Alien from L.A. (1988)

Alien from L.A. is, in a vague sort of way, a riff on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It’s a 1988 Cannon Group release directed and co-written by Albert Pyun.

Wanda Saknussemm (Kathy Ireland) is a California gal who has just been dumped by her hot surfer dude boyfriend. He dumped her because even though she’s cute she’s such a wet blanket and a dorkette and her whiney voice gets on his nerves.

Now she’s off to Africa to look for her missing explorer/archaeologist father. All she knows is that apparently he fell down a bottomless pit and hasn’t been seen since.

Inevitably Wanda falls down the same pit.

She finds herself in a huge hitherto unknown underground city known as Atlantis. In fact it’s a vast underground world. 

She gets rescued by a gruff hardbitten miner, Gus Edway (William R. Moses).

Atlantis is a dystopian totalitarian hellworld. And now she’s being hunted down as an alien. Anyone from the surface world is an alien. Amusingly the authorities tell the citizens to be on the lookout for an alien girl from the surface world while at the same time assuming them that aliens do not exist and that the surface world does not exist.

There’s a difference of opinion about what to do with her when she’s caught but security chief General Rykov (Janie du Plessis) favours extreme measures.

Wanda gets into countless scrapes and has countless narrow escapes. And eventually finds out something extraordinary about the city.

I was expecting this to be a very low budget affair but clearly the budget was reasonably generous. It has the grungy post-apocalyptic wasteland look that one finds in so many movies of this era. This is the film’s first fault - it doesn’t have quite enough of a distinctive flavour.

Albert Pyun has said that he was trying to make a fairy tale movie aimed at a family audience. There’s nothing wrong with that except that as a result the villains are not sufficiently evil and scary to be really memorable and we don’t have enough of a sense that Wanda is in real danger.

The third problem is that Gus Edway is a very bland hero.

A fourth and bigger problem is that there’s no real romance subplot. There is obviously zero attraction between Wanda and Gus. An action/adventure movie works better when the hero and the heroine care enough about each other to take risks for each other, and when we, the viewers, are desperately hoping that they’ll end up together. Another character is introduced very late who might have potential as a love interest for Wanda but this subplot doesn’t go anywhere.

The final problem is that the extraordinary revelation about the city isn’t exploited. We expect it to lead to something but it doesn’t.

The power struggle within Atlantis could also have been developed a bit more.

For some people Kathy Ireland as Wanda is an issue, especially her high-pitched little girl voice. I don’t have a problem with her. Wanda is supposed to be whiney and to irritate people. That’s why her boyfriend dumped her and that’s how the whole adventure began. I think however that she comes across as fairly likeable and sympathetic.

Alien from L.A. has some major flaws but it’s not as bad as it reputation would suggest. If you don’t set you expectations too high it’s a reasonably enjoyable sci-fi adventure flick. Tentatively recommended.

Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-Ray presentation is excellent.

The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals (1969)

The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals is a very low-budget 1969 horror flick made by an outfit called Vega International. This company had a brief and very chaotic history and it appears that some of the half dozen or so movies they planned to make were never completed, or simply ended up being lost. The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals seems not to have had much, if anything, of a proper release and was pretty much unknown until it turned up on VHS in the 80s.

Egyptologist Dave Barrie (Anthony Eisley) steals two Ninth Dynasty Egyptian mummies after the plane carrying them to a museum crashes near Las Vegas. One is the mummy of the Princess Akana. The other is the mummy of some high priest dude who had been her lover.

Akana is perfectly preserved. Dave is immediately fascinated by her. He had already come up with a theory that she could be revived after being dead (or apparently dead) for several thousand years.

It turns out he was right and she does indeed revive. He naturally falls in love with her but the bad news is that he is now the victim of a curse. He has become a jackal-man, a werejackal.

He runs amok, kills a couple of cops, then returns to his extraordinarily dilapidated house and goes to sleep. He wakes up with no knowledge of his nocturnal rampage.

Meanwhile the other mummy has revived as well and he is determined to destroy Dave, seeing him as a rival to Akana’s love. Their ongoing battle provides most of the movie’s action.

Dave takes Akana out on the town, along with his friends Bob and Donna. Akana likes 1960s Vegas.

Dave has more werejackal episodes and that other mummy is causing mayhem as well. Fortunately people in Vegas are sophisticated enough not to be overly disturbed by rampaging mummies and werejackals roaming the streets.

A movie like this wouldn’t be complete without John Carradine who plays a professor who is a bit worried about what Dave is up to.

The plot obviously borrows heavily from other mummy movies but I can’t recall another movie with a werejackal.

In low-budget movies that rely on iffy makeup effects it’s usually a good idea not to let the audience see too much of the monsters until it’s unavoidable. But in this movie we see lots of both monsters. The werejackal prosthetic head is actually not that bad.

The acting is mostly dull. Anthony Eisley isn’t going to convince anyone that he’s an Egyptologist. Marliza Pons as Princess Akana is a problem. Apart from not being able to act she does does not have the necessary glamour or allure.

On the plus side the pacing isn’t too bad (pacing is where very low budget movie so often fall down).

The fact that the story is crazy is no great problem. A great gothic horror movie doesn’t need a dazzling plot. What it needs is a suitably spooky or creepy atmosphere and a sense of dread - a sense that something is happening that just isn’t possible. These are the things that this movie fails to pull off.

A gothic horror movie set in Vegas is however a cool idea.

It’s all very silly and to be honest it’s a very bad movie but if you’re in the right mood you’ll get some fun out of it.

Severin have released The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals on Blu-Ray. The transfer is acceptable given that this movie probably never looked stunning to begin with. The disc comes with a stack of extras plus a bonus film, another Vega International production - Angelica, the Young Vixen.

Angelica: The Young Vixen (1970)

Angelica: The Young Vixen is a low-budget sexploitation movie made by an outfit called Vega International. This company had a brief and confusing history and of the half dozen or so movies they planned to make some were completed and some weren’t. One of the partners in the company was Oliver Drake, a prolific director of B-westerns who helmed several of Vega’s films including The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals. He’s credited as director of Angelica: The Young Vixen but it was in fact directed by another guy who had taken the name OIiver Drake.

Vega were active from around 1968 to maybe 1971 and Angelica: The Young Vixen seems to have had its original release in 1970. It was considered a lost film until very recently when Severin got hold of a very battered but complete release print. They have included it as an extra on their Blu-Ray release of The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals.

Angelica: The Young Vixen falls vaguely within the hicksploitation sub-genre (a sub-genre I dearly love).

Ned Hurley (William Johnson) is the overseer on the farm belonging to Judge Blaine (Lou d’Jena). Cute blonde nymphet Angelica (Dixie Donovan) is one the field hands. She’s shacked up with a gypsy named Nick (Vincent Ricco) but she’s been playing around with Ned as well and that’s already led to the two men trading punches.

We then get a sex scene, a threesome, which was a later insert and has no connection whatsoever with the rest of the movie but presumably a distributor thought the movie needed to be spiced up. It adds a bizarre touch because we have no idea at all who these people are.

Then, in a slightly surreal scene, Nick drags the two illicit lovers, sleeping bag and all, to a tree where he tries to string them up. The final result is that Ned is charged with murder. It was really an accident and the dropping of the charges is just a formality but the judge has to figure out what to do with Angelica. She’s a material witness. And she’s 17.

The judge’s daughter Marlou (Josie Kirk) suggests that Angelica can come stay with them.

Marlou has an ulterior motive. She likes girls. She likes girls in That Way. Especially cute blonde sexpots. Angelica isn’t into girls in That Way but she figures it would be wise to play along.

Angelica is still sleeping with Ned. And she’s started sleeping with Judge Blaine. And with a lawyer attached to the judge’s court. Angelica is a very friendly girl. Very affectionate.

There’s a perfect setup here for some overheated melodrama and that’s what we get and it’s done reasonably well and it’s quite entertaining. The script is perfectly adequate.

The acting on the whole is pretty basic but Dixie Donovan (who made a stack of sexploitation movies in her very brief film career) is a lot of fun as Angelica. Maybe not a conventionally good actress but she knows how to do the seductive dangerous sex kitten thing to a tee and she clearly had no inhibitions about taking her clothes off. And she’s very easy on the eyes.

There is nudity, including frontal nudity, in copious quantities and numerous sex scenes but there is still plenty of time for the outrageously overcooked plot to keep simmering along.

The print has some very major print damage which was obviously why Severin decided to throw it in as a freebie. It was a good decision. This is a thoroughly enjoyable slice of classic American sexploitation. I liked Angelica: The Young Vixen but then I do like this sort of thing quite a bit.

And they’ve included an audio commentary for it! Which makes this a fine double-header Blu-Ray release.

