The opening narration lets us know exactly what sort of post-apocalypse we are in for which I’m always in favor of because it’s so much quicker to just tell me why Rich has jumped off a two story tower into his leather pants than to show me with a bunch of boring set up scenes of the world going into the crapper. (It’s all probably going to be a montage of stock disaster footage and bad models getting blown up anyway.)

I don’t even remember what the specifics were this time around beyond the fact that Rich was the last guy left that was trying to recover the Spear of Longinus in an effort to somehow reverse the holocaust that had occurred several decades prior. (For all you liberals and other atheists out there, the Spear of Longinus is the spear that Jesus was stabbed with.)

To give you an idea of the perfectness of these opening scenes, you have to understand a little about Equalizer 2000. That movie was built around Rich’s love affair with a mega-gun called the Equalizer 2000. It was souped up and could shoot explosive shells among other things. It was pretty sweet, but it kept getting stolen and it seemed to have a horrible time finding its mark because Rich was fighting the same guys for well over an hour before really making a dent in them with the E2K.

In Future Hunters though, Rich is equipped with a gun that frankly surpasses the E2K. This one has the capacity to blast everything like the E2K, but you can also load it with exploding arrows just like Rambo used!

Condensed though things are, the first 20 minutes mimics the plot of a full-sized post-apocalyptic flick by having Rich get captured, escape, and miraculously run right into the temple where the spear is hidden!

But the bad guys aren’t exactly giving up! They’re going after Rich, but because Future Hunters isn’t just about raising the bar for this sort of thing, but is all about chucking it into the stratosphere, they don’t send a wave of thugs in after him. They just start blasting away at him with tanks!

Oh Spear of Longinus! Please use your mysterious, unexplained, and all around nonsensical superpowers to deliver Rich from this awesomely explosive evil!

And it does! It sends Rich straight on back in time, right back into the 1980s, leather pants and vest and all!

And as luck would have it (for the audience!), he stumbles out of the temple and smack dab into a biker gang trying to rape a woman!

Rich beats them up, gets shot, and stabs a guy with the Spear of Longinus (he turns to ash!) and before dying in the car of the woman and her boyfriend, delivers enough plot points to keep them going for the next extraordinarily painful (and Richard Norton free) 75 minutes!

The rest of the movie is stupidly boring though Cirio was pulling out all the stops to try to make up for pulling the old switcheroo on us with his abandonment of the Richard Norton future world for the Robert Patrick and ugly girlfriend current world.

There’s some self-styled Nazis after the Spear and if they get their hands on it, the world will end for some reason and cause Richard Norton’s world to become a reality, but if Robert and his old lady can stop them, I guess we get to keep our old, boring, crappy world where cars don’t have spikes welded to the hoods.

The movie from here on out is a series of unexplained coincidences and plot holes that have the good guys and bad guys encountering each other and losing the head of the spear to each other with a tedious regularity. Even the characters seemed to be deliberately doing stuff to make sure action occurred no matter how pointless.

How else to explain that the head Nazi didn’t kill the good guys right away, but waited until he was in his helicopter to fire missiles at his own compound where the good guys were trying to escape? Or that the bad guys left a fueled up second helicopter with a flight plan right there for the good guys to steal and fly after them? Or that the bad guys then left a bomb on the second helicopter just in case the good guys steal it and fly after them? Or that the bad guys use the radio to warn/taunt the good guys that there’s a bomb on board and the bad guys are just about to set it off which gives the good guys time to jump out into the ocean and escape again?

You’ve also got a kung fu scene that didn’t have anything to do with anything which involved a friend of Robert Patrick he knew in Hong Kong. This guy was fighting against one of those white haired kung fu masters and I suppose it was memorable for when Robert’s friend pulled some nunchucks out of his sock.

There was also a tribe of Filipino midgets Robert and his lady had to help out against another tribe which went on forever and amounted to nothing.

This was one time I was rooting for the “shock” ending where somehow Richard Norton’s ruined future happened anyway and we’d get to see him killing stuff as the credits rolled. Instead it ended with Robert’s girlfriend holding the spear up in the air while wearing a goofy smile as Robert Patrick and his midget buddies looked on appreciatively.

If you insist on post-apocalypse Filipino midget action, I recommend watching Equalizer 2000 and then playing the first part of this movie like it was the epilogue to Equalizer 2000 and then shut it all down and fire up Raiders Of The Sun.

© 2012 MonsterHunter

Pathos? Am I kidding or trying to be cute? Aren’t all great Cirio movies about guys scuttling over rocks and dressed in shoulder pads simply an exercise in how many beat up junk cars can be blown up in less than 90 minutes? Of course they are!

