Legend (1985)

Legend is a 1985 fantasy film directed by Ridley Scott and it seems to be almost a forgotten movie. 

This is old school fantasy, not just in terms of special effects but in terms of overall feel. It has more of an affinity with movies like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth than with more recent fantasy films.

This is a fairy tale movie without any noticeable comic-book influence.

It was a box-office flop and critics were unimpressed.

The central characters are Princess Lili (Mia Sara) and Jack (Tom Cruise). This is definitely the Realm of Faerie, a world of magic with goblins and unicorns and all manner of fantastic creatures, but it appears that Lili and Jack are human. Jack lives in the forest. Perhaps he was raised by the fairies? He does speak the language of the animals. 

Lili and Jack are madly in love and although Jack does not seem to have the usual qualifications one needs in order to marry a princess it is clear that Lili has chosen him.

These two young lovebirds then make two serious mistakes. They do two forbidden things. Firstly Jack allows Lili to touch a unicorn, something no mortal is permitted to do. And then Lili exercises her prerogative as a princess to set Jack a quest. She tosses the ring that signifies their betrothal into the lake. Jack must retrieve it, which proves impossible.

Unfortunately these mistakes aid the magical plans of the Lords of Darkness. He detests the sunshine and plans to create a world of perpetual night. To achieve this he must destroy the forest’s two unicorns and he must corrupt innocence. And Lili is clearly an innocent.

The corruption of Lili began with her impetuous urge to touch the unicorn.

The forest has now been plunged into permanent winter.

Jack is not exactly obvious hero material. He’s a naïve good-natured child of the forest. But now he will have to become a hero. 

Yes, there’s a hero’s journey here and Jack has a Destiny.

He has a small band of fairies to help him. They don’t seem like much of an army but they are devoted to Lili. And the elf Gump will be a useful lieutenant.

Tom Cruise is surprisingly effective as a sweet-natured hapless lad trying desperately hard to do the hero thing. And he’s very likeable. He’s the one cast member who gets it just right.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Tim Curry is incredibly hammy as the Lord of Darkness.

Lili is the problem. But that depends on which ending you choose. Yes, this is a Ridley Scott movie so there are three different cuts of the movie each with a radically different ending which changes the whole movie, and which will totally change your feelings about Lili. Either way the fact remains that Mia Sara just didn’t have the necessary star quality or warmth or depth to make us really care about Lili.

This was 1985, long before CGI. But by this time old school special effects and makeup effects had become extraordinarily sophisticated and effective. Legend is a demonstration of just how stunning pre-CGI movies could be.

Ridley Scott’s greatest asset has always been his aesthetic vision and his ability to assemble teams of talented people who can put his vision on the screen. His best movies are largely exercises in aesthetic vision and when he sticks to that he makes superb movies. When he makes movies that require storytelling skill and complex characterisation  the results can be very disappointing (Someone To Watch Over Me being a prime example). I think each of the endings of Legend has its pluses and minuses.

Legend has a few problems but they’re outweighed by its strengths. Recommended.

Gothic (1986)

Ken Russell’s Gothic, released in 1986, is based on the famous real-life events of a three-day period in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati Near lake Geneva when Lord Byron, his mistress Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley and his mistress (and soon-to-be bride) Mary Godwin and Byron’s personal physician Dr John Polidori amused themselves by reading ghost stories and decided, as a contest, that each of them would write a ghost story. As a result the 18-year-old Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and Polidori wrote The Vampyre, two of the most influential literary works in history.

With Frankenstein Mary Shelly invented science fiction (in this case with major gothic overtones) and with The Vampyre Polidori invented modern vampire fiction.

It was subject matter that was always going to appeal to Ken Russell. He was fascinated by artistic genius and explored the theme in countless movies. Russell was not interested in worshipful biopics. He was more interested in things like genius as madness, genius thwarted (Savage Messiah), genius betrayed (The Music Lovers) and genius as a self-destructive force (Isadora, Mahler, Dante’s Inferno).

It’s obvious from the start that Russell is going to great lengths to avoid the look and feel of BBC-TV costume dramas and the Merchant-Ivory movies and that he did not want cast members who looked like they belonged in any of those productions. Russell wanted something much wilder and crazier and he wasn’t worried about getting all the period details correct. Claire Clairmont in this movie looks like she’s on the way to a 1980s nightclub.

