I like a main character in a movie that needs as much action as I do! Too many times we’re saddled with reluctant heroes and guys who only grudgingly go about the business of serious ass kicking. Where are the dudes who want to take it right to the dirty scum that’s threatening to take over everything that matters to them? Isn’t there anyone willing to risk everything for the simple pleasure of killing Borneo pirates? Aren’t there any two-fisted guys in red neck kerchiefs and sea captain’s hats that don’t mind invading the island stronghold of the evil Tiger single-handedly while time bombs are going off everywhere around him? Sure there is! Imagine a guy with balls the size of the big boulder that tried to roll over Indiana Jones in Raiders Of The Lost Ark! That’s Captain Yankee!

To the uninitiated Jungle Raiders and its star, Captain Yankee, may appear to be just another faux Indy flick from Italy. There’s an adventurer in 1930s Malaysia who ends up helping a babe (museum curator Yanez) search for the legendary Ruby Of Gloom while everyone around them tries to steal it and kill them! You’ve got your close escapes, swinging over lakes of fire on ropes, and even a golden statue that Captain Yankee helps steal for a rich guy while outwitting vicious death traps! And remember how Indy was a pussy about snakes? This movie has snakes, too!

Saying that Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Jungle Raiders are pretty much the same type of movie is like saying the 1927 New York Yankees and the 1962 New York Mets are both baseball teams. Yes, it’s technically accurate, but it doesn’t tell you the whole story. You know the golden idol Cap helps steal at the beginning of Jungle Raiders? Just part of a fantasy camp he runs for dimwitted dilettantes! It’s almost like Captain Yankee saw Indiana’s first movie and said, “sure, that’s an adventure - for movie stars who like to play dress up in between Star Wars movies!”

Captain Yankee doesn’t have time to nursemaid wimpy guys with bullwhips and a studiously applied sheen of sweat and stubble though! He’s just been blackmailed into heading off into a cave beneath a volcano by none other than spaghetti western legend Lee Van Cleef! But not before he gets in a car chase with some pirates while helping out Yanez! Cap’s life is so action-packed he gets started on the secret mission before he’s even on the secret mission! And it’s the sort of action that can be handled only one way! With cuts to fairly convincing miniatures crashing and blowing up!

Italian adventure? Miniature stuff exploding? That can only mean one thing! The Indiana Jones of schlocky Italian action movies is back! Antonio Margheriti, the man behind the camera for the reels of awesome called Yor, the Hunter from the Future and Ark Of The Sun God, puts it all together here, balancing shots of Christopher Connelly (Bronx Warriors, Cobra Mission) shooting and beating people up with Godzilla-style model destruction! If you didn’t get giddy when you saw that the pirates were trying to get a giant oil refinery operational and were holding Cap’s tribal pals hostage there, you’re brain is probably the sort of bottomless pit of fire that would rather have Sean Connery as some guy’s mouthy dad in a movie rather than Luciano “Alan Collins” Pigozzi as a sidekick named Gin Fizz!

Jungle Raiders features solid tomb-raiding action with Cap squaring off against the mysterious and murderous Guardians as well as avoiding the severed head that the pirates throw his way! He even risks burning his hand trying to snatch the Ruby of Gloom which is protected by fire! What I liked about Captain Yankee is that he tried about three times to snatch the ruby before he finally decided to just use his gunbelt! Most sissy adventurers would’ve gone to the gunbelt after suffering third degree burns the first time!

What’s particularly awesome about Captain Yankee is that after the Ruby is stolen from him by pirates and the search for lost treasure is finished, he turns it up about thirty notches and hijacks a front end loader, proceeding to demolish the oil refinery with the help of his friends! At one point during all this, Captain Yankee shouts to Gin Fizz what amounts to Yankee’s personal motto, “don’t just sit there! Blow something up!” Has there even been a hero better than this? Yeah, the guy who stomped the leader of the pirates even as the slime pointed a machine gun at him from point blank range, beat him with a chain, and tried to cut him up with a sword while everything exploded around him! Wait! That was Captain Yankee, too? Who else wants some? Bring on the Nazis, the Joker, Ghidorah, and the Borg! All at once!

And remember the snakes? They even help Captain Yankee! There’s native boy and he can talk to his pet cobra! When the boy is taken hostage, the snake escapes, kills a guard and leads the boy to where the hand grenades are hidden! Later, a female cobra is spotted and the boy sets his buddy loose so that he can get to work with that forked tongue! And that’s when the Jungle Raiders love theme plays! Your love theme for Jungle Raiders though will be playing the whole time Captain Yankee is on screen letting everyone know his name was no accident and that other guy ought be named Indiana Mets!

© 2008 MonsterHunter

I don’t think that Richard really wanted to be governor all that badly. Sure, he was giving interviews, holding court in his fancy office shuffling files while advising his secretary he was not to be disturbed, and having cocktail party receptions, but I don’t think his heart was in it. And I sure know his dingus wasn’t in it either! Because it kept getting into his stripper/singer girlfriend when his old lady was out of town at her mother’s!

But it wasn’t Richard having an affair so much that led me to that conclusion. Heck, we had that tubby president who sodomized a gal with freaking cigar for crying out loud! And who knows what George Washington did with those hippopotamus ivory dentures of his! Americans have to know that their leaders can bone with the best of them, but you’ve got to be just a little bit discreet about it. You can’t go shoving your studliness in our face - we have our double standards to maintain after all.

Richard didn’t really seem to grasp this notion that your indiscretions must be kept to mere innuendo level because he was pretty much doing everything but pumping this broad in a campaign commercial! After first meeting Angie at the Blue Angel Cafe (memo to aspiring politicians - sleazy nightclubs should probably only be visited if you’ve already canvassed every other locale in your district except for the local whorehouse), Richard goes back to see Angie at the club and immediately screws her brains out. (Just look at the pained expression on her face - that’s a broad whose brains are being freaking scrambled six ways to Sunday!)

Richard doesn’t get any help from the people surrounding him either. His old lady (Kate) makes him wait at the beauty parlor for her and guess who just happens to be there getting a topless massage for all to see? And guess who decides to go ahead and get dressed right in front of Richard when he’s just trying to admire his wife’s new fuddy duddy hair do? I don’t care if you’re a male hairdresser, when some stacked blonde is posing in black panties and giving you the eye at the beauty parlor, you’re going to want to give her a shampoo! It almost makes me wonder why I still go to a cruddy old barber shop!

