Mad Max: From Toecutter To Joe

George Miller’s had a weird old career. He started out in medicine, and for much of the 1970s balanced a career as a doctor (in which he found himself treating a notable number of injuries from car accidents on Australia’s highways) with participating in the indie filmmaking scene in his native Australia – eventually, he became a respected Hollywood director with major releases like Happy Feet and Babe to his name. How did he get here from there?

Well, the road to that led directly through those car crash mutilations, because between that and losing friends to traffic accidents Miller was left with a healthy appreciation of just how lethal the open road can be- and how much scope it has for drama. Frequently working without a permit, he and his crew took to the road with some seed capital, some cars, and a fascination with violent mayhem, and they turned out Mad Max. If the shoot went wrong, well, George would have had a busy day at the emergency room – but it went gloriously, spectacularly right, creating an action movie archetype that was the making of his career as well as his lead actor, infamous antisemite Mel Gibson.

Mel Gibson’s gone from the franchise now, and George Miller is back – a pay dispute between him and the studio over the mega-successful Fury Road having resolved – and he’s treating us to Furiosa: A Mad Max Story later this month, a prequel further exploring the pivotal co-protagonist of Fury Road. This makes it a good time to go back over the series and see where the road’s taken us so far, wouldn’t you say?

Mad Max

In the not-too-distant future, social order is on the verge of breaking down. A losing battle to conserve what is left of it is being fought by the Main Force Patrol, an elite police division that combats road bandits with a ferocity comparable to that used by their quarry. One of the best of the bunch is Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), who proves to be the only MFP officer able to cease the rampage of escaped convict the Nightrider (Vincent Gil), in a pursuit which culminates in the Nightrider’s death. That’s a problem, because the Nightrider was a long-time member of a motorcycle gang ruled over by the Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a Charles Manson-esque figure who urges his underlings into ever-greater acts of violence.

When the Toecutter’s gang arrives to collect Nightrider’s body, nobody is safe – not Max, not his best buddy on the force Goose (Steve Bisley), and not Max’s wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) or his child Sprog (Brendan Heath). As the violence escalates and the Goose gets cooked, Max contemplates quitting the force so he and his family can keep their head down and look out for each other – but when the Toecutter and his cronies ruthlessly destroy any hope of that, Max takes the souped-up Pursuit Special that the department commissioned for him specifically to keep him on the force. Justice is no longer an option – but maybe there’s a chance of revenge for Mad Max…

Lone Wolf and Cub: Surprisingly Not Furry

Released between 1970 and 1976, the Lone Wolf and Cub manga by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima has unleashed a range of spin-offs, and perhaps the most famous is the series of six movies put out by Toho. Four of the six were released in 1972 alone, with an annual release in 1973 and 1974 before the sequence petered out; the series was initially produced by Shintaro Katsu, star of the long-running Zatoichi series which habitually put out several instalments in a year, and on his part it seems to have been his bid to craft a similar regular gig for his elder brother, Tomisaburo Wakayama, who took on the lead role of Itto, the Lone Wolf.

Whereas the Zatoichi sequence ran for over a decade, Lone Wolf and Cub was over within a few years – then again, in the same general timespan Zatoichi also petered to a halt, so perhaps the market was shifting. Either way, it’s the Lone Wolf and Cub movies which have gained more recognition with Western audiences, for reasons I’ll get into towards the end of this article; the Criterion Collection has put out a compilation of Lone Wolf and Cub, in particular. For this review, I’m going to review all seven movies in the six-part series – no, that’s not a typo, you’ll understand by the end…

Oh, and rape is a frequent feature of these stories, so content warning for discussion of that below here.

Sword of Vengeance

We open with Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama) attending to some business with the lord of a noble house, who has been denounced as a traitor. The lord is, alas, a small child – but such are the draconian measures the Tokugawa Shogunate are turning to, along with a network of ninja spies and assassins. Officially, Ogami’s role in the state apparatus is to act as the second of nobles who are performing seppuku, to ensure they can do it properly or to perform the act himself if they cannot (as is the case with this small child). In practice, everyone knows and admits that he is the Shogun’s executioner.

There are those, however, who have decided his usefulness is at an end – shadowy forces gathering power to themselves within the bureaucracy who realise that Ogami is unlikely to be recruitable for their schemes, but is eminently replaceable – simply engineer an incident at his home to prompt an investigation, plant incriminating evidence to conprehensively discredit him, and you open up his position to be co-opted. So it is that ninjas infiltrate his household and kill Ogami’s wife Azami (Keiko Fujita), family, and servants, and soon after Inspector General Bizen Yagyu (Fumio Watanabe) – a senior agent of the conspiracy – shows up to frame Ogami as a traitor intending to assassinate the Shogun.

