If that sounds like the set up for producer Roger Corman’s Lords Of The Deep to you, then you are not only correct, but also have my sympathies for apparently having been subjected to that waterlogged abomination.

But Roger is all about second chances! Because a second chance costs half as much as an all new first chance! Thus, this not very intriguing or original premise is also the jumping off point for another of his company’s movies, Unknown Origin.

There’s only so many great ideas floating around, so it’s understandable that every so often you’re going to have recycle a story here or there. This is especially true in one of our most cherished genres, the “underwater version of Alien” genre.

Movies like Deepstar Six, Leviathan, and Endless Descent are favorites because not only do you get plenty of gory deaths from icky creatures, but also because it all takes place right here on planet Earth! This ups the suspense because it’s a lot easier to believe that terribly deformed bloodthirsty creatures are rampaging around a super secret advanced lab that’s been constructed at the deepest part of the ocean for some usually vague mining reason than it is to buy that it’s all happening on a spaceship!

A spaceship? That’s science fiction! Undersea labs are basically submarines that are parked! That’s science fact!

In keeping with the movie’s theory that we can’t continue to plunder our nation’s non-renewable resources, Corman leads by example by re-positioning some of his favorite footage from Lords Of The Deep into Unknown Origin! Pretty much all the exterior shots of the undersea lab as well as the scenes of the lab’s subs moving here and there were first seen in Lords Of The Deep.

There’s also probably some footage from other Corman movies inserted as well. There is at least a shot of an explosion in a shaft that was also seen in Star Hunter and The Terror Within.

None of that is particularly shocking or off-putting since we’ve seen that sort of thing done before in movies like Ultra Warrior. Despite Unknown Origin not having the sheer quantity of re-used scenes as a movie like Ultra Warrior, Corman still turns it up a notch and does something I’ve never seen before in a movie – he uses the same opening text that describes the plight of earth in 2020 as he did in Lords Of The Deep!

I urge you though to ride it out because Corman takes everything that was wrong about Lords Of The Deep (everything) and changes it! I was going to say that he fixed it, but replacing a surly Bradford Dillman as the lab commander with a surly Alex Hyde-White was not exactly an upgrade.

To Alex’s credit, he does spend most of the movie threatening his crew and pulling a gun on them while forcing them to suffocate to prove they aren’t possessed by an alien parasite. Besides, it wasn’t like he didn’t take his suffocation first. It’s called leading by example.

The story of Unknown Origin is just the sort of story we were wishing for while enduring Lords Of The Deep. Gone are the pansy aliens who want to tell us how to save our planet and spend all their brain power communicating with a perpetually stupefied looking Priscilla Barnes. In their place are nasty little lizard-rat-like parasites that crawl into your mouth and slap pinkish tentacles all around your head! And the only to way to destroy them? Burning!

You know what that means! Time to hit the mining supply depot and load up on the flame throwers!

The stuntmen who specialize in burn scenes get a nice workout in this movie as there are at least three guys who get burned alive! That was a smart choice for this movie because in these undersea movies you aren’t able to blow up cars and watching models of subs and labs explode doesn’t give you the same kind of rush. Guys engulfed by flames and writing around on the floor though? Always appreciated!

The parasites are brought over accidentally when the crew investigates a distress call from an underwater Russian mining facility. The Russians uncovered the aliens while digging under the sea and once the parasites were on the loose, everyone went crazy and killed each other.

Despite not knowing the cause of death, the dead bodies are brought aboard for examination as is a survivor. Naturally, he’s infected and the corpses are harboring parasite eggs.

It’s true that the super powers the parasites exhibit are never fully explained. Like how they can avoid almost all detection despite being a big lizardy thing that’s moving around inside a body. And yes, they somehow can possess a person, commanding them to do whatever nefarious bidding they can think of. And really, isn’t it obvious that they’d also have a dose of that super strength all parasitic reptiles are renowned for?

But who really cares about some monster’s dubious résumé so long as there’s 75 minutes of shooting, burning, accusations, and a lab with a self destruct sequence! It even has an android in it along with a shady doctor who has his own agenda!

Unknown Origin is what Lords Of the Deep should have been, which admittedly wasn’t a hell of a lot, but still, I’ll gladly trade slimy parasites with unexplained powers for preachy manta rays too stupid to communicate with anyone other than one of the gals from Three’s Company!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

And into this nightmarish way life rides one man astride his chopper, ready to brawl with evildoers and romance native gals with access to a potassium mine! Yeah, it’s an apocalypse pretty much like you were hoping for!

Raiders Of The Sun was made by Cirio H. Santiago for Roger Corman. Cirio was pretty much the one man Philippine equivalent of the entire Italian trash movie industry. The titles of his films are a mouthwatering collection of junk that will instantly convert the uninitiated into Cirio fanatics!

Equalizer 2000, Dune Warriors, Future Hunters, and Wheels Of Fire are just a few of the more prestigious of his post-apocalyptic oeuvre alone! That he also shot a film called Bloodfist 2050 but somehow without Don “The Dragon” Wilson only cements his status as “Favorite Director Who Was Not Italian But Should’ve Been.”

At the beginning of Raiders Of The Sun there is some narration explaining how the world ended, but that’s just strictly boiler plate stuff, legally required to get us to the point where nameless groups of poorly dressed extras run around shooting and blowing each other up!

