Day of the Panther (1988)

What do you get when you mix martial arts, the land down under, bad acting and an awesomely bad script? Day of the Panther. That's right our movie takes us to everyone's favorite island of convicts and gives us the harrowing tale of an undercover cop hellbent on revenge for the killing of his partner.

What do you get if you mix Crocodile Dundee and Bruce Lee? The killing machine that is Jason Blade. That's right his name is Jason friggen' Blade. How awesome is that? If I continue calling him by his full name instead of him, he, or just Jason it's because he has the greatest name in cinematic history.

Our movie starts out with Jason Blade and his partner doing an undercover operation, and by that I mean they're sneaking around in the kitchen of a restaurant where a drug deal is going down. Apparently they have a much different definition of undercover in Australia. Either way the drug deal goes to hell, the buyer kills the sellers, our two undercover detectives get caught in the middle and have to fight their way out of the restaurant. Luckily it's a Chinese restaurant so everyone in the joint knows karate; that way Jason Blade can really showcase his talent.

Up next you have the most mind blowingly awesome scene in Australian cinema. Linda, Jason Blade's partner, is watching a drug deal go down. He tells her to wait, but that's not how Linda rolls. She's going to go down and check it out... and Linda knows how to make an entrance.

Little known fact: everything in Australia is made of balsa wood.

Remember how I said that this was a mind blowingly awesome scene? Want to know why? Because these are the three guys that Linda ends up fighting:



That's right, it's old man mask man! Cower in fear when he looks like an old man but is actually a really bad ninja!



Skull mask man with bat that has spikes in it! Okay, I can see where he's going with this. Skull masks are kind of scary, and a good way to intimidate others. The third guy must be really scary!



Pig... mask... man? What happened to Rocksteady there Bebop? He late? Seriously, I know that Pig Mask Man has a machete but really? Were there three masks and skull guy got the only good one? Was there just not a costume store on the way to the drug deal and you had to use what costumes you could scrape together from your mom's basement?

Also, if you've ever participated in the candy giving holiday of Halloween you've probably worn a latex mask. Let me ask you something, how was your peripheral vision out of one of those things? There's a reason kids get hit by cars on Halloween and it's not just because they're stupid. It's because you can't see worth a goddamn out of those masks. No wonder they get the crap kicked out of them by Linda. Also, want to see the greatest thing? During her fight with Skull Mask Man Linda pulls off his mask and...



He has a friggen' skull painted on his face! Why in God's name does he need the mask at all!?

So are you wondering why she's fighting three guys in masks? Get in line buddy because I'm pretty sure so is everyone else who viewed this movie.

Long story short Linda manages to dispatch the three guys in the goofy masks and is killed by their boss, the only one not stupid enough to put on a mask and parade around like it's Halloween. Though he does look a lot like George Michaels.



So on to the meat and potatoes of the movie. So now Jason Blade has learned that his partner has been killed. Thankfully he was already going undercover into the group that killed her, and actually undercover this time, not spying on them from fifteen feet away.

The great thing is, the moment he shows up at the airport two bumbling detectives are assigned to follow him because they think he's a gangster hitman. Despite the fact about 20 minutes later he tells their boss that he's actually undercover... yet they follow him throughout the movie. I guess the captain just likes wasting manpower. On the other hand I don't know if there's a Mayberry in Australia that these two could be policing instead.

Basically the rest of the movie is bad karate fights with plot kind of sprinkled around it.

You have Jason Blade working for the local gangster in Australia, and his right hand man is George Michael looking bastard, the guy who killed the drug dealers at the first and Linda... this guy really gets around.

You also have Jason Blade's Sensei, William Anderson, who happens to be Linda's father and his other daughter Gemma... is also Jason's love interest in the movie. I would think after you lost one daughter you wouldn't let your other hang around with a guy who tends to get into kicking fights with the gang that killed said daughter... but that's just me.

