New Year’s Evil (1980) – Review

There are plenty of holiday-themed horror movies out there from Bob Clark’s Black Christmas to John Carpenter’s Halloween to the lesser and cheaper-looking entries like Jack Frost, but what if they made a horror film that was wall-to-wall new wave and punk music, a film that followed the machinations of a serial killer during the ball dropping on New Year's Eve? That seemed to be the premise behind Emmett Alston's New Year’s Evil, where everyone was invited to be “The death of the party.”

Coming out of the Cannon factory New Year’s Evil is pretty much what one could expect from producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, it is a film with a low budget and a cast of relatively unknown, but this entry was still early on in the Cannon Groups history, so they allowed director Emmett Alston a little freer reign when it came to creating his 80s slasher film, in what was already an overpopulated genre. The basic plot of this film surrounds a New Year’s celebration being hosted by Diane “Blaze” Sullivan (Roz Kelly), a punk rock media celebrity whose show plans to ring in the New Year across each of America’s time zones, but an anonymous caller informs Blaze that when the clock strikes midnight in each time zone, a "Naughty Girl" will be "punished" i.e. murdered. What is interesting here, and by interesting, I mean very out of the norm, is that there is no real suspense as to who the killer actually is, we do get a brief moment where we think the killer could be Blaze’s neglected teenage son Derek (Grant Cramer), who pops pills and pulls a pair of his mother’s red nylons over his face, but then in the next few seconds we get a clear look at the real killer (Kip Niven), but hey, suspense is overrated, who wants a mystery anyway?

 

This particular killer certainly wasn’t a master of disguise.

Watching New Year's Evil with modern eyes one could best compare it to an episode of C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation, with the serial killer du jour targeting young women on a popular holiday, and I will say that movie surprised me quite a bit by depicting the police as competent in their jobs, with their intervention actually saving one of the killer’s targets – go figure – but fans of slasher films may find themselves a little disappointed when it comes to the kills themselves as they are neither inventive nor executed all that well. What really works is Kip Niven’s portrayal of a misogynist asshat who takes his feelings of emasculation out on the women of Los Angeles, it’s a very chilling performance and helped even more by the script not making him some kind of brilliant mastermind – at one point he literally runs into a motorcycle gang and has to flee for his life – but where the film does drop the ball is in the characterization of Blaze, who is simply a Rock Star/Bad Mother and that’s about it, and actress Roz Kelly isn’t given much else to work with here as she doesn’t do much more than whimper and answer the phone when “Evil” calls.

 

"Evil, could you please hold, I have Good on the other line?"

Stray Observations:

• The first victim is an African American woman because the “Black Character Dies First” is a trope that must not be ignored.
• I hope you like this movie’s theme song, which is performed by Seattle rock band Shadow because you hear it a lot.
• That Blaze’s New Year’s Eve show consists of only two bands illustrates that either Blaze or Golan and Globus didn’t have enough of a budget to provide a decent show, most likely both.
• Killing a person at midnight in each time zone is an okay gimmick but I’d have been more impressed if the killer had performed them on location in those time zones, a little cross-country mayhem if you will, rather than all of them being in the Los Angeles area.
• The murderer also fails to kill anyone at midnight Mountain Time, a major break in his M.O. but one can’t expect too much from this sad sack of a killer.
• I’ll give the film credit for having the killer put a mask on “At the end of the movie” but as different as this was he could have at least picked a less lame mask.

 

I'll give it that a Stan Laurel mask is an interesting choice.

The film does try to make the identity of the killer seem like some kind of cool “twist” but for this to have worked we would have had to know more about Blaze, as it stands, we really don’t care all that much for Blaze or her weirdo family, so any third act reveals kind of falls flat, as did the stinger ending which was so clunkily handled that it’s quite laughable, and if they intended this to lead to a sequel even more so. That all said, there is a bit of charm to New Year’s Evil and cinematographer Thomas Ackerman really knew how to shoot L.A. and both Kip Niven and Grant Cramer elevated what was basically a pretty silly script into something quite compelling with their nicely unhinged performances. This may not be a top-tier slasher film but it’s far from the bottom of the barrel and is worth checking out.

 

Empire of the Ants (1977) – Review

In what would be the fourth adaptation of an H.G. Wells story, having already made three films loosely based on the novel “Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth,” producer Bert I. Gordon would tackle the short story “Empire of the Ants” in another “In name only” adaptation, and that's if we're being kind.

In the 1905 short “Empire of the Ants” H.G. Wells pointed out how man’s grip on the Earth was tenuous at best and that Mother Nature could always be relied upon to show humanity just how small and pathetic we are in the grand scheme of things, which is a fair assessment but such introspective thinking would not be found within the 89-minute running time of Bert I. Gordon’s Empire of the Ants, and while both the original story and this film version dealt with ants showing an advanced intelligence, Gordon would be making a movie that wasn't so much an adaptation of the Wells story but one that harkened back to the movies 1950 and the atomic age, an era of cinema that birthed such classic giant monster films as Them!

 

What could be more inspiring than James Arness fighting giant radioactive ants?

If one thing can be said about the filmography of Bert I. Gordon is that he really liked things that were BIG, making a career out of bringing the world of cinema an amazing collection of giant monster films that included such entries as The Amazing Colossal Man and the Beginning of the End, so a story about giant ants seemed right up Gordon’s alley, but the funny thing is, Wells didn’t write a story about giant ants, in fact, his short story dealt with ants that while large were only large by ant standards, about five to six centimetres in length, but in this movie, the ants appear to be about five to six feet in length, which one has to admit is a rather larger change from the source material, then again, who am I to argue with a B-Movie genius like Bert I. Gordon.

 

It's not like H.G. Well is around to complain.

The movie kicks off with the arrival of real estate swindler Marilyn Fryser (Joan Collins) and a bunch of her prospective clients to a nearby island to view some 'beachfront property' but we quickly learn that the land is useless, even before the discovery that the island is inhabited by giants ants, and once the “big” reveal occurs the story quickly unfolds much in the way of an “And then there were none” horror flick, with various people being killed off by the giant ants on their attempted journey to safety, with monstrous ants stepping in for axe-wielding maniacs. And just how did these ants become such a large menace? Well, if this film had been made in the 1950s it would most assuredly have been caused by atom bomb testing but as this movie takes place in the 1970s we get an environmental angle with the cause being related to the illegal dumping of radioactive waste.

 

I think these polluters may work for the villainous organization AIM from Marvel Comics.

