The Expendables (2010)

I'm not going to insult your intelligence by explaining the cast or premise of The Expendables. If you have fond memories of the same 80s action movies that I do, then you probably already know about it and have been gritting your teeth in anticipation of it's release, but I guess that's part of the problem. Any film that trades so heavily in nostalgia is bound to raise expectations to impossible levels. I'm certainly not immune. Let's face it, it's been a pretty lean decade for action films and I'm only human. When you've been subsisting on direct-to-video scraps, a film like this is going to have you climbing aboard the hype train for a one-way trip to Disappointment Interchange. Luckily my natural cynicism kicked in before catastrophic derailment, and my excitement was tempered to manageable levels. In the end I found the film enjoyable but seriously flawed. Not quite a non-stop express to Awesome Central, but an exciting if bumpy ride that eventually pulls into Adequacy Station.

If there is a penny on the train tracks that threatens to derail the whole film, it's the script. At its core it's a fairly standard action movie scenario. A corrupt CIA agent (Eric Roberts) is stirring up trouble in a fictional South American country (surprisingly it's not Val Verde, the fictional country referenced in Commando and Predator) and it's up to Stallone and his team of Expendables to take him down. Somehow though, it seems oddly structured and paced, curiously missing in typical action-movie beats. Apparently there were a lot of rewrites due to scheduling conflicts, and it shows. You know how sometimes a big-name actor will drop by the set of a Direct-to-Video film for a quick paycheck, but because their scenes are so rushed they seem weird and out-of-place? Well most of this film is like that.

The other major problem with writing a script for such a big, iconic cast is that it's really hard to juggle them properly. Inevitably some actors are going to get shortchanged. Statham and Stallone get the bulk of the screen time, Li and Lundgren get a lot to do as well, but some of the others, like Crews and Couture, just show up inexplicably in the middle in the film. It's sad, because at 107 minutes there just isn't enough time to develop any of the characters properly, or at all. There isn't even a getting-to-know-you scene where everyone is introduced by name and specialty. Crews's character has the hilarious name Hale Caesar, but they don't even bother to mention it as far as I could tell.

A couple of Expendables appear briefly but manage to steal the show anyway, and one is Mickey Rourke as their mentor Tool. There's a part where he's chatting with Stallone and gets all emotional as he relates one of his old war stories. It's a cliched moment but Rourke sells it, and I was thinking "Why are you in this movie, Mickey? You are too good for this script." He's given the character his trademark Rourke quirks (or "quourkes", as I call them) like goofy glasses and a big pipe. He steals every scene he's in. Can we have some prequels about Tool's previous adventures with Stallone please? You can call it Toolin' Around.

The other Expendable I liked was Dolph Lundgren, who, like in the recent (and awesome) Universal Soldier: Regeneration, looks like a terrifying Frankenstein's monster. When he calls someone "cockroach" or "insect", I can believe that they'd shit their pants in fear. I particularly liked the bit where he stands on a guy's head (while he's driving!) and when he pulls him up off the floor he's got a Dolph-sized bootprint on his face. I'm glad they gave his character Gunnar his own little mini-arc too. When the film begins he is acting crazy and Stallone kicks him out of the gang. He is hired by the bad guy and tries to kill the other Expendables, but at the very end of the film (spoiler) all is forgiven and he is brought back into the fold. I thought that was very nice of them. I guess they aren't that Expendable after all.

Nobody is expecting a brilliant script from a film like this, but I do expect one or two badass one-liners and I'm not sure I got them. I know terrible one-liners are action movie staples, but here they don't seem to make a lot of sense. There's a part where Terry Crews blasts some bad guys and then shouts "You remember that next Christmas!" What does that even mean? When Schwarzenegger pinned a guy to the wall with a machete and quipped "Stick around!" it wasn't exactly Oscar Wilde, but at least it made sense in context. Schwarzenegger's much ballyhooed cameo in this film is particularly disappointing. It almost seems improvised.

Unpolished banter is just one symptom of a script riddled with weird moments. Subplots are brought up and then abandoned. Certain lines seem important but go nowhere, like vestigial organs from earlier drafts of the script. Stuff that is common to direct-to-video but is strange to see in a big budget film. For instance, there's a part where bad guy Eric Roberts is discussing the evil General's rebellious daughter, and when he discovers that she's a budding artist he shouts "She paints too? This is how it starts!!" I don't know where this art-hating thing comes from, but in a neat callback the General later paints up his men with lightning bolts on their faces like they're the Baseball Furies.

Now, I hear you saying "Nobody gives a shit about the script! If you want more than tits and explosions in your action films then you're a gay homo fag etc." I really hate this attitude, but okay. Let's talk about the action scenes.

As we all know, the current style of filming action scenes involves strapping handheld cameras to some hyperactive labradors and then cutting between them every half second. This method is the mortal enemy of old-school action, which emphasised choreography, clear geography and visual storytelling. If modern action scenes were a person (I picture them as a two-headed monster with the heads of Michael Bay and Paul Greengrass) the old-school action hero would impale it with a pipe and tell it to "let off some steam".

I thought if anyone could understand the appeal of classic action movie choreography it would be Stallone, but alas it was not to be. The fight scenes in this film are over-edited and sloppily put together. There was a Li/Lundren fight that was apparently choreographed by the great Corey Yuen, but damned if I could tell from the way it was edited. It's a pity, because from what I could see of the fights they were pretty good, with lots of creative and interesting violence. Gary Daniels gets a particularly grisly and entertaining death.

The action isn't all bad though. Action sequences that do not involve hand-to-hand combat are filmed well, with lots of fiery explosions. The final assault on the General's mansion is a particular highlight, with a body count in the triple digits. I can think of a lot of good bits, such as Stallone's crazy-fast reloading skills, Terry Crews mowing down dozens of bad guys with his full-auto shotgun and Statham tossing knives into many uniformed bad guys. With moments like these I can't write the film off completely. It's still a lot of fun.

I should note that most of the blood effects in the film are all CGI. Obviously I would have preferred squibs, and if I had to guess at why they went in that direction I'd think it was so they could have the option of selling their souls down the track and cutting the film down to a PG-13. There's also a bit where Steve Austen stumbles around on CGI fire, which looks terrible. I know Steve Austen is a big guy, but I'm pretty sure you could have found a suitably huge stuntman and put him in an asbestos suit. Or put a normal sized stuntman on a miniaturised set, like Godzilla. There are many options. CGI fire is the coward's way out.

So yeah, the film had some flaws, but it also had some good action and memorable moments. I enjoyed it a lot. Judging from the crowd at the showing I went to, I suspect there are a lot of hipsters seeing this film simply for snark potential, but luckily they can only pay for their ticket in real money and not Irony Dollars, so the film is still doing pretty well. I was worried that it would be another case of Snakes on a Plane syndrome, where everyone is so busy making fun of the premise that they forget to see the actual film. Hopefully it makes enough money that they can make a sequel. I'd definitely see it. I'm even hoping for a Direct-to-Video knockoff starring Steven Seagal. They can call it The Dispensables.

Tough To Kill (1978)

Om nom nom

Coming straight off the heels of Emanuelle and Last Cannibals, Joe D'Amato took a break from softcore porn and punched out this sporadically entertaining if grim action flick. It takes it's cues from the cynical men-on-a-mission films of the era (The Wild Geese was clearly a big influence; one of the characters even notes "You were at eachother's throats like wild geese!") and it takes place in a nihilistic, dog-eat-dog world where everybody is out for himself etc. In that respect it's a lot like Rolf (aka The Last Mercenary), but while that film had a guy getting his fingers dipped into a poop-filled toilet, this film has a guy getting his whole body dunked into a huge tub full of human feces. Point: Joe D'Amato!

Martin (Luc Merenda) is a tough-as-nails mercenary who, after some mysterious business involving a slip of a paper in a safe deposit box, signs up to a regiment of mercenaries in some unnamed African country. The outfit is lead by Major Haggerty (Donal(d) O'Brien from Zombie Holocaust and 2020: Texas Gladiators), nicknamed "Ex-Lax" for his tendency to make new recruits shit their pants. Haggerty runs a tight ship (as he puts it "I'll be leading this unit as long as I'm able to break the spine of presumptuous young upstarts like yourself") but his methods are fairly unorthodox. For instance he has an obstacle course full of remote control fans and flamethrowers; and he likes to test the leadership abilities of his troops by forcing them to play chicken with live grenades.

For some reason a local native named Wabu (Percy Hogan from Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals) sneaks into the base and latches onto Martin. After Wabu proves himself worthy by not flinching when Martin pulls a gun on him, Martin bestows upon him the generous honour of becoming his personal servant. As this would suggest, Martin's not the most racially progressive guy around. During his last assignment in Angola he didn't even bother to learn the local language ("I didn't talk to 'em; I only shot 'em") and when he fucks up an obstacle course Haggerty demands he leave the whites-only unit and serve with the Africans, a shameful fate that Martin simply cannot live with. Instead he opts to take part in Haggerty's grenade-focused officer's exam, a test he passes with flying colours.

