GLO Friends Save Christmas

GLO Friends Save Christmas

United States - 1986

Children's Video Library, 1985, VHS

Run Time - 30 minutes

The Jolson Story

The Jolson Story

United States - 1946

Director - Alfred E. Green

RCA/Columbia Pictures, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 2 Hours, 9 Minutes

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.

Messenger of Death

Messenger of Death

United States - 1988

Director J. Lee Thompson

Media Home Entertainment, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 32 minutes

Dinosaurs!

Dinosaurs!

United States - 1994

Diamond Entertainment, 1994, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 38 minutes

Eliminators

Eliminators

United States - 1986

Director - Peter Manoogian

Playhouse Video, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 36 minutes

To be released by Shout! Factory today on DVD with Arena and several other 80's Charles Band productions.

Master Yamashita Bo Techniques

Master Yamashita Bo Techniques

Tape # 5 of a continuing series

United States - 198?

Panther Home Video, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour

The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings

United States - 1978

Director - Ralph Bakshi

Republic Pictures, 1993, VHS

Run Time - 2 hours,  10 minutes

Dracula vs. Frankenstein

Dracula vs. Frankenstein

United States - 1969/71

Director - Al Adamson

VidAmerica, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

Nomad Riders

 Nomad Riders

United States – 1984

Director – Frank Roach

Vestron Video, 1985, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 30 minutes.

It takes a certain panache for a film to claim right on the cover to follow a particular tradition or style.
The forebears mentioned are, predictably, popular and successful films to which the adherent whishes to attach itself and against which it is inevitably, poorly compared. There’s nothing at all wrong with this, and in fact it requires some devil-may-care confidence to openly cite one’s aspirations. Negative comparisons can only follow. Then again I suspect that the people writing the synopses on the box are not the same people who made the film.

Our hero, slouching toward vengeance...

Nomad Riders asserts on the back that it was conceived in not just one, but two traditions, those of Mad Max and of Death Wish. The first ostensibly because it takes place, at least partially, in a rural desert landscape, but also because it centers around one man’s quest to avenge the murder of his wife and child, which also brings us round to the Death Wish franchise. Unfortunately, protagonist Steve Thrust has none of the charisma of either of those leading men and is in fact quite a detestable jerk. It’s one thing to be angry, another entirely to be sadistic. Pretty early on in Nomad Riders one begins feeling sorrier for his victims, to say nothing of his poor family, than one does for Thrust himself. None of the victims are very nice either, but Thrust’s tiny head and fashionably oversized glasses perched atop an all white outfit make him look remarkably like a predatory insect.
 

The Nomad Riders vs a circular saw, nobody wins.

Nomad Riders takes its name from a group of three bikers working as heavies for a “Mr. Vacci” by the writer/director. Having exceeded the parameters of their assignment to merely intimidate by actually killing Thrust’s family, the bikers are now the target of both their own employer as well as the aggrieved. But that doesn’t let Steve of Mr. Vacci’s hook yet… As vile as all of these characters are, and there are lots of them to despise, there is something appealing about this protracted and often incongruous cat and mouse game. There is no subtlety, no ‘acting’ in Nomad Riders, only a form of direct address, a sort of yelling-in-the-face line recitation that gives the whole thing a constant sense of physical urgency. To the best of my knowledge (a cursory IMDB search) none of these people, from the writer/director to Thrust to any of the other principals did much more than this single film. It’s a confused and abrasive experience, but its austerity gives it a jarring sense of authenticity lacking in the big budget productions like those it invokes. Thrust and his cohort may be heartless unlikable pieces of shit, but at least they’re honest about it.

This short clip of senseless destruction is both hilarious and well shot. A perfect example why the amateurishness doesn't detract from Nomad Riders. Notice grandma's reading material. Thanks to user XXTUBBYXX who has uploaded a number of other great scenes from this movie...

9 1/2 Ninjas

9 1/2 Ninjas

United States - 1990

Director - Aaron Barsky

Republic Pictures Home Video, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

This low budget ninja parody film neatly secures a place among the most irritating films of all time with a spectacularly grating performance from, everyone in the film. Granted, there are a number of brilliant double entendres and visual puns sprinkled throughout, the script is actually quite good, it's just the execution that's lacking. Not in the enthusiasm category mind you, but the subtlety category. I realize that subtlety is not the stock in trade of physical comedy, quite the opposite, but when all is said and done with a film like this, one almost feels emotionally abused rather than entertained. I'm not stupid, you don't need to punch me in the face with ham, just humiliate yourself and everything will be fine. Perhaps that's the problem. When the characters are so annoying that you can't empathize or identify with 'em, even when you're laughing, it's no longer funny.

