ROBOWAR (Italy - 1988) Directed by Vincent Dawn (Bruno Mattei). Written by Rossella Drudi. Cast: Reb Brown, Catherine Hickland, Alex McBride (Massimo Vanni), Romano Puppo, Clyde Anderson (Claudio Fragasso), Max Laurel, Jim Gaines, John P. Dulaney, Mel Davidson. (Unrated, 91 mins) A year after unveiling the never-released-in-the-US SHOCKING DARK, a beyond blatant 1989 Italian ALIENS ripoff, Severin Films has taken another dive into the cinematic cesspool of Flora Film and producer Franco Gaudenzi with the Blu-ray releases (because physical media is dead) of 1988's ROBOWAR and 1990's NIGHT KILLER. Like SHOCKING DARK (shamelessly released in Italy as TERMINATOR 2), neither of these two Italian ripoffs ever made it into US theaters or video stores back in the day, though they've been available in inferior quality versions on the bootleg and torrent circuit for years. Reuniting the star (Reb Brown) and director (Bruno Mattei) of 1987's immortal RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II ripoff STRIKE COMMANDO, ROBOWAR doesn't even try to hide the fact that it's stealing entire set-ups, scenes, and plot points from the previous year's Schwarzenegger smash PREDATOR. BrownIS Major Murphy Black, the tough-as-nails leader of a mercenary unit called BAM ("It stands for Big Ass Motherfuckers"). He and his men have been commissioned by government stooge Mascher (Mel Davidson) for a mission to help take out some rebels who have gained control of island that's been wiped out by a cholera outbreak. The real mission, known only to Mascher: to find and eliminate Omega 1, a State Department-funded robot killing machine secretly "created by a team of bionic experts" and sent in to kill the rebels but now out of control and on a rampage. Black and his men--Guarini, aka "Diddy Bopper" (Massimo Vanni), Corey (Romano Puppo), Quang (Max Laurel), Peel, aka "Blood" (Jim Gaines), and pipe-smoking medic Papa Doc (John P. Dulaney), plus UN aid worker Virginia (Catherine Hickland), the sole survivor of a hospital massacre by the rebels--are stalked and offed one-by-one in PREDATOR fashion by the helmeted Omega 1, played by both Puppo and future TROLL 2 director and frequent Mattei writing partner Claudio Fragasso, who also stepped in to direct a few scenes when Mattei briefly fell ill on location in the Philippines.
Shot in the same sweltering Filipino jungle locations as most Gaudenzi productions of this period (STRIKE COMMANDO, ZOMBI 3), ROBOWAR wastes a lot of time on tedious stretches where everyone's just walking around and asking "Did you see that?" Brown gets to do his signature Reb Brown yells, but up to a point, it's rather restrained and too hesitant to commit to the all-out insanity of STRIKE COMMANDO or SHOCKING DARK. That is, until the last 15 minutes, when Mattei and screenwriter Rossella Drudi (the wife of Fragasso, who also made some uncredited contributions to the script) abruptly switch gears and turn it into an out-of-nowhere ROBOCOP ripoff with a revelation about the Omega 1. Only then does ROBOWAR reach the heights of madness usually associated with Mattei and Fragasso, capped off by gaffe-filled closing credits that list Brown playing "Marphy Black" and Hickland playing "Virgin," and misidentify Gaines and Vanni. The hapless Mattei can't even properly copy the PREDATOR heat vision shots thanks to Gaudenzi's cheap-ass budget, with the Omega 1 vision just a blurry pixellation, which begs the question "A high-tech, state-of-the-art US government funded robot killing machine and the best vision they can give it looks just like the scrambled porn you tried to watch when you were 12?" Until the last 15 minutes, ROBOWAR isn't as much fun as it should be, but more interesting for Eurotrash fans is the wealth of extras offered by Severin on the Blu-ray, including interviews with Fragasso, Drudi (two interviews with her), Hickland, Dulaney, Gaines, and Vanni, with at least two of those participants going into specifics about why everyone hated co-star Davidson, a Danish actor who lived and worked on B-movies in the Philippines. Both Dulaney and Gaines describe Davidson as a known pedophile, with Gaines mentioning him being caught in the act with a 12-year-old boy at one point during production, and members of the cast restraining Brown from beating the shit out of him (perhaps the Davidson issue is why Brown, who contributed to the YOR Blu-ray and is a convention regular, is MIA in these extras?)
