DVR Diary: REVOLT OF THE SLAVES (La rivolta degli schiavi, 1960)

The Emperor Maximian never ruled the Roman Empire on his own. Made a partner in rule by Diocletian in the late 3rd century, he later formed part of a tetrarchy. At Diocletian's urging he retired with him to establish an orderly procedure for procession, but soon reclaimed a share of the throne, only to be forced out by Constantine. But from the evidence of Nunzio Malasomma's film Maximian (Dario Moreno) is sole and absolute ruler of Rome. Diocletian was a great persecutor of Christians; in this picture that's Maximian's work. It's a tough job, since a good chunk of Rome's ruling class are clandestine Christians, to the dismay of headstrong, chariot-driving Claudia (Rhonda Fleming). Revolt of the Slaves is the story of Claudia's discovery of Christian love, and her romance with a rebellious Dalmatian slave, Vibio (Lang Jeffries, early in his short stint as Fleming's husband). The title may create expectations of a Spartacus-style adventure, but there's really only a late uprising of militant Christians determined to free their brothers and sisters from the arena. We get a bit of gladiator action as well, including a whip fight over a burning pyre, but the martyrdom is actually pretty dull stuff. Each Christian is made to run for their lives, only to get a spear through his or her back. You'd think Romans would be jaded by such stuff but the crowd cheers every kill until Agnes gets them on her side by refusing to run. Instead, she gracefully walks over to pay homage to her spiritual teacher, who's being crucified and slow roasted at the same time. So impressive is her performance that when Vibio and his gang burst into the arena, they promptly decide to drop their weapons and die. Claudia decides to die as well, and it looks like we'll get the Sign of the Cross finish until the mob in the stands demands that Maximian spare the Christians. He's about to have his African personal guard massacre the Nazarenes but the Praetorian Guard, usually the bad guys in Roman stories, shows up to cancel the African threat and force the Emperor to declare a happy ending. This African element may have been the most provocative part of the film for American audiences. History says that the Praetorians lost their traditional standing as the emperors' personal guard during the Tetrarchy, but it doesn't appear that Maximian or his partners relied on Africans instead. In the film, the African commander Iface (Van Aikens) is an unprincipled schemer -- his troops are often made to look incompetent when fighting Vibio and friends -- who's willing to take a huge bribe from Claudia to let some Christians go, only to spurn her when he gets a chance to become the emperor's chief of security. He taunts and threatens Claudia (and even lays hands on her) to the point that it surprised me that he didn't suffer any real comeuppance. I wonder if those scenes were cut out in some parts of the U.S. In any event, Revolt is a well-staged, well-budgeted but indifferently performed Italian epic, worth seeing mainly for its production design and cinematography. I was glad to see TCM run it letterboxed, since it's still relatively rare to see peplum pictures that way on American TV. This particular picture might not deserve too much respect, but the genre as a whole, from Hercules knockoffs to more ambitious stuff like this, might not be so despised if more people could see them the way they were meant to be seen.

CENTURION (2010)

Once a hot genre director, Neil Marshall will release his first theatrical feature film in nine years when the Hellboy reboot -- heralded by an unimpressive trailer in theaters now -- premieres this April. Marshall, who made his name worldwide with The Descent in 2005, has been stuck directing TV since Centurion flopped in 2010. It's a film I've long been curious about, but maybe it's part of the problem that I've only just gotten around to seeing it. Whatever the case, now that I have seen it I can say it wasn't that bad, but there are some things I didn't care for. The CGI blood sprays are unrealistically instantaneous, for instance, and I still find it jarring to hear Roman soldiers from nearly 2,000 years ago using modern swear words. I understand it's meant to make them relatable as common men rather than antique aliens, but just as when I tried to watch the Spartacus TV show it always threatens to take me right out of the story. Hollywood has conditioned me too well, I guess. Anyway, on the positive side of the ledger Centurion is an often-impressive outdoor action picture that suggests a symbolic birthing of Britain from the mating, promised at the end, of the best of both worlds, Roman and Briton (or Pict), though each is in a tiny minority. Starting out as the sole survivor of a Roman outpost overrun by the woad-wearing savages, Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) escapes only to lead the remnants of the almost-annihilated Ninth Legion back to safety behind the new line of defense, Hadrian's Wall. For his trouble he's targeted for death by unscrupulous officials who want no one to tell of the legion's sad fate -- led into an ambush by a treacherous guide (Olga Kuryenko) who was trusted by the highest authorities. Marshall likes his strong female, so the guide Etain becomes the primary antagonist of the picture, leading the Picts with her super tracking skills while Quintus rallies a motley band, not all of whom are worth saving, to safety. Along the way the Romans take shelter with Arianne, a woman exiled by the Picts for alleged witchcraft (Imogen Poots) who seems the nearest thing to a "real" Englishwoman on screen. She knows Latin (the Picts speak in subtitles, making the natives the "other" against the multicultural but all Anglo inflected Romans) just as Quintus has mastered Pictish, each finding in the other at last an object for sincere cross-cultural communication. In the environment established by Marshall Arianne seems too good to be true, but I suppose such people are exceptional everywhere. The point seems to be that she and Quintus aren't going to find good people anywhere else. The main point, however, is that the action scenes justify this film's existence. Marshall arguably is a good enough action director that he doesn't need to punctuate his combats, but once a horror guy, always a horror guy. After a while the decapitations and such started to seem sophomorically superflous, but in the climactic fight, with the last three Romans defending an abandoned fort (introduced in a scene like something out of Northwest Passage) against a foolhardy final Pictish attack, Marshall focuses on drama rather than effects and makes the best scene in the film. You can see why he's remained in demand for genre projects, though maybe the film as a whole also shows in its excesses why he hasn't been given a chance to do something of his own for so long now.

THE SLAVE (Il figlio di Spartacus, 1962)

When Kirk Douglas's dying Spartacus is shown his infant son and told he's free at the end of Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film, producer Douglas perhaps didn't realize but most likely didn't care that he'd left a door open for a sequel. Stars like him didn't do sequels, after all, so it would be left to the Italians to exploit the opportunity. The opportunity went to Sergio Corbucci, a busy young director who had just directed the top American peplum stars, Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott, in Duel of the Titans. Reeves returned for the new project. which included some location work in the shadow of the Sphinx and Great Pyramid in Egypt. Since Spartacus was a historical figure, Corbucci and his writers didn't have to worry about anyone protesting his exploitation of the Douglas film. For what it's worth, though, they did poach one bit that could be considered Douglas's, or novelist Howard Fast's, intellectual property. History doesn't name Spartacus's wife, but The Slave identifies its hero's mom as Varinia, the name Fast coined. A small detail, but one that might have helped impressionable 1962 audiences believe that Corbucci's film actually was a continuation of Douglas and Kubrick's.