But the truly great ones give us a reason to be invested in those explosions! There was so much going on in Stryker while stuff was blowing up that a few times, I almost believed I was watching something that wanted to mimic an actual movie instead of the loose collection of action scenes shot in the wilderness we usually are treated to!

Take Stryker for instance. He’s the ultimate survivor, decked out in leather pants, leather vest, black wifebeater, and Crocodile Dundee hat, rifle at the ready for whatever sort of action the parched Earth dares to serve up. He doesn’t talk much and when he does, it’s usually to explain why he doesn’t talk much.

And why doesn’t he talk? Because everything’s already been said! Crud! A guy could watch a hundred real movies and never get that kind of insight from a character! And you know what else? Nobody listens anyway! We know Stryker’s right! Or at least we would if we had bothered to listen to him!

Stryker’s world view while no doubt impacted by the crappy world he lives in, is undoubtedly primarily formulated by his past! A past that he is haunted by!

Once, Stryker was a man with love in his heart! A man with a woman he was devoted to! But then she was captured by the evil Kardis! And her head was chopped off right in front of Stryker!

Stryker escaped, dishing out all sorts of carnage in the process, even managing to chop off Kardis’ hand, but that hardly makes up for his old lady getting decapitated, right? So he did what any of us would do in that situation. He struck out on his own, leaving the colony run by his brother, Trun, and hit the road!

And then Stryker comes back three years later! He returns with a new hottie named Dehla that he rescued from Kardis’ forces. Along with Dehla and Stryker, Bandit comes back to the colony as well. Bandit and Stryker stare at one another now and again which show they respect each other and when circumstances force Stryker to leave the colony, the goodbye looks between him and Bandit are every bit as emotional as between Stryker and Dehla. And a lot more creepy, too!

But there’s so many unanswered questions! Trun wants to know why Stryker left all those years ago! Stryker responds that everyone has to find their own highway to hell! Again with the philosophical revelations that will stay with me for years to come!

But Stryker isn’t through just yet! When Trun attempts to take over the colony with access to water to prevent Kardis from getting it, Stryker wants to know what the difference is between Trun and Kardis! Stryker has the wisdom to see that becoming a tyrant in the name of fighting another tyrant just makes you, um, a tyrant!

And so, Stryker again leaves, to find his own path. A path that leads straight into the clutches of Kardis!

When Stryker was being dragged behind a vehicle on the way back to the bad guys’ base camp, I was worried! For Kardis! I knew that they were just scrapping away the last bits of humanity that Stryker still possessed! That when Stryker would be rescued by his Filipino midget pals he helped earlier in the film, that he would lead his dwarf army against Kardis and liberate the colony his freedom loving spirit was only recently forced to flee! And when the midgets handed Stryker the machine gun, I knew we were in for exactly one thing: lots of extras dressed in black falling down lots of rock piles!

Don’t worry that Stryker is saving up all his kick ass for the last moments of the movie though! He’s out there banging out the stunt work for you from the very beginning, thwarting Dehla’s kidnapping, rescuing his brother who was buried up to his head in the sand and pissed on, and carjacking a tanker truck full of water and ramming it straight into Kardis’s camp!

He’s even got to storm Kardis’ hideout to stop Dehla from being raped! This results in a spectacularly slow neck snapping by Stryker of a guy who is on top of Dehla, thrusting away! And then Stryker goes into post-traumatic stress mode, flashing back to his old lady, and he stabs the guy over and over! Dang, I feel you, Stryker! Your whole freaking movie sent me into paroxysms of post-apocalypse-awesome disorder by the time it was over!

© 2012 MonsterHunter

Like a low-budget exploitation filmmaking Jesus, director Cirio H. Santiago leads us to the Promised Land, where every guy who isn’t Richard Norton exists to be used by Richard Norton as a human shield as he takes advantage of the ongoing feud between rival factions to settle a very personal score!

Richard plays Slade, a guy whose father was a big time military hero with The Ownership. The Ownership is one of three factions, the other two named appropriately enough The Rebels and The Mountain People. When Slade’s dad is killed by one of his own men (Lawton), Slade goes post-post-apocalyptic on his ass! (It’s like post-apocalyptic but even meaner!)

Like all truly great movies, Equalizer 2000 doesn’t let itself get bogged down in characters, story or technique. You’ve got groups of armed men trying to kill each other with Slade leading the way against one of the groups. There’s no need for much else, least of all any introspection. This is revenge we’re talking about!