And what in the hell is Richard’s dimwit butler doing letting this woman into his house when Richard is out? He claims he made her stay out on the veranda, but when Richard goes into his bedroom, she’s buck naked taking a bath in his tub! Oops! You mean this isn’t the veranda? Silly old me!

The rest of the movie details how Richard realizes his mistake and does everything he can to avoid being exposed thus costing him his career and wife, right? There’s probably lots of Fatal Attraction-style moments where pets die, phone threats are made and dirty pictures are waved around. And it all ends with someone being stabbed, shot or hopefully pushed off a building! Yeah, maybe in some awful world where Joe D’Amato didn’t direct this movie!

D’Amato (Beyond The Darkness, Heroes In Hell) is clearly after something else here, though I had really no idea what it was. Richard gets set up by Angie’s agent and the affair is exposed about 30 minutes into the movie. The purpose seemed to be to generate some big tabloid money for Angie to tell her story. Except that she’s really in love with him! And Richard is really in love with her! So they move in together! Then he gets the old heave-ho from the governor’s race and kicked out of his political party! He also gets divorced from Kate and he and Angie have a nice montage where they are happy doing sissy stuff like running along the docks together and going to the mall. We know Richard is happy because of the really sissy sweaters he begins to wear.

A year goes by and Richard still doesn’t have a new job. He’s broke, has to sell his big ass house and move into a crappy apartment, and develops a healthy drinking problem. We know he’s not happy because the ugly sweaters are gone, replaced by shirts that are unbuttoned, bathrobes, and a lack of shoes. Angie is pissed because they don’t have any money and we can see that she only loved him for his wealth and powerful position. Except that maybe she wasn’t that shallow because then she went and got her old job back and even picked up an extra gig as a centerfold to make ends meet! I was never entirely sure what Richard and Angie were all about especially since somehow or other Richard ended up back with Kate in the fancy house he had to sell earlier. Those unfamiliar with D’Amato’s work may chalk it up to a muddled story and characters, but since it’s all in service to Angie parading around in heels and stockings, who cares? Muddle away!

Tara Buckman (Night Killer) displays the gravitas of someone indifferent to taking off her clothes every ten minutes or so while the guy who played Richard parlays the looks of Eric Roberts’ brain damaged little brother into a role where he exuded all the presence of a piece of plywood painted up to look like a person. It’s a testament to D’Amato’s abilities that he could wring chuckles from the audience with such moments as Richard slumped over in Angie’s dressing room while chugging from a whiskey bottle in a brown paper bag as well as when an angry Richard shoves Angie’s dirty magazine in her face complaining about her layout. He must have picked it up at the porn shop on the way to the liquor store!

But do you know how totally awesome D’Amato is? The photographer for Angie’s nude pictures was none other than Black Emanuelle herself, Laura Gemser! But do you know how unawesome D’Amato is? All she did was take pictures! And by the time Angie, for the FOURTH time, sings the title song that’s so bad Cthulhu himself probably banished it from his hideous dimension, you’ll understand why Richard is back with Kate in his fashion-don’t sweaters and apparently on tranquilizers. For fans of Tara’s ta-tas only. Which means all of us!

© 2008 MonsterHunter

Do you know what makes me so crazy that I just want to take this foot and put it upside of the head of the nearest human being, like I was Billy Jack rolling up on a scene of prejudiced locals humiliating and disrespecting the cultural heritage of the little brats that hung out at his old lady’s Freedom School? Can you even imagine what would cause me to turn my “World’s Sexiest Grandpa” baseball cap around like it was a fricking switch and roll up my sleeves like I was back on Iwo Jima, cleaning up the crud that kept me away from my lady for four long years? Maybe Monster Dog didn’t mean to cause me to take my two gunboats out of dry dock, but dang it, when the Devil starts sashaying around, wrecking all that I hold dear, you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to raise some hell!

If you don’t have any idea what my malfunction is, you don’t know diddly about Monster Dog. And if you don’t know diddly about Monster Dog, you don’t know diddly about life. What you sheltered pansies who never went to Nam need to understand about life is that sometimes it just don’t matter how good you are. You can be the best at what you do, but you’re still at the mercy of forces beyond your control. You could very well be the perfect killing machine, but if your country won’t let you win the war, there’s not a lot you can do. Yeah, you can go back and bring the boys you left behind home and you can get revenge on the crooked guys who doublecrossed your unit and sacrificed you to Charlie, but they don’t exactly give ticker tape parades and medals for that, now do they? And Monster Dog is just another example of the best there is hampered by inferior support.

Monster Dog was written and directed by Claudio Fragasso. Claudio was a frequent collaborator with Bruno Mattei, but he also had a decent-sized body of work he did on his own. Beyond Darkness, Troll 2, and Night Killer all demonstrated what he could do without Bruno’s help. With Monster Dog, Claudio tells the tale of a monster dog that is terrorizing the countryside and who may have some connection to music superstar Alice Cooper. Regardless of who else is involved, fans of the big name talent associated with this project will probably figure that his abilities can overcome the obvious obstacles the movie suffers from. But alas, I am sad to report that the unfortunate presence of Cooper was even too much for Claudio to overcome!

Alice plays Vincent, a rock singer whose gimmick seems to be looking really tired. He’s also one of these singers that wears make up during his videos. Let’s just close the book on this business of guys needing to wear eye shadow and fake eyelashes when they sing. Elvis didn’t do it. Frank Sinatra didn’t do it. Bing Crosby didn’t do it. But I suppose it’s okay if you’re someone like Cher.

So Claudio is saddled with some make-up wearing old geezer who insists on singing not one, but two different numbers during the movie! His first number thankfully comes at the beginning of the movie when the audience is still at its strongest. And you will need every ounce of Claudio-love to get through the opening minutes when Alice croons the instant un-classic, “Identity Crisis” in a music video where he assumes different personas. The James Bond bit is probably the worst, but he also dresses up as Sherlock Holmes, Jack The Ripper, and Billy The Kid so there’s really something for everyone to hate.

