John Carter (2012)

John Carter, released by Disney in 2012, was intended to launch a franchise based on the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Never in the history of motion pictures has a studio so successfully sabotaged one of its own films. A stunning combination of incompetence, cowardice, lack of imagination and malice caused John Carter to be a massive money loser. It was also a spectacular example of a ludicrously inflated budget ensuring that even if the movie did well at the box office it would lose money. The marketing was catastrophically inept.

The first mistake was the title. It’s based on the first of the Barsoom novels, A Princess of Mars. That’s a cool title so Disney changed it to John Carter, the most unexciting title that could be imagined.

So is it really a turkey? The answer is no. It has a few problems but it’s actually pretty good.

It retains the novel’s framing story. Edgar Rice Burroughs appears as a character in the framing story. John Carter is a cavalry officer left jobless, homeless and impoverished by the Civil War. He’s also embittered by personal tragedy (an unnecessary element not present in the novel). Now Carter hopes to revive his fortunes by prospecting and he’s discovered gold.

And then he’s on Mars. Burroughs made no attempt at any plausible scientific explanation or this. The movie, despite adding some technobabble, doesn’t either. It doesn’t matter. He’s on Mars and he’s a prisoner of the six-limbed green-skinned heavily tusked Tharks.

He gets caught in the midst of an epic power struggle and the beautiful princess Dejah Thoris tries to persuade him to come to the aid of the people. And to save her from a forced marriage to the power-hungry ruthless Sab Than. Pulling the strings behind the scenes are the immortal Therns.

Carter has no interest in noble causes but Dejah Thoris is both gorgeous and persuasive. He can be convinced to save a woman, if she’s the right woman. 

There’s lots of CGI and while I’m not a fan of CGI some of it is pretty impressive and some of it has that subtle lack of solidity and weight that makes it look fake. But overall there are plenty of cool visuals.

Despite being a tad overlong it does keep the action happening and there’s an abundance of battle scenes and exploding air ships.


The big problem is the star, Taylor Kitsch. He just doesn’t have hero quality. He comes across more like a librarian who’s a vegan and drinks decaf coffee. He has zero charisma. He lacks the necessary physicality.

On the other hand Lynn Collins is a pretty good Dejah Thoris. She’s beautiful and she has the pride that a princess should have. I personally think they should have put her in much sexier costumes (she spends much of the novel naked) but the geniuses at Disney didn’t see it that way. There’s also just not enough erotic tension between the two leads. Mind you, it’s hard to imagine any woman being excited by the wimpy Taylor Kitsch.

One thing I do like is the lack of cynicism and nihilism. This is an old-fashioned tale of heroic adventure. It has a hero who is unequivocally the Good Guy and a heroine who is unequivocally a Heroine.

One other thing I do like is the absence of ideological lecturing. There is good and evil in this tale but it’s old-fashioned evil - greed and ambition. And it’s old-fashioned good - courage and loyalty and love. 

The main change from the novel is the addition of the Therns, presumably to add a touch of mysticism (and perhaps they were intended to play a major role in later movies in the franchise had the franchise eventuated). 

It has some flaws but on the whole John Carter is solid entertainment. Highly recommended. A movie that deserved a much better fate.

Disney’s Blu-Ray presentation cannot be faulted.

I’ve also reviewed the source novel, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars.

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1989)

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death is a goofy 1989 spoof of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The U.S. Government is concerned about a nefarious foreign plot to cut off the nations supply of avocados. This will lead to a guacamole crisis which will be the prelude to complete societal collapse. 

As everyone knows almost all of America’s avocados come from the savage unexplored jungles of southern California. 

Those jungles are the home of the much-feared Piranha Women who eat their men after mating with them. 

The Government sends a feminist ethnographer, Dr Kurtz (Adrienne Barbeau), to persuade the Piranha Women to move to a government reservation. Actually it’s a condo in Malibu.

But Dr Kurtz has vanished.

The U.S. Army sent a Special Forces team to rescue her but they were wiped out. The Army has decided that more drastic action is needed. They are going to send a Women’s Studies professor this time. They have selected Dr Margo Hunt (Shannon Tweed). She’s well qualified for the mission, being cute and blonde.

One of her students, Bunny (Karen Mistal), insists on going along. Bunny is a Valley Girl but she’s keen.

They will need a guide. Jim (Bill Maher) gets the job because he’s cheap. He’s also Margo’s ex-boyfriend, well sort of.

They set off downriver, braving the typical southern California hazards such as hippos.

They will discover that there’s something much more vital than avocados at stake.

In their tent at night Margo and Bunny get into some girl talk, confiding their hopes and dreams to each. Margo dreams of a world of equality and respect between the sexes. Bunny dreams of finding a man who will tie her up and spank her.

A common problem with low-budget movies (and this one is very low-budget) is pacing but that’s no problem here. There’s also the tendency to rely purely on goofy ideas but writer J.F. Lawton (who went on to write Pretty Woman) understands that you need actual gags as well and they have to be funny. And he wrote a genuinely very funny script.

I like Shannon Tweed and consider her to be underrated as an actress but the big revelation here is that she’s so good at comedy. She has a wonderfully sly deadpan comic delivery.

Bill Maher and Karen Mistal have totally different approaches to comedy but the three leads work together extremely well.

Adrienne Barbeau makes a good scary villainess - when ethnographers go bad they go really bad.

There’s satire here but it’s directed at just about everyone and everything. Men get mocked, and so do feminists. And Valley Girls. And the military. And academics. But it’s actually rather good-natured. For all his posturing Jim is a pretty nice guy. For all her feminist seriousness Margo is a nice lady. And maybe Bunny is a bimbo but she’s cute and sweet.

This is also a rom-com. When male and female characters snipe at each constantly we suspect that they’re crazy in love with each other.

And then the movie throws in a couple of unexpected twists at the end. It’s as if J.F. Lawton (who directed the picture as well as writing it) decided not to be predictable and to surprise us a little. I approve of that and I think the ending is perfect.

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death is very funny in a fairly clever way. It’s a much better movie than you expect it to be and it’s highly recommended.

Full Moon’s Blu-Ray presentation is excellent.

Alien from L.A. (1988)

Alien from L.A. is, in a vague sort of way, a riff on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It’s a 1988 Cannon Group release directed and co-written by Albert Pyun.

Wanda Saknussemm (Kathy Ireland) is a California gal who has just been dumped by her hot surfer dude boyfriend. He dumped her because even though she’s cute she’s such a wet blanket and a dorkette and her whiney voice gets on his nerves.

Now she’s off to Africa to look for her missing explorer/archaeologist father. All she knows is that apparently he fell down a bottomless pit and hasn’t been seen since.

Inevitably Wanda falls down the same pit.

She finds herself in a huge hitherto unknown underground city known as Atlantis. In fact it’s a vast underground world. 

She gets rescued by a gruff hardbitten miner, Gus Edway (William R. Moses).

Atlantis is a dystopian totalitarian hellworld. And now she’s being hunted down as an alien. Anyone from the surface world is an alien. Amusingly the authorities tell the citizens to be on the lookout for an alien girl from the surface world while at the same time assuming them that aliens do not exist and that the surface world does not exist.

There’s a difference of opinion about what to do with her when she’s caught but security chief General Rykov (Janie du Plessis) favours extreme measures.

Wanda gets into countless scrapes and has countless narrow escapes. And eventually finds out something extraordinary about the city.

I was expecting this to be a very low budget affair but clearly the budget was reasonably generous. It has the grungy post-apocalyptic wasteland look that one finds in so many movies of this era. This is the film’s first fault - it doesn’t have quite enough of a distinctive flavour.