Besides, I tend to think of a movie like Equalizer 2000 as a pre-documentary. After all, what we’ve got here is your basic nuclear something or other that happened and turned northern Alaska into a rock-filled desert with quarries that look suspiciously like the same Filipino locations featured in Cirio’s later Raiders Of The Sun which also starred Richard Norton! All you’ve got to do is take a look at the current state of world affairs and it doesn’t take much imagination to see that we’re headed toward a time when guys in leather pants with Australian accents start roaming around The Last Frontier.

While Equalizer 2000 does share quite a bit with Raiders Of The Sun (star, director, footage, star’s leather wardrobe), its differences are what really puts Equalizer 2000 in a class all by itself. For instance, the midgets in Raiders Of The Sun? Gone! Replaced by Corinne Wahl and a big ass gun called Equalizer 2000! Sure, I don’t recall anyone in the movie actually calling it that, but the way everyone caressed and held it, how could they not have given it such a bad ass name!

Equalizer 2000 even gets top billing in the movie! The start of the movie opens up with a loving shot of E2K rotating around against a black backdrop. (I imagined it was rotating magnificently in space like one of those monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Then we had the scene where Slade first lays on E2K while it was still being built and going into a kind of trance! Immediately, Slade and E2K are inseparable, with Slade diligently cleaning her every nook and cranny before finally engaging in a glorious E2K building montage that had Slade working on it as if he were Vulcan himself!

And Corinne Wahl? Heck, I’d trade her for a bunch of Filipino midgets any day of the week! Her leather gear was second only to Slade’s and you don’t have to be a genius or porn-addict to see that she just keep the hooker boots she used for her Penthouse photo shoots and wore those in the movie!

And you want to talk about a trooper? Check out how she is busting her ass trying not to fall down while walking around the rocky landscape in those four inch heels! Let’s see a Meryl Streep or Jodie Foster do that! On second thought, let’s not!

Slade and Corinne’s adventures together chiefly consist of them rescuing one another after one of them gets captured during some fight. Sometimes Corinne gets captured trying to broker a deal for rockets with an evil Robert Patrick (T-1000 from Terminator 2), sometimes Slade is getting shot and needing some TLC.

And don’t you believe that all of Slade’s humanity has been shot right out of him by the poop sandwich the post-apocalypse has served up to him. When he and Corinne are by the fire after he’s rescued her in particularly dashing fashion, she asks him why he came back for her. His response? He sexes her! Look, if your name was Slade and you wore leather pants, any other answer would be a filthy, dirty lie!

But Cirio handled it classy and it all took place off screen, since he only had about 76 minutes to play with. I’m guessing that the MGM/UA American VHS release I had (the awesome cover art is worth the purchase by itself) that claimed it was 85 minutes was wishful thinking. And even in that 76 minutes, Cirio sometimes had trouble covering up some of the limitations the movie’s sensibly non-existent budget caused, such as the scene where the fly crawled around on the camera and the scene where a guy was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, but a moment later when he was set on fire, he was wearing a long-sleeved jacket!

I was also unsure why so many Filipino extras were roaming around northern Alaska, but we are talking about a world gone mad, so there might be some plausible reason for that which was lost in the nuclear holocaust that caused the post-apocalypse we’re benefiting from in the movie.

And like all movies that stand the test of time, this one left you wanting more, though that may just have been due to some bad editing since we didn’t find out what happened to Corinne after she got shot and Slade just sort of drive off after it was over. (Parents should be aware of a particularly upsetting scene where Slade destroys E2K by slamming it against a rock. It’s kind of this movie’s “Old Yeller” moment and will likely leave younger, gun-obsessed viewers crying.)

© 2012 MonsterHunter

John Ritter? You mean the dead guy who was on Three’s Company? The guy who finished up his career in one of those lame sitcoms playing one of those befuddled dads that always seem to be outwitted by their hot teenage daughter?

Did Olivier Gruner lose a bet or is this one of those movies where the tough guy gets mixed up in some hideous comedy like Vin Diesel in The Pacifier?

Rest easy, amigo – Olivier is snapping necks, not changing diapers in this one. Still, he gets involved with Ritter in just as convoluted manner as if this was a comedy involving preschoolers and terrorists so you’d probably enjoy yourself more if you didn’t stop to think about how dumb it all was.

Ritter is a millionaire hosting a party for an author when Phoenix and his men attack killing the author as well as Ritter’s wife. Ritter himself was wounded and vows to get revenge on Phoenix for the death of his wife. Not getting any help from our pussy government, Ritter turns to the one guy that hates Phoenix more than Ritter does. Enter Hawk!

Hawk (Gruner) is the best death machine ever to come out of NATO special forces! He was head of Sabre which did all sorts he-man missions around the world, but there was a single stain on his impressive resumé of death and destruction!