As a selfish, unrepentant asshole, Martin fits in nicely with the rest of his unit. These include Polanski (Wolfgango Soldati), a Polish mercenary who keeps a pet white rabbit in his pocket at all times, and Leon, a cowardly blowhard and Haggerty's second-in-command, who stands out as a particularly racist shithead even by the standards of the team. They, along with a couple of other nondescript side-characters, agree to volunteer for a suicide mission, but only on the promise of a hefty bonus, a generous insurance policy and an even split of the shares of any casualties. Martin has additional motivation, though. Turns out that Leon, Haggerty's second-in-command, is actually a war criminal and Martin has contacts that will pay a million dollar bounty for his return. Haggerty is well aware of this fact and intends to collect the bounty himself, but they let it slip to the rest of the team and soon everybody wants a piece.

Unsurprisingly their ill-defined mission to liberate a bridge from "the enemy" goes tits up to the moon, and the team is forced to escape into the jungle. It's a slow trudge back to civilisation and everybody is acutely aware that each casualty means a greater share of the reward. When they run out of food Polanski ruefully agrees to cooks up his pet rabbit, but as a final act of retribution he laces it with the team's cyanide pills. Leon wolfs it down singlehandedly and pays the price, but luckily the bounty is one of those dead-or-alive deals. When Leon's rapidly-decaying corpse becomes too much of a burden Martin makes the grisly realisation that the head itself will be sufficient proof to his employers. Insert your own head pun here.

Naturally the cast is whittled down to a few starring players through natural and unnatural causes, including a mano-a-mano battle between Haggerty and Polanski that sees Donald O'Brien running around the jungle in his underwear. The survivors manage to make it back alive and collect on the reward, but I really didn't expect a cynical third-act twist that shows the white man doesn't have a monopoly on fucking people over. In any other film it would have been fairly obvious, but I've grown so accustomed to the racism that is ingrained into 70s exploitation films that I honestly didn't see it coming. You got me, D'Amato.

On a technical level this is middling D'Amato, which is probably 10,000 leagues under what most people would consider watchable. I guess I considered it watchable though, since I watched it. The usual caveats apply: bad acting, terrible sound quality, bad dubbing, etc. There is some nice location shooting. The score is by Stelvio Cipriani, who did the music for Nightmare City and James Cameron's first (and some might say best) film Pirahna II: The Spawning. The main theme is a funky piece of jungle-disco that is catchy at first but loses it's luster after it is used over and over again, frequently in scenes where it is completely inappropriate.

Aside from the full-body poop-dunking though, this film is somewhat lacking in the tasteless exploitation that is synonymous with Joe D'Amato. Explosions are entirely off-screen, the infrequent gun battles are almost completely bloodless and the beheading takes place completely out of frame. We never even get a good look at the severed head, and I was hoping for at least one shot because judging by the reaction shots it was pretty ripe by the end of the film. The DVD I watched was an abysmal VHS transfer though, complete with several seconds of test pattern preceeding the film, so I wouldn't be surprised if some violence or sex was cut out somewhere along the way.

Do not expect the manly, explosion-filled action film promised by the awesome cover. It's pretty manly (there's only one woman in the entire film and she only has one line of dialog - telling the hero how awesome he is, naturally) but it really isn't that kind of film. It's about the journey, man. An uncompromisingly bleak journey where you have to drag around a rotting corpse while violent, racist assholes try to fuck you over for a buck. I kind of liked it. It would make a good date movie.

SS Girls (1976)

Too subtle. More swastikas.

Nazisploitation is a sub-genre that polarises even the most ardent lovers of sleaze. I must admit, although a steady diet of exploitation films has left me an empty shell of a man, this is one form of 'sploitation that still leaves me feeling a little icky inside. Born out of the women-in-prison genre, it sprung up in the wake of two highly-influential films. Firstly there's Tinto Brass' 1974 masterpiece of arthouse sleaze Salon Kitty, which is beautifully shot and surprisingly lighthearted, if a little overlong. Secondly there's 1975's infamous Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, a nasty piece of work that is exploitation filmmaking at it's most sleazy and shameless. Most Nazisploitation films took their cues from one of these films, although most were closer to the quality of the latter.

Bruno Mattei has always been willing to latch on to any popular sub-genre and punch out a couple of shameless rip-offs, so it's not surprising that he managed to crank out two Nazisploitation films, one from each end of the spectrum. SS Girls (or Private House of the SS as it's called on this print of the film) is definitely the most lighthearted of the two, and one of the most shameless rip-offs of Salon Kitty in a genre of film composed almost entirely of Salon Kitty rip-offs. Most of the famous scenes from that film are recreated here, so if you ever doubted the artistic merit of Brass' opus, pop this in and you can see the Salon Kitty that could have been if Tinto Brass had a $500 budget and a mild head injury.

In the waning days of WW2, Hans Schellenberg (Gabriele Carrara) is a top Nazi official tasked with rooting out traitors within his ranks. To that end, he meets with Madame Eva (Macha Magall), hires a team of ten prostitutes and, with the help of his sexy assistant Frau Inge (Marina Daurina), trains them to become "perfect sex machines", so that they can seduce Nazi officers and trick them into revealing their true feelings about the Führer. He also trains them in armed combat, so it's a solid and tactically sound plan that couldn't possibly go wrong.

What follows is a ridiculous training montage where the girls dress up in togas and perform aerobics, stick-fighting, fencing and marksmanship. There is also the sexual component of their training, which is overseen by the white-labcoated Dr. Jurgen, played by Mattei regular Luciano Pigozzi. He insists that he will act as their father during their operation, albeit a father who forces them to have sex with a succession of grotesque freaks, including a fat hairy man, a deformed hunchback and even a German Shepherd. Don't worry, it's just implied; the dog is simply lying on top of the girl while she sensually rubs it's head, but they both look like they are enjoying it anyway.

After their training is completed a handful of suspected traitors are invited to the mansion for some R&R. Once suitably soused and sexually satisfied, the Generals start mouthing off to the girls about how good ol' Adolf is completely unhinged. The next morning Schellenberg surprises them with a political trial, condemning them to death while dressed as the Nazi Pope. This eccentric scene is made moreso by Gabriele Carrara's performance, which is completely off the chain. I guess because he doesn't look threatening at all (he looks kind of like Crispin Glover with an even dorkier hair cut), he overacts to a terrifying degree, mugging and shouting and turning every scene into delicious high camp. Highly enjoyable. It's like Nicolas Cage times ten.

The Führer is pleased with Schellenberg's progress and sends some more treasonous Nazi officers his way: General Oscar and his two bodyguards, Wang and Kominski. Nobody should be looking for historical authenticity in films like this, but these guys are particularly ridiculous. Oscar is murderous psychopath who wears a blacked-out monocle over his sightless eye, while Wang is an Asian (?!) Nazi officer who carries nunchucks and a samurai sword and wears a headband with a swastika drawn on it in felt-tip pen. After the usual debauchery, including whipping, orgies and cocktails made from cognac and human blood (freshly squeezed from a prostitute, so there's probably some bonus syphilis in there too), the three of them are chased into the gardens and shot by Schellenberg's diminutive balding enforcer.

Schellenberg celebrates his success by watching Inge and Eva make out in front of some huge swastikas, which is admittedly pretty awesome, and gets himself so excited that he starts ranting crazily and declares himself the next Führer. I think we've all been there, saying something we regret in the heat of the moment, but unfortunately Inge uses his treasonous outburst later to try and blackmail him into sleeping with her. You might wonder what the hell is wrong with Schellenberg that he'd need to be blackmailed into sleeping with a super hot Nazi dominatrix. Well, apparently she's got some minor scarring on her cheek and that's enough for Schellenberg to hysterically scream "You're a beast! I loathe you!" and spit in her face. Ouch.

By the end of the film the Russian tanks are rolling into Berlin (or rather "tank", Mattei could only afford one) and news of Hilter's death is broastcast over the radio. Those left at the mansion decide to partake a drunken orgy followed by mass suicide, but not before wrapping up a subplot about a handsome SS officer that I had long since forgotten and/or stopped caring about. The parties so far have all been marked by the international sign of debauchery: pulling corks out of liquor bottles with your teeth (done at least four times by my count), so when the officer does so while surveying the aftermath of their suicidal orgy it has a sadly ironic ring to it.

Unlike other Nazisploitation films, which tastelessly dwell on scenes of torture and misery, SS Girls seems quite fun in comparison. Fun for a film about Nazis, rape and mass suicide anyway. It's still incredibly tasteless, make no mistake, but there are many colourful scenes of naked, drunken revelry and, thanks largely to Mattei's incompetent direction, would-be-disturbing scenes of torture and sexual abuse are rendered giggle-inducing. In conclusion, an entertaining piece of sleazy Euro-trash cheese.

No Retreat, No Surrender 2: Raging Thunder (1988)

"Raah, I am evil Russian! Ignore mein German accent!"