But this movie isn’t just about a bunch of idiots being picked off one by one by giant ants, no siree, that’s just the lead up to the real goods, because before the story proper even started the film had opened with a narrator extolling the virtues of the ant, stating “This is the ant. Treat it with respect, for it may very well be the next dominant life form of our planet” and while that statement may seem a bit extreme the narration continues with a quick lesson on some of their remarkable abilities, such as their skill at building bridges, cultivating crops and that they even herd other insects like cattle, but the most remarkable aspect of the ant is their ability communicate via pheromones, with messages that cannot be disobeyed “A mind-bending substances that forces obedience” and this narration was a less than subtle way to set up the third act “Big Reveal” that when the remaining survivors eventually reach the local island town they are shocked to discover that the queen ant is using pheromones to control the human population, forcing them to work at the town’s sugar factory on behalf of their new ant overlords.

 

This is the kind of setup that Captain Kirk typically kicks the crap out of on a routine basis.

Of course, for a movie like this to work the cast of characters must include people for us to root for, as well as the obligatory members who we will delight in seeing eaten by giant ants, but in Empire of the Ants, they all kind of fall in the “Wouldn’t care if these people were eaten” category. First, we have the aforementioned real estate scammer Marilyn Fryser, who constantly berates her boy-toy assistant Charlie Pearson (Edward Power), then there is the gruff and stoic boat captain, Dan Stokely (Robert Lansing), who will be this film’s heroic leader, almost by default, then there is the recently unemployed Margaret Ellis (Jacqueline Scott) who is the closest we get to a sympathetic character in this movie, then there is sexual predator Robert Pine (Larry Graham), who will get kneed in the junk before getting eaten by ants, and Coreen Bradford (Pamela Susan Shoop) as the beautiful nut kicker, next there is deadbeat dad Joe Morrison (John David Carson) who the nut kicker actually seems interested in, for some reason, and finally, we have a couple of elderly time wasters and a pair of penny-pinchers to help fill out the menu, and the loss of any of them will not cause much in the way of emotional response from you the viewer, but to be fair, I was pretty much rooting for the ants from the start.

Note: I hope you like the giant ant multi-faceted POV shots because Bert I. Gordon sure did as we get to see a lot of them during the film’s 90-minute running time.

Bert I. Gordon got his start in the 50s by producing and directing a series of low-budget science fiction flicks that were notable for using various low-budget techniques to make things appear giant, sadly, decades later his budgets remained just as low and his techniques and skill as a special effects creator not much improved – Gordon didn’t just produce and direct he was also the writer and effects man on his films – and Empire the Ants utilized the same methods of making insects appear giant as he did back in 1957 in his giant locust movie Beginning of the End, as was the case in that film, Gordon would use full-scale puppets for those rare “close encounters” moments with the actors, which would rely on the use of “shaky-cam” to hide the fact that the models looked rather motheaten and cheap, but the primary technique would be to have real insects crawling up photographs and around miniature sets which led, of course, to the problem of these little creatures seen crawling up the sky.

 

I cannot stress enough how unconvincing and laughable this looks.

Stray Observations:

• For some strange reason the dudes doing the illegal dumping of toxic waste use barrels that are surprisingly buoyant, allowing them to quickly wash ashore, which seems like an odd way to “secretly” get rid of your nasty byproducts.
• Charlie states that “One in three people are here just for the boat ride” but it’s more like one out of ten and as there are only nine people on this particular excursion and that seems like a very bad business model.
• Marilyn uses a megaphone to deliver her spiel about the remarkable features of Dreamland Shores, despite her “clients” sitting five feet away from her. I’m getting a distinct impression that she’s not a good person.
• The script is a little fuzzy on the timeline, the film opens with the barrels of waste being dumped and then we see little ants lapping up toxic sludge, but before you can say “Our picnic is ruined” giant ants are running a little island empire. I think the movie is missing a title stating “Six months later” or something along those lines.
• The people in this movie have terrible peripheral visions as they fail to notice scores of giant ants, who are literally a stone’s throw away, which makes the viewer quickly wonder if any of them even deserve to survive.
• The group soon realizes that the ants are forcing them in one particular direction, with one character exclaiming “Oh my god, they are herding us like cattle!” but if that’s true the ants are really bad at herding because by this point in the film the ants have killed about half of the party.

 

“We need to find a phone, so I can call my agent.”

With those laughable bad effects and a collection of either annoyingly bad or just plain forgettable characters, there is not a lot to recommend about Bert I. Gordon’s Empire of the Ants and the name of H.G. Wells should not be mentioned in the same breath as this film, but when the third act goes all Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with an entire town mentally enslaved by the ants, it does reach a certain level of camp fun while also the stakes a little, unfortunately, it’s a case of too little too late because when the end credit abruptly roll we are left with a rather flat feeling of “Who cares?” and that is not a good way to conclude a monster movie.

The Food of the Gods (1976) – Review

The literary works of legendary science fiction author H.G. Wells have seen many cinematic adaptations, from such classics as the 1933 Universal horror film The Invisible Man to goofier and fun outings like Ray Harryhausen’s First Men in the Moon, but we will not be looking at such lofty adaptations today, instead, we will be checking out Bert I. Gordon’s The Food of the Gods, which at best could be called an “In Name Only” adaptation.

Legendary B-movie filmmaker Bert I. Gordon made name for himself by producing a series of low-budget giant monster films with such titles as The Amazing Colossal Man and Earth vs the Spider, so him tackling the H.G. Well book “The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth” must have seemed like a foregone conclusion at the time, but not only did he attempt to adapt that classic story he actually did it twice. In 1956 Gordon made an American teensploitation film called Village of the Giants, which pitted a group of giant-sized teenagers against the adult population, and while that film can be considered loosely based on the H.G. Well story the same can not be said about his second attempt, The Food of the Gods, which bares almost no semblance to the source material. This swing at the bat is more of a “Nature Amok” picture than it is an adaption of Wells’ satirical work of science fiction, not only were there no giant people in this movie – the key component and conflict in the book – any social satire from the novel were simply replaced by people being eaten by giant animals.

 

I smell a rat fink and I think it's me.

The protagonist of this film is a football player named Morgan (Marjoe Gortner), who along with his teammate Davis (Chuck Courtney) and the team’s press agent Brian (John Cypher), decide to take a little hunting trip only to find themselves the ones being hunted. The film does give us a little bit of classic foreshadowing with Morgan’s opening narration informing us that “My father used to say, "Morgan, one of these days the Earth will get even with Man for messing her up with his garbage. Just let Man continue to pollute the Earth the way he is, and nature will rebel. It's gonna be one hell of a rebellion." That bit of expo-dump clearly puts this film in the subcategory of “Eco-Horror” and the isolated island they visit is a perfect location for a group of disparate strangers to band together against a bunch of giant killer animals, a situation that is kicked off when one of the three friends is killed by giant wasps.