Percy Shelley is too often imagined as a sensitive, gentle, pallid aesthete. In this movie he’s a complete nutter and much more like the real Shelley - an unstable overgrown selfish spoilt child.

Byron was the first rock star. He lived the rock star lifestyle. Sex, drugs and Romantic poetry.

Wth five neurotic unstable drug-addled individuals stuck indoors with wild storms raging outside, reading too many ghost stories and doing too many drugs they quickly become even crazier than they were to begin with. Their personal demons are soon getting the better of them.

It doesn’t help that Byron is growing bored with Claire. Or that Percy Shelley had had an affair with Claire. There’s a whole web of interlocking jealousies and obsessions.

Claire is getting seriously weird and Shelley is becoming unhinged. They’re both experiencing hallucinations. Pretty soon they’re all experiencing hallucinations.

This movie is Ken Russell excess at its most excessive. Lots of wild off-kilter camera angles and disturbing lighting and then there are the automatons.

This is Ken Russell remorselessly picking apart the dark side of genius, and the Byron-Shelley circle was ideal material. Mary Shelley’s parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were advocates of anarchism, feminism and free love which had predictably catastrophic effects on Mary Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont and on Percy Shelley. These were particularly dangerous ideas for a mind as feeble as Shelley’s. Percy Shelley’s embrace of these doctrines drove his first wife to suicide.

Not only can creative geniuses be profoundly unpleasant people, they can also be profoundly stupid.

The movie is certainly a horror movie. Five awful people descend further and further into a drug-fuelled gothic fiction nightmare world of madness and horror, a nightmare world they have themselves created. They can no longer distinguish between nightmare and reality.

Do creative geniuses need to be mad? Probably not, but there’s no question that many creative geniuses have been trainwrecks as human beings and they’re the geniuses Ken Russell was interested in. The film suggests that it was three days of deranged but talented people tearing themselves apart in an orgy of insanity and excess that gave the world two unquestioned masterpieces, Frankenstein and The Vampyre. Maybe it was worth it from the world’s point of view.

Russell is trying to tie in the crazy goings-on at the Villa with the creation of Frankenstein and The Vampyre. These two works are gradually taking shape in the minds of Mary and Polidori. The five think they’re created a monster that’s haunting them but in fact they’re assisting in the birth of two literary masterpieces (and there is plenty of procreation and child-birth symbolism).

The performances could not be described as good in a conventional sense but they’re the crazed off-the-wall performances that Ken Russell wanted.

Gothic may not quite be top-tier Ken Russell but it deserves a much better reputation. Fascinating and highly recommended.

I have the German Blu-Ray which provides an excellent transfer and offers both English and German language options.

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1989)

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death is a goofy 1989 spoof of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The U.S. Government is concerned about a nefarious foreign plot to cut off the nations supply of avocados. This will lead to a guacamole crisis which will be the prelude to complete societal collapse. 

As everyone knows almost all of America’s avocados come from the savage unexplored jungles of southern California. 

Those jungles are the home of the much-feared Piranha Women who eat their men after mating with them. 

The Government sends a feminist ethnographer, Dr Kurtz (Adrienne Barbeau), to persuade the Piranha Women to move to a government reservation. Actually it’s a condo in Malibu.

But Dr Kurtz has vanished.

The U.S. Army sent a Special Forces team to rescue her but they were wiped out. The Army has decided that more drastic action is needed. They are going to send a Women’s Studies professor this time. They have selected Dr Margo Hunt (Shannon Tweed). She’s well qualified for the mission, being cute and blonde.

One of her students, Bunny (Karen Mistal), insists on going along. Bunny is a Valley Girl but she’s keen.

They will need a guide. Jim (Bill Maher) gets the job because he’s cheap. He’s also Margo’s ex-boyfriend, well sort of.

They set off downriver, braving the typical southern California hazards such as hippos.

They will discover that there’s something much more vital than avocados at stake.

In their tent at night Margo and Bunny get into some girl talk, confiding their hopes and dreams to each. Margo dreams of a world of equality and respect between the sexes. Bunny dreams of finding a man who will tie her up and spank her.

A common problem with low-budget movies (and this one is very low-budget) is pacing but that’s no problem here. There’s also the tendency to rely purely on goofy ideas but writer J.F. Lawton (who went on to write Pretty Woman) understands that you need actual gags as well and they have to be funny. And he wrote a genuinely very funny script.

