A gay action movie? That’s something I’ve never come across before, and I like coming across things I’ve never come across before. But it’s a made-for-cable movie, so I hesitated. My instincts to give it a shot only won out because the director is Brian Trenchard-Smith, the sometimes-great director of DEAD END DRIVE-IN, THE MAN FROM HONG KONG and DEATH CHEATERS. And, uh, LEPRECHAUN 4: IN SPACE.

Well, let’s just say it’s not Trenchard-Smith’s best work. This is partly just because of the low TV production values. In the old days low budget meant he couldn’t do as many explosions as he wanted in TURKEY SHOOT, now he has all the explosions he wants but they’re extremely fake looking CGI ones.

The worst part is trying to fake Presidential shit on a low budget. At no point do you believe these people are really in Air Force 2. (God forbid if they had to fake Air Force 1!) They’re sitting around playing cards when the shit goes down, and there’s so little protocol that it was a while before I figured out David Keith was supposed to be the VP. Later when there’s some dude sitting in a room with a general I assumed I guess this guy must be the president but it turned out he was the secretary of defense or something.

I guess they haven’t yet invented that escape pod the president gets into in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, or at least they don’t have two of them. When the plane’s going down they all just hold onto the card table.

There are four survivors: Vice President Walker (Keith), head of security Sergeant Major Lynn Delaney (Mariel Hemingway), Press Secretary Sharon Serrano (Jill Bennett), and a fat guy. They start getting shot at as soon as they hit the beach, so they run off into the trees, where they’ll spend most of the movie sneaking around and camping out. It turns out there’s a military camp here where a sadistic American mercenary named Armstrong (David Millbern) is helping train rebels to overthrow a dictatorial government.

Of course they get into some trouble with this Armstrong guy, who sees an opportunity to ransom them off. So Delaney and Walker bust out their Rambo skills and you get your usual showing-civilians-how-to-use-a-gun, civilian-being-traumatized-by-having-to-kill-somebody, all the usual stuff you’d expect. And then also you get sexual tension between Delaney and the press secretary lady, that’s the novel part. They fight all the time but it turns out it’s because they like each other.

Although mostly generic and poorly done the stuff on the island is not as bad as you expect while watching the ridiculously crappy opening on the plane. They do film out in some woods and everything, they got actual locations. I was worried it was gonna be some greenscreened studio shit.

But you’re still gonna need to suspend the shit out of your disbelief. It’s pretty much always demanding that you overlook some hugely unbelievable story point. I’m not saying our government works like a Swiss watch, but this thing makes them look completely incompetent, it’s almost offensive. I don’t think they’re trying to make a point about it, they just rushed through and didn’t put much thought into the screenplay. The vice president’s plane goes down and they have no way to track it – no mention of the black box or GPS or satellites or anything. They just lost communication so they get nervous and sit around waiting for a phone call. Hours later, when they finally find out where it went down, the secretary of defense asks the general to have a search team ready to go… first thing in the morning! I’d figure they’d already have been searching when the fucking VP was missing, but they were waiting for a lead like this before they even told everybody to put their boots on. Now he says it’s too dark to search so they gotta wait for sunlight.

On the island, where everybody should be trying to protect the VP, the first thing they do is let him swim out in the water by himself to try to rescue somebody. And throughout the ordeal nobody seems protective of him at all. They constantly split up, he carries the gun and often goes out in front. Later we find out he and Delaney were in Kuwait together, so I guess that’s why she trusts him to do that kind of stuff. But she oughta be taking her job as a Secret Service agent more seriously. Maybe she’s one of those agents that mostly does the counterfeit money stuff.

Meanwhile, the acting is not so hot. Bennett is the weakest link, she might be okay for guest spots on TV shows but sure isn’t believable as a press secretary. Not that they give her convincing dialogue either. But she’s whiny and annoying and when Delaney threatens to leave her behind if she doesn’t shut the fuck up it seems like the best idea anybody’s had in the movie.

Hemingway is the best thing about the movie, but she definitely didn’t get enough training to be a great action hero. When she infiltrates the enemy camp to plant bombs she should be moving with supreme grace and confidence, like a ninja. She’s got a little of that and a little of the teenage-girl-trying-to-sneak-out-without-waking-her-parents type of feel. But acting-wise I think she’s convincing as a tough professional and given better material (way better) I think she could be really good in this type of role.

The title is kind of funny. Since she’s protecting the vice president I assume it’s a reference to IN THE LINE OF FIRE, where Clint was in the secret service and trying to stop a wannabe assassin. But of course in Clint’s movie the title means that he’s in the line of fire, putting himself in the path of bullets to defend the president. So a true feminized version of the title would be SHE’S IN THE LINE OF FIRE. This title says nothing about protection. In fact, it doesn’t make it clear who’s in her line of fire. It might mean she’s gonna accidentally shoot the vice president.

This is a bad movie and I don’t recommend it at all, but what little charm it does have is from seeing people try to make this type of ’80s post-Rambo throwback movie from a more liberal world view. It’s funny to hear the phony news reports at the beginning and end talking about universal health care being passed and the U.S. being able to help the rebels non violently through the U.N. In the ’80s the rebels would’ve all been evil rapists, I kinda like how in this one most of them are fairly honorable but stuck in an unwise alliance with this asshole mercenary. And it’s kind of sweet that the girls feel okay kissing and embracing openly at the end. I’m all for it. Consenting adults should be able to love each other openly, they should be able to marry each other legally, and they should be able to embrace at the end of action movies after the bad guys have been killed, everybody’s catching their breath and the camera is pulling away to show the aftermath. Maybe some day it’ll happen in a movie that doesn’t suck.

Apparently alot of Australian cinema is built on the success of a whole bunch of sexploitation movies and broad comedies about puking. So the first half of this is mostly movies I wasn’t very interested in. It does show alot of naked ladies though, in my opinion, for what that’s worth. And a few dudes I think too.