The Alpha League are the good guys and they’re fighting another group of losers for control of this really awesome quarry. You can tell everyone apart because the Alpha League wear yellow vests and one of the leaders of the bad guys commands his troops while wearing a hoghead, as if he was on his way to an Arkansas Razorback football game when Armageddon broke out.

The film follows the wasteland adventures of Talbot and Brodie. Talbot is a pretty generic guy who thinks the war is finally over and he can go home to his wife. Before he can get there though, his wife is kidnapped by the bad guys thus sending him on a search for her deep into the heart of enemy territory.

Brodie (Deathfight and Not Another Mistake’s Richard Norton) is mega cool with his blonde hair, dark beard, black leather pants, and open black leather jacket with no shirt. He rocks some mean kung fu when he has to and always seems to be hauling a giant gun, squeezing off rounds into whatever freak wanders by. He also gets hooked up with a bunch of midgets!

Cirio is obviously going for an epic feel with his almost 80 minute thriller by splitting the story between Talbot’s attempts to rescue his wife, Brodie’s quest for the hidden potassium mine, and the bad guys’ scheming to destroy the Alpha League once and for all.

There is a concern that perhaps Cirio is trying to cram too much into such a limited amount of time and that the movie might suffer from a lack of focus. Do not panic! The movie is excellent at maintaining its focus on stuff exploding!

Besides, you’ll be wrapped up in Brodie’s and Talbot’s situations in no time. With Talbot undercover in the evil gang, you’ll get to go on raids with him where he gets to see his buddies die, you’ll see him in a deadly rite of initiation that involves swinging on ropes while trying to club another to death, and you’ll see the big jail break where he and his old lady make their dash for freedom!

And don’t think that his old lady is just some piece of white trash arm candy (though she is that, too!) because she gives as good as she gets and manages to run over the guy in the hog helmet with his own car! Let me tell you something, brother – the end times is COLD!

But whither Brodie? After rescuing a native girl and getting shot for his troubles (thankfully not in the leather pants!), she takes him back to her secret village which just happens to be the very same village he was looking for that worships a potassium mine.

Their leader doesn’t want any outsiders because outsiders bring trouble, but Brodie is wise and says that trouble will find them anyway and trains the men in the village in stick fighting. He also has time to bang his new girlfriend and again demonstrates the wisdom of a guy who is getting banged regularly by saying that for the first time he knows what it is to be at peace.

Nothing is forever though! Especially in this new world where guys in leather pants are our wisest people! The bad guys roll in, steal gunpowder, kill Brodie’s girlfriend, and trap them all in a cave in!

The friendly midgets that Brodie saved earlier from being burned alive appear and dig Brodie and the villagers out of the cave in. Brodie heads back to the Alpha League to assist the final battle with the bad guys and when he gets out of a station wagon followed by about five or six midgets carrying buckets of gunpowder, the power of that scene is self-explanatory.

The best moments of the movie though occur when Brodie goes one on one with the leader of the bad guys. Karate fighting is the order of the day as kicks, punches, kneeings, head bashing, and assorting grapplings are delivered without mercy. That it was done to the chunky beats of the bad ass background music only made Brodie and his leather pants that much more awe-inspiring!

Raiders Of The Sun keeps getting better even as it ends when there’s a little victory parade where Brodie hugs Talbot and is taken through the assembled crowd of about ten people by his midget pals. It was kind of like the end of Star Wars when Han Solo and Luke and the rest were recognized by the Rebellion for their bravery. But with tight leather pants. To state the obvious, I, like Brodie, now know what it is to be at peace.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

To be caught outside of the futuristic structure where the whores are kept known as a House of Pleasure means certain death!  Police suspecting a Subgrade of cavorting illegally with a woman will demand to see their junk to make sure its not suspiciously engorged!

It goes without saying that this new world we all have to look forward to is a paradise!  These restrictions on the class of people most prone to breaking them (young, unemployed, horny, single guys) inevitably leads to zero crime!  It’s true!  David Carradine even says so!

Carradine is in fine form during this particular cheap sci-fi phase of his career (see also Warlords, Dune Warriors, Karate Cop) as the enigmatic Jason, a cigar chomping, suit wearing guy who recruits Bone and Helen to pull off a heist for him.

Bone is a guy who was just fired from his job which means he’s busted back down to Subgrade. He hangs out with a couple of his loser Subgrade friends including Creon (Michael Shaner, the serial killer from The Expert) and J.D.

Helen (Sherilyn Fenn in a pre-Twin Peaks role) is a whore who catches Bone’s eye.  After beating Creon at some futurisitc pool game (the balls looked different) and fending off his advances, Helen hooks up with Bone and begins an illegal love affair with him.

Jason appears and offers to help them escape their city (Soleil) if they’ll just steal a computer disc with some information on it for him.  They do this and immediately become Soleil’s most wanted criminals.

When they meet with Jason to find out about their escape, he explains that they need to pull off one more job for him and then they can go to the rival city that Soleil is currently at war with.

So they rob a bank and screw that up, but they were already public enemey number one, so it’s not like the tension is exactly ratcheted up any.

In the first twist of the movie that comes as a surprise only to a Subgrade named Bone, Jason turns out to be one of the head cops!  He explains that since the cops are so freaking great, there’s no crime in Soleil anymore so he has to create crime! And Bone and Helen are his greatest creations to date!

