The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) – Review

With the success of John Boorman’s Excalibur the movie-going public was treated to an onslaught of fantasy films of varying degrees of quality, mostly ranging from poor to terrible, but Albert Pyun’s directorial debut The Sword and the Sorcerer is a surprisingly decent offering. I’m not saying it’s a great example of the genre, the plot makes little to no sense and the two villain aspect didn't quite work, but there is a lot of fun to be had with this flick.

The movie has the prerequisite narration to give us a taste of the world we are about to enter, “Know you now of days long past. The time when the world was young when sorcery thrived and wild adventure was forever in the offing.” This narration is heard over the opening scene of the villainous King Titus Cromwell (Richard Lynch) and his men rowing ashore Tomb Island (Tip #1 do not visit places called Tomb Island), and with the help of a witch, they resurrect Xusia of Delos (Richard Moll), a long-dead sorcerer who Cromwell needs to further his plans of conquest.

 

He’s either a long-dead sorcerer or someone who fell asleep during a mud bath.

It turns out that the awesome kingdom of Ehdan has been able to fend off the armies of King Cromwell for years so Cromwell is forced to turn to the dark arts to defeat King Richard (Christopher Cary), the noble ruler of Ehdan. With the help of the Xusia and his evil magic, the armies of King Richard are defeated but instead of preparing for a siege, Richard tells the Queen to take the royal heirs and flee the kingdom while he himself will ride off to face Cromwell, yet he does pause his ride to certain doom to entrusts his youngest son Talon with his magnificent triple-bladed sword, instructing the boy to avenge his death should it occur.

Meanwhile, Cromwell, a complete moustache-twirling dick, is concerned about having an evil sorcerer on the payroll so while Xusia is weak after a day of "battle conjuring magic" he tries to kill the sorcerer with a good ole treacherous stabbing. Xusia me have been weakened but he certainly wasn’t down and out so he is able to escape by jumping off a cliff to the raging seas below. Talon, on the other hand, rushes out to find his father to see if he needs any avenging, he does. Richard has been killed and Talon even sees Cromwell murder his mother and make off with his younger sister. With the use of the triple-bladed sword, Talon manages to escape Cromwell’s men.

Note: Not only can this triple-bladed broadsword launch the two outside blades like pneumatically powered missiles but the thing even has a fourth blade hidden in the hilt. Resurrected evil sorcerers are more easily believable than this being a weapon anybody could wield successfully.

The film’s narrator returns to tell us, “For years the boy was to be hunted, but Cromwell’s assassin found not a trace. Talon had simply vanished into the void.” We get a fade to black then the narrator tells us that years have passed and that rumours are passing among the outland kingdoms of a fearless adventurer, “These rumours grew into a legend about this man who was at once a buccaneer, a slave, a rogue, a general!” Strangely enough, this awesome man, who seems to have co-opted Conan's life story, goes by the name Talon. How he has managed to elude Cromwell’s assassin without even changing his name is beyond me, he even carries that same freaky triple-bladed sword the king owned, so Cromwell clearly needed better lackeys.  I think Cromwell's assassins were taking the money and just hanging out in bars because Talon was being about as circumspect as James Bond.

It’s a day before the eleventh anniversary of Cromwell’s conquering of Ehdan and General Talon (Lee Horsley), along with his band of mercenaries, postpones their mission to help a neighbouring kingdom so that the General can pay an old debt., which brings up a big question "Do even his men know that he is the lost prince honour-bound to avenge his dead father?" Did this little tidbit never come up during their previous adventures? We never find out for sure, he’s apparently just this awesome guy that everyone loves to follow. He keeps everything so on the "down-low" that even after winning the day at the end of the movie he still doesn’t tell anybody that he is “That Talon” and the rightful heir to the throne.

During all these years the sorcerer Xusia has been slowly healing himself from that treacherous attack he suffered at the hands of Cromwell and his machinations to avenge himself on the traitorous king are just about to bear fruit. The once peaceful kingdom of Ehdan is now fraught with rebellion; Prince Mikah (Simon MacCorkindale), son to the late King's chief advisor and claimant to the throne, is not so secretly gathering men to help him take the throne (and I mean "not so secretly" as in the bartender asks any knuckle dragger that enters the bar if they want to join the rebellion), and with the aid of Cromwell’s own chief advisor Machelli (George Maharis) they hope to see Cromwell overthrown the very next day.

 

He certainly looks trustworthy enough.

But it turns out that not only does Machelli betray Prince Mikah to Cromwell but he’s actually Xusia in disguise and this is all part of his plan to destroy Cromwell as he’s been playing both sides against each other. Political maneuvering and fermenting rebellion aren’t what one expects from a practitioner of the dark arts which is really what makes the sorcerer the most interesting “person” in this movie.

When Prince Micah is betrayed and captured by Cromwell’s men, his sister Alana (Kathleen Beller) finds herself about to be raped by some of Cromwell’s guards, but then Talon shows up and defeats them with nothing but a half-eaten leg of mutton. Alana offers to pay Talon to rescue her brother but he isn’t interested in gold coins, he wants one night of sexual bliss with Alana as payment. A desperate Alana agrees but even before Talon can leave the room to fulfill his end of the deal they learn that a group of Micah’s rebels are trapped in a cave and are about to be killed by Cromwell’s Red Dragon Archers. Alana asks Talon to go and help them but he quickly asks “What am I to be paid for this small chore?” She tells him, “You are being paid enough for a thousand such tasks.” Talon responds, “I can’t wait to bed you wench, you raise my expectations.”

