The Seven Magnificent Gladiators

Director: Bruno Mattei
Writer: Claudio Fragasso
Producer: Alexander Hacohen (on screen), Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus (on box)
Cast: Lou Ferrigno, Sybil Danning, Brad Harris, Dan Vadis
Year of release: 1983
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: UK video (Guild, 1985)

The title, I Sette Magnifici Gladiatori, says it all really: this is The Magnificent Seven in Ancient Rome. The marvelously named Dan Vadis is the villainous Nicerote, all cape and codpiece, who holds a village in fear through regular raiding parties with his bandits. The local priestess (Nicerote’s mother) sends village girl Pandora (Carla Ferrigno) to Rome, equipped with a magic sword, to find one suitable to wield it.

That one turns out to be Barbarian slave, former Incredible Hulk and Carla’s hubby, Lou Ferrigno, who defeats Centurion Brad Harris in a chariot race but defies the Emperor’s order to slay his opponent. Lou and Brad gather five compatriots including the glorious Sybil Danning (also in another Magnificent Seven rip-off, Battle Beyond the Stars) whose costumes are worth the price of admission alone.

Once the seven arrive at the village, the film sticks slavishly (as it were!) to its source - which was of course itself an unofficial remake of The Seven Samurai - with Nicerote driven off then returning for a final showdown, resulting in the deaths of four of the seven.

An unashamed attempt by Cannon to recreate 1960s Italian pepla, this generally works and is undemanding fun. Stars Harris (The Fury of Hercules, Goliath Against the Giants) and Vadis (Triumph of Hercules) provide a direct link to the original subgenre, and both still stand up well, though they were 50 and 45 when this film was made (Vadis died a few years later). Director Mattei, though better known for stuff like Zombie Creeping Flesh (also written by Fragasso, whose later works include the dire Troll 2) and SS Experiment Camp, actually started out as an editor on films like Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators (which starred Dan Vadis).

Danning, Ferrigno and Harris worked together on another latter-day peplum for Cannon - Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules, shot the same year. Also watch out for Mandy Rice-Davies, of Profumo scandal notoriety, as the Emperor’s favourite.

With Ferrigno’s torso vying for screen time with Danning’s cleavage, there truly is something here for everybody to enjoy.

MJS rating: B
review originally posted 20th March 2005

Ultraman II

Director: Sidney L Caplan
Writers: Sidney L Caplan, Tom Weiner, Steve Kramer, Wally Soul
Producers: Noboru Tsuburaya, Sidney L Caplan
Cast: Barbara Goodson, Steve Kramer, Joe Perry
Country: Japan/USA
Year of release: 1983
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Isn’t it bloody typical? For years I search the video shops of this land for Ultraman tapes (or indeed any other Japanese superheroes). All I ever find is multiple copies of Ultraman: The Alien Invasion, a feature-length re-edit of the first few episodes of the Australian series Ultraman: Towards the Future. I’m not even sure that the second volume of that was released in the UK; I assume it must have been but I’ve never seen it.

So, in the summer of 2005 when I was writing about the character’s history in a feature on Ultraman: The Next for Neo magazine, I stated with some confidence that the Aussie series is the only one ever released in the UK. And while that issue was on sale - while it was on sale! - I came across this 1983 tape of the 1979 animated version, which was simply called The Ultraman. Bloody typical.

The on-screen title, clearly generated after the fact, is Ultraman 2: The Further Adventures of Ultraman which is all very odd because of the four episodes which make up this faux feature, the first is the series’ opener about the creation of 'the' Ultraman himself. So what, if anything, was in the first animated Ultraman ‘film’, if such a beast exists?

Okay, here’s the set-up. In response to some weird writing that appears in the sky, the Earth Defence Force (sometimes called the Earth Defence Organisation) establishes ‘Emergency Science and Defence Squads’ in every ‘zone’ on Earth. Captain Adam (sometimes called Captain Adams) is put in charge of the Eastern Zone ESDS. He agrees to the job provided that he can have at his disposal a super-amazing aircraft (and occasional submarine) called the Super Star (sometimes called the SS13 - as you can, see there’s not much consistency here).

He gathers around him a team of four people: fat comedy sidekick Marconi, tall engineering genius Glen (who is not mentioned by name until the second episode), beautiful Lieutenant Ann Johnson and enigmatic Commander Harris who has been serving aboard Earth Space Station 3. Piloting his one-man spaceship back to Earth, Harris goes through the usual Ultraman scenario: red light blah blah blah lose control blah blah blah giant figure blah blah blah. Ultraman (for it is he) tells Harris that he must go to Earth, using Harris’ body: “The survival of the whole universe, including Earth, depends on it.”

The story proper starts off with an iceberg that crosses the equator without melting and which eventually cracks open to reveal a giant bipedal dinosaur thing which somehow, shortly afterwards, turns into four identical giant bipedal dinosaur things. And let me tell you folks, with their little arms akimbo and mincing gait these are the campest monsters you ever saw. Nevertheless, the crew of the SS13 - which can launch smaller aircraft from itself - succeed in keeping a straight face long enough to defeat the beasties with the assistance of a mysterious giant stranger dressed in red and silver. (Harris has a green star which he places on his forehead to become Ultraman for a limited time. Of course, as is traditional, none of the others have a clue that their giant benefactor is actually their colleague.)

And so, 22 minutes in, we leap to a different episode which takes place just before Ann’s birthday. Marconi and Glen both have crushes on her, of course, but she is most interested in Harris. In this episode a tornado attacks a power station which derives energy from a giant whirlpool. Investigations reveal that at the centre of the tornado is a monster that looks like a five-tentacled heart. After some more flying around, Ultraman appears and gives it a good hiding.

The third story starts with the team enjoying a bit of a holiday but they are swiftly called back into service to investigate a giant red cloud. Glen manages to capture some of it in a bottle, takes it back to the lab and discovers that it coalesces into a living thing when it gets wet. Adams tells him this is very useful information but it’s not really because it has already started raining and the cloud has become a giant pink yeti. The SS13 battles the big beastie until Ultraman appears, dispels the rain clouds and causes the monster to revert to cloud form.

Probably the best of the four stories is the final one, not least because it has a vaguely decent monster, a sort of giant crocodile thing. We start with Marconi destroying this threat by himself using a hand-held rocket launcher at close range - which everyone agrees is very impressive. We then see something that must happen after most kaiju eiga but rarely gets shown: somebody clearing away the bloody great reptilian corpse. The guy supervising the crane and lorry involved turns out to be the Chief of the Space Biology Group who wants the body to study. Oh, and it’s not quite dead (sorry, Marconi). At the same time, a young boy discovers a baby version of the monster and adopts it as a secret pet, despite local warnings that the authorities are looking for a strange creature which could be dangerous. Of course, ‘Baby’ grows at an alarming rate and eventually becomes a full-grown crocodile-thing. Both plots in this episode show some promise and it’s just a shame that there is no apparent connection between them.