The movie is divided into different categories with colorful, stylized intros made by re-coloring and animating stills from the movies. So the look is pretty cool. Also alot of the footage just jumps off the screen with vivid, feverish colors, even those sexplo movies. Not sure but I suspect they digitally enhanced the colors to make the clips look crazier. But I think that’s fine, it just makes you want to see the movies.

Eventually it starts getting into the cars and the giant crocodiles and what not. They talk about pretty much every Australian movie I’ve seen in the last few years: RAZORBACK, DARK AGE, ROADGAMES, WOLF CREEK, ROGUE. Of course they talk about George Miller doing MAD MAX (the guys who did the first SAW and DEATH SENTENCE talk about hearing legends of this doctor who went out and illegally shot car crashes) and even get into him adding the car chases to THE CHAIN REACTION. And they get heavily into Brian Trenchard-Smith. (The DVD has his conversation with Q. Tarantino, not surprisingly a big fan.)

The best part of the movie is the stories about THE MAN FROM HONG KONG and what a dick Jimmy Wang Yu was. Every single person they talk to seems to think Wang Yu was an asshole of such epic proportions they just have to laugh about it or bite their tongue. They say he was such a bastard and hated actresses so much that right before he had a kissing scene he caught a bunch of flies and ate them! In my opinion that’s not cool. Above average martial arts star, but definitely not a courteous man. Let’s see some manners next time, pal.

They also talk about George Lazenby catching on fire, how he did the stunt himself but burnt his hand, then decked Trenchard-Smith for having convinced him to do it. Lazenby is interviewed and doesn’t believe he really did that, but apologizes in case he’s remembering wrong. You see that Jimmy Wang Yu? That’s how a gentleman acts, you fly-breathed prick.

To be fair, we don’t know Jimmy Wang Yu’s side of the story, maybe he had to eat the flies for health reasons or something.

For all the movies they talk about they edit together all the craziest shots and make them look just incredible. Of course, many of them are gonna seem kind of boring when you actually see the whole movie and have to see all that stuff in context. But I think MAN FROM HONG KONG comes close to living up to the impression its clips make. You’ll definitely want to see it after watching those and hopefully you’ll enjoy it.

There are some pretty good insights into the mindset of these filmatists. They seem very self conscious about how the rest of the world perceives Australian film. They keep mentioning PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK bitterly and talk about struggling with their Australia-ness – sometimes not wanting to mention kangaroos or any other cliches of what Australia is like, other times being more wise about trying to take advantage of the unique qualities of their culture and landscape.

This might’ve been a little more exciting if I’d seen less of the the movies discussed, but I still wound up with a list of at least 7 or 8 titles I want to check out. One of them was HURRICANE SMITH starring Carl Weathers. They don’t really talk about it but its poster is shown in a graphic about a wave of Australian movies that were failures. I always wanted to see this one but was afraid to because I knew it could never live up to the half-rhyming power of ACTION JACKSON. I never knew it was Australian either though so this finally gave me an excuse. It’s part of my Australia studies.

Weathers plays Hurrican Smith (usually not called Hurricane), a dude looking for his sister who went to Sydney and disappeared. He hooks up with a prostitute who was her roommate and the prostitute’s America-hating grandpa. He gets in fights with pimps and other criminals using unconvincing moves like knocking a guy out by punching him in the back. He takes part in some Australian activities like some kind of gambling-on-coin-flipping game. Is that a real thing, Australians, or are you just fucking with Carl Weathers?

I kind of like the idea that Hurricane Smith could be a reverse Crocodile Dundee – or I guess a reverse Crocodile Dundee 2 anyway. He’s an American who comes in and doesn’t understand the ways of the Australians. But I don’t know if he shows off any distinctly American culture, unless punching guys out is ours. I doubt it.

See, if that guy in WOLF CREEK had picked up Carl Weathers, I think things would’ve turned out differently. I’m sure they would’ve had a hell of a fight and would’ve had a begrudging respect for each other at the end.

It’s a watchable movie and not really bad, but definitely not memorable. In fact I’ve already forgotten most of it, including the explanation of why he’s occasionally called Hurricane. It’s always nice to see Weathers in a lead role, obviously. But that’s the main thing it’s got going for it. The most NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD moment is a stunt where he jumps a speed boat through a house. That was cool. But I can see why this wasn’t a smash hit.

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Time to get back to my ongoing study of the works of Brian Trenchard-Smith. This one will also be part 1 in a Steve Railsback double feature.

TURKEY SHOOT is one of the Brian Trenchard-Smith pictures I had heard of before I started going through his filmography, although I knew it under the American title ESCAPE 2000 (which is what it’s called on the Anchor Bay DVD). It takes place in a dystopian future where “deviants” have been locked up in camps to be brainwashed and abused. Not sure if this happens at all of them but at this particular one, Camp 42 I believe, they also let the inmates run around in some wilderness to be hunted by rich people. Hence the title “TURKEY SHOOT.” It’s kind of like in the U.S. a couple years ago what we would’ve called “DICK CHENEY PHEASANT HUNT.” Means the same thing.

Our heroes are naive Olivia Hussey, sexy Lynda Stoner, and defiant Steve Railsback. Railsback gets a pretty badass setup because the headmaster, Thatcher, lists all the different camps he’s escaped from, and you know he’ll be adding Camp 42 to the list soon. I love Railsback from ED GEIN, LIFEFORCE, etc. but to be honest he doesn’t have that great of a character in this one. He mostly just runs around. Not that he’s not good at running around, it’s just not that memorable a part.

The weirdest moment in the movie is when you first see the wolfman. For some reason one of the hunters has a pet wolfman that he got from a circus. He wears clothes like a pilgrim and likes to eat people’s toes. I guess the guy pretty much uses him as a hunting dog, if a hunting dog could wrestle people and snap spines over his knee.

I mean that’s a pretty big shift in perception, you’re watching a movie thinking “okay, here is this movie, TURKEY SHOOT” and then out of the blue you realize “this is a movie that has a wolfman in it.” It changes everything, you have to adjust every assumption you made back when you thought it was a regular non-wolfman type of movie.

