Western

Santo vs. the Riders of Terror (1970)

Leave a comment

Maybe I’m wired differently, but hypothetically speaking, if I were sheriff of a wee town in the late 1800s, and six lepers escaped our local hospital, I doubt I’d ever arrive at the solution of “I know how to find this dirty half-dozen and keep their gnarly disease from spreading. If only I could locate a masked wrestler who rides horseback while wearing white pants.”

But who am I to question the great René Cardona? Basically the Roger Corman of Mexploitation cinema, he’s at the helm of Santo vs. the Riders of Terror, one of the silver-masked superhero’s scant few Westerns.

As word of the free-ranging lepers leaks, the townspeople rile each other up with the fearmongering fury of a thousand Infowars broadcasts. Despite the sheriff (Armando Silvestre, Cardona’s The Batwoman) pleading for compassion, even his best gal (Mary Montiel, Santo in the Vengeance of the Mummy) buys into the mob mentality by wrongly assuming those goddamn lepers are to blame for the fatal gunshot in her papi’s back.

Fresh from donating a match’s winnings to some nuns, Santo (Santo) finally shows up to render aid to the sheriff — and presumably to Riders of Terror. But instead of leaping into action, Santo goes full Science Corner by visiting the doctor (Carlos Agostí, Cardona Jr.’s Guns and Guts) for a sit-down lesson on leprosy. Per Cardona’s typical peso-pinching ways, the lepers’ sores look like each actor fell asleep into a plate of room-temperature ground round.

The issue with Santo vs. the Riders of Terror isn’t Santo’s anti-violence stance nor Santo’s unexplained existence in a prior century. It’s that the movie is as dull as the dirt beneath the horses’ collective clopping feet. End to end, it’s among the least engaging outings I’ve seen from the genre-hopping film series. If you do watch it, go for the longer version.

You read that correctly: longer. Because it adds three recently unearthed sex scenes. Similar to the magical switcheroo of Cardona’s Santo in the Treasure of Dracula into the NSFW El Vampiro y el Sexo via Russ Meyer-ian mammaries, a spicy version of Santo vs. the Riders of Terror exists under the unappetizing title of Los Leprosos y el Sexo. However, it mines a level or two of explicitness deeper than Treasure, especially in a fully nude makeout session ’round second base between the physically gifted Montiel and a lottery-lucky Silvestre. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Action

The Big Switch (1968)

Leave a comment

After a decade of directing such saucy shorts as For Men Only, Pete Walker finally cracked the hourlong barrier with the Carnaby Street crime caper The Big Switch.

One night, professional ad exec and unprofessional blue-eyed fuckboy John Carter (Sebastian Breaks, The Night Digger) leaves a London discotheque with a lovely bird (Erika Raffael, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush). They head to her pad for a proper shagging. Whilst Carter first goes ’round the corner to grab some cigs for post-coital smoking, she’s shot dead by a hitman hiding in her shower. Talk about a case of the blue balls, mate — when Carter finds her body, no wonder touches the gun left behind and vamooses without phoning the authorities.

Which is exactly what local gangster/club owner Mendez (Derek Alyward, Walker’s School for Sex) counts on. He blackmails Carter into a secret assignment with a beautiful model named Karen (Virginia Wetherell, Walker’s Man of Violence). Neither Karen nor Carter have a clue what they’re in for — and I ain’t telling, either — but they hope it doesn’t involve their deaths.

This sleek, quick pic is a real fanny-slapper, like a men’s pulp paperback come to life. On cheap paper, those hard-charging, easy-bedding heroes could trot through formulaic exploits dozens upon dozens of times. The Carter character could have fronted an equal amount of adventures, yet went no further.

I enjoyed Walker’s first true feature from start to its photo finish, a marvelously fun sequence that places its climactic chase and shootout within a boardwalk arcade and ghost train attraction. After the baddies are dispatched or discombobulated, the po-po show up and invite Karen and Cater to the station for a cuppa tea.

