VHS Purgatory/Exploito All’Italiana: The Squeeze (Antonio Margheriti, 1978)

Not to be confused with the excellent, Stacy Keach-starring British crime movie of the same name, THIS Squeeze was shot in New York with a largely American cast by our old friend “Anthony M. Dawson”.

Given how little known it remains amongst the Euro-Cult contingent, I was pretty stoked when I fished this VHS copy out of some mouldering old cardboard box somewhere about five years ago. Apparently I wasn’t sufficiently stoked to find time to actually watch the damn thing however – that’s a pleasure I left until the clock was approaching midnight last Saturday, and…. well it wasn’t a moment too soon, let’s put it that way.

The plot here sees Lee Van Cleef’s retired master safe-cracker lured out of retirement when the needy and weak-willed son of his former boss (Edward Albert) drops into Lee’s Mexican ranch to explain that his life is on the line if he can’t successfully pull off a daring diamond heist for some nasty German mobsters he’s involved with. Out of loyalty to the kid’s dad, Van Cleef reluctantly agrees to help him out, and soon finds himself on the wintry streets of NYC, with only a full length white overcoat and a furry Russian hat to protect him from the thrills and spills that one imagines will inevitably ensue.

Lionel Stander – looking more like Ernest Borgnine than ever – gets a substantial role as Van Cleef’s old time fence/pawnbroker buddy, Karen Black is the – uh – “kooky” next door neighbour who inexplicably turns up to care for a sullen Van Cleef whilst he’s holed up in a rented apartment with a leg wound, and Robert Alda is the cop hot on their trail.

Although the print under review here is an absolutely brutal pan-and-scan job, it's still clear that cinematographer Sergio D'Offizi (an Italian exploitation vet whose credits include ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’ and ‘Cannibal Holocaust’) extracted some great atmosphere from the snow-covered Brooklyn and Manhattan locations, and composer Paolo Vasile also keeps things ticking over nicely with some cracking ‘70s cop show music.

So far, so good but… oh man. How can I best put this? If you watch this one at all, don’t do so late at night. I took the plunge, and my battle to keep my eyes open until the end proved more epic than anything than unfolds in ‘The Squeeze’.

A director who spent most of his career making competent, impersonal mid-tier genre movies, Margheriti seems to have taken the opportunity to strike out in an uncharacteristically bold direction with ‘The Squeeze’. Unfortunately however, that direction involves ditching the action-packed hi-jinks viewers might reasonably have expected of a film like this, and instead attempting to craft an under-stated, melancholy thriller in the vein of, say, ‘The Conversation’ or ‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’, perhaps even drawing slightly on ‘Midnight Cowboy’ in its attempt to concentrate on the oddball friendship that develops between the Van Cleef and Albert characters.

The thing is though… (deep sigh)… making a film work on that level requires a few things. Like excellent writing, good direction, and a convincing set of performances. With all due respect to the combined talents of the cast members I’ve listed above, no one working in any of these capacities on ‘The Squeeze’ seems to have felt the need to raise their game much beyond the level you’d expect of a run-of-the-mill late ‘70s Italian crime flick.

Which is to say, ‘The Squeeze’ basically plays out like a run-of-the-mill late ‘70s Italian crime flick in which nothing whatsoever happens. There are no real action scenes as such. No fights, no running around. No sleaze or violence, no crazy shenanigans, not even any amusing dubbed dialogue. The characters are one dimensional, the plotting is predictable and boring. The cast spend most of their time sitting around moodily, muttering dialogue that you feel might have carried some meaning in an alternate universe where it hadn’t been knocked out by a team of writers who were just treading water between the ‘Death Wish’ rip-offs and the ‘Rambo’ rip-offs.

There’s a big explosion after Van Cleef pulls off the diamond heist, but one explosion does not an action movie make. Thereafter, Van Cleef spends most of the remaining run time hiding out with a bad leg, trading sullen banter with Black’s genuinely rather insufferable ‘ditzy single chick’ stereotype.

In one of the film’s weirder touches meanwhile, Albert is arrested for the heinous crime of playing the display drum kit in a shop window without permission (I kid you not) – a caper that apparently lands him with a stretch in maximum security, where he spends much of the rest of the movie playing poker with some Black Panther type dudes.

(Even more unfeasibly, Van Cleef is shown reading about this in the papers the next morning, where we briefly see a headline along the lines of “LOCAL HOOD DRUMS HIMSELF TO JAIL” topping a full page story – it must have been one hell of a slow news day in NYC.)

Whilst all this is going on, the film’s primary antagonist – the nasty, Boris Johnson-lookalike German mobster – has been unceremoniously rubbed out by some thugs working for the guy they stole the diamonds from, and so, with its two protagonists both cooling their heels in confined locations and its main villain out of the picture, the movie proceeds to ramble on toward…. what exactly?

I mean, I’m sure Robert Altman or Sidney Lumet or someone like that could have pulled some compelling drama out of this lackadaisical scenario, but – again, with all due respect to his achievements in the field of broadly decent exploitation flicks - Antonio Margheriti, not so much.

The film’s eventual conclusion is, admittedly, nicely played out, with a bit of a melancholy kick to it, but it’s more of an “I guess I should be feeling something here?” kind of deal than anything else, and the faux-profound closing dialogue between Van Cleef and Stander, like much that has proceeded it, falls flat.

In closing, it’s worth noting that my tape of ‘The Squeeze’ ran about eighty four minutes, whilst the box states ninety three minutes and IMDB gives a run time of ninety nine. Could it be possible that I’ve just subjected myself to some kind of heavily neutered TV version of the film with all the good bits cut out? Or alternatively, is there an uncut version out there somewhere that is even more monumentally tedious? Or, is the ninety nine minute thing on IMDB just a mistake, and the differential in the video run-time just a result of those always mind-boggling PAL / NTSC conversion issues? Answers on a postcard, please.

Until the first of these three possibilities is proven to be the case however, I’m going to let this rather dispiriting review stand – partly just for the purposes of consumer advice, and partly to highlight the superb poster artwork reproduced on the VHS cover. (Aside from the explosion, and Lee Van Cleef holding a gun, absolutely none of the details depicted in this painting are reflected in the film itself, by the way.)

I suppose it’s possible that, at some point in the distant future, you might run across this movie on late night TV and, noting the intriguing cast, the great locations and the cool music, think to yourself, “gee, this looks like a good movie”. Maybe, if you can call to mind the merest fraction of what I’ve written here today, your evening could still be saved. Take heed.

VHS Purgatory: Pretty Kill (George Kaczender, 1986)

It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these posts, isn’t it? To be honest, with my movie watching time increasingly squeezed, and discs of solid must-see titles piling up, throwing on a random “hey, no idea” tape in the ol’ VCR has become a bit of a… well, luxury doesn’t seem quite the right word, but you get my meaning.

I don’t remember where I acquired this particular tape - it must have been a charity shop find I suppose – but the deliciously sleazy artwork by definitive ‘80s poster artist Enzo Sciotti has been staring at me from the shelf for months now, and this week the time finally came for me to give it a whirl.

I’d never heard of director George Kaczender (a Hungarian filmmaker who directed his first feature in Canada in 1969, quoth IMDB), and the more-half-arsed-than-usual plot synopsis on the back doesn’t give much away either (what happened here? Looks like the copywriter got about halfway, let his pre-school daughter write a sentence and then gave up…). As such, the only thing I had to go on prior to watching was the cast – Susannah York, clearly bumped up from cameo to top-billing to capitalize on her name value vis-à-vis this British edition, Season Hubley (who was good in Paul Schrader’s ‘Hardcore’), and Baron Greenback himself, the great Yaphet Kotto.

So. Turns out ‘Pretty Kill’ (which got a theatrical release in the US under the name ‘Tomorrow’s a Killer’) is a thoroughly mediocre Reagan-era New York cop / psychopath thriller, with a milieu that sometimes recalls that frequented by great NYC genre directors like Larry Cohen, Abel Ferrara and Bill Lustig, but is crucially lacking in the grit, talent and vision that went toward making them such.

Swinging unevenly between over-scored melodrama and sub-Friedkin faux-documentary mumbling during it’s first half, but the pace is sluggish, the direction strictly pedestrian, and the story rendered along lines flat, clichéd and emotionally manipulative. Even the obligatory 42nd street / strip club / sex party interludes seem bland and anemic, and the attempts to portray underworld / drug situations are laughably unconvincing. Not a *terrible* movie by any means, but something of a snooze, you might say.

Basically, the best stuff here comes from the cast. Though as suspected her role is very small, York is good value here, and Hubley is solid too as the kind of “professional high class hooker” character that only exists in ‘80s movies. David Birney is a very likable presence as our heroic-cop-on-the-edge male lead, with a kind of “Harry Dean Stanton’s wide-eyed younger brother” vibe to him. I feel he could have done good work injecting a bit of thespian muscle into in these kind of generic crime / action roles, but presumably the world at large disagreed, as just about everything else on his IMDB CV is prefaced with the dreaded “TV” brackets.

Always a joy to see Kotto too of course. Initially I feared he was going to be wasted here playing the obligatory “by-the-book superior officer” antagonist to Birney’s bush league Dirty Harry, but he actually twists the formulaic role in rather a winningly cool direction, oozing soft-spoken menace and somehow managing to convey the impression that he’s just as much of a threat to public decency as the movie’s low-life criminals, not as a result of any particular actions or story points, but just through the sheer force of his creepy demeanor and intimidating physical presence. The scene in which he unexpectedly appears in a zipped up leather jacket to whisper veiled threats at Birney during an after-work drinking session was the highlight of the movie as far as I’m concerned.

At the other end of the scale however, actress Suzanne Snyder, who plays the pivotal character of Francie, is simply atrocious. Her “taking pre-planned deep breaths and staring straight at camera” performance is pretty hard to take even when she’s playing a wholly one dimensional character in the film’s first half, but when the story opens out into a DePalma-esque psychodrama in the second half, requiring her to essay a chameleonic, split personality psychopath, her poor acting simply renders the whole thing comical, pushing ‘Pretty Kill’ beyond mere blandness and into the realm of being an actual living, breathing *terrible movie*.

Admittedly, this isn’t entirely Snyder’s fault – the script’s treatment of her character’s mental illness and childhood abuse-induced dysfunction is ham-fisted in the extreme, and the scenes in which she goes through the whole ‘regressing back to childhood’ breakdown routine – inexplicably clutching a corn dolly, imitating her father’s voice etc – are painful to sit through; an absolute embarrassment to all concerned, even if we write off any serious intent and just take the movie as a pure exploitation flick.

Speaking of which, ‘Pretty Kill’s finale does at least attain a certain degree of low level camp/trash excelsis, as Snyder, now in full scenery-chewing psycho mode, takes on Hubley in a bloody corkscrew / straight razor battle that plays like a TV sketch show parody of a DePalma set-piece. Nothing to write home about, but it was utterly ridiculous and moderately entertaining.

Also, the “story of a psycho” style synth-pop ballad that plays over the end credits is just unspeakably bad. Did Snyder sing it, whilst ‘in character’? I didn’t hang around to check, but I wouldn’t be surprised. A staggeringly misguided inclusion, either way. It pains me to rag on someone like this in a review, so I'll wrap this up now and sincerely hope that Snyder put this farrago behind her and went on to better things. (To my surprise, a quick IMDB check reveals that she actually racked up a pretty solid CV of smaller roles in ‘80s ‘cult’ fare, with appearances in ‘Weird Science’, ‘Night of the Creeps’ and ‘The Last Starfighter’ amongst others.)

Despite its myriad faults, ‘Pretty Kill’ nonetheless has a certain charm to it on a “turn off your mind and float downstream” level – perfect, mind-numbing late night TV comfort viewing that has a palpable nostalgic pull to it if yr in the mood for this sort of thing... a feeling that is only enhanced by the exquisitely degraded VHS form in which I watched it here.

Picture was nicely colour-drained and fuzzy throughout, but playback was smooth and consistent, suggesting this tape has been well cared for since 1987. Before the film, we got a lovely Guild Video ident, and trailers for ‘War Zone’ (Christopher Walken and David Hemmings in war-torn Beirut!), ‘Take It Easy’ (post-Flashdance synth-rock / acrobatics opus?!), ‘Duet For One’ (jaw-droppingly crass, based-on-a-true-story Cannon Films Oscar-bait) and ‘Witchboard’ (you know it) – all very much worth looking up on Youtube if you’ve got the time.

A full scan of Sciotti’s wraparound cover art is provided for your viewing pleasure below.

VHS Purgatory: The Brotherhood of Satan (Bernard McEveety, 1971)

When I reviewed lovably eccentric Louisiana witchcraft movie The Witchmaker a few years back (mental note: gotta get a watchable copy of that some time), I failed to make the connection between producer L.Q. Jones and the gaunt cowboy actor of the same name who turns up in most of Sam Peckinpah’s ‘60s/’70s films. Partly I just wasn’t paying that much attention, and partly it just seems kinda unlikely, y’know? Well, turns out that it actually was that same L.Q. Jones, and that following the success(?) of his first venture into low budget occult horror, he and co-producer/actor Alvy Moore actually took a second shot at the genre, with Jones persuading his frequent on-screen partner Strother Martin to co-star in 1971’s Texas-lensed ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’. (You’ll remember the pair as the hapless bounty hunters in ‘The Wild Bunch’, and the varmints who leave Jason Robards to die in the desert in ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’.)

Regrettably, what they came up with is a dull and rather mystifying stab at the early 70s “Satanic panic” sub-genre, mostly lacking the self-contained charm of its predecessor. But, it is at least a lot stranger than the already fairly strange 'Witchmaker’, and that’s gotta count for something.

What manner of madness is this, you may find yourself asking from the outset, as the film opens with motion-blurred close-ups of tank tracks crushing piles of metal, accompanied by grinding machine noise and occasional sounds of people screaming in terror, intercut with shots of a wind up toy tank (shades of ‘Astro Zombies’). When this… whatever it is.. has been completed, we see a small boy walking away from a pile of smouldering wreckage. Climbing a hill, he meets a couple of other children, including a girl who begins to brightly glow in supernatural fashion – cue animated credits sequence.

After that, we’re introduced to a happy family who are having a nice day out near a.. lake? I guess it’s a lake. Driving off, they travel along a desert road, where they discover the crushed car seen in the prologue. Heading to a nearby town to report this rather extreme ‘accident’, they meet with an inexplicably hostile reception, as the cops immediately rough up and interrogate the father, before a crowd of locals descend upon their car in a kind of mass rage. “You took them away from us!”, a man who looks rather like Fidel Castro yells despairingly as the family turn tail and get the hell out of there.

Strange stuff this. Definitely uneasy. Not at all a good end to a day at the lake. But yes – unease, unease, unease seems to be prolific TV director Bernard McEveety’s bag, his apparent disdain for establishing shots and clear transitions leaving us with an uncomfortable mixture of blurry, abstract close ups and cramped, medium shot dialogue scenes that never really settles down into any kind of sensible rhythm.

The actual storyline of the film, once we’ve figured it out, is predictable bordering on tedious – a coven of elderly citizens are using Satanic powers to prevent local people from leaving town, and hypnotising/stealing their children one by one, so that they can transfer their spirits from the older bodies to the younger and continue their unholy existence. Ho hum. A pretty straight-down-the-line set up for horror fans, and unfortunately one that veers closer to the oh-so-‘70s threat-to-the-family vibe of ‘The Stepford Wives’ or Bert I. Gordon’s achingly dull ‘Necromancy’ than to the more decadent, whacked out brand of Satanism I tend to favour.

But linear though this plot may be, it becomes unbearably confusing simply due to the film’s refusal (or inability?) to really communicate anything to us very effectively. Hard to explain quite what I mean, but basically this is the kind of film where at any point characters we’ve never seen before can start wondering around, talking about stuff we have no interest in; in which we’re never quite sure where or why a certain scene is happening, or what pertinent information we should take away from it. Whether the result of incompetent editing, heavy cutting or reliance on incomplete footage, or just an admirable (if doomed) attempt to avoid exposition-heavy dialogue, the result is that we’re often simply lost.

