Trucks (1997) – Review

When Stephen King first took a crack at bringing his killer truck story to the screen, he already proved this idea could crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Apparently, that wasn’t warning enough. Because 1997’s Trucks rolls in anyway, stretching, mangling, and flattening the premise into a wheezing made-for-TV relic that somehow makes one wonder if the vehicles should’ve just finished the job and run the script over completely.

Stephen King’s Trucks was first adapted into the cocaine-and-AC/DC-fueled chaos of Maximum Overdrive back in 1986, which, for all its screaming insanity and exploding soda machines, at least had a camp energy that made it unforgettable. Fast forward to 1997, and the USA Network decided the world needed a more “faithful” adaptation. Unfortunately, “faithful” doesn’t always mean “better.” In fact, Trucks proves that sticking closer to the source can turn a wild concept into a slow, joyless slog.

 

“Son, this will not be a Field of Dreams.”

We’re in Lunar, Nevada, a dusty speck of a town that survives on two things: its nearby military base (shh, don’t say Area 51 too loud) and alien-themed folklore. But forget flying saucers—Lunar gets invaded by Peterbilts. It starts small: a guy named Phil (Harry Nelkin) gets flattened when a semi crashes into his house while he’s taking a shower. Take that, Hitchcock. Then a frozen meat truck eats its own driver, because…irony? Meanwhile, Hope (Brenda Bakke), who runs a hiking-and-tourism gig, is guiding some out-of-towners—Jack (Jay Brazeau), Thad (Roman Podhora), and his daughter Abby (Amy Stewart)—when they stumble onto Phil’s truck blocking the road, and have to then dodge the meat truck, followed by the discovery of Phil’s lacerated corpse.

 

Welcome to Lunar, folks.

Naturally, she calls in local gas station owner Ray (Timothy Busfield), an overprotective dad and his teenage son Logan (Brendan Fletcher), who immediately get nearly sideswiped by a rogue yellow truck, and before you can say “Stephen King,” the group is holed up at the diner/gas station/cabin combo while trucks circle the lot like lazy sharks. A semi tries to bury Abby and Logan alive under a drainage pipe like it’s starring in a very slow-motion Saw trap. Rednecks show up, one blows himself up with Molotov cocktails, and everyone spends way too much time debating how to sneak past parked trucks. We even get a HAZMAT suit that inflates itself and goes full Halloween on two poor workers.

Note: While this film stays more in keeping with the short story, with it being only trucks that come alive, the scene with the HAZMAT suit is goofier than anything we saw in Maximum Overdrive.

The machines, meanwhile, play the long game—keeping Ray alive since he’s the only guy around who can pump their gas. There’s some sneaking, some failed escapes, a few more pancake victims, and eventually, Ray manages to blow up the diner with one of the lead rigs inside. Problem solved? Not quite. By morning, he, Hope, and Logan are still being chased by a charred truck until a helicopter swoops in to rescue them. Hooray! Except… surprise—no one’s flying it. The movie ends with the chopper tilting into the sky while everyone looks horrified, because apparently Trucks wanted one last twist of “what the hell?” before the credits rolled.

 

That’s sort of an ending, I guess.

Stray Observations:

• Ray brought his son south after his wife was killed during a drive-by in Detroit, to keep him safe from guns and gangs. But isn’t the “South” known for its guns and rednecks? Is that much better?
• The power is knocked out by a truck, and we get some vague explanation as to why the phones and radio don’t work, but the television occasionally turns out to provide plot developments.
• Trucks was directed by Chris Thomson, who mostly worked in television. You can tell—this thing has all the visual flair of a rerun of Highway to Heaven, just with more tire tracks on people’s faces.
• Unlike Maximum Overdrive, which at least gave us that insane “lawnmower vs. Little League team” moment, Trucks is PG-level tame.
• A mailman is mercilessly bludgeoned to death by a toy Tonka truck, and I will give the movie bonus points for that.

 

Is that gore or strawberry jam?

On paper, Trucks actually does follow King’s short story more closely. The setting is smaller, the tone more serious, and there’s even an attempt to tap into the hopelessness of humanity being outmatched by their own machines. The problem is, the film has the energy of a stalled engine. Where Maximum Overdrive gave us campy gore and AC/DC blasting in the background, Trucks gives us long stretches of people sitting around in a diner arguing about what to do next, while the trucks—wait for it—drive in circles.

