Fraser meets Nemo after Nemo’s men rescue him from a sinking ship along with a few other passengers. Fraser and company are taken to Nemo’s secret underwater city where Nemo advises that they will spend the rest of their lives there because he can’t risk one of them tattling on him to the surface dwellers about Templemere.

In perhaps the most fantastical moment in a movie filled with such things as a machine that produces breathable air for Nemo’s city and has as its by-product gold, Senator Fraser gives his solemn word that he won’t say anything and I think Nemo believed him!

I don’t know about you, but that just sounds like one of those campaign promises that’s promptly forgotten once the election is over and the anti-Nemo PACs start dumping truckloads of money off at the Senator’s office. Still, Nemo isn’t a crabby old genius for no reason and while he may stupidly believe Fraser is a man of his word, he rightly observes that Fraser can’t promise the silence of the others who were rescued.

You can’t really blame Nemo either. One of the survivors is a guy suffering post traumatic stress syndrome from sort type of mine collapse so he’s crazier than a rabid jellyfish when he realizes he’s cooped up with millions of gallons of water pressing down on him. Even the gold-obsessed schemers who were also rescued recognize that this guy isn’t someone you want to hatch an escape plan with!

The crazy guy does provide some of the only excitement in a surprisingly dull film, when he blows up one of the pumps in the city in a effort to do something that I’m not sure the guy even understood. All he gets for his trouble is drowned when Nemo simply orders the room sealed so that the entire city isn’t destroyed.

With crazy guy dispatched, the rest of the characters can get down to the serious business of trying to escape a place where there is no escape! After all, they’re 10,000 fathoms beneath the ocean and Nemo’s got the keys to the Nautilus, the only way out, right?

Sure, except for the top secret project in the part of the city labeled “Forbidden Area” which goes by the top secret code of Nautilus II!

But even if they could get their hands on the Nautilus II, there’s no way a Senator, a couple of budding Goldfingers, or the widow, her kid, and his pet kitty could possibly drive the thing! Except that as luck would have it, Senator Fraser has been taking submarine driving lessons with Captain Nemo!

Despite Nemo’s understanding of technology that doesn’t exist to this very day, he displays zero knowledge of human emotions. His second in command has the hots for fellow city dweller Mala, but in the movie’s singularly most realistic moment, as soon as the Senator sees her, he immediately makes a play for her and she reciprocates much to Joab’s dismay. Nemo’s response? Pretty much laughs it off.

Nemo though is determined to make things even worse when he shunts Joab aside and starts to groom the Senator as his main guy instead! So now Nemo has in his two most trusted guys, one who has stated plainly he will do whatever he can to escape and another who will do whatever he can to see that the other leaves the city! I smell a submarine hijacking! And it’s probably going to be an inside job!

But the joke is on everyone but Nemo because the Nautilus II has one vast improvement over the original Nautilus! And that improvement is a faulty engine that will surely blow up if someone starts trying to drive it!

And Nemo just found out about it the morning of the escape! And now he has to rush out in the old crappy Nautilus I and try to save everyone! And even worse, it’s on the day of some festival where he’s supposed to be watching little kids swim through obstacle courses! And the Templemere brass band (complete with strange instruments) is even making an appearance!

I admit that I swelled with pride as I watched a single American politician single-handedly screw up of all Nemo’s perfect plans in about a week.

While the movie looks like a decent amount of money was spent on sets and model submarines, the impressively mounted underwater city can’t hide how utterly dull life in the city actually is. So little happens that the film is forced to insert a giant stingray to harass the city a few times just to give us a break from Nemo’s blather about his future plans, the failed comic relief of the Goldfinger brothers, and the creepy burgeoning romance between Nemo and the rescued widow, who is surely young enough to be his great granddaughter!

The movie further suffers from a lack of a clearly defined villain as Nemo is nothing more than a dude with a dream that he wants to see succeed at all costs. He doesn’t do anything dastardly to our heroes and in fact, caters a pretty awesome meal for them when they first arrive!

The widow and the kid decide to stay, further dampening the drama, as all we are left with is rooting for the Senator and the goldbugs to escape, though the idea that I was supposed to care if the Senator got back in time to deal with some European arms issue was a bit silly since we have ended up with nothing but nonstop wars in the 20th and 21st centuries anyway.

By the time the surviving escapees somehow swim up 10,000 fathoms with no ill effects and emerge in the ocean right near a passing ship, this movie has left you with so much water on the brain, you don’t even stop to think about how blandly meaningless it all was.

© 2012 MonsterHunter

Of course all that potential was fulfilled (and then some) once those five weeks in a balloon proved to include future Branson, Missouri headliner Fabian peforming the film’s odious theme song on a concertina during a pitstop at a desert oasis in a sequence that Jules Verne only wished he was imaginitive enough to concoct!

It wouldn’t be fair though to lay much, if any, of the blame on the awesome hair of Fabian for the film’s propensity to float aimlessly and provoke the nausea that such a real life balloon trip would surely entail.

