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Posts Tagged ‘Sybil Danning’

Hercules (1983)

Monday, August 28th, 2023

August 26, 1983

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first movie experience was playing Hercules in the comedy HERCULES IN THE NEW YORK (1970). Here, thirteen years later, his PUMPING IRON opponent Lou Ferrigno played the character in a serious (but still laughable) Greek-mythology-meets-’80s-sci-fi-fantasy epic – his second movie role. Like Arnold in his debut, Ferrigno’s voice is dubbed (by Marc Smith, who played a mafia boss in CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER and later became a prolific anime dubber). He had turned down other movie offers, but had also been obsessed with Steve Reeves’ Hercules movies growing up, and jumped at the chance to follow in his hero’s footsteps.

It’s definitely a movie made in a post-STAR WARS world, with mythological creatures depicted as robots and a poster painted by Drew Struzan. It’s also clearly inspired by the existence of Arnold’s CONAN THE BARBARIAN, even introducing adult Hercules on the Wheel of Pain, though without dissolving from a younger version. They were able to steal the image, but not what was cool about it.

Most of all it strikes me as a poor man’s CLASH OF THE TITANS, with its gods sitting around on the moon talking about how to control human affairs. But let me tell you, its stop motion sequences do not deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as. Ray Harryhausen’s. Important information I neglected to mention: this is produced by Cannon Films and directed by “Lewis Coates,” a.k.a. Luigi Cozzi (STARCRASH, CONTAMINATION). (read the rest of this shit…)

Chained Heat

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023

May 27, 1983

CHAINED HEAT is a genuine exploitation movie. Maybe it’s my ignorance, having been a child in the early ‘80s, but I think of those days as being pretty separated from the era a decade earlier that produced Jonathan Demme’s debut CAGED HEAT, which the title seems to be a throwback to. That must be wrong, though, because there’s not much that seems winky about this one. It’s very serious about providing lurid, sleazy entertainment.

Linda Blair, in her followup to HELL NIGHT, stars as Carol Henderson, a nice girl and “prison virgin” doing 18 months for vehicular manslaughter. Sitting on a bench waiting to be booked she meets some more experienced cons who are pretty welcoming to her. But one of them saying she’s in for stealing TVs starts a discussion of favorite soap operas that escalates to a threat of throat slashing. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Seven Magnificent Gladiators

Thursday, September 29th, 2016

tn_sevenmagnificentgladiatorsEnough with the cowboys. THE SEVEN MAGNIFICENT GLADIATORS is the sword and sorcery version of the SEVEN SAMURAI story. Obviously.

An evil Ming-the-Merciless-Halloween-costume-looking-motherfucker named Nicerote (Dan Vadis from EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE and ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN) who apparently has some kind of magic sorcerer powers threatens his own mother (Barbara Pesante) that he’s gonna come back and attack the village after the harvest. What a brat. So she sends Pandora (Carla Ferrigno [BLACK ROSES] in her movie debut) and three other women into town with “the mystical Sword of Achilles,” which can only be held by the worthy. Find somebody worthy and get him to come protect the village.

They find Han (Lou Ferrigno, also in his first movie, though he’d already done six seasons of The Incredible Hulk), a gladiator who is said to be immortal, but it’s not really explained very well. I guess he’s not strong or immortal enough to do it on his own, so he has to put together a team which includes some gladiator friends and a badass cynical mercenary lady named Julia (Sybil Danning, who had already been in the space version of SEVEN SAMURAI, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS). (read the rest of this shit…)

Battle Beyond the Stars

Monday, July 6th, 2015

tn_battlebeyondFuck a star war – what about a battle beyond the stars? I know a battle is smaller than a war, it is only one of the units that makes up a part of a war, but maybe that’s better. More intimate. More focused. And then it’s beyond the stars instead of within them, as a mere star war is. Beyond is better. This battle has transcended the fucking stars.

Admittedly, it doesn’t seem like BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS takes place further away from here than any of the STAR WARSes. In fact, it is for sure closer, because people have heard of the planet Earth, and one guy is from there. His name is Cowboy, but not the pioneering rapper from the Furious Five who coined the term “hip hop.” He’s actually George Peppard a couple years before The A-Team and he wears a cowboy hat, plaid shirt and insulated silver space pants. He always shows off that he likes westerns and exotic Earth liquor. Obviously he’s the Han Solo character, and he’s entertaining, but most of his scenes are alone in his ship, so there’s a Chewbacca-sized hole next to him. (read the rest of this shit…)