All posts by Louis Fowler

Martial Arts

The Sword and the Claw (1975)

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Cüneyt Arkın, one of the proud futuristic freedom fighters from Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam — also known in the States, rather dumbed-down if you ask me, as Turkish Star Wars — is back on the small screen in a rather good-looking print of 1975’s Kiliç Aslan or, for the sake of argument here, The Sword and the Claw.

In this bargain-basement flick, a king with a birthmark of a lion on his back is killed by his sleazy mustachioed rival. When his concubine, pregnant and on the run, has his baby in the woods, said child is kidnapped and raised by lions, mostly done through a quick vignette of a small child feeding an equally immature lion some raw meat, which couldn’t have been safe, but the kid and the lion look like they’re having fun.

As the child grows up into strapping vine-swinging man Arkin, he immediately runs afoul of the same corrupt leader and, for his troubles, has his hands burnt black, Cajun-style. Thankfully, an old man forges a pair of new unwieldy metal hands — lion’s claws, if you will — and, in the last 10 minutes of film, rips out the throats of the supreme leader’s army and, of course, the big boss. Roll credits.

That seems simple enough, right?

A prime example of the popular Turkish costume dramas of the time, The Sword and the Claw has choppy editing, uneven music and the worst dubbing in history, but damned if it isn’t an entertaining flick, with Arkin jumping off the screen, somersaulting into every fight scene, with particular abandon being given to the bloody finale and his angry lion-face.

If memory serves me, I vaguely remember the VHS box for this movie when it was called Lionman, always overlooked and gathering dust. Still, the American Genre Film Archive’s Blu-ray — from the only 35mm print in existence, natch — is the nicest I’ve even seen of a Turkish film of this ilk, a genre usually reserved for 10th-generation burns.

As a bonus feature, the AGFA disc includes the kung-fu foible Brawl Busters starring Black Jack Chan, produced by the “Official Chinese Black Belt Society.” Yep, that sounds totally legit. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Split (1989)

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Not to be confused with the recent M. Night Shyamalan film — but how I hope it is — the Split from 1989 is very much a prototypically bizarre YouTube clip stretched out into interminable movie length, so I guess that’s something to be technologically proud of.

Within minutes of pressing play, the screen is soon filled with bad teeth, bad accents and bad dialogue — including the classic line “We came for breakfast, not for AIDS!” — with the immediate start-stop bent going between this homeless man’s world and some sort of technologically unsound underworld, giving the movie an infinitely more intriguing first half-hour than many other futuristic-repressed films of the time.

The homeless man, actually, is a sort of quick-change artist, slipping in and out of one bad comedic persona after another; he’s also on the run from this nameless group of American computer-hacker types who are desperately trying to track down the man, whose real name we learn is the unlikely Starker (Timothy Dwight).

Apparently living off the grid, especially in a time when it was easier to, strange computer graphics come to life, pixelating and swirling, proving somehow that Big Brother really is watching Starker and, of course, brainwashing all of us. By the way: Everyone is living in some form of a dystopian future, but I only learned that from reading the back of the Blu-ray case — it still looks and feels like generic 1989 Los Angeles to me.

While writer/director Chris Shaw’s film drags as we follow Starker around from one supposed comedy bit after another, where he goes to art shows as an Austrian psychoanalyst and hangs out at a Terry Gilliam-esque woman’s house, for example, keep with it; if you persevere and give it a few minutes, Split eventually becomes an absolute cheesy mind-melt as it barrels down toward a typically dark and depressing ending that I’m not sure I really get yet, but I appreciated nonetheless.

Apparently one of the first films to use CGI — and it shows — Split was a very low-budget outing with a message bigger than it could possibly contain: Conformity is a soul-destroying beast and the only thing that can save us all is a fat urinal cake to be dropped in the water supply cleaning our clouded visions — something I’ve written about in clandestine pamphlets for years. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Reading Material

Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares from the 1980s

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Here I was, for all these years, thinking I was the only dumb kid who clipped movie ads out of the newspaper.

Whenever my dad was through with The Dallas Morning News or The Dallas Times Herald, whichever he picked up that day, I scoured through their massive entertainment sections, cutting out the advertisements for movies that I knew would never come to my small town of Blooming Grove, Texas, but maybe someday I’d catch them on TV or, even better, VHS.

I think my mother threw that collection of yellowing pulp out sometime ago, sadly, but here’s Ad Nauseam, which is definitely the next best thing. A collection of 10 years’ worth of newspaper advertisements — apparently printed straight from the dailies themselves — by former Fangoria honcho Michael Gingold, the memories this book will resurrect from the dead is a beautifully scary thing.

From the classics like first runs of Poltergeist and reissues of Halloween to — and the most interesting, in my opinion — trashy works like Death Valley and Madman, as well as the horror comedies of Once Bitten and Transylvania 6-5000 and, let’s not forget, the Italian imports such as The Gates of Hell and Demons, everything your adolescent mind could have dreamed up from such imaginative slicks — and, let’s be honest, were often better than the actual film — is right there, all in screaming black and white ink.