I like Shannon Tweed and consider her to be underrated as an actress but the big revelation here is that she’s so good at comedy. She has a wonderfully sly deadpan comic delivery.

Bill Maher and Karen Mistal have totally different approaches to comedy but the three leads work together extremely well.

Adrienne Barbeau makes a good scary villainess - when ethnographers go bad they go really bad.

There’s satire here but it’s directed at just about everyone and everything. Men get mocked, and so do feminists. And Valley Girls. And the military. And academics. But it’s actually rather good-natured. For all his posturing Jim is a pretty nice guy. For all her feminist seriousness Margo is a nice lady. And maybe Bunny is a bimbo but she’s cute and sweet.

This is also a rom-com. When male and female characters snipe at each constantly we suspect that they’re crazy in love with each other.

And then the movie throws in a couple of unexpected twists at the end. It’s as if J.F. Lawton (who directed the picture as well as writing it) decided not to be predictable and to surprise us a little. I approve of that and I think the ending is perfect.

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death is very funny in a fairly clever way. It’s a much better movie than you expect it to be and it’s highly recommended.

Full Moon’s Blu-Ray presentation is excellent.

Possession (1981)

Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession starts on a note of hysteria and the hysteria level rises steadily. All of the characters exist in a constant state of hysteria.

This is not an overly coherent movie. There are ideas that seem to be just thrown in for the hell of it and are not followed through. At the start of the movie Mark (Sam Neill) is apparently an intelligence agent who has just returned from a lengthy mission. We see a glimpse of the Berlin Wall so we know we’re in Berlin, therefore we assume he was undercover behind the Iron Curtain. This is potentially an intriguing angle for a horror movie to explore - spies exist in a world of deception where nobody is what he appears to be. But we hear no more about Mark’s job as a spy. It’s as if the writers just totally forgot about it. This is all too typical of this movie.

Mark is married to Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and they have a small son, Bob.Their marriage is falling apart. He suspects that she has been unfaithful. We don’t really know what led up to this or how long the marriage has been rocky. We never do find out.

They both give the impression of being deranged babbling lunatics.

Mark finally discovers that Anna has been having an affair with Heinrich. Mark goes nuts, but he goes nuts about everything. Mark confronts Heinrich, and that doesn’t go well.

And then Mark discovers that Heinrich is not his only rival. And his other rival is much stranger.

We get lots more shouting and lots more histrionics. Then we see the monster. Then there are lots of gross-out scenes. When the monster appears the pacing, which was slow enough to begin with, becomes positively glacial. Something is going to happen connected with the monster but it takes forever to happen. And there will be further developments in the marital drama between Mark and Anna, and that takes forever to resolve.

In the meantime Mark has become involved with Helen. Helen is Bob’s schoolteacher. Helen is also played by Isabelle Adjani. It’s like Anna and Helen are two sides of the same woman, with Anna being the bad girl and Helen being the good girl. Maybe each of us has a good side and a bad side. Maybe that explains everything about the human condition. It’s a struggle between good and evil. Pretty deep stuff. We’re talking philosophy here man.

There’s a sub-plot involving a private eye, which also drags. And eventually we get to the infamous tentacle sex scene. Which is as un-erotic as the rest of the movie.

And what does it all mean in the end? I haven’t the remotest idea. That’s not necessarily a flaw. Some of my favourite movies are those that leave the audience wondering what on earth has actually been going on, and wondering what it all meant.

If that sort of thing is done well then you’re left wanting to see the movie again in the hope of teasing out a bit more of the meaning. You’re left perplexed but fascinated. If it’s done badly, you end up simply not caring that nothing made sense. And that, alas, was my response to this movie.

Both Sam Neill (a very fine actor) and Isabelle Adjani give performances that are somewhat incoherent and histrionic.

The performances are totally insane right from the start. We don’t get to see a gradual descent into madness, which might have been interesting. So we don’t get to know them as people. We never see them as anything other than crazed nutters. We have no idea what made Mark tick before he went crazy because we only see him as a crazy person. We have no idea what made Anna tick before she became a psycho because we only see her as a psycho. We do see Mark become more and more unhinged and we do see him descend into complete madness but I think it’s a weakness of the film that he’s already unstable right from the beginning. His descent into madness doesn’t really surprise us. He seems like the sort of guy who is already close to cracking up.

