1986 - Future Hunters (Lightning Pictures)
[US/Filipino/Trinidad co-production filmed in 1985 as
"The Spear Of Destiny"; released as "Deadly Quest", in France as “Les Nouveaux Conquérants”, in Italy as "Eroi Del Futuro", and in Poland
as "Mysliwi Z Przyszlosci"]
Director Cirio H. Santiago Story/Producer/2nd Unit
Director Anthony Maharaj Screenplay “J.L.”/J. Lee Thompson Cinematography
Ricardo Remias Music Ron Jones Editor “Bass”/Gervacio Santos Sound Effects
Editor Rodel Capule Sound Effects Mixer Rolando Ruta Casting Henry
“Stakowsky”/Strzalkowski Production Design “Joe”/Jose Mari Avellana Art
Directors Ronnie Cruz, Boyet Camaya Special Effects Ben Otico Makeup Artists
Teresa Mercader, Norma Remias Camera Operator Proceso Lázaro 2nd Unit Camera
Operator Johnny Araojo Location Manager Dick Reyes Wardrobe Elvie Santos
Production Coordinator Martin Perez Script Supervisor Nonett J. Garcia
Continuity Chining Trinidad Post Production Coordinator Noah Blough Sound
Re-recording Mixers Jeffrey J. Haboush, Greg P. Russell Music Editor John Caper
Jr Music Engineer Bill Cobb Music Supervisor Ezra Kliger Orchestrator
[uncredited] Matthew Ender Pre-Production (Trinidad) Judy Maharaj, Azsha
Maharaj, Charmaine Maharaj Production Services (Manila) Flordelena Furugganan
Cast Robert Patrick (Slade), Linda Carol (Michelle), Ed
Crick (Fielding), Bob Schott (Bauer), David Light (Zaar), Paul Holmes
(Hightower), Peter Shilton (Old Man), Ursula Marquez (Amazon Queen), Elizabeth
Oropesa (Huntress), Bruce “Li”/Le (Liu), Jang Lee Hwang (Silverfox), Richard
Norton (Matthew), [uncredited] Ramon D'Salva (Hong Kong Gangster), Nick
Nicholson (Shootist in Car), Mathew Westfall Nazi Soldiers Mike Abbott, Eric
Hahn, Henry Strzalkowski
Review by Andrew Leavold:
Cirio told me in our interview that his post-apocalypse
feature Stryker (1983) held the fondest memories for him, and I can understand
why. It's not just the first in a string of Road Warrior clones which, due to
its phenomenal success overseas, brought Cirio back into the Corman fold.
Moreso, it's the film which neatly divides his export career in two distinct
phases, the Drive-In Years (from 1973's Savage to 1981's Firecracker) and the
Direct-To-Video Years - a slight misnomer, since Corman was releasing some
features to theatres as late as The Sisterhood (1988), but apt, since it was in
the burgeoning Home Video market that Cirio would be at his most industrious.
Cirio originally approached Corman to distribute Stryker,
and for reasons only known to Roger, he turned it down. Instead, Cirio found an
international sales agent, Trinidad-born distributor Anthony Maharaj, who
managed to sell the film worldwide as a cost-effective alternative to the
rampaging hordes of post-apocalypse films pouring out of Europe in the wake of
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Escape From New York (Cirio was delighted, if
completely mystified, why Stryker would have a dream run in French cinemas for
an entire year!). With the aspiring filmmaker Maharaj, a three-film partnership
was born while Cirio was still reviving his association with Corman, all with
Maharaj on producer and story duties: the urban actioner First Mission (1984),
the I Spit On Your Grave-inspired Naked Vengeance (1985), and a film defies any
single tag: a post-apocalypse, jungle action-adventure – with kung fu! - called
Spear Of Destiny, later renamed Future Hunters (1986).
The film opens, appropriately enough, in a desert
wasteland in 2025 AD, almost forty years after a global calamity has turned the
Earth into wasteland. A lone warrior named Matthew (Richard Norton, complete
with broad Australian accent) is pursued by an evil warlord named Zaar (David
Light); both are after the prize, the Spear of Longinus, said to be the point
that pierced the side of Christ while on the Cross, and once the spear head and
shaft are reunited, so legend has it, gives the beholder its power to change
the world's destiny. Thus, in the hands of those insane enough to wield it for
personal gain (Hitler for one, or so the story goes), it can cause empires to
fall. In Matthew's hands – and he is mankind's only hope, the narrator reminds
us – it can turn back time. And it does – to 1986, moments before the global
catastrophe is set to occur, and he stumbles from the temple into modern-day
California carrying the Spear's point, just in time to save Michelle (Linda
Carol), a young kewpie-doll anthropologist and her boyfriend Slade (Robert
Patrick) from a gang of biker rapists. Slam! Matthew kicks into high gear,
Whack! Down the bikers drop. Then Slunk! Matthew plunges the Spear head into
one of the bikers and watches the guy melt into molasses.
Sadly Norton's character checks out of the film early,
expiring on Slade's back seat after warning them of the calamity to come, and
begging them to find a scientist named Hightower. He's the expert at the local
university on Spear of Longinus, but is currently MIA looking for a fabled Venus Valley
somewhere in Southeast Asia. His assistant
Fielding (Ed Crick) is more than interested in Michelle's artefact, and on the
trail of Professor Hightower from California
to Hong Kong they find themselves pursued by
Fielding's henchmen, a jackbooted Aryan thug named Bauer (Bob Schott), random
gunmen, lone assassins, and even the Triads. Even a low-key visit to a Hong Kong shrine ends in a kung fu showdown between the
white-haired temple priest Silverfox (the ubiquitous martial arts actor Jang
Lee Hwang) and their taxi driver, played by one of the Bruceploitation
industry's busiest clones, Bruce Le! Everyone wants the spear, it seems, and
none more than Fielding's neo-Nazi organization, who clench their fists and
gibber ceaselessly about bringing on the “cleansing” fires of Armageddon.
At this point the trail takes Michelle and Slade to the Philippines, where on one of its many islands
it's rumoured the lost Venus
Valley is located. Their
tour guides? Cirio's old Stryker stand-by, an army of dwarf monks: the
essential binding, it seems, with most Pinoy B films, but without the freakshow
element we would expect; unlike Western culture, Filipino dwarves have less
sinister or nightmarish connotations, and are regarded instead as innocent,
pure, childlike or somehow magical. In Cirio's world, however, it's more like a
nod to George Lucas' Sand People or Ewoks, and deliberately cued for yet
another “what the...?” moment. From then on the film's like a Cirio pinball
machine: from dwarves to Mongols, to Nazis, to Amazon Women, BACK to Nazis, and
a finale where the Spear and Shaft are finally united in Jo Mari Avellana's elaborately
threadbare Amazon village, but not before a fight with an awkward Michelle and
an Amazon Huntress (Seventies starlet and “wet look” pioneer Eliabeth Oropesa)
over a fire-lined crocodile pit. More explosions, an avalanche of plaster
boulders, and we've just witnessed one nutty, NUTTY movie.
 |
| Henry Strzalkowski |
As Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas stand-ins, Slade
and Michelle are more a case of Romancing The Stoned; for one thing, they're
already a couple long past the honeymoon stage who don't really seem to like each
other, and while we never actually see them getting down to the dirty deed,
there's certainly lots of pouting, nagging, and unnecessary post-coital (or
NON-coital) lounging around in underwear. To be honest, if the Spear of Destiny
is the glue keeping their relationship together, the planet's not the only
thing that's doomed... Linda Carol is a cute lead, whether she's underplaying
or overplaying her lines (she later faced off against Wendy O. Williams in the
cheerful send-up of prison movies, Reform School Girls) whereas Robert Patrick,
in only his second lead role (after Clark Henderson's Mexican drug wars film
Warlords From Hell) looks completely bewildered at the events that brought him
– and would return him three more times - to a Cirio set in the Philippines.
Other noted Cirio alumni include Henry Strzalkowski as Bauer's right hand man –
he gets a close-up fondling Linda Carol's trussed-up torso before delivering
his single line “Shuddup” - dressed like a WW2 Japanese soldier alongside Eric
Hahn and IFD regular Mike Abbott. An uncredited Nick Nicholson also appears
briefly as a thug shooting at Slade and Michelle before his car bursts into
flames, though I swear I saw him materialize later in a Japanese uniform.
 |
| Nick Nicholson...times two! |
There are several ways of looking at this magnificent
mutant of a feature, a six-legged Frankenstein horse lumbering out of the Philippines'
sand dunes with limbs of different colours and lengths. At first glance it's
part Terminator, Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Romancing The Stone, with the Road
Warrior scenario Cirio had already plundered for Stryker at the beginning and a
little Bruceploitation thrown in for extra seasoning at the end of Act One.
It's a grab-bag, and a desperate one, attempting to cover as many bases as its
100 minutes will allow AND YET amidst the madness it somehow holds itself
together and is propelled forward by its own inane internal logic. If Cirio's
later Road Warrior and Platoon clones are interchangeable, Future Hunters
stands entirely on its own: ambitious, unapologetic and utterly preposterous,
it represents Cirio at a playful, experimental, genre-splicing peak.
Robert Patrick on Future Hunters from the Pretty Scary
website:
Tell us a romantic love story involving YOU...
Mrs. Barbara Patrick. I met my wife in a play reading
the first play I did when I got to Los
Angeles called Go in 1984. I fell for her right there.
She was just... I knew immediately that that was my wife, that was my girl. It
took her about a year to even go out with me. .. Eventually things lined up she
went out on a date with me. She went with me to my first film audition and I
got it.
Question: You got your start with Roger Corman!
Ron Howard, Jack Nicholson, Scorsese... there's so many
people that had their roots there. More than 50% of the people working in Hollywood today started
by working with Roger Corman. And I am very very proud of that experience!
Horror fans have such a wonderful positive outlook on it.
They are so dedicated.
If I were going to recommend a Robert Patrick movie to a
friend, would you prefer I tell them to see Warlords of Hell or Future Hunter?
Future Hunter not that good.
Is that really Robert Patrick
stuff?
I'll never forget, I gotta tell you. And I am not avoiding
the question. I made Warlords from Hell and then I made Future Hunter for the
same director. And I was in NY doing Conan O'Brien for The X Files, and here I
am in Manhattan in this beautiful hotel and I'm doing all this Regis and Kathy
Lee stuff and I have the TV on in the background and all of a sudden I hear
this high pitched whiny voice, and I am listening and I go, OMG that's me. What
movie is that?' and I look, and I'm horrified, and it's Future Hunters, and its
on TNT. And I'm just like, 'NOOOOOOO they wouldn't do this to me!',but sure as
shit, there it was! It's just a humbling experience.
Can you imagine the fear I felt? I mean, here I am about
to do Conan O'Brien and Future Hunters is on TV.
There's some stuff I do in Future Hunters that's all
right. I'm trying hard and working hard in it. There's some bad stuff I do too.
Warlords has some cool motorcycle stuff. Is my wife in
that movie? No. That was Corinne Wallace in that movie. That's where I was
cutting my teeth and Thank God. I got to learn a lot of my craft doing movies
like that that will never be seen by the light of day except for people like
you!
What do you think about a Robert Patrick Film festival
where we show Warlords From Hell, Future Hunters, and Killer Instinct?
No! I can't deal with it, please no! Killer Instinct, I
think that was my third film. We shot that in the Philippines. I was so bad in that
movie. Just horrible.
Cirio Santiago, the prolific Filippino director, comes up
with another cropper that tries to imitate many of the popular mainstream
action films. This one mixes in equal parts of MAD MAX, THE TERMINATOR, RAIDERS
OF THE LOST ARK and ENTER THE DRAGON with wildly uneven results. The prolog,
set in the year 2025, finds Matthew (Richard Norton) roaming the nuked-out land
in search of the Spear Of Longinus, said to have killed Jesus during his
cricifixion. Matthew finds the spear and
touches it, which transports him back to 1986. Matthew is shot and mortally
wounded as he saves Michelle (Linda Carol) and Slade (Robert Patrick, who would
later star as the evil T-1000 in TERMINATOR 2 and replace David Duchovny on THE
X-FILES), an archaeological couple, from an evil biker gang. During his dying
breath, Matthew tells the couple that they must return the spear to its'
rightful place in order to avoid future Earth's nuclear destruction. With the
spear in hand, Michelle and Slade are chased across the world by modern day
Nazis, led by the evil Fielding (Ed Crick) and Bauer (Bob Schott), who plan on
using the spear for world domination (what else?). Along the way, Michelle and
Slade must face kung-fu fights (courtesy of Chinese action star Bruce Li),
numerous gunfights, an exploding helicopter, a plane crash, a band of marauding
Mongols, jungle traps, a pigmie tribe and a civilization of Amazon women before
they can complete their quest.
