Sci-Fi & Fantasy

King Kong Lives (1986)

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kingkonglivesArriving a full decade after producer Dino De Laurentiis’ 1976 monster hit, its too-little, too-late sequel, King Kong Lives, was DOA at the box office. Director John Guillermin returned; audiences did not. The entire landscape of cinema had changed in that 10-year gap, and it shows in the new film’s opening. As if an acknowledgment that too much time had passed, Lives begins with a reminder: the ending of Kong ’76. As you’ll recall, the giant ape plunged from the World Trade Center to his death below, as Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges feigned horror.

But lo and behold — guess what! He’s not dead! In fact, King K– oh, you knew already. Yeah, the title does kinda spoil it, huh?

But how did he survive? Obviously, the big galoot was peeled off the New York sidewalks and airlifted to the Atlanta Institute of Georgia, where Amy Franklin (Linda Hamilton, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) is among the team of doctors performing emergency surgery on Kong — specifically, the implantation of a $7 million artificial heart approximately the size of a Yugo. Problem: Kong also needs a blood transfusion, but no species is a match, y’know?

kingkonglives1Cut to: the jungles of Borneo, where intrepid adventurer Hank Mitchell (Brian Kerwin, It Came from Outer Space II) happens upon a second giant ape, this one with a vagina and floppy breasts. Brokering a quick deal, Mitchell has Lady Kong (as the credits call her) hauled to Hotlanta pronto. At least one oversized plasma bag later, Kong’s as good as new … and horny as hell. (Considering his inability to seal the deal with Lange’s Dwan, one can imagine the level of pent-up sexual frustration must be out-of-your-gourd maddening.) No matter how afar they hide Lady Kong, ol’ King can detect her musky, matted-fur scent … and it drives him bananas! He breaks loose to run away with her in the wild, where they enjoy such romantic acts as picking ticks off one another.

Primate-on-primate bliss is short-lived as the meddling military gets involved. Hank and Amy combine jungle wits and shoulder pads to save the Kongs from this ever-present threat of the feds, not to mention redneck hunters, whose appearance confirms that King Kong Lives has veered into self-parody without even realizing it.

As silly as the guys in the gorilla suits are (Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan veterans Peter Elliott and George Antoni) as they cuddle and snuggle and romp about green-screened backgrounds, they are better actors than our main characters. Kerwin is bereft of leading-man magnetism, while Hamilton cannot even utter “shit” with conviction. Maybe it’s just me, but that single-syllable word should be a cinch against ludicrous lines of dialogue like “We’re not lancing a hemorrhoid here!”

Believe it or not, the shit-silly Toho and Rankin/Bass co-production King Kong Escapes is doubly serious by comparison — mind you, that 1967 dose of matinee magic is the one in which Kong battles a giant-robot version of himself. King Kong Lives, however, is the only movie I’m aware of featuring an African-American youth waving the Confederate flag in celebration … so it’s got that going for it. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Shadows in an Empty Room (1976)

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shadowsemptyCanada’s answer to Dirty Harry? In theory, it’s Capt. Tony Saitta, as played by the graying, mutton-chopped Stuart Whitman (Invaders of the Lost Gold) in Shadows in an Empty Room, which begins with a bank robbery and ends with a helicopter explosion, yet pains to connect the dots. The thriller is rendered bizarre not by design, but the incompetence of director Alberto De Martino (Puma Man), working under the Americanized moniker of Martin Herbert.

Saitta is a seemingly invincible supercop with a trigger finger that’s likely been used so often, its movements now are involuntary. When his sister (Carole Laure, Naked Massacre), who is in college — and thus, young enough to be his daughter — is poisoned and declared dead on the scene by a nervous doctor (Martin Landau, Ed Wood), Saitta seeks revenge. Although a missing necklace is something of the only solid clue he has, actually solving the case feels secondary to shooting holes into people.

shadowsempty1Nothing wrong with a mystery, unless it’s not treated like one. De Martino wants Shadows to be everything to everyone, as it veers from crime drama to action film to giallo; not for nothing is its most common alternate title Blazing Magnum, which tonally sits on the opposite end of an Empty Room. More of a collection of scenes than a narrative, the in-shambles script includes transvestites, a little person with a French accent, a limping man, a blind roomie, a John Saxon and the erect nipples of Marlowe’s Gayle Hunnicutt.

Despite all those ingredients thrown into the mix without being measured, Shadows in an Empty Room wakes only for a high-speed car chase, notable because Saitta doesn’t give a fuck about the condition of his car or the safety of others. The vehicles achieve liftoff — a sight akin to striking gold, which De Martino clearly knew, because he presents it in full from a variety of angles. —Rod Lott

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Action

River of Death (1989)

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riverdeathNarration in the 1965-set River of Death suggests that director Steve Carver (Big Bad Mama) may have viewed this adaptation of the 1981 Alistair MacLean novel as his own Apocalypse Now. Of course, Michael Dudikoff is no Martin Sheen; the American Ninja star has trouble delivering the VO convincingly, stumbling and rolling over the words awkwardly, the way some people tussle with strands of pizza cheese that just won’t break. The more he tries, the goofier he comes off.

Produced by Harry Alan Towers (reuniting with Dudikoff after 1988’s Platoon Leader), the Cannon Films cheapie takes place 500 miles from civilization, deep in the Amazon jungle, where adventurer John Hamilton (Dudikoff) leads a doctor (Victor Melleney, 1989’s Hellgate) and the doctor’s sexy-enough daughter (Sarah Maur Thorp, Edge of Sanity) to a lost city, in hopes of finding the rumored antidote to the disease that’s been eating away the brains of various tribesmen and tribeswomen — an equal-opportunity contagion.

riverdeath1How Hamilton knows the location — or even the general whereabouts — of this supposed “lost” city is not worth wondering about. For starters, the doc is killed almost immediately after being introduced. Eventually, the real story reveals itself, in the form of Third Reich member Dr. Wolfgang Manteuffel (Robert Vaughn, Superman III), who conducts the kind of Nazi experiments adorning many a pulp-mag cover as if Hitler never died, and his in-cahoots benefactor, Heinrich Spaatz (Donald Pleasence, Prince of Darkness). Somewhere in between this sequence of events? Midget boxing.

A mess of a movie, River of Death in no way approaches the built-in excitement of its title. At best, it’s a middling jungle picture that checks off the boxes: sacred temple, ooga-booga tribes, cannibalism, boredom … —Rod Lott

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Sex

Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure (1995)

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bodychem4In Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure, sultry TV producer turned shady murder suspect Dr. Claire Archer (Shannon Tweed, Hot Dog … The Movie) decides to check out the legal briefs of her married lawyer, Simon Mitchell (Larry Poindexter, American Ninja 2: The Confrontation), in hopes of helping her case.

To get on his good side, she gives him an oral examination in his office’s break room. With him completely won over by her well-timed arguments, they do a little gavel-bashing atop a car in a parking garage, in an elevator, on a pool table and on his own dining room table, where people eat. Even a whole bottle of Pledge wouldn’t mask that evidence.

bodychem41Thoroughly routine among erotic thrillers of the 1990s (Tweed’s character likes to hump? Who’da guessed?), this entry from director Jim Wynorski (Sorority House Massacre II) also has the misfortune of allowing Tweed’s six-time co-star Andrew Stevens to show up briefly as his character from the previous year’s Body Chemistry III. Tweed, however, is new to the Roger Corman-birthed franchise, taking over the role from Shari Shattuck, who took it over from Lisa Pescia.

Also making a return appearance? Fake breasts. (To clarify, Stevens’ are real.) —Ed Donovan

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Horror

Flight 7500 (2014)

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flight7500No offense is meant to Leslie Bibb, a genial actress with bona fide comedic flair (from Talladega Nights to Hell Baby), but she looks as if she were genetically engineered to play a flight attendant. Her striking, all-American features combine for the kind of friendly face commercial air carriers look for when employing ambassadors for beverage service at 37,000 feet. While Bibb’s Laura may be an ideal hire for the fictional Vista Pacific Airlines, she cannot save Flight 7500 from interminable boredom. The film is flawed from its initial taxi down the runway.

Passengers board a red-eye flight that will take them from Los Angeles to Tokyo … or at least that’s the intent. With air travel, so many variables loom as threats: severe weather, mechanical failure and, if your movie’s director is Japanese, a high probability of a supernatural haunting. With The Grudge’s Takashi Shimizu in the proverbial cockpit here, the latter is at play: an invisible force that chokes the life out of frequent fliers in the most predictable and detaching ways.

flight75001One wonders if Shimizu and screenwriter Craig Rosenberg (2009’s The Uninvited, an underrated spooker) have attempted to imbue this routine horror film with a statement on the state of the modern marriage in these United States. Consider that Laura is playing “Coffee, tea or me?” with the married pilot (Jonathon Schaech, The Legend of Hercules), and that the other four main characters are either in a dissolved union (Crank’s Amy Smart and Knights of Badassdom’s Ryan Kwanten) or newly part of one already doomed to collapse (Hall Pass’ Nicky Whelan and Entourage’s Jerry Ferrara).

Or at least I wondered that, because the movie failed to grab me, and when it comes to horror, I’m a fairly easy lay. It’s no wonder Flight 7500 took four years to land a stateside release on DVD, after originally being made for theaters. While Shimizu is a competent filmmaker, this elicits not even a fraction of the fear of his greatest hit (or hits, plural, if you lump in his own remake). While welcome, the ending succeeds only in insulting its audience, followed by an unscary jump scare that doesn’t even make sense within the story’s timeline. —Rod Lott

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