Oh, and there’s one really curious thing which I haven’t yet mentioned: the obligatory robot sidekick. In this case it’s a squat, crinkly, alien-looking blob named PDQ who carries a very tiny grey monkey on his shoulder. He makes no significant contribution to any of the stories, is absolutely never explained (nor is his monkey) and really only serves to raise the weirdness quotient of this otherwise distinctly lacklustre cartoon.

Even if you enjoy anime (and as I have observed elsewhere, I can’t stand the stuff) you have to be pretty tolerant to sit through Ultraman II. Stuff like Battle of the Planets may have been fun when we were kids but it doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of 21st century eyes and The Ultraman isn’t even up to Battle of the Planets standards. Frankly it’s barely up to Thunderbirds 2086 standards.

The characters are one-dimensional, the plots arbitrary - not nonsensical enough to be entertaining, just boring - and the animation is as simplistic and basic as the scripts. The music is derivative and obvious, the monsters for the most part are bollocks and Ultraman is hardly in it at all. This is definitely one for completists. I watched the tape once then gave it away for someone else to ‘enjoy.’

The Ultraman/Ultraman II has no connection with the rest of Ultraman continuity, kicking off with an origin story in a world where the Ultra Brothers are completely unknown (much like Ultraman: The Next, but there the similarities end!). In Japan this version of the character was apparently known as Ultraman Jonias or Ultraman Joe and featured in some stage shows as well as the cartoon. It took me a while to track down confirmation but apparently there was a previous western release of animated episodes which was called The Adventures of Ultraman. However, as this ‘sequel’ kicks off with episode one, it’s difficult to see what could have been on the first volume.

Despite the very obvious breaks between episodes, it’s clear from the linking narration that it was added after the shows were combined into this ersatz feature. The ‘film’ finishes with a series of still images which presumably were designed to play under the closing credits of the episodes if the show was broadcast. There was evidently a Region 1 DVD release of this a while back but that is now deleted.

The voice artists are Barbara Goodson (who was the voice of Rita Repulsa in the early series of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and both Power Rangers films, and also contributed voices to Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Robotech, Digimon, Cowboy Bebop and stacks of other interchangeable anime), Steve Kramer (who wrote the English script for Zeram), Tom Weiner (also credited as narrator) and Joe Perry. Director/writer/producer Sidney L Caplan apparently also produced Bert I Gordon’s Necromancy and Reginald Le Borg’s So Evil, My Sister. The film is presented as ‘produced by Tsuburaya Production Company Ltd and Associates Entertainment International’; Noboru Tsuburaya’s credit as producer is the only Japanese name to be seen.

MJS rating: C-

[Addendum: Would you Adam and Eve it? Less than a month later, I found a 1987 reissue of this film so it was actually released twice in this country. - MJS]

Village of Doom

Director: Noboru Tanaka
Writer: Takuya Nishioka
Cast: Masato Furuoya, Izumi Hara, Misako Tanaka
Year of release: 1983
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: screener DVD (Artsmagic)

This has to be one of the most obscure films that Artsmagic has so far released - and I should know because as usual I compiled bio-filmographies of director and cast for the film. Well, I found out about the individual people, but a thorough search of my own files, the internet and the BFI library turned up absolutely nothing on the film itself.

So I sat down to watch the screener disc with absolutely no preconceptions whatsoever. What sort of film is this? A horror movie, an action flick, a drama? It’s a bit of all of them I suppose. It’s a revenge movie is what it is, but unlike that most high profile of recent revenge flicks Kill Bill - which is pretty much non-stop revenge from start to finish with the occasional flashback for justification - Village of Doom (Ushimitsu no Mura) is 75 per cent justification and only kicks into full-on revenge mode in the last half-hour or so.

Masato Furuoya, more recently seen in spooky TV series such as Juni Inagawa’s House of Horror and Tengoku e no Kaidan, stars as Tsugio Inumaru in this WW2-set tale. While other young men go off to fight in Manchuria, sensitive, intelligent Tsugio is left in the village because he’s not fit enough for the army. This has its apparent advantages - with so many husbands away, it’s not long before he loses his virginity to an older woman - but all that Tsugio feels is shame.

He lives with his grandmother Han (Izumi Hara: The Magic Serpent) and the two of them are soft touches who frequently lend money to others, unlikely to ever see it back. The isolated village, whose only link with the rest of the world is a rickety railway line, is an insular little place where cousins marry cousins and strangers aren’t tolerated.

Struggling to retain his honour, Tsugio finds that those around him have none. He is tortured by guilt over his occasional flings with other men’s wives and pain at his inability to relate to girls his own age, and a desperate attempt to pass the army physical leaves him feeling even worse. So he goes to the city and buys a gun. And when the village policeman finds and confiscates it, he goes back and buys lots of guns. And swords. And knives. And combat gear of all sorts.

And at the 83-minute mark, the tension which has been slowly building bursts and Tsugio makes his way around the village, coolly and brutally killing almost everyone he meets in a flurry of bullets and blades.

Director Noboru Tanaka (Watcher in the Attic, A Woman Called Sada Abe) worked under Kurosawa on films like Yojimbo before becoming a leading director of ‘roman porno’ soft porn films in the 1970s. Star Furuoya committed suicide in March 2003. The other cast members include Isao Natsuyagi (Tidal Wave, Virus, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge), Renji Ishibashi (Roningai, Lone Wolf and Cub: White Heaven in Hell, Tetsuo the Iron Man and stacks of Kinji Fukasaku and Takashi Miike films), Misako Tanaka (Gonza the Spearman) and Shino Ikenami (Evil Dead Trap 2).

Fascinating and intense, Village of Doom is a look inside the psyche of a troubled teen entirely unfettered by modern western concerns. It’s beautifully shot and elegantly written, but may just be too slow-moving for many potential viewers, because until that 83-minute point, it’s entirely unclear where this is going.

