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.
Directed by Vincent Dawn (Bruno Mattei). Written by Clyde Anderson (Claudio Fragasso). Cast: Reb Brown, Christopher Connelly, Alex Vitale, Loes Kamma (Louise Kamsteeg), Alan Collins (Luciano Pigozzi), Mike Monty, Edison Navarro, Rene Abadeza. (Unrated, 89 mins)
When FIRST BLOOD hit theaters in 1982, it was a relatively low-budget indie that became a surprise hit for Sylvester Stallone, but fell a bit short of achieving ROCKY-level box office. However, it found an even bigger audience on video and cable, and by the time the bigger-budgeted 1985 sequel RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II came out, Stallone's John Rambo, initially a withdrawn, shell-shocked, battle-scarred loner more in line with "crazed Vietnam vet" subgenre protagonists like Robert De Niro in TAXI DRIVER (1976), William Devane in ROLLING THUNDER (1977), and Robert Ginty in THE EXTERMINATOR (1980), became a Rocky-sized American hero and full-fledged cartoon killing machine draped in the American flag. RAMBO, coupled with the Gene Hackman actioner UNCOMMON VALOR (1983), and the Chuck Norris breakout smash MISSING IN ACTION (1984), was a key film in spawning a series of "the war's not over till the last man comes home" Namsploitation flicks, a few of which were domestically-made (1986's P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE with David Carradine, and Norris' two MISSING IN ACTION follow-ups), but most of these titles that flooded video stores came from Italy and particularly the Philippines. Roger Corman associate and Filipino exploitation icon Cirio H. Santiago even had his own direct-to-video Namsploitation franchise with 1987's EYE OF THE EAGLE, which spawned two sequels of its own in addition to a supporting character played by a then-unknown Robert Patrick (four years before TERMINATOR 2) getting his own spinoff film BEHIND ENEMY LINES (1988). Cartoonish fantasies like MISSING IN ACTION and RAMBO and serious films like PLATOON (1986) and FULL METAL JACKET (1987) among many others, kept Namsploitation a very in-demand and financially successful subgenre in the world of video rental well into the 1990s.
Of course, in those days, wherever a popular American film or genre was being ripped off, you can bet there was a crew of Italians working without permits nearby. Fabrizio De Angelis, using his reliable "Larry Ludman" pseudonym, gave us the first notable Italian FIRST BLOOD ripoff with 1983's THUNDER WARRIOR, featuring 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS' Mark Gregory as Thunder, a Native American war vet being run out of town by an asshole sheriff (Bo Svenson). Gregory returned for two sequels, 1986's THUNDER WARRIOR II, which finds Thunder promoted to deputy sheriff with Svenson returning as a different asshole sheriff, and 1988's imaginatively-titled THUNDER WARRIOR III (with John Phillip Law stepping in as the asshole sheriff), but De Angelis never put the Thunder character back in combat, instead choosing to confine his ass-kicking to the surrounding areas of Page, AZ, where the Italian exploitation industry set up shop and made a number of action films in the mid-1980s (busy Italian actor Claudio Cassinelli was killed in a helicopter crash at the Navajo Bridge outside Page in the summer of 1985 while shooting Sergio Martino's cyborg arm-wrestling classic HANDS OF STEEL). De Angelis's 1985 film COBRA MISSION (released in the US in 1987 as OPERATION NAM) had four bored and disgruntled vets heading back to 'Nam to free POWs. Elsewhere, the ever-reliable Antonio Margheriti, who helmed the 1980 APOCALYPSE NOW ripoff THE LAST HUNTER, continued his Namsploitation contributions with TORNADO (1983), but there's one Italian Namsploitation RAMBO ripoff that stands apart from the rest. Yes, I'm talking about Bruno Mattei's ridiculous 1987 trash classic STRIKE COMMANDO.
Mattei (1931-2007), who usually directed under the name "Vincent Dawn," was one of the busiest and least competent of the Italian schlock artists, with 1980's HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (released in the US in 1983 as NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES) and the sleazy women-in-prison gems CAGED WOMEN (1984) and WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE (1985) to his credit. Mattei's films have their bad movie charms, though it's obvious that his top priority was getting it in the can. Mattei was perhaps Italy's most flagrant ripoff artist. His 1988 film ROBOWAR is an almost scene-for-scene copy of PREDATOR, while 1990's SHOCKING DARK is a blatant ALIENS clone. Towards the end of his life, Mattei was making really cheap films and couldn't even be bothered to shoot imitation scenes and instead opted to just openly steal footage from other movies. One of his last films, 2006's unwatchable THE TOMB, not only rips off the Brendan Fraser-headlined THE MUMMY, but uses footage from it, in addition to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (!). His last film, 2007's ZOMBIES: THE BEGINNING, somehow manages to work in footage pilfered from 1995's CRIMSON TIDE. In short, Mattei was a real character, and the Philippines-shot STRIKE COMMANDO is one of the all-time great examples of Italian exploitation at its most ludicrous, blatantly copying the plot of RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II and, with a straight face, restaging scenes from it.
Instead of Stallone as John Rambo, we get the great Reb Brown as Mike Ransom. Brown, who actually co-starred in the previously mentioned UNCOMMON VALOR and whose contributions to world cinema have been documented on this blog time and again, opts to not go for the stoical Stallone approach, but instead plays Ransom as if he's constantly having a spaz attack. Brown's signature battle cry, heard in many of his films, is front and center throughout most of STRIKE COMMANDO, which finds Brown's Ransom on a mission to destroy a VC stronghold with the elite Strike Commando unit in Vietnam. Despite the protests of his commander Major Harriman (Filipino B-movie fixture Mike Monty as Richard Crenna), Ransom and his men are left behind to die when overzealous Col. Radek (Christopher Connelly) decides to blow the place up before all the Strike Commandos are out. The last Strike Commando standing, Ransom is nursed back to health by a village of refugees cared for by Frenchman LeDue (Brown's YOR co-star Luciano Pigozzi, using his usual "Alan Collins" pseudonym), who tells Ransom that Russian military officials have been patrolling the area. Back at the base, the traitor Radek (not to be confused with Charles Napier's Murdock from RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II) orders all evidence of the Strike Commando unit to be erased, but Harriman stages a rescue of Ransom, who immediately goes back to the village to rescue the refugees only to find they've been slaughtered by Jakoda (Alex Vitale), a psychotic, hulking Commie killing machine with no tolerance for "Americanskis." Ransom is captured and tortured by Jakoda, eventually escaping and launching a one-man assault on the VC, the Soviets, and other "lousy bastards" that get in his way, as Radek repeatedly ignores Harriman's warnings that Ransom can't be stopped and "There's no one who can touch him in your whole damned army!"
Brown's overwrought, shrieking acting style (as any fans of MST3K's skewering of SPACE MUTINY will recall: "Big McLargehuge!") is the main reason for STRIKE COMMANDO's cult appeal, but don't underestimate the general stupidity of the script by Claudio Fragasso (MONSTER DOG, TROLL 2) and Mattei's inept direction. The dubbing crew also had a field day on this one, especially whomever dubbed Vitale, whose grunting of "Americanski!" reaches ridiculous proportions by the end. There's also some questionable attempts at humor in the opening scene where Ransom and his men are cutting their way through a fence and an African-American Strike Commando remarks "When I was stealin' watermelon back home in Alabama, we had to climb fences, not cut 'em!" What?! There's also Ransom's friendship with mushmouthed young refugee Lao (Edison Navarro), who's always asking Ransom to tell him about Disneyland ("There's popcorn and ice cream growing on trees!"). Of course, Lao is killed by Jakoda, which leads to one of STRIKE COMMANDO's most mocked scenes:
Once Jakoda is introduced, the hilarity is almost non-stop. I love how LeDue tosses a grenade at some VC soldiers and quips "Bonjour!" Wouldn't it be "Au revoir!"? There's a great scene with Ransom taking out some officers on a boat and rigging it with grenades, shouting "Our Father who art in Heaven!" as he jumps off the boat. There's a cut to a long shot as the boat explodes, and it looks a lot like a toy floating around in Mattei's bathtub. And the endless scenes stolen from RAMBO! The torture scenes, the shot of a VC officer in the foreground with Ransom camouflaged in the background (of course, Mattei is too clumsy to pull this off without piecing two shots together, which really dampens the effect), and the way Ransom arrives at Radek's office and shoots everything up while screaming "RADDDDEEEEKKKKKK!" Also hilarious is the first of two climactic brawls between Ransom and Jakoda, which is livened up by the surprise appearance of a huge waterfall.
Christopher Connelly (1941-1988)
Brown would go on working in low-budget Italian and South African action films (including reteaming with Mattei for ROBOWAR) before retiring from acting in the late 1990s. He recently started hitting the convention circuit and, in 2012, shot a still-unreleased horror film titled NIGHT CLAWS. Vitale appeared in a few more Italian exploitation films, most notably BEYOND THE DOOR III (1989), and a pair of late-period post-nuke Z-listers: URBAN WARRIORS (1988) and the hilarious THE BRONX EXECUTIONER (1989). Sadly, Connelly, a veteran American TV actor (PEYTON PLACE) who was reduced to appearing in some really shoddy Italian fare by the end of his career (STRIKE COMMANDO is so sloppy that his last name is misspelled "Connely" in the credits), was already ill with lung cancer while shooting STRIKE COMMANDO, and he's visibly uncomfortable in the obviously hot and humid shooting conditions in Manila (everyone is sweating, but Connelly is completely drenched). He doesn't look well and there's a couple of scenes where you can see his hand shaking, seemingly involuntary. He died the next year at just 47 years of age.
STRIKE COMMANDO went straight to American video stores in late 1987 courtesy of International Video Entertainment, formerly U.S.A. Home Video and later Live Entertainment. It was apparently successful enough in the rest of the world to spawn a Reb Brown-less sequel a year later...
STRIKE COMMANDO 2 (Italy - 1988)
Directed by Vincent Dawn (Bruno Mattei). Written by Claudio Fragasso. Cast: Brent Huff, Mary Stavin, Richard Harris, Vic Diaz, Richard Raymond (Ottaviano Dell'Acqua), Alex McBride (Massimo Vanni), Mel Davidson. (Unrated, 96 mins)
STRIKE COMMANDO 2 may lack the vein-popping histrionics of its predecessor, but in its own way, it's just as insane. Reb Brown is out, replaced by Brent Huff, an American model who was trying to get an action career off the ground. He co-starred with Tawny Kitaen in the cable favorite THE PERILS OF GWENDOLINE IN THE LAND OF THE YIK YAK (1984) and did a few other movies and TV shows, and though he never really got his big break, he remains busy today (his most significant recent credit is guest-starring on a 2010 episode of MAD MEN). Huff essays the Ransom role as more of a cynical smartass as opposed to Brown's testosterone-fueled, pants-shitting 'roid rage portrayal. It doesn't even really feel like a sequel, with the RAMBO elements dropped fairly early on in favor of becoming more of a lighthearted RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK/ROMANCING THE STONE knockoff, complete with the Mattei trademark of scenes restaged in their entirety.
But nevermind all that. The elephant in the room with STRIKE COMMANDO 2 is the mother of cinematic WTF?! surprise guest stars with the presence of a seriously slumming Richard Harris as Jenkins, Ransom's old commander in Vietnam. It's doubtful that even magical wizardry of Albus Dumbledore could reveal the actor's true motivation for taking third-billing in a Bruno Mattei film, but the fact remains: he's there, he's in the movie, and it's not a "one day on the set, Henry Fonda in TENTACLES" driveby, either. Harris is in most of the movie and even takes part in some of the action scenes. And on top of that, he seems to actually be trying. With his career in the toilet by the time of STRIKE COMMANDO 2, it's very possible that this was his best offer at the time, or maybe, for whatever reason, he just wanted to visit Manila. Maybe he was blackmailed. Maybe he and Mattei had a mutual friend and he felt like doing the hapless director a favor. Maybe he saw STRIKE COMMANDO and found it a powerful analysis of America's involvement in Vietnam. Who knows? Harris went through the 1980s without a box-office hit, and his most notable film of the decade was the 1981 Bo Derek train wreck TARZAN, THE APE MAN. When Harris got an Oscar nomination for his comeback role in 1990's THE FIELD, he claimed to have been retired for several years. This was in the pre-IMDb days but a look at his credits now shows that he never stopped working and STRIKE COMMANDO 2 was simply the shittiest in a series of shit jobs in shit movies that he probably hoped nobody would ever see. Fortunately for Harris, THE FIELD led to his career getting a second wind that carried him through character roles in A-list fare (including UNFORGIVEN, GLADIATOR, and the first two HARRY POTTER films) until his death in 2002. Harris' mere presence gives STRIKE COMMANDO 2 an element of class exhibited by no other Mattei film, and Huff--not a gifted actor--seems to step up his game a bit in his scenes with him. Of course Richard Harris would have that effect on a co-star. He's Richard Harris.
This time, Ransom is visiting Manila after getting news that his war buddy Jenkins has died. It turns out Jenkins, a deep-cover CIA agent, has faked his death and is in cahoots with Far East drug lord Huan To (Filipino B-movie icon Vic Diaz!), on some convoluted cocaine and diamond smuggling operation. Ransom teams up with hardass tavern owner Rosanna Boom (Mary Stavin) after a complete re-enactment of Karen Allen's beer-drinking contest intro in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Ransom also tangles with a Huan To flunky (Mel Davidson) who's a combination of Paul Freeman's Belloq and Ronald Lacey's Toht in RAIDERS, and there's ninjas and a couple of destructive chases and painfully unfunny banter between Ransom and Rosanna. Mattei finally lets loose with the explosions in the last 15 minutes and it finally starts to look like something that should be called STRIKE COMMANDO 2, especially when Ransom barges into Jenkins' coke lab and starts blasing away, bellowing...you guessed it..."JENNNNKKKKKKIIIIIINNNNS!"
Made when the Italian exploitation heyday was entering the life-support years, STRIKE COMMANDO 2 never got an official US release, neither theatrically nor on VHS or DVD. It's been available on the bootleg and torrent circuit and there's even a 1.66:1 widescreen print on YouTube, but really, other than the morbid curiosity of seeing Richard Harris at his career low playing second fiddle to Vic Diaz, there's little reason to endure the dull STRIKE COMMANDO 2. It's impossible to follow and it's entirely possible that Claudio Fragasso's script was reworked into English on the fly by the actors who could very well have made the story up as they went along. There's a very (bad) improvisational feel to a lot of Huff's and Stavin's scenes together, and with the exception of two dubbed Italian supporting actors (the apparent package deal of Ottaviano Dell'Acqua and Massimo Vanni), all of the dialogue was recorded on-set and real voices used (Stavin, 1977's Miss World, tries to hide her Swedish accent in her earlier scenes, but gives up soon after and by the end, she's pointing a gun and screaming "Late me keel da fackin' base-turd!").
Mattei made STRIKE COMMANDO 2 right after doing producer Franco Gaudenzi a favor and stepping in to finish Lucio Fulci's troubled ZOMBI 3 (1988), which was also shot in Manila around the same time (it might've even been the same trip). Fulci quit ZOMBI 3 early in the production and Mattei completed it without credit. After STRIKE COMMANDO 2, Mattei continued punching a clock and cranking out whatever trendy ripoffs came his way, even delving into post-BASIC INSTINCT erotic thrillers like 1993's DANGEROUS ATTRACTION. The films seemed to decrease in budget and quality with each passing year, with the belated 1995 JAWS ripoff CRUEL JAWS being particularly embarrassing, recycling footage from JAWS, JAWS 2, and even the 1982 JAWS ripoff GREAT WHITE, in addition to having a character say "We're gonna need a bigger helicopter!" Mattei's career hit bottom late in his life with a string of no-budget, shot-on-video horror films that are actually painful to endure and make even CRUEL JAWS look good by comparison. But for pure Mattei magic at its finest, there is no better place to start than the inspired insanity of the immortal STRIKE COMMANDO.
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 Riki Shelach. Written by Bud Schaetzle, Dean Tschetter, Andrew Deutsch, Terry Asbury. Cast: Peter Fonda, Reb Brown, Ron O'Neal, James Mitchum, Robert DoQui, Henry Cele, Joanna Weinberg. (R, 93 mins)
Reckless stuntwork and dubious ethics aside, the barely-released MERCENARY FIGHTERS is an entertaining, explosion-filled exploitationer that has a serious message at its core, but doesn't do the greatest job of conveying it. This was one of Cannon's several late '80s South African-shot films, made during the apartheid era when it was highly frowned-upon to be working there and Cannon repeatedly denied that they had a production facility in Johannesburg. They certainly weren't the only company doing it, but they probably attracted the most attention, and were singled out by the L.A. Times and mentioned in an expose from the long-defunct magazine Premiere in a piece that focused on the troubled South African shoot of the Jack Abramoff-produced Dolph Lundgren actioner RED SCORPION. It was a bad time to be shooting in that region, and while Cannon could attract A-list talent, you can bet none of them were willing to work in South Africa in the late '80s.
MERCENARY FIGHTERS deals with the titular crew, headed by the ruthless, Swisher Sweet-sucking Virelli (Peter Fonda, pretty much on the skids a decade before his ULEE'S GOLD comeback), hired to do the dirty work of wiping out rebels opposed to the building of a dam in the fictional Central African country of Shinkasa. Top military man Kjemba (Robert DoQui, who's actually really good in this) is acting under the genocidal orders of the Shinkasa president, who doesn't want the heinous activity to be traced back to him or his office. Virelli and his team--among them Cliff (Ron O'Neal), Wilson (James Mitchum), and new recruit T.J. Christian (Reb Brown!)--get the job done, but T.J. starts to have second thoughts after witnessing atrocities committed by Kjemba and his men, who are after in-hiding rebel leader Jaunde (SHAKA ZULU's Henry Cele). Tensions mount as T.J., realizing he's been working for the wrong side, wants to do the right thing and stop the mission, while the openly racist Virelli only sees the money. Also complicating matters is T.J.'s falling for an American nurse (Joanna Weinberg)--referred to by the endlessly charming Virelli as "the gash"--doing humanitarian work with the Shinkasa rebels.
Crazy Larry and Crunch Buttsteak are...
MERCENARY FIGHTERS!
The script actually pays lip service to serious issues and director Riki Shelach does a nice job of incorporating local color, but all that gets tossed aside when the Shinkasa rebels have given up all hope and realize that only T.J....yes, Reb Brown...can lead them in their fight. Those issues aside, MERCENARY FIGHTERS is a well-made actioner that's never dull, and with its endless explosions, some surprisingly hair-raising stunt sequences (including a shot of a little girl in the path of a speeding Jeep that's clearly not faked) and Reb Brown yelling, it actually feels more like one of the countless 1980s Philippines-shot Italian junglesploitation works of Antonio Margheriti or Bruno Mattei than a late '80s Cannon production. Not a bad B movie at all, even though I'm sure most involved probably aren't proud of it. I get the feeling that when Fonda's Virelli says "Fuck this. I'm gonna find out if this job's over. I got a house payment to make," it's entirely possible that Fonda was talking to a co-star and didn't know the camera was rolling. Working actors have to work, and iconic but past-their-prime figures like Fonda and O'Neal (a long way from SUPERFLY and with his name misspelled "O'Neil" in the credits) went where the work was. Brown, right on the heels of Bruno Mattei's legendary STRIKE COMMANDO (1987), did a few more D-movies in South Africa, including the MST3K favorite SPACE MUTINY. And yes, MERCENARY FIGHTERS does find an opportunity for Brown to do his signature battle cry.
One of the more obscure films in the Cannon canon, MERCENARY FIGHTERS was recently made available as part of MGM's manufactured-on-demand "Limited Edition Collection" (available via numerous online vendors as well as Warner Archive) in a surprisingly nice-looking 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer.