Talon is the film’s other saving grace as Lee Horsley just oozes roguish charm and imbues the hero with a great devil-may-care attitude that reminded me of Errol Flynn in his best swashbuckling roles. He constantly runs into danger without giving it much thought, and you kind of buy into the idea that this man has earned the respect of men across the land. My one question is, “Why come to Ehdan now?” We hear that he has helped other kingdoms that were in peril in the past, and was just on the road to offer his services to another kingdom in need when he suddenly decided to make a pit stop in Ehdan, so why and the hell has he waited this long to avenge his dead father and save his own homeland?

 

Is Richard Lynch just that imposing?

For a Conan the Barbarian rip-off this film doesn’t just go with a simple boy who grows up to get revenge story, instead, it is one of the most complicated Sword & Sorcery movies I’ve ever seen, the script to this movie is so overplotted it’s quite amazing that they managed to fit it all into the movie's 104-minute running time.  To help you out here's a "quick" breakdown:

• Cromwell raises dead sorcerer to defeat rival kingdom.
• Rival kingdom is defeated and Cromwell tries to kill off the sorcerer.
• Son of defeated king flees after seeing his father and mother killed and sister captured.
• Prince Micah forms a rebellion to overthrow Cromwell.
• Micah is aided by Cromwell’s chancellor who turns out to be the not-dead sorcerer.
• Chancellor betrays Micah and the Prince ends up in the dungeon.
• Talon arrives and saves Micah’s sister Alana from being raped.
• Talon and the rebels stage a dungeon break.
• The Prince is rescued but Talon is captured and to be crucified.
• Alana is captured and is being forced to marry Cromwell.
• Talon’s younger sister turns out to be one of Cromwell’s concubines.
• Elizabeth finds Talon’s men and asks them to stage a prison break.
• They fail immediately and end up in the dungeon.
• Elizabeth gets stabbed by the dungeon’s torturer.
• Cromwell plans to murder all the visiting kings during the wedding ceremony.
• A couple of the visiting kings recognize the crucified Talon as a friend of theirs.
• A group of Cromwell’s concubines help break Talon’s men out of the dungeon.
• During the ceremony Talon rips his hands off the six-inch spikes holding him to the cross.
• Massive fight ensues between Cromwell’s men and the supporters of Micah and Talon.
• Machelli/ Xusia spurries Alana away from the fight.
• Xusia reveals his true nature and is about to kill Cromwell when Talon arrives.
• Talon can’t let Xusia kill the man he vowed to kill, so they fight.
• Xusia gets a propelled blade to the chest.
• Talon and Cromwell then have their own long-drawn-out sword fight.
• Alana is menaced by a big snake while the two bozos fight.
• Talon wins and gives the crown to Micah.
• It’s then payment time so Talon swings away with Alana.

Yeah, that’s a lot of stuff to happen in a movie that’s less than two hours long. I’m guessing the reasoning behind this is that with so much happening the audience won’t have time to ponder if any of it makes sense. Any time the audience may be thinking such thoughts as, “Why hasn’t Talon shown the slightest interest in rescuing his sister after all these years?” We get a nice distraction like Talon falling face-first into the King's harem.

If the audience starts to wonder “How can Talon wield that massive triple-bladed broadsword with hands that were seconds ago nailed to wooden crossbeams?” simply cut to half-naked concubines racing to free his comrades. As tactics go it is quite effective, and even more so on any teenage boy watching. Albert Pyun clearly knew who his target audience was and gave them exactly what they wanted; heroic musclebound men wielding improbably large swords, villains to hiss and boo at and plenty of gorgeous women to keep our hormones percolating. It certainly worked on me as I practically wore out my VHS copy of this movie when I was but a lad.

Watching The Sword and the Sorcerer, now through older eyes, it has lost a little of its lustre but there is still lots here to offer the modern viewer. Alana is not the standard damsel in distress, even though she does get captured and almost married to the villain she is still a bit of a badass, and she repeatedly takes out lascivious villains by getting them to lower their guard just before she knees them in the junk and somehow her offer of sex to Nolan as payment for his help seems way less creepy than it should. Basically, without the remarkable chemistry between Kathleen Beller and Lee Horsley, this film would not have worked at all.

What I particularly love is that after they defeat Cromwell, and Nolan swings away with Alana via a well-placed tapestry, the movie then cuts to Nolan and his mercenary buddies heading off to help the kingdom that they had detoured away from so that Nolan could “pay his debt” to Cromwell. "The End"  Nolan could have stayed and taken the crown for himself, as he is the rightful heir, but instead he sleeps with Alana (a dude has to get paid) then rides off with his men into the sunset, which is certainly not your traditional "guy wins the day and gets the girl" ending we tend to see in these types of movies and you've got to respect that.

And about that promised sequel...

 

Eventually, we got one, but not until 2010 starring Kevin Sorbo and it was crap.

Man of Steel (2013) - Review

With Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice about to hit theatres worldwide I thought I’d take another look at Warner Bros's first entry in their DC Comics Extended Universe. Man of Steel was directed by “visionary director” Zack Snyder and as is often the case the term “visionary director” is to highlight the director’s unique visual style that hopefully compensates for his lack of storytelling ability. This is definitely the case here. Man of Steel is wrought with some truly breathtaking visuals but as a Superman story it is a bit of a mess, or are we just looking at it the wrong way?

The benchmark to aim for when making a Superman movie is of course the Richard Donner movie starring Christopher Reeve, now I’m not saying that the 1978 Superman movie was perfect, but to date Christopher Reeve is still the best Superman/Clark Kent we’ve seen and Donner’s film was the first serious comic book movie that showed the studios you could make a lot of cash with this stuff, if done well. In 2006 Bryan Singer made a sequel to that film but unfortunately it was more of a love letter to Donner’s movie than a film that could stand on its own, and poor Brandon Routh, who is an excellent actor, was forced to do his best Christopher Reeve impression instead of being allowed to make the role his own. Flash forward seven years and Zack Snyder brought us his incarnation of the world’s first superhero, and he basically pissed over everything Superman as a character stood for. He also, for some reason, insisted on giving us Superman’s origin story again, as if everyone on the planet didn’t already know it.

 

It’s in this overlong opening that we learn of planet Krypton's imminent destruction (we totally already knew this), but then we get Krypton's military commander General Zod (Michael Shannon) and his followers initiating a coup d'état against the ruling council. Zod’s rebellion fails because it consists of like six or seven people. Did Krypton’s military commander forget to ask his army to join him for this little coup? Regardless the planet blows up and Jor-El (Russell Crowe) manages to send his son Kal-El, the first naturally born Kryptonian child in centuries, off in a rocket, but for some reason he infused Kal-El's cells with a genetic codex of the entire Kryptonian race. Why did he do this? Zod wants the Codex so that he can pick and choose what genetic traits for his new master race, but what was the purpose of Jor-El sticking it inside his son? Was it just the best hiding place for it or did Jor-El plan on his son populating the Earth with a new race of Krptonians all on his own?

Zod and his compatriots survive the destruction of Kyrpton because they got sentenced to the Phantom Zone, but they are freed when the planet explodes, which I’ll grant is better than them being freed by an exploding French elevator. We then see Kal-El’s little rocket speed across the galaxy on its way to Kansas. The film then jumps ahead in time to an episode of Deadliest Catch where we see adult Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) working on a fishing boat that is then called to aid an oil rig that has become a raging inferno. Clark dives off the boat and uses his super strength and invulnerability to help with the evacuation.

This leads to some of the best and worst sections of this Superman story. Zack Snyder decides to jump back and forth along Superman's timeline to tell of the early days of Clark Kent, and with these flashbacks there is stuff that we've actually haven’t seen depicted countless times before; a young Clark being terrified of his X-Ray vision, not being able to fight bullies because he could kill them with one punch, and him saving a school bus load of children when it goes off a bridge and into the river. Which brings me to my least favorite moment in the entire film and that is when Jonathon Kent (Kevin Costner) chides Clark for risking exposure by saving those kids from drowning.

Pa Kent: “Clark, you have to keep this side of yourself secret.”
Clark: “What was I supposed to do? Just let them die?"
Pa Kent: “Maybe.”

What the fuck? Superman’s dad actually says “maybe” when asked if he should have let a bus load of kids die. Superman is the way he is because of how he was raised by the Kents, and this version of Jonathon Kent is just such an asshole that I can barely wrap my head around the character, but then again this scene does kind of explain why Superman isn’t all that upset about the thousands of people in Metropolis who die during his fight with Zod.

Just how dumb is Jonathon Kent? Well when an approaching tornado threatens to kill the family dog good ole Jonathon runs back to the car to rescue said pooch, and though he saves the dog he is caught by the tornado and killed. I love animals just as much as the next guy and yet I’m not sure what kind of person would risk his life to save a dog in this instance, but sure, say they really loved that dog and Krypto is a swell pooch that they can't live without, but then why didn’t Clark run back to the car? He could have easily run back at speeds not too suspicious for onlookers to see, got the dog free, and then made it back to safety. Instead moron, thy name is Jonathon Kent, stands in front of the tornado nobly waving off Clark’s desire to rescue him because that could expose the “Big Secret.”
 

How else did being raised by this version of Jonathon Kent affect Superman? Well in another flashback we see Clark working as a busboy at a truck stop and when one of the truckers is rude to a waitress he steps in to help and the trucker responds by pouring beer over Clark’s head. Now Clark could pop this jerks head like an overripe zit but that isn’t a very Superman thing to do so he turns and walks away, even ignoring the beer can the trucker bounces off Clark’s retreating head, but later when this asshole leaves he finds his truck smashed and impaled by several telephone poles. Let’s let slide the impossibility of doing that much damage to a truck, located just outside in in the parking lot, with no one hearing anything, but what this does show us is that Clark Kent is a vindictive dick. He just totalled a vehicle that costs roughly between $130,000 to $180,000 dollars and unless this trucker has a very understanding insurance company that guy's livelihood is pretty much fucked.

