MonsterHunter

I have a lot of fantasies about how the world will end. It kind of goes with the territory of feeling disenfranchised with life and having no control over anything except occasionally your bowels. Usually these fantasies are some variation of me waking up on a warm sunny day to find that everyone I hate has been killed in an SUV rollover or been bludgeoned to death in their trailer by a guy who resembles me (hey - how did that guy also get my ball bat?) while all the people that I like are dropping by my house sucking up and telling me what a swell Joe I am and how would I like to go to Six Flags with them?

I can tell that most of you are nodding your heads in agreement out there, but just because we all share a similar outlook about the likely circumstances of Armageddon (those giant turkey legs at Six Flags are no longer six bucks - there’s a Judgment Day Sale-A-Bration going on!) doesn’t mean that that’s the only way the end might occur. Why, some folks (Italians mainly, but this movie also featured a French gal and an American guy) have gone as far as to speculate that the end of the world and its subsequent rebirth will somehow involve an ape-man, a guy with a leather headband, a sterile gal, and a fertile gal all making a dramatic getaway in their souped-up station wagon!

Well, shoot. I feel a little bit dullwitted now. How could I have not guessed that the apocalypse would involve a station wagon? Leather headbands I could have guessed (and even hoped for!) but if I was putting my money down on which vehicle would figure prominently in starting a new world, it would have been on a bitchin’ dune buggy. I could mention that the station wagon is given to these people by a dwarf who cheerfully announces that it’s all gassed up and just needs to break through a wall into the Holland Tunnel, but that might seem to veer from “end of world fantasy” into “medically recognized delusion”.

This is the film that proves that director Sergio Martino (Slave Of The Cannibal God , The Great Alligator) knows his way around a station wagon tunnel chase which ain’t something they’re likely to teach you at UCLA Film School. He also demonstrates a keen eye for talent, hiring on Michael Sopkiw and Valentine Monier as Parsifal and Giara respectively. He thought so much of their talent in fact that he worked with both of them on Monster Shark! I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this: If you liked seeing Michael Sopkiw and Valentine Monier tooling around the wasteland in their Country Squire, then you will love them riding around on a really big smelly shark!

The real question all of this raises (other than what was Monster Shark co-conspirator Lamberto Bava up to during all this that he couldn’t have pitched in with this movie - at least to make sure that dwarf didn’t get locked in the trunk of the station wagon or something) is just what sort of sissy name is Parsifal for a hero? I didn’t even know what they were calling this guy during the movie. I thought the actors were drunk and slurring “Percival” the whole time. Parsifal turns out to the be name of some goober from a story in the middle ages who had to go steal the spear that stabbed Jesus from some evil wizard. Surely, you’ve all seen Wagner’s opera depicting all this? Don’t laugh. It sure beats being Richard Burton crying over Jesus’ bathrobe.

The movie opens by firing up not one, but two classic tools of low-budget end-of-the-worlders everywhere: the narrator and the scale model of a devastated New York City. The narrator explains how the world was microwaved like a fifty cent burrito and then launches into the unlikely political unions and strange evolutionary results that sprung up from the ashes of doomsday.

There’s these Euracs which is a group of European, Asian, and African folks and then you’ve got your Pan American Confederacy who are the Americans which makes them the good guys of course. These two groups are fighting one another to see who gets the privilege of ruling what’s left of the world.

And what a world it is! The war has pretty much reduced everyone to a primitive existence where groups of similarly deformed freaks hang out and harass people that have different deformities. All the Deformers (that’s what I’m calling them) periodically get hunted down by the Euracs and their mercenaries. None of this is the real hook for the movie though.

That would be the fact that since the war fifteen years before no babies have been born. Clearly, this means that ground zero must have been every trailer park in the midwest cause these suckers get preggers when their guts bump one another in the aisle with the Mountain Dew and Fritos at Wal-Mart.
There is hope though because it turns out that there is exactly one fertile chick left in the country. Inexplicably, her name is not Amber or Crystal, but the much more middle class Melissa. First Parsifal and now Melissa? What’s next? A cyborg named Ratchet? You bet your radioactive gonads!

There’s also a former school teacher named Bronx who runs around with a claw instead of a hand and since this is an Italian movie he doesn’t just menace people with it, but sticks it in their faces and gouges their eyes out! If it’s one thing you can’t ever whine about with these Italian films, it’s that they don’t deliver the promised violence. This one also serves up some exploding heads and a group decapitation. The ape-man somehow accomplishes this when he heaves his sword out the back of the speeding station wagon at a group of Eurac soldiers. He was melted down himself a short while later. Win some, lose some, right?

The story is as sturdy as the flimsy model skyscraper husks that make up the desiccated landscape of the Big Apple. It involves Parsifal being recruited by the president of the Pan-Am Games or whatever to go into NYC to get this hussy and bring her back for their side. Pan-Am has a secret base in Alaska (it was least affected by the radioactivity) and they are going to load her on a spaceship with some other people (I’m guessing a bunch of studs) and fly off to start a new life in the solar system that exists around Alpha Centauri.

Uh, let me reset this in my own words here. Civilization has been destroyed. You’ve been reduced to hiding in a snowfort in Alaska and need a guy whose previous job was fighting in futuristic demolition derbies in the Nevada desert for ugly chicks, to rescue the only girl that can save all mankind? And
you have a rocket ship with the capability to fly to another star? But you can’t even move to Spokane?

Did I also mention that the girl is being hidden in the heart of NYC which the Euracs control, but somehow they can’t find her? But a guy named after an opera who wears tight blue jeans with silver buttons on them and who looks and acts like Snake Plisskin’s scuzzy, wimpy cousin is going to bring her out? In a station wagon? That he borrowed from a dwarf? After she got pumped by the ape-man? What do you bet that once they get a gander at the ape-baby on the way to Alpha Centauri that they test out the air lock with it and start Melissa on birth control pronto? So, as you can see, this is one of those plans that’s just so crazy it just might work.

Once Parsifal, Ratchet, and Bronx (Is this a Nintendo game or something?) make it to New York, they spend most of their time getting captured and escaping from different groups of freaks including the rat catchers, the ape-men, and the Euracs. This allows us to get a sample of why there was someone in the credits listed as “acrobatic coordinator” because there’s a couple of times when Parsifal insists on flipping over cars and doing somersaults and rolls and other fighting techniques you would have to expect from a guy whose name is pretty dang close to Parasol.

Sergio shows us that he is truly a master of this sort of movie because he concentrates on the two most important points that make or break these cheapies: pacing and variety. Keep the action moving and if you’re going to be showcasing stupidity make sure it’s something new and stupid every ten minutes. Lingering is never advised in these types of things. Sure, it makes absolutely no sense that the radiation would turn one group of people into dwarves, one into ape-men, one into rat catching freaks, and one into disgruntled demo derby drivers, but you’ll be too busy giggling at George Eastman’s ugly ape make-up to worry about how stupid the oriental rat catcher guy was.

Like other Shriek Show DVDs, this one contains some interviews with a few participants and you get to hear Sergio talk about how Quentin Tarantino liked this movie. Even better than the obligatory Tarantino endorsement (We’re waiting with baited breath to see if he gives a big thumbs up to Zombie 5: Killing Birds!) is when the guy who played the rat catcher starts talking about how parts of the movie were Shakespearean. Which part? The ape-men or the station wagon getaway? I just pretend this stuff is an epilogue to the movie and give Sergio more points for keeping the torrent of dumbness rolling along unabated. Go on and get it - you know you want to see Parsifal argue his philosophy of life with his girlfriend even as she is dying in his arms after being stabbed by a cyborg.

© 2008 MonsterHunter