I know at this point you’re probably thinking “great, I love movies like that”, but the kicker here is that not a great deal happens to make any of this narrative heavy lifting worthwhile. Despite some moderate outbursts of violence and fright, the whole thing has an inescapable TV movie feel about it, which certainly gels with McEveety’s CV. But imagine a TV movie directed by someone who seems to be looking to Jess Franco as a paragon of narrative efficiency, and you’ll start to get the idea.

Not that the Franco comparison extends much further than that, unfortunately. Certainly Uncle Jess wouldn’t think much of ‘Brotherhood..’s subdued retiree Satanists, led by head cultist Strother Martin, here mustering little of the energy he brought to his western roles as he intones some totally square Satanic litanies (just yr typical “oh Lord Satan..” sorta stuff really). Admittedly, their hideout does have a couple of pretty cool sets (that cobweb-shrouded giant ankh gateway thing is a bit of an eye-opener), and all that business with making hypnotised children stand motionless on marble pillars is pretty peculiar and subliminally disturbing, but… yeah, not much doing really.

In essence I think ‘Brotherhood of Satan’ is a viewing experience very well suited to the pungent charms of this 1989 Parkfield Entertainment VHS (other titles in the “Hollywood Horror Collection” include ‘Torture Garden’, ‘The Mutations’ and ‘Blind Terror’). As well as the coating of nutritious fuzz, adding an extra layer of unearthliness to otherwise mundane imagery, it’s a good one for drifting in and out of sleep to as the VCR wheels whir.

In fact, good advice for watching this one would be… well actually good advice would be to watch something that provides some degree of entertainment value or emotional/intellectual engagement instead. But if say you were to find yourself stuck on some hellish airline where they’re showing this as the inflight movie, taking some sedatives and just letting it roll over you is definitely the way to go.

Yes, watching whilst fully awake would be a mistake. You’d only start asking questions. Why do the elderly Satanists seem to be letting a a young-ish woman join their ranks? Why - possibly as a result of this, possibly not - does one of the elderly women in the coven have to beg for her life before the altar and then stand motionless on a pillar with the kidnapped children whilst the rest of the cult mock her? What’s the reasoning behind giving Strother Martin’s character a ‘real world’ identity as the town’s mild-mannered doctor? (His secret identity as head Satanist is never revealed to the good guys, and he never uses any of the information he’s learned from hanging around with them to modify the plans of his cult - in fact he does bugger all in either of his identities really). Why, after a typically confusing scene in which it is implied that two people have died, do we see our male lead (who wasn’t there) walking shell-shocked through some hellish basement full of body bags as the police question him?

No, best not to worry about any of that. Just wash half a sleeping pill down with a few stiff drinks. As you drift in and out of consciousness, strange pictures will appear, flickering across your mind’s eye, hinting at far stranger mysteries than this the sober surface of ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’ is able to provide.

Men in monastic robes move hypnotised, formally attired children around on a chequered floor, like chess pieces.

A woman sinks into an armchair, experiencing some sort of seizure, as her husband(?) sits disinterestedly behind her, reading obscure and/or oddly translated bible verses aloud.

A distraught deputy sheriff chases the dust cloud kicked up by a departing car, waving an orange toy monkey above his head.

These are the building blocks ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’ offers the brave somnambulist. Dare you try to assemble them..?

VHS Purgatory:Sister Streetfighter(Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1974)

Let’s start this one off with a confession: I’m afraid I’ve never been much into kung-fu movies. I don’t dislike them or anything, but at the same time I’ve never embraced them quite so readily as I have most other exploitation genres.

My stock explanation for this has long been to just to say that I’m not really all that excited by the idea of watching a bunch of guys fighting, but clearly this logic doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. I mean, if you look at things in those reductionist terms, I’m not *particularly* interested in watching people wondering around in the woods looking confused, or bored actresses performing unconvincing softcore sex scenes, or some guy with rubber fangs going around biting people’s necks… but I’m still happy to dedicate thousands of hours to watching films in which all that stuff happens.

No, I think perhaps my disinterest in kung-fu dates back further, to when I was about 12 or 13, and I had this friend who – as wimpy teenage boys are apt to do – had decided he was really into martial arts, and so his dad had bought him a box set of all the pre-‘Enter The Dragon’ Bruce Lee films. What a cool dad! They were all rated 18, and I was totally psyched to watch them. With my childish expectations calibrated according to a mixture of big budget Hollywood action flicks and Mortal Kombat style video games though, it was a brutally disappointing experience.

If I’d seen the slicker, more Westernised ‘Enter The Dragon’, I probably could have dug it, but the appeal of the Hong Kong flicks was entirely lost on me at the time. Not only were they entirely lacking in the kind of skull-crushing, eyeball mangling gore-violence I was anticipating, but, well… what is this shit, y’know? Where are all the explosions, the motorbike chases, the sword-fights? Why is everybody speaking in that weird way where the words don’t match their lips? So he’s just got to protect his buddy’s restaurant from some goons? You mean.. that’s the whole plot? Shouldn’t he be SAVING THE WORLD or some shit? Some fucking hero, this guy. Spiderman would’ve saved a few small businesses from goons before the opening credits. If he’s not gonna pull anyone’s spine out in the next five minutes, I’m outta here.*

I thought it was funny when Bruce Lee punched some guy through a wall and he left an exact outline of his shape, with splayed arms and legs. And I liked the inexplicable comedy bits where he drank loads of soup, or made a kid cry at the airport. But aside from that… well it was just guys slugging each other really, and, not being in a frame of mind that allowed me to appreciate the grace and power of the way in which they were doing the slugging, I was pretty underwhelmed. And, having failed to cultivate the appropriate frame of mind in subsequent years, kung-fu and ‘fight movies’ in general remain a bit of a blindspot for me ever since.

I mean, I’ve seen a few Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung movies and thought they were awesome, and I’ve seen a few of the wackier Shaw Bros flicks with all the magic and special effects and whatnot, and they were great too, but I’ve never really investigated further. My wider interest in Japanese films has at least led me though to check out Sonny Chiba in ‘The Streetfighter’, a quintessentially kick-ass venture that really delivers on the kind of bone-crushing grue my 12 year old self might have appreciated. And that brings us (finally) to the little number pictured above, housed in a sweet 1983 big box from the venerable Video Tape Centre of Suffolk Street, SW1.


I was going to continue with a disclaimer saying something along the lines of “I really enjoyed ‘Sister Streetfighter’, but because I don’t really watch many of these films, I’m perfectly prepared to accept the fact that all the things I thought were weird or noteworthy about it are pretty standard kung-fu topes”. Hopefully that won’t actually be necessary though, because having looked up a few online reviews, it seems it wasn’t just me who got KOed by the film’s general goofiness - in fact the general consensus seems to be that ‘Sister Streetfighter’ really is just totally crazy.

Of particular interest to me is the fact that several key-players from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s heyday of Japanese action/exploitation films are involved in the film (Kazuhiko ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly’ Yamaguchi directs, and our old pal Norifumi Suzuki co-wrote the script), but the tone and style is so different from the Toei films I was writing about in my Think Pink feature that you’d never guess in a million years that this movie emerged from the same studio within the same five year period.

Whilst it’s true that popular film industries all over the world went into a catastrophic financial nosedive during the ‘70s, it seems that in Japan the decline took place more quickly and severely than elsewhere, reaching a crunch point as early as 1974, when the relatively lavish action and youth films that had filled the release schedules only a few years earlier started to disappear, replaced by nastier, lower budget sex films and, after the international success of ‘The Streetfighter’, an occasional bit of kung-fu. As such, watching ‘Sister Streetfighter’ feels a bit like watching an Italian film from the early ‘80s, when directors who’d helmed slick, even respectable, productions a decade earlier found themselves jamming econo, going straight for the gore/boobs/blockbuster rip-off jugular and basically blowing whatever reputation they had left out their ass in thoroughly entertaining fashion.