So right there we have some interesting "Nature vs Nurture" elements that show how being raised by Snyder's version of the Kents has changed his personality from the one most people are familiar with, but is there anything of Superman's character we can recognize?  Well when Zod shows up and demands that Kal-El surrender himself, or the people of Earth will suffer for it, Superman does come forward and hands himself over to the government. That is the kind of self-sacrificing move we'd expect from our Superman, but unfortunately it has to follow a scene where Clark goes to a church to find answers because we haven’t had the Superman is Jesus metaphors hammered into us enough over the last few decades.

When Clark finally dons the tights and cape and brings the fight to Zod, his tactics to say the least, are not all that good. Zod and his minions arrive at the Kent farming looking for the Codex and they threaten poor Martha Kent (Diane Lane), but Superman arrives in the nick of time, tackling Zod and carrying the villain away from the farm and Superman’s sweet mother. There are two problems with that strategy; first he ends up taking the fight from the rather isolated farmland to the much more populated town of Smallville where collateral damage will be greater and more lives put at risk, and secondly Superman left dear ole mom back at the farm with the other three Kryptonian supervillains.

Sure, we don’t actually get a shot of Zod’s henchwoman snapping Martha’s neck but there is no reason for them to leave her alive except to maybe take her as a useful hostage, which they do not do. Snyder never cuts back to the farm so we are supposed to assume that the three minions just immediately took off to help their fearless leader without one thought as to what to do with their enemy’s mother. At least Superman isn’t the only one who with poor tactical thinking. Speaking of bad tactics…

Experts estimate that the damage caused by Superman’s fight with Zod during the film’s third act to be at about $700 billion, with a total economic impact of around $2 trillion, and that’s not counting the 129,000 killed during the fight with another 250,000 missing in the rubble, and another million beyond that left injured. In Superman’s canon of films only Lex Luthor’s plan to drop California into the ocean would have caused more damage and loss of life, but Superman STOPPED THAT FROM HAPPENING.

In Superman II once Superman realized that the fight with the Kryptonian supervillains was causing too much damage, and was endangering lives, he lured them off to the Fortress of Solitude where he used his brain to defeat them. Now in Superman II it does look like Superman drops the de-powered villains to their deaths in the bowels of the Fortress but there was a deleted scene where the Kryptonians were later marched off in handcuffs, because Superman does not kill.

With the popularity of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films DC has taken the wrong lessons to heart. Nolan’s films were not successful because they were dark and gritty with the hero being a total badass, but because they had strong stories and dealt with characters that made logical decisions based on their life history. Henry Cavill is a fine actor, and he certainly looks the part, but he is not the Superman I poured over page after page of when I was reading comics as a kid. Now I've talked to many people who quite enjoyed this movie, and Snyder's version of Superman, because they had no problem with the liberties he took with the character, and to be fair there have been many versions of Superman over the years, and there is an entire collection of DC comics that is dedicated to alternate versions of beloved characters called Elseworlds.  Mark Millar’s wrote an Elseworld story entitled Superman: Red Son which answered the question “What if Superman was raised in Russia?” and so Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is basically an Elseworld story that posits the theory of “What would Superman be like if he was raised by a terrible Jonathon Kent?”

Though this version of Superman wasn't my cup of tea there were a few things I quite liked about Man of Steel; Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is finally shown to be fairly good investigative reporter who is able to track down and figure out who Superman really is, Laurence Fishburne brings the proper gravitas to the character of Perry White, and not since Christopher Reeve has there been an actor who looked the part as well as Henry Cavill does. I’d also like to give a shout out to Ayelet Zurer who played Lara Lor-Van, Superman's biological mother, because she was just fantastic in this. Russell Crowe as “Action Jor-El” left me cold but Zurer’s Lara brought so much pathos and dignity to the character, and with virtually no dialog, that I wish she'd been the one to become a hologram in the Fortress of Solitude.

So whether this is an Elseworld story or not Man of Steel is still one of those movies that angers me the more times I watch it, just for the sheer loss of potential this movie squandered. With that cast and the amount of money spent on visual effects we could have had one of the best Superman movies to date, but instead we got Zack Snyder’s dull colour palette, with David S. Goyer's nonsensical storytelling, making me look back more fondly at the misstep that was Superman Returns.  

Tarzan of the Apes: Edgar Rice Burroughs – Book Review

Stories of humans being raised by animals dates as far back as 5th Century BC with Romulus and Remus who were suckled by a she-wolf before founding Rome, and of course in the 1800s Rudyard Kipling wrote many short stories about young Mowgli who was also raised by wolves, but it wasn’t until 1912, in the pages of All-Story Magazine, did the world get one of the greatest heroes to ever grace the printed page, Tarzan of the Apes.


There have been Many Faces of Tarzan since Edgar Rice Burroughs published his first installment back in 1912; from the silent screen with Elmo Lincoln to Johnny Weissmuller for MGM, and for decades to follow many more men donned the traditional loincloth of Tarzan, but today we will look at the original story that started it all.

Like many books by Edgar Rice Burroughs this story begins with a narrator explaining how he came across this incredible account, a story of how an English Lord by the name of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke and his wife Lady Alice were marooned on the savage coast of Africa by a group of mutineers. The reason for their marooning, opposed to being straight up murdered by the mutineers, is because John Clayton had saved the life of the head mutineer earlier during the voyage. This is an important lesson for all of us because any good deed could someday save your life…or at least land you alive on a godforsaken coastline where almost every creature is bent on your destruction. So take from that what you will.

