The Vindicator

 Sad cropped box

The Vindicator

Canada/United States - 1984

Director - Jean Claude Lord

Key Video, 1986, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 32 minutes

Every scientific research lab has a snitch. You know, some punk who gets whiny and raises all kinds of stupid ethical objections and threatens to go to the cops or the press as soon as his coworkers start conducting some cutting edge sketchy research. In this case the head honcho of the lab, Dr. White, is designing genetically modified homicidal chimps whose readiness to kill he verifies like a ten -year-old, by poking them with sticks until they tear themselves to bloody pieces with rage.

Carl, the lab whiner threatens disclosure when White cuts his research budget and steals his chimps. Carl demands answers, and his innovative boss decides to give them to him by incinerating Carl in a giant dangerously “defective” kiln.

Carl’s pregnant new-age-synthesizer-playing wife thinks she is burying his corpse, but in an ironic twist of fortune for the high minded and cautious Carl, his crispy corpse has been kept alive in a nutrient solution to forward the very morally reprehensible research he sought to end.

White and his cronies soon attach Carl’s carcass to a cyborg-body with the very same automatic homicidal defense reflex programming they’ve been giving the chimps, which wouldn’t be a problem except that White’s technique for hypothesis verification is perhaps somewhat too provocative.

After Carl’s cyborg body, temporarily clothed in a gold foil Power Ranger suit is fired up, he flees the lab to feel sorry for himself and be alone with his feelings. Along the way the suit, and one hopes his temerity, is burned off, and there’s some vindication in store for ol’ Carl and his crusty scorched muscly robot body.


While trying to brace his wife for the inevitable infeasibility of homicidal cyborg domestic bliss, he reveals to her the gross pickled body within his metal exoskeleton and it seems for a moment that there may be some madness to his methods. Sadly, Carl’s version of vengeance is hand in glove with his programmed passive aggression and he repeatedly runs away and waits for his killflex to be provoked by White and his goons before killing them.


But let’s face facts here, Carl’s very existence proves that these experiments are vital and more work must be done creating an army of amoral murderborgs susceptible to provocative prodding. Thank god White has been saving each one of Carl’s vindicated victims for new cyborgs. What!? Once again Carl’s stupid bleeding-heart pacifism just pushed me over the line.

 UK clamshell insert from Dawn of the Dave.

 

This gorgeous Japanese sleeve comes courtesy of Miyaji at Japanese VHS Hell

New Stuff

Lots of new movies have been arriving these days, most of those below in the last couple of weeks, including a VHS copy of Starcrash (yay!) since DVD copies are pretty much out of print. Both of the Caged Fury movies are already reviewed below.

The Last Hunter, which I believe is an Italian Apocalypse Now knockoff starring David Warbeck (Fulci's The Beyond) arrived yesterday and a few more are due in this week.

Caged Fury

It says DVD here but this is the same cover art on my VHS tape.

Caged Fury
Phillipines/United States - 1983
Director – Cirio H. Santiago
VEC, 198?, VHS

With all the hope in the world, I opened my heart to Caged Fury because of the genre, and the name of Cirio Santiago. I tracked my immediate knowledge of his name to Future Hunters, but the recently deceased exploitation director/producer is well established as one of the exploitation greats and has left an impressive wake.In any case, I may have imagined for Caged Fury shoes too big to reasonably fill, but I can hardly be blamed.

A pre-credit Manchurian Candidatesque assassination bodes well, but is quickly overshadowed. A young Canadian woman with a Farah Fawcet-do is shuttled to a prison camp in Vietnam where women are brainwashed with daily volleyball-games and nightly booby-electrocutions.
The repeated shots of stony, vacant stares sandwiched between lines of banal dialogue very quickly grew to an excruciating crescendo of purgatorial painfulness. I know why the guards and commandant are so pissed off all the time.


“You have no brains to wash” the film boldly declares while rooting heartily in plot items that are somehow related to previously undisclosed information, and information related to plot items never to be disclosed. The requisite Women In Prison shower scene lasts mere scintillating seconds before an escape attempt, alluded to only in passing before, suddenly takes on an abrupt and suicidal immediacy.

Giving her Vietnamese prison-guard boyfriend everything she has, Canada hides with him in a chicken coop where a quaint and conveniently placed lantern give the subsequent copulation a 70’s cigarette advertisement feeling I just can’t shake. Shooting, and recapture follow.