Yes, the film saddled him with the role of the crabby professor’s assistant, Jacques, who was pointlessly Canadian, but little was demanded of him beyond putting wood in the balloon’s furnace and pulling a lever up and down. The guy who had the audience constantly wishing that Fabian would pull that lever in the wrong direction was Red Buttons as the scandal-plagued reporter Donald O’Shay.

O'Shay is an unfunny nitwit who is assigned to the balloon's crew by his newspaper owner uncle because he's always getting mixed up in something unseemly. When we first meet him, he's rescuing a gal from a bunch of slavers who want to auction her off. A lengthy chase through town follows with lots of guys falling down unconvincingly until O'Shay finally makes it to his appointment with the balloon.

O’Shay spends the rest of the film simultaneously attempting to be the comic relief and the hero and not succeeding too well in either category, coming off as merely obnoxious and making you feel bad for the classy Barbara Eden having to be anywhere near this moron.

O’Shay, Jacques, the professor, and stereotypical elderly British soldier more concerned with his precious teapot than anything else are aboard the balloon in an effort to beat a bunch of slave traders to western part of Africa. If they can get there first and plant the British flag, this will allow Britain to claim the area and somehow all the slave trading will cease.

As is to be expected, much of the film is made up of our heroes worrying about whether they are ahead or behind the slavers and whether they can make up a bunch of time after various disasters befall them. Needless to say, once you find out toward the end of the film that they haven’t even been flying during the night, you begin to question the true urgency of their mission.

The reason for the trip though isn’t really the point of these sorts of movies. It’s the crazy adventures that happen along the way that really matter.

With five weeks floating across uncharted lands, surely there are all sorts of amazing, hair-raising, and fantastical civilizations, creatures, and treasures to be had, right? Sure, if you think Peter Lorre and a wacky chimp qualify. For anything else though, you’d have to watch another movie.

Lorre as a captured slaver is largely wasted though he has about two funny lines (which is two more than anyone else), but it is the chimp who is the sole reason to watch.

She drinks wine, carries a rifle and walks guard duty, lathers up her face as if to shave and sports a monocle at one point! During one battle scene, she was even waving a rolling pin around prompting both chuckles and wonderment that a balloon expedition across uncharted Africa would pack a rolling pin!

Nothing much else of any interest transpires on this hot air trip. There’s escapes from angry natives of various stripes including one where Eden’s character Susan is rescued from slavers (not to be confused with Makia who was rescued at the beginning of the film and stowed away on the balloon), O’Shay and Jacques have to rescue everyone from imprisonment in Timbuktu, there’s an incident where O’Shay is chased by a lion, and a final crisis where everyone ends up at risk of being swept down a raging river. It’s all very repetitive, but even worse, what’s repetitive was dull to begin with.

Lacking any of the excitement of other Verne adaptations such as Mysterious Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, the film does feature sporadically passable special effects during some of the balloon action, though there are also several times where it is painfully clear a model is being used and characters are only reacting to stock footage of wild animals.

It should also be noted that while the balloon itself is a very stylish red and white striped affair, the gondola is an ugly thing dominated by a large unicorn head at the front of it, like it was some sort of fey viking air ship.

Director Irwin Allen rightfully began earning his nickname “Master of Disaster” with Five Weeks in a Balloon.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The back of the DVD case claims this was filmed at an old amusement park down in Florida, but I could have sworn that it was filmed on the stage of my junior high auditorium. Watching poor Channy utilize an acting style that alternately wobbled between whiny and surly, but never veered from a delivery that was entirely robotic, I couldn’t help but be transported back in time to 1983 to the Walsh Junior High presentation of Bye Bye Birdie whenever Channy attempted to sing.

The movie wisely uses a lip synch technique that allows for a studio-bound version of the song to be used complete with accompanying instruments, however the movie unwisely retains the actors from the movie as the singers.

While no one can really be described as having a voice that should be heard outside of their own very loud shower, it is Channy himself who is far and away the worst of any of these singers as he is prone to a unique singing style that sees him choking on the last word of each line he sings. That’s not to say that he could carry a tune the rest of the time, it’s just that at least he got all those words out before he ran out of breath.

I suppose that the benefit of the studio recording is that the memory-impaired Channy could sing the song until he got all the lines right, unlike in the movie where he seems to momentarily forget his lines and muffs them slightly.

The worst offender though has to be Glinda the Good who manages to stumble over a few lines in her big speech after the interlopers are run out of Oz. Her speech serves to explain everything that’s going on, but between Glinda’s botching of her big speech, her silly poofy pink dress, Toys R Us tiara, and her noxious singing voice, I never could figure out why she was called “the Good”. Glinda the Good Riddance I get. Glinda the Good is a mystery to me though.

I was also reminded of my junior high play because of Barry Mahon’s idea of set design. His sets looked like painted cardboard and wood and he didn’t even bother with backgrounds. When the movie you’re watching opens up with a purple papier mache cow and has all the articulation of a homecoming float, you know that the guy who played Pumpkinhead and the gal who played Glinda the Good most likely had the tool belt strapped on and the paint brushes in their hands between takes.

With all the elements in place for a kiddie flick of historically abominable proportions all we needed was a story to go with it. Barry doesn’t disappoint us there either.