With supplies left to them by the mutineers Clayton is able to build a nice cabin for his wife and soon to be born child, and a short time late the cry of a little baby joins the cacophony of cries from the jungle. The Claytons have much to deal with when it comes to unwanted callers and the worst of this is the Great Apes of the tribe of Kerchak, and only Clayton’s “thunder stick” keeps these brutes at bay. After one particular traumatic encounter with the apes where, Alice is forced to shoot one, her mind to snaps and from that day on she lived believing they were back in London. That is until one morning, when the bay was but a year old, John found his beloved Alice dead. She had gone peacefully in her sleep. A distraught Clayton forgets to secure the cabin door and soon finds himself unarmed and facing the ferocious Kerchak. Things go poorly for Lord Greystoke. The baby on the other hand has a lucky reprieve as the she-ape Kala prevents Kerchak from killing the tiny lordling. Earlier Kala’s own baby was killed when an enraged Kerchak chased her through treetops, the little baby ape was unable to hold on to it's mother and fell to its death. Seeing a chance to replace a dead child for a living one she makes the swap.

Burroughs goes into quite a bit of detail on how a human child could possibly survive being raised in the hostile jungle. Of course there is pretty much no chance something like this could happen in the real world, but in the pulp adventure world of Edgar Rice Burroughs it makes perfect sense. Much of what makes it work stems from the dynamic between young child, now named Tarzan (ape for white-skin), and his mother Kala. These apes are kind of a missing link, and have almost a society of their own with laws and rituals, so the she-ape Kala is shown as being a being of deep love, and it is her unbridled love for this weak pale thing that keeps Tarzan alive. When all of Tarzan’s contemporaries have reached full adult size in a few years poor three year old Tarzan is still having a difficult time walking through the jungle let alone climb the massive trees that make up his world.  It was up to Kala to prevent Kerchak and the other apes from killing this pathetic thing. But it’s not just Kala’s loving protective nature that allows Tarzan to survive in this world of sudden death, but Tarzan’s innate intelligence.

Eventually Tarzan finds the cabin built by his father and in it he discovers two important things; the books that were brought to help teach the new Greystoke baby, and John Clayton’s hunting knife. One stokes and expands the little jungle boy’s mind while the other gives him a fighting chance against creatures with fangs and claws. Two physical features Tarzan quite lacks. Right off the bat the knife saves his life when he encounters a gorilla, one of the more dangerous enemies of the Great Apes, and it is only the use of the knife, mostly by accident, that allows Tarzan to survive this meeting. He also creates ropes to lasso his prey, or his annoying foster father who would really like to see Tarzan dead, and gives him the edge even against such dangerous adversaries as Sabor the lioness. When a group of cannibals move into the territory Tarzan is able to acquire, through some killing and theft, a bow and poison tipped arrows. The downside to these new neighbours is that one of them kills Tarzan’s beloved Kala. The enraged ape man tracks down the “murderer” and kills the bastard.

Burroughs depicts Tarzan as a being who thrills in the kill, but without any malice of the heart. We are told that some of Tarzan genetic heritage keeps him on the straight and narrow; such as when after killing the cannibal that murdered his mother he does not eat him. At first Tarzan is perplexed by his resistance to eating this black man, as he is clearly not quite the same as Tarzan, but still he cannot eat him as he would any other prey. In many of his books Burroughs delves into the theories of “Nurture vs Nature” usually siding on nurture over nature. As in his excellent book the Outlaw of Torn the hero was raised to be a highwayman and outright villain, but his very nature prevented him ever doing anything too cruel or callous. In the Tarzan books we often see Tarzan’s bestial side escape, often flying into a killing rage, but for the most part his cool intellect wins out. Apparently the Greystokes have an excellent bloodline.

But what about Jane you ask? Where is the beautiful American blonde that is the center of so many Tarzan movies? Well it’s not until about the book’s halfway point that Jane Porter, Tarzan’s destined mate, is finally introduced. Jane, her father Professor Archimedes Porter, his assistant Philander, William Cecil Clayton, and Esmeralda the maid are marooned in the very cove that John and Alice Clayton were marooned at decades ago. Now that may seem like a huge coincidence but worse is the fact that not only is once again the marooning of our characters due to a mutiny, but William Clayton is also Tarzan’s cousin. Is the part of Africa some personal Bermuda Triangle for the Greystokes? I know it’s a small world by sheesh. In this section there are some great comic bits such as Professor Archimedes Porter and his assistant wandering off into the jungle where they complain about the lax zoological standards that allows lions to roam around free, and then there are the not so good comic elements stemming from the racial stereotyping of Esmeralda the black maid. Esmeralda’s caricature is quite in the vein of Prissy the hysterical maid from Gone with the Wind, and is certainly a victim of the time this book was written. Every time she screamed “Oh, Gabrielle!” and fainted I cringed.

After Tarzan rescues members of the party numerous times, seriously, without Tarzan these idiots wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes, but when Jane is abducted by Terkoz, a cruel ape who took over leading the ape tribe after Tarzan left, shit gets real.  Our jungle hero leaps into action, kills the bastard who dared take one that Tarzan cared for, and then Jane's forest god smothers her with kisses. The relationship that develops between Tarzan and Jane is based mostly on primordial lust. When Jane saw this perfect specimen of maleness rushing out of the jungle to battle for her she pretty much tosses aside the civilized part of her mind, and it’s this primitive Jane who trades kisses with Tarzan and falls in love with him. It’s when rational Jane raises to the fore that things get messy.