You also have the greatest 80's/karate movie plot cliche ever... you see the gangster boss holds a great big karate championship each year and he wants Jason to fight in it. Do these kinds of things actually happen? I mean I know there's karate tournaments, but are there huge underground tournaments held by stereotypical mob bosses where the worlds best get together and fight perhaps to the death? You see it constantly in movies, but you never hear about these kinds of things being broken up by the police in real life.

Either way you bet your ass that Jason Blade and George Michael end up in the ring fighting against each other. Sure it's not during the tournament, you see they find out Jason Blade is a undercover cop before then... but oh, ho, ho you bet they duel it out in the ring. You also probably guessed that Jason Blade is getting the crap kicked out of him but makes a miraculous recovery and wins. Frankly I'm surprised this fight didn't take place at dusk with the Sydney Opera House in the background.

So of course Jason Blade saves the day with a little help from Sensei Anderson and Gemma... But don't worry, Jason Blade will be back for Strike of the Panther. And you can bet your ass I'll be watching it as soon as I find a copy.

2 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.

Trauma (1978)

So here we go again. A foreign movie dubbed into English. This time it's an on the edge of your seat, thrill ride of a roller coaster called Trauma, or Enigma Rosso, or Red Ring of Fear, or Virgin Killer, and the list keeps going... Frankly I'd go with Virgin Killer, mostly because it shares the name with a Scorpion's album with a very inappropriate album cover.

Trauma wasn't as horrible as I thought it would be. Don't get me wrong it's still pretty bad, but I guess it could have been a lot worse. Mostly it's kind of an ordinary movie with weird subplots that seem to go nowhere. Like the main character is a detective, who happens to be dating a woman who's a kleptomaniac. Why is she a kleptomaniac? No real reason, she just likes to steal things... it adds absolutely nothing to the story. Though it doesn't really matter because about half way through the movie she leaves him for no real reason. He goes to leave and she says that when he gets back she wont be there, and that's that. What does that have to do with the story? Nothing at goddamn all. There's several little things like this throughout the movie... they don't do anything for the story, and in some places actually just seem to hurt it.

What does this picture have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing, but it's awesome.

That guy up there? That's our detective friend. He's investigating the murder of a sixteen year old girl. You know, when he's not having to deal with his shoplifting girlfriend. So while looking into this girls murder he discovers two things:

1) The girl goes to an all girl boarding school, along with her and her friends they have a secret little club called The Inseparables. All the sudden this movie got a lot more sexy.

2) The dead girl has a sister who's creepy. I'm not sure if she's meant to be, but I'll be damned if she doesn't seem that way.

Either way the dead girl's sister (who by the way doesn't seem all the broken up over the death of her sister, though neither does her mother) pops in occasionally throughout the movie with little hints and help for the detective. Because I hope that if a detective is looking into my murder he's doing so with the help of a ten year old... I hope it's a lot like Cop and a Half.

But don't worry, our detective doesn't rely solely on the help of a ten year old to solve crimes... oh no! You see, the detective is a loose cannon with unorthodox interrogation techniques! And by that I mean he takes one of the people he's trying to get information out of on a roller coaster ride. That's not a metaphor or anything, he literally takes him on a roller coaster ride. That's what gets the guy to talk. Seriously, I've seen Jack Bauer do things that are banned by the Geneva Convention... and this guy takes his suspects to the carnival. Maybe if he doesn't talk he takes them on the tilt a whirl.

Dammit, I get results!

Either way the story is kind of crappy. The plot is confusing with way too many subplots and unexplained things to make it even somewhat decent and the characters seem to do things that defy explanation. Maybe I got an edited version, or maybe it just didn't translate well to English. All I know is I got done with the movie and I know who killed the girl... I think... but I'm not sure how or why, and those things are kind of important in a murder mystery. It's like it started out well and then about halfway through the writers decided to get lunch. From about halfway through till the end just seemed like a convoluted mess.

Is it worth wasting 84 minutes of your life on? Probably not, but what else are you going to do?