By the end of the gambit, the Ogami clan is near extinct; only Itto himself and his tiny son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) have survived, Itto having slain the Inspector. Now the former executioner journeys through the land as a dishevelled ronin, toting Daigoro in a baby cart…

A Touch of Zen

Fort Jinglu is a foreboding ruin at rhe edge of a sleepy rural town that has stood empty since immemorial. Gu Shengzhai (Shih Chun) lives next door to it with his mother (Zhang Bing-yu), who frets that he’s satisfied being a mere scribe and scholar rather than trying out for the civil service, a good marriage, and other forms of social advancement. Shengzhai, however, has other things on his mind: he keeps hearing noises from the fort, bringing to mind all the old legends about it being haunted. What’s more, there’s strangers in town – the herbalist Dr. Lu (Xue Han) and his apprentice (Wan Zhong-shan) who showed up a month ago seem nice enough, but there’s something odd about Ouyang Nian (Tien Peng) – a strange man who only just arrived, seems to be spying on the herbalist, and appears intent on getting Shengzhai to believe in the ghost stories.

There’s no ghosts in the Fort, however – instead, someone very much alive is living in there, a coldly formal woman named Miss Yang (Hsu Feng). Who is Miss Yang? Who are the other strangers? Can Shengzhai’s mother convince him to try for Miss Yang’s hand in marriage? Why does Ouyang suddenly seem keen to encourage him to take the civil service exam and move away? And why has the Eastern Group – a feared secret police force controlled by the Imperial palace eunuchs – taken an interest in this sleepy little town?

Directed by King Hu, this followup to his previous Dragon Inn is another highbrow wuxia effort, but unlike that movie was not an instant hit; being rather long, it was initially released in two parts, neither of which performed well domestically, and it was only when the full three hour version had a showing at Cannes that it gathered widespread international praise. You can somewhat see why that is the case; it’s a three hour martial arts epic in which not a single blow is struck for nearly 40 minutes, the first proper fight doesn’t happen until around an hour in, and what appears to be the climactic fight happens half an hour before the end.

John De Hart: Dreamweaver, Visionary, Plus Actor

Rick (John De Hart) and Huck (Wings Hauser) are two buddies on the LAPD who end up on the wrong side of Normad (William Smith), a corrupt cop who uses his influence and a little bit of perjury to get them thrown off the force. Huck ends up in a downward spiral – turning to booze, having severe money problems, splitting up with his wife Alex (Lisa Boyle, credited as Cassandra Leigh), and running into legal snags. Rick, on the other hand, takes on a new job as a limo driver and hooks back up with an old flame of his, Cindy (Pamela Bryant), who he lost touch with after she moved away from Hollywood for a while.

However, Normad’s crimes still cast a shadow over Rick and Huck alike. Not only has Normad become a judge – one willing to exploit his position to get at Huck (Normad’s now banging Alex and she tries to get Huck arrested by faking that he assaulted her) – but Cindy eventually recognises Normad as the leader of a Satanic cult she’d become entangled with, which she’d fled after witnessing a ceremony where they sacrificed a baby to Satan. When the cult, which is at the centre of Normad’s organised crime empire, decides to whack Cindy as punishment for leaving the fold, Rick flies into action to… Geteven.

Geteven, AKA Road To Revenge, AKA Champagne and Bullets, is a movie which has had several incarnations, all of them completely bananas. John De Hart wrote, directed (with assistance from James Paradise), and produced the movie, as well as playing the lead role, singing most of the songs, and writing a few of them on top of that. The original version of the film – Champagne and Bullets – was shot in 1993, had some astonishingly cheap opening and closing credits applied to it, and failed to get any form of release, in part because distributors balked at a few of the violent scenes and a lot of the sex scenes, which largely involved John De Hart exploiting the fact that he’d cast a Playmate of the Month as his love interest at great length. (Seriously, there’s three reasonably long sex scenes between De Hart and Bryant here and they border on softcore porn.)

De Hart lashed together a 75 minute cut, Road to Revenge, which more or less cuts the film to the bone by deleting everything the distributors had balked at – some violence, and most of the parts where De Hart was guilty of directing-while-horny. (Based on the choices of what to cut you could call this the Ray Smuckles edit.) This allegedly had some sort of release but disappeared almost entirely, and as De Hart has explained in interviews it also cut most of the exposition needed to follow the story.

Then De Hart decided to do some reshoots in 2007, and by “reshoots” I mean he did a very few exterior establishing shots to make up for the fact that he forgot to do any in the original cut (not that that’s anywhere near the biggest issue) and film an epic martial arts sequence to depict Rick’s extensive martial arts training. And by “epic martial arts sequence”, I mean a short bit where you see a clearly much older-looking Rick limply biffing a punching bag and feeding butter to his adorable doggy. At 89 minutes and with perhaps a couple of minutes of additional material this new take, now entitled Geteven, largely filled out the time by restoring much of the sex and violence (but still being coy about a few violent moments – the Satanic baby-sacrifice, for instance, is still truncated before you get to the actual killing).

Now Vinegar Syndrome have put out a deluxe region-free blu-ray release of the film – with the Champagne and Bullets cut in high definition, given a careful remaster from the original source material, and SD presentations of Road to Revenge and Geteven (since only SD sources are available for them). This is part of their Vinegar Syndrome Archives series, which is intended to give a loving release to material which wouldn’t exactly be expected to get that treatment (and given some of the schlock they’ve put out outside of this series, that’s saying a lot).

Hand Over That Badge, Stallone!

When it comes to the top rank of 1980s action movie stars, Sylvester Stallone’s got to be up there (in terms of commercial success, if not quality of output), and when it comes to iconic premises for 1980s action movies, the whole “renegade cop fighting a ruthless crime boss” subgenre is pretty damn archetypal. This might explain why Sylvester Stallone kept trying to make movies with that premise – but it doesn’t explain why those attempts are so dreadful, failing to measure up to even B-grade Schwarzenegger material like Raw Deal or Red Heat.

His first stab at this was Cobra. This was a Golan-Globus production, right at the height of them turning the Cannon Group into a non-stop schlock factory, and for a star of Stallone’s stature at the time to appear in one of those was a pretty major departure from the norm, but 1986 was a time when Golan and Globus’ ambitions were beginning to seriously outpace their reach – for instance, they’d buy out the Superman franchise rights at around the same time, yielding the series-killing Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. If you were going to make a bid to take your studio from B-movie schlock to the absolute top of the box office, Stallone was arguably the guy you’d go to in at the time, since his two 1985 movies had been huge deals – Rocky IV having been another box office smash for that franchise, and Rambo: First Blood Part II being far and away the most successful Rambo.

Golan-Globus had initially announced that Stallone’s project with them would be a remake of the revered classic Angels With Dirty Faces, but with critics and industry magazines questioning Stallone and Cannon’s ability to pull it off, they went with Cobra instead, and it seems evident from the marketing at the time that they really hoped that this would be Stallone’s third big signature role. After all, the film’s title is based on the five-letter nickname of the protagonist, and his name combines the r, o, and c from Rocky and the r, o, a, and b from Rambo, how could it fail? (Even the title font on the poster is I think meant to make us think of the Rambo: First Blood Part II poster.) Further parallels extend to the crew, with George P. Cosmatos, director of First Blood Part II, in the director’s chair again.

In addition, Cobra represented a chunk of unfinished business for Stallone. A few years earlier he’d been pencilled in for the lead role in Beverly Hills Cop. The project had always had a somewhat comedic fish-out-of-water angle based on the essential concept of a cop used to a run-down, violent area of L.A. being reposted to Beverly Hills, but Stallone was more or less disinterested in the comedic aspects and started rewriting the script wholesale to be more of a straight-down-the-line action thriller.

Creative differences broke out, Stallone left the project, Eddie Murphy stepped in, the dial got cranked back towards comedy, and the film was a hit, leaving Stallone with a bunch of unused ideas of his own in search of a script to hang it on. He duly knocked out the script to Cobra and now had the chance to make it a reality. In theory, the movie’s based on the novel Fair Game by Paula Gosling, which got a much more loyal adaptation under its original title in 1995, but the plots differ so much I think it’s one of those cases where someone realises a Hollywood production’s got a few plot points which glance dangerously close to an existing thing so the studio options that thing and slaps on a credit just so they don’t get sued for copyright infringement. (This didn’t stop Stallone wanting Gosling to reissue the novel crediting him as co-author, an idea she roundly rejected.)

Still, don’t jump to the conclusion that this is an unlikeable ego project that’s solely about making Stallone’s self-insert character seem impossibly cool. His then-wife Brigette Nielsen gets to be his love interest in the film, so it’s an unlikeable husband-and-wife ego project that’s solely about making Stallone’s self-insert character and the character he wrote for Nielsen seem impossibly cool or sexy respectively, and proving that Stallone has some very odd ideas about what constitutes those things.

