I am so grateful for my mom. Okay, this is a statement that should go without saying - as Mister T expounds you should "Treat your momma right" - but in this particular instance, I have to directly credit her with my love of exploitation flicks. For the majority of my childhood, she took me to the local drive-in for all manner of schlock and exploitation movies: The Nude Bomb, Death Ship, Galaxy of Terror, Jaws 3D, Battle Beyond the Stars, CHUD, Yor: Hunter from the Future, Halloween II - the list of B-Movies I was directly exposed to every weekend is endless.
Bad parenting? Probably - but I love her just the same for it.
Where am I going with this? While I'm about as far away from the sleezy grindhouse theaters of 42nd street in New York and you can possibly get and still be in the United States, while I never actually set foot in one of those all-night exhibitions in Times Square (back before Mayor Ed Koch cleaned up the area and gentrified the hell out of it), I still appreciate schlock in all forms. Fortunately Synapse films is there to feed my habit with their outstanding series of wonderfully wild and trashy and twisted trailers: the 42nd Street Forever series.
Volume Five, by the way, comes to us with the help of the folks at Austin, Texas' legendary Alamo Drafthouse Cinema - which if you haven’t heard of (and/or been too yet), you need to check out. Opened in the late nineties, the Alamo Drafthouse is a movie theater/restaurant, with food and drink service while you watch the movies. The Drafthouse is famous for showing old exploitation flicks and obscure kids movies and cheap action flicks, and has grown in popularity to host all kinds of special events (like the annual film festival hosted by Quentin Tarantino). In short, The Alamo has become the center of the schlock and exploitation movie scene in America.
We start off with a solid gold nugget of reto cheese: Charlton Heston on a tennis court. Chuck is taking time out his busy day to explain the then newly implemented MPAA ratings system. Despite the potential for camp, Chuck actually plays it straight, delivering some pretty solid advice to the parents: be responsible for what your children see, use the guidelines and don’t let other people decide for you. Now if only Hollywood would follow that advice today. . . .
With the preamble over, it's off to the races! And what a curtain puller: A Life of Ninja! I've never heard of this before, but the trailer makes me want it more that air and food and water and sex itself. There's glowing eyes, dismemberment in alleyways, over the top dubbing, and gratuitous shower scenes. This thing looks like Kung Fu gold! Then there's 1973's Sting of the Dragon Masters, a flick I dimly remember watching in my youth on Kung Fu Theater on my local UHF station. And yet again since Asia really doesn’t care about copyrights, we get the North by Northwest score in the soundtrack! And then there's the trailer for Sonny Chiba's The Bodyguard - not very rare (it's on BCI's Sonny Chiba double feature disc), it's still a blast, with the chant of "Viva! Chiba! Viva! Chiba!" bringing things to an orgasmic crescendo. Finally rounding out the Kung Fu opening, we get a sample of Shaw Brothers and the trailer to Mad Monkey Kung Fu, probably one of their better known projects - at least in America. It's a good flick and the trailer does it justice!
Shifting gears, we head into the Wild Animals on a Rampage genre, leading off with Enzo G. Castellari's The Shark Hunter. Enzo is one of my favorite Italian exploitation directors, and him teaming up with Franco Nero and a giant shark promises to be one hell of a flick. And then we get Wild Animal Porn in a flick called Birds Do It, Bees Do It, a Mondo documentary about animals mating.
Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
From Animal Porn to Human Porn, we jump into soft core territory with an entry from Mister B.I.G himself, Bert I. Gordon, a flick called Let's Do It! I've never seen it, but the trailer seems harmless enough. More outrageous is Chatterbox, a story about Rip Taylor and a singing Vagina. Yup, only in the seventies, people, only in the seventies. Then there's a whole bunch of skin with Danish Love Acts, with plenty of slow motion sex over a bed of smooth jazz. Rounding out the Soft Core Sexploitation section is a flick called Group Marriage, which apparently is a bunch of youngsters shacking up together in a house and swapping bodily fluids.
Sonny Chiba makes a return appearance as a sci-fi samurai in a Japanese flick called Message From Space (with Vic Morrow?!?), there's the amazingly awesome entry MindWarp (A classic from Roger Corman) and quite possibly the best trailer of the disc - Hal Needham's career-ending Megaforce. The movie itself is so brilliantly bad, it's the gem of my Horrible Movie Collection. The trailer manages to distill all that gloriously bad movie-ness into 120 seconds. Fantastic! Then we get mobsters versus solders in a movie I simply have to track down: Zebra Force, which looks like it delivers tons of car chases, explosions, gunfights killings - and a one-armed man with a machine gun. Oh, and it promises to have a chase equal to The French Connection or Bullitt.
We'll see about that one.
There's an entry from Indonesia called Blazing Battle, set in the south seas of World War II with all manner of fighting, punji stick impaling and brutality against the enemy, And then Sonny Chiba shows up as a Three Time Offender in International Secret Police: The Diamond Trap, sporting some of the worst English translations since "All Your Base Are Belong To Us!
In need of some wilderness adventure? How about the shameless Tarzan rip-off Karzan: Master of the Jungle, staring Johnny Kissmuller, Jr. Did I mention Lee "I'm Banging Farrah Fawcett and you aren’t" Majors in a Viking epic called The Norseman? How about Roger Corman's Sorceress, featuring two buxom blondes with Kung Fu and Supernatural powers? Well, it is Roger Corman – the buxom part goes without saying.
Now keep in mind, I'm just hitting the highlights here. There's simply way too much to get into any sort of detail. I'm skipping Slaughterhouse Rock, the Rock and Roll horror flick starring Toni Basil, the Charles Manson mondo documentary The Manson Massacre, the Bill Cosbey produced remake of The House of Wax or the shameless Rosemary's Baby rip off The Devil Within Her.
For completion sake, here is the full list of everything included:
* A Life of Ninja
* Sting of the Dragon Masters
* The Bodyguard
* Mad Monkey Kung Fu
* Wonder Women
* Lucky Seven
* a vintage concession stand advertisement (our stand is state of the art cool!)
* The Shark Hunter
* Birds Do It, Bees Do It
* Let’s Do It!
* Chatterbox
* Danish Love Acts
* Group Marriage
* Violated
* Caged Virgins
* another concession stand spot (racist BBQ sauce? YUM!)
* Message From Space
* The Terrornauts
* Mind Warp
* Megaforce
* Zebra Force,
* Blazing Battle,
* James Tont: Operation One,
* International Secret Police
* Machine Gun McCain
* Stacey,
* Lightning Bolt,
* 3 Supermen In The West,
* Pretty Maids All in a Row,
* Putney Swope,
* Norman, Is That You?,
* Redneck County
* Moonrunners
* A commercial for really nasty looking shrimp rolls at the consession stand
* The Fabulous World of Jules Verne
* Magic Christmas Tree
* Pinnochio’s Birthday Party
* The Magic Kite
* The Secret of Magic Island
* The Norseman
* Sorceress
* Terror in the Wax Museum,
* The Manson Massacre,
* The Devil Within Her
* Slaughterhouse Rock.
Whew. Seriously, that's just about two hours of grindhouse goodness all in one spot. And the great thing is, often an exploitation trailer is way better than the actual movie, where you have to sit through boring exposition and character development to get to the good stuff. Here we just have a nonstop parade of bare titties, blood splatter, explosions, freaky monsters, gun fights and car chases for two solid hours. For a Bad Movie Junkie like me, these discs make Crack seem like a Popsicle.
THE DVD -
As one can imagine, the video is all over the map here. Some of the trailers look awesome and some show some serious print damage. They've all been presented in a anamorphic widescreen, though - and that's a giant step in the right direction for DVD quality. The Dolby Digital mono soundtrack is pretty much is the same quality - gets the job done, but not outstanding.
THE EXTRAS -
A couple of them this time, a half hour documentary on the Alamo Drafthouse (which should be more than enough to make anyone want to visit the Lone Star State) and a commentary with Tim League (the owner of the Alamo Drafthouse) and Lars Nilsen and Zack Carlson (programmers at the Alamo Drafthouse). Commentary for trailers? I hear you say. Don’t knock it - these guys really know their shit. It's a fun, entertaining, informative chat track stuffed with trivia and insight. Also, the DVD comes with an eight page booklet of liner notes, detailing the history of the Alamo Drafthouse, plus some lobby art reproductions.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
If sitting through two hours of bad movies sounds as much fun as pulling teeth, then this DVD is not for you. If, on the other hand, you're like me and cant get enough bloods and tits and Kung Fu, then 42nd Street Forever 5 is right up your sleezy alley. The disc is chocked full of vintage goodness and will provide hours of entertainment for the fan of exploitation flicks.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment