CONTAMINATION aka ALIEN CONTAMINATION (Italy/West Germany - 1980; US release 1981) Directed by Lewis Coates (Luigi Cozzi). Written by Lewis Coates (Luigi Cozzi) and Erich Tomek. Cast: Ian McCulloch, Louise Marleau, Marino Mase, Siegfried Rauch, Gisela Hahn, Carlo De Mejo, Carlo Monni, Martin Sorrentino, Mike Morris, Brigitte Wagner. (Unrated, 95 mins/R-rated US theatrical version, 84 mins).
Given its box-office popularity and groundbreaking special effects, it couldn't have been much of a surprise when Ridley Scott's 1979 classic ALIEN spawned its own subgenre of B-grade ripoffs over the next few years. And it's also no surprise that the Italians climbed aboard the bandwagon, even though the most prominent of the ALIEN imitations were from the US with the Roger Corman productions GALAXY OF TERROR (1981) and FORBIDDEN WORLD (1982), plus the non-Corman CREATURE (1985), and the UK, with HORROR PLANET, aka INSEMINOID (1982) finding fans in drive-ins and on late-night cable. The Italian exploitation scene inevitably got into the act, but they must've been too busy with zombie and cannibal films and getting prepped for the flood of post-nuke and barbarian ripoffs coming down the pike because they didn't contribute much to the post-ALIEN cash-in cycle other than two films from 1980: Ciro Ippolito's misleadingly-titled ALIEN 2: ON EARTH and Luigi Cozzi's CONTAMINATION. What differentiates the Italian ALIEN clones from their American and British counterparts is spelled out in the title of Ippolito's film: they primarily took place on Earth instead of space, and they only used the Scott film as a starting point for stories that went into generally different directions. ALIEN 2: ON EARTH, which came out on Blu-ray in 2011 as the first and last release of Midnight Legacy, was considered a long-lost Holy Grail of obscure Eurotrash, allegedly never given an official US release, though Cinema Shares acquired it and it's listed under the title STRANGERS in John Stanley's Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide, published in 1988, so it must've gotten some kind of exposure somewhere in America, either theatrically or perhaps on TV. It's a mind-numbing bore with Belinda Mayne as a psychic spelunker that has some occasional bits of inspired splatter caused by some alien rocks but is killed by a plethora of padding, with endless tracking shots inside the caves, Mayne standing at a marina while a boat docks in real time, and Ippolito's bizarre idea of how Americans hang out...with its group of heroes (among them is future CEMETERY MAN director Michele Soavi) heading to the local bowling alley to share a big can of pineapple juice. ALIEN 2: ON EARTH is worth seeing for Italian ripoff completists, but it's a chore to sit through. Fortunately, the news is better with CONTAMINATION, which is no less idiotic but is filled with some genuinely lively splatter, so much so that it landed itself a spot on the infamous British "video nasties" list in the early '80s.
CONTAMINATION was directed by genre vet and Dario Argento associate Luigi Cozzi under his usual "Lewis Coates" pseudonym. Cozzi was coming off of his highly entertaining STAR WARS ripoff STARCRASH (1979) and would go on to make two HERCULES movies with Lou Ferrigno for Cannon, who acquired CONTAMINATION in the early days of the Golan-Globus empire, cut 11 minutes out of it, and retitled it ALIEN CONTAMINATION to make sure everyone knew it was ALIEN ripoff. But Cozzi and co-writer Erich Tomek, who worked under a variety of pseudonyms and spent most of his career penning screenplays for German softcore porn films, are less interested in an alien of the H.R. Giger variety and more concerned with constantly replicating that film's unforgettable chestbursting moment. In an opening remarkably similar to Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE (1979), a ship careens into New York Harbor, and police find the crew gruesomely slaughtered. Following one of the most awkward introductory handshakes you'll ever see, sarcastic NYPD Lt. Tony Aris (Marino Mase) and Dr. Turner (Carlo Monni) investigate the cargo hold and find countless crates of coffee filled with strange green, football-sized eggs. One of the eggs rolls under a pipe and, from the warmth, "ripens" and explodes, spraying a toxic goo all over Dr. Turner and an assistant, causing their torsos to explode. Aris flees the scene and is detained by the military, led by brittle Col. Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau), who's from "Special Division #5," and prone to barking numerically-based orders like "Put emergency plan #7 into effect!" and "Call in the Special Section, Squad 2!" Military scientists determine that the eggs are filled with an alien bacteria, and then, almost as an afterthought, Holmes remembers she headed an inquiry into a disastrous space mission to Mars two years earlier where Hubbard (Ian McCulloch) claimed he and fellow astronaut Hamilton (Siegfried Rauch, Steve McQueen's racing nemesis in the 1971 vanity project LE MANS) found a cave filled with the same mysterious eggs, with Hamilton being drawn in by a strange power and never making it back home. Hubbard was written off as a delusional madman and is now a disheveled, self-pitying, alcoholic wreck when Holmes finds him and tells him he was right all along. Hubbard joins Holmes and Aris, and they trace the ship to a Colombian coffee plantation where the presumed-dead Hamilton, taken over by an alien force known as "the Cyclops," is enacting a plan for the alien domination of Earth by spreading a chestbursting virus housed inside these Mars-based eggs that are to be distributed all over the planet. Yes, that's right--the primary side effect of the alien bacteria is that it causes your chest and gut to explode: the perfect excuse to recreate ALIEN's signature move over and over and over again.