There’s also no gradual build-up as things get progressively stranger. Even when nothing strange at all is happening everyone is shouting hysterically and throwing things. So when strange things do start to happen the impact is lost. These are people who would put their fists through the kitchen wall if they burnt the toast.

Watching strange crazy things happening to strange crazy people isn’t that interesting. It’s what you expect to see happening to such people. It has no shock value. It’s a lot more interesting to see strange crazy things happening to relatively normal, or at least relatively sane, people.

This is what happens when you get a non-horror director trying to make a horror movie. They don’t understand the genre and they make a mess of things.

I loved crazy messed-up trippy weird movies. I love movies that are surreal and disturbing. I even love movies that combine horror with artiness. But just because a movie is crazy and messed-up and trippy and weird and has arty pretensions doesn’t make it a good movie. I don’t think Possession is a particularly good movie of this type.

If you’re going to make a weird movie you have to choose a particular kind of weirdness and stick to it. Even if the viewers never do figure out what is really happening and what it all means they have to at least feel that all the weirdness they’ve seen was in some way connected.

Listening to the audio commentary by the director it’s obvious that this was a very personal film for him. I can’t help thinking it was just too personal. It’s all based on the break-up of a relationship which happened to him, and all the characters are based on real people who were involved in that event. The result is that the movie is packed with minor details that have a deep personal significance for Zulawski, but which are not going to have any significance for the viewer. There are lots of things that make vague sense when he explains them, but when the director has to explain what various things in his movie mean then to me that is bad film-making.

As a horror movie I think Possession fails. It isn’t scary and it isn’t horrifying and it isn’t creepy. There are moments that are disgustingly gross but genuine creepiness requires more than grossness. I suspect that Zulawski thought he was adding a fairytale element to his domestic melodrama but I can’t see that it serves much purpose.

But I don’t think Zulawski had any intention of making a horror movie as such. It’s a story of personality disintegration (made literal in the doubling of Anna and Helen) and the monster is merely some kind of metaphor.

I didn’t like this movie at all but in fairness I should point out that almost everybody disagrees with me on this!

Night of the Comet (1984)

Night of the Comet is a 1984 post-apocalyptic science fiction film but it’s not handled in quite the way you might expect.

A comet is about to pass very close to Earth. Scientists reassure everybody that there is no danger. It just will be a spectacular light show.

Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) misses the show. She’s in the projection booth of an old movie theatre having sex with her boyfriend. Well he’s not exactly her boyfriend. They’re not going steady.

The projection both just happens to have steel walls. That’s important.

The next morning everybody is dead. Everybody in LA. Maybe everybody in the world. Well, almost everybody. By a coincidence Regina’s sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney) spent the night behind steel walls.

And Hector (Robert Beltran) spent the night in the back of his truck with some chick he’d picked up. It seems like anybody who was safely behind steel barriers of some sort has survived. Which means that everybody is dead except for a tiny handful of people.

They run into Hector at the radio station. That’s important, because that’s how the scientists find out about them.

There are also the zombies. There aren’t many of them. But they’re mean and you don’t always recognise them as zombies at first.

And there are those scientists. They’re holed up in some top-secret laboratory out in the desert. Since they’re scientists and they’re part of a secret research facility we assume they’re evil. They might not be, but it’s highly likely. Maybe they will rescue the two girls. Maybe.

The romantic comedy Valley Girl had been a huge hit in 1983. Writer-director Thom Eberhardt sold the producers of Valley Girl on Night of the Comet by pitching it to them as Valley Girls at the End of the World. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but with valley girls.

What makes Night of the Comet oddly appealing is that you expect it to become silly and goofy and it is, but only up to a point. It’s a bit darker than you think it’s going to be. It seems like it’s going to become a black comedy, but it’s more an absurdist comedy. The tone is all over the place but its unpredictability works in its favour.

As a post-apocalyptic nightmare world it’s just desolate and empty rather than terrifying and horrific. But the desolation and emptiness are effective.

Regina does have one big thing going for her. Her dad is a Special Forces officer. Regina can handle a submachine-gun with the same skill as her favourite arcade game. And her dad has taught her that if you have to use a gun, shoot to kill. Regina is more than a match for the average zombie. And kid sister Samantha is a pretty cool customer as well.

