That Lucky Touch

That Lucky Touch

United Kingdon - 1975

Director - Christopher Miles

Video Treasures, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 33 minutes

The Barbarian

El Barbaro (The Barbarian)
a.k.a. Conquest

Italy, 1982

Director - Lucio Fulci

Platino Video, 1995, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

Here's an interesting one as far as distribution goes. Video Treasures circulated this tape although under the above Platino Video name, ( think "Latino") which also bears Mexican Home Video label in the bottom right corner. Funny though, the last is written in English...
In any case, Conquest, or "The Barbarian" as it is titled here, was filmed in Mexico, presaging Deathstalker 3 by 5 years or so.

Firewalker

Firewalker

United States – 1986

Director – J. Lee Thompson

Video Treasures/Media Home Entertainment, 1987, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 46 minutes

If ever there was a cheap - and I do mean cheap - knockoff of the Indiana Jones franchise – and I assure you, there weren't ANY, not one - this would probably be, if not the best cheap knockoff, then maybe the worst good one. If there were such a thing as a Heroic Pantheon of Legendary Norris Films - and there isn't - Firewalker might just be one of the best. In fact, even as I shook my head at the simple, crude script, I was laughing right along with it, an intoxicated dopey grin spread over my face. The thing is, this movie really took me by surprise. That devious right-wing ginger ideologue pulled out a good performance on me. It's almost as if this is actually the role that he should have played all along, his perfect match.

I might also say the same of his buddy Louis Gossett Jr., who compliments Norris' reckless charming white-guy lead with a stellar performance as a skeptical, fast-talking black-dude accomplice. Once again, a Norris film that isn’t challenging any stereotypes, but it ‘works better’ (or is less offensive) than many iterations and is far less grating.

Together our color-coded-combo consistently screw up and botch their various treasure seeking adventures: Max (Norris) dutifully getting them deep in the shit, then barely pulling them out in the nick of time, making it seem completely accidental, while Leo (Gossett) curses and berates him with practiced consistency. As if on cue, (as if) the beautiful blonde Patricia shows up with vague clues promising a plethora of potential wealth at great risk of life. Consulting Tall Eagle, a cynical but campy Native American stereotype, they learn the legend of the Firewalker, for whatever it's worth and are off to Central America followed by an evil Apache shaman (Sonny Landham.)

 

Unsurprisingly, Central America is full of overeager loudmouthed revolutionaries with big bottles of tequila and a love for blonde gringo women. John Rhys-Davies pops in for a quick (Norris-requisite) 'Nam reminisce, and an almost uncomfortable philosophical discussion. Don’t get too carried away now, Firewalker gingerly walks the triple line between campy, dramatic, and crappy, without totally botching any of them, but narrative depth is not on the menu. The essential Norris staples are still there, but the big fella actually manages to squeeze out a little human emotion and warmth this time out.  But that might just be the secret of the firewater, er…Firewalker.

Still image credits from top to bottom are:
listal.com
theworstmovie.files.wordpress.com
masternorris.com

I borrowed this UK VHS sleeve from Cannon Rank

Dangerously Close

Dangerously Close

United States - 1986

Director - Albert Pyun

Media Home Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 36 minutes

Either you love it or you don't really care enough to have a strong opinion. Dangerously Close is an early film from auteur Albert Pyun. Sandwiched between other 80's Pyun classics The Sword and the Sorcerer and Vicious Lips, Dangerously Close is surprisingly unembelished. In fact it's downright vanilla, following a lower class kid who goes to an elite school only to discover that the rich students are not particularly friendly towards the lower classes.

Numerous other films have covered similar territory, at LVA we've met Zombie High and Brotherhood of Justice, but its a story that comes directly from the pages of history. Ever since the inception of private property, the Haves have tried to keep out the Have-Nots. United Statesian cinema loves to tell the story of the poor kid who fought back and kept his dignity. If he won the girl that's because love is more valuable than riches. If he won the riches, it's because, darnit, this country is GREAT, and anybody can achieve anything if they set their minds to it. I would argue that it is the power of such myths that makes this country great. That films in which we sympathize with the po' folks keep getting made and out in the real world we continue to idolize the vampire elite.

Witchfire

Witchfire

United States – 1985

Director – Vincent J. Privitera

Video Treasures, 1990, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 32 minutes

When I saw this on the shelf at the thrift store, I felt that I was being pressured, browbeaten, and even taunted into buying it by the singular, menacing name on the box. Shelley Winters. The movie sinks or floats on the power of that name alone, and that is all you need to know to justify its purchase, rental or theft. Not knowing who Shelley Winters was only deepened my feelings of guilty ignorance, playing upon heretofore suppressed feelings of inadequacy and making it all the more necessary to paper over the deep rifts in my spirit with the purchase of this dollar ninety-nine indulgence.