Of course, that was enough to make gorehounds happy, and the gleefully explosive splatter throughout CONTAMINATION is what's endeared it so much to Eurotrash fans over the years even though it really drags in the middle and almost turns Rauch's Hamilton into a Bond villain at times, right down to his Blofeld suit. It also has an infectiously goofy main theme by "The Goblin" (when the band was led by Fabio Pignatelli and Agostino Marangolo and without Claudio Simonetti), which boasts a synth cue that sounds like Cozzi's hoping he doesn't land on the Whammy. CONTAMINATION was made during the period when British actor McCulloch found himself an unexpected witness to the Italian gore revolution: he had just finished shooting both Fulci's ZOMBIE and Marino Girolami's ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST, which would be infamously released in the US in 1982, with additional Roy Frumkes footage, as the legendary DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. All three films were banned in the UK as part of the Video Nasty controversy. McCulloch didn't make any more Italian horror films after CONTAMINATION, opting instead for regular work on British TV until the mid '90s, when he seemed to retire from acting. Now 74, McCulloch appeared in the 2013 British horror spoof BEHIND THE SCENES OF TOTAL HELL, but in recent years, has found a following on the cult horror convention circuit, usually as part of Italian horror panels discussing the career of Lucio Fulci and the Video Nasty era.
CONTAMINATION found Cozzi in the prime of his filmmaking career. He co-wrote Argento's 1972 giallo FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, had a hand in his four-part 1973 Italian TV series DOOR INTO DARKNESS, and directed his own giallo with 1975's impressive THE KILLER MUST KILL AGAIN. But it was the run from STARCRASH to 1983's HERCULES for which Cozzi is best remembered and there isn't much of note after 1985's hilariously bad THE ADVENTURES OF HERCULES. Cozzi was often called upon for uncredited clean-up duty to fix the messes left by fired directors. In what must've been a purely money gig, he finished LA GEMELLA EROTICA, a 1980 hardcore porno started by BLUE MOVIE director Alberto Cavallone. He was one of five (!) directors cycled through the notoriously troubled NOSFERATU IN VENICE, the barely-released 1988 semi-sequel to Werner Herzog's NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1979). Producer Augusto Caminito is the credited director and helmed most of the picture, but Cozzi, Mario Caiano, and Maurizio Lucidi were onboard at various times and were either fired or driven away by the unstable nature of volatile star Klaus Kinski, who even took his own turn behind the camera. In 1986, Cozzi reunited with Lou Ferrigno and Cannon when he wrote and planned on directing SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS, which was intended to be a mini-series for Italian TV. Cozzi was fired during pre-production and replaced by Enzo G. Castellari (THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS), who rewrote most of Cozzi's script. Castellari's footage was deemed unusable and Cannon shelved the entire project until 1989, when they rehired Cozzi and had him take the six hours of Castellari footage, shoot new wraparound sequences framing the plot as a thoroughly confusing bedtime story being read by a mom (Daria Nicolodi) to her daughter (Cozzi's daughter Giada) and edit it all down to a 90-minute feature. The result was understandably an incoherent hodgepodge and went straight-to-video in 1990, though Cozzi did manage to salvage John Steiner's gloriously hammy performance as evil wizard Jaffar from the wreckage.
