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!

From Hell to Victory

From Hell to Victory

Italy – 1979

Director – Umberto Lenzi (as Hank Milestone)

United American Video Corporation, 1990, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 42 minutes

In history classrooms and textbooks around the world, you’ll likely find a standard narrative regarding the Second World War. Typically the stories would have you believe that there was a concerted effort by a few evil imperialists to take over the world. Against these were arrayed a fragile alliance of freedom loving peoples who, with a great deal of cautious strategy and careful planning bought a narrow victory for the cause of freedom. A very grandiose and inspiring tale to be sure, but sadly inaccurate.

Through Umberto Lenzi the true saga of World War Two can at last be told. But his is not the standard tale of triumph snatched from the jaws of global fascist conspiracy. Lenzi employs a unique documentary style, utilizing randomly selected archival footage to lend his picture a blurry realism, and jumping deftly between his own dramatized material and footage never before seen outside the context of its original movie. Rather, he loosely describes a series of boring and unconnected local skirmishes which might have coincidentally happened around the same time. Eisenhower, Stalin and Hitler were only shuffling about with little direction, but Lenzi admirably captures that confusing mess and transfers it to the screen with such accuracy it astounds.

"Where's that angry fellow with the mohawk?"           "Vietnam isn't over until 1983 sir."

The loose group of friends around which the narrative quickly skirts, is caught up in the totally unexpected arrival of war in 1939 Paris. All are cast into diverse and dubious roles; French Partisan, Wermacht Panzer Colonel, Elderly American Paratrooper, and each is given an enigmatic and ambiguous motivation, their intense personal struggles revealed through vague dialogue and inspiringly minimal use of continuity. Unbelievably, though each is fighting for a separate cause the friends come face to face in the final climactic battle as if scripted in some low budget melodrama and not by cruel ironic accident of history. It is only through such carefully crafted efforts as Lenzi’s that we can truly come to terms with the pointless chaos of war.

By definition the job description “director” suggests giving a point or a purpose or goal to some series of events or behaviors. Direction implies some kind of plan under the authority of a leader. Much like a general issuing orders to his army; “Move there, attack that ridge and capture and hold the summit there.” It makes for interesting college courses, for it makes history sound like it happened in a sort of linear narrative progression type of thing. But at last, thanks to our beloved Umberto, it has become clear that what sounds good for the headlines and history majors, is really just fluff, propaganda, an elaborate delusion to make us feel like we’re actually taking part in some sort of shared temporal experience. Lenzi’s most lofty triumph in From Hell to Victory is to give the lie to that self-important ivory tower conspiracy called history.

A nice French poster from Moviegoods.

Future Hunters

Future Hunters

United States/Philippines - 1985

Director – Cirio H. Santiago

Vestron Video, 1989, VHS

2025, in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, a guy with a suggestively biblical name is running away from a bunch of Mad Max throwbacks. Arriving at a decrepit brick building, he finds the Spear of Longenus, the spear that pierced the side of Christ as he was crucified, and apparently, allows people to travel through time. To prove the point, the guy grabs it and ends up in 1989, at the same building.

Michelle is a hot archaeology nerd poking around the building with her boyfriend Slade (Robert Patrick) when future guy shows up, saves em from some bikers, hands em the spear and mumbles something in a monotone before croaking
Resorting to a bickering match which is set to continue for the rest of the movie, the happy couple are soon menaced by some goofy Nazi goons who in similar fashion make a repeated whack-a-mole nuisance of themselves. In search of the other half of the spear, the couple flees to Hong Kong where, they meet up with Bruce Le who flexes his sweaty muscles, has a kung fu fight then vanishes from the script (exotic isn’t he?). Returning to their hotel just in time to rescue Michelle’s goods from some slavering natives, Slade is subjected to another practiced and scripted belittling, the shame of which he masks by assaulting a bellboy with his bulge.
The closer we get to the climax of this thing, the longer it feels and the more bizarre the plot twists become, but the introduction of a native militia, a small army of cave-dwelling midgets, and a band of fierce horny amazons can’t save the film from spiraling into a longwinded if action packed conclusion.
Throughout the film, bonehead jock Slade whines and complains, trying at every turn to throw in the towel, for which he is repeatedly upbraided by Michelle. Yet, despite the fact that she is the motivating force behind the entire plot, all the other characters essentially ignore her, and cast her aside to be smothered, along with a great plot, beneath a deluge of crude silly genre clichés.