ROBOWAR in no way inspired by PREDATOR
That's all interesting stuff, but the big treasure among the extras is a 15-minute compilation of on-set home movie footage, blurry but with clear audio, taken by Hickland during some downtime on the shoot. An American soap star married to David Hasselhoff at the time and serving her required stint in the Italian exploitation industry (she was also in WITCHERY with Hasselhoff, and Stelvio Massi's never officially released TAXI KILLER), Hickland managed to get some absolutely priceless footage of the cast and crew goofing off ("There he is, the maestro Bruno," as Mattei waves to the camera from his director's chair, or Brown yelling "Eat your heart out, David!" when she gathers her co-stars--"my guys"--for an impromptu cast introduction that, judging from Davidson being included in the fun, must've been before everyone found out about his off-set activities), specific dates of production (Brown is heard saying "Today is May 1, 1988"), and even a brief interaction ("This guy right here...") with Mario Bava and Antonio Margheriti regular Luciano Pigozzi, aka "Alan Collins," who's in the cast credits but nowhere to be found in the released film. Pigozzi is credited but unseen in several Filipino-shot Italian productions of this period (including ZOMBI 3), with IMDb adding a parenthetical "(Scenes deleted)" with each entry. It's unknown why Pigozzi was supposedly cut from so many films, or if he was credited for some kind of quota reason, but Hickland's footage proves he indeed was there on the set. Raise your hand if you ever thought you'd see behind-the-scenes footage from a Filipino-shot Reb Brown/Bruno Mattei joint.
NIGHT KILLER (Italy - 1990) Written and directed by Clyde Anderson (Claudio Fragasso). Cast: Peter Hooten, Tara Buckman, Richard Foster, Mel Davis, Lee Lively, Tova Sardot, Gaby Ford. (Unrated, 93 mins) Shot in Virginia Beach and Norfolk, VA in December 1989, the obscure NIGHT KILLER was a film that Claudio Fragasso envisioned as a serious auteur statement, a psychological thriller that was also a riff on Ingmar Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. Italian schlock producer Franco Gaudenzi didn't like what he saw with Fragasso's initial cut, and while the director was off in Louisiana working on 1990's BEYOND DARKNESS for Joe D'Amato's Filmirage, Gaudenzi had Bruno Mattei shoot an interminable opening sequence and additional murder scenes in Italy, plus several insert shots that significantly cranked up the gore and splatter that was virtually non-existent in Fragasso's cut. This essentially brought an end to Fragasso and Mattei's working relationship, and to top it off, Gaudenzi, taking a page from the ZOMBI 2 and ALIEN 2: ON EARTH playbook, sold the film as TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 3 for its Italian release (the real LEATHERFACE: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III, released in the US in January 1990, wouldn't hit Europe for another year). The retitling is in complete disregard for the film's Virginia Beach setting and the fact that the killer is clearly inspired by A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, wearing some rubbery hands with talon-like fingernails and what looks like a knockoff Freddy Krueger mask that Fragasso picked up at a Norfolk Rite-Aid.
After the Mattei-shot opening where an irate choreographer (Gaby Ford) loses her shit with her dancers and storms off only to be disemboweled and tossed off a balcony by the killer, the story shifts to Melanie Beck (Tara Buckman), who's still reeling from the collapse of her marriage to an alcoholic, disgraced cop. She sends her young daughter Clarissa (Tova Sardot) to spend the day with family friends Sherman (Richard Foster) and his wife Annie (an uncredited actress who's terrible) and is soon terrorized by an obscene phone caller who turns out to be calling from inside the house (there's no stated reason for Melanie to have two phone lines, much less ones that dial to phones that are five feet apart). Unable to escape, she faces certain death until Fragasso makes a time jump to Melanie in the hospital, stricken with amnesia and unable to even recognize her own daughter. It seems that offscreen, Sherman returned to the Beck home in the middle of the killer's attack and suffered a facial laceration in the process of saving Melanie when the killer fled the scene. Still suffering from amnesia, Melanie is released from the hospital (?!) and is soon harassed by a creep in a Jeep named Axel (Peter Hooten), who ends up saving her from a suicide attempt not out of the kindness of his heart, but because he wants to kill her his way.