Originally filmed as THE SPEAR OF DESTINY in 1986, it took
three years to find a release and it's easy to see why. The screenplay is
hackneyed and full of gaping plot holes that a train or good sized elephant
could fit through. The action scenes (there are many) range from good to poorly
executed (especially the rockslide in the finale). As an actor, Robert Patrick
makes a serviceable action hero. He speaks his lines as if he cannot believe
what he is saying. The only saving grace is lovely Linda Carol, who is not
afraid to get into the middle of the rough stuff and get her hair dirty. You
can also catch luscious Linda in REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS (1986) and CARNAL CRIMES
(1991). To sum it up, FUTURE HUNTERS is no better or worse than Santiago's other films.
That's not saying much. An Avid Home Entertainment Release. Rated R.
It can’t be! It just can’t be! I’m only a couple films
into my Project VHS reviews, in which I take a written tour of some of my
strangest old VHS tapes, and I’m finding that the common thread running through
all the films I’ve selected for this treatment is that they lead me almost
instantly to refer to them as Lovecraftian horrors that cannot be processed by
the feeble mind of man, and thus merely witnessing them will destroy you and
turn you mad. And it turns out, that comparison can easily be sustained in our
next foray into video cassette nostalgia. Although not nearly as batshit
bizarre as Roller Blade, Cirio Santiago’s Future Hunters still resembles some
ancient horror buried for millions of years at the bottom of a pit beneath some
black and unnamed ruin of a city comprised primarily of forms and colors that
have no corresponding point of reference in our own universe.
In fact, when first I purchased this tape, I ended up
returning it as defective. I bought it used from a video store that was
liquidating its stock back in 1995 or so, and a few days later, I popped it in
the VCR and set about watching it while I did some simple household chores. The
film started out as a Road Warrior rip-off, with occasional Hong
Kong action film villain Richard Norton tearing around the
post-apocalyptic wasteland in a muscle car. Familiar enough territory. Then I
got distracted, possibly by the discovery that our refrigerator had been
leaking, and the leakage had turned into a putrid yellowish goo underneath the
crisper drawers (man, talk about unspeakable Lovecraftian horrors). When I
finished towelling up the gelatinous gloop and throwing the towel onto the roof
of the credit union across the parking lot, I returned to the living room and
found that someone had recorded a different movie over the one I’d purchased.
Because there on my massive ten-inch screen was a Bruce Le kung fu film, with
the famous Bruce Lee imitator locked in mortal kicking combat with Hwang Jang Lee
wearing a silver wig.
I took the movie back, told them of the error, and had my
$3.00 returned to me. Oddly, a couple weeks later, I found the film for sale
again at a different video store, and for some reason or other, I purchased it.
It was like unwittingly being saved from purchasing some accursed item only to
equally unwittingly acquire the item again. It was destiny. So once again, I
went home and popped it in the VCR to watch while taking care of some chores.
It was around this time that I discovered some hamsters had escaped their
twisting tube universe and had gone feral, living in the walls of our duplex.
This revelation came shortly after noticing that the area we used to clean out
our various aquariums — a flower garden owned by the aforementioned credit
union — had been turned by uneaten hamster trail mix into a garden of
sunflowers and corn stalks, which we eventually harvested and ate while the
poor guy in charge of that small plot of flora was wondering how the hell his
flower garden turned into a corn field.
Anyway, after I gave up trying to corner one of the wily
rodents and resigned myself at last to being the guy who destroyed the north Florida ecosystem by
introducing wild hamsters into its delicate balance, I returned to the movie
only to find out, son of a bitch! It was that damn Bruce Le movie again!
Although I flirted with the idea that somehow the film had been purchased by
someone who promptly resold it to a different video store that then put it on
sale for me to end up purchasing a second time, the more logical theory emerged
that this movie was just really schizophrenic, and what had started out as a
Mad Max movie morphed at some point into a film about Bruce Le wearing a modern
track suit and fighting a guy who looks to have stepped out of the Chinese
middle ages. So I decided that I was going to have to sit down and actually pay
attention to this movie if I hoped to ever unravel its tantalizing mysteries.
What I discovered was even more bizarre than initially I suspected.
So as I saw the first time around, the movie opens in the
near future. Society has crumbled and the earth has been ravaged by nuclear war
which, in the 1980s, was as versatile an explanation for pretty much anything
as “hacking” is today. Depending on the movie, nuclear war could turn the world
into a desert wasteland populated by S&M punks or a lush jungle populated
by Amazons, or it could somehow cause dinosaurs to come back. Similarly, if
your movie requires someone to get some piece of information or control over
some device they couldn’t possibly achieve, all you need to do is write the
following line of dialogue: “If I can just hack in through the back door…we’re
in!” then you can do pretty much any damn thing you want.
So it’s the future. A guy named Matthew (Richard Norton),
is speeding around in the desert looking for the fabled Spear of Longinus, the
weapon that pierced the side of Christ during his crucifixion. According to
this film, the loosely defined good guys of the future need the spear so they
can travel back in time and prevent nuclear obliteration from ever having
happened. Unfortunately, Matthew is pursued by the bad guys, lead by someone
named Zaar (unfortunately not played by Robert Z’Dar), and where as Matthew has
a cool car, awesome hair, and the same gun I think Richard Norton had last time
he was a post-apocalyptic hero (that being in the film Equalizer 2000), Zaar
has tanks and wears a gratuitous cape. They capture Matthew, bring him to
within a stone’s throw of where he was going anyway, then let him escape. Then
they chase Matthew to some crumbling temple where he finds the mythical spear
with relative ease, only to have the full brunt of Zaar’s armored divisions
brought down on his head.
Then we cut to 1986, where college student Michelle (Linda
Carol) is randomly poking around the ruins of the very same temple of the
future with her boyfriend, Terminator 2 (Robert Patrick) because her “big exam
is coming up.” Once again I have to question the colleges attended by people in
B-movies. In what class can you prepare for your test by driving out to an old
church frequented, as we will soon learn, by rapist biker gangs, and looking at
it with no real defined purpose? And if it’s archaeology or art history or
something, wouldn’t other members of the class be out there as well, or at the
very least, shouldn’t you be doing something a little more scientific than
wandering aimlessly while a Terminator 2 sits on the steps and complains about
being bored and needing to get back to town so he can kill John Conner? Or
shouldn’t the professor at least have warned his female students that the
deserted site is routinely patrolled by vicious gangs of rapists? This is as
unacademic as the classrooms in movies like Gor where the entire curriculum
seems to be based around listening to a professor make random proclamations
about some ridiculous pet theory of his, or the grad student in Cannibal Ferox
whose thesis was “Cannibals don’t exist any more” when everyone else had to
write thesis papers like “Aspects on Process Engineering in the Finnish Pulp
and Paper Industry.”
Michelle’s investigative archaeology is accompanied by
that 80s direct-to-video action film music that is so hard to explain yet so
familiar as soon as you hear it. It’s a playful little number, and the sound
isn’t straight synth nor is it a mimic of the piano, exactly. But in pretty
much every 80s direct-to-video action film, they used this style of theme for
the “makin’ love” scene or the “just horsin’ around” scene. I’m a bit surprised
that there is no Future Hunters soundtrack on Varese Sarabande, as “Soundtrack
on Varese Sarabande” is the single most repeated phrase in the entire
Psychotronic Video Guide. The world is a darker place for not having a CD
quality recording of “Love Theme from Future Hunters.”
After this goes on a spell, Michelle and Terminator 2 are
randomly attacked by a biker gang who, for some reason or another, like to
troll the ruins of out in the middle of nowhere churches looking for loving
young college couples to terrorize. I guess they didn’t realize they were
messing with Terminator 2, who I assumed would instantly turn his pinky finger
into a long silver spike and stick it in someone’s shoulders (a painful sensation
not unlike the one you’ll feel watching most of this movie), then follow it up
with that very determined “running after the vehicle” shtick all Terminator 2′s
are wont to do. But then this was 1986, and we were barely done with Terminator
1, so I guess Robert Patrick didn’t have his Terminator 2 powers yet (though
later in the film he does do a determined run after a jeep in a scene I’m sure
he included on his highlight reel to get the T2 job). As a result, he gets his
ass kicked and is forced to soothe his bruised ego with the knowledge that it
won’t be too long before he’s strong enough to beat up the gaunt, corpse-like
Edward Furlong, who would achieve the dubious honor in his twenties of looking
less vital and more deathly than Peter Cushing (whose picture is in the
dictionary next to the word “gaunt”) did a month after he died.
Michelle is about to be on the bad end of an 80s action
film style raping when Richard Norton wanders up out of nowhere and beats the
tar out of the bikers before getting shot and handing the Spear of Longinus
over to Michelle, stammering that she must use it to prevent the apocalypse. So
I guess the time travel thing works, even though they later explain that the
spear can’t possibly work unless you have both halves of it (the shaft is
elsewhere). He also stammers a few names, all of whom, conveniently, are
related in some way to the community college (or Touro) Michelle attends. And
then Matthew dies and goes off to get more use out of his costume in Equalizer
2000.
As is often the case with these types of films, I realize
that I’m straying a bit too far into the realm of plot synopsis, but once again
I feel it’s justified, as there’s not much hope otherwise of explaining just
how cracked in the head a film like Future Hunters can manage to be. Because
before too long, Michelle and T2 are on the run from a secret society of Nazis
who want to get the Spear and use it to cause the apocalypse we saw before the
credits. Which is kind of odd, as they couldn’t possibly have possessed the
spear the first time they caused the future apocalypse — which is the first and
only time I’ll mention the underlying stupidity of the entire time travel
plotline, since for starters is gets dropped almost immediately, but mostly
because no one should bend themselves out of shape worrying about shoddy time
travel threads in Future Hunters, a movie that, soon enough, will present us
with everything from an impromptu kungfu film to an army of stone age midgets
to a secret society of sexy Filipina Amazons in the jungles of South Asia.
Also, if Matthew retrieved the Spear from it’s ancient
resting place half an hour outside of Los Angeles (how the hell did it get
there?), then traveled back in time to that same location, isn’t the 1986 Spear
of Longinus still in the temple? Maybe the Nazi bad guys should just use that
one instead of the future Spear of Longinus.
Michelle and T2, whose name in this movie is actually
Slade (and I mention this only because Robert Patrick and Richard Norton appear
together in Equalizer 2000, where Norton’s character is named Slade — Santiago
apparently has a fetish for the name) must find the elusive Professor
Hightower, and doing so leads them to Hong Kong. I guess her big test wasn’t
that important after all. Also, I guess she’s incredibly rich to be able to
close up her crappy desert diner and fly to Hong Kong
that same day. But then I expect no less from a naive young college girl who,
for some inexplicable reason is able to outdrive, outfox, and outshoot the
various trained killers sent after her. Robert Patrick spends most of the movie
being believably beaten up, on the other hand. I hope you like the sight of him
lying on his back with a dumb look on his face, because you’re going to get it
a lot.
T2 has a friend who is a taxi driver in Hong
Kong, but more importantly, he has a friend who is a taxi driver
and is also Bruce Le, though as was his lot in life, he’s often miscredited as
Bruce Li. Because a random taxi driver in Hong Kong will obviously be in tune
with rumors surrounding missing anthropology professors from small American
colleges, he informs our duo that Hightower’s last reported location was at the
Forbidden Pagoda, a tourist attraction which no one is allowed to enter lest
they incur the wrath of high kicking kungfu warrior Hwang Jang Lee, dressed
like he just came from the set of the latest Seasonal Films production, or
possibly from a kungfu film themed amusement park. When T2 tries to enter the
pagoda, he gets whupped, which leads to a lengthy fight scene between Le and
Hwang, complete with the sudden introduction of kungfu film sound effects. When
the monk is finally dispatched — not via the fight, but because a sniper
attempts to kill T2 and kills the monk instead — Le and T2 enter the pagoda,
look around for for a few seconds, then testily proclaim, “Nothing!” Then they
walk away. Shouldn’t they report the murder to the police or something? Worst
tourist attraction in Hong Kong!
Oddly, this isn’t the first time Bruce Le has found
himself randomly inserted into a film for a gratuitous if not unwelcome fight
scene. A while back, I was wondering if Bollywood, always quick to exploit a
trend, had ever produced any Bruce Lee exploitation films (films that cast
someone with a similar name or haircut in an attempt to sucker people into
thinking they’re going to see the real Bruce Lee). Eventually, I came across
Katilon Ke Kaatil starring Dharmendra and featuring a scene were he randomly
walks by Bruce Le — who hasn’t been in the film before and won’t appear again —
and a fight breaks out. I mean, I assume that if Dharmendra and Bruce Le
swagger by each other, a fight is going to break out, but it had nothing at all
to do with the rest of the movie. I guess there was a period in the 1980s when
directors in need of some extra action and running time could put in an order
for Bruce Le, and they’d just ship him from Hong Kong
in a wooden crate to wherever they needed him. Today, he remains in a huge
warehouse full of crates like the one in Indiana Jones, stored alongside the
likes of Sho Kosugi, patiently meditating until the day their services are once
more required to save the world from the awakening of Cthulhu.
So having now seen exactly how the film suddenly becomes a
kungfu film for ten minutes, it still doesn’t make any more sense than when I
thought someone had mistakenly recorded Eagle vs. Silver Fox over part of
Future Hunters. I mean, all that for absolutely no reason? I was about to swear
that this whole film was assembled piecemeal out of other equally bad but less
nonsensical films, but that isn’t the case. I mean, I saw Hwang Jang Lee and
Robert Patrick in the same shot together, and this was before the world
possessed the technology to digitally insert Robert Patrick into every movie
ever made, which I assume we’re going to do.
And even though I knew it wasn’t the case, the rest of the
movie caused the same feeling. Things get no less logical when Michelle and T2
follow the trail to South Asia with a band of
Nazis hot on their trail. There, in the jungles, they encounter a tribe of
stone-age midgets who aid them in their quest to recover the shaft of the
spear, which is in a cave guarded by a city of scantily clad Amazons. And when
one of these movies ends up in an Amazon city, you know you’re going to get at
least one really awkwardly staged catfight. In the end, an earthquake happens
for no reason, foam rocks bounce harmlessly off people who show up bloody and
dead in the next shot, and Michelle randomly holds up the spear, causing all
the midgets to cheer and the film to end.
Before we go much further, like talking about how the
Spear doesn’t even do anything in the end, let’s discuss the career of one
Cirio Santiago, the Roger Corman of The Philippines — though I suspect them of
actually being the same man. Understanding a film like Future Hunters may be as
impossible as understanding the full implications of quantum mechanics, but
understanding a little about Santiago
might help us at least grasp a film like this on some elementary, superficial
level. Future Hunters and the many films like it bearing Santiago’s name are lasting monuments to
nepotism. Santiago is the son of a studio
founder, which might help explain how Santiago
got his first jobs. And those jobs were as producer on a film called Cavalry
Command in 1963 and as director of 1964′s Darna and the Tree Monster, an entry
in a popular pulp superheroine adventure series.
It was in the 1970s, however, that Santiago really came into his own. Roger
Corman, always on the prowl for ways to save money, hit upon The Philippines as
the ideal location for many of his productions. The sprawling island-nation has
long been and continues to be the stand-in for a variety of places populated by
chubby guys with thick mustaches and Hawaiian shirts. It was the go-to place
for any film set in Vietnam or Cambodia, at least until Thailand became a more
viable option. Future Hunters is one of the few movies to actually attempt —
and fail — to pass the streets of Manila off as
downtown Los Angeles,
but hey, you gotta respect the moxie. Corman most famously produced a series of
sweaty, lesbian-filled women in prison films in The Philippines, and it’s
probably around this time that he struck up his relationship with Cirio
Santiago. Although he still produced and directed local fare during that time, Santiago became the go-to guy for American co-productions
slumming it in Manila.
He produced and/or directed a number of blaxploitation films throughout the
70s, and in the 80s he split his time between cheapjack action films — mostly
set in Vietnam — and cheapjack post apocalypse scifi, almost all of which got
distributed by one Roger Corman company or another in the United States, much
to the delight and puzzlement of people like me who prowled video store shelves
in search of anything with a title like Machete Maidens of Mora Tao.
Future Hunters may be his crowning achievement, a film of
such stunning incompetence, with such total disregard for making even the least
bit of sense, that one can hardly process it. Seriously, by the time ancient
Mongol horsemen attack the 1986 Nazi camp in The Philippines, you’re not even
going to care any more. This film contains more individual movies and genres
than most Bollywood films. All it lacks is a song and dance number, but what it
lacks in terms of item numbers by Helen it more than makes up for with shots of
young Robert Patrick lying spread eagle on a bed in his tighty whities. By the
time we got to the end and realized that the Spear of Longinus serves no
purpose whatsoever, all I was capable of doing was lying in the corner,
giggling uncontrollably and scrawling esoteric runes from floor to ceiling on
every wall in my padded cell.
Seriously, what the hell were we thinking in the 1980s? I
mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m happy that amazingly freakish crap like this got
made, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wonder how the hell it happened. Cirio
Santiago has, in his career, flirted with competence; Future Warriors doesn’t
even flirt with coherence. This film simply shouldn’t be, and like I said, even
though the footage is original, it feels like the entire movie was pasted
together out of other shot-in-The-Philippines movies. Both the Amazons and the
midget tribe ideas would return in Warriors of the Apocalypse, directed by
Bobby Suarez, who on some days I would swear is just the third part of the
unholy trinity formed along with Corman and Santiago. Richard Norton driving around in
the post-apocalyptic wasteland would show up again in Santiago’s own Equalizer 2000.
But perhaps weirdest of all is that a few years after
this, Robert Patrick would appear in another “time travelin’ to save the
future” movie, albeit one with a considerably larger profile. I can only assume
that young James Cameron was sitting around one day and, much like me, popped a
copy of Future Hunters into the VCR and, mere minutes later, thought to
himself, “I have to get this guy to be the terminator in my next movie!” But as
the guy who plays the king of the caveman midgets wasn’t available, Cameron did
the next best thing and cast the annoying redneck prone to lying around in his
man panties as an unstoppable killing machine from the future.
Patrick’s performance, like that of his co-star Linda
Carol, consists entirely of plaintive whining. “We have to protect the spear!”
“Aww, dang, Ah don’ wanna protect tha spear!” “Oh come on! Help me protect the
spear!” After spending a few minutes with them, nuclear apocalypse is suddenly
looking like the preferable choice. When watching the endless banter, when
watching him get beat up by Hwang Jang Lee, when watching the T2000 buffalo
shots, remember that this guy somehow, despite being in Future Hunters, went on
to star in not one, but two of the hugest franchises of all time, although one
of those came after the characters people actually gave a damn about had
already left the show.
Still, the rest of the cast wasn’t nearly as lucky. Well,
except for Hwang and Le, but I’m pretty sure they’re only in this movie because
Cirio accidentally stumbled onto the set of a film they were already filming and
decided to work it into his own movie. I mean, you never really need an excuse
to pad your film with a fight scene between Hwang Jang Lee and Bruce Le.
Linda Carol had a smattering of film and television
appearances of little consequence, the highest profile of which was the women
in prison spoof Reform School Girls. Everyone in that movie had the misfortune
of having to compete with half naked Wendy O. Williams of The Plasmatics as she
howled like a banshee and rode a school bus to hell. Everyone else had solid
careers in TV shows you only pretend to like but never actually watched (I
don’t care what they say on VH1 specials or what the camp appeal of William
Shatner may be; you did not watch T.J. Hooker) and films like Bloodfist VI, but
they must all be watching Robert Patrick in Terminator 2 and thinking, “Holy
shit, I once hit that guy with a floor lamp while he was in his underwear.”
And Aussie ass-kicker Richard Norton, it goes without
saying, is awesome, even though almost everything he’s ever made stinks to high
heaven.
Of course, the end of the day means admitting that the
individual pieces of this film are far more entertaining than the whole. For
every minute we spend with bikini clad Amazons and warrior midgets, we spend
twice as much time with Slade and Michelle as they bicker with each other.
Still, this movie is just weird enough to make it fascinating so long as you
are a viewer possessed of some high degree of constitution. It’s no Roller
Blade, but where else are you going to get a movie where a guy time travels
back to 1986 to give the spear of destiny to Terminator 2 so he can show it to
Bruce Le while running from Nazis who get attacked by Genghis Khan’s hordes
while they are surrounded by caveman midgets and Filipina Amazons? I’m a sucker
for movies like this, and Future Hunters won me over. If Fantasy Mission Force
has a kindred spirit, this film is it.
Oh, and what ever became of ol’ Cirio Santiago you may
ask? Well, in 1995 he was appointed by none other than Filipino President Fidel
Ramos as head of the Philippines Film Development Fund. The Fund’s purpose?
“To improve the quality of Filipino films.”
For 20 minutes, Future Hunters is the greatest movie ever
made. With its Richard Norton leatherpocalypse scenes of non-stop Mad Max-style
cars racing around desolate rock and sand covered terrain and its violent shoot
outs complete with exploding vehicles, it was like someone took Equalizer 2000
and Raiders Of The Sun and compressed them into a highly concentrated speedball
of sneering and sweating ultra-manly aggression. It probably makes sense that
that someone was director Cirio H. Santiago who also teamed up with Richard
Norton and Rich’s leather pants to bring us Equalizer 2000 (in the same year no
less!) and Raiders Of The Sun!
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.
Future Hunters begins appropriately enough in the future,
the year 2025 "almost 40 years since the Great Holocaust" where we
are told that a group of rebels has stood against an evil Lord Zaar until one
last rebel remains, Matthew (Richard Norton) who is the last hope of
civilization. His quest is to find the spear of Longinus that is said to be so
powerful it could turn back time. It was of course the spear of a Roman soldier
who used it to pierce the side of Christ. This is no religious tract however,
the use of the artifact though, and the film has no real agenda other than a
mystical object to quest for. After all, Indiana Jones had his ‘Lost Ark’
so it was almost a given requirement at the time of pulp-style, serial-style,
B-movies that a religious artifact had to be the treasure sought.
As for the SF/ Fantasy/ pop-culture at the time of the
film’s release, the legend of Longinus’ spear was most famously used in the
1980s as part of author Barry Sadler’s Casca: The Eternal Mercenary series of
books, which featured a character called Casca Longinus as that Roman soldier,
doomed to wander immortal only until the return of Jesus. Sadler’s premise of
course, opposed the anti-Semitic lore of the past that had long claimed there
was a ‘wandering Jew’ awaiting the return. Fans of DC Comics may recall that
‘The Spear Of Destiny’ played a prominent role in The Last Days Of The Justice
Society published in 1985 (I can still remember reading both those series
concurrently). Historically speaking, there was also popular thought among some
of the more esoteric elements of Nazi Germany that it existed and if found
would be an important tool in their Reich. These things are useful to know as the
film progresses.
There is a lot of action crammed into a fairly short time
dealing with the post-apocalyptic future. The feel is more Mad Max (1979), than
it is Road Warrior (1981) or Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and it looks a
bit better than Warriors of The Wasteland (1983). We see Matthew tearing up the
roadway pursued by others in cars, bikes, and even tanks. There is a capture,
an escape, a faked death ruse, accompanied by plenty of gunfire and pyro.
After his escape, Matthew is apparently cornered in the
ruins of an old temple. But it was there he had intended to get to. He picks up
the spearhead from an imbedded resting place in what looks like a weathered
Roman funerary relief. And then we get a fairly innocuous credit sequence.