All along the way, this movie has not provided me with the correct answers, and needs to be electrocuted into agreement, making what is really a rather hateful experience into something rather Phyrrically amusing.
Another ill-concieved escape attempt on a steam locomotive motivates the film, like our heroines under pain of torture into an explosive and genuinely entertaining, but tragically last minute exploitation plot-twist that this whole movie should mercifully have been all along.

Caged Fury

Caged Fury
United States - 1989
Director – Bill Milling
Cinevision Intl., 2006, DVD

From the title alone it’s pretty clear that this is intended to be bought as a “Women-In-Prison” flick. At least it passes itself off as one. Another film of the same name was produced and directed 6 years earlier by Filipino B-auteur Cirio H. Santiago, and looking for that Caged Fury, I stumbled upon this one.

If my assumption that a WIP flick is essentially required to have lots of skin wasn’t unasailable, I would say that at first, this has the emotional simplicity of a made for TV movie. Opening with a squabble between some prison guards who slash each other with razors between raping the underwear clad inmates offscreen, it’s clear that something besides the budget is going to be low.

Ostensibly a vehicle for top billed Erik Estrada of CHiPS, Caged Fury is more of an ironic diatribe on how men are fucking filthy sexist sharks as even the predatory protagonists are sexist tyrants, only wearing smiles. Kat, fresh young Mormon chum seeking her fame and fortune in Hollywood despite her father’s admonitions discovers from the word go that apparently even nice-guys will use any excuse whatsoever to use your meat and leave you dead in the water.

Look at those choppers.

The first to smell her blood is Buck, a discharge-dripping sleazo-photographer/agent who dolls her up in a slutty dress and takes her to a biker bar, where after being nearly raped by the bikers, she is “saved” by Dirk, a musclebound mulleted ‘Nam-vet/mercenary and his pal, pasty and swollen Estrada with a taut and toothy grin that looks like he could eat anything within arms reach. No sooner said, than Estrada coarsely pressures Kat into what we are led to believe is an offscreen sexual experience.

Next it’s an encounter with a grating overfed porn director who tricks Kat into a compromising situation which leads to her arrest. At an exasperating 38 minutes she’s finally sentenced to “prison” where the guards (including Ron Jeremy as “Pizzaface”) repeatedly rape and abuse the inmates with the collusion of the S&M lesbian warden.

Finally fed up after another 45 minutes of typical WIP debasement at the various and sundry hands of her captors, Kat foments rebellion among the inmates just as Dirk rides his motorcycle to the muscly stoic smash-happy rescue. As an afterthought, Estrada appears again from catering van convalescent leave with his clammy pork-chop face, still theoretically the toothless version of voracious misogynist, but for all his deceptive fat-puppy-dog whimpering, still chattering his fangs like a cold dumb sack-of-hammers.

The DVD triple-feature with which I secured my very own copy of Caged Fury.

Alice, Sweet Alice

Alice, Sweet Alice

United States - 1976

Director- Alfred Sole

Goodtimes Home Video, 1985, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 48 min.

I’m pretty sure this movie is going to suck. It’s too old to be really graphic with such a big budget, and I’m sure I would have heard about it if it was actually good. The religio-horror thing is usually more borror and so I enter into this with great hesitancy. Though for a dollar, I can’t ask much.

Alice is the somewhat mean and mischievous older sister of Brooke Shields. She seems a bit evil or something but I’m guessing she’s just going through puberty. While Shields whines and shrieks her way onto my hit-list, the morbidly obese landlord shares a can of food with his cats.

At her first communion, Shields is choked to death, apparently by Alice, and her body set ablaze in one of the back rooms of the church. OK, that’s pretty fucked up; but hey at least there’s no more whining right?

Some cops get involved in trying to find the killer, as does the estranged re-married father (Niles McMaster of Bloodsucking Freaks). The only people who don’t think Alice is the killer are her parents who stubbornly refuse to let the police question her.

The giant fat landlord sexually assaults Alice who deters him by smashing one of his cats to the floor, escaping to her secret table of creepy stuff down in the basement. Ascending the stairs just as her harsh harpy of an aunt is leaving, she stabs the living shit out of her aunts leg and foot, later pretending to have been frightened and hiding in the basement during the event.