 

This film feels like it’s stuck in neutral.

It’s almost impressive how a movie with killer vehicles can feel so lethargic. Even the big “attack” sequences are clunky. One guy gets pancaked by a pickup in broad daylight while staring at it for about twenty seconds too long. Another person gets mowed down because apparently nobody in this universe understands the concept of stepping to the side. The supposed climax involves the survivors trying to sneak past the trucks in the middle of the night, which sounds thrilling until you actually watch it. And even though the body count is technically higher than King’s short story, every single death feels about as exciting as watching someone lose at Frogger. Compared to Maximum Overdrive—with its exploding gas station, deadly vending machines, and lawnmower Little League carnage—this tally is about as bloodless and bland as TV movies come.

 

Fifty percent of this film is just people staring out windows.

As for the performances, Timothy Busfield’s Ray is technically the “hero,” but he spends most of the movie looking like he wandered into the wrong production while waiting for a West Wing callback. Brenda Bakke’s Hope tries to inject some toughness into the proceedings, but she’s mostly relegated to shouting lines like “We have to get out of here!” Brendan Fletcher and Amy Stewart do their part as teenagers who alternate between sulking and shrieking. The real stars, of course, are the trucks. Unfortunately, they don’t exactly have the charisma of the homicidal Happy Toyz truck from Maximum Overdrive. They just kind of roll forward, stop, roll back, and repeat. Imagine trying to feel terror while watching a traffic jam, and you’ve got the vibe.

 

This film could definitely have used a Green Goblin truck.

At the end of the day, Trucks is that rare beast: a movie that’s more faithful to Stephen King’s story than its infamous predecessor, yet somehow manages to be less fun, less scary, and infinitely more forgettable. Where Maximum Overdrive was a loud, dumb, glorious mess, Trucks is a quiet, dull, joyless one—so committed to being “serious” that it squeezes out every drop of entertainment. It doesn’t even have the decency to go off the rails; it just sputters along until it runs out of gas.

Super Hybrid (2010) – Review

There are bad movies, there are dumb movies, and then there’s 2010’s Super Hybrid, a killer car flick that somehow manages to make Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive look like a masterclass in restraint. It mistakes a dim parking garage for atmosphere, CGI tentacles for terror, and Oded Fehr’s scowl for character depth. The result isn’t scary so much as it is hilariously confused.

The setup is simple enough: on the back streets of Chicago, two would-be car thieves wander past a black Chevy Nova, only to double back seconds later and find it transformed into a shiny red Corvette. Naturally, they climb inside, whereupon the handles vanish, the windows black out, and the car digests them like a Venus flytrap on wheels. Later, a speeding vehicle obliterates the Nova, but when the cops check the wreck, they find no trace of passengers and send it off to the impound lot, treating it like just another routine mess in Chicago. But the fun doesn’t stop there, the car promptly reassembles itself and hurls a hapless mechanic down an elevator shaft, because in this movie, suspense isn’t so much built as it is body-counted with automotive precision.

Note: This film “borrows” the tinted red view through the windshield of the killer car’s POV from the 1977 horror classic, The Car. Strangely, this film uses crappy visual effects rather than just tinted glass.

Enter Ray (Oded Fehr), the garage’s eternally irritated owner, and his motley crew: Gordy (Paul Essiembre), an older mechanic with a hearing aid, Al (Ryan Kennedy), Bobby (Kerry Beyer), and Bobby’s aunt Tilda (Shannon Beckner), who is young and hot and doesn’t like being called an aunt. Finally, we have Maria (Melanie Papalia), the secretary, who provides most of the shrieking and running around in heels. Soon, Tilda notices the car isn’t made of normal metal, but something… slimy. And before you can say “Little Shop of Horrors,” the garage becomes a feeding ground when the vehicle wraps a tentacle around Al and swallows him whole, then comes back later with a full snake’s head bursting from under its hood like Jurassic Park had a low-rent sequel called Garage-o-saurus Rex. Gordy gets electrocuted, Maria almost becomes lunch, and Ray finally accepts that his workplace hazard list now includes “carnivorous shape-shifting Chevrolet.”