The second number is called “See Me In The Mirror” and is less annoying simply because a dead guy interrupts the filming of the music video. I’m not sure if it’s a compliment to Claudio or an indictment of Alice that the music video they were shooting for “See Me In The Mirror” felt very authentic. Alice is decked out in leather and looking into a mirror while some chick in a wedding dress is walking down the stairs. It’s one of those hideous dirge-like ballads that heavy metal guys periodically feel compelled to do for some reason. Why can’t they leave the ballads to the professionals like Bon Jovi and Def Leopard? At least they have the good taste to not film their videos in a run down Italian villa.

Oh yeah, there’s also apparently some dogs on the loose eating the locals. The locals blame Alice for some reason even though he just rolled into town to make a video at his ancestral home. Apparently, Alice’s dad was killed years ago for allegedly being Monster Dog! But now, Monster Dog has returned to command all the dogs in the county! And that command is to kill! And bite! And eat! And pee all over your rugs!

Claudio does make the best of a bad situation and gamely gives us everything he has to bring us what we expect out of a Claudio Fragasso movie! There’s the total reliance on a fog machine and blue lighting that would make Lucio Fulci envious! There’s the guy who has half his head blown off! And a long and fairly pointless dream sequence always spices things up and allows for extra kills without hiring extra actors since guys who get killed in a dream can then be killed again in real life! And there’s those little touches like the local cops setting up roadblocks because of the dog attacks. Some of you are no doubt snickering and thinking, “yeah, in case the dogs are driving cars and picking up hitchhikers to slaughter!” But guess what, funny man? Monster Dog does turn up in a car! So those cops knew exactly what they were doing! Except for when they wandered around the moors and got eaten!

Claudio even goes so far as to have Alice’s voice dubbed by the guy who dubbed all the Italian horror and action movies of the 1980s! It’s a technique that allows the viewer to close his eyes and pretend that we aren’t watching a movie starring some shock rocker, but instead a movie featuring an Italian guy with a beard! Still, Alice ultimately gets the best of Claudio when at the 79 minute mark, the movie portion of things concludes, but we are then treated to another airing of “Identity Crisis” over a montage of scenes from the movie! Claudio gives his best effort, but this thing is totally rabid and needs the Old Yeller treatment pronto!

© 2008 MonsterHunter

A lot of us guys who kicked ass over in Nam got a dose of that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that good old sneaky Charlie was lacing their tunnels with. The severity of the PTSD seems to vary depending on the dogface. For instance, I got a fairly mild case of it. Generally, my symptoms consisting of yelling “incoming!” at the top of my lungs and diving under my desk at work whenever somebody rips a fart. Sure, it tends to hamper my upward mobility in the business world, but it isn’t exactly crippling. Plus I avoid a lot of stink, too.

For other guys though, it’s a tougher road. It can impact not only their employment, but their family life as well. Trying to bayonet your wife every time she comes in the living room while you’re engrossed in a football game is a recipe for marital strife. The PTSD might even be so bad that you turn to self-medicating yourself with drugs or booze. That’s what Steel did in this movie. Steel liked to get liquored up and beat up the cowards in the bars who didn’t have the balls to go to Nam! That’s some pretty cool PTSD! Or at least it would be if we actually got to see it instead of just having Steel’s whiny wife recount it for us and Steel when she’s picking him up outside the police station.

The other problem I had with it was that Steel’s wife was talking about his PTSD like it was some kind of bad thing. “The war’s been over for 10 years! What about your family? What about your job? What about our son?” was all she could say. And if this selfish pig would have taken ten minutes to watch the movie’s prologue, she would have seen that Steel is carrying some pretty heavy baggage. I mean, when you’re all fudged up by Charley and being choppered out of a hostile LZ and the best friend you had in that steaming hell on Earth is wounded on the ground and you’re yelling “Danny! Danny!” and reaching for him and the other guys in the chopper won’t let you get him, well heck, you’ve probably got a medal that gives you permission to hit the hooch and the long-hairs who pussed out on going to war with you!

Savage Attack is Italian-style awesome in its severely under-budgeted chronicling of one man’s journey to redemption from the jungles of Nam to the wilds of the Dominican Republic (which look remarkably similar) all the way to the old abandoned sugar cane plant where terrorists have taken his old buddy Danny hostage! Danny! Danny! How did you survive and escape Charlie and end up in the old abandoned sugar cane plant in the Dominican Republic, Danny? I’m guessing it was the fog of war or something like that.

As soon as Steel hears on the news that Danny is being held hostage, he hits the road looking to round up his old platoon for the rescue mission that’s in every one of us Nam vets. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating since a lot of you weren’t over there. We had a code in-country: if your brothers need busting out of POW camps in Nam or Cambodia years after the war, you do it. And if your brothers are ever in trouble in a foreign country and need to be busted out there, you do it. This also applies if you’re a pro football team and your quarterback’s daughter is in a foreign prison, too. (See The Last Match.)

Steel runs down three of his former army pals and they all reluctantly agree to go with him to get Danny back. One guy had a wife and a terminally ill son and he and his old lady were having an intense discussion about not going and then he comes out of the other room and tells Steel he’s in. So long, son! Hope you hang on until Daddy gets back! Another guy was running a casino and was being threatened by mobsters and apparently decided Steel was the lesser of two evils and joined up.

When we met the fourth guy, he was at a disco in the Dominican Republic reading slam poetry. In drag. He explains that he was caught smuggling drugs and a general took his passport away and that the general is now blackmailing him! Really, can you imagine what it might do to his career as a tranny street poet if it came out he was a drug mule? Steel is nonplussed though and immediately seizes on this as a positive, using G.I. Sissy to get into the general’s base and steal a bunch of weapons!

Up until this point, Savage Attack was only a borderline recommendation. Frankly, the guy in drag and a few explosions in the opening minutes were the only things keeping this in the marginally positive category. But then Steel finds the hostages and Danny! And Danny kills a hostage and it turns out he’s the head of the terrorists! And it’s all because Steel left him behind! And now he hates capitalist imperialism! No! Danny! No! Don’t turn your back on the American Dream! Is there anything that can be done to save Danny from his own deranged political outlook?