Quite a few minutes of screaming women follow, and Alice is made to take a polygraph which reveals that she is both lying and telling the truth in all the appropriately creepiest spots, and is checked into a psychiatric hospital where she whines. Meanwhile, the nosy dad is killed by what is revealed to be the church housekeeper who proceeds to bleed the film of interesting plot development as effectively as she has her theoretically implied previous victims.

The detectives chatter over their radios, and the housekeeper runs around and kills the witnesses to her crimes, but at this point I really only care enough to flush slightly at the brief paroxysms of onscreen violence that continue perplexingly to implicate an adolescent (told ya) Alice. This movie feels like it’s in its third hour of trying to convince me that a womans menstrual cycle is somehow evil, and all the initial pleasant gory surprise has faded into distraction.

Hotwire

Hotwire

United States - 1980

Director- Frank Q. Dobbs

Paragon Video Productions, 1984, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 35 min.

On the basis of the preview I saw on the Mongrel tape I found at goodwill, I picked up Hotwire, a movie about stealing cars and fallin’ in love, duh.

Rednecky right from the getgo, it remains to be seen if this is intended to pander, or to mock redneckery. Greasy hardass cop Harley, George Kennedy, raids a hotel room in which Billy Ed is humpin’ to arrest him on trumped up charges of car theft. While doing time in jail, Billy Ed is visited by Fair Deal Farley, Harley’s equally greasy used car salesman twin brother, also played by George Kennedy. Farley offers Billy Ed a pardon if he’ll come and work for him as a repo-man. With little to lose, Billy Ed agrees and is soon cruising the streets with a rough and grimy bespectacled old car thief who claims to have first hotwired a Model-A. George Hammersmith Forney, better known as The Weasel (Strother Martin) a wheedling dirtbag who guzzles Firebird by the bottle, curses, fights and would be wearing fingerless gloves if this wasn’t set in the Southish.

Together The Weasel and Billy Ed engage in various car thieving, or repossessing as it were, antics set to the same knee-slapping banjo music I’d expect to hear in Hazard County. Billy Ed soon gets sick of Farley’s slick-dealing and tells him to shove the job, but some awkward crosscut scenes of the twins discussing his incarceration and a homely but off-limits girl-next-door return him to the hotwire fold.

Deciding to play both fields with a newfound confident insolence, the idea here being that he is “hotwiring” someone else’s girl, Billy Ed finds himself courting the surrogate daughter of the town crime-boss-with-the-sheriff-in-his-pocket. Billy Ed is surely going to have a hell of a time of the rest of this movie, but if the comedy sticker someone rather generously applied to the box indicates, it will probably end with some kind of homely redemption and some hotrods.

Ninja: Silent Assassin

Ninja: Silent Assassin

1984 – Hong Kong

Director – Godfrey Ho

Imperial Entertainment Corp., 1988, VHS

There’s been a lot of the Godfrey Ho movies recently and for that I apologize, mostly to myself, but business is business and it has to get done. This one I picked up because of the promise of Richard “Dick” Harrison, and sure enough there he is in full ninja getup in the credit sequence.
Some multiracial goons hash out a drug deal with some bread that goes sour before being broken up by a gymnastic flipping black narcotics agent Alvin. One of the goons, Lenny is captured and after smoking over the problem agrees to turn in his boss Rudolph for the promise of cash and immunity.

On the other end of the line however is Rudolph an angry and ugly Australian ninja who quickly orders Alvin and Lenny executed ninja style when he catches wind of the deal.
Alvin returns home to suck face with his underage wife on their anniversary, but the ninjas show up and Alvin isn’t able to switch into his ninja outfit quick enough to save her. Dying in his arms choking on her own blood she exhorts him over the course of a long conversation not to seek revenge. When he is taken off the case at work he returns home gets drunk and hallucinates his wife. That’s enough to drive him insane and he packs his ninja gear for HK.

Rudolph is already there meeting with his ugly business partner who’s running the streets with his coarse menacing asian flunky Tiger across an invisible editing vortex.
Dick finally shows up again, a hard nosed cop on the HK vice-squad assigned to catch the Rudolph Mafia. Dangerously rupturing the fabric of time and space, Dicks boss actually holds up a photograph of one of the Asian characters in the film and a stuccato of random fighting pours from the breach.
In a progression of confusing unmaskings it’s hard to keep track of who is who, and who is who’s proxy Asian fighting against who’s proxy Asian in a fluttering morass of ugly white men in sparkly ninja outfits and Asian people dancing in goofy 80’s fashion.

