DEATHSTALKER (Sbardellati, 1983) ... This response to CONAN THE BARBARIAN is the perfect realization of the 'sword and sorcery' genre and knows precisely that its audience is young men aged 13 - 22. Nary a scene passes that an excuse is not found to render an actress at least partially naked, and lots of dudes either take their shirts off and flex, or chop off heads. Usually both. But seriously there is a TON of female nudity in this movie. A LOT. IT has more nudity than a 70's Corben comic! I can see why it was on Cinemax so often back in the day. Also I wonder why I never watched it, maybe my standards were too high. Its not super good or anything but its budget is pretty high especially in comparison to other attempts to mimic CONAN. There's some cool gladiator fighting with a lot of extras and a giant set and oh yeah did I mention all the boobs yet because there are a LOT.
MURDER IN SPACE (Stern, 1985) ... I broke one of my self-imposed rules and wound up fast-forwarding through this POS starting at about the 50 minute mark. Note to self: stop watching Steven Hilliard Stern movies because they suck ass. This one does at least, good grief, what a boring load of nonsense. All hopes of getting a cool detective picture set in the confines of a spaceship are dashed before the damn opening credits are finished rolling and the viewer realizes this movie has no budget and a corresponding lack of ambition to boot. DULL DULL DULL and not even Michael Ironside can save it although he tries. I dig Wilford Brimley but honestly his Quaker ads are a lot more compelling than this snoozer. I figured since it was a mystery, they'd recap who the killer was at the end, so I FF'd to the last 15 min and lo and behold I was treated to a TON of flashbacks --- of scenes from earlier in the movie! Man I hate that, what a waste of time. Worked out pretty well for me this time however, they totally spelled out who the killer was, so no complaints. (You know you are in trouble in a movie when the high point of interest is spotting a Canadian character actor from early Cronenberg pictures.)
MEGAFORCE (Needham, 1982) ... An absolutely MIND BENDINGLY BAD FILM. And never has it been so easy to point the guilty finger at so obvious a culprit: the star, Barry Bostwick. And when your movie is directed by the same guy who made CANNONBALL RUN that's really saying something. Everything about Bostwick is offensively, intensely, wrong. First of all he looks like an utter fool in that stupid jumpsuit and beard and sky blue headband. He looks like a gay aerobics instructor! Which isn't entirely his fault but he seems to really "own" the role and anyone who agreed to be photographed that way deserves the blame regardless of seamstress. Add to this his silly heroic posturing and smarmy "it'll all come out in the wash" 'tude and you just want to scream. Mind you he isn't exactly surrounded by talent here. Michael Beck is astonishingly lame in his fake "cowboy" getup and accent, almost to the point that he rivals Bostwick on the Scale of Intolerability. But we soon forget this contest when confronted with the misogynistic treatment of the female character (singular; Persis "I'm a soldier not a diplomat" Khambata), who Bostwick allows to train with the men but then refuses to let her go on the mission because he worries she'd distract him, and SHE STAYS AT THE BASE WILLINGLY as a result! Some soldier. The icing on this stale hardpan cake is the stunningly inept special effects so proudly achieved with model rockets (!!!) and cheap bluescreening that they get big, fat, glowing credits singling them out in the opening titles! When the trumpeted "sky diving" sequence finally rolled around I wanted to stab my eyes out. Seriously. Eye-stabbingly bad. Henry Silva as the bad guy was pretty funny though.
ELIMINATORS (Manoogian, 1986) ... Ugh ugh UGH. It made me wish I had 2 sets of eyes so I could stab them REPEATEDLY. This will go down as the movie that made me exercise more discretion while renting. And I've seen Nazisploitation movies! Its almost not worth describing except as a warning like in ALIEN. Miserable garbage. Miserable PG-RATED garbage to boot. Its sole source of amusement is seeing just how many disparate tropes could be crammed into one single picture. Here's a laundry list: a TERMINATOR/ROBOCOP sympathetic cyborg, a cocky, selfish pirate-type reminiscent of Han Solo, a cute talking robot filling in for R2D2, some cavemen, some Romans, a fucking NINJA, a lesbian river guide with a shotgun, 2 mad Japanese scientists, and a chick from STAR TREK so the nerds can at least beat off to the side of one of her boobs. It did however feature an admittedly cool tank-like contraption that replaced the cyborg's legs, turning him into a KILLING MACHINE! But since this was PG he was more of a WOUNDING MACHINE!!! Still, this robot thing honestly did look pretty cool, and the producers could easily have just stuck with it alone and had a more interesting piece on their hands, instead of this piece that had me checking the bottom of my shoes while it played because I thought I smelled shit the whole time. Terrible, terrible, awfulness. AVOID.