How about a little PTSD? Oh yeah! Finally, a movie that dares to show the glorious benefits of PTSD! Just when all seemed lost, Danny gets caught in an explosion and when he comes to, he thinks he’s back in Nam! And he’s back to being a Grade A Johnny Yank! Steel! Steel! Where are you? Danny starts blasting bad guys and pitching in before buying the farm! And even in death, Danny is helping Steel and his pals because they use Danny’s still warm corpse to lure the evil general played by Martin Balsam into their trap. They take him hostage, take proof of life photos, and then the movie suddenly ends with a narrator telling us the fates of Steel and his men!

Savage Attack delivers a double-barreled cinematic Tet Offensive with its combination of perfectly choppy script (entire scenes appear to be missing in this 75 minute VHS version!) and delectable melding of Nam war movie cliches (evil general trying to kill his ex-soldiers!) with typical over-the-top Italian excess (Steel is strung up and has needles in his face!). That you have director Tonino Valerii (My Dear Killer), Bo Svenson (Deadly Impact, The Inglorious Bastards) scowling his way through the role of Steel and being dubbed by THE guy who dubs all these Italian movies along with Peter Hooten (Claudio Fragasso’s Night Killer, Wartime), Werner Pochath (Striker, Days Of Hell), plus the adopted son of Nat King Cole ensures that you have the experience to sell this timeless tale of how the war never ends for the warrior. And that sometimes you even end up fighting it in a wig, dress, and heels 15 years later!

© 2008 MonsterHunter

In life nothing is more pure than the sweet science of effortlessly bad Italian filmmaking! Relentlessly pummeling the viewer with its English-as-a-third-or-fourth-language level dialogue, jabbing with its cast of faded legends, has beens, bimbos, and talentless dudes vaguely recognized from other horrid Roman roundups before finally delivering the knockout blow with a deadly combination of awful songs, punch-drunk plot, and laughably over-the-top action, movies like The Opponent easily fill the undercard of your pointless life.

Though one is tempted to pass up The Opponent and its potentially dull honest boxer vs. crooked promoter storyline, even a cursory glance at the VHS box will convince you otherwise. First of all it stars Ernest Borgnine and Daniel Greene! Ernie is most famous for winning an Oscar and then going on to do time in Italian monuments to easy paydays like The Last Match, Treasure Island in Outer Space, and Super Snooper. Daniel is probably not famous for also appearing in pretty much all of director Sergio Martino’s late 80s-early/90s movies such as After The Condor, American Rickshaw, and Beyond Kilimanjaro.

Secondly, the video box announces that what we are about to see is an “explosive blood-splattered saga in the tradition of Rocky and Raging Bull.” That sounds great, but what if I thought everything in Rocky and Raging Bull except the parts where guys get hit in the face was gay? Don’t worry! Unlike Raging Bull, The Opponent is not in black and white! That makes it about 1000 colors better than Raging Bull! And remember Rocky’s annoyingly crotchety manager? It took that old geezer how many sequels to die? In The Opponent, Bobby’s manager not only dies, but is forced to drink a gallon of rubbing alcohol, then chucked into the ocean in what is ingeniously engineered to look like a drunken fishing accident! And you know what that means! Title fight death dedication!

It’s easy though to build a case for The Opponent being better than a pair of overrated Hollywoodized boxing epics. Hell, any Italian movie has a puncher’s chance of that! The real test though is whether you can still enjoy all its kick ass even if you haven’t seen those other wimpy color-impaired pugilistic pictures. Damn, does the ref need to stop this fight or something? Are you suffering from some sort of dementia? All this movie does is rabbit punch you right in the feel-goodies for 90 minutes!

Bobby’s just a dumb lunk who wants to be a fighter! Just how dumb is he? When he gets into a fight with a couple of drunks while trying to clean up the bar he works at because they dumped some toothpicks on the floor, he beats the piss out of them and simultaneously manages to make an exponentially bigger mess than they ever imagined doing! I suppose you could also say that Bobby screwing his promoter/gangster’s girlfriend before he had his title fight was pretty dumb as well, but the mess the bar fight caused was surely a more obvious consequence than having your right hand repeatedly crushed with an iron bar by the gangster’s goons when he refused to throw a fight to pay for his cheating ways!

Bobby though might be forgiven for being seduced by Gilda, the gangster’s moll, since his personal life was in turmoil. He has a girl that he really loves named Anne and she really loves him, but there’s just one problem - her dad! Borgnine plays the father who hates fighters! In fact, he hates fighters so much that when he sees Bobby at his grocery store, he taunts him, punches him a couple of times and even slaps him! Bobby responds by punching Borgnine right through a bunch of produce back into 1955 when he won the Academy Award for his role in Marty! For some reason, Anne then breaks up with Bobby.

Not to worry though because Borgnine watches one of Bobby’s fights and becomes convinced that he isn’t a bad person after all. It probably didn’t hurt any that Borgnine won a bunch of money on the fight, too. He signs up as Bobby’s trainer for the title fight, reveals why he despises boxers (some gibberish about how his wife saved him from becoming a vegetable), and gets involved in the final training montage. As in the case of most title fights though, Bobby’s girlfriend gets herself kidnapped by the gangster thus setting up the dramatic conclusion on the docks! Hey, this is an Italian movie - you didn’t think it would just end with Bobby winning the title bout did you?

Martino thankfully gets everyone’s worst in this one! Star Daniel Greene demonstrates a stultifyingly wooden technique that would have been dismissed as too stiff and unnatural for an old Hercules movie while Italian film icon Giuliano Gemma (The Scalawag Bunch, Arizona Colt, A Pistol For Ringo) is dapper and frequently unintelligible as the evil promoter. Mary Stavin (Gilda) has never had bigger hair and her efforts here easily justifies Bruno Mattei using her in Strike Commando 2 and Born To Fight. And how about Bobby’s girlfriend Anne? Keely Shaye Smith would go on to gain fame for becoming Pierce Brosnan’s second wife and putting on a bunch of weight!