The next sequence takes place at the ruins, but in the
year 1986. We meet the film’s two leads characters, Michelle (Linda Carol), and
her ex-marine boyfriend, Slade (Robert Patrick. She is an anthropology student
who is at the ruins as part of her studies. Slade is frustrated with her
because she is in school and running a restaurant when she had inherited a lot
of money that could free them from their drudgery. As they leave, Matthew wakes
up in a dark corner of the ruins.
Outside the ruins, Michelle is attacked by a wandering
biker gang that thought she was easy pickings for their entertainment. Slade is
overpowered and knocked out. While the gang is attempting to gang rape Michelle
who is a fair hellcat in her defense, Matthew stumbles out of the ruins into a
meeting with a bunch that looks like most of his adversaries from his own time.
He takes them all on and wins. One of them has his back cracked over Mathew’s
knee in the relatively short fight. Matthew is mortally wounded, but ne of the
opponents that he takes down is stabbed with the spearhead and he disappears
like Christopher Lee’s Dracula in an old Hammer film. It establishes the deadly
force of the religious artefact to evil doers as had the final action sequence
of Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) established the deadly power of the Ark against evil doers.
This is all part of the sub-genre expectations.
As they race towards the city, Matthew tells them his
story, that the spear must be rejoined with the shaft to avert the holocaust to
come. He warns them to beware though for evil forces will be already seeking
them out. He doesn’t make it, and Slade believe he was crazy as apparently did
as well. But not Michelle: she researches ‘The Spear of Destiny" and she
believes Matthew’s dying words.
A hulking, Aryan looking, almost Albino looking, giant of
a man in a high end white suit shows up at her restaurant accompanied by his
goons. They are looking for the spear head, and I can only guess that the
organization they are members of has access to police arrest reports on short
notice, because that is the only way they could have known. This won’t be the
first time they are pursued by a party with no explanation as to how they were
found. It could subtly suggest they have a supernatural source of information,
or perhaps it is merely an explanation nobody thought was needed clarified in
order to get to the next scene.
After a chance escape they flee to a nearby university to
see a Professor Hightower, as that was a name mentioned by Matthew. They find
he is not there and his colleague who is there, Fielding, wanted them to trust
him and leave the spear with him because Hightower was somewhere in Asia, possibly Hong Kong. They leave determined to speak
only with Hightower about the artefact. And when they are fired upon in a car
chase on the road out, Slade reluctantly agrees to go to Hong
Kong with Michele.
At the airport they are met by Slade’s old friend Liu
(conveniently, plot-wise) who is played by Bruce Le. The credit sequence
however, lists Bruce Li. They are two different names/actors, although both of
them did have careers built on marketed likenesses to the great Bruce Lee after
his passing. I am sure this one is Bruce Le. I have seen his Shaolin Fists Of
Fury (1987) many, many times: it is Le at his best and most deserving of genre
fan respect.
Liu tells Slade and Michele that the last known location
he was able to find on Hightower was "The Forbidden Pagoda Of The Silver
Fox" and that he and Slade could check it out. He warns Slade that it is
said The Silver Fox guards the pagoda with his life.
Slade and Liu find no obvious clues at the pagoda when
they are confronted by The Silver Fox himself. Martial arts fans will recognize
that The Silver Fox is played by Hwang Jang Lee, who had played the character
in a number of classic and not-so classic martial arts films. Slade is not
interested in leaving and it may be unintended, but seeing Robert Patrick
standing up to Hwang Jang Lee and being quickly trounced is a riot. Clearly his
character hadn’t seen Secret Rivals (1976) or Snake in The Eagle’s Shadow
(1978)!
Liu steps in to save his buddy, and the fight between
Bruce Le and Hwang Jang Lee, The Silver Fox is really a standout of the whole
film, absolutely the best one-on-one fight of any characters in Future Hunters.
They fight hand to hand, with Bruce Le showing good form,
and not so much the Bruce Lee mannerisms that characterized most of his work of
the ten years preceding. Some of Le’s posture between feigns and attacks seem
more like Alexander Lo Rei actually, than Bruce Lee. He gets a few basic kicks
in, and The Silver Fox doesn’t faze much. The Silver Fox puts some boot in
mostly as a series of feigns, before the slow motion starts in as he puts in a
one-two-three series of kicks to Le’s chest and shoulders. This is a
done-in-one shot too: no camera tricks of any kind. It deserved the slow motion
exposition.
When The Silver Fox crouches down, and grasps a staff that
had been hidden out of shot, he goes after Le again, but there is clearly an
edit when Le avoids the initial attack. He rolls away and then retrieves
nunchuku that he had hidden in the foreleg of his pants. The limitations of the
nunchaku as an offensive weapon against the reach of the staff, is briefly on
display, just as its effectiveness as a defensive weapon is clear. The only
reason Le is able to disarm Silver Fox of the staff is because the script said
so, as the fight choreography leading up to it did not allow for that to occur.
Le discards the staff and it is then his nunchaku versus
the unarmed Silver Fox. The Silver Fox is believably quick to disarm Le of the
nunchaku with a left then a right kick. In addition to the above average reach
of his legs in his kicking skills of renown, he shows that two kicks are better
than one for the need. Had he immediately kicked right only, in order to disarm
Le’s left hand of the nunchaku, its defensive strengths would have likely won
out. By kicking left and then right, it appears that he allowed his left kick
to be essentially a distracting graze which drew Le’s attention from the real
intent, right kick to target left hand.
Silver Fox’s last move is a leap that lets him kick Le in
the back of the neck and shoulders as he kicks his left right into Robert
Patrick as he picks himself up. We aren’t allowed to see a definite winner or
loser to the fight as an assassin’s bullet meant for Slade takes out The Silver
Fox in mid-form. Slade asks Liu where he learned to fight like that, and Liu
says, smiling, "My grandfather taught me. He was a Shaolin monk."
They flee back to the hotel barely in time to stop a
half-stripped Michele from torture by more villains (this time, Chinese) also
seeking the spear head. They roust them, but keep one to beat information out
of. They then learn that Hightower was last known to them to be in the Venus Valley,
a land where resides an Amazon tribe. This is apparently somewhere in Manila.
Their journey then leads Slade and Michele to cross paths
with a bunch of neo-Nazis. They of course have an ideology sprung form the
Third Reich, and equally have the same esoteric interests in supernatural artefacts,
especially ‘The Spear Of Destiny’.
With some of the fights that follow it looks like Patrick
as an actor, with his physical presence in the fight sequences is such that he
had the stuff that action heroes are made of, and should have done well in that
type of casting. It likely never came to pass because action cinema at the time
wasn’t looking for an All-American action hero type as much as it was
interested in bulked-up wrestler/ muscle builder type action film leads. He
comes off like a lithe and slimmer John Cena but with more convincing acting.
The Neo-Nazis are the main pursuers of the story, but
along the way they are coerced by some ‘little people’ living in the side of a
mountain to help them fight off raiding Mongol hordes (that look right out of
an historical epic). Their assistance gives them the next location on their
quest. Obviously, when they find the Amazon tribe it becomes Michele’s show.
The tribe would obviously see her as the only one they need deal with, if she
proves worthy.
Ursula Marquez plays the Amazon Queen, and Elizabeth
Oropesa plays her champion warrior. The Amazon Queen will provide them with
information they need, but only if Michele wins in a fight to the death with
her champion warrior, and in the event she loses Slade’s life is on the line.
The women fight on a log surrounded by a ring of fire, with crocodiles below.
They fight with primitive swords. There is some genuinely good fight
choreography along with a few "courtesy" shots during their fight.
There are a few ‘final reel’ surprises before their quest
is achieved and Michele gets to pose statuesque like the warrior-queen of the
Celts, Boudicca. This a great b-movie, an R-Rated 12 chapter serial condensed
into one film, with the non-stop action and often preposterous plot twists that
characterized those old serials. It has a lot of similar raw elements of Jimmy
Wang Yu’s Fantasy Mission Force (1982), yet it plays a bit more coherently: I
hesitate to say more believably!
J. Lee Thompson wrote the script from a story by producer
Anthony Maharaj. Thompson is old enough to remember the days of the matinee
chapter serials, and it is clear one or both of them intentionally structured
the story after their story conventions of impossible cliff-hanger captures and
escapes, and plot left turns all the way to end.
Thompson wrote the Charles Bronson film 10 to Midnight, in
addition to directing a whole slew of Bronson’s films -- St. Ives, The White
Buffalo, (the under-rated Casablanca homage) Cabo Blanco, 10 to Midnight, The
Evil That Men Do, Murphy’s Law, (the very uneven) Death Wish 4: The Crackdown,
Messenger of Death, and Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. In the 60s he directed
full fledged classics The Guns Of Navarone, Cape Fear,
and MacKenna’s Gold. In the 70s he directed the franchise sequels, Conquest of
The Planet of The Apes and Battle For The Planet of The Apes. In addition to
his solid work on the Bronson pictures though he took a few left turns in the
80s to make the awful camp King Solomon’s Mines, and the not much better Chuck
Norris film, Firewalker.
Robert Patrick is now most famous for his villainous role
in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and his fill-in seasons on the Chris
Carter series X-Files while the series’ original male lead David Duchovny was
absent. He also starred in Hong Kong 97 (1994). His most recent role of note
was on the CBS television series The Unit.
Linda Carol appeared in many low-budget films and
direct-to-video features, but she may be most widely recognized for her role as
Jenny opposite Sybil Danning, and the Plasmatics’ lead singer Wendy O. Williams
in Reform School Girls (1986).
Bruce Le was one of many actors/martial artists trotted
out to feed the kung fu film fan desire for Bruce Lee films that could never be
made after his passing. While many of the films were successful they were often
cheap cash-ins. By far his best film, and the one I feel most confident in
urging people to check out would be Shaolin Fists Of Fury aka Ninja Over The
Great Wall (1987).
Richard Norton has had bigger roles in many films over the
years. He played villains in the Jackie Chan films City Hunter (1993) and Mr.
Nice Guy (1997). He was also in such films as Force: Five (1981), starred in
Return of The Kickfighter (1987) with Bruce Le and director Anthony Maharaj and
starred opposite Cynthia Rothrock in the China O’Brien movies (1990+91), and in
her Rage And Honor movies (1992+93) as well. He started off small in big
pictures of the genre with minor roles in the Chuck Norris films The Octagon
(1980) and Forced Vengence (1982).
Hwang Jang Lee IS The Silver Fox.
The director, Cirio H. Santiago has a history in film
equally as long as Thompson’s. He did films with Roger Corman. He broke some
ground in the "Blaxplotation" era as well, for example directing the
urban-samurai/Nam film Fighting Mad (1978), and directing Playboy Playmate
Jeannie Bell’s starring turns in T.N.T. Jackson (1974) and in The Muthers
(1976); directing Mad Max-type films Stryker (1983), and Dune Warriors with
David Carradine (1991), Raiders Of The Sun also with Richard Norton (1992);
Viet Nam themed films like Killer Instinct also with Robert Patrick(1987), Kill
Zone with Carradine (1993); and martial arts films with Jerry Trimble, Live By
The Fist (1993) and One Man Army (1994).
If you've watched many new direct-to-video movies (or, as
the new term has it "D2DVD") in the past few years, you've noticed
just how many unimpressive movies there are cobbled together from old stock
footage, with minor "original" bits to tie it all together. (Such
movies show up with appalling regularity at Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension.)
How does that relate to today's movie under discussion,
dating as it does to 1985? Well, the good news is that as far as I can tell,
every inch of footage was shot original to this motion picture.
The script, though, is just as Frankensteined together as
anything currently besmirching the new-release wall.
I think I can even discern which borrowed elements were
used to make the initial pitch: "It's part Terminator, part Raiders of the
Lost Ark!" But that doesn't even begin to do justice to this hack job, which
also manages to incorporate The Maltese Falcon, Romancing the Stone, The Road
Warrior, any of several hundred interchangeable kung fu movies, every
"lost world of Amazons" movie ever made, and maybe even For Your
Height Only.
Oh, and it sucks, too.
As a voiceover narration helpfully informs us, we begin in
2025, almost forty years after the world falls down and goes boom. There's one
man, Matthew, who is trying to find the legendary Spear of Longinus, the fabled
implement which pierced Christ's side and thus gained phenomenal (though vague)
powers, one of which is to travel through time. Matthew is trying to go back
forty years and keep the holocaust from happening. Yes, all of this information
(and more!) is contained in the narration; why bother with that namby
"visual storytelling" when you can just unload efficient exposition?