As evidenced by TROLL 2, Fragasso has a knack for setting up an Italian production in an American location and finding local actors who seem like pod people for whom English is, at best, a second language. While TROLL 2 had a cast of amateurs who've gone on to have a good sense of humor about the experience, NIGHT KILLER is anchored by a pair of professional American actors with a long list of credits, yet they still look like they've never been in front of a camera before. Buckman had a TV career going back to the late '70s, and co-starred with Claude Akins on THE MISADVENTURES OF SHERIFF LOBO but is perhaps best known for teaming with Adrienne Barbeau as the cleavage-baring Lamborghini duo in 1981's THE CANNONBALL RUN. By the late '80s, Buckman's career was tanking and she was starring in softcore Italian erotica for Joe D'Amato, like 1989's OBJECT OF DESIRE and 1990's HIGH FINANCE WOMAN. Hooten co-starred in 1977's ORCA and had the title role in the 1978 Marvel TV-movie DR. STRANGE, a pilot for a proposed CBS series that didn't get picked up. His career never really took off stateside but he found quite a bit of work in Italy, like Enzo G. Castellari's THE INGLOURIOUS BASTARDS (1978), Duccio Tessari's THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT (1978) and Joe D'Amato and George Eastman's post-nuke 2020: TEXAS GLADIATORS (1982). He acted sporadically from the mid '80s on and would walk away from the industry after NIGHT KILLER to devote himself to caring for his longtime partner, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill, who would succumb to AIDS in 1995. Hooten virtually disappeared from public life, relocating to his native Florida, though he did emerge from retirement in 2013 for a pair of regionally-produced, no-budget horror movies, HOUSE OF BLOOD and SOULEATER. The latter film was directed by Michael Lang, who conducted a career-spanning interview with Hooten around that time and posted it on YouTube. Fragasso and his wife and uncredited co-writer Rossella Drudi are interviewed in the Blu-ray bonus features, both reiterating how displeased they were with the additional Mattei footage, plus Fragasso dishing on Hooten and Buckman's mutual dislike of one another, with Buckman allegedly complaining throughout the shoot about the openly gay Hooten's sexual orientation making him an unconvincing kisser and unsuitable to play a "macho" character.
SHOCKING DARK aka TERMINATOR 2 (Italy - 1989) Directed by Vincent Dawn (Bruno Mattei). Written by Clayde Anderson (Claudio Fragasso). Cast: Cristofer Ahrens, Haven Tyler, Geretta Giancarlo Field (Geretta Geretta), Tony Lombardo (Fausto Lombardi), Mark Steinborn, Dominica Coulson, Clive Ricke, Paul Norman Allen, Cortland Reilly, Richard Ross, Bruce McFarland, Al McFarland. (Unrated, 90 mins)
For fans of Eurocult cinema, Italian ripoffs are among the most essential and endearing offerings. The flood of imitations in the wake of huge hits like THE GODFATHER, THE EXORCIST, STAR WARS, DAWN OF THE DEAD, ALIEN, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, THE ROAD WARRIOR, and RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II only gained momentum in the 1980s when video stores needed product and Italy was offering a seemingly endless supply. Perhaps no other genre-hopping journeyman epitomized the concept of the shameless Italian ripoff more than Bruno Mattei, or, as he's known under his most frequently-employed pseudonym, "Vincent Dawn." Born in 1931, Mattei began his career as an editor in the late 1950s, usually on undistinguished and instantly obscure post-HERCULES peplum, and later, third-tier spaghetti westerns and 007 knockoffs. He's the credited editor on Jess Franco's COUNT DRACULA (1970) and would later work for Joe D'Amato on 1976's BLACK COBRA. By the late '70s, Mattei shifted into directing, with a couple of 1977 Nazisploitation outings with SS GIRLS and WOMEN'S CAMP 119, followed by some dalliances with nunsploitation (THE TRUE STORY OF THE NUN OF MONZA, THE OTHER HELL), zombies (HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD aka NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES), post-nuke (RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR), women-in-prison (CAGED WOMEN, WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE), and even a Lou Ferrigno vehicle for Cannon (THE SEVEN MAGNIFICENT GLADIATORS). Mattei had a collaborative partnership with writer and future TROLL 2 auteur Claudio Fragasso, and the pair would frequently work as a team behind the camera, sometimes sharing credit with a pseudonym like "Stefan Oblowsky" on the nunsploitation films. In 1987, Mattei directed and Fragasso scripted the RAMBO ripoff STRIKE COMMANDO, their first effort for Italian producer Franco Gaudenzi. Gaudenzi's career in movies began with Mattei as part of the Joe D'Amato stock company, working as a set decorator, art director, and eventually assistant director on BLACK COBRA and the 1979 cannibal/necrophilia classic BEYOND THE DARKNESS. Mattei and Gaudenzi went way back, and when Gaudenzi formed his company Flora Film and became a producer based primarily in the Philippines, he had plenty of work for Mattei and Fragasso.
In his films for Gaudenzi, most of which were shot in and around Manila, Mattei really found his true calling as Italy's premier ripoff artist. He wasn't exactly new to the notion of swiping other people's ideas--HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD stole huge chunks of Goblin's DAWN OF THE DEAD score--but STRIKE COMMANDO really set the template for what the Three Stooges in the Gaudenzi/Mattei/Fragasso team would accomplish (with occasional uncredited script contributions from Fragasso's wife Rossella Drudi). STRIKE COMMANDO completely restages the finale of RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II, while 1987's DOUBLE TARGET was a somewhat less obvious take on the same material. Gaudenzi kept Mattei occupied during a busy 1988: STRIKE COMMANDO 2 is a Namsploitation outing that's also an unexpected riff on ROMANCING THE STONE, with Mattei and Gaudenzi somehow corralling a seriously slumming Richard Harris (who would later claim to be retired at the time the film was made) for a supporting role; ROBOWAR is an almost scene-for-scene copy of PREDATOR; and so enamored of the Namsploitation craze were Gaudenzi, Mattei, and Fragasso that they even cranked out COP GAME, a quickie imitation of the Saigon-set Willem Dafoe/Gregory Hines non-hit OFF LIMITS. As if Mattei's 1988 schedule wasn't already packed enough in the sweltering Filipino heat (everyone in these movies is profusely sweating at all times), he was even called in from the nearby set of STRIKE COMMANDO 2 by a desperate Gaudenzi to take over for a surly and ailing Lucio Fulci, who had just walked off of ZOMBI 3 with only 50 minutes of usable footage in the can. Mattei and Fragasso finished the film, which feels more Mattei than Fulci, even though the latter retains sole credit. But it's 1989's SHOCKING DARK that is perhaps the most jaw-droppingly audacious of Mattei's ripoffs from his furiously productive Gaudenzi era.
Set not in Gaudenzi's usual Manila stomping grounds but in a toxic Venice "after 2000," SHOCKING DARK has an elite Marine unit called "Megaforce" venturing beneath the city's canals to investigate the disappearance of another group of soldiers offed by mutant creatures. It doesn't take long to recognize that this is a blatant ALIENS ripoff. Not only are entire scenes completely recreated and played out verbatim (including one where a meter shows the creatures closing in on them and somebody yells "That's impossible, they'd already be here!" and another where two people are seen on a monitor silently waving for help but the mission's saboteur stealthily turns it off) but the characters themselves are exact replicas. There's the team of military badasses led by the hysterically raging Koster (Geretta Geretta, best known as the doomed Rosemary from DEMONS and credited here as "Geretta Giancarlo Field"), who's a composite of ALIENS' Vasquez and Apone; Sarah (Haven Tyler), a scientist and the Ripley-like outsider sent along as a consultant; young orphan and Newt stand-in Samantha (Dominica Coulson); and special ops badass Samuel Fuller (Cristofer Ahrens), an operative from "The Tubular Corporation," which sounds about as believable as Vandelay Industries, who eventually functions as SHOCKING DARK's Burke but in a completely different way. You see--and SPOILERS follow--SHOCKING DARK isn't content to just rip off one classic James Cameron film. It's also a knockoff of THE TERMINATOR, a mid-film twist hinted at by naming Tyler's character "Sarah." The mutant creatures eventually take a backseat once "Samuel Fuller" is exposed as a cyborg hellbent on sabotaging the mission. Though the film was made as SHOCKING DARK, it was eventually retitled by Gaudenzi and sold as...wait for it..TERMINATOR 2 (!), flashing back to the practice of Italian ripoffs being passed off as sequels to blockbuster American movies.
The real TERMINATOR 2 was still a couple of years away, but Gaudenzi's rechristening of SHOCKING DARK certainly did it no favors in finding US distribution, where it would've likely gone straight-to-court instead of straight-to-video. Long available on the bootleg circuit, SHOCKING DARK has finally received an official US release nearly 30 years after it was made, thanks to Severin's new Blu-ray, along with two other Gaudenzi productions, ZOMBI 3 and 1989's AFTER DEATH, directed by Fragasso and now commonly known as ZOMBIE 4: AFTER DEATH. SHOCKING DARK comes barrelling out of the gate and seems poised to become a new MIAMI CONNECTION or NIGHTMARE WEEKEND-level bad movie discovery of WTF? proportions. The ridiculous dialogue works beautifully in conjunction with the cast, comprised mostly of one-and-done American non-actors who were never seen or heard from again. Portland, OR-born model Geretta Geretta is probably the most experienced cast member (now a convention regular, she spent a significant amount of time in Italy in the '80s and also acted in Mattei's RATS under the name "Janna Ryann"), but she's killed off 35 minutes in. Fausto Lombardi appeared in several Italian B-movies from the early '80s on (RATS, HANNA D: THE GIRL FROM VONDEL PARK, the TOP GUN ripoff BLUE TORNADO). And Ahrens had some small parts in Italian genre fare but seems to have left the industry after 1999.
But as for the bulk of the remaining cast members--Tyler, Coulson, Cortland Reilly as the rad surfer-dude soldier Caine, and Bruce McFarland as the colonel at the command center--they all seem to be American college students who may have been in an exchange program or were just partying in Italy when they answered a casting call to be in a low-budget horror movie (even Coulson, who's supposed to a child but is probably in her late teens and is almost as tall as Tyler). Their inexperience as actors is only highlighted by the fact that this is one of the rare instances in Italian exploitation where the filmmakers are using live sound and not dubbing everyone over. None of the usual suspects in the dubbing world are present here. Nope, these deer-in-the-headlights newbies are bellowing their lines in an overwrought fashion and standing around looking confused (Tyler never seems comfortable and looks directly into the camera twice in one scene), with Mattei doing little to hide their obvious inexperience. Most of Mattei's films for Gaudenzi had some established name actors to provide even the slightest modicum of credibility--Reb Brown and Christopher Connelly in STRIKE COMMANDO, Brown in ROBOWAR, Richard Harris (Richard Harris?!?!) in STRIKE COMMANDO 2, Miles O'Keeffe, Donald Pleasence and Bo Svenson in DOUBLE TARGET--but there's no such voice of experience for the neophyte actors to look to here, only the performances of Sigourney Weaver and everyone else on a VHS copy of ALIENS that they probably had to share.
Eventually, SHOCKING DARK settles into a bunch of repetitive scenes of people walking down long corridors in the maintenance area under Rome's Termini Station, standing in for the Venice underground, with the possibility of playing a great drinking game for every time Coulson's character shouts "Sarah!" It's got some dull stretches, but the sheer chutzballs of its straight-up plagiarism of early James Cameron (what, no flying piranha?), and its final ridiculous twist in the closing minutes, is at times truly astonishing. It's also the kind of film that's so sloppy that it misspells Fragasso's usual "Clyde Anderson" pseudonym as "Clayde Anderson." Before long, stealing plots wouldn't be enough for Mattei. By 1995's belated JAWS ripoff CRUEL JAWS, he was swiping footage wholesale from JAWS, JAWS 2, and the slightly less-belated 1982 ripoff GREAT WHITE. This blew open new doors of duplicity for the veteran director. By the time of his final films--zero-budget, shot-on-video drek like 2004's THE TOMB and 2007's ZOMBIES: THE BEGINNING--Mattei was pilfering unlicensed footage from the likes of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, ARMY OF DARKNESS, the 1999 version of THE MUMMY, and CRIMSON TIDE. Mattei died in 2007 at the age of 75, but the recent Blu-ray releases of SHOCKING DARK and WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE are doing their part to keep his dubious legend alive. Now all we need is a deluxe Blu-ray edition of STRIKE COMMANDO.