Beirut! 1989! Phoenix bombs the military barracks that Hawk was in charge of securing and was never caught! Hawk quit the force shortly after that and became a…mercenary!

Phoenix is also a freelancer now, selling his evilness to the highest bidder and we all know that means the potential for doublecrosses is 120%! And the doublecrossing gets going in earnest after Hawk turns Ritter down for the job of going after Phoenix!

Hawk knows that Ritter is all emotional and that’s the sort of thing that gets you killed on a mission! Well that and the fact that you are a flabby civilian millionaire with no military training and you want to go against the greatest villain in the history of the universe!

Luckily for Ritter, Hawk’s old buddy gets caught with drugs in his luggage so Hawk agrees to drag Ritter out to Turdistan to harass Phoenix in exchange for helping out Hawk’s pal.

Once they get to Turdistan, the movie began to surprise me. I figured we were in for a half hour montage of getting Ritter whipped into shape, but while we did get to see Hawk’s pal with a stopwatch shaking his head that it was still taking too long to storm the mock up of Phoenix’s lair they had built, the training was over in a hurry.

Thankfully there was plenty of time for Ritter to cuss out Hawk for being mean to him and also for Hawk to give Ritter a dirty look when Ritter tried on Hawk’s beret! Come on guys! How are you going to defeat Phoenix if you’re busy fighting over clothes?

All of that is finally sorted out and Hawk, Ritter, and the rest of the team parachute into Phoenix’s fortress. Their brief training pays off as they are all immediately killed or captured! This is where Phoenix gets a chance to shine!

Phoenix is expertly played by Martin Kove who affects one of those bad guy Russian accents and is prone to lines such as “how do you say?” whenever he wants to make a snide comment to Hawk.

Despite not being in the movie for long he also engages in a fair amount of over-the-top terrorist activities. He fights Hawk and one of his men with knives inside of a ring surrounded by fire! He rapes native women! He even locks Ritter in a cell with a man-eating dog who is chained to the wall, but Phoenix releases acid so that it slowly dissolves the chains holding the dog at bay! It probably isn’t a stretch to suggest that Phoenix has seen his fair share of James Bond movies!

The last part of the movie has Hawk and Ritter trying to survive in the mountains of Turdistan as they simultaneously work to avoid Phoenix’s men and get back to their base. Lots of action surrounding this as well as their escape from Phoenix easily puts this a cut above Savage, the other movie that Gruner and director Avi Nesher made together. (A lack of references to aliens, Atlantis and virtual reality also helped.)

Yes, their escape in a helicopter was hampered by non-existent special effects, but the big dune buggy chase that ended with Hawk and Ritter going over a cliff was great! And really, with Ritter at the wheel, could Hawk be surprised that they ended up upside down in a river a hundred feet below where they started?

The action continues even when they get back to their base as the ultimate betrayal comes to fruition. Like I said, it’s best not to dwell on how complicated and far-fetched the actions taken were to cover up something, but a movie with Olivier Gruner should never involve Securities and Exchange Commission audits.

Olivier gets to do a lot of fighting and killing, says little, and his facial expressions consist of squinting his eyes ever so slightly to indicate he’s thinking. Yes, it’s a must for Olivier fans! Ritter fans? Maybe not so much. You do get see him stab a guy a couple of times though. And Hawk even gives him his own beret at the conclusion of the film! I’m pretty sure that’s better than any Emmy he won for one of those stinky TV shows he was on!

© 2012 MonsterHunter

In one aisle of hair products you’ve got Evan Lurie as the insane Slash Gallagher! Evan is bent on stealing, killing, and periodically remembering that he also supposedly is trying to free the denizens of L.A. from their corporate masters! But is shooting the governor of California in the head a good way to affect system-wide change? Who cares! That was simply the prologue to the real mayhem! And we’ve actually got Evan to thank for that since he also came up with the story for Hologram Man!

Evan’s bona fides extend beyond his roles behind the scenes of this movie (he was also an associate producer!) since he flung his hulking physique and impressive head of hair around with such legends as Don “The Dragon” Wilson in Operation Cobra and Ring Of Fire II, and Jack Scalia in T-Force. Stints in films such as Shadow Warriors and American Kickboxer 2 only further solidified Evan’s status as a guy who worked steadily in the mid 1990s.

The other mane attraction in this film is Joe Lara, most famous for being one of the Tarzans no one has ever heard of. (Admit it, after Johnny Weissmuller and maybe Lex Barker if you’re really an obsessive freak, can you name any other Tarzans?)

