THE CLONES OF BRUCE LEE (1981)
aka Shen wei san meng long
Article 3914 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-22-2012
Posting Date: 5-2-2012
Directed by Joseph Velasco
Featuring Dragon Lee, Bruce Le, Yi Tao Chang (as Bruce Lai)
Country: Hong Kong / Philippines
What it is: Just what you think it is

Upon Bruce Lee’s death, a scientist uses his DNA to clone three new Bruce Lees, named Bruce Lee 1, Bruce Lee 2, and Bruce Lee 3. They go out and fight crime. But can the scientist who created them be trusted…?

On the level of sheer physical spectacle, it’s hard not to be a little impressed by the fighting in a martial arts film; as a combination of fighting, gymnastics, mime, dance, and sound-enhanced gesturing, it’s at least interesting to look at. But it takes more than a series of staged fight scenes to make a movie, and outside of a handful of silly moments, there’s very little else to draw you into this one. On top of the cloning concept, there’s also some fantastic content with a mad scientist who develops a formula that turns men into metal, which largely results in their being more clanging during the fight scenes with them; their defeat involves force-feeding them poison grass, certainly the comedic highlight of this film. As to how our Bruce Lee wannabes compare to the original, I can only say that I’m not familiar enough with Bruce Lee’s own work to do so, but I’m willing to bet that none of them had a movie made after their death in which someone was cloning them.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE CAMPUS CORPSE (1977)
aka Campus Corpse, The Hazing
Article 3907 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-15-2012
Posting Date: 4-25-2012
Directed by Douglas Curtis
Featuring Jeff East, Kelly Moran, Sandra Vacey
Country: USA
What it is: Not what some people would have you believe…

An athlete, going to college on a scholarship, decides to join a fraternity, but as part of his initiation, a terrible accident happens that results in the death of a fellow initiate. The head of the fraternity decides to cover up the incident, and the new initiate finds himself unwillingly caught up in the plot…

First of all, a few facts. My copy of the movie is in a DVD case that shows a close-up of a bloody face of a corpse, and has the phrase “From the producer of FREDDY VS. JASON” at the bottom. The tag line on the poster on the back cover says “What begins in fun suddenly becomes one corpse with thirteen killers… Now it’s their time for terror!” Now, from these two pieces of evidence, I’m under the impression that there was a real attempt to market this movie as a horror film. Well, I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag on this one too much, but I do feel compelled to at least point out that the movie is not a horror movie, and anyone going in expecting one will be sorely disappointed.

Yet, at the same time, I can understand why it was marketed that way; it’s the type of movie that doesn’t want to give itself away. Anyone who wants to find a more accurate genre appraisal of the movie need check no farther than its classification on IMDB. However, despite its attempt to cover up its true intent, that poster does give the game away; it has one little blurb under the title of the movie, and I won’t repeat it here, but I will say that it’s the type of blurb that could have been used for movies like PSYCHO or HOMICIDAL. I saw the blurb before I saw the movie, and it was all I needed to figure out ahead of time things that the movie didn’t want me to know.

So if you’re interested enough by the plot description to see the movie, you may want to do so with as little advance knowledge as possible. Don’t expect a horror movie; go in expecting something along the lines of a crime drama inspired by a true story, and you’ll at least not go in with too many misconceptions. As for the movie itself, I though it was okay… no more, no less, though I might have liked it a little better had I not read that blurb I talked about. And there is at least one moment in the movie which does give it a twinge of horror.

CARNIVAL OF BLOOD (1970)
Article 3902 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-10-2012
Posting Date: 4-20-2012
Directed by Leonard Kirtman
Featuring Earle Edgerton, Judith Resnick, Martin Barolsky
Country: USA
What it is: Psycho in a carnival

Somebody is knocking off women at Coney Island. A policeman investigates, unaware that his girlfriend may turn out to be one of the victims.

Who is the killer? Is it the fortune-telling woman? The balloon barker? His hunchback assistant named Gimpy? Personally, between this batch of suspects, it’s pretty obvious. This one is pretty bottom of the barrel, with a lousy script, shaky camerawork, less-than-convincing gore effects, and a total inability to milk any suspense out of the material. Still, there are moments when this one gets by on sheer strangeness; there’s the bizarre and unexplained opening credits which have something to do with the talking but silent head of a disembodied woman (if this means anything, I don’t get it), and then there’s one of the weirdest flashback sequences I’ve ever seen near the end of the movie, just to name a couple. Still, for the most part, the movie seems obsessed with showing you just how annoying the victims are; it spends endless time wandering around the carnival with them before they finally get offed, and even that’s no relief, because the movie will just move on to another annoying character. This one does have the novelty of featuring at least one actor who became something of a name; Burt Young plays Gimpy, which is (apparently) his character’s real name.

