Doctor Death (1989), by Webster Colcord

* And yes, this is the best screencap I could get of the title card with my tech limitations.

"For some, the end of the world was just the beginning." So opens Webster Colcord's 19-minute Super 8 post-apocalyptic epic, Doctor Death! Kinda the message for the times, huh? Well, it was the message of the '80s, too, when Mad Max clones were all the rage. We were two years away from the end of the Cold War when this film emerged, but that didn't mean the ostensible nuclear threat was over. Still, I doubt that Mr. Colcord was taking the idea of nuclear armageddon overly seriously. How could he, when he turned out pure goodness like this? For only a teenager could imagine and actualize such cinematic glory.

Dr. Death is our football-helmet-wearing, schoolbus-driving post-nuke marauder. Because it's the end of the world, there's nothing to do but toss Molotov cocktails and grenades at all visible passerby, and at any cows unfortunate enough to have survived the fury of mutually-assured destruction. The Deathmobile is destroyed by an agent of the Mutant Police--are those cops who police mutants, or are they cops who are mutants? The guy Death runs into while running from the officer is definitely a mutant. He looks a surprisingly-better version of some of the alien extras from Turkish Star Wars. TVs remind our hero of the world before the bomb, so he smashes them with a pickaxe. Then it's down to more murderin'--this time, he runs down a fellow whose friend calls in a mutant bounty hunter. The bounty hunter dresses like the killer from Nail Gun Massacre and has a rocket launcher in his wheelchair. During his fight with the bounty hunter, DD gets knocked onto a nuclear bomb, which has an oh-so-convenient activation button right on the top. We get see to Doctor Death's face melt off. This doesn't kill him, as melty-face Doctor Death shows up at the end with the magic of (really good) stop motion.

Super 8 was an astounding medium, because it enabled kids and adults the world over to make movies with real film, yo. Hell, it let them make home movies in general! There's just something nice about Super 8's grunginess, a permeating nostalgia that affects even those of us who didn't grow up with it. A generally silent medium, many Super 8 movies are either dubbed or have music and sound effects only. Doctor Death is no different, containing only grunts, screams, explosions, gunshots, and an endless supply of homemade '80s Casio themes. Ultimately, a film like this needs no dialogue; just some labels and text cards to let us know where we are. For people who like their cinema straightforward, I'm not sure you could streamline a movie more than this.

Themes? What themes? These are teenagers we're talking about! Kids Goofing Off is enough of a theme by itself. There's a certain innocence to the gruesome violence of teenagers. Perhaps they are the only ones we can excuse for capital-W Wallowing. In some ways, teenagers are expected to Wallow. But Wallowing can get you far, y'know? Webster Colcord now has a pretty solid-looking visual effects career, having worked on the X-Men films, Minority Report, and Stranger Things. We all start somewhere. And this is a great debut.

For something this small and cheap, the direction, editing, and effects are all very top-notch. Shots are framed intriguingly all the time. The transitions are made of explosions or chilled fade-ins. The mutants look like mutants, and the explosions are astonishingly rendered via damaged/blown-up film stock, as if the flames of the blast are enough to burn the medium it's shot on. This movie is dressed to impress, and you really should see it. If I haven't "sold" this movie enough to you, I want to let you know that Colcord gives a role credit to his puppy, "Misty the Wonder Dog," even though she does not appear outside of the end credits.

You can help support the A-List on Patreon! And you can like our Facebook page to get radical updates!

Blood Freak (1972), by Brad F. Grinter and Steve Hawks

Don't smoke too much weed, or you'll turn into a blood-drinking turkey man.

You can support the A-List on Patreon at www.patreon.com/AdamMudman, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MudmansAList.

Rats: Night of Terror (1984), by Bruno Mattei

Synthesizers and badly-dubbed dialogue are the waters which take us to the world of 225 AB; AB being "After the Bomb." This is a world of Bruno Mattei's making--it's remarkable what he and Claudio Fragasso thought the future would be like. A dark and shabby place, inhabited largely by danger and idiocy. It's no wonder that after-the-end movies were so big in the '80s, but Mattei's unique (or "unique") vision of what humanity and rat-anity would become stands out to me among a vast tan-gray sea of repetitive Mad Max cash-ins. Mark my words, I'm sure there are some "nods" to Mad Max in Rats: Night of Terror that I'm missing, but this is Mattei through-and-through, for better or worse.

Rats doesn't really follow a specific "plot," per se--we mostly just follow a group of dozen-odd "New Primitives" as they attempt to fit in with the surface world after mankind has spent two centuries living underground. (In a reference that doesn't bode well, Mattei mentions that the nuclear holocaust happens in 2015. I'm abstaining from any "two years overdue" jokes.) They all wear outfits that Doctor Who would wear if he regenerated twelve times in the '80s--hell, there's even a girl who dresses like a fucking vampire! They slowly uncover many gruesome secrets about their world, such as the fact that the previous settlers of the surface were all killed by the legions of rats that now rule the ruined former metropolises. And slowly, one by one, the same fate befalls them. Either they damn themselves with their own idiocy by mocking the rats or the rats do weirdly intelligent things like eat through their motorcycle tires. In the end, only a small group of survivors makes it out to witness the ending, which...oh, I'll talk about that.

But to start with, let's just dig into something that nagged at my mind upon rewatching this: what genre is this? I've deliberately tried to avoid horror films in these last few weeks leading up to Spookyween, but it seems I've written myself into a bit of a pickle, as Rats: Night of Terror definitely looks to be a horror film. Post-apocalyptic horror is a natural genre; I mean, swap out the rats for zombies and you've got yerself something mainstream. (And guess what, this movie steals settings and scenarios from Night of the Living Dead.) There are plenty of horror music cues and rotten, half-eaten corpses to go around, plus that delicious ending, but in the end there's a lot of emphasis on the action of fighting off the rats, and also, on the comedy. As we've seen, Claudio Fragasso had a distinct obsession with writing absurd dialogue, up to and through the time that he made Troll 2. And Bruno just kept giving him more leash. I mean, they must have been making some money together, even if it never showed up onscreen. And as such, Rats is a conversational nightmare, fraught with bad lines delivered so poorly it's hard to imagine there wasn't some desire to raise laughs.

Really, how do you explain the scene where the black girl--sigh; her name is Chocolate--gets flour dumped all over her. She starts jumping around, excitedly exclaiming, "I'm white! I'm whiter than all of you!" Then, one of the New Primitives comes across a bunch of rats falling into their water purifier. "Mangy beasts," he says. "That's how our waters get...pahlluted!" Have I talked about this before? Even if I have, it bears repeating. I'm sure I've never mentioned the line, "Computers and corpses are a bad mixture." There are also Ax 'Em-esque sequences of large crowds screaming that go on for such a long time that I can't believe they aren't played for laughs. Then, finally, there's the scene where the leader, Kurt, puts one of the rat victims out of his misery with a flamethrower. I'm pretty sure that there are much more humane ways of killing someone whose flesh has been bitten off than roasting them alive. Incompletely roasting them alive, I should add, as this poor soul lives for several more minutes after being set on fire! I know there's such a thing as the Idiot Ball, but this is fucking ridiculous.

Did Bruno and Claudio read Jack Kirby's Forever People comics or something? There's something about a gang of motorcycle-mounted youngsters having over-ecstatic adventures laden with hilariously unrealistic dialogue that really strikes a familiar chord with me. Of course, these kids don't have superpowers, unless you count Video, who has the power to restore power to computers by pressing random switches.

Yes, I did say "Video." It's astonishing, but I can almost remember all the main characters' names. There's Kurt, the leader, with his scarf and leather jacket; his girlfriend, Diana; Duke, who wants to overthrow Kurt as head of the Primitives; Video, who is a tech wiz; Chocolate, the black girl and heroine of the film; Lilith, the vampire lady; Lucifer, her boyfriend; and there's the bald guy with the third-eye tattoo (a descendant of the girl from Infrasexum, no doubt), and there's also the kind of nerdy guy who gets killed by the water-purifier rats. I should know Bald Guy's name because he almost makes it to the end. But alas, I guess this just means I'll have to watch it again.