 

This is why you should always travel with an EpiPen.

The basic plot of this "adaptation" stems from a mysterious bubbling food that local farmers Mr. and Mrs. Skinner (John McLiam and Ida Lupino) discover causes their farm animals to grow when ingested, and believing this substance is a “Gift from God” Mr. Skinner heads to the mainland to find a buyer so that the two of them can become rich from this all-natural miracle food. Unfortunately, some of the local pests have gotten into this “Food of the Gods” and soon giant wasps, grubs and rats are rampaging all over the woods in search of some nice human morsels. Watching this film one must believe that Bert I. Gordon never intended for anyone to take any of it seriously, especially considering the script includes such comical lines as “Where in the hell did you get those goddamn chickens?” which was brilliantly delivered by Marjoe Gortner to co-star Ida Lupino, and you can’t help but believe that everyone was in on the joke.

 

In what universe are giant chickens not hilarious?

To round out the cast of hapless humans we have an expectant couple, Thomas (Tom Stovall) and Rita (Belinda Balaski), whose Winnebago has broken down and left them stranded on this island of the damned, then we have Jack Bensington (Ralph Meeker), who has been sold the bill of goods on this remarkable mystery food by Mr. Skinner and has brought along his company’s bacteriologist Lorna (Pamela Franklin) to verify the findings. There really isn’t much of a plot to this film, which is to be expected with this kind of thing and most of its 98-minute time consists of people running around shouting at each other or shooting at giant whatevers and not much else. As a producer, writer, and director, as well as a special visual effects artist, it cannot be denied that a Bert I. Gordon film is a Bert I. Gordon film, and if not everything on camera makes perfect sense one can be a little forgiving due to the sheer willpower put behind such a production, that all said, Marjoe Gortner’s character is such a pompous jackass, who gets his friend killed for no reason, that it’s really hard to rally behind what is happening on screen and I found myself starting to side with the rats.

Note: Marjoe Gortner played a lunatic National Guardsman in the disaster epic Earthquake and his character here is just as nuts, so I kept hoping George Kennedy would show up and shoot him.

The special effects utilized to bring off these giant creatures were a mixed bag, anytime an optical effect was required things tended to be a little transparent, but the full-scale rat puppets used to attack the actors were really quite impressive and Bert I. Gordon was not one to skimp on the gore and thus we get some nice bloody scenes of people being mercilessly gnawed on by the giant rats. It should also be noted that horror movies of this era often had one or two veterans from Hollywood’s Golden Era to add a little prestige to the proceedings, and as was the case with Olivia de Havilland in The Swarm this entry offers up Ida Lupino to class up the joint and she does a fairly good job here, even if she wrote her own death scene so that she could leave the production early and go home, despite the fact that the original script she was one of the final survivors.

 

“I’ve worked with Bogart and Errol Flynn, I don’t have to put up with this shit!”

Stray Observations:

• The credits state that the film is “Based on a Portion of the Novel by H.G. Wells” which is probably their way of saying “We didn’t finish reading the book.”
• Morgan doesn’t want to tell the District Attorney that their friend was killed by “something large” because he’s afraid they’d think they were crazy, but a quick trip to the Skinner farm would easily verify their story. Did he think Mrs. Skinner was going to go and hide her giant chickens?
• Brian tells Morgan that the coroner had informed him that “From the amount of poison in his body, he estimates that Davis was stung by no less than two-hundred and fifty wasps” but did the coroner not notice that the body didn’t have two hundred and fifty stinger holes? And I’m betting the stinger of a giant wasp would make a rather and noticeable nasty hole.
• Brian thinks Morgan’s idea of driving around in an open jeep on an island infested with giant rats is a rather stupid idea, which it is, in fact, Morgan’s whole sanctimonious attitude probably causes more problems than it solves. If he’d simply notified the authorities in the first place none of what follows would have happened.
• Morgan’s plan to electrify the wire fence that spans the island, so as to keep the rats at bay, was as futile as it was stupid because the fence runs right into the water on each side of the island, so the minute he turned on the generator it's obvious that it would immediately short it out.
• Morgan’s second plan to defeat the rats involves blowing up a nearby dam, thus flooding the area and drowning the rats, but the dam we see is about ten feet high and at most, it would cause an ankle-deep flood because it's not like this island is a valley.

 

I would love for anyone to explain how you flood an island like this.

One element that really harms this “Animals Amok” entry is that the rats Bert I. Gordon used were not all that terrifying, while the puppeteered worms and wasps were properly horrifying the rats Gordon utilized were all rather cute looking, like the ones you’d find at your average pet store and not the nasty ugly variety known to populate the New York City sewer system, thus the sight of these cute little critters scampering around miniatures sets was about as scary as that old children’s show Tales of the Riverbank with Hammy Hamster.

 

“Do any of you guys know how to drive a Winnebago?”

Where this film remains unique is in the fact that while it falls into the category of the eco-horror genre it doesn’t really have the typical environmental stance often found in such pictures – pesticides or mad science has nothing to do with these giant creatures – and though we do get an evil capitalist the only death he’s responsible is for his own. Now, the book was about people becoming giants and animals being affected was just the first part of the story, but the movie does end with the mysterious goo being consumed by dairy cows and the closing scene is of schoolchildren unwittingly drinking the tainted milk, so this film could be called a prequel to the novel, if you close one eye and squint. Basically, as an adaptation of the novel this movie is a bit of a joke but it's also a fun eco-horror film that you and your friends can have a good time watching over pizza and beer while dumb people are eaten by large carnivorous Muppets.

Village of the Giants (1965) – Review

What would you get if you mixed the premise of the H.G. Wells story “Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth” with that of the beach party film genre? Now, no one in their right mind would even posit such a question but questionable sanity was never really a concern of producer/writer/director Bert I. Gordon and thus in the mid-60s he would take his penchant for “size-themed movies” and blend it with some '60s teen culture, what could go wrong?

From the film’s opening psychedelic credit sequence, with half-naked teens gyrating to some 60s pop music in wild technicolour, you know exactly what kind of movie you are about to watch and that pretty much sums up the films of Bert I. Gordon a man who doesn’t just deliver a film on an incredibly small budget he also makes a product that completely fulfills the promise of said story, no matter how goofy or bizarre. And just how messed up and bizarre is this film? Well, the very first scene is a bunch of teens stumbling out of their car after it wrecks during a rainstorm, and by stumbling, I mean they come out of the wreck dancing and gyrating like complete lunatics while reaching for more beer.