 

“Why couldn’t that thing attack the DMV?”

With power down and exits locked, the survivors decide to fight back. They concoct a trap involving welded spikes, Molotov cocktails, and a tarp, apparently forgetting they work in a garage, not a Looney Tunes cartoon. Maria promptly botches the plan, setting herself on fire and plunging to her death in what is meant to be horrifying but mostly plays like slapstick. Bobby fares no better, getting in the very wrong car. The movie piles on these deaths with all the emotional weight of a demolition derby, as if the writers figured you wouldn’t notice because, hey, look…a car with tentacles!

 

“Feed me, Seymour, feed me now!”

In the climax, Ray and Tilda finally trick the monster car into the spike pit, dropping another vehicle on top of it for good measure. Victory, right? Not exactly. Ray reveals that he had the exit keys the entire time, making him less of a leader and more of a sadistic escape-room host. Tilda staggers outside to find her boyfriend mourning his wrecked Trans Am, only to spot five more alien cars arriving in the distance. She shrugs it off, while Ray is surrounded by headlights in the garage, his fate unresolved. It’s a non-ending that feels less like a cliffhanger and more like the filmmakers just ran out of money for CGI.

 

“It was the low budget that killed the Beast.”

Stray Observations:

• The female protagonist has a slacker boyfriend and a traumatic past, because why not add in a few more clichés while you’re at it. I’m betting her parents tragically died in a car crash.
• “Where did it come from, and why is it in my garage?” That is an example of the scintillating dialogue to be found in this taught script. Is it self-aware or just lame?
• The script’s reason for why they don’t immediately call for help, after a monster car has eaten two of their friends, is that they could capture it and make money selling it. Is that lazy writing or just dumb? It’s hard to tell.
• Tilda finds some black goo and deduces, “If it can bleed, it can die” because why not paraphrase a classic line from a good science fiction monster movie?
• It’s hard to root for people as dumb as this group is. Not one person suggests hiding in the concrete stairwell, a place the car monster could not enter.
• What was the real horror? Forget the monster—imagine working an overnight shift in a parking garage with these coworkers. The killer car was the least toxic thing in the building.
• The reveal of five more cars showing up is meant to be ominous, but it really just looks like the world’s saddest Fast & Furious spin-off.

 

“Do I have to come back for the sequel?”

As a movie, Super Hybrid is gloriously stupid, and you can’t help but laugh at the level of idiocy on display. The CGI appears to have been rendered on a 2002 laptop that had run out of RAM. The dialogue sounds like it was patched together from discarded CSI episodes, and the characters are archetypes you’d forget even if they survived. Oded Fehr’s Ray is the asshole boss, Shannon Beckner’s Tilda is the obligatory “final girl,” and everyone else might as well have worn red Star Trek shirts for how long they last. Still, there’s a perverse charm in watching a film so convinced it’s being deadly serious while serving up digital tentacle attacks that wouldn’t pass muster in a cutscene from Twisted Metal: Black. The filmmakers do their best to hide this defect by keeping everything perpetually dark.

 

Prepare for a lot of people wandering around in the dark.

The monster itself is both ridiculous and, in a strange way, inspired—half muscle car, half calamari, like Christine wandered into an H.P. Lovecraft fanfic and never came out. The film borrows shamelessly from John Carpenter’s The Thing (shapeshifting monster), Stephen King’s Christine (killer car), and every SyFy Channel creature feature that ever aired on a hungover Saturday afternoon. The problem is that it never commits fully to its own insanity. Where Maximum Overdrive was loud, dumb, and gloriously unhinged, Super Hybrid plays things far too straight, mistaking endless garage corridors and dim lighting for atmosphere. Its biggest sin isn’t being bad, but being bland where it should have been outrageous. When you’ve got a car that sprouts a snake’s head and eats people, you don’t go subtle, you floor it.

 

It would also help if we could see what was going on.

In the end, Super Hybrid doesn’t shift into horror; it just idles loudly in neutral until the credits roll. It’s not thrilling, it’s not scary, but it is oddly watchable in the way a demolition derby is: chaotic, loud, and slightly embarrassing for everyone involved. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Christine got blackout drunk and hooked up with an octopus, well…now you know.