MJS rating: B

Wacko

Director: Greydon Clark
Writers: Jim Kouf, Dana Olsen, Michael Spound
Producer: Greydon Clark
Cast: Julia Duffy, Scott McGinnis, George Kennedy
Country: USA
Year of release: 1983
Reviewed from: UK VHS

I can’t explain it, I can’t even excuse it, but I find something compulsively watchable about this desperately, desperately, desperately unfunny horror spoof. It’s like a car wreck. Every joke falls so completely flat (even the one or two that, handled properly, could actually have been funny) that it is difficult to tear one’s eyes away from the screen. In many cases, they’re not even real jokes, just jokoids: something which has the shape of a joke but isn’t actually humorous. Wacko comes from the school of comedy which says it’s enough to simply make a reference to something or recreate an image from another film - you don’t actually have to spoof or lampoon it in any way or, you know, inject any wit or anything.

A prologue set thirteen years ago sees High School student Pam Graves (Claudia Lonow: Knots Landing) preparing for the Halloween Pumpkin Prom. Her date drives her to the High School car park where the two of them are brutally killed by a long-nosed. pumpkin-headed maniac armed with a petrol-powered lawnmower. This is witnessed by Pam’s little sister Mary and her friends Bambi, Rosie and Johnny, all of whom are trussed up in the back seat.

Thirteen years later, Mary (Julia Duffy: Battle Beyond the Stars, Charlotte’s Web 2) is about to attend her own Halloween Pumpkin Prom at Alfred Hitchcock High School, where her date is a young man named Norman Bates (Scott McGinnis, who was in Star Trek III and Sky Bandits and directed episodes of Angel). Yes, he’s called Norman Bates: that’s the level of satire on show here. And of course he has a dead mother whom he pretends can talk. But there’s just nothing intrinsically funny about having a character called Norman Bates unless you do something with that name, use it to make a point - or at least make a joke. But it's not a joke, just a jokoid, as is the school name. There’s even a banner up announcing that weekend’s big football game between the Hitchcock Birds and the De Palma Knives. Oh, spare me.

Mary is the only Virgin in the High School. Rosie (Michele Tobin, who must have been very young when she made her debut in an episode of The Wild, Wild West) is a glamorous pricktease dating tight-trousered Travolta-esque Tony Schlongini (notoriously unfunny comedian Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay, just credited as ‘Andrew Clay’) while Bambi is a squeaky-voiced cutie who lacks a date, played by squeaky voice artist EG Daily (credited as ‘Elizabeth Daily’).

Scuzzball detective Dick Harbinger (Joe Don Baker: Leonard Part VI, Cape Fear remake, Mars Attacks! and three Bond films) is convinced that the Lawnmower Killer will strike again, but he has so many suspects to choose from. There’s the hilariously named Harry Palms (Jeff Altman: Highlander II), evangelical Vice Principal of the school who punishes wayward students who indulge in ‘vice’ (get it?) by squeezing their heads in a large vice (get it!!!). There’s a bald escapee from a mental hospital, tastefully credited as ‘The Looney’ (David Drucker). There’s geeky loner school gardener Zeke (Anthony James: Return from Witch Mountain, Howling IV, Mortuary Academy) and science teacher Dr Moreau (Victor Brandt: Neon Maniacs, Sliver, The Cat in the Hat and two episodes of classic Trek) who injects the school football team with a chemical that turns them into beastmen, giving them their first victory in years (something we don’t actually see, presumably because it would cost too much to stage a whole ball game).

Back at Mary’s house, there’s her father, Dr Graves (George Kennedy: The Naked Gun, Monster Makers, Demonwarp, Death Ship) whose sub-Benny Hill lustings for young women are rendered distinctly dodgy by the fact that said young women are his teenage daughters. When caught in the act of spying he always claims to be “mowing the lawn”. Stella Stevens (The Nutty Professor, Invisible Mom - ah sod it, you all know who Stella Stevens is) plays Mary’s mother and Michael Lee Gogin (Critters, Munchies, Spy Hard, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) is her weirdo younger brother Damien who, with typical lack of subtlety, has three sixes on his forehead. There is also a strange bloke, credited as ‘The Weirdo’ (Sonny Davis), who keeps trying to catch Harbinger’s attention.

The sad part is that, though they may tick every comedy stereotype box, none of these characters are actually funny. Nor does the ‘plot’ make much sense; there’s one particular scene where Rosie and Tony are in the school cafeteria and moments later they’re in the back of a car. You might say that such sloppy story construction can be excused by the fact that it’s a hot-rod car used for school driving lessons which then chases another hot-rod car across the football field before one vehicle crashes and the other flies into the sky (in the manner of Grease), but frankly it can’t.

Filmed in 1981 but not released until two years later, Wacko is one of those films that tries to be a non-stop barrage of jokes but whereas that worked with Airplane (to which the video sleeve tries to compare this crap), it doesn’t work here because none of the jokes are even slightly funny. There are tick-the-box gags spoofing The Exorcist and Alien, neither of which is worth even a smile. The whole thing is just terrible beyond belief.

I love it.

I could watch Wacko over and over again (as long as there’s a gap of several years between each screening). It’s compulsively awful in a very 1980s way but not really ‘so bad it’s good’ (as the much abused cliche has it). It’s just crap frankly. But I must be achieving some sort of meta-entertainment because I’m certainly not enjoying it in any conventional sense.

The three-way script credit is shared between Jim Kouf (The Hidden I and II, National Treasure, Rush Hour and a producer on Angel), Dana Olsen (Memoirs of an Invisible Man, George of the Jungle) and Michael Spound (presumably the actor who went on to be in The Ring, though this seems to be his only writing credit). I’m guessing that one of them wrote the script, the second inserted jokes into it and the third one had some Tippex. Greydon Clark - who is right up near the top of my interview wishlist, I don’t mind admitting - also brought us the likes of Without Warning, Dance Macabre, Dark Future and The Uninvited (which also starred George Kennedy). Cinematographer Nicolas von Sternberg is, bizarrely but not unexpectedly, the son of Josef von Sternberg. A regular Clark collaborator, his credits also include Slaughterhouse Rock, Hospital Massacre and Dr Alien.

I’ve always had a fondness for the surprisingly extensive subgenre of lawnmower horror movies (no honestly, there’s loads) and maybe that’s the reason why I enjoy Wacko despite its status as a comedy vacuum. Plus it has the deeply wonderful EG Daily (the voice of Babe in Babe, Tomy Pickles in Rugrats and Buttercup in The Powerpuff Girls), one of the very few actresses I could legitimately claim to have a crush on. Neither of those things completely explains my appreciation of this awful film, but they must be considered as mitigating factors, m’lud.