I can’t say that I really understood why he willingly put himself in harm’s way so that he could explain his devious dealings, but perhaps it was just a way to really get his criminal superstars over to the public.  Still, seems a bit risky.

In the meantime, Creon’s grudge against Bone and Helen has really blossomed and it isn’t long before Jason approaches him with an offer for vengeance!

Bone and Helen, having escaped Jason and his police, have hooked up with their old military pilot buddy Alexi and cooked up a plot to steal a helicopter and fly to Soleil’s mortal enemy and seek sanctuary there.

But first, Bone and Helen are going to pull one last job!  How many “one last jobs” are they going to pull?  Thankfully, this one is unlike anything you’ve ever seen.  Except in a really cheap, cruddy, sci-fi movie.

It takes place at the cryogenic facility where the rich people are housed.  There’s about three or four of them and they’re just standing up inside plastic tubes with a little lighted collar on.  It’s less than great.

Bone does get to confront his old boss and trade lots of unconvincing cuss words with him before Helen plugs him in the back.  Then Creon shows up and wreaks a little havoc before everyone escapes Jason and the cops.

A race to the helicopter ensues and our heroes fly to freedom!  Or do they?  I suppose that if you’re a Subgrade who hasn’t gotten laid regulary, you would be shocked at the shock ending they lay on us, but really I would have been shocked if it had ended any other way.

Landing in the territory of Soleil’s enemy, all they find is a decayed airfield with skeletons lying all over.  But who is that waiting in the hangar? Holy crud!  There’s a guy in there that looks exactly like Jason!  Oh wait, it is Jason.

For the second time in the movie Jason reveals his secret agenda.  This time he explains for no real reason that  Soleil defeated their enemey 20 or 30 years ago, but they needed to pretend the enemey was still around to keep the military budget up.

Then he started complaining about how radiation doesn’t stay where you want it, that the stolen computer disc would ensure that he wouldn’t be the next criminal of the month and that by telling everyone that Bone and Helen had gotten away and might someday come back to attack them, things would continue to be really great in Soleil.

You don’t need to be a pent up Subgrade to tell that Crime Zone is comfortably sucky. Combining no new twists with one of those dystopias that don’t make any sense (what was the entire point of the whole Subgrade system?  And how did that eliminate crime instead of make it skyrocket?  Especially since everyone lived in squalor much worse than anything most people live in today?) with the expected production values of a Roger Corman produced movie, Crime Zone will sparodically make you wince with its non-existent peformance by Bone and over-the-top mugging by Creon (the exact sort of mugging that actually worked for him in The Expert).

Mostly though, it will bore you with its trash-strewn set decorating, cops decked out in umpire chest protectors, and all sorts of boring scenes of Creon, Bone, and Helen arguing with each other.  Say what you want about the onerous life of the Subgrade, but at least they never had to watch this.  

© 2011 MonsterHunter

And not your standard exciting space-related deaths like getting your stomach blasted out by some hideous alien or getting chucked out an air lock by a crabby computer! No, Star Quest is keeping it real! (And by real, I mean seriously mundane.)

One guy hangs himself and another guy has a heart attack during a particularly intense virtual reality session! There’s even some drug overdosing going on! Is this a spaceship or one of those motels with weekly rates?

The movie though isn’t all about how past problems like drugs, suicide, and underemployed actors continue to haunt us in the future. It still maintains a nice dollop of the expected horror movie in space motifs we demand in our thoughtless-provoking sci-fi.

The captain of the ship for instance is one of those guys who doesn’t make it through suspended animation! You know that guy! Everyone wakes up, but there’s always some grody looking corpse in a busted sleep chamber. It happened to hapless astronauts at least as far back as 1968′s Planet of the Apes, so you know that’s futuristic gold!

You know what else every good, great, and entirely anonymous space movie (Star Quest for example) needs? A pyscho android! I don’t know that I’ve ever been on a spaceflight yet where the android didn’t get his hard drive in a wad for some reason and started trying to manhandle all the wetware on the ship!

What’s even worse is that usually these androids are the undercover variety which means that they look like you or I (if you are I looked like an actor desperate for a paying gig) so we never see these things coming until the rest of the astronauts are smacking the android with hammers to no effect. What really helps in maintaining their cover is that we are never sure if their robotic like speech and movements are because they are really an android or just because they can’t act!

Despite all this dying and android angst happening, Starquest still manages to bend the law of physics by clocking in at less than 80 minutes, yet seeming to be infinitely longer!

This is chiefly due to a clever use of characters bickering amongst themselves for no reason, the same devastating information being doled out a couple of different times to different characters (I believe there were at least four different scenes where some character first learned that Earth had been destroyed), and the mostly pointless use of the virtual reality bit. (It did provide Roger Corman’s company an excuse to reuse the space dogfight footage that we previously thought was pointless when it appeared in Dead Space.)

There isn’t a whole lot beyond the crew members sniping at each other going on for the first half of the movie. With the captain dead, a new, unpopular guy assumes command. Though his sour disposition is the most obvious reason for this dislike, I can’t help but believe that the fact that he’s sporting a toupee that looks like the pelt of some alien creature played some small part in everyone’s distaste for him.