The Boondock Boondoggle

Connor and Murphy McManus (Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus) are two brothers who work in a meat packing plant. They are proud of their Boston Irish roots, and have disdain for the forces of organised crime, and when they stand up to some Russian mobsters and have to take desperate measures to escape with their lives intact they become lauded as heroes. On more or less the drop of a hat, they decide that they have been chosen by God to dole out justice to evildoers in the world.

When people do that in real life, they become known later by names such as “the Yorkshire Ripper“, but since this is an action movie with a stance on vigilantism which makes the most braindead Death Wish sequels seem nuanced this is absolutely fine, just the best possible use these boys could find for their time. Still, law enforcement feels a certain obligation to check up on things when entire hotel suites full of dead bodies are discovered, so eccentric FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) must at least go through the motions of investigating their activities, only to find himself increasingly persuaded that they are on the side of right.

Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints is very much a Boston film, and more specifically a Boston Irish film; this is unsubtly driven home with the way that the film opens on St. Patrick’s Day and the title sequence entails shots of Boston landmarks set against Irish folk music (and the brothers beating up a co-worker at the meat packing plant they work at because… er… she points out something misogynistic and they get really aggressive at her about it) before we wind up at an Irish pub.

Then the initial conflict which kicks off the action comes down to a group of Russian mobsters trying to shake down said pub, which prompts a brawl which prompts reprisals from the Russians – forcing the brothers to extremes in self-defence. With the mobsters slain and the actual killings clearly being an instance of the brothers defending themselves, the police and public see the brothers as heroes, and the nod of tacit approval from society and the authorities perhaps plays into the brothers’ decision that God wants them to slay those they decide to be evil.

Back To the World of Assassination

IO Interactive’s Hitman series has always been their bread and butter. After pioneering the game’s classic format with the somewhat shaky Hitman: Codename 47, they really hit their stride with the sequel, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. It’s notable that the original Codename 47 is the only one of the first four Hitman games to not get a high definition rerelease during the PS3/XBox 360 era – the third game, Hitman: Contracts, offered a mix of new missions and updated do-overs of the original game’s best levels, allowing them to benefit from the better controls and other improvements that IO had made, and it is this version which enjoyed more rereleases and repackages whilst Codename 47 sat fallow. Hitman: Blood Money further refined the basic format.

All the classic Hitman games follow the same general premise. You control Agent 47. Cloned by the unscrupulous Dr. Ort-Meyer as part of a nefarious project to create the ultimate killer, Agent 47 escaped his creator’s clutches and eventually found his way to joining the ICA – the International Contract Agency, the favoured assassination bureau of the global elite. 47 (often using the alias of “Tobias Rieper” where a conventional name is necessary) works under the direction of Diana Burnwood, the ICA handler who provides him with his mission briefings and occasionally pipes in with useful intel during his missions. As you might tell from this basic format, we are basically in espionage techno-thriller territory here, with just a whiff of cyberpunk to spice things up.

When it comes to the gameplay, like many great videogames, it’s based around a simple goal that is challenging to achieve, but can be accomplished in a great variety of ways. Each level is one of Agent 47’s missions, during which he must locate and kill his designated target (or targets) and then escape the area, occasionally also carrying out secondary objectives like obtaining valuable information.

Typically, the mission area will have numerous people wandering around, ranging from innocent bystanders to bodyguards to the targets themselves. Whilst many level designs work in cunning ways of accessing and eliminating your target, the best-received levels have always been amenable to you finding your own way and figuring out your own approach, essentially offering you a sandbox in which to devise and enact a murder.

This means that if you want to go in guns blazing, you absolutely can, though it will likely end badly for you; an emphasis is put on stealth and the player is encouraged to go for the “Silent Assassin” accolade, awarded if you complete a level by killing only your intended target (subduing others non-lethally is fine), leaving no evidence behind, and without being observed doing anything seriously dodgy. Often, the process of completing a level will entail obtaining some form of disguise, usually by knocking out someone appropriately dressed and quickly dressing in their clothes, thereby allowing 47 to, say, pretend he’s one of the troops who’s supposed to be on this army base or whatever.

The challenge of attaining Silent Assassin is often the source of much replayability of the levels, but the fact that you don’t need to get it to progress is a big help: it means you can progress in the game and enjoy more of the story without having to do things perfectly. And often things will go awry. Some of my most hilarious memories of playing the games involve operations where everything was going smoothly until the wrong guard saw me tossing his unconscious buddy into a meat locker, and then things kind of snowballed from there and it became a hideous massacre.