Albert Pyun has said that he was trying to make a fairy tale movie aimed at a family audience. There’s nothing wrong with that except that as a result the villains are not sufficiently evil and scary to be really memorable and we don’t have enough of a sense that Wanda is in real danger.

The third problem is that Gus Edway is a very bland hero.

A fourth and bigger problem is that there’s no real romance subplot. There is obviously zero attraction between Wanda and Gus. An action/adventure movie works better when the hero and the heroine care enough about each other to take risks for each other, and when we, the viewers, are desperately hoping that they’ll end up together. Another character is introduced very late who might have potential as a love interest for Wanda but this subplot doesn’t go anywhere.

The final problem is that the extraordinary revelation about the city isn’t exploited. We expect it to lead to something but it doesn’t.

The power struggle within Atlantis could also have been developed a bit more.

For some people Kathy Ireland as Wanda is an issue, especially her high-pitched little girl voice. I don’t have a problem with her. Wanda is supposed to be whiney and to irritate people. That’s why her boyfriend dumped her and that’s how the whole adventure began. I think however that she comes across as fairly likeable and sympathetic.

Alien from L.A. has some major flaws but it’s not as bad as it reputation would suggest. If you don’t set you expectations too high it’s a reasonably enjoyable sci-fi adventure flick. Tentatively recommended.

Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-Ray presentation is excellent.

The Seventh Curse (1986)

Even by the standards of 1980s Hong Kong movies Golden Harvest’s The Seventh Curse (1986) is wild wild stuff.

It was inspired by the hugely popular novels of Ni Kuang. He wrote at least 300 wuxia and science fiction novels, being noted for working extraterrestrials into detective and mystery novels. His two most popular novel series were the Wisely series, about a wealthy adventurer named (obviously) Wisely, and the Dr Yuen series. The Seventh Curse is a Dr Yuen adventure but it’s an original story written for the film. And Wisely appears as a supporting character.

At a dinner party the famous novelist Ni Kuang (played by the famous novelist Ni Kuang) recounts the latest exploits of Dr Yuen.

The opening action scene is absolute mayhem. It’s a raid by the Hong Kong equivalent of a SWAT team. It’s a big operation - there must be a hundred cops involved. The police call on Dr Yuen for help. A doctor is needed to treat a hostage held in an office building. His job is to set off a flash bomb to distract the bad guys.

We soon learn that Dr Yuen is not just an everyday medical doctor. He’s a martial arts expert, a crack shot, a medical researcher and an adventurer.

This guy is a totally awesome all-round hero.

But he has a problem. It’s a deadly blood curse imposed on him in Thailand.

He was part of a scientific expedition into the jungle, an expedition that encountered a particularly hostile tribe. That’s where he met Bachu. She was bathing half-naked in a river. Both Dr Yuen and Bachu fell foul of an incredibly evil sorcerer. The sorcerer presides over human sacrifices. Dr Yuen escapes.

The blood curse is a delayed action time bomb. Nothing happens for a year, then it activates, and now it will kill him in seven days. His only chance is to return to Thailand to find a cure for himself, and for Bachu.

In that opening police siege sequence Dr Yuen first came across Feisty Girl Reporter Tsui Hung (Maggie Cheung). Feisty Girl Reporters can be irritating but Tsui Hung is cute, sexy and adorable. Now she insists on accompanying him to Thailand - she smells a big story here.

From this point on the mayhem is non-stop with one great action sequence after another. Martial arts fans will not be disappointed. There's a huge amount of gunplay as well, and explosions.

And lots of crazy over-the-top special effects and plenty of gore. There’s a very obvious influence from Alien with demonic babies popping out of people’s chests. The intention was clearly to make the special effects fun.

Chin Siu-ho is terrific as Dr Yuen. He doesn’t look like an action hero. He looks a bit geeky. But in reality he’s a kind of Chinese Indiana Jones. He’s also very likeable.