The crew is an international one which means we are subjected to a variety of bad accents as well as some bogus tension between people from different countries. When the Russian complains that the British chick is too reserved and the British chick retorts that the Russian is suffering from her Russian paranoia, my American apathy was kicking in big time. There’s also a French guy who sounds like he’s a moronic hayseed from Lousianna when he speaks. No wonder that android went crazy on all of them!

Predictably, once the movie ramps up the action for the big finish, it goes from being merely an annoying curiosity (why is the Russian chick smoking cigarettes on the spaceship? Why is her virtual reality session taking place during a violent demonstration at Red Square? Why is everyone so worked up over “Federation” regulations when there’s only five or six humans left in the universe?) to an increasingly dunderheaded collection of familiar space movie elements.

How many times do we have to see the scene where the android’s severed head is hooked up to a bunch of wires so that it can be interrogated by surviving crew members while it taunts them for their own lame humanness?

And what is the deal with the self-destruct sequence on spaceships? I’ll admit that it’s been a while since I’ve been on a space shuttle, but I don’t recall that it comes equipped with an auto destruct button (though you could probably tastelessly note that it really doesn’t need one).

Cars, buses, trains, planes, and boats don’t have any gizmo that lets you blow it up as a computerized voice counts down the seconds towards detonation. So why would anyone building a spaceship put that in, except to increase the tension at the end of a movie? And why is it always so hard to shut off the self-destruct? Seems like that’s the kind of thing you want to give people some leeway on if they change their mind.

When the movie finally reveals its first shock ending, it doesn’t come as a shock ending so much as just a bit of a tacked on cheat. Without giving away too much, based on what had already happened in the movie, the big reveal wasn’t really justified or realistic.

Here’s my big reveal about their big reveal – do some psychological evaluations of your crew members and don’t hire a bunch of egocentric jerks to fly in close quarters for a long time in space. These astronauts had their own rooms, a VR machine, and could smoke on board! What more do you need to keep your sanity?

The final shocker isn’t unexpected, but does give you a chance to see perhaps the worst matte painting used in a movie ever. On the other hand, the movie gives you the best scene ever of an android’s severed arm being used to fly the spaceship. Of course, that arm turns traitor and tries to blow everyone up, but that’s just another day at the office in deep space, right?

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Antonio Margheriti was preparing for this movie his entire career, honing his craft by directing such sword and sandal epics as Hercules, Prisoner of Evil and Devil of the Desert Against the Son of Hercules when he wasn’t busy unleashing outer space fare with titles like Assignment: Outer Space, War Between the Planets, and Wild, Wild Planet. His Cannibal Apocalypse and Ark Of The Sun God showed he was equally at home giving us a modern dose of gore and adventure! And his expertise in using silly-looking models as props is put to good use as well!

But no matter how much Antonio had trained for this project, it all would have been for naught if he couldn’t find just the right smooth-chested, greased-up hunk from the future to fill out Yor’s abominable blonde wig. Enter Reb Brown!

If you thought that Reb’s death matches with the Big Russian in Strike Commando were earth shattering, if you thought his showdown with Robowar in Robowar was cataclysmic, they aren’t anything but your Aunt Petunia’s church social compared to when Yor fights a triceratops single-handedly and wins!

Or when he takes on a stegosaurus and gets his faced licked by its big nasty tongue and wins! Or when he fights an army of savage cave people bent on killing him and making his woman theirs and wins! Or when he takes on soulless desert people and goes to town on them with their own fire sword and wins! There’s much more of course, but I was getting the vapors from all that primo Yor battle action!

Just what in the heck has Reb gotten himself into this time? He’s a blonde wig-wearing hunter without any other body hair in a world of dark-haired and quite hirsute savages and the only key to his past is the ugly medallion he wears.

After saving some villagers from an attack by ape-like men, Yor teams up with a woman and the old coot named Pag who watches out for her. Together, their journey in search of the secret behind Yor’s pimp medallion takes them from one deadly adventure to another.

As luck would have it, the only thing more destructive than all the villainous forces they encounter is Yor himself! It’s almost like no one bothered to tell him the apocalypse happened centuries ago so there’s no reason to go and try to destroy the world again. But you know Yor!

The icky ape-men that kidnapped his old lady? They live in a cave that for some reason has a dam inside of it. Guess who busts that dam wide open and causes a slow motion flood the likes of which haven’t been since a dude named Noah decided to take up sailing? But even better than that, guess who shoots a pterodactyl down out of the sky with an arrow and then flies it glider-style into the ape-men’s cave in the first place? Well, that was actually a model of Yor and the pterodactyl that did that, but you know what I mean.

After about an hour of owning various savages and dinosaurs, Yor hits warp factor nine when he gets captured by space men that turn out to be his own people! His medallion was actually a record of his past and we learn that Yor was just a kid when his old man’s spaceship got shot down!

The world had been destroyed years ago by atomic weapons and his people live underground on an island. Their ruler is the evil Overlord. We know he’s evil because he wears a black cloak with a hood perpetually over his head, has metal gloves, and prattles on and on about how he’s going to use Yor’s seed to create a master race of androids. And also because his name is Overlord.