In The Slave, the son of Spartacus and Varinia is named Randus and raised to be a Roman soldier. By 48 B.C. he's a centurion in Julius Caesar's army as it occupies Egypt. Caesar (Ivo Garrani) gives him a sensitive mission to spy on Marcus Licinius Crassus (Claudio Gora), Spartacus's nemesis and one of Caesar's few remaining rivals for dominion over the Roman world, in his power base in Zeugma. In the English dub, Crassus's voice actor seems to make an effort to imitate Lawrence Olivier at times. More intriguingly, Randus has a Germanic sidekick (Franco Balducci) who resembles Kirk Douglas a good deal more than Steve Reeves does, as if Corbucci wanted us to think for awhile that that guy might be the son of Spartacus.

Nevertheless, Randus learns of his true heritage, and the meaning of the Thracian trinket he's worn around his neck since childhood, after an accident at sea strands him and slave girl Saida (Ombretta Colli) in a strange country where they are promptly captured and enslaved. A fellow slave is a veteran of Spartacus's rebel army who recognizes the trinket as the sign of the son of Spartacus. Whether Randus believes this or not, he doesn't care to be enslaved and leads a successful rebellion just before his erstwhile shipmates arrive to rescue him and fetch him to Zeugma.

Randus is possessed of innate compassion. We saw it displayed early in the picture when he mercifully stabbed a rebel to death in mid-crucifixion. He despises cruelty and so comes to despise slavery. After visiting Spartacus's grave -- we're told his remaining followers stole the great man's body from the cross and took it to the City of the Sun -- he embraces fully the role of Son of Spartacus, appropriating the helmet, breastplate and sword that conveniently have been left atop the old man's sarcophagus, unmarred by time or desert climate. Randus becomes a masked avenger, part Moses, part Zorro down to signing his work with a big S, though the more immediate model was the recent Reeves vehicle Goliath and the Barbarians. By harassing Crassus he continues to do Caesar's work as well as his father's. Once that work is done, however, Randus and Caesar's interests inevitably diverge.

 Steve Reeves performs tremendous feats of strength as the Son of Spartacus

Corbucci makes the most of his picturesque locations and clearly knows his way around the widescreen frame, but he's not as good at peplum action as he would be at spaghetti western gunplay. He's good at horseback chases through the desert, but like most peplum directors he never really figures out how to make swordplay as dynamic as contemporary Asian filmmakers could. The Slave is the same sort of episodic, essentially juvenile adventure that Hollywood made ad nauseum in the 1950s, only with superior art direction if not a higher budget.

 

Above, Crassus faces his comeuppance.

Below, Randus is about to get his from Caesar.

 The story skids to a halt rather than reaching a proper climax. After Crassus is killed -- the real man died five years earlier, but the film follows the legend of his conquerors forcing him to drink molten gold -- Caesar arrives and Randus surrenders himself for crucifixion, hoping that the other escaped slaves will be spared. The film leads us to expect an attack from some of Crassus's erstwhile allies, who are pissed over the death of one of their royals during a Randus raid on the Roman's palace. If you're not going to take history seriously, the sensible ending would have been for Caesar and Randus to join forces to repel this attack, and for Randus to earn his life and freedom from a grateful Caesar. But this attack never takes place. Instead, a bunch of people show up to protest Randus's crucifixion until Caesar decides that the execution isn't worth the trouble. Randus gets the happy ending that his dad didn't, but then again, his picture was made for a different audience, at once less and more demanding, than his dad's. If you don't demand too much in plot or acting you'll probably appreciate such spectacle as The Slave offers, especially  if you, like its target audience, demand a happy ending.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE EAGLES (All'ombra della aquile, 1966)

Cameron Mitchell was near the end of his European sojourn and the peplum was near the end of its time as a popular genre when the American actor starred in two films for Ferdinando Baldi, who billed himself as "Ferdy Baldwin." The wintry look of the film, shot by the certainly pseudonymous "Lucky Satson," appears inspired by Anthony Mann's Fall of the Roman Empire, and parts of it may have been filmed on Samuel Bronston's massive sets for that ambitious flop. Mitchell plays a tribune, Marcus Ventidius, tasked with taming the Pannoni, a barbarian tribe that has been slaughtering Roman troops. The Pannoni are torn between the paths of peace and war, between the counsel of elder chieftain Magdo (Vladimir Medar) and hothead Batone (Aleksandar Gavric). Ventidius is torn between his betrothed, the consul's daughter Julia (Gabriella Pallotta) and Helen (Beba Loncar), Magdo's daughter and Batone's intended, whom the tribune brings to Rome with Magdo as a prisoner.

Julia grows jealous and tries to degrade Helen by making her dance for aristocratic entertainment, but this only further alienates Marcus from her. Hoping to get her as far away from Marcus as possible, Julia arranges for her and Magdo to escape and return to their people. Give her credit for not just killing Helen as a jealous Roman more likely might in movies. Still, her scheme has disgraced Marcus, since the prisoners were his responsibility, and that unintended consequence chastens her and effectively ends their relationship. Julia pretty much disappears from the picture at this point, when it could have used more of her smoldering jealousy for fuel.

Marcus can redeem himself by taming the Pannoni once and for all. That means inflicting a decisive defeat on Batone, whose plans for an ambush are thwarted by Helen. There's a big battle, Marcus and Batone fight and the Roman kicks his antagonist off a cliff. For his trouble, Marcus is made governor of Pannonia, enabling him to go off with Helen and, presumably, live happily ever after.

The romantic triangle aspect of the picture is actually stronger than its action spectacle, thanks mainly to Pallotta's performance and her interactions with Mitchell. It's hard to tell whether Baldi was working around some issue with Mitchell or was directing the actors according to his original plan. In some scenes, Mitchell (if not a stand-in) stands or sits in shadow so his face can't be seen. Could this be because they had no dialogue for Mitchell to mouth on the set? Or was Mitchell incapable of reciting it? For that matter, I'm not sure if Mitchell did all of his own dubbing. Some of it sounds like the actor, albeit reading his lines rather flatly; other lines don't quite sound right. Whatever was going on, this approach actually helps convey Marcus's increasing alienation from Julia and, as the dance scene suggests, the whole spectacle of imperial domination. By comparison, the battle scenes are standard, unimaginative stuff. Baldi is better known for spaghetti westerns and apparently had a better grip on mano-i-mano gunplay. While he gets some nice shots of the army on the march, the battle scenes here are by-the-numbers montage, montonously punctuated by warriors jumping on horsemen and dragging them out of the saddle. The climactic single combat of Marcus and Batone has no energy; the leaders practically vanish into the background melee until Baldi cuts to close-ups. While Baldi probably got as much out of Mitchell as was possible, the actor seems stiff in a way that might seem "Roman" but probably indicates his disinterest in the project. Yet he and Baldi would shortly team up again for Massacre in the Black Forest and, despite this film's limitations, I'd still be willing to give that one a chance.