And for me it kind of fucked me up because I thought wait a minute, this is that movie? I remember that cover! But I was thinking of the wrong movie, I was thinking of this one:

I’ll have to check that one out, because this wolfman was pretty cool and he didn’t even have a boombox or American flag. So it is possible that the AMERICA 3000 wolfman will top this one due to those two props.

Anyway, maybe it’s because of the lack of boombox, but somehow even with a wolfman the movie seems a little bland. I mean, the bad guys are pretty colorful – a cool bald guy with a mustache, a lesbian with a bow and arrow. They get some mileage out of them, they’re more memorable than the heroes. There’s some pretty good gore here and there – an exploding head, an amazing shot of a wax dummy getting machine gunned. And you gotta admire any movie where a character says “Oh shit!” and the reason he says it is because he accidentally cut his pet wolfman in half with a bulldozer and needs to hurry up and fire his bazooka or Steve Railsback will get away. That is obviously a great moment in the history of cinema, but for the most part TURKEY SHOOT still has the lifeless feel of many ’70s sci-fi movies in the SILENT RUNNING vein. Something seems missing.

The DVD extras helped me put my finger on it. They explain that the budget got cut at the last minute, they had to tear out the beginning of the script, cut a helicopter chase, have less extras, less stunts. Trenchard-Smith seems to have only stayed on out of professionalism and not a belief in being able to still pull the movie off. He mentions not being able to have stuntmen fall out of towers, and Anchor Bay cuts in a shot of a watch tower shooting sparks, and that’s it. Nobody falls out and it doesn’t tip over or anything. And I realized that’s it, it just never is able to go that extra distance Trenchard-Smith would’ve in the days of his Grant Page movies (or later in DEAD END DRIVE-IN).

They interview Lynda Stoner, who gets upset talking about it, calling it “juvenile garbage.” It surprised me she talked about it with such disgust because she is strangely un-exploited in the movie. There’s foreshadowing that the guards will manhandle her, or worse, that she’ll mandhandle them. But it never happens. All the manhandleship is saved for Olivia Hussey and her boob double. There’s even an “ogling Lynda Stoner as she bathes in the river” scene where she’s fully clothed!

Her beef is not with her character. She seems upset that the setup of the world – the “1984 scenes” Trenchard-Smith says – were cut out of the script. But I wonder if they were really necessary. We get the idea that people who don’t fit into society’s norms lose their human rights, and aren’t allowed to reproduce. I guess it’s hard to judge without seeing what was in the script, maybe it was some seriously deep shit. But I suspect they were able to imply the important stuff in a simpler way. Why do you need more than that?

You don’t. But you do need guys falling out of towers. So this one’s not that great. Come to think of it, this guy’s made more interesting curiosities than he’s made actual good movies. But oh well, that’s better than most people. Or at least more curious.

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It seems like everybody involved in this movie is just doing it for a quick paycheck, but that’s okay. It’s still cool to see them all together in this weird little movie. Glenn Ford plays the guy who hires Connors, and he looks like he’s either retired or on vacation. He’s wearing shades and a white Adidas track jacket, and he’s only in a few scenes, sitting next to the swimming pool. I bet whenever Trenchard-Smith called “cut” he jumped in. It honestly seems like they either filmed it at his house or invited him on a fun vacation and then peer pressured him into shooting a few scenes real quick at the hotel. But it’s definitely worth his time because he gets to say the best line:

“We need a man who is bathed in the dragon’s blood. A man with little hazard of duplication.”
“Fleming, sir?”
“Yes. Yes, Fleming. The man for this job is Mr. Thomas Fleming.”

Fleming is of course Chuck Connors. And it’s true, because at 6′5″, with his freaky square jaw and blonde hair there is little hazard of Chuck Connors being duplicated. A cheap bootleg, maybe, but never an accurate re-creation.

The story is all made up of things you’ve seen a million times before, but I like these kind of things. This Fletcher is a real smartass, he pretends to be a painter and plays dumb when other people call him out. He knows they know he’s lying and still pretends he thinks they don’t know just to fuck with them. He teams up with another guy so he can get the documents and the other guy can get the money, and they pull some of the ol’ OCEAN’S 11 type disguises and scams. My favorite part is when they’re disguised as workers, transporting the loot in a truck. The first time they get inspected they’re all in the back of the truck eating lunch, and they distract the cop by giving him food. The second time, Chuck’s partner just stands in the back smiling as the cops poke around. When they start looking where he doesn’t want them to he just pulls out a gun and pops them, never breaking his smile. Afterwards they joke about him enjoying shooting people. Somehow it still comes across as a pretty lighthearted movie.

But the undeniable highlight is an unintentional laugh. Roundtree dies when his car falls off a huge cliff. It’s shown in slow motion with a long, girly, hilariously un-Shaftlike scream dubbed over it. If I still had the tape I’d have to learn how to transfer that to digital and get it on Youtube, because the world needs to see this. The long, girly scream in itself is laugh out loud funny, but the idea that it’s supposed to be Richard Roundtree is incredible. Plus the car going off the cliff is pretty cool.

It also has a very enjoyable sort of disco/porn-funk score by some electric pianist named Bebu Silvetti. I swear I heard one of the main themes somewhere before, maybe sampled by somebody, but I couldn’t figure out where.

This one’s only on VHS, with a cover that made me think it was a TV movie. There’s alot of mystery about the credits because the box and IMDB both list Trenchard-Smith as sole director, but the actual opening credits give it to “Carlos Vasallo and Brian Trenchard Smith.” Vasallo is a producer but doesn’t have any directing credits on IMDB. Also, the box but not the credits or IMDB list “original screenplay ‘Traitors in the Lake’ written by Robin Estridge, adapted for the screen by Robert A. Miller.” Estridge was a TV writer but I can’t find any evidence of what this “Traitors in the Lake” was or why it was turned into this.

I don’t know man, it’s a pretty crappy movie and didn’t really keep my interest the whole time, but there’s something about it. I like those types of competing experts movies, it’s a good slumming cast and there’s just kind of a cool vibe to it. I think it would work well on one of those drive-in double feature DVDs that Dark Sky does. Or at least it could play at 2 o’clock in the morning on one of your local channels.