There is none of the “Me Tarzan, you Jane” nonsense that we see in the movies, for at this point Tarzan can speak no human language at all. He may have miraculously learned to read and write on his own, but his ape friends were not very good conversationalists. Later Tarzan is taught French by Lieutenant Paul D’Arnot, a French Naval officer who was captured by cannibals while part of a search party looking for Jane, and of coursed rescued by Tarzan. It is D’Arnot who figures out that Tarzan is the son of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.

Fighting his fellow apes, battling the local cannibals, and taking on Sabor the lioness are all in a days work for Tarzan, its when he must deal with affairs of the heart that things get complicated.  Tarzan has to contend with not one but two suitors for the hand of the lovely Jane Porter, one is a Snidley Whiplash type villain who Professor Porter owes a great deal of money to, and is forcing the Professor into making Jane marry him to save the family honor, and the second is William Clayton who is the heir to Greystoke fortune.   He is a decent enough chap but is only the heir because no one knows that John and Alice’s child is still alive and living in the jungle.

The “love” triangle aspect of the book is very minor, but does lead to a Soap Operaesque cliff-hanger that actually went in a direction I didn’t expect, and Jane’s war with herself over who she should marry is kind of fun. How could a well-respected woman marry a man who doesn’t wear shoes and eats with his bare hands? Her moral quandary gives us a nice little glimpse into women of that period in time.

Tarzan of the Apes is a fantastic pulp adventure novel, and if you are a fan of any movie version of Tarzan you owe it to yourself to check it out. Sure the idea of a person learning to read and write just by looking through a child’s illustrated encyclopedia is ridiculous, and a person who has not used his speech center for twenty years is not going to learn to speak French, or any other language, no matter how awesome Lieutenant D’Arnot is as a teacher. But the Tarzan Burroughs describes is clearly a superman, “His straight and perfect figure, muscled as the best of the ancient Roman gladiators must have been muscled, and yet with the soft and sinuous curves of a Greek god, told at a glance the wondrous combination of enormous strength with suppleness and speed.” Tarzan is the man many a boy dreamed of growing up to be, and certainly better than any fairy tale prince.

The Super Inframan (1975) – Review

Those of you that grew up in the 90s are most likely familiar with The Power Rangers but their origins, and most of the footage used in the show, dates back to the mid-70s and the Japanese Super Sentai Series. This show consisted of a team of people who would transform into superheroes in order to battle a group of evil beings that threatened to take over the world. Such Japanese television shows as Kamen Rider, Ultraman and Super Sentai gained worldwide popularity and China wasn’t going to just let that stand. Thus in 1975 the Shaw Brothers produced China’s very first superhero movie, The Super Inframan.

 The movie opens with a dramatic attack on a school bus by what looks like a cross between a Mynock from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core and a small dragon. The creature destroys the mountain road causing the bus to slide off and explode, but luckily the children were evacuated in time. Not so lucky is Hong Kong which is consumed in flames. What could be the cause of such destruction, and if it isn’t natural who could be behind such a monstrous act? Lucky for China there is a high-tech Science Headquarters, run by Professor Liu Ying De (Hsieh Wang) and his super team of martial arts experts, to save the day.

 

I think more science foundations should look like this and be manned by martial artists.

After tracking the destruction to Mount Devil the team is shocked when the top of the mount explodes to reveal a monstrous fortress. The image of a dragon appears on the monitor but it then shifts into a more human, and curvy form, that of Demon Princess Elzebub (Terry Liu). She makes the startling claim that, “I’ve conquered the Earth. I’m your new master now. This disaster was just a small example of my great strength. You just have to surrender to me or I’ll destroy the whole human race.”

 

She has a dragon for a hand, who can argue with that?

The Professor had just completed work on his BDX project which can transform a person into a bionic kung fu superhero, and Rayma (Danny Lee) volunteers to undergo the process even after the Professor tells him that, "We will wire your arms and legs with powerful transistors and death rays. You will be powered by a tiny nuclear reactor. Unfortunately, the operation will be very painful and you may die."

 

“Sounds great, sign me up.”

What follows for the next 90 minutes is a continuous battle between the forces of Demon Princess Elzebub and the science attack team backed by Inframan. Elzebub will unleash a giant plant creature whose massive vines seek to crush the super-secret science base, then Inframan will appear and destroy it with an array of futuristic weapons. The Demon Princess will capture and brainwash one of the science team so that she can get a hold of Inframan’s blueprints, and then Rayma and company will take off in hot pursuit. Rayma is ambushed by a group of Elzebub's skeletal warriors, plus a crab like henchman, and Rayma has to use every martial arts trick to stay alive.  Now this leads to one of the goofier elements of this show (and to be fair almost all shows of this genre suffer from it) and that is how long Rayma will engage in a kung fu fight with the horde of monstrous henchman before turning into Inframan.

 

Wouldn’t this be a good time to turn into a bionic superhero?

After Rayma and his friends engage in hand to hand combat eventually a second monster appears and Rayma finally yells out, “Change to Inframan!” and then proceeds to kick some serious butt. Stranger still is when the one crablike monster suddenly grows to about two hundred feet high and only after dodging giant pincers does Inframan finally follows suit and grow to an equal size. Is there a reason he waited so long? Unlike Ultraman there is never a stated time limit as to how long he can remain Inframan.

 

Giant bionic superhero would certainly be my go to setting.

Inframan’s armaments include missiles stored below his ribs, a laser blade he can unleash at will (which he uses to sever the hands of Elezebub’s second in command), he has a solar attack called the “Sun Ja” which is an instant kill attack, he has Thunderball Fists that can be launched as a ranged attack and can destroy any matter known to man (they gauntlets also have limb severing blades in them as well), and he has something called the “Lethal Kick” which also instantly kills his enemies. I think Rayma just really loves kung fu for there is no other reason to spend this amount of time back flipping around and throwing punches when you could obliterate your foe instantly with one of several awesome weapons.

 

Inframan is a Swiss-Army Knife of death.

Of course the real reason behind his holding back is because then the movie would be over at about the twenty minute mark and we’d miss out on a whole lot of fun. Instead we are treated to a mind blowing colourful action film with some of the goofiest looking monsters you will ever see; from the Elzebub’s skeletal army (just guys in horned motorcycle helmets), a monster with drills for hands so he can burrow into the science base, a red witch-like demon with long hair and huge horns that shoot yellow beams, the aforementioned plant monster and crab creature, and best of all is Witch-Eye Elzebub's beautiful-but-deadly second in command who can fire hypnotic or destructive beams out of the eye’s located in the palms of her hands. She is the most dangerous next to the Princess but I particularly love the pair of robots that can launch their armored heads or their spiked-clubbed fists on retractable coiled springs.

 

I’d have killed to have these as action figures.

This is one of those guilty pleasure movies that fans of “monster suit cinema” will get a kick out of it (hopefully not the lethal kind), but even your average movie goer should get some fun out of a movie that has a dragon princess from the Earth’s core unleashing a horde of monsters against a team of scientist who are studied in the martial arts and who also have a bionic superhero on their roster.  What’s not to love?

He Never Died (2015) – Review

There are not too many films that have a cannibal as a protagonist, and this is just one thing that set’s writer/director Jason Krawczyk's He Never Died apart from other horror films. Actually calling this a horror film is way too limiting; it’s also a dark comedy, a crime thriller, and even a little bit of a love story, but what it truly is is a tour de force performance from Henry Rollins in his first starring role.

 Jack (Henry Rollins) lives a regimented life; he has a routine that he follows that keeps him from falling off the wagon and succumbing to his hunger, the hunger for human flesh. Does this mean Jack is some deranged serial killer trying to live the straight and narrow life? If only it was that simple. Jack is able to keep his hunger at bay by drinking blood provided by hospital intern Jeremy (Booboo Stewart), but when local mobsters looking for Jeremy try to interrogate Jack things get a bit messy.

 

Jack believes in gun safety.

Turns out Jack is a very tough customer; punch, stab or shoot him and he gives almost no reaction other than to return violence in kind, but his retaliations are not from anger more akin to bored frustration. Jack has been around for a long time and he's done and felt everything at one time or another.  Rollin’s Jack makes the typical laconic John Wayne character seem absolutely gregarious, and his deadpan delivery and world weary look is what drives the film’s comedy. When later Jack sees those selfsame mobsters abduct Jeremy he steals a post office truck to follow them, but his motive is to retrieve the blood Jeremy was bringing him, the rescue of the intern is secondary, and of almost no importance to Jack.

 

Though the mobster who loses an eye thinks it’s important.

Rent-a-Thugs and threats to his blood supply isn’t the only thing upsetting his routine as one night he receives of phone call from an ex-girlfriend who informs him that he has a daughter named Andrea (Jordan Todosey) who is out drinking and she is worried that she will try to drive home, and she wants Jack to go out and get her. Jack eventually finds her and though he is not really father material Andrea “"Vaginas are like coupon books for alcohol" is certainly not your typical girl next door, yet they actually have quite good chemistry together, and Andrea even tries to help Jack with his non-existent love life.

 

A family that bingos together stays together.

This possible love interest is Cara (Kate Greenhouse), a waitress with a crush on Jack that he seems completely oblivious to.  Sadly father/daughter bonding and dating get put on hold when the mob continue to escalate things in their battle with Jack, and when they kidnap Andrea after murdering her mother we are thinking “Shit is just about to get real” but Jack barely reacts to the information, and doesn’t even show up at the docks where he is told to come "And no cops" or she will be killed. Jack is not the stoic hero who will ride in to save the day, at one point he tells the villain “I’ve killed nine year olds for no reason. What makes you think you have a chance?” That isn’t something even your baddest anti-hero would claim, and when Jack says it you know it to be true.

 

"I am Jack’s utter distain."

What is Jack’s secret, how can he survive multiple gunshots to the head? I won’t spoil it here but let’s just say that when Cara finds a picture of Jack from 1914 France she asks him how old he is and his response is, “I have no idea, but I’m in the Bible if that means anything.”  Will Jack save Andrea?  Can Cara consider dating a man who can pull bullets out of his head with a pair of pliers? And just who in the hell is Jack?  The movie does answer a couple of questions concerning Jack’s past yet it leaves many more open, but I expect we will learn more if the mini-series that is planned eventually airs. He Never Dies is violent gore fueled story that will have many a viewer squirming in their seats and peeking out between their fingers. The open ending we get may disappoint some people but it just makes me eager to see the return of Henry Rollins as Jack

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014) – Review

“This morning I shot my wife and child with a nail gun.” This line is from the film’s main protagonist and pretty much sets the tone for brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner’s Australian zombie movie Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead. It is a dark film but with a deeply twisted sense of humor, which is nice to see in a genre that can sometimes take itself way too seriously, “I’m look at you Walking Dead.”

 We are currently living in an era overflowing with projects featuring either superheroes or zombies on both big and small screens (which does have me wondering why we haven’t seen Marvel’s Zombies made into a movie yet), but of the two genres the zombie film is the more predominant as such films are easier to make on the cheap. Director Kiah Roache-Turner and his brother Tristan bring us a low budget meal containing ingredients from Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, chunks of Thom Eberhardt’s Night of the Comet, and with a liberal splashing of George Miller’s Road Warrior, but with enough originality to make this film stand out.

The movie opens with a group of men dressed up as Road Warrior wannabees (see above pic) as they battle a horde of the undead while trying to retrieve a truck. A truck that will of course later be turned into a Mad Max armored vehicle. The movie then gives us a couple of flashbacks as to what led to all this zombie carnage. The editing of these scenes is probably the film’s weakest element as at times I couldn’t quite figure out how each scene figured into the timeline and when we were actually caught up to the present, but once we are caught up the earlier chunkiness is quickly forgotten. But it’s here these flashbacks that we are introduced to our three main characters; first we meet an Aborigine named Benny (Leon Burchill) who witnessed the meteor shower that we assume is the cause of this particular zombie apocalypse (special thanks to the filmmaker for having characters refer to the undead as zombies) and is horrified to wake up to find one brother dead and the other a bloodthirsty fiend. Then we jump to Barry (Jay Gallagher) a mechanic and the author of the line “This morning I shot my wife and child with a nail gun,” who is forced to kill his family when they become zombified.

Thirdly we have Barry's sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey), who is some kind of photographer, and while she is shooting a Goth model she and her assistant are quite stunned when in the middle of the shoot the model suddenly goes full on zombie. Which brings us to the mechanics of this particular zombie outbreak, an element often kept vague in most zombie films, but in this movie it is clearly an airborne virus (which we assume is connected to the meteor shower but that is never confirmed), and if you are out and about without wearing a gas mask you will be zombified. That is unless you are an A negative blood type which is not affected by the disease, and thus Benny, Barry, Brooke, as well as a few friends they meet along the way, have not turned.

If you have seen Thom Eberhardt’s Night of the Comet 1984 sci-fi horror film this may sound familiar. In that film a meteor shower turned most of the Earth’s population to dust, you were spared if you were somewhat sheltered but only for a while as eventually you would turn into insane zombie like monster, unless you had a certain blood type. There is also another character in Wyrmwood that is very reminiscent of a character in Night of the Comet and that would be the Mad Scientist (Berryn Schwerdt) who travels around in lab located in the trailer of a transport truck. He dances to pop music while experimenting on infected and non-infected people alike. I’d say he also has a dash of The Re-Animator in him as well.  And he is magnificently deranged and one of the film's highlights.

Brooke ends up in this doctor’s clutches when she is “rescued” by some gas masked military types who save her from her zombie predicament but then gag her and chain her to the wall of this rolling laboratory of horrors. I will not dare spoil what happens to her while in their clutches but let’s just say it is one of the most original elements of this film or any film of this genre, and is the most fun. The adventures of Benny and Barry pale in comparison to what Brooke goes through, and when they are finally re-united what follows is pure awesomeness.

Now over the years we have been treated to two main types of zombies; the slow shuffling zombies of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and the other being the rage fueled sprinting zombies we’ve seen in 28 Days Later and the Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, but in Wyrmwood we get both, and with a delightfully batshit reason. Our heroes soon learn that the gas powering their vehicles has become inert, a bizarre side-effect of the meteor showering, but then by accident they discover that zombies breathe a gas that is combustible and can power their truck. Barry is able to use his mechanic skills to convert their armored vehicle to be zombie powered and off they go to rescue his sister, but they run into a problem at night. It seems that when the sun sets the normally slow shuffling zombies stop exhaling the gas and instead use it to becoming the fast running undead of the 28 Days Later type of zombie.

This is a low budget movie that put every penny on screen with some really well done action scenes throughout. The make-up effects for the zombies are universally great throughout with the only caveat being that I’m not a fan of the CGI blood hits you get in many modern low budget movies. This film has been compared the early gore filled works of Peter Jackson, and while Wyrmwood has much of the same pitch black humor you see in Bad Taste and Brain Dead, there isn’t near the level of pure visceral gore of Jackson’s films.

An apparent sequel in the works and as we never find out just who the mad scientist and his military associates work for, or even what the point of the experiments were, there is certainly wealth of stuff for further films.  Once you see this film you are going to want to see more adventures with Brooke, she is that cool of a character.