But it is Borgnine who dominates every scene he is in. The impressive array of ugly shirts he wore, many of them with horizontal stripes which only served to further amplify how horribly bloated he was, couldn’t help but capture the viewer’s undivided attention whenever they appeared! The fact that these shirts were almost certainly from Ernest’s own wardrobe only adds to the authentic terribleness that makes The Opponent a winner by unanimous decision!

© 2008 MonsterHunter

As I watched it unfold, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it about a hundred times before. It seems so obvious in retrospect. A loved one gets framed up in some nameless banana republic on drug charges. A father can’t get any help from the impotent American embassy. His daughter is facing years behind bars in such a tough prison that the warden has the father beaten during visiting hours! There’s no one left to turn to for help! Except the teammates on his professional football team! Admit it, you just got goosebumps!

But you’re thinking, “sure - that sounds like an uber-awesome idea, but it all just turns into another commando rescue mission movie once the assault on the fortress-like prison begins, right?” Of course it does - if it was made by anyone other than the Italians!

Do you think the writers of Murder Rock, The New York Ripper, and Miami Golem aren’t going to add a little Neapolitan seasoning to things? And you surely can’t believe that director Fabrizio De Angelis managed to make six Karate Warrior movies, three Thunder movies, two Killer Crocodile movies and something called Karate Rock without knowing how to deliver the goods!

Knowing this film’s pedigree, you may be able to better comprehend what I am about to tell you regarding the rescue mission itself. You see, when the football team attacks the prison, they do so in their football uniforms! We’re talking cleats, shoulder pads, even helmets! When Coach gives the word over his headset to the guys in the trucks to check in that they’re ready and they all put their helmets on, you know it’s just about kickoff time!

Did I say that Coach was in charge of this operation? Well, who else is going to lead the football team in, as Coach so eloquently puts it, “the most important game of our lives?” And when your head coach is Oscar-winner Ernest Borgnine, you can bet there’ll be a good game plan. (In this case it happens to be a blueprint of the prison.)

Swiss superstar Oliver Tobias plays the quarterback for the nameless team with white jerseys, yellow pants, and plain black helmets. If that seems a bit on the low-rent, rec league side of things, their opponents are likewise outfitted from the same local used sporting goods store. And just who exactly is this Oliver Tobias that he thinks he can play the intense father who is such a stud that he can get a professional sports team to invade a small country to save his skank daughter? It turns out that Oliver is actually THE Stud, as he played the title role in the Joan Collins classic film called unsurprisingly enough, The Stud. If Oliver can hold his own with Joan, then he shouldn’t have any problems with the evil prison warden played by Henry Silva.

Henry Silva? Sometimes even though I watched the movie, I feel like I’m just making up my dream movie when I’m writing about it afterwards. How else to explain the inspired casting of character-acting legend Charles Napier (Rambo: First Blood Part II) as the useless embassy official or a very sweaty Martin Balsam (Psycho) as a useless local attorney? And there probably isn’t any way to explain the casting of former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly as one of the football players. Though I haven’t seen any official acknowledgement that this is actually the NFL Hall of Famer, it sure looked like his atrocious haircut and goofy face staring stupidly during team meetings where Coach Borgnine was going over how they couldn’t afford to be offsides during the big prison break.

There may be some of you out there (probably soccer fans who don’t understand real football) that are not entirely sold on a professional football team taking a few days off in the middle of a season to mount a Delta Force-level search and rescue mission in hostile territory. As Coach Borgnine explained to Oliver during the planning stages, “you served in Vietnam, the rest of the guys have seen service, and I served in a couple of wars!” They didn’t call it McHale’s Navy for nothing!

Besides, it wasn’t like they were taking on the Third Reich. We’re talking about a few dozen prison guards. Any pro football team worth a spit other than the Arizona Cardinals ought to be able to handle that with their second stringers.

Once the operation gets underway, Borgnine demonstrates the best combination of Vince Lombardi and General Douglas MacArthur. Assuming his position as the “eye in the sky” aboard a helicopter piloted by a player (in full uniform and helmet of course), Borgnine radios in the plays to his team, directing when and where to blow stuff up. He also is able to use his binoculars to see in the darkness via infrared which shows you what a great leader Borgnine was since the binoculars looked liked ones that cost about 20 bucks at K-Mart.

It’s with these magic binoculars that Borgnine gets off the second best moment of the movie. He spies Silva slapping around Oliver’s daughter shortly before the rescue and Borgnine snarls “that bastard!” I don’t care who gets the writing credit on this movie, that was pure Borgnine!

Believe it or not, the best moment is not when the team is storming the prison and yelling “hut, hut” or when Borgnine is running through a hail of enemy gunfire on a runway en route to the getaway plane or when Borgnine experiences his last fourth down in a touching death scene aboard the plane where he just seemed too exhausted to participate in the movie anymore.

No, the moment that no one but Fabrizio De Angelis would have the guts to put in his football-players-invade-foreign-country movie was when the punter opened a duffel bag, took out a football that had been split open, dumped a grenade inside of it and then proceeded to punt the ball into a helicopter causing it to explode!

The Last Match was so entertainment-packed that we even got to see Oliver and his team play another game after they got back to the United States! Borgnine coached via flashbacks kind of like Obi-Wan, but with a clipboard. Fans of all of this may also want to check out Cobra Mission which was the first time that Oliver, Fabrizio and the writers teamed up, though that movie features a distinct lack of exploding footballs and Borgnine.

© 2008 MonsterHunter

So much of the Vietnam POW experience is portrayed in a negative light. There’s the obscene physical abuse as well as the unrelenting mental torture. There’s the inhuman living conditions and the years away from loved ones. There’s the uncertainty of whether you are going to live through the next morning or whether you’re going to get another meal. Then, even if there is a rescue mission mounted by a one man killing machine named Rambo or Braddock, there’s the distinct possibility that you might be one of the anonymous grubby guys who dies in the escape attempt.

But like everything else in life, nothing is all bad. Despite what all those slick American POW movies and their grimy Italian counterparts would have you believe, there is one big benefit to being a POW. And thankfully, Camillo Tetti finally dramatized it in his remarkable Brothers In War. I speak of course of the tiger cage booty call.