Joe though, like Evan, comes to us well-seasoned in action movies most of us have never seen. Steel Frontier, Warhead, Operation Delta Force and Operation Delta Force 4: Deep Fault are just a few of the movies that sound really awesome, but probably aren’t that he’s appeared in. Of course the most awesome sounding of all his films is American Cyborg: Steel Warrior which holds the distinction of being the second-to-last movie released by Cannon Films. (Jeff Speakman’s Street Knight is perhaps fittingly, the very last movie from Cannon.)

This tangle of manly pony tails though wouldn’t be worth the kegs of shampoo it probably took to keep Joe and Evan in tip top shape if the movie was nothing but a bunch of yakking over stuff like brushes vs. combs and how much volume a particular brand of mousse gives you.

You’ve got nothing to worry about though because this is a movie that Richard Pepin made for his PM Entertainment! Pepin and Joseph Merhi specialized in movies devoted to exploding cars and endless gunfights dressed up with a few scenes of talking, presumably put in the film to allow the crew to locate more cars to detonate.

Pepin himself directed CyberTracker, Cyber-Tracker 2, Firepower, and Dark Breed, four movies that contain as much violence between them as in both World Wars, the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, and my last family reunion combined! Thankfully, despite its gimmicky and stupid story, Hologram Man is cut from the same cloth!

Holograms are the latest technique in dealing with criminals. Somehow, their consciousness is turned into a hologram and stored in a computer while their body lies frozen elsewhere. Computers are used in an attempt to “fix” the criminals while in their hologram state. Periodically the holograms are brought before a parole board where it is determined whether they have been rehabilitated enough to be reunified with their bodies and released back into the general population.

But what would if the unthinkable occurred? An unthinkable thing like some computer genius working for Slash messing things up so that a power surge somehow caused Slash’s holographic form to be allowed to escape and also somehow given super holographic powers like being able to pass through physical objects, assume any identity, and discharge deadly energy blasts! (Regular old prisons where guys just lifted weights and came out of jail really ripped don’t seem so bad now, do they?)

Joe Lara is the cop who is charged with taking Slash down and it doesn’t take a genius to know that at some point during the film, he will also have to become a hologram to fight Slash.

The holograms were a little silly, looking like the projection of Princess Leia at the beginning of Star Wars when Luke accidentally caused R2 to play her message to Obi-Wan. Aside from that, I didn’t fully understand why the holograms always had to be dressed in a form-fitting white leotard and why both Joe and Evan had their hair in ponytails whenever they assumed that form. Luckily, they made use of some special rubber and stage makeup to provide themselves with an artificial layer of skin which allowed them to look normal even when they were truly holographic! Don’t worry about how Joe’s girlfriend knew how to find and use artificial skin/stage make up, just enjoy that helicopter getting shot out of the sky!

Familiar faces appear to class up the production and pick up a paycheck, so you get an unexpected dose of William Sanderson, Michael Nouri, John Amos, and Joseph Campanella along with your long-haired action icons. Director Pepin does exactly what you want giving us a nice mix of vehicular-related violence and guys shooting each other.

Yes, some of the action scenes in these PM Entertainment movies tend to look the same (didn’t I see a bus chase in Running Red? Weren’t some of those shoot outs just scenes from Cyber-Tracker 2?) but you can never get tired of seeing guys jumping in slow motion toward the camera while a car explodes with the force of a hundred nuclear bombs behind them! Shoot, Pepin even ends things by having Joe use his holographic powers to blow up a limousine! In short, this the same old PM Entertainment movie with a new paint job. Thank God!

© 2012 MonsterHunter

Uh no, this isn’t an angst-ridden story about some pussy bug boy! This is the tale of the most bad ass of Italian bad ass bodybuilder flicks! Just how bad ass? Four words: raised by freaking lions!

As I was watching this, I was glad that Edgar Rice Burroughs had passed away in 1950 because if he had still been around in 1961 when Ursus in the Valley of the Lions came out, he would have probably killed himself after seeing how lame Tarzan was for being raised by crappy old apes!

Heck, apes are pretty much just people with a lot of back hair! Is it really any big whup that they can raise a kid just as well as the drugged out dirtbags that pop five or six kids out by the time they’re 25? But being raised by lions, you can’t help to be awesome when you grow up if you somehow survive that!

And just how was it that a bunch of man eating wild animals manage to nurture and care for an infant so that he would grow up into a moralistic good guy with great hair and a really ripped bod?

Do you really think that these lions are going to give up their mystical child rearing secrets so easily? Besides, I’m not watching this movie to see a bunch of lions change diapers and supervise Ursus’s youth weightlifting regimen!