Crash! (1976) – Review

Before Charles Band became the king of VHS-era horror with Puppet Master and Ghoulies, he directed this oddball supernatural thriller, Crash! Equal parts domestic melodrama, occult weirdness, and demolition-derby stunt reel, it’s the cinematic equivalent of an out-of-control car: noisy, dangerous, and weirdly fun to watch.

After witnessing brutal road-rage crash, caused by a mysterious black Camaro, we are introduced to Kim Denne (Sue Lyon), a young, beautiful, and unlucky enough to be married to Marc Denne (José Ferrer), a wealthy old crank who spends most of the film sulking in a wheelchair, though not exactly “bound,” since he can still shuffle a few feet before collapsing back into it. Once a tennis fanatic, now an “active invalid,” Marc blames Kim for the accident that left him half-crippled and devotes his time to making her miserable. When she finally tries to leave in her sleek black Camaro, Marc sends his Doberman after her. The dog leaps into the moving car, mauls her, and she crashes, ending up in the hospital bandaged head-to-toe, muttering the word “Akaza,” and clutching a weird little flea-market keychain idol, an artifact of the Hittite god Akaza. And let’s just say, he’s not the deity you want weighing in on your marital issues.

“The medical term is Revenge-Fuelled Coma?”

With Kim wrapped up like the Invisible Man, the real star becomes her possessed Camaro, which resurrects itself and roams the highways like Christine’s sloppy cousin. Random motorists, especially unlucky AMC drivers, are terrorized in slow-motion smash-ups, while back in the hospital, Kim occasionally channels Akaza directly: glowing demon eyes, flying keychains, and wheelchairs that suddenly go berserk. Best scene? Marc’s motorized chair gets possessed, rams his Doberman into oblivion, and forces him into a crutch duel with his own furniture.

José Ferrer vs. The Chair.

To help solve the mystery, we have Dr. Martin (a Robert Stack look-alike, John Ericson), who takes in the amnesiac Kim and sets out to unravel her mystery. His investigation leads to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from John Carradine as a local anthropologist, who conveniently points him to—of all people—Marc Denne. Small world. Before long, Kim stumbles back to her old villa without realizing her abusive husband still wants her dead, at least until he tries to roast her alive in a sauna, a scene that feels like it wandered in from Charlie’s Angels. By now, Kim is half-human, half-Hittite rage spirit, and more dangerous by the minute.

Fun fact: The film Crash! was marketed as “the ultimate in car-crunching terror.” Audiences quickly discovered that the phrase meant “gratuitous car crashes” barely related to the plot.

The climax finds Marc, shotgun at the ready, squaring off against the demon-possessed Camaro in what has to be cinema’s only Mexican standoff between a man in a wheelchair and a car. The showdown ends with the Camaro giving him a gentle shove down a hill before launching itself on top of him with all the grace of Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, capped off by an obligatory fireball explosion. Or at least I think that’s what happened. The scene is so murky you don’t know anything’s over until the boom. That’s Charles Band’s Crash! for you: part supernatural revenge tale, part killer-car flick, part unintentional comedy, and 100% gloriously WTF. And the lingering question you’ll be asking isn’t “Who will survive?” but “Why did the car waste time mowing down random motorists before bothering with Marc?”

I guess evil cars don’t need a motive.

Stray Observations:

• Kim purchases the little Hittite idol from a creepy dude at a flea market stall located at a local drive-in theatre, and I’m guessing the next stall was selling Monkey’s Paws.
• After her forced accident, we find Kim all bandaged up in a hospital room, still clutching her little Hittite keychain. Are we to assume the doctors couldn’t remove it from her hand while they operated? Is there something called a “Pre-Death Grip?”
• The way the film is edited, with us seeing the killer car even before the attempted murder of Kim, is quite odd. This causes a weird disconnect between what is going on with the killer car and Kim’s trauma, which makes it seem like we are watching two different movies smashed together.
• It’s weird that with the numerous attempts by the police to stop the killer car, not one of them mentions that the convertible Camaro is obviously driverless. Are they afraid of being accused of drunk driving?

Tremble before the endless shots of the driverless car!