Cozzi's career in narrative cinema has been on hold since two films he made in 1989: THE BLACK CAT, an oddity marketed as a Poe movie but really Cozzi's unofficial attempt at completing Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy, following 1977's SUSPIRIA and 1980's INFERNO (Argento officially completed the trilogy himself with 2007's MOTHER OF TEARS), and the bizarre PAGANINI HORROR, about a possessed Paganini composition unleashing hell on an all-female rock band--whose hit singles sound suspiciously like ELO and Bon Jovi--shooting a video in an old dark manor. Cozzi made two documentaries about Argento in the 1990s and since then, has managed Profondo Rosso, the Argento and Italian horror memorabilia store and horror-fan tourist destination in Rome, named after Argento's 1975 classic DEEP RED. These days, the now-67-year-old Cozzi can usually be found behind the counter at the store, a museum curator of sorts, preserving the memory of the glory days of Italian horror and genre cinema. Like his former star McCulloch, Cozzi is also a fixture at horror conventions and has taken part in several interviews for DVD releases of his films. Never the visionary auteur that many of his contemporaries were, Cozzi was at least proactive enough to see the writing on the wall concerning the decline of Italian horror (and, it should be added, his own films), and got out early. Perhaps his mentor Argento would've been wise to follow his lead.
This 1981 Florida newspaper ad, archived by horrorpedia.com, strongly suggests that
Cannon was trying to attract fans of SCANNERS as well as ALIEN.
YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (Italy/Turkey, 1983)
Directed by Anthony M. Dawson (Antonio Margheriti). Written by Robert Bailey and Anthony M. Dawson. Cast: Reb Brown, Corinne Clery, John Steiner, Carole Andre, Alan Collins (Luciano Pigozzi), Ayshe Gul, Marina Rocchi, Sergio Nicolai, Paul Costello, Nello Pazzafini. (PG, 88 mins)
In a summer movie season ruled by RETURN OF THE JEDI, it's hard to believe that Columbia Pictures put YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE on 1400 screens nationwide on August 19, 1983. Much like THE ROAD WARRIOR gave birth to an endless parade of Italian post-nuke ripoffs, CONAN THE BARBARIAN was a huge hit in 1982 and kickstarted a string of muscleman and musclewoman barbarian movies (a few came from Roger Corman, but most came from Italy), each new one cheaper than the last, that flooded theaters, drive-ins, and video stores for the next couple of years. Likely a relatively inexpensive bid by Columbia to beat the highly-publicized Lou Ferrigno take on HERCULES, which opened a week later, YOR began life as IL MONDO DI YOR (THE WORLD OF YOR), a four-part, four-hour miniseries for Italian TV, directed by veteran journeyman Antonio Margheriti under his "Anthony M. Dawson" pseudonym. Originally running 200 minutes, the miniseries was re-edited into an 88-minute feature and an English dub was prepared for US export. Normally, this kind of venture would be picked up by an indie or grindhouse outfit and dumped in drive-ins, but for some reason--maybe a lack of their own in-house barbarian movie--Columbia thought this had potential, picked it up, and decided to make it a major theatrical release in late summer. It opened in 7th place at the box office but disappeared quickly once HERCULES opened a week later, and by that point, audiences got wise to the fact that these were cheesy, low-budget, badly-dubbed affairs, and by the time big-budget, major-studio Hollywood offerings like CONAN THE DESTROYER (1984) and RED SONJA (1985) rolled around, interest had waned and most of the Italian knockoffs either got very small releases or went straight to video. But YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE has held on to become an endearingly bad, undeniably entertaining cult film over the years, even airing once at 2:00 am ET on Turner Classic Movies (!). YOR! On TCM! I'm not making that up.
Yor, Ka-Laa, and Pag!