MJS rating: D

Throne of Fire

Director: Franco Prosperi
Writer: Nino Marino
Producer: Ettore Spagnuolo
Cast: Sabrina Siani, ‘Peter McCoy’ (Pietro Torrisi), Harrison Muller
Year of release: 1983
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Mr Video)

More tedious early 1980s Italian sword and sorcery crap. How many of these bloody films did they make?

A witch called Azeera gets raped by Belial (Harrison Muller from Avi Nesher’s She) who is ‘the Devil’s messenger’ and wants a son to rule the world. She gives birth on a stormy night to a hideous mutant thing which grows up to be handsome but cruel Morak (Muller again). Born at the same time is Siegfried who grows up to be Pietro Torrisi from Werewolf Woman and Django the Bastard.

The land is ruled by King Agon the Wise who sits on the titular throne of fire, which was forged by Odin (apparently). If Morak can kill Agon and marry his daughter Princess Valkari (Sabrina Siani: Black Cobra, Ator the Fighting Eagle, Mondo Cannibale) he can sit on the throne and rule to his evil heart’s content. But he must do this before sundown on ‘the day of the night in the day.’

Well, killing Agon proves no problem. Morak has a whole army of black-garbed bad guys and we eventually see a flashback to the king’s demise. But Valkari escapes. Eventually captured, she is rescued by Siegfried. And when he is captured, she rescues him. There‘s a lot of very ho-hum to-ing and fro-ing and much running around a castle which, in the manner of these things, has iron handrails on the steps and modern guttering.

At one point, Morak shows how villainous he is by offering to free the villagers he captured along with Valkari, letting them run one by one towards the door only to be shot in the back with his arrows. Later, Siegfried is thrown into the Well of Madness which proves to be an underground cave system where he faces hallucinations including a panther, a floating head and a python which he drapes round his neck and pretends to wrestle with. It seems to be real and live but drugged up to the eyeballs. From the Well of Madness he breaks into a cell where he finds his father Antar (as you do) who turns out to be a magician and grants him a one-time spell of invisibility while also making him invulnerable to everything except fire.

But that rotten old Morak overhears this and fires a flaming arrow at Siegfried when he tries to escape with Valkari. Morak’s problem, you see, is that only legitimate rulers can safely sit on the throne, and he will only be legitimate if he marries the late king’s daughter. He demonstrates what will happen otherwise by asking a doubting courtier to sit on the throne. Up come the flames and the guy burns to a nasty death.

Eventually it all comes down to a fight in the throne room between Morak (who is still a mutant-demon-thing at heart) and Siegfried... just as a total eclipse is happening. At the moment of full eclipse - ‘the day of the night in the day’ - Siegfried pushes Morak onto the throne where he roasts, on account of not being married to Valkari presumably. It all ends happily with Siegfried and Queen Valkari cheered by a small group of villagers, all of whom were murdered by Morak about fifty minutes earlier.

Even by the low standards of this dodgy subgenre, Throne of Fire (Il Trono di Fuoco) is rubbish. There’s not even a mad narrator with giant shoulder pads to relieve the tedium of the threadbare plot. Plentiful shots of Morak’s hordes attacking villages (well, the same village from different angles) are scattered throughout the film for no good reason. Some shots were overcranked so they can play in slow motion but one has been accidentally speeded up so that villagers skitter around like extras in a Benny Hill sketch for a couple of seconds.

Among the cast are Benny Cardoso (not ‘Beny’ as some sources claim, though her real name is apparently Beni Cardosi) from Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed in Ecstasy and Sumuru; Isarco Ravaioli, finishing off a career that began in 1953 and included The Vampire and the Ballerina, Wild Wild Planet, Three Graves for a Winchester, Danger Diabolik and Achtung! The Desert Tigers; and Roberto Lattanzio - now an assistant editor in Hollywood!

Franco Prosperi directed Hercules in the Haunted World back in 1961 and a bunch of other great-sounding flicks of which the one I most want to see is a 1967 low-rent Bond spoof called Dick Smart 2007. Producer Spagnuolo’s most notable credit was Fulci’s Aenigma in 1987.

Interestingly, the artwork on the British video sleeve is identical to that used for the Spanish poster for another Spagnuolo production, Sword of the Barbarians - as La Espada Salvaje de Krotar - even though it is clearly more relevant to this film (it features a throne of fire, for one thing). Sword and Throne both starred Sabrina Siani and ‘Peter McCoy’ but ironically the bloke in the painting looks less like Pietro Torrisi than I do!

There are a few brief shots of quite nasty, bloody wounds, courtesy of make-up man Giuseppe Ferranti (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cat o’Nine Tails, Cannibal Ferox, Monster Shark, Rats: Night of Terror). Special effects (such as they are) are credited to Paolo Ricci (The Sexorcist, Mountain of the Cannibal God, Eaten Alive, The Atlantis Interceptors, 2019: After the Fall of New York). Silvio Laurenzo (The Case of the Bloody Iris) designed the costumes, which must have taken all morning, and the art director was Franco Cuppini who was set decorator on Argento’s Inferno and assistant set decorator on Juliet of the Spirits!

The only watchable thing in the film is Siani (real name Sabrina Seggiani, also variously credited as Sabrina Sellers and Diana Roy) who was nineteen when she shot this and not only looks good in her suede bikini but can actually wield a sword. She puts far more effort into her performance than this shoddy film deserves.

This was one of several sword’n’spaghetti flicks made/released by Cannon in 1983-85, the others being Thor the Conqueror, Hercules, She, Sword of the Barbarians, The Adventures of Hercules and The Seven Magnificent Gladiators.

MJS rating: D

Ragnarok

Writer: Alan Moore
Cast: Jon Glover, David Tate, Norma Ronald
Country: UK
Year of release: 1983
Reviewed from: UK video (Nutland)

Okay, sports fans. How many films can you name based on stories by Alan Moore? Well, there’s V for Vendetta and From Hell and The League of Explain to Me Again Why I’m Watching This Crap. And if you’re reading this in 2008 or later you can probably add Watchmen to that list.

What has been entirely forgotten is that Alan Moore’s first screen credit was produced as far back as 1982. It’s 70 minutes long (though the packaging claims “approximately 90 minutes”), it’s British and it’s a (just about) animated sci-fi adventure with ray guns, spaceships, aliens and a talking dinosaur. It’s called Ragnarok and it’s extraordinary.

Calling this production ‘animated’ is stretching the definition of the term because it is told through a series of still drawings, rostrum-filmed in varying degrees of close-up and edited together to tell a story. There is the occasional addition of a death-ray, an explosion or a flashing light but in the animation stakes this falls somewhere between Bleep and Booster and Mr Ben.

