Martial Arts

Dynamo (1978)

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With Bruce Lee dead and buried, the world needs a new action star and they find one in Lee-alike Bruce Li! He’s just an everyday dude who becomes just as good as Lee — possibly better — with just a few days of training. And he’s going to need it to, because an area advertising agency has put a hit out on him, which seems a bit drastic.

Once a horny cab driver with a passing resemblance to Lee, Li is hired by an unscrupulous producer to become the new face of international kung fu; clad in a Game of Death workout suit, he uses his Yuen Woo Ping-choreographed martial arts to lay waste to a team of sparring partners, including one sent to kill him. He also uses it to make love to a French actress. Ooh-la-la!

The Cosmo Company, by the way, wants to assassinate Li because he won’t fall in line with their advertising wants and needs, forcing them to send world-class skiers, room-service attendants and a guy who resembles a fit Rudy Ray Moore to crack his dragon-looking ass in half, often spectacularly failing.

Li is pitted in one fight after another in the 96-minute runtime, often soundtracked by songs such as “Nobody Does It Better” from The Spy Who Loved Me. With a Rocky-lite finale and a quickie ending, Dynamo might as well have been the Bruceploitation masterpiece of the era, showcasing the nimble Li as a worthy successor with an actual personality to match. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Mystery

Ellery Queen’s Operation: Murder (1986)

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When VHS was all the rage, the VCR game was, alas, not. But dammit, they tried — some more than others. Spinnaker Video appears to have put all its chips of effort toward the kick-ass cover of Ellery Queen’s Operation: Murder, because the tape’s half-hour whodunit is half-assed at best.

Highly intelligent in the novels and also highly likable in the Jim Hutton-starring TV series of the 1970s, the Ellery Queen of this “You-Solve-It VCR Mystery Game” is just a smug jerk. Played by Michael Solomita, the unofficial detective enters the Doorn Memorial Hospital office of Dr. Minchen (Don Dill), who sparks immediate regret in viewers with this greeting: “Ellery Queen, by thunder! What on earth brings you down here? Uh, still snooping around?”

Indeed, Queen is, asking questions about rigor mortis in diabetics, to which the doc replies in a near-singsong, “Just a fortunate coincidence, I happen to have diabetes on my mind this morning.” Totally normal response.

It’s all related to Queen’s latest case, concerning the hospital’s comatose benefactor (Helen Cuftafson) being strangled to death before surgery, but after she changed her will. From a playboy little brother to a mad-scientist researcher, likely suspects abound, each thrown at you in time-heavy exposition too quick and too dull to properly absorb. At eight points in the story, a clip-art screen informs you to “PICK a RED or BLUE CARD MARKED EVIDENCE.” I can’t imagine anyone having the patience to play this game more than once.

Although based on a real Queen novel, The Dutch Shoe Mystery, the catchpenny Operation: Murder is amateurishly acted and staged. At the beginning of my professional journalism career in the early 1990s, I was assigned to observe a murder-mystery party at a local bed-and-breakfast. Quasi-cosplaying, the attendees all looked the part, but had little to no idea of what they were supposed to do. Across the parlor, I spotted an elderly woman with a stooped back shuffling my way. Clutching a tiny notebook and pencil, she looked me in the eye and said only three words: “Got any clues?” I replied I did not, and she wandered to the next person in vicinity and asked the same. That’s what Operation: Murder is like, except mercifully shorter. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Mag Wheels (1978)

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If Dazed and Confused had been made not by Richard Linklater, but by its most burned-out characters, the result would have to be Mag Wheels. It would just have to.

In reality, this scrubby, unfunny teen comedy was written and directed by softcore porn’s Bethel Buckalew (Below the Belt) in an attempt to go legit. Also released under the pre-Mark Harmon title of Summer School, it’s produced in part by Batmobile designer George Barris, who more or less cameos as himself, as he did the year before in Supervan, a more enjoyable vehicle of vansploitation.

Although the little-known Mag Wheels is largely meandering, its main concern after four-wheel fetishization is a love triangle so simple, its points are mapped on the movie’s poster. Expelled from school for truancy, pretty Anita (one-and-doner Shelly Horner) takes a waitress job at the local skate park’s concession stand. Through no fault of her own, she attracts the eye of cool dude Steve (John Laughlin, The Hills Have Eyes Part II), which irks his spoiled-brat girlfriend, Donna (Verkina Flower, The Capture of Bigfoot), who accuses, “You’re all horned up after that hoozit!” (Admit it: Horned-Up Hoozit is your favorite Dr. Seuss book, too.)

As Steve and Anita get cozy, Donna gets back at him in the most logical way: anonymously calling the police to bust him for dealing cocaine. He’s not. The resulting scene is played as hilarity. It’s not.

But the barely watchable Mag Wheels isn’t really about that. Other things it’s not really about, yet features in large measure: gang initiations, lesbian truckers, beach Frisbee, sexual assault, joint toking and cube gleaming. Eventually, the ladies square off against the men in a life-or-death game of tug o’ war using trucks against vans atop a cliff. It’s not really about that, either, given their cavalier attitude toward death. It’s about attracting young audiences with the promise of seeing flashed tits and sweet paneling; viewers get both and yet nothing at the same time. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Action

Cop Killers (1977)

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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

Get it at Amazon.

Action

3 Dev Adam (1973)

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Forty-three years before Captain America and Spider-Man stood on opposing sides in Captain America: Civil War, they did so in 3 Dev Adam (aka Three Giant Men). The former is a billion-dollar blockbuster with enough star power to fuel a thousand suns. The latter is from Turkey. Yet only one opens with Spidey motorboating a woman.

And I don’t mean in the sense of sexual slang, but pushing a motorboat’s whirring engine smack into the face of a distressed damsel buried neck-deep in sand. This Turkish Spider-Man (Tevfik Sen, Yor, the Hunter from the Future) is a real asshole. Captain America (Aytekin Akkaya, another Yor vet) is the good guy.

That’s not the only edge 3 Dev Adam has over the mighty Marvel movie. Far from it. Does Civil War — or any Avengers film — give you:
• Cap joining forces with masked Mexican wrestler Santo (Yavuz Selekman, Tarzan the Mighty Man)?
• Spidey involved in a counterfeit currency scheme?
• Spidey behind the theft of historical artifacts?
• a fashion-show fracas on a yacht?
• Santo pulling guard duty at a post office box?
• a newsboy crying out, “Latest news! Rich woman killed in her bathroom!”?
• Spidey letting hungry mice gnaw on a captive’s face?
• superhero costumes made by a third grader’s stay-at-home mom?
• a frickin’ strip show???

I think not! Keep your Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen. I’ll take Deniz Erkanat and Dogan Tamer. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

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