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First and best is a goofy comedy called DEATH CHEATERS. The title daredevils are played by the mustached John Hargreaves and the bearded Grant Page. Page seems kind of like the sidekick here, but in reality he was and is one of Australia’s top stuntmen. He was the movie’s stunt coordinator and had already done the same for Trenchard-Smith’s THE MAN FROM HONG KONG. He even did the hang gliding for that one as you can guess when you see him do the same in this one. Later he would be the stunt coordinator for MAD MAX 1 and 3. He seems like a goofy kind of Jim Henson creative countercultural type in this, so it never occurred to me that he’s the crazy bastard stalking Stacy Keach in the excellent ROAD GAMES.

Anyway they’re playing a couple of stunt men who we learn from flashbacks were war buddies who once did all kinds of dirty special ops deeds, but vowed never to kill again. The stunt life is fun but isn’t quite enough death cheating to satisfy their adrenaline habits, and the local cops take advantage of that, strategically letting them know about crimes in progress so they’ll get involved. For example a cop chases some bank robbers right past their filming location, knowing they won’t be able to resist joining the chase. They use their weird all-terrain vehicle (a camera truck?) to catch up and throw a frozen lamb chop through the thieves’ windshield.

Eventually they get hired for a “freelance job” from a mysterious secret agency. They have to sneak into a base in the Phillipines and steal some documents. Along the way there is some hang gliding, submarining, dangling from heights and bombing lots of shit. Also the guy with the mustache has to placate his wife and the guy with the beard tries to get laid. This could still be a serious plot for a movie, but it goes for comedy. Some of it (the crazy German movie director in a beret) is embarrassingly broad, but most of it’s okay. Page especially has a good deadpan line delivery, and spends alot of the movie talking to his basset hound like it’s a person. I’m not sure why but the style of humor sometimes reminded me of The Monkees minus the laugh track.

STUNT ROCK has more of a following due to a DVD release and some screenings in Austin, L.A. and here in Seattle. Page returns, this time playing himself. He leaves Australia to work on a cop show in Hollywood and while he’s there he hooks up with his (not in real life) cousin, who plays in a cheesy wizard-themed rock band called Sorcery. A good chunk of the movie is concert footage of these guys. They have a dude dressed as Merlin who fights against their singer, holding a crystal. They also do various Alice Cooper/Kiss type shit with people being executed on stage and what not. Off stage they like to do magic tricks and escape-artistry. They have the type of hair and clothes that only a rock band would ever wear, but they’re huge nerds. They even have a keyboard player who always wears a hood and has a distorted voice. You know these fuckin guys play Dungeons and Dragons.

Page hangs out with the band and also tries to teach his co-star and a journalist about stunts. It keeps cutting to stunt footage from other movies including DEATH CHEATERS. The end.

It’s an undeniably weird mix of ingredients. Rock + magic + stunts = what the hell. So that’s the reason for the cult following. And it’s interesting to watch Page, more of a cool celebrity dude in this one (no basset hound), talk about his work and why he does it. Parts of it are like a documentary. DEATH CHEATERS acts like a stuntman’s life is all fun and games, just a couple buddies who like to jump off of shit and throw each other through tables. This one has a little bit about how they get treated bad by directors and don’t get the credit they deserve since they’re doubles.

So this is a unique movie, totally worth watching, but I gotta admit it didn’t live up to my hopes, because a friend of mine has a STUNT ROCK poster that gave me the wrong idea. Above a cool painting of the band it says DEATH WISH AT 120 DECIBELS! That means “Grant Page is crazy, he must have a death wish!” but unfortunately I took it to mean “this movie is like the movie DEATH WISH! Only with guitars!” I thought it was a rock band who also work as stunt drivers. But maybe their bassist or road manager or somebody gets shot in a drug deal gone bad. So the rest of the band goes after the drug gang, or maybe the whole cartel. Maybe they plan their tour dates around the locations of the people they gotta get revenge on, moving their way up the pyramid. And they also do side wheelies and motorcycle jumps. Their tour bus probaly flies off a cliff and blows up. Then there’s a big concert at the end.

Well, there’s plenty of concert in this one, in fact way too much concert. Just no revenge.

On Youtube I saw Brian Trenchard-Smith introducing the movie in L.A. He’s real self-deprecating and laughs about the movie but I was still kind of put off by what seemed to me like smarmy laughter from the audience. I mean, the guy’s standing right there, his movie is entertaining you, you don’t have to act like you’re above everything. I say honor what is awesome in the movie, or be disappointed that it’s not awesome enough, but don’t give me that “ha ha, so bad it’s good” shit. Anyway, I learned that

1. No, it was not planned as a Sorcery vehicle, they were just the best band that was available.
2. Phil Hartman is apparently in the movie, but I didn’t notice him.

There are alot more heavy stunt movies I should get into, particularly in the area of car movies. But as not-great as these two are there is definitely an appeal to movies where the stunt people are the stars. That’s part of what I liked so much about DEATH PROOF. You got this character you’re enjoying watching and then you know it’s not fake, it really is the same person sliding down a rope or hanging on a ledge or whatever. These two have already blurred together, but I believe it was STUNT ROCK where Page talks to a woman by suspending himself in mid-air outside of the tall building where she lives. Obviously it’s fantasy that he would do something like that in his every day life, but there is a reality there because you know he’s really doing it for this movie.

But for my tastes I’d prefer to see those skills used in a serious action or revenge type plot. DEATH CHEATERS has a lighthearted adventure plot, STUNT ROCK has a lighthearted, uh, well, no plot. And the rock band is funny for a minute but I don’t really want to sit through all that. So like alot of cult movies I gotta admit I appreciate these more for the idea of the movie than for the actual movie. The fact that they exist is more interesting than actually sitting and watching them (especially with STUNT ROCK). But it’s the thought that counts I guess.