Opening with the Razzie-nominated anthem "Yor's World" by Guido & Maurizio De Angelis (a duo that also went by "Oliver Onions," and were responsible for numerous catchy, English-as-second-language ditties in many Italian cult movies), YOR finds the affable barbarian hero (Reb Brown, formerly TV's CAPTAIN AMERICA in the late '70s) rescuing Ka-Laa (Corinne Clery) and Pag (Luciano Pigozzi/"Alan Collins") from a dinosaur attack. A tribal elder (Nello Pazzafini) tells Yor that his medallion matches one worn by the "Daughter of the Gods," who lives among the desert people. After battling some cavemen, Yor, Ka-Laa, and Pag go off in search of this Daughter of the Gods, much to the consternation of the catty Ka-Laa, who immediately gets all clingy like Yor's her man. They run afoul of more cavemen, one of whom steals Yor's medallion, but Yor manages to rescue Ka-Laa by hang-gliding from the carcass of a giant bat.
In a sign of continuity errors that are bound to happen when you cut a 200-minute miniseries down to an 88-minute feature, Yor is suddenly and without explanation sporting his medallion once more, and they finally meet the Daughter of the Gods, Roa (Ayshe Gul), when Yor rescues her from a pack of angry mummies. Roa's presence, and Yor's clear attraction to her, as evidenced by one of Margheriti's many cuts to Reb Brown's stupid grin, immediately makes Ka-Laa jealous and she starts acting like a kid showing off to show Yor how hot she is. The scowling Ka-Laa challenges Roa to a duel to the death, but then they're both attacked by (the same?) cavemen. Roa dies as a result of her wounds, but more importantly, Ka-Laa now has Yor all to herself.
US opening credits
Italian opening credits
After burying Roa, the heroes are lounging on a beach when they rescue some children from another attacking dinosaur. As a show of gratitude, the head of the village (Sergio Nicolai) announces "The women have prepared a feast in your honor!" Really? How? They just got there. How did the women know that their children would be saved by Yor? Or do they usually just not pay attention to their children and prepare feasts for passing strangers who risk their lives to save them? And how did Yor and his friends not see this village? It's on the same beach! This is also the kind of film where villages consistently appear out of nowhere and rampaging dinosaurs manage to sneak up on people. The villagers keep watch on the skies because of a "god" that periodically appears. This "god" is a spaceship, and soon, androids appear and take Yor to another dimension ruled by the maniacal Overlord (an expectedly hammy John Steiner), who wants to use Yor's genetic design to create a master race of super-intelligent androids to help him rule the world. Some space rebels appear and take Ka-Laa and Pag to Overlord's realm to find Yor, and Yor leads the rebels in a battle to take down the malevolent Overlord, whose stronghold appears to be the same abandoned factory that's used in most Italian post-nuke films of the era.
John Steiner as Overlord
I can't imagine YOR making a whole lot of sense even in its IL MONDO DI YOR incarnation, but the nonsensical stupidity is indeed a lot of its charm. In its quest to rip off everything, YOR is a standard barbarian adventure, a prehistoric monster movie, and an outer space sci-fi epic with spaceships, a Darth Vader-inspired villain and an army of androids. Surprisingly, despite the choppy editing and some obviously mismatched, cobbled-together scenes in the theatrical YOR (when Ka-Laa and Pag are attacked by a dinosaur in a forest, Yor's reaction shot shows him standing in a desert, clearly taken from another, unrelated section of IL MONDO DI YOR), whoever put it together and dubbed it managed to keep (or perhaps instill) a vague sense of coherence. It's a ridiculous story, but it makes some kind of sense as long as you don't examine it too closely.
If only we could hear Reb doing this "YAAAAAAH!!"
Reb Brown became a bit of a B-movie star in the '80s after his two-TV movie stint as Captain America ended. He did some TV and co-starred in a couple of serious films (1983's UNCOMMON VALOR and 1986's DEATH OF A SOLDIER), but after YOR and 1985's disastrous HOWLING II, he found himself in another Italian actioner, Bruno Mattei's hilariously awful RAMBO ripoff STRIKE COMMANDO (1987) and the die was cast. For the next several years, Brown bounced back and forth between straight-to-video Italian and South African action movies, and in them, patented his own hyper-macho persona where he was constantly barking orders or emitting some shrieking battle cry. The cult of Brown didn't really happen until MST3K aired his 1988 sci-fi film SPACE MUTINY ("Crunch Buttsteak!" "Big McLargeHuge!"), and then it took off. Now there's a ton of fan-made Reb Brown highlight reels all over YouTube. Now 64, Brown quit acting in the late '90s, but recently began appearing on the convention circuit, indicating that he seems to be a good sport about things. He also just completed the low-budget DTV horror film NIGHT CLAWS, his first starring role in a film since 1994's CAGE II. Brown fans who go back to YOR are invariably disappointed--not in the film, but in that Brown's performance is dubbed by Gregory Snegoff, so you don't get to hear his voice or the signature battle cry made famous in STRIKE COMMANDO and SPACE MUTINY. The choice to dub YOR in English was probably made well after filming ended and the dubbed-in-Italian version aired on TV, and it's likely that they didn't want to pay Brown to fly back to Rome to record his dialogue, as Italian films were still being shot without direct sound, the intention always being to dub them later on. Judging from some of YOR's publicity shots, it certainly appears as if Columbia had Brown put his YOR loincloth back on, but on the US theatrical poster and in this shot below, it's Brown's own hair and not his YOR wig.
Margheriti was an endlessly busy genre-hopper and special effects craftsman with a career going back to the late 1950s. He was best known in the 1960's for his sci-fi space operas, but he also made various peplum, 007 ripoffs, and gothic horrors, followed in the '70s by several westerns and crime thrillers, but it was in the '80s that he found a niche with a string of junglesploitation potboilers inspired by films as varied as THE WILD GEESE, APOCALYPSE NOW, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and the RAMBO films. Margheriti died in 2002, and a few years before his death, he mentioned in an interview with Video Watchdog that he more or less felt YOR was junk and didn't really care for it. But oddly, it's YOR that's become one of his most recognized films. Known as much for his special effects and miniature construction as he was for directing, Margheriti uses his signature methods on YOR, often embarrassingly so as in this scene where a Yor action figure is clearly subbed in for Reb Brown during a stunt shot. You can't really miss it.
Margheriti's use of miniatures worked in the '50s and '60s, but was getting pretty stale by the '70s (a badly-designed tornado destroying a miniature dam in 1979's KILLER FISH was particularly laughable). While miniatures were still being used by the likes of George Lucas in the STAR WARS films and Ridley Scott in ALIEN and BLADE RUNNER, both took painstaking efforts to make them look as believable as possible. I'm pretty sure Margheriti just used a Conan doll for the above clip. Margheriti continued making films into the late 1990s, at which point Italian cinema was largely in decline and older, experienced directors were having a hard time finding work. That may very well be the case, but with Margheriti, it's also possible that his (and other aged, old-school Italian directors who are still with us but haven't worked in years) was a situation of a set-in-his-ways craftsman who was unwilling--or unable--to change with the times. Margheriti could stage a huge explosion as well as any director who ever stepped on a movie set, but even his most ardent supporters and/or CGI-haters would be hard-pressed to defend his use of toy cars and models on what looks like a Hot Wheels tabletop racetrack in his last film, 1997's VIRTUAL WEAPON.
YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE is a bad movie. But it's a gloriously fun bad movie. And for all his talk of not really caring for it, Margheriti's style is too apparent throughout for him to have not cared what was going on. He loved his models and miniatures, and he stuck with them until the bitter end. Margheriti didn't live long enough to see the rejuvenated interest in Italian cult cinema that started just a year or two after his passing (I'm glad guys like Enzo G. Castellari, Sergio Martino, Ruggero Deodato, and Umberto Lenzi, to name just a few, are still with us to see how revered their films have become to cult fans). He'd probably be shocked to find that YOR aired on TCM. The cult of YOR was strong enough to prompt Sony to release it as part of their "Columbia Classics" made-to-order DVD line, available online or from Warner Archive in a surprisingly pristine anamorphic widescreen transfer.
Directed by Nello Rossati. Written by Roberto Gianviti, Nello Rossati. Cast: Franco Nero, Deborah Barrymore (Deborah Moore), Mary Stavin, William Berger, Larry Dolgin, Rodrigo Obregon, Steven Luotto, Shirley Hernandez, Robert Redcross, e con la partecipazione straordinaria di George Kennedy. (Unrated, 88 mins)
It can't be easy to take a story that blends INDIANA JONES adventure, Nazi war criminals, secret gold treasures, UFOs, Spanish conquistadors, government conspiracies, Cold War espionage, badly-staged bullfighting, angry cyborgs, and barfing aliens and make it this incredibly boring, but Nello Rossati's TOP LINE is an almost total snooze. Rossati, who had just done 1987's DJANGO STRIKES AGAIN, the first official sequel to Sergio Corbucci's 1966 spaghetti western classic, reunites with that film's star, the iconic Franco Nero, who can normally make anything interesting, but TOP LINE (also known as ALIEN TERMINATOR) finds everyone on an off day.