Ragnarok himself is a sort of space-roving law enforcement character or ‘Regulator’ who seems to be judge, jury and executioner, somewhat in the manner of Judge Dredd. He has a spaceship called the Sunscreamer, equipped with a computer named VOICE, represented by a digitised image of a woman with long hair. Our hero has a variety of large guns and grenades as well as body armour and a helmet.

His companion is Smith, a flying (well, floating) blue alien who looks like a cross between a manta ray and a jellyfish. Smith communicates through a sort of electrical crackle, Ragnarok speaks English, but they seem to understand each other. Smith can also fire some sort of energy ray from his pointy tail.

The ‘film’ is divided into three parts, the first running about half an hour and the others about twenty minutes apiece - and there are clear differences in the drawing style between all three. In ‘The Shattered World’, a grizzly space prospector named Weegee is collecting minerals from an asteroid, accompanied by his talking cyber-mule Sparkplug (who dreams of transferring his electronic brain into a pleasure droid - and yes, he does make ‘hee-haw’ noises). Weegee’s partner Charlie is messily gunned down in cold blood by the villainous Daddy Bonus and his two henchmen, Razormouth (who has a metal jaw) and Jittercat (who has a head like a leopard).

Alerted by VOICE, Ragnarok comes to the rescue, first killing seven of Daddy Bonus’ other henchmen elsewhere on the asteroid. Most he guns down but two of them drift off into space when Ragnarok switches off their gravity boots. The bad guy has hung Weegee upside-down without functioning life-support on his space-suit in an attempt to get him to reveal where the logbook is, which is what Bonus needs to jump the claim. Our somewhat amoral hero despatches Jittercat and Razormouth and rescues Weegee, leaving Bonus in a similar predicament. The ‘twist’ (which is given away in the sleeve blurb!) is that the asteroids are the remnants of humanity’s original home-world, which was destroyed by war a million years ago. It had a strange name like Dirt or Mud... you can see where this is going.

‘Gates of Hell’ finds the Sunscreamer answering an automatic distress call on the planet Yatan where an interdimensional gateway has gone wrong. Ragnarok and Smith find the world in ruins with only one living being - a sentient Tyrannosaurus named Arang or Hran or somesuch. Hran has a little jacket, a plumed helmet and a refined English accent - and he can throw things around and blow them up using only the power of his mind. It seems that he came through the gateway from a universe where dinosaurs didn’t die out but became the dominant species on Earth and subsequently throughout the galaxy. He has killed and destroyed everything on Yatan and now seeks no less than complete control of the universe, but first he has to get off the planet so he needs Ragnarok’s spaceship.

Guns and grenades have no effect on Hran and even Smith’s energy ray only irritates him. When our heroes think they have finally killed the beast, they race back to the Sunscreamer which takes off, blasting Hran with its engines as he tries to stop them. An epilogue shows two salvage men picking up the same distress signal from Yatan and deciding to head down to the planet, despite a recent official announcement that no-one must land there. This leads into...

...the third part ‘Sacrifice’ which is set on the Regulators’ homeworld of Kobar. We get to see other Regulators although the only ones given names are John Brittlemask (who gets killed) and a young woman named Slow Jane who serves no narrative purpose whatsoever. In charge of them all is a large, elderly woman named Mother Blood who has a grey bun, a permanent snarl and a scar across her eye which switches sides between drawings.

Hran has escaped Yatan and made his way to Kobar where, once again, no-one and nothing can stop him. Ragnarok lures the dinosaur onto a spaceship called the Void Angel with the intention of piloting it into a black hole, thereby ending the unstoppable threat of the loquacious, telekinetic tyrannosaur. But Smith stows away aboard the vessel, knocks out Ragnarok and puts him into an escape pod before piloting the ship to destruction himself.

“Why did he do that?” Ragnarok asks Mother Blood later. “He wasn’t even human.” “Perhaps he loved you,” suggests the matriarch. “Perhaps aliens can love after all.”

It should be evident from these plot synopses that the stories are extremely simplistic pulp sci-fi with no real character development or thought-provoking concepts. None of these would pass muster as a 2000AD ‘Future Shock’, that’s for sure. The final musings on platonic cross-species love seem completely out-of-place after seventy minutes of shooting first and asking questions later.

All the voices for these three adventures - which don’t have separate opening and closing title sequences - are supplied by Jon Glover, David Tate and Norma Ronald. Glover and Tate were both regulars on Week Ending and the former also did a lot of voices for Spitting Image while the latter is probably best known to sci-fi fans as Eddie the Computer in the radio and TV versions of Hitchhiker’s Guide. Ronald was in The Men from the Ministry and had a semi-regular role as Straker’s secretary in UFO.

There is no director listed and Moore is credited only with ‘stories’ not script so it’s not clear whether he wrote this or just came up with the ideas. As he was very much at the start of his career, just a jobbing writer, I suspect he wrote all the dialogue himself. The character was designed by no less a personage than Bryan Talbot, who also drew the cool image on the video sleeve. The actual illustrations on screen are by Dave Williams, Raz and Ham Khan (who I believe are Argentinean), Don Wazejewski, Mark Farmer and Mike Collins - some of whom went on to become big names in the comics field, working for DC, Marvel and of course 2000AD. The only other person credited is David King, who wrote the music (Alan Moore knows the score!).

This bizarre video - essentially an on-screen comic - was produced and released (in March 1983) by Nutland Video Ltd, a company based in Southend-on-Sea. The film has a 1982 copyright date on screen but a 1983 date on the box. The company also produced two rather more genteel videos along similar lines. The Adventures of Gumdrop was based on a series of children’s books by Val Biro about a vintage car and was narrated by Peter Hawkins. Tales of Bobby Brewster was based on a series of books by HE Todd about a young boy and his oddball adventures. There is an advert at the end of Ragnarok for these two videos along with two completely incompatible titles also released by Nutland: Seven X Dead, a retitling of the 1974 US horror film The House of Seven Corpses starring Faith Domergue and John Carradine; and a 1981 US football comedy with the jaw-droppingly awful title The Kinky Coaches and the Pom Pom Pussycats.

A hilariously bland voice - presumably the owner of Nutland Video, whoever he was - reads out the details of all four videos in a monotone that applies the same level of excitement to the phrase ‘When they play... everybody scores’ as it does to describing a vintage car. Seven X Dead is pronounced ‘Seven Times Dead’ and Faith Domergue is pronounced ‘Faith Domergoo’. Nutland’s slim catalogue of titles also included Claude Mulot’s Franco-Italian thriller The Contract, a collection of four cartoons called Zilch! (which may have been more of the rostrum drawings subgenre) and a single episode of Spectreman, the packaging for which included a free Spectreman mask!

