Good Against Evil (1977)

This film was the pilot for what looks like it would basically have been "The Exorcist: The Series", only with a sillier name.

Jessica Gordon is a 22 year old woman who seems to lead a charmed life.  While in design school an anonymous benefactor arranged for her to have her own show, for instance, and she now earns her living doing what she loves.  It's almost like she has a guardian angel.  Or a guardian fallen angel.

Jessica, you see, has been earmarked as the consort of the demon Astaroth, and he is the one ensuring her smooth and orderly progress through life.  Well, except for the fact that any man she shows an interest in quickly meets a sticky end.

It's probably no surprise then that she is initially very unwelcoming of the advances of Andy Stuart (played by the wonderfully-named Dack Rambo).  He wears her down though, with tactics we're meant to find romantic but which in this more modern age veer rather more toward 'stalkery'.

When an attempt to deal with Andy in the same way as Jessica's previous paramours fails, Astaroth decides to simply hypnotise her into forgetting the last two years and whisk her off to the other side of the country.  And then to make sure Andy is distracted, he possesses the daughter of a former lover and makes her have an accident.  Andy rushes off to help the woman (a young Kim Cattrall), but the joke's on Astaroth since in the process he meets a priest who recognises the signs of demonic activity.  Together, they free the possessed girl, and then drive off in search of Jessica like a 1970s version of the boys from Supernatural.

Which, now that I think of it, is something I'd watch.  "Starsky and Hutch, Demon Hunters" sounds like a pretty cool elevator pitch.

This however is a fairly forgettable little film, and it is easy enough to see why the series didn't get picked up.  There's just not much intensity to it, and Astaroth's machinations are rather impractical given the advantages he has.  The film makers also have a very inflated opinion on the scariness of the average black cat, to the point that the 'dun dun dun' ending involving one gave me a fit of the giggles.

Zipang (1990)

Imagine if Indiana Jones was a swaggering, not-terribly bright bandit from the Shogunate era, and you've got an idea of what sort of film Jipangu (as it is known in the original Japanese) is going to be.

Jigoku is the swaggering bandit mentioned above, a braggart and scoundrel but - in the manner of movie heroes everywhere - not entirely bad underneath it all.  With his entourage of kooky sidekicks, he stumbles across a magical sword that can unlock the door to the mythical Land of Gold, Zipang.

Alas for Jigoku, there are literally hundreds of bounty hunters after him.  And the small matter of an army of ninja who want the sword.  On the plus side, at least if you ask Jigoku, one of the bounty hunters is Yuri the Pistol.  He's rather flattered to be chased by such an attractive young woman.  Even if she is only after his head.

Yes, of course they're going to end up together.  Zipang may be a pants-on-head crazy movie with NinjaCam binoculars and people punching out their own rib cage to make a weapon, but it's got fairly traditional story beats under all the nuttiness: boy meets girl.  Girl tries to kill boy.  Ninjas and evil gods attack.  True love wins out.  You know, typical stuff.

I'm not going to go into detail about the film's plot, or all the wacky hijinks en route to the conclusion.  I do want to call out the neat design though.  There's a segment where the entire cast of good guys and bad guys converges on a massive, spiralling staircase several hundred feet high, and the whole scene looks and feels like they really are on such a construction.  It's very well done.

As for whether I'd recommend the film?  If you were at all intrigued by any of the above, you should see this movie.

Idaho Transfer (1973)

There's the kernel of a decent film in here.  Certainly, I found the first half pretty intriguing.  Unfortunately, it suffers from a couple of pretty major flaws, and they sink it pretty thoroughly in the second half.

But let's talk about the premise and plot first, before the problems.

A secret research project - ostensibly tasked with attempting to discover a way to transmit matter - has accidentally stumbled across time travel.  Specifically, they can jump to a point 56 years in the future.  I'm not sure how they know it's 56 years, given that they're unable to find anyone alive to tell them, but they do.

So yeah, they're a bit anxious about the whole 'no living people' thing, as you might imagine.  They've scanned the radio channels without success, and travelled far enough to check out a couple of local towns, but both were abandoned.

The project team's reaction to this is to keep their discovery secret and attempt to restore the human race in the future.  They plan to do this by recruiting teenagers (anyone over 20 who goes forward suffers kidney failure within days or weeks at most) and sending them into the future to be seed stock.  In the mean time, they keep the authorities in the dark about what's going on.  Why is not explained, but this is the early 70s so scepticism about 'the man' was probably just assumed.

Anyway, the project gets shut down - probably due to them not showing any results and giving the higher ups the run around.  About a dozen of the teenagers manage to escape to the future, however.  That brings us to around the mid-point of the film, where it seems to be setting up for an exploration of this strange future world: presumably a tale of whether they discover what happened, and so forth.

The film's not going to play out like that, though, and it's here that its two biggest flaws really start to undermine it.  The first and most obvious is the rather ham-fisted eco-moral of the ending.  I mean, I think the evidence for climate change is overwhelming, and that resource scarcity is going to be a big problem for humanity, but this still made me roll my eyes.

The second problem is the main character.  I don't know if you've seen the article on "Pixar's 22 rules" of writing, but one of them is:

You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

The main character of this film fails to try.  Some of her failure is understandable - she goes through some rough stuff - but it makes it very hard to care much about her travails when the script gives you no reason to like her or root for her success.

An interesting start unfortunately comes to nothing, so I can't overall recommend this.  A shame, since it started quite promisingly.

Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987)

Andy Sidaris was an Emmy-award winning director of sports television coverage who subsequently decided to give writing and directing movies a try.

The bulk of these movies feature a fictitious law enforcement agency (given the name 'L.E.T.H.A.L.' late in the series) that appeared to be almost entirely staffed by nude models.  I guess it was harder to find female actors willing to go topless than it was to find Penthouse Pets willing to try to act.

What this means is that most of the series feels rather like what you'd get if you asked a supremely hormonal teenage boy to write a James Bond film.  There are lame one-liners, horrible racial stereotypes, random NINJA WEAPONS, and of course, boobs as far as the eye can see.

Hard Ticket to Hawaii, however, is a whole 'nother level of lunacy.  It's Sidaris's sophomore effort and it is jam-packed with "why is that happening?" moments.  I don't just mean in terms of the character's actions - though there are plenty of those - but also in terms of film structure.  For instance, the only explanation I can give for the near three minutes of scenery porn we get early on, with the movie's theme tune playing over it, is that it was filmed as the credits sequence ... but then they came up with a 'better' idea for the credits and just left the other stuff in because hey, it had been shot already.

Then there's the subplot about the TV coverage of a sporting event.  This occupies a good ten minutes of screen time and appears to connect to the main plot only via the fact that one of the agents sleeps with one of TV presenters.  I won't even mention the ways that their 'date' violates the laws of space and time.

Then there's the contaminated killer snake, the hysterically unsexy sexy talk ("I just want to suck the polish right off your toes"), and the greatest drive by shooting ever committed to film.  Seriously, it is a thing that must be seen to be believed.

What makes this film so much fun though, at least for me, is that it shows absolutely no indication that any of this is supposed to be camp or goofy, even when it is at its most silly.  There's something charmingly naive about it, despite its sleaziness.

Check it out if the idea of the most cheesetastic, uber-80s bit of nonsense appeals to you.

The Disappearance of Flight 412 (1974)

I'm generally pretty antipathetic toward narration in movies.  So it's ironic that I think this film would have been improved by adding more narration.

Not as much as eliminating the narration entirely, mind you, but improved nonetheless.

You see, this film uses narration as a means to give it a documentary style feel.  Which is not an immediately terrible idea when you're doing a "secret government conspiracy!" type of thing.  Pitch it like it really happened and you can generate some sense of outrage over the treatment of the men in the story, and/or some creeping anxiety about the machinations of clandestine organisations.

Heck, in the 1970s - when there were still people actively looking for the Loch Ness monster, and a bunch of supposed Bigfoot sightings - you might even have found an audience willing to accept such a 'docudrama' at face value, even when the subject matter is UFO-related conspiracy.

So the flaw with the use of narration in this film isn't that the script doesn't commit to it.  Too much of the movie plays just like any other bit of celluloid fiction.  Throwing in some sombre voice over and the occasional time/date stamp doesn't make it feel more authentic.  It just draws attention to the parts that aren't done that way.

The film also lacks a satisfactory ending.  Having witnessed a UFO (on radar, anyway), an Air Force crew is whisked away to a secret base and subjected to a lengthy debriefing that's intended to persuade them their equipment was faulty.  Those that go along with this get promotions.  Those that don't get dead end posts.  The end.

There are much better uses of 75 minutes.  Go watch some Minecraft videos or something, instead.

Mutant Vampire Zombies from the 'Hood! (2008)

One thing the zombie genre absolutely, positively did not need was the addition of rape.  Especially rape as comedy.

Want to guess what this film's addition to the flesh-eating oeuvre is?

Sigh.

Starting with something that annoys me far less, you might notice that the title of this review and the title on the DVD image above are different.  A cynic might think the makers of this film were trying to cash in the success of the Spierig Brothers' (far superior) Undead.  Certainly, the box title is only a skin deep change: the film's credits still refer to it by the title at the top of the post.

The original title is also a lot more reflective of the film's tone.  It's mostly playing the genre-aware card pretty hard.  It's no accident that it gets compared to Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead in the image above - if you think of it as their sleazy, lazy younger sibling, you're on the right track as to the sort of tone it has.

I tend to think that this is a shame, because from time to time there's a pretty good zombie flick peeking out between the not-as-funny-as-it-thinks humour and unnecessary rape stuff.

Because yeah, let's talk about that.  So the film's zombie apocalypse comes about because of a sustained solar flare.  Anyone not adequately protected from the radiation expelled becomes a mutant, in an agonising state of impending death that can be slowed by consuming the uncontaminated blood of those people who were deep underground or otherwise shielded from the flare.

The flare also makes gasoline not flammable anymore.  Because reasons.

Anyway, in addition to the whole blood-drinking thing, the mutations cause the zombies to lose their inhibitions, so we get rapist zombies.  Which would be bad enough even if it wasn't played for laughs, but the film doubles down on this terrible idea by doing exactly that.  It leads to a lot of very juvenile, unpleasant stuff.

Go watch the Spierig Brothers' film instead.

Shadow of Chinatown (1936)

The Googles tell me this film was originally a 15 part serial.  Perhaps if served up in bit-sized chunks, it would be more interested and less disjointed.  It would still be howlingly sexist, racist, stupid and badly acted.

Now if one is feeling charitable, one might be inclined to make allowances for the first two problems, given the film's age.  The last two are inexcusable in any era, however.

Bela Lugosi plays a Eurasian mobster, hired by another Eurasian in order that they can wreak their "revenge on the white and oriental races", who they both hate.

Yes, I realise the preceding paragraph makes no sense.  The film does not.

Anyway, Lugosi's character isn't just a mobster.  He's also a world-class mesmerist and an expert in electronics who plants tiny bugs everywhere so he can overhear his enemeis' plans.

Which probably makes it all the more embarrassing for him that he's going to be defeated by the worst version of the "intrepid girl reporter" archetype I've ever seen (also the worst acted), and some offensive Chinese stereotypes.

There is nothing to recommend here.