Our trio of survivors has no idea what is going on. They know that somehow the comet killed everybody but they don’t know the truth about the zombies and even when they encounter the scientists they don’t know what that desert laboratory is all about. But they are 80s teenagers and they’re not inclined to be overly trusting. And they’ve seen horror movies. They know you don’t take chances with zombies. And they know that scientists and government people are not always the good guys.

The scenes of deserted LA are beautifully and atmospherically shot. The desolation is achieved with commendable subtlety. The slightly red skies are a nice touch. You don’t need a huge budget to make a post-apocalyptic. You just have to know what you’re doing.

The two lead actresses are wonderful. They play off each other beautifully and they’re sassy without being annoying. This is not a movie that offers non-stop mayhem. It’s more a bitter-sweet look at real people trying to deal with the end of the world. It doesn’t need gore because we really care about these people. We really really want them to make it.

This is a much better movie than it has any right to be. It manages to warmhearted and cynical at the same time. Highly recommended.

Ninja III: The Domination (1985)

Whenever I see the Cannon Group logo at the beginning of a movie I get a feeling of confidence. Whether it turns out to be a great movie or a not-so-great movie it will be fun. Ninja III: The Domination belongs to the not-so-great category but in its own perverse way it achieves a kind of quasi-greatness.

This is a psycho ninja chick movie. And any psycho ninja chick movie has got to be worth watching.

It begins with a bunch of people playing golf. Then a ninja shows up and kills everybody. Then the cops show up. Lots and lots of cops. Dozens of cops. The ninja kills most of them. Finally, having been shot about 98 times the ninja has had enough and he’s about to expire. But his story is not yet finished. Christie (Lucinda Dickey), a perfectly ordinary young woman, finds him lying in the bushes about to die and something weird happens.

One thing that’s cool is that we never find out why the ninja ran amok on the golf course. We presume someone hired him. We have no idea who that someone could be. Writer James R. Silke knows that we don’t need to know. This is not a mystery or a police procedural, it’s a ninja action picture.

The cop who interviews Christie, Officer Secord (Jordan Bennett) takes a shine to her. Christie doesn’t date cops. But Secord isn’t a quitter and his desperation to get into her pants is finally rewarded with success. And soon there’s a thing between them.

Christie has a sword, a katana. We soon have reason to suspect it’s a magic sword.

The cops who shot that ninja start to die in rather grisly ways. Maybe there’s another ninja about.

There is, in a way. That evil dead ninja has possessed Christie. She now intermittently turns into an evil lady ninja.

And there’s another ninja, Yamada (Shô Kosugi). He has an eye patch. We don’t know if he’s a good ninja or an evil ninja.

More cops get sliced up. Poor Secord doesn’t know what’s going on. Christie doesn’t know either.

Truly immense quantities of mayhem follow.

This is not just a psycho ninja chick movie. It’s also an incredibly bad rip-off of The Exorcist. And it’s a bit of an 80s dance movie as well. Lots of aerobics. And a video game movie. If something was fashionable in the 80s it will show up somewhere in this movie.

The acting is terrible. If you’re wondering why Lucinda Dickey did not become a major star then watch this movie and you’ll have your answer. The gal just can’t act.

But then this is not exactly a character-driven movie so that doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the martial arts action and there’s plenty of that and it’s pretty entertaining with a very high body count. And Miss Dickey can dance and trained dancers always handle fight scenes pretty well.

There are some really bad special effects as well, which adds further layers of fun. I have no idea why some of these effects were even there except that I think they wanted a video game vibe.

What do you want in a psycho ninja chick movie? You want a cool lady ninja and you want her to be totally nuts and you want her to leave a path of death and destruction behind her. That’s what this movie offers. It doesn’t offer anything else. It doesn’t need to.

Ninja III: The Domination is in truth a very bad movie but that’s what makes it fun.

I have the Spanish Blu-Ray release which sadly doesn’t provide a very good transfer. On the other hand this is the sort of movie that is more enjoyable if it looks like you’re watching it on a VHS rental from Blockbuster back in the day.

Murderock (1984)

Murderock (AKA Murder-Rock: Dancing Death) is a 1984 Lucio Fulci giallo.

The setting is a dance school in New York. This was 1984 so it has a bit of a Flashdance vibe. There’s fierce competition. Out of more than a dozen young dancers only three will be chosen for bigger things.

Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos) runs the class. She was once on the brink of a glittering career, until she was knocked over by a motorcyclist. She recovered, but not fully. Not fully enough to have a career as a dancer. Now she teaches.

One of the girls in her class is murdered, in a rather odd way - a hatpin through the heart.

Lieutenant Borges (Cosimo Cinieri) has insufficient evidence to make any moves. It appears likely that someone in the dance school was the killer. Likely, but not certain.

There’s a second murder. Another girl pupil. The same murder method.

There’s no certainty as to whether the killer is male or female. The victims are knocked out by chloroform first.

Candice is worried. Her boss Dick Gibson (Claudio Cassinelli) is worried. He knew some of the girl pupils. He knew them intimately. That makes him a suspect but there’s so much jealousy and backbiting within the school that everybody is a suspect.

Candice has strange dreams. There’s a man in the dreams trying to kill her. She knows the man from somewhere but she can’t remember having actually met him.

There are romantic entanglements between the various students as well as entanglements the students and the staff. There has been a relationship between Dick Gibson and Candice. Candice also has a hot new boyfriend, male model and unsuccessful actor George Webb (Ray Lovelock).

There’s another murder. This time the killer was photographed but frustratingly the photo shows nothing useful. The paranoia builds. Everyone is jumpy. And nobody believes that the killings have stopped.

There are a lot of interesting aspects about the way Fulci made this movie. It’s a giallo with almost no gore at all. I don’t mind that. There are other things that matter more in a giallo. Style is more important, and this movie has style. An atmosphere of indefinable menace matter, and this film has that. Hints of sexual motivations are essential in a giallo and they’re found here as well. And while there’s no gore there’s a hint of kinkiness in the murder method.

Many giallo fans consider plot coherence to be of minor importance but in this case the plot does all come together even if there are some offbeat outrageous elements. Offbeat and outrageous elements are always welcome in a giallo.

And there are plenty of clues. Lieutenant Borges does not rely on inspiration. He has spotted those clues and he has noted their significance. He’s a good cop. He notices clues and he thinks about them, about what they really mean.

When the solution is revealed it makes perfect sense. The motivations make sense.

I love the automated message that warns the students to vacate the premises within fifteen minutes every night before the whole school is locked down tight by electronic means. It adds to the suspicion that the murder was an inside job and it also adds a touch of paranoia. The school itself is a character in the story.

There are cameras everywhere in the school. Everybody is being watched by somebody - and not just by those authorised to be watching. There’s visual surveillance and auditory surveillance. This is a movie with a definite interest in voyeurism of various kinds.

I love the way Fulci shoots so many scenes in a fragmented way. The frame is fragmented. Some parts of a shot will be lit while other parts are unlit. Lights keep flashing on and and off. Music recordings switch on and off. It’s as if reality is being splintered. It’s very unsettling, and deliberately so.

I’m increasingly fond of 80s Fulci. This was a fascinating extremely varied phase of his career, and Murderock is Fulci in top form. Highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks great.

Other 80s Fulci films that I recommend - The Black Cat (1981), The Devil’s Honey (1986), Aenigma (1987).

Cyborg (1989)

Cyborg is a 1989 science fiction action movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and directed by Albert Pyun. While there is a cyborg in the film the character played by Van Damme is totally human.

The setting is your basic post-apocalyptic wasteland world. There’s been social, political and economic collapse and then a devastating plague.

The last remaining scientists are holed up in Atlanta and they’re working on a cure for the plague. They need some crucial data. That data is contained in a female cyborg, Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haddon). She has to make it to Atlanta.

The chief bad guy is an incredibly vicious pirate named Fender (Vincent Klyn). He wants that data. Not to save lives, but because he would give him unlimited wealth and power.

Gibson Rickenbacker (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is a Slinger - a kind of mercenary/hired gun/adventurer/freebooter. Slingers might not be solid law-abiding citizens but they’re not pirates and they’re not murderers. He doesn’t care about the data or the cyborg but he has a really big grudge against Fender (explained in a series of brief flashbacks). He’ll try to save the cyborg but what he wants is revenge.

He hooks up with Nady Simmons (Deborah Richter). She’s some kind of thief and she tries to kill our hero but he feels sorry for her and he doesn’t like hurting women and when she insists on tagging along he puts up with her. She has come over all idealistic and wants to save the cyborg.