The movie know this and so it is that we see a scene of lions sniffing around the baby and the next thing you know, a grown up Ursus is playing around with the lions and even pulling one by the tail!

What we do know though about Ursus’ past is more than enough to give the movie its dramatic heft. It turns out that even in olden times, people just didn’t put their kids up for adoption by a pride of lions – there have to be good reasons for doing so. With Ursus, it’s because barbarians invade his father’s kingdom and kill his parents.

Before his death though, Ursus’ father gives him a medallion which shows that he is the rightful heir to the kingdom. Of course, once Ursus becomes a man, he sells the medallion to a slaver for a sexy girl thus setting into motion all the drama with the evil Ayak who murdered his father and still sits on the throne.

It’s hard to fault Ursus for jumping on the first piece of ass to come along though, what with the dearth of hot babes that probably hung around the lion’s den while he was growing up.

Ayak didn’t get to be an evil barbarian usurper by doing things half way and the audience is rewarded by any number of bad guy doings he engages in. Ursus’ adopted lion family? Poisoned except for the majestic Simba! Ursus’ new girlfriend? Captured and tossed into quicksand in an effort to get Ursus to surrender! (To his credit, Ursus gave it a lot thought before ultimately giving in just before his old lady’s head almost got swallowed up.) Ayak even engages in the ultimate strongman taunt as he forcibly kisses the girlfriend while a tied up Ursus is forced to watch! Is there no limit to this man’s imaginative heinousness?

Thankfully no because when it’s time to execute the girlfriend and all the people who support Ursus, he breaks out the elephants! And while stomping people to death would be pretty awesome, Ayak is more creative than that. Instead, he chains the people to the elephants, has a big bonfire between the elephants and the chained up prisoners and then has the elephants start pulling the people toward the fire! All the anti-death penalty liberals out there should keep this in mind the next time they carp about how barbaric lethal injection is!

The entertainment this film provides is just as massive as its star Ed Fury is! One of the most perfectly pumped up efforts from the era, Ursus in the Valley of the Lions will leave some demanding the film be tested for cinematic steroids, it is so beyond jacked in every way!

From the delightful cuckolded-while-in-bondage scene, to the moments where Ursus battles and overpowers the executioner elephants, to the invertible yet still pleasing lion attack on Ayak, and all the way to the hideous green fetish outfit Ursus trades his fur loin cloth in for once he begins to lead the revolution, there’s nothing about this movie that will leave the audience anything other than blown up and drenched in muscle man movie sweat when it finally finishes destroying every other sword and sandal flick out there! Any of you flabby wimps still doubting that this is the Mr. Universe of the genre, try heaving this phrase around – hyena pit death fight!

© 2012 MonsterHunter

Sure, you had your adrenaline-fueled moments of our hero going undercover as a goat shepherd (whose herd was made up of exactly one goat) where he fooled three drunken Slavs with a beard so fake that no one but a trio of Slavs who can’t hold their liquor would be fooled.

And when the Slavs stab our hero’s only goat for no apparent reason, we all held our breath to see if our hero could muster anything sufficiently resembling vague confusion at the wanton act of goat-cruelty so that his cover wasn’t blown.

Sadly though, such memorable scenes revolving around unfortunate farm animals were vastly outnumbered by Captain Hans whining to the evil count that all his underpaid thugs were on the verge of rioting unless they came up with a way to meet that month’s payroll.

The plot is a fairly simple affair that the film unsurprisingly takes forever to put into motion. Captain Hans’ despised Slav allies have lucked into capturing a Papal emissary who’s carrying letters of credentials which will allow him to pick up a large amount of treasure and transport it back to the Holy See.

You almost can’t help but feel sorry for Captain Hans during all this when he is forced to admit to his evil count buddy that he can’t read the letters! I say almost because how you can feel sorry for anyone who’s rockin’ a black leather vest with a butch beard and haircut like the deliciously surly Hans?

Everything goes according to the dull plan (the count impersonates the emissary and has his men steal the treasure during transport), but there’s just one little loose end named Captain Brunello who’s going to make Captain Hans, the count, those treacherous Slavs and the audience sorry they were ever born!

Brunello is left for dead after the attack, but he recovers enough to go after the treasure and the captured emissary. But he’s not going to do it alone! For a mission this tedious, I mean, arduous, he’s going to need some back up! And this is the kind of back up that can only come from his oldest and most awesome friend!

I always love a good recruiting scene! The old timer or the guy who quit the business has to be hunted down and convinced to do one more job for God, country, and all the guys who got left behind!

Usually they’re found retired on their farm or doing some menial task in an effort to forget all the crap that haunts them from the old days. Sometimes you find them at the bottom of a whiskey bottle in some dive and every so often you have to make special arrangements to have them released from the brig to go on your mission!