The tagline to this movie states "It's not a rematch, it's war!" which is actually quite accurate since the movie has a completely different cast and plot from the first movie. It was originally intended to be a direct sequel to No Retreat, No Surrender, with both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kurt McKinney reprising their roles, but Van Damme decided to break his contract to go and make Bloodsport instead and McKinney left with him. Neither showed up for the first day of shooting, so the crew were left scrabbling to rework the plot and cast a couple of different actors in the lead roles. This worked out pretty well for a number of reasons. Firstly it resulted in Van Damme's appearance in Bloodsport, an 80s classic. Secondly, the talented Loren Avedon picks up the lead role from McKinney. The movie was shot under the name Raging Thunder but the producers saw the No Retreat, No Surrender name sitting in the corner collecting dust and decided to use it anyway.

Scott Wylde (Avdeon) is an American with an awesome name who travels to Thailand to meet his fiance Sulin's parents. After a date at a fancy Bangkok restaurant turns into one of those "wow, foreigners eat some crazy shit" gross-out sequences, the two of them head back to Scott's fleabag hotel. Even though she's a rich girl she's cool with the filth, the door-to-door pimps, the broken bed and all of the strategically torn photos of naked women plastering the walls and they totally do it. What she does mind is a bunch of kidnappers busting into the place the next morning and abducting her. Scott rushes to her parents' place to try and find some information about the kidnappers but he discovers that her family has been murdered by Vietnamese refugees and the Thai police want to pin it on him. He is arrested despite his plaintive cries of "You can't do this to me, I'm an American!", but escapes at the first opportunity, intent on rescuing his girlfriend and clearing his name.

On his first stop he visits his Vietnam vet buddy Mac Jarvis (Max Thayer). I guess he's supposed to remind us of Han Solo since he's a smuggler who is older and more rugged than Scott plus he calls Scott "kid" in almost every line. He trades mostly in heavy machine guns, explosives and tanks, a good guy to know when you want to wage a one-man war. They act like old friends but I have no idea how these two guys could possibly know each other. Scott's a known fugitive by this stage and the two of them can't even enjoy a glass of freshly-squeezed snake blood without a bunch of bounty hunters showing up, so they hire a helicopter pilot Terry (Cynthia Rothrock) and head out to a Khmer Rouge resistance group to try and find out where Sulin in being held.

It turns out that Sulin is being held for ransom at a secret North Vietnamese military base. They are trying to get to Sulin's father but I'm not exactly sure why because big chunks of dialog were in Vietnamese and there weren't any subtitles. The base is run by a huge Russian muscleman named Yuri. He is played by Matthias Hues, taking over the "evil Russian" role from Van Damme. In the first film it was a Belgian and now they've got a German so I guess they are working their way eastward through Europe. Maybe by the fifth film they'll have a Russian played by an actual Russian.

Terry gets kidnapped somewhere along the way and by the time the two of them arrive at the secret base they discover that it is too heavily guarded for them to take alone. It's only when the two of them are kicking back with a few brewskis (Wylde cools down by spraying himself with a room temperature Bud, which is disgusting on many levels) that they get the idea of using the empties to rig up a remote-fire system for a bunch of M60s. If these kinds of movies have taught us anything it's that Commies are helpless against aimlessly-sprayed machine gun fire. They also set up explosives and plant dozens of claymore mines that I guess they carrying with them (along with the beers)?

Despite the fact that Wylde probably smells like luke-warm Bud (ie cat piss and hobo vomit) he manages to sneak up on the guy in the guard tower and stab him. You'd think they would then slip into the camp under the cover of night and rescue the girls, but instead Wylde strings up the guard's corpse and leaves it there while the two of them catch some shut-eye until the next morning. This gives the bad guys ample opportunity to prepare for the climax of the film, suspending the two hostages over a crocodile pit from a rickety death trap.

Wylde's final battle with Yuri is pretty hilarious. Yuri tears his shirt off at the first opportunity and starts grunting and screaming so much he's liable to drop dead of a brain aneurysm at any moment. Eventually the fight spills into Yuri's office, giving plenty of opportunity for politically-symbolic beatings eg Wylde smashes a portrait of Lenin over his head and wraps him up in a Russian flag. Then Wylde ties him to the back of a jeep and drags him into the crocodile pit, pushing the jeep in after him and shooting it until it explodes. It's a pretty thorough ass-kicking, A+ for effort. A nice touch is that Wylde actually takes off the gas cap and makes sure that the tank is full first, as if the audience would cry foul if the jeep exploded without adequate justification.

The first film was a tale of Karate-Kid-esque competitive martial arts and teenage romance, so the shift into Rambo territory is pretty jarring. Wylde even wears a red headband for most of the film. Normally in a film like this the hero would have military training of some description but as far as I can tell in this film it's just an average college kid, and by the end of the film he's mowing down dozens of commies, setting death traps and firing a crossbow with pinpoint accuracy. Shit, if the US had just sent in a bunch of Scott Wylde's the cold war could have been over that much sooner.

I probably enjoyed this one more than the first film. Both have decent fights but watching someone beat up platoons of Commies is more fun than watching a whiny high school student get his ass kicked by bullies. Acting is pretty terrible across the board (the banter between Terry and Mac is particularly painful) but the fight scenes are interesting and varied with a very Hong Kong style. A fight with some counterfeit Buddhist monks is a particular highlight. Avedon has some good fighting skills so it's good that he stayed on for the rest of the series. Unfortunately Corey Yuen left after this one so we'll see whether Lucas Lowe (who's only director credits are the last three films in this series and some obscure film called Diaries of Darkness) is as good at showcasing Avedon's abilities.

Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia (2009)

This is my serious face.

I don't remember all that much about the first Behind Enemy Lines film. It was set in Bosnia for that ripped-from-the-headlines-of-a-few-years-ago feel and it featured a sniper in a jogging suit and a hilarious scene where Owen Wilson runs through a minefield in slow motion, the anti-personnel mines tearing his enemies to shreds but leaving him unscathed. Must have had them set to 'Balkan' instead of 'American'. Meanwhile Admiral Gene Hackman chewed the scenery and scowled lines like "I'm getting my man out and I don't give a damn what those pencil pushers in Washington think." It was a mildly entertaining piece of propaganda but nothing you haven't seen before.

Apparently someone thought this was a concept worthy of a franchise and a direct-to-video sequel followed in 2006, this time set in North Korea. I didn't see that one though, and the only reason the third entry caught my eye was because of the involvement of WWE Films, the company who brought us See No Evil, The Marine and The Condemned. This one stars Ken Anderson, a wrestler who goes by the unassuming name of Mr. Kennedy. The cover of the DVD consists pretty much entirely of Mr. Kennedy standing in front of an explosion and a billowing American flag. If you use a magnifying glass you might be able to spot the real star in the background somewhere, a Navy SEAL named Lt. Sean Macklin played by Joe Mangianello. Mangianello's imdb page has a lot of TV roles but few movie credits except for a small role in Spider-Man and a 2002 movie named The Ketchup King in which he played a character named Black Dildo.

This film also has some of that action movie bullshit that tries to paint life in the marines as basically being in the most bro-tastic frat ever. Ooh-rah! What appears to be a stealthy reconnaissance mission turns out to be a surprise birthday party for Lt. Macklin, during which all of his other SEAL buddies are introduced through the lazy direct-to-DVD tradition of subtitles. There's tough guy MCPO Carter Hold (Mr Kennedy), the gadget man CPO Kevin Derricks (Channon Roe), the bomb expert PO3 Steve Gaines (Chris Johnson). They also include a fun fact about each member of the team, for instance PO2 Greg Armstrong (Antony Matos) "Loves Jesus, and cleavage". There's also a terrible gag about a cake decoration going haywire, but it's still better than the golf scene in Navy SEALS.

Their celebrations don't last long and after a mission briefing they are sent into the jungles of Colombia on a reconnaissance mission. They are there to investigate a secret gathering of FARC guerrillas that turns out to be a peace negotiation between FARC and the Colombian military, but unfortunately nearly everybody there is slaughtered by some mysterious rogue soldiers. They are led by a Colombian officer who went rogue after his wife and child were killed in a FARC terrorist bombing. They manage to kill a couple of SEALs, take one hostage and the rest are framed for the shooting. Due to the Black Ops nature of their mission the American government is reluctant to intervene, so now the survivors have to rescue their buddy and gather the evidence that will clear their names.

Pretty standard stuff, if it were made twenty years ago it would probably be made by Cannon films and star Michael Dudikoff or something. Occasionally the film cuts back to their CO played by Keith David who wrestles with weaselly government bureaucrats. Tim Matheson appears a minor role too and he also directs. The action is filmed in a modern style, shakily filmed but reasonably coherent, although I was hoping a little less Blackhawk Down and a little more Commando. The DVD special features seem to be very proud of the authentic military hand signals and equipment and you can tell because it seems like half the film consists of the SEAL team loading and unloading gear and creeping around the jungle.

I was hoping for some of that shamelessly exploitative patriotism and xenophobia that you'd expect from the WWE and 80s style action films but there really isn't much of that. Oh sure, it presents a simplistic view of Colombian politics and U.S. interventionism (the fact that their mission is basically a hostile incursion into an allied nation isn't even acknowledged) but there's certainly nothing as ridiculous or tasteless as John Cena's one man war on terror in The Marine. I got a chuckle out of one part: The Colombian General states that "America isn't well liked in Latin America" and Lt. Macklin looks back with an expression like "Whuh? How could this be?" Well, films like this probably don't help.