What makes Crash! entertaining isn’t the logic — because there is none — but the sheer sincerity. The film plays its absurd premise straight: an abusive husband uses black magic to sic cars on his wife. José Ferrer delivers his lines with grim conviction, as though he’s in a courtroom drama, while Sue Lyon spends most of her screen time screaming, crying, or running from vehicles moving at about 10 miles per hour. The stunts, however, are the showstopper. When cars begin flipping, colliding, and plummeting down embankments, the movie transforms into a mini-disaster film, and you can see where Band spent every cent of the budget. If you’ve ever wanted to watch station wagons and pickup trucks behave like possessed sharks, this movie delivers.

Note: This film continues the long tradition of vehicles being forced off the road and then exploding, even if it’s just a small incline.

But the film also has that unmistakable Charles Band touch: the mix of the absurd and the straight-faced. Everyone delivers their lines with Shakespearean seriousness, even when the script is talking about ancient curses and killer Buicks. On that front, José Ferrer, whose commitment to the role feels both admirable and baffling, like he’s trying to win an Oscar in a movie about a demon car causing traffic accidents. And then there’s Sue Lyon, who does her best as the tormented wife, though she spends the bulk of the film sitting in bed swathed in bandages while occasionally having demon spasms.

She’s got those demon bedroom eyes.

In retrospect, Crash! feels like a prototype for the kind of gonzo B-movie empire Band would later build. It’s messy, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, and yet oddly charming. There’s a kind of grindhouse sincerity to it: no irony, no winking at the audience, just pure pulp madness played straight. Is it a good movie? Absolutely not. Is it a fun one? Without question. This is the kind of midnight-movie gem best enjoyed with a group of friends, some drinks, and an appreciation for that special brand of ’70s drive-in nonsense where even a Camaro might be possessed by an evil amulet.

The Ice Pirates (1984) – Review

In a galaxy where water is more valuable than gold, and fashion is stuck in a Renaissance festival, one man and his crew of space degenerates will steal ice, battle space herpes, and age 40 years in five minutes. I bring you The Ice Pirates.

In the midst of the post-Star Wars boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hollywood found itself flooded with science fiction properties attempting to ride the lucrative wave of space-themed entertainment. Among the many forgotten or ill-fated productions that followed in the wake of George Lucas’s space epic was The Ice Pirates, a science fiction comedy that blends swashbuckling adventure, slapstick humour, and B-movie aesthetics to create a uniquely chaotic entry into the genre.

 

“Hi, I’ll be your Han Solo tonight.”

The premise is delightfully dumb: In a future where the galaxy has run dry, literally, with water being the new gold, hoarded by an evil interstellar monopoly called the Templars. Enter the space pirates, who steal ice and sell it on the black market. Jason (Robert Urich), a roguish captain of a ragtag crew of misfits, gets caught up in a conspiracy involving space royalty, killer robots, and a time-warping climax that feels like Monty Python wandered into Star Wars and brought a six-pack.

 

Pirates of the Galactic Caribbean. 

Jason and his crew of budget space pirates who specialize in stealing ice run into a complication during a routine ice heist aboard a Templar cruiser (read: evil space monks with fashion issues). The crew stumbles upon a mysterious stasis pod containing the beautiful princess Karina (Mary Crosby), frozen like a Galactic TV dinner. Naturally, Jason, who clearly thinks with his space pants, defrosts her, sets off alarms, and promptly kidnaps her. Romantic!?

 

Sleeping Beauty on ice.

This rude awakening sends the Templars into a rage (and possibly a wardrobe malfunction), and Jason’s ship blasts off into space, now with a princess and a big red target. As enemy ships close in, Jason tells crewmates Maida (Anglica Huston) and Zeno (Ron Perlman) to take the escape pods, sparing them from the oncoming nonsense. Loyal sidekick Roscoe (Michael D. Roberts) sticks around because he apparently missed the memo about self-preservation. Soon enough, Jason and Roscoe are captured by the Templars and sentenced to a fate worse than death: robot-assisted castration and slavery, courtesy of the most terrifying assembly line in sci-fi history.

 

Castration brought to you by the Acme Company.