Shelley Winters many years before Witchfire

During a long career that began during the Second World War, Winters began as an up and coming blonde bombshell actress, but rejected this role both on screen and in her public persona, and instead actively challenged expected feminine norms. Some 45 years later in Witchfire, she actively challenged my tolerance for shrill, embarrassing nonsense. Her character Lydia is a patient at a psychiatric hospital where the handsome young doctor has just driven his car off a cliff. In an attempt to calm their psychoses, the interim doctor allows Lydia and two other aggrieved female patients to attend his funeral. Led by the intrepid Lydia the ladies escape and hide out in the nearby woods at her childhood home. It is there that she burned her family to death as a child, resulting we are left to assume for lack of any evidence other than the criminally deceptive title, in her subsequent mental illness and pharmaceutical treatment for such. Lydia claims to be a witch with the ability to cast a spell which will resurrect the dead doctor and bring him back to comfort them. Without their medication however, the three women begin the descent into unscripted madness. When a strapping hunter conveniently appears, they assume that he is the returned doctor and a few tepid minutes of climax splutter and ooze across the screen like the exudate from a carbuncle.

Witchfire, but not Shelley Winters

Witchfire is a slow-motion train-wreck in progress engineered (literally) by the nonsensical ad-libbing of Winters. I am not embarrassed to admit that I devolved into a more primitive mental state, debasing the film at every turn, and seeking whatever crude and degenerate sport I could make of this scintillatingly flogable carcass. What my desperate vulture-like mind latched on to were an extra’s boobs, (see right. Despite a love scene with The Hunter which generated some base anticipatory tension, patient Julietta (Corinne Chateau) doesn’t grace the screen with her presents) and the little kid from Over The Top (David Mendenhall) who performs the exact same role here, and receives a satisfying smack across the face from his dad, the very same Hunter. That I enjoyed these two moments so much is equally the fault of Witchfire and my own weak will, but assigning blame is irrelevant when the end result is the same.

Ministry of Vengeance

Ministry of Vengeance

United States - 1989

Director - Peter Maris

Media Home Entertainment/Video Treasures, 1990, VHS

Starring - George Kennedy, Yaphet Kotto and John Schneider

Run Time - 1 hour, 36 minutes

Yet another painfully boring piece of junk from Peter Maris, the man behind the profoundly disappointing Land of Doom. John Schneider in case you didn't see fit to follow the link above was Bo Duke.

Ministry of Vengeance trailer courtesy Action Packed Cinema on Youtube.

Double Kung Fu Double Feature!

Mafia vs. Ninja

Hong Kong - 1984

Director - Robert Tai

Super Dragons

Taiwan? - ??
Director - Cheung Chu??
Difficult to find anything about this movie, the names on screen are all cut off by the "formatting for my TV," maybe it's this one.

Shaolin Temple Against Lama

Taiwan - 1980

Director - William Chang

Shaolin vs. Lama

Hong Kong - 1983

Director - Tso Nam Lee

The quality on these transfers is, as you might expect, garbage. With the minor exception of Mafia vs. Ninja, I don't recall any of the films being very entertaining, and thus these tapes are difficult to sit through. The boxes sure are cool though.

Rolling Thunder

Rolling Thunder

United States - 1977

Director - John Flynn

Video Treasures, 1990, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 39 minutes

Rolling Thunder was a film written by Paul Schraeder around the same time he wrote Taxi Driver. That should give you some idea of the emotional content of the film. It comes across as a more physically savage approach to the same subject of a man deeply wounded by his experiences in war. In this case, the man is actually two men, William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones both giving excellent performances. Having just arrived home to a small Texas town after many years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp the tagline says it all; Major Charles Rane (Devane) is coming home to war! Truly a grindhouse classic, this the movie that lies at the root of brutal Tarantinoesque vengeance films and gave him the name for his defunct distribution company.

I'll use this box art post as an opportunity to inform you readers that I've modified the menus at the side of this blog. I'm keeping the genre list, but I removed the mind-numbing list of all the names and tags since it didn't get used much, and was only getting longer. I replaced it with something special for the VHS freaks, a clickable list of distributors with all the videos I've posted from each one. It will take me a while to finish updating them all since I have to go back through two years of crap, but in the end it will be worth it. Specific distributor names will also appear in the label list at the bottom of each subsequent post. Let me know what you think of the changes, and if you think a list of countries of origin or anything else might also be useful.