Maggie Cheung is delightful and amusing and Miss Tsui Hung participates gleefully in the mayhem.

The location shooting was done in Thailand.

There’s a very small amount of nudity and no sex. This is all about the crazy witchcraft stuff and the action. I believe it was one of the films later retrospectively given a Category III rating.

This is a good-natured adventure romp that doesn’t take itself at all seriously. It wants the audience to enjoy the ride.

Director Lam Ngai Kai does a great job here. He went on to helm the fabulous Erotic Ghost Story.

The Seventh Curse is insanely entertaining. It’s not just bonkers. It’s beyond bonkers. But it delivers everything it promises and then some. Not surprising it was a major commercial success.

This movie is very highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray offers the original Hong Kong cut and the shorter Export Cut plus plenty of extras.

Hawk the Slayer (1980)

Hawk the Slayer is a sword-and-sorcery movie but it’s definitely one of the more lightweight movies in that genre.

The setup is pretty standard. There are two brothers. One brother, Voltan (Jack Palance), is evil. The other, Hawk (John Terry), is good. We never find out why one brother is 30 years older than the other. Voltan kills their father. He wants his father’s magic sword so he can do evil deeds. The brothers also have a falling-out over a woman. Voltan has vowed to destroy his brother.

Voltan is holding an abbess to ransom. Hawk is determined to save her but he will need to get hold of a lot of gold. He steals it from a slaver.

He gets assistance from a good witch. She tells him that he will have to get a team together, which he does with her magical help. The team is the giant Gort (Bernard Bresslaw), the dwarf Baldin (Peter O’Farrell) and the elfin archer Crow (Ray Charleson). He already has Ranulf (W. Morgan Sheppard) who is in the service of the abbess’s sisterhood.

There’s lots of action and mayhem. At times Voltan gets the upper hand but then Hawk and his men turn the tables.

Voltan has to get regular magical treatment for a serious face wound which doesn’t serve any plot purpose but it allows Jack Palance to wear a cool sinister helmet that hides half his face.

All the right ingredients are there for a great sword-and-sorcery movie. There’s nothing original to the story but it’s perfectly serviceable.

So what went wrong?

The answer is, everything.

As a director Terry Marcel is completely incompetent. Everything manages to be rather dull when it should be exciting.

It’s visually uninteresting. The special effects look like a lame attempt to ape Star Wars. Or a disco laser light show.

The matte paintings look totally like matte paintings. That’s actually one of the things I do like in the movie - I like matte paintings that look like matte paintings. It’s something that actually works because it gives the film very much an artificial fantasy film look but it’s rather at variance with everything else in the movie which seems to be aiming for grittiness.

John Terry has zero charisma and his performance is totally lifeless.

Bernard Bresslaw was a gifted comic actor but he feels out of place here.

None of the cast members seem to know what’s expected of them.

The fight scenes mostly just don’t quite work.

Jack Palance may be the greatest bad actor in history and he at least provides some entertainment.

There’s a total absence of humour, whether intentional or unintentional. The movie takes itself rather seriously. Bernard Bresslaw could do comedy but plays it very straight. Even Roy Kinnear plays things very straight in his brief appearance. There’s no indication that Marcel was aiming for camp or a tongue-in-cheek approach, or perhaps he simply had no idea how to achieve such a feel.

It could be said in the movie’s defence that sword-and-sorcery was a brand new genre (John Boorman’s Excalibur came out out the following year and Conan the Barbarian followed in 1982) so that the template for the genre was not yet established. But the formula for making adventure movies had been known since the 1920s. And The Land That Time Forgot, from 1975, displayed a perfect knowledge of what was required. My suspicion is that Terry Marcel just had no idea how to approach the subject matter.

A movie like this can work if it’s silly fun but Hawk the Slayer is just not much fun. Not really worth bothering with.