Tokugawa Sex Ban (1972)

Tokugawa Sex Ban AKA The Erotomaniac Daimyo (The Lustful Lord) is a 1972 Japanese exploitation movie from Toei Studios. Although it was written and directed by one of the masters of the pinky violence genre, Norifumi Suzuki, it’s not actually a pinky violence movie. It’s a combination of costume drama and sex comedy. And since it is a Norifumi Suzuki movie it does include a great deal of inspired craziness. A very great deal.

The setting is Japan in 1825, during the Tokugawa Shogunate. The current shogun has 54 children so as you’d expect finding suitable wives and husbands for all of them is quite a challenge. The immediate problem is the Princess Kyohime (Miki Sugimoto). Finally it is decided that Lord Tadateru Ogura (Hiroshi Nawa) would be a suitable match.

This lord is not pleased at the prospect. He is a middle-aged virgin with zero desire to marry. The princess for her part is unhappy about having to live in Kyushu which she considers to be a kind of barbaric hicksville.

She’s been doing some research on a wife’s marital duties, perusing instructional manuals on the subject. She is concerned that some of the positions look rather uncomfortable but overall she’s looking forward to losing her virginity.

Sadly her wedding night is a major disappointment. The bliss she anticipated does not eventuate.

This is a problem for Lord Ogura. If the shogun finds out that his daughter is disappointed in her husband he is likely to be very annoyed.

Lord Ogura’s chief advisor decided that his lord needs to undergo some intensive training. His lack of sexual prowess is due largely to inexperience. The advisor has three young lady assistants who undertake his training, He also has a secret weapon. It has just arrived in a crate from Paris. It is a French Doll. The doll is in fact a gorgeous French babe, Sandra (Sandra Julien). Soon Lord Ogura is obsessed with her.

This does not solve the princess’s problem.

Lord Ogura comes up with a fiendish plan. If he cannot enjoy connubial bliss then no-one will. He bans sex throughout his domain.

After this the movie gets more and more bizarre. It’s pointless to try to describe what happens. You have to see it to believe it and when you’ve seen it you still won’t believe it.

Fans of Norifumi Suzuki’s movies will know that he had a bit of an obsession with Catholicism. That obsession figures in this movie, in ways that make very little sense.

As a sex comedy it is very very funny although in a totally deranged way. It should be mentioned as an aside that sex comedies are something the Japanese do extremely well.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is the feel of the movie. Many of the sets have a kind of fairy tale feel and there are scenes that look like they’re shot through the proscenium arch of a theatre. There is a play within a play. With the voiceover narration as well it appears that Suzuki was aiming for a fairy tale or folk tale or storybook feel.

The subject matter certainly suggests that Suzuki intended the movie to be a satirical comment on censorship. There’s also a bizarre seppuku scene, this coming just a couple of years after celebrated Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s pubic act of seppuku.

Tokugawa Sex Ban is wild and crazy but it’s pleasingly oddball and it’s sexy and it’s funny and it’s highly recommended.

The movie looks lovely on Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray release. There’s an excellent exhaustively detailed audio commentary by Jasper Sharp.

Norifumi Suzuki made some extraordinary movies including several featuring Miki Sugimoto, most notably Sex and Fury, Girl Boss Revenge (Sukeban, 1973) and Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom.

Sandra Julien was clearly cast in this movie after the successful Japanese release of I Am a Nymphomaniac (1971).

OSS 117 Double Agent (1968)

Pas de roses pour OSS 117 (OSS 117 Double Agent, OSS 117 Murder for Sale) was the sixth of the eight French eurospy movies made between 1956 and 1971 based on the popular novels of Jean Bruce.

For this movie John Gavin took over the role of Agent OSS 117. CIA Agent OSS 117 is Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, of French descent but American-born.

A shadowy organisation has been masterminding political assassinations. OSS 117 has to infiltrate the organisation by posing as a notorious hitman named Chandler. He does so successfully. The given him another new identity, James Mulligan. To avoid confusion I’ll just refer to him as OSS 117 throughout.

The leader of the assassination organisation, the Major (Curd Jürgens), gives him a tough assignment to prove his mettle and his loyalty. He has to kill a United Nations official Heinrich Van Dyck who is brokering a peace deal between two warring factions in the Middle East. The assassination will wreck the peace deal and this will benefit the powerful interests who are behind the Major.

It starts slowly and at first it’s all a bit predictable. Secret agents posing as assassins is a familiar enough spy/crime trope.

It gets more interesting when OSS 117 meets the girl. Of course there’s a girl and of course she’s beautiful. Her name is Aïcha Melik (Margaret Lee). She’s the daughter of a rich banker. It doesn’t take much to get OSS 117 interested in pretty girls and he gets even more interested when for some inexplicable reason the bad guys instruct him to keep away from her.

Of course you never know if beautiful girls will turn out to be delightful companions or evil lady super-spies. That’s what makes beautiful girls so enticing.

The vaccine he is given is one of the nicest touches in the movie. It’s a time-lapse killer vaccine. If he isn’t given the antidote regularly he’ll drop dead. It’s a good way to keep new employees in line. It allows for the introduction of another villain, a sinister doctor.

A couple of goons have been tailing the girl. They could be working for the Major or for some other faction or could even be good guys. It doesn’t matter. It gives OSS 117 the chance to do the protective hero thing. Chicks always go for that. Pretty soon Aïcha thinks OSS 117 is a total dreamboat.

Thee are double-crosses going on and there’s the Major’s vicious henchman Karas to worry about. Karas took an immediate and intense dislike to OSS 117.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with the plot. It just doesn’t have quite enough twists and quite enough interest. It’s a bit too routine.

The fight scenes are done well but it needed at least one reasonably cool action set-piece and sadly it never eventuates. It’s like an aircraft that taxies along the runway but never quite manages to get airborne.

This movie has the cosmopolitan feel of so many 1960s/70s European genre movies. It’s a French movie with an American leading man, an English leading lady, a German actor as the villain and several Italian supporting players. John Gavin is quite OK. Margaret Lee is adorable and charming and is really the best thing in the movie. Curd Jürgens was a great actor and should have made a terrific super-villain but the Major never becomes the colourful larger-than-life presence that was needed. Look out for Rosalba Neri and Luciana Paluzzi in small roles.

Eurospy movies could not match the budgets or the spectacles of the Bond movies. The best of them, such as Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966) and Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill (1966), make up for this by adding inspired craziness, surreal touches and lots of style. OSS 117 Double Agent by comparison is too straightforward which means that you notice the limited budget.

It’s all pretty tame. No nudity. Very restrained violence.

OSS 117 Double Agent is perfectly decent entertainment but for me it’s one of the weaker entries in the series. It’s still worth a watch if you buy the five-movie Kino Lorber boxed set (on both Blu-Ray and DVD) and if you’re a eurospy fan you simply must buy it. The transfers are excellent. It’s a real treat to see such movies decently presented in their correct aspect ratios and looking so good.

I’ve also reviewed the really excellent OSS 117: Mission for a Killer (1965) and OSS 117: Mission to Tokyo (1966).

Armitage III: Dual Matrix (2001)

Armitage III: Dual Matrix was released in 2001.

Something that needs to be clarified in regard to Armitage III: Dual Matrix right at the start is that this is not the third film in a series. It’s the second film in a two-movie series. It’s a sequel to Armitage III: Poly-Matrix. It’s called Armitage III because the heroine, Naomi Armitage, is a Third.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix was in fact an OVA which was later edited into feature film format.

You need to have seen Armitage III: Poly-Matrix first, otherwise you won’t understand where the heroine is coming from and you won’t understand what she is. The background from the first film is that this is a world in which Mars has been colonised and has a large population of both humans and robots. Robots have become ubiquitous. The second-generation roots, known as Seconds, are useful for routine work. The Thirds, the third-generation robots, are a different matter. They are almost indistinguishable from humans, which makes many people uneasy.

Armitage was a cop working for the Martin PD, partnered with a human cop, Ross Sylibus.

Thirds have something very much akin to human emotions. Armitage knows she is a robot but she feels that she is also a woman.

As Armitage III: Dual Matrix opens Armitage is married (to Ross) and they have a daughter, Yoko. Yoko really is Armitage’s daughter. But Armitage is a robot. How can that be possible? It’s possible because Armitage is a Third. That’s the secret of the Thirds, the secret that has been closely guarded but now a sinister robotics tycoon is determined to get hold of that secret.

There’s also a move afoot to give robots legal rights. That has triggered a major political storm on both Earth and Mars.

There’s more to this struggle than is apparent on the surface. It has some connection to much earlier events, an apparently robot-inspired revolt known as the First Error.

It’s not just stubbornness that makes Armitage determined not to reveal the secret of the Thirds. It is vital that the secret remains a secret.

This is one of a number of cyberpunk movies (from Japan and elsewhere) dealing with the blurring of the line between humans and machines. In Blade Runner there’s Rachel who doesn’t know she’s a robot because she has her childhood memories (which are actually someone else’s memories). That’s her tragedy. In Ghost in the Shell Motoko has an entirely prosthetic body but she still has her (genuine) human memories. She still has her “ghost” - the essential human core of her consciousness - within the shell (the body). But she has to wonder if that’s enough to make fully human.

And here we have Armitage. She knows that she is a robot but she is a robot that may have crossed the threshold into consciousness. She feels things the way a woman feels things. But is she a woman?

One thing I love about the Armitage films is that Armitage is not a kickass action heroine who could just as easily have been a male character. Her femaleness is at the very core of the story. And being a mother is at the core of the story.

And although in the first movie Armitage and Ross start out having a kind of regular cop buddy movie relationship in this second film their relationship as husband and wife, and mother and father to Yoko, is crucial. This is what motivates all of their actions.

There is of course a vast amount of violent mayhem, done with energy and style.

By the mid-1980s anime dealing with complex grown-up subject matter was becoming a big thing. This was around the same time that cyberpunk was becoming the fashionable style of science fiction. In a way anime and cyberpunk grew up together. The Japanese took to cyberpunk like a duck to water. They loved the mood and the aesthetic.

By the time the first instalment of Armitage III came out in 1996 there had already been some great cyberpunk anime. Ghost in the Shell (1995) obviously but also Goku Midnight Eye (1989) and Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990). There’s also a slight cyberpunk flavour to the excellent Angel Cop (1989-94).

Armitage III: Dual Matrix is top-tier cyberpunk anime and it’s highly recommended.

I have the old Madman DVD which is sadly out of print.

Demon Witch Child (1975)

Demon Witch Child (La endemoniada) is a 1975 Exorcist rip-off written and directed by Amando de Ossorio. 

Amando de Ossorio made some fine creepy gothic horror such as the brilliant Blind Dead movies but he also made some wonderfully crazy tongue-in-cheek horror romps.

By 1975 everybody in Europe was making Exorcist rip-offs. This is a Spanish example.

There are moments in de Ossorio’s movie that are lifted directly from The Exorcist (the levitation, the head spinning the wrong way, the different voice coming from the child) but there are plenty of differences and there are moments in Demon Witch Child which in my view are creepier than anything in The Exorcist.

A local witch, a very old woman known as Mother Gautière, has been sacrificing children to the Devil. Now she’s taken possession of a young girl, Susan Barnes (Marián Salgado).

What follows is the kind of mayhem you expect.

Susan is the daughter of the police chief. He’s already under pressure from the press after the unsolved murder of another child. Reporter William Grant (Daniel Martín) is really going after him but they later become allies.

The old witch is arrested and that has fateful consequences.

Susan begins acting very strangely and disturbingly. It’s like she’s become a different person.

William’s fiancée Anne (who seems to be Susan’s governess) suspects demonic possession.

Father Juan (Julián Mateos) gets involved. He’s reluctant to admit it’s a case of possession. He has his own problems. Before entering the priesthood he was engaged to marry a girl named Esther (María Kosty). She was so upset at being dumped that she became a whore. Father Juan seems strangely indifferent to her fate. This subplot makes Father Juan slightly less sympathetic but also slightly more complex. And Esther is not out of the picture yet.

Mother Gautière, now in possession of Susan, has very nasty plans in store for both William and Anne. This leads to one of the movie’s big shock scenes in which poor William loses a vital part of his anatomy.

This is a movie that relies mostly not on actual gore but on horrifying ideas. What we don’t see can still shock us.

And it has a slightly surprising but rather effective ending.

This was a very low budget movie, shot in eight days, but the cheap special effects work very well and the makeup effects are excellent. The makeup effects on the young girl (I don’t want to give way spoilers but it involves the way the possession manifests itself) are incredibly creepy and effective.

The crawling down the wall scene is also nicely scary and weird.

It’s worth mentioning that the lead actress in this film, Marián Salgado, dubbed Linda Blair’s voice in the Spanish release of The Exorcist. Salgado gives an amazing performance here.

Demon Witch Child is odd in being rather low-key but also quite disturbing at times. I’m quite a fan of European Exorcist rip-offs and this one is recommended.

This film is part of a three-movie Blu-Ray set from Vinegar Syndrome, along with The Vampires’ Night Orgy (1973) and Curse of the Devil (1973). Demon Witch Child gets a very nice transfer with a number of extras.

I’ve also reviewed de Ossorio’s wildly entertaining The Loreley’s Grasp (1974) and the even more delightfully crazy The Night of the Sorcerers (1973).

If you’re a connoisseur of Exorcist rip-offs you’ll also want to check out Alberto De Martino’s The Antichrist.