Past Misdeeds: Miami Golem (1985)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


War correspondent turned local TV reporter in Florida Craig Milford (David Warbeck) is sent to film the newest experiment of scientist Dr. Schweiker (Sergio Rossi), whom everyone calls - smiling as if it were the best of jokes - "that filthy Nazi". Schweiker has cloned and somehow genetically manipulated cells that were found inside of a meteorite. Schweiker's goal is to, um, you got me there.

A malfunction during Craig's highly scientific looking attempt at filming the alien cells nearly ends the film early by killing the poor dears. Fortunately, the cells miraculously revive and Craig is distracted from that particular strangeness by vague looking projections swirling around the lab, talking to him in a language he doesn't understand.

Our hero's not too fazed by stuff like this, shrugs the David Warbeck shrug, and goes home. Shortly after he's gone, Schweiker and his whole team are assassinated by the henchmen of evil rich guy Anderson (John Ireland), who also steal the cells while they’re at it. Anderson has a fiendish and absolutely sensible plan: to grow the cells into a monstrous creature completely under his control he will then use to blackmail governments into doing whatever he wants them to do, like giving him contractual work. I think bribery would be an easier way to achieve that particular goal, but then I'm not an evil capitalist. For some reason, Anderson thinks Craig - and not sanity - is a threat to these plans and commands further henchmen to kill the reporter too.

But Craig, once he's heard of the murders, gets himself a gun and demonstrates that shooting down helicopters with a revolver and being an all-around action hero are among the skills you learn as a war reporter.

When Craig's not involved in chases and shoot-outs, he tries to find out what the strange swirling things were trying to tell him. Fortunately, he meets Joanna Fitzgerald (Laura Trotter), a very helpful woman who recognizes the message as being in the language of sunken Atlantis. Or aliens. Or both.

In fact, Joanna is secretly working for a group of benevolent aliens who give her fantastic psychic abilities (none of which protect her from a gratuitous shower scene). The aliens have decided that Craig is The Chosen One™, destined to destroy the cells which of course belong to the most horrible and destructive creature ever to live. It's all in a day's work for David Warbeck, I suppose.

Quite at the end of his career, Italian director Alberto De Martino had to work from confusing scripts bizarrely unfit for someone who was always at his best when directing straight action material. Miami Golem's bizarre and generally random mix of Science Fiction, horror, action, and all kinds of 70s crackpottery (and all that in the mid 80s to boot) isn't as drugged up as that of De Martino's Pumaman was - but what is? - yet it's still pretty darn weird.

The film's first fifty minutes or so consist of cheap and silly but also pleasantly tightly realized action scenes, which are regularly broken up by long sequences of characters talking reams of ridiculous poppycock at each other. There's bad science, Atlantis, telepathy, telekinesis and people talking in that lovely Italian dub job manner that makes everyone sound as if they had learned cursing watching Ed Wood movies. It's enough to let anyone who has a heart and a brain cry tears of laughter and delight.

After those first fifty minutes are over, though, Miami Golem gets really weird. De Martino still shakes things up with decent action sequences, but most of the rest of the film is dedicated to melting its audience's brains with as much dead-pan ridiculousness as it can possibly offer.

Among the film's greatest moments belong a scene where an alien explains Craig's role as The Chosen One™ by stopping time and drawing our hero into a mirror dimension (or something) where it can take on Craig's appearance to talk to him, making the film's main expository scene one of (an obviously pretty amused) David Warbeck discussing THE END OF ALL CREATION with himself. No no no, I'm sure he's completely sane. Other high points of this phase of the film are many, many, many shots of actors and the embryo rubber doll in a jar that is the titular Miami Golem using mental powers at each other - leading to some lovely facial expressions and much VERY HARD STARING. And a blinking rubber embryo.

Even better are probably the scenes where the Golem/rubber embryo attacks Craig and Joanna with telekinesis, which is of course mostly demonstrated by the actors jumping around in the style of mildly excited St. Vitus's dance sufferers and stunt doubles looking nothing like the actors catapulting themselves against walls. This, dear friends and readers, is exactly what movies were invented for.


Miami Golem's air of heart-warming wonder is further strengthened by an acting ensemble willing and able to say the most ridiculous things with the straightest of faces and what looks like real enthusiasm to me. His enthusiasm is of course what made David Warbeck such a likeable leading man in most films of the Italian phase of his career. He clearly realized that he was usually acting in ridiculous nonsense, but didn't let that hinder him from putting as much energy into what he did on screen as possible, seemingly always having fun with his lot. If there's an ability ideally suited to letting a grown man upstage a rubber embryo in a jar, as Warbeck does here so beautifully, it is the man's gift of throwing himself into the job of having serious fun on screen.