As every guy who’s ever spent time in a tiger cage half submerged in some parasite-infested Vietnamese river will tell you, when you’re not worrying about some exotic worm crawling up into your shriveled dingus, you’re thinking about just how freaking horny this war has made you! If only I was locked up in here with a showgirl from a USO tour, then the fact that I’m going to be beaten savagely before being shot in the head at dawn wouldn’t sting as much!

Brothers In War bravely tells this story in all its relatively unsanitary glory and though you are sure to be grossed out by the groaning and thrusting happening in the fetid waters of the tiger cage, it’s all very tastefully done. With all the nasty bits obscured by a modesty-friendly waistline water level combined with the night time shoot of the scene, you’re not having to deal with much more than some bare chested sloshing about. Bonus points go to the guy, Stereo, for being able to accomplish all this with his hands tied behind his back! It’s hard to believe that this is the same guy that his army buddy, Josy, always warmly referred to as “faggot” throughout the film.

Josy is a bit of misanthrope who is teamed up with Stereo on a mission to escort Mary, the showgirl and her oafish manager Bert out of hostile territory to De Nang. Certainly, while Josy’s homophobic comments to and about Stereo are outrageous and indefensible, I am open-minded enough to laugh at them, too. Of course, I am not laughing in support of him, but as his ignorance.

Once their escort mission gets underway, you begin to wonder if the movie should have been titled Warjeep. Warbus was all about marines driving a bus to safety, while Brothers In War featured Stereo, Josy, Mary, and Bert cruising through the jungle in their jeep. Brothers In War scribe Dardano Sacchetti also penned the other warbus epic, Warbus Commando the same year as this film, so it wouldn’t be shocking if Dardano thought what worked on a bus with Mark Gregory and Bobby Rhodes also would work with the stars of Bye Bye Vietnam and Cy Warrior.

Luckily, Stereo wasn’t a very good driver and managed to wreck his warjeep in the jungle during a big jeep chase with Charlie. He and his crew would have to hoof it the rest of the way, though they did get to ride in a boat that they had to clear of enemy corpses and also commandeered an enemy train before American forces blew it up.

Their journey on foot through the jungle provided an opportunity to really get to know the characters. For instance we learned that Josy was a thief as he stole Bert’s secret stash of money. Then we learned that Josy was a comedian as he allowed Stereo to have a machete fight with Charlie while refusing to help for about five minutes before finally shooting the bad guy and announcing “I’m trying to sleep here!” to the disbelieving Stereo. And finally, we learned that Josy was a scummy-assed rapist as he assaulted Mary while Stereo and Bert were trapped in a large muddy hole. Walking around in the jungle doesn’t create character so much as reveals the distinct lack thereof.

To Mary’s credit, despite being brutally raped in a driving rain storm in the mud, the next day she has on clean clothes, her hair is fine, and her make up is perfect. Mary would also be raped again, this time by Charlie, after her one night stand in the tiger cage with Stereo. It’s a testament to either her strength or her lack of brains that once they escape and Stereo also stupidly rescues Josy that she begrudgingly goes along with the plan and ends up laughing and smiling with Stereo once they get rescued.

Brothers In War does an excellent job dramatizing the impact of the horrors of war on a showgirl. From the opening moments when Mary belts out an extremely long and utterly painful version of “Hey Big Spender” to her ability to squeeze in hot tiger cage sex in between bouts of rape, it’s clear that if war is hell on soldiers that war is also hell on showgirls’ private parts!

Nowhere does the viewer get to experience the hellishness of the Vietnam war more intensely than during one scene between Mary and Stereo in the tiger cage. Mary is going crazy with worry about their fates and Stereo uses all his survival training to calm her. “Think about something pleasant! Like talking a walk! Or eating ice cream!” Then he suggests that they sing a song and he picks “Jingle Bells”! It all ends with Stereo screaming hysterically and shouting “Jesus Christ!” I feel better already! Certainly the masterpiece that Tetti was working toward while toiling away on such films as Bye Bye Vietnam and Cobra Mission 2!

© 2008 MonsterHunter

Heroes In Hell gives you an up close and personal look at the lives of a group of World War II POWs. It’s up close and personal not because you get to know the characters or you are treated to a day to day examination of what life in a German prison camp entails. It’s up close and personal because most of the freaking film is shot right in these guys’ faces! And it didn’t serve to build tension or give a sense of claustrophobic suspense so much as left the viewer straining to see around everyone’s big fat skull!

If the extreme abuse of extreme close ups was the only the issue with the film, you could probably write it off as an admirable attempt at some type of artsy take on the normally cruddy Italian war movie genre. Instead, the idiotic story, poor pacing, minimal amount of action, and the contribution of noted French director File Footage (pronounced Fee-lay Foo-taj) all add up to a normally cruddy Italian war movie with lots of extreme close ups!

The torture the German war machine inflicts not only on the prisoners, but those of us watching at home, begins as soon as the opening credits roll. It’s three minutes of black and white World War II footage and it’s punctuated by the announcement that there will be a special appearance in the film by some guy named Klaus Kinsky! Since Klaus Kinski appeared in only the final fifteen minutes of the movie as a German general who babbled on about Renaissance art, he very well may have had it in his contract to use his secret identity of “Klaus Kinsky” instead of his real name so that his fans would not be disappointed with his minimal and silly participation in such a project. Heck, even Joe D’Amato (Beyond The Darkness, Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals) himself went with his Michael Wotruba moniker for this film! (Which goes to show that the Italians are much more adept at pretending never to be within a country mile of such a steaming pile of rotted sauerkraut!)

Once File Footage finishes directing the opening credits, it’s D’Amato’s turn and he proves to be a trooper even through the weakest of material. Despite a story that seemed improvised from the memories the writer had of other POW movies (how else to explain the painfully long roll call scenes?), D’Amato does manage to occasionally give the proceedings his own flavor. For instance, we get a nice loving look at a guy’s shrapnel wound the alcoholic camp doctor operates on. There is also a swollen tongue and some lesions for us to savor.

It is difficult though to chalk this one up to Joe doing as much as possible with the material he was given. You remember that writer who seemed to be scripting this movie based on his hazy recall of other movies? That was Joe, too! Sure, he gave us guys rubbing poisonous plants on themselves to simulate the effect of the plague, but he also gave us an escape plot that hinged on the Germans not immediately shooting and burning guys who looked like they had the plague!