Synthwave Criminals Driven To Extremes

One of the strangest things about nostalgia is the way it distorts and tweaks the eras it pines for. This isn’t always obvious when you are younger, because naturally you don’t have a basis for comparison when it comes to nostalgia for eras you didn’t live through, but once you get old enough that the decade of your birth becomes the nostalgia target du jour it becomes more obvious. Some things get heightened to the point of parody, other things are neglected by the collective memory, eventually the nostalgia material is on the verge of being its own genre that is almost distinct from the material it’s inspired by.

For this article, I’m going to take a look at Michael Mann’s Thief and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, the former an iconic 1980s crime movie which established genre tropes for the decade to come, the latter a synthwave pastiche of Thief and the material it inspired.

Thief

Thief opens with rain, dark urban landscapes, and synthesiser music – it’s Blade Runner without the science fiction. The first full-length feature from Michael Mann, it’s inspired by The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar by professional jewel thief John Seybold, AKA Frank Hohimer.

Birds of a Feather

Goth subculture might be mostly recognised for its music and fashion sense, but let it never be forgotten that there is a geekier side of the subculture too. Vampire: the Masquerade got a bunch of goths into gaming and lots of gamers into goth stuff, and was a legitimate pop culture phenomenon to the extent of having an actual (kind of bad) TV show based on it in an era when the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon was long-since cancelled and the odds of a D&D TV show were practically nil.

Similarly, there was the crossover with comics. The most successful superhero movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s in terms of commercial performance and critical acclaim were the Tim Burton Batman adaptations, and Sandman was practically required reading for goths.

And then there was The Crow.

The Crow has been a blessing and a curse to the goth scene. On the one hand, for a window in the 1990s The Crow was absolutely huge, and the subculture that influenced it, embraced it, and was influenced in it was naturally buoyed up by that. On the other hand, the cliche of the guy who’s seen The Crow once and decides to make that their look is a cliche for a reason.

It’s worth revisiting both the comic which originated The Crow and the movie adaptation which will live forever in infamy thanks to the negligence which killed Brandon Lee to take another look at them, now that around a quarter of a century has passed since their peak of popularity. Is there anything of value to find here, or are we talking something which only made sense in a very particular zeitgeist which no longer applies?

The Comic

Give O’Barr credit: when it comes to a gothic-horror superhero origin story, The Crow has this beautiful archetypal simplicity to it that puts it in the same “OK, I instantly get what the deal is here” that all the really good superhero origin stories do. Superman is the last survivor of a dead world who is trying to be accepted in American society and use his powers for the benefit of his adoptive people. Batman was confronted in his youth by an act of violence which the wealth and privilege of his parents could not shield them against; he takes to the streets for revenge and to make perpetrators of violence feel the same fear he felt as a child. Spiderman was a cocky teen who got bit by a radioactive spider, developed a bunch of powers that he just sort of fucked around with, and then realised that if his power isn’t used for a beneficial purpose then it’s just selfish jerking-off.

And the Crow?

The Crow was once Eric Draven, just your average goth boy with your average goth girlfriend Shelly. Once upon a time, Eric and Shelly were attacked by street criminals; both would die, as Eric bled out he saw Shelly being raped by the attackers.

Then, astonishingly, a year later Eric comes back – raised from the dead by the intervention of a crow which might be more than your average corvid. Painting his face with theatrical makeup, and traumatised by the recollection of his own death and his bereavement from Shelly, he embarks on a campaign of revenge; in between his brutal attacks on the murderers, he prowls around the dilapidated house he and Shelly used to live in and reminisces about better times. The crow – the bird, not the dude – discourages him from concentrating on anything other than his rampage of reprisals, but something persistently human remains within him and makes him want to be something more than an engine of destruction. Is this even an option any more, or is it too late for him to arrive at a different view on his ruined life?

Sopkiw: After “After the Fall of New York”

Michael Sopkiw had a brief acting career, appearing as the lead in a number of Italian genre movies in the mid-1980s before retiring from cinema to become a plant scientist. Though he didn’t appear in any films you’d call objectively good, he usually added a little something to the cheesy schlock that was his stock in trade, usually due to his knack for giving the impression of buying into the situation much more convincingly than his often rather lackadaisical co-stars.

I’ve previously covered his debut, 2019: After the Fall of New York. Another movie of his, Devil Fish, was the subject of a memorable Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode which kind of covered all you need to know about it. His other two, I’m going to review below, starting… now!