The Wild Pair

The Wild Pair

United States - 1987

Director - Beau Bridges

Media Home Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 29 minutes

As a late entry into the 80’s buddy-cop cycle that was turned up to 11 by one Eddie Murphy, The Wild Pair is yet another white-cop/black-cop combo, but it is also another local-cop/federal-cop pairing. Yet neither of these “ironies” is mined for its humor. Baby-faced Beau Bridges plays FBI agent Joe Jennings with enough suave confidence and pig-headdedness, and Bubba Smith plays short-fused Narc Benny Avalon with sufficient pathos to be convincing, but given that by this late date the context has been standardized, it’s not surprising that their performances are also comfortably standard. Together they foil a criminal endeavor perpetrated by a fairly run-of-the-mill array of semi-inept punks and nominally-sinister kingpins and all ends more-or-less happily. As a result, The Wild Pair is both predictable and unsensationally flat, an otherwise forgettable flare-up of Action’s most chronic case of sub-generic herpes.

And yet, beneath this placid, run of the mill surface is a not so subtle current of transgression just waiting to drag you under. The Wild Pair could have gone the way Hellbound  and Cop and ½ eventually did (following precedent), making Benny into a Jim Crow stereotype to compensate for the film’s flaccid storyline. But Benny is not the comic relief to Joe's more serious (and hence we are led to surmise more important and worthy of our identification) quest/project. His physicality, in it's unusualness (to the film) is certainly hard to ignore, and (as with obesity, shortness, boobs etc.) simply must be exploited by the conventions of low comedy (Police Academy) reliant on physical idiosyncrasy for narrative engagement. What humor there is in The Wild Pair (and there aint much) is dependent on Smith's being huge, not on his “acting black" and fulfilling those standards that make white viewers feel safe liking him.

This works because while Jennings is technically on the other side of the tracks, the film is not about his discomfort and the sort of coming to terms for which white audiences need irony and stereotype to feel vindicated. It makes sense then that Benny is the character with depth, history and personality while Jennings is a two dimensional milquetoast (despite Benny’s pointed questioning: “Do you drink your own bath water?” “Sometimes.”) It is after all his neighborhood, his friends and ‘his’ kids who are being subjected to the terrorism of drugs and political violence perpetrated by a racist white conspiracy that goes right to the top levels of government.

Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s little war, drugs and junkies were as necessary to 80’s cinema realism as punk-rockers, but it was his predecessor Richard Nixon who initiated the War on Drugs, clarifying that it was really about black folks, you just couldn’t say it was. At the same time, the CIA really was deliberately introducing narcotics into black neighborhoods to undermine the Black Power movement. (Not surprisingly this was also the same time that the NRA was for gun control; to prevent armed Blacks.) To be sure, there’s a black guy in there peddling drugs in The Wild Pair. It’s easier to dismiss all of this conspiracy stuff if they do it too, but I choose to see his name “Ivory” as somewhat more than accidental. As my friends over at Comeuppance Reviews said in their write-up of The Wild Pair, “it’s all there,” to which I would add; IF you choose to see it. It may appear too convenient to find all this baggage in a forgotten crime dramedy, but after realizing that The Wild Pair has already subverted the staid norms of its genre, its allusions to history appear much more deliberate. The Wild Pair may not be the most original buddy-cop flick out there, but for rocking the narrative boat, it does have the most to say.

Flying Down to Rio

Flying Down to Rio

United States - 1933

Director - Thornton Freeland

Turner Home Entertainment, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 29 minutes

Last Chance Detectives

Last Chance Detectives: Mystery Lights of Navajo Mesa

United States -  1994

Director - Steven Styles

Leucadia Family Films, 1994, VHS

Run Time - 50 minutes

Great cover art by "Rodriguez". It looks like s/he did the art for several of the other videos or books though I can't confirm it with any of the images I found.

Lethal Weapon

Lethal Weapon

United States - 1987

Director - Richard Donner

Warner Home Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 50 minutes

I've been working on an essay about buddy cops and watching a lot of movies that fit the mold. I decided to post this because it's the first VHS release of this iconic entry in the genre, and it also features another movie trope I'm interested in exploring, the 'Nam Vet.

Lunch Wagon

Lunch Wagon

United States - 1981

Director - Ernest Pintoff

Media Home Entertainment, 1982, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes
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In the metropolitan areas of the United States, the food truck has now become ubiquitous. The taco truck was probably the first contemporary incarnation, but you can find just about anything these days. A few blocks from my apartment in Seattle, in the parking lot of a gas station/convenience store you can get fresh sushi, while a little further down the same street, Haitian Creole is available. Although they’ve been around practically forever, this level of cultural variety is a relatively recent development. I cannot of course speak for anywhere else, but virtually all of these rolling establishments seem to have appeared in the last 10 years, most in the last five. Talk all the nonsensical ignorant trash you want about immigration, but even bigots love a curry.

Presumably intended to be just as exotic as the smorgasbord of international options now available from food trucks, Lunch Wagon unfortunately comes from an era when, as its name implies, the typical vehicular dining establishment offered a much more banal culinary experience, like hot dogs and burgers. It is also, again one can only assume, supposed to be more titillating than the average food truck of today* since its owners are two scantily clad and buxom young women (prominently advertised on the box as former playmates Pamela Bryant and Roseanne Katon.) Unfortunately both the exotic and titillating spins on the food truck premise, which might under other circumstances actually work really well together, are afterthoughts. The truck itself, painted pink and named the “Love Bites,” plays only a peripheral role in the film, serving predominantly as a vehicle (literal and figurative) for a septic stew of lounge-act comedy.