Fortunately, Karina pulls some strings (literally) and rescues them—because nothing says “thanks for the abduction” like saving your kidnapper’s nethers. Now part of Princess Karina’s personal space entourage, Jason and his crew, which now includes “Killjoy” (John Matuszak), a professional thief and conman who they picked up while escaping, agree to help her find her missing father, who disappeared while looking for the mythical “seventh planet,” a secret water-rich world hidden from Templar control. (Because this future has evil space monks but apparently no GPS.)

 

“The coordinates should be in the script somewhere.”

They travel aboard Jason’s ship, which is now loaded with more of Roscoe’s robot soldiers. Meanwhile, the crew gets attacked by a creature called space herpes, which is exactly what it sounds like and raises many questions science can’t answer. Along the way, they encounter a band of space Amazons riding unicorns, because why not? While briefly captured, they quickly turn the tables and get another clue as to the whereabouts of Karina’s father. This is achieved via a hologram hidden within her father’s ring, which the leader of the Amazons kept in his mouth. Yuck.

 

Wait a minute, the Amazons were ruled by Bruce Vilanch?

Eventually, the crew discovers a wormhole/time warp thingy that might lead to the legendary water planet. Unfortunately, they are ambushed by the Templars just as they enter this cosmic slip-and-slide. Cue the wildest time-warp battle in cinema. During the climactic space battle, the ship enters a “time warp,” causing the characters to rapidly age and the fight to turn into an intergenerational brawl. Jason goes from dashing rogue to gray-bearded warrior in the span of seconds. Princess Karina gives birth and watches her son grow into a man in under five minutes. The logic makes zero sense, but it’s such a wild swing for the fences that you can’t help but applaud the audacity.

 

“Hey, I’m my own grandpa!”

Despite the time chaos, they manage to defeat the Templars, survive the aging process (somehow), and—surprise!—discover the mythical water planet was real all along. Hooray! Unlimited showers for everyone! The film closes with the heroes triumphant, the galaxy’s thirst finally quenched, and all of us deeply confused but weirdly satisfied. Jason gets the girl, the pirates get the water, and you get the satisfaction of watching the most gloriously unhinged space comedy ever made with a straight face. How could you find a Star Wars/Road Warrior knock-off anything but fun?

 

Who cares if none of it makes sense?

Stray Observations:

• For his space opera, George Lucas replaced swords with lightsabers; not so here, the pirates just use your garden variety cutlasses. Way to use your imagination, guys.
• I’m not saying the visual effects in this film were cheap…well, yeah, I am saying that. Jason’s ship’s combat graphics look like leftovers from Atari’s Space Invaders.
• The villain’s plan is unclear. The evil Templars control water, but their goal seems to be “look vaguely sinister and ride around in cloaked hover-gondolas.” It’s like if Skeletor ran the EPA
• The domed city our heroes are taken to after they were captured is made up of sets and props from the 1976 sci-fi classic Logan’s Run.
• In the control room where the alarm is triggered, the television screens are showing 1975’s Rollerball. It’s good to see the filmmakers believe in recycling.

 

At least someone is watching a good movie.

Directed and co-written by Stewart Raffill, The Ice Pirates was originally intended to be a serious sci-fi film with a $20 million budget. MGM slashed the budget to $8 million and had the script rewritten as a comedy. This fact explains why the tone swings wildly. One moment, there’s a Mad Max-style chase, and in the next, our heroes are dealing with space herpes. Make no mistake, this film isn’t trying to make you think. It’s trying to make you laugh, groan, and possibly call a therapist, and it’s clear that the cast was in on the joke. That is, if they can find the jokes among all the cheap sets and “borrowed” footage from better movies.

 

“Does anyone have the foggiest idea what’s going on?”

Robert Urich is surprisingly effective as the smirking hero; he manages to sell the character’s charm and desperation with more gravitas than the film probably deserves. Mary Crosby brings a feisty energy to the role of Princess Karina, though she’s more of a plot device than a fully developed character. Michael D. Roberts, as Roscoe, is the tech-savvy straight man to Urich’s smuggler, and the chemistry between the cast holds the film together, just barely. And while it was nice to see Ron Perlman and Angelica Huston in early-career roles, and even though they aren’t given much to do, they both bring a weird level of credibility to the madness. It’s a sci-fi movie that constantly winks at you… but with a lazy eye.