Blastfighter

Ex-cop Jake “Tiger” Sharp (Sopkiw) is released from prison and is immediately picked up by his buddy Jerry (uncredited) – who gives him a car, a brand new sci-fi super-shotgun (basically a SPAS-12 with a futuristic scope on it and the ability to shoot a bewildering array of different types of ammo) and the opportunity to assassinate the corrupt lawyer who put him behind bars in the first place. Deciding getting revenge isn’t worth going straight back to jail, Tiger decides to take the car off to his Appalachian mountain cabin to get some peace and quiet to come to terms with the memories that haunt him – of the killings of his partner on the force and of his wife, and the jail term he served after taking down his wife’s killer (having killed the guy without finding evidence that he was actually responsible).

Unfortunately, the outside world won’t leave Tiger alone, and when a group of poachers encroaches on Tiger’s turf, it kicks off a feud which eventually escalates to murderous violence…

Apparently this was originally going to be another SF number, but they decided to ditch all the SF stuff except the special gun for budget reasons. The recent release of First Blood may have also had an influence here; the super-shotgun spends most of the movie stashed under the floorboards of Tiger’s cabin, so a good chunk of the movie consists of similar “manhunt in some American woodland”, with the twist that this time it’s an ex-cop chased by rednecks rather than an ex-soldier chased by cops.

An attempt is made to reinforce the southern-fried feel of the movie by way of the soundtrack by Fabio Frizzi – a mixture of generic disco-ish synthesiser tracks and bluegrass ranges from the generically inoffensive to the obnoxious. (Frizzi was credited here as Andrew Barrymore, so either he wanted to give this the Alan Smithee treatment or they wanted to limit the number of Italian names in the credits.)

The super-gun is only retrieved 10 minutes before the end of the movie, so buyer beware: this contains little in the way of actual blastfighting, but that doesn’t mean that the movie is entirely absent of action – this is literally one of those movies where a truck rolls a brief way down an incline, hits a tree, and explodes immediately.

Some of this action is outright inexplicable. Tiger’s strategy for avoiding being shot seems to be to do a lot of jumping forward rolls, like he’s Sonic the Hedgehog or something. There’s also the bit where a random woman (played by Valentina Forte) shows up at the cabin and sleeps over and Tiger wants nothing to do with her because she’s a random weird stranger so he decides to drive her into town, only someone’s cut his brakes and he’s going downhill down this steep mountain road – all very exciting, slightly spoiled by the sound of him very obviously using the accelerator on the soundtrack (which is extra crazy because the Italian movie industry has no qualms about dubbing), and why would you ever accelerate in such a situation?

Oh, and it turns out the woman is Tiger’s daughter Connie, but she was really weird about waiting around to say who she was.

That said, other parts of the movie are more effective. The segment where the poachers roll flaming barrels of oil downhill to attack the location where Connie (Valentina Forte), her boyfriend Pete (Michele Soavi), and Jerry have set up camp is genuinely terrifying, all darkness and flames and screaming. Likewise, Tiger and Connie’s desperate bid to escape from the poachers after Jerry and Pete have been killed is incredibly tense, especially the part where the two of them tentatively make their way across a raging waterfall on foot.

There’s also a George Eastman appearance – often the saving grace of what would otherwise have been utterly forgettable Italian genre movies. Eastman plays Tom, the local sawmill owner and therefore the big man in town, and a former childhood friend of Tiger’s. The only problem is that Tom is also the older brother of Wally (Stefano Mingando), the leader of the poachers, and regards the poaching as a nice little earner for the town, given the prices some of the animal parts are able to find in, say, the Traditional Chinese Medicine market.

Eastman and Sopkiw’s interactions were a highlight of After the Fall of New York, and they do a good job of conveying a somewhat more nuanced and realistic chemistry here. The characters clearly like each other, even though they disagree on some stuff, and in a rare instance in an action movie Tiger even at one point decides to cut a deal with Tom to just leave the area (which he has no major stake in anyway) for the sake of a quiet life in return for being left alone… unfortunately, this coincides with the poachers ambushing Tiger’s friends, with the result that the peace reached can’t last.

For his part, Eastman does a great job of playing Tom as a somewhat conflicted villain. On the one hand, he’s clearly exasperated with Wally’s boneheaded aggression and regrets the feud it’s caused; on the other hand, like many big brothers he feels protective of his younger sibling, and Tiger is trying to fuck up the local gravy train. Between them, Eastman and Sopkiw manage to carve out something interesting in the midst of all this nonsense.