Once on the loose, our heroes immediately fall in with a group of grubby partisans. These resistance fighters are standard issue all the way down to the token hot chick they have with them! In the great tradition of the plague escape plan, the partisans have a “plan so ridiculous and ill thought out that it can’t possibly fail in a movie as awful as Heroes in Hell.” They are going to kidnap the general played by Klaus Kinski right from his stronghold! But how could they possibly pull it off? Because one of the escaped POWs speaks German! And they have some German uniforms! But does it work? Sure it does! Almost everyone gets shot and some stuff blows up!

Though the horrors of war are finally over for those who didn’t survive, the rest of us will have to carry the trauma of Heroes in Hell around with us like some sort of nasty plant blister. Can we ever truly forget the genocidal use of stock battle footage during a nightmare one of the POWs had? Or the fact that that footage was actually better than the newly shot material showing the soldier making faces inside the cockpit of a plane during the same dream? And how do you ever get past the half-witted rescue scene where our guys again fooled the Germans by rolling up in a truck dressed in German uniforms? By the end of this movie I was thinking that if our military commanders had a half a brain back in the 1940s they would’ve just dressed all our boys in German outfits and had them drive into German positions and that whole World War II business could have been wrapped up in about three days. Heroes in Hell easily violates every article of the Geneva Convention and will leave the viewer in dire need of assistance from the Red Cross should he or she somehow survive it.

© 2008 MonsterHunter

What follows is my rickety and probably half-right explanation of Emanuelle’s film career. Apparently there was once a movie called simply enough, Emmanuelle. Released in 1974, it starred Sylvia Kristel as a French broad living in Bangkok doing all sorts of things that adults do when they get horny. Sporting such a powerful plot, the movie easily spawned about seven legitimate sequels. But this isn’t our Emanuelle. You see our Emanuelle is known as the Black Emanuelle and she’s a slut of a different color.

Black Emanuelle was played by Laura Gemser and she managed to star in eight movies that all begin with Joe D’Amato’s Black Emanuelle. This particular Emanuelle is usually portrayed as some variety of reporter or magazine photographer and her assignments usually end up taking her into more traditional Italian schlock territory such as the cannibal-infested Amazon or a women’s prison (Bruno Mattei’s Violence In A Women’s Prison). Other times, she’s apparently in between reporting jobs and just gets involved with stuff like trying to hire a hitman to kill her husband. In any case, D’Amato directed the first three of these films (his resume of 173 movies include no less than eight different ones with some variation of “Emanuelle” in the title). Other luminaries that took a whack at this legendary film series include the aforementioned Mattei as well as Mario Bianchi of The Murder Secret fame.

Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals is listed as the third film in the Black Emanuelle series, but I counted at least twenty films in Laura Gemser’s body of work involving an Emanuelle of some sort, so I’m not sure if there is some international board of arbitration or something that makes the call as to what qualifies as an official entry in the annals of the Black Emanuelle legacy, but somewhere, someone made the call letting in this one and keeping out such hopefuls as Emmanuelle on Taboo Island, Emmanuelle Goes Japanese, and The Degradation of Emanuelle.

After squirming my way through this one like I caught a bad case of whatever it was that one of the last ten guys that “co-starred” with good old Black Emanuelle must’ve had, I was wondering if there was an appeals process I could use to go before the board and get this movie booted from not only the Emanuelle mythos, but more importantly, from the Italian jungle cannibal genre.

Why are the only cannibals I see in this movie for the first hour from some grainy film a professor is showing Emanuelle back at his swank bachelor pad in a pathetic (but strangely successful) effort to get her in bed? And why are those cannibals from Africa instead of the Amazon? And why is there close up footage of them whacking a guy’s dingus off with a machete?

But before Emanuelle is proving to us how easy she is in the apartment of some square she just met (played by her real life husband, so I suppose she just might’ve confused the script with real life), she was proving to us how sleazy she was while she was undercover in a New York City mental hospital. So what was she doing there? Manny is a reporter for the Evening Post and has gotten herself checked in to the nut hut along with her super secret hidden camera that’s concealed in the doll she carries along with her. Whenever she takes a picture its eyes close. You’ll be as disappointed as I was when you find out that Emanuelle’s famous doll-camera does not make the trip to the Amazon with her, but she didn’t pack any bras either, so she was obviously traveling light.

An incident occurs at the hospital while she’s there that sets her off on her trek to South America in search of some cannibals. A patient attacks a nurse and eats her breast and Manny sneaks into her room and sodomizes her (don’t even ask - it made no sense except that Joe D’Amato had it in his contract to feature at least one gratuitous sex act every nine minutes) and discovers a strange tattoo on this girl’s stomach. You can bet that her Kodak dolly blinked a few times at that!

Back at the magazine, Manny gets tipped off that the tattoo is the marking of some ancient tribe of cannibals from the Amazon that supposedly died out a long time ago. She hooks up with this professor named Mark Lester (though the way he was all over her, you’d have thought his first name was Moe) and he hooks her up with a dude he knows down in the Amazon and the next thing you know, Manny is saying goodbye to her old boyfriend (his only appearance in the movie) by screwing his brains out in broad daylight in New York City under some docks!

Down in the Amazon, Mark and Manny meet up with his pal, an old fat guy named Wilkes. Since he’s an old fat guy and has a young daughter named Isabelle, he sits out this expedition and instead sends his daughter out with them to look for cannibals. Rounding out their group (not counting nameless native porters, guides, guards, cooks, etc.) is a nun named Sister Angela. This seems like a slightly dubious assortment of folks to go off into headhunter territory, but their first stop is actually at Father Morales’ mission. The Father is friendly with all the local tribes, so if there’s any cannibals among them, he’ll likely know.

Things hit a bit of a snag when they get word that Father Morales and his mission have been wiped out by an unfriendly tribe, but at least the group picks up the services of Donald and Maggie McKenzie. The McKenzies say they’re there hunting big game, but they have their own (rather mundane as it turns out) agenda.

