Not that you needed it, but for further proof Italy never saw a movie trend it couldn’t rip off, I give you Karzan, Maitre de la Jungle, aka the Tarzan wannabe Karzan, Master of the Jungle, starring “Johnny Kissmuller Jr.” (actually Loaded Guns’ Armando Bottin) as the illiterate lord of the loincloth.

The setup Xeroxes the premise of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ legendary literary hero to a T (or should that be “to a K”?), as the male child of a well-to-do family is orphaned by tragedy and subsequently raised by apes in the African wild, acquiring formidable vine-swinging prowess as the years progress. In Karzan, the pith-helmeted, J&B-fueled members of an expedition go looking for this “fabulous creature.” Among them are the beautiful Jane Monica (Melù Valente, Blindman) and, serving as guide, a towering mute named Crazy (Attilio Severini, Viva! Django).

Much of the film by Coffin Full of Dollars’ Demofilo Fidani is taken up by the expedition traversing the harsh mistress known as nature. With every step, they teeter on the precipice of doom, with expository dialogue constantly reminding the viewer: “We haven’t got a chance,” “One bite means instant death,” et al. Most memorable among the close calls are Crazy’s use of a blow dart to kill the (obvious toy tarantula they call a) black widow atop Monica’s chest, followed by Crazy making good on his nickname by wrestling — and then biting — a poisonous snake. Of presumably less threat is the native tribe whose leader’s foreign-tongued babbling is dubbed to sound like Looney Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil.

When they finally meet Karzan (who looks not unlike the Samurai Cop himself, Mathew Karedas), they find him shacking up with the subservient Sheena-esque Shiran (Simone Blondell, Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks), who’s literally so stupid she can’t even drink from a coconut without its milk judiciously spilling down her bare midriff.

Now is a good time to open the floor so I can answer your burning questions:
• “Does Karzan do the Tarzan yell?” If you consider every third note changed to avoid intellectual-property litigation and delivered with less confidence than Carol Burnett, then yes, you may.
• “What about the animals? I like the animals. Mommy takes me to the zoo for going potty. Can I see lots and lots and lots of animals?” Oh, heavens, yes! Prepare to see such exotic stock-footage sights as the giraffe, zebra, water buffalo, elephant, lion, rhinoceros and crocodile. Or is that an alligator? I get those two confused. You also will meet a chimp named Cika, credited as playing itself.
• “Pray tell, does the climax involve Karzan wrestling a man in a shoddy ape suit?” As a matter of f– wait, how did you know? —Rod Lott

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Say the words “flamethrower” and “Robert Ginty,” and I’m excited to watch The Exterminator and/or Exterminator 2. But those words also apply to White Fire, a European action film that ultimately will extinguish your desire. For starters, Ginty isn’t the one who throws those flames, but he does get to rip into the flesh of his attackers with a Stihl chainsaw — a great element that, unfortunately, comes front-loaded with all the good stuff.

Ginty’s Bo is in the diamond-smuggling business, thanks to his loving sister, Ingrid (Belinda Mayne, Alien 2: On Earth), being employed by a mining company and using her assets to manipulate the CEO (Gordon Mitchell, Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks). The siblings’ scheme is discovered by sleazy people who want in on it, just as a random miner lucks upon the fabled million-year-old White Fire diamond, a 2,000-carat rock so named because it’s radioactive, burning the hands of all who touch it.

What will burn your eyes, however, are the incestuous overtones between Bo and Ingrid, such as him freeing her towel from her nude body after she emerges from a swim, and voicing what a shame it is he’s her bro when she has a rockin’ bod like that. If you think that’s icky, just wait until he starts living with the prostitute Olga, who’s Ingrid’s spitting image — so much so that she’s also played by Mayne. Then again, White Fire comes written and directed by skin-flick filmmaker Jean-Marie Pallardy (Erotic Diary of a Lumberjack), for whom this kind of thing is NBD.

Shot in Istanbul (not Constantinople), White Fire introduces Fred Williamson (The New Gladiators) in the second half as a foil for Bo — a case to file under “Too Little, Too Late.” Ginty’s mealy-mouthed appeal is a peculiar one, with him forever in motion like a coke fiend. That he’s sold as some kind of sex symbol is hard to swallow; that’s he also sold as a guy who can karate-kick his way through a circle of heavily armed men is even harder. Nearly every backup goon looks like a Turkish Tom Savini, but only one gets bisected by a table jigsaw, testes first. —Rod Lott

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We all owe Timothy Dalton an apology. Turns out he’s quite good in the role of James Bond, even if his first of two shots at bat, The Living Daylights, is not an all-star entry in the 007 franchise.

Befitting of its time — near the end of the Cold War — Daylights pits Bond against the ever-fearsome KGB, but also the ever-formidable Joe Don Baker (Walking Tall) as a gluttonous arms dealer. Honestly, the plot is overwritten with the usual geopolitical brouhaha that could drive you crazy on first viewing, so just worry about following the fun as 007 traipses ’round the world with Kara (Maryam d’Abo, Xtro), a Russian cellist he meets cute when she tries to assassinate the KGB agent Bond helps to defect (Jeroen Krabbé, The Fugitive).