The Shadow (1994)

The Shadow, released in 1994, was one of several 1990s attempts to kickstart superhero franchises. Other notable attempts were The Rocketeer, Dick Tracy and The Phantom. All these attempts failed which is a pity because they’re pretty good movies.

The Shadow began as a pulp magazine hero was was featured in several movies in the late 1930s.

The 1994 movie wisely adopts for a period setting although it looks more 1940s than 1930s.

The movie gives us a backstory. Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) is a very nasty American bandit operating somewhere in central Asia. He ends up as a prisoner in a monastery where he learns to deal with his inner demons. 

He returns to America to become a force for good as a masked crime-fighter.

He has one super-power. He can cloud men’s minds. This gives him virtual invisibility - others are hypnotised into not seeing him.

Now he’s up against Shiwan Khan (John Lone), a descendant of Genghis Khan who has some similar hypnotic powers. Shiwan aims at world conquest. He plans to get hold of an atomic bomb. Such things do not yet exist (we assume the setting is the United States just before the Second World War) but Shiwan knows of a couple of eccentric genius scientists who may be able to invent one.

Lamont Cranston has one possibly useful ally. Margo Lane (Penelope Ann Miller) is the daughter of one of the crazy scientists but she appears to have telepathic powers. Or at least she has the ability to make telepathic contact with Lamont Cranston.

I have a few reservations about this movie but they’re more matters of personal taste than actual criticisms.

Alec Baldwin is seriously lacking in charisma and charm. But given that it was decided to make Lamont Cranston a very dark tortured character constantly battling the darkness within him his casting works reasonably well. He does the tragic brooding ominous thing very well and overall his casting works.

I’m not sure that Penelope Ann Miller has the necessary star power. Margo Lane is more than just the hero’s love interest. She becomes his active ally. This movie needs a really strong female lead, especially with such a taciturn leading man. Compared to Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer, Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Phantom or even Madonna in Dick Tracy she’s a little bland. I can’t help thinking of several other major female stars of the period who might have injected bit more life into the character. Nicole Kidman perhaps. Or Sharon Stone (who had demonstrated in King Solomon’s Mines that she could be a delightful adventure heroine). On the other hand Penelope Ann Miller is pretty, she’s likeable, she looks very good in period costumes and hairstyles and there’s nothing actually wrong about her performance.

At times the visuals are just slightly too reminiscent of Tim Burton’s Batman, but I must admit that The Shadow does the 1940s urban gothic thing very effectively.

Viewers unaware of The Shadow’s long pop culture history were likely to dismiss this movie as a mere Batman rip-off. In fact The Shadow as a character pre-dates Batman by a decade.

The biggest problem with these 90s attempts to launch new franchises was that these movies were horrendously expensive. It was not enough for them to do well at the box office. To justify a franchise they needed to be gigantic hits, which they weren’t.

Australian-born Russell Mulcahy was a solid choice to direct. One of this movie’s great strengths is that it doesn’t suffer from the problems that afflict so many movies of recent decades - bloat and poor pacing. It keeps powering along and there’s always something happening.

The Shadow is heavy on the urban gothic noir vibe but with moments influenced by old Hollywood musicals and even (as Penelope Ann Miller quite correctly points out in her interview) some nice screwball comedy touches. The dynamics of the Lamont Cranston-Margo Lane relationship are structured in a very screwball comedy way.

It’s very special effects-heavy but they are done extremely well. There’s some CGI (CIG was around but still in its infancy) but Mulcahy preferred practical effects and that’s mostly what we get. It really is a great-looking movie.

The Shadow delivers dazzling visuals, thrills and adventure. That’s more than enough to keep me happy. Highly recommended.

Savage Beach (1989)

Savage Beach is the fourth of Andy Sidaris’s twelve Triple B (Bullets, Bombs, and Babes) movies. Like the previous two movies in the series it focuses on blonde bombshell DEA agents Donna (Dona Speir) and Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton).

It was shot mostly on location on Molokai.

