Issuu

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT Period Covered For a number of reasons this book focuses on movies released since 1970. Earlier good-bad classics like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Robot Monster have been part of popular culture for well over half a century and are discussed in any number of books. And for good reason, they’re great. Conversely, there are so many unheralded gems from later (the VHS era in particular) that it seems like there's a bottomless pit of potential. Dozens of distributors are focused on finding the next Miami Connection or Samurai Cop. These distributors know the modern audience for good-bad movies is

at least a generation removed from that which first anointed Ed Wood a legend. We grew up in video rental stores, not drive-in theatres. We essentially learnt a different language. If you look at even a good 50s movie like Forbidden Planet, the acting seems absurd, the effects are laughable, the technical elements basic. You have to recognize the context to appreciate it. If you show it to a bunch of teenagers today they’ll laugh themselves silly (I’ve seen it happen). In spite of it being a great movie it strikes a lot of the notes you’d expect to hear from a bad one made 30 years later.

Plan 9 from Outer Space

“One is always considered mad when one perfects something that others cannot grasp.” -Ed Wood

“All of a sudden I found myself doing things like Robot Monster and I didn’t know what the devil was going on.” -Elmer Bernstein

Robot Monster

So it’s hard to put something like Plan 9 from Outer Space alongside a modern movie like Jupiter Ascending and judge them both by the same criteria. Battle Beyond the Stars may have been made nearly 40 years ago, but it speaks the same language as the Wachowski siblings’ Jovian catastrophe. The dialect might have developed, but they can still communicate with each other. I shudder to think what they’d talk about. A sea change in the style, tone and nature of genre movies took place during the late 60s and 70s. The collapse of the production code opened the floodgates to gore, violence, nudity and

more. The public’s interests and expectations developed. And Hollywood is still dealing in derivatives of a handful of movies that changed cinema soon after. Star Wars, Jaws, Halloween and others defined the template that most genre movies still work to today. Subsequent inspirations and innovations amount to evolution, not revolution. The VHS boom then created a plethora of fly-bynight production companies that churned out truckloads of good-bad fodder. Strip the surface elements away and genre movies haven’t changed much since. Go back much further and they’re suddenly very different. »

DO OR DIE 1991 - 97mins - USA

Ever thought how great a James Bond movie directed by Russ Meyer on the set of Magnum P.I. would be? Andy Sidaris is way ahead of you. Donna and Nicole (Speir and Vasquez), a pair of elite Special Agents with a profound animosity for meaningful clothing, are cornered by international crime lord Mr Miyagi (Morita). He warns them they are too close to discovering his secrets and so they must be killed. But not now. At some point in the future. The race is on for the girls to get somewhere or do something.

DIRECTOR Andy Sidaris STARRING Dona Speir Roberta Vasquez Pat Morita Erik Estrada Cynthia Brimhall

Writer/director Andy Sidaris cornered the boobs and bazookas market in the 80s with a series of almost identical ‘action’ movies pitting Playboy bunnies against cartoon villains. Just as we do Ed Wood a disservice when we focus solely on his standard bearing Plan 9 from Outer Space, we run the risk of reducing Sidaris down to his bestknown work, Hard Ticket to Hawaii. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that movie (just as there isn’t Malibu Express, Savage Beach, Picasso Trigger and the rest of his minor masterpieces) but I feel obliged to try and share the love around the less well known entries in his catalogue, and Do or Die is seriously overlooked. It might be the 1990s but it’s the same old Andy. In the opening scene one of the lead topless model-cum-secret agents injures her ankle kung fu fighting a bad guy, and must retire to a hot tub in order to tend it. Before long the girls are up and off on a strangely cyclical mission to escape from, capture, or kill Mr Miyagi (it’s not very clear what their objective is). It’s cyclical because, by this stage, Sidaris has reduced his formula to a 15-minute sequence that he simply repeats

.....8 CHEESE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .....9 ACTING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .....9 EXCESS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .....8 INEPTITUDE. . . . . . . . . . . .....6 WHAT?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

six times: the girls change clothes; take a vehicle somewhere to get something; evade the bad guys who intercept them; hop in the hot tub; rinse and repeat. It’s like a video game. Do or Die’s only down side is that each cycle slips in footage of Mr Miyagi getting it on with his assistant. Nobody needs to see a naked Pat Morita rubbing breasts, you’ll never be able to watch him wax on and wax off again.

“My wife Arlene uses all of these fancy words like ‘motivation’ and ‘story’. Where the fuck did you learn those words? I couldn’t spell ‘story’ if you spotted me the ‘s’ and the ‘t’, for chrissakes.” -Andy Sidaris

Sadly Sidaris passed away in 2007 without getting his comeback movie, Battlezone Hawaii, off the ground. But he lives on through his work and in the spirit of every fleshploitation film and TV series of the last 30 years (his movies adorned the shelves of the Baywatch production office).

With that simple structure strong enough to support any silly crap Sidaris wants to hang from it, there’s no end to the comedy gold. We’re introduced to a steady flow of Secret Agents, each more buxom and naked than the last. It’s as if Sidaris is seeing how far he can push it before we throw our arms up in the air and collapse laughing. All this can leave the action a little stilted. At one point a foot chase through a forest on a remote, deserted island ends with the baddie crashing through a huge sheet of glass. In a city backstreet it might make sense. But in the middle of nowhere? The best moment is hard to pick, as it should be in a movie that features both ninjas and dune buggies. But Erik Estrada pitching an exploding baseball at a thug who’s using a shotgun for a bat must be up there (“Bastard hit my best pitch! Should have thrown him a slider.”)

FANTASY MISSION FORCE 1983 - 90mins - Hong Kong/Taiwan

Jackie Chan fights hopping vampires, cannibal tribesmen and Japanese Nazis. When a gaggle of American Generals are kidnapped by Japanese soldiers in Canada, the Chinese army are charged with rescuing them from Luxembourg (...erm?). Captain Don Wen (Wang Yu) must assemble a team for the mission, and for some reason he favours criminals, misfits, weirdos and hobos over military personnel. It’s hard to know when all this takes place. The politics seem to be World War II but one of the kidnapped generals is Abraham Lincoln, and the bad guys drive 1970s cars. I guess anachronisms like that are the last thing we should be worried about. Just clinging on to a vague sense of what’s happening is hard enough. It’s the sort of movie in which Chinese soldiers wear kilts to perform high speed marches. Thankfully there’s a familiar face in the form of Jackie Chan. Even if he doesn’t have a familiar voice (for some reason he’s dubbed by a grizzled Old West prospector, consarnit!), it’s surprising how reassuring his presence is. The movie’s problems (or rather its advantages) stem from the slapdash nature of the filmmaking. The camera never seems to know where it’s meant to be pointing, the plot is insane and the characters come and go without any warning or logic, making it near impossible to keep track of who’s who.

“When the tree falls, the monkey runs.”

DIRECTOR Chu Yen-ping STARRING Jimmy Wang Yu Brigitte Lin Pearl Cheung Jackie Chan

CHEESE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 ACTING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 EXCESS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 INEPTITUDE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 WHAT?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

THE INTRUDER aka RAMBU

1986 - 88mins - Indonesia

Keen to jump onboard the exploitation gravy train that was proving so lucrative for the Philippines, neighbouring Indonesia produced a plethora of Hollywood rip-offs starting in the late 1970s. I think this one might have been inspired by Rambo. Rambu (O’Brian) just can’t help himself. He’s compelled to act on any injustice he witnesses, no matter how petty. His wife is less dedicated to righteousness and after Rambu angers the local gang boss, she pleads with him to stop. He doesn’t. When his reckless vigilantism gets her killed, Rambu goes on a rampant rampage with no concern for the ramifications.

DIRECTOR Jopi Burnama STARRING Peter O’Brian Craig Gavin Lia Warokka Dana Christina

CHEESE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 ACTING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 EXCESS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 INEPTITUDE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 WHAT?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Badly disjointed and dazzlingly dubbed, The Intruder is far funnier than a movie about a bereaved former policeman has any right to be. Star Peter O’Brian was a Kiwi travelling through Asia when he was spotted in the street by legmen for Jakarta-based producers known as the Punjabi brothers. Even though he had no acting experience, his audition only required him to prove he could fight. Within days he found himself on the set of The Intruder. It’s essentially Death Wish meets Rambo and features about as much subtlety as that implies. It flags in places but the highs are stratospheric. The opening scene, in which Rambu dispenses with a couple of old lady-bothering thugs, has been watched hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube. And the multi tuk-tuk uber-battle in the middle of the movie is just as great. O’Brian would go on to make a series of similar Indonesian movies in the late 80s before retiring back to New Zealand, but this is the best.

DELTA FORCE 2:

THE COLOMBIAN CONNECTION 1990 - 111mins - USA

Released just as the mighty Cannon Films began their terminal decline, Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection has nothing to do with its predecessor (or Colombia for that matter). Where the first film accurately portrayed the Delta Force as an elite army unit specializing in hostage rescue, this sequel sees them more as a cartoon crime-fighting team pumped up on military grade steroids. Colonel Scott McCoy (Norris) and his Delta Force are tasked with arresting South American drug lord Ramon Cota (a superbly hammy Drago). When it all turns pearshaped, McCoy goes rogue and heads into hostile territory. National sovereignty, military protocol and audience intelligence are not given much respect.

DIRECTOR Aaron Norris STARRING Chuck Norris Billy Drago John P. Ryan Begonya Plaza Richard Jaeckel

Cannon Films stands like a colossus over the 80s B-movie scene. No comparable production company was as prolific, shameless or wonderful. They tended to focus on ripping off whatever Hollywood trend was popular at the time, which meant there were opportunities for any actor who could fill in for Clint Eastwood in a Dirty Harry knock-off, or step into Sly Stallone’s combat boots for a budget Rambo. Luckily for us, Cannon and the American way of life, Chuck Norris existed. The partnership produced ten movies over a decade, most of which are still popular today. Delta Force 2 isn’t the worst (Braddock: Missing in Action 3 must claim that title). Nor does it have the silliest conceit (I’m looking at you, Invasion USA) but it is the funniest.

“I didn’t fight. I gave a motivational seminar.”

The clichés are top drawer. There’s an undercover agent who’s so overly confident that you haven’t finished assuming he’ll be exposed and killed when he’s suddenly exposed and killed. There’s a friendly sidekick with a loving wife and kid brother, I wonder if he’ll get kil... oh yes. McCoy himself is a killing machine who wants to avoid violence (his first line is “I don’t want to fight”) and Cota is a cackling uber villain who maintains a chamber of death for visiting Special Forces operatives. In his living room. The female characters are even less well drawn. This isn’t a movie that fails the Bechdel test so much as one that shouldn’t have been allowed to take it in the first place. No woman with a speaking role survives and at one point McCoy is warned that a female contact ‘might be sensitive’ on the subject of Cota because he raped her and killed her family. You think? None of these characters are developed beyond the single line description in the screenplay, and none have an arc any greater than Norris’s stuntman (who spends so much time on camera he should have been billed above the supporting cast). If the first hour serves up a steady stream

“You’re nothing but a chickenshit weasel... when death calls, you’ll be screaming like a baby.”

of convention, the rest unhinges itself from reality and goes loco. There are car chases, helicopter crashes, countless bloody deaths and so much machine gun fire that when the AK-47s do occasionally pause to reload your first thought is that you’ve gone deaf. In one glorious sequence the US General in charge of the mission careens around San Marcos airspace blowing buildings up in his helicopter gunship of random murder. It’s a very special end to a very special movie.

CHEESE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 ACTING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 EXCESS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 INEPTITUDE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 WHAT?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

SCIENCE CRAZED 1991 - 83mins - Canada

There’s no excuse for this. Dr. Frank (writer/director Switzer) is sacked for conducting dangerous experiments on infertile women in some sort of hospital. His final act is to impregnate a woman with slime. She dies almost immediately, but her supposedly aborted baby does not. It soon grows into a man, a man crazed by science..! Shot in the late 80s on 16mm (you’ll swear it was VHS), Science Crazed didn’t find a distributor until 1991, and even then many of the tapes issued to rental stores were returned by angry customers. It’s no surprise; this is a particularly demanding watch. Stuff this amateurish is seldom so bad it’s good, but by sheer force of incompetence and novelty value it qualifies. Just. The novelty is its strange attempt at expression – I think Switzer believed he was making an art film.

DIRECTOR Ron Switzer STARRING Cameron Scholes Tony Della Ventura Robin Hartsell Ottalie Mason Mike Sommers

“In exactly 3 hours you will be pregnant. In 24 hours you will give birth.”

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Science Crazed initially lay unreleased because there wasn’t enough footage to spin it out to feature length. This problem was cleverly solved by recycling shots, and stretching everything to breaking point. There’s a scene early on in which the killer walks down a corridor to a gym where two women are doing aerobics. It’s a classic setup that demands no more than a shot of the women cut with a shot of the killer walking. That way the filmmaker establishes that the threat is approaching its unwitting target and it builds a little tension. A few seconds is all that’s needed. Switzer takes nine minutes. Nine brain-bending, dialoguefree minutes cutting between two women exercising in a bland room, and two feet stumbling down a bland corridor. Nine minutes. Then when ‘The Fiend’ (as he’s known) finally gets to the women, we cut back to shots of the (now empty) corridor

“What could go wrong? It’s a basic experiment. One mother, one injection, one baby.”

and listen to him growling them to death. We don’t even see the moment we’ve spent nine minutes waiting for. Towards the end of the movie there’s a three-minute static shot of a woman we’ve never seen before sitting at a desk slowly writing down names of countries. Why? What is it setting up? Why does it take three soul-destroying minutes? It only stops when she, or rather her shadow, is murdered by The Fiend. Which highlights another curiosity of the movie. We know Switzer is a horror fan because his living room is one of the locations, and the walls are adorned with the Evil Dead posters issued to all low budget horror filmmakers on their last day at hack school. But he refuses to shoot anything horrific. Either we cut away from the killings or they’re somehow

obscured. Given there’s such an interminable buildup to each one it feels like he’s laughing at us. Putting this alongside the daft but solid genre fare that fill most of the pages in this book seems wrong. Comparing it to a typical Cannon B-movie is like comparing The Room to Citizen Kane, but not in the way it normally is. Science Crazed is so bad that if it weren’t for the interview with star Cameron Scholes (originally Cameron Klein, presumably he changed his name in an attempt to escape association with this movie) featured on the Videonomicon release, I’d have to assume the movie was a prank. But not so. Switzer took the whole thing dead seriously, which might be the scariest thing about it It turns out that Things, a movie I once held to be the worst ever made in spite of its curious appeal, isn’t even the worst horror movie made in Canada in the late 80s that references The Evil Dead and is about a killer monster birthed by a woman who’s undergone experimental fertilization at the hands of a crazy doctor! »

CHEESE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 ACTING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 EXCESS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 INEPTITUDE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 WHAT?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

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THE SWARM 1978 - 116mins - USA

For some reason much of the world takes Michael Caine seriously. They don’t realize he’s a comedy genius. Throughout the late 70s and 80s he made a string of supposedly serious movies that were lifted enormously by his comedic performances. The Swarm represents the highlight of this period, a time when Michael Caine had forgotten how to be a proper actor. Bees!

DIRECTOR Irwin Allen STARRING Michael Caine Katharine Ross Richard Widmark Richard Chamberlain Olivia de Havilland

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The Sunday Times described The Swarm as ‘simply the worst movie ever made.’ Caine himself said it was the worst he’d been in, and he was in Jaws: The Revenge. But they’re both wrong, it’s fantastic. You know you’re watching something special when Caine heads off to warn a nearby town of an impending bee attack. Understanding the importance of keeping the residents calm in order to evacuate them safely, he runs into the main square waving his arms about and screaming “THE BEES ARE COMING, THE BEES ARE COMING!!!” at anyone and everyone. Another great moment is Henry Fonda’s introduction. Arriving by helicopter, he’s lifted out by a burly assistant and carried off like a baby. With no explanation on offer we’re left profoundly amused by such surreal events. Only later do we learn that he’s confined to a wheelchair.

“I’m afraid to speculate. But, I think the bees did this.”

