Reviews

Awful, confusing bit of crap from South of the Border. I've now watched it twice and I STILL don't really know what was going on. It had something to do with a stupid looking Aztec mummy, a 'human robot' that's the dumbest looking robot I've ever seen bar none, and a woman who is the reincarnation of some ancient Aztec chick. Most of the story is told in a painfully slow and droning manner by an incredibly dull scientist. This guy is a marvelous sleep aid. His nemesis is a fat slob called The Bat, which is a pretty unimaginative name for an evil scientist.

I guess the boring scientist and his wormy assistant dug up the mummy, and what a shocker, the scientist's wife just HAPPENS to be the reincarnation of the mummy's girlfriend. They keep the mummy perpetually in a mausoleum for some reason, I guess so that the overacting bad guy can steal it. It takes him five years to do this, because he's inventing a 'human robot' to steal the mummy, or attack it, or whatever. He's after some treasure that the mummy has, so that he can be rich. But excuse me, if the guy had this huge an intellect and a strong drive to succeed, why didn't he just patent some of his ideas and get rich that way?

Oh, well, I suppose that would make too much sense. Instead, there is ridiculous fight between the mummy and the robot, and it's really hard to tell which one is faker looking or more cheesy. To tell you the truth, I watched this because I thought a film with a name like The Robot Vs. the Aztec Mummy just HAD to be fabulously cheesy. Instead it was just dully awful and mind blowingly confusing.

Agghhh! Why do the Italians continue to make these horrible cheap knock-offs of American genre films? To ship them directly to video over here and makes tons of filthy lucre, or Lira, or whatever, off the poor unsuspecting American public's pain. In this awful serving, which is a sequel to a film that I haven't(thankfully) watched(I actually saw the first movie to Cavedwellers, much to my horror), an idiot professor by the name of Tarl Cabot(what kind of stupid moniker is that, anyway?!) is drawn once again to the planet called Gor. Along for the ride is his 'friend' and fellow professor, Watney(again with the ridiculous name!). This guy is one of the most annoying characters ever put onto film. He has a contest with himself early on in the film to see how many times he can say Cabot! in the space of five minutes. Four thousand and twelve, I think the total was. If only I'd had a shovel and a way to get into the movie, that sucker would have been toast..

Anyhoo, Cabot arrives at the capitol city of..umm...the country? Planet? Or whatever, of Gor, called Koroba. Here this turkey is greeted as a hero(did the good citizens have nothing else to do that day?) by one and all and taken into the castle of the King. He's in love with the King's daughter, although how she stood his open mouthed trout kissing is anyone's guess. There's a lot of misogynistic scenes with scantily clad women and, more disturbingly, an equally scantily clad albino dwarf(am I making that up? God,I wish I was). Apparently Cabot and the dwarf are 'old friends'(nudge, nudge, wink, wink). Enter at this point the venerable Jack Palance(what is he doing in this piece of crap? I mean, I know a job's a job, Jack, but come on!), dressed in a ridiculous costume with what looks like a split butter top loaf of bread on his head instead of a hat. He's supposed to be the second bad guy, along with the evil younger Queen that the King married(sure, seventy year old decrepit guy, she married you because she loves you! Yeah, right!).

Cabot's wormy friend Watney is seduced by the Queen(ewww!) into helping her frame Cabot for her husband's death by really sharp blade. He goes on the run with his personal dwarf, and we see them wander for days in the desert(or that's what it feels like, anyway). During this time, we get an immense amount of buffalo shots from the two men in their tiny loin cloths. I SO did not need to see that dwarf's butt cheeks the fifteen times or so that they showed them! They see a slave caravan where the slaves are wearing toilet seats instead of collars around their necks, and the dwarf unfortunately stops Cabot from drinking some poisoned water. Dammit, Herve, couldn't you just have let him die? We would all have thanked you, believe me!

They get out of the desert and save a slave girl from the market. Cabot gives her a lecture about loving freely(who does this guy think he is? John Brown Cabot?) then he goes back to the capitol city to try to rescue the Princess(who was in a wrestling match with a pair of lesbians) and stop the evil Queen and her creepy old High Priest adviser(Palance). Of course he succeeds, when in reality this guy would have had as much chance of winning the day as he would have had successfully hang gliding off of Mt. Everest. You'd at least think that the utterly infuriating little toad Watney would have been killed by the Queen, but no...the last scene is of this total moron walking down a road in 'America'(for America, read Italy), still wearing the lame ass costume he got in Gor. Once again I have to take my hat off to the Italians, who loved making films with scantily clad well oiled idiots pretending that they're big, bad swordsmen and wizards. These aren't even B grade films-they're more like Z-grade for the most part, although most of them do have the laugh factor going for them, since they're pure Italian cheese of the stinkiest kind.

Terrible. That's the only way I can think to describe this film. From the opening shot of the scientist strolling along(like we want to waste our time watching some guy take a Sunday walk!) while the worst,most drab folk song that I have ever heard plays in the background(sashay through the sarcasm?! What does that even mean, for chrissake?!) To the end shot of the girl moseying into the ocean to become mate to the stupid looking monster that the doctor transforms into, this movie is just dreadful. The voice-overs are annoying, the acting is pitiful, the soundtrack dull, the cinematography makes it look like it was shot in a foreign country by someone with a home-made video camera, and the plot is just eye popping. Killer walking catfish?! A scientist turinng himself into what looks like a really old, wrinkly Gumby? All so that the crazy old ex-Nazi can get his revenge on a bunch of guys who might have bumped into him in the hall once, or whatever? What was the screenwriter smoking? And did he share it with the director?

I think that the whole purpose of the film was the girl in the yellow bikini. There certainly were long enough shots of her walking around her camp, swimming in the water, brushing her hair, etc. Not that she wasn't easier on the eye than the old scientist(when he stripped down to his skivvies to transform, I almost lost my lunch). Still, she had Director's Girlfriend written across her forehead. How many of these F grade movies get made so that the guy making them can get a date? Bet most of them-maybe all of them.

Dull, confusing Finnish piece of crap about some obscure bit of Norse mythology involving a weird magical device called a Sampo? The gist of the story seems to be that an extremely mannish(who was actually played by a woman!)witch kidnaps the pretty sister of a legendary(at least locally)smith and forced him to create one of these odd machines so that she can use it to make salt, or gold, or streusel, or something. The main hero is not the smith but this guy named Lemon-Kynin(or at least that's what it sounded like). This useless idiot tries to retrieve the Sampo after they save the girl, and manages to wiz it thoroughly. He ends up destroying the thing, after which the whole village celebrates his failure happily.

There's some weird bits about the witch having the four winds in Hefty bags in her cavern/castle, and the 'hero's' Mom talking to a whiny complaining birch and an equally whiny bit of road about her idiot son. Then the witch 'steals' the sun in retaliation, don't ask me how she accomplished that. So everything gets really, really cold(so how is that any different from any other day in Finland?), and the villagers fashion harps(harps?!) and use them to defeat the witch and release the sun. That's what I call a Just Don't Ask situation. The color in the film is so washed out it looked like somebody spilled a can of 7-Up on it. The dubbing is atrocious, and the character names hysterical. While it isn't quite as naturally funny as Jack Frost, it's still pretty amusing.

Ahh, Mr. Ben Murphy. Before Bruce Campbell stole his crown, Murphy was the King of Cheese. Unfortunately, Murphy was serious about his lousy acting career. He really, actually thought that he had some talent. Amazing.

In this crappy serving of Murphy's Law(that the more serious a movie with Murphy in it is supposed to be, the worse and more cheesy that movie will be)Murphy plays an anthropologist(yeah, right!) who finds a sarcophagus in King Tut's tomb. In it is a peculiar mummy who was a visitor to Tut's kingdom three thousand years ago. Apparently this mysterious visitor made people sick(literally), because he had some kind of weird fungus growing on him..Or something.

One of Murphy's idiot students touches the fungus, which got accidentally irradiated by another of his idiot students. It ate the moron student's hand faster than the flesh eating virus. Meanwhile, the mummy disappeared from his coffin(he felt the need to party. Well, it had been three thousand years, after all!) and started lurching around off camera looking for some ridiculous looking crystals that the idiot student who had irradiated the sarcophagus stole from it(larcenous as well as stupid.Did Murphy hand pick these guys?). The crystals glowed whenever the mummy got near them, becoming tiny disco balls. Welcome to the seventies, everyone! All that was missing was seeing the mummy do the Hustle.

Murphy discovers that the mummy is actually the body of an alien visitor. It is trying to retrieve the stupid looking crystals so that it can phone home. Apparently the alien was in a state of suspended animation or something, which is why the zap of radiation brought it back to life. Never mind that that deserves a big fat HUH? since this movie is so groovy and with it that it doesn't really have to make sense. In the end, the mummy retrieves its tacky jewelry and is about to beam itself up(to what, we'll never know, since I doubt the mother ship actually hung around waiting for it to return for three thousand years)when a security guard tries to shoot it. Murphy plays the hero and hurls himself onto the bullet(thank you, movie!) and then is beamed up with the alien. Good riddance, Murphy, and I hope you enjoy the anal probe.

Cameron, Cameron, Cameron. Here is yet another example of the spiral downward of your career, which ended with the fantastic horror that is Space Mutiny. Here you play an overacting chief of a quasi-Nazi state on a parallel Earth. This made for t.v. movie(which is simply the pilot shows of a never got made t.v. show-gee, I wonder why this one never went into production?)highlights your mediocre acting skills perfectly.

The plot, such as it is, is that some astronauts from Earth crash land on an identical world that circles the sun parallel to ours. The other two astronauts are killed, and the 'perfect order' that runs the world in a 1984-esque fashion tries to find out all the info they can from the remaining astronaut, Neal Stryker. He escapes from the special hospital where he's being kept so easily that it made you wonder if all the hospital staff had been lobotomized or something. Then he wanders around trying to find out where he is and what happened, nearly giving himself away over and over again.

One of the things that almost gets him is that everyone on the planet is left-handed(the opposite of Earth, nudge nudge, wink, wink). He meets up with a female doctor who already betrayed him in the hospital, and forces her to take him to a weird old guy who thinks his pigs are spies for the Perfect Order. Now that's a quality guerrilla fighter, to be sure. This old guy tries to help him steal a spaceship so that he can get back to Earth, but for some strange reason the plan doesn't work. Can't imagine why not, really, especially since their most dangerous enemy is Cameron Mitchell. It should have been a cake walk. At the end of the pilot...errr...movie, Stryker is stranded on the planet with nowhere to go. Much like the t.v. series itself, in my opinion.

Gaah. Another terrible Italian knock off of an American movie genre. I for one was distracted from the so-called 'plot' by the fact that the dubbing was done by the same company that did Pod People. Listening to them try to do Bronx and Hispanic accents made me wince in horror.

The basic story is that its the year 2000, and a giant corporation has decided to level the Bronx(Bronx, Italy, that is)and put up fancy apartment towers and whatnot. The only thing standing in their way are the idiots that live in the Bronx, and for some reason really enjoy squatting in squalor.They've become 'freedom fighters' or something, living in the sewers(good place for them)while battling the extraction crews, who are guys in shiny tinfoil outfits.

Their leader is a long haired guy from a Poison cover band aptly named Trash. His parents get toasted by the crews because they refuse to leave their fetid apartment building. Trash then declares war on the corporation and its minions, including Henry De Silva as a psychotic overseer with a scarily high forehead. He joins forces with a Hispanic guy named Toblerone, I guess. This guy is a hoot and a half. His accent alone is a joy, but he also overacts with great joie de vivre. Which makes up for everybody else underacting like crazy.

Along with a French resistance fighter, his annoying little Dickenseque brat of a kid, and a shrill voiced female reporter, they set out to kidnap the President of the corporation and hold him hostage, not knowing that his second in command wants to get rid of him anyway so that he can take over and sit in the big leather seat for a change.

Somehow these tepid warriors conquer all and save the day, so that these idiots can continue to live in the dirty, unsanitary, polluted Bronx. Hooray for the forces of good! I guess. Once more I have to thank the Italians, for whether they do it deliberately or not, they managed to produce some of the most inadvertently funny movies of all time.

I totally love Aya, the red headed grey eyed swordsman with the cool coat. He's the only one of this florist/assassin foursome who seems to have any brains at all, frankly. The only thing I had to complain about him is the ugly Velma from Scooby Do-esquire orange sweater he almost continually wears. I'm wondering if he had a whole closet full of these ugly things, or does he just always wear that one(ewww!)? It clashes horribly with his hair, too. I didn't like the animation much, because it has the line drawing quality of some early 80's anime. And some of the story lines made me want to growl, as when the truly idiotic Ken(what is it with the Japanese fascination with guys named Ken?) falls in love with a girl who's totally ditzy and annoying enough for him, but decides not to leave because Yoji points out that he's killed a lot of people. What does that have to do with anything? And why would he listen to Yoji, who's biggest thought for the day was whether he'd used his hair gel?

Omi the computer kid is a little silly, but he seems to be just young. He's the only other one with any brains at all. I suppose it balances out, having two members of the team who can actually think. Some of the bad guys are actually kind of interesting, specifically the bodyguard/assistant of the gangster Aya has a personal grudge against. Not only is he a good fighter, he's pretty gorgeous, as well. Why is it that the bad guys are so often more interesting and cool than the good guys? Probalby because the 'good' guys seem to too often check their brains at the door when they run off to be heroes.

Anyhoo, i've only seen the first five episodes, but I know that I'll probably only watch the rest of them for Aya. He rocks, and the rest of them can roll.

This movie is a hilarious, adventure filled bit of silliness. When you're not watching it for the 'plot' or the interaction between the characters, you're laughing your butt off at the tin foil and glitter costumes, Broadway musical face make-up, and amazingly cheesy special effects. The fight scenes aren't the worst I've ever seen, but I kept being distracted by the main character's(Shinbei) Farrah Fawcett locks. His hair is the height of early 80's awful.

The cardboard and plastic armor sported by the soldiers in the film is a riot. The sets and fx aren't as bad as any Godzilla film, thankfully. And the story becomes engrossing, despite the lame costuming and ridiculous hair-dos. This is a good bit of fluff, well worth a watch once in a while.

Feh. This movie started out in an interesting manner, but quickly ran the gamut from confusing to dull. The confusing parts happened mostly at the beginning, where the cut scenes are so numerous that its hard to tell just what is going on for the first twenty minutes or so. The dull comes later, with a tepid romance between the two living people(pusses both). The vengeful spirit of the dead girl is actually the most lively person in the film, which is sad. If the rest of the cast had been up to her caliber, the movie might have been better.

Maybe. Because the storyline gets really interesting for awhile, as it appears that the insane priestess mother of the dead sixteen year old girl is trying to resurrect her daughter from the dead, with the decidedly unfortunate side effect that all of the other dead people would come back as well, take on solid human form, and most likely start killing off everybody. A sort of Japanese mystical Night of the Living Dead type thing. But this doesn't come to pass. Even though this hairy unwashed priest with a tiny basket strapped to his head tells the uninteresting young people that this will come to pass if the priestess finishes her ritual, she does just that and the only dead person who manifests is her daughter. No mass rising of the dead, no walking army of corpses, nothing. The priest merely makes the girl's spirit go back to the land of the dead, taking the washed out wuss of a boyfriend with her, as she'd crushed his spine like peanut brittle(at which point I was tempted to cheer loudly, as this idiot went over to kiss and fondle the DEAD girl,,ewwww!!!). The Robitussen sucking, spineless best friend has a long introspective shot at the end as she leaves the village for the last time, and that's it. No real horror, no real creepiness, which the Japanese tend to do far better than American film makers with their emphasis on over-the-top cheesy face make-up, no screaming mimis. I was very disappointed.

of all the post apocalyptic Mad Max rip-offs I've seen(and I've seen far too many), this one was one of the funniest. That's because, joining Robot Holocaust, it is one of the sincerely worst 'future' movies I've ever laughed at.

Our story begins with a blurry shot of our 'hero' riding his bike along a pleasant lane in Ohio or Vermont or someplace. This is supposed to be the post apocalyptic world of the future, and instead it looks like a lovely vacation place. I expected to see cows grazing placidly in the fields on either side of the road. He gets attacked by the cops of the future, who have spikes on their bumpers(which is how you can distinguish them from the cops of today),and talking cars a la Knight Rider. The scruffy bearded loser's..err..HERO'S souped up futuristic bike talks as well, in a truly annoying Valley Girl accent that made me want to get a flamethrower and a blow torch and just melt that thing down. The Warrior(does he have that name on his post apocalyptic drivers license I wonder?) mumbles like he's half asleep, when he's not whining at the top of his lungs. The urge to slap his mug was so strong I kicked my cat(not really)hard as a relief valve.

The bike can apparently jump higher than Evil Knievel's, and besides its amazingly irritating voice it also has armament built in. The Warrior escapes the police, then has an incomprehensible run-in with some grungy guys in a junkyard. Now this, boys and girls, is why it's best to stay out of junkyards. Some creepy people hang around there.

Anyway, doofus boy rides his bike into a wall(he's either blind or stupid. Guess which one I'm picking), and is healed by a group of mystical(i.e., they wear long white robes and drone a lot of nonsense all the time)people who claim that he's the 'Chose One'. Chosen as the world's most annoying guy? O.K., yeah, I could see that.

These toga wearing ninnies want idiot mitten to go save a scientist from the forces of Evil, a 1984-esque society that's about as scary as a Shirley Temple film(o.k., that's pretty scary, but whatever). It's run by Donald Pleasance, a staple of awful 80's films in which he plays a totally inept villain(I.e., Puma Man). He goes off with the scientist's lovely daughter, whining all the way. Somehow they manage to get her Dad out, but Mr. Chivalrous abandons the girl to the loving hands of the New World Order for no particular reason except for the fact that he's a total rank coward. And a jerk, to boot.

The Warrior, a.k.a Puss Boy, ends up in some weird fight where he takes on everything from cowboys to ninjas, we're never sure why. His big move is to punch a girl. This guy is a real rank a-hole, and that's no doubt. After that, there's some scenes of a peculiar torture session with the scientist's captured daughter making a really peculiar noise, and then the 'hero' takes on a semi with some puny flamethrowers on the front, dubbed Megaweapon(because apparently they decided not to call it B.J & the Bear, for licensing reasons). The only thing that this accomplishes is the stupid Valley Girl bike being crushed, which is a major props. Unfortunately the horrible bike gets resurrected later, much to our chagrin.

At the last, The Bearded Boob decides to return and save the scientist's daughter after all, because she was really hot. The Evil Prosser(Pleasance) has brainwashed her into killing her father and Hero-Boy, a task which I would have been supremely happy with if she'd just carried it out adequately. But NO! Couldn't have that, could we?

The end of the film is particularly repulsive, with the lovely girl and our galloping Mr. McNasty locking lips for what seems like a full ten minutes before he rides off into the sunset. All I can ask is: "Why, WHY? Why would you hurt us so much when we've done nothing to you?!"

No offense to Mamie, she's a lovely, voluptuous woman. But her acting chops are minor at best, and she should never, EVER try to sing. Not that any of the 'hip' youthful songs in this movie were any good at all. The plot, about a town in a cotton pickin' county, is rather lame, involving a dishonest female judge and a sleazy cotton grower. Oil-hair boy has seduced the judge (a woman old enough to be his mother) into changing the city laws so that people can be arrested for even minor infractions such as jay-walking and then be sent to his cotton farm as free labor. There are plenty of 'interesting' lesser characters, such as the leering deputy who arrest mamie and her sister at the swimming hole, the drunken overseer, and the greasy chow cook with the pumpkin pie fetish. Why they call this film 'Untamed Youth' I don't know since most of these kids seemed really drab and half-asleep most of the time??? Rounding this out this cast was a woman whose purpose I wasn't really sure about and whose sex was indeterminate, since she looked like Greg Brady in a dress and wig. When these 'criminals' weren't slaving in the field, they were rockin' the house, although you'd think they'd be exhausted after all that physical labor. Unfortunately, no. We were treated to many, many scenes of bad singing and 'dancing'.

There was a subplot with one of the girls who was five months pregnant and whose nickname just happened to be baby. She dropped dead from a miscarriage, making you wonder if the director had a king-sized trowel for laying on the morality tale. To top it all off, the underscoring soundtrack was of the soft core porn variety, heavy on the sleazy trumpet.

These youth films of the late fifties, early sixties, were a curious phenomenon. It was as though the adults of the time sensed the coming of the hippie generation and were trying to hold on to their old way of life by brainwashing the youth of America into being good. I don't know who their intended audience was since I'm fairly sure none of the targeted teen types would have gone to see them. ???

Being a person born and (mostly) raised in Michigan, I can say with complete confidence that all of the nutty things that happen in this film would probably never have happened anywhere else. Michigan is a state where just about everyone is crazy in some way, the most conspicuous being the gun toting nuts in the Michigan militia. It's obvious that John Cusack was born and raised in Michigan, because this movie perfectly captures the oft times amusing madness that seems to permeate the entire state.

Matin Blank is a neurotic, angst ridden, but at the same time completely cool and professional hit-man, who ran away from his High School prom ten years ago to join the Army and learn how to kill. The girl he left behind haunts him, so that when he gets a letter about his high school reunion in Detroit, and a job offer for the same place, he decides to return to his old haunts to work out some of his kinks.

Debbie(the old flame), is single and working at a local radio station. He starts to bond with her again, meets some old friends, and learns that his childhood home has been converted into a convenience store. His good old days jaunt is complicated by several rival hit men out to punch his clock, some FBI guys with the same mission, and the fact that his old girlfriend is more than mildly unhappy to learn what he does for a living. There is a hysterical shootout in the convenience store between Martin and a nasty little Eastern European hit-man, which culminates in a hand grenade in the microwave. Priceless.

The reunion is an odd mix of nostalgia and weirdness as Martin duels yet again with the same hit-man in the upper halls near his locker, after dancing to some 80's hits played by an atrocious band. The dichotomy of the scenes is jarring and amusing at the same time. The movie culminates in a bloody shoot out between Martin and a hit-man out to start an assassin's union, of all things. Martin wouldn't co-operate, so the hit-man is trying to get rid of the unaffiliated competition. There's a bit with a t.v. that is just wonderful. The whole movie has such a peculiar, almost dreamlike quality, because it is such an amalgamation of bloody violence and the most mundane details of life. I mean, a high school reunion couldn't get more sappy, and side by side with shootouts and hand to hand combat it presents an interesting joining of two seemingly opposite situations. Funny and twisted, it is a fabulous film by the family Cusack. Wish they'd do more.

I saw this film about twelve years ago, and I thought it was very good then. I recently got the DVD from Netflix, and was amazed to find that not only is it as good as I remember, it was better.

The first thing that struck me is how very correct to the medieval point of view the movie is. All of the characters act as they should for the times they live in. The Lord Arnofini is a scheming jerk with a will of steel, which you had to be back then to be a Lord. After all, things could change so quickly, such as when the mercenaries raid and take the castle later in the movie. You could lose your standing and/or your life, if you weren't ruthless. Martin and his band of mercenaries are crude, sly, jolly, practical, greedy, and hardened by life-as mercenaries would have been, trading their lives for a bit of cash all over Europe. Some might have been disturbed by the cheerful lasciviousness shown by the women, but back then women knew that they had only a few things to trade for safety and security, namely their bodies or their standing. If they had no standing, their bodies were the only coin they had. They had to find a strong man to protect them, or they were vulnerable to any man that came along with bad intentions. Jennifer Jason Leigh's young noblewoman knows that lesson as well, and schemes ruthlessly to stay alive and escape once she's taken by the mercenaries. The casual nudity and dirtiness are also characteristic of the middle ages, when practically no one bathed and clothes were seldom washed. In fact, the lower orders thought that washing invited devils into your body and made you sick, so it isn't surprising that Martin's mercenaries never bathed.

The plague scenes towards the end of the movie were ingenious and showed how terrified people were of the disease-and rightly. it killed off a third of Europe's population, and spread like wildfire. The scholarly Steven's telling the monk to lance Hawkwood's plague boils is correct, because Nostradamus himself studied among the Arabs for a time, then came back and tried to convince people to lance the boils. A movie is in the details, and Verhoeven gets almost all of them right. He captured the mad religious practices of the time, as terrified people grasped onto any sign that might have been from God. They were starving from a little ice age, dying from a dreadful disease, and plagued by wars. Its no wonder that people fell into such a religious fervor.

The interaction between the characters is wonderful. The rivalry of Martin and Steven over Agfnes is very interesting to watch. The two men, like young and older alpha wolves, circle and attack, watching for every opening. And Agnes, an alpha female, watches and makes her choice of mate in the end.

I'll definitely be buying a copy of this movie on DVD, because it is one of my favorites. For once, Hollywood actually got it almost right. That is astounding, especially since it was made in the mid-80's, not a time known for depth or realism in movies.

Another gray, horrible bit of schlockiness from the family Corman. The first space capsule into outer space crash lands back on Earth(with some of the worst special effects ever), and the pilot appears to be dead. But appearances can be deceiving. He's actually more alive than the rest of the cast, including a patronizing misogynist old doctor(who'd also really, REALLY boring), a greasy guy who looks like he's cornered the market on hair oil, another guy so dull he doesn't even make much of an impression, a female scientist who never seems to be hurt or angry over the old guy's patronizing, and a female photographer with a Farah Fawcett haircut(pre-Farah, of course) and about as much liveliness as a dead duck.

What are any of these people's names? I think it was Steve. Apparently, everyone in the cast, including the women, were called Steve. Anyway, the dead pilot Steve turns out to not only be alive, but to be incubating baby aliens(or seahorses, or shrimp, or whatever) inside his torso. The Momma beast that implanted these little critters looks like a giant bald parrot with claws. Once again, I am impressed by the laugh-ability factor of the monsters created by the House of Corman. The space carrot from Venus in It Conquered the World is still officially the worst, most laughable monster I've ever seen grace the screen, but the Cormans always manage to deliver when it comes to bad, cheesy looking monsters.

They also managed to deliver on their other trademarks as well; i.e. a boring, confusing plot, long gray shots(thank God Corman did most of his films in black and white, since his color stuff still manages to look somehow gray)two or three locations max, stupid and lame props and special effects, and lots and lots of dull dialog. There's only two deaths in the film(if you don't counted the roasted parrot..err..alien blood beast being offed at the end of the film). Cheers rang out through the land, I'm sure, when the alien rips the old doctor's head off and(apparently) eats it. Now it can talk in English and has the doctor's memories. It can also move the pregnant astronaut around as though he were Pinnochio.

The monster's apparent intent is to rebuild its race using human beings as food and giant wombs. There's a confusing bit at the end(well, more confusing than usual, anyway) in which the creature tries to explain why it is doing this, but it makes no sense whatsoever. Something about how humanity is about to follow in its race's footsteps and destroy themselves by something they'll soon create. It never really said what that was. It could have been anything from toaster ovens to digital watches, who knows. Its baby minder stabs himself rather than let the alien shrimp crawl out of his body, and the oily guy(and the other guy) burn the parrot-alien to death with a Molotov cocktail. Ahh,the smell of roasting chicken..err.. alien. End of story, in which the rest of the characters wander off and leave their dead comrade laying on the ground to rot. Oh, Hell, why not save yourself the expense of a funeral? I'm sure that was what Corman was thinking, when he was trying to cut corners and make his scenes as cheaply as possible.

I've never seen the first two films in this series, and I can't say that i'm sorry about that. This egregiously bad 80's sword swinger ranks up there with the Ator the Fighting Eagle series as the worst of all time.

The main character is a smug, sleazy idiot with a bad 80's hair-do and an accent that fluctuates more than the stock market did on Black Tuesday. No woman in her right mind would touch him, which explains why his love interest in the film is four barrels short of a load. His enemy is a guy who wears more furs and turbans than Liza, and gasps out his lines like he's trying to act during an asthma attack. Rounding out this cast is a really annoying princess, a stupid wizard who's the lost member of ZZ Top, and a sorceress with a grating voice who tries to roast our hero's nuts(my favorite part of the film, by the way).

The movie starts out in a village(Renn Fest) where Deathstalker is being his usual smug, oily self. He impresses the local yokels by fighting a guy while standing on a log, then goes to a fortune teller/wizard to get his fortune told. I pretty much know what the guy would have told him, that his film career was over and he should take that job at the car dealership, but he never got that far because the bushy bearded wiz was in conference with a princess carrying a giant faux crystal door handle. The wizard was toting one of these hideous kitsch baubles around as well, and apparently when you put them together it is a key that unlocks a fabulous city full of wealth(yeah, right). Some men wearing metal bats on their heads attack, and the wizard disappears by spinning rapidly. He leaves his shoes behind, making you wonder(most horribly), why he didn't leave his clothes behind as well. The princess takes off with our hero, and promptly gets killed before she can slap him to head off his sleazy sexual advances. She gives him the Airwick air freshener, so that he can go find the other one himself. It would cut his body odor wonderfully.

Cut to a later time,where the bad guy Truxartis? is doing his best Broadway musical singer imitation while going on about how he means to find the other stone and use its magical power for his own thing. He brings some guys back from the dead, using the powers of deepest, blackest Hell, so that they could lounge around his castle pretty much doing nothing. There was a waste of magic. Deathstalker, meanwhile, has met the dead princess's twin? sister, who is on her way to marry ol feather and furs Truxartis. He also meets his love interest, a fairly slow and rather strange girl with amazingly big hair and a problem with bathing. Her and he get along well together, not a big surprise.

The movie devolves into a quagmire at this point, with plot points trailing off into nothing one after the other. The dead guys catch up with Deathstalker, but instead of killing him as they should, they pretty much do what they've done throughout the movie-which is nothing. The princess arrives at the castle, dresses in a silly looking faux harem costume, and spends the rest of the movie whining. The sorceress tortures idiot boy, the only detraction from the pleasure of this scene being the fact that he's wearing only the tightest of tights while she does this. Arrgh!

The scrubby bearded wizard shows up again, nobody knows why, is captured and tortured by the femme fatale Truxartis, and is rescued by Deathstalker in a really lame fighting scene. Deathstalker frees the souls of the dead guys by giving them a mason jar, which was no loss to anyone since they were neither scary nor effective, and terminally lazy to boot. Truxartis comes to his stupid end, the princess and the wizard move into the fabulous city(didn't look that fabulous to me, but since the whole budget for the entire movie seems to have been about five dollars and some bags of peanuts, that's not really surprising), and Deathstalker rides off into the sunset, where we hope he gets a severe sunburn.

I liked this show when I was about twelve, it was a pleasant memory. Then I re-watched it as the MST3K episode Master Ninja 1, in which they slammed together three or four of the episodes to make a horrible movie. I admit, I was tearing up more than laughing watching it, because i really did like this goofy show when i was a kid.

Lee Van Cleef as a ninja was just sad. They had better stunt doubles in Power Rangers, when the girls were clearly played by much shorter men. I mean, you could clearly see that Lee hadn't studied any kind of martial arts, which is kind of like those 70's sword swinger b-movies where the actor would just randomly swing his or her sword and 'kill' people. The fight choreography was obviously done by Stevie Wonder while he was heavily medicated.

The Master's 'student', played by the gratingly annoying Timothy Van Patten, is a total idiot who drives around in a van randomly. No real ninja would take this guy on as a student. He'd just slit his throat and be done with it, a few moments after meeting this twerp. He certainly wouldn't enlist his 'help' in finding his daughter or anything else, for that matter.

The movie dragged off, since it was made from t.v. episodes so they couldn't have any kind of real denouement. I am not looking forward to Master Ninja II, and in fact may avoid it altogether. Another pleasurable childhood memory down the drain.

dreadful. This total mess of a movie makes as little sense as our modern tax code, and is as hard to pick your way through.

Basically, we have Christopher Lee doing some of his worst work ever, dressed in Chinese drag and a terrible make-up job that doesn't make him look oriental but does make him look pretty gay. He drones on in a monotone as the dreadfully evil Fu Manchu, sucking the air out of the room in every scene he's in. The only thing I can think that is oriental about him is the obvious opium addiction, because he must have been high on SOMETHING to help him get through this stinker. Plus, his eyes are pretty glazed. That could be just boredom, however. Couldn't blame him if it was.

The plot, such as can be made out of it, is that ol' Fu has acquired a way to turn the world's oceans to ice, and is using that as his threat to make the world's government's kowtow to him a la Dr. Evil. Unfortunately, this scientist with the silly name who's the only one who can help him make this device has a heart problem and is at the edge of death. So Fu kidnaps an English heart specialist and makes him perform the world's first heart transplant. They never show on screen whether there was any tissue typing of any kind, so the scientist could easily have rejected the (unwilling) donor heart. Oh, wait, that would require the plot to make sense and be coherent, and it's not having anything to do with that, no sirree.

In the meantime, Fu's killed the governor of a province in Turkey(I think) and stolen his castle, with the aid of a girl who he promptly locks up in the dungeon. I was never sure about her role in this film, but like so many other things it was a loose end that never really got resolved. It might have been Turkey, or it might have been a huge Shriner's convention, I can't be sure.

To convince the English heart doctor to go through with the surgery, Fu obliquely threatens his girlfriend by blowing up a dam. A pretty puzzling way to carry out a death threat, but o.k. This scene, like so many of the others in this movie, was unnecessarily long and tedious. They should have called it the Sleep Aid of Fu Manchu, that would have been closer to the actual substance of the film.

Fu's enemy is a bland English guy with zero charm and a habit of blending into any background like a chameleon. I wasn't even totally sure of his name throughout most of the film. James Bland, I think it was.

Anyhoo, Fu's plan is foiled and his castle blown up(I was never sure how or by who,the editing's pretty bad at the end). The doctor and his girlfriend escape through the sewers, which couldn't stink more than this movie. The boring hero type drags the heart patient scientist out the front way, and the movie comes to its incoherent end with no idea on the part of the viewer about what was going on for the last hour and a half. There aren't words enough to describe how bad this film was, at least not in the English language. Maybe in Mandarin? We should ask Fu Manchu, eh? Oh, wait, he probably doesn't speak any Chinese dialects, being British and all..

drab morality tale about a high school kid who's pretty much the now-stereotypical nerd. He's smart, but has no friends, no social skills, and a lazy loser of a father who borrows money from HIM. A pretty girl hits on him(he should've known she wanted something-he's supposed to be smart, right?). She manipulates the poor desperate fool into writing her term paper on Shakespeare, which the teacher immediately knows she couldn't have written. He loses the girl(not that he ever really had her) the confidence of his teacher, and his college scholarship, all in one fell blow.

Marv is so silly and desperate for love that he decides to rob some heroin dealers who are running the stuff through the warehouse he works at. Then maybe the trashy little slut will be impressed and want to marry him. Sad, really sad. Marv is such a pathetic dope(and pretty brainless, for a supposedly smart guy. I mean, trying to rob drug dealers? Has this kid got a screw loose?) that you stop feeling sorry for him and get the dreadful urge to kick him in the butt, instead.

The girl, of course, tells her boyfriend about the robbery Marv boasted of to her, and talks him and his cronies into stealing the money from Marv and company. They try to do so, and in the process manage to shoot several people. The cops show up at the same time, and the idiot Marv is dragged away, a total disgrace forever. I know this thing was geared towards making teens behave themselves by showing them the consequences of bad behavior, but all it really illustrated was the consequences of stupid behavior. Which is the premature end of your film career, of course. Goodbye, Marv, we never really knew ya. And thank goodness for that.

boring, horrible piece of Italian euro-trash about a scientist who seems to spend most of his time guzzling beer(this is what makes him American, right? Our scientists spend most of their academic life soused out of their minds, sure. That's where all the really great theories come from), who's studying something(dolphin calls, fish migration patterns, who knows). He hears a weird sound through his headphones, proving that his radio is picking up a station in Jamaica. At the same time, a Jack Skellington girl with one of the worst, most bleached manes of bad 80's hair that it has ever been my pleasure to witness is trying to calm down the dolphins in the Seaquarium she works at, as they're apparently upset about the amount of fish she's been doling out lately. The beginning of the film was a really badly colored storyline about two annoying, very Italian people who's boat is attacked by something unseen under the water. The whiny woman is never seen again(best part of the story), and the guys' corpse is found with no legs. The dim, alcoholic scientist(who has an inexplicable, English- American- Italian accent) and the stick girl with the hay hair begin to theorize that there's some kind of giant monster lurking under the seas off the coast of Italy...err..Florida.

They enlist the help of an electrician to set up an underwater mike, so that the monster can sing karaoke. This guy has a beautiful girlfriend, who's only drawback is that she pronounces Peter "Pey-tah", but for some reason he's sexually drawn to the anatomical skeleton with the frizzly hair, a situation that leaves one blinking.

The dubbing is awful, the editor a spaz, and the storyline generally a yawn. There's a bit about how this weird scientific corporation genetically engineered this monster giant shark-squid-barracuda thing for some reason that makes no sense, and a really unpleasant greasy haired guy goes around killing women, again for no apparent reason. A stupid sheriff and his bulked up deputy are along for the ride, along with a female scientist(who we know is smart because she wears huge glasses). At one time the woman scientist takes on the huge, terrible monster(yeah, right, Ed Wood's giant octopus was more believable) with only a small handaxe, and she wins the contest. Hooray for skinny little women, who obviously make the best monster hunters!

The solution to the problem of the giant thing is to blow up half of the Everglades, leaving a dead zone for several miles in every direction. To Hell with ecology and the environment, right? We have to kill this giant monster! At the end, the electrician and his broomstick love ride off into the sunset on her Vespa, which is o.k. since she's gotten over her colleagues' death and he's not very upset that his girlfriend got whacked by the crazy guy with the greasy hair. Hooray for true love! Wait a minute, isn't there something fishy about all this...

This might not have been a bad western if it could have figured out where it was going, what it was doing when it got there, and where they buried the plot under the prairie.

The main character is a guy named Duke, who apparently decided that robbery wasn't paying(at least not the way he did it, anyway), and so took a job at a local ranch run by a really annoying old guy who fancies himself a learned medical man, his huge goofy sidekick who walks around in an apron a lot, and the old guy's clichéd tomboy granddaughter, who immediately takes a liking to the 'hero'.

The main hinge on which the thin plot revolves is the fact that many of the local ranchers are rounding up wild horses to breed and tame, to the point where there might not be any wild ones left. The worst of the offenders is another old guy, this one in a wheelchair(probably because he let the other old guy treat him for something). His daughter also takes a shine to Duke, although I figure they were both bound to be disappointed, since Duke showed little interest in either and was probably gay.

The wheelchair old guy makes a pact with the other ranchers not to round up any more wild horses for awhile, but the straight out of prison ranch foreman has other ideas. He intends to get himself deputized, along with his thugs, so he can kill and steal land with impunity. Since the only person who can stand against him is Duke, he stand a pretty good chance of succeeding. He even manages to frame Duke for murder, so that he has to flee town as a fugitive, hide out, and get shot by the wheelchair guy's daughter. As a hero, Duke is pretty ineffective.

Actually, it's the medical old guy who figures out the scheme, using a conveniently dropped letter. There are several conveniently dropped bits of evidence, which is a cheap way to advance a plot. The bad guy shoots the old guy, but only manages to give him a scratch in spite of the fact that he was no more than fifty yards away and the old guy was going really, really slow because he was in the middle of a river. Okay, so he can't shoot. But he's pretty efficient about everything else, so we can forgive him that.

Duke and the local sheriff(who finally grew a spine) arrest the evil foreman, and the movie peters out to its slow end. Nothing is really resolved, and the effeminate hero ignores both of the attractive and drooling women(probably in favor of the big, apron wearing sidekick). The horses were by far the best actors, which is fairly sad.

Cheap, gloriously bad cheese from the 80's, the decade of cheese. I watched this one first uncut and un-MST3K'ed, and it was pretty much laugh out loud funny even without the comments.

The plot(such as it is) revolves around a post-apocalyptic world in which the AI robots revolted(sound familiar?) and destroyed pretty much everything, leaving a world in ruins with air so bad no one can breathe it. The few humans that are left act as slaves to an enigmatic being called the Dark One, which seems to be part computer and part organic being. The 'air slaves' work to produce energy for this being in return for breathable air. Every once in a while, the Dark One has the strongest of the air slaves fight to the death, so that no one will rise as a leader in a revolt against the Dark One.

Okay, that's the so-called serious stuff. On to the silly stuff, such as the ridiculous quasi-futuristic clothing that everyone sports, including car seat cover 'fur' garments, loin cloths, and spangly stuff and feather boas(worn mostly by the Dark One's henchwoman, a chick with an unrecognizable and almost non-understandable accent). Or the wooden acting and stilted lines sported by all of the so-called 'actors', who's dialog is high on pretension and low on sense. Or the dime store special fx, including pink socks with teeth glued onto them for 'deadly' sewer snakes, a bomb made of strung piano wire and a tin can, and terrible 'mutants' with Halloween rubber masks on.

A band of air slaves follow their leader, a mysterious wanderer who has adapted to the air outside, to go to the energy plant to destroy the Dark One. The guy's name is Neo, which explains where the Wachowski brothers got the idea for the Matrix. They meet up with a group of Amazons along the way, with the obligatory fight scene in which the female is bested(of course). Has anyone else ever noticed that in every Amazon movie or t.v. show ever produced, these so-called amazing warriors always get their butts kicked by either men or women? Amazons are just pansies, I guess.

This band of determined warriors makes their way through Central Park...errr...the ravaged lands beyond the last standing city(good way to save money on the matte paintings of a destroyed New York City, anyway) and journey into the sewers leading to the Power Station where the Dark One and his go-go girl henchwoman Valeria hang out. Here they vanquish such ferocious beasts as the sock puppet worms, a giant spider no one sees, and the goofy lobster robot who is one of the Dark One's personal guard.

The final showdown is pretty sad. One of the slaves, a girl who's father was taken by the Dark One because he'd produced a way for people to breathe the foul air, sees that her father has been 'consumed by the Dark One's true form", which involves him being eaten by a giant avocado until only his head is sticking out. The three remaining adventurers destroy the Dark One by turning off a few switches, and the robot holocaust dies not with a bang but with a whimper. The two humans exchange some amazingly wooden last lines, and that's it. The End.

Corman, Corman, Corman. My real question has always been-who kept giving this guy money to make movies?! After they saw the first couple of films, the backers should have pulled out faster than a guy out of a syphilitic hooker. Instead, Corman had a long career of making total stinkers, like Attack of the Giant Leeches. And It Conquered the World. And Gunslinger. And many, many more. Each and every one guaranteed to be gray, bad, and cheaply made, with no more than a dozen people total in the cast, and that includes extras.

This one takes place in a backwoods swamp in Florida(I think, it might have been Arkansas, or Alabama, or any southern state, really). The local yokels are yakking in the grocery store, and one of them starts to pontificate in one of the corniest southern accents ever(and that's saying something) about a giant creature that he shot in the swamp while he was out poaching. Nobody believes him(big surprise). There's also a scene between the fat grocer and his beautiful younger wife, in which she declares her undying loathing for him.

Cut to a beefy blonde game warden, the usual smug pompous fifties 'hero' that populate so many of these awful movies. He's complaining because he can't catch a cold, let alone the local poachers. This guy's about as effective as a diaphragm full of holes. But of course he'll somehow find a way to save the day, at least for other chunky white guys with large jaws.

The poacher get attacked when he's out in his canoe, and gets dragged under the water. Then not much happens, until the grocer's wife and her lover meet at the edge of the swamp to have a tryst(wouldn't't that be a rather stinky, moist place to conduct an affair?). The grocer returns early, goes looking for his spouse, and threatens the pair with a gun. Beforew he can blow them away, they're jumped on by the very large leeches. Everyone(for everyone, read the local idiot sheriff) thinks that the grocer killed them and threw the bodies in the swamp.

Two more inbred hicks are pulled under while they're hunting for gator(one wishes heartily that the gators would hunt them, instead). The game warden begins to suspect that something other than the normal local wildlife is causing these attacks. After his father-in-law gets arrested for using the Charleton Heston Fish Locator(dynamite), the warden decides to use some scuba diving gear and start looking for the underwater cave that he's theorized must be where the bloodsuckers are taking their prey for an afternoon snack. That's when the 'giant leeches' start really appearing, although not clearly. They look like guys in plastic bag suits. They're almost as stupid looking as the giant Venusian carrot in It Conquered the World. Corman is a master of stupid looking monsters.

After he expressed reluctance to use dynamite to blow up the leeches earlier, the warden changes his mind with a vengeance. He uses about a ton of explosives, killing the leeches and all of the aquatic wildlife for miles in every direction. Thank you, Mr. Conservationist. Corman's reason for the giant leeches-the fact that NASA(I guess it is Florida, after all) used some atomic energy in their early experiments. Apparently, even a touch of atomic or nuclear radiation is enough to make normal people and animals grow to an enormous size. Why this is, and they don't just die from radiation poisoning, is beyond me. Anyhoo, that was the end of this moist, pointless, ridiculous saga of giant leeches-who really sucked. Heh, heh.