DEATH DIMENSION aka FREEZE BOMB aka THE KILL FACTOR (US/Italy - 1978) Directed by Al Adamson. Written by Harry Hope. Cast: Jim Kelly, George Lazenby, Harold "Odd Job" Sakata, Terry Moore, Bob Minor, Patch McKenzie, Aldo Ray, Myron Bruce Lee, April Sommers, Linda Lawrence, T.E. Foreman, Frank Scarpitto, Madame Sally Conforte. (R, 88 mins) With the fateful inevitability of a foretold prophecy of doom, a collaboration between Al Adamson and Dick Randall simply had to happen at some point, and we got just that with 1978's DEATH DIMENSION. It did reteam Adamson with producer Harry Hope (THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE), who bankrolled his teen sex comedy SUNSET COVE the same year, but DEATH DIMENSION's co-producer was the infamous Randall, best known for bad-movie classics like 1973's FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS (featuring one "Boris Lugosi" as "Ook, the Neanderthal Man"), 1980's CHALLENGE OF THE TIGER, 1983's PIECES, and 1984's other killer Santa movie DON'T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS. Randall's company, Spectacular Film Productions, was quite busy throughout the '70s and '80s, setting up shop at various times in places like Italy, Hong Kong, Spain, and the UK and moving around like a shell company perpetually trying to stay one step ahead of the posse. At the time of DEATH DIMENSION, Spectacular and Randall were based in Italy, though he didn't bring along any Italians or even any of his usual actors (how are Brad Harris and Edmund Purdom not in this?). Other than some Italian financing, DEATH DIMENSION is a standard-issue Adamson exploitationer shot in his frequent stomping grounds of Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and Reno. It even includes a visit to the Mustang Ranch, along with a cameo by its madame, Sally Conforte, probably throwing in a few bucks toward the budget (or perhaps supplying other services) in exchange for promotional consideration along the lines of Colonel Sanders popping up in a KFC in HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS.
1980 re-release poster, with title font
apparently doodled by a bored
high-schooler during study hall
Included on Severin's sprawling new 14-disc, 32-movie Adamson box set (because physical media is dead), DEATH DIMENSION stars Jim Kelly, just five years removed from his breakout turn alongside Bruce Lee and John Saxon in 1973's classic ENTER THE DRAGON. Kelly was an unknown at the time, but he had a loose, likable screen presence ("Bullshit, Mr. Han Man!") and could kick ass onscreen, so he became the first black martial-arts star when Warner Bros. immediately rewarded him with his own movie, reuniting him with ENTER THE DRAGON director Robert Clouse for 1974's BLACK BELT JONES. Later the same year, they teamed him with Jim Brown and Fred Williamson on the insane THREE THE HARD WAY. After supporting roles in Clouse's Joe Don Baker actioner GOLDEN NEEDLES in 1974 (a busy year for Kelly) and the 1975 western TAKE A HARD RIDE (again with Brown and Williamson), Kelly's big-studio career ended with Warner Bros' little-loved 1976 kung-fu comedy HOT POTATO. When that flopped, he found himself sucked into the Adamson orbit, starring in 1976's BLACK SAMURAI. It wasn't quite the same as what Kelly had grown accustomed to in just a short time, but he and Adamson reunited for the ridiculous DEATH DIMENSION. Kelly is Lt. I.J. Ash, an L.A. cop who ends up on the trail of ill-tempered Reno megalomaniac Joe "The Pig" Santamassino (Harold Sakata, who was so identified with his iconic turn as ultimate Bond villain henchman Oddjob in 1964's GOLDFINGER that he was just now going by Harold "Odd Job" Sakata). The Pig is very much Adamson's version of a Bond supervillain, except that he appears to live in an ordinary average ranch-style house with distinctly 1970s wood-paneled walls. And his plan is a doozy: hijack the blueprints for constructing a "freeze bomb" that a scientist (T.E. Foreman) has benevolently invented in the name of controlling the weather to eliminate droughts. But it also has the ability to reduce the temperature of large areas to absolute zero, and The Pig intends to sell the patent to the highest bidder to be used in warfare or terrorist attacks. Ash sums it up best when he tells his boss Capt. Gallagher (one-and-done 007 George Lazenby), "That's heavy stuff."
"Yeah Jim, I know you were in ENTER THE DRAGON.
I was James Bond, for Christ's sake! And yet, here we are."
The scientist has stored the information on a tiny microchip and implanted it just under the skin on the forehead of his assistant Felicia (Patch McKenzie), who finds herself targeted by The Pig and his chief henchman Tatoupu (Bob Minor). The Pig tries to broker a deal with Verde (Aldo Ray), a representative from a foreign country with interests in the freeze bomb, and they end up holding Felicia prisoner, with The Pig pulling out a giant, ugly-ass snapping turtle and threatening to have it "bite your tit off!" and even mocking her by shouting "You're going to be flat-chested!" Ash spends his spare time at his karate dojo and relaxing at home with orange juice and malt liquor, but his pursuit of The Pig gets personal when Tatoupu kills his wife (April Sommers), leading to his teaming up with kung-fu cop Li (the debut and farewell of martial-arts non-sensation "Myron Bruce Lee") to rescue Felicia, stop The Pig, and make sure he doesn't detonate...the Freeze Bomb!
FREEZE BOMB was actually an alternate title when the film was re-released in 1980, and it underwent yet another title change when it hit VHS as THE KILL FACTOR. Under any name, it's reasonably entertaining junk so long as expectations are tempered. It's Al Adamson, so you've got choppy editing; jaw-dropping continuity errors (watch when Ash and Li are battling bad guys on two separate speedboats, and one speedboat suddenly vanishes and they're both together on one); inept fight sequences where you can see guys huffing for breath and waiting for a cue to attack Ash; Ash's arrival in Reno beginning with an establishing shot that looks like it came from 1965, followed by travelogue footage of Kelly wandering around the strip, with onlookers gawking at him before he ducks into a casino and plays a few pulls on a slot machine; McKenzie walking around downtown L.A. with Adamson and cinematographer Gary Graver employing a trippy kaleidoscopic lens filter for no reason at all; a dubbed Sakata's vein-popping overacting, whether he's petting his turtles or demanding a massage from his girlfriend (Linda Lawrence) and yelling "Soothe me, Sheila!"; and of course, that absolutely pointless detour to the Mustang Ranch, where Ash walks in, exchanges pleasantries with Madame Sally, gets a girl, ducks away while she's undressing, walks down a hallway, pops into a room where a guy's in a jacuzzi with several women, gets kicked out, then heads to the Reno strip. Why was he there? Who was he looking for? There's no point to this entire sequence other than promoting the Mustang Ranch. With the presence of Sakata and Lazenby in the cast, it's obvious this is intended as a tongue-in-cheek Blaxploitation 007, and the climax involving a helicopter vs. cable car at the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway has an unmistakably "Bond on a tight budget" feel that's scored by inappropriate jazz piano and ends with the same aircraft explosion stock footage that Adamson recycled multiple times during this period, including at the end of 1976's BLACK HEAT. Kelly next starred in the 1978 Hong Kong kung-fu actioner THE TATTOO CONNECTION and appeared in 1982's ONE DOWN, TWO TO GO, with his old buddies Jim Brown and Fred Williamson. He then left movies and continued practicing martial arts in addition to becoming a tennis pro on the senior circuit. He appeared in a 2006 Nike commercial with Lebron James, made a one-off return to movies with a cameo in the 2009 YouTube-inspired AFRO NINJA, and in his later years, was a regular presence at fan conventions. Kelly died of cancer in 2013 at the age of 67.
NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE (US - 1986) Directed by Gil Bettman. Written by Steven Paul and Anton Fritz (Tony Foutz). Cast: John Stamos, Vanity, Gene Simmons, George Lazenby, Robert Englund, John Anderson, Ed Brock, Peter Kwong, Tara Buckman, Tim Colceri, Randy Hall, Branscombe Richmond, Patrick Wright. (R, 96 mins) A demented mash-up of GYMKATA, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, and Andy Sidaris that was demanded by no one, NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE has a minor cult following but isn't nearly the gut-buster it should be considering its individually insane ingredients. It never takes itself seriously, but it doesn't quite demonstrate the cleverness or the panache required to be the kind of self-conscious, winking 007 parody that its fan base claims it to be. Making his big-screen debut, John Stamos, then best known for his stint as Blackie Parrish on GENERAL HOSPITAL and still a year away from the premiere of FULL HOUSE, is Lance Stargrove, a star gymnast at a posh private school. He's estranged from his father, CIA agent Drew Stargrove (George Lazenby, the one-and-done 007 of 1969's ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE), who's killed trying to thwart the evil schemes of performance artist and hermaphrodite supervillain Velvet Von Ragnar (Gene Simmons). The elder Stargrove infiltrated the Ragnar compound to steal the key component of his nefarious master plan: a disc encrypted with data containing codes Ragnar needs to dump tons of radioactive waste into the city's water supply and decimate it for decades to come...that is, unless of course he's paid a hefty ransom. The disc ends up in Lance's possession as Ragnar's goons come after him, prompting him to team up with his dad's sultry partner Danja Deering (Vanity) to secure the disc and stop Ragner's reign of toxic terror...if they don't kill each other first!
The brainchild of producer/screenwriter Steven Paul (A MILLION TO JUAN, BABY GENIUSES, KARATE DOG), who's still active in the business (he's one of the producers of the recent GHOST IN THE SHELL), NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE was intended to be a more serious action movie in its earliest stages. But Paul's script went through numerous overhauls, with the only other credited writer being "Anton Fritz," a pseudonym for Tony Foutz, who was a minor figure in the Rolling Stones' inner circle back in the late '60s. At one point, Foutz was planning a HELP!-style dystopian sci-fi musical for the Stones that never happened. Instead, he took that idea and turned it into SATURATION 70, which ended up starring Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, and Brian Jones' young son. Foutz started shooting the film in 1969 but funding dried up and he never finished it. Foutz worked as a production assistant on a few Italian films and was a member of the Gene Corman/Monte Hellman-led team of fixers brought in to salvage 1979's AVALANCHE EXPRESS after star Robert Shaw and director Mark Robson both died during production. Foutz also had a brief career as a screenwriter in the '80s, though that seemed to be the result of a friendship with Ben Gazzara, as Foutz's only writing credits under his real name are three Italian films that starred the future Jackie Treehorn: Marco Ferreri's TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS (1983), the obscure Gazzara-directed vanity project BEYOND THE OCEAN (1990), and FOREVER (1991), which doesn't appear to have ever been released. It's unclear how Foutz ended up on NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE, but his and Paul's work was later rewritten by director Gil Bettman (whose claim to fame was directing the video for Sammy Hagar's 1984 hit "I Can't Drive 55") and Lorenzo Semple Jr., one of the key architects of the 1960s BATMAN TV series and a top journeyman screenwriter of the 1970s on films like THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974), THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), THE DROWNING POOL (1975), KING KONG (1976), FLASH GORDON (1980), and NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN (1983). According to "pop culture historian" Russell Dyball's commentary on the just-released NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE Blu-ray (which includes a bonus option to view the film in a blurry VHS transfer), Bettman and Semple are the ones who steered the script into the level of high camp reflected in the finished film, despite Paul's wish to keep it more straight-faced. Neither Bettman nor Semple receive credit for their script contributions, and it's telling that only one of the film's four writers wanted his name on it.
Bettman also directed the Tawny Kitaen/Lee Curreri rock romance CRYSTAL HEART around the same time, but mainly settled into a sporadic TV career, with his only other feature being the 1997 straight-to-video Fred Williamson/Cynthia Rothrock thriller NIGHT VISION. His direction on NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE is largely undistinguished, with inept, clumsily-edited action sequences (several editors are credited, including Paul Seydor, who would later become a reputable Sam Peckinpah biographer) and an uneven tone that results from an inability to commit to being a legitimate action movie or a campy comedy, ulltimately succeeding at neither (STEELE JUSTICE, another '80s action obscurity recently resurrected on Blu-ray, achieves this balance much more successfully). Ragnar and his dune buggy-driving creeps look like they wandered in off the set of an Italian post-nuke (check out Ed Brock as "Pyramid"), and a gloriously-mulleted Stamos is never believable as an action hero, not even when he's beating the shit out of the venerable Branscombe Richmond as one of Ragnar's henchmen and especially not when he's trading would-be 007 witticisms with Ragnar. You won't mistake Stamos for Sean Connery (or George Lazenby for that matter) when he smirks "You're half of each, but I'm a whole man...and I don't have time for this. I gotta save the world!" Vanity never looked better than she did here, exhibiting a convincingly icy badassery that would've excelled in a better film--watch her in NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE and you can see she would've made a terrific Bond girl.
NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE was barely released in theaters before finding its ultimate destination: gathering dust on video store shelves. The real reason anyone remembers it today isn't Stamos, it isn't Vanity, it isn't a cackling Robert Englund, taking a break between NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET films as Ragnar's weaselly computer nerd sidekick, it's not the fact that Danja's CIA boss is obviously someone wearing what appears to be the world's least convincing Chuck Norris disguise, and it's not the anthemic "Stargrove" theme song. It's rock icon Simmons' flamboyantly over-the-top performance as Ragnar. Simmons was trying to launch a career as an actor during this period, and did some solid work as the villain in the underrated 1984 Tom Selleck sci-fi thriller RUNAWAY. He also appeared in a 1985 MIAMI VICE episode, the 1986 cult classic TRICK OR TREAT and he played a terrorist pursued by Rutger Hauer in 1987's WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE, but it's Ragnar that will ultimately go down as his crowning achievement (?) on the big screen. Putting more effort into this than he did any of Kiss' generally lackluster studio albums from the period, Simmons is having a blast here, vamping and strutting across the screen like a freakish fusion of Mae West and Chyna, rolling his eyes back, showing off his legendary tongue, performing at a drag bar called "The Incinerator," and finally, being defeated by young Stargrove's gymnastic prowess, falling off a dam to his death after Lance unveils his ultimate power move: ripping open the homicidal hermaphrodite's shirt and biting him/her on the tit. John Stamos was in the news and on the talk show circuit recently, sharing memories of his friend Don Rickles after the comedian's passing. They were close for a number of years, with Stamos and FULL HOUSE co-star Bob Saget regularly taking the comedy legend out to dinner, which usually consisted of listening to endless insults being hurled their way. Let's hope Mr. Warmth saw NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE and never let Stamos hear the end of it.