Brunello’s old running buddy? He’s busy having his portrait painted!

Look out Captain Hans! This is going to be a rampage of brushstrokes!

Lest any of you unsophisticated types out there equate going into retirement from being a kick ass swordsman and spending your golden years sitting for a portrait is some sort of sissy endeavor not worthy of a great action hero, remember what Charles Dickens said about it: “there are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.”

That describes the exact sort of brawny taciturn bad ass you want hunting down Captain Hans and his faithless Slavs! That Brunello’s pal told Brunello he’d have to wait a few hours so that the portrait could be finished up only confirms what a serious business this painting is!

The painting sequence isn’t just an excuse to pump up Brunello’s pal’s credibility as an expert fighter who has the good sense to immortalize his over-the-hill looks before all his teeth fall out though. It also provides that moment of sheer coincidence that these sorts of movies trade in so the plot can kick into gear for the last half of the film!

While perusing the artists other paintings, Brunello recognizes the evil count and the artist tells him his name which allows Brunello to finally track him down, thus setting the scene for the completely routine finale of using a secret passage to enter the castle, getting caught, sentenced to death the next day, having his pal go undercover as a priest to rescue Brunello from the executioner’s axe, and battling Captain Hans to the death in a fairly lackadaisical sword fight. (The count is stabbed in the guts by a woman he earlier defiled in the movie’s lame and quite late effort to make the count truly despicable instead of just being a greedy dope.)

If all the emphasis on painting pictures, slashing goats, worrying about the loyalty of Slavs, and typically moronic plans to invade the castle single-handedly makes it sound like there was a decided lack of emphasis on traditional action scenes (i.e. scenes where people move more than just their lips) you are the observant perfectionist type that this movie wasn’t made for.

For the rest of us who like soothing Italian swashbuckling affairs that won’t aggravate our high blood pressure caused by sumptuously buff dudes in black leather vests who huff and puff angrily about, Rampage of Evil is the perfect balance of boring chatter, undistinguished story, and unattractive and nondescript characters.

© 2012 MonsterHunter

Andy J. Forest brings his skinny dweeb persona with the pod person countenance to Brazil in the role of a director of a music video. Much like Mark Gregory (Bronx Warriors, Thunder), another talentless Italian exploitation legend, Andy somehow parlayed his unfailingly bland and stiffly uncool presence into a mini-career headlining monstrously bad Italian films (Bridge to Hell, Mark of the Scorpion) in which he was always the most miscast person in a cast usually made up of folks who looked they were pulled from whatever street the Italian director in question happened to be driving down that morning on the way to the set.

In Lambada, Andy shows he’s a director’s director, announcing the music video is going to be a cross between a Duran Duran video and a Bacardi commercial, thus whetting the viewer’s appetite for the music video train wreck of grody fashion, icky hair, cheesy metal music, and silly camera angles and lighting that is sure to come. In true punishingly awful Italian movie fashion though, the music video is never actually shot!

Yes, there is the ugly American singer (Mary Sellers from other dingy pasta epics like Ghosthouse, Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil and Contamination .7) who sports a blue wig and blathers on about adding a lambada scene to the end of the video, but the only work on the video is cut short when a group of thugs on motorcycles (whom I thought were part of the video!) interrupts things to threaten Andy with a knife.

Andy has gone and gotten himself on the bad side of the local gangster/lambada expert (Temistocles) because he has fallen hard for a local girl named Regina who Temistocles also is hung up on. As Andy somewhat melodramatically puts it, Temistocles will stop at nothing to make sure he doesn’t have Regina. And when the wimpy Andy says “stop at nothing”, he of course means that a dude will wave a knife in his face for about five seconds and then get back on his motorcycle and drive away. I guess Temistocles is saving all his terrifying stop at nothing stuff for the dance floor!

Andy finds out from another dancer who knows Regina, that Regina is reluctant to love Andy not because he is a doofus incapable of exhibiting a human emotion, but because Temistocles arranged to have her first love killed by a garbage truck! (In a film full of questionable technique – I am assuming maintaining a long shot for an inordinate amount of time is cheaper than using a second camera for an occasional close up – the scene where the dude’s head hits the side of the garbage truck is as funny as it sounds. It isn’t shot well of course, but it is funny.)

Further complicating matters (but really only for the sake of complicating matters) is that Temistocles is having a torrid love affair with the star of Andy’s music video! And Temistocles has a really funny story of how they met. It all started when Andy and the girl pick up a hitch-hiking drag queen who steals their car. Somehow the girl is then kidnapped by someone else and brought to Temistocles where he forces her to dance in a line with some old women, before seducing her thus proving the old adage that everyday is Carnival in Rio!