Dick is dismissed from the Rudolph case by his smug tool of a boss, and he and Alvin; restless angry ninja with matching yellow outfits, finally team up to fight their way through Rudolphs henchmen. It takes the destruction of Rudolphs entire drug shipment, this time concealed in watermelons before he agrees over the phone to meet Dick and Alvin at the reservoir in full ninja regalia for some loud, face-to-face grappling.

Actually, this might be one of Godfrey Ho’s more watchable ninja-frankenfilms, Ninja: Silent Assassin manages to skim the fetid cream off the top off of some very spoiled milk.

New Notebook

After almost 8 years of writing these reviews of trash movies with occasional economically imposed breaks, I finally completely filled my old notebook with writing almost as bad as the movies. Out of several hundreds of reviews many of them have never been edited and typed up much less posted here or at Genrebusters.



The next review, Ninja Silent Assassin will be the first I write in the new notebook.

Silent Rage

Silent Rage

1982 – United States

Director – Michael Miller

Good TimesVideo, VHS, 1989

For some reason, at some point in his career Chuck Norris decided to grow a perma-beard and assume the role of rugged strawberry blonde teddy bear. Indeed, it seems so evident to me now, that with his new look he seems to have abandoned any attempt at truly serious dramatic acting. Silent Rage however is from the age of naïve innocence, one of his last “honest” movies extolling the virtues of halfassery.

A sweaty, twitching gaunt dude staggers around a boarding-house, talks to his doctor on the phone, and then chops up his landlady with a fire axe. Shortly thereafter, babyfaced Dan Stevens (Norris) Sheriff of this small Texas town (a role I think he later reprises) shows up in his truck to coolly administer some justice. That’s right. With awkward determination, Stevens flushes the psycho out into the front yard where he is messily shot to ribbons by the rest of the police department.

Clinging feebly to life (in order to build tension) the psycho, John Kirby, is whisked to the hospital where a crazed doctor armed with a total lack of morality waits to inject him with an experimental (plot)reanimating formula. In the lobby, another doctor who can’t remember, um, what the, uh, hospital does, uh, um gives Norris the bad news;
“Sorry dude, uh this can only get more ridiculous.”

Sheriff Stevens goes to talk to Kirby’s (former) shrink Dr. Halman, and runs into his ex-girlfriend Alison Halman, the doctors sister. Are you kidding me? No. Back at the hospital, Dr. Halman argues with his colleague about morality, bah! Morality my ass, lets inject this serial killer with some super regeneration potion! I want to see that whiny Halman pussy dead in 15 minutes or less! As soon as Norris takes a shower and turns on the electro-disco tape to towel off, Alison turns up at his house to throw herself at his lovemaking montage mercy.

Inexplicably weakening his resolve, Kirby uses the time honored neck-snapping-to-avoid-explicitness murder technique. Thankfully Norris doesn’t soften, he takes Alison like a stud, and retains all his rigidity, exerting total dominance over all things living and (hopefully, I’m begging!) dead in this film. Nevertheless it’s one of Chucks few movies featuring boobs, and a Chuck love scene. The completely pointless and unrelated lawless-biker-gang subplot on the other hand is strictly an excuse to slip in some of that real life karate power between predictable plot slivers since none of these people can actually take the guy singly.

I needed it, and I have little to hide at this point, anything I could get made me feel better. I’m not sorry if it made me seem shallow, cheap and disrespectful. Just like Chuck I started with the best of intentions and became a mass of twitching sweaty nerves. When he was in films for his ability to actually kick ass, it didn’t matter that the films were cheap, almost sci-fi-horror thrillers lacking follow through. It just didn’t matter.

Another VHS cover, a UK VHS cover with a way older Norris, and a UK DVD cover.

Hunk

Hunk
1984 – United States
Director – Lawrence Bassoff
BCI Eclipse Company, 2007, DVD
School Dazed 8 movie set

I’m not particularly fond of the word “hunk” except perhaps when used in a particular context by Elvis, but even then…In this case the context is hot dudes, with lots of money and muscles. Treated to a montage of the waxy leading man Hunk Golden (John Allen Nelson of Deathstalker 3 and Killer Klowns from Outer Space) getting ready to face another day of being well a hot rich muscular dude, it looks like this film is going to be a confused hodgepodge of hetero-sexual frustration and quasi-homo fantasy. How appropriate.

