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

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Martial Arts

Mr. Vampire (1985)

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Kung fu and horror movies go together amazingly well. From the Shaw Brothers/Hammer Films coproduction The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires to 1980s classics like the Chinese Ghost Story series, nothing quite scratches the itch of ancient evil like a kick to the face. It’s even better when you mix in broad slapstick comedy, and 1985’s Mr. Vampire did everything so well that it created a whole genre of sequels and rip-offs featuring jiangshi, Chinese hopping vampires/zombies. It’s also a case study in how sometimes actors can make some serious coin if they lean into typecasting.

Set in a sleepy small town that looks nothing at all like the towns in all of Golden Harvest’s other ’80s movies, Mr. Vampire stars Ching-Ying Lam (Mr. Vampire II, Mr. Vampire III, Vampire vs. Vampire, Magic Cop, Encounters of the Spooky Kind 2) as our main hero, a Taoist priest named Master Gau who also knows a kung fu or two. And of course, he’s got some bumbling, but earnest assistants, played by Siu-Ho Chin (Vampire Cleanup Department) and Ricky Hui (The Haunted Cop Shop, the guy who goes “Whaaa?” for comic relief in, like, 50 other movies). Everything seems to be going pretty good for Gau: He’s rolling through life, hanging out with dead bodies waiting to be hopped back to their hometowns for burial — you know, normal shit. Yeah, maybe his assistants go a little too far messing around with the corpses, but who’s going to know?

Everything goes sideways when Gau is hired by Mr. Yam, a wealthy local merchant (those guys are the worst) played by Ha Huang (A Chinese Ghost Story). Richie Rich wants Master Gau to relocate his dad’s body to ensure good fortune for Yam’s business. Yam’s daughter, Ting-Ting (Moon Lee, Fighting Madam), also hangs out with her dad a lot, which is weird, but whatever. Oh, also there’s a funny bit where Master Gau’s assistants think Ting-Ting is a prostitute, which is an hilariously embarrassing situation!

Anyway, they dig up Yam’s dad, but here’s where things get bad. The corpse hasn’t decayed. At all. And everyone knows that’s a surefire sign of Impending Undead Evil High Jinks. If Gau doesn’t make with the rituals and quick, Yam’s dad is totally going to turn into a kung-fu vampire (Wah Yuen, Mr. Vampire Saga).

On top of the vampire threat, one of Gau’s assistants falls in love with a spectral bride played by Siu-Fung Wong (New Mr. Vampire), who hops on the back of his bicycle one night while a creepy song called “Ghost Bride” is sung by a children’s choir. And things really go downhill from there. But amid all the kung-fu slapstick horror laid down by this masterpiece (which is even better on the recently remastered limited-edition Korean Blu-ray that I have, but you know, not everyone appreciates Film like I do), Mr. Vampire serves up some important life lessons:
• Jiangshi have to hop everywhere, so take the stairs! It’s hilarious.
• These monsters are allergic to sticky rice. (As a side note, you should note that sticky rice costs more than regular rice, so beware unscrupulous merchants who might try to cut the sticky rice they sell you with regular rice. Again, merchants are the worst.)
• Like all of us, they’re repelled by mirrors. Are you not?
• They track humans by their breath, so keep a big bamboo tube by your bed as a vampire snorkel.

The first draft of this review had tons of explanation about the mythology behind jiangshi, but you’ll figure it out. I’m serious about the vampire snorkel, though. —Ryun Patterson

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Action

Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (2018)

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If the Fast and Furious movies are the cool jocks who get good grades and homecoming honors, then the Death Race films, Universal’s other gas-powered cash cow, are the near-invisible stoner kids who spend breaks between classes smoking outside. And this one, Death Race: Beyond Anarchy, tries so little, he flunks woodshop.

In this fourth and fetid entry, the titular competition now takes place within the walls of The Sprawl, an 88,000-acre home to 220,000 hardened criminals. You do the math (because the target audience sure can’t). Metal-masked Frankenstein (Velislav Pavlov, Lake Placid vs. Anaconda) may be the prison sport’s reigning hero, but he’s no longer our main character — hell, he’s no longer the good guy, which seems pretty counterproductive, but whatev. That task falls to a not-up-to-it Zach McGowan (Dracula Untold) as Connor Gibson, a black-ops specialist sent undercover to take down Frankenstein and the race. This requires Connor to earn a contestant’s slot via a preliminary game of Capture the Keys, whose officials do not want “to see some MMA-submission bullshit.”