Showing a lack of judgment matched only by Chan agreeing to appear in the film in the first place, Tip (Chan) decides that he should play a prank on his evil witch stepmother Mombi.

Tip’s prank involves making a pumpkinheaded guy that he christens Jack Pumpkinhead. I wasn’t too sure of the point of the prank, but the next thing I know, Mombi has dumped magic powder on Jack and brought him to life.

She also told Tip that his prank was going to get his dumb ass turned into a statue in the morning. Showing that he’s not fall down stupid, Tip promptly runs away, enlisting Jack (who annoyingly calls Tip “father” the entire movie), and they make their way to Oz to get some help from the Scarecrow.

Along the way, they meet up with various people such as General Jinjur (pronounced “Ginger”), a gal in a drum majorette uniform who is leading an army of similarly clad chicks in an effort to overthrow the Scarecrow for some reason.

Tip also meets the Tin Woodsman who now has a heart bolted to his chest, and a pointless dude named Wogglebug. He is distinguished by the fact that he wears the worst make-up in the film. (Remember – he’s competing against a guy with a funnel on his head!)

None of this is very interesting as they basically stand around yattering at each other in their absurd voices (the Scarecrow and the Pumpkinhead are the worst offenders) trying to remember their lines while the sets try to remember not to fall on them.

You can’t help but laugh when it’s finally revealed that Tip is really a girl in disguise and is in fact Ozma, the rightful heir to the throne of Oz. The ultimate in parental humiliation is visited upon Chan as he is forced to admit that maybe it won’t be so bad being turned back into the girl he always was deep down inside!

Along with the previously mentioned Jack and the Beanstalk, Something Weird has loaded the DVD with extras including a featurette made by H.G. Lewis and some cartoons, but the best extras are the numerous trailers for other kiddie movies from some of the same people!

While I’m sure that it stinks just like this Oz flick does, how can I watch a guy in a skunk costume named Stinky the Skunk mucking around with Little Red Riding Hood, a wolf, a vampire, a Frankenstein monster, and Siamese twins in the classic Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters and not desperately want to see it?

The Wonderful Land of Oz is really hideous and reeks of something that I think would be quite enjoyable if you were fairly inebriated. Unfortunately I was stone cold sober when I watched it, but even that didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of trailers for not one, but two versions of Puss In Boots! Guys in cat suits wearing boots hanging around a castle with their pal in a chicken outfit? How do I get invited to that party?

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Scotland?  As in Loch Ness Monster Scotland?  As in “on the other side of the continent from Italy and Greece” Scotland?  And in the Middle Ages, too?

Whatever happened to that oiled up stud who ran around liberating places like Thebes and Mycene, driving chariots, and going skin-on-chiseled-bronzed-skin with monsters like Antares and the Moloch?

Never fear because in spite of everyone else in Maciste’s Scottish village dressed up like extras from a Vincent Price-Roger Corman picture, Maciste is still decked out in skimpy brown loin cloth and isn’t afraid to heave stones and trees around when need be!

Those of you hoping for some type of explanation as to how it was that Maciste just happened to be wandering around the Scottish countryside at precisely the same time as a hot young thing was wrongfully accused of being a witch and in need of rescue are obviously new to this genre.

Usually, the best these flicks can offer in terms of explanation consists of some musclehead showing up at the troublespot, quickly uttering something along the lines of “I came as soon as I heard there was trouble” and immediately shifting back into “heave and throw” mode.

The Witch’s Curse doesn’t even bother with this!  Maciste shows up, the town doctor tells him that some crappy witch they torched last century put a curse on the town and only by getting the curse lifted can the girl be saved.

Maciste is one of those can-do kind of fellows and once the haunted tree is pointed out that’s giving the town so much trouble, he lowers his shoulder and tries to uproot it.  Then he pushes it.  Then he tries to lift it.  Just when it looked like Maciste had spent the last few months trying to pass a steroid test, he manages to make it budge enough so that a hole beneath it opens up.

Maciste hops on in and finds himself in hell!  Right there under a tree in Scotland!  Just like it says in The Bible!

Maciste spends the remainder of the film wandering around the cave, periodically battling Satan’s pets (lions and giants) and getting the wool pulled over his eyes by the witch in beautiful girl disguise. (It may take place in Scotland, but this is sword and sandal stuff right on down to the “hunk gets seduced into forgetting his mission” sequence all these movies contain.)

Maciste regains his memory by gazing into a pool of water that just happens to be playing highlights from some of his previous adventures.  And even though star Kirk Morris played Maciste something like seven times in his career, none of the flashbacks are from Maciste movies that he was in!

One of them, Samson And The 7 Miracles Of The World, starred Gordon Scott, but was at least directed by Ricarrdo Freda who also made this one.  The other movie, apparently Atlas In The Land Of The Cyclops, wasn’t even directed by Freda, but did star a guy named Gordon, but not Gordon Scott! That would be Gordon Mitchell of The Giant Of Metropolis fame.  Somehow, seeing clips from his colleagues’ past films jogs his memory and Maciste gets back on the case.