Despite its importance as an early work by one of the world’s top comic writers, Ragnarok seems to be completely unknown. The only reference to it anywhere on the web is on Bryan Talbot’s own site where he says: “I met the Nutland Video guys when they did a presentation at a Society of Strip Illustration meeting and I proposed they do a Science Fiction animated feature. I recommended Alan Moore as writer (he was relatively unknown then and looking for work) and he created the character Ragnarok and wrote the script. I designed the character and did the cover illo and logo.”

I picked up this tape from a dealer at the Festival of Fantastic Films in 2007, proving that however dead VHS may seem there are always discoveries to be made. I wonder who owns the rights to this now. It would be an interesting item for some enterprising DVD label to release on the back of the publicity for Watchmen.

MJS rating: B+

Invincible Obsessed Fighter

Director: John King
Writer: Stephen To
Producer: Tomas Tang
Cast: Elton Chong, Michael Wong, Robert Chan
Country of origin: Hong Kong
Year: 1983
Reviewed from: UK DVD

The chop-socky genre - though we love it to death - does not have a reputation for coherent storylines. Maybe that has changed nowadays (the day after watching this DVD, I saw House of Flying Daggers at my local cinema and was blown away by it) but it certainly held true twenty years ago - especially on any film where Tomas Tang was credited as producer.

The main character in this movie is played by Elton John. Actually the actor's name is Elton Chong but the amusement value of that monicker pales into insignificance when we learn that he is seeking revenge for his murdered father - named 'Fat Ho'! In doing so, he adopts a range of disguises and has, unsurprisingly, plenty of fights using the 'eight chopper fist' technique which his father taught him. There are frequent references to someone named General Ching who is searching for a treasure which is never actually identified, but that was about as far as my understanding of the plot went.

Among the bad guys sent to despatch Chong is a chap with very short hair and foot-long sideburns - he looks ridiculous but you wouldn't want to tell him that because he's a mean piece of work with a nasty kick. There is also an old guy in multi-coloured robes who we will come to later.

The fights are surprisingly good and have a nice comic touch to them; several times people get kicked by their own legs and there's one great sequence where somebody is pulled around by a pair of chopsticks jabbed up his nose. In fact the whole movie is played for laughs although any humour in the dialogue or situation is lost by the typically atrocious dubbing. Fortunately, there's enough energetic physical humour to make the film genuinely entertaining, as well as fun with the various disguises.

Now - the old man with his coat of many colours. "If you wear that," Chong tells him playfully during an early encounter, "people will think that you're an exorcist." And indeed when they fight again later in the film the old chap (subsequently referred to as 'the ghostfighter') raises a zombie from... somewhere... to make it two against one. Fortunately this particular member of the undead, played by a bloke with his face painted brown, isn't much cop at martial arts, whereas the ghostfighter is obviously adept, albeit using an extraordinary stiff style incorporating lots of straight arms and legs. Fortunately Elton John manages to rip the zombie's arm off which makes him even worse at kung fu than before. And that's not a sentence I ever expected to write!

Tomas Tang, making his third appearance on this site after his work on Firefist of Incredible Dragon and Death Code: Ninja, turns out to be a pseudonym of ex-Shaw Brothers staffer Godfrey Ho Jeung Keung according to the excellent Kung Fu Cinema site although the Inaccurate Movie Database reckons that it was some sort of house pseudonym. Whatever, he certainly knew how to come up with titles and Invincible Obsessed Fighter is a definite step up from those two other films.

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 19th January 2005

The Great Bear Scare

Director: Hal Mason
Writer: John Barrett
Producer: Mary Roscoe
Cast: Ted E Bear and Friends
Country: USA
Year of release: 1983
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Big disappointment, this one. It takes a lot to be disappointed by a 23-year-old, 22-minute cartoon about a teddy bear because, well, expectations are naturally low, but let me explain.

Back in 1992, when I moved to Stoke-on-Trent, I spotted this tape in a video store. There on the cover was ‘Ted E Bear’ - blue hat, blue waistcoat, green bow tie - and ranged around him were Dracula, a werewolf, a witch and a Karloffian Frankenstein monster. The sleeve blurb about ‘monsters’ naturally led me to believe that this was some sort of House of Frankenstein-style monsterfest. And I love monsterfests!

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, The Monster Squad, Mad Monster Party, Mad Mad Mad Monsters. Heck, I even enjoyed Van Helsing (dumb, but fun). Any time you cram a bunch of classic monsters together in one film, you can count on at least one person in the audience. I included The Great Bear Scare in a list of Frankenstein films that I was compiling in those days, when the nascent internet was not yet a feature of film research and you had to plough through books and magazines and, well, browse video stores. But I never watched the video. Had no time, had no money.

Now here it is in Help the Aged for 50p. Now, I get to watch it. And you know what? There’s no Frankenstein monster in this film! Nor is there a werewolf! I’ve been had.

Here’s the plot. Rumours are circulating in “beautiful downtown Bearbank” that tomorrow night all the monsters are going to emerge from nearby Monster Mountain and take over the world, starting with Bearbank itself. Ted E Bear bravely volunteers to go and investigate the mountain, a news story which is covered by Patti Bear on K-BEAR news (the cartoon actually opens with a ‘we interrupt this programme for breaking news’ caption).

Dracula and a witch named Miss Witch see this news report and Drac decides to fly down to Bearbank and check the place out. Unfortunately his magical spell of ‘Lumpkin pumpkin, make me a bat!’ doesn’t work very well so although he flies there he has to walk back, accepting a lift on the way from Ted E Bear (who doesn’t recognise him).

Ted discovers that inside the mountain is a whole city populated by monsters, but these are generic big, ugly monsters, plus assorted witches and ghosts. There is a mummy glimpsed briefly in one shot but there are no werewolves and there’s no Frankenstein. I want my 50p back!

Ted has been told that “bears are afraid of nothing” so he reasons that if bears are afraid of monsters, then monsters are really nothing. The monsters chase him around the monster city (which includes locations such as Madison Scare Garden and the Vampire State Building) before he escapes and is picked up by Patti Bear in her news blimp. He broadcasts a message back to Bearbank that the bears should not be afraid of the monsters so that, when the invasion starts, the ghouls are easily routed by bears who do little more than shout boo and occasionally pour pots of honey on them.