And believe me, this is mostly nonsense, replete the sort of clumsiness that director Lamberto Bava would also bring to his other 1984 collaboration with Sopkiw, Devil Fish. In particular, the whole “corrupt lawyer” thing – which was made out to be a crucial motivator at the start of the movie – literally never comes up again after the opening scenes except in flashbacks, of which there are a bunch. It’s like they started to make a completely different movie with a different plot, changed their minds, and used what they’d shot so far for the flashbacks.

Massacre In Dinosaur Valley

In a sleepy backwater Brazilian town a quirky selection of characters take a charter plane flown by Josè (Joffre Soares). Professor Pedro Ibañez (Leonidas Bayer) and his daughter Eva (Suzane Carvalho) arranged the flight, and maverick archaeological bone-hunter Kevin Hall (Sopkiw) managed to get a spot by flattering the Professor’s academic credentials. Also along for the ride is washed-up retired Green Beret Captain John Heinz (Milton Rodriguez) and his wife Betty (Marta Anderson) who constantly belittles him, and “fashion” (maybe porn) photographer Robbie (Roberto Roney, looking astonishingly like Freddie Mercury) and his two models Monica (Maria Reis) and Belinda (Susan Hahn).

Enroute to their final destination, they plan on making a stopover at the Valley of the Dinosaurs – the Professor having persuaded Josè to make this mild diversion in order to seek fossils. Unfortunately, the plane crashes in the vicinity of the valley, killing Josè and Monica on impact and mortally wounding the Professor, who bleeds out within minutes. Worse yet, the valley is very remote, being in the middle of a reservation for the Amazonian tribes – the local one having a particularly fearsome reputation. There’s no local help to be expected, the radio is broken, and because they are not strictly meant to be here, they didn’t tell the authorities about their planned diversion – meaning that even when the authorities realise the plane is missing, they won’t search in the right place.

There is nothing for it: to survive, the remaining passengers must journey through the rainforest on foot. At first Captain Heinz takes charge, though it soon becomes apparent that Kevin is no slouch when it comes to jungle survival either. And that’s good, because they’ll not only have to tangle with the local cannibals and natural hazards, but the tyrannical China (Carlos Imperial), the brutal boss of a gemstone mining operation; China’s mine makes extensive use of slave labour (perhaps contributing to the indigenous locals’ hostility), and he sees the party as yet more free labour…

This was Sopkiw’s career swansong. He did a small cameo role decades later, but he gave up on making a go of acting after this. I can see why; this is not something anyone can be particularly proud of being in. This is evident from early on, in the comedy bar brawl scene at the beginning after Hall tries to help out the models when a drunk local bothers them.

In a general movie of this type, the harassment would involve nasty talk and possibly a bit of grabbing; here director Michele Massimo Tarantini has no qualms about having a random dude just yank down Monica’s top to get a good look at her boobs. Then later, we have a bit where Hall leers at Eva without her knowledge when she’s in the bath. Then we have a bit where Captain Heinz isn’t shy about leching on Eva and Belinda after they get their tops wet in a river and their boobs are highly visible.

Yes, of all the movies associated with the Italian “cannibal movie” cycle, this is the Porky‘s of the bunch, replete with an utterly juvenile sense of sexuality which a horny 13 year old might find transgressive but which just seems tawdry and empty. It keeps resorting to cheap titillation bordering on softcore porn, right down to Belinda letting China’s aggressive lesbian assistant Myara (Gloria Cristal) bang her in return for a chance at escape. China’s rape of Eva late in the movie is particularly violent and nasty.

When it isn’t being unnecessarily and incongruously horny, Massacre In Dinosaur Valley is ripping off other jungle adventure material; for instance, there’s a scene where they literally just do the “chopping the heel off the shoe” bit from Romancing the Stone. As the Amazonians kill Captain Heinz he yells about “gooks”, which I think happens because lots of Vietnam movies have characters using that slurt a lot. Sopkiw’s character is basically a sort of Indiana Jones/Jack Colton type, with a slight emphasis on the latter because Romancing the Stone came out the previous year and, if you hadn’t guessed from the shoe thing, this movie is not shy about ripping it off.

What it doesn’t rip off, despite the title, is any movie featuring dinosaurs. Yes, to avoid anyone being disappointed, let the record show that there are no dinosaur attacks in this movie, making it an utter waste of a title. The most you get is a shaman in a triceratops skull who uses a glove with dinosaur claws on it to rake the flesh of Belinda. Perhaps we are meant to believe that the tribe encountered dinosaurs back in the day and are doing these rites in recollection of that, but the idea isn’t developed at all before Kevin just starts tossing grenades into the ritual and blasting tribespeople with a shotgun.