 

If this is Counterculture I want nothing to do with it.

Meanwhile, over in the nearby town of Hainesville, an eleven-year-old named “Genius” (Ron Howard) has accidentally stumbled upon a growth formula while playing with his chemistry set in the basement, as kids of this ear were apt to do, while his sister Nancy (Charla Doherty) and her boyfriend Mike (Tommy Kirk) make out on the living room couch, but when the formula turns the neighbour cat into a giant feline it takes Mike no time to realize the money-making potential of such a formula would have. A quick test resulting in two giant ducks proves that the formula can make them a mint with giant livestock, unfortunately, the group of rowdy teens from the film’s opening have made their way into town, crashing at the closed-down theatre, and they have a close encounter with gigantic ducks when the fowls turn up at the local nightclub. The leader of the group, Fred (Beau Bridges), decides a little industrial espionage is in order so he and his girlfriend (Joy Harmon) try and seduce the secret of the growth formula from Mike and Nancy.

 

I hope those giant ducks didn’t shit on the dance floor.

The out-of-town teens' scheme to learn the secret of the growth formula, and while seduction fails, they are ultimately successful with a little breaking and entering, escaping with a sample of the “Goo” and returning to the theatre to make their plans. Then with a colossally stupid turn of events, Fed is goaded into trying some of the Goo himself – he is called “chicken” and no self-respecting leader can let something like that stand – and so he slices of the sample into eight portions, and everyone partakes, but what exactly does one do when you’ve turned yourself into a thirty-foot giant? Why, you decide to take over the town, of course. That Mike hitting giant Fred across the shin with a chair actually hurt makes it clear that these giants are far from invulnerable and so they take Sheriff’s (Joe Turkel) little girl hostage to insure their safety and then demand that everyone in town hand over their guns, which they do. With the adults proving themselves to be completely inept, it’s up to the town’s teens to step in and save the day. The first attempt involves Mike and company trying to rope Fred up like Gulliver from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, but this fails when Nancy is taken hostage as well.

 

Is a side effect of the giant formula osteoporosis, cause those are damn skinny legs.

With the still adults paralyzed by ineptness and the “Gulliver Plan” turning out to be a complete bust, Mike turns to Genius to make them a supply of ether, so that they can neutralize the one giant left guarding the hostage while Mike attempts to distract the rest of them by playing David and Goliath with his puny sling. What’s interesting here is that while the plan to knock out one of the giants works, with one of our heroic teens dropping onto the chest of a giantess to drug her with a giant swab soaked in ether, the day is not saved by our intrepid teens as that honour goes to Genius, who accidentally discovered an antidote to his original creation and he rides over on his bicycle with a pail full of the fuming antidote, that then reverts all the giants back to normal size.

 

“Defeated by Opie Taylor, we’ll never live this down.”

Stray Observations:

• This would be Bert I. Gordon’s second of three “adaptations” of H.G. Wells's story Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth, with the first being Beginning of the End and the latter one actually being called Food of the Gods.
• This movie was filmed in something the studio called "Perceptovision" which was just another gimmick like “Smell-O-Vision” and like most of these types of gimmicks it didn’t add to the film at all.
• One of the giants is seen reading an issue of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" that has War of the Colossal Beast on the cover because Bert I. Gordon loves self-promotion.
• The cat in this film was the same feline used in the classic science fiction film The Incredible Shrinking Man, and I must ask “Is that typecasting?”
• That all the citizens of a small American town are willing to hand over their guns is a bigger piece of fantasy than that of giant teenagers.
• After the antidote reverts Fred and his pals back to normal size the Sheriff just allows them to leave as if kidnapping and holding an entire town in a grip of fear wasn’t actually a crime.
• The movie ends with the now normal-sized teens meeting a travelling band of little people who have heard about the growth formula, but as the giants had destroyed all communications in and out of the town, I’m not sure how this was possible.
• Science fiction films dealing with animals or people growing tend to ignore where all that extra mass is coming from, if we were dealing with magic that would be one thing, but this is supposed to be a scientific growth formula not a wish from a genie.
• On the money-making side of things, what would the cost of producing enough food to keep your giant livestock healthy be? Would a giant cow eat less or more than three normal-sized cows?

 

“I’m just an eleven-year-old mad scientist, I don’t worry about things like cost efficiency.”

Bert I. Gordon’s Village of the Giants is perfect drive-in fare as not only does it center around fun and a goofy group of teen protagonists and antagonists, with adults being completely useless, the film is padded with several musical numbers that will allow teens in their parked cars plenty of make-out time without there being in danger of them missing any important “plot” moments, and the movie itself will give any guy in the audience plenty to look at as we get endless views of partially naked female bodies gyrating to the rhythms of the Beau Brummell's or Freddy Cannon, in fact, this film should have been called Village of the Giants: The Male Gaze.

 

I’d say Doctor Freud would have a field day with this movie.

What a modern viewer will get out of watching Valley of the Giants is the novelty of seeing a young Beau Bridges in a toga and an even younger Ronny Howard as the film’s boy genius, both of whom actually give really fun performances in this outing, we also have Disney mainstay Tommy Kirk as the hero, sadly, he’s pretty forgettable along with the rest of the cast and kind of annoying.  As to the special effects and photographic trickery utilized to create the film’s titular giants, well that is actually done surprisingly well for a film that was clearly on a shoestring budget, add to this the fact that the film is quickly paced and you’ve got yourself a nice little sci-fi flick that is about as entertaining as one could expect to find in a story about giant rebels without a clue.

Earth vs. the Spider (1958) – Review

If you need a giant monster on a small budget look no further than B-movie master Bert I. Gordon, a man who brought colossal entertainment to the big screen on almost non-existent budgets, with such films as The Cyclops and Attack of the Puppet People, but with Earth vs. the Giant Spider he brought a little of his trademark magic to the classic “giant bug” genre.