THE CHAIN REACTION (1980)
Article 3898 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-6-2012
Posting Date: 4-16-2012
Directed by Ian Barry
Featuring Steve Bisley, Arna-Maria Winchester, Ross Thompson
Country: Australia
What it is: Action version of THE CHINA SYNDROME

A race car driver and his nurse wife encounter a fugitive who has information about a fatal leak at a nuclear waste facility and wishes to warn the public. But the fugitive is dying and only has a few days to live… and the company that owns the facility will stop at nothing to keep the leak a secret.

I found this movie on a DVD called “Action Classics” by one of those low-budget DVD companies. It has four movies crammed onto one disc, none of which I’ve ever heard of. It lists Richard Roundtree as one of the stars of the disc (though a quick perusal of the movies and plot summaries on the back of the package fail to list his name anywhere), and the whole set has an air of being a cheap toss-off for the uncritical action fan. I’ve not seen all the movies on the set, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie is the best of the lot, despite a lack of any big name stars (with the exception of a very short cameo by Mel Gibson in a beard).

Like THE CHINA SYNDROME, I think this movie works much better as a thriller than a social commentary; the bad guys in this movie are so steeped in cinematic evil that they defy your ability to believe in them as real people, while the nature of the disaster is such that no amount of initial cover-up would keep the truth from coming out in very short time anyway. The Australian accents are a bit thick, and the action is a bit confusing at times, but the basic story is easy to follow, and the action/thriller elements are effective. The car chase scenes are especially impressive, and I was a bit surprised to find that it was Ian Barry’s first directorial effort, though he did have some previous experience with editing. Still, I suspect the chase sequences had a lot of help from associate producer and uncredited second unit director George Miller of MAD MAX fame; if anyone knows how to handle a car chase, it’s him. At any rate, despite its flaws, the movie is entertaining enough to work quite well on the action movie level.

THE CASTLE (1968)
aka Das Schloss
Article 3864 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-4-2012
Posting Date: 3-13-2012
Directed by Rudolf Noelte
Featuring Maximilian Schell, Cordula Trantow, Trudik Daniel
Country: West Germany
What it is: Kafkaesque frustration

A land surveyor arrives in a small village only to discover he is not wanted or needed, and that his presence disrupts the routine of the village. He becomes obsessed with speaking to an elusive official of the castle that presides over the town.

I think part of the trick to enjoying Kafka is to know that you’re dealing with Kafka, which is to say, that you’re dealing with mysteries with no solutions and labyrinths with no exits. The movie is a fantasy because it can’t be anything else, though it could also be seen as a horror movie in the sense that it presents a very specific type of nightmare, one in which we are trapped in a world in which we don’t know the rules and our efforts to understand them just makes them seem more impenetrable. Personally, I’ve always suspected there’s something profoundly comic about his work, in much the same way that the work of Chekhov is, and like Chekhov, he is often played more for heavy drama. I also suspect that being a protagonist in a Kafka drama was not unlike being trapped into a game of fizzbin and never realizing it. Maybe that’s the reason I think the main flaw of this movie is that it’s just too glum; I think that the makers of the movie had about as much of a sense of humor as the character of the land surveyor. But then, if the land surveyor had had a sense of humor, he wouldn’t have been a Kafka protagonist, would he? Actually, I find Kafka fascinating, but he is an acquired taste.

THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER (1973)
aka La corrupcion de Chris Miller, Sisters of Corruption
Article 3859 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-28-2012
Posting Date: 3-8-2012
Directed by Juan Antonio Bardem
Featuring Jean Seberg, Marisol, Barry Stokes
Country: Spain
What it is: Psycho and psychological horror

A drifter moves in with a pair of women who have a bizarre relationship with each other. The drifter becomes sexually entwined with the two women, but is there a possibility he could be the serial killer who’s been in the news lately?

This movie ended up with one strike against it early on when I realized that the basic premise was way too familiar; the story of the psychotic drifter becoming intertwined with the lives of two dysfunctional females is actually a pretty common theme, and it has its roots all the way back to NIGHT MUST FALL. Still, you can’t always judge a movie about what it seems to be about initially, and the movie has one little fairly common director’s trick that made me expect that the movie had something up its sleeve; whenever a movie makes you peg someone as a serial killer while taking the effort to hide the serial killer’s face during all the attack scenes, you’d better be prepared for a twist. In the case of this particular movie, the end result is that you’re not quite sure which of the two plot threads (the serial killer one and the dysfunctional relationship one) will ultimately prove to be the major one. In the end, I found this movie had enough interesting touches and plot twists to win me over, despite that initial strike against it. I’m always glad when a movie can surprise me in a dramatically satisfying way.