MURDER IN SPACE (Stern, 1985) ... I broke one of my self-imposed rules and wound up fast-forwarding through this POS starting at about the 50 minute mark. Note to self: stop watching Steven Hilliard Stern movies because they suck ass. This one does at least, good grief, what a boring load of nonsense. All hopes of getting a cool detective picture set in the confines of a spaceship are dashed before the damn opening credits are finished rolling and the viewer realizes this movie has no budget and a corresponding lack of ambition to boot. DULL DULL DULL and not even Michael Ironside can save it although he tries. I dig Wilford Brimley but honestly his Quaker ads are a lot more compelling than this snoozer. I figured since it was a mystery, they'd recap who the killer was at the end, so I FF'd to the last 15 min and lo and behold I was treated to a TON of flashbacks --- of scenes from earlier in the movie! Man I hate that, what a waste of time. Worked out pretty well for me this time however, they totally spelled out who the killer was, so no complaints. (You know you are in trouble in a movie when the high point of interest is spotting a Canadian character actor from early Cronenberg pictures.)
MEGAFORCE (Needham, 1982) ... An absolutely MIND BENDINGLY BAD FILM. And never has it been so easy to point the guilty finger at so obvious a culprit: the star, Barry Bostwick. And when your movie is directed by the same guy who made CANNONBALL RUN that's really saying something. Everything about Bostwick is offensively, intensely, wrong. First of all he looks like an utter fool in that stupid jumpsuit and beard and sky blue headband. He looks like a gay aerobics instructor! Which isn't entirely his fault but he seems to really "own" the role and anyone who agreed to be photographed that way deserves the blame regardless of seamstress. Add to this his silly heroic posturing and smarmy "it'll all come out in the wash" 'tude and you just want to scream. Mind you he isn't exactly surrounded by talent here. Michael Beck is astonishingly lame in his fake "cowboy" getup and accent, almost to the point that he rivals Bostwick on the Scale of Intolerability. But we soon forget this contest when confronted with the misogynistic treatment of the female character (singular; Persis "I'm a soldier not a diplomat" Khambata), who Bostwick allows to train with the men but then refuses to let her go on the mission because he worries she'd distract him, and SHE STAYS AT THE BASE WILLINGLY as a result! Some soldier. The icing on this stale hardpan cake is the stunningly inept special effects so proudly achieved with model rockets (!!!) and cheap bluescreening that they get big, fat, glowing credits singling them out in the opening titles! When the trumpeted "sky diving" sequence finally rolled around I wanted to stab my eyes out. Seriously. Eye-stabbingly bad. Henry Silva as the bad guy was pretty funny though.
ELIMINATORS (Manoogian, 1986) ... Ugh ugh UGH. It made me wish I had 2 sets of eyes so I could stab them REPEATEDLY. This will go down as the movie that made me exercise more discretion while renting. And I've seen Nazisploitation movies! Its almost not worth describing except as a warning like in ALIEN. Miserable garbage. Miserable PG-RATED garbage to boot. Its sole source of amusement is seeing just how many disparate tropes could be crammed into one single picture. Here's a laundry list: a TERMINATOR/ROBOCOP sympathetic cyborg, a cocky, selfish pirate-type reminiscent of Han Solo, a cute talking robot filling in for R2D2, some cavemen, some Romans, a fucking NINJA, a lesbian river guide with a shotgun, 2 mad Japanese scientists, and a chick from STAR TREK so the nerds can at least beat off to the side of one of her boobs. It did however feature an admittedly cool tank-like contraption that replaced the cyborg's legs, turning him into a KILLING MACHINE! But since this was PG he was more of a WOUNDING MACHINE!!! Still, this robot thing honestly did look pretty cool, and the producers could easily have just stuck with it alone and had a more interesting piece on their hands, instead of this piece that had me checking the bottom of my shoes while it played because I thought I smelled shit the whole time. Terrible, terrible, awfulness. AVOID.
posted by figurebuilder at 1:57 PM
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