And yup, there's Matthew (Richard Norton) himself, driving
a MadMaxMobile across an arid landscape, pursued by two more such contraptions.
As usual, gasoline doesn't seem to be in short supply; neither do the rounds
which Matthew's pursuers expend in automatic weapons fire. But Matthew outranks
them there -- they've got machine guns, but he's got a grenade launcher!
Unfortunately, Matthew is himself outgunned by the warlord
Zaar (David Light), who has a number of tanks at his disposal. Matthew is
captured and dragged to a bad matte painting of a fortress, escapes, runs next
door to the mission-style church (which everyone calls "the temple")
and, lo and behold, this is where Tsar is keeping the spear! How convenient!
I should note that at least someone did some research. I
read a book a few years back that purportedly told the true story of the spear
of Longinus (though, naturally, it was also vague on what the spear could
actually do apart from poking crucified messiahs), and the prop they use here
does look like the picture in the book. Well, except for the animated-in glow
that pulses through it when Matthew picks it up. I'm hoping that really
mystically-charged artifacts have better special effects. Oh, and although
everyone calls it the "spear," it's actually just the spearhead --
it's a lot easier to run around with a desperately-sought artifact when it
isn't seven feet long.
Anyway. Tsar orders his tanks to fire on the temple rather
than let Matthew get it. Everything explodes...
...And we roll opening credits and cut to 1986. The back
of the video says 1989, but that's easy enough to explain -- the movie was made
in 1985, but couldn't find anyone desperate/stupid enough to distribute it for
four more years.
So. 1986, same church out in the desert, though it doesn't
look much better for wear than it does in forty years. In fact, the entire
landscape is just as arid and deserted as it is in the future. Are you sure
there was a nuclear apocalypse? (The matte painting is notably absent, though.)
A young couple is exploring the abandoned church. Actually, only Michelle
(Linda Carol) is exploring it, because she wants to be an anthropologist in
addition to a cafe owner because her dad died and all he left her was a bunch
of money. Her boyfriend Slade (Robert Patrick) is just hanging around, waiting
for her to be done; in addition, he helpfully gives us the chunk of Michelle's
backstory above through some exceptionally clumsy dialogue. (Well, exceptional
compared to most movies, not to what follows in this one.)
As they get ready to leave, a small biker gang (ganglet?)
rides up and proceeds to molest them, because there's nothing bikers like
better than checking in on small abandoned churches in the desert to see if
there's anyone there to rape. They kick the tar out of Slade, and are about
ready to take turns with Michelle, when Matthew wakes up inside the church with
the spear in his hand -- he's been blown backward in time! He comes out of the
church and makes short work of the bikers (one of them melts into ash when
stabbed with the spearhead), but takes a bullet in a vital organ.
Michelle and Slade try to get him to a hospital, but he
gives them the spear and a short, nonsensical description of it and its powers
before he expires in their backseat. His last words are to find someone named "Hightower"
who knows all about the spear's power and destiny. (That, and the fact that he
didn't know what they meant when they said they were "outside L.A." I can
understand his confusion -- I mean, is Los Angeles
supposed to look so much like the Philippines?)
Slade's one of those "don't get involved"
people, and wants Michelle to forget all about it after they ditch the corpse
with the police, but he didn't see someone melt to ash like she did. Plus, I
guess he doesn't have the soul of a wanna-be great anthropologist. No, he's
just a cropduster mechanic. (Gee, wonder if that will come in handy later.) And
she's not the only one who thinks the spear might be important; while they're
cleaning up the cafe, a trio of standard-issue heavies come in, demand the
spearhead, and demonstrate that they really don't know how to wreck a
restaurant very well. They then leave because... um... customers are coming.
(Curses! In a cafe, of all places! Foiled again!)
Michelle finds Professor Hightower's work in the library;
he's one of the foremost experts on the spear of Longinus, and wouldn't you
know it, he's a member of the faculty right here at the local university. (In, L.A., I mean. Where this
is taking place. Not in the Philippines,
where of course this is not taking place.) Unfortunately, Hightower has
disappeared somewhere around Hong Kong on one
of his expeditions, according to Professor Fielding (Ed Crick), who offers to
take the spear off her hands. When she refuses, he then offers to put Hightower
in touch with her as soon as he resurfaces, and she gives him her address.
(Let's see -- you want the professor to contact you, and you know that bad guys
are trying to take the spear by force; wouldn't leaving your phone number be
more appropriate? On the other hand, the bad guys seemed to intuit who she was
and where she ran her cafe,so...)
Well, more bad guys pursue them down a lonely street (in L.A., dammit, not the Philippines, despite the jungle
encroaching on the shoulder of the road!), and only her defensive driving
skills keep them alive. She and Slade decide that the most sensible thing to do
would be to fly to Hong Kong and try to find
Hightower. After all, there are only six million people in the city, all
speaking a language they don't know; how hard could it be?
Plus, they do have an advantage: Slade has a friend in Hong Kong. What's more, he drives a taxi (and who better
to track someone down than a taxi driver?). And what's even more, he's Bruce
Li! That's quite the ace in the hole, especially when (after driving around
pointing at the tall buildings -- these three minutes brought to you by the Hong
Kong Tourism Commission) Slade and Li take a trip to the Forbidden Pagoda of
the Silver Fox, where Hightower was rumored to have been. Well, they don't find
Hightower, but they do find an old kung fu master who cops a "Which part
of 'forbidden' don't you understand?" attitude and wipes the floor with
Slade.
But -- did I mention? Slade's friend is Bruce Li! Which
means that for the next ten minutes, we're going to forget about the plot and
watch Li and the kung fu master whup on each other. Hey, we've even got those
exaggerated hand-to-hand sound effects that were notably absent when the master
beat up Slade.
It seems like the bout will go on forever -- it certainly
tries to -- but it's mercifully cut short when a mysterious sniper shoots the
kung fu master, although he apparently meant to plug Slade. Slade and Li make a
half-hearted effort to find the sniper, but get sidetracked into looking around
the pagoda for signs of Hightower. But after ten seconds of diligent searching
and finding no obvious graffiti on the walls that says "Hightower was here
but went thataway," they shrug their shoulders and trot on their merry
way. (They also find no one else taking care of the pagoda. I guess one kung fu
master per historic landmark is sufficient.)
They get back to the hotel just in time to catch Michelle
once more entertaining thugs (but this time, it's Asian thugs) who're on the
trail of the spear. More fighting ensues (man, they oughtta bottle that Bruce
Li and sell him in corner stores), and the thug leader spills the beans about
Hightower being somewhere in -- the Philippines! Boy, I thought we'd
never get there! And extra weirdness: Hightower is supposed to be looking for
the fabled Venus Valley, an Amazon-inhabited lost world somewhere in southeast
Asia where the shaft of the spear is hidden; the spear and the shaft have to be
brought together to have any power (excepting, one assumes, that whole
"travelling through time" thing, and that "turning the impaled
to ash" thing).
So. Over to exotic Manila
we go, where Slade and Michelle ooh and ah some more at the buildings (these
three minutes brought to you by the Philippine Tourism Commission). But there's
a mysterious someone who's waiting for them -- an evil, nefarious white supremacist
who wants the spear to rid the world of all the inferior races, even if it
takes a nuclear cleansing! We don't see his face right off, but that's okay;
he's got the most overacting hands I've ever seen, which makes up for it. And
really -- given that there are absolutely NO other characters it could possible
be (unless you think it's Bruce Li), I'll just clue you in: It's Professor
Fielding, the guy from the university who offered to relieve Michelle of the
spear. And let's just think about this: a), how can someone on an academic's
salary afford a foreign villa, plus all the equipment for his neo-Nazi army?
and b) would a white supremacist be really happy with his secret hideout in the
Philippines,
surrounded by, you know, all those brown people (quite a few of whom are among
his footsoldiers)?
Fielding's goons try to nab Slade and Michelle at the
hotel; many luggage carts and potted plants figure in the ensuing chase, as you
can well imagine. The goons grab Michelle, and Slade follows in a convenient
vehicle. Check this: Apparently the international date line runs right through
the Philippines,
because mid-pursuit it changes from the pitch-black night to the middle of the
day. Slade, ex-Marine that he is, fights his way through Nazi fodder to the
inner room where Fielding and his chief goon loom over Michelle and the
much-sought Professor Hightower (Paul Holmes), the latter manacled to the wall.
Fielding triumphantly pulls the spear from Michelle's shoulder bag, and... they
leave. Kill the captives here and now? Nah -- not when he can fire rockets at
his own villa from a helicopter to kill them, right? But Slade and Michelle had
enough time to escape the villa first (Hightower, not so much), and gee,
wouldn't you know it, there's a second chopper right there, ready to go. Heck,
an extra copy of Fielding's flight plans to the Venus Valley
are sitting right there on the seat.
You know, it's one thing for a movie not even to try. It's
another when it proudly displays the fact, practically walking up to you,
slapping you in the face, and proclaiming, "We're not even trying!"
But this chase doesn't get very far, because Fielding has
a remote explosive wired to his second chopper. But he waits long enough before
pushing the button that Slade and Michelle can jump to safety in the water. And
it's only a minor delay; on land, Slade immediately finds a small aircraft
hangar and steals a single-prop plane. And of course, he's got the flight plan
memorized, so off they go after Fielding again. But now there's no place to
land near the right coordinates, and they're almost out of fuel, so they have
to bail out again (using a parachute this time) while the plane crashes.
We'll cut short their bickering "banter" in the
jungle; suffice it to say that, for the first time since I originally saw
Romancing the Stone, I really wished I were watching it again instead. But
that's all cut short when they stumble, yes, right into the Nazi camp and into
Fielding's clutches. Michelle's again almost about to be given the "rough
love" treatment by one of the Nazis (boy, does she ever attract Mr. Wrong)
when the camp is attacked...
Even just reliving the scene as I write about it makes me
want to poke at my cerebral cortex with a straight pin until I skewer that
specific memory. Why are there Mongols on horseback, with swords and primitive
firearms, inhabiting a Philippine jungle? Not only is there no answer, no one
even acts like it's a question.
Cue really boring battle between Nazis and Mongols as a
lot of extras we've never seen before get killed. Ten minutes later, when the
smoke clears, Slade and Michelle have once again escaped into the jungle with
the spear. And there, they meet...
Okay, let me preface this. I'm thinking that the original
intention was to get this movie into drive-ins, and the assumption was that by
this time, just about everyone there would be making out and paying no
attention to the screen. (After all, who wouldn't be turned on by all the
"jungle bickering" bits? Not to mention all of the "Michelle
almost gets gangraped yet again" scenes.) And you know, if I were at the
drive-in for this flick, I'd neck with just about anything to distract me from
the feature. But you really have to feel bad for anyone who was getting
hot'n'heavy, happened to glance up at the screen, and saw...
... midget Filipino cavepeople.
Seriously. It's like they hired every midget, dwarf, and
other variety of little person in the Philippines (plus a few children
thrown in to fill out their numbers) to wrap themselves in burlap and meet
Slade and Michelle in the jungle. They're a friendly sort, but they've been
having awful trouble with the Mongols, so they make a deal with Slade and
Michelle: You help us defeat the Mongols, we'll show you where the Venus Valley
is. (You know, where the spear's shaft is. That goes with the head of the spear
of Longinus. That Matthew brought back from the future. I thought you'd
appreciate the recap, since we've moved so far away from the initial premise
that the opening scenes must seem like a distant memory.)
And now? Now a full fifteen-minute digression as Slade,
Michelle, and the Mighty Munchkins sneak up on the Mongol camp and attack. Here
are some things you may not know about Mongols: Their camps are liberally
decorated with oil drums. And they buy modern chemicals in plastic containers
to mix their own gunpowder for their primitive firearms. Oh, and despite their
reputation as ruthless warriors, they can be easily taken on their hometurf by
a dozen midgets and two whiny Americans.
Fifteen irreplaceable minutes of my life later, the
Mongols are wiped out, and the cave-dwarfs cheerfully point the way to the Venus Valley.