Caine plays a scientist (I haven’t bothered with his character’s name because, as usual, Caine’s just playing himself) working with the military to find a solution to the killer bee epidemic sweeping America. In charge of the operation is Richard Widmark’s disagreeable General Slater, a classically bullish military figure who you just know is going to insist on the most dangerous, excessive and ineffectual solution to the crisis. The scene is set for Caine to go toe-to-toe with him, and ultimately prove that faith in science and mankind is well placed while narrowminded jingoism is never the answer to anything. Only that isn’t what happens. After correctly identifying the bees as the cause of destruction at a military base, Caine

“Houston on fire. Will history blame me... or the bees?”

is wrong about pretty much everything else that happens. He’s also so farcically prone to losing his temper and aggressively yelling at everyone that he comes off as a bit of a dick. Director Irwin Allen’s sledgehammer subtlety ensures we don’t care about these, or any other characters. Ageing stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age die and we don’t care. Lead characters die and we don’t care. Even children die, and we still don’t care. But we care when Caine opines “We’ve been fighting a losing battle against the insects for fifteen years, but I never thought I’d see the final face-off in my lifetime. And I never dreamed that it would turn out to be the bees. They’ve always been our friend.” We care so much we roll about on the floor caring uncontrollably.

CHEESE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 ACTING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 EXCESS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 INEPTITUDE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 WHAT?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

199

A*P*E 1976 - 87mins - USA/South Korea

A movie with so little respect for its audience that at one point its simian star pauses to give us the finger. If you’ve seen King Kong you know the plot. This just skips the Skull Island bit so the monster can start smashing stuff up sooner.

DIRECTOR Paul Leder STARRING Rod Arrants Joanna Kerns Alex Nicol Nak-hun Lee

Apparently, partway through production the American contingent among A*P*E’s multinational backers saw some rushes and wanted to re-tool it as a spoof. It appears different directors worked on it day to day, some of whom got that memo and some of whom didn’t. The ape’s scale fluctuates wildly from shot to shot, the model cities wouldn’t pass for background miniatures in a Toho movie, the editing is at best random and at worst an attempt to injure, and it’s padded, stupid and derivative. But somehow it’s also enormous fun. The A*P*E vs. Great White Shark fight is one of many dramatic peaks, though the best bit is when A*P*E clouts the tripod while wrestling with a giant snake and the camera wobbles violently. I think they left it in to show they had a tripod. You have to admire the ambition in doing a special effects movie on a $23,000 budget, and that’s before you consider it was shot partly in 3D! And whoever had the balls to announce, presumably with a straight face, that A*P*E stood for Attacking Primate monstEr, deserves an award for huckstering.

.7 CHEESE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 ACTING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 EXCESS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 INEPTITUDE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 WHAT?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

209

SHARK ATTACK 3: MEGALODON 2002 - 99mins - Israel/South Africa/USA

Welcome to The John Barrowman Show. Tonight our guests include pissy scientist, malevolent boss and dinosaur shark! Ben Carpenter (Barrowman), head of security at a beach resort, and Cataline Stone (McShane), a covert paleontologist, try to convince all and sundry there’s a giant shark on the loose. Meanwhile a dodgy power company does dodgy stuff.

DIRECTOR David Worth STARRING John Barrowman Jenny McShane Ryan Cutrona Bashar Rahal George Stanchev

“Torpedos away motherfucker!”

210

For those who don’t know Doctor Who star John Barrowman, try and imagine a man so hyper-enthusiastic and positive that he makes Tom Cruise look like he’s in a Ritalin-induced coma. It’s as if someone spiked a sugar-rushing kids TV presenter with ecstasy. Once he’s paired off with dour, moaning Cat Stone (McShane) the contrast between the two makes him seem unhinged. He’s childlike, completely asexual and unbelievably funny. As are most of the cast. McShane is so obviously and intensely irritated by Barrowman’s chirpiness she hardly stops scowling and seems constantly on the brink of losing her shit and punching him. I’m not joking, the two apparently got on horribly on set, which led to one of the most fantastic and infamous bits of improvisation in cinema. Carpenter is meant to try and woo Stone by suggesting they go for a romantic dinner. Instead, Barrowman tries to liven up McShane by ad-libbing “I’m really wired. What do you say I take you home and eat your pussy?” Some reports claim she didn’t speak to him for the rest of the shoot.