The cannibal action in this movie doesn’t take place until over an hour into things, which means if you’re going to watch this, you’ll have to be prepared for way too much of what Emanuelle is known best for. I’m sure there are some plots that would work with, maybe in a movie called Emanuelle And The Last Whorehouse, but it all seemed a bit incongruous that we’re suppose to be hunting for a bunch of vicious cannibals, but Manny and Isabelle have time to bathe each other in the river.

Once the cannibals finally come out of hiding, they hold up their end of things relatively well. They eat people’s nipples, rip their guts out, tear a guy in half, gang rape a sacrificial chick, and ram spears into people with wild abandon. It’s all suitably gory, but as it’s confined to the final twenty minutes or so of the movie, real cannibal fans are going to more satisfied going elsewhere for their kicks. And anyone else is going to have the good taste not to bother with this one at all.

The production values of this one are pretty much what you would expect from a guy who directed no less than five films the year this one came out (four of them with the Emanuelle name attached) - beyond shoddy. Dubbing is uniquely abominable with Emanuelle dubbed by someone who has just learned English and is seeing the script for the first time as she reads it out loud in the recording studio. And if the movie wasn’t painful enough, the Region 2 PAL DVD from Italian Shock also provides you with the soundtrack! I didn’t dare try it out after hearing the theme song at the beginning and ending of the movie where some woman was warbling “I’m your queen. You, you’re my king.” Queen of what? The easy lay? This one had too much skin and not enough skinning.

Reviews © 2008 MonsterHunter

“Let me tell you something. You read my fucking lips. I will never sign anything or admit to anything…that would slander my name, my God, or my country. You understand me? I loathe you. I despise everything you stand for. You’re a low life pathetic, drug-dealing, greedy, Petrovian piece of dog shit. That’s what I think of you. So if you have anything to say to me, say it right to my nuts.”

Captain Ben “Woodchopper” Garret does a great job of laying out what United States foreign policy ought to be with those words, words that are basically the twenty-first century version of our Declaration of Independence. Garret has been held prisoner for weeks by the scumbag narcoterrorist Ivan. He’s been punched, kicked, beaten with metal bars, and even had a taser applied to his aforementioned nuts. Ivan’s greasy-haired henchman, Chicago, is trying to force Garret to sign some piece of propaganda buttwipe saying Garret committed war crimes or whatever, and Garret tells him what every single American better tell him in that situation.

But what is a bunch of super bad ass talk if you can’t back it up? Here’s the deal about us Americans that you Euro Socialists, Third Worlders, and Democrats don’t understand - the words are just our way of verbally warming up for a fight. When we start giving you the dire, snarling, sneering warnings and start invoking, God, country, and family, you either better back the freak down or expect that in about ten minutes, your surviving heirs are going to be fighting over which one of them gets possession of your blown up compound.

Chicago tells Ivan that Captain Garret said “nuts” to his command to sign the confession and Ivan runs out there to cut Garret’s balls off! Both Ivan and Chicago go into Garret’s cage and Garret cleans the floor with his Don’t Tread On My Nuts brand of kung fu! And this after weeks of being tortured! Let me tell you something about us guys who love our country and our nuts. No matter the odds. No matter our physical condition. We will stay alive until we see our opening and then strike like the bald eagle strikes whatever it is that it likes to beat the piss out off!

There may be other countries out there who also speak English that train their soldiers to be that sort of bad ass. I frankly doubt it, but I’m willing to give the Australians the benefit of the doubt since they’re just British guys too rough for the U.K. But whereas anyone else would escape and haul ass back to safety, once Garret escapes, it’s just the beginning of his mission to run around Ivan’s camp and destroy every piece of equipment and kill every one of Ivan’s men!

Sucking down a bunch of water, eating some bread he got off a guy he killed, and changing into black combat gear, Garret lets his Texas-sized nuts do all the talking! The warehouse with all the military trucks stored in it? Dowsed in gas and lit up with a Cuban cigar he ripped from a guy he also killed earlier! The explosion was so mammoth, I think it’s still going on! But Garret also manages to shoot his way into the bunker housing the millions of dollars that Ivan’s stolen! One wad of C4 later and it’s raining cash! Same goes for the shed with all cocaine!

Mission accomplished, right? What is your malfunction, private? Garret was just waking up the neighbors! Have you forgotten the solemn oath he swore after Perez was killed when Ivan had the Officer’s Club bombed? In front of the entire squadron, after reading a letter that Perez had written to his mother, he placed his hand on Perez’s flag-draped casket and said, “as God as my witness…I will make Ivan pay. He’ll fry for this. I swear it on my life.” This explains why he’s shaking off his helicopter pilot girlfriend’s radio call for him to be extracted and why he ditches his guns once the ammo runs out, picking up a machete to cut through enemy dirtbags like some sort of U.S. Army version of Jason Vorhees!

I will leave the pleasure of discovering just what happens to Chicago and Ivan for the first-time viewer to savor as it happens. As it is, a few words needs to be said about just how we got to the point that Garret was playing hack and slash with a bunch of Bulgarian extras. Like all our really great heroes, Garret has actually quit the Army and retired to his log cabin in Minnesota, where he spends his days chopping wood. When his old CO shows up and asks him to rejoin the squadron, Garret refuses. Until he finds out that his brother has been killed!

But the squadron has lost some other patriots in their most recent battle with Ivan, so Charlie comes to replace one of them. But Charlie turns out to a hot blonde chick! And she freezes up during a big helicopter attack! After a pep talk from Garret (hot babes always deserve pep talks instead of the court martial some normal grunt would get!), she reveals that Ivan killed her brother, too! It’s really no surprise then that when Garret has to go on a dangerous, suicide scout mission to Ivan’s stronghold that they fall in love and he gets a big sloppy kiss before he leaves. Take that Ivan! Our brothers are avenged!

Air Strike is easily the equal to another of its American Heroes series brothers, Special Forces, displaying the courage of a few American actors and a whole bunch of foreign guys playing Americans as they battle ugly guys with uglier accents. Ivan and Garret’s crew spend the movie exchanging explosions and kills that any American can be proud of. Some people have apparently been put off by the enthusiasm displayed by the helicopter crew at the end of the movie when they are chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” while America The Beautiful plays in the background. Well, if those treasonous skunks have anything to say about that, they can say it right to my freaking nuts!

© 2008 MonsterHunter