The B-Masters Cabal

WARRIORS OF THE APOCALYPSE
If there’s anything that sets the films of Bobby Suarez apart from the films of Cirio Santiago, it’s that most of them make some sort of sense, at least relative to the universe about which we’re talking. But even Suarez was unable to resist the siren song of making an insane post-apocalyptic action movie. And so where Santiago gave the world Future Hunters, which featured a leather-clad future hero, a tribe of midgets, Robert Patrick in his tighty whities, and a lost society of Filipino Amazons, Bobby Suarez gives us Warriors of the Apocalypse, which featured a leather-clad future hero, a tribe of midgets, and a lost society of sexy multi-ethnic Amazons. What it lacks in Robert Patrick buffalo shots, however, it certainly makes up for with what has to be the very final word in post-apocalypse shoulderpad jackets.

I didn’t plan to have a mini-theme running between the two reviews that constitute this week’s intallment of Month of the Living Dead 8, but there it is anyway:

If you’re tempted to watch Dead Clowns (2003), go rent The Fog (1980) instead.

If you’re tempted to watch Die and Let Live (2006), go rent Night of the Creeps (1986) instead.  (Okay, so that’s not so easy to do these days…)

Oh, and something I forgot to mention last week:  comments are enabled at Cold Fusion Video Reviews.  Let’s give this interactivity a spin!

BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH
The wonderful thing about Battle Beneath the Earth is that it allows even an underachiever like myself with no college edukation to feel that he has a breadth of scientific knowledge superior to that of its makers. On more than one occasion while watching it I was able to point at the screen and exclaim, “Der, that can’t not happen! Har!” For instance, I don’t know anything about geology, but I know that molten lava is hot, and that you can’t just daintily step over a stream of it as if it were a crack in the sidewalk. Also, if digging a tunnel between China and the U.S. were as easy as this film makes it out to be, China’s biggest problem would be the steady influx of six-to-eight year-old American boys constantly emerging from holes hither and yon to excitedly wave their shovels at people. Battle Beneath the Earth strikes me as being what a movie conceived by one of those six-to-eight year-old boy might be like.

With spring, and consequently spring-cleaning, in the air, I was in the mood to visit with a couple of old friends – and remind myself that some people have domestic problems rather worse than dirty windows, an infestation of daddy long-legses, and cat hair as far as the eye can see.

Amityville II: The Possession is just as sleazy as I remembered, although perhaps a little more clever about its sleaziness than I was prepared to concede the first time around; while Amityville 3-D takes poking you in the eye to heights not even the Italians ever dreamed of. Booga-booga!

No, The Party Animal is not about the wild personal life of a certain muppet, though if the filmmakers had gone along that route, the end results probably would have been a lot more entertaining. To be fair, the movie does has its moments, enough of them so that it is a definite cut above the usual for this genre (the youth-oriented sex comedy.) The movie does has its fans, so read the review to see if it sounds appealing to you.

It’s time for Month of the Living Dead again, so here are the first two entries in what has become a venerable annual tradition:

Return of the Evil Dead (1973) — Those Satan-worshiping undead Templars are back again, as if they were never here!

Hide and Creep (2004) — At last, a rednecks vs. zombies movie that doesn’t leave you wondering which party is smarter. Not that smarts count for much in these things…

IN THE DUST OF THE STARS
You’d think that the isolation of Soviet-style communism would have at least shielded the citizens of East Germany from the worst excesses of seventies fashion, but the 1976 space opera In the Dust of the Stars tells us otherwise. Neither, apparently, did it prevent the creatives at the state-run DEFA studio from falling under the influence of such decadent western cultural products as Jess Franco movies and the swinging sci-fi TV series of Gerry Anderson. That this film never saw release on this side of the Iron Curtain is no surprise, given that the vision of a socialist utopia it presents — marked by free love, frequent casual nudity, and a distinctly lopsided female-to-male ratio — is one that many healthy young Western men could easily get behind. The resulting sudden spike in defections Eastward would have been truly crippling to national security.

Project VHS closes September in classy fashion:

Angelfist
Just as I was pleased that “post apocalyptic rollerskating movie” is not a description of a single film but of an entire genre, so too am I happy that “movies featuring nude kickboxing” yields expansive enough results that I can sit back and say, “You know, I think I’m going to become an expert in films that feature nude kickboxing.” Angelfist certainly doesn’t fail to deliver in the nude kickboxing arena, though it does fail to deliver in just about every aspect that a movie might otherwise strive to achieve. It joins a storied list of films that includes Angel of Destruction, Redline, Girls on the Run, Rolls Royce Baby, and Kungfu Leung Strikes Emanuelle in my collection of nude kickboxing movies. Rolls Royce Baby in particular teaches us that there’s nothing appealing about watching a sleazy Eurotrash lounge lizard do full frontal nude katas. In general, nude karate is not a sport that lends itself to the male anatomy, though I don’t begrudge any man who chooses to make it his chosen form of exercise. If only they’d had the good sense to accompany his workout with a similar scene of Lina Romay, but she’s spending too much time in that movie standing on her head while nude for no good reason other than it never hurts to feature Lina Romay nude and standing on her head. I know there are plenty of other films out there featuring nude martial arts, and I intend, one by one and while dressed like Coffin Joe, to possess them all.

The Black Rose
With The Black Rose, Chor performed an innovative trick of genre alchemy, taking the female-centric swashbuckling of early wuxia cinema and the populist heroics of Chinese folklore and placing them in a contemporary urban setting. Perhaps inescapably, the film also pays service to the then pervasive influence of the Bond films, as well as to the campy pop art aesthetic that would find its most visible expression a year later with the Batman TV series in the US. Appropriate to its tale of daring masked avengers, The Black Rose also seems to owe a debt to the Republic serials of the forties–not to mention other American studio product of that time. Made in 1965, it has the look of a Hollywood film from twenty–even thirty–years previous. And this is to its distinct advantage.

Catching up with some Poverty Row mysteries, some Edgar Wallace thrillers, and the occasional Hammer film in our Shrimp Chips Section:

The Witches
The College Girl Murders
Murder in the Museum
The Fellowship of the Frog
Strangler of the Swamp
Strangler of Blackmoor Castle