These two RAD Japanese boxes come from Japanese VHS Hell. They have tons of great scans, GO THERE.

Platoon Leader

Platoon Leader
US – 1988
Director – Aaron Norris
Video Treasures, 1990, VHS
Run time - 1 hour 37 min.

Aaron Norris was a busy monkey in 1988, dropping the threequel to Missing In Action, (the ‘Namsploitation franchise that started it all and made his brother Chuck a household name) and squeezing out this nugget of rapid-fire ‘Nam mayhem based on the actual memoir of the same name by James R. McDonough. The book was good enough to read twice, but the films parasitic association with the Norris family, and its crudely bifurcated Platoon mimicry pretty much eclipse the source material.

Not to mention the nominal lead, Michael Dudikoff who doesn’t have a beard or any of Chucks parlor tricks to offer, that might actually be worse. Dudikoff plays a green as grass Lieutenant fresh out of West Point and sent into the bush to command a platoon of the 173rd Airborne. Understandably all the GI’s at his new command expect him to get one whiff of the shit and scramble home. That’s what they’d like too, keep your head down and Leave Charlie alone so you won’t get shot. Our green Lt. won’t have it and institutes all sorts of regulation mickey-mouse bullshit that earns the ire of his men. But in the field you gotta learn by doing which doesn’t help the Lt. who manages to bumble-fuck himself into the hospital by tripping a mine on his first patrol.

Contrary to expectations he returns to command again, instituting more by-the-book operations including squad-sized night patrols and synthesizer war-movie trumpet music. Thankfully, Norris did do his research on visuals, there are lots of shots -particularly involving Hueys- that closely resemble any number of period photographs. There seems to be a musical divide here mirroring the greater conflict between the Americans and their enemies. First the tinny trumpet music that evokes Norris’ admirable attention to visual and historical accuracy (most movies can’t even get the type of chopper right) and accompanies tearjerking prideful militarism. Gradually however a two note synthesized pipe-organ theme begins to creep in, each time accompanying some scene of excessive explosions, bottomless rifle magazines and machismo.

As Lt. Knight (Dudikoff) attempts to inject some killin’ spirit into the men, he necessarily pushes them into more and more risky situations. The trumpets and organ grow closer together, closing the distance between the believable and bombastic, and groaning with a sickening gravity towards an ultimate devastating accretion.

Finally the climax breaches the dam, and like two volatile molecules the canned themes rush together with a terrible nauseating rush and explode into a delicate new isotope of pure ‘Namsploitation. Waves of faceless “gooks” pour onto the base camp and crash against American jingoism, our weeping sympathetic killer-men fire ceaselessly from the hip and clap each other on the back in cardboard stereotypes of touching macho camaraderie.

Some very nice foreign VHS covers courtesy The Cannon Films Archive.

And a trailer from the Cannon Films Archive YouTube channel prominently featuring the heroic trumpet music mentioned above.

If you search YouTube for the title of the film you can watch the whole thing in several parts, as well as a student video project to re-create one of the scenes from the book.

Dark Tower

Dark Tower

United States - 1987

Director- Ken Barnett

Video Treasures, 1994, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 31 min.

I personally believe that it is a bad idea to try and push anything other than the plot of the film at hand on the box itself. The obvious deduction when you see a video sleeve with claims like “in the tradition of…” is to think the film can’t stand on its own merit. When it’s an indie movie, like Dark Tower, it might also be a bad move to call out all the actors and their previous roles, in a bulleted list no less, to try and generate interest in the film. In short, any attempt to play up the quality of a film by invoking other films is a bad idea. But, for all I know, that was the only thing the marketing team though they had going for them.

Carolyn Page (Jenny Agutter) gives a bunch of fellows a tour of a skyscraper under construction and then retires to her office to undress and walk around in some underwear. A window washer catching an eyeful cranes his neck to get a better look but when she sees him he suddenly starts getting jerked around by an unseen force, his head bashed against the window and finally hurled over the side of his pulley falling like a giant bird poo to splatter on top of one of the guys who was just getting the tour. This says less I think about the fall, than the woman’s full closet nightie setup in her office, in an otherwise totally unfinished building.

Dennis Randall (Michael Moriarty, The Stuff, Hanoi Hilton) is called in as a head of security or something, to give the film a procedural feel and sporadically squeeze out his lines with a manic yell. Randall also has numerous waking psychic episodes in which he visualizes himself raping Carolyn while some guy in a shabby suit watches. He also appears to be sleeping with her while he has these visions, but the films producers deemed this paradox beneath clarification. That evening a security guard is menaced by a malfunctioning fluorescent light fixture and some spooky music. The whole thing is like a primitive god concept, in which a little understood phenomenon, mechanical failure in this case, is explained by the irrational invention of a supernatural controlling force. Hence the evil elevator, which drops at terminal velocity to splatter the security guard, but remains functional for the rest of the film to perform the same trick ad nauseum with the same boring static shot. Nobody calls a repairman, it’s just taken for granted that it's an evil spirit.