Donna and Taryn operate an air cargo business as a cover. They have to fly urgently needed medical supplies to a remote island. They run into a storm and their Cessna is forced down. They’re lucky enough to make a crash landing on a tiny uninhabited possibly uncharted island. They were hundreds of miles off course so it could be quite a wait for a rescue plane.

They have the uneasy feeling that they are not alone on the island. Their suspicion is well-founded. And soon there are lots of people on the island, all of them almost certainly bad guys.

What our two heroines don’t know is that they have stumbled onto something very big and very secret. Something official, but now it’s been complicated by a criminal conspiracy. During the Second World the Japanese military hid a hoard of gold looted from the Philippines on a remote island (yes the same island where the girls’ plane crash-landed). The government of the Philippines wants the gold back. The US Government wants to help them to find the gold but there is at least one criminal gang after that gold as well.

And possibly more than one criminal gang.

Donna and Taryn have no idea what is going on but there are unpleasant men with guns running about the island, they’ve been captured and tied up more than once and shot at and they’re getting quite annoyed about it. One of the bad guys even calls Donna a bimbo. She can handle being tied up and having guns pointed at her but when you call her a bimbo you have crossed a line you should never cross.

This is a pretty good script by Sidaris. It sets up endless opportunities for mayhem and double-crosses. On the island we have our two blonde heroines, there are two gangs of murderous cut-throat bad guys and then there’s the strange old guy who might be a good guy or a bad guy. And there’s the beautiful dark-haired bad girl. We’re not sure which of the gangs she belongs to.

Some of the bad guys might be good guys and some of the guys who claim to be good guys might be bad guys.

Luckily the girls are well-armed. They have an automatic rifle and several pistols and Taryn has a crossbow that fires explosive crossbow bolts. Which of course means we’re going to get some explosions. But then this is an Andy Sidaris movie so you knew there were going to be explosions.

There is also, naturally, some martial arts action because why would you not add some of that to the mix?

It goes without saying that as well as lots of action this movie includes lots and lots of bare breasts (and some brief frontal nudity). How could you possibly add a nude scene to a scene with two girls in the cockpit of a Cessna in flight? Andy Sidaris manages it. He likes those kinds of challenges.

It doesn’t hurt that all of the women are extraordinarily attractive.

What really makes these Andy Sidaris movies so great is that Andy and his wife Arleen (who acted as producer) knew all the tricks of low-budget filmmaking. They knew how to get high production values and a very polished professional look without spending big bucks. They had their operation running like a well-oiled machine. Andy’s Triple B movies look a whole lot more expensive than they were.

For a low-budget movie Savage Beach really is beautifully shot.

They were also pretty good at casting. No-one would suggest that Dona Speir and Hope Marie Carlton were great actresses but they gave performances that were just perfect for this type of movie. And that applies to most of the cast members. They’re not angling for Oscar nominations but they’re entertaining.

All of the Triple B movies are available in a terrific DVD boxed set from Mill Creek, with excellent transfers. Most have now been released by Mill Creek on Blu-Ray. It’s the Blu-Ray release that is being reviewed here. Both the DVD and Blu-Ray releases include an audio commentary by Andy and Arleen Sidaris and they provide an astonishing amount of fascinating information on the shooting of the movie.

Savage Beach is absolutely top-notch entertainment. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed lots of Andy Sidaris’s earlier movies - Seven (1979), Malibu Express (1985), Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987) and Picasso Trigger (1988). They’re all fun with Hard Ticket to Hawaii being the best.

Killer Fish (1979)

Antonio Margheriti’s 1979 opus Killer Fish has a 4.2 rating on IMDb and is contemptuously dismissed by people who take movies seriously so I figured I’d almost certainly love this movie. And I was right.

And it has a cast guaranteed to bring joy to the hearts of fans of 70s cult movies and TV.