So I guess this is also a Power of Friendship movie on top of everything else. Except Friendship doesn't really prevail in the end, does it? Because Chocolate and Video are finally found by masked survivors who are seemingly a group of saviors coming to help them; they poison the rats and save them from the poison in turn. But then it turns out they are Rat People. Huh. Throughout most of the movie, the characters give a strangely human quality to the rats, which may be a remnant of this perhaps having once been a zombie script--maybe Bruno realized that humanization, and decided to make the full jump? In any case, this ending is weird and painfully open. Are the rat-human hybrids friendly? Did they record some of the messages that the Primitives heard earlier in the abandoned buildings? If they can speak English, why do they refuse to communicate with the survivors? Are they mutated rats who have taken on a human-like shape, or are they humans who have adapted by becoming rat-like? Fucking Christ! Why did this movie get no sequel?

Sequel or no sequel though, I don't think I've yet seen a post-apocalyptic movie better than this one. This is quintessential Eurotrash, quintessential Bruno, and quintessential after-the-endsploitation. What have you got to lose?

If you want to see more of these reviews, you can help me buy movies by supporting the site on Patreon! And don't forget to check out the A-List on Facebook to get updates.

New Book Out!! DEUS MEGA THERION & THE DIVINE MRS. E ARE HERE!!!

I have some exciting news! My double-sided party in paperback has been published by Odd Tales Productions! Check it out here on Lulu!

Publisher's Description: "DEUS MEGA THERION tells the tale of Jagged Skull, an '80s heavy metal band who runs afoul of a Satanic cult presided over by the sinister Edward Tamaron. Forced to play a string of concerts for the cult, the band members learn more about themselves and the world they live in. 

THE DIVINE MRS. E (Or, the Adventure of the Textual Lacuna) is the story of an actress who must solve a murder on the set of one of her films. But she is not who she seems to be, and her adventure will bring her face-to-face with fiction, femininity, and the divinity of both. 

This paperback features two excellent covers from James Bezecny, and has awesome flipbook action, meaning it can be read no matter what side is up. An Odd Tales Productions exclusive!"

An ebook version and a video trailer will be coming soon! And thank you!!

P.S. There will an extra review this week as Wednesday sees the release of James Bryan's long-lost soon-to-be-classic Jungle Trap. GET PUMPED!

The Raiders of Atlantis (1983), by Ruggero Deodato

Huh. I never thought I'd actually grow to love a Ruggero Deodato film. My experience with Deodato has primarily been the second-hand experience of knowing people who have actually sat themselves down and watched Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. To be honest, I'm sure I myself will find the strength to watch Cannibal Holocaust at some point, since I made it through Cannibal Ferox and all--I'm not overly concerned with the human violence in Cannibal Holocaust, even if I know I have my limits. What worries me more about Holocaust and Deodato in general is the animal cruelty that would become a hallmark of the Amazon Cannibal subgenre...I keep my movies in the realm of fiction. If you start breaking out into reality with some of your stunts, then eyebrows are going to be raised. I made the mistake of following the trails of breadcrumbs that fanned out from the animal slaughter depicted in Cannibal Holocaust and found that Deodato was actually still one of the lighter of the Italian exploitation filmmakers--at least he didn't actually participate in human trafficking, or show real executions, like his comrade Franco Prosperi. Even so I wasn't prepared to forgive Deodato anytime soon. Today's movie, The Raiders of Atlantis, presents to me a paradox I've also run into with Prosperi, which is that I have actually found one of his movies that I like. (In Prosperi's case, I was a fan of his weird killer creatures movie Wild Beasts before I found out about some of his doings.) The Raiders of Atlantis is an unexpectedly entertaining action film, wildly disconnected and yet bizarrely sober all at once. Kinda makes you forget that the guy who made it was a colossal A-hole.

The year is 1994, in Miami Florida a bunch of mercenaries are killing dudes. They include Mike Ross and a man whose name is Mohamed but whom everyone insists on calling Washington. After they are done killing dudes and getting paid for it, we cut to a scientist, Kathy, who has been called from her Central American archaeological work to examine a 12,000 year old tablet of unknown origin. Suddenly, in the wake of the crash of a Russian nuclear submarine, Atlantis rises from the ocean, and as it does so, a group of biker punks, led by a guy in a really cool semi-transparent skull mask, begin killing people. They shoot a housewife in the neck with an arrow and dispose of her husband shortly thereafter. You may not believe it (I sure didn't), but this all comes together and leads to the bulk of the film's content, wherein the mercenaries and scientists battle the punks with a seemingly-endless supply of Molotov cocktails, which they keep kissing before throwing. In the end, however, none of it makes sense, least of all the bullshit explanation that a radiation leak on the Russian sub somehow caused Atlantis to rise from the ocean.

