Jesse V. Johnson appears to have supplanted Isaac Florentine as the director of choice for Scott Adkins, still the best-kept secret in action movies even after critics finally appeared to discover his existence with 2019's astonishingly feral AVENGEMENT, an instant cult classic that should've opened on 3000 screens. Johnson's been plugging away in the world of DTV for 20 years, but he's found a niche with fellow workhorse Adkins, and DEBT COLLECTORS marks their sixth collaboration since 2017. These two can blow the doors of the joint with stuff like AVENGEMENT and ACCIDENT MAN, but DEBT COLLECTORS, a sequel to 2018's THE DEBT COLLECTOR, suffers from the same issues as its predecessor: it's trying to be a Shane Black movie but Johnson and co-writer Stu Small's script doesn't quite have the chops to compete. After being mentored in the first film in the ways of debt collection for loan sharks by '80s ninja movie washout Sue (Louis Mandylor), French (Adkins) is sucked back into that world when Sue asks him for a favor: he needs backup for a road trip from L.A. to Vegas to collect three vigs for his boss Big Tommy (Vladimir Kulich, also returning). One of those includes getting $155,000 from ruthless club owner and Sue's pegging-enthusiast ex-flame Mal Reese (Marina Sirtis), but as soon as they collect it, they're nearly ambushed by Mal's own crew trying to get the money back. Then they get $95K from gym owner Estaban Madrid (Cuete Yeska), and pay a visit to obnoxious Cyrus Skinner (Vernon Wells), before all hell breaks loose and people start trying to kill them. It seems Big Tommy's operation has been taken over by Molly X (Louie Ski Carr), the vengeful brother of the dead Barbosa Furiosa, French and Sue's double-crossing nemesis from the first film (where he was played by CANDYMAN's Tony Todd), and he's got scores to settle with all of them.
Johnson and Adkins finally unleash the mayhem in the third act, but too much of DEBT COLLECTORS is just endlessly talky, and once again, the repartee between French and Sue just isn't that snappy or witty. If anything, DEBT COLLECTORS is much darker and more serious than the first film, which makes the crazy action, especially a comically long alley French-Sue alley brawl that's a blatant riff on THEY LIVE, seem at odds with the overtures to real drama. Much of the time, this actually feels like more of a Louis Mandylor loan shark drama than a Scott Adkins actioner, with Mandylor really getting some room to work with Sue talking about his dead daughter and stopping at nothing to display his loyalty to the fatherly Big Tommy. A lot of Adkins fans liked THE DEBT COLLECTOR--with some citing it as a Walter Hill homage--but it just didn't click with me, and DEBT COLLECTORS really didn't either. A couple of nicely-delivered zingers land (Brit French trying to talk some rednecks out of a bar fight, only to be dismissed with a "Fuck off, Harry Styles!") and the action definitely takes center stage by the end, but it's hard to get excited about this when there's both better Johnson/Adkins projects and enough real Shane Black movies that we don't really need another middling imitation of one. (Unrated, 97 mins)
ROBERT THE BRUCE (US - 2020)
A long-in-the-works passion project for Angus Macfadyen, ROBERT THE BRUCE is an unofficial spinoff of Mel Gibson's 1995 Oscar-winner BRAVEHEART, which featured Macfadyen as Robert the Bruce, the eventual King of Scots from 1306 to his death in 1329. Set not long after the 1305 execution of William Wallace, ROBERT THE BRUCE's title character has been met with one defeat after another, and goes off on his own as some defectors from his army are opting to hunt him down and turn him in for a handsome reward. He's seriously injured and nearly killed by a trio of traitors led by Will (ALMOST FAMOUS' Patrick Fugit), but he makes his way through the snowbound wilderness and takes refuge in a cave near the cottage of the peasant Macfie family, headed by the widow Morag (THE CABIN IN THE WOODS' Anna Hutchison). Morag's late husband and her brother were killed in battle in Robert the Bruce's army, and now she's raising her young son Scott (Gabriel Bateman) and her brother's teenage children, Carney (Brandon Lessard) and Iver (Talitha Bateman, who played Hutchison's daughter in the Nic Cage thriller VENGEANCE: A LOVE STORY). It isn't long before the family is visited by Brandubh (DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY's Zach McGowan), Morag's husband's younger brother, who's on the hunt for Robert the Bruce while making his designs on his sister-in-law quite clear ("My brother was a lucky man...until death claimed him"). The family finds Robert the Bruce near death in the woods surrounding the cottage and realize it's their duty to nurse their king back to health, even though young Scott initially resents him and blames him for his father's death. Soon, the entire family bands together to protect and fight alongside the king, even if it means turning against one of their own when Brandubh inevitably tracks the Bruce to the Macfie home.
Supporting actors from beloved '90s classics making their own unofficial "sequels" decades later seems to be a thing this year between this and John Turturro's unwatchable BIG LEBOWSKI offshoot THE JESUS ROLLS. While it's easy to think of it as BRAVEHEART II: THE BRUCE ROLLS, ROBERT THE BRUCE isn't the fiasco you'd be inclined to assume it would be. Macfadyen produced and co-wrote the script, and while it obviously suffers from budget constraints, director Richard Gray keeps things polished and professional, with the snowy mountainous terrain of Montana doing a credible job of filling in for Scotland. It looks better than most DTV-level fare of this sort, and Macfadyen's intent is sincere (considering 25 years have passed since BRAVEHEART and he's still playing the same character at roughly that same age, he doesn't appear that much older, and he obviously hit the gym prior to shooting, looking noticeably slimmer than he has in recent years), but other than a journeyman actor finding a way to reprise his best-known role, what's the point? The story presented here is Robert the Bruce fan fiction, and the battles depicted in the 2018 Netflix film OUTLAW KING (with Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce) are only mentioned yadda-yadda-style in onscreen text before the closing credits, obviously since ROBERT THE BRUCE doesn't have the money to convincingly stage epic battle sequences. For the first hour, Macfadyen almost appears to be on Bruce Willis detail, offscreen for long stretches and periodically dropping in on his own movie to mostly lie in a cave grimacing in pain while we get caught up on the backstory of Morag's family. He almost seems to be erring on the side of caution to avoid the pitfalls of a vanity project--there's a big, rousing speech at the end, and Robert the Bruce isn't even the one delivering it. ROBERT THE BRUCE is far too long at just over two hours, Jared Harris is wasted in a brief cameo as John Comyn, and when MAGNOLIA's Melora Walters shows up as Morag's witch mother, apparently on furlough from a lost Shakespeare play, things get precariously close to IN THE NAME OF THE KING-era Uwe Boll territory. ROBERT THE BRUCE was scheduled for a one-night-only Fathom Events screening at theaters nationwide in April 2020 before that plan was nixed by the coronavirus, resulting in the straight-to-VOD premiere that was its destiny from the very start. All things considered, it's not bad, but perhaps this whole thing should be shut down before Jaimz Woolvett gets any bright ideas about UNFORGIVEN II: THE SCHOFIELD KID. (Unrated, 123 mins)
AGONY (Italy/US - 2020)
Completed in 2017 and likely shelved in the wake of star Asia Argento's #MeToo scandal involving sexual assault allegations by her HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS co-star Jimmy Bennett, AGONY (originally titled THE EXECUTRIX) looks a lot like a throwback Italian horror film but never quite gets its act together. At least, not in its current version. There's very little information on this thing, and the film logging site Letterboxd didn't even have it listed until two days ago (under the EXECUTRIX title), and as of this writing, I'm the only Letterboxd user who's actually seen it, but it apparently had a running time of 115 minutes at one point. AGONY, on the other hand, starts rolling its closing credits at 75 minutes, and after the director credit for Argento's ex-husband Michele Civetta (they divorced in 2013, but remained professional collaborators), there's an "additional directing" credit for screenwriter Joseph Schuman that's in a different font than the rest. Three additional cinematographers buried in the credits is another sign of a troubled production, but even without seeing that kind of evidence, whole chunks of AGONY seem to be missing in terms of character consistency, motivations, and basic continuity. There's a foundation for an interesting idea here about the dynamics of abuse and how they're sometimes unwittingly handed down from generation to generation, but it gets drowned out by one tired horror cliche after another, culminating in a final reveal that's an infuriating resurrection of the oldest cop-out ending in movies.
It's too bad, because you can see Argento is really throwing herself into this. She stars as Isidora, a New York artist married to Michael (Jonathan Caouette) and with a young daughter, Jordan (Claudia Salerno, who's been unconvincingly dubbed over). Isidora's life is turned upside down when she's notified that her mother has died and left her the executrix of the family estate in a remote area of Tuscany. That's news to Isidora, who's been under the impression that her mother died 30 years ago when her gallery owner father Arthur (Rade Serbedzija) brought her to NYC. It turns out Isidora's mother was insane and tried to kill her, and she was so young at the time that her father thought it best to just get her far away, start over, and hope the memory faded. Off the family goes to Tuscany, where things are weird right from the start, and it's clear that everyone--including prim, proper caretaker Angelica (a nice Alida Valli-esque turn by Monica Guerritore) and affable handyman Rudolfo (long-ago Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli)--is hiding something, and that's even before aristocratic local Carlo (Franco Nero, looking like a rock star with a ponytail and an earring) starts dropping clunky exposition about the area being a haven for heretics and her mother being a witch. There's a good buildup here, and Civetta (or Schuman) tries to go for some Dario Argento colorgasms but it just comes off as cheap, garish, and overly affected, and the crazier Isidora becomes, the more they start piling on disorienting Dutch angles like a Hal Hartley wet dream. There are some good things in AGONY--Argento's increasingly anguished performance is pretty harrowing by the end, the look of the estate, which screams "decaying Visconti," and Davoli's ever-beaming grin, so vital to his Chaplin-esque comic performances for Pasolini, is used in a subversively sinister way here--but it's a structural and tonal disaster. Caouette, a documentary filmmaker (ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES) who acts infrequently, has no chemistry with Argento, young Salerno's revoicing is distractingly bad in a "Bob in THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY" way, and the final shot just destroys any good will AGONY might've been accruing in its favor. And who thought it was a good idea to cast Rade Serbedzija as a guy named "Arthur?" (Unrated, 82 mins)
IN SEARCH OF DRACULA (West Germany/France - 1975) Directed by Calvin Floyd. Written by Yvonne Floyd. Cast: Christopher Lee. (PG, 82 mins) Look, we all love the late, great Sir Christopher Lee and miss him dearly as we near the fifth anniversary of his passing, but having said that, it might've behooved him to perhaps turn down an offer every once in a while. For all his contributions to cinema and the number of classic films in which he appeared over a career spanning eight decades, I can't think of a beloved, respected actor who's also been in more terrible movies than Christopher Lee. In a worst-case example, had he been more discriminate in some of his choices, he might not have ended up in something called MEATCLEAVER MASSACRE in 1977. Granted, he didn't intentionally star in a movie with that title, but that's what happened when he agreed to shoot a five-minute onscreen introduction for an occult documentary that never came to be, prompting its producers to sell their footage of him to whatever buyers they could find who somehow possessed even less scruples. Who bought it? The makers of MEATCLEAVER MASSACRE, "starring Christopher Lee." In 1970, he agreed to play the small role of Dolmance, the master of ceremonies at a sinister Marquis de Sade club in a Jess Franco project that was based on de Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir. By the time the film was released, it was called EUGENIE...THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION and had an X rating in the US, with Lee claiming that after he finished his scenes and moved on, Franco inserted some lewd footage that made it appear that the actor was right there overseeing and leering at all sorts of disrobings and orgies. An outraged Lee felt so thoroughly betrayed by the duplicitous, unethical chicanery of Franco and producer Harry Alan Towers that he continued to work with both of them multiple times over the next 25 years.
Of course, Lee was most famous for playing Dracula in a series of Hammer productions from 1958 to 1973, plus once in 1970 for (checks notes) Jess Franco and Harry Alan Towers. After actually refusing to play Dracula in Hammer's quite entertaining 1974 horror/kung-fu mash-up THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES, Lee was so fed up with being associated with the role and so desperate to establish himself beyond the horror genre and Dracula in particular that he agreed to...host IN SEARCH OF DRACULA, a documentary about the legacy of the character and its supposed foundation in reality. Directed by Swedish filmmaker Calvin Floyd, the German/French co-production was intended to be a project for TV but was picked up for US theatrical distribution by Independent-International, the drive-in and grindhouse outfit run by schlockmeisters Sam Sherman and Al Adamson. Speculative documentaries were a strangely popular phenomenon during this period, the craze dating back to the Italian "Mondo" films of the 1960s but getting a major second wind when the 1970 German film CHARIOTS OF THE GODS? became a huge box-office hit when it opened in the US in 1974. Over the next few years, these kinds of docs were popping up in mainstream theaters all over America, often from, but not limited to, the Park City, UT-based Sunn Classic Pictures, with titles like BEYOND AND BACK, IN SEARCH OF NOAH'S ARK, THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE, MYSTERIES FROM BEYOND EARTH, THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH, THE MAN WHO SAW TOMORROW, and any number of Bigfoot documentaries. With IN SEARCH OF DRACULA, just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), Sherman obviously saw a way to cash in on the speculative docudrama fad and even had a huge name like Lee to help sell it. Of course, it somehow played in theaters all over America and people actually paid money to see it.
What is IN SEARCH OF DRACULA? It's based on the best-selling 1972 book by Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, which purported that the legend of Dracula was rooted in historical fact, specifically on 15th century tyrant Vlad III, aka Vlad Tepes, aka "Vlad the Impaler," the three-time "Voivode" of Wallachia, a principality of Romania. He had a reputation for extraordinary cruelty and brutality, impaling his enemies both real and assumed on wooden spikes in acts that today would constitute genocide. Vlad descended from the Dracul line, the second son of his predecessor Vlad Dracul, aka "Vlad the Dragon." This is all fascinating info, and the book generated enough interest and publicity upon its release that Florescu and McNally made the rounds on all the talk shows, sitting down with the likes of Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas, and Dick Cavett. The book--and its theory that Stoker based Dracula on Vlad the Impaler--has been largely debunked over the ensuing decades. When writing his novel Dracula, Bram Stoker didn't set out to necessarily make a literary correlation between Vlad the Impaler and Count Dracula--he merely co-opted the name, presumably because he liked the sound of it, and in his early stages of writing, the character was named "Count Wampyr."
Lee addresses much of this stuff--sans the subsequent debunking--in his role as narrator and host, with eerie accompaniment by a certain Bela Bartok composition that will sound familiar to fans of THE SHINING, but Floyd bounces all over the place with no clear hypothesis. Lee's distinctive voice makes him a great choice to narrate, but good luck following him as Floyd has him drift to Transylvanian customs and folklore; the atrocities of Elizabeth Bathory; a Romanian dance ritual to exorcise vampirism; some scientific info on bats, with black-and-white footage of a bat and a guinea pig; scenes of Lee from 1970's SCARS OF DRACULA; Lee in newly-shot footage as Dracula staring at and eventually biting a servant girl; a sequence where a guy does a re-enactment of a 1964 case study of an American named "Bill," who displayed signs of vampirism; Lee wandering around a courtyard dressed in a ridiculous Vlad the Impaler costume looking like a confused Rick Wakeman roadie; footage of silent movie "vamp" Theda Bara; some mention of the serial killer "The Vampire of Dusseldorf" accompanied by stills of Peter Lorre from Fritz Lang's 1931 classic M, which the case inspired; shots from Carl Dreyer's VAMPYR; and, for some reason, an entire section devoted to Mary Shelley's creation of her novel Frankenstein, complete with footage from Al Adamson's DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN, as inaccurate a representation of Mary Shelley as it is an example of competent filmmaking. By the end, after showing several uninterrupted minutes of F.W. Murnau's 1922 film NOSFERATU and having Lee talk about Bela Lugosi and show a long sequence of the future Dracula legend in the 1925 silent THE MIDNIGHT GIRL, where he's not a vampire but a sinister suitor to the heroine, it's obvious that Floyd is just pulling public domain footage out of his ass to run out the clock.
Some of this is clearly superfluous padding to get a TV documentary to feature length (certainly the case with the inclusion of the DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN footage, obviously provided by Sherman), but through the lens of present-day moviegoing, it seems absolutely unfathomable that audiences would pay to see this shit in the summer of 1975. Did it just benefit from JAWS spillover? "Oh, JAWS is sold out? Well, we're already out...what about this new Dracula movie with Christopher Lee?" Floyd would be further linked with both Independent-International (he co-produced Al Adamson's 1976 blaxploitation actioner BLACK HEAT for them) and the Frankenstein legend when Sherman released his 1977 film TERROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, aka VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN, a Swedish adaptation that suffers from budget-deprivation and is frankly boring as hell, but might be actually be the most faithful cinematic interpretation of Shelley's novel. It's also of interest for the presence of Leon Vitali as Dr. Frankenstein, just before he abandoned his acting career to become Stanley Kubrick's devoted personal assistant. Vitali became close friends with Kubrick while co-starring in 1975's BARRY LYNDON and had already made the decision to quit acting once he was finished with TERROR OF FRANKENSTEIN. He even asked Floyd if he could shadow him through the post-production process, just to get practice time in to prep for his duties under Kubrick.
MEAN MOTHER (US - 1973) Directed by Albert Victor (Al Adamson) and Leon Klimovsky. Written by Charles Johnson and Joy Garrison. Cast: Clifton Brown (Dobie Gray), Dennis Safren, Luciana Paluzzi, Lang Jeffries, Tracy King (Marilyn Joi), Bedi Moratti, Albert Cole, Al Richardson, Elizabeth Chauvet, Dick Poston, Irv Saunders, Barta Barri. (R, 87 mins) Throughout his prolific career in Z-grade schlock, Al Adamson was no stranger to stitching together pieces of his various finished or unfinished projects with newly-shot scenes to to create completely different movies. He managed to get two more films out of copious amounts of stock footage from 1965's PSYCHO A GO GO (1967's THE FIEND WITH THE ELECTRONIC BRAIN and 1972's BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR). He turned his unreleased 1968 spy movie THE FAKERS into the 1970 biker flick HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS, and transformed the biker-turned-mad doctor horror flick THE BLOOD SEEKERS, uncompleted and abandoned in 1969, into 1971's DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN by adding Dracula and Frankenstein. In the case of 1970's HORROR OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS, where astronauts visit a prehistoric planet to stop a vampirism epidemic on Earth (?!), he used tinted footage from a black-and-white Filipino caveman movie as well as dinosaur shots from 1940's ONE MILLION B.C. Adamson's Independent-International partner Sam Sherman acquired a 1971 Spanish/Italian thriller called RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, directed by Spanish journeyman and frequent Paul Naschy collaborator Leon Klimovsky (DR. JEKYLL VS. THE WEREWOLF, VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES). The story dealt with an American Vietnam War deserter (Dennis Safren) making his way to Rome and getting involved in jewelry smuggling and a kidnapping plot, but upon further review, Sherman didn't see much potential for it being a success at drive-ins and on the grindhouse circuit.
Original 1971 Spanish poster
for RUN FOR YOUR LIFE
His solution? Have Adamson cut about 45 minutes out of it, add new scenes and create an entirely new plot to turn it into a blaxploitation movie, with HAMMER and SLAUGHTER'S BIG RIP-OFF screenwriter Charles Johnson helping concoct the new story. They also brought back Safren--a Sal Mineo clone whose short career other than RUN FOR YOUR LIFE was limited to three TV guest spots before vanishing into obscurity--to shoot some new scenes to tie into the old RUN FOR YOUR LIFE footage, though his hair is very noticeably longer and more shaggy in these new scenes. The new movie became 1973's MEAN MOTHER, a haphazardly-assembled hodgepodge that's nonsensical even by Al Adamson standards. The star of these new scenes that make up MEAN MOTHER is R&B singer Dobie Gray in his only acting role. Gray was already known for his 1964 hit "The 'In' Crowd," and he was still enjoying the biggest chart success of his career with his 1973 radio staple "Drift Away." He's credited as "Clifton Brown" in MEAN MOTHER, ostensibly because he wanted to keep his music and acting careers separate. Translation: Gray didn't want fans of "Drift Away" going to see MEAN MOTHER. Adamson did likewise, using the pseudonym "Albert Victor" (his first and middle names) and sharing directing credit with Klimovsky.
It opens with a hilariously inept fight sequence that doesn't really have anything to do with anything that follows, with Beauregard Jones (Gray) beating the shit out of some guys on an L.A. rooftop. Cut to RUN FOR YOUR LIFE footage, with Joe Scott (Safren) in Vietnam, getting into an argument with his lieutenant and being placed under arrest. He's being transported to base when enemy soldiers attack. He kills the enemy soldiers and is the only survivor. With his hair suddenly much longer, Joe is rescued by fellow deserter Beauregard, who announces his intention to go to Spain, advises Joe to flee to Italy, and off they go into their separate movies. In old footage, Joe meets mystery man Daniel (Lang Jeffries), who gets him into the smuggling game and introduces him to cocktail waitress Therese (Luciana Paluzzi), who agrees to help him find an apartment the next day. Meanwhile, in Spain (played mostly by a Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles), an on-the-run Beauregard is discovered by some American criminals and gets into a brawl that's so unconvincingly executed that an extra sitting in a booth can be clearly seen laughing hysterically at Gray and the other actors (Gray may have been a terrific singer, but he's absolutely awful in these action scenes). The next time we see Joe in old footage, Therese is yelling at him about how he won't marry her and he fires back with "We've been through all this before!" Wait, didn't they just meet? Meanwhile, Beauregard is one step ahead of the syndicate, smuggling plates through Europe with his girlfriend Joy (Marilyn Joi, billed as "Tracy King") and eventually ending up in Rome, where he and Joe briefly reunite (Safren with shaggy hair), and just like wherever Beauregard was in Spain, Rome still looks a lot like the Hollywood Hills (the ruse isn't helped by Adamson failing to conceal the California license plates on the cars). Joe (Saffren with short hair) ends up trying to rescue a woman (Bedi Moratti) from some big event that has something to do with Daniel, and Beauregard and Joy try to elude syndicate guys who show up in Rome.
With scenes from RUN FOR YOUR LIFE seemingly edited in at random, MEAN MOTHER is a mind-bogglingly incoherent experience. Whole chunks of story from RUN FOR YOUR LIFE have been hacked away willy-nilly with zero thought given as to how what's left can work into the plot of MEAN MOTHER. Gray and Safren only have two actual scenes together--in "Vietnam" and in "Rome"--before Safren returns to his previous movie, already in progress. Adamson has so little interest in what's going on with Joe's side of the story that Safren eventually vanishes from MEAN MOTHER altogether, with Gray's Beauregard explaining him away with a shrugging "He gave himself up!" Even without knowing the backstory or if they somehow don't pick up on Safren's hair continuity, anyone watching MEAN MOTHER can immediately tell it's comprised of two separate movies just from the different look of the film stock on RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, and its Eurolounge score and post-synced dialogue juxtaposed with the more American look and live sound of the Gray footage, with is augmented with a standard funky blaxploitation soundtrack. MEAN MOTHER makes 87 minutes feel like an eternity, and even then, Adamson had to pad his end of the movie with nearly ten minutes of Joi seducing some syndicate doofus charged with babysitting her while the others track down Beauregard. "Drift Away" is a song everybody knows, but there's little wonder why Gray's acting career began and ended here, and Safren never acted onscreen again. He's awful in both shoots (he, Paluzzi, and Canadian actor Jeffries appear to be dubbing themselves in the RUN FOR YOUR LIFE scenes), and has this strange affect where he leans way too hard into the enunciation of his "T"s, leading to robotic line readings like "It doesn't maT-Ter," and "I've got thirT-Tee thousand." Best known as the lethal Fiona Volpe in 1965's THUNDERBALL, former Bond girl Paluzzi was lovely in every movie she ever made, but I'm willing to bet that to this day, 42 years retired from acting, she still has no idea she's in an Al Adamson blaxploitation movie called MEAN MOTHER.
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (US - 1977) No director credited (Geza von Radvanyi, Al Adamson). No writer credited (Fred Denger, Geza von Radvanyi, Al Adamson). Cast: John Kitzmiller, Herbert Lom, Olive Moorefield, Mary Ann Jenson, Prentiss Moulden, Erwin Fuller, Jean Clark, Biff Yeager, J.C. Welles, Chuck Welles, Vincent Isaac, Marilyn Joi, O.W. Fischer, Gertraud Mittermayr, Catana Cayetano, Charles Fawcett, Vilma Degischer, Thomas Fritsch, Bibi Jelinek, Harold Bradley, Aziz Saad, George Goodman. (R, 98 mins) Speaking of Bond actors utterly oblivious to their presence in an Al Adamson movie, John Kitzmiller probably would've been shocked to find himself starring in the director's 1977 version of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, especially since he died in 1965. Best known as Quarrel, the islander who helps 007 get to Crab Key in 1962's DR. NO, Kitzmiller was born in Battle Creek, MI in 1913 and joined the US Army after graduating with a chemical engineering degree from the University of Michigan. He was stationed in Italy during WWII and just stayed there when the war ended. He fell into acting after a chance encounter with a young Carlo Ponti, which led to him becoming a regular presence in postwar Italian neo-realist films, including one of the lead roles in Federico Fellini's 1950 directing debut VARIETY LIGHTS. He worked all over Europe, even winning the Best Actor award at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival for the Yugoslavian war drama VALLEY OF PEACE. It didn't lead to bigger and better roles--being a black actor in Europe, Kitzmiller found his options were limited, so he usually ended up playing a variety of soldiers, servants, or jazz musicians, and as time went on, he fell into depression and alcoholism. But in 1964, he landed the starring role in UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, a prestigious, three-hour West German/French/Italian/Yugoslavian adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's legendary 1852 novel. As Uncle Tom, Kitzmiller headed an international cast that included Herbert Lom as Simon Legree, German-based American singer Olive Moorefield as Cassy, and other respected European actors like O.W. Fischer, Mylene Demongeot, Eleonora Rossi Drago, Charles Fawcett, and Juliette Greco. It was directed by Hungarian filmmaker Geza von Radvanyi, best known for the 1958 version of MADCHEN IN UNIFORM. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN won acclaim in Europe when it premiered in West Germany in April 1965, but it still didn't provide a career bump for Kitzmiller: the actor died two months before the film's release, succumbing to cirrhosis of the liver at just 51.
Poster for the 1965 German version
The German-language UNCLE TOM'S CABIN was a tough sell in the US, where it wouldn't appear until 1969, when distributor/showman Kroger Babb released a version cut by nearly an hour and dubbed in English (Lom's voice isn't heard in the shorter US cut, though he is speaking German in the original version). It wasn't a hit, but Babb kept it in circulation, even re-releasing it in 1975 as CASSY. In 1976, a financially-strapped Babb sold his 1969 re-edit of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN to Adamson and Sam Sherman's Independent-International and, as usual, Sherman had a brilliant idea: relaunch the film to capitalize on the phenomenal success of the TV miniseries ROOTS, and to make it even more marketable, have Adamson spice it up with some salacious sex and violence to pull in the MANDINGO and DRUM crowd. Adamson cut about 40 minutes out of the already-shortened 1969 re-edit, and added a new subplot about a Legree slave named Napoleon. In the original 1965 film, Napoleon (Aziz Saad) escapes by jumping off a steamship and swimming away but is killed by an alligator. In Adamson's version, Napoleon manages to make it to land, where he's suddenly played by a different actor (Prentiss Moulden) and finds refuge at a nearly abandoned plantation where young spinster Melissa (Mary Ann Jenson) is all by her lonesome and very horny. Of course, she seduces Napoleon, allowing Adamson to give us a couple of prolonged, grinding sex scenes. Fearing his presence would put Melissa in jeopardy, Napoleon leaves her but is caught by three Legree goons (among them Adamson regular Biff Yeager), who proceed to strip him, gang-rape him (why not rip off DELIVERANCE while we're at it?), tie him to a tree, and pour boiling tar all over him until he dies.
Adamson cuts back to the 1965 scenes, but the story has been so chopped up, so many actors have been cut entirely (Rossi Drago, Demongeot, and Greco are nowhere to be seen in Adamson's version), and so many characters and relationships obliterated by hacking away entire sequences at random that there's no narrative to speak of whatsoever. But really, that's not why Sherman had Adamson restructure von Radvanyi's film anyway. Adamson semi-regular and MEAN MOTHER addition Marilyn Joi (best known as Cleopatra Schwartz in KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE) is on-hand at the beginning as a slave's daughter who tries to run away and gets raped by one of Legree's men, who taunts her father with "Hey, boy! I'm gonna fuck your daughter!" Those same three Legree guys in the new footage also fear contracting a venereal disease from raping Napoleon, but one quips "Can't be any worse than what we got from that sheep!," a line that one can only assume was in Beecher Stowe's first rough draft. They also wind up castrated by the first rape victim's father and two other slaves as the movie comes to an abrupt end, completely abandoning the characters who are actually in UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. Adamson's new footage is trashy and tasteless, and the Napoleon/Melissa sex scenes are barely above stag-quality in production value and execution. Also, having none of the technical crew credited (no director, no writers, etc), along with the use of "Albert Victor" on MEAN MOTHER really begs the question "How utterly disreputable must a movie be for Al Fucking Adamson to leave his name off of it?"
John Kitzmiller (1913-1965)
The added skin doesn't quite gel with the rest of the film which, despite the sloppy dubbing overseen by Babb, is clearly a prestige project that had some money and effort put into it. The 1977 composite released by Independent-International, included in Severin's epic 14-disc, 32-film Adamson box set on the same disc as the aforementioned MEAN MOTHER (because physical media is dead), actually played in theaters and at drive-ins across America (and they re-released this cut again in 1979 under the unlikely title WHITE TRASH WOMAN), so it's possible Herbert Lom, then enjoying a bit of a career upswing thanks to his exemplary work as twitchy Inspector Clouseau foil Dreyfus in the rebooted PINK PANTHER franchise, knew he somehow ended up in a crummy Al Adamson movie. Poor John Kitzmiller definitely did not, and he never would've imagined starring in a sleazy, grindhouse T&A revamp of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN 12 years after his death, let alone WHITE TRASH WOMAN two years after that.
Al Adamson's revamp of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
opening in Toledo, OH on 3/11/1977
THE VAST OF NIGHT (US - 2020) Directed by Andrew Patterson. Written by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger. Cast: Sierra McCormick, Jake Horowitz, Bruce Davis, Gail Cronauer, Cheyenne Barton, Mark Banik, Gregory Peyton, Adam Dietrich, Mallorie Rodak. (PG-13, 91 mins) A micro-budgeted Little Movie That Could out of Texas, THE VAST OF NIGHT was shot way back in 2016, with debuting director Andrew Patterson seeing it get rejected for submission by one indie film festival after another. The Slamdance Film Festival finally bit and included it on their 2019 roster and the buzz grew from there. It was picked up by Amazon, who released it to some drive-ins in mid-May, two weeks before its streaming debut. With cinemas closed and new movies at a minimum due to the coronavirus pandemic, THE VAST OF NIGHT is certainly benefiting from a bad situation and likely would've been lost in the shuffle under normal circumstances. It's not quite the genre Insta-Classic of the Week, but it is an affectionate love letter to THE TWILIGHT ZONE from the start, with its very set-up introducing it--accompanied by a Rod Serling-like voiceover--as an episode of a faux TV series called PARADOX THEATER. It's a throwback '70s style sci-fi/paranoia thriller set in the '50s and with the investigative mindset and low-key feel of a podcast, refreshingly done completely straightforward and without any kitsch, irony, affect, or self-conscious awareness that it's an homage.
With shades of THE X FILES and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, as well as Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds radio broadcast and even PONTYPOOL, THE VAST OF NIGHT takes place largely in real time with only a minimum of clock-related implausibilities (there is one bit where a lot seems to happen in ten minutes) in the fictional small town of Cayuga, New Mexico. References to Sputnik still being a topic of conversation set it in the vicinity of late 1957 to early 1958, and the entire town is at the high school basketball game except for a few babysitters and people stuck at their jobs. People like 16-year-old science nerd Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick of VFW), who platonically hangs around with fast-talking, chain-smoking WOTW night DJ Everett "The Maverick" Sloan (Jake Horowitz). Fay is working the night shift at the Cayuga switchboard and keeps hearing strange sounds on numerous calls that keep being cut off, or there's no one being on the other line, just a bizarre radio frequency. She's listening to Everett's radio show, which keeps getting interference. A woman calls into the switchboard and says there's a "large object" hovering over property, high above the trees. Everett plays the sound over the radio and asks if anyone who recognizes it could identify it and call in to the show.
It isn't long before he gets a call from Billy (voice of Bruce Davis), a terminally ill, African-American war vet who recognizes the sound from various covert military operations during and after the war. He describes the sounds and how he's "seen things" during his years in the service and that the military would exclusively put black and Latino soldiers on these secret assignments, transporting large objects under cover of night because no one (meaning, white folks) would ever believe them if they talked about it (and like Billy, they were viewed as expendable, and frequently exposed to radiation that's been slowly killing them). The more they listen and the more they investigate--with some key info provided by elderly shut-in Mabel Blanche (Gail Cronauer, delivering a captivating, heartbreaking monologue) with a traumatic secret--the deeper Fay and Everett find themselves in a mystery that's seemingly targeting Cayuga for specific reasons.
Patterson and screenwriters James Montague and Craig W. Sanger take a very minimalist approach with THE VAST OF NIGHT. Indeed, the storyline doesn't really bring anything new to the table for this sort of thing, but there's an admirable discipline to Patterson's technique and a respect for both the genre and its audience. It manages to create captivating sequences with Patterson's love of both long tracking shots (one of them is particularly tricky) and stationary ones, such as the mesmerizing, ten-minute unbroken take with the camera planted on McCormick as she maneuvers her way through switchboard calls and slowly pieces together that something very strange is happening in the sky over Cayuga. The film nails the atmosphere of a small 1950s podunk town, with everyone knowing everyone else and various secondary characters with names like Ethel, Gertie, and Bertsie. The two leads make a likable buddy team, with Patterson unafraid to give them reams of rapid-fire dialogue that both establish their friendship and their short-hand conversation with one another (plus it's hard not to be amused by Fay talking about science journal articles predicting "a car radio with a screen that gives you driving directions" by 1974, or palm-sized "tiny TV telephones with screens on them!" by 2000. There's things you can nitpick (it does seem unlikely, given the story she tells, that the incident Mabel describes from decades ago wouldn't be an urban legend in Cayuga, and that Everett would have no idea who she is even though she lives two blocks from the radio station), but THE VAST OF NIGHT otherwise plays fair, doesn't back itself into corners forcing itself to bullshit its way out, and it's got a hauntingly effective final shot. It's a little too soon to declare it the second coming of PRIMER, but it is an impressive lo-fi debut of a young filmmaker already demonstrating remarkable confidence and discipline, with the period setting and finding areas of Texas that haven't changed all that much in 60 years (probably not as difficult as it sounds), the fashions, and the pristine condition of the vintage switchboard, radio, and analog equipment. How many antique malls, museums, and private collectors did the filmmakers consult and visit to get the things they needed?
FIST OF FEAR, TOUCH OF DEATH (US - 1980) Directed by Matthew Mallinson. Written by Ron Harvey. Cast: Bruce Lee, Fred Williamson, Ron Van Clief, Adolph Caesar, Aaron Banks, Bill Louie, Teruyuki Higa, Richard Barathy, Gail Turner, Hollywood Browde, Louis Neglia, Cydra Karlyn, Annette Bronson, John "Cyclone" Flood, Ron Harvey. (R, 86 mins) When he died suddenly in 1973 at just 32, Bruce Lee was already a renowned figure in martial arts and his legacy would be cemented when ENTER THE DRAGON hit theaters a month later. The official cause was deemed cerebral edema but Lee's death was instantly shrouded in mystery and intrigue with conspiracy theories continuing to this day, with a bonus "family curse" added to the mix when his 28-year-old son Brandon was killed in a tragic on-set accident with a prop gun while filming THE CROW in 1993. In the years following Lee's death, the cash-ins and ripoffs--the "Bruceploitation" craze--never stopped, the best-known being GAME OF DEATH, the film Lee was working on at the time of his passing. He had the climactic fight scenes (including one with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) done in 1973 but ENTER THE DRAGON director Robert Clouse ended up creating a new plot around the existing Lee footage, using outtakes from past Lee movies and two unconvincing doubles (and, in one incredible shot that somehow didn't end the careers of everyone who thought it would work: a cardboard cutout of Lee's head attached to a mirror so it looks like it's his reflection). GAME OF DEATH hit theaters in 1979 and despite its dubious nature (and perhaps because the fight scenes Lee completed were among the best he'd ever done), it satisfied a public that still wanted all the Bruce Lee it could get, even if wasn't him. That demand was further satiated by tons of kung-fu movies featuring rechristened actors with names like Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lea, Dragon Lee, Bronson Lee, and the unlikely Myron Bruce Lee, among several others. These guys starred in films like ENTER THE GAME OF DEATH, NEW FIST OF FURY, FIST OF FURY II, GAME OF DEATH II, THE CLONES OF BRUCE LEE, and EXIT THE DRAGON, ENTER THE TIGER just to name a few.
Legendary 42nd Street grindhouse god Terry Levene and his Aquarius Releasing were no strangers to scrounging in the exploitation gutter to make a quick buck, like driving a "Butchermobile" around NYC in 1982 to promote DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D., or releasing the same movie multiple times under different titles, so it was inevitable that they got a piece of the Bruceploitation action. Aquarius had titles like GOODBYE, BRUCE LEE: HIS LAST GAME OF DEATH and BRUCE LEE FIGHTS BACK FROM THE GRAVE in regular rotation in Times Square and on America's drive-in circuit, but 1980 saw their most shameless Bruceploitation con job yet with FIST OF FEAR, TOUCH OF DEATH, which has just been released by The Film Detective in a surprisingly nice 40th anniversary Blu-ray edition (!) with a top-notch transfer (!!), bonus features (!!!) and liner notes (!!!!), because physical media is dead (?).
It's hard to believe FIST OF FEAR, TOUCH OF DEATH actually played in theaters across America, but gullible Lee fans were so hungry for more of their hero that they'd plunk down their hard-earned cash to see any new stuff they could, no matter how many times they'd get hosed and leave pissed-off. Driven by sheer chutzpah, Levene decided to assemble a "new" Bruce Lee movie out of some footage from a black-and-white 1957 Hong Kong drama he acquired called THUNDERSTORM, which featured a 17-year-old Lee among the supporting cast. Aquarius staffer Ron Harvey found the two-decade-old film by accident while doing an inventory of titles in Levene's library. Harvey was then charged with constructing a story around the THUNDERSTORM footage, and what he and director Matthew Mallinson came up with can only be termed a "movie" in the loosest sense. It's set up as a TV documentary hosted by then-busy grindhouse trailer narrator Adolph Caesar, who would get a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination four years later for A SOLDIER'S STORY and co-star as Old Mister in Steven Spielberg's THE COLOR PURPLE a year after that. Caesar is covering the 1979 World Karate Championship at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden and interviewing various talking heads about the legend of Bruce Lee. That includes event organizer Aaron Banks, taking on the role of conspiracy theorist and insisting that Lee's death was caused by "The Touch of Death" as punishment for revealing too many of the secrets of Chinese martial arts. Banks then proceeds to reveal more secrets of Chinese martial arts by detailing a move called "The Vibrating Palm," which can be laid upon someone in a certain way and lead to death in three to four weeks.
Caesar jabbers endlessly about this tournament being the deciding factor as to who will be the successor to Lee's legacy. Among those interviewed are actor and ex-football star Fred Williamson, who's introduced in a comedy sketch where he gets a late wake-up call and is exhausted and spent from satisfying his woman (Hollywood Browde) all night long (she begs for more, and Fred replies "Five times ain't enough?"). A running gag has everyone mistaking Fred for Harry Belafonte, including a would-be tough guy named Jasper Milktoast (played by Harvey) who tries to start shit with Fred by stealing his cab. Fred ends up catching a ride to the Garden with Caesar, who talks incessantly about Lee's TBD successor while Mallinson provides us with some vintage shots of 1979 Times Square, with movies like 10, HALLOWEEN, STARTING OVER, ANIMAL HOUSE, and APOCALYPSE NOW on theater marquees. Caesar also talks to full contact karate champ Ron Van Clief, who's shown doing his workout routine before agreeing with Banks and emphatically declaring that there's no way Lee could've died from natural causes. Dr. Van Clief is then shown beating the shit out of some creeps hassling an attractive women in the park. "How can I ever repay you?" the woman coos to a beaming Van Clief, as a presumably leering Caesar coyly quips via voiceover, "I'm sure Ron has some ideas of his own." Canceled.
Then comes what Caesar calls "The Halftime Show," where he delves into Lee's past and what made him the martial arts legend he became. Cut to over 30 minutes of footage from THUNDERSTORM, which has been dubbed over with ridiculous American voices to become a story of a teenage Bruce Lee being pressured by his family to pay attention to his studies when all he wants to do is keep practicing karate and get tickets to "the karate show." The black-and-white THUNDERSTORM footage is periodically interrupted by another detour into completely different stock footage, as Lee's mother tells him about the legend of his kung-fu warrior great-grandfather, which plays out in scenes taken from 1971's in-color and Bruce Lee-less INVINCIBLE SUPER CHAN, another import that Levene forgot he owned and would eventually release on its own in 1983 as FORCED TO FIGHT. Of course, it didn't matter to anyone that INVINCIBLE SUPER CHAN was about a samurai warrior and not a kung-fu fighter, but hey, whatever helps pad the running time by 30-plus minutes. And the THUNDERSTORM footage is the sketchiest way possible at Levene's disposal to justify giving Bruce Lee top billing in a movie being hastily assembled to take advantage of his name seven years after his death.
There's another haphazardly-stitched together scene of Lee having a conversation with Banks (of course, never in the shot together at the same time, and the scene is tinted to make it all match), and the Lee side of it is just badly-dubbed stock footage from either an old interview or a TV show (possibly taken from his recurring role on the short-lived 1971 ABC series LONGSTREET, which starred James Franciscus as a blind insurance investigator), followed by Mallinson cutting to World Karate Championship contender Bill Louie (seen earlier in a hilarious staged shot yanking out an opponent's eyes and tossing them into the crowd) going after some muggers in Central Park while dressed as Lee's Kato from THE GREEN HORNET. Caesar continues to ask anyone within earshot about who will carry on the legacy of Bruce Lee, including a ringside sitdown with a seemingly irritable Williamson, followed by a desperate crawl to the feature-length threshold by showing the final two rounds of the World Welterweight Full Contact championship bout between Louie Neglia and John "Cyclone" Flood. Neglia wins but Caesar, who's spent the entire movie pestering everyone with the same inane questions about who will inherit Bruce Lee's crown, decides it doesn't matter. On the subject of handing off Lee's legacy, he asks "Why should we?" and concludes that Lee is irreplaceable, which is interesting since no one was even talking about it in the first place except Adolph Caesar.
Can you imagine paying to see this in 1980? What is this movie? Is it even a movie? It's part documentary, part mockumentary, part sketch comedy, part sporting event coverage, part proto-JACKASS, and it was all sold as a new martial arts epic teaming Bruce Lee, Fred Williamson, and Ron Van Clief ("The 3 Greatest Masters!"). The Blu-ray features interviews with all the major surviving players, including Levene (who's in his 90s), Mallinson, and Harvey, plus Williamson and Van Clief are interviewed together (Caesar died in 1986). They all have a sense of humor about it, with stories of creating forged credentials and equipment adorned with a "WAQU-TV" (for "Aquarius") logo so Garden security would let Caesar and a cameraman into the event, thinking they were with an actual TV station. Harvey also shares a hilarious memory of Caesar (described by Mallinson as "not drunk, but he had a couple drinks and was feeling good") nailing some lines of dialogue before Harvey realized he missed a couple of sentences, and started shouting to get Caesar's attention "like I was Arthur Miller trying to preserve the sacred texts." It's hard to recommend FIST OF FEAR, TOUCH OF DEATH to anyone but the most die-hard Bruce Lee completists or Bruceploitation masochists, but one almost has to admire the audacity of its very existence, along with the nostalgic reminder that there was once a time when some straight-up bullshit like this could make money in theaters. I feel sorry for any '80s kid who decided to do a book report on Bruce Lee and thought watching this would be a good way to get around the reading ("...but all he really wanted to do was get tickets to the karate show").
FIST OF FEAR, TOUCH OF DEATH
opening in Toledo, OH on 11/14/1980
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.
SURVIVE THE NIGHT (US - 2020) Directed by Matt Eskandari. Written by Doug Wolfe. Cast: Chad Michael Murray, Bruce Willis, Shea Buckner, Tyler Jon Olson, Lydia Hull, Riley Wolfe Rach, Jessica Abrams, Sara Lynn Holbrook, Jef Holbrook, Ravare Elise Rupert. (R, 89 mins) "Where's Frank?" "He went to get help."
And there it is. "He went to get help." It takes longer than usual--about 45 minutes--for Bruce Willis to find his way out of SURVIVE THE NIGHT, the latest installment in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series. Of course, it's premiering exclusively on VOD, with the COVID-19 novel coronavirus preventing this newest entry from making its standard simultaneous ten-screen, one-to-two-showings per day theatrical bow. But other than that, it's business as usual for Willis who, even before it became a matter of public health, has long been a practitioner of socially distancing himself from the co-stars and plots of movies he's actually in. To his credit, Willis, reuniting with director Matt Eskandari after their TRAUMA CENTER triumph, is onscreen quite a bit in SURVIVE THE NIGHT, but he frequently appears visibly inconvenienced and couldn't appear less invested in the proceedings. It's a DESPERATE HOURS home invasion scenario minus any sense of suspense, urgency, or even light, as it takes place in almost total darkness, with two sibling fugitives--violent psycho Jamie (Shea Buckner) and somewhat more rational Matthias (Tyler Jon Olson)--on the run and, as typically happens, only making things worse for themselves. Jamie impulsively decides to start shooting in a carryout, killing a hostage and starting a skirmish that ends up with Matthias getting hit in the leg, opening his femoral artery. Traveling the back roads, they find the "Country Clinic" is closed, so they decide to follow doctor Rich (Chad Michael Murray) back to his home.
But Rich has fallen on hard times. Once an up-and-coming surgeon, he was bankrupted by a malpractice suit and only got the job at the Country Clinic through an old friend who wants to give him a second chance. So along with his resentful wife Jan (Lydia Hull) and daughter Riley (Riley Wolfe Rach), he's moved back to his childhood home in rural Georgia. That's fine with Rich's mom Rachel (Jessica Abrams), but it's a sore point with his retired sheriff dad Frank (Willis), who can't believe he caved to the lawsuit and has always regarded his brainy son as a loser with no fight in him. Rich gets to prove his dad wrong when the brothers break into the house in the middle of the night demanding Rich operate on Matthias' leg and stop him from bleeding out. Of course, the plan instantly goes to shit since Jamie can't stop himself from killing somebody, in this case Rachel, who he apparently stabs though it's hard to tell how it all goes down since the scene is so darkly shot and awkwardly cut. Insisting "We're not here to hurt anyone!" approximately ten seconds after stabbing the family's matriarch to death, Jamie ends up tying everyone to chairs and forcing Rich to operate using basic household tools, though Murray doesn't do a very convincing job of selling it (slices open the leg, a couple snips, a clamp, and he says "It's done" after a few seconds and some perfunctory grimaces). But before he can sew the gaping incision, hardass Frank takes action, attacking Jamie with a scalpel and getting stabbed in the gut himself, with Rich eventually getting shot in the shoulder in the ensuing melee.
At this point, Frank takes off and hides in the woods, plotting his next move. It's here that Willis does his most emoting, grunting, crying, and even howling at the moon before taking a short sabbatical and returning for the climax. SURVIVE THE NIGHT is pretty repetitive, with various dumb circumstances repeatedly forcing people to run around the house or go outside only to end up back inside, a sure sign that Eskandari and screenwriter Doug Wolfe really don't have anything here and are just padding the job to get to an acceptable 90-minute length. And isn't there a manhunt for these clowns? Where are the cops? Performances range from apathetic (Murray) to terrible (Buckner), with Willis falling somewhere in the middle. He's a little more present than you'd expect, and his regular double is noticeable only fleetingly when Frank runs into the woods after a pointless car chase around the property (?). There's no character development of any kind and the arcs are totally predictable. Of course, father and son will iron out their differences and Frank will finally respect Rich and apologize for being such an asshole his whole life ("I want you to know that I was always proud of you!"). SURVIVE THE NIGHT is utterly inessential even by VOD-era Willis standards, but it's not the worst he's done. Still, if Chad Michael Murray can't even be bothered to give a shit, then why would Bruce?