A thrilling surprise cameo by Evel Kneivel pinball!

Move it Proles!

After inheriting their lunch wagon from Dick van Patten, our two leads recruit a sexy cook and begin selling food to construction workers. By parking over a particular manhole cover however, they run afoul of a swanky white-collar criminal type who is using said manhole to gain access to a bank. With the help of freshly landed (color coordinated) boyfriends, the female trio manage to foil not only that dastardly plan but another, less dastardly but no less annoying plan by another set of cloying “comedians.”Snagged on the undercarriage of this heretofore thrilling ordeal and dragged along like week-old road kill is yet another tangentical story, this one a talent show which goes on for days and days and is notable only for an early appearance of Missing Persons whom repeatedly perform their song Mental Hopscotch.

It’s an apt metaphor for a film that jumps all over the place yet somehow still lands on a conclusion. Using a food truck as the crux of your film is clearly not a lucrative source of material. As Wheels on Meals, the only other film with a foundational food-truck demonstrates, some other element is critical (in that case incomparable kung fu.) Instead, Lunch Wagon takes its cue Loose Shoes style, from the trashy and titillating exploitation trailers that are entertaining when compressed into 3 minutes, but stretched to feature-length become a chore.

Yes, it's that good.

*Here in Washington State there are a number of drive-up coffee joints that “offer” young women in lingerie or bikinis making the coffee. I suspect these exist elsewhere in the country as well. However, the interior of food trucks in my experience are not typically attractive, sexually or otherwise. 

McGee and Me!: Skate Expectations

McGee and Me!: Skate Expectations

United States - 1990

Director - Chuck Bowman

Focus on the Family, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 30 minutes

Mary Kate & Ashley's Sleepover Party

You're Invited to Mary Kate and Ashley's Sleepover Party

United States - 1995

Dualstar Video (Warner), 1995, VHS

Run Time - 30 minutes

To those who have not experienced it, the 90's had a flavor the protected will never know.

G.I. Joe: The Movie

G.I. Joe The Movie

United States - 1987

Director - Don Jurwich

Celebrity Home Entertainment, 1995, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 33 minutes

Marjoe

Marjoe

United States – 1971

 Director – Sarah Kernochan and Howard Smith

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1983, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 25 minutes

The first impression one gets while watching Marjoe – the man, not the movie- is that you’re being conned. Marjoe the film is about the man of the same name, Marjoe Gortner, whom I was introduced to, as I suspect most people within ten or so years on either side of 30 who watch movies were, by way of Starcrash. He was in a few other choice exploitation films of the late 70’s, but the Luigi Cozzi Star Wars rip off is probably his greatest work (and Cozzi’s.) Before he entered low budget cinema however, Gortner was a Pentacostal revival preacher from the age of four.

The difficulty, if it can be called that, for it is something more akin to suspicion and contagion, is in deciphering which of Gortner’s personalities is real; the speaking in tounges version, or the turned on tie-dye version, for each seems equally genuine. True, it’s unlikely that many of us has been to a revival the likes of those seen in Marjoe, but they bear a striking resemblance to the stories, and if the conviction and feeling of the attendees is anything to go on, Gortner is both effective and affective. Gortner is as convincing in his spasmic and gesticulating Haleilujah’s as he is counting the cash afterwards and explaining the intricacies of the faith healing scam to the documentary crew. Therein lies what I suspect is the convincing factor for so many fans of Marjoe (The Academy deemed it Best Documentary, 1972); its protagonists bizarre lack of duality. There is no difference outside context.

Gortner is not at one time a preacher and at another a hippie, but at all times Marjoe. To me this is what reveals the great lie in religion, for the pious man, the mouthpiece of God, the very conduit of the Holy Spirit (and thus the source of experiential faith) is merely a skilled and practiced (and it appears, weary) man at a job. He preaches because he knows how and it is lucrative, called to it as much as a plumber is “called” to fit pipe. The devout need him to confirm their faith in God as much as his long-haired pals need him to confirm their belief that it’s a sham. And of course, Gortner needs Marjoe in order to prove that he has a moral soul. It is fortunate for us, and I assume for Gortner that he can see and point to the difference between truth and fiction. It’s even more so to those like myself who are unbelievers, that Marjoe (the man and the movie) doesn’t clearly distinguish between the two because to do otherwise would be to rely on a common, but false dichotomy. Whether or not religion or science can be empirically proven is, for most of us, irrelevant. Each exists primarily to affirm through varying methods, our desires rather than any objective reality.

 We're gonna save this here pup, show him the kingdom of the almighty and bring him to Jesus!

Image 2 from MOMA
Image 3 from Jarrett's Blog
Image 4 from Awkwardboyhero