Where do I start? Maybe at the beginning...these opening credits really caught me off-guard. The theme that plays over these credits was jarringly similar to the theme from Yor, Hunter from the Future. It turns out this is due to the simple fact that both songs are done by the Oliver Onions, a band which along with Goblin ended up scoring a lot of European exploitation through the '70s and '80s. It doesn't help that the theme the Spoony One plays on his old Rebuary videos is the theme from The Raiders of Atlantis, even as he's showing footage from Yor, which is probably where I got confused. In any case, I allowed myself to believe for the first ten minutes of this film that Deodato had just stolen the theme from Yor and cut out all the parts that talk about the titular Yor. That would have been the funniest thing since Bruno Mattei stole the Dawn of the Dead theme for Hell of the Living Dead.

Actually, this movie's dialogue feels like Mattei's...it has that Claudio Fragasso fragrance to it. And I may in fact be selling Raiders of Atlantis a little short, as the dialogue occasionally exceeds the lunacy of the Mattei/Fragasso combo. Take for example this exchange between Mike and Kathy:

Mike: "You gotta be like Popeye. Eat your spinach."

Kathy: "I like spinach too!"

Mike: "Well, tell you what. When we're back ashore, and this is all over...I'll take you out to a spinach dinner."

...I'm sorry, what?

That's some Carlos Tobalina shit right there. A spinach dinner? Is spinach by itself really a meal? Is there a restaurant that would comply with a request for just spinach? Is that already an option on their menu? Are they going to be eaten their spinach raw or cooked? If the former, are they at least going to put dressing and croutons on their spinach, or does their love of spinach eclipse any culinary value they could derive from such? As remarkable as this exchange is...it comes back at the ending. This was considered by the screenwriter to be a big moment in the relationship of these characters.

This isn't even disjointed; this is all the joints taken out of the bones, and reassembled into something weird and spider-y. Individual moments, save for the ludicrous dialogue, work by themselves, but this film in no way becomes a gestalt. There is no unification between the punk plot, the Atlantis plot, and the mercenary plot, save for the fact that they are all in this movie. And Deodato definitively succeeds at distracting us from how these plots in no way overlap by smothering us with endless awesome action sequences, ablaze with tripwire decapitations and napalm.

Finally...returning somewhat to the character of Mohamed. It's true that only Italian exploitation directors could make a movie this illogical, but it also took an Italian studio to make an action movie where the hero, or one of the big heroes, is a black Muslim who lives all the way to the end. Seriously, I've yet to see such a thing outside out of, well, the film markets of the Islamic world, and so for this and for everything else he does in the movie, Mohamed is now one of my favorite action movie heroes ever. Let him be one of yours, too!

If you enjoyed this review, please consider sponsoring the site by becoming my Patron on Patreon!

Blue Summer (1973), by Chuck Vincent

I don't know why this movie the impact on me that it did--which is kind of my way of saying I don't know why this movie left any impact on me at all. It's kind of like The Witches' Mountain, another movie I love which, frankly, has so little going for it that it's remarkable that it even still finds release. Really, there's little to separate Blue Summer from other softcore porn exercises of the early '70s, and I can think of little that makes it stand out against other "teen road trip" movies I've seen, to say nothing of the fact that it's not even that distinct from other non-teen road trip movies I've seen. But the High Concept premise sold me quick: "Two teens load up a car with beer and go on the road in search of sexual adventures." I think what made Blue Summer hook into my heart is it's cheap attempts to milk my nostalgia for the road trips of my youth. Sure, I never went on these trips in search of beer or sex--I went looking for ghosts, because I had this weird Gravity Falls-style youth--but the thrill of being young on the open road is something that fades away over time. Maybe it never goes away, but it's never quite the same again. So this crude little porno managed to stir up some strange emotions in me, managing to overcome another fault I had with The Witches' Mountain: I hated it the first few times I saw it.

Gene and Tracy have just finished high school, and soon, horror of horrors, it'll be off to college for the both of 'em. Thus they decide to spend the summer making the trip out to Gene's uncle's cottage, with plenty of stops along the way. The primary mission, of course, is girls, as many as they can bed. Once this premise is established and we've gotten our first few twangs of '70s guitar out of the way, our string of ostensibly erotic vignettes can begin. First our boys run into two girl hitchhikers of around the same age who turn out to be quite permissive. Of course, this is because they expect the boys to be permissive with their valuables. It's implied these two have been running this thumb 'em, bang 'em, and rob 'em for some time. Next, they run into a Manson-esque hippie leader and his two free-loving girlfriends, and that doesn't end well either. At last, they end up in some crap shanty town, where they're offered drunken sex with the village bicycle, Regina. Eventually, however, some thugs show up and butt ahead of the two on the train to Reginasville, and when they decide to fight for their rights to sex it looks like they're going to get their asses kicked. But back near the start of the movie, they ran into the world's most apathetic biker, whom they helped out when his bike wouldn't start. Ever since he's been stalking them with unclear intentions. Turns out he's just been looking to repay the favor, as he fights off the toughs so the boys can get away. When they reach the cottage, Tracy is reunited with an older woman whom he shared an attraction with earlier in the movie, and the two have sex, before realizing they probably shouldn't see each other again when Tracy meets a man older than him who turns out to be the woman's son. Finally, they pack it in, reflecting fondly on the new memories, but also lamenting what comes next.

Because Blue Summer is a porn first and foremost, it spends most of its runtime showing people rolling around and utterly failing at making out. This stuff is easy to fastforward through, unless you want to hear some purebred '70s guitar indulgence, including the occasional not-Beatles. The musical interludes are on par with An American Hippie in Israel for sheer ridiculousness. They highlight the fact that everything about this movie is pure '70s...it's just conspicuously free of drugs, even in the presence of hippies. I think I appreciated it initially by merit of its being a time-capsule film. It is a living memory of something that is, like the road trips of our youth, forever inaccessible. Hell, most of the buildings, forests, and mountains shown in this thing have probably been bulldozed by this point. One needs reminders that the world is always changing, and coming head-to-head with the past is one way of going about that.

There's some actual...heart...in this movie? Like, again, T&A, and tongue-on-tongue, those are the goals, but I get the impression Chuck Vincent, director of such films as Sex Crimes 2084 and Sexpot, actually had something of a personal stake in this film's story. Weird, innit? Any of us who graduated from high school knew it was a bigger step than anything we'd previously known, and that feeling is adequately communicated here. Growing up is scary. It does mean the end of a lot of freedoms that you may go on missing for the rest of your life. But it's also liberating. You get to have your own pets, you can feel the weight of your accomplishments, you can eat whatever garbage you fucking want. And you find that, after a time, you can even still find days to just sit around watching and writing about awesome movies. I can't help but wonder if there is a deliberate irony in that final sadness Tracy and Gene leave us on. One life's ending, but another is just beginning. I mean, if anything, I guess I don't get why they think there's not going to be booze, sex, and road trips in college.

And I think that theme--the fear of growing up--comes back in what is probably the most memorable thread in the film, the affair between Tracy and the older woman. I don't remember if the movie really explains why she ends up going for him; specifically, I don't know if she's meant to be predatory or not. But perhaps this woman fears the future as much as Tracy does, and therefore looks to younger men to help her feel youthful again. There's enough ambiguity that it gives the film depth it didn't have up until everything spills out about her twenty-something son.

I really don't think I can encourage you to watch Blue Summer. It's a relatively tedious run-of-the-mill skin flick, but with a few patches here and there that break up the ennui in ways that I at least found interesting. Let me know if it sticks in your head as well.

If you like the site and want to see more awesome stuff like it, consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!

Holy Sword (1982)/Death Warrior (1984), by Çetin Inanç and Cüneyt Arkin

...these are honestly the only two Turkish movies I need to review on this site.