On WTF: Miami Golem (1985)

If you thought Pumaman was the be all and end all of Alberto De Martino's late career phase, you just haven't encountered Miami Golem, a movie that is nearly as weird but not as boring.

If you jump over to my column on WTF-Film, I'm going to tell you all about it.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,alberto de martino,david warbeck,laura trotter,john ireland,sf,action,horror. reviews

Ratman (1988)

What will those mad scientists think of next? Well, this film's mad scientist is all for winning the Nobel price (seems to be quite easy these days anyhow) by creating a hybrid between rat and monkey.

One day Mousey (Nelson de la Rosa) - as the mad scientist calls his creation - escapes from his cage and starts to teleport around the tropical island he was born on, killing young women and the occasional man left and right without anyone caring or noticing or trying to find out how he can cover incredible distances on two very short legs in no time at all.

Some time later the American Terry (Janet Agren) arrives on the island to identify the dead body of her sister Marlis (Eva Grimaldi). In front of the airport, she meets the mystery writer Fred Williams (David Warbeck) who will at once become inseperable from her and tag along everywhere, even to the morgue. There, Terry learns that the local police isn't good for much. The dead body she is supposed to look at isn't her sister at all! It turns out that Marlis is on a photoshoot with the photographer Mark (Werner Pochath) somewhere in the jungle and just hasn't returned by now.

This doesn't hinder the cops from showing Terry another dead body a little later, for no reason I could comprehend.

While Terry and Fred are looking at corpses and trotting through town with no particular ambition for doing anything worth watching, Marylin and her photographer friend delight us with a weird photoshoot scene before they find more dead bodies and witness another murder. They flee to the home of the mad scientist. Will this turn out to be A Very Bad Idea?

When you take a look at "the world's smallest actor" Nelson de la Rosa in his Ratman (and no, I don't know what makes a rat/monkey hybrid a ratman) get-up, you might very well think to yourself that this is going to be a rather creepy piece of cinema. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. While Nelson really looks the part, the film never bothers to make much use of that fact.

In truth, there's just not much happening at all - there are some murders, some cheesy photo shoot scenes and our "heroes" traipsing around finding some corpses, then flying back home, and that's it for excitement.

I have to admit I was hoping for something a little better from the last film Giuliano Carnimeo directed. Carnimeo isn't one of the big Italian genre names, but he has some fine, entertaining movies like Exterminators of the Year 3000 or The Case of the Bloody Iris in his filmography, so I had certain expectations of, not exactly quality, but entertainment value.

Ratman completely wastes the excellent duo of Warbeck and Agren and doesn't allow them to do anything of interest besides walking around. It's such a shame.

On the film's plus side are the insane ravings of the mad scientist, the scene where Mousey climbs out of a toilet and the insane ending I am now going to spoil: Mousey hides in the dead Marlis' handbag (not without killing a police clerk without anyone noticing) which is taken by Terry without a look inside or a comment on the weight of the thing, then goes through customs without a problem and causes a freeze frame shot of a plane with screams on the soundtrack. Take that City of the Living Dead's ending!

Now, you could argue that the toilet scene and the movie's ending alone are enough to make it mandatory watching for the friend of cheap Italian crap, and I certainly wouldn't contradict you, yet I still can't help but feel disappointed about the misuse of Warbeck and Agren and the terrible feeling of meh the rest of the film left me with.

Of course, when someone will ask me in a few months what I think about Ratman (this sort of question comes up all the time, doesn't it?), I'll only remember that Agren and Warbeck are in it, the way Nelson looks, the toilet and the freeze frame plane, and call the film completely awesome.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,horror,janet agren,david warbeck,giuliano carnimeo,reviews

Ark of the Sungod (1983)

aka Temple of Hell

The gentleman burglar Rick Spear (David Warbeck) has come to Turkey to combine a pleasurable holiday with his girlfriend Carol (Susie Sudlow) with a little light burglarizing. Keeping Carol out of the loop of what he's doing for a living is surprisingly easy. The woman's a real airhead, but at least she will turn out to be a very practical airhead without much of a propensity to scream during the course of the movie, so the film already has one better on the middle part of the Indiana Jones trilogy (there is no fourth film).

Rick's burglary business is easy work for a professional, even with a random cultist trying to kill him while he is acquiring the tools of his trade from the shady Mohammed (Ricardo Palacios), but it also turns out to be a benign sort of trap laid by Rick's old buddy Lord Dean (John Steiner). Dean wants Rick to find and steal the scepter of king Gilgamesh for him. The artifact is securely tucked away in a lost temple somewhere in the mountains of what should be Iraq. An expedition in the 30s found it, but didn't manage to open the large, golden door leading into it. Obviously, an expert burglar will succeed where archeologists have failed.

Finding the last survivor of the old expedition (our dear old friend Luigi Pigozzi aka Alan Collins) to learn where exactly the temple is located will be the least of Rick's problems. He'll also have to cope with more cultists and the bumbling henchmen of a certain Prince Abdullah (Aytekin Akkaya, if you believe the IMDB the man who played Captain America in 3 Dev Adam) who is planning on using the scepter to...rule the world. Mwahahaha. I see kidnappings in Carol's future.

Ark of the Sungod (and might I mention the complete lack of an ark in the film?) shows director Antonio Margheriti in full cheap-skate Spielberg mode, although I would argue that while Indiana Jones might be the commercial reason for the film's existence, the serials the Lucas/Spielberg films were based on are the company in which the Italian film really belongs in spirit of quick and dirty fun and by virtue of its cheap but effective production values.

The archeological adventure part isn't as important for the film as one might think. Mostly it is a very (yes, pulpy and serial-like) succession of fistfights, stunts, model-driven car chases (in fact one of the best model-driven car chases in movie history), and gleefully absurd humor.

Some would call the plot and the plotting here dumb and juvenile, but I find the lightness of touch this film shares with Margheriti's other adventure movies much too knowing and endearing to be this humorless about it. There's also a friendly little bunch of stereotypes to offend the easily offended, but taking offense here would mean putting a weight on a film it never was meant to take.

What Ark of the Sungod has going for it is an infectious feeling of fun and enthusiasm that comes through in Warbeck's sarcastic swagger, Akkaya's insane ranting, the relish with which Margheriti presents the location shots made in Turkey and the shrugging disinterest for common sense that runs through much of the film.

Like many of the director's best films from this phase of his career, Ark of the Sungod possesses a slightly post-modern feel. It is a movie very conscious of being a movie and of being stitched together out of parts of other movies. Margheriti is of course very adept at being irresponsible and playful about it without the need of great gestures to demonstrate how clever he is.

Ark of the Sungod is a boy's own adventure with all the problems that entails, but it seems to know that these problems are mostly dangerous for and in those boy's own adventures that decide to take themselves much too seriously. The only thing Margheriti takes seriously is having some fun while making his film, which in his case more often than not produced a fun film.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,adventure,action,antonio margheriti,luciano pigozzi,john steiner,reviews,david warbeck

In short: The Last Hunter (1980)

Look here, future American presidents: Even Italian war exploitation movies are telling you that war is bad.

Antonio Margheriti and Dardano Sacchetti probably saw Apocalypse Now a few times before making The Last Hunter. The basic rhythm of both films has quite a few similarities and both films are not telling us that war (in this case the Vietnam war) is hell, but that war is madness.

Of course, the Italian film does this in a much cheaper way (I am sure I must have heard parts of the music one or two times before) as well as with much more dubious motives.

Captain Henry Morris (David Warbeck, displaying just the right amount of cynicism) is ordered to destroy a highly effective Northern Vietnamese propaganda radio station. On his way there he meets a lot of mad or half-mad people, hooks up with the war journalist Jane Foster (Tisa Farrow, looking terribly under the weather), enters an American outpost commanded by John Steiner, who amuses himself with playing recorded gunshots and explosions as his beloved music, shoots a lot of people, is tortured etc etc. Also, there are lots of explosions (many of which you can meet again in later Margheriti films. I can't blame the man - they are nice explosions.).

What makes the film surprisingly effective as a variation on its rather surrealist predecessor is Margheriti's assured direction. As I might have said about him before, the man knew how to use a meager budget to produce a rather expensive looking film.

I'm always fascinated by the way Margheriti can get away with the depiction of as much nastiness and depravity in his films as other Italian directors without looking like a cynical madman. The trick lies in the humanity of his gaze, I think. The camera may linger on many things a lot longer than one should be comfortable with, yet Margheriti often uses this to give the victims of violence at least a basic human dignity. In this sense, his films feel like a humanist counterpart to the nihilism of Ruggero Deodato or Umberto Lenzi.

His merry gang of constant collaborators helps a lot with humanizing the film, too. The script doesn't care for the kind of psychological depth that pleases the jury at Cannes, but still gives the actors enough to work with to create a certain amount of human depth. People like Warbeck, Farrow, Steiner and Pigozzi (aka Alan Collins) are able enough actors to make the best of what they get when in the hands of a director who cares at least somewhat about their performances.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,antonio margheriti,david warbeck,tisa farrow,john steiner,action,war