Morris (Colossus and the Headhunters) displays a pretty limited playbook in this movie when it comes to studly displays of superpowered he-man mayhem.  With him bopping around a big cave the entire movie, his moves consist mainly of chucking rocks, stone columns, and getting buried in landslides. He does bust out his top-secret ability to jump really far though after a giant wrecks his efforts to cross a chasm with a big log.

Morris’ dialogue is fairly minimal which is a good thing since the few times he opens his mouth to let the dubbed lines pour out, he looks half asleep. I think it says something important that someone could see Morris in action here and say to themselves, “here’s a guy we should put in eleven more films exactly like this one!” Something important like it was an awesome time for us muscle fetish guys to be alive!

Cruddy in both concept and execution, The Witch’s Curse nevertheless manages to evoke enough chuckles in its mercifully brief 75 minutes (the original version, Maciste in Hell, is several minutes longer) to make it a worthy second feature on Something Weird’s DVD of the entertaining Hercules Against The Moon Men. (Watch the scenes where Maciste is fighting the giant and try not to think that it isn’t just some little dude in a bad wig fighting a regular-sized guy.)

And if there’s  one moment in the flick that makes it all worthwhile, it has to be where Maciste is almost stampeded to death by a herd of steers thundering through the caves of hell. It’s beef vs. beef! Thank goodness he was able to fend them off with the big stalagmite he picked up just in the nick of time!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Certainly that’s a loose translation, but the point is that when your opening salvo on an unsuspecting public is to cast the once and future Matt Houston as a guy mucking about some fake medieval world with a clumsy-looking three pronged sword that somehow fires its blades at people, no good is going to come of allowing you within a country mile of a camera ever again.

Pyun, who is also credited with being one of the writers, manages to completely muddle even the simplest story elements, such as who is related to who and how. In an effort to be fair, I even went back to parts of the movie to make sure he didn’t explain things after I mentally checked out when I got a gander at how ugly everyone’s wig was, but I still had no idea who these people were.

Horsely plays Talon, the son of King Richard who gets killed by the evil Titus Cromwell so that Titus can take over Rich’s kingdom. Talon has several siblings. One older brother is killed. He also had a sister and he may have had a younger brother, but I’m not about go to the instant replay a third time to confirm this.

Talon escapes Titus and years later emerges as a great warrior who runs around the various kingdoms with his buddies. He comes back to his dad’s old kingdom right about the time Prince Mikah and Princess Alana are planning their big rebellion to overthrow Titus.

You would think that these would be Talon’s younger siblings, but this is never brought up. In fact, Talon agrees to rescue Mikah after Titus captures him in exchange for a night of bumping and grinding with Alana! And Talon never bothers to figure out that as the oldest surviving heir, the throne is rightfully his! (You almost get the sense that Talon didn’t ever realize he was back in his home country until he saw Titus up close and had a flashback.)

Most of that could be overlooked if any of the rest of the movie was any good. The problems though run the gamut, from the off-putting claustrophobic and cheap sets, to the decidedly small scale camera work (there’s a “quickie TV movie, but with some boobies” vibe to it), to the abysmally staged battle scenes, to the annoying attempts of the musical store to sound epic and heroic but only managing to come off as low-grade parody.

You’re also going to feel cheated if you come into this thinking that just because the sorcerer is half the title, that he’s going to be half the movie. There’s actually almost no sorcerer action in this movie.

Titus uses a witch to resurrect the sorcerer at the beginning of the film to aid him in defeating King Richard’s armies. Titus then stabs the sorcerer and throws him off a cliff. The extent of the sorcerer’s remaining activities for most of the movie consist of him assuming a human disguise.

I never get why these super powerful creatures craving revenge on the mere mortals who hosed them earlier always seem to spend their time concocting elaborate revenge schemes instead of just using their powers to kill the guy. What was the sorcerer doing pretending to be Titus’ military adviser when he could make his fingers glow and pull someone’s heart from their chest without even touching them?

Speaking of pointlessly complicating your life for the sake of dragging the movie out, what was the reason again for Titus forcing Princess Alana to marry him? He was already in control of the kingdom and reviled by all its inhabitants, so it wasn’t going to legitimize his rule.

I suppose it could have been a ruse to lure all his fellow kings to the wedding so that he could eliminate them all at once (that was the plan he tried to carry out), but if that’s the case, why not just marry someone you want to and invite these people to that wedding? Why marry the gal who just kneed you in the balls in the previous scene? (Unless, there were some kind of subtleties to Titus’ sex life that thankfully went over my head.)

Even though Talon takes on both Titus and the sorcerer in a pair of battles at the end (his only beef with the sorcerer was that both he and the sorcerer wanted to kill Titus), this movie can’t get to the end credits soon enough.

Between Talon’s lame three pronged sword, the awful effects employed when the sorcerer gets rid of his human identity (I’ll never criticize computer generated effects again!), and the sluggish fight between Titus and Talon complete with colored sparks whenever their swords lazily banged into one another, your finger will be anxiously caressing the stop button on your remote control like it was some kind of home video rosary.