Almost everyone now has heard of the insanity of Turkish cinema, and of that percentage of the thus-blessed population, most of them have heard of it primarily through Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam, aka Turkish Star Wars, or 3 dev adam, aka Captain America and Santo vs. Spider-Man. I love the former, and have gotten a kick or two out of the latter. Usually people point out that a lot of Turkish movies--at least, a lot of the ones that we Americans have actually heard of--are new, weirder takes on Western films, though one will notice that the most famous of these films, Turkish Star Wars, doesn't resemble Star Wars at all, plot-wise. Today's movies--if they can be describes as movies, in the sense of being plural and actual movies--are original stories, though if they did come close to ripping anything off, it would be the filmography of Godfrey Ho. A man whose filmography looks like this. Yeah, I wasn't kidding when I said I was leaving movies like last week's behind...Holy Sword and Death Warrior are probably the most exciting, unfettered, kinetic, bizarre movies I have ever seen. Because of their weirdness, energy, and Cüneyt Arkin star power--he's Turkish Han Solo and basically the greatest action star of all time--they are quintessential Turkish films for people who dig this sort of thing.

First, some clarification. I've decided to do a "double feature" on these movies because...they're kind of the same movie. As far as I know, both of them aired on TV two years apart, and Arkin didn't serve as co-director on Holy Sword. I encountered these movies via Death Warrior, and when I finally tracked down Holy Sword I was surprised to find a lot of familiar scenes. In fact, the same scenes, just in a different order. I feel as if there may be a few scenes that appear in one movie or not the other but there's nothing in my memory denying that those "scenes" were actually footage from the shared scenes that was cut depending on the version of the movie. But rest assured--Death Warrior is not a remake or repackaging of Holy Sword. It is a bona fide sequel, and I know this because at one point a character explains, "Two years ago in Germany was ninja terror," referencing the movie's previous (ostensible) setting in Berlin. And as if a movie's sequel being composed entirely of remixed footage from the first movie was not enough, there is the trifling matter of the subtitles that adorned my bootleg. God bless Google Translate. I'm sure I'll say more later.

Regardless of which movie you're watching, the plot is the same--an evil Ninja Master is leading his army of supernatural warriors against the world, in the name of controlling everything! And these ninjas are already a force to be reckoned with. Not only do they have an army of zombies, and the ability to breathe underwater and live without food, but they have mastery of alchemy. Who could possibly stop these immortal zombie-controlling gold-creating monsters? It turns out that Inspector Murat, aka Cüneyt Arkin, is on the case. Murat has two things on his side: he is the world's greatest martial arts master, and he is incapable of being surprised or flummoxed by anything. But don't think that means he lacks energy--Arkin action-mugs to every shot and is still charismatic as fuck outside of the fight scenes. Most of these movies are comprised of fight scenes. Are you surprised? If you are, watch Ninja Terminator and reinvent your definition of cinema. Even in the movies' downtime people are having their faces ripped off by mummies or being strangled by garden plants. There is a shockingly generic romance that occurs between Murat and Füsun Uçar, who was also Arkin's girlfriend in Turkish Star Wars. And consequently, there is no boredom here, not for a second. These are movies that threatens to repel its audience through sheer noise rather than a lack of anything interesting--shield your mind well and float downstream, or you will die of an adrenaline overdose.

If you can find this, hope it's the same as my copy, because you don't want to miss the now oft-mentioned subtitles. The Ninja Master instructs his evil pupils in the ways of archery: "Five arrow not enough. But matchstick" Lack of period included. Or how about the endlessly quotable "Zombies coming underground"? And it's hard to not cry laughing over putting "Help." over a woman whose scream sounds roughly akin to "AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH." That the audio people also at least doubled the sounds of people screaming or fighting (so as to make them as loud as possible, you see) makes whatever script these movies had into an audiovisual waking nightmare.

Like many of the Turkish films that have filtered down to us mere mortals, the technical aspects are the final icing on the cake. The shots are all dynamic but not sophisticated--they were shot in a matter of days if not hours for an audience of similar patience. Characters teleport at random, and some shots last for mere fractions of seconds before they cut to something else, usually someone fighting or being killed. The sound and video were probably faded to the garish whining (gorgeous) shit we see today when they first aired. They could also only afford one stock effect for people punching each other, which appears to be comprised of a wet flour sack being hit by a stick while someone grunts off-camera. This sound effect never gets old even people are being punched a million times a second, and it is occasionally intercut with the sword duels (!!!) which also only one "clang" sound effect ad hilarium. These sound effects play even when the punches or slashes clearly miss by several feet.