Hunk speeds off into the city to visit a high priced shrink Sunny to whom he unravels an unbelievable tale about an alternate personality named Bradley Brinkman a loser computer nerd. Brinkman was in trouble of losing his job for not writing good computer programs until he casually offers to sell his soul for a good program at which point the computer springs to life and writes “The Yuppie Program” on Brinkman’s behalf. When the program is a hit, Brinkman’s boss gives him six months off and a huge cash bonus which he uses to rent a dilapidated house on the swankiest yuppie beach in California in order to live among the people who most scorn him and maybe slip through the cracks until the cash runs out.


All his endeavors are a total failure until his fantasy woman O’Brien turns up at his house and promises to give him the life he wants for his soul. Thinking it a joke, he laughingly signs in blood, but that night, she returns and magically (no really, she just waves her hand in the air) makes his inflatable rubber torso bulge muscularly and the next day he wakes up a total hunk, named Hunk!


He enjoys the lifestyle for a while but eventually feels the need to clarify a few clauses of the contract with O’Brien where he discovers that come labor day weekend and the end of the summer he will be wreaking global suffering in the service of the Devil, one Doctor D. who reappears throughout the film appropriately dressed and fresh from such evil exploits.


Not so bad if you want to stay Hunk, but Bradley’s conscience is still alive and shrieking in there somewhere, and to top it all off, O’Brien has fallen in love with him.
Awww, even Doctor D. turns out to not be such a bad guy after all, and like a brown banana we can get soft and mushy all over eachother.

Disproportionately vanilla and loaded with all the same dead-horse-floggingly stupid cliches that made the 80’s an intolerable cesspool, Hunk nevertheless turned out to have a decent mean sarcastic streak that made this unappealing and unredeeming simpleton watchable; barely.

Not that I'd recommend the investment, alternate DVD and VHS covers.

Bionic Ninja

Bionic Ninja

1974 – Hong Kong

Director – Tim Ashby (Godfrey Ho)

Alpha Video Distributors, Inc., 1996, VHS

Purchased on the name alone, I found this title while looking for a cheap copy of Robo-Ninja, an as yet unfulfilled search. Produced by notorious Thomas Tang whoever the hell that happens to be at the moment, it was directed once again by Godfrey Ho and that, along with the inclusion of the word “ninja” in the title virtually guarantees racially segregated cut-and-paste nonsensical garbage.

Sure enough some white guys in crappy ninja outfits scramble around goofily alongside some Asian guys who never appear in the same shots. Thank god for all those convenient telephone conversations that make it so much easier to pass crucial plot threads between completely unacquainted overdubbed actors.

The asian guys have a fight on the road and some of them steal a “top technical secret film” from a lone overwhelmed courier. At this, the white guys send their top CIA agent Tommy to Hong Kong to recover the film from the thugs. But, on top of this the ninjas not only want, but don’t have the film, and they also hate the CIA.

Sorry Tommy, the ninjas hate you.

So in the course of this triangular duel are a series of disconnected fight and intimidation scenes with Asian cops, heavies and street punks, with the ninja rearing up once in a while to remind what this film is half called. The gangly courier though seems to be the primary suspect of all involved and is repeatedly harassed by the various parties.

CIA too, due to his natural enmity with all things clandestine, hence ninjas, is also harassed on his morning whistling-practice/stroll. After fighting them off, an Asian cop standing nearby(!) jumps in with the information that the ninja are KGB drones controlled by a master ninja.

More disconnected and ridiculous fighting and fist shaking menace occur with every other shot seeming to introduce new characters, it doesn’t help that they all have generic Anglo names and dress so similarly dumb. Nonetheless the stolen music is actually pretty cool but again so odd that it’s impossible to pretend I can really follow along with this.

CIA visits his own ninja master and is given an ancient montage training manual which he puts to use while the cops and heavies hack away at eachother with knives and hatchets and blunt dialogue until finally worn down, their section of the movie concludes.
That leaves only a little ninja fight to put those montage skills to the test and recover the top-technical-secret-film, which appears to be as close as we’re going to get to anything “bionic”.

Looks like French to me.