CRUISE INTO TERROR (1978)
TV-Movie
Article 3847 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-15-2012
Posting Date: 2-25-2012
Directed by Bruce Kessler
Featuring Dirk Benedict, Frank Converse, John Forsythe
Country: USA
What it is: Evil incarnate at work

A ship finds itself stranded in the Gulf of Mexico near an underwater tomb built by the Egyptians many years ago… and containing a sarcophagus of terrible evil.

Well, the premise is pretty far-fetched, but that hasn’t necessarily been a stumbling block for movies of this ilk before. However, the script suffers from an appalling lack of subtlety. It’s one of those scripts where you feel the author had some interesting ideas about the various character relationships, but had no idea how to express those relationships in other than the most ham-handed ways possible. Problems like this don’t seem fatal at first, but when it persists throughout a whole movie, it does make the affair very tiresome, and the movie wears out its welcome long before it’s over. In the end, the movie is stolen by Stella Stevens, if for no other reason than that she’s very easy on the eyes. Still, this is one movie that could have been better than it is.

CLASS OF 1999 II: THE SUBSTITUTE (1994)
Article 3844 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-12-2012
Posting Date: 2-22-2012
Directed by Spiro Razatos
Featuring Sasha Mitchell, Caitlin Dulany, Nick Cassavetes
Country: USA
What it is: Carnage

A substitute teacher turns out to be the last remaining android of a line designed to teach in schools… and who see the students as the enemy and will stop at nothing to destroy them.

Here I take another unexpected leap into the nineties with a sequel to a movie I have yet to see. In fact, if IMDB is correct, the original (CLASS OF 1999) was a sequel to CLASS OF 1984, which I also haven’t seen. At any rate, it’s one of those movies that primarily feature three types of character; victims, people who threaten them, and the people who kill the ones that threaten the victims. There’s lots of explosions, lots of gunplay, the occasional post-kill one-liner, people who should be dead still wandering around so we can see them killed again, lots of people doing stupid things so that we can maximize the carnage, and a stupid twist ending. It’s the type of movie that makes me understand why science fiction movies are now lumped in with action movies in the stores where you can buy DVDs. I hope the earlier movies in the series have more substance than this one does.

CHILD’S PLAY (1984)
Feature Length episode of “Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense”
Article 3842 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-9-2012
Posting Date: 2-19-2012
Directed by Val Guest
Featuring Mary Crosby, Nicholas Clay, Debbie Chasan
Country: UK
What it is: Lateral thinking movie

A family wakes up to discover that their house is surrounded by an impenetrable wall.

I’ve taken to calling them “lateral thinking stories”. Basically, they’re stories that set up a totally inexplicable situation that is almost impossible to figure out, and the answer, hidden until the very end of the movie, hinges upon being made privy to the truth by looking at it from a perspective that is hidden to the main characters of the story. As a good example, think of “Six Characters in Search of an Exit” from THE TWILIGHT ZONE, and you’ll know the type of story I mean. The trouble is that once you’ve got it pegged that this is the type of story you’re watching, you’ll know when the explanation will come and you’ll know that you’ll just have to sit it out until then, so the burden really falls on the writers/actors/directors to do enough to hold your interest until then. That’s not too difficult when you’re watching an episode of a half-hour TV-series, but when your episode is feature length… well, to keep things short, let’s just say that I got pretty annoyed with the characters (especially with the obnoxious kid and the always-on-the-edge-of-hysteria wife) to make the wait much fun. And truth to tell, given the title of the story, I can’t say I was all that surprised by the final revelation. For the record, this episode has characters discovering logos on all sorts of things, and there’s slime dripping down the chimney; these might give you a hint if you’ve seen it before and can’t remember its name. It has a rating of 7.0 on IMDB, which leads me to believe that it has its fans, but for me, it was just a little too familiar.

CINDERELLA 2000 (1977)
Article 3841 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-10-2012
Posting Date: 2-20-2012
Directed by Al Adamson
Featuring Catharine Burgess, Jay B. Larson, Vaughn Armstrong
Country: USA
What it is: Sexploitation Sci-Fi Musical

In the future, sex is allowed only by those chosen by computer to mate. A young woman with an evil stepmother and two evil stepsisters hopes to meet the man of her dreams and have the laws changed.

I found a version of this movie free on YouTube, though its 78 minute running time indicates that it has been cut by about 11 minutes, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what has gone by the wayside, especially since the movie originally had an X rating, while this version was rated R. Therefore, I’m really in no position to describe how well Al Adamson does as a director of softcore sex scenes, but given that the movie has a 2.4 rating on IMDB, I’m guessing he didn’t turn out to be a master of the form. For the rest, we have bad acting, stupid songs, threadbare production, and lame comedy. It wasn’t even the best softcore musical version of the story from that year, which you’d think might have been a small enough universe to have at least accomplished that.