It should be pointed out that the title is just a little bit misleading. There are piranhas, lots of them, and they do the stuff you expect piranhas to do, but they’re not the main focus. This is not a Jaws rip-off. It bears not the slightest resemblance to Jaws (or to the movie Piranha). This is a totally different type of movie. This is a frenetic action movie and it’s a heist movie.

We start with a fine heist sequence. Margheriti loved miniatures effects and he knew how to make them work. He was a guy who was just not going to include miniatures work unless it was done right. Yes, you can tell that he’s using miniatures, just as you can tell when directors of a later era use CGI. But somehow good miniatures work just looks better than CGI. It doesn’t have that cartoonish CGI look. This particular sequence involves lots of explosions. Margheriti liked to blow stuff up. I personally think that this is a very positive thing.

At first we don’t know it’s a heist. We get a brief scene of a smoother operator doing some big-time gambling at a casino, then we cut to a man and a woman breaking into some kind of industrial plant (possibly a power plant) deep in the Amazon rainforest. These people could be secret agents or thieves.

We soon find out that they’re thieves. The objective is not sabotage (they blow up a whole pile of stuff merely as a diversion). Their objective is the safe in the main office. It would appear that either the owners of the plant have been doing some shady financial stuff or possibly they just don’t trust the government but they keep their financial reserves in that safe. In the form of precious stones. Emeralds.

The smooth operator is Paul Diller (James Franciscus) and he’s the mastermind. He has a hobby. Tropical fish. Carnivorous tropical fish. He has a tank full of piranhas. At first it just seems like an odd hobby. The duo who made the break-in are Paul’s girlfriend Kate (Karen Black) and Lasky (Lee Majors). We get the feeling that there could be a bit of a romantic triangle here. This suggests the possibility of a double-cross. In fact there will be lots of double-crosses. The first attempt is made by the two guys who are the gang’s hired muscle. The emeralds are hidden in a lake. These two guys think that grabbing the emeralds for themselves will be easy. Big mistake.

The heist story intersects with a separate plot strand involving a fashion photo shoot in the rainforest. The organiser is the glamorous Ann Hoyt (Marisa Berenson). The star model is Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway). The thieves are lying low in a luxury hotel and they get to meet the fashion photo people and it’s instantly obvious that Gabrielle and Lasky are hot for each other. That will lead to big trouble.

The plot then gets complicated when the hurricane strikes. And what about those piranhas? Don’t worry, they get plenty to do (and plenty to eat).

So this is a hurricane disaster movie, a killer fish movie and a heist movie. Bringing that all together might seem like a challenge but Margheriti pulls it off with style.

The action scenes are excellent. I’ve already mentioned the excellent miniatures work. We do see the piranhas but mostly we see the results of their activities. And we get scenes of spectacular destruction during the hurricane.

James Franciscus is very good - smooth but with a hint of obsessiveness bordering on madness. Franciscus handles this with admirable subtlety.

Lee Majors isn’t called on to do any fancy acting. All he has to do is project a brooding intensity and a sense of being a dangerous bad boy. He does this effortlessly.

And then there are the women. Three very glamorous women played by three glamorous actresses. Marisa Berenson’s job is to be classy and stylish, which she handles with no problems. Karen Black as Kate shares top billing with Lee Majors and she’s in terrific form. Kate is sexy and dangerous, possibly treacherous and she’s a passionate woman. She’s a bad girl but we like her a lot. She has spirit.

Margaux Hemingway was not a great actress but she’s playing a fashion model and Miss Hemingway was a fashion model. Gabrielle is beautiful, blonde and dumb but maybe not so dumb. A girl doesn’t survive long in the cut-throat world of the super-model without learning a few survival skills. Maybe Gabrielle shouldn’t be under-estimated. This was a role that was just within Margaux Hemingway’s limited acting range but she’s adequate and she looks super-glamorous.

There’s no nudity or sex (although Margaux Hemingway does share a shower with Lee Majors). Considering the presence of thousands of piranhas the gore is very very restrained. The intention was obviously to avoid a US R rating at all costs.

The pacing is excellent (Margheriti always knew how to pace a movie). The plot has the necessary nasty little twists. You get a fine heist story plus a large-scale disaster plus piranhas. This is what cinema is all about! Killer Fish is hugely entertaining. Highly recommended.

I have the Spanish Blu-Ray and it looks great. It includes the English-Language version with removable Spanish subtitles.

The Ark of the Sun God (1984)

The Ark of the Sun God is a 1984 Italian-Spanish-Turkish Indiana Jones rip-off but it’s directed by Antonio Margheriti so you expect that it will be a very good very entertaining Indiana Jones rip-off. And it is.

This is very much a feelgood movie. It’s family entertainment in the best sense of the term. There’s no gore, no graphic violence, no nudity and no sex. But there is an abundance of fun and style.


It begins with a burglary but the burglar, Rick Spear (David Warbeck), has been set up. It was a test. It was a way for his old buddy, English aristocrat Lord Dean (John Steiner) to manipulate Rick into agreeing to carry out a much more challenging burglary. He has to open a door. It is the door to the tomb of Gilgamesh. The objective is to steal a jewelled sceptre, thousands of years old and of immense mystical and symbolic importance. It is reputed to have magical powers. It is potentially the key to vast political power. Lord Dean wants the staff, but Lord Dean is not the bad guy. Or at least he claims to be the good guy.

There are others who want that sceptre. They are the bad guys, although perhaps from their point of view they’re the good guys.

Both groups want to have a lever that will force Rick to join their side. The obvious lever is his cute American girlfriend Carol (Susie Sudlow). Rick is crazy about Carol. If she were to be kidnapped Rick would agree to anything.

Lord Dean is a kind of freelancer who seems to be working on behalf of the British and American governments with the aim of keeping the sceptre out of the hands of those who might use it in a way that would damage British and American interests. This is a story that could easily have been developed in a more cynical direction, with perhaps a suggestion that the good guys are no more moral than the bad guys, but Margheriti clearly did not want to go down that path.

On the other hand Lord Dean does kidnap Carol, ostensibly so that the bad guys cannot kidnap her again. It’s also notable that Carol is not actually mistreated by either the good guys or the bad guys.

Rick has an ally, of sorts, in Mohammed (Ricardo Palacios). He’s a dealer in curios and artifacts and anything else that might prove profitable. He’s a nice guy but he’s unscrupulous where business is concerned. He’s the kind of guy who might well be tempted to double-cross his own mother.

He acquires another ally, a grizzled old adventurer named Beetle (Luciano Pigozzi). Beetle had been part of the expedition led by a German archaeologist who discovered the tomb of Gilgamesh decades earlier but was unable to open it. Beetle is a nice old guy but again we can’t be certain he will prove to be trustworthy. The viewer is left with just enough uncertainty about the motivations of key characters like Lord Dean, Mohammed and Beetle to keep things interesting.

There are some truly spectacular action sequences, naturally all done using the techniques of the pre-CGI era, and they look a whole lot better than most modern action scenes done with CGI. Margheriti had a real flair for action scenes and he had a very good crew.

There’s superb use of the Turkish locations especially the remote location of the tomb.

Margheriti clearly had a reasonable budget to work with but like most Italian genre directors of that era he could always make a movie look more expensive than it was. This is visually a very impressive movie.

David Warbeck makes a fine action hero. He’s a decent guy but he is a professional burglar so he’s not exactly honest and he has a definite tough edge. Warbeck has real charisma. Happily the English dub features Warbeck’s own voice. It also features John Steiner’s own voice and he’s great fun as Lord Dean, a guy who like Rick is a good guy with flexible ethics.

The whole cast is good.

The Ark of the Sun God is highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks very nice and includes a decent audio commentary.

Dinosaur Island (1994)

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