Saturn 3

Saturn 3

United Kingdom – 1980

Director – Stanley Donen

CBS/FOX Home Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour 28 minutes 

Until my friend laid this old tape in my hands I had never heard of Saturn 3. That isn’t saying much I suppose, but he hadn’t either, and we are both big fans of robot oriented space-fiction so it was a pleasant surprise. Before watching the film I did a little research and discovered some interesting stuff. Despite not initially wanting to write extensively about what is a fairly mainstream film, after watching I was inspired to say something about it its relationship to space-fi in general.

When it was released, Saturn 3 appears to have received generally negative reviews, and remarkably, continues to do so . Not surprisingly these predominantly appear to stem from unfavorable comparison to Star Wars, which was released just a few years before. Although not mentioned in anything I read, I think it also owes a large debt to Kubrick’s 2001 in both overall plot, and Elmer Bernstein's score. But even if it’s not exceedingly original, Saturn 3 does a damned good job of wearing it’s pedigree on its sleeve.

The important thing to remember about Star Wars, especially because it has compounded its cultural significance in the last decade, is that it wasn’t very creative. As I’ve said before, it’s an entertaining movie, but the plot as we know is a generic and predictable white hero myth. Saturn 3 is not as epic or inspiring than its predecessor, but neither is it any less creative. What was so remarkable about Star Wars (and this is what I think most people find so endearing about it) was the visual design. Saturn 3 interestingly enough, was written and (initially) directed by John Barry, the same man responsible for the look of Star Wars.

The story itself centers around Adam (Kirk Douglas) and Alex (Farah Fawcet) on one of Saturn’s moons where they operate a hydroponic farm but mostly shag. When another astronaut, Benson (Harvey Keitel) arrives at their secluded love nest, they soon discover that he and his robot are not on a mission of peace. Compelling? Perhaps not, but visually everything in this movie, from the spacesuits to the ships clicks. The thing that really sells it for me is the robot, “Hector”, an eight foot tall machine powered by a giant tube of vat-grown human-fetus brains. The concept is pretty twisted if you think about it, and the way in which Hector takes on the sociopathic personality of its programmer Benson is particularly well conceived.

I’ve always cushioned my disappointment with the termination of sci-fi cinema’s great sagas with a simple philosophy; If the human geography of space has been expanded as much as my favorite films claim, then it is quite possible that each space-fiction film (of a nominally similar quality) merely represents another local facet in the same broad story. In that sense, there is no “end” to what I call the “Space-Fi Narrative Continuum”*. Garnished with moments of genuine intelligence and clothed in awesome visuals, Saturn 3 definitely makes the cut.

*In the future I'll refer to qualifying films under this label. Previously reviewed films which qualify have been back referenced.

 This Japanese poster is from Movie Outlaw

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.

Contagion

Contagion

Australia - 1987

Director – Karl Zwicky

Sony Video Software, 1988, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 30 min.

I don’t like narration, particularly when it’s vague and arcane and meant to add suspense to a film that appears about to not otherwise have any. I wasn’t expecting this to be Australian either and that’s set me off balance a little. A well-paced scene of a motorcyclist getting beheaded is nice, but ultimately it’s all implied and happens offscreen. There better be something redeeming, that’s the only way implied gore is tolerable, when there’s another hook.

When our protagonist Mark takes a drive in the woods and witnesses a girl getting kidnapped he tries to rescue her. A graphic and prolonged scene of her attackers fondling her is a bit unsettling and suggests this is actually going to be visceral. The attackers turn out to be mulleted Australian hillbillies who capture and sodomize Mark while wearing furry masks. I’m thinking it was less for having interrupted their city-girl raping than for having the audacity to sport a wee dust-ruffle mullet of his own. Mark later escapes after pickaxeing one of the hillbillies in the skull, traumatized to the point of losing all social grace and common sense. Worse than the yellow sweatshirt over a white button-up he's already wearing that is.


His first decision is to trust the two attractive women and the old guy in a robe who rescue him. These total strangers offer him limitless riches and sex if only he’ll “do the right thing” which he interprets to mean crushing and suffocating his co-workers to death and robbing and strangling his harpy of a wife.