I’m sure there must be a moral in here somewhere but it’s hopelessly confused. Is it that we shouldn’t be afraid of monsters, or that monsters don’t exist, or that we shouldn’t be afraid of anything, or... what? Like most people, I get annoyed when moral messages are spelled out simplistically, but in this instance it’s all very muddled. It’s like there are several bits of different morals all bolted together in the hope that one general moral will emerge.

Then there’s the animation, which is among the cheapest I have ever seen. Most movements are done as a simple dissolve from one character position to another, so while the movement isn’t jerky, it’s very limited and there’s no real inbetweening. The exceptions to this are facial movements, which are properly animated, and anything moving in a straight line without changing shape, such as Ted’s car or Patti’s airship.

The Great Bear Scare is a sort of sequel to The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas, a 1973 DePatie-Freleng production although the only shared credits are Tom Smothers as the voice of Ted E Bear and ‘ghost writer’ (as he is credited here - ho ho, very satirical) John Barrett, who in ‘73 shared writing duties with Larry Spiegel. Both animated specials are based on books by Barrett who also wrote Ted E Bear books on Thanksgiving and Easter, although neither of those seems to have been animated.

Smothers, of course, was half of the comedy folk act the Smothers Brothers. Largely unknown here in the UK, I used to have half a dozen LPs by them which were unfailingly hysterical. Over the years he has made numerous appearances on TV, and occasionally in films, usually with his brother Dick. The rest of the voice cast are Louis Nye (a frequent stooge for Steve Allen who was in Larry Cohen’s Full Moon High) as Dracula, Lucille Bliss (The Secret of NIMH, Robots) as Miss Witch, jazz singer Sue Raney as Patti Bear, Hal Smith (hundreds of 1960s, 1970s and 1980s cartoons including Owl in many Pooh animations) as town mayor C Emory Bear and Hans Conried (Captain Hook in Disney’s Peter Pan) as ursine scientist Professor Werner von Bear. That last name is a gag on rocket scientist Werner Von Braun, of course.

Director Hal Mason was a well-known animator who worked with Walter Lantz on characters such as Woody Woodpecker and Oswald Rabbit. His most famous creation was the Pillsbury Doughboy. The Inaccurate Movie Database confuses him with another Hal Mason who was production supervisor on many classic Ealing comedies. He directed a Chipmunks Christmas Special in 1982 and this appears to have been his follow-up project although I can find no other actual directing credits for him. He passed away in 1986.

Producer Mary Roscoe had worked on various Warner Brothers properties in the 1970s including Duck Dodgers and the Return of the 24 1/2th Century. She was also responsible for the Americanisation of the Japanese Voltron cartoon series. The Great Bear Scare appears to be the only credit of any sort for either production company DimenMark International Inc or executive producer Thomas A Mayfield.

Music on the cartoon is credited to Thomas Loose and Edward Yelin. Loose was a prolific composer of stock music tracks which have been used in Night of the Living Dead, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a whole bunch of Russ Meyer pictures, Trader Hornee, The Adult Version of Jekyll and Hide and many other movies far, far removed from animated teddy bears.

The Great Bear Scare has a few very weak gags, paper-thin characters, a plot that makes little sense, an unclear moral message, limited animation and no Frankenstein or werewolf, despite what the sleeve promises. It’s pretty rubbish all round, to be honest.

MJS rating: D
review originally posted 18th November 2006

Firefist of Incredible Dragon

Director: Jimmy Tseng
Writer: Danny Liu
Producer: Richard Wong
Cast: Maple Lin, Jerry Young, Keith Lee
Year of release: 1983
Country: Hong Kong? South Korea?
Reviewed from: UK DVD

Even by my pitifully low standards, this is a rubbish film. But it does at least have an interesting ‘monster.’ Rather than a flying head, this is a flying heart.

We open on a snow-covered hillside where the bodies of young women are being buried by four black-clad men. Unseen by them, a human heart magically appears and flies at them as they walk back through the forest, somehow killing them and flinging their bodies high up into the branches. In the city, tyrannical warlord Liao Woo-hing (I’m guessing at these spellings!) and his wife Lam Chi return from somewhere, but Liao does not realise that his beautiful but treacherous young wife is actually having an affair with his major-domo who, for want of a name, we’ll call Sneaky Pete.

In the town square a girl is demonstrating magic tricks to the small crowd: she throws paper into the air and it becomes a flock of birds. An ugly bald guy who is Liao’s Chief Henchman is harassing an old market trader and his daughter, so the girl with the magic throws a bit of rope at him which turns into a snake, then back into a rope.

At the palace, Ugly Baldy tells Liao that he saw Zhu Zhu in the square, even though they buried her in the snow. He is sent with his under-henchmen to check for her body but it’s gone. Walking back through the forest, the bodies of the four guys from the prologue fall from the trees onto them. (Actually, let’s be clear here - because the film certainly isn’t! - what happens on screen is that four men apparently jump down from the trees then lie still when they hit the ground. It took me some time to realise that these were the men from the prologue and they were supposed to be falling.)

Elsewhere in the forest two people are on the run from Liao’s men. One is ‘Zhu Zhu’, the girl from the market square, the other is a young man who is described as “The Chen Kin-shi we’ve been watching lately.” In actual fact ‘Zhu Zhu’ is called either Pin Pin or Kun Kun - or possible both - while the fellow seems to be called Ten Chi.

It was at this point that I put my pen and notebook down and realised that this film doesn’t make a Damn Bit of Sense. So I sat back and enjoyed it. Well, I say ‘enjoyed’; I actually suffered through half of it and then watched the rest two days later when I had recovered sufficiently.

The disc is a budget-price release from InstantVision’s ‘Hong Kong Connection’ range, which otherwise consists of crappy chop-socky flicks like Assault of Final Rival, Deadly Strike, Five Fingers of Steel, Fury in Shaolin Temple, Golden Dragon Silver Snake and Invincible Obsessed Fighter. While Firefist of Incredible Dragon is also undoubtedly a crappy chop-socky flick, it also offers something else. And I quote:

“In a small town lives the notorious and wicked Liao. When one of his men informs him about a girl he’s seen in the street, a girl who looks remarkably similar to the girl Liao raped and murdered - he orders his men to check on the buried bodies. They discover the girls [sic] body is missing, and uncover a breathtaking mystery of Ghosts, Witches and Demons, all hellbent on destroying the vile Liao.”

Which all sounds very promising, doesn’t it?

So far as I can piece the (for want of a better word) plot together, Liao is kidnapping and imprisoning young girls whom he rapes and then kills, but is unaware that Sneaky Pete is actually screwing his wife. Kun Kun and Ten Chi are investigating these disappearances, including Kun Kun’s sister, who is her only surviving relative, as she explains to ... her uncle.