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An Australian cop undercover as a tourist busts 22-year-old Sammo Hung (also the fight choreographer) during a drug deal. Inspector Hung is called in from Hong Kong to extradite Sammo. The two cops in charge of the case (including Hugh Keays-Byrne, Toecutter from MAD MAX) want Fang following Australian law, not trying to pull any shit, but they make the mistake of leaving him alone in the interrogation room with Sammo. This leads to a full-on close quarters kung fu battle. Not cool. But he gets a lead out of it.

The Australians want Fang to get his ass out of Australia quick, but for some reason he’s intent on using his unorthodox ways and what not to climb his way up the totem pole to rich Australian kung fu expert, playboy, criminal mastermind and expert party-thrower George Lazenby. In one scene he does the William Tell routine with a lady friend, which is movie code for “hey man this guy is decadent.” Another sign of his decadence: he has an open fireplace in the middle of a room in his mansion. No sides on it, just a fire right there. Before the Man From Hong Kong is through with him I think he regrets that sort of flamboyant interior design. It’s like that evil nurse chick in TRANSPORTER 2 having spikes on the wall in her living room. You evil fuckers gotta start thinking these things through better, it’s just not safe to live like that if somebody’s gonna come fight you in your place of residence. Also if you have kids would be another reason to avoid the spikes or open flames. And put those little plugs on all the electrical outlets.

Anyway, maybe decadence rubs Fang the wrong way or something, so he’ll stop at nothing to take out Lazenby. He basically spends most of the movie chasing people and then beating the hell out of them.

I probaly shouldn’t have brought up ENTER THE DRAGON, because this isn’t as slick as that one. Like most kung fu movies of the era it’s pretty crude, the story is silly and Fang’s dialogue is pretty laughable (”Hey – don’t give me any SHIT!”). There’s also about four too many white characters making comments about the color yellow and one too many where a white lady pulls the sides of her eyes out as a cute comment about Asians.

But what makes this movie great is that it has about twelve times more action than most action movies. Okay, so the hang-gliding scenes may go on a little too long. But it’s a movie with foot chases, climbing up the sides of buildings, motorcycle jumps, various vehicles going off ledges, a van that blows up three times, a chain fight on top of an elevator, a skyscraper rapelling scene, and more. During the car chase Lazenby’s car drives right through a house and keeps going, so Fang has to catch up with him and ram his car so hard it splits in half like a fortune cookie. (that’s not some racial comment, fortune cookie just fits what happens better than, say, wishbone or something.)

You get used to movies where you’re waiting for a fight or a chase to happen, and when it does you get excited but it’s over before you know it. THE MAN FROM HONG KONG does not believe in that type of bullshit. THE MAN FROM HONG KONG believes in fight after stunt after chase after long-ass fight. I knew I had rented well early on when Fang chased a suspect through the streets, caught up with him in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, had a long fight involving various cooking utensils and ingredients, then moved to the restaurant where they proceeded to destroy many dinners, tables, chairs and dishes as well as their own clothes. His opponent actually splits the ass of his jeans and you can see that he’s wearing yellow underwear. And that is long before the fight is over.

That’s my favorite fight but it’s only one of many. There’s also the “kung fu demonstration” at Lazenby’s backyard barbecue where he ends up fighting all of the henchmen and destroying all of the snacks and only has to leave when a bow and arrow gets involved. Or the scene where he sneaks into a martial arts academy at night but for some reason every member of the dojo is there and he has to fight all of them at the same time. They should actually have to pay him for lessons because they get a real workout and get a chance to try out every weapon they have on hand.

I mean, this guy beats up a whole lot of people. At one point one of the cops complains that Australia has a small population and that Fang is working through all of them.

But he’s got some Shaft in him too. The movie takes place over a few days but he meets, falls in love with and beds two different Australian ladies. One of them gets blown up, the other one teaches him how to hang glide.

There are plenty of more artful martial arts movies out there, and where it is more convincing that everybody is hitting each other every time. This doesn’t compare to, say, the best Shaw Brothers movies. But the story of an arrogant asshole tearing his way through Australia with no regard for the law, ethics, strategy, manners or common sense is pretty hilarious, and the action is so relentless and down and dirty that you gotta love it.

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I was kind of embarrassed though when I found out there was a documentary going around called NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD that lumps these movies together under the silly name “Ozploitation.” It was real popular down there in Austin where my Ain’t It Cool colleagues are and Tarantino’s interviewed in it and everything so it got them all interested. I swear it’s a coincidence, I had no idea this was a big thing right now. If anything, the documentary probaly copied the idea from me.

Anyway, one of the really prolific directors I haven’t checked out yet is Brian Trenchard-Smith, who I believe is actually English but did dozens of movies in Australia starting in the ’70s. He’s got a bunch of them I’ve been meaning to check out, and DEAD END DRIVE-IN wasn’t one of them. But the new Fangoria has an article about NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD and it includes this picture:

So obviously I rented it.

Although it’s a post-apocalyptic movie full of crazy punks and there are some of the car stunts implied by the picture, this is not at all a MAD MAX rip-off. In fact it’s a pretty clever allegory. The story takes place after a series of disasters caused world economic collapse (oh come on, that would never happen) and shit is fucked up.

The main character is a skinny punk named Crabs. His musclehead brother is in the towing business, because there are lots of car wrecks in this world, but it’s a dangerous occupation and Crabs might be too weak to cut it. Then one day he brings his girlfriend to a drive-in movie, and somebody steals the wheels off of his car while he’s there. The drive-in is at the end of a restricted road so there’s nowhere to buy wheels and it’s highly illegal to walk. So they’re stuck.

But they’re not the only ones. In fact, this drive-in is pretty much a commune for futuristic punk rockers and new wavers who have all been stranded. They live in their junked out cars, cover the walls in graffiti and subsist on theater concessions. There’s easy access to drugs so nobody’s in a hurry to leave. Life is better for them here than if they were free. But most of them don’t even notice the electric fences that keep them locked in.

Crabs wants to get the hell out of there though, and it quickly becomes obvious that it ain’t gonna happen. These people were stranded there for a reason – they paid the unemployed rate for the movie. This is society’s way of dealing with the youth and the underclass. They spend their days watching movies, eating hamburgers, getting high, fucking and fighting, not wanting to do anything else. Both literally and figuratively they’re at a dead end.