Bless those in my life who showed me a plethora of good movies in my youth, so that the awesomeness of these ones could break me in my adulthood. Every time I watch them, they leave me at a loss for air, and my head spins. Human lungs can't keep up with speed like this.

I'm not kidding, folks. I know I sort of take on the role of a "character" in these reviews, but if that character exists, I break them to let you know that these movies are indispensable. If I found out I missed them in mortal life after my death, I would feel cheated. I would be depressed for the rest of eternity. Do not do that too yourself--you are too good. This is nonstop ninja action, and it is probably the absolute best at what it does. Though as always, I dare somehow to prove me wrong.

The Cross of Seven Jewels (1987), by Marco Antonio Andolfi

If you were to take Bryan James' Run Coyote Run, mixed it with bootleg Waldemar Daninsky, and featured the Bruno Mattei dub actors, you would get this movie. It is a werewolf movie with a sex cult in it. It's also an action movie with Mafiosi, car chases, and Caspar Gutman impersonators. This is another one of those movies where the writing committee all each liked different genres. It becomes simultaneously spooky, hilarious, and testerone-y to an extreme, even though one of those adjectives isn't exactly real. The plot is somewhat complicated, but here's what I know of it...

Marco (played by director Marco Andolfi) has his jeweled cross stolen by motorcycle bandits while he visits his cousin. Both the theft and the visit are bad because firstly, Marco wants to bang his cousin, and secondly, the cross is the only thing that stops him from transforming into a werewolf! A werewolf who is actually a nude man wearing half a Chewbacca mask. Apparently Marco's lycanthropy is linked to the BDSM sex cult seen at the beginning of the film. Yes, this movie has one of those too. There are many fights with various types of gangsters, some of which involving some badass cops who appear to have been transplanted in from another movie. Ah well. Things become more complicated when the underlings of a Senator show up to retrieve Marco, and when we find out that the werewolf god the cult worships killed Marco's witch mother by exploding her belly. Will the answer lie with "Amnesia the Fortune Teller"?

This movie is over before you know it, even though it also drags. It's full of creative ideas, and no wonder--it, like many other great movies, serves as a glimpse into a weird otherworld. Everything that comes at us in the film is nonsensical and foreign, and it slowly gains momentum as time goes on. In this world, zombie Vatican priests can lead werewolf-worshipping cults involving lots of leather and whipping. That's just how it is. Sometimes it takes a little while to get from idea to idea, but when they all line up it's remarkable just unfettered this movie is.

It is also ludicrously cheap, as evidenced by the Wookiee mask and furry cock-socks on display. I believe the movie went into the drugs that fueled the script, and also into shooting the movie on film. European film is great because even in 1987 they still resisted the VHS scourge (though many Americans did too). Thus this movie seems artsy somehow while also being incredibly sleazy and cheap. This is pretty light stuff, outside of a werewolf rape scene (obligatory, probably), and the cousin-flirting--there's no Joe D'Amato here. It feels actually pretty American, with the action sequence lunacy and with the Universal homage they do, aka the werewolf-makeup transformation sequence with the fades and whatnot. As in those movies, it goes on forever and becomes inane after awhile. It's not nearly as boring as a Daninsky film though.

Insanity is the peril of boredom. That's why so many of us become insane--because our lives are empty. Madness fills our lives in the form of great movies like this one. When we watch these movies, we believe in the impossible, even when we don't believe in what's happening on the screen. We are taken to a fantasy land where the ultimate escapism happens. It turns out at the end of the tunnel of escapism is love.

I love this movie and it reminds me of several other movies, because of course it does. Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead, William Edwards' Dracula, the Dirty Old Man, Nick Millard's .357 Magnum--these and many others come to mind. That means we're on the right path, probably. That it takes all those movies and adds even more influences to the cocktail is always truly impressive.

This was my first time seeing this movie, but I plan on watching it again sometime soon. Perhaps then I'll have more to say. I would like to apologize now for not having done a Christmas movie, but this movie has a cross in it, which Kirk Cameron would say is an empty Christmas tree. I think I may be getting that mixed up but Kirk Cameron Christmas doesn't play by anyone's rules, least of all Kirk Cameron's. As an aside, I watched God's Not Dead on Christmas. That will not be reviewed on this site because, surprise, it is not fun.

The Cross of Seven Jewels is fun. Go for that instead.