Of course, before they get that far... you guessed it. Right into the hands of
the Nazis again. By this time, I was about ready to slip Fielding a Jackson to just kill them
and be done with it, but no; before he can do anything decisive -- Amazon
attack! (Filipino Amazon attack.) They kill a bunch of Nazis and take Slade and
Michelle prisoner.
And when Michelle tells what they're looking for, the Head
Amazon declares that the only way to earn the right to go up to the cave at the
end of the valley is single combat. Not Slade; Michelle. Boy, that'd be a real
nailbiter if we cared. As it is, despite the fact that the awkward Michelle is
facing the Amazons' undefeated champion, it takes little time for her to knock
her opponent into the crocodile pit and earn their passage.
And in the cave, they find... well, a stick. (What were
you expecting?) Oh, and Fielding, showing up for his last-ditch attempt to get
the whole spear-and-accessory set for himself. Slade and Fielding fight;
Fielding gets killed with the spearhead. (Oh, irony... or something.)
Naturally, the cave decides to collapse into huge styrofoam boulders, but Slade
and Michelle are dug out by... the cavemidgets. ("Hey, we've paid for the
whole troupe through Thursday -- maybe we should use them again!")
Michelle emerges into the sunlight, fits the spearhead to
the shaft, holds it aloft, and... The end.
That's it? The spear doesn't DO anything?
Nope. Roll credits.
This pitiful excuse for a motion picture comes to us
courtesy of Cirio H. Santiago, notorious hack director from the Corman stable
who has quite possibly directed more forgettable post-apocalyptic movies than
anyone before or since (with the possible exception of Albert Pyun). But even
having seen several of Santiago's
other movies, I still couldn't anticipate that he could put his hand to such an
ill-conceived -- or unconceived -- project. It's a movie that surprises and
horrifies you by hitting what you thought was bottom pretty early, then digging
several sub-basements below that.
More horrifying is that the screenplay is by J.L. (aka
"J. Lee") Thompson, director of the last two Planet of the Apes
movies. Thank whatever you hold holy that, of all the filched crap that shows
up in here, he didn't throw in any talking chimps.
And in retrospect, it's easy to see the best part of the
movie: Richard Norton as Mad Max ripoff Matthew, waaaaay back there at the
beginning. Sure, he's no master thespian, but his fight scenes were energetic
and well-paced, looking natural and unchoreographed. I could have watched
ninety minutes of meaningless post-apocalyptic combat of that caliber pretty
easily, relatively speaking...
On the other hand, if Matthew hadn't brought the spear
back in time, there's no reason to suppose that a world-cleansing freak like
Fielding would have ever had a chance to get ahold of it... so the only thing
making the apocalypse possible is the effort of the man trying to keep the
apocalypse from happening.
Well, whaddaya know. This whole movie is even more useless
and pointless than previously supposed.
Joe Bob Briggs' intro from his website:
I'm Joe Bob Briggs, and tonight on
"MonsterVision" we've got one of the finest futuristic post-holocaust
kung-fu road movies with sledgehammer-carrying midgets ever filmed in the Philippines. Of
course, who else could I be talking about than the legendary Cirio Santiago,
director of some 500 Filipino movies, and the total combined budget of those
films has STILL not topped the hundred-dollar mark. One of the wonders of
modern civilization.
But before we get to that, a lot of you may have noticed
that young children frequently write in to "MonsterVision," even
though this show comes on WAY past their bedtimes, and sometimes they're
seeking advice from "Uncle Joe Bob." Since all of these children are
criminals and liars who shouldn't be watching this show anyway, I felt like
maybe I should do my part to influence their delicate young minds. Hence, a few
tips from my own childhood.
First of all, your SISTER is always the enemy, guys. Never
forget this. Your sister was placed in your family by God in order to be
terrorized by you. Lemme give you an example. I used to say the following words
to my own sister: "In exactly one minute, I'm going to copy everything you
say." She would start SCREAMING at me. "No, you're NOT." I would
just placidly look up at the second hand on the clock, inexorably sweeping
closer and closer to the dreaded twelve.
Now. You're thinking, "So what? Unoriginal. Everyone
has done the old 'I'm gonna copy you' torture." But here's the beauty of
it. The BEST part is the minute BEFORE you start copying her. It's the WAITING
A MINUTE to copy her that makes it so brutally perfect. She'll talk the whole
minute. "I'm not gonna say anything." "If you copy me, I'll copy
you." Just chuckle when she says this. Even if she goes to the ultimate
threat: "I'll tell Mama!" You might want to respond to this one:
"You'll tell Mama what? That I was exercising my Constitutional rights of
free speech to copy you?"
Actually, my own sister tried to follow through on that
threat. Most of my terror was carried out while I was the official family
babysitter. So she would write notes to my mom. First I would say, "Well,
your bedtime is before she gets home, so I'll just find the note and tear it
up." This would require her to clutch it in her fist while falling asleep,
or hide it under her pillow. But here's the best part. When she finally got the
note to my mother, usually the next day, it would say something like "Joe
Bob copied me." And you know what Moms do when they see a note like that?
They say "Isn't that cute? We should save that note for our
scrapbook."
Okay, more tips in the future as we expand our childhood
audience of guys evading their bedtimes. But right now it's time for Robert
Patrick, star of "Terminator 2," and his foxy girlfriend to run
through the Filipino jungle fighting Nazis, Amazon warrior tribes, kung fu
masters, white flesh-eating crocodiles, while searching for the sacred crystal
Spear of Destiny. I'll do those drive-in totals at the first break. Roll film.
[fading] Also starring Bruce Li! Remember when Bruce Lee
died, the Hong Kong filmmakers came up with
all these other martial artists named Bruce. Bruce Lo, Bruce Lay, Bruce Law.
Well, Bruce Li was one of the best. He's got a battle in here with Wang Chang
Lee that's one of the funniest dang kung fu fight scenes I've ever witnessed.
And I'm the guy who DISCOVERED "Mad Monkey Kung Fu" and introduced it
to the west. Little known fact.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"FUTURE HUNTERS" Commercial Break #1
Nothing like the old crystal Spear of Longinus to break up
a sexual assault by a biker gang that preys on female anthropologists. See,
they trick you. You THINK it's gonna be a post-holocaust "Mad Max"
sorta deal, then they switch to a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" Spear of
Longinus subplot, then they've got sweaty evil biker gangs screwing up the
time-travel plot. I admit, I WAS a little confused there for a minute -- when
we flashed back from 2025 to 1986, I thought maybe we were seeing Matthew when
he was younger. But now I see they're two different guys. The one from 2025 is
the great B-movie actor Richard Norton -- "Karate Cops,"
"Ironheart," "Rage and Honor," one AND two, of course. And
the younger guy is Robert Patrick, otherwise known as the T-1000 from
"Terminator 2," as I mentioned earlier. We'll talk more about him
later--for now let's do those drive-in totals I promised. We have: Seventy dead
bodies. Three motor vehicle chases, with five crash-and-burns. Hand-biting.
Stabbing. Exploding helicopter. Exploding airplane. Exploding tent. Exploding
Nazi. Spear to the back. Multiple spears to the chest. Candelabra to the head.
One swordfight. Multiple Kung Fu. Suitcase Fu. Ex-Marine Fu. Midget Fu. Babes
in fur bikinis, rassling over an alligator pit. Three and a half stars. Let us
continue.
[fading] That Spear of Longinus is in the book "Holy
Blood, Holy Grail," by the way. A lot of guys ARE searching for it, and
the BBC guys think they know where it is. The Masons have it or something.
Longinus was the guy who pierced the side of Jesus, and the wooden spear he
used to do that is called the Spear of Longinus, or the Spear of Destiny. It's
the second most holy object sought by holy-object-seekers. After the holy grail
itself. Did you follow that? The crystal thing, though. Cirio Santiago made
that up, I think. I don't think the Roman soldiers had crystal spears. So to
speak. I got your Spear of Destiny right HERE, man.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"FUTURE HUNTERS" Commercial Break #2
Whew! Good thing Michelle is wearing that bra and panties
when she delivers those lines. That gal is a magnet for attempted sexual
assaults, though, isn't she? We're only a half hour into this thing and she's
already been attacked twice. Okay, meeting Robert Patrick and Linda Carol --
that's the actress's name -- wow! is that a producer's girlfriend name or WHAT?
-- "Starring Linda Carol as the girl who couldn't say no" -- meeting
Robert and Linda at the Hong Kong airport is
Bruce Li. The great Bruce Li, star of many a Hong Kong
kung fu picture. Hey, you know what just occurred to me about the "Raiders
of the Lost Ark" ripoff aspect of this picture? They didn't wanna hire TWO
actors in the Philippines,
so Linda Carol is both the archeologist and the cafe owner--she plays the
Harrison Ford part AND the Karen Allen part. And Robert Patrick is just the
wimp along for the ride. Which we're gonna prove in this next section. Bruce Li
and Wang Chang Lee engage in one of THE funniest, most imaginatively
choreographed kung fu matches ever filmed -- it's really the highlight of this
movie -- and Bobby just kinda stands around going "Uh, need any
help?"
[fading] Robert Patrick has done a LOT of B movie stuff.
Psycho biker in "Warlords from Hell." Psycho cowboy in
"Equalizer 2000." Psycho terrorist in "Die Hard 2." Why
does he always need "psycho" in front of his name? Wasn't he also in
that Teri Hatcher movie that set all the records for internet downloads? What
was that thing called? Robert Patrick, right? The man is everywhere.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"FUTURE HUNTERS" Commercial Break #3
I call that the "Land Shark" scene.
"Telegram." Michelle has her sexy bathrobe on. SHOULD she answer?
"Telegram." She won't open the door. Then they give her the line she
just can't argue with. "You've got to sign for it." So she opens the
door and sets off on yet ANOTHER attempted sexual assault. Okay, we're goin to Manila. Did I forget to
mention that this flick was directed by Cirio Santiago? One THE most famous
Filipino directors around. His father, Ciriaco Santiago, started Premiere
Productions in Manila, which is still one of the
biggest studios in the Philippines.
Cirio runs it now. Cirio was one of the first guys to cast blacks as action
heroes, so you could call him a pioneer of the Blaxploitation genre. Remember
"T.N.T. Jackson" from 1975? That was Cirio Santiago. Then in the
eighties he did a bunch of low-budget Vietnam war movies like
"Firehawk." Made over twenty flicks with Roger Corman, although
"Future Hunters" isn't one of em. In fact, a lot of pretty big
directors started out working with Cirio Santiago -- he and Jonathan Demme
co-produced a flick called "Hot Box" -- I'm sure you guys have all
seen that. Then Demme went on to do "Silence of the Lambs." Carl
Franklin, the guy who did "Devil in a Blue Dress" and "One False
Move," he directed "Eye of the Eagle 2" for Cirio. I'll give you
more of an overview of the Filipino cinema later. For now, let's do the ads and
get back to the flick.
[fading] We all have our favorite Cirio Santiago film.
"The Vampire Hookers," of course, is a classic. You might know it as
"Ladies of the Night." "Nam Angels" from 1988.
"She-Devils in Chains." It's no wonder the Filipino president made
Cirio president of the Philippines Film Development Funds in 95. You guys know
how much "The Vampire Hookers" made, compared to what it cost? Well .
. . a lot, I'm sure. I should look that up sometime. Remember the poster for
"Vampire Hookers"? "They tease, they squeeze, they're ready to
please."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"FUTURE HUNTERS" Commercial Break #4
Don't you love it when the motor vehicle chase starts in
the nighttime but ends up in broad daylight. That was a LONG mother of a chase,
wasn't it? And you know that wherever you see a fruit stand in a chase scene,
they're gonna bust over the fruit stand, right? But a fruit stand in the middle
of the night? Do they HAVE that in the Philippines? Fresh prunes at 2
a.m.? Then we've got the machinegun fire in the lobby of the Manila Hilton, the
old "let's leave our flight plan in the OTHER helicopter and maybe they'll
try to fly the other helicopter and then we can blow it up by remote
control" trick, and about five minutes back, was I hearing right? Did the
Nazi professor stop the big guy from shooting the heroes by saying, "No,
no! That would spoil our fun!"? I must not of heard that right.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"FUTURE HUNTERS" Commercial Break #5
Uh, did some Nazi soldiers just fight a battle with some
samurai on horseback, preceded by an airplane crash and followed by a gunbattle
on a rope bridge? Is that what I just watched? I thought so. And I can't
believe they killed off Bauer, the Nazi bodyguard in the knee socks. He had a
good look going. He was being true to his German roots. You guys ever been to Germany? Socks
and sandals -- big look over there. Anyway, the bad guys had a great offensive
strategy there on the footbridge, didn't they? "Hans, run out there and
kill that couple on the bridge. No, no, don't shoot them -- HIT them with your
gun. I don't CARE if they have ouzis! Just go! Okay, Hans is dead. Wolfgang! Go
hit those people with your gun!" All right, we still got midgets and
amazons comin up, so let's get back to the flick, after the ads.
[fading] Who were those guys on horseback, by the way? I
have no idea. We just had a major battle, and I don't even know who those guys
were. You know who they probly are? They represent nature, going against the
evil forces of man gone bad. The horse being the classic image of rural life.
That was the Ingmar Bergman part of the flick. I think Ingmar did the second
unit work.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"FUTURE HUNTERS" Commercial Break #6
That Michelle, she's always falling out of her dress,
isn't she? What a goofball. Is she still wearing her high heels in the jungle?
I thought so. And that was the famous sledgehammer-wielding tribe of midgets
against the Mongol horde saltpeter and nitrates lab sequence, complete with
dynamite-stick hurling, chest-spearing, and, of course, plenty of crossbow
action. Actually my favorite bit of violence was not any of that stuff. It was
when the four midgets just jump on the guy and stomp him to death. All of which
could only exist in the Filipino cinema! They shot part of this flick in
Trinidad, and part of it right here in L.A., but
a lot of it's shot in and around Manila.
Filipinos love movies, and they make about 150 of their own every year, so they
can be full of the stuff they like best: sex and violence, melodrama, toilet
humor, fantasy, horror, and sex and violence. There are a handful of early guys
who were serious filmmakers, like Lamberto Avellana, Manong Gerry de Leon,
Manuel Conde, and Cirio Santiago himself, who used to do the occasional art
film, but lately they haven't been too proud of their output. I'm not making a
judgment, I say this because a little while ago, the Filipino government itself
created a couple of organizations to improve things, like the Cultural Center
of the Philippines.
The trouble was, the Filipino audience LIKED the stuff that was being made. So
you know what the government decided to do? Affect the demand -- CHANGE THE
AUDIENCE. They started doing these traveling workshops in the provinces on how
to watch films. They have marathon screenings of classic films:
"Rashoman," "A Clockwork Orange," "The Bicycle
Thief," -- 34 flicks in eight days -- with discussions afterwards. These
people didn't need to WATCH "A Clockwork Orange" -- they were living
it. Anyhow, these organizations are trying to teach the audience how to
"read" films, that in order to appreciate Filipino movies, you have
to watch out for the film's cultural subtext, blah blah blah. I'll teach you
how to "read" a Filipino movie. You just go, "Hey! Two-hundred
midgets with crossbows! Cool!" All right, best part, coming up after the
commercials.
[fading] I have no idea why the midgets needed Robert
Patrick and Linda Carol's help. They seemed to do pretty well on their own. I
think they just wanted to keep em around in case Linda Carol's dress fell off
completely. A sundress and white pumps -- not very practical for an
anthropologist, is it? And after Labor Day, no less.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"FUTURE HUNTERS" Outro
And the Filipinos do know how to end a movie, don't they?
An earthquake, an avalanche, a speared Nazi and a midget rescue. And, of
course, you can't go wrong with catfighting Amazons in fur bikinis, dangling
over the flesh-eating crocodile pit. That was Ursula Marquez as the amazon
queen--"Future Hunters" was the first in a series of one movies for
Ursula. A woman with two amazing talents, matched only by the two talents of
Elizabeth Oropesa as the huntress. That alligator had one sumptuous snack.
Okay, I wanna let you know that next week we have an
encore-performance of the classic "Planet of the Apes." Charlton
Heston bares his bewtocks and kisses a monkey, not necessarily in that order,
in the science fiction standard. If you missed it last time we showed it, do
NOT repeat that mistake.
That's it for me, Joe Bob Briggs, reminding you that the
light at the end of the tunnel just may be a muzzle flash.
You guys hear the one about the team of archaeologists who
are excavating in Israel
when they come upon a cave? Written on the wall of the cave are symbols of a
woman, a donkey, a shovel, a fish, and a Star of David. The writings are
determined to be at least three thousand years old. The piece of stone is
removed, brought to the museum, and archaeologists from around the world come
to study the ancient symbols. They hold a huge meeting after months of
conferences to discuss the meaning of the markings. The President of the
society points at the first drawing and says: "This looks like a woman. We
can judge that this race was family-oriented and held women in high esteem. You
can also tell they were intelligent, as the next symbol resembles a donkey, so,
they were smart enough to have animals help them till the soil. The next
drawing looks like a shovel of some sort, which means they even had tools to
help them. Even further proof of their high intelligence is the fish, which
means that if a famine had hit the earth, and the food didn't grow, they would
take to the sea for food. The last symbol appears to be the Star of David which
means they were evidently Hebrews." The audience applauds. But a little
old man stands up in the back of the room and says, "Idiots! Hebrew is
read from right to left. It says: 'Holy Mackerel, Dig The Ass On That
Woman!'"
Joe Bob Briggs, reminding you that the drive-in will never
die.
[fading] A priest and a rabbi are flying in a plane. After
a while the priest turns to the rabbi and asks, "Is it still a requirement
of your faith that you not eat pork?" Rabbi says, "Yes, that is still
one of our beliefs." The priest then asks, "Have you ever eaten
pork?" Rabbi says, "Yes, on one occasion I did succumb to
temptations, and tasted pork." The priest nods in an understanding way and
goes on reading. A few minutes later, the rabbi asks the priest, "Is it
still a requirement of your church that you remain celibate?" Priest says,
"Oh, yes celibacy is a requirement." Rabbi asks him, "Have you
ever fallen to the temptations of the flesh?" Priest says, "Yes,
Rabbi, on one occasion, I broke with my faith." Rabbi nods in an
understanding way, then says, "A lot better than pork, isn't it?"
From all the movies I've seen that take place at least 20
years in the future, things are going to be pretty bleak for us, with the post-apocalyptic
world and all. We visit another one of
these era's in Cirio H. Santiago's 1986 film Future Hunters, where everything
is all Mad Max, and people chase each other around in cars looking to get a leg
up on the competition. In this case,
Matthew (Richard Norton) is being chased and in order to save the world, he has
to get his hands on the spear that pierced Jesus' chest, the spear of
destiny. He manages to grab it seconds
before he's about to be blown up, and his contact with the spearhead transports
him 39 years to the past - from 2025 all the way back to 1986, and in proximity
to our main subjects, Michelle and Slade (Robert Patrick). After Matthew is shot and on his way to
death's door, he fills in Michelle and Slade on what the spearhead is, and that
they need to contact a "Hightower" in order to learn how to save the
future... Wow... heavy, man.
Michelle is an anthropology student, and she runs a bar
near LA. She believes Matthew, even
though he sounds batshit crazy. Slade,
on the other hand, thinks that the guy was just a wackjob, and that they should
get rid of the spear as soon as possible.
After some thugs come looking for the spear they decide they should look
a little deeper into this Hightower fellow, and find out that he's a doctor
that's been doing a lot of research on the spearhead itself. While they can't find Dr. Hightower at the
local university, they do find an associate of his that can help bring the
spearhead to him in Hong Kong. Michelle and Slade decide to investigate Hong Kong themselves, and choose wisely, because soon a
car is following them to gain information about the spear. Hong Kong ends up being a gateway to an
unbelievable adventure including Nazi's, a tribe of Mongols, and an army of
little people, amongst other things, but will they ever find Hightower and find
out what the business of this spear is all about?
Sean: Nazi's, Mongols, Little People, and did I forget to
mention Amazons above? I must have
forgotten that, since there are so many directions this movie goes
towards. It seems like they give you
just enough information to follow along before they move towards something
else. Hell, sometimes they don't even
give you that much. I have to say
though, if I had to go through all of this crap fighting all these different
groups, I'd want to be with Robert Patrick's character. He plays Slade, the former marine who used to
be an airplane mechanic during his time.
Because he was a marine, I guess that means he knows how to beat ass
against Kung Fu masters (he's so good he gets to fight along side Bruce Lee
clone, Bruce Le) and sword fight with the best scimitar wielding Mongol
leaders. He's an expert pilot who can
fly any aircraft and tell it's top speed and max range just by sitting in it,
even though his only experience is as a mechanic. Did I mention that he's a marine? I'm telling you, I wouldn't go to war without
him!
Raz: Yeah, this movie is pretty crazy. Your brain will explode, because of all of
the crap this movie throws at you. I
caught my self wondering several times,
"Am I watching the same movie?
When did they throw in a kung fu flick?
Is that Bruce Lee fighting Pai Mei?" It seems like they tried to fit every action
move genre into this movie. It doesn't
seem like it has that much dialog ether.
In the beginning during the "Mad Max" future car chase, there
was a bunch of gun fire and explosions. During this whole sequence there is
probably two lines, after eight minutes. You definitely don't have to think
much while you're watching it, although you may think that you are watching
like, ten different movies.
Sean: This thing was full of bad edits and
inconsistencies. There's a car chase
(with required car driving into a fruit stand to avoid an accident), and at the
start of the car chase, it's night time.
After the chase goes on for about 3 or 4 minutes, the screen goes dark
for about 1/2 a second, and it's all the sudden day time. It's as if the whole preceding 3 or 4 minutes
was all inside of a tunnel, and you finally got out of it. In another scene, our main characters have to
jump out of a helicopter seconds before it explodes. They leap straight down into the water, the
helicopter explodes, and there's no wreckage... or at least it never falls out
of the sky. One of my favorites is
during a gunfight on a wooden bridge where one of the baddies gets a grenade
put down the back of his shirt. It takes
about a minute for the grenade to explode and when it does, one of the main bad
guys is holding the exploding dude. The
next scene that guy is shown running with the rest of his Nazi buddies,
although he never shoes up again. There
are several more of these, and I could probably fill another couple paragraphs
with them, but the film still manages to stay fun, and I had to just chalk
these up to the fun of the movie.
Raz: I love how they reuse movie props these days. The spear of destiny prop looked exactly like
the one they used in the Constantine
movie released in 2005. It's like they
started filming Constantine
in the same studio as Future Hunters and they were like "Hey! This spear head would be a great prop for the
spear of destiny we need." I guess
it is a spear head though. It's metal,
it has a point, it's triangular, so yeah I guess a lot of spear heads would look
the same. Another thing that is so great
about this movie is that they get these actors that look just like the actors
from the really popular movies they are pulling the genres out of. For example Mathew, looks kinda like Mel
Gibson and he tries really hard with his two lines to sound like him. Liu looks just like Bruce Lee. Well he is Bruce Le, the popular Bruce Lee
look alike.
Sean: The ending is totally weak. I was pretty disappointed after all this
adventure that it just cuts away so abruptly.
You would have thought there would have at least been a voice over or
some text on the screen or something.
It's not arty enough to just be able to end like that, I needed some
more cheese, man... All in all though, it's a good, fun action/adventure move in
the vein of "Romancing the Stone" and "Raiders of the Lost
Ark" (it even has the Nazi's!) If you can put up with all the
inconsistencies, poor edits and continuity problems it's totally worth the
time. I mean, where else are you going
to find an army of little people!? I
give Future Hunters 3 confusing plot holes out of 5.
Raz: I agree that the ending was fairly
disappointing. It's like they didn't
know how to end the movie so they were like "Eh... The movie is long enough, let's end it here". Overall
I liked this movie though. The movie
threw so much action at me that I never lost interest. The plot holes and editing problems were just
hilarious. I give Future Hunters 3
reused movie props out of 5.
My friend at Movies in the Attic suggested this one to me
after I'd reviewed a few other films from the late, great, Cirio H. Santiago.
The combination of Robert Patrick and Richard Norton sounded great. It took
some work to get it on VHS on Amazon, but I did, so here it is.