Even though Mark is clearly desperate for financial gain his primary motivator quickly becomes the twins. Okay, my primary motivation became the twins, I did say that this movie needed another hook after all (and yes, all the deaths are still off-screen). Cleo and Helen are it and Mark and I keep hoping for more. It doesn’t matter that despite the notorious reliability of financial market speculators the old guy hasn’t proffered any actual cash. What matters is that the girls have delivered on their part of the bargain, repeatedly, at least in Mark’s head. I suspect that he’s hallucinating the whole thing, they are a bit out of his league and he’s still wearing the same filthy sweatshirt from the hillbilly ordeal.


I bought this movie based almost exclusively on the bad cover art which turned out to be deceptively accurate. It’s the title that doesn’t make much sense. It did make me think of a boob-sprinkled Aussie Cannibal Apocalypse plot, the trauma of tiger cages in ‘Nam and viral cannibalism replaced with hillbilly sodomy and shallow male fantasy. (guilty) The money is thrown in there just to round out the insanity. C’mon, hot Aussie nympho twins isn’t possibly enough to make a guy crazy right, but it will save a movie.

A Japanese clamshell VHS and an Italian DVD. I like the distributors logo on the VHS.

A UK VHS clamshell insert from It's Only A Movie(.co.uk).

Terror Vision

Terror Vision

United States - 1986

Director- Ted Nicolaou

Lightning Video, 1986, VHS

Run Time – VHS: 1 hour, 24 min.

Terror Vision is 80’s culture on steroids, or rather, 80’s culture on Charles Band’s production dime. It is but one of the many pieces of the puzzle that composes the Band legacy. I have never felt any affection for anything that came out of Full Moon, I watched all 9 Puppet Master films in a row once and literally had to be physically restrained from committing suicide. But there was a strange and wonderful period of time during the 80’s when Band (and his brothers Richard and Albert) were responsible for some of the awesomest cheesy movies in history, among them Terror Vision and its philosophical sibling Shrunken Heads. Terror Vision is a campy assault on 80’s pop culture that isn’t afraid to bring up homosexual group sex but still never lets slip a single expletive. It’s part of the 80’s microculture of overt on-screen shout-outs to the history of B-film and goes on to openly mock said history’s delusional detractors.

In the 80’s TV options exploded when satellite television began entering the average American home and access to all that untapped brain-rot was considered a mark of affluence and modernity. Never mind that in those early days of satellite (and cable) TV most of it was totally banal crap, that didn’t stop (and still doesn’t I guess) uptight moral tyrants from blaming the tube for societies perceived ills.

Family patriarch Stanley Putterman is determined to get his malfunctioning dish working and don once again the mantle of cool guy. This accomplished, he and his wife leave for a swinger’s party leaving raving bloodthirsty war-vet Grandpa and their son Sherman on the couch watching an old horror movie show (including the epic Giant Claw) hosted by a well-endowed floozy dressed as Medusa. Grandpa who lives in a fully stocked, fully armed fallout shelter says “war stories and horror movies are educational, they’re survival stories and they always neutralize the enemy in the end.” Hmmmm, only in a literal sense…


Social corruption, manifested as alien monster stares out from the TV then steps off the screen into the house, quickly consuming the least hip, Grandpa and reducing him to an appealing 2-dimensional caricature of “Grandpa”, kindof like on you would expect on TV. Mom and Dad replete with ascot and high heels return home with another couple with whom they intend to share the decadent luxury of the pool/satellite setup. They soon meet the same fate as Grandpa, but in the interim Sherman, his punk sister and her metal boyfriend "O.D." (Jon Gries) befriend the monster and teach it to love junk food and television (that’s too much of a mind-fuck metaphor for me to describe in this space). It spends the rest of the film hanging out in the Putterman’s pool watching Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.

So you see, It’s not the TV that promotes sex and violence, but rather that these things are already there. The popularity of vice media can be traced to its nascent presence in the home, people consume what is familiar and makes them feel good. Any assertion otherwise is just so much rhetorical paid advertisement.

Terror Vision trailer from the Monsters A GoGo YouTube channel.

Or a slightly longer, more METAL version of the trailer at Cult Trailers.

The Abomination

Cover image from Amazon. Since I never saw the cover I assume this is what you'd find on the market if you could get this video at a reasonable price.

The Abomination

United States - 1986

Director – Bret McCormick (as Max Raven)

Donna Michelle, 1988, VHS

Run time – 1 hour, 40 min.