Fans of the previous Death Race pictures are bound to express disappointment with where director Don Michael Paul (Half Past Dead) and co-writer Tony Giglio (S.W.A.T.: Under Siege) take their first turn at the direct-to-video franchise’s wheel: to something resembling fanfic, built upon the visual equivalent of STDs and self-pleasing dialogue like “Well, ain’t this a rainbow of fuckin’ ugly?” So skeevy and scuzzy is this “effort” that the returning character played by Danny Trejo (L.A. Slasher) appears to want little to do with it, spending most of his runtime literally watching the action from bed!

Early in, someone remarks that it doesn’t matter who’s behind Frankenstein’s mask, because duh, it’s a mask. However, Paul proves that theory untrue — Luke Goss, we hardly knew ye! — and not just because the mask looks positively Predatory this time around. The previous entries may be junk, but they are fun junk; this grimy, slimy one forgets and/or forgoes the fun. In its place? Decapitations, misogyny, face piercings, sub-Slipknot metal, Purge-level beatdowns, talk of taxes, more misogyny, dramatic rain fighting, Danny Glover, motocross, ziplining and some MMA-submission bullshit. —Rod Lott

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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

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Horror

Terror at Red Wolf Inn (1972)

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One of the more frequent robocalls I receive promises a “free” fabulous vacation as a thank-you for recently “staying at one of our resorts! Press ‘1’ to be connected to an operator …”

Even if I had stayed at any resorts of late, which I have not, I’m smart enough not to fall for this scam. My teenage daughter, on the other hand? She fell for it. She pressed “1.”

I tell you this because, God love her, my daughter is basically Regina, the main character of Terror at Red Wolf Inn. As played with total golly-gee-whiziness by Linda Gillen (Black Rain), Regina is a college student majoring in advanced gullibility. In her dormitory mail slot lands a letter informing her she’s won a trip to the site of this film’s title. Despite having entered no sweepstakes, she gleefully accepts the sketchy invitation — made even more suspect by its must-leave-today catch — and celebrates her good fortune by exclaiming to all fellow dorm residents within earshot, “I’m a winner, everybody! I won something!” (Alas, if only the prize were a brain-to-mouth filter.)

The Red Wolf Inn is a quaint bed-and-breakfast establishment run by the kind, doddering old couple Henry (Arthur Space, The Bat People) and Evelyn Smith (Mary Jacobson, Audrey Rose). Per the inn’s guests already there, Evelyn is “the world’s greatest cook,” to which Regina replies, absent of irony or sarcasm, “I’m the world’s greatest eater!” (Stupidity loves company, as a guest played by The Centerfold Girls’ Janet Wood introduces herself to Regina with a smile and these three words: “I’m a model!”)

Evelyn’s secret recipe? Well, it’s hardly a secret when the poster gives it away, not that a delicate touch ever was listed on the film’s call sheet. The surprise of Terror at Red Wolf Inn is not its cannibalistic theme, but how much of this B-grade obscurity will remind you of a certain drive-in classic that arrived two years later: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Like Tobe Hooper did on that terrifying touchstone, director Bud Townsend (Nightmare in Wax) milks his movie’s most unsettling moments out of its dinner scenes, with rib-chewing, soup-slurping, lip-licking, corn-on-the-cob-smacking mastication depicted in revolting close-ups.

Fish is also on the menu, albeit when the Smiths’ weirdo grandson, Baby John (John Neilson, Sharks’ Treasure) unleashes some serious rage on a baby shark he’s reeled in. After hitting the life out of it on the beach, he turns to Regina and offers the only logical explanation for such a bonkers display of unjustified animal cruelty: “I think I love you.” Being as dumb as the piece of wood Baby John beat Baby Shark against, yes, of course she’s smitten.

The events within The Terror at Red Wolf Inn may not exist on our plane of reality, but I’m glad the film does; it’s a bit different from the horror norm, including by having its token black character (future Oscar nominee Margaret Avery, The Color Purple) be the smartest character. Although it possesses a devilish sense of humor, it is not a comedy, much less a parody as some critics have claimed. Now, if its innards contained the literal wink at the audience that closes the credits, that’d be a different story. As is, Townsend’s spookhouse of a picture straddles the Hollywood hagsploitation efforts that had been in vogue and the teen slashers that were about to be, and gives you a hearty slap on the back to let you know it’s all in good fun. And to quote Regina, “I love parties!” —Rod Lott

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