(SPOILERS follow)
Boozing, washed-up author Ted Angelo (Nero) is aimlessly idling about in Cartagena in a drunken haze when he inadvertantly stumbles on the trail of some secret gold treasure hidden in a cave. He's informed by his pal Alonso (Eurocult stalwart William Berger) that it's Nazi gold and wouldn't you know it...Alonso mysteriously turns up dead the next day. Proceeding with his investigation, Ted finds the gold, but also discovers a UFO in the cave, and then is almost killed by cackling Nazi war criminal-in-hiding Heinrich Holzmann (George Kennedy...yes, THAT George Kennedy), who nearly runs Ted down in his car and ends up forcing him to run barefoot through a cactus field before Ted ends up suffocating him by dumping a ton of sand on top of him.
"Yes, uh, Mr. Kennedy is here to see his agent."
Ted thinks that the UFO abducted a ship of Spanish conquistadors and their gold, but there's more to it, as the US government sends assassins to off Ted, and even the KGB is involved through their secret dealings with Holzmann. Ted ends up on the run with June (Deborah Moore--Roger Moore's daughter--but she's billed as "Deborah Barrymore"), who's sent to check on him by his ex-wife Maureen (Mary Stavin), who happens to be his publisher. The draggy film, little more than a Colombian travelogue with a maddeningly senseless, made-up-as-it-goes-along plot, finally lets the crazy break out with the late-in-the-game arrival of a pissed-off cyborg (Andy Sidaris regular Rodrigo Obregon) that immediately fries its face after accidentally igniting a fireworks display and ends up getting gored by a bull in a hilarious chain of events that has to be seen to be believed. But it gets better! After thinking they've fled to safety on Maureen's boat, Ted and June find an even greater evil when Maureen transforms into a gooey, slime-drenched, EXORCIST-green-puking alien that whips its long tongue around Ted's neck and says "You still taste good." Ted is understandably appalled that his ex-wife has been a reptilian extraterrestrial this whole time, but according to "Maureen," so has nearly everyone. "We've been here for 12,000 years," she/it explains. "We are in every position of power on this planet!"
And he thought she was a bitch before?
It's an imaginative THEY LIVE-style twist that arrives far too late to really be effective. TOP LINE has such a deliriously batshit closing 20 minutes that you be fooled into thinking it's more entertaining film than it really is. It's mostly awful, and the first 70 or so minutes are an absolute chore to endure. Easily one of Nero's least distinguished Italian efforts (DJANGO STRIKES AGAIN wasn't very good, either), but he'd find his way into a co-starring role in DIE HARD 2: DIE HARDER in a couple of years. The biggest surprise here is the partecipazione straordinaria di COOL HAND LUKE Oscar-winner Kennedy, in one of eight films he made in 1988 (did he really make this and DEMONWARP the same year he was in THE NAKED GUN?). With his brief two-scene role in TOP LINE (he's killed off less than halfway through), Kennedy joins the esteemed--and possibly blackmailed--likes of Henry Fonda in Ovidio Assonitis' TENTACLES (1977), Richard Harris in Bruno Mattei's STRIKE COMMANDO 2 (1988), and Brian Dennehy in Antonio Margheriti's INDIO (1989) in the "WTF is he/she doing in this?!" Italian Exploitation Hall of Fame. The veteran actor couldn't have been on the set for more than a couple of days, and likely took the job for a free trip to a Colombian resort. He didn't even stick around long enough to dub himself, and for an actor as recognizable as George Kennedy, being dubbed by a high-pitched, subpar Col. Klink-esque voice is distracting, to say the least.
Rodrigo Obregon!