In 1955 director Jack Arnold made the classic Tarantula for Universal Pictures, which dealt with a mad scientist creating a miracle growth formula, and three years later Bert I. Gordon would take a crack at the subject matter – minus the mad scientist and with a few teenagers tossed in for good measure – but with a considerably lesser budget than what Jack Arnold had for his giant bug picture Earth vs. the Spider relied on cheap optical effects and an overzealous cast of characters to sell the idea to the public. It should be known that Bert I. Gordon doesn’t mess around when it comes to getting the action going, something required when your pictures are often just a little over an hour in length, and this film gets off with a bang as we open with a dad, Jack Flynn (Merritt Stone), racing home to deliver a birthday bracelet to his daughter Carol (June Kenney), and his journey home is cut short when his pickup truck is intercepted by the title creature and he never makes it home. The next morning a worried Carol convinces her boyfriend, Mike Simpson (Eugene Persson), to help her search for her missing father and because the power of boners is strong, he agrees. After finding her father's overturned pickup truck they investigate a nearby cave, one rumoured to have had many people enter but not all having returned, and their concerns are quickly justified when they come across a skeleton.

 

“If that’s my dad, he’s lost a lot of weight.”

Things don’t get much better when the two intrepid teenagers stumble off a rocky ledge and fall into what appears to be a giant spider web, to which Carol and Mike quickly extricate themselves, but not before a giant spider appears and chases them out of the cave. Needless to say, when they get back to town nobody believes their story about a giant spider and it’s up to their high school science teacher, Mr. Kingman (Ed Kemmer), to convince the town’s sheriff (Gene Roth) to round up a search party to check out their claims. Armed with rifles and large amounts of DDT our intrepid authority figures enter the cave system and soon find Jack's desiccated body, much to Carol’s anguish, but before anyone has time to mourn the poor man the giant spider makes its appearance and it is up to our heroes to put it down by spraying DDT throughout the cavern. Now, I’m not sure why they thought it was necessary to climb onto the giant spiderweb to spray the cavern, but I’m not the expert here.

 

Darwinism at work, folks.

The Sheriff wants to seal the "apparently dead" arachnid in the cave but Kingman, being a man of science, talks him out of it and claims they need to study the carcass so that they can figure out why it grew so large, stating that “We have to put an end to it. Otherwise, there may be more giant spiders coming into the world, they may even be hatching from their eggs in some remote spot, right now. You realize how easy it would be for them to overcome us humans? Then instead of being the hunters, we’d become the hunted. They’d be our masters, they’d live on us.” And sure, that’s pretty fine speech and there is a very reasonable point at its center, but it’s pretty much forgotten after this as the threat of a global spider epidemic is never addressed again. The lifeless body of the spider is taken back to town to the high school gym, where Kingman hopes to not only study the creature but get reimbursed for his expenses by the university, unfortunately, a group of rock and roll teenagers decide to use the gym to practice their music and soon an impromptu dance breaks out that awakens the not at all dead giant spider.

 

Cue giant monster rampage.

As mentioned, this is a very low-budget affair so we don’t really get much in the way of a rampage on display, though one shot of a deserted street and a crying baby covered in blood was really quite effective, and the film's required optical work to composite the creature amongst the town’s streets and screaming populace resulted in a lot of moments where the giant spider is either transparent or not quite making contact with the ground. As this was a "Bert I. Gordon Production" he was not only the producer and director of the film but he is also credited for its special technical effects, and they are definitely special, but this kind of thing only adds to the charm of these type of films and Gordon is a master at giving just enough “magic” to keep his audience entertained.

Note: It is always important for your cast of characters to take things seriously, if the audience is going to buy into the conceit of a giant monster attacking a town, and the actors in this movie give it their all in this picture.

Stray Observations:

• The town's theatre is playing a double feature of The Amazing Colossal Man and Attack of the Puppet People, which were both Bert I. Gordon pictures and also starred June Kenney.
• The interior of the "unexplored" natural caverns was extremely well-lit. It’s nice to see that even giant spiders have an appreciation for good lighting.
• Our heroes find numerous human skeletons littering the cave but seem rather nonplussed as to their identities.
• Movies like this will often have scientists around to give out the required expository dialogue but the one in Earth vs. the Spider is really bad at his job as he keeps calling the spiders “insects” instead of arachnids.
• While lost in the cave, Carol and Mike find a skeleton with the words on the cave wall above it “George Weston Lost April 9, 1902” written on the cave wall above it, and Carol remarks, “He must have starved to death. I’m getting awful worried, Mike.” Which wins Carol the understatement of the year award.
• The actors portraying high school kids are either in their late 20s or early 30s and are even less convincing as teenagers than Steve McQueen was in The Blob.

 

I bet these guys bring a quart of malt liquor to their teacher instead of an apple.

Bert I. Gordon’s Earth vs. the Spider is a quick and fun romp through the giant monster genre, with good use of Bronson Canyon and the Carlsbad Caverns where our heroes seem to wander around endlessly, but the one thing this movie was really missing is a kicker ending, showing a bunch of giant spider eggs hatching, and that just screams missed opportunity. Overall, this low-budget entry promises and delivers exactly what was expected and who can really ask for more than that?

Tourist Trap (1979) – Review

Going on a road trip with friends may seem like a lot of fun, with America’s open roads unfolding before you like an endless smorgasbord, but that is only until you take that one unfortunate detour and find yourself running from a chainsaw-wielding maniac or being hunted by a group of children through a cornfield, and this is why I generally fly to places like Disney World or Cancun, statistically speaking, it's still the safest way to travel.  It was in 1979 that director writer-director David Schmoeller conceived of a truly horrifying pit stop in the form of Tourist Trap, a film sporting a telekinetic killer and some of the most bizarre roadside attractions ever collected.

What would Stephen King’s Carrie White be like if she had a sadistic sense of humour? David Schmoeller’s Tourist Trap does its best to answer that burning question in a rather fun if derivative horror film, one that pits a group of attractive people against a telekinetic madman who is obsessed with mannequins and wax sculptures, and these sculptures aren't exactly what they appear to be. The film opens with a young man named Woody (Keith McDermott) rolling a tire down a desolate road, we later learn that he blew a tire, and his girlfriend Eileen (Robin Sherwood) is waiting for his return, but he does not return because he has a close encounter of the telekinetic kind in an abandoned gas station and is killed. Woody and Eileen’s other friends, Becky (Tanya Roberts), Jerry (Jon Van Ness), and Molly (Jocelyn Jones), who were travelling in a different vehicle, come across the stranded Eileen and as a group, they decide to search for good ole Woody. In their search, they come across a picturesque waterfall and the girls choose to take a dip, enter roadside museum proprietor Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors), who offers them a ride back to his place for help. You may now start the egg timer to mark the remaining moments of their lives.

Note: The character of Molly dresses like she is going to a 1930s Church Social while her friends Becky and Eileen are wearing cut-off denim shorts and tube tops, clearly, Molly knows the appropriate outfit to wear to become the Final Girl.

This film’s particular tourist trap is an old roadside stop that is filled with mechanical wax figures, a place called Slausen’s Lost Oasis, but it is more than a simple tourist destination, as the film title has a double meaning, this place is a literal trap. Our cast of young idiots are soon separated, after being warned not to go outside in the dark, and much of the film will consist of this gallant bunch of morons wandering around either the dark woods or the even darker hallways, calling out to each other incessantly. Mysterious elements are slowly introduced, such as a weird mannequin of Slausen’s late wife and the whereabouts of Slausen’s brother Davey, who may or may not actually exist, but all of this is just window dressing to the weirdness of Slausen’s world, one full of animated mannequins and grotesque figures in bizarre masks.

 

“Oh my god, they killed Gilligan!”

Stray Observations and Spoilers Below:

• Mr. Slausen states that "Once they moved the highway, I'm afraid we lost most of our business" which is a direct quote from Hitchcock’s film Psycho, and I assume was used here to illustrate how progress creates crazed murderers. At least that’s the impression I got.
• Horror icon Linnea Quigley has an uncredited role as one of the animated mannequins, that she did not get a bigger part in this film is a crime that I will not forgive
• This is one of the rare slasher films without any nudity at all, despite the three main girls going skinny dipping, and it’s even stranger when you consider that Tanya Roberts would later have nude bathing scenes in both The Beastmaster and Sheena.
• Jerry escapes the house, running in one direction while Molly runs in the other with Mr. Slausen hard on her heels, but during the film’s big finale Jerry shows up and is revealed to have been turned into one of Slausen’s mannequins, yet we are given no clue as to how Slausen had recaptured Jerry.
• That none of the characters tumble to the fact that Mr. Slausen and his masked murderous brother Davey are one and the same just proves that their deaths are nothing more than a simple cleaning out of the gene pool.

 

I call this Darwinism by way of a psychopathic killer.

There is something innately creepy about mannequins, the Twilight Zone episode “After Hours” being an especially effective use of our collective fear of these rigid imposters of humanity, and director David Schmoeller really knows his stuff when it comes to orchestrating truly nightmare-inducing moments, and Slausen’s telekinetic ability to move the mannequins around heightens the horror of the situation, that said, the film does borrow heavily from other horror films, the setting has a very Texas Chainsaw Massacre feel to it and the telekinesis from Stephen King’s Carrie is on full display, the villains' dissociative identity disorder is clearly lifted from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Slausen turning his victims into mannequins themselves is a page right of the Vincent Price classic House of Wax.

 

Safety Tip: Avoid dinner parties at the Slausen’s.

Strangely enough, all those borrowed elements work surprisingly well together, as if ingredients in some bizarre stew, and at any point in the story when something seems to break with logic Schmoeller is able to fall back on the film’s intrinsic dreamlike quality, or nightmare landscape to be more accurate, as we the viewer can never be sure that what they are seeing is actually happening because it could be just a broken nightmare vision of one of the characters. That Slausen’s supernatural ability is never explained works to the film’s benefit, as does the simple backstory of his murdering his wife and brother for having a sexual tryst behind his back, and when the film finally wraps up, we are just as broken as the movie’s last “surviving” character.

 

"I am the world's first fully functioning homicidal artist."

This low-budget horror film from Full Moon Entertainment may have plundered many ingredients from other better films but the core story and cast of characters on display here are quite excellent, with a special shout out to Chuck Connors in a role that he took on with gusto, and it all goes towards making a visit to this particular tourist trap well worth the time.  Note: That this thing was rated PG boggles the mind and that soft rating was certainly a detriment to its box office success as the hard "R" ruled this genre.

Sheena (1984) – Review

In the 80s comic book-based movies were not quite the marketable thing they are today, the Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn’t even a twinkle in Kevin Feige's eye yet, so when producer Paul Aratow began to bandy around the idea of bringing this old 1940s comic character to the big screen he was really going out on a limb, and while I give him credit for having balls to go with a "superhero flick" as female leads at the time was far from the norm, but it'd have been nice if he'd managed to come up with a viable concept for this film and avoided producing one of the biggest cinematic duds of the decade.

Premiering in 1938 the comic book "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle" told the story of an orphan girl who had been raised by an African witch doctor and somehow developed the ability to communicate with wild animals, basically she was a female Tarzan, but it should be noted that she was the first female comic book character with her own title and it was a successful title at that and it spawned several adaptations over the years, including a cool 26-episode television series in 1956, but when the 1980s rolled around a big-screen version was brought to life, one that was very loosely based on its comic book cousin.

 

Jayne Mansfield or Veronica Lake could have played Sheena back in the day.

The movie opens with a pair of idiots investigating rumours of a mystical "healing earth" whose powers are said to flow forth from the sacred Gudjara Mountain, but their investigation ends in tragedy, both of them killed in a cave-in, leaving their young daughter an orphan and to be raised by the Shaman of the Zambouli tribe (Princess Elizabeth of Toro), who states to her people that “The prophecy has come to pass. When the sacred mountain cries out. A golden god-child will come from the depths of Gudjara and she shall grow in wisdom and be the protector of the Zambouli and all their creatures. And she shall be called Sheena.” You have to admit that’s a lot of pressure to lay on a little girl who's barely out of diapers. With a nice little montage of Sheena (Tanya Roberts) growing up, where she learns much from the Shaman about the lore of the jungle and the ways of all its creatures, as well as her telepathic communication with these animals, she is soon ready to be the Lord of the Jungle…sorry, I mean Queen of the Jungle.

Note: The roles that Tanya Roberts choose seemed to often include bathing by a waterfall.  She skinny-dipped in the horror film Tourist Trap and bathed nude in this film, as well as in The Beastmaster.  To be fair, If you got something that works I guess you stick with it.

Of course, this film isn’t just about communing with nature and nude bathing, if only that were the case, as we also have a plot concerning the assassination of an African King (Clifton Jones), with his Prince Otwani (Trevor Thomas) conspiring with his brother's fiancée, Countess Zanda (France Zobda), so that they can exploit the Zambouli land, which turns out to be rich in titanium, and the framing of the Zambouli Shaman for the crime. There to document what he thinks to be a simple puff piece about Prince Otwani and his post-sports career life is reporter Vic Casey (Ted Wass) and his comic relief cameraman Fletch Agronsky (Donovan Scott), who accidentally films evidence that would prove that the Shaman did not kill the king. This leads to all our main characters crossing paths during a jailbreak, a rescue that does succeed, kind of, because the Shaman still dies of her wounds and this results in Vic and Sheena being on the run from Prince Otwani and his small mercenary army.  This chase takes up the bulk of the film and it's less than thrilling. Lucky for Sheena, but not us, her ability to call for "animal assistance" keeps the two of them one step ahead of the bad guys.

 

“Can we see if there is a Motel 6 anywhere around here?”

What is nice is the fact that the film was shot on location in Kenya and the photography is quite spectacular, as is the wildlife action that animal handler Hubert Wells executed to bring this story to life; including lions, some elephants, a pair of chimps and a rhino – the flamingo attack on a helicopter, not so much, but the rest of the film’s bestiary is excellent – and the final jungle fight between the Zambouli and the mercenaries is quite fun, giving us some truly good pulp movie carnage to keep even the most jaded ten-year-old happy, unfortunately, the film’s “White Savior” trope was already problematic by this point in time yet director John Guillermin decided to double down on this idiocy with a scene of Sheena, surrounded by her African tribe, proclaiming “See! Even in chains, we can defeat them! Turn your minds back, my people. Remember yourselves a thousand, a thousand moons ago! Bring your bows!” and this moment is embarrassing beyond words.

 

“Have any of you people seen Roots?”

Stray Observations:

• On my list of things I never needed to see, please add the sight of a thirteen-year girl riding topless on a zebra. Just no.
• In the comic book, Sheena could communicate with animals, much in the way Tarzan did in the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, but for this movie, she now has some form of telepathy with the beasts, which is an idea one must assume they borrowed from The Beastmaster, which also starred Tanya Roberts.
• Coming down in the hotel elevator, Ted and Fletch are shocked when the elevator door opens to reveal a group of mercenaries readying for battle, but why were these guys stationed right outside the elevator? If you want to keep your planned coupe secret maybe don’t hang out in the lobby.
• If Prince Otwani was always planning to assassinate his brother what was the point of sneaking in his own personal mercenaries, with his brother dead he becomes king and thus there is no need for his own army. Now, if he was staging a military coup that would make some sense but with the whole “Framing the Zambouli” plan it's completely unnecessary.
• For the prison break, where Sheena and her animal friends bust the Shaman out of an armed military compound, composer Richard Hartley decided to go with some sort of acoustic guitar love theme, which is not what you’d expect to hear during a supposed action sequence.
• When Vick kisses Sheena, she says, “Mouths were given us to eat with. Why did you touch yours to mine?” but she was raised by the Zambouli tribe, not wolves, did the people of her tribe not kiss?  Is this type of affection not known in the jungles of Africa?
• It’s also kind of hilarious that during the Shaman’s entire death monologue we have the elephant in the background digging her grave because there's no sense in waiting until she's cold.

 

I kept expecting the Shaman to cry out “I’m not dead yet.”

The film's cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis does a great job of capturing the beauty and power of the African landscape, and as mentioned, the animals are fantastic here and are the true stars of this movie, but I swear film composer Richard Hartley thought he was writing the score for a sequel to Chariots of Fire and not a pulp adventure film as almost every piece of music suffers from a complete disconnect from what we are actually being shown on screen. But the true criminal here is John Guillermin whose direction is amateurish at best and with what looks to be a complete misunderstanding of the subject matter, and this is the man who directed Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure and Tarzan Goes to India, which are arguably two of the better entries in Tarzan’s Cinematic Career, and while you can laugh at Tanya Roberts as she gazes blankly into space while spouting some of the most inane dialogue imaginable, I'd have to lay a lot of the blame for her performance on Guillermin whose direction is more than suspect.

Note: Tanya Roberts pressing her fist to her forward, as she telepathically communes with the animals, never stops looking wonderfully silly.  Is she calling her animal friends or suffering from Brain Freeze?

It should be noted that Will Eisner and Jerry Iger, the creators of Sheena, weren’t even credited for this movie, but I'm guessing it’s safe to say that neither one of them would have been too upset if they'd learned of this snub. Though to be fair completely fair to the filmmakers, taking a character from the 40s and trying to make a modern adventure film out of it was always going to be tricky, and one has to give credit where credit is due in the willingness to produce a female-led action movie during a period in time where this was still quite rare, sadly, with a terrible script from Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Newman, which included some truly laughable dialogue, and acting that ranged from bad to "what the hell they thinking" there was no way this film was going to be a success, but it does remain entertainingly bad and if watched with the right mindset you will probably have a good time.

The Beastmaster (1982) – Review

The 80s were a booming time for sword and sorcery films and the year 1982 in particular, with such fantastical films as John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian, Albert Pyun’s The Sword and the Sorcerer and Jack Hill’s bizarre entry of Sorceress crowding the theatres, but today we will be looking at another jewel in that particular crown, one that starred Marc Singer and the beautiful Tanya Roberts in a film simply titled The Beastmaster.

This film was based on renowned science fiction author Andre Norton's 1959 science fiction novel The Beast Master, which centred around a former soldier who had empathic and telepathic connections with a group of genetically altered animals and the story took place on far-off planets, needless to say, not much of the source made its way into the screenplay by Paul Pepperman and Don Coscarelli as they only kept the telepathic bond with animals and jettisoned pretty much everything else, they simply plopped the hero down into a world familiar to fans of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs and made a movie that was kind of a throwback to the old Steve Reeves sword and sandal movies. This is a world of dark sorcery, vile villains, weird monsters and beautiful women, this is the world of The Beastmaster.

 

“I wonder if I could trade this thing in for a blaster?”

Even though the throughline of The Beastmaster follows the basic structure of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” when you watch the film you can’t help but be a little impressed with how many stories they managed to cram into just two hours. The film opens with an evil high priest named Maxx (Rip Torn) being told a prophecy by his three witches, that he will die at the hands of King Zed's unborn son, not wanting that to happen he sends one of his witches to kidnap and kill the child, who is teleported out of his mother’s womb and into that of an ox, but before she can finish the job and sacrifice the babe to their dark god, a villager (Ben Hammer) rescues the child and then takes him away to raise him as his own in the village of Emur. The child grows up to be a great warrior, named Dar (Marc Singer), who over time, develops an ability to telepathically communicate with animals. Unfortunately, this talent does not help save his village from the Jun horde, a fanatic bunch of barbarians who have allied themselves with Maax, but having witnessed his people being slaughtered Dar decides to journey to Aruk to avenge them.

 

“Can your scrying pool get HBO?”