For the actual readers, however, there are even a few quotes from Oklahoma City film critics along the pages, most notably The Daily Oklahoman’s burly Gene Triplett, who calls Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D a “snuff movie” — which goes to show that there’s a reason people have called his paper “the Daily Disappointment” for 50 or so years.

But Ad Nauseam is far from any kind of disappointment. While yes, many people won’t get it — especially fathers who ask “Why do you waste your time with these stupid horror movies?” — for those of us who remember the grotesque excitement of the movies, the ads — hell, even the newspaper in general — this is a grue-soaked return to the glory days of gory cinema.

Or, as they’re known in Oklahoma, “snuff movies.” —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)

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Upon its dismal original release, Starchaser: The Legend of Orin was positioned to be a Star Wars for the next generation, which, of course, it wasn’t. But, for cartoon nerds whose first love was weirdly cheap French animation — think Fantastic Planet — but needed a wholly North American story they could glom on to, I guess this flick will do just fine.

Orin is a slave working in the coal crystal mines and before he can say “Lord, I am so tired … how long can this go on?” he finds a glowing laser-sword — a light-saber, if you will — in the dirt. Before he can toss it out, a little wizard pops out of the handle and tells him he’s his people’s only hope. This all sound somewhat familiar yet?

Filled with plenty of misplaced promise, he takes on a couple of robots and their laser-whips, escaping his nightmarish hellhole to the mildly bad-dreamish surface world filled with swamp-monsters, man-droids and a supposedly cool Han Solo-type that suggestively calls Orin “my little water-snake” in between making out with a sex robot that I’m pretty sure was on the cover of Aerosmith’s Just Push Play.

They go on various adventures, visiting dumb planets and fighting stupid aliens, all in an effort to take down the dastardly overlord Zygon. I’m not giving anything away to say that they do, but it’s all still nowhere near as pseudo-exciting at George Lucas’ sci-fi spree; with the further adventures of Anakin Skywalker — whizzer! — and gang still a good 15 or so years away, I guess Starchaser was the best you could do for swashbuckling adventure in 1985.

Directed by Steven Hahn, this film is probably more famous for spending about 17 days in the theaters, when it was quickly pulled by distributor Atlantic Releasing after making only $3.3 million. But, somewhere out there, the dream for a live-action Starchaser is alive, when Rilean Picture announced one is coming in March.

Of 2012, that is. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Blame It on Rio (1984)

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Blame It on Rio is the Celebrity Skin-ready tale of the woefully middle-aged Matthew (Michael Caine, The Island) and his painfully farce-ready love affair with his best friend’s teenage daughter, Jennifer (Michelle Johnson, Beaks: The Movie). His excuse? Blame it on Rio!

Rio is one of the lustiest cities on this side of the planet, a brown-skinned Bacchanalia filled with an infinite amount of bare breasts bringing to life all your damnable desires, flaunted about in the streets 365 days a year. It’s seemingly the perfect setting for Stanley Donen’s directorial swan song, if it wasn’t such a bleak, horrific view into the mindset of a dying man wishing for one last view of pert teen bosoms. The easiest way to get them? Blame it on Rio!

Matthew and his wife (Valerie Harper, TV’s Rhoda) are seemingly in a loving relationship, but, in this film, love is a selfish emotion that gets more grotesque as the movie goes on. When the spirit of a crazy night in Rio gets into him, he gets even deeper into Jennifer, giving fully into the sudden sexual aplomb of the city. He expects to have one torrid night to forget with her, as most middle-aged men would, but, of course, she obsessively falls in love with him. He totally blames it on Rio.

After their initial sexual encounter, Matthew gets tries admirably to cut things off with Jennifer, not out of the dark shame of bedding a willing teenage girl, but completely out of fear of getting caught by her equally sleazy dad (Joseph Bologna, Transylvania 6-5000). When he tries to gently let her down, she goes a tad overboard and tries to off herself. We’ve all been there, but we probably weren’t able to blame it on Rio.

Donen, who directed films such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Singin’ in the Rain, sadly, seems to forgotten all he knew about being a filmmaker, his master’s touch now a pervert’s sticky glove, with his leering view coating the film in a gooey veneer of manmade despicableness. He made an ugly film of people doing rather ugly things, but it was the ’80s, and anything went, usually with the help of cocaine and an Animotion album. Especially if you going to blame it on Rio.

But no one really comes off worse than Caine; now considered a great actor because, well, he’s old and British, here he’s a combination of visibly embarrassed and audibly horny as Jennifer writhes and grinds on him every chance she gets. But, if the authorities asked him what he was doing with a 17-year-old-girl in his bed, he could always wink at the camera and blame it on Rio. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.