The one good thing about this movie is that it did generate an honest to goodness scare at the very end of things. Talon had defeated the bad guys, there were some forced cheers for him and then the screen went black and the following words appeared on the screen: “Watch for Talon’s new adventure Tales of the Ancient Empire coming soon.” Even though that film has yet to materialize and The Sword And The Sorcerer came out way back in 1982, the thought that Albert Pyun is still out there making movies and probably has this thing in the back of his mind hangs over your head like a clunky three pronged sword.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

And you better believe that this Sinbad is one sassy dame, I mean sailor. First off, his all-male sailing crew consists of a Greek and a dwarf! And guess who has a thing for short, fat midgets? Let’s just say that when Sinbad playfully slapped Pucci the Dwarf on his ass, Sinbad had hulk-sized grin on face!

Then there’s the fact that he’s prancing around in purple tights and a little brocaded vest throughout much of the movie. This proved especially uncomfortable for me as I was forced to confront the fact that I somehow knew the word “brocaded.”

Not to worry though because this Sinbad flick pulled out all the stops, pumping up everything Lou’s previous work in Italian muscle movies like Hercules and The Adventures Of Hercules did so well (mammoth gluts, pecs and traps), minimized the shortcomings of those two movies (lack of midgets, lack of kung fu buddy in rainbow colored clothes, lack of a Viking), and added all the things that were missing in them (bodybuilder sorceress, palace with trap door in floor).

The evil wizard Jaffar has taken control of the city by stealing four gems. The four gems are hidden throughout the ancient world and Sinbad and his posse have to go and find them to free the kingdom, save the princess and reunite her with the prince who is part of Sinbad’s crew. Before Sinbad can go out on his quest for the jewels, he has to escape the dungeon he falls into via the trap door in the throne room of the palace.

This is where we get our first hint of how awesome this movie will be. Down in the dungeon with Sinbad are a bunch of deadly snakes! A lazier, far flabbier Sinbad movie would probably have Sinbad get into a big snake fight with lots of shots of Sinbad holding a rubber snake to his face and pretending to struggle so as not to get bit. Lou’s Sinbad? He just chats up the snakes, commiserating with them about how no one likes them and eventually ties them in knots to form a big snake-rope that he uses to climb out of the dungeon!

Out on the open seas in search of the gems, Sinbad and his crew encounter all sorts of horrors in various lands, most noxious of them all, the amazon queen who subjects them to a tribal dance routine! She shimmies and shakes in front of our tied up heroes until one by one they have no choice, but to pass out!

Sinbad and company battle a variety of other freaks as well. There’s the ship full of the undead that Sinbad first tries to fight with a bow and arrow before remembering how much of a bad ass he is and going toe to toe with them. Unsurprisingly, he knocks one of their heads clean off and finishes off the leader by putting his fist through the guy’s chest and pulling out his heart!

Well, I thought it was his heart until Sinbad and I got a look at it. It turns out it’s a miniature head complete with face! There’s only thing to do about that. Sinbad pops that nasty little head like a pimple and green goo splatters everywhere.

There’s also a rock monster, a monster that looks like a guy in big slimy fat suit, and a bunch of haunted knights. (This means lots of slow motion shots of guys clubbing empty suits of armor.)

By the time Sinbad makes it back to face Jaffar for the last time, Jaffar has obviously grown desperate because he goes nuclear on Sinbad! Using all the magic at his disposal, Jaffar conjures up…another Sinbad! Just as powerful as our Sinbad! He knows every thought and every move the real Sinbad knows! All of Sinbad’s advantages are suddenly nullified!

What follows can only be described as the most intense all-Lou struggle ever captured on film! So evenly matched are these two that not much more happens beyond lots of straining, gritting of teeth, grunting and clutching of various body doubles who are filmed from behind. It ends the only it could – by having good Sinbad flip bad Sinbad into a fiery pit somehow.

And do you how tough this Sinbad is? With Jaffar defeated, Sinbad exacts his revenge by forcing him to… resign as the king’s wizard! I don’t know what Jaffar was moping around about – that sounds a lot better on your resume than “fired for trying to take over the kingdom and draining the princess’ lifeforce.” But that wasn’t the last surprise. That would have to be when Sinbad goes and gets married! To a woman! And she wasn’t even a dwarf! But not to worry hunk fans – Sinbad may be walking off with his new bride, but he’s walking off in a very silky, very flamboyantly colored blouse!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The movie itself begins in Africa (after a credit sequence showcasing a lot of African wildlife, everything switches to a sound stage where you had left over sets from One Million Years B.C. laying around) with a British guide named David leading an old guy on a safari to hunt leopards.

After the old guy botches the hunt and merely wounds the leopard, David gets mad and sends the guy back to camp while he goes after the wounded animal because he doesn’t like to see the animals in his jungle abused. Shot full of lead until they’re dead? Acceptable. Simply winged by amateur? Morally reprehensible.

Despite being warned by some of his native pals that he’s entering forbidden territory where all the locals worship the white rhino and even though he sees a tree marked with the dreaded sign of the white rhino (it’s just a carving of a rhino, not a big white rhino dump or anything), he blunders on ahead, right into the white rhino obsessed tribe!