“Sounds groovy,” Karen says earlier in the film, to which Carter coldly replies, “It is.” They may as well be talking up The Big Switch. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Masters of the Universe (1987)

Leave a comment

While people re-evaluate their opinions of Masters of the Universe due to the new movie, I’ve always liked the property on-whole — not just the 1987 filmic adaptation, but the cartoons and toy line, too.

That being said, it’s been around 40 years since I last saw the movie, on broadcast television one afternoon because my parents wouldn’t pay for first-run movies, dollar movies, premium cable or, even worse, basic cable. Yeah, for many years, we were a broadcast-only family and, consequently, I missed out of most of the MOTU studio Cannon Group filmography. Chuck Norris be damned!

I remember it being “all right” for what it was. Which was okay, because most adaptations at the time were very fast and loose and needed serious legroom to stretch out their fantastical concepts. You dealt with it. In preparation for the 2026 remake, I rewatched the original and, I gotta say, with all the limitations like budget constraints and unworkable screenplay, it’s actually pretty good for what it was.

The movie starts with a Superman-like title crawl that prepares us for Skeletor (Frank Langella) and his baddies to take the mythical wasteland of Eternia. The only thing that can stop them is a cadre of cannon-fodder soldiers, allies like Teela and Man-at-Arms, and, of course, muscular himbo He-Man (Dolph Lundgren).

During the battle, they find li’l Gwildor (li’l Billy Barty) and his fantastical tool to travel though strange dimensions and the like. With Skeletor on their brawny tails, they go through the machine and accidently find themselves in … a fried-chicken restaurant in Anytown, U.S.A.

Here is where most people have a problem with the movie: He-Man is given a backseat to his own movie to Courteney Cox and her boring boyfriend and their relationship problems, most of which stem from her wanting to leave to the big city after the death of her parents.

During a tearful moment at their grave, Courteney and said boyfriend find the dimension-hopping instrument and naturally decide it’s a new Japanese synthesizer to fiddle with. This sends out a beacon to He-Man, but also to Skeletor, sadly. Monitored chaos ensues, with Skeletor marching down city streets as he gives He-Man laser-lashes on his bare bottom. Or something like that.

The movie doesn’t really break new cinematic ground, but the characterizations of both He-Man and Skeletor are virtually spot-on. I like these characters and even though the costumes aren’t exactly right, they work. Even Teela, Man-at-Arms, Evil Lyn and the barrage of low-rent, bargain-basement, completely original villains (like Lizard Man, Eyepatch Man and Guy with Old Lady Hair) are fine for the material. Even li’l Gwildor.

No, the movie’s real problem is this: It’s soooooooo boring.

The characters — especially the humans — have no depth or meaning. Truthfully, I would have been good with the earthbound story if they had given us more than two dead parents, a depressive complex and a bucket of chicken to go.

I assume the new Masters of the Universe movie helps alleviate that, but surprisingly, it’s not doing well with movie critics or movie fans, with most saying it’s too faithful to the toys and cartoons.

By the power of Grayskull, what more do you want from me, Hollywood? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

The Manhandlers (1974)

Leave a comment

When her uncle is gunned down by the mob, Katie (the utterly ravishing Cara Burgess) inherits his business, the Loving Touch “massage parlor” offering “special handling,” if you get the drift. (And if you don’t, maybe the photo of W.C. Fields on the wall helps? No?)

Kicking the working girls and their johns to the curb, Katie vows to turn the fleapit brothel into a legit rubdown provider. For help, she recruits two gal pals: a sexually harassed secretary (Judith Brown, Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off) and a failed vaginal-spray commercial actress (Rosalind Miles, Shaft’s Big Score!). They reopen the place as Soft Touch — a terrible name, if you ask me, but their matching caveman-cheerleader outfits accentuate enough cleavage that I’m willing to let it be.