3 Birthday Fish out of 5


Squid

Cindy and Donna (1970)

Needed something new so I switched over to the Drive-In Cult Classic DVD pack. Basically every movie in this pack is a bad sexploitation movie from the '70s. Every movie on it generally has to deal with someone wanting to have sex with a mother, a stepmother, a nanny, a sister, two sisters... you get the point. And Cindy and Donna is no different.

I learned two things from Cindy and Donna:

1) The '70s was an awesome time when you could use the word "groovy" in all seriousness.

2) Pot turn women into nymphomaniacs.

I can tell you that number two is false, if it were true my high school life would have been a hell of a lot more interesting.

The tagline for Cindy and Donna says it all: A story of two sisters. Cindy... so anxious to grow up. Donna... who grew up too fast! That's basically it, you have the sweet, innocent Cindy who wants to be like her big sister Donna, who's basically a pot smoking whore. I would strive to achieve that as well.


Also it has the greatest opening theme ever.

That's it. That's pretty much the whole movie. Seriously. The movie is just an excuse to get Cindy, Donna, Cindy's friend Karen, and Alice the stripper naked... all while leading up to one of the most hilarious endings I've ever seen. And frankly I'm okay with that.

Sure there are other "plots" in the movie but mostly they go nowhere. The father in the movie likes to have sex with a stripper... and that's pretty much all there is to that subplot. As far as I can tell it's only there to show the stripper naked. I'm starting to see a trend. Then there's the mother. She's an alcoholic. That's her subplot. She also has an accent that seems to randomly change throughout sentences.

The funny thing about this movie is that it's all about nudity and sex and drugs. It's sexploitation at its finest... and yet if you take all of that away you have almost a morality tale. This film is basically about the dangers of drugs and alcohol.

You have Donna who will do anything for weed. Sex in a car for a joint? Oh yeah. Have two creepy guys take naked pictures of you and then have sex with you? Oh she'll do it all for some sweet, sweet mary jane. Pot will do this to you. It's evil.

Then you have sweet, innocent Cindy. She wants to go farther with her boyfriend but just isn't sure that she's ready. But the second that joint touches her young, virginal lips? Well all the sudden her and Karen are going at it like lesbianism is going out of style.

But you have this odd message seemingly hidden under tons and tons of titties. So imagine an after school special about the dangers of drugs but where everyone is naked and having sex with random people.

2 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.

Spare Parts (1979)

Going in to Spare Parts I expected something horrible. We're talking about a '70s made for TV move that was shot in German and then dubbed into English. That's pretty much a recipe for disaster right there.

But Spare Parts surprised me... no, not because it was a great movie. Hell it wasn't even all that good of a movie, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. It had its ups and downs but overall came out fairly well.

Spare Parts is about a man and woman, Bill and Monica, who stay at the Honeymoon Motel for their... Honeymoon. First off let me say that I wish there were still motels that cost $7.50 a night... or maybe I don't, I'm not sure. Back to the movie though. Despite the fact that the desk clerk is the creepiest woman ever, the newlyweds decide to stick around and do newlywed kind of stuff (sex) and watch the sun set in a field.

This was their first mistake.

You see, as they're sitting in the field watching the sun set an ambulance drives up to them. Now most people would quizzically wonder what the hell an ambulance is doing in the middle of a field, and in fact that's exactly what Bill does. Monica on the other hand has the complete opposite reaction, she runs away screaming like a mad woman.

Bill should have listened to her.

Bill is kidnapped by the two men in the ambulance and carted away to god knows where, all the while Monica continues running away screaming. Though I can't blame her, the two men in the ambulance did have comically large guns. Either way she takes her screaming all the way to highway where she's promptly picked up by a friendly trucker. I can never decide if that's a good idea. On the one hand she's a hot twenty something blond wearing nothing but a white tank top and short shorts. On the other hand she's disheveled and crazy looking. Kind of a toss up about what's going to happen.

So this is what cataracts are like.

Luckily Trucker Mike is a nice guy who decided to help out our poor, crazy Monica. And I don't mean just a little bit of helping out, I mean going far beyond the call of duty on this one. He's devising plans on how to help her get her fiance back.

The whole movie involves Trucker Mike and Monica devising a plan that would allow them to find out who kidnapped Bill and how they can stop these people. So they pretend to be newlyweds and go back to the same motel that this started in in hopes of having the exact same thing happen again. And luckily for them it does! They manage to extract the information from the ambulance drivers and find out what they want with the people they're kidnapping. Spare parts of course! You see, there's a group that kidnaps people so they can harvest their organs. Seems like it would be easier to target say, homeless people as opposed to normal everyday people off the street who may have families that will miss them... but I guess that doesn't make as compelling of a movie.

The last half of the movie is where it starts to somewhat go downhill for me. It's not that the movie gets bad it's just that it's when it seems to start dragging on. The first half of the movie was generally pretty good, but the last half just seemed kind of odd and a almost like a different movie. The first part was a pretty good horror/thriller movie but the last half just turned out weird. It involved Trucker Mike and Monica going undercover in the group to find out who is behind the whole body harvesting scheme... and then get help from a very unlikely source to bring it down. The last half isn't bad, it just feels kind of off to me.

Like I said, it's not bad and it's not good. The story isn't bad but tends to drag on in places. The characters tend to do things that I don't think normal people would do, but that tends to happen in a lot in movies. The acting isn't bad when, again, you consider it was a made for TV movie from the '70s.

Spare Parts falls into a weird category for Bad Transfer Reviews, because while it's not bad I certainly wouldn't sing it's praises. It's just kind of there. It's better than a lot of the things I've had to watch, but I wouldn't really suggest that everyone rush out and see it.

2 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.

Slave of the Cannibal God (1978)

Finally made it back to the Drive-In Movie Classics 50 Pack. Was in the mood for something bad and exploitative so I settled for Slave of the Cannibal God.

Slave of the Cannibal God stars Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach. First off, I didn't realize that it was Stacy Keach until about halfway through the movie. I think the first thing I remember seeing Stacy Keach in was Titus and that was in 2002, about 24 years after he made this movie. He had aged quite a bit. I also spent a good portion of the movie trying to decide if Ursula Andress was hot or not. On one hand she's pretty good looking, but on the other she's got kind of a weird facial structure and odd hairline. By the end of the movie I had settled on the fact that she was "odd hot", meaning even though she had some odd things about her look wise, she was still hot.

Odd hot or hot hot. I still can't decide.

Why have I brought this up? Well how good do you think a movie is when I spent a good portion of the time trying to decide if the leading actress was hot or not instead of, you know, paying attention. Give you a hint: not very.

If you were Italian and made a movie in the '70s with the word cannibal in the title there was a good chance it had two things in it: excessive amounts of boobies and real animal killings for shock value. Slave of the Cannibal God had both of these... kind of.

You see, the version of Slave of the Cannibal God that I had was the "heavily cut" version. The uncut version is 102 minutes long, where as the one I saw was 82 minutes. That means that they cut a fifth of the movie (here's hoping my horrible math skills are correct). Apparently this movie is chock full of nudity... unless you saw the version I did where you briefly see a little bit of boobies. When you cut out a fifth of a movie, I'm guessing here and there you end up cutting little bits of important information pertaining to the plot... and that's how Slave of the Cannibal God felt. Like you were watching a movie that was missing parts of its plot.

No explanation is needed for this. It's just terrifying.

I'm not saying that the movie made no sense, I was able to piece together the information easily enough. Occasionally though, you would get to part of the movie that felt like it wasn't explained very well... it could just be incredibly bad writing, but it also may be that the explanation had been cut out, it's hard to say.

Overall Slave of the Cannibal God was just kind of a boring movie. It didn't offer me anything that I hadn't already seen before in these kind of exploitative cannibal movies... and once you get rid of all the nudity the only thing you're left with is the animal killings which really does nothing for me. And Birthday Fish doesn't like seeing his animal brethren die just for the purpose of a crappy movie with no boobies.

Birthday Fish Gives this a 5 out of 5 on No Boobies to Animal Killing Ratio

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914)

I would guess some people don't realize that The Wizard of Oz is based off of a novel by L. Frank Baum, but I would guess that most people don't realize it wasn't the first movie based off of those books. Hell, L. Frank Baum had his own production company called The Oz Film Manufacturing Company which cranked out quite a few of them. Including the little gem I watched called The Patchwork Girl of Oz, which as far as I can tell is the first feature full length movie based of of the books, though I may be wrong. Either way this movie is strange. How strange you ask? Imagine dropping acid while watching a Terry Gilliam movie where all of the audio has been replaced with intertitles and organ music.

Strange.

You won't find Dorthy or Toto or The Wicked Witch of the West in this version. You will however find The Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, as well as the Scarecrow. Though instead of the fun lovable characters you know some of them have been replaced by something straight out of your nightmares.

Not Ray Bolger.

So is the movie good? Well, kind of. It's a mix of odd, good, and terrifying. The movie is about Ojo, a young girl who travels out with her father? ,I'm not sure how he's related, to her to find food. Upon the way they follow a mule to a magician's house who's making a patchwork girl. Shortly after making the patchwork girl Ojo accidentally turns three people to stone and then has to find the ingredients to make a cure. Unfortunately for her some of the ingredients are illegal and procuring them manages to get her in trouble with the law in the land of Oz.

It's all very strange. I realize it's hard to tell a story when all you have are title cards that pop up every few minutes and the rest of the story has to rely on the actions of the actors to convey what is happening. So that being said The Patchwork Girl of Oz is a good movie, but holy hell is it occasionally like a bad acid trip.

Also it has more black face than the 1939 version.

3 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.

The Smallest Show on Earth (1957)

So I deviated from my normal course. All of the previous movies I've reviewed are from the Drive-In Movie Classics 50 Pack so last night I decided to try something new and broke out the Comedy Classics 50 Pack. That's when I realized my problem.

The Drive-In Classics movies are generally pretty bad. They range from "so bad they're good" to "so bad they're almost unwatchable". I've seen 2 of 12 DVDs in the Comedy Classics pack in the past and I can say I thoroughly enjoyed both of them. I like old timey things, and I'm not exactly sure why. Early cinema fascinates me, but so does the early 19th century in general. You're talking to a guy whose favorite "attraction" at Disneyland is the Penny Arcade on Main Street, followed closely by the old time theater which shows old Disney shorts. Hell, you're talking to a guy whose last.fm is currently playing the Boswell Sisters.

Why am I telling you this? Mostly because I'm wondering if I can write an objective review on something I'm so enamored with. The answer is probably no, but I'm going to go ahead and give it a try. On with the show.

The Smallest Show on Earth is a good movie, and I'm not saying that just because of everything I said above. It truly is a good movie.

Jean and Matt Spenser receive a letter telling them that Matt's uncle has died and left Matt The Bijou, his movie theater. They head off on the first train to the city to claim their inheritance. Well the movie would be fairly boring if the theater was in pristine condition and everything was running well, thankfully for us it's not. The Bijou is nicknamed "The Flea Pit", and is currently being run by three very eccentric workers. One of them being Peter Sellers... how can you not love Peter Sellers?

So the movie theater is a bust, but they're hope is restored when they learn that the villainous man who owns the other theater in town once offered the uncle 5000 pounds for his theater. Except now he's only offering 500... so they hatch a plan. If they can pretend that they're going to reopen the The Bijou perhaps they can get him to sell at higher price rather than compete for customers. Unfortunately their plan is discovered before they can even get it off the ground. So they come up with a new plan... what if they actually open the theater?

I'm not going to spoil anymore of the movie because you might actually want to see this one. Sure, it's not the funniest movie I've ever seen and it's certainly not Peter Sellers greatest role, but it's a good movie. Everyone in it is very good, and overall it has some very funny parts. If you don't enjoy old comedies and their humor you probably won't enjoy the movie as much as I did, but if you do I think you'll enjoy this movie.

1 Birthday Fish out of 5

Squid.