DVR Diary: RISEN (2016)

Tensions are high in Judea as occupying Roman armies fight pitched battles against insurgent Zealots while a cult leader is crucified in Jerusalem. Procurator Pontius Pilate (Peter Firth) oddly wants a quick end to the spectacle of Yeshua's (Cliff Curtis) expected slow death and sends Centurion Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) to hurry things up. By the time he arrives at Golgotha, having not long before led the troops to victory over the Zealots, Yeshua has been up only a few hours, but appears to have already died. Clavius orders the other condemned men's legs broken so they'll die quicker and he can shut the site down. Without thinking much about it, he acquiesces when Joseph of Arimathea (Antonio Gil) claims Yeshua's body for burial in his own sepulcher. That should end the matter, but the local Jewish authorities warn that since Yeshua predicted his own resurrection, his fugitive disciples may try to steal the body and claim that he rose after all. Clavius assigns two guards to the sealed tomb who promptly get drunk, and somehow the body disappears from the tomb. It becomes Clavius' mission to find the body, or the disciples who might lead him to it, before rumors of Yeshua's return from the dead further inflame a volatile province.

That's the setup for Kevin Reynolds' Christian procedural, written by Reynolds with Paul Aiello. Taking the police-procedural approach to the mystery of mysteries is an ingenious idea, though it's inevitably compromised by a Christian production company's imperative to affirm Yeshua's divinity. There's a specific moment when Risen stops being a procedural, when Clavius possibly prematurely abandons his investigatory skepticism. This is when his detective trail leads to a house where Yeshua, apparently alive, presides at a giddy gathering of his disciples. Clavius is understandably gobsmacked by the site, since he'd last seen Yeshua as a corpse, but there should still be room for skeptical suspense. After all, to this day people still speculate that there may have been a switcheroo somewhere, a lookalike dying in Jesus's place or an imposter passing for the risen Christ. The sight of Yeshua displaying his wounds for a not exactly doubting Thomas might preempt such doubt, especially in a more credulous age, but viewers may have developed enough respect for Clavius's intelligence by this point that they'd want to see him hold out a little longer. Instead, he follows the disciples to the Sea of Galilee after Yeshua pulls a vanishing act, in hope of meeting the living-dead man again in the disciples' old fishing ground.

Until that turning point, Risen is admirable for its unconventional presentation of a sacred story. I especially appreciated how the writers and actors transcend the performance cliches of Bible movies. You don't get the glassy-eyed heavenward gaze that often makes early cinematic Christians look brainwashed rather than converted. Instead, Clavius's first encounter with a disciple is with a rather goofy Bartholemew (Stephen Hagan) who seems to have been driven just a tiny bit crazy by the ecstatic news of Yeshua's return. There's a welcome consistent note of uncertainty among the disciples, since for all that the resurrection was prophesied, it's still hard for them to fathom in all its apocalyptic implications. It's fun to see an exasperated Simon Peter (Stewart Scudamore), probably still chagrined by his misadventure at Gethsemane, nearly go apeshit on Clavius when the Roman, startled awake by the disciple's offer of water, nearly hamstrings the big fisherman with his sword. You get the sense that these guys (and Mary Magdalene [Maria Botto], in her popular guise of former prostitute) are disciples, but not yet saints. As for their faith, Risen (like this year's Ben-Hur) soft-pedals Christianity as some vague philosophy of love, with no doctrinal strings attached that Clavius or the audience can see. That's probably necessary to attract as wide a Christian audience as possible, not to mention agnostics and secularists. I count myself in the latter category but I've always enjoyed Bible movies for their spectacle and have never felt threatened by their explicit or implicit messages. Risen is a perfectly unthreatening film, unless the mere reiteration of the Jesus story offends you. As a Bible movie fan, I appreciate this film's attempt to view familiar events from a fresh vantage point, if not from an actually different perspective.

On the Big Screen: BEN-HUR (2016)

I was probably the youngest person at a screening of Timur Bekmambetov's film this afternoon, and I am not a young man. The word is that Ben-Hur is bombing, and I think I understand why. This third Hollywood version of Lew Wallace's "Tale of the Christ" is by no means a B-movie, but for anyone to whom "Ben-Hur" means anything, the fact that a remake of the Oscar-winning 1959 blockbuster is not being treated as a tentpole event must make it look sight-unseen like a poor imitation of both the William Wyler epic and its 1925 precursor. In 1959 there was no bigger tentpole than Ben-Hur; probably something bigger couldn't be imagined. Biblical or Bible-era epics were the superhero films and CGI extravaganzas of their day, just as contemptible in many critics' eyes and just as compulsively spectacular for the masses. By then, Ben-Hur had set the standard for spectacle for generations, in theater before movies. If you had a big action climax in a movie you called it your "chariot race." But when was the last time your chariot race was a chariot race? Movies can soar in so many ways now that they'd seemed to pass Ben-Hur by, so that to remake the story again with such inevitable modesty as one must have in the 21st century must seem like an insult to those for whom the Wyler film was the biggest thing ever.

By now, you've probably detected a note of regret implying that the 2016 film has gotten a raw deal. So let me end the suspense by saying that Bekmambetov's movie is an often-worthy remake into which a lot of creativity has gone, that it shouldn't be judged by comparisons of scale to previous versions of the story or the hype surrounding them, and that I recommend it despite the way it trips across the finish line and falls on its face.

While some people may dismiss the new Ben-Hur in advance as another product from Bible-film purveyors Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, it's still a film from the director of Nightwatch (and, alas, Wanted), co-written by the screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave. It is no mere "Bible movie," though the biblical parts are certainly its weakest. Inevitably it embraces Christianity, but it does so almost in pragmatic rather than proselytizing fashion, its message being that Jesus's message is the only thing to keep people from destroying themselves and each other. But it's a minimalist, theology-lite Christianity that boils down to little if not nothing more than "Forgive Your Enemies." Unlike the previous Hollywood Ben-Hur films, this one looks Jesus in the face and lets him talk, but in the most perverse casting choice of the year the actor who played Frank Miller's god-monster Xerxes in the 300 films here plays Our Lord & Savior. While the new film departs from its cinematic predecessors in normalizing Jesus -- watching the Wyler film I can't help wondering whether Jesus was horribly deformed, given the way one Roman reacts to that face we can't see, though a Roman in a similar situation reacts the same way to Rodrigo Santoro here -- it also departs from Lew Wallace's story (or so I assume, not having read of it) in important and interesting ways.

