (check) are held in tiger cages and starved. Finally they are fed human flesh (check) which they consume eagerly, infecting themselves with some kind of spreadable zombie/cannibalism disease, whether physical or psychological, it doesn't matter, they just do. Rescued by John Saxon (check) and some haphazard gunfire and explosions (check) they return to the States and start killing and eating people (check) while John Saxon ogles his underage neighbor (check). Whew.
Talk about exploitation, I can think of few instances in which genre cliche's are combined with such recklessly brilliant abandon, and spearheaded by John 'effing Saxon. This is one of the reasons why Margheriti is a genius, he doesn't care if it makes logical sense or it fits in (even in a hypothetical "film" world).
Every November I celebrate American Thanksgiving (the Canadians have one too) by giving thanks for the worlds largest as-yet untapped food-source; people. Writing this has convinced me which film to start off this year's celebration.

Thanks to the various sites from whom I borrowed the following images.

Another VHS cover, this time from Antionio Margheriti.com

This is the version I have on DVD, but I got the cover scan from It's Only A Movie(.co.uk).

Poster image from Honors Zombie.

Alternate titled poster from Friki Tu Puta Madre.

A third poster I got from Wrong Side of the Art.

And hey, why not, a one sheet from Grindhouse Database

Blood Beach

Cover scan courtesy of itsonlyamovie.co.uk

Blood Beach
United States - 1981
Director – Jeffrey Bloom
Media Home Entertainment, 1982, VHS

Just moments after the opening shot, shit, in the opening shot, a granny is sucked screaming, into the sand of an LA beach while her dog and a harbor patrolman look on. Sadly the patrolman, Harry, knows the old lady and all the more traumatic for him, used to date her daughter Catherine. It might not have gone any farther than that as far as Harry is concerned, except that the following night, in an epically metaphorical cross cutting of scenes, Harry gets it on with his sexy foreign stewardess girlfriend while simultaneously the granny's dog gets its head ripped off on the same stretch of beach. Now Catherine, a sensitive artist type, arrives in town and Harry’s all nervous and twisted up with inrequited "harbor patrol" duties.

Meanwhile, on the scene to investigate, is a pair of perfect character actor cops. Uncouth, unkempt and unruly ex-Chicago cop Royko (Burt Young from a million things) and his scolding fatherly Lieutenant (Otis Young) a stern and overly serious "black cop". Permissably perplexed, the cops have nothing to go on until the next day when a rich bitch on the beach gets her legs chewed on. Enter the big man on precinct, tough as nails Capitan, John Saxon (Cannibal Apocalypse, Nightmare on Elm St.) who orders the entire beach exhumed by a backhoe.
Nothing.

Saxon, a media vulture, and Royko (Young)

For no reason except perhaps to compensate for the relative timidity of scares thusfar in the film, the script resorts to a simple "unexplained noise + cat jumping out of nowhere" ploy, which on second thought only morosely emphasizes the previous fact. As if that weren't enough. When Harry's goofy partner, affectionately called "Hoagy", parts ways with his girlfriend, she gets sexually assaulted under the pier but throws the guy off. Crawling towards her, apparently while fully erect and penetrating the sand, his weiner is gruesomely removed by the sand creature. Follow wiener joke.
Next it's Harry's girlfriends turn to go under, and while the all the backhoes in the world didn't find shit the first time, this time one guy with a spade is able to find her eyeball, solidly placing her in the dead meat category and sealing Catherine's place at the top while nonetheless steeling Harry's resolve.



At this point it's clear that despite the best efforts of a generally talented crew of actors this movie is not going to deliver on the serious meat, or creeps. John Saxon himself cracks down on his boys and pushes them toward the inevitable sideline role all cops play in this type of watered down everyday-quasi-hero horror flick. Harry will inevitably discover the solution somehow linked to his and Catherine's past relationship. And while the cops will execute the final actual kill, Harry will be the artistic father of the operation, and receive the movie's only real hero medal, the girl.

Despite its relative predictability, Blood Beach holds great promise, never altogether delivered, but certainly promised. There's an assload of talent here, and the fact that the monster is based on a real life insect, the Ant Lion, is pretty rad. I thought those bugs were pretty creepy when I was a kid. Here though, the concept isn’t played to its full potential and when it comes so close to the end, there’s no time to let the full weight of the idea sink in. Seeing people getting sucked into the sand and gored is awesome, but there's not enough of it to make all the talent interesting, and the strain between moments of each is only just bridgeable by intoxication.

Some poster art, mostly in languages I don't understand, the last looks like a double feature of some kind.