Warbus (1984)

What's that you say? Looks like an ordinary school bus?
Fuck you, man! This is a WARbus.

The opening scene is so desperate to convince us of it's bonafide American patriotism it all but leaps out of the TV and crams apple pie down our throats. The mournful trumpets, billowing American flags, endless shots of statuary honouring the country's brave fallen soldiers, they all but guarantee you'll have a single, manly tear rolling down your cheek by the end of it. So naturally it's an Italian film. It is written and directed by Ferdinando Baldi (like the rest of the cast he is credited under an anglicised name, those sneaky Italians) who ran the gamut of Italian genre film including swords-and-sandals, spaghetti western and giallos, but is probably best known for Comin' At Ya!, a 3-D spaghetti western that sparked an 80s revival of 3-D film. So I guess he's partially responsible for Jaws 3-D. Fucker.

Warbus tells the story of the little school bus that could, a bright yellow bus packed to the gills with a cast of missionaries, prostitutes and mercenaries that manage to escape a Vietnamese mission right as it's being bombed into the ground by the VC. They are soon confronted by a trio of US Marines let by Sgt. Dixie (Daniel Stephen aka Catch Dog from 2020: Texas Gladiators) the only survivors after their entire platoon was wiped out. They commandeer their bus until they can get to the nearest American military base. This is no longer an ordinary bus. It's a WARbus.

They are kind of lucky these soldiers stopped by because it turns out that the bus driver man not only drinks and cusses and stinks up the buses... he's also a commie traitor! You'd think somebody would have noticed by now but apparently he's been driving North this whole time, right into the hands of the VC. After taking care of the traitor and turning the warbus around, the Marines head for the nearest military outpost but discover that the riverbanks have all been mined and they are very low on fuel. That night they stage a raid on an abandoned military base with hopes of scrounging some fuel, but find it completely overrun by VC forces. Their mission starts with stealthy throat slitting before transitioning into a desperate, explosion-filled battle for survival. Right as things start looking hopeless warbus comes crashing through the gates. God bless you, warbus! You may be bright yellow, but you ain't no coward!

Unfortunately we aren't all as brave as warbus. While the Marines are on their mission liberating fuel from the VC, Ronny the missionary (Don Gordon Bell) pulls his hidden fuel tanks out from under the warbus and tries to take off on his own! Luckily he's discovered by Major Kutran (Ernie Zarate), an officer in the South Vietnamese army who, despite his superior rank and frequent acts of heroism throughout the film, can only every hope to be a second string character due to his unfortunate affliction of not being white. Ronny's weird, paranoid and generally quite stupid behaviour might have you thinking he'd be more at home on the short-warbus, but later on he keels over from a seizure and his wife Anne (Gwendolyn Hung, who played Richard Harrison's wife in Fireback) reveals that he has "epilepsy with schizophrenic tendencies". That's got to be a pain to deal with, no wonder she's eyeballing all the other guys on the warbus.

Aside from Anne, the rest of the girls aboard the warbus don't get to do a lot except splash around in the river with no pants on and provide love interests for two of our heroes. Surprisingly despite being the hero Sgt. Dixie doesn't get any love from anyone. Even Anne's roving eye passes him over, going straight for a grizzled, middle-aged Australian played by spaghetti Western veteran Benito Stefanelli. Must be the accent. Or maybe she just goes for the bad boys (turns out he's a convicted murderer). Or maybe she just doesn't go for guys in glasses. Yes, poor Sgt. Dixie is forced to suffer the slings and barbs of his fellow Marines when he puts on a pair of glasses in order to operate a radio. War is truly hell.

Anyway, they use the radio to call for a couple of helicopters to pull them out, but unfortunately the VC intercept their communication and send out a platoon of soldiers. After enemy forces arrive and engage in synchronised tumbling, there is a massive gun fight that leaves several main characters and dozens of VC dead. In a final heroic act, the mortally-wounded Major Kutran gets behind the wheel of the bullet-riddled warbus and drives it into an ammunition dump, causing a massive explosion. Hail to the bus driver... bus driver man.

I've been giving this film a lot of shit, but it's actually pretty good. There's some pretty impressive explosions and exciting, well-staged gun battles. There's even a few touching moments amidst all the carnage. At one point they find the crucified bodies of American soldiers. Unable to bury them because the bodies have been booby trapped with explosives, they can do nothing but look on sadly and detonate the charges. In another scene they manage to find some music as they operate a radio and pipe it over the loudspeaker, giving everyone a few moments of peace before the final battle. Small touches like this and some strong character development really elevate it above many of the other shot-in-the-Phillipines cheapies. Take a ride on the warbus. You won't regret it.

Tiger Joe (1988)

Snakes... why'd it have to be -
wait, I already made that reference

Antonio Margheriti was incredibly prolific in the early 80s and knocked out a string of jungle adventure films, ranging from blatant Indiana Jones rip-offs like Ark of the Sun God to slightly less blatant Indiana Jones rip-offs like The Hunters of the Golden Cobra. Tiger Joe is the middle film in a trilogy of shot-in-the-Philippines Vietnam war films (although it isn't really set in Vietnam) sandwiched between The Last Hunter and Tornado. Like many of Margheriti's films, Tiger Joe stars the great B-movie regular and would-be Bond David Warbeck.

Warbeck plays Joe, a pilot who does some gunrunning for a group of Cambodian guerrilla rebels with his partner Midnight (Tony King). He is also helped out by his grizzled mechanic Lenny, played by Luciano Pigozzi (it's a Margheriti film so he's bound to pop up somewhere). During his Last Big Score he is attacked by the Khmer Rouge and his plane is riddled with bullets. He escapes death but crashes into the river.

After narrowly avoiding death by jungle trap he is captured by a different group of guerilla rebels and is tended to by the lovely Kia (Annie Bell from House on the Edge of the Park), an American woman who has taken up the rebels cause. They take him to a nearby village, but the entire rebel army is wiped out by Khmer Rouge forces. Only Joe, Kia and her childhood friend Tatu survive. It should be noted that Kia does a lot of screaming for a battle hardened rebel soldier and someone should probably tell her that an oversized t-shirt and no pants is not suitable clothing for guerrilla warfare. Meanwhile Joe spends most of his time wandering around without a shirt, so I guess between them they have one full set of clothing.

It should go without saying that eventually Kia succumbs to Joe's hairy-chested masculinity. This comes to a great disappointment to Tatu who attempts to kill Joe in a jealous rage but is stopped by Kia. The three of them are relentlessly pursued by soldiers into an abandoned house where Joe has an amusing Mexican stand-off with a deadly cobra. Tatu redeems himself by throwing himself onto a knife and saving Joe's life and Kia finally decides to put some pants on.

Meanwhile Midnight, Lenny and their cowardly boss Ronsky attempt to mount a rescue mission of their own. Their plane crashes after they are attacked by the Khmer Rouge and they are nearly captured but eventually Joe and Kia show up and save their asses. Ronsky demonstrates why surrendering to the Khmer Rouge is rarely a good idea and the rest of them manage to avoid dudes with flame throwers and other dangerous jungle foes, such as a man-eating tigers (or at least stock footage of a man-eating tiger). Disappointingly, after scaring it off with machine gun fire, Joe claims ominously that "it's still out there" and then it's neither seen nor mentioned for the rest of the film.

Subsequently our heroes wander around getting into scrapes and trading quips flavoured with the casual racism that is a beloved part of so many Italian genre films. For example Midnight is black (duh) so Lenny peppers their banter with terms like "son of sambo" and "spearchucker". Oh Lenny, you hilarious racist! I guess Midnight doesn't harbour any resentment though, because when Lenny is killed in a tunnel collapse (spoiler) Midnight bursts into a fit of anguished screaming that must be seen to be believed.

Despite a great performance from David Warbeck and an entertaining and bullet riddled finale, I didn't think this was one of Margheriti's better ones. It's relatively free of Margheriti's trademark model work (except for a train explosion that rips off Bridge on the River Kwai) and although it steals several action scenes from his superior Vietnam war film The Last Hunter, it doesn't steal it's gritty anti-war sentiment. In fact the film avoids making any statement about war whatsoever, except for a scene where Warbeck rants vaguely about "causes, those damn causes". Yeah, fuck causes! It was obviously made as a means to use up the leftovers from The Last Hunter, kind of like when they used all of Arnold Schwarzenegger's leftover DNA to make Danny DeVito in Twins. Like that film Tiger Joe is probably best avoided.

Soldier of Fortune (1987)

You wish you were this cool.

A lot of people complained about the magic amnesia bullet in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but bullet-to-the-brain induced amnesia is part of a rich tradition in action cinema. If action films have taught us anything, it's that a bullet bouncing around inside your skull causes nothing more than a mild headache and some temporary memory loss. Such is the case for Vincent Miles (Daniel Greene), wearer of white turtlenecks, hater of music and hero of Pierluigi Ciriaci's Soldier of Fortune. After copping a bullet to the head from a sneaky Russian, the only thing he can remember about his last mission in Afghanistan is chilling out with a bunch of natives while a blonde woman seduces him with some belly dancing. As far as wartime flashbacks go, it could be a lot worse.

Miles leaves the army but pretty soon a couple of government spooks respond to his ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine. They have orders direct from Section Y (that's one letter more secret than Section X!) to take him to meet his former CO, "the Colonel" (Bo Svenson in an eyepatch), at a shack on the Afghanistan border. There he is offered a top secret mission to recover the wreckage of an experimental Russian fighter jet that went down somewhere in Afghanistan. Accompanying him on his mission is a dorky egghead in shorts named Professor Rossi. He is a big fan of rock music and although no specific bands are mentioned I would guess that he is one of those guys who won't shut up about how Pink Floyd is the best band ever. Unfortunately Miles hates music and in fact when Rossi starts listening to his walkman Miles threatens to "shove it up your ass." Well, I know someone who isn't invited to Rossi's next Guitar Hero night.

When Miles and Rossi safely arrive in whatever rocky Eastern European country is passing for Afghanistan, they meet up with their contacts and do their best to evade the entire Russian army using nothing but a dirtbike and an uzi. Between bouts of getting captured and escaping they occasionally manage to check in with the Colonel (codename: Donald Duck) under their secret codenames Hewey and Louie. Dewey is MIA, I guess. Eventually the top brass catch wind of the Colonel's mission and they aren't happy. Apparently he was categorically ordered not to select Miles for this mission but he was like "whatevs" and did it anyway. Naturally the pencil pushers in Washington relieve the Colonel from active duty, canceling the mission and leaving Miles and Rossi at the mercy of the Russian army. As Hondo growls menacingly: "There's a problem at Disneyland. Donald Duck has been replaced."

After getting captured by some Russians and then busted out by some different Russians, Miles runs into the guy who put that bullet in his brain in the first place. He reveals that Miles' real name is Johnny Hondo, which is pretty awesome. It would suck if you found out your real name was Herbert Nerdlinger or something. The Russian is after the Eye of the Prophet, the mysterious artifact that Miles/Hondo was trying to find during his last mission. You see, Hondo was actually working for the Department of Science and Archaeology. Of course! Nobody is going to suspect a government department with such a goofy sounding name! I've never even heard of the DSA, but I guess that goes to show how secret they are.

Eventually Hondo and Rossi escape into a cave where they find the Eye of the Prophet, which turns out to be Ulysses 2000, a shiny high-tech bowling ball that contains all of human knowledge. I think something like that could be pretty useful here on Earth (like at quiz nights) but NASA decided to shoot it into space, where it was believed to be destroyed by a Russian killer satellite. Rossi concludes that the explosion somehow threw it backwards in time, where ancient peoples worshiped it as a god. Duh. Also hanging out in the cave is the woman from Hondo's recurring flashbacks, a psychic named Hanlulu, and she uses her powers to force a massive amount of exposition on the audience.

Due to Hanlulu's psychic powers she's the only person on the planet sufficiently advanced enough to interact with Ulysses. I guess it makes her pretty useful to have around, like a human Google, but it also gives her the power to fry some evil Russians somehow. As the Professor says "this woman is a terrible weapon! She could rule the world!" Luckily their problem is immediately solved for them when Hanlulu is shot dead by a proactive Russian soldier. Hondo and Rossi escape as the cave collapses, a bunch of crappy models are flooded around them and Ulysses explodes. During their escape Rossi breaks off part a stalactite which is apparently a huge uncut diamond, or as Rossi puts it "Tangible proof of the mountain's generosity." As they drive away that sneaky Ulysses comes rolling after them, giving us all a chance to wave goodbye to the camera crew, who are clearly reflected off it's surface. Goodbye Pierluigi!

Since this film was made in 1987 it should go without saying, but Dardano Sacchetti wrote the script. The guy wrote dozens of scripts in the 80s and I think the stress must have got to him by about the 70 minute mark of this film, where it loses any notion of being a low-budget Rambo cash-in and goes bugfuck crazy. Those with a hankering for more Johnny Hondo should check out Afghanistan: The Last War Bus, easily the second best film in the armoured-school-bus-being-driven-through-a-warzone genre of Italian cinema. Those disappointed with Daniel Greene's goofy-looking non-acting will be pleased to know that in that film Johnny Hondo is played by Marc Gregory (aka Trash from Bronx Warriors) whose goofy-looking non-acting is at least more entertaining to watch.

The Last Mercenary (aka Rolf) (1983)

Don't let go Rolf! You could fall three feet to your death!

In Mario Siciliano's The Last Mercenary, Antonio Marsina (Slave of the Cannibal God) plays Rolf, a man who has given up his evil life as a mercenary and found underpaid employment as a pilot in Tunisia. At least I assume it's Tunisia, judging from the flag on the wall and the vaguely Middle Eastern sounding music they were able to coax out of their Casio keyboard. He's so distant that his hot bartender girlfriend Joanne is at the end of her tether and the local cops hate him so much that when they mistakenly arrest him for a murder they take his fingerprints by dipping his fingers into poop. So it's not a great life, but at least he gets a groovy Fabio Frizzi theme song for whenever he's brooding, which is most of the time.

We all know it's not going to take long for his former war buddies to try and bring him back into the fold, and sure enough a guy appears on his doorstep to offer him One Last Mission (tm). Naturally Rolf refuses and as a sign of his commitment to his new life he takes his neglected girlfriend out on an intimate date the next day. On their date they inspect the wares of Tunisian street vendors and have a cup of tea at a street cafe, where Joanne reminisces about pulling the mangled torso of her father from the fatal car crash that left her an orphan. Rolf counters with a story about his hooker junkie mother being given a fatal drug overdose by her pimp. You know, typical date talk.

Immediately after their romantic date Rolf is cornered by his former mercenary buddies. Rolf may have a catchy theme song but Fabio Frizzi is no Isaac Hayes and Rolf is definitely no Shaft. Rolf is the anti-Shaft. Whereas Shaft's theme song assures us that Shaft "won't cop out when there's danger all about", Rolf's theme song whines that he's "taking a road that leads to paaain." Shaft is a bad mother who always succeeds no matter the odds while Rolf's confrontation leaves him a bloody mess, lying in a ditch covered in leeches until his girlfriend rescues him the next morning. Rolf kind of sucks, actually.

The next day Rolf interrogates his pilot friend Mark, who admits that he is assisting the bad guys with their smuggling operation and agrees to help Rolf steal their package and their charter plane. Rolf's childhood experience has left him with such an intense hatred for drugs that when he discovers that they are smuggling a crate of China White he pisses all over it and tosses it out of the plane. It's pretty hilarious, but it's also pretty shortsighted on Rolf's part. It doesn't even occur to him to tell his girlfriend "Uh, you might want to leave town for a couple of days", so as soon as pulls his little stunt the bad guys immediately ambush her at home, run a train on her (with a succession of ugly mugs leering into camera, thanks Mario) and then kill her. Mark doesn't fair much better, he gets a pan of hot oil thrown in his face and then roasted over a hot plate. Geez Rolf, I know you like brooding, but try thinking of someone else for a change.

With nothing left to live for except a burning desire for revenge, Rolf decides to retrieve his hidden stash of guns and go on a Rambo style rampage in the forest. It's here that Rolf finally comes into his element, but that's mainly because the bad guys are so busy infighting and raiding each others' corpses for valuables. Rolf sets up a few sweet jungle traps but he gets shot in the hands and his arch nemesis escapes. Rolf snarls "You filthy bastard" and then stretches out his bleeding hands and asks for God's help, making for one of the weirdest and sleaziest Christ metaphors I've ever seen. You can't really blame Rolf for feeling self-righteous about killing these guys though, because they are pretty damned evil. Did I mention that during a flashback sequence they toss babies into the air and use them for target practice? Six of them? In front of their mothers? As blood splashes on the floor in slow-motion? To the sounds of a Fabio Frizzi disco score? I can say without hesitation that I'm against all of those things, especially the musical score.

Eventually Rolf gets his revenge on the main villain with a low speed truck chase followed by a fist fight that ends with the bad guy being repeatedly slammed in a car door and meekly slumping into unconsciousness. What the shit, Rolf? This guy ran a train on your girlfriend. He tortured your friend to death. This is your ultimate act of revenge? Punching him in the back until he collapses? I'm sorry but after gang rape, torture and infanticide it just seems a little anti-climactic. To be fair we don't see what he does with the guy's body and in the next scene Rolf is taking a shower in a waterfall, so I'm willing to assume that the subsequent orgy of violence left him soaked in blood and was too depraved to depict on film.

I must say I was quite surprised by this film. From the title I was expecting your typical cheap Italian actioner, but the experience of watching Rolf is not unlike having your hand dipped in poop. It starts conventionally enough, lots of exploding huts and machine guns firing wildly, but pretty soon it takes a hard left into sleazy exploitation territory. For lovers of sleaze though, this film hits all the bases: drug abuse, torture, rape, feces, urination, racism, misogyny. Something for everyone. This is a mean, nasty, ugly exploitation film, miserable and hateful in tone with few redeeming qualities. Highly recommended.

