All posts by Louis Fowler

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie (1997)

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The intergalactic pirate Divatox — whose name kinda sounds like a feminine hygiene product of some sort — is chasing a little person dressed in an ill-fitting troll costume through the woods on a swirling green planet; back here on Earth, however, a young kid named Justin is feeling a little blue because his mom is dead. It doesn’t help when a random Power Ranger, right in the middle of a training sesh, spin-kicks himself right out of the ring and into a broken back. Ouch!

Meanwhile, the typical mutants-on-ice monsters are cutting off their hands and such as the caustically attractive Divatox explains the film’s main plot points for those who walked in too late to catch the opening Star Wars-esque crawl as Lerigot, the mini-wizard who reminds me of Gwildor from Masters of the Universe, sadly, shoots himself to Earth and lands in a wildlife preserve in, presumably, Africa; he immediately meets a lion and shoots pleasant-enough fireballs from his hand. Also, monkeys throw feces at him, which I can fully understand.

As area losers Skull and Bulk are kidnapped by Divatox’s fish-shaped pirate ship, Power Rangers leader Tommy wrestles somewhat convincingly with a rubber anaconda in the jungle. Once they find Lerigot and take him back to PR HQ, that spazzy robot Alpha gives the Rangers new powers which, if you can believe it, turns out to be some new cars … turbo cars, but still.

Now, it’s up to the Power Rangers to not only stop Divatox before she marries an incarnation of Satan, but also rescue retired Rangers Kimberly and Jason before they are sacrificed to said demonic being. Mind you, this is just the first 30 minutes of the movie; sure, it sounds like a lot going on, but keep in mind that the next hour is just wholly repetitive fight scenes, with the mostly basic cars offering very little turbo-charged power for these anonymous Rangers.

While the budget has definitely been given quite a bit of high-octane Nos, this new cadre of superheroes is, sorry to say, an unlikable crew that might have worked well on the small screen, but in a movie theater, lacked the personality that made the original team so much fun. But, then again, I am a 40-year-old man that just watched Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie, so what the hell do I know? —Louis Fowler

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Action

Intrepidos Punks (1980)

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With a title that translates to Fearless Punks, the Mex Pistols of Intrepidos Punks are a down and dirty wrecking crew that roams the near future — possibly a day or two from now — of a small, south-of-the-border town, dedicated to causing mass anarquía wherever they go. ¡Ay, dios mío!

After the oft-repeated three-chord tune plays over the vandalized credits, led by the chain mail-masked monster Tarzan (El Fantasma), these satanic punks rob and rape any and everyone they come in the slightest contact with, to the point where a pair of powerfully mustached plainclothes cops decide suficiente es suficiente, especially when it disrupts their undercover mota operation, I think; to be fair, there were no subtitles to this Mexican flick and my Spanish is intermedio at best.

But, you know, the language barrier shouldn’t really make a difference because these choque rockeros de la ciudad speak that one language that truly matters in the future: pura violencia. With very little plot, the movie relies heavily on the punks cruising around on their impressively innovative motorcycles, killing men, women and possibly children wherever they go, always in new and inventive ways, no stuntmen required.

With a forward-thinking flamboyant costume design that probably scared the mierda out of many a punk-fearing abuela, Tarzan and his high-haired old lady, Fiera (La Princesa Lea), mercilessly fling throwing stars, chuck battle axes and wield other decidedly non-punk paraphernalia with appropriate ferocity; it all leads, of course, to their own deathly downfalls, along with most of their gang, by the two undercover cops who afterward have an on-screen steak dinner to celebrate their win.

Sadly, their job isn’t done yet: The punks somehow returned seven years later in the follow-up, La Venganza de los Punks. It’s a flick I own, purchasing it in an area flea market’s parking lot. When I went to play it, however, in a final middle finger to society, my machine wouldn’t read the disc. ¡Malditos gamberros! —Louis Fowler

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Sex

Private Lessons (1981)

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You never realize just how sleazy most Rod Stewart tunes are until they’re used as the backdrop for the seduction of a teenage boy; I know this not from personal experience, mind you, but from the fact that the filmic wet dream Private Lessons uses at least three different Rod songs for this erotic purpose.

The summer’s here and all Albuquerque rich-kid Philly (Eric Brown) and his requisite chubby bud want is to see a girl naked. That perverted wish comes true — and a whole lot more than that — when sexy maid Ms. Mallow (Sylvia Kristel) moves into his mansion, sexually teasing and sensually taunting him until, in the middle of surprisingly graphic intercourse, she dies of apparent heart failure.