The last half hour of the movie finds Yor and his companions in the basement of a power plant. It’s put to good use with an emphasis on laser blaster battles between Yor’s forces and Overlords black-clad androids. You’ll be glad to know that Yor is just as handy with a laser blaster as he is with a stone axe and he is immediately rolling around shooting with perfect aim.

Yor hits all the action-hero notes we expect as we see him swinging across a great chasm in an effort to destroy the atomic pile in the underground hideout of Overlord. He also goes one on one with Overlord, disdainfully tossing aside his laser blaster so that he can flush this space turd with his bare hands!

This movie is such an action-juggarnaut that even a decrepit old timer like Pag gets a spectacular stunt! It’s a scene that will leave even the most jaded Reb Brown fan gasping for breath. Yor is trapped at the far end of the atomic pile, the power cord he swung over on is out of reach! There’s no escape – he’ll have to die when the pile goes up!

But wait! Old man Pag grabs the cord and swings over to save Yor and in mid-flight, he somehow flips around so that his legs are wrapped up in the cord leaving his arms free to grasp Yor! To say it all this was accomplished with some more of Antonio’s models doesn’t lessen the implausible splendor of it all.

A winner from the top of Yor’s bad wig down to the toes of his ugly fur boots, one simple scene in the film sticks out that really tells you what a hellacious hunk Yor is in this one. One of the ape-men chucks poor old Yor off a cliff and he lands in heap on the rocks below. After laying there awhile, guess what Yor does? Shakes his head, gets up and wanders off to fight more dinosaurs and mutants! Heck, in a world where geezers double as accomplished trapeze artists, a young blonde barbarian space stud better be able to shrug off a little tumble down a cliff!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Peter Graves (Beginning Of The End) plays the father saddled with an 18 year old nerd know-it-all son and a shrieking, hysterical tom boy daughter, who, against all odds, don’t die when the big solar flare attack of 1974 turns almost everyone on Earth to dust!

It’s not too far of a stretch to think that about the time his son was whining about his mommy and his daughter was clutching a doll and demanding to be taken to the bathroom, that Peter was wishing his pile of dust wife and he could switch places.

Maybe the idea of surviving the apocalypse was new back in the early 1970s – it shouldn’t have been since they had movies like The Omega Man and No Blade Of Grass. In any case, I don’t get these people who discover the phones are dead, nothing electronic works, everyone has disappeared, and all the dogs have gone rabid over night and they’re standing around with their thumbs in their butts wondering if it’s like this everywhere and that they need to rush back home to save Mommy. If I woke up tomorrow and all that had happened while I was sleeping, the first thing I’d figure was that we are officially in a SHTF situation. And if you don’t even know what SHTF stands for, you’re just raw meat for the rest of us.

If you want to know what else I’d do in this situation, just watch Where Have All The People Gone and I’ll be doing the opposite of what these goobers do. Screaming teenage brats? These little snot noses need to be told to grow up and accept reality. I need someone on point, someone to keep track of our water supply, and we need to start sleeping in shifts. If you got time to piss and moan when all that’s done, go find a bush and do it while you’re taking a crap.

Yeah, we’ll go look for Mommy, but not because there’s any chance she’s still alive. Hell, when we get home, I’ll be going in right after my 12 gauge because there’s a better than even chance that if the old bag is still kicking, she’s turned into some type of zombie who would just as soon bite your face off than kiss it.

But we’ll go look for her since there isn’t anything else to do and because we need to keep moving until we can get a sense of what kind of shape the surrounding area is in. You know – dope out how many armed goons are milling around raping women and stealing gas while declaring themselves the new king of the United States. Looking for Mom is fine and dandy as long as you remember why it’s important: recon and intel.

Peter Graves and his family aren’t the only problems that Peter Graves and his family run into. First of all, they’re woefully underarmed.

You’ve got a planet full of crazy dogs and desperate survivors and the only weapons you’ve got is your can-do attitude and emotionally crippled kids? You’ve got to be carrying something with some kind of stopping power whether it’s guns, knives or a frigging tire jack! I mean when you have to scramble to find a wrench and a rag to save your family from a single dog, your post-apocalypse is not off to a good start.

A couple more lessons are real easy to pick up from this movie. If you’ve got transportation and you see a sweaty guy standing around his broken down car, you do not stop to see if he needs help. You blow past him with several of your crew making sure this guy is in their gunsights at all times.

If you do stop to raid him for weapons and provisions, you punch his ticket before he knows what hit him. When Peter and company stopped for this guy, I just thought, why don’t you just bend over for this guy and hand him the Vaseline?

Peter manages to pick up a couple of more losers for his group as his journey progresses, violating another Golden Rule of the New World: no one should be in your clan that can’t pull their own weight.

Guess what Peter added to his all-star team of his worthless son and daughter? A woman who’s basically catatonic and a little boy that tried to kill him! Pete, why don’t you just strap two 100 pound weights to your back – they’d be easier to carry and they wouldn’t need as much water.

Aside from being a pathetic comedy of errors where Peter and his family survive in spite of their best efforts, the movie’s apocalypse doesn’t make any sense.

There were some solar flares that did something and Peter learns from a note his wife conveniently wrote before she turned to kitty litter that they isolated a virus and some people were immune, maybe because of a recessive gene. And if that didn’t make little enough sense, the apocalypse also managed to mess all the electronic stuff up and turned dogs into killers.

Why do I get the idea that the aftereffects of this particular end of the world scenario were driven by a TV movie’s meager budget as well as broadcast standards? Piles of dust? A bunch of growling dogs? Cars all broken down? Is this the end of the world or my apartment building?

Truly apocalyptic for all the wrong reasons, Where Have All The People Gone is the sort of dingbat film where Peter constantly turns to his 18 year old son for the scientific reasons for what happened because his son had a single physics course instead of having the kid booby trapping the homestead to repel invaders who are going to be after Peter’s women. The film’s ending is also a bit bogus since it’s obvious the dogs are the only ones smart enough to survive.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Gary is a British kickboxer who has appeared in a string of straight-to-video action movies including Rage and Riot. What his films lack in budget, originality, and entertainment value is generally made up for with excessive use of stunts and action scenes.

Gary himself comes across as relatively non-threatening, but is always more than willing to show some intensity with his fight scenes, so I usually zone out until I start to hear the dubbed smacking of his feet and hands landing on some grubby-looking thug. You also don’t want to look to hard at some the action scenes where guys get knocked through the air because it’s a crap shoot whether you’ll see the cable yanking them to and fro.

Those of you whose stomachs are churning at the thought of one of these action movies where the star plays twins (think every other Van Damme movie) and the distractingly stupid tricks the films inevitably use to show the “twins” at the same time (can you say “bad wig?”) will be relieved to know that Gary’s wuss twin, Oliver, is shot in the head early on in the film, thus limiting the interaction Gary has with himself to a scene where the surviving twin carries the dead twin to a dune buggy so he can be taken home and buried. And how can you not appreciate a film with a dune buggy hearse?

The twin that Gary spends most of the movie playing is Roland. Roland is a bounty hunter and when you see that he is dressed like some college kid going to a Halloween party as a gunslinger from a spaghetti western complete with stubble and cigar hanging out of his mouth, you’ll realize that modern civilization hasn’t been destroyed, but has just been replaced with a strange hybrid of “wild west meets standard post-apocalyptic motorcycle thugs” scenario complete with a disenfranchised group of outcasts known as Scavengers. The wild west aspect of things isn’t actually necessary beyond giving an excuse for Roland and his arch enemy Little Ray to dress like cowboys and twirl around six shooters and rifles.

Little Ray runs afoul of Roland when Roland learns that Little Ray has killed his brother. Oliver’s old lady escaped and is hiding out from Little Ray in Roland and Oliver’s family home. Little Ray is after her because she is pregnant with a child who has a gene that could help fight the plague that killed everyone.

Of course, if the plague already wiped out everyone that was susceptible to it, the value of that may be a little suspect. Besides, regardless of how serious that plague is, I think that if Earth wasn’t getting any sunlight, plague research would probably be taking a backseat to stuff like trying to stay alive.

In any case, Little Ray wants to ransom her off to the government while Roland is looking for revenge. Roland is also trying to atone for his haunted past since he got in a car wreck that killed his parents.

Oliver’s old lady hates him since she is reminded of Oliver whenever she sees Roland and also because of the pain he caused Oliver by killing their parents. I wouldn’t be losing a lot of sleep over what she thought about me though if I was Roland since she revealed that she and Oliver were saving all their money up to start a mushroom farm. You know, because mushrooms don’t need sunlight. And because when the world ends, the survivors are going to demand lots of mushrooms!

There isn’t really enough great action in this Gary Daniels movie like in Rage and some of that is because the movie feels like it’s been filmed on the same couple of sets with different angles and rearranged garbage masking the fact.

So you get motorcycles and dune buggies driving up and down alleys and streets that look pretty much the same and are mysteriously quite well lit for a world without sunshine. It doesn’t really do much for maintaining your interest and forces you to concentrate on the moronic story as well as Little Ray’s high maintenance facial hair.

You can’t really fault Gary since he gives it his all whenever he has the chance, kicking guys off motorcycles, spinning in the air, flipping over and shooting guns, but what am I supposed to think about your movie when Oliver’s old lady escapes in a helicopter and Little Ray has it shot down with the intent of capturing her alive by having it shot in the tail? And it works! I know this is supposed to be the wild west, but is Annie Oakely in his gang?

When Little Ray and Roland finally get down to business and fight it out, at least that gives us what we want. First, there’s the shoot out where they fire at each other through a wall separating them until they run out of bullets and have to dive clear of each other!

Then they agree to throw down their weapons and settle it like men! Lots of frenetic kick fighting and punching ensue and even an iron bar is used at some point.

Finally, they agree to finish it with this game where there’s one bullet for each gun and the first guy to load the bullet in the gun and shoot the other in the head wins!

This is definitely second-tier Gary Daniels and Gary isn’t helped with the idiotic setting and concept of the film. He also isn’t helped in scenes that require him to suggestively polish his rifle as he stares at his late brother’s wife giving herself a sponge bath. Ultimately, it is the audience that gets kicked in the face whenever Gary isn’t doing the same to someone on screen.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

After he makes it disappear, his friends are amazed but not convinced that there has been any time travel. They all leave and his good friend Filby makes George promise that he won’t go and get any himself involved in any time-space distortions. He swears that he won’t go out of the room, but then he goes to where he’s been storing the full sized time machine!

It’s pretty pimped out as far as temporal vehicles go. For instance on the time machine’s control panel consisting of a lever and an odometer that listed dates instead of speeds was a nifty little brass plate affixed to the center of it. Engraved in fancy cursive was the phrase “Manufactured by H. George Wells”! How many times have you ever seen a mad scientist go to the trouble of putting a label on his gizmo before?

He gets in and fires it up, but he doesn’t do it like a real man would. Any other guy would get in and immediately pull the lever all the way forward or all the back, instantly transporting themselves to the very beginning or end of time. No guy is going to get in there and just sit there watching the flowers in their lab bloom and un-bloom while the sun and moon fly by over head. We’d get in there and see what this baby can do!

George on the other hand is content to sort of putter along watching weeks and finally years go by all the while marveling at the mannequin across the street and how the fashions it displays change over the years. I was amazed that a department store would be so dull it would have the same mannequin and window display for sixty years.

Grandma George finally kicks it out of first gear and the next thing we know, he’s wrecking his time machine in the year 800,000 give or take several centuries!

Everything he recognizes is gone, replaced by wilderness. He wanders around and locates some people by a river. They, like most futuristic types are all young, blonde and dressed in pastel colored togas. Yes, this is one of those sci-fi movies that thinks being evolved means dressing up like you were Aristotle and hanging around in the woods.

George notices that one of these future saps is trying to drown in the river. No one around helps her out so George takes off his jacket and dives in and saves her. He tries to lay a guilt trip on everyone for not trying to save her, but even the girl he rescued isn’t too put out about it. I would have just thrown her ungrateful ass back in, put the time machine into fifth gear and gone on to an era more appreciative of my super heroics, but George is determined to learn about these people.

He tries to get information out of them, but no one has anything to say. Soon it becomes clear to George that these people are all dull-witted (they’ve let all their books turn to dust for heaven’s sake!), but since the girl he rescued is a good looking blonde he decides that these people just need to have someone like him to rekindle that spark in them to make them upstanding citizens.

These people are called the Eloi and they don’t do anything but lay around and periodically get harassed by an underground race of slugs called the Morlocks. There is some connection to these people that is so heinous it’s virtually unspeakable except to say that the Morlocks herd these dumb blondes around and use them as food.

George learns that during the last great war, the survivors split into two groups, the dumb blondes and the man-eating subhuman freaks. You can practically see George licking his chops when he hears this – he’s been looking for something concrete to do to show these blondes how to be men again.

Plus he needs to kill some time since the Morlocks car jacked his time machine and hid it in some temple he can’t get into. Do I even need to go into how something like the Club should probably be standard issue on a rig as sweet as a time machine?

Once George’s girlfriend gets captured by the Morlocks, George climbs down into the Morlocks’ lair, lights up a torch and opens up a can Victorian whoop-ass (Manufactured by H. George Wells!) on those cave scum.

The Morlocks are pretty cool as monsters go. They have this blue skin, long stringy white hair and their eyes light up which is a nice effect in the dark caves. Since they live underground they can’t stand light and even more importantly they don’t like to be set on fire!

There are nice touches throughout the movie about the significance of time travel such as when he meets up with the son of his friend Filby at different times. George sometimes talks about how he wants to go back and tell everyone what he’s discovered about the future. But will he tell them everything? Will he tell Filby that he is destined to die in the War?

The movie doesn’t really address these moral dilemmas with any depth and you wish that maybe they could have explored what the weight of all that knowledge, of the wars to come, his friends’ fates, presumably even his own, would do to an ordinary man. Time travel isn’t all just sightseeing and picking up future babes.

You do admire George for putting his money where his mouth is at the end of the film by returning to the future to help the Eloi out. The prospect of starting over is probably both simultaneously daunting and exhilarating. With the time machine though, I suppose he could just go back and forth until he gets it right.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

He ends up stopping a husband and wife (who don’t like each other), their dog (Timmy) , a granddaughter-grandfather team driving a truck, a guy driving a semi truck with a hitchhiker, and a couple that just got back from winning $175,000 in Vegas.

Everyone wants to know why they’ve been stopped and Colter won’t tell them. The hitchhiker won’t get out of the truck, so Colter goes over there and recognizes him as Clint, a kid who is a serial killer and so heartless that he wrote his dad who was dying in the hospital and told him to hang on until he got there so that Clint could watch him suffer an agonizing death. Naturally, Colter refers to this little vacant-eyed maniac as a “good kid” thus revealing that the perpetually moronic look on his pug face goes straight to the bone.

Clint runs away, threatens some people with a knife and demands his suitcase, but loses it. He runs into the farmer’s granddaughter in the woods later and wants her to bring him his suitcase, but by the end of the movie the suitcase is completely forgotten about and we never do learn what was inside of it. I guess that’s just the movie’s way of pointing out how insignificant the details of our everyday existences are when we’re getting nuked into the Stone Age. Either that or it’s just sloppy writing.

Once Clint escapes, everyone assumes that they’re free to go and that they were being held there so that Deputy Colter could catch Clint. Colter tells everyone to give him their car keys and that they aren’t going nowhere. Finally he lets on that they are under attack and his orders are to keep people from going into town and leaving town on that road.

One of the things I liked about this movie was that every time Colter said something completely stupid (which was pretty much whenever he opened his giant maw) the rest of the characters would stand around pointing out just how stupid he was.

They never did anything about it and pretty much obeyed whatever he told them to do, but they didn’t do it quietly or politely. Like when Colter says that they’re going to be safe where they are.

Someone points out all the military and civilian targets that are within twenty miles of where they are and that basically they are sitting on ground zero and that any place other than the mountain road would be safer to hunker down at. Colter’s response is that they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and people survived so they might survive, too. The best part of this snappy answer is that he used it more than once!

Since Colter is intent on keeping everyone at this location while the end of the world occurs, they ask him what his big plan is to save them all. This is where that governmental know-how that bought $800 toilet seats and classified ketchup as a vegetable comes in handy. Colter eyes the semi that one of the guys was driving and says that they are going to unload it and hide in there when the missiles come!

You can imagine the pooh-poohing that goes on amongst the citizens when they hear that one. Colter is impervious to these naysayers and so they unload the truck to get it ready as their mobile bomb shelter.

Oh, and did Deputy Colter tell you that you would be living in that semi for two weeks while all the fallout settled down? Just for good measure, to make sure that they are doubly safe, Colter wastes a bunch of water so that he can make mud to clog up all the ventilation spots in the semi so that none of that pesky radiation seeps in there while they’re all improbably breathing the same stale air for two weeks.

But Colter even has a plan when he thinks that maybe there won’t be enough air. Guess what cute little dog gets strangled by Colter for breathing too much?

I never would have thought that hiding from an atomic attack in a semi would be such fun! In spite of how utterly ridiculous the notion of stopping people and herding them into semis in an effort to save them from World War III is, this one had some of that good-old fashioned sweaty paranoid atmosphere that movies like this depend on to overcome their inborn stupidity.

Somehow against all odds, this movie manages to treat a consistently silly premise with such grave seriousness that you can’t help but get caught up in it all. You’ll feel like you spent 72 minutes in a big, hot, sweaty semi with a dead dog after watching this one!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Purportedly the tale of a deadly invasion by a mysterious army and the efforts of a scrappy bad of survivors to outwit their indestructible enemies, Target Earth is really about one thing: guts. The guts the filmmakers displayed by pushing their clunky, box-like robot front and center as a terrifying force of vaporizing destruction even though every time it appears, the audience involuntarily wonders how many takes it took for it to walk up the stairs without the stuntman inside falling down.

Really though, it’s completely cheap and gratuitous to claim this movie stunk once the robot started wobbling around the deserted city streets. The movie really stunk long before that, just about the time when the four people left in the city cowered as they observed the shadow of the clunky robot on a building. If you can’t even use a shadow to disguise the fact that your robot is made up of some sheet metal and has all the agility of quadriplegic in a tarpit, you might as well just settle on having the world taken over by an “unseen menace” and let your audience do the work you were too cheap to do.

But let’s say you’re an easy mark for these types of films and are willing to cut it some slack despite the fact that you’ve seen vacuum cleaners and snow blowers scarier than these invading robots. Sure, these robots are lumbering metal boxes with dryer hoses for legs, but when hundreds of them are marching en masse down Main Street, U.S.A. you can’t help but be chilled to the bone! After all, they’re just like metal zombies!

I agree! The movie that has robot armies slowly and methodically plodding about and zapping any humans dumb enough to stand around gawking is going to get my endorsement no questions asked! When it comes down to it, sheer numbers will do you in every time.

It’s too bad then that Target Earth‘s deadly robot invasion consisted of one robot. Oh sure, the military guys talked about armies of these invaders wiping out legions of soldiers, but what did we see? One robot shuffling after four people in a hotel. I had to think that when the humans were falling down trying run up the stairs away from the robot, they were falling down laughing.

Of course, if we care about our heroes enough, we might be able to overlook a threat to them that is somewhat lacking. Of course Target Earth features a whiny suicidal broad, a shrew, a hot tempered guy prone to fighting with the shrew, and a guy with over-Brylcremed blonde hair who backhands Suicide Gal when she gets too spazy. There’s also the pointless addition of a crazed killer later on because when you’re battling a deadly robot invasion, a crazed killer harassing the survivors makes perfect dramatic sense.

The guy with the blonde hair (Richard Denning, who would take on the end of the world again the next year in Roger Corman’s Day The World Ended) is presumably the brains of the operation. We know this because after getting a gander at the killer robot he declares that it’s probably from Venus. He knows this because a buddy of his was really into sci-fi magazines and he read a few of his buddy’s magazines and some of those writers were dead on with their predictions!

The worst part of this Target Earth mess (okay, the second worst part since the robot was head and shoulders the worst part over all the other worst parts) is that our heroes don’t actually do anything to survive. They hang around complaining and fretting about the robot and about the crazed killer holding them at gun point until the army rolls in to save their hides with a last second sonic weapon that destroys the dreaded and almost indestructible cathode ray tube that serves as the robot’s face. (The movie switches between the four survivors and the scenes of the army trying to figure out how to crack the cathode ray tube in such a clumsy bit of story structure that you almost wonder if the robot had invaded the editing bay. )

Target Earth is only required viewing for Whit Bissell fans who want to see him play a good guy scientist instead of the evil guy scientists he immortalized in teen monster epics like I Was A Teenage Werewolf and I Was A Teenage Frankenstein.

© 20111 MonsterHunter