Raiders of the Magic Ivory (1988)

Cråppen desk lamp: $17.95
Available in black or ivory

Have you ever been watching one of these cheap Italian jungle war/adventure movies and thought "Yeah, this movie is okay, but it really needs more walking." Or maybe sometimes you're confused by basic storytelling, such that two contiguous scenes will show the heroes in different locations and you'll wonder "How the hell did that happen?" Well, have I got the movie for you! Raiders of the Magic Ivory packs in more footage of jungle walking, river boating and cave exploration in it's 80 min run time than all 7 hours of Apocalypse Now Redux. No instance of our heroes moving from point A to point B was deemed too unimportant to commit to celluloid.

Sure, all of this hardcore walking action may be enough to satisfy some people, but director Tonino Ricci knows that without some shootouts and a desperate jungle mission to tie it together it's all just empty thrills. It begins with Mark (Christopher Ahrens) busting his buddy out of a South American prison. His comrade-in-arms is named Sugar (Peter Mitchum) which leads to some pretty confusing instances of people shouting "Come on, Sugar!" "Hurry up, Sugar!" or "Call me Sugar." Sugar may have been trapped in a pit for several months with only a curiously well-groomed mouse for company, but when Mark tells him he "stinks like a latrine" he still manages to lay him out with a right hook. That's how you know these guys are destined to be BFFs.

Cut to our two heroes lounging by the pool and I'm sure there's nothing more than these two manly men would like to do better than lounge around in their fruity silk robes for the rest of the movie, but their mission has only just begun. The rescue was funded by Lee Chang, a Fu-Manchu-ish Chinese stereotype played by a white guy in makeup and probably the least convincing Asian since Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice. Chang wants them to retrieve a magic ivory (plastic) tablet from a death cult in a jungle on the North Vietnamese/Cambodian border called the Hell From Which No-One Returns. Sounds nice. They're offered $250,000 to do so, under the condition that they bring along Chang's creepy manservant Tao (Franklin Dominguez).

Naturally they have a few run-ins with the local military, but luckily the soldiers' tactics seem to be modeled after the British military strategy of WWI ie sending waves of troops headlong into a hail of gunfire. After commandeering a boat from a bunch of skeletons, they eventually they find their way into the monks' "temple" (a cave). Descending to the inner sanctum, they discover the monks, dressed in their finest potato sacks and Halloween masks, in the middle of a ritual sacrifice. They led by a guy with a bushy white beard in a bright red robe that I like to call Bathrobe Santa. When they interrupt the ceremony with a shotgun blast and rescue the sacrificial victim, Bathrobe Santa uses his spooky black magic powers to summon a few floating spectral monster heads that do precisely dick. Sugar replies "It's some kind of bullshit, man" and walks right through them. You know, these black magic powers are failing to impress.

Once they've escaped they get a chance to talk to the girl they rescued. Luckily she speaks perfect English, enabling her to spill out a headache-inducing level of exposition nonsense. She is named Me Lai and she is the Keeper of the Celestial Peace, the only one with the power to neutralise the dark magic bestowed by the tablet. If you're Chinese this is probably old hat to you, since according to Me Lai this stuff is known by all Chinese people. As they travel to the extraction site they are attacked by more cultists who swarm them en masse and are mowed down like so many paper targets. Unfortunately at the last minute they are betrayed by Tao, who steals the tablet and escapes in their rescue helicopter. This forces Mark, Sugar and Me Lai to battle their way back to civilisation by stealing a truck and murdering about a thousand soldiers. I assume they are Viet Cong, but their uniforms are wildly off model and they are played by Latinos so who knows.

Once they get back to China, or wherever it's supposed to be, they confront Chang Lee only to have him escape and a bunch of ninjas to pop out of the woodwork (the 80s). Me Lai catches a bullet but before she dies she transfers her sacred powers over to Sugar and feeds him some Peter Pan bullshit about having to believe. They track Chang Lee to his private yacht, where Sugar and Mark battle Tao and some more ninjas. Eventually Sugar retrieves the tablet from Chang Lee and "renders him inoffensive" by turning him a smoking puddle of goo. A brief epilogue shows our heroes sailing away in a yacht with a couple of hot 80s babes. Sugar raises a brewski towards the camera and says "Here's to keeping the Celestial Peace!" Amen to that, Sugar. Amen.

If I close my eyes I can imagine the efficient, assembly-line process by which a film like this is made. Some producers think up a popular Hollywood film to rip off (Rambo and Indiana Jones in this case) and Dardano Sacchetti is given a few days to turn out a script (he wrote eight other scripts that year, a new personal best). Obviously nobody is going to watch a film made by a bunch of Eye-talians, so Ricci, directing under his Anglicised pseudonym Anthony Richmond, and a couple of American actors are flown out to a jungle in whatever third-world country will let them film for the cheapest. Sure you can't afford any real actors, but Peter Mitchum shares enough genetic material with his father (Robert Mitchum) to provide that coveted "vaguely familiar" feeling. Then bus in a bunch of confused locals for extras (ethnicity unimportant) and raid an amateur theater production of The Mikado for costumes.

Put together some awesomely misleading cover art for the VHS cassette and BAM! You've got yourself a movie that does the bare minimum to distract you from your miserable life for 80 minutes. Or as I like to call it, Keeping the Celestial Peace.

Fireback (1983)

A young Rob Liefeld watched this movie and his
destiny was changed forever...

Richard Harrison was one of a number of muscle-bound American actors who made his way to Italy in the 60s to capitalise on the swords-and-sandals boom. In the subsequent decades he appeared in a number of genre films, from spaghetti Westerns to Eurospy movies but these days he is most well-known (much to his chagrin, I'm sure) for his string of Godfrey Ho "directed" ninja films in the mid 80s. Ho was a thrifty man and would film a few scenes of Harrison and edit it together with some randomly scrounged fight footage to create Ninja Terminator, Ninja Champion, Ninja Kill and dozens of other titles containing the word ninja. These films are all pretty much an incomprehensible mess.

Fireback is one of a few films Harrison and a bunch of other actors (Mike Monty, Bruce Baron, Jim Gaines) made for Silver Star in the Phillipines. It was one of director Teddy Page's first films with Silver Star and for the rest of the 80s he managed to turn out a couple of cheap war films a year It predates Harrison's ninja films, but disappointed ninja enthusiasts should be aware that Harrison does dress up in a ninja uniform in the last scene, which I'm sure Godrey Ho stole and spliced into a dozen other films.

The film begins at a US military outpost in Vietnam and Jack Kaplan (Harrison) is there to demonstrate a new multi-barrel superweapon that combines a built-in radio, automatic rifle, 30 caliber machine gun, grenade launcher, bazooka, mini missile, infrared scope and the ability to paralyse enemy troops with laughter when they see it. It probably weighs about 300 pounds and I'm not sure why anyone would need a bazooka and a mini missile, but still it puts the "firepower of one platoon in your hands". I bet you can't wait to see it in action. Well tough shit, because the Viet Cong immediately attack and Kaplan is captured before he can fire a shot.

With a senior weapons expert captured and dwindling morale, things are looking pretty bleak for the US forces. They are so starved for equipment that a senior military officer is forced to order the rescue mission out of a shoddy makeshift office in somebody's living room. Nevertheless, the mission is carried off without a hitch and Kaplan is rescued. As he recovers in hospital he is unable to contact his wife Diane (Ann Milhench) and becomes increasingly worried. He expresses concern to a friend who casually tosses him his keys and says "Here's my car." Now that's a good buddy.

When he arrives back home he finds that his wife is indeed missing and sets out on a mission to find her. His first stop is a strip club where a bunch of goofy losers clap out of time while a stripper dances seductively without actually stripping. Kaplan, in a pimping disco suit, is instructed to find the Man with the Golden Hand (aka Dennis). First he talks to Digger, a jive-talking black guy clearly dubbed by a white guy (he says "I thought you were in Angelsville, man!") and is told to speak to a club owner named Eve. So he goes to see Eve and she tells him to see a guy named Bart McNeil. McNeil is killed before he get any information, but eventually he is put onto the trail of a guy named Johnson.

The film just goes on and on like this, with Kaplan following clues from location to location in search of his wife, beating information out of anyone he comes across. After a while it gets kind of surreal. While he is following the trail of clues a series of assassins are sent out to kill him. These include a blind (or is he?) man with a sharpened cane, a guy in a spiffy leather cap/neckerchief combo, a would-be bomber played by Harrison's own son and a ninja named Shadow (the 80s). Naturally they are all wildly unsuccessful.

It turns out the one behind his wife's disappearance is a guy by the pimptastic name of Duffy Collins (Bruce Baron). Even though there is nothing remarkable about his appearance or identity, his face is obscured until the very end. He gives a big emo speech saying "I offered her flowers, but she wouldn't accept them" and "I tried to be nice to her, but the more I tried, the more she rejected me". That sounds awfully to familiar to my own love life but while I would deal with things by curling into ball of self-loathing and depression, Duffy kidnaps her (entirely in slow motion) and when he discovers Kaplan is still alive, chains her up in a basement dungeon and murders her so that nobody else can have her.