 

“Angelica, are you supposed to be a space dominatrix?”

Unsurprisingly, the effects are hilariously cheap. Spaceships are clearly models on strings, robot designs look like they were repurposed from a high school art project, and action scenes feel like LARP sessions caught on camera. But that’s part of the fun. The sets are colourful and cluttered, costumes look cobbled together from a thrift store in space, and the aesthetic is a charming blend of futuristic pulp and Renaissance faire leftovers. The editing is also a bit rough, the pacing is uneven, and the music veers between competent and utterly wrong for the scene. Yet, it all adds to the film’s ramshackle appeal.

 

“Yohoho and a bucket of ice!”

Is there a message in The Ice Pirates? Sure. Something about greed, environmental collapse, and corporate power controlling resources. But those ideas are buried under a mountain of robot parts and juvenile humour. If this film was trying to teach us anything, it’s probably “Drink water, punch robots, and never trust a Templar with a mustache.” And hey, it also gave legendary actor John Carridine a paycheck, who plays the Templar Supreme Commander.

 

And he didn’t even have to get out of bed.

In conclusion, The Ice Pirates is a relic of an era when Hollywood was still trying to figure out what to do with science fiction after Star Wars. It’s messy, crude, often nonsensical, but undeniably unique. It belongs in the same drawer as movies like Flash Gordon and Barbarella, and not for everyone, but if you’re into over-the-top camp, you’ll have a great time.

The Lost Empire (1984) – Review

Written and directed by Jim Wynorski—who never met a B-movie trope he didn’t love— I bring you The Lost Empire a pure, unfiltered ’80s exploitation gold. It’s got ninjas, Amazons, evil cults, a gorilla, and more slow-motion cleavage shots than an entire season of Baywatch. What’s not to love about that?

The plot kicks off when a cop gets killed by a gang of ninja thieves who are after a mystical gemstone located at a Chinatown jewellery store (because of course it is). Still, it turns out that his sister happens to be a badass federal agent, Angel Wolfe (Melanie Vincz), and she vows to track down the people responsible for his death. Enter Federal Agent Rick Stanton (Paul Coufos), who she is, of course, sleeping with. He informs her that this all has to do with a megalomaniacal sorcerer named Dr. Sin Do (Angus Scrimm), who serves an ancient evil deity called Lee Chuck, and that he seeks to harness the power of ancient mystical artifacts to gain ultimate power, and the stolen gemstone is one piece of a magical eye that grants unimaginable abilities when fully assembled. Hopefully, these gems will be more effective than this film’s ninjas.

They just stand still and get shot.

But how can Wolfe find this enigmatic villain? Well, it turns out that he is recruiting women for an army of terrorists, luring them to his island by promising them fabulous wealth. Needless to say, it’s a one-way trip for these women as they are brainwashed to be his minions. As he’s an evil sorcerer, that’s actually kind of expected. Wolfe is told that Sin Do only accepts women in trios so to infiltrate his evil lair and stop his evil plan she must recruit two allies, thus we get two more scantily clade heroines to enter the picture; White Star (Raven De La Croix), a mystical martial artist with the personality of a pro wrestler, and Heather McClure (Angela Aames), a wisecracking prison inmate who proves her worth by fighting a dominatrix in the prison yard.

This brings “Caged Heat” to a whole new level.

Once on the island, the trio faces a gauntlet of brutal challenges as Sin Do’s fortress is part Enter the Dragon, part Hugh Hefner’s Mansion of Doom, and all nonsense, where female prisoners are forced to battle in vicious trials for the amusement of the cult. The contestants must survive combat against lethal opponents, ranging from ninjas to big snakes to leashed gorillas. Our heroes enter this bizarre, deathtrap-laden contest organized by Sin Do, posing as gladiator trainees, navigating deadly booby traps, fighting off hordes of brainwashed warriors, and facing sadistic female guards. Along the way, they discover Sin Do’s twisted experiments, including women being transformed into mind-controlled assassins or sex slaves.

You expected progressive employment from a guy named Dr. Sin Do?