Not surprisingly, the abysmal TOP LINE, made in the waning days of the Italian trash cinema heyday, never made it into US theaters, nor was it even given a VHS release. Its only US DVD release has been on a couple of those Mill Creek "50 Sci-Fi Classics" sets that you find at Best Buy or Wal-Mart for $10 or less, filled with public domain titles in mostly subpar, VHS-quality transfers. You can actually find some occasional diamonds in the rough on those things, but the ironically-titled TOP LINE is most definitely not.
Directed by Michele Lupo. Written by Marcello Fondato and Francesco Scardamaglia. Cast: Bud Spencer, Raimund Harmstorf, Cary Guffey, Joe Bugner, Gigi Bonos, Carlo Reali. (Unrated, 89 mins).
WHY DID YOU PICK ON ME? (1980/Italy)
Directed by Michele Lupo. Written by Marcello Fondato and Francesco Scardamaglia. Cast: Bud Spencer, Cary Guffey, Ferruccio Amendola, Robert Hundar, John Bartha, Carlo Reali. (Unrated, 87 mins)
Have you ever been trying to describe something to someone and they don't know what you're talking about and look at you like you're insane? This happens to me with an alarming degree of frequency. It was worse back in the pre-Internet days. At least now, when you're describing something you've seen or experienced and the only reaction you get is a blank stare back at you, you can Google it and have evidence of it in seconds. Back in the early '90s, just as Crystal Pepsi was rolling out, I once spent the bulk of an evening trying to convince two people of the short-lived existence of the late '70s soft drink Pepsi Light, which was Pepsi with lemon flavor added. They looked at me like I was crazy. I even described the blue logo with a lemon on it. "Are you making this shit up?" one guy asked. Why would I make it up? I later experienced a similar ordeal at a party when old-school arcade games came up in conversation, and I said "Hey, remember Baby Pac-Man? The arcade game that was half-pinball machine?" Blank stares all around. Me: "Yeah, it had the screen and was a regular Pac-Man game, but when you steered Pac-Man to the bottom of the screen, he'd go off the game and a ball would pop out and you'd play the pinball part of the game." This was not jogging any memories. "You're full of shit!" someone said. "No, I'm not. This thing existed. I played it! It wasn't there very long, but it was at the arcade at Northtowne Mall!" I knew Pepsi Light was real, and I knew I played Baby Pac-Man, and nobody was going to convince me I didn't. I wasn't imagining things, but I had no way to prove it. So I ended up looking like a loon with my shitty lemon Pepsi and my made-up Pac-Man half-arcade/half-pinball machine. But now, thanks to the Internet, vindication is mine!
See? The blue logo? Lemon? SEE?!?!
YOU SEE?!?!?!
So what does any of this have to do with THE SHERIFF AND THE SATELLITE KID? For years, I thought I imagined this movie. Not that it was particularly good, but it would periodically pop into my head and I could never remember the title. Additionally, all attempts at describing it to people got me those same incredulous Pepsi Light and Baby Pac-Man stares that were equal parts confusion, disdain, and possibly pity. All I could remember was that I saw it on TV when I was maybe 8 or 9, which would've been 1981-82, and it had this burly sheriff, his deputy who spoke in rhyme, a bunch of funny fight scenes scored to "wacky" music, and it involved a child alien played by the kid who got abducted in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977). We take things like IMDb for granted, but prior to the ease and availability of almost literally everything on the Internet, these kinds of mysteries could haunt movie fans for years. This film had evaporated from my mind until I was on one of those aimless, random tears through IMDb where you just start clicking on various titles and names, and I somehow ended up at spaghetti western star Bud Spencer, and eventually got to 1979's UNO SCERIFFO EXTRATERRESTRE - POCO EXTRA E MOLTO TERRESTRE. I clicked on it. Wait, what's this? Alternate title THE SHERIFF AND THE SATELLITE KID? Wait a second. Cary Guffey? The kid from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS?! Holy shit! Hold on...this is THAT movie!
And then I promptly forgot about it and went on with my life.
That was many years ago, but it turns out a lot of people my age have fond memories of this badly-dubbed Italian obscurity. I can't find any evidence of it ever getting a US theatrical release, so it must've gone straight to cable or network TV and was likely one of those things that got stumbled upon by kids stuck inside on rainy days, latchkey kids just getting home from school or really weird kids who might've been fans of THEY CALL ME TRINITY. After watching it for the first time in what must be 30 years, it turns out there were still scenes that I vividly remembered. But why? The movie's terrible.
Spencer stars as Sheriff Hall, whose small town of Newnan, GA (where most of this was filmed, about 40 miles from Atlanta) gets caught up in UFO fever when one is spotted hovering about. Not coincidentally, a mysterious little boy (Guffey) turns up wandering around a nearby amusement park (actually the Six Flags in Atlanta). Calling himself H7-25, the boy says he's from another world, but of course, Hall doesn't believe him, despite massive evidence that supports H7-25's claims: he exhibits "biomagnetic power," can power electronic devices just by being near them, heals the sciatica of Hall's elderly, constantly rhyming deputy (Gigi Bonos), can make a horse talk, has the ability to freeze and rewind time, and has a squad of military goons led by Briggs (Raimund Harmstorf) in hot pursuit. Eventually, after finally being convinced, the Sheriff teams up with town troublemaker Brennan (Joe Bugner) to protect H7-25 and take on Briggs, which basically results in a lot of bad country music and one slapstick brawl after another. One takes place in a supermarket, which has peculiarly-staged displays in the middle of aisles that seem to exist only for Spencer to toss people into them, since the store probably still had actual customers in it at the time. The same goes for a car chase where boxes and other items are strategically placed in the middle of the road for him to plow through.
This is pretty childish fare for the most part, but some it is amusing, especially when H7-25 starts pulling a ONE FROGGY EVENING on the Sheriff when he tries to tell anyone that the kiddie alien has incredible powers. I can see where the constant slapstick brawling would provide much entertainment for undiscriminating viewers under ten years of age, and Spencer seems to genuinely be having a good time working with young Guffey. Seven-year-old Guffey, in his first film after CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, was from Georgia and even at this young age, never intended on acting as a full-time gig. There's an interview with him on YouTube where he talks about how CLOSE ENCOUNTERS got him all this notoriety at a very young age, leading to him being offered the role as Danny in THE SHINING and his parents turned it down. Clearly, they went with this Italian film simply because it was being filmed close to home and over the summer when Guffey was out of school. Georgia saw a lot of Italian film activity during this period, with many films shot in Atlanta and Savannah from 1978-80 (THE VISITOR, CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, and others), and numerous Atlanta landmarks are on display in SHERIFF: the downtown area, with the Equitable building and Peachtree Plaza, and H7-25 is captured by Briggs outside the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, the now-demolished former home of the Atlanta Braves. And, as if the casting of Guffey wasn't a blatant enough nod to CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, H7-25's alien family has made arrangements to meet him at Stone Mountain, noted for its Confederate Memorial carving of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis.
THE SHERIFF AND THE SATELLITE KID appears to have gone straight to TV in the US, but was a big enough hit in Europe to bring Spencer back to Atlanta to reunite with Guffey and director Michele Lupo for a 1980 sequel, titled WHY DID YOU PICK ON ME?, aka EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO ME. It's largely more of the same, with H7-25 coming back to Earth to visit Sheriff Hall, who gets a job in another town, rechristening the boy "Charlie," and passing him off as his nephew. This time, H7-25 is being pursued by evil alien robots led by Robert Hundar, while Hall tries to deal with a predictably wacky motorcycle gang that seems like an annoying version of the Village People. Juvenile antics ensue, along with more downtown Atlanta sightseeing and a return trip to the Atlanta Six Flags, plus the unique sight of Bud Spencer drinking a can of Tab, visiting a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and, briefly near the end, doing what looked suspiciously like The Robot. The first film was hardly a model of narrative cohesion, but the sequel is all over the place, with large portions of the running time devoted to Spencer dealing with the motorcycle gang (including a sequence in a Mexican restaurant where he goes undercover as a bartender) and he and Guffey are split up for a good chunk of the film, which may be an indication that the filmmakers didn't have as much access to the young actor the second time around, as he perhaps didn't want to waste a second summer vacation making another bad ripoff of a classic film in which he starred. While both THE SHERIFF AND THE SATELLITE KID and WHY DID YOU PICK ON ME? are available from bootleg DVD outfits, neither has officially been released on home video in the US. I'm not even sure if WHY DID YOU PICK ON ME? was even granted the straight-to-television release in the US that its predecessor received.