This is kind of indicative of the movie’s problem: occasionally it will step on an interesting concept, like a culture who has an oral tradition of long-ago encounters with dinosaurs or a slave labour-driven mining operation that the survivors of a plane crash have to contend with, but none of them have the space to be properly explored because it’s trying to cram in more stuff than they are really capable of doing justice to.

Then again, the cast and crew don’t seem to be good when it comes to thinking through the details, because when they do they make some utterly wild mistakes. Robbie gets his leg nommed down to the bone by piranhas; Kevin just stands about in the exact same body of water watching what is going on, and then Kevin and Captain Heinz fall in the water as they have a fight about it (Heinz killed Robbie to stop his screams attracting trouble, Kevin thinks, not unreasonably, it is a bit harsh). The piranhas don’t bite again. This is astonishingly weird; even if we were to assume that the piranhas were sated with just a little leg meat and weren’t interested in the others, the fact that Kevin just dawdles around in the water when he knows there’s piranhas in it is absurd. Wouldn’t you immediately get good and clear of the water as soon as you saw that happened?

The depiction of the Amazonian tribe is a mashup of crappy colonial adventure fiction tropes and stuff which might be a bit more authentic but, frankly, I don’t trust Italian genre movies in general to get this right. The “cannibal” sequence involves a lot of undressing of the female leads and many boob shots and not much in the way of actual cannibalism, which didn’t stop the movie being marketed by some as Cannibal Ferox II, but in general the indigenous folk are a red herring – despite being talked up a lot in the earlier parts of the movie, they’re largely a secondary threat, a roadbump on the way to the main antagonists – China and his cronies. Rather than tossing their spears in a manner which would actually be dangerous, the Amazonians just sort of chuck them sideways uselessly. The group would be in real trouble if they ever ran into a tribe that actually wanted to kill them.

The mining camp sequence is perhaps the most frustrating bit, because it combines some of the sleaziest and nastiest material in the movie (Belinda getting raped by Myara, Eva getting raped by China) with some actually interesting stuff arising from the fact that the people running the camp are actual characters rather than utter ciphers.

I particularly liked the wonderfully melodramatic villain-sidekick moment where Myara pretends to be giving Belinda her promised chance to escape – but in fact just set her up to get shot in the back by China, and it’s pretty evident that this is a form of fun for them. With so many Megatron-Starscream type pairings in villain organisations in genre fiction, where the big boss can’t trust their sidekick, there’s a certain fun in seeing an abusive organisation where it’s like that not just because the main person in charge likes it that way, but because the leadership in general are assholes and the sidekick supports the boss because the boss lets the sidekick get what they want.

Then again, even the mining camp bit falls apart under the weight of a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make sense. “China”‘s name is pronounced “Cheena” but on the soundtrack it keeps sounding like he’s being called “Cheetah” or, at some points, “Cheeto”. Kevin frees all the slaves, only for them to run into China’s supervisors, who then kill them all. It’s in aid of setting a trap for the supervisors, but it feels like it’d have come out better if Kevin had let Eva and the slaves in on his plan.

Eva forgets she’s been raped by China, and then fired at by shotguns by China’s goons due to Kevin leaving her in the cage in the mining camp, awfully easily. In the end of the movie she and Kevin are all smiles and quips because they got away with a bunch of emeralds – apparently forgetting that a) this wasn’t Romancing the Stone, emerald acquisition wasn’t the point of this exercise and b) they have just been through astonishing trauma and Eva’s had her dad die in her arms, watched several other people get killed, and been violently raped.

Then there’s the animal stuff. Kevin escapes from the pig pen because one of the friendly piggies decides to gnaw at the rope on his wrists enough to break it, but doesn’t gnaw on him, despite these being the sort of piggies human beings get fed to when murderers want to get rid of evidence. Thank you, piggy!  Kevin beats China by throwing a bag with a rattlesnake in at him, forcing China to waste his last shot not shooting Kevin, but the rattlesnake… which… which China could just walk away from. Seriously, the rattler isn’t aggressively coming at him, it’s just sat on a rock going “hss hss I just got hella thrown around in a bag and I’m mad about it hss”.

Massacre In Dinosaur Valley will disappoint everyone. I got my copy because I got in on the 88 Films Indiegogo campaign to restore a clutch of Italian genre movies of the era, including Aenigma and Absurd. This means my name is in the credits of the restoration, because they tacked on a continuation of the credits to thank the contributors. I’m sorry, folks – I didn’t know this movie existed before the campaign, I wish I didn’t know now, and I backed the campaign with the intent of getting access to some rare Fulci rather than looking into Massacre itself. It’s my fault, gang. This one’s on me.