If you’ve ever wanted to see Bond on a roller coaster as part of a carnival date, you’re in luck! This is the one for you. However, coming in at the back end of the ’80s, Daylights feels curiously past its sell-by date, starting with one of the series’ worst theme songs, by a-ha, the Norwegian pop act that already had peaked. Meanwhile, Desmond Llewelyn’s Q demos a literal ghetto blaster in a missile-launching boombox, and a bad guy infiltrates supposedly secure grounds by tossing milk-bottle bombs.

Still, with old pro John Glen (Octopussy) directing the penultimate in his record-setting run of five 007 films, count on action sequences executed with clockwork precision. As good as the scenes are that kick off the plot and then bring it to closure — the latter while hanging out the open cargo bay of an airborne plane — two others are more deserving of mention. The first is the prologue, in which a military paintball exercise suddenly gains life-or-death consequences; the second finds Bond and the bland Kara fleeing pursuers by riding an open cello case down a ski slope. Snow has been exceedingly kind to this franchise, no matter who dons the tux. —Rod Lott

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Confession time: All my life, I never quite understood the appeal of baseball, “America’s pastime.” Then I saw Blood Games. Batter up!

The one and only film from one Tanya Rosenberg, Blood Games begins as Babe and the Batgirls, a traveling all-ladies team, are beating the pants off an unofficial assemblage of backwoods hicks and rednecks. Led by Babe (Laura Albert, The Jigsaw Murders), the Batgirls have been hired to play nine innings against birthday boy Roy (Gregory Scott Cummins, Action U.S.A.) and his greasy, uneducated buds. The girls win, which the guys do not cotton to, so they respond with grab-ass and other on-the-field antics of sexual harassment.

That night, after Roy’s wealthy dad (Ken Carpenter, Tammy and the T-Rex) shortchanges the Batgirls the $1,000 they’re owed, Babe’s father (Ross Hagen, Wonder Women) goes to collect … and a couple of people get killed in the process. Roy’s father places a $1,000 bounty on each Batgirl the boys bring back dead, not alive, so the Batgirls’ bus outta town is thwarted in the middle of the nowhere, leaving every woman for herself. Let the Blood Games begin!

Like Deliverance in hot pants, Blood Games more than satisfies the bloodlust of viewers in the mood for a back-to-basics revenge thriller. Being directed by a woman gives it a more progressive viewpoint while still wallowing in exploitation elements; the movie is a case of having its cheesecake and eating it, too. Beyond Babe and Donna (Lee Benton, Beverly Hills Brats), the Batgirls don’t get much in the way of individual personalities, but the fact that we get any is more or less a plus. With Rosenberg often playing violence in slow motion, her flick rouses as a gem of cathartic VHS trash. As George “Buck” Flower’s character says without an ounce of eloquence, “It was them baseball bitches did it.” Boy, did they ever! —Rod Lott

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The cop killers of Cop Killers number exactly two: Ray and Alex, respectively played by Flesh Gordon himself, Jason Williams, reunited with his producer, Bill Osco. With this pair, coke is it! In fact, the film opens with them closing a $100,000 drug deal when the po-po show up to preempt their celebration. Four dead cops later (hence the title), Ray (the one with the ’stache) and Alex (the one with sideburns the shape of lamb chops) decide to Thelma & Louise their way toward the border of Mexico.

From there, Walter Cichy’s lone directorial effort plays episodic in execution, with the on-the-lam men driving from one situation to another, leaving multiple felonies and misdemeanors in their path. That includes tormenting an effeminate ice cream truck driver (James Nite, in a jaw-dropping performance of ineptitude), forcing a kidnapped blonde (Diane Keller) to read aloud from a trashy paperback novel and making a bloody mess of a convenience store, before finally reaching a hippie den to make a couple of transactions — only one in the financial sense.

Befitting of grindhouse fare, every frame of the independently produced Cop Killers is coated in grit and grime, in part due to its unwashed, grease-caked stars. If it feels like a Bonnie and Clyde riff made by porn producers, that’s because it is. Williams’ inexperience may have worked for the spoofery of Flesh Gordon, but he’s in over his head here; that said, he acts Osco off the screen. The performance most likely to leave your mouth agape can be witnessed — and oh, how it must be — at the hippie den, when a gourd-stoned plaything named Becky (Judy Ross) gives Pespi what would go unchallenged as the company’s most awkward pop-culture moment until 1983, when Michael Jackson’s non-flame-retardant hair knocked it off its perch.

For all of Cop Killers’ rough edges, I found the first half quite enjoyable because the damn thing kept moving forward — not propulsively so, but enough to keep boredom at bay. Then the action pauses for Alex to give their comely captive a step-by-step tutorial on snorting cocaine, and it never recovers, progressively becoming more downbeat. The ending is a foregone conclusion, but gives future multiple Oscar winner Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London) an early chance to develop his makeup-effects muscles. —Rod Lott

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