She makes a likeable cute side-kick and gives Rickenbacker the chance to show that he has a gentle side. He’s not interested in getting her into bed but he does end up caring about her.

The plot is very sketchy but that doesn’t matter because it’s just an excuse for a series of extremely violent incredibly brutal action scenes but that’s OK because those action scenes are superbly staged.

This movie is a non-stop adrenalin rush.

Jean-Claude Van Damme was cast for his very considerable martial arts skills. As an actor he’s competent.

Fender is an evil villain with the emphasis on the evilness and he’s effectively scary and very very nasty.

This is a Cannon Group production and while the budget was limited and the concept of the post-apocalyptic world is routine it looks very impressive. Imagination and energy are more important than a big budget.

The presence of a cyborg suggests a cyberpunk influence but really she’s just there to add an extra coolness factor. Both the plague and the cyborg are just plot devices to make Rickenbacker’s quest about something more noble and important than mere revenge. There is however one major emotional twist towards the end.

The movie is totally focused on the action and Pyun wisely allows nothing to distract us from that. He’s not going to waste time on exposition. We don’t care where the plague came from. We don’t need a detailed history of the process of social collapse. We don’t even need to know exactly what a Slinger is. We just need to know that they’re basically good guys while the pirates are seriously evil. This is totally a good vs evil story. The villain has no redeeming features whatsoever.

Cyborg is pure action entertainment and it delivers the goods very impressively. There’s not a wasted minute in the movie. The plot probably has lots of holes in it but there’s no time to notice such details. Jean-Claude Van Damme is a badass action hero and his martial arts skills are pretty awesome. He doesn’t say much, but he doesn’t need to.

Cyborg is highly recommended.

I have the French Blu-Ray release and it looks terrific.

I’ve also reviewed another much less successful Albert Pyun-directed Cannon Group release, Alien from L.A., released a year earlier.

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.

Mr Vampire (1985)

Mr Vampire is a 1985 horror comedy released by Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest studio.

I have to be upfront here - I really dislike horror comedies in general. This is a very crazy movie, which is a good thing, but for my tastes it’s just too silly. I enjoy silliness, but this is too much silliness for me. 

And the comedy is mainly slapstick, my least favourite form of comedy.

It begins with the reburial of the father of a prominent citizen, Master Yam. The family had buried the father after taking advice from a feng shui master but the advice was bad and has caused the family twenty years of bad luck.

The corpse is dug up and taken to the mortuary where it is discovered that the old man is turning into a vampire.

The priest and his two hapless assistants take what they hope are the necessary steps to prevent the transformation from being completed.

Their efforts are in vain. And one of the assistants is bitten by the vampire.

The other assistants is waylaid by a pretty female ghost. They have a nice time in bed together but the young man is now bewitched.

So the priest has to save one of his assistants from being turned into a vampire and save the other from the attentions of a very horny lady ghost.

At one stage the priest is locked up on suspicion of murder by Master Yam’s unbelievably stupid policeman nephew.

All of which gives rise to countless comedic kung fu action scenes.

The humour is mostly lame. One of the few genuinely funny moments is the misunderstanding in the shop where one of the priest’s assistants is employed - he thinks Master Yam’s very respectable daughter works in the brothel across the road. This is witty verbal humour and it works.

What makes the movie worth seeing is the fascinating wealth of vampire and ghost lore, much of it based at least to some degree on actual Chinese folklore. Chinese ghosts are corporeal and actually can and do have sex and lady ghosts do seduce men. And Chinese ghosts are not necessarily evil. Having sex with a ghost can lead to unfortunate consequences but this is not always the case.

And then there are the hopping vampires, and vampire-like hopping undead creatures do figure in Chinese folklore. They add a very bizarre touch.

The steps that need to be taken to combat vampires are insanely complicated. If you’re up against vampires you will need a great deal of glutinous rice, plenty of black ink and a lot of string. You’ll need advanced martial arts skills.

You’ll also need a good deal of luck. These vampires are near-unstoppable. You cannot afford mistakes.

Mr Vampire has its attractions and it’s certainly different. It was a huge commercial success and kicked off an entire genre.

The performances and the comedy are very very broad. Your enjoyment of the movie will depend very heavily on how much you like ultra-zany goofy slapstick humour.

If you do enjoy this type of comedy you’ll enjoy the movie much more than I did.

The Eureka Blu-Ray offers a very nice transfer with some extras.