At any rate, the syndicate tries to muscle its grubby paws back into Katie’s honey pot of a biz, even enlisting the kingpin’s nephew (Vince Cannon, 1967’s Trackdown) to seduce her into submission. Each woman gets a romantic subplot, none more entertaining than Miles’ cherry-popping a virgin customer (Peter Fitzsimmons, 1987’s The Principal) so inexperienced, his response to her kiss is, “Sure was slippery, wasn’t it?” (Moments later, as she doffs her top, his agog line is, “Breasts!” And it’s stated not with joy, but with the shock one might reserve for stumbling across a corpse.)

Lee Madden, whose career would crater two films later with Ghost Fever, directs The Manhandlers with little to no verve, opting for about two angles unless it’s time for a sex scene, which suddenly sees him get all dark and arty. At least he knows the ol’ exploitation-pic axiom of when in need of production value, shoot the climax at an amusement park. Or perhaps he’d just already had his fill of paisley and wicker, and needed to get outside.

Cribbing elements from soaps and sitcoms to pad the running time, the movie rides the Ms. magazine wave of feminism by presenting its leads as take-no-guff ladies with sharp minds … except when they fail to comprehend the true intentions of the gregarious and gargantuan Texan bursting through their door as their inaugural patron, with all the hypothetical bluster of Joe Don Baker invading a Hometown Buffet on Fried Shrimp Fridays. Oh, well, girlbosses gotta start somewhere, as Burgess does here in her first film. Unfortunately for us, it’s also her last. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Queen Kong (1976) 

Leave a comment

Portions of Queen Kong are so cringeworthy, they should be illegal. And they were, with King Kong remake ringleader Dino De Laurentiis successfully prohibiting this UK comedy from a homeland theatrical run. Considering a theme song with “She’s my queenie-queenie for my weenie” among the lyrics, I believe the British populace dodged a bullet.

Written and directed by Frank Agrama (Dawn of the Mummy), the movie is an outright spoof of the 1933 classic King Kong, but gender-flipped, sanity-questioning and littered with musical numbers. Seeking a leading man for her jungle picture, liberated lady filmmaker Luce Habit (Rula Lenska, Alfie Darling) finds him in Ray Faye (Robin Askwith, Cool It Carol!), a mop-topped thief of toffee apples. With an all-female crew in tow, Luce takes Ray by boat to shoot at the all-female island of “Lazanga, where they do the conga” and where rose bushes pinch the asses of passing lasses.

The island’s luscious leader (Never Say Never Again’s Valerie Leon, speaking in ooga-booga) kidnaps Ray to offer him as a birthday sacrifice to Queen Kong, a 64-foot gorilla played by someone in a tatty suit presumably labeled “giant Monchhichi.” Rather than eat Ray, Queen Kong immediately falls in love with him, then defeats a dinosaur with a swift kick to its prehistoric penis.

Luce takes Queen Kong to Great Britain for exhibition, where prim-and-proper authorities force the animal to wear a bra. Naturally the big ape goes bananas to demolish (a Matchbox set of) London before climbing Big Ben. Look, the longer it goes, the more you wish to die.

Queen Kong quickly establishes its low-hanging kind of comedy. If you don’t grasp that from the screeching-breaks sound effect as the boat anchors, perhaps a Lazanga secretary’s bellow of “Tarzan, your wife, Jane, is on the other vine!” will.

With no offense meant toward Mad, that magazine’s marginalia approach fuels Agrama’s many sight gags, as well as (blessedly) brief parodies of The Exorcist and Jaws. I will admit the scene ribbing Airport 1975 made me laugh, all thanks to Blood on Satan’s Claw star Linda Haynes as a singing nun: “I like flying big planes / Little planes, medium-size planes / All kinds of planes …“

Somehow, I doubt the Golda Mier and Sacheen Littlefeather jokes were funny even in the spirit of ’76. Quips a crocodile in a quick cutaway, “Rubbish!” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Random Genre & Cult Movie Reviews