Meanwhile, there is this odd heart flying around the forest, scaring people and occasionally killing them by splatting blood all over their face (on another occasion it flies at someone and there is an explosion, and it also somehow slices someone’s hand off). Liao is having nightmares: one particularly promising scene has the bodies of the young women buried in the snow rising from their graves and flying through the air to surround him - alas it’s all a dream.

Liao decides that what he needs is a Taoist priest - to which Ugly Baldy replies, “Master, there are no Taoist priests around at this particular hour.” But UB finds one courtesy of a crappy comic relief whom we’ll call Goofball. There is also a white-clad female ghost in the forest who doesn’t actually do anything except stand around and look spooky, and there is an odd-looking tall young bloke with a dodgy silver wig and piss-poor make-up on half his face presumably designed to look like scar tissue. (In his final scene, as he lies dying and Kun Kun recognises him as Ming Hao - Ming who? - his wig falls off and the actress playing Kun Kun actually peels the make-up from his face.)

What else do we have? A couple of rapes, a bit of brief female nudity and Liao killing the unfaithful Lan Chi by stabbing her in the breast with one of her own hair-bobbins. There are also a few halfway decent fights, mostly involving Sneaky Pete or Ugly Baldy, whose weapon of choice is his head! At one point Goofball is killed by SP (his uncle the Taoist priest bemoans, “He’s dead! He’s been killed! Good heavens! How unfair! My student’s been beaten to death!”) but is revived by the intrusion of the flying heart, which turns him into a robotic super-fighter.

The film culminates with Ten Chi and Kun Kun releasing all the imprisoned girls - including Kun Kun’s sister, which surprised me because I assumed she was the ghost - before the two of them take on Liao. This fight travels through the palace, into the gardens, then all three protagonists leap in the air - and land in a field. From where they move to the forest, then ultimately the snow-driven mountainside, where Liao is somehow trapped in a cave by the ghost and Crappy Scar Make-up Man.

These are just the lowlights of a film which makes No Sense Whatsoever. At times it seems to be just a random selection of scenes, rather appropriate as the title reads like just a random selection of words. There is nothing even vaguely like a firefist in this and no dragons, not even anyone called The Dragon, incredible or not. It’s a great title - and is on the original print - but really does seem to have been created using a random phrase generator.

Some sources list this film as a 1980 production (at least one says 1978) but the on-screen title clearly says ‘copyright Filmark International Ltd MCMLXXXIII.’ The Inaccurate Movie Database gives the director as Wang Yung Ling which may or may not be Jimmy Tseng’s real name; I can’t find another credit for either of him. But then pretty much everyone in the credits looks like a pseudonym except for associate producer Tomas Tang, who went on to make crap like Death Code: Ninja. Firefist of Incredible Dragon is a work of genius by comparison. For the record, Li Yi Ting is credited with cinematography, Andy So with special effects, Ko Pui as action director, Benny Ho as dubbing supervisor, and Melissa Miller was responsible for the English version.

It should be no surprise that this deeply crappy film is presented in a deeply crappy manner: a scratchy print, almost certainly missing bits - which doesn’t exactly help one’s attempt to understand what’s going on - and with colour all over the place. The film is divided into eight untitled chapters which are quite brilliantly represented on the menu by eight random frame grabs not one of which is a recognisable image. On the other hand, this disc is available for only a fiver and even if the promised “breathtaking mystery of Ghosts, Witches and Demons” fails to appear it’s still the only flying heart film I’ve ever seen so I’ll up the grade a notch from rock bottom.

MJS rating: D
review originally posted before November 2004

[Edit: When I wrote this I assumed that this was a Hong Kong film but this guy, who seems to know what he's talking about, reckons it's Korean! - MJS]

Boggy Creek II

Director: Charles B Pierce
Writer: Charles B Pierce
Producer: Charles B Pierce
Cast: Charles B Pierce, Chuck Pierce, Cindy Butler, Serene Hedin
Year of release: 1983
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Hollywood DVD)

Or to give this film its full title: Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues... (in fact on the trailer it’s called Charles B Pierce’s Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues...!). It is also listed as The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek Part II, and no, I have never seen the first Boggy Creek film so I can make no direct comparison.

But oh, this must be one of the dullest monster films ever made. It’s not that it’s tedious or boring, it’s worse than that - it’s gentle. The first ten minutes is basically a nature documentary, a travelogue about the watery, swampy area on the Texas-Arkansas border where the story takes place.

Anthropologist Dr Brian Lockhart (writer/director/producer Charles B Pierce) heads down that way to search for the legendary Beast of Boggy Creek, a sort of redneck bigfoot. He is accompanied by two of his students, Tim Thornton (Pierce’s son Chuck) and Tanya Yazzie (Serene Hedin: Sacred Ground) plus Tanya’s friend Leslie Ann Walker (Cindy Butler: The Town That Dreaded Sundown) who wears make-up in the woods and would rather stay in a hotel. Tim spends almost the entire film showing off his skinny white chest which is an alarmingly gay subtext given that he’s being directed by his father.

As they search for the animal, we see various flashbacks to occasions when it was sighted. Despite Dr Lockhart’s comments that it hardly ever attacks people, that’s pretty much all we ever see it do. And once camp is established, including a frankly bizarre radar set-up, the Beast finds them almost immediately and then keeps popping up. So it’s not exactly difficult to track down, but once they spot it they get scared and do their best to scare it off. So quite what sort of research are they doing exactly? There is also a scene where the quartet are menaced by a rabid dog which has no bearing on anything but pads out the running time.

Eventually they get a lead and head off up-river to find an overweight redneck recluse named Old Man Crenshaw (Jimmy Clem, a regular in Pierce movies) who turns out to have a baby Beast lying injured in his back room. Quicker than you can say 'Gorgo', Momma Beast comes around looking for her kid. Dr Lockhart reunites the family and realises that to preserve this rare and special creature he must not report the positive findings of his expedition.

Which is all very well and laudable, in the same way that it was with Ted Danson and the plesiosaur much later in Loch Ness. But Boggy Creek II not only lacks the magic spark of that film, it misrepresents itself as a horror film, which it certainly isn’t. The acting, on the whole, is not up to much and the script is bland - with Leslie’s whinging the only concession to characterisation - but the photography is nice and that seems to be the main point. The hairy Beast suits are pretty good, though there are some inadvisable close-ups of the masks in the final scene.

MJS rating: C+

Review originally posted before November 2004