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.

A Fistful of Djangos

The sloppy state of Italian intellectual property law and enforcement in the mid-20th Century enabled all sorts of cinematic shenanigans. For instance, Zombie Flesh Eaters was known as Zombi 2 in the Italian market and presented as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead (whose Italian release was called Zombi), and a number of movies came out presenting themselves as Zombi 3 when it became clear that there was a hungry audience for this sort of stuff.

Another example is the Django craze of the late 1960s and early 1970s. After the 1966 release of the Spaghetti Western Django, a swathe of Westerns came out capitalising on its popularity – often by just adding the name “Django” to their titles and changing nothing, which is awkward when the movies in question don’t include a character called Django (or even a character who resembles Franco Nero’s character in the original movie).

Some of these were dross, some are pretty good, and naturally any obscure movie craze from this period is going to sooner or later catch the attention of Quentin Tarantino and be recycled by him: thus, Django Unchained, with Jamie Foxx in the title character, came out in 2012, prompting in turn a brace of reissues of Django movies. Talking Pulp has produced some reviews of these, and here’s my take on two of them.

Django

In the first Django movie the iconic character – played this time around by Franco Nero – is introduced to us as he’s dragging a coffin through mud and filth in a miserable rainstorm, wearing the remnants of a Union uniform. He encounters and rescues María (Loredana Nusciak), a prostitute who has become caught up in a conflict between Mexican bandits and the forces of Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo), a Confederate officer who, with the Civil War over and ol’ Dixie run down, has gone off West to fight his own private war against those he considers racially inferior.

Lenzi’s Variable Focus

Umberto Lenzi’s career, like many Italian directors of his generation, would require him over the years to adapt to a range of different genres. Tending to work more towards the sleazier end of the spectrum, he’d happily turn out sword and sandal epics, spy movies, gialli, or whatever other flavour of schlock was in vogue at the time, though he also made some original contributions of his own – for instance, his Man From Deep River is considered to have kicked off the cannibal subgenre (and his later Cannibal Ferox is, alongside Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, held to be the point where people said “OK, enough of this, the ‘who can be grimmer’ competition is over and we have our tied winners”).

As with any Italian director from this era, the quality of his output varied widely. Lenzi seemed happy to pitch his movies at the level demanded by the genre he was working in – going a bit more sophisticated for giallo, a bit sleazier for zombie movies, and so on – and when Lenzi is truly phoning it in, the results are awful. (Ghosthouse is only worth watching in the Rifftrax version.) Here’s a brace of three of his movies which have had recent Blu-Ray releases to illustrate what I mean.

Spasmo

Despite its title sounding like the sort of playground insult that people should really know better than to use these days (it’s a perfectly legit Italian word which happens to sound terrible in English), Spasmo does in fact at least start off as one of the more clever giallos out there. A young man and his girlfriend ride their motorbike to a ruined cottage by the coast to get some privacy – though they’re not so concerned about privacy that they’re shy to ask a dark figure sat in a car a little way away from the cottage to light a cigarette for them. In the middle of their making out, they are interrupted by…

After the Fall of Good Taste

It is 20 years after a devastating nuclear war between the Pan-American Confederacy and the Euracs, an alliance of European, African and Asian forces. Massive contamination from radiation has largely sterilised humanity; no new human beings have been born for 20 years. The Euracs have occupied Noo Yoik and are scouring it for survivors, on whom they conduct intensely painful and invasive medical tests in the hope of finding anyone capable of producing children.

Meanwhile, the defeated Pan-American Confederacy has regrouped in Alaska (or an amusingly poor model thereof), where their leaders have discovered through old census records the existence of a woman in New York who could viably become pregnant. (How records largely compiled before the downfall of civilisation that caused mass sterilisation can indicate this is, shall we say, one of several plot points which are glossed over due to not making a lick of sense. (It actually makes sense in the end, but it seems like Parsifal is caused an awful lot of problems by the fact that the Confederacy leaders don’t bother giving full details to him.)

Parsifal (Michael Sopkiw), a badass road warrior who has a troubled history with the Confederation, is recruited by them to go on a mission into Eurac-occupied New York to retrieve the woman in question, so her eggs can be surgically harvested and used to make a viable new population on a colony mission to Alpha Centauri. Along the way he’ll have to tangle not only with various local ragamuffins and Eurac soldiers, but also the animalistic gang led by Big Ape (George Eastman), who dress in old-timey costumes and for some reason include a bunch of Neanderthal-types and full-blown Planet of the Apes-esque talking apes.

George Eastman: Absurd Anthropophage

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Among the various movies added to the so-called “video nasty” list in the UK in the 1980s, few have as as much in common as Anthropophagous and Absurd. Both are projects by expert trash merchant Joe D’Amato, and both have George Eastman in almost identical costuming. And both are incredibly grim, though in mildly different ways…

Trigger warnings would be appropriate at this point: both of these involve cannibalism and murder, one involves violence against a pregnant woman, one involves violence against a disabled person.

Anthropophagous

As with many of the video nasties, this one was released under a whole swathe of different titles; the print 88 Films seems to have used to prepare this high-definition rerelease actually has the title “The Savage Island” appear during the opening scenes. The film kicks off with a young German couple exploring a delightful Greek island, with a lovely old village and decent beaches. As the man sunbathes, the woman spots a boat sitting apparently abandoned just off the beach. She swims over there, only to be shocked by what she finds therein – the occupant being the eponymous anthropophage, who after slaying her makes short work of her blissfully unaware friend.

The Sophisticated Soavi

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Italian horror cinema is generally held to have had a peak of creative accomplishment in the 1970s and a rather sad decline in the 1980s, with the former masters of the genre suffering from diminishing returns and a tidal wave of second-rate material glutting the market.

A happy exception to this critical slump is the work of Michele Soavi. After serving an apprenticeship with a number of small acting parts and stints as an assistant director or second unit director for more prominent directors like Lamberto Bava, Joe D’Amato or Dario Argento, Soavi would direct four movies that are often taken to represent the best in Italian horror of the 1980s and 1990s.

Unfortunately, his career was derailed when he was forced to step back his involvement in the industry to care for his terminally ill son, though in the 2000s he did make some non-genre TV movies, and it’s still possible that – particularly with recent blu-ray releases of his own movies and those projects he assisted on coming out – the stars might align to allow him to produce another horror feature one day. If he does, these are the films that work will be measured against.