By the way: In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Philly is only about 15 years old when all this is going on.

Panicked, he enlists his chauffeur, Dr. Johnny Fever Lester (Howard Hesseman), to help him get rid of that fine body; little does Philly know, however, that it is all part of an extortion plan that, sadly, takes the movie’s view off of the adolescent sexual experimentation and, instead, on a lame crime subplot that wraps up neatly with a minorly madcap chase scene.

Private Lessons has, embarrassingly, been a longtime favorite film of mine since secretly viewing cable airings of it, repeatedly, as a kid in the early ’80s. Star Eric Brown was pretty much the luckiest kid on TV at the time — besides this film, he also got it on with statuesque Sybil Danning in They’re Playing with Fire, as well as being cast as Buzz on the first season of Mama’s Family. What a resume!

Not to be outdone, French delight Kristel — high on both her marriage to Ian McShane and mounds of cocaine, possibly at the same time — is a tempestuous delight, even if for half the nude scenes she’s using a body double, for reasons I don’t understand and, honestly, don’t care to explore unless “Tonight’s the Night” is blaring in the background. —Louis Fowler

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Kitchen Sink

Charlie Says (2018)

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WTFI think that, if I was born a couple of decades earlier, I would have been a pretty good hippie cult leader, you know, minus all the murder; just me and a bunch of groovy runaways, kicking back on a deserted movie set and eating out of dumpsters while trying to reach universal oneness … sounds like far-out time to me.

That’s probably why I never fully understood Charles Manson or the notorious 1969 murders he was behind; sure, you can go with the de facto notion that he’s a fucking lunatic, but he probably would have had it so much better, possibly for the rest of his life, if he hadn’t ordered his followers to go out and kill due to a record producer not wanting to record his mostly lousy tunes.

It’s a line of thought that the mediocre flick Charlie Says could get behind, I’m sure. Starring Merritt Wever as Karlene Faith, a fully invested prison teacher who comes to know Manson’s so-called girls — Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins — and their undying devotion to Charlie, who took the classic pimp-game strategy and added a skewed version of Christianity to it to give his lost followers something to believe in.

Director Mary Harron (American Psycho) does a good job of keeping the usual histrionics of the girls to a bare minimum — something many other Manson filmmakers seem to go absolutely crazy themselves with. The real sore spot of the movie is with ol’ Charlie himself, played by the flaccid Matt Smith, complete with a laughable beard and wig, but maybe that was the point.

Sadly, while the ’60s are long over and so is my chance to be a cult leader, Charlie Says is thankfully the wishful-thinking flick that tells me I would probably screw it all up just as bad — if not worse, yikes — as Manson did. Believe me: Even the most minor of power corrupts, especially in me, absolutely. —Louis Fowler

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Western

Django the Bastard (1969)

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In all the dusty annals of the mythical Western genre, if there was ever a true bastard to tame the Wild West, it was apparently Django or, even better, Django the Bastard, this illicit Italian rip-off of his blood-spattering name.

People are strange when you’re the Stranger, a gunslinger dressed in black (the decided un-Franco Nero Anthony Steffen) who walks into town one day carrying a convenient wooden cross; he plants it dead in the middle of the town square and quickly doles out his six-shooter justice, the only way a black-hearted demon from hell — as we’re told he might be — can.

Meanwhile, the just-as-terrible townsfolk are placing wagers on a game where two poor boys toss a stick of dynamite back and forth, betting dollars on who is going to get a hand blown off first. Welcome to Desert City, population … well, I guess it doesn’t matter, because Django’s got a handmade wooden cross for all of them, which he hands out one by one.

Turns out that this low-rent incarnation of Django isn’t an avenging angel, but rather a former soldier who is seeking revenge on the perpetrators of a brutal Confederate massacre, one that apparently he can’t seem to get over; he crafted this death-bringer persona as way to not only strike fear in the hearts of fellow evildoers, but also to help him through the apparent post-traumatic stress that he is surely going through.

Whatever works, I suppose.

Filmed at a tumultuous time in spaghetti cinema when the men looked like glam-rock refugees and the women like young Melania Trumps, Django the Bastard was originally released under the more family-friendly title of The Strangers Gundown — and it’s gundowns a-plenty that Django delivers in this mostly watchable tale of brutal revenge and copyright infringement. —Louis Fowler

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