There are sadly a great number of philistines out there who like to cast aspersion on this film, fortunately you and I are smarter and more attractive than all of those throwbacks, and we know better. Our friends at Metal Thai (Thailand’s first and greatest webzine for Metalheads!”) captured this movie in one sentence; “When the carnivorous creature grew inside the Cody's body, he became to the brutal guy who killed the people to feed the monster!” I doubt I can improve much on that description, but I’ll try and flesh out the details a bit here…
Opening with a ten-minute montage recap of every good splatter scene in the whole movie The Abomination wears its eviscerated heart on its sleeve. (Plus that means you get to watch them twice!)

Cody is an average 20-something Texan boy, working as a car mechanic and living at home with his chain smoking evangelical mother. TV evangelist Brother Fogg has convinced her that the tumor in her lung is an infestation of evil. One night she hacks and spits up a big pulsing bloody lump that she tosses in the trash, but it slithers into Cody’s room and into his mouth while he’s sleeping. Soon Cody is also hacking up bloody throbbing nuggets, all of which compel him telepathically to provide meat food in large and expanding quantities.

Bye, bye Mommy, say hi to Jesus for me.

Grown huge feasting on the devil’s work, The Abomination quickly infests Cody’s house filling any enclosure suited for the awesome practical puppet effects used to create the flesh hungry gore-beast. Wet leathery tentacles bursting from every drawer it feeds on anything that comes too close, dragging it into a gullet big enough for an entire human body to be sucked up and go slipping down its toothy throat screaming and thrashing the whole way. The cozy split-level soon becomes a charnel house where Cody grins sardonically as his mother and girlfriend are each dismembered and eaten. He pitchforks buckets of viscera into the snapping meat holes that strain the joints of every blood caked cabinet. This is truly become the demon seed of evangelism, the flesh eating offspring of idiot faith.

The Abomination is a gut-churning experience in homemade extreme gorror at its finest. Even though it suffers from the usual super-indie problem of generally lousy production, every minute of The Abomination is worth watching simply for the unsettling audacity of meat eating god monsters. Think Bad Taste meets a gospel Deadly Spawn in Texas and you have some idea of what this baby is like.

Sadly, The Abomination is an impossible to find VHS only gem. Thankfully I live quite close to Scarecrow Video, and although I refuse to enter the place because I don’t think I could control myself, my friend Daniel is kind enough to bring these things over to my screening room now and again…

I found the Metal Thai website thanks to an image search that turned up the gorgeous UK VHS cover above, and a bunch of other great images from The Abomination.

Exterminator City

Exterminator City
United States - 2005
Director – Clive Cohen
York Home Video, 2005, DVD

A woman is taking a shower when a skull faced robot barges into the room and murders her. Damn, these robots are awesome. Credits, oh crap, Julie Strain is in it, and I have a hard time dealing with this whole clique of on-the-cheap meat-for-hire scream queens. And I wasn’t expecting boobs in this movie.

Oh, right, robot puppets! Lots of creepily lit model high-rise buildings make a rain soaked noiresque atmosphere of tilted walls and tinny canned sound. Aero-cars zip through the semi-darkness suspended from strings.

Skull face robot, a former pest exterminator-bot catches another well-endowed woman in the bathroom with her top off and chops her up. He halucinaties an evil bloodthirsty Christian God for a little while, sweats, fingers his killing blade, and then goes to robo-confession.

So, this is basically a low budget blasphemous, stripy, puppet, robot, noir gorror film?

A detective robot, programmed to be hard boiled, and unleash a string of crusty hardwired catchphrases teams up with the killers shrink, another chromed cookie-cutter charicature to solve the rapidly mounting top-heavy death-toll.




As the Exterminator carves up another preening prosthetic princess, the detective is subjected to the lo-bugit data-onslaught of robo- serial-killer psychology and his own sweaty unrelenting vice.

An merciless onslaught of bitter, hard-boiled and unscrupulously corrupt robots populate this emotionless evisceration of genre standbys. Little attention is given to building a living, breathing world for these characters to fill. Rather, they mutter cynical, cliché sarcasm, gazing out through dimly glowing LED eyes and let their dark digital void fill the world.