As Wolfe, Whitney, and Heather work their way through the competition, they uncover Sin Do’s ultimate plan: to merge the pieces of the mystical eye and unleash a dark force that will grant him immortality and dominion over the world. Angel and company must face off against purple-robed cultists, topless brawls and knock-off Roman gladiators, because why not? Before long, the plot throws logic out the window in favour of slow-motion fight scenes, random explosions, and gratuitous nudity, culminating in a finale where everyone just starts shooting and punching their way to victory.

“We are Spartacus!”

With swords, explosives, sheer grit and the untimely arrival of Wolfe’s idiot boyfriend, the women must rally all the other contestants to put a stop to this evil and escape the island, well, at least before it collapses in flames like any proper villain lair should. The film eventually reaches its final showdown, pitting the girls against Dr. Sin Do’s top henchman Koro (Robert Tessier) and his army of cultists, who takes an arrow to the chest, so no biggie there. Of course, the ultimate challenge is against Sin Do himself, who reveals his true monstrous form.

Wait, he’s actually Skeletor?

Stray Observations:

• The opening shot of the movie is a close-up of a well-endowed woman’s cleavage. Wynorski is the kind of director who is quick to let the viewers know what kind of movie they are about to watch.
• Angel Wolfe’s federal agent outfit is a skintight, cleavage-revealing catsuit. Because professionalism.
• Wolfe is menaced by a tarantula while in bed, a nod to the first James Bond film, Dr. No, but Wynorski amps things up by making it a robot tarantula.
• The costume budget was clearly spent on loincloths, bikinis, and whatever spandex they could find. It’s like Mad Max meets a fashion show at a strip club.
• Dr. Sin Do’s Island retreat has all the makings of a lair that any James Bond villain could love, or at least it’s a cool matte painting they could appreciate.

“Call the Super Friends, we’ve located the Legion of Doom.”

One could almost consider this Jim Wynorski’s audition tape for a lifelong career in B-movie mayhem, as this film is a pure distillation of ‘80s exploitation: equal parts ridiculous action, bizarre world-building, and gratuitous everything. But what about Logic? Cohesion? Character development? Forget it. This is a movie where women fight in slow motion for no reason, and villains cackle like they’re auditioning for Scooby-Doo. There’s something almost refreshing about how shameless The Lost Empire is. It knows it’s a low-budget spectacle held together with duct tape and sweat, and it embraces that fact. Every scene is designed to maximize either action, absurdity, or the amount of time someone spends in a bikini. It’s a film that operates on pure “Rule of Cool”—if it looks awesome (or at least insane), it makes the final cut.

Are these girls auditioning for Charlie’s Angels?

Melanie Vincz’s Angel Wolfe is the kind of protagonist who should have had her own action figure line. She’s a badass secret agent who can fight, shoot, and deliver cheesy one-liners with a smirk that says, “Yeah, I know what kind of movie I’m in.” Meanwhile, Raven De La Croix and Angela Aames feel like they were beamed in from two different genres—one from a cheap Western and the other from a Women in Prison film, but that somehow only makes the trio more entertaining. And then there’s Angus Scrimm as Dr. Sin Do. He doesn’t so much act as loom, delivering every line with the exaggerated menace of a cartoon supervillain. He’s the kind of bad guy who could order a pizza and still make it sound like world domination. He couldn’t be eviller if he tried.

“Have you heard about Hedge Fund Derivatives?”

The action in The Lost Empire is equal parts Enter the Dragon and something you’d find on Softcore Cinemax at 2 AM. We get kung fu fights, Amazonian death matches, characters running up and down corridors while knocking out clueless guards, and explosions happen for no discernible reason. Our heroines will mow through bad guys with the kind of action-hero invincibility that makes Rambo look like an amateur. And when the “Ultimate Weapon” that threatens mankind is revealed, it doesn’t matter because good guys always win, even in the 80s. 

Of course, not before the villain gets in a last grope or two.

In conclusion, The Lost Empire is pure, unfiltered, neon-drenched, low-budget 80s excess at its finest. It’s what happens when a 12-year-old boy writes an action script after binge-watching films Barbarella and Flash Gordon. And honestly? It’s kind of amazing. Basically, if you love B-movie nonsense, outrageous action, and an aesthetic that screams VHS rental in the weird section of the store, this one’s for you.