The "Never Got Made" Files #64 & #65: Reaping the non-Harvest

Chances are if you saw a Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan film at some point in your life, you’ll recognize the film company logo to the left.  Opening many a film with the famous “bong, bong, bong, bong, do-dah-dah-dah,” the Golden Harvest logo is known the world over.  The company was formed in 1970 by Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho, two former employees of the famous Shaw Brothers studios who decided to try to succeed on their own.  And succeed they did as the duo managed to woo top box office draw Jimmy Wang Yu – among many other popular actors and directors – away from Shaw Bros.

Golden Harvest also scored a major coup by winning the bidding war with the Shaws to sign a relative unknown named Bruce Lee to a film contract.  Within just a few years, the company was the top film production house in Hong Kong and usurped their competition.  This was helped, no doubt, by the popular ENTER THE DRAGON (1973), which was made with help from US company Warner Bros.   Co-production was the name of the game and Golden Harvest had no qualms letting their big names get international exposure.  Wang Yu films like THE MAN FROM HONG KONG (1975) and A QUEEN’S RANSOM (1976) saw them working with Aussies and Brits, respectively.  They got even more clout by signing Robert Mitchum to THE AMSTERDAM KILL (1977), which reunited the company with ENTER director Robert Clouse.

In 1978, Golden Harvest had another successful international production with the Vietnam war flick THE BOYS IN COMPANY C (1978), which was directed by Sidney J. Furie and released by Columbia Pictures.  Looking to go to the co-production well one more time, Golden Harvest arranged for a series of films again with Warner Bros. Pictures and announced several pictures.  While many of them got made (THE CANNONBALL RUN, Jackie Chan’s THE BIG BRAWL, DEADLY EYES aka THE RATS), one big bandied about title did not – THE SHIPKILLER.  Based on a book by Justin Scott, THE SHIPKILLER revolved around a guy who begins an Ahab-esque quest to see vengeance on a huge oil tanker and its crew after it unwittingly crushes his smaller boat and kills his wife.

The first notices of the project came in these tiny blurbs in Box Office in August 1978 mentioning producer Chow had picked up the rights to the novel:

A few months later, in December 1978, it was announced that Sidney J. Furie had signed on to direct the project:

This impressive ad ran in Variety in May 1979 with the bold comparison to JAWS (1975).  Hey, no one would get it if they said, “It is like a seafaring DUEL (1971).”

Five months later, this ad appeared in Variety in October 1979.  We can only assume most of 1979 was spent on developing the script as the screenwriter went from Clarke Reynolds to Jonathan Hales.  A small GH profile mentioned a $20 million dollar budget.

Fast forward to May 1980 and the film has still not gone into production.  It is mentioned again in a write up for Harvest’s 1981 line up and is now looking about $4 million lighter in the budget department.

Alas, the film never got off the ground, er, set sail.  Furie would leave the project and go on to make THE ENTITY (1982), much to the delight of ghost sex fans everywhere.  It is a shame as it sounds like it could have been a cool project as 70s nautical films tended to rule and it would have been an awesome vehicle for someone like George C. Scott.

At the same time Golden Harvest announced THE SHIPKILLER, they also announced the production of HIGH ROAD TO CHINA.  “Wait a sec,” I can hear you saying, “that did get made fool!”  Yes, it did but after a prolonged pre-production process that saw some major players attached to the film.  Here are two items from Box Office in October 1978 announcing the project with ENTER THE DRAGON producer Paul Heller behind the project with a May 1979 start date.

Come May 1979, the producers are promising a July 1979 start date with a huge name attached to direct.  Yes, that is the one and only John Huston listed as director.  No doubt it was his fine acting work in TENTACLES (1977) and THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE (1978) that really convinced Golden Harvest he was the man for the job and not his storied directing career.

Despite the targeted summer 1979 filming date, they never got started.  In October 1979, the following ad ran for the film.  Huston was no longer attached with Brian Hutton (KELLY’S HEROES) taking his place.  But an even bigger name (in front of the camera) now took up the ad space: Mr. James Bond himself Roger Moore!  Pretty big casting as Moore was at the height of his popularity as Britain’s top secret service agent.

Sadly, we never got to see either incarnation of the project.  Golden Harvest developed it for a few more years before it finally went before cameras in 1982 with Tom Selleck in the lead role.  And, despite having a convoluted production history, the film turned out to be a pretty entertaining adventure.

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No Deniro Pistolero: GET MEAN (1976)

Someday I would like to meet Tony Anthony. Some people want to meet their matinee idols so that they can bask in their presence and maybe get some recognition of their hard work of keeping a seat firmly attached to the floor over the many hours and years of watching their films. I want to meet Tony Anthony so I can ask him one question.

Anthony’s film career is a relatively short and rather odd one comprised of a fistful of spaghetti westerns and a smattering of others. His main claim to fame would be The Stranger series. The first film being A DOLLAR BETWEEN THE TEETH (1967), a pretty straightforward, but entertaining, low-budget rip-off of A FISTFULL OF DOLLARS (1964), the second being A MAN, A HORSE, A GUN (1967) and the third being THE SILENT STRANGER (1968) in which Anthony’s unnamed character goes to Japan. This was a genre precedent as RED SUN wouldn't see the light of day until three years later. The film was not well received by MGM who decided to edit it and tack on a voice-over explaining the action early in the film and then shelved the film until 1975. In the end it barely got released to US theaters and went largely unreleased in many foreign territories. I am guessing Anthony had a bit of a fascination with Japanese cinema (as did most Italians at the time) which led to this ground-breaking crossover pic and then subsequently the superb Zatoichi reworking BLINDMAN (1971). Where it all goes pear-shaped is this quasi fourth installment (aka THE STRANGER GETS MEAN), which ends up in a surreal universe that is so completely bizarre that it really has nothing to do with the three Stranger films at all and almost makes EL TOPO (1971) seem rather rational.

The basic plot outline is thus: The Stranger finds himself in a dilapidated desert town that is under attack by Viking raiders. A gypsy fortuneteller and her son offer him ten thousand dollars to escort a Spanish princess (Diana Lorys) back to Spain where she can summon an army to assist in putting an end to the attacks. After The Stranger demands fifty thousand for the task, they are off. Once they travel from Wisconsin (!?) to Spain, they find that the Vikings and the Moors are at war and the Vikings now control Spain (though, the leaders seem to be more Moorish than Nordic) and are searching for the lost treasure of Rodrigo, which as the legend goes, only the princess can find. Naturally this causes some friction between The Stranger and the usurpers , the permanently enraged Diego (Raf Baldassarre), his gay advisor Alphonso (David Dreyer) and the hunch-backed puppet-master Sombra (Lloyd Battista) who has an obsession with Shakespeare’s Richard III. Oh, and yes, you read that right. Vikings in Wisconsin. Hey, maybe they migrated over from Minnesota.

Directed by Ferdinando Baldi (under the appropriately named “Strange Films Inc. Productions”) with some of the same stars as BLINDMAN, from the opening frame you know this is not going to be your average western. Opening with a close-up of a silver sphere sitting among the tumble-weeds on a desert plain (I think I have that album), we are re-introduced to The Stranger as he is literally dragged screaming into a windy, empty dirt town, where his horse promptly keels over and dies, while the town is being ripped apart by desert winds. If that isn’t one of the best character intros ever, I don’t know what is. No lazy, loping into town at noon ala Trinity or slogging through the rain and mud ala Django, nope, this one is not having any of it.

On arriving in Spain, The Stranger and the Princess find themselves trapped between the Viking/Barbarian army and the Moors who proceed to wage an epic battle with hundreds of extras that looks as if it