Whether by conscious intent or haphazard compromise, easily the best use of puppets since Henson or the Feebles. A blundering, full-force low-budget exploration of the boundaries of creative insanity exploitation filmmaking.

Amazons vs. Supermen

Amazons vs. Supermen

(Superuomini, superdonne, superbotte)
Italy - 1975
Director – Alfonso Brescia (a.k.a. Al Bradley)
Rarescope, 2008, DVD

The music alone foreshadows a tenuous grip on logic, and should have given me all the warning I needed. If only I had noticed it during the first viewing, drunk with four friends, I might have noticed a big terrible secret. Instead, I sat expectantly through what at first looked like an average low budget Italian adventure movie, but what quickly turned into a full-fledged assault on my sense of propriety. Menaced by brutal vicious Amazons, their callous disregard for life proven by an opening a scene of them killing each other to great fanfare, the innocent peasant residents of a peaceful valley turn for help to Dharma, a skinny old white man who lives in a Batman style rock cave. Not just any skinny old white dude, this guy spouts cocky mystical passive aggressive rhetoric while wearing a chain-mail short-short/hood combo with a tiny waist length red cape.


Nearby a giant black man is eating lentils and pitching dwarves at local hoods, while a Chinese guy (Shaw Studios actor Hua Yueh) astride an ox does more or less the same thing to the strains of spooky jazz, and wins the affection of the only other Asian actor in the film, a pretty girl.
Passing on the yoke of “gay medieval superhero” to his protégé, Dharma reveals the secret of the flame of immortality. Really, is this supposed to be metaphorical?

With their racially matched mates in tow, black man and Chinese man team up to beat up some more thugs, ostensibly to prove their worth to Dharma who is busy trampoloining into a fracas with the gullible Amazons, taunting them all the while with an incessant trampoline slide whistle sound effect. With Dharma hogging 90 percent of the screentime, and having sufficiently angered the hollering Amazons with a little panty-raid, the three heroes return to the valley to prepare for the inevitably bizarre confrontation.
A brutally, hair pullingly insistent combination of inept slapstick and vanilla violence, this bears all the marks of improvisation on a scale that can only be the work of one man. Alfonso Brescia, mastermind of babbling, semi-coherent “tourettes syndrome” filmmaking. There is no way of predicting what crescendo of insanity is sure to come spluttering from the glue sniffing blowhole of this movie short of heavy drinking and cranial trauma.

Hunter's Blood

Hunter’s Blood

United Statesl – 1986

Director – Robert C. Hughes

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 42 min.

Surprisingly comfortable within the warm fold of 80’s exploitation, Hunters Blood, with all the B names behind it, has a lot to go on, and with little hesitation it sets to work. The cover, and box synopsis immediately invoke Deliverance, an association I am surely not the first to draw (and in fact the reason I bought it). Nevertheless, Hunters Blood quickly sidesteps any chance at class with an instant shower scene, an asexual one, but the point is that we establish this as exploitation right away.

David (Samuel Bottoms, Lance the surfer in Apocalypse Now) and his dad (Clu Gulager) don flannel & vests and hop into his uncles rumbling Bronco and rip up the road on their yearly hunting trip. Picking up dads brother and his New York lawyer buddy Marty (Joey Travolta) they back slap their way up to a beer joint in the Apilachians where loudmouth Marty plays the boorish tourist and gets the vengeance ball rolling. After sexually harassing the barmaid, they get in a knife fight with some more hillbillies, and take flight in the Bronco.
With sheer stupid blundering luck propelling them from here on, the protagonists run into the redneck’s poaching operation. Time after time they are self-trippingly lucky enough to escape, capture, be captured by and escape again the bloodthirsty filth encrusted hillbillies. Yet, despite prolific flayed and crucified warnings from skittish Game Wardens, the group resorts to positive thinking.
Thanks to good old fashioned yankee naivete, they continue the hunting trip. It is this very stubborn determination to die that makes the horror films of this generation so watchable.

Somebody has to get shot, yes, there will be blood in this movie. Between a fair mix of shrieking idiocy and meat-headed obstinacy, the surviving civilised guys will, after a few dramatic personnel cutbacks, surely catch the last meat wagon back to town .

VHS sleeve from Backwoods Horror

  The poster whence came the artwork. Courtesy of 123 Nonstop as is the one below.