Along the way, Dar picks up some travelling companions to help him on his quest, a golden eagle he names Sharak, and a pair of thieving ferrets he names Kodo and Podo, who save him from quicksand, though to be fair it should be pointed out that they caused him to fall into it in the first place, and his final animal ally is a black tiger named Ruh, who he rescues from a group of Jun warriors. Now, animal companions are great and all but you can’t have a proper sword and sorcery film without a pretty damsel in distress and for this film that comes in the form of a slave girl named Kiri (Tanya Roberts), who Dar spies upon while she’s bathing nude by a beautiful waterfall – it should be noted that he uses his tiger to con a kiss out of the half-naked girl, making our noble hero just a little flawed – and like many young men of the 80s, the sight of Tanya Roberts coming out of the pool topless was a nice way to be ushered into puberty.

 

“Can someone bring me a towel, this water is freezing!”

This may seem like a lot is going on but where not even at the film’s halfway point, soon after his close encounter with Kiri he has a more disturbing encounter with an eerie half-bird, half-human race who dissolve their prey for nourishment, wrapping their victims in the bat-like wings to basically drink them until they are but a gooey mess, but Dar is spared such a fate because, apparently, this race of maneaters worship eagles and when Dar summons Sharak they spare him and give him an amulet. But who exactly are these mysterious and dangerous creatures, you ask? And what is this strange amulet and why did they give it to Dar? I hope you don’t expect an answer to those questions because other than the amulet kind of working as a “Get out of dire circumstances free card” we never do find what their whole deal was.

 

“Give our agents a call and we’ll do lunch.”

After that chance encounter, one that will give many a young viewers nightmares, Dar will finally arrive at the city of Aruk, where discovers that Maax has now assumed total control and is having a great time sacrificing the children of the city to his dark god, needless to say, this doesn’t sit too well with our hero but as we're still not quite at the halfway point of the film, he can’t completely thwart Maxx, at least not yet, thus he is able to save one of the two children being sacrificed – way to go, Dar, you da man – just before learning that Kiri is set to be sacrificed as well and that just won’t stand. On his way to save her, Dar is joined by the deposed King’s younger son Tal (Josh Milrad) and his bodyguard Seth (John Amos), neither one of whom realizes just yet that Dar is the King’s long-lost first child. What follows here is a bunch of running around by our heroes, a couple of fun rescues, a few skirmishes with Jun soldiers and a big fiery showdown that pits our small band of heroes against insurmountable odds.

 

He may not have been as large as Arnold Schwarzenegger but Singer was certainly ripped.

Stray Observations:

• The three witches who tell high priest Maax of the prophecy come from a long tradition of such trios, dating back to the Stygian witches of Greek mythology, the three Norns of Norse mythology and the witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and like in most cases of prophecy any attempt to thwart them will most likely result in fulfilling them.
• When an evil priest tells you that your unborn child must be cut out of the womb and sacrificed to his god, and all you can come up with is “I could have you killed” but then you don't kill him and only banish the evil bastard, well, the following events are kind of on you.
• The houses of the village of Emur are built on towering stilts but the village is located on a mountainous plain so flash flooding is certainly not a threat, and the walls that surround them should keep the residents safe from predators, so why build your homes so high off the ground? And this impractical design certainly didn’t stop them from being slaughtered by the Jun horde.
• Dar runs around in nothing but a loin cloth and his animal friends as his companions to help him on his adventures, basically, he’s Conan the Barbarian meets Tarzan.
• The half-bird, half-human race that Dar encounters gives off a very strong Mahar vibe from the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel At the Earth’s Core.
• Tal is brother to Dar, and they are both sons of King Zed, but as Dar’s mother died while he was snatched from the womb who exactly is Tal’s mother? Later in the film, we find King Zed a blind old man imprisoned in the Temple of Ar and I’m left wondering “When was he allowed to get married and have another child?”
• This film gives us a classic villain move, where the hero thinks he’s killed the bad guy only for him to pop up for one final attack because heroes are notoriously bad at finishing the job until the end credits roll.
• Under Dar’s command, the people of Aruk pull up the drawbridge and cover the tar moat that surrounds the city, so that the mounted Juns will ride into it, but the Juns had allied themselves with Maax years ago so they should have been quite familiar with the city’s defences.

 

“I rely on the stupidity of strangers.”

Don Coscarelli’s The Beastmaster has all the ingredients of the pulp adventure tales of the 30s and 40s, and even its plot structure has that same episodic nature of those stories, the one misstep here is in having Dar confront and kill Maxx, the film’s primary antagonist, with over twenty minutes remaining and then having the film’s final confrontation being with the Jun chieftain, who has had barely any screen time and absolutely no character depth other to look like he stepped out of a Frank Frazetta painting. Even stranger is the fact that once Dar defeats the “Death Dealer” our heroes are about to get wiped out by the remaining warriors of the Jun horde, who outnumber and surround Dar and his friends, only to be saved by those weird birdmen from earlier in the film, in what must be one of the most bizarre Deus ex machina in cinema history.

Note: The film's use of in-camera effects is quite extraordinary and their foreground model work is especially fantastic, not to mention all the amazing practical make-up effects for the various creatures.

Now, I don’t expect hard and fast logic in my fantasy movies but when a group of weird-ass monsters show up to save the hero in the climax of your film, that’s a problem, not to mention Coscarelli breaking a narrative rule by introducing this really cool bladed throwing weapon, given to him by his dying foster father, but then he never even uses the bloody thing! He just gives it to his little brother and then fucks off with Tanya Roberts.  Wouldn’t it have made more sense for this thing to have been used against Rip Torn atop the Temple of the God Ar, or at least against the Jun chieftain?

 

“I get stabbed by my own weapon, and it’s not even treated as ironic.”

So yeah, the story structure isn’t the best, with the plot meandering and becoming a little too episodic, but the fact that Coscarelli was literally kicked out of the editing room by the film’s money men it’s not fair to lay the blame solely on him, and who knows, maybe someday we will get the "Coscarelli Cut." That all said, the movie is still a ton of fun and Marc Singer made for a fantastic action hero, he wielded the sword with a natural grace and with it being shot by John Alcott, who was Stanley Kubrick’s primary cinematographer, you can’t help but admire the beauty of the film,  What I’m trying to say here is that despite its flaws you only have to look from fantastic production designs to the iconic score by Lee Holdridge to find a lot to love about The Beastmaster and that any of those flaws can easily be overlooked due to the film’s overall element of fun and energy, that and Tanya Roberts taking off her top of course.