His torture is immediate and brutal as these guys start to dance around in their white rhino masks (characterized by enormous phallic-shaped noses) all the while singing one of their hit songs (probably about how they’ll meet some lady friend on the down low and let her ride their white rhino).

David is told by the tribal leader that there is no defense for defiling their land and that the penalty is death. The leader also babbles about how his tribe is enslaved to the white rhino god, but I imagine that David was pretty much concentrating on the whole death sentence aspect of things and wasn’t really in his right mind. How else to explain the fact that while everyone is about to stab him to death that he reaches out and touches the horn of the white rhino statue which instantly freezes everyone around him and simultaneously opens a portal to another time?

Actually, there isn’t any other way to explain it because it doesn’t make any sense. Along with an overabundance of dancing and laughably unconvincing cast, this is one of the movie’s big problems since none of the nonsense that occurs ever amounts to anything beyond a bunch of people milling around in caveman outfits in between dance numbers.

Just what sort of world did David find himself in after groping the white rhino horn? It’s a world unlike any other, except for the sound stage that he just left, only with a few different brightly colored plants. There’s also a prehistoric woman being chased by other prehistoric women and she bites David when he tries to help her.

Both David and the woman are captured by the evil prehistoric women and taken back to their village. There we are subjected to cruelties undreamt of since the last time we had to watch a bunch of people dancing around. This time though, it’s a bunch of blonde chicks instead of African natives. And their moves are even more annoyingly dull than what we had previously seen.

For those that lack even rudimentary powers of observation, it is pointed out that all the blonde girls are enslaved by the dark haired girls. The men are likewise enslaved and are all held in a prison where they are forced to do metal working.

Additionally, all the males are outfitted with these terrible looking fake beards and wigs, which lead me to believe that whomever was in charge of that sort of thing had a conversation with the director that included the phrase “you won’t believe how cheap all this was!”

The dark haired gal in charge is one of these ruthless barbarian queens who doesn’t mind if her slaves have to eat off the floor and who takes bubble baths. Personally, I don’t see why wanting to pamper yourself every now and again and maintain baby soft skin is such a crime, but I think it stretched credibility a bit that you would have a prehistoric woman so concerned with her personal hygiene.

Barbarian Queen has her eye on David and with his wussy demeanor, what Amazon-ish woman wouldn’t want to put him in a scissors hold?

But the blonde girl that bit him also likes him and David likes her. To really add to the drama, Blondie conceives a scheme to free her people. Her plan is for David to pretend that he likes Barbarian Queen and slip into her bubble bath and then do something that helps the blondies get free.

I don’t think David’s girlfriend thought it through beyond the whole “my boyfriend is going undercover as hooker” aspect and you can bet that even though Dave whined about doing it, he eventually sucked it up and agreed.

Things go slightly awry once the plan is put into action, mass stupidity ensues and David finally ends up back in the present day after an embarrassingly fake appearance by the white rhino himself!

One of Hammer Films’ worst efforts which was a bit of a surprise because even with some of Hammer’s lesser films, there’s some aspect that shows a little care went into things, whether it be set design, the acting, or a story that at least made sense.

There is nothing here to redeem this movie though and the fault has to lie with writer/director Michael Carreras. It’s a dumb story that feels like an unfinished jumble of ideas and clichés.

Carreras gets no help from his leading man either. Michael Latimer in the role of David is singularly underwhelming with his unenthusiastic and wimpy portrayal of a guy fighting to survive in a hostile world. He was completely miscast here. He wasn’t a brawny he-man, he wasn’t a rakish rogue, he just looked like an uptight nerd. It all left me feeling like I sat on a white rhino horn.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

It all begins on a dark and stormy night (This movie has everything!) when three Union POWs are planning their elaborate scheme to bust out of the joint. Captain Cyrus Harding, Herbert Brown, and Corporal Neb Nugent have tricked up the staircase that leads down to their cell and once the guards come down with a new prisoner they make a break for it.

Once free, they escape in a giant hot air balloon the Confederates were using to observe enemy troop movements. They also lift off with a rebel soldier who knows how to fly it. You can tell he’s from the South because he talks like he has much more than a pinch between his cheek and gum.

He and the Union boys forge an uneasy alliance while airborne with the understanding that once they land no one is anyone’s prisoner and they each go their separate ways.

Unfortunately for all involved they just happened to pick the very day that the worst storm in the history of the United States decided to hit! One crash landing later, everyone has miraculously survived and reunited on an island.

Once Cyrus is revived, he takes command and they go exploring the island they’ve washed up on. It’s one of those lush islands with volcanoes painted in the background and birds superimposed over the shoreline. It’s also one of those islands where they run into overgrown wildlife about every fifteen minutes or so.

They first encounter a large crab and after battling it, they push it over the side of cliff into a hot spring below. The expected comic relief follows as the next scene shows everyone sitting around enjoying the biggest crab dinner of all time.

Two chicks get added to the mix when the boys find them washed up on shore, survivors of a recent shipwreck. One of them quickly becomes a love interest for Brown, while the other one is older so she’s relegated to doing stuff like sewing a hot new summer wardrobe for the younger one.