Eventually Kaplan finds his wife's body (still chained up for some reason) but so do the police and with all of these bodies piling up they are pretty quick to blame Kaplan. The police chief (Mike Monty with absurdly yellow hair) orders his men to bring him in by any means necessary, warning them that Kaplan "can make an ordinary soft drink straw into a weapon" and you don't want to know what he can do with one of those bendy straws. Luckily for them Kaplan doesn't have access to any straws but he does manage to get a hold of a rifle and a bunch of pipes. He uses them to create a superweapon which appears to be a rifle with a bunch of pipes glued onto it.

When Kaplan conducts his brutal assault on Duffy's property we get superweapon blueballs again: Kaplan carries it around with him but he doesn't actually fucking use it, instead relying on a pistol. When he gets overwhelmed he flees, one of the bad guys remarking that "he's heading into the jungle". You know, those jungles they have near population centers in the United States. Once he's in Rambo mode in the jungle he finally decides to use his superweapon, which has a built-in harpoon gun, to silently kill a couple of approaching enemies. Eventually the bad guys give up and the seriously injured Kaplan holes up in a cave.

Even though a whole search party with M16's can't kill him, Duffy decides to call in an assassin because that's worked well so far. He calls the ninja Shadow again (I think he's the only one still alive) and even lends him his horse, you know, for navigating through the jungle. Unsurprisingly, Kaplan kills him (too dark to make out how exactly) and takes his ninja outfit so he can sneak back into Duffy's property. Unfortunately he fails to take into account that he is a strapping 6 foot white guy while Shadow was a tiny Asian man, so Duffy immediately sees through his disguise. Luckily Duffy is a terrible shot so Kaplan still manages to kill him with a series of brutal slow-motion stabs. The film abruptly ends on a freeze-frame of Kaplan in the middle of a particularly rage-filled stab, and a title card explains his post-movie fate, Animal House style:

"Jack Kaplan went into hiding after killing Duffy Collins but he was apprehended by the authorities after a month of close surveillance. He was tried in court and was sentenced to life imprisonment. After a few years in the national penitentiary, he developed a heart ailment and later died of a heart attack. He was 42."

So John "Bluto" Blutarsky became a senator, William Munny prospered in dry goods in San Francisco and Jack Kaplan died of a heart attack in jail. Thanks, movie! Actually, I think more revenge/action movies should include a sobering title card detailing the incarceration and death of the hero. It would kind of bring things into perspective if we found out that, say, after Death Wish Jack Kersey was charged with murder and sent to jail, where he was shanked in the shower at age 54. Kind of ruins the sequel potential, though.

This is a pretty weird film. Badly dubbed dialogue and an abuse of slow motion during dramatic scenes provide a few moments of unintentional hilarity. Apparently Harrison wrote it himself in one night, so I doubt anyone was particularly interested in turning out a watchable product. Still, it's good times for anyone who wants to see Harrison stumbling through the Filipino jungle on a delirious rampage of revenge. With a plot that lurches schizophrenically from one plot point to the next and music that comes from the fevered dreams of a madman, I felt like I was right there with him.

Cobra Mission (aka Operation Nam) (1986)

A fine example of the foreign policy that has
made America beloved around the world

The 1980s brought us a slew of revisionist Vietnam war flicks, painting our veterans as brave heroes fighting a war that the cowardly government just wouldn't let them win. Fabrizio De Angelis (as Larry Ludman) made a whole bunch of them, most notably the Thunder Warrior trilogy starring Mark Gregory (yes, Trash from Bronx Warriors!) as a disgruntled Native American/Vietnam vet. Kind of like Billy Jack meets Rambo only less awesome. Cobra Mission, also known as under the bizarrely generic title Operation Nam, is one of De Angelis' vetspoitation films, but it doesn't take the direction you might think.

When our hero Roger (Chris Connelly from Strike Commando) is introduced he is sitting on the couch playing video games, late for his own daughter's wedding, so immediately I knew that this is a guy I can relate to. Then during the wedding reception he loudly reminisces with his two Vietnam vet buddies Richard (Oliver Tobias) and James (John Steiner) about the "big, free-swinging titties" at Vietnamese whorehouses. If that's garden party conversation I'd love to hear his wedding speech, but unfortunately when his daughter complains about their behaviour they skip out on her wedding and hit the local watering hole. Naturally, one of them punches out an old man after he starts sass-talking about Vietnam vets. Ladies and gentlemen, our heroes!

Still, it's understandable that they'd be a little grouchy. Despite the best efforts of Sly Stallone, Chuck Norris and Gene Hackman, it seems there are still a few missing POWs back in-country, ten years after the fact. With the government turning it's back on them, our trio of disgruntled vets decide they might as well be the ones to bring our boys home. Screw military support, intelligence, equipment or a plan of any kind. Those are for pussies. However, before they get back to the jungle and fight toe-to-toe with Charlie, they've got to pad the run time by busting out a parade of Italian B-movie regulars.

Firstly they decide to talk it over with their former CO Major Morris. Instead they find Colonel Mortimer (Gordon Mitchell from Endgame, playing pretty much the same guy) who reveals that Major Morris has been drummed out of the armed forces because of his obsession with the missing POWs. When they get to Morris' house we discover that he is none other than famed B-movie director Enzo G. Castellari. When they mention the POWs he pulls out a bunch of maps and charts, but I was more interested in the sweet tiger painting on the wall of his swinging pad. Stylin'!

Next they hit the Veteran's hospital to pick up Mark (Manfred Lehmann), the fourth member of their crew. He says that he's only pretending to be crazy so he can avoid taxes, get free meals and bone hot nurses. If you can get past the confinement and electroshock therapy, I guess it's a pretty sweet deal. You might doubt the veracity of his claim since he jumps at the chance to get back in action, but I guess this is one of those Catch 22's that everybody is always talking about.

Next stop, Thailand! Firstly they visit their former war buddy, who is the owner/dealer (he should learn to delegate) at a local casino. He doesn't come with them but he lets them win some cash to finance their mission. Then they meet up with Ennio Girolami (Bronx Warriors 2) playing an asshole who takes money from distraught parents of MIA soldiers, in this case Luciano Pigozzi (Yor: The Hunter From the Future), under the false pretense of mounting a rescue mission. Roger rightly calls him a "suckfish" who'd "fuck [his] mother for a dollar", beats the crap out of him and takes the money. I'm not sure if he returns it to the parents, but since he's mounting a rescue mission of his own you could argue that he's earned it.

Finally they meet up with Donald Pleasance, appearing as a French priest, who spends his time wandering around looking completely stoned, babbling about how they are doing God's work by slaughtering the Viet Cong. After he gives them a bunch of guns and helps guide them along the river and into the heart of darkness (tense stand-off with a Viet Cong riverboat ending in a bloody massacre? Check!) their mission has officially begun! Although "mission" probably isn't the right word as it implies some sort of planning or strategy. Basically their plan is to just wander around South-East Asia until they bump into somebody who knows something about the secret POW camps.

They hit up the nearest village, heroically issuing death threats and bravely shaking them down for supplies, and pretty soon they stumble across a POW being menaced by Viet Cong soldiers. They follow them back to camp and wait for the right time to strike, but unfortunately one of the officers reminds Richard of a guy who gave him a bareass naked whipping back when he was a POW, so he goes nuts and starts shooting everybody. Luckily these Viet Cong are pretty dumb so everything turns out okay. Roger stands outside a doorway and mows down dozens of troops as they rush outside like lemmings, while Mark pitches a grenade into a bunker window and shouts "You've got mail!". I believe a couple of straw huts explode, too. The POWs are reluctant to follow them for some reason, but eventually they all pile into a truck escape. James turns out to be the hero of the day, blowing up a (model) helicopter with his M16 and then, when faced with a roadblock, loading up the truck with live grenades and barrel rolling to safety, blowing them sky high. Then he flips them the bird, giving us the little something extra that Italian productions are known for.

Back at the village Roger chats to one of the POWs, who expresses a regret that he's never been to the big apple. Roger says that he'll "Take you to New York, introduce you to a couple of girls and fuck your brains out." I think he'd probably prefer the girls for that, but thanks for the offer, Rog. Meanwhile, Mark hits on a Vietnamese girl by comparing her to girl who was killed in a bombing run during the war. He really needs to work on his pick-up lines. She takes off her top (good), exposing her hideously scarred chest (bad), and shouts "American napalm!" before shooting him dead. Not sure if she's supposed to be the same girl Mark was talking about, but if so she's aged remarkably well, at least until Richard rushes in and shoots her.

Their journey back along the river is fraught with the usual gun violence, explosions, stabbings and profanity ("If you don't talk I'll cut your nuts off, fucker!"), all topped off with a delicious frosting of casual racism. A couple of POWs are killed, and eventually they are forced back onto land and ambushed by dozens of Viet Cong soldiers, tanks etc. Even with action movie physics on their side they are fucked, but luckily Colonel Mortimer shows up in a chopper to save them. He reveals that the government knew about the POWs the entire time, they've been kept there as part of a peace agreement. Roger and company can leave, but the POWs have to stay. It's a surprising bummer of an ending, with the sole surviving POW kneeling on the ground in despair as the helicopter flies away and dozens of Viet Cong close in. As someone sadly intones, "Forget it, man. It's Vietnam." making it the most ballsy and inappropriate Chinatown reference of all time.