Future Hunters starts in the future, where Richard Norton
lives in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. He needs to get his hands on the
spear that pierced Jesus Christ so he can travel back in time, put it on a
special shaft, and prevent the nuclear war that started the apocalypse.
Unfortunately, when he makes it to the present day, he bumps into Robert
Patrick and his woman getting attacked by bikers, and in the process of
defending them, he's fatally wounded. Now it's up to Patrick and his woman to
join the spear with the shaft in order to save the world.
This is bad. Bad in a good way, maybe; but definitely bad.
First off, do not, under any circumstances, watch this alone. You need people
around you to make this one work. To give you an idea, moviewise, this is akin
to Alien From LA. Ever seen that one on MST3K? It's great with Mike and the
'Bots making fun of it, but if you were stuck with it by yourself, you'd be in
trouble. I'd love to see an MST3K version of this film too.
The biggest problem is the length. We pretty much see the
same things over and over: Patrick and his woman get close to something, then
the baddies show, and they have a close call, and then we repeat. There were
some great individual scenes, making it perfect for watching with friends,
because in the spaces of nothingness in between, you can talk about how you're
going to tell your staff you're hiking the Appalachian Trail, when, in reality,
you're planning to see you're mistress in Argentina.
This is the fourth Robert Patrick film we've covered here
at the DTVC. He was kind of weird here, because in the beginning, he couldn't
hold his own against three bikers, and then later, he announces "I was in
the Marines", and suddenly he's great at hand-to-hand combat. Still, the
novelty of the Liquid Metal Terminator never wears off, and it's still good
here. Again, another reason why this is more enjoyable among friends.
This has Bruce Le, not to be confused with Bruce Li, or
the real deal, Bruce Lee. He was great for the five minutes he was there. I was
expecting him to hang around and help Patrick for the rest of the movie, but
for some reason he didn't. It was like being invited to dinner, offered a
smidge of caviar, then told the rest of the meal will be tuna casserole. Eww.
Since Richard Norton was barely in it, I decided to devote
the final paragraph to Cirio H. Santiago. This fall, he will be the second
director, after Albert Pyun, to make the DTVC Hall of Fame. That makes sense,
because he's probably the second best DTV director of all time, after Pyun. He
unfortunately died last September from lung cancer. Looking him up on imdb, I
see that he not only did much for the DTV film industry, but he did even more
for the art of filmmaking in his native Philippines. He will be missed.
I really think this is a fun movie if watched in a group;
but alone you'll just be bored to tears. There isn't enough to grab onto for a
solo mish, and the good parts are even better when you have people there to
laugh at it and mock it along with you. Believe me, it's much better to get
through the down parts if you have someone there to talk about how you need
your parents to pay off the girl you were just having an affair with down in
Argentina.
Film starts as post apocalyptic movie. Year is 2025 and
world has been a wasteland for last 40 years. One man can save the world by
finding the spearhead that was used to kill the Christ and he must touch it to
go back in time. Yeah, that's right. He finds the spear and is transported back
in time to LA. Year is 1987.
Slade (Robert Patrick, Terminator 2) and Michelle (Linda
Carol) finds him wounded, man tells them that they have to return the spearhead
to it's original shaft. Man from the post apocalyptic world drops dead. Couple
start their journey to find the shaft. Bad guys are of course after the spear
so that they can unleash the evil powers and rule the world.
Wild mix of genres in this one. Post apocalyptic movie
turn into present day drama, then suddenly some kung fu is thrown in and rest
of movie is sort "Romancing the Stone" rip off. Movie also includes
tribe of Amazon women, rose sniffing bad guy (that was SO over the top that i
totally cracked up), lots of cardboard stones and all kinds of crazy shit.
Definitely not the best Santiago movie, but lots of fun. Just be
ready for some really over the top WTF moments.
I remember that Henry and I went to find a smoking site away
from the set and we went to this Banyan tree and as we moved to the side not
visible to the set, Henry said, “Holy Shit Pare, look at that!” and he was
pointing at a fresh pile a poop that was fucking huge! I would guess that the
diameter was at least 3″ and it must have been no less than 3 feet long kind of
coiled up. You wouldn’t think it was possible for a human to take a dump like
that, but there it was complete with a couple of pieces of tissue that were
used to wipe this super humans butt! It was times like this that I kick myself
for not bringing a camera with me to capture this oddity. Throughout the day
various people went over to that tree to look at that magnificent piece of shit
and speculation ran wild with, “Who did it!?!” A lot of people pegged Gloria
from wardrobe as the culprit, others claimed it could only have come from her
brother Lino who was gay, and made our coffee. Nobody ever claimed it, but, it
was talked about for years! It ell you, it was fucking scary!!!
I'm not going to pretend that this
film is nothing but a low-budget PLATOON (1986) rip-off, but it's still damn
entertaining. Director/producer Cirio H. Santiago, working with a script by
frequent Santiago
collaborators Joseph Zucchero and Nigel Hogge, has fashioned a fast-paced,
mindless actioner that's basically a non-stop series of action set-pieces
connected by the barest of plots. Brett Clark is stiff as a piece of one
inch-thick plywood and Robert Patrick, who would appear as the same character
in Santiago's next Nam film, BEHIND ENEMY LINES (1987), only this time as the
lead, mugs for the camera and screams out his lines. Luckily, we don't watch
these films for the acting talent and Santiago
doesn't disappoint when it comes to the carnage. People are shot in the head
(our trio's preferred method of disposing of the enemy), blown-up or riddled
with automatic gunfire and Santiago
also includes a shot of a man on fire, a recurring gag in nearly all his films.
I'm still trying to figure out why Ransom dresses like a Southern rebel from
the Civil War and why he was allowed to bring a Winchester
rifle and a Colt pistol to Vietnam,
but I suppose it's best not to dwell on such matters. Unfortunately, Cec
Verrell keeps her clothes on throughout, but there's a brief shot of a topless
prostitute during the bar fight. If you like war action films, EYE OF THE EAGLE
is a good way to spend 82 minutes. Two unrelated sequels followed, EYE OF THE
EAGLE II: INSIDE THE ENEMY (1988; directed
by Carl Franklin and produced by Santiago) and
EYE OF THE EAGLE 3 (1990; with Santiago
returning to the director's chair). Other Santiago Nam epics include THE
EXPENDABLES (1988), NAM ANGELS (1988), FIELD OF FIRE (1990), BEYOND THE CALL OF
DUTY (1992), KILL ZONE (1992) and FIREHAWK (1992). Also starring Nick
Nicholson, Henry Strzalkowski, Willie Williams, Mel Davidson, Jim Moss and
Jerry Hart. Originally issued on VHS by MGM/UA Home Video and later released on
DVD by Roger Corman's New Horizons Home Video as part of their AMERICAN VALOR
series. 
At the height of the Vietnam War a brutal attack on an
American base kills dozens of soldiers. In charge of an elite team known as
'Eagle', Sergeant Rich Stratton leads his men on a commando attack on a train
carrying a Viet Cong officer - they kill their target but are abandoned by
their pick-up and forced to trek back to base. Meanwhile a journalist Chris
Chandler manages to get close to an abandoned military base where she discovers
a 'lost command' of American soldiers who have absconded from their units and
hidden in the jungle, carrying out covert attacks on American troops and bases
for loot. Stratton and his Eagle team are sent to investigate...
The Vietnam war affected a whole generation of young
Americans and divided a nation over what many saw as a needless war. As a
result the conflict has been treated with earnest sincerity by most American
film makers, examining its brutality and suffering in films from the viewpoint
of the men on the ground in Platoon (1986) to the suffering of the neglected
veterans in Born on the Fourth of July (1989). However in the Phillipines
during the 1980s there was a boom in exploitation film making and a number of
enterprising producers saw the potential for using the country as a double for
Vietnam leading to a slew of action packed war movies throughout the decade.
Attracted by the incredibly cheap production costs of these films, American
exploitation producer Roger Corman provided funding and several American actors
for the first of what would become a trilogy of films.
Scripted by Joseph Zucchero (who had previously written
director Cirio H. Santiago's Rambo rip-off The Devastator (1985)), Eye of the
Eagle starts off with a bang, literally - the opening frame of the film shows a
soldier being shot in the head - and it never seems to let up on the action
with well over two-thirds of the film's runtime being dedicated to explosive
gunfighting and action scenes with the plot coming a distant second place. The
storyline that there is, is incredibly simple (with its absconding officer
theme it does seem to be a homeopathically distilled take on Apocalypse Now
(1979)), serving to get our characters into innumerable fights with minimal
exposition. Of course this does leave all sorts of important questions
unanswered, like the actual motives of the 'lost command' (they are making
money from their looting, but what they can do with this in the middle of a
jungle is never stated), however none of this seems to matter particularly as
the storyline speeds on to the next explosion - even what might have been a
token romantic sub-plot is bypassed (although this does deny us the chance for
a gratuitous sex scene). Obviously the pacing never gets time to slacken and
the film builds to an inevitable but suitably dramatic climax.
Although hardly likely to be authentic the production looks
as good as you could expect - the screen is continually filled with explosive
effects and enough gun wielding extras to give the combat scenes a large scale
feel, there is a good selection of American military hardware on show
(including the requesite UH-1 helicopters and M113 troop carriers) and the
Phillipine jungles do make a suitably convincing Vietnam (certainly much more
so than the American rural locations used in many US produced low budget
'namsploitation films). The commando unit conform to all of the usual genre
clichés with completely inplausible uniforms (including a noticable lack of any
supply packs, even when dropped far behind enemy lines) and a habit of
successfully wielding several guns at once. Probably the most inadvertantly
humourous scene is the attack on a train which is built up as a major operation
with commandos boarding at both ends, but turns out to be a tiny narrow gauge
steam train with four coaches bouncing along the tracks.
Director Cirio H. Santiago is never more than workmanlike
behind the camera, but adds enough variation to the combat scenes to keep the
film from feeling repetitive - only one of the battle scenes, an attack on a
village, becomes rather confusing with it being hard to tell just who is
fighting whom. Despite the endless gunshots and explosions, gory effects are
surprisingly understated - a few bloody head-shots are the most vivid effects
on display, while some bikini-clad dancers in a nightclub are the closest the
film comes to female skin, probably a reflection of the film's intended
American release market. The soundtrack is a very mixed bag - sometimes
fitting, often rather less so - one combat scene plays out to soft jazz and not
in an deliberately ironic way.
Though Santiago flirted with a Vietnam War film in his First
Blood rip-off Final Mission, Eye of the Eagle would mark his first full fledged
Vietnam War film which desperately tries to copy the macho hero successes of
Rambo: First Blood Part II and Missing in Action. Here we get a lame Rambo type
hero in the form of Brett Baxter Clark who seems a rather oddball with his
blond highlighted 80's hairdo despite the film taking place in 1970. He is in
charge of a military assassination group called "Eagle" (catchy code
name isn't it?). After a botched mission our group comes in contact with a
reporter who has proof of an existence of a rebel American military group made
up of MIAs. This rebel group just happens to be headed by the same asshole that
killed Brett's brother in cold blood! Brett and his trusty sidekick (Robert
Patrick, pre T-1000 role!) set out to shoot lots, and lots of bullets.
When it comes to no brain action, Eye of the Eagle could be
the dictionary definition. No thought goes into this plot what-so-ever and it
seems machine guns are fired through most of it's 90 minute run time.
Everything cliché in an war action film is here, including a typical bar fights
and double crosses. All aspects of this film are just downright poor, from its
writing, to its editing, to its acting. Hell even the sets are so damn cheap
that they almost fall down when Robert Patrick slams a door! You also got to
love that ultra lame model helicopter explosion at the end.
I enjoy no-brain 80's action as much as the next guy but
Santiago's action outings tend to be not only no-brain but also brain killing.
It has some amusing unintentional laughs but this comes nowhere near the
enjoyment factor of other cheesy Vietnam
flicks produced in Italy and
America.
The Last Hunter... now that's a likable B-grade
Vietnam war
flick. My advice is to check out the work of Margheriti instead. If for some
God forsaken reason you were floored by the awesomeness of Eye of the Eagle...
don't worry, it was followed by two sequels!
Posts