By the time of the big Lambada contest, I wasn’t even sure who was competing or if anything would be solved once a winner was crowned. I needn’t have worried though because once our heroine arrived to the contest in a garbage truck and everyone seemed to psychically know that Temistocles wasn’t such a bad guy after all, the movie just ended (after the fiftieth or so extensive dance sequence) with nothing being resolved!

Much like Andy J. Forest himself, Lambada will leave you with a stonily befuddled look on your face as you try to puzzle out how something as simple as a mildly sleazy cash in on a quickly forgotten fad could be hosed so masterfully. It all felt like dirty dancing with two left feet and a soiled thong.

© 2012 MonsterHunter

Then you have love’s smarmy, douche-like face which Hank wears like a Congressional Medal of Honor for Service to Desperate Vacationing Broads Who Have No Self Respect during all the gigaloing he does, when he’s not making a play for Pete’s wife, Kit Jordan.

You also can’t avoid love’s drunk face either, since Hank, Pete, and especially Kit spend every moment they aren’t spitting out ridiculous dialogue at each other drinking down glasses of hard liquor.

Love’s most magnificent face though has to be the one that Kit has during what laughingly passes for a climax during the film. This is of course the “I’ve just been gored in the guts by a big ass bull” face!

It all begins innocently enough (and it is innocent because nothing much ever comes of it) when the body of a beach stud who hung around Pete and Hank washes up on the shores of Acapulco. The only clue to his mysterious demise is the bracelet he was wearing inscribed with the phrase “love is thin ice.” The dead guy had been involved with Kit, so Pete is a suspect, but Mexican law enforcement being what it is, the investigation never amounts to much more than the occasional chat between Pete and the barely interested detective, Riccardo.

The dead guy’s ex-girlfriend Carol comes down to Mexico to find out what happened to him, but she spends most of the time mooning over Pete and by the time it comes out that the dead guy apparently sent her a suicide note, the main consequence of his death is that that chintzy bracelet with the cheesy inscription has been used by both Kit and Carol to zing each other in their low wattage squabble over Pete.

The casual viewer can be excused for suffering through the first 90 minutes of the movie wondering just what the hell the point is of watching this group of unlikable characters drinking and bickering amongst one another. Kit is a dour lush who delights in humiliating both herself and Pete whenever she can like when she tells Carol at a party that she and Pete met at the hospital where she was recovering from another of her (no doubt drunken ) car wrecks and he was there selling his blood!

For his part, Pete is even more pathetic because he is completely cognizant of just how pathetic his existence is. He insults Kit about all her money, while living the easy life off it, but somehow at the same time, not really caring about the money at all. Perhaps his dalliance with Carol (who he believes is a good-hearted small town gal) is his attempt to escape and reclaim a bit of his lost humanity. But Carol sort of turns out to be just as willing to sink to Kit’s level in going after Pete, except that she’s no where in Kit’s league in doing so.

Every broken down dude who’s ever sold his blood and by extension his soul in order to hook up with a blonde bombshell with lots of dough knows you don’t get redeemed by walking away from that payday though! Redemption can come only from out-studding the stud who’s trying to take your mealticket, I mean, your soulmate!

So it is that Pete finds himself caught up in not one, but two towering throwdowns involving both man and beast! Following the nonsensical field trip that all these people who hate each take together to a bullfighting farm, Kit gets into the expected bullfighting accident causing Pete to have to unleash all his matador skills to keep his gored gal from getting stampeded! As magnificently masculine it is that he fended off man’s deadliest enemy to save his lady, what follows is even more macho: Pete vs. Hank. In a hospital parking lot!

Two tanned gods slugging and hugging, all for the right to hold Kit’s head out of the toilet during one of her inevitable drunken pukefests!

By the time Hank throws in the towel, it seems so obvious that the only way Pete could regain a bit of self-respect is to fight over an alcoholic chick with a male whore in front of the hospital where said alcoholic chick is recovering from being punctured by a large bovine. It’s in all the reputable self help books.

Lots of quotably bad lines, Hanks lame blackmail attempt of some old broad he’s banging, and Kit’s sordid past that wasn’t even interesting enough to compel the maid who was listening to it to stick around for the end of the story, all only add to a languidly bad film that constantly threatens to boil over into hilarious territory, but never quite makes it due to an appalling lack of anything much happening. Love Has Many Faces leaves the audience with yet one more face – abject apathy tinged with minor humorous disbelief at what is being seen and said throughout.

© 2012 MonsterHunter

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