But the nihilism doesn't end there! Following this scene are some title cards explaining the grim fates of our surviving heroes. Roger dies in an auto accident, James dies in a helicopter crash and Richard ends up in a drugged-out coma at a Veteran's mental hospital. Presumably a puppy was kicked and a kitten was put in a microwave too. Featuring brutal violence, racism, unlikable protagonists, suprisingly anti-American politics and unrelenting nihilism, Cobra Mission is the perfect film to pull out at your next 4th of July family barbecue. God Bless, America!

Death Raiders (1984)

Some of Karamat's men demonstrate their highly ineffective
"standing out in the open and waiting to get shot" strategy

When you are the leader of rebel militia with aims to take over the country, you really need to consider your sartorial choices. Take Karamat in this film, for instance, who wears a bright red Gilligan-style cloth hat. Good news for me, because the DVD was apparently sourced from a fifth generation VHS dub that somebody accidentally put through the washing machine and his hat made for really handy visual landmark. Bad news for him, because nobody is going to take a guy in a hat like that seriously. I mean, could you imagine Barack Obama showing up for a press conference in a Gilligan hat? He'd be laughed out of the Oval Office.

It may be because of this that he and his rebel soldiers kidnap the provincial Governor of... wherever this is supposed to be, and his two hot daughters. They hope to use the hostages to overthrow the government somehow. The army agrees that it is too dangerous to allow an air or artillery strike. Their only option is to re-form the Death Raiders, a group of highly-trained commandos that are so skilled they can kill a dozen enemies with a single burst of machine gun fire, even when they aren't aiming anywhere near them.

With only a few days until the mission, it's time for the Seven Samurai style scene where the leader of the Death Raiders gathers up all of his former comrades. The first guy is busy macking on some tough guy's girl at the disco. The tough guy invites him onto the dance floor and when he reluctantly accepts the two men engage in an awesome disco dancing contest that sees our hero Bump n' Hustle his way to victory! Nah, I'm just kidding, actually he kicks the tough guy's ass and mops the floor with all of his goons. When they find the second guy he is busy defusing a delicate hostage situation with a largely superfluous slow-motion John Woo leap. Boom! Headshot!

The third guy is far more difficult to recruit. He's turned to the bottle and frequently bursts into impromptu drunken boxing fight scenes in the street. In a normal war film his heavy drinking would be an admirable trait or at worst a lovable quirk, but here his fighting brothers are quite concerned with his alcohol abuse and stage an intervention. It's kind of weird. He reveals that his girlfriend has been forced into working at a nearby whorehouse, so his brothers put into action a rescue which spirals out into an entertaining bar room brawl.

While all of this is going on we are subjected to the far less entertaining antics of Karamat and his family. You see, Karamat's son doesn't agree with his father's methods and defies him at every turn. This is fine, the problem lies in the fact that he is a whiny bitch. All he ever does is make proud, defiant speeches to his father and get his ass whupped. Or make proud, defiant speeches while getting his ass whupped. The most proactive he ever gets is sneaking the prisoners some food and helping them to escape, but even then the prisoners are recovered the next morning and he gets slapped silly by his father in front of a crowd of onlookers. He's so useless that his mother has to curry favour with one of Karamat's men just so Karamat doesn't beat him to death.

Once the Death Raiders are assembled they are air-dropped into the jungle and conduct a stealthy assault on the rebel village. Lots of throat slitting and fist fights, you know the drill. While they are working their way to the cave where the prisoners are being held, Karamat's wife and son are staging a rescue mission of their own. Eventually the two rescue teams all meet up and make their way back to the rendevous point. Karamat's men are in hot pursuit and a violent gun battle ensues. Luckily for them, Karamat's men's strategy consists primarily of lying prone out in the open, making then easy targets. Eventually Karamat catches a stray bullet and the film ends abruptly. I guess they forgot to film the epilogue.

This being a Filipino war film there's a lot of attempted rape and there's a weird scene where a dozen of Karamat's men wade into the water and get into a fight over who is going to rape the Governor's daughter. I guess it's being played for laughs? Far more successful at drawing laughs are the atrocious dubbing, terrible dialogue and the cartoony, Jackie Chan style physical comedy that peppers the fight scenes. At a brisk 80 minutes, this is a lean and reasonably efficient delivery vehicle for explosions and fighting, but I was disappointed with the lack of nudity and gratuitous profanity that similar Italian productions have left me accustomed to.

Mannigan's Force (1988)

Don't you just love saying "Mannigan"?
Mannigan, Mannigan, Mannigan.

The place: the fictional Central American country of Cenagua (played by the Phillipines). The time: 1984 (played by 1988). In an opening scene familiar to most aficionados of war movies and/or gay porn, a group of hairy, muscular, armed men creep through the steamy jungle. The most hairy, muscular and armed of them all is Jack Mannigan (George Nichols). He and his force (ie Mannigan's Force) are helping a rebel group mount an attack on an enemy encampment and they must be really good because there's over a dozen of them crouching in open sight no more than 20 meters from the base and they aren't even spotted.

Mannigan leads the attack, leaping into the fray while screaming and blasting away with his huge, overcompensatory gun. The ensuing attack is full of bloody, Sam-Peckinpah-esque slow motion kills and burning bodies leaping out of exploding guard towers. I counted at least 90 kills, and most of them can be attributed to Mannigan himself, who mows down soldier after hapless soldier with an M16 in in each hand. This is strictly a shooting gallery style affair, with enemy soldiers completely forgetting they are armed as they run into a hail of gunfire. Lots of stunts, exploding huts and and bloody squibs. It's a good sequence.

Victorious, they head back to the rebel village. His men celebrate while Mannigan has a heart-to-heart with some local girl he's boning, saying he can't take her with him because he's a free bird and this bird you cannot chay-ay-ange. The next morning the enemy conducts a brutal counter-attack on the village. It's pretty hardcore, with women and little kids getting riddled with bullets in slow motion. Jeez. Mannigan's Force (and his girl) manage to escape the village and eventually find their way back to civilisation.

NOTE: Here's where you should probably turn off the film, because it seriously blows it's load in that opening sequence.

Some time later back in Cenagua, some enemy forces capture a military convoy and take some US hostages. While your standard group of international politicians/businessmen huddle in a briefing room, a guy demonstrates that Mannigan is a "karate expert, vietnam vet, mercenary, all rolled into one". He even includes some handy visual aids; slides of Mannigan posing in a karate uniform, army greens etc. They are all impressed by Mannigan's big muscles and agree that he is the man for the job, so they send a group of armed men to ambush him at home. You might consider that strange, figuring an official letter or polite phone call might be more appropriate, but tough guys like Mannigan and I, the only language we understand is violence. If the conversion doesn't start with a sweaty fist fight and a gunpoint confrontation, then we're just not going to take you seriously.

They offer Mannigan a million dollars, so he reluctantly agrees to the mission and puts out a coded newspaper ad to rally his force. All of his old buddies show up to lend a hand and there's a new guy too, a kung fu expert named Hang. Mannigan is unsure of him at first because he's one of the few men without any facial hair. Seriously, they are all sporting Magnum P.I. regulars. I would have called them Mannigan's Moustache Rangers.

Once they are back in-country they meet their local contact and formulate a plan of attack, but things aren't as simple as they seem. Turns out their chief employer is actually in league with the Cenaguan military forces, and he is using Mannigan's suicide mission as a decoy to placate his fellow colleagues while he trades arms and drugs with the Cenaguan General. Or something, I don't know. There were big chunks of dialogue that were in Spanish and the DVD didn't have any English subtitles (had burnt-in Japanese ones, though). I could tell that the Cenaguan General spoke Spanish phoenetically, which really isn't what you want in a military leader.

Mannigan meets up with his old girl (the only female character in the whole film I think), but she turns out to be a traitor working for the General. In 80s action films, one should maintain a healthy distrust of anything with a vagina. When they finally storm the base about a hundred of the General's soldiers appear out of hiding and I was all geared up for everyone to go out in a Wild Bunch style mass slaughter. Instead Mannigan's girl turns out to be a double agent for Mannigan's Force, taking the General hostage and helping them escape without a single shot fired. Total cinematic blueballs.

During the escape the General reveals that there aren't any hostages and that Mannigan's employer has double-crossed him, so Mannigan drives to the airstrip to confront his employer and plays a game of poorly-edited chicken with his jet. Mannigan barrel rolls to safety just in time to avoid the huge explosion, and then the film immediately ends. We don't find out how he manages to escape the General or his men. There isn't even a scene with Mannigan and his buds lounging by the pool after a job well done. Weak sauce.

The director is some dude named John Ryan Grace who left no corner uncut and spared every expense. The lighting is terrible and the acting is purely amateur hour, especially Mannigan who's displays of table-thumping anger are kind of embarassing. After the brilliant opening I thought I had discovered a lost gem of cheapie war films, but it's probably the worst case of premature ejaculation that I've ever seen. Nothing else in the film comes even a tenth of the way to matching that first action sequence. It's nice of them to put the best bits at the beginning so you don't have to fast forward, but I wish I'd known beforehand so I could have stopped watching about 15 minutes in.