Instead, Randall hires a "French" paranormal-psychologist to bring still more verbal diarrhea to this buffet of talent. The shrink, Kevin McCarthy (My Tutor and Innerspace among other gems) gets drunk and tells everyone they are stupid. Advice for the ages to be sure, but perhaps better received prior to signing a contract to be in this film. In any case all three of the boys team up to tackle the building's poltergeist, dragging a snarky Carolyn along for laughs. Soon confronted by some wind and noises, everyone becomes overwhelmed by the awesome vapidity of the film. Randall becomes possessed by said spirit, apparently Carolyn’s dead husband, and barks out the whole back-story like a steaming hairball into Carolyn’s lap. Inexplicably he becomes a cheap rubber zombie and chases Carolyn around the building, grabs her and magically re-seals them both back into the broken concrete piling of the buildings foundation before reappearing moments later as Moriarty, apparently at peace with the whole ridiculous poltergeist-zombie-transmogrification thing. Well, that’s faith for you. Amen.




IMDB claims that this was directed by Freddie Francis who was later replaced by Ken Wiederhorn (Return of the Living Dead II, Shockwaves), the former seems ridiculous because he's a multiple Oscar winner, but the second sounds more feasible simply because this is his caliber of film

P.O.W. The Escape

P.O.W. The Escape
a.k.a. Attack Force Nam, Behind Enemy Lines
United States - 1986
Director – Gideon Amir
Video Treasures, Inc., 1989, VHS

As the negotiations are going on in Paris in 1973, Col. Jim Cooper (David Carradine) stomps into his commanding officers office in a rage demanding to know why their rescue mission plans have been changed. Damnit, if Chuck Norris can make four, count ‘em, four POW rescue movies, goddamnit, Carradine wants one too.

Without hesitation, Cooper hops on a chopper with a bunch of green privates and air assaults the purported POW camp, unloading a chopperful of shoot from the hip naivete only to discover that, duh, the camp is abandoned. Or is it! To a rockin’ 80’s soundtrack the North Vietnamese Army start mortaring the camp and the Americans pull back, but true to his motto of “Everyone goes home,” Cooper goes back into the fray for wounded boot, Teague. Narrowly escaping, they are about to get on the chopper when it is rocketed and they are forced to flee on foot into the jungle where Teague soon dies and Cooper is captured.

Taken to an inhabited camp, Cooper meets the rest of the prisoners who include Steve James (American Ninja & several Norris flicks), and the commander of the camp, Maj. Vinh (Mako of Norris’s An Eye for an Eye). Instructed to send Cooper to Hanoi as a bargaining chip, Vinh decides to cut his own deal.

If Cooper helps Vinh get to American lines (with a big sack of gold and cash he’s stolen from prisoners) the two of them can avoid Hanoi altogether and go free. Without the inclusion of the other prisoners, Cooper refuses. After kicking the ass of Sparks, a recalcitrant POW who disagrees with his plan, Cooper stonyfaces Vinh into caving, and they all roll out of camp with the POW’s hidden in a water truck.

Inevitably, the truck is shot up and the guys pile out into some hand-to-hand combat/yelling etc, in which Vinh disappears. Having discovered the sack of loot, Cooper stashes it and Sparks takes off in a jeep thinking he has it. Vinh returns and gives chase in another jeep. Cooper and the remaining guys follow in wooden canoes until they meet up with some other GI’s searching for help for their besieged base on Radar Hill.

With little time left to one up Norris’s Col. Braddock, Col. Cooper goes to the rescue once again, this time all alone until the other guys gung ho into the fray with hoots, hollers a dirtbike and a hole in the chest. Oozing big dumb water buffalo heroics, and frankly, flat out stupidity, all while draped in an American flag, Cooper smashes through the walls of subtlety to reach the inner sanctum of excess.‘Namsploitation is arguably a fun little niche from the video era, but this movie manages to use the entertaining staples of the genre to make 90 minutes feel like 190. I lost count of false endings and secondary and even tertiary characters. The one redeeming characteristic is that despite it’s plentiful use of war violence it refrains from the overt sadism of the Norris MIA series, and if one doesn’t nitpick the inaccuracies and machismo, it’s still pretty ridiculous fun.

Covers for title Attack Force Nam: