D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' (1988), by Chuck Schodowski

Let me see if I can even begin to name all the cash-ins and ripoffs of Spielberg's E.T. that have emerged over the years.

There are the two Turkish ones, Badi and Homoti. There are at least five or six porno spoofs. We can't forget about Pod People...or Mac and Me...and now, there is D.T. Hallelujah! D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' (because Single Quotes Are Cool) was a short video made by the Cleveland Browns alongside the barbarian fantasy epic Masters of the Gridiron, probably in a gesture of fanservice to Browns fans. Both films became something entirely else--something which man was perhaps not meant to witness. But we'll see. We'll see if our minds are ready to take the long step into the depths of Dawg Territory.

D.T. of the Planet K9 is on his way to the Intergalactic Fetchball Championship when he is knocked off course by his rival team, the evil Zomalians! (They keep saying it as "Somalians" which makes it awkward.) If D.T.'s team has to play without him they will lose, and if they lose, the Zomalians will take control of the galaxy; "Tyranny and bloodshed shall surely follow," D.T. helpfully explains. Fortunately, the humans who found D.T., and supplied him with his trademark Hershey's Kisses, are the kindly gentlemen of the Cleveland Browns, including Bob Golic, Dan Fike, and Tim Manoa. (I love writing sentences that are meaningless to me.) It isn't long before D.T. is captured by the Zomalians, led by their Thundercats-reject Queen and her right-hand demon, Revoltar. Revoltar looks like if Jack Kirby's Etrigan decided to rob the wardrobe of Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. This leads to a training sequence of a bunch of NFL dudes grabbing camo and guns to storm the enemy ship and rescue their buddy, highlighted in great detail with a soundtrack that wouldn't seem out of place in Lady Street Fighter.

D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' is what happens if pure juvenile id vomits on the camera lens. It's a strangely sobering experience to witness these colossal beefy chaps, so typically associated with masculine seriousness, display an innocent and earnest eagerness for shooting lizard-aliens with beam-rifles. Or having lightsaber fights with cat-people. All while channeling what the '80s considered the kid's movie to end all kid's movies. Perhaps the majority of their delight comes from the prospect of this being a blast for their kid fans, but in a way, this was probably a relief from the image football players are ordinarily required to maintain. Again, all of my speculation comes from faulty understanding--I know nothing about football, outside of what I've seen in this movie and Masters of the Gridiron. There may be worlds of information encoded deep in this movie that I'll never understand unless I watch tons of '80s football reruns. All I see, from my perspective, is a bunch of guys enjoying themselves with a man dressed in a dog costume. That's all I need.

And the movie isn't badly shot, either. Director Chuck Schodowski knows what he's doing, as far as duplicating shots from other movies. I don't know where I've seen the shot of a group of camo-clad troops striding out of an orange-lit fog before, but it's generic enough where it's probably a 4th-generation ripoff of something big. Schodowski's like a junior Bruno Mattei, and it's wonderful. I think it's also appropriate that the director of this nerdy football movie is named "Schodowki." That's like the secret last name of every white person's football-loving dad. Who probably gets over-nostalgic about all the trash from the '80s, including E.T.

Running not even a full half-hour, D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' is an almost-literally one-of-a-kind movie that shows a strange side to football, even if you do happen to be familiar with The Sports. It makes a great double-feature with the similarly-short Masters of the Gridiron, a love-letter to '80s fantasy in the same way this is a tribute to '80s sci-fi. Both of them are on YouTube, too, so shoestring fans rejoice.

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The Instructor (1981), by Don Bendell

Some movies start out letting you know they're gonna be awesome. The Instructor opens with two men jogging, but loses focus on them after mere seconds to instead show a street fight between a bearded punk and a punk woman named "Cookie." She almost cuts his dick off with an axe. Castration is usually a good sign for a movie, and I'm glad this one decided to put such a thing--or nearness to it--at the beginning. It was like being greeted with a hug rather than a handshake. The encounter that ensued proved to be a fulfilling one. Let it be known that The Instructor is something special, even if it's not always entertaining.

Our joggers from the beginning are the titular Instructor and his pupil, Thumper Rhodes. The Instructor, as you might expect, teaches at a local karate school. They exposit for us that long ago, the Instructor's wife was raped and murdered by Bud Hart, who runs a rival martial arts academy. Hart's goons are the punks we saw at the beginning of the movie. We follow the Instructor and Thumper as they increasingly come to blows with Hart and his mob, while they are stalked by a ninja who turns out to in truth be a mentally handicapped man who wants to become a karate tournament champion. At one point this man clubs a fellow martial artist to death with his trophy, in a plot I don't remember going anywhere. In any case, this character exists to provide "comic relief" and to be beaten up by children. In the end, the Instructor probably defeats Bud Hart, and gets the girl I didn't know he was after.

The Instructor is, um. Puzzling. On one hand, it hits all the buttons I want to have hit whilst watching a martial arts movie. It features rugged dudes with mustaches and the whole Godfrey Ho-esque feel (while admittedly still being too American to be as crazy as something like Ninja the Protector). Yet I couldn't keep my focus on it for some reason. Even as I was being charmed by things like people catching ninja stars with their shoes and kicking people off motorcycles, I felt a weird fuzziness over the whole thing that left me feeling disinterested. I watched this movie three times for this review, and I still can't entirely remember if Bud Hart died, and if so, how he did. I don't remember when exactly the Instructor's new girlfriend enters the plot. I do remember being confused when we got a flashback to the Instructor finding his wife's corpse. That happened much later than I feel it should have. This is another movie where I feel like it was edited out of order, while knowing fully that that was not the case. Ordinarily I would find this sort of feeling pleasurable, but something is holding me back in this case.

It may be that there's something off about the fight scenes. They don't grip me as much as the material around them--I wouldn't call them lethargic, or lazy, but those two words nag at my mind for some reason. I just remember zoning out during the fight scenes in particular. I think I was bored by them, only really recalling one segment where an Asian martial artist showed up to very poorly use nunchuks and make stereotypical "Hwah!" noises. I probably remember that because it was rather offensive. I also remember the "ninja" getting his ass kicked by children, because I don't easily forget scenes of people being kicked around by kids. These fight scenes are often set to music, but I'm spoiled on the soundtracks from movies like Miami Connection, so these songs didn't hook my attention either, instead feeling as intrusive as the songs in bad musicals.

But there was still a lot I liked about this. Bud Hart is a particularly interesting villain, being not only an evil martial arts instructor as per action movie tropes, but also functioning as a mafia villain, and blaxploitation villain a little bit as well. There's a scene of him having a fancy restaurant dinner with an Italian dude, where they have one of those hush-hush Godfather-style conversations. He's also racist, calling some of the black characters slurs--one almost suspects that he's trying to buy out Sugar Hill's club on the side. He even dips into sci-fi villain territory, beating Khan Noonien Singh to the punch by a whole year in forcing his enemy to shout his name dramatically. Shatner would be proud.

Overall, I liked The Instructor, but this is definitely one that's not for everyone. Pop in Furious or Games of Survival first to get a feel on what you're stepping into. It may shake your focus a little bit, especially when we get to the kickboxing tournament. Actually, maybe slap some Mexican wrestling movies into the mix while you're at it. You're going to need to pick up a taste for endless spectator fights to make it through this one.

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High Kicks (1993), by Ruta K. Aras

I have encountered a generation of movies--usually action movies, but it varies--that have managed to contain the very living essence of the '90s, which was a bizarre era for those of us who set out to make movies with no money. A lot of these low-budget productions washed up on the shores of our elementary schools. Some of them distantly haunt my memory, all nameless and indistinguishable from one another; nothing else but old ghosts now. They always featured the immortal VHS hiss, wooden acting, curious accents, and questionable slang. It turns out there were some movies that had all of that, down to the letter, in movies made for adults as well, and High Kicks is one of them. It is a martial arts film. It is also a rape revenge film. But because it's filtered down through classic shot-on-shitteo blandness, it comes across as jarring and flat at the same time. That contrast has always intrigued me for some reason. Maybe I just like being embarrassed by how stupid the decade I grew up in was.

High Kicks starts off on what is probably the weirdest possible note for a rape revenge film: with super-sexualized shots of ladies working out. I feel like maybe this was supposed to set up some sort of guilt in the audience, possibly offense and confusion as well. This workout takes place as a gym called High Kicks!, run by Sandy, mistress of aerobics. When her handyman ditches out on her she takes on a new one, a sailor named Sam, who is secretly a karate master. A group of street thugs, led by a chubby white dude named TC, break into the gym and assault Sandy. Sam helps her recover from the trauma, and he offers her to teach her karate, with the aid of his buddies/practice combatants Jonas (from Germany!) and Maurice (from "OUTAH SPAAAAACE!!!"). Every line of dialogue throughout is unnatural but charmingly Hamill-esque ("I'm kinduva free spirit, actually!" Sam says), and the hair on most of the characters is pretty awful. It's simultaneously dark and whimsical, uplifted by Casio cues and community theater earnestness even after people have been gang-raped. It jumps from unflinching and realistic images of trauma to a weird love triangle between Sandy, Sam, and one of Sandy's students, Tracy, which plays out in the most soap opera-y of fashions. And all throughout, those training montages and synth demos never let us forget what decade it is. High Kicks is vengeance and justice...for the '90s!

The scope of the film never gets too sizable for its trousers, as the saying goes. That is to say, it is a movie that you can believe would happen in real life. There is a five-man criminal organization who is the subject of sweet revenge by Sandy and her three karate buddies, broken down into several ass-kicking sessions. Then, there is the Tracy-Sandy-Sam love triangle, which is endearingly the fault of Sam's bad social skills. Actually, Sam is a pretty great character for this sort of movie--not only is he as awkward as he is good at martial arts, but he, too, is a rape victim. He and Sandy are on equal terms, because one is never above the other in terms of martial arts skills, or at least so. Can I go so far as to call it a feminist movie? It does fail the Bechdel test pretty hard, at least as far as I noticed, but unlike a lot of low-budget action movies, it doesn't glory in or exploit its rape scenes...er, even though those rape scenes become the primary motivation for its lead character. I may be thinking too hard about this--you know the rule of never devoting more time than the director did. 

This movie isn't going to change how your brain works. It is simply entertaining. But entertainment, at least in my opinion, can truly be an end in itself--humans thrive on it. And High Kicks will entertain every time you come back. That means it's a reliable resting place for one to go to when the "real world" gets too intense. You just need something of a strong stomach, a little tastelessness, and a forewarning of the potentially triggering material. (The whole thing's nudity-free--there is nothing explicit in Sandy's assault, though it may still be troubling.) But it is rewarding, and not merely because the acting really does remind you of Birdemic.

This movie is better than Birdemic. For one thing it's only 80 minutes, and also, things constantly happen in it, instead of there being blank seas of hopeless nothing. The special effects are better, too, because there are none. A better comparison movie would be 1987's Killer Workout. That film plus this one would be a great double-feature, providing a slasher take on the world of aerobicizing. (A world lost to time, full of dark and mysterious secrets.) I'm sure Killer Workout will end up on this site at some point or another.

Seriously, though: do not watch High Kicks if you have a dislike of the '90s in any way. It will literally kill you.