Part of the modesty of scale that has handicapped the new film is that it comes in at nearly 90 minutes shorter than the 1959 film. Keith Clarke and John Ridley do this by eliminating the Nativity prologue and, more significantly, the whole storyline of Quintus Arrias, the Roman admiral who adopts Ben-Hur as his son and secures a pardon for him after the wrongly-condemned galley salve rescues him during a sea battle. The new writers prefer to have Judah Ben-Hur (fourth-generation film dynast Jack Huston) a criminal and fugitive when he returns to Jerusalem for vengeance on his enemy Messala. As for the Roman antagonist, his is the most dramatically altered storyline. In the new film, Messala Severus (Toby "Koba" Kebbell) is Judah's adopted brother, his own family having been disgraced, if not condemned, for its participation in the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar. Some wags have speculated that Messala has been made Judah's brother to preempt the homoerotic reading of the story inspired by Gore Vidal's  purported injection of subtext into the 1959 screenplay. But given that Clarke and Ridley have Messala fall for Judah's sister Tirzah (Sofia Black D'Elia), establishing a family tie need not rule out any shipping or slashing between the men. In any event, brotherly love prevails until Messala, feeling alienated as a practicing pagan among Jews, enlists to reclaim his Roman heritage. Before that, to show what a good guy he is, we see him and Judah drag racing in Bronson Canyon until Judah's chariot hits a rock and tosses him headfirst to the ground. Messala's own ride having run away, the Romano-Judean carries the unconscious Judah all the way back to the city. Throughout, we're reminded of the almost unbearable pressure Messala is under to prove himself and restore his ancestral family's good name by getting tough with Judean insurgents. Even past the point of no return, certain moments illustrate his horror at what has happened. Just before the chariot race, as Judah guides his team to their starting position, we see Messala in the foreground, leaning his head forward on his arms as if struggling to absorb what's about to happen. Even during the race, the film softens Messala by having him do without the scythes on his chariot wheels that did so much damage in the 1959 race. In sum, the new Messala is an intriguingly, evocatively ambiguous figure, at once embodying the arrogant occupier and the unassimilable immigrant. He threatens to be irreconcilably Other, except that this Ben-Hur is doggedly dedicated to reconciliation.

Meanwhile, Judah starts out dangerously ambivalent toward the enduring Zealot insurgency against Roman rule. He doesn't believe in violent resistance himself -- and for that is accused of privilege -- but can't bring himself to rat out Zealots when the returned Messala, now the right hand of Pontius Pilate (Pilou Asbaek), asks for help in pacifying Judea. Judah believes in peace but has no clear idea of what peace requires. He's unimpressed by his first encounter with Jesus, who you may be surprised to learn plied his carpentering trade in Jerusalem for a time. When Jesus tells him that God has a plan for everyone, Judah asks how that's different from slavery. Perhaps tellingly, Jesus doesn't have an answer to that just yet. Whatever Judah's plans are, they begin to unravel when he ends up reluctantly harboring a wounded Zealot who takes the place of a loose roof tile as the instrument of doom for the house of Hur. When Pilate and his army make their entrance into Jerusalem, after Judah and Messala have tried to discourage violence, the Zealot can't resist the opportunity to take a pot shot at Pilate and incriminate his hosts. The entry into Jerusalem is one of the new film's best scenes. Because the script has emphasized the importance for both Messala and Judah of the event going off peacefully, tension is established early. It's heightened when the Romans come in chanting belligerent sounding marching songs in Latin, almost as if daring the Zealots to do something. Making Pilate the victim of the roof incident rather than some pointless, otherwise nameless Roman also helps tighten up the plot.

From here the plot develops in familiar ways, apart from Judah washing up after the sea battle directly into the custody of Sheik Yilderim (Morgan Freeman). The sea battle has been the most acclaimed part of the new film so far, since it's probably the easiest part of the 1959 film to top. However, the CGI skies and waters don't look that much less fake than the studio tank Wyler had to use. On the other hand, Bekmambetov's strategy of staying inside the doomed galley, with only fleeting glances of the action through oar windows until the ship is rammed, earns the scene some honest suspense, as does Judah's climactic escape, which requires him to unchain himself underwater from a line of drowned men. Freeman's Yilderim is a more ruthless character than Hugh Griffith made him in his Oscar-winning 1959 turn. The sheik is ready to turn an escaped galley slave over to the Romans until Judah shows some horse-whispering and horse-doctoring skills that will make him useful to a breeder of chariot-racing animals. Yilderim is a realist whose cynical wisdom comes from futile experience as an insurgent against Rome. The most you can do to Rome, he advises Judah, is humiliate their champions in the no-holds-barred environment of the chariot circus. Since chariot racing is for all intents and purposes a death sport, racing for Yilderim gives Judah an opportunity to embarrass Rome and kill Messala, especially after Yilderim makes immunity for Judah part of his bet with Pilate.

The 2016 chariot race has been criticized, mostly, as a poor, CGI-fake imitation of the 1959 race contrived by Wyler, Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt. But I don't think Bekmambetov need be embarrassed by comparisons with 1959 or 1925. While CGI allows him to come up with plenty of new stunts, the 2016 race is also soundly structured dramatically. Yilderim has advised Judah to hang back for the first half of the race, since the front of the field will be a demolition derby early on. Since Messala heads for the front immediately, this means the two antagonists will be separated for half the race. The new film solves this problem by giving each man a preliminary antagonist, Judah a bald Egyptian in the back of the filed, Messala a turbaned lunatic up front prone to yelling "I kill you!" These early rivalries are punctuated by disasters befalling other drivers, all of which sets us up nicely for the main event. Some of the stunts are frankly preposterous. To top Charlton Heston's somersault bump, Huston actually falls out of the chariot and is dragged for a seemingly-lethal period of time before he pulls himself back in by the reins. Other moments are brutally spectacular, and one of my most vivid memories of this movie will be of one chariot tumbling into the seats and the horses running amok in the stands as spectators flee in all directions. Overall the 2016 chariot race works as a climactic action scene, and thematically as well. In a way it exposes Judah and Messala's feud as irrelevant and petty, since all the other drivers seem ready to kill each other with nothing personal entering into it. It also exposes the hollowness of the symbolic vengeance on Rome Judah and Yilderim hoped for. As Yilderim enters Pilate's box to collect his winnings, he sardonically consoles Pilate over the Roman's defeat.  Strangely, Pilate doesn't feel defeated at all, apart from the money he's losing. Surveying the Judean mob that's swarmed onto the track to celebrate Judah's victory, some of them bouncing a seemingly-lifeless Messala about like a meat puppet, Pilate observes that they're all Romans now.