The allegory gets even deeper when the cops show up with busloads of Asian immigrants who they leave at the drive-in. Instead of realizing that they’ve been had and their hangout is an internment camp, the dumb-dead enders turn their hatred toward the Asians. They call a meeting to discuss such fears as “they might rape our women.” Even Crabs’s girlfriend falls for this shit. This seems like a fair criticism of various punk movements that seemed to fall pretty easily into stupid racism like that. It’s hard to separate the serious anti-establishment people from the morons who just want to break shit.

So DEAD END DRIVE-IN raises many questions: Where is the line between having fun and wasting your life on superficial bullshit? What should I be doing with my life? Why are we so quick to turn on our own people instead of those who oppress us? And most of all how the fuck did this guy end up directing LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE? I mean, not just because it’s LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE, but it’s just such a shitty movie. This one is pretty smart and real nice looking, lots of production value in the elaborate recycled society at the drive-in, nice photography with smoke always in the background, a great fight scene, and some amazing car crashes and explosions (see photo). There’s even some very clever directing in the way the movies on the drive-in screen (other movies directed by Trenchard-Smith, it turns out) sync up with the action in front. For example the camera pans across as Crabs fights various foes while behind him a scene from THE MAN FROM HONG KONG pans across as the hero defeats enemies with his martial arts.

I also want to give them some credit for having really good graffiti on the walls. Almost all low budget punk rock movies of the ’80s have god awful graffiti, a bunch of anarchy signs and stupid sounding names and crude statements of rebellion, in sloppy amateurish lettering. I don’t mind graffiti as long as the kids show pride in their work. Some of it is real sloppy and you figure they should go home and practice more before defacing public property. The graffiti in movies is even worse than that though because it’s not done by people who give much though to the subject, they just gotta cover some walls real quick for the movie. It’s just terrible. But the graffiti in this one is great, very elaborate tags obviously done by real graffiti artists. That’s going above and beyond there. There is clearly more effort put into the graffiti wall than into any single element of LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE.

I’m gonna have to check out more of this guy’s movies, so I’ll keep you updated.

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More importantly, it was St. Patrick’s Day, and I’m not Irish, and I can’t drink, so what the fuck else am I supposed to do on St. Patrick’s Day besides watch some Leprechaun pictures.

The first one is the one that stars Jennifer Aniston playing a Jennifer Aniston type. She’s an L.A. city girl who has to come with her dad to a barn out in the boondocks somewhere. Little does she know that the old Irish immigrant who used to own the place once went back to the motherland, trapped a leprechaun (Warwick Davis, RAY) and stole his gold. The leprechaun came home with him in his luggage and tried to kill him, but the old man used a four leaf clover (like a crucifix to a vampire) to trap him in a box. In Jennifer Aniston’s barn.

Mark Holton (Frances from the PeeWee Herman movie) plays a reta– I mean a lovable manchild who accidentally opens the box. And because he’s a lovable manchild, nobody believes him that he saw a leprechaun. Also they don’t believe him because he said he saw a leprechaun.

The lovable manchild and his actual child friend find the leprechaun’s gold, and the manchild accidentally swallows a piece of it, and then the leprechaun uses evil magic to try to get the gold back. etc.

Now, the idea of a movie about a killer leprechaun is pretty funny, but I didn’t enjoy this one all that much. There’s not enough absurdity to fuel it. It gets pretty boring. But I’m glad they treat it seriously and it seems like a real movie.

Because I didn’t really get into that one I decided to skip parts 2 and 3 and go straight for part 4, LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE. Unless maybe part 3 has a crazy EVIL DEAD 2 type ending there is no explanation of how the leprechaun got into space. He’s just in a space cave somewhere with a space princess who’s using him for his gold. He wants to marry her so he can become king of some galaxy or something, then have sex with her and kill her. He is not exactly the most enlightened leprechaun you’re gonna come across when it comes to gender issues, in my opinion. I mean maybe there’s stories I never heard about the Lucky Charms guy being a pig, who knows, but as far as I know this particular unnamed leprechaun is the Ike Turner of leprechauns. Minus the musical talent. (More on that later.)

Unfortunately for the leprechaun, his marital coup plan is interupted by some ALIENS-style space mercenaries brought in by a cyborg mad scientist working on an experiment to regrow his damaged body. I forget exactly why he was there but unfortunately I don’t think he knew about the leprechaun or that he was impervious to bullets. As long as they’re ripping off ALIENS it would be great if they said they were trying to get the leprechaun’s DNA for their bio-weapons division, but no dice.

What happens instead is the marines see the leprechaun and blow him up, but then one of them (the Bill Paxton type) pees on the corpse, and some (green?) electrical beams come up into him. Later, when he gets a boner the leprechaun busts out of his crotch. This might be an homage to A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4 where a dog pees fire onto Freddy’s corpse to resurrect him, but more likely it is just a half thought out idea that these guys thought might seem to make sense. They never explain what happened to the corpse that he peed on. Are there two leprechauns in space now?

There is all kinds of ridiculous shit that happens in this movie. A guy gets his DNA spliced with a spider. A tough guy cyborg marine has to wear a dress. The leprechaun turns himself giant, and gets blown out into space just like the Alien. The whole thing is so ridiculous that it seems like it would have to be enjoyable, but I really didn’t get into it. I think there’s two basic problems. One is that they make it really jokey, they are not really taking it seriously, and the acting is about porn level. The second is that the production values are so fucking shitty. There aren’t even TV shows that look as crappy is this, the sets are more like a school play. They don’t even bother to use green screens to put realistic stars in the space ship windows, they just have black felt with a bunch of identical white lights poking out of it.

If this had good production values, and it if it had a more serious tone, if it felt like a real ALIEN sequel, but had a leprechaun in it – that would be a classic right there. That is the movie I want to see. But not this shit.

Now, by the time of part 5, and especially since it’s called LEPRECHAUN IN THE HOOD, you would expect it to be even shittier. Or at least I was. But I was happy to find that IN THE HOOD is actually one giant leap for mankind compared to IN SPACE. The production values are way better – pretty good photography, shot on location instead of shitty sets, and even the acting is alot better (although iffy in spots).

The opening scene is in the ’70s, and Ice-T (with an afro) discovers the leprechaun’s gold, a magic flute and a statue of the leprechaun wearing a gold necklace. Of course, when his friend takes the necklace it brings the leprechaun to life. And it takes about 5 seconds to realize the leprechaun is a complete asshole, because he quotes Dr. King’s “Free at least, free at last, God almighty I’m free at last.” Man, talk about inappropriate. Ice-T should call him a racist but instead calls him “you midget Midas motherfucker.”

Luckily Ice manages to get the necklace back on him and escape with the goods. It’s weird because this mostly seems like a serious scene, but there’s a part where Ice pulls a baseball bat out of his afro.

Skip ahead to the ’90s and our protagonists, a “positive” rap trio trying to make a name for themselves. Ice-T (not playing himself, by the way) is now a very powerful rap mogul who could put them on the map. They manage to get a meeting with him, but it doesn’t go well.

This is the scene where I first realized I like this movie better than the other ones. I knew Ice-T was in this movie and I figured it was one of those half-assed roles alot of rappers do in DTV movies, he is just fuckin around trying to be funny. But that’s not what Ice-T is doing – he plays it just as seriously as he does that role on whichever LAW AND ORDER show he’s on. He plays it like it’s an actual menacing villain. In the middle of the meeting he makes them wait while he makes a phone call:

“Hey you, you listen to me. You don’t wanna fuck with me, okay? I hope you had sex last night, ’cause I’ma come over there and cut off your dick, then I’ma feed it to my pit, then I’ma burn the shit when it comes out of my god damn dog’s ass, you hear me? DON’T FUCK WITH ME, BITCH!”

Then he turns back to the kids and asks them more questions about their music. This could be dumb but all the actors treat it completely deadpan. Even when they’re doing broad jokes (they find out how to kill the leprechaun from a “Leprechauns For Dummies” book, they stick four leaf clovers in a joint to try to kill him, etc.) the actors seem like they don’t know it’s supposed to be funny, which is the complete opposite of most of these types of movies. They don’t even have wacky music on the score pointing out the jokes.

The rappers get in trouble with the leprechaun when they decide to rob Ice-T’s office. He has the leprechaun statue in a trophy case and they make the mistake of stealing his necklace, bringing him to life. They also steal his magic flute which they find out has hypnotic powers, and they use it to help their rap careers.

It keeps seeming like Ice-T’s gonna die, but he survives throughout the story so he is a threat to the rappers and a possible victim for the leprechaun. And that’s good because Ice-T is the heart and soul of LEPRECHAUN IN THE HOOD.

You know who could really learn from Ice-T is that fuckin leprechaun. Like in most of his movies, his dialogue is all rhymes. Horrible, stupid rhymes. The guy is just a complete jackass. I don’t know if you’ve seen this but Ice-T had a reality show called ICE-T’S RAP SCHOOL where he tried to teach white prep school kids to be rappers. The leprechaun could really benefit from going to this school. He thinks if he just makes a rhyme that says “Tiger Woods” in it that counts as wit. Leprechaun, you suck.

Different people have different reactions to seeing a monster leprechaun. One guy thinks he’s a kid and says, “I’m not gonna buy any Halloween costumes, so leave me alone.” I guess in the hood there are kids who go around trying to sell Halloween costumes. There’s a transvestite prostitute who has a different reaction, he’s horny so when the leprechaun shows up at his crib he tries to fuck it. That’s one thing that doesn’t usually happen to Freddy, let alone Chucky.

This one has even more crazy shit that goes down than IN SPACE. Not one but all of the heroes have to dress up like women this time. Maybe the weirdest scene though is where the rappers have to help out at the church in order to get sanctuary, but their song offends the congregation and everybody starts to leave. Out of desperation, one of the dudes blows the magic flute, and all the churchgoers get hypnotized into coming back in and sitting down. And then they notice two guys standing at the back of the church.

“Yo, that’s… Coolio?!”

Then they perform a horrible rap song. There are 2 or 3 shots to show that Coolio stands there and listens. Then you never see or hear from him again. Apparently, the magic flute is not only hypnotic, it also has the power to summon Coolio. That’s pretty cool but at least in this particular situation it didn’t really help, Coolio did not offer assistance or anything. Still, it’s good to know. If you ever need Coolio, blow the magic flute.

By the end of the movie, the leprechaun has an entourage of babes with glowing green eyes who he calls “me zombie flygirls.” And luckily he doesn’t rap until the end credits.

That would be my one complaint about this one other than the general annoyingness of the leprechaun: the music is terrible. And that’s a problem because it’s practically a musical. The rappers have this corny old school stytle and they’re just not very good at it. And the leprechaun doing a song called “Lep in the Hood”? Jesus. Even Ice-T’s song on the soundtrack is pretty terrible, he actually keeps saying “Straight shootin, darn tootin.” I don’t know how the fuck they got Ice-T using the phrase “darn tootin” but I’m sure it involved the magic flute. Otherwise though, an admirable leprechaun picture.

I figured part 6, BACK 2 THA HOOD, couldn’t be as good, but actually it is at least on par with IN THE HOOD. It even starts out Disney style with a big fancy book that opens up to LEPRECHAUN: CHAPTER 6, and the pages come to life with animated drawings as a female narrator gives us the (never before explained, at least in parts 1, 4 or 5) mythology of the leprechaun. It’s like the beginning of LORD OF THE RINGS 1. Turns out some ancient king summoned the leprechauns to protect his gold and punish the evil people who tried to steal it. But when the king died they all went back to nature except for one asshole who stayed behind and turned evil from being in the human world. So he’s one of those stubborn individuals like the old man who refused to leave Mt. St. Helens before it erupted, or one of those guys that was still fighting the civil war years later.