Clearly made with both eyes on the international market, it actually features far less sleaze and nastiness than your average Japanese exploitation flick - the bone-breaking action of ‘The Streetfighter’ has been significantly scaled back, presumably to reflect Etsuko Shihomi’s more genteel fighting style, and, give or take the odd implied rape and a relatively tame torture set-piece during the finale (are these guys actually incapable of making a movie in which no women get tied up and beaten..?), things more or less conform to ‘70s Western notions of good taste.


In most other respects though, it very much shares the spirit of the kind of threadbare, one camera epics that the Italians were trying to foist upon the world market as their film industry collapsed around them. One of the first things you’ll notice about the film is that, in stark contrast to the technical professionalism found in earlier Toei films, the camerawork is completely out to lunch. Whole scenes are weirdly framed and blurred, and the camera rattles around like it’s been mounted on one of those rickety coalmine wagons. Sudden lurching pans and ‘da-da-dah!’ shock zooms happen relentlessly, for no reason, to the point where the constant disorientation is almost headache inducing.

Perhaps seeking to ‘dumb down’ their product to fit the lower expectations of overseas kung-fu audiences, Yamaguchi and co also seem intent on packing the film with as many chop-socky clichés as they can come up - maybe it’s just the English dubbing track that’s to blame, but did they REALLY have to throw in that awful ‘Hong Kong Garden’/’Kung Fu Fighting’ music cue – you know the one - every time the action switches to Hong Kong..? I think most of the characters here are meant to be Chinese, hanging out in the ex-pat community in Yokohama, but for all the English dub cares for such subtleties they could be living on Mars, and with the filmmakers all too happy to throw aside such tired notions as continuity and basic coherence, the result is a flick that often plays more like some crazy-ass, death-or-glory shit from Indonesia or The Philippines than a product of one of the oldest and proudest film industries in the world.

Maybe I’m reading too much into Suzuki’s contribution to the film’s writing, but ‘Sister Streetfighter’ definitely exhibits a certain strain of bewildering, fast-moving craziness that strongly echoes that found in his pinky violence films. Who cares that our heroine is suddenly teleported to a clifftop rope bridge for one showdown, then inexplicably returns from the dead after plummeting to the rocks below, when you’ve got a guy in a feather headdress firing poisoned blowpipe darts hiding round every corner, and a former priest in a black cape leaping out of a wardrobe armed with a prototype spear-gun when you least expect it, all whilst distorted library music blares and the camera blasts around the place like an out of control helicopter..?

Then there’s this whole thing about heroin being smuggled boxes full of wigs, a wild Franco-esque nightclub scene, and even a classic, shrieking rubber bat attack scene at one point, just because, well.. why the hell not? Perhaps compensating for the lack of any serious sex n’ violence, random zaniness amped up to the nth degree seems to have been the intention here, and it's a strategy that certainly works for me.


Much of the film’s entertainment value arises from that fact that the main drug dealer bad guy’s favourite hobby is ‘collecting killers’, surrounding himself with what must surely be one of the most unlikely arrays of eccentric martial artists ever assembled on-screen. “It’s just as much fun as a car full of gorillas”, he enthuses. And, whilst I have to admit that I think a car full of gorillas would be pretty fun, he may have a point. In one wonderful / hilarious sequence, the Big Boss is shown chilling by the pool as his collection of freakish combatants practice around him, the movie helpfully freeze-framing with on-screen captions telling us who they are – “Tessin – The Sickle User!”, “Hachigen Ma - Japanese Cudgel Play!”, “Eva Parrish – Karate Champion of Australia!”, and so on.

Some of these guys we get to see quite a bit of (that annoying bastard in the red robe with the nun-chukas just won’t shut up and die), but others (like poor old Eva) are never heard from again. Playing a particularly prominent role in proceedings is a guy named ‘Hammerhead’, a generic self-regarding demi-boss with his own gang of loyal goons. What I liked about them is that they march about with what appear to be steel wastepaper baskets on their heads, but when engaging in a fight they immediately take them off, presumably realising how unhelpful such ‘armour’ would prove to be in a hand to hand combat situation, but unwilling to fully abandon the enjoyment they gain from parading through the streets with steel buckets on their heads. I also like the fact that the big prize the bad guy has promised him when he kills Shihomi is “a gym you can be proud of”.


Another WTF highlight is the inclusion of the ‘Amazons 7’, a troupe of tiny Thai kick-boxing ladies who wear animal masks and Fred Flintstone style leopard-skin mini-dresses. As with many of the more outlandish baddies on display, Etsuko and Sonny Chiba deal with them in disappointingly double-quick time, but hey, ya pays ya money, ya takes ya choice.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Sonny Chiba is in this movie? The original American advertising certainly did, misleadingly proclaiming him to be the star, when in fact he manages little more than a extended cameo, turning up every now and then to kick some ass (which he does spectacularly, of course) before enigmatically disappearing again. Dunno what it is that keeps tearing him away from this desperate life & death conflict. I guess he’s just a busy man. Bizarrely, the back cover blurb on the UK VHS claims that Chiba’s character has ‘..the power to become invisible!’, which I can only assume is the result of the writer working from a translated plot synopsis that said something like “Chiba keeps vanishing”, and taking it a bit too literally.


Left to carry the film largely on her own, Etsuko Shihomi does a pretty great job if I’m any judge. Presumably pretty young when the movie was made, she’s a charismatic and likable enough screen presence to stand alongside Chiba, a capable actress within the confines of what is admittedly an astoundingly silly movie, and – insofar as a rube like me is able to tell – an extremely impressive karate fighter and physical performer. If Chiba can be taken as a fairly obvious unofficial reference point for Ryu in the Streetfighter video games then Shihomi is a shoe-in for Chun Li, and it’s not surprising that she followed up for success here with ‘The Streetfighter’s Last Revenge’, ‘Return of the Sister Streetfighter’, ‘Sister Streetfighter: Fifth Level Fist’ and a whole raft of other karate movies that, along with some straight acting roles, kept her busy all the way through to the mid ‘80s, including ‘Karate Inerno’ (directed by Teruo Ishii) and the brilliantly named ‘Which is Stronger, Karate or The Tiger?’ (aka ‘Sonny Chiba’s Dragon Princess’).


So, in conclusion: ‘Sister Streetfighter’ makes barely any sense, is jam-packed with craziness, has a cool, ass-kicking cast, and appears to have been thrown together in about a week by a bunch of jittery maniacs with a few domestic camcorders and a hang-glider. Perfect entertainment, in other words. A thing of beauty and a joy forever, as the boy Keats once had it. If I’d seen this back when I was 12 years old, my life might have been very different (and hopefully not just because I’d be running around with a bucket on my head orchestrating ill-advised wig-based smuggling escapades).

Until somebody bothers to issue a takedown notice, ‘Sister Streetfighter’ can be viewed in its fuzzy entirety on Youtube (from whence I took the rough screenshots above). Meanwhile, here’s the US trailer:

If I recall correctly, the VTC tape also has a bonus trailer for some movie in which Chuck Norris and Lee Van Cleef fight the Illuminati. It looked pretty great! Remind me what the title is in the comments box and win, well… a very fleeting sense of self-satisfaction, and possibly an acknowledgment when I edit this post to include a link to the trailer.


* It should be noted that these are my garbled 15+ years ago recollections of the Bruce Lee films, and do not necessarily reflect what actually happens in them, even in the slightest. I haven’t watched them since, but I’m sure they’re all marvellous. Please don’t spam me Bruce fans.

VHS Purgatory: Zeta One (Michael Cort, 1969)

Say what you like about Nigel Wingrove and his Redemption empire (and there is plenty to be said), I can’t deny that I owe those sleazy mofos a colossal debt of gratitude. Not only for bringing the work of Jean Rollin to my attention (and indeed, pretty much singlehandedly rescuing his films from obscurity during the ‘90s), but also for introducing me to the likes of Bava, Fulci, Argento, de Ossorio, Jess Franco, even George Romero’s ‘Martin’ and ‘The Crazies’. Long before I began to develop a particular interest of the world of cult horror movies, all of these good things came my way in the form of Redemption VHS, all picked up more or less at random from creepy market stall traders during my lunch-break from whatever crappy temp job I was doing at the time, just because they were cheap, and looked weird, and I was bored.