By the way, this film's Pilate is rather unbiblical in one important respect. In the Gospels, you get the impression that Pilate doesn't know Jesus from Adam when first presented with the prisoner, and of course he famously states that he finds no guilt in the man. Here, Pilate actually witnesses an impromptu Jesus sermon after the carpenter rescues some petty thief from a stone-throwing lynch mob. Hearing Jesus preach forgiveness, Pilate advises Messala that the carpenter will prove more dangerous than any Zealot. Violence can be answered by violence, after all, but what is Rome's answer to Jesus's message. The answer, of course, is crucifixion, and since the Sanhedrin isn't shown at all in this picture, there's no doubt where it places responsibility for Jesus's execution, which has been foreshadowed both by Judah's march to the galleys, arms tied behind him, which Jesus witnessed, and Judah's floating on a cruciform fragment of a ship's mast.

Jesus's capture at Gethsemane begins Ben-Hur's death plunge. I suppose there was no way to escape the ending we got given how the screenplay had harped on forgiveness and reconciliation, but even if you still believe that Christianity is capable of achieving those results you'd probably concede that this film's resolution is way too good to be true. Lew Wallace himself would probably think so. For the most part, of course, the denouement follows the familiar story. Judah tries to intervene during Jesus's march to Golgotha but is told to stand down by the condemned man, who goes to death willingly. Judah watches the crucifixion and hears Jesus's dying words, "Father, forgive them..." making an especial impression by provoking flashbacks to better times with Messala. Upon Jesus' death a healing rain falls, curing Judah's mother and sister of the leprosy they contracted in a prison where they were sent by Messala's subaltern without his commander's knowledge; the man had explained to Judah that he'd wanted to save Messala from himself on this point. Yilderim uses some of his race winnings to pay for the Hurs' release. Judah heads to the Roman barracks to see what became of Messala. He survived the race (as he does in the novel, though he doesn't survive the novel) but has lost a leg. He deliriously vows revenge, promising to grow his leg back the better to kill Judah with, until Judah reminds him of the time he carried Judah home after the chariot accident. After everything, this suffices to reconcile the brothers into a sobby embrace of mutual forgiveness, and that brings Messala back into the family fold, and back into Tirzah's embrace, all of them presumably Galileans now. Obviously the writers wish this to happen, and for the film they are God, but they're the ones in a delirium for the last five minutes or so of the movie. It's an embarrassingly bad finish given how good most of the movie is, but it's not enough to sink the film, especially if you concede that this version of the story probably couldn't end any other way. If no other Ben-Hur movie existed, I suspect most people would think more highly of this one. As it is, in some respects it's better than the Wyler film or the 1925 picture. None of them are truly great films because, or so I infer, Wallace's novel isn't really great source material. But as a Ben-Hur for our time, Bekmambatov's film will do -- or it would have had people really wanted one.

THE ARENA (1974)

It's a stroke of exploitation genius. The women-in-prison movie was a big money-making genre in the sleazy Seventies, but how do you keep it fresh? You can change the locale from Central America to the Philippines or beyond, but after a while the camp in the jungle motif looks the same no matter where you shoot it. Why not take the idea back in time? And what more natural destination for the Roger Corman wayback machine than mythically decadent and exploitative Rome? It was a perfect opportunity for Corman to do something new with Pam Grier and Margaret Markov, the stars of his Philippine production Black Mama, White Mama. I didn't care much for that film when I finally saw it but the original audiences ate it up, so Corman wanted to reunite the glamazonian actresses in a similar tale of sporadic adversarity and uneasy alliance. He sent them to Italy with novice director Steve Carver to work for local producer Mark Damon, a long established expatriate American actor. The Arena had a happy ending after it wrapped when Markov and Damon married; they remain a couple today. As for the film itself, it fulfills the potential Black Mama, White Mama really only hinted at for Grier and Markov as a formidable female action team.

In the first century B.C., with memories of Spartacus's uprising still fresh, Romans are scouring the world for plunder and slaves. In "the Brittany," a raiding party attacks worshippers leaving some sort of druidic ceremony, slaughtering most of the natives but taking Boadicea (Markov) alive. In Nubia, Roman raiders interrupt the celebratory dance of leopard-skinned Mamawi (Grier) with a rain of arrows, seizing the woman after killing the men. You'd think they'd take more slaves to make the raids worthwhile, but maybe they just enjoy killing, or maybe they're trying to solve the Riddle of Steel. In any event, our hapless heroines end up practically shackled together in Brundusium, in the house of the lanista Timarchus (Daniele Vargas), his consort Cornelia (Rosalba Neri), his effete servant Priscium and a school of gladiators. The women are meant to be kitchen workers, servants of refreshments during the games, entertainment for Timarchus's cronies and comfort for the gladiators. But after the prideful Mamawi attacks a citizen-turned slave (Marie Louise) who'd insulted her race, and Boadicea intervenes to keep the Nubian from killing the woman, Timarchus gets a brainstorm. He'll liven up his games by matching his slave women against each other in the arena.

There's some training involved, but soon enough the women are fighting before crowds who aren't sure what to make of it all. Boadicea is matched against the film's comedy-relief gladiatrix, Dierdre of the Erse (Lucretia Love), a stereotypical carrot-topped dipso who quickly proves incompetent in the arena. But the audience is so amused by her pratfalls that they convince Timarchus to spare the clown. The next bout pits Mamawi against Livia, the onetime Roman citizen, who appeals to the crowd to be spared such shame. She wins them over, compelling Timarchus to replace her with Lucinia (Mary Count), the girlfriend of top gladiator Septimus (Pietro Ceccarelli). We'd seen him earlier breaking up the fight between Mamawi and Boadicea, so we're expecting one or both of them to get back at him later in the picture. For now, we see him watch in horror as Mamawi gets the upper hand over Lucinia and Timarchus orders the Nubian to kill her foe. She can't do it until Timarchus's archers make it clear that she has no choice if she wants to live. No Woody Strode style self-sacrificing heroics -- for the moment.

Lucretia Love (above right) was actually top-billed in Italian advertising for this picture. Maybe they gave her credit for genre experience for starring in Alfonso Bresica's Battle of the Amazons a year earlier.

Two thumbs down.

Finish her!

Inevitably, Mamawi and Boadicea are matched against each other. Like their male counterparts, they're invited to seek comfort with a bedmate the night before -- in what proves, shockingly, the film's only nod toward lesbianism, they're told they can choose a male or a female. Boadicea chooses the desolate Septimus, not to screw with him, except maybe with his head. But it doesn't take much convincing to get him to seek vengeance on Timarchus. Unfortunately, he's ratted out, captured, and sentenced to crucifixion -- but a sympathetic soldier allows him an honorable suicide. Now the question becomes whether Boadicea and Mamawi will kill each other or make a stand. This shouldn't be too hard to figure out....

Because the lesbian content is minimized to almost nothing, you might miss that Arena is basically a women-in-prison film, complete with an antique equivalent of a shower scene. The absence of lesbianism makes sense when you remember that same-sex desire was usually vilified in these movies, accentuating the unnatural power women wardens seemed to have in prison settings. In The Arena there's no illusion of female power; while Cornelia comes closest to a wicked-warden figure it's always clear that Timarchus is the master. In a way, that makes the gladiatrix uprising (oops, I spoiled it) even more of a titillating nightmare of female empowerment than the jailbreaks and riots are in the conventional WIP movie. This time it's unambiguously a war of women against men -- though the male gladiators join in as well. The WIP movie has a subtext of fascinated fear of the sexually liberated women, pandering to a male notion that these women need to be kept down and controlled before jolting them with the arousing terror of a female breakout. The Arena arguably makes this point more plainly by emphasizing the training mandated by men that turns the women into unstoppable killing machines. Movies have sent us mixed messages about the outcome of a gladiator-vs-soldier showdown, Spartacus of course favoring the gladiators while Anthony Mann's Fall of the Roman Empire noted their indiscipline and likely cowardice under battle conditions. The Arena is all the way with gladiatrices. Once the rebellion breaks out, Mamawi and Boadicea make mincemeat of the soldiery, and even the ridiculous Dierdre manages to kill a few. Think of it as sublimated sexual blowback. Men may want sexual superwomen but the revolution won't necessarily stop there.

Look into your hearts! I can't die here, like some gladiator!

Steve Carver is best known to me as the director of that cheese epic and guilty pleasure of the Eighties, Lone Wolf McQuade, and The Arena shows that he hit the ground running. Aided by cinematographer Aristide (Joe D'Amato) Massaccesi, Carver gives the action a dynamic budget-epic vibe. The arena scenes may be underpopulated but otherwise the production values are perfectly adequate and even superior during the climactic escape and chase through the catacombs. A few cheesy moments are worth noting, however, like the way a man slashed across the throat clutches his head and the way a gladiator can manage to rape Dierdre while keeping his black trunks on. A little of that is probably inevitable, but it's not typical of the film. Francesco de Masi, who did a stupendous score for Lone Wolf McQuade, punches things up nicely here in his first work for Carver. Most importantly for the success of the picture, Grier and Markov are on their game, the latter for the first and only time in a marriage-shortened career. Doing their own fighting and stunts, the two rangy females are still occasionally gawky but mostly as convincingly forceful as they need to be and often more than that. To an extent, it's just a matter of Carver being a better action director than Black Mama, White Mama's Eddie Romero. But he also makes judicious use of huge, spaghetti-western scale close-ups that showcase the actresses emotions, Grier's especially, as well as their physical prowess. Let's not mistake The Arena for anything profound -- the previous paragraph notwithstanding -- but let's give credit where it's due some serious high-functioning kick-ass schlock like they hardly make anymore.

Listen to the hard sell on this trailer, uploaded by Keshizzz.

DUEL OF CHAMPIONS (Orazi e Curiazi, 1961)

Less than a decade after making Shane, Alan Ladd's career was on a stark downhill slide by the time he went to Italy to shoot this international co-production based on the ancient wars between Rome and Alba. While the credits list Ferdinando Baldi as the director, they also identify Orazi e Curiazi as "a Terence Young film." IMDB lists the men as co-directors, the Englishman presumably filming Ladd's dialogue scenes. Young had directed Ladd previously in The Red Beret (aka The Paratroopers), so the American presumably would not feel entirely lost among the Italians. Still, it was apparently an unhappy shoot. In February 1961 UPI reported that Ladd had walked off the set because the Italian producers had not forked over the $20,000 advance he'd been promised. A fresh infusion of money from another production company apparently saved the day. But gossip columnists reported that Ladd's pet dachshund had died on the last day of production. According to legend, Ladd was desperate to remain a top-billed star, and at this point going abroad seemed the only way to retain that level of stardom. But his Italian project was doomed never to receive a general U.S. theatrical release, and a year after completing it Ladd shot himself. In 1964, after finally accepting subordinate billing for The Carpetbaggers, he suffered a fatal overdose, though history still questions whether or not he did it on purpose.

The best-known pictorial representation of the story of the Horatii is the 18th century Frenchman Jacques-Louis David's painting The Oath of the Horatii. The Horatii were three brothers who volunteered to settle the long feud between Rome and Alba by triple combat with a band of Alban brothers. The Roman historian Livy tells us that the Horatii won, three kills to two.

A team of Italian writers, including directors Carlo Lizzani and Giuliano Montaldo, embellished the ancient legend, crafting a more character-driven screenplay than many contemporary "sword and sandal" products. They make the lead brother, Horatio (Ladd), a military commander who suffers disgrace due to miscommunication. Ordering a subordinate to take command of the main body of troops while he attempts a flanking action, he is wounded and taken prisoner while unconscious. Meanwhile, his messenger is killed before he can fully convey the order, and Horatio's fellow soldiers become convinced that their commander fled the battle as a coward. His own name is disgraced in pre-republican Rome, but the disgrace doesn't extend to the entire family. Instead, King Hostilius (American character actor Robert Keith) offers the hand of his daughter Marcia (Franca Bettoia), originally promised to Horatio, to the next brother in line.

Meanwhile, Horatio is condemned by the Albans to death in an outdoor carnival. In a nice tracking shot, the Roman is shoved through a circus of activity, including fire jugglers and wrestling women, before he's dumped into a wolf pit. A sympathetic captive girl (Ladd's daughter Alana) tosses Horatio a rock to bludgeon the beasts with, and later helps him escape captivity altogether.

Returning to Rome, Horatio finds himself an unperson. His father remains ashamed of him, still believing him a coward, while his brother and once-intended bride are profoundly embarrassed by his presence. King Hostilius is happy to see him, however, because he can help his brothers fulfill the prophecy of a sibyl who had predicted that the war with Alba would be settled by three brothers fighting three brothers. Feeling disrespected, Horatio refuses to fight and leaves for neutral country.

Adding another complication is a history-based subplot involving the sister of the family, Horatia (Jacqueline Derval). While out bathing with some girlfriends she gets kidnapped by the very Alban brothers who've been assigned to fight the expected Roman trio. One brother is clearly smitten but determined to have her immediately. He vows to make her love him eventually, but all it takes is a single kiss and she's his. I suppose this was necessary to make it not look like she was falling in love with a rapist, but it still does seem that way.

Marcia implores Horatio to return to Rome and do his duty, but he tells her to consider him a dead man. Before long, however, yet just in time, he arrives in front of the city's walls to take his place beside his brothers, who are promptly killed by the Albans. While this gives him a chance to win Marcia back, it also leaves him outnumbered one to three. The better part of valor in such a case is to ride into the woods. The Albans think that means Game Over, but since this was supposed to be combat to the death, Hostilius isn't going to surrender until the Alban brothers go into the woods and bring back Horatio's corpse. The Albans comply confidently. Numbers still favor them, but the woods offer plenty of opportunities for ambush, and before long it's down to one on one, Horatio versus the very man his sister now loves. No matter who wins, there won't be triumph without tragedy. In the end, the movie softens the legend. According to Livy, Horatio kills his sister when he sees her mourning the Alban. In the film, Horatia kills herself out of grief and the chastened survivors hasten to make peace.

Despite its relatively ambitious script, Orazi e Curiazi is a mostly uninspired film. While an atrocious fullscreen Mill Creek Entertainment DVD leaves me unable to judge the cinematography, I feel I can still fault the film for unimaginative staging of action. For some reason Italian sword-and-sandal or peplum films rarely live up to the standard of action staging set by the Americans and Japanese. The swordfights lack energy and distinction and the early mass battle is unmemorable apart from the flaming balls sent hurtling down on the Romans in emulation of Spartacus. The sets are unimpressive and the music sounds like nearly every other peplum of this period. The music of this genre is even more disappointing when you consider what Italian composers were doing or would do with nearly every other genre in this period.

Alan Ladd's performance would never have won him new friends in Hollywood. He's convincing only when his character is sulking, but the actor seems to be sulking through the entire picture. He looks fatigued throughout and invests his dialogue with little emotion. Worse, he undermines his credibility as an ancient Roman with throwaway Americanisms like "Hey, you!" His lack of confidence in the project is obvious, and it seems like a great effort for him even to smile occasionally. This is a star near the bitter end of a career, and while it may exert the morbid fascination of a trainwreck there really isn't anything amusing about it. The other actors do what they can, but the dubbing is lifeless and the script (or at least this English-language cut of the film) lacks the character and relationship-establishing scenes that would have made the conflicts among the Horatii more compelling. The writers went far enough to prove that there is strong dramatic potential in the Horatii legend, but they didn't follow through fully enough to realize that potential. It might be worth trying again someday, when no one's career is on the line.

THE NINJA STRIKES BACK (Xiong Zhong, 1982)

Whichever of the purported directors of The Ninja Strikes Back came up with this image deserves to be considered the Rene Magritte of martial-arts cinema.

Two thousand years ago, give or take, the Flavian Amphitheater (known to us as the Colosseum) witnessed combat to the death from the mightiest killing machines of the age: the gladiators. In 1972, Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris revived the tradition, symbolically at least, by staging a mock mortal combat for the film Return (or Way) of the Dragon. Ten years later, Bruce Le and an international team of exploitation filmmakers continued that tradition in the film now under review, which is just a respectful way of saying they ripped off Return of the Dragon.

The Ninja Strikes Back, which was known elsewhere and at other times as Bruce Le Strikes Back or Eye of the Dragon, is a collaboration between Le and exploitation maven Dick Randall, who had earlier worked with the star in such stuff as The Clones of Bruce Lee. On his own, Randall produced films ranging from The Wild World of Jayne Mansfield to For Your Height Only. Le co-directed this film with Joseph Kong (aka Joseph Velasco), the director of Clones as well as the film with the most sublimely illiterate U.S. title ever: My Name Called Bruce. While co-star Andre Koob isn't listed as a director in the film itself, the RareFlix DVD box cover adds him to the list. So we have as many as three directors, along with a producer with a certain style, for a production that sprawls from Rome to Paris to Macao. This is a volatile mixture even before we get to the plot.

"Bruce" lives in Rome, where he and his friend Ron Wong are muscle for "The Boss." We are introduced to our hero in the back room of a pool hall where he's playing a high-stakes poker game. Catching a competitor cheating, Bruce chastises all involved with flying feet and the requisite Brucian screams. While fellow Brucian Dragon Lee resembles Curly Howard somewhat in his vocalizations, Le sometimes comes closer to Jerry Lewis, were Lewis a Bruce Lee imitator.

The Boss sends Bruce and Ron to carry out a drug deal. The deal goes bad and Bruce gets a bullet in the leg. Nobly he tells Ron to get away, and is himself taken by the police. At this point, nearly nine minutes into the picture, the opening credits appear.

Bruce serves his time and is released. In the meantime, Ron seems to have risen in the Boss's organization. He's now bold enough to propose kidnapping the daughter of a newly arrived ambassador (from where? who knows?) who won't do business with The Boss. He's also eager to have Bruce back in the gang, telling our hero, "It's a great big one I owe you." But Bruce wants to make a clean break from his criminal life. Invited by The Boss to beat up a captive for old time's sake, he demurs. Ron does the honors instead, while The Boss wishes Bruce well.

So of course Ron and some goons disguised as artists try to kill Bruce a few minutes later (in running time) while he's on the town with his (presumably) Italian girlfriend Laura. Our hero's kung fu is strong, but the gang has him on the ropes until a redheaded woman with a gun scatters the criminals. She never gets a name, but she turns out to be a policewoman working with Inspector Marino. The actress is audaciously named Chick Norris, but is really Corliss Randall, wife of the producer (who himself plays the Ambassador). The Rome police are investigating Ron and The Boss. They have more cause to investigate when Ron's kidnap plan kicks in. Ron is a creative thinker. This is who he sends after Sophie, the Ambassador's daughter.

Go ahead and question the utility of a kidnapper in drag, but this film's attitude is why not? There'll be more proof of this later. Right now, the thing is still just getting started.

Red and Marino start roughing up the criminal element for information on Ron, whom they suspect in the kidnapping. But their interrogation techniques won't get them very far. Here's how they work: they corner a guy in a pool hall, and Marino punches him once in the gut. They ask him about Ron, but he won't answer. They give up. Bruce is little help, either. At the hospital after the last attack, he tells the cops that he'll settle his business with Ron on his own. But after the gang attacks him at the hospital, Bruce is ready to go to Paris with Marino to help track down the kidnappers.

There's just enough of a hint of the Italian polizioteschi genre to give this kung fu movie a little Euro-exoticism. And as our heroes go to Paris the film begins to burrow its way into a special little world of sleaze. The tone is set by their visit to a discotheque, where Marino gets information using a gun and a urinal.

This informant directs our heroes to their next stop, a porno studio. This is as good a time as any for an Exploitation Movie Quiz.

Q. The script calls for the protagonists to invade a porno studio. Do you
a)go for shock value by following them into the studio and surprising the crew, or
b)build up suspense by showing the making of a pornographic film.

The correct answer is b). Or at least I assume that Messrs. Randall, Le, Kong et al hoped to create some sort of tension in their audience by allowing the lesbian scene within the film to develop from kissing to groping to bodies grinding nakedly together before Bruce and the Inspector spoil things. Now they have to reckon with porno set security. Had this been twenty years later, they might have had to deal with Kimbo Slice, and they probably would have had an easier time than they do with this fat guy.

But all of this effort only gets them another name and another destination. Coitus interruptus is the common motif here as our heroes catch Jean Pierre in the act. This only incites a chase scene and a hostage standoff on the Paris Metro. Then Jean Pierre ditches the kid and runs for it. He deserves what he gets: a beating. But when he tells the good guys what they want to know, they tell him to go home. He reveals that the ninja has taken Sophie to Macao.

The who? The whaaa? This is the first time anyone's mentioned a ninja in the movie, if you don't count those almost subliminal images from the opening credits. Who is this ninja person, anyway? The question takes us to Macao, still ruled by Portugal at the time, where young women are turned into doped-up nymphomaniacs in order to get prominent men into compromising positions.

And Yang Sze wants a piece of the action. Yes, it's our old friend Bolo Yeung taking his pick of the crop. Except he has to answer to none other than Harold "Oddjob" Sakata. And in case you had any confusion as to who he is, a bit of, er, borrowed James Bond music plays every time he shows up. Poor Bolo is Oddjob's bitch. The once-mighty "Chinese Hercules" lives in fear of Sakata-san's dreaded iron glove. It makes him whimper, "Put it away....I won't touch her, I swear it!"

But these mighty men are merely minions of the ninja, whom we see (for now) only from the chest down. To make sure of this, the camera freeze frames in the middle of a pan up they mystery man's ninja-clad body before the film hurries back to Italy to get Bruce back in the action. You see, it was one thing to tag along to Paris with the inspector, but Bruce would rather hang out on the beach and oil Laura's naked back than fly out to Macao.

Too bad, Bruce: a clumsy sniper blows a hole in Laura's head that was meant for yours. Ron isn't done with our hero yet, so Bruce isn't done with the search for Sophie. Of course, $50,000 from the Ambassador helps firm up his resolution. "Bring my daughter home," the diplomat pleads. "I will," Bruce says, "I promise...honest."

Now it's personal for Bruce, and it's only going to get more personal. Macao is Bruce's home town. His father drank and worried about him there, and Bruce's first thought is to pay Pop a visit. But the house is empty, except for a friend who appears to explain that two Japanese men (Oddjob and Bolo to you) showed up two months ago to kill Bruce's dad and kidnap his sister. "They were ninja," the friend says, "I'm sure of it." But not the ninja, of course.

For all his travails, sometimes it's still good to be Bolo Yeung.

All right, then. Randall's gang has been sort of teasing us with this ninja business for over half the picture. Here's where they start making up for it. Ninjas attack Bruce and his friend at a cemetery in all their pajama-clad backflipping splendor. These are full-tilt ninja, too; they have the power to vanish. I didn't say they throw smoke bombs and run away. I mean that they vanish into thin air. They also can burst out of the earth when they need to. And they decapitate people.

Bruce is hard pressed to put an end to this silliness.

But he prevails here and against both Bolo and Sakata, the latter on a boat with Sophie tied to the mast. For the occasion, our villain is sporting his old Oddjob hat, for all the good it's ever done him.

Hooray! Sophie and Bruce's sister and the other drugged-up nymphomaniacs are saved, and Bruce brings his prize back to Rome. But not all scores have been settled yet. With Marino and Red tied up in traffic, Bruce has barely deposited Sophie at the Ambassador's residence before she's kidnapped again, and the Ambassador himself is killed. You all forgot about Ron and The Boss, didn't you? But Ron forgets nothing. He calls Bruce and challenges him to fight the ninja to the death at the Colosseum to save Sophie. Funny thing is, when Bruce shows up and fights his way through a bunch of pretenders, the only dude left to face him is Ron himself. No pajamas, no magic tricks. So is Ron the ninja, after all, or did distributors simply require our filmmakers to use the word "ninja" a certain number of times in the script? We may never know. But there remains one more thing to be ripped off: the anatomical analysis of carnage innovated by Mr. Sonny Chiba.

As I've attempted to demonstrate, The Ninja Strikes Back has something for just about everybody, except for good taste. It has a soundtrack stolen from other movies, it has a Bruce Lee imitator as well as the real Bolo Yeung, it has quasi-pornography, appallingly Euro-fied disco music (the 70s seemed to end later on the Continent), tons of tourist footage of Rome, a decapitation, toplessness at every opportunity, and just when you start to think the title is a rip-off you get ninjas up the wazoo. The combination of disco and ninjas leaves the film poised on the border between 70s and 80s trash, as if a new era of exploitation cinema was struggling to be born. Randall, Le and Kong simply pile on as much junk as they can find to make a bigger bonfire, and it burns pretty good for a while. Their film has a cumulative effect as events grow more outrageous. The fun of it is wondering what they'll think of next, and when you reach that point the story doesn't really have to make sense anymore, which is a good thing for the story.

The Ninja Strikes Back is part of the RareFlix Triple Feature Vol. 3 box set, along with Lady Street Fighter (see below) and the Leo Fong starrer Revenge of the Bushido Blade. While Lady Street Fighter is strictly for the serious connoisseurs of bad moviemaking, Ninja is probably more accessible thanks to its more competent action and its flaunting of impressive locations. It also looks as good as it probably can in a widescreen edition straight from the rights holders. While I expect "good" things of the Fong film, I can say pretty confidently that the two movies I've seen make the set worth seeing for exotic cinema buffs.