I only mention that backstory because it brings up some complex questions. There doesn’t seem to be any continuity in these movies. The place the leprechaun is at in the beginning of a movie is never connected to where he was at the end of the last one. At the end of 5 he seemed to have died but then all the sudden he was alive and wearing sunglasses and was the manager to a famous rapper. In part 6 he doesn’t have that, he doesn’t even have his zombie flygirls, and he’s after some priest who stole his gold to fund a community center for the children.

So I had decided these were actually different leprechauns, they weren’t the same dude. But now we find out there is only one leprechaun in the human world. So it is the same dude. I don’t get it.

This one has a comic relief type character, but otherwise it’s even more deadpan than IN THE HOOD. The lead is Tangi Miller (Felicity) whose performance is just as serious as she would give if she was in, say, MUNICH. They also got Kirk Sticky Jones (TV’s Blade) in the cast but he’s just the villain’s #2 in charge so he doesn’t get much to do except get hit by a bat and get his throat slashed by the leprechaun near the end.

There’s alot of good scenes in this one. The leprechaun tries to explain to the cops that it’s his gold they found on some guys, but they don’t believe him. So he starts fighting them, and one of the officers starts doing kickboxing moves on him. But he tears off the cop’s leg and uses it to reach the gas pedal when he steals a cop car.

For some reason the leprechaun doesn’t use magic powers like shooting fireballs anymore, so a guy is actually able to punch the shit out of him. But he can take it, because of magic. He can even take being burned to the bones in a furnace. Our heroes unfortunately don’t have the Leprechaun For Dummies book, but a psychic tells them about four leaf clovers. I have noticed that for some reason these movies never acknowledge that four leaf clovers are hard to find. In this case it was already established that (for reasons I do not understand) one character’s weed supply had been contaminated with clovers. And luckily they are four leaf clovers.

Anyway, point is, they put four leaf clovers into the tips of hollow point bullets. So this is a pretty good movie.

Based on the ones I saw I would definitely have to say that the two HOOD movies are the best of the series. Those are the ones I can endorse. I gotta say though, I am not a fan of the leprechaun in general. His rhyming is obnoxious, his sense of humor is worse than Freddy’s, and his accent and forced archaic language just makes him seem like a prick. Sometimes Warwick Davis’s acting is pretty good (for example, his reaction when a guy who interrupts his threats to answer his cell phone) but this character is no Chucky.

Part of the problem might be his motive. Usually when a slasher has some thing they’re getting revenge for there is at least a grain of truth to their moral outrage so that the victims feel guilty. Freddy was burned alive by his victims’ parents, the chainsaw family’s property was disrespected, Vincent Price got fucked over by various people, etc. But the leprechaun’s complaint is so fuckin petty. I know, “don’t steal shit” (paraphrase) is one of the ten commandments, but come on. This leprechaun leaves gold laying around, most of the time the people don’t even know they’re stealing it. If Bush is a bastard for executing retarded people (and he is), then the leprechaun is the same for going after a mentally disabled lovable manchild just because he found some gold in a pickup truck. There is just no validity to this leprechaun’s killing spree.

Still, I hope they keep making these movies. I would like to see the production values and almost-seriousness of the HOOD duology, but obviously it’s time to move on to some new settings and premises. Here are a few suggestions I got.

LEPRECHAUN SQUAD: Fed up with the bad reputation this leprechaun is bringing to the larger leprechaun community, an elite squad of good leprechauns come to the human world to hunt the fucker down. These would be some real badasses as far as leprechauns go. All kinds of scars, eyepatches, tattoos, and they have high tech equipment. They rapell in with their infra-green goggles on and go to work.

LEPRECHOPALYPSE: Some time after LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE, the leprechaun returns to earth to find that civilization has been destroyed in a nuclear war. Now he wanders the wasteland on an awesome green motorcycle trying to find mutants to steal his gold.

LEPRECHAUN IN IRAQ: This one is kind of like LEPRECHAUN meets THREE KINGS. It turns out that Saddam stole the leprechaun’s gold, and it was actually the leprechaun that hung him. (they could incorporate him into the actual camera phone footage of the hanging.) But the gold switches hands from Iraqi looters to American soldiers, making them all targets of the leprechaun. This would be more of an action movie because the soldiers would have even better ammunition than the drug dealers in BACK 2 THA HOOD. There could also be some wacky FORREST GUMP style humor where the leprechaun is involved in notorious incidents like the Abu Ghraib scandal, etc.

LEPRECHAUN IN DOUBT: This is more of a character drama about what the leprechaun does when nobody steals his gold. At the beginning he puts his gold in the bank. Then he gets so bored he starts to wonder if maybe he really wants people to steal his gold. His life has no meaning otherwise, he is defined by the theft of his material goods. We know from the other movies that he knows how to drive a car (”Well he was doing very well last night!”), answer a phone, smoke a joint, etc., so he must have non-gold related interactions with humans on occasion. But judging by his horrible personality and annoying habits those interactions must not go well. This is a sad story about loneliness and alienation, but also about self discovery and, ultimately, redemption. Definitely the most emotional of the LEPRECHAUN franchise.

LEPRECHAUN UNDER SIEGE: After the box office failure of LEPRECHAUN IN DOUBT, the Leprechaun will go back to what he does best: killing people who steal his gold. But this time it happens in an action movie context. At the beginning of the movie the Leprechaun goes to withdraw his gold from the bank, but he happens to get there just as a team of highly armed and skilled mercenaries are taking hostages as part of a plan to rob the vault. Now, using magic and sneaking around in small vents that nobody else can fit in, only the Leprechaun can rescue the hostages, or at least kill the guys who stole his gold. I guess probaly not rescue the hostages, but who knows.

LEPRECHAUN IN CONGRESS: After becoming a media hero for his heroic rescue of the hostages, the Leprechaun makes a successful bid for Congress and becomes chairman of the ways and means committee, where he learns to not only protect his own treasure, but that of the American people.

LEPRECHAUN IN THE SPACE HOOD: After the box office failure of LEPRECHAUN IN CONGRESS, the Leprechaun returns to more familiar territory.

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