Being Redemption tapes of course, they often had random bits hacked out of their running time, terrible cropped transfers, inexplicable softcore fetish photography on the front and back cover copy written by illiterates. But still, without their formative influence, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here writing this today. God only knows, I might have been somewhere else entirely, writing about some healthy and socially acceptable pastime that I’d taken up instead. Maybe I’d be skiing, or building model boats, or discussing the novels of H.E. Bates. Well fuck that – thanks to Redemption, I’m watching late ‘60s sci-fi sexploitation films, and there’s nothing you can do about it!

And even now, Redemption’s pioneering assaults on the PAL home video market are blazing a trail through my consciousness in an indirect sort of way. Certainly, no other critics or movie distributors have gone out of their way to point me in the direction of something like ‘Zeta One’, but heaven help anyone who’d stand between me and the copy of this ropey looking Tigon quickie I spied in a darkened corner of Edinburgh’s Avalanche Records last year, hidden behind a pile of oversized photo-books, affixed with a sign that said something like “VIDEOS - £whatever”.

For once featuring a Redemption cover model who is posed LESS salaciously than most of the women in the actual movie (what’s up with that?), the humble 84 minutes of this thing turn out to be, well… kind of extraordinary actually. Like a head-on collision between Jess Franco’s ‘Girl From Rio’, one of Lindsey Shonteff’s witless James Bond spoofs and the kind of dream a sixteen year old boy might have after too much cheese and a marathon screening of Gerry Anderson’s ‘UFO’, it’s certainly highly entertaining, if nothing else.


After an agreeably swanky credits sequence soundtracked by a crazy psyche-lounge Bond theme pastiche composed by Johnny Hawksworth (the genius who also brought us the Roobarb & Custard theme, believe it or not), the action, such as it is, begins in the slightly cramped bachelor pad of ‘Department 5’ agent James Word (see what they did there?). Word’s role in British Intelligence seems to consist primarily of being seduced by sexy enemy agents and feeding them a bunch of misinformation (OR IS IT?) when they pump him for secret info during pillow-talk, and his latest conquest is none other than the thoroughly personable Yutte Stensgaard, of ‘Lust For a Vampire’ fame. After a bit of chat and an extended bout of strip poker, they finally hit the sack, where James spins her a yarn regarding his recent encounters with a race of alien women who make incursions onto the earthly plain from a realm called, I’m afraid, ‘Angvia’ (and if you’re having trouble with that one, ask Johnny Alucard). “I think it’s out in space somewhere, or perhaps it’s not… perhaps it’s right here, in a negative time zone or something”, Word helpfully explains.

As you might expect, from hereon in things get pretty weird pretty quickly, as the film explores the earth-bound activities of these, uh, Angvians, who seem chiefly concerned with kidnapping earth girls and indoctrinating them into their “vast supernatural ant colony”, transporting them back to Angvia by means of “some sort of time or space machine housed in a pantechnicon, or in other words, a large van” (thanks James).


As fans of trashy movies and pulp adventure stories have long been aware, societies of women deprived of male companionship will naturally tend to fall back on a dress code consisting of revealing and impractical fetish gear, and the ladies of Angvia are certainly no slouches in this department, adopting a lively variation on the quintessential ‘roman’ look (ill-fitting fringed togas, nipple tassels and heavy golden accessories) before stripping down to some truly startling Guido Crepax style metal & rope bikinis for combat and ‘physical endurance training’.

Although brief, our visits to Angvia are pretty cool, the film’s budget at least stretching to some truly whacked out psychedelic visuals and brightly-coloured, geometric sets – including a ‘self-revelation room’ walled with pulsing mylar sheeting like something out of Ira Cohen’s ‘Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda’ – all accompanied by bursts of demented Sun Ra style abstract electro-blather that provide a stark contrast to the ham-fisted library cues used through most of the rest of the film (sounds like someone in the editing room was jamming ‘whimsical chase themes vol # 27’ pretty heavily, sad to say). I’d like to be able to credit these way-out sounds to composer Hawksworth (they certainly tally with the gratuitous dissonance he threw into the opening theme), but with a movie like this I guess it’s equally likely they just stole them from somewhere else, or cued up ‘fucked up atonal space jazz vol # 12’. Who knows.


Thus far, it seem as if this whole Angvia business takes its inspiration either from cheesy ‘alien women’ flicks like 1956’s Anglo-American ‘Fire Maidens From Outer Space’ (very much the direct forerunner of the kinda stuff we’re witnessing here), and partly from Sax Rohmer’s Sumuru stories. I’ve always been quite fond of Rohmer’s conception of a hidden island inhabited by a race of man-hating female warriors and their all-powerful queen (sort of doing for the gender issue what Fu Manchu did for racial equality), and have always been kinda surprised that the idea wasn’t seized upon more frequently by exploitation/adventure-happy late ‘60s filmmakers. As it is, Harry Alan Towers (don of the Christopher Lee ‘Fu Manchu’ series) did at least commission the aforementioned Lindsay Shonteff to make ‘The Million Eyes of Sumuru’ in 1967, a film chiefly notable (or so I’m told – I’d love to actually see it sometime) for preceding the also aforementioned ‘The Girl From Rio’, which began filming as a proposed sequel, retaining the character of Sumuru and her secret city of Femina, but quickly spiralling off onto some other shit entirely as Jess Franco’s wayward imagination took control.

In terms of both its sci-fi take on the Sumuru mythos and its ultra-kinky pop art aesthetic, ‘The Girl From Rio’ would seem like a natural companion piece to ‘Zeta One’. Any similarities though can probably be regarded as purely coincidental, as ‘Zeta One’ was actually directly inspired (although curiously this is acknowledged nowhere in the credits) by Zeta magazine – a totally bizarre mod/sci-fi ‘men’s mag’ published in London in the late ‘60s. Sadly, very little info on the magazine seems to be available online, but you can look at some scanned pages from an issue here, and you totally should, because they’re really far out! Seemingly an attempt to blend avant/arty softcore photography with some kind of pulp sci-fi photo-story, the scans clearly reveal that the whole Angvia concept, the characters and situations found in the film, and overall approach to costume and design, came straight from the pages of the magazine. Crazy stuff.


Anyway, back to the movie, and back on earth the agents of Angvia take care to adopt appropriate garb, which, this being 1969, naturally consists of bright red mini-dresses, white leather thigh boots and Mary Quant flapper wigs. As they hop around London trying to induct a young stripper called Ted into their ranks, the girls are pursued not by James Word and Department 5 (he’s back at the shack bedding another Angvian agent) but by some curious characters who seem to be their chief antagonists at earth – renegade aristocrat Colonel Broughton, played by James Robertson Justice, and his chief crony Swyne, played by Charles Hawtrey.

Yes, that James Robertson Justice and that Charles Hawtrey.

I know, I know.

By means of assorted capers too convoluted to bother going into here – including a thoroughly incongruous and unconvincing torture chamber sequence in which a poor thigh-booted maiden is subjected to the indignity of having Justice and Hawtrey leer over her going “oh, my dear.. my dear..” and so forth – the Colonel ends up dispatching his private army of ne’erdowells (and seriously, they’re one rough looking bunch – I think the producers just hung around outside a casting call for a Hammer tavern scene and picked up the rejects) to hunt an Angvian prisoner Most-Dangerous-Game style across his ‘Scottish’ estate.

This prompts Zeta herself (the hereforeto unmentioned Dawn Addams) into action, mobilising a squad of Angvian shock troops to take on the Colonel’s men, and thus before long we find ourselves witnessing the delirious spectacle of a gang of deerstalker & tweed-clad bully boys running around some National Trust woodland pursued by squads of buxom, Crepax un-bikini and flapper wig clad Angvians (one of them none other than Hammer fan favourite Valerie Leon), who proceed to zap them to death with invisible laser beams fired from their fingers! What a sight! Surely my eyes doth lie when they present to me with such wonders!


I’d like to think that this singular sequence represents the vision those swinging cats at Tigon had of the coming decade. With censorship on the retreat and the counter-culture encroaching further into mainstream society, who can blame them for picturing the 1970s as a wondrous era in which the fusty guardians of the old order would be roasted alive in their plus fours amid a hurricane of gigantic boobs and invisible laser beams, to the accompaniment of parping, faux-funky chase music?

That such a starry-eyed vision so swiftly ran aground in the face of the three-day week, ‘Mutiny On The Buses’ and close-ups of Robin Askwith’s pimply arse is a tragedy beyond words. No wonder Tony Tenser packed it in to sell wicker furniture.

For a brief moment though, we can watch ‘Zeta One’ and enjoy the last gasp of a rare moment of cultural optimism that extended even into the world of fly-by-night soft porn movies. Full of seedy detail, unlikely conversations, perplexed looking actors, opportunistic location shooting and all manner of mystifying strangeness, almost every shot in ‘Zeta One’ is an unadulterated joy for fans of Vintage British Weird, a perfect piece of bonkers late night viewing on all levels.

With the exception of a 1972 short subject, ‘Zeta One’ marks writer/director Michael Cort’s sole statement in the cinematic medium, but IMDB does at least boast a nice low-res picture of him playing the trumpet. What a fella!


As is inevitably the case with VHS reviews, the images used in this post aren’t my own screengrabs, but are respectfully borrowed from here, there and everywhere – most notably from the ever-wonderful Island of Terror. The poster above was found at the no less wonderful Pulp International.

VHS Purgatory: The Lamp (Tom Daley, 1987)

THE BOX:

You’re not quite getting the full effect from the scan above, but the central panel on the cover of this VHS is actually a totally awesome hologram, depicting some evil spirits or somesuch emerging from the genie’s lamp, then disappearing again when you tilt it away from the light. The surrounding ‘frame’ bit is made of thick cardboard, glued to the front of the box on top of the plastic insert/wallety bit (or whatever you call it) with a bond that has held fast for nigh on twenty-five years. Damn, somebody really put some effort into this thing.

THE PRICE:

I don’t usually go in for the cold, impersonal, what-the-hell-am-I-doing-with-my-life feeling of buying old video tapes off ebay, preferring to hunt them out tooth & claw on the ground, but when I happened to see this one sitting there with no bids, I had to bite. I think it was about £4.50 including postage or something? Clearly one of the more impressive items in my small collection of big box VHSs anyway, and after staring at the packaging for a few hours, I thought the least I could do was give the movie inside a whirl.

THE MOVIE:

Essentially, ‘The Lamp’ is a routine circa ‘87 slasher enlivened by the fact that the slashing is being carried out not by some doofus with mother issues, but by an enraged djinn. It is better known in the US under the title ‘The Outing’, and if you can tell me why that is in any way a less lame name for a horror film than ‘The Lamp’, perhaps you should consider a job in movie distribution? (Why the video company didn’t just rename it ‘BLOODBATH IN THE SEX MUSEUM’ and dig themselves a new money pit I’ll never understand, but maybe in the post-video nasty era the prevailing wisdom was to play it cool and keep things bland..?)

Shot in Texas, this is basically a pretty boilerplate ‘80s independent production, rendered interesting thanks to the wealth of eccentricities necessitated by the ‘murderin’ genie’ conceit. Put it this way: I don’t think the filmmakers were at all into weirdness, but by choosing to film a story in which the antagonist is an incorporeal demon who lives in a lamp, they found themselves having to get a least moderately weird, if you see what I mean.

Indeed, there is a faint vibe of surreality hanging over proceedings throughout, exacerbated by the fact that, whilst the technical aspects of the film are flatly proficient, the scripting and acting is extremely poor throughout. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that’s not necessarily a criticism. Most of the films I write rave reviews of here are somewhat lacking in what might be conventionally regarded as nuanced performances and razor-sharp plotting. But still, there’s something going on here that is just… not good. Occasionally amusing, but all the same – not good. Most of the cast appear totally disconnected in a dead-eyed stare sorta way, counterbalanced by an occasional proponent of scenery-chewing frenzy, with no one on hand to actually hit that necessary middleground that I believe we term ‘acting’.

At least some of this lack of commitment can probably be blamed on the writing, which has a definite ‘first draft’ kinda feel to it, as if the writer (or writers, I can’t be bothered to check the credits) banged out a rough outline to get the basic sequence of events down, with some placeholder dialogue that they’d tighten up later, after they'd done some research and redrafting to make all the exposition and continuity a bit less goofy. Then they went for a long weekend in, I dunno, Lake Tahoe or somewhere, and returned to find that – oh no! – the damn fools had already started shooting it!

So, things kick off with a trio of scuzzy, all-purpose low-lives who are breaking into a remote house owned by a little old lady, with the intention of stealing some money and/or treasure which they seem pretty sure she has. The leader of this half-assed crew is a pleasantly crazed individual who goes hilariously beserk when the riches he is anticipating fail to emerge, banging on the walls with his fists, kicking stuff around and nixing the old lady with a battleaxe (gosh, that was pretty violent). His two accomplices meanwhile assert their scuzzy, low-life credentials beyond doubt by getting ripped on musty old hooch from the cellar, getting naked and making out in the… hang on a minute, you’re telling us this bed-ridden old lady who lives on her own in a dilapidated house in the middle of the woods has a swimming pool? A fairly clean and functional looking one, even?

Well, why not. Stranger things have happened. Like errant genies emerging from lamps and killing the fuck out of everyone with magical powers, for instance. Axe-to-the-face, telekinesis, scuzzy low-life boobs = opening sequence accomplished!

As is standard procedure when elderly people die under violent and mysterious circumstances, the old lady’s possessions are immediately entrusted to the local Natural History Museum, where we now join the curator and his assistant as they enthusiastically catalogue all her old crap, scanning it with some kind of 80s-tastic computer imaging software. I could spin out a paragraph or two questioning why staff at a Natural History Museum are seemingly operating like high-tech rag & bone men, studying man-made objects which do not even fleetingly fall within the remit of ‘natural history’, but, please… let’s just move on.

The curator’s daughter is our main character / final girl, although she doesn’t do a great deal to justify that position. She looks grumpy, occasionally wears an unflattering hat, and guilt-trips her dad about what a bad father he is. Aside from that, she’s just on the screen a lot. More interesting, at least in theory, is her irritating ex-boyfriend, who is some kind of porcine quasi-punk bully. Something of a misguided trendsetter in his own way, he drives a Mercedes Benz and wears a sleeveless collared/buttoned checked shirt and skinny tie. He’s very ‘no rules’ with his aggressively thuggish demeanour, casual racism and sub-human problem-solving abilities, but still, I can well imagine the authors of Destroy All Movies scrutinising his scenes and concluding that he doesn’t quite make the punkoid grade. Just as well really. He gets very little done, and is generally a pain in the ass.

The headmaster at the school is a cool black dude. Porcine bully guy pulls a knife and gives him some lip, to which he responds “Son, do you want to know the meaning of the words Black Power? Cos if you do I’ll wipe the floor with your ugly white ass!” Pow! Not since ‘Savage Streets’ have I encountered a headmaster I can so readily get down with. In another great scene in this section of the movie, the kids are in a class where the teacher (who has a thing going with the curator/dad) is telling them all about Vlad the Impaler and (of course) djinns. What the hell was that supposed to be? Monster class? Why didn’t I get to do that one at school?

That afternoon, teacher takes everyone on a field trip to the Natural History Museum, where Main Character uses her knowledge of the high tech security system and access to dad’s keys to allow her friends to sneak off and hide until after dark, so they can illicitly spend the night in the museum. Unfortunately, CCTV and 24 hour security guards (and perhaps lack of shooting time at the museum location) mean that they have to lock themselves in the basement, where they’re all, like, oh, right, we went to all this trouble just so we can spend the night in an unfurnished basement? – great idea, dude. But they’re a nice bunch, so they try to make the best of it and not hurt Main Character’s feelings too much. They have beer. I have beer. The porcine bully guy and his sidekick are trying to sneak in to cause rapey mischief. The scene is set.

We can probably all guess more or less what happens next, and let it be said that after a fairly shaky first half, ‘The Lamp’ really pulls out the stops from hereon in, with twenty minutes or so of unhinged supernatural carnage that sees our cast decimated in imaginatively gory, crowd-pleasing fashion in double-quick time – this djinn don’t mess around! Seriously, I felt like I thought have brought along a rattle and a foam rubber hand to go with the beer, such was the potential for whooping it up.

The highlight is probably the scene that sees some poor girl bitten to death in a bathtub full of snakes, the result of a credulity stretching sequence of events that I’d like to think was the result of the director sticking his head around the long-suffering scriptwriter’s door one day and shouting “GIRL IN A BATH FULL OF SNAKES – MAKE IT HAPPEN!”, causing him to furiously back-pedal in order to incorporate this vision into a scenario that ostensibly has no snakes and no reason for anybody to take a bath. A stretch and a half, but he made the magic happen.

And you know what else makes the magic happen? Giant, glowing stop-motion creatures voiced by ultra-reverbed Texas DJs, that’s what. There is one. Oh yes. It doesn’t do a great deal, but what can I say – I wasn’t expecting it to be there, but it turned up anyway. Perhaps it was on the lam from the set of one of the many cheapjack movies that promise you a giant stop motion creature and don’t deliver? Anyway, rack up some more points for ‘The Lamp’!
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Whilst watching ‘The Lamp’, I somehow got the impression I wasn’t enjoying it. All those excruciating inter-character scenes, all that terrible dialogue and aimless, exploratory padding, must have taken its toll. Reading back through what I’ve just written though, I think I was mistaken. Clearly it was brilliant. A minor classic, perhaps. You should probably check it out.

Oh yes, one more thing worth mentioning: this film has one of the strangest endings I’ve seen for a long time. If anyone reading has seen this thing, then I’d like to know your opinion because.. I just don’t get it. Am I missing something? Let me know.

I’m sure I won’t hitting you with that much of a spoiler if I let slip that the djinn is eventually vanquished, leaving the main girl and the lady teacher as sole survivors, but get this:

Classic ‘the morning after’ establishing shot that sees reporters and emergency services vehicles crowded around the museum. The two survivors are led out and ushered into the back of a police car, and the driver starts the engine.

Close up on Main Girl’s face as she yells “STOP!”.

Cut to her POV: a long shot of a Pepsi delivery truck, with a guy unloading some crates.

Cut back to her face, which freeze frames on a look of horror as the credits roll.

What the…?

I actually rewound and freeze-framed the shot of the Pepsi delivery truck several times, trying to spot some sign of the obligatory ‘the monster lives on’ twist, but no dice. The delivery guy, Pepsi crates, delivery trucks – none of these things have played a role in the film up to this point. Again: am I missing something? Did some pothead assistant editor just put the wrong shot in? You tell me.

End credits prominently thank the Pepsi-Cola Company.

Stay safe out there, readers. Stick to beer.

TRAILERS, etc:

There’s a trailer on this tape for something called ‘Night Screams’. It looks amazing:

VHS Purgatory:Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (Gordon Hessler, 1978)

PRICE PAID:

£1, from that odd furniture/junk shop just up from Brockley station. Man, that shop is so weird… I can never tell who’s a member of staff and who’s just a weirdo looking around… everytime I go there, everything seems to be a completely different price… I don’t know if it’s a charity shop or just some strange, marginal business venture… it doesn’t seem to have a name… when I walked past the other day, their whole back room seemed to be filled with smashed up bits of wood… but, er, anyway…

THE BOX SAYS:

“Mystery and mayhem with Kiss perofmring their greatest hits --- with spectacular visual effects!”

THE FILM DELIVERS:

So long, ‘Slade in Flame’! Get behind thee, Aerosmith tour video I watched when I was twelve! Don’t even think about it, ‘Abba: The Movie’! The ultimate ‘70s corporate rock cash-in movie is here, and I will accept no substitutes.

Produced by those loveable goofs at Hanna Barbera on behalf of the Gene Simmons Evil Mega-Corporation (or whatever), I expected ‘Kiss Meets The Phantom of the Park’ to provide a few chuckles and a lot of comforting boredom, and so was ill-prepared for the veritable fungasm that awaited my tired eyes when I hit play on this humble tape.

(By sheer coincidence, I think this is actually a very appropriate post for the 4th of July, even though as a stinking foreigner I myself care little for such festivities.)

A crude opening montage sees the members of Kiss super-imposed on top of night-time fairground footage. Inexplicably, Peter Criss is seen miming the drums on a roulette wheel. Drink it in, Kiss Army recruits, as this is the last glimpse of your commanding officers you’ll be getting for quite a while. Director Gordon Hessler (whose horror credits include ‘Scream and Scream Again’ and ‘Cry of the Banshee’ for AIP, as well as taking over ‘The Oblong Box’ after the death of Michael Reeves), clearly has other things on his mind.

Like FUN, primarily. Beautiful, sun-dappled, 1978 suburban American amusement park fun, to be precise. Thankfully I’m a bit too young and located on the wrong side of the world to be fully smitten by this full-scale nostalgia landslide, but anyone currently in about the 35-45 age bracket and raised somewhere in the Southern half of the USA should probably prepare themselves for paralysing wistfulness and bouts of uncontrollable sobbing, as gentle, smiling ‘Dazed & Confused’ teens fade in and out of focus, enjoying a summer’s day out in their local parentally-approved leisure complex. Costumed mascots caper and light aircraft spell out messages in the sky as bell-bottomed girls giggle over cans of soda. “Don’t forget to be here at 7pm for the first night of the KISS CONCERT”, declares the blaring public address system. Truly, it is paradise.


Not everyone is happy though, and in particular a rift seems to be developing between the park’s manager (a simple, business-minded fellow who wants to give the kids what they want, like rollercoasters and Kiss concerts) and the ‘creator’ (a brooding weirdo who lives in a hi-tech underground research complex and is primarily concerned with making crappy animatronic waxworks depicting macabre historical scenes). You can probably see where this is going.

Also seemingly less than satisfied with the status-quo is a small faction of scruffy, biker-esque miscreants with names like ‘Chopper’ and ‘Slime’ , who seem intent on polluting the wholesome atmosphere of the park with assorted examples of cruel, low-key thuggery.

Now before we proceed, I should state that I’ve never really felt comfortable with Kiss. Sure, a few of their records are cool, and their whole costumed character shtick is pretty amusing, but as a rock n’ roll group – even in the relatively debased mode of ‘70s arena rock – they have always struck me as a distinctly candy-ass proposition. I take the implicit ideology behind my rock n’ roll pretty seriously, and as such, the shallowness of the Kiss brand has always rung hollow as the cracked liberty bell for me, even as many of my grunge-era peers have sought to rehabilitate their cultural legacy.

This ideological disjuncture can immediately be seen in ‘Phantom of the Park’, via the portrayal of the aforementioned ‘delinquent’ characters as stupid and threatening figures. I mean, I ask you: what kind of self-respecting heavy rock band would seek to set themselves up in OPPOSITION to the plight of angry, disenfranchised loser kids? I’m afraid the only possible answer is: a really shitty heavy rock band. If by some quirk of fate you happen to be a grumpy older brother or sister reading this in the mid 1970s, then please, do the decent thing and provide your younger siblings with a Black Sabbath record, that they may see the path before them more clearly lit.


But anyway. As you might expect, this ‘gang’ (they dress like bikers, talk like sit-com beatniks and behave like prototype pseudo-punks) swiftly come into conflict with the eccentric park creator, during a highly amusing scene in which they flagrantly mock one of his dioramas, depicting a chained ape. (“Perfection? C’mon man, you call some baboon doin’ the herky-jerky perfection?” says Chopper). As punishment for their lack of respect, the ne’erdowells are lured into the park’s Chamber of Horrors, where they find themselves gassed or concussed by a series of cunning traps, their bodies deposited in the creator’s subterranean lair, where he has his wicked House-of-Wax style way with them. (Later we see him refashioning the female member of the gang as an automaton of a pioneer-era bride, exclaiming “I’ll make a real American of you yet” – the implied criticism of this transformation marking an odd deviation from this movie’s dominant anti-misfit/pro-conformity agenda.)

Mad though he may be, the park creator is nothing if not efficient, and by the time Kiss have concluded the first night of their residency at the park (we see them playing a forgettable number extolling the virtues of ‘partying’ and ‘turning it up loud’, presumably the opening cut from whichever album they were giving the big push to crica ‘78), he has already fashioned robot doppelgangers of the band to further his evil schemes!

Unfortunately though, the robot Gene Simmons goes haywire and is unleashed upon the world earlier than planned, as he (it?) breaks through a wall cartoon-style, duffs up some security guards and demolishes a lemonade stand! The stunned onlookers don’t know what’s going on. They thought Kiss were the good guys! It’s shocking!


Now, I was kind of assuming we’d be introduced to Kiss-as-characters here via, say, a backstage scene where they towel off and swap banter of the “boy, tough crowd in these theme-parks” variety. But no. Because GET THIS: Kiss in the movie are not merely costumed rock stars raking in the nation’s pocket money, they are bone fide supernatural beings – mystical cosmic warriors with the ability to read minds, fly, fire laser-beams from their eyes and partake in gravity-defying kung-fu battles. Throughout the film, band members are never referred to by their real names: they are 100% in-character as Space Ace, Star Child, Catman and The Demon.

As higher echelon Kiss Army members will no doubt be aware, Kiss’s powers derive from a set of four golden ‘talismans’, each taking the form of an elemental symbol reflecting the role of each Kiss member within the group. Kiss keep these talismans in a lead-lined suitcase, which is protected by a forcefield installed in their personal accommodation. As they explain at one point to the film’s lovelorn heroine, each of us has the power within us to ‘materialise’ our own talisman and take on our own superpowers, joining Kiss in the ranks of the Ubermensch. We just don’t, that’s all. Because we’re lame.


Perhaps due to its complete reversal of expectation, the scene that does eventually introduce us to Kiss is perhaps my favourite moment in ‘Phantom of the Park’, from a choice of many potential favourites. Following the faux-Demon’s polite rampage, a deputation from the park management seek out Kiss to demand an explanation. They find the band seated at the far end of a hotel swimming pool, chilling atop high, tennis umpire style chairs, silver towels draped over their heads, in silent communion with cosmic forces. Kiss speak to each other in a kind of character-specific private language, casually chatting over the heads of their visitors, as if they were corrupt feudal princes receiving a deputation of peasants. The poor shlubby security dudes, who were presumably expecting to merely lay down the law to a bunch of run-of-the-mill hell-raising rockers, get all hot and bothered and generally just don’t know what to make of it.

Now that our lofty heroes have been alerted to the threat facing them, much of the rest of the film is comprised of lengthy nocturnal fight scenes, in which Kiss meet the minions of the park-creator in deadly combat. First they head to the interior of the splendid wooden rollercoaster, to fight some kinda monkey-headed creatures in rubber suits. Next, they move on to an amphitheatre, and fight a series of robotic samurais and kung-fu bad-asses who emerge one by one from an elevator shaft.

I realise I’ve conveyed those notions to you in but two short sentences, but please, take some time to reflect on the fact that these sequences go on for a long time, and feature laser-beams, anti-gravity slo-mo flying kicks and short-circuiting robots, set to a relentless soundtrack of chicken-scratch heavy ‘fight scene funk’, all of which made served to make me very happy indeed as I began to drift into early morning unconsciousness.


Meanwhile of course, the Phantom has sent a mind-controlled dupe to steal Kiss’s talismans from their hotel suite, so by the time the band enter the Chamber of Horror and start mixing it up with the Frankensteins and mummies and so, their powers have deserted them and they soon find themselves captive in the Phantom’s liar! (He keeps them in a big iron cage conveniently overlooking his, uh, computer consoles and stuff, that they may watch him bring his schemes to fruition.)

Naturally the Phantom’s first order of business is to dispatch his evil duplicates to replace Kiss at the next evening’s Kiss Concert. His plan, you see, is to have his Kiss clones perform violent and provocative material which will rouse their audience to a nihilistic fervour which will see them riot, destroying the park and discrediting both band and management!

This is a canny plan on the Phantom’s part, because as everyone knows, Kiss audiences in the 1970s were apt to literally act out the lyrics of their idols’ songs, as soon as they heard them, with no consideration for the consequences of their actions. This is why the band had to be extremely careful about their lyrical content, sticking strictly to discourse on such nebulous concerns as ‘partying’ and ‘crazy nights’, even as their heavy metal peers were free to tackle more challenging subject matter, be it drinking the blood of slaughtered innocents, shagging mermaids, discovering the ruins of lost Lemuria or Livin’ in a Ram’s Head. Kiss must have felt frustrated, being unable to tap into such potent and topical imagery for their own music, but with great power comes great responsibility.

And so, let us shudder as Evil Kiss take the stage and launch into a malodorous ode specially designed to propel listeners into a mindless, destructive rage! I mean, can you imagine it? A popular rock band playing grinding, monotonous music that urges people to “rip and destroy” and “tear down the walls”? It simply doesn’t bear thinking about. And, as sturdy examples of wholesome American youth, the kids in the crowd instantly smell a rat and are having none of it. Yes, the Phantom’s mistake was to underestimate the purity and singlemindedness of the Kiss Army, who now boo the Evil Kiss, turning away from their negative sentiments and demanding the return of their true heroes.


The Phantom’s other mistake of course was to leave the Real Kiss in a big cage within easy telekinetic reach of their talismans, allowing them to quickly regain their powers. Flying to the concert auditorium upon beams of stardust, they proceed to righteously kick the crap out of their doppelgangers as the audience cheers them on, reclaiming their instruments from the fallen clones and triumphantly launching into….. the exact same song they played in the earlier concert sequence! So Party On, Turn It Up Loud (but not too loud), God Bless America, and if you feel at all disgruntled with the corporate wonderland you’ve been born into, well… better keep it to yourself buddy, or some jerky House-of-Wax guy will probably pick you out to be turned into a mindless robo-zombie. Either that or Kiss will just turn up and beat your ass. I think that was basically the message. Something like that anyway – I dunno, I forget easy.

I’m sorry for lapsing so hard into interminable plot summation in this over-long review, but really it seemed the only way to express the wonderful totality of ‘Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park’. I mean, I just don’t really have much to say about the cinematography, y’know. It was good. I could see the colours. Most of the time I could understand what was going on. Hey, how ‘bout a Pepsi?

BEST DIALOGUE:

One of the best things about ‘Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park’ is that most of the dialogue sounds as if it’s been post-synced by Hanna Barbera voice actors, adding immensely to the overall charm of the endeavour, and providing a wealth of highly quotable, oddly enunciated nonsense for us all to enjoy. The aforementioned baboon exchange was probably my favourite, but I liked these ones a lot too;

#1: Star Child voiceover over shot of the park manager looking uncomfortable:

“He’s sweating the possibility we might pull out… he’s just plain sweating”

#2: Lovelorn heroine in search of her captured boyfriend asks two moustachioed security guards about the whereabouts of the park creator guy’s lab:


GUARD # 1: Oh, that’s underground.

GUARD #2: Yeah… waaaay underground.

I could carry on all day really, but the realisation that it’s a summer’s day outside and I’m sitting here transcribing chunks of the script from ‘Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park’ leads me to do the decent thing and leave it at that.

EXTRAS:

The corporate ident for Hendring, the Putney based company who put out this tape, is by far the most elaborate and confusing I can remember seeing. Basically it’s a sorta self-contained short film that features POV shots of a black-gloved burglar breaking into a darkened living room. There are Oscar silhouettes and pages from scripts on a glass table and a big VCR with a flashing ‘play’ button. There are a lot of different shots of these various elements. Eventually, the Oscars fall off the table. It’s sorta hard to describe, but probably worth the entry price alone if you happen to see any tapes originating from this presumably quite marginal operation.

(PLEASE NOTE: screengrabs in the above post are not mine. I pulled ‘em off other people’s sites, primarily this one:

http://happyotter666.blogspot.com/2010/03/kiss-meets-phantom-of-park-1978.html

and this one:

http://itsallforyoudemon.blogspot.com/2011/05/kiss-meets-phantom-yesterday-and-today.html

Hope nobody minds.)