Thus is born that fashion craze of the summer of 1862 – the goatskin tank top and microskirt. It’s what all the stylish gals are wearing when they want to sneak away for a romantic afternoon in the giant beehive!

The incident with the giant beehive doesn’t happen until after the incident with the super deluxe prehistoric chicken thing that saw Brown jump on the its back and ride it around stabbing it!

Sometime when they’re all taking a break from fighting mutant animals, Cyrus and his crew go exploring some more and locate a cave. Inside it they discover a diary written by a guy who got hosed by a bunch of pirates.

Cyrus decides that this would be an ideal place for all of them to make as their home and with a bunch of stuff that Neb found in a crate floating in the bay, they move in and put the girls to work to give it that homey touch. And the homey touch means washing the dinner dishes and giving out haircuts.

The stuff in the crate reveals that it’s from the Nautilus and everyone reminisces about what a swell guy that Captain Nemo was and didn’t he get his butt sunk eight years ago in the Gulf of Mexico and why was he always sinking other guys’ boats and do you want your hair left over your ears?

Later on Captain Nemo saves everyone from a pirate attack. The Nautilus isn’t seaworthy anymore and sits in an underground grotto and Nemo has abandoned his plan to force man to stop making war on one another in order that he might try to tackle the world’s ills through horticultural research. Specifically, increased food production through larger animals.

While I was never quite sure how he was able to carry all this out with one guy and a broken down submarine, I was struck by the thought that if Nemo could ever make it back to civilization that he could completely dominate the giant vegetable circuit at all the state fairs.

Since the Nautilus won’t be able to rescue anyone, they have to work to raise the pirate ship that Nemo sunk to use as their getaway boat. They have to work double time though because the volcano that dominates the island picks the next day to blow its top.

Lots of action, exploration of cool landscapes, caves, monsters, and climbing of vines and ropes make this one a good solid adventure yarn.

Things never bogged down with too much talk and the movie was colorful, though the special effects didn’t always hold up. Sometimes they were fairly impressive (the crab, the underwater stuff, and the landscaping), but there were other times when they showed their age such as the scenes in the balloon.

The actors are a forgettable lot with the exception of Nemo (Herbert Lom) who had a fairly impressive presence about him, but how memorable do you really have to be when you’re riding around on a thirty foot high chicken?

© 2010 MonsterHunter

We should be celebrating our love of guns and big hooters since that merely affirms our belief that our families should be secure as well as demonstrates our healthy mother fixation. It’s these wishy washy movies full of crybaby sissies who pine for a slower, more relaxed pace where no one ever wants for anything and everyone is equal that’s the real stick in the eye of Lady Liberty.

I might have been able to tolerate all the feel good mumbo jumbo about how everybody is really polite to everyone else and how all the Tibetan natives were forced to learn English (say, this is paradise, isn’t it?) by some pushy Catholic priest though, if it all wasn’t so blasted boring.

Director Frank Capra let that whole “slow down the pace” ideal of his paradise seep into his filmmaking here because this one edges ever so slowly from leisurely to glacial to La Brea Tar Pit paced.

It took him the first half hour alone to establish that the plane carrying star Ronald Coleman and his supporting cast was being hijacked to paradise. (If this place is so great, why do you have to commit an act of air piracy to get people to join up?)

Once their plane finally crash lands in the mountains not too far from the hidden paradise of Shangri-La, Ronald and the rest of the survivors get rescued by a guy named Chang and his people.

Chang is a white dude who is at peace with himself in paradise (we know this because he speaks in the unemotional tones usually reserved for pod people) and he leads Coleman and his group to Shangri-La.

Shangri-La is a village nestled in between a bunch of mountains in remote Tibet where the weather is surprisingly balmy and the women are surprisingly attractive.

Chang explains that they are all welcome to stay with them until some outside porters arrive and can lead them back to civilization. It sounds like a pretty sweet set up until everyone hears that Chang has been waiting for these porters for the last two years!

Coleman plays Robert Conway, a famous British guy who’s written books, been a soldier, a diplomat, and is up for the job of Foreign Secretary. He seems to have it all and be really fulfilled. Therefore, it’s only natural that deep down, he feels that his existence is rather empty. This means that he’s pretty much primed to drink the Kool-Aid and join up with Chang’s cult.

I don’t suppose it hurts that as soon as Conway showed up in paradise, he was already making eyes at one of the local gals. (By local, I of course mean a white gal that lives there, not a native gal. Just because it’s paradise, doesn’t mean we have to forget all our racial hang ups does it?)

Everyone else in the group though is initially not terribly excited by this turn of events. Most notably, Conway’s younger brother periodically throws temper tantrums and shoots a gun to express his displeasure at being cooped up in paradise.

Gradually, everyone else comes around to how great life in Shangri-La is. Boring hobbies are the order of the day in paradise as one guy somehow becomes interested in building a modern sewer system for the village while another dude begins teaching a class on geology to the Tibetan kids in the village.

The movie dinks around with Coleman’s character and his acceptance of life in Shangri-La for most of the running time. He babbles with Chang. He flirts embarrassingly with his girlfriend. He even meets the High Lama himself!

The High Lama is really the 300 year-old Catholic priest that founded Shangri-La in the first place and he imparts all sorts of wisdom onto Coleman.

I didn’t hear a word the old fool said though because I was laughing too hard watching Coleman acting interested in what this old coot had to say since this sucker didn’t even have his front teeth! Looks like paradise could use a refresher course on proper dental care!

The movie creates an artificial climax involving Coleman’s brother leaving Shangri-La with Coleman inexplicably and unbelievably going with him.

Capra must have known that none of us would really care that the obnoxious brother or his dunderheaded girlfriend were leaving so he had to have Coleman’s character accompany him to try and rouse the audience, notwithstanding the fact that that was completely out of character with everything Coleman had expressed in the previous two hours.

The various speeches given during the film by everyone didn’t reveal any great truths and the big philosophy of Shangri-La turned out to be “moderation in all things.” Thanks for that, but I think I can practice that right where I’m at and not give up the three hundred channels of my digital cable or the convenience of a 24 hour grocery store.

The whole isolation-is-paradise message is defeated on the basest level though when it’s revealed that Shangri-La imports everything from the outside world in exchange for gold. It’s all just a bunch of self-important gum flapping that’s as toothless as its dearly departed leader was.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Not really. Ulmer is able to stretch his French-Italian backers’ money and cobbles up some fairly impressive “lost city” sets, though I guess there’s really only about three or four different ones and they usually consist of some fancy steps, doors, and a big grinding wheel that the slaves have to keep turning.

Just so you don’t get the idea that this isn’t a cheap adventure movie, they do have a generous supply of shots featuring lots of fake rocks, fake cave walls and really smooth floors. (Why they could be the floors of a warehouse or soundstage, they’re so smooth!)

The film starts out promisingly enough with three guys (Robert, John, and Pierre) in a helicopter flying over an atomic testing range in the Arabian desert and being forced down in the nearby mountains by some bad weather.

During the storm their helicopter gets blown off the ledge of a mountain. Even though they weigh hundreds of pounds less than the helicopter they don’t blow off the ledge and manage to stumble to some shelter in the mountains.

John, the helicopter pilot, was hurt during the hard landing so they try to make him comfy when they notice a guy going over a waterfall and down a river. I was never sure exactly what type of desert this was, because there were all these rivers, canyons, waterfalls, mountains, and lost civilizations whose citizens wandered around disguised as nomads.

They attempt to rescue him and this involves Robert holding Pierre by the ankles with Pierre straining to reach this guy. After some tense moments (would the guy being rescued smell Pierre’s armpits and just decide to let go and take his chances with the hundred foot drop to the rocks below?) they pull this dude up to safety.

He turns out to be a nomad they flew over not long before the storm started. What the guys in the helicopter didn’t see that we did was that this guy ordered all these slaves with him to be machine gunned, giving us in the audience the sneaking suspicion that this character may not be what he appears to be.

They do a little meet in greet in their shelter and he claims to be in charge of some nomads and his name is Tamal. Tamal is actually the leader of Atlantis and has no intention of letting these guys go.

But didn’t Atlantis sink into the sea? Nope, turns out there was some earthquakes and it sank into the sands of the desert, but because those Atlanteans were really smart, instead of just being suffocated like regular folk who get buried in sand like a bunch of cat turds, they decide that they should build their civilization under all that sand.

They meet the queen (Antinea) and she takes a liking to the hunky Robert. While Tamal is at work all day, she hangs out with Robert. This pisses off Tamal, who has pined away for his queen forever and leads to a discussion about their relationship.

Uh, that’s great that Tamal wants to talk it out and I realize that talking it out is pretty inexpensive for Ulmer, but raise your hand if you were watching this one hoping to see if Tamal and Antinea could salvage their relationship by rationally discussing their feelings.

There is a fairly entertaining slave-escape sequence where they battle guards and escape via an underground river only to get ambushed on the outside, but by and large the film is a talky affair, marked by forgettable performances by everyone involved. (Antinea seems particularly vapid.)

The movie feels like it should have rightfully finished up after the slaves escaped, so you sigh audibly when Robert gets recaptured and you have to wait for him get loose again in fifteen minutes.

I was never really sure what Tamal was up to with these three guys. If he was going to make them slaves, just get on with it. Instead, they’re put in some spacious cell where they argue amongst themselves, try to escape periodically, and get involved in the queen’s pointless schemes.

There wasn’t much in the way of explaining what was going on with the civilization down there. I think the slaves were mining diamonds maybe, but only because that would be the only thing that makes any sense.

I’m assuming that these underground people did a ton of trading with the outside world because of stuff like the machine guns and Tamal’s nifty weather radio, but why bother even living down there at all, if you just want all the goodies the outside world has?

The movie does have a look that’s above the usual standards of films like this and the queen wears a series of bust enhancing and/or exposing outfits designed to keep her subjects and the audience from dozing completely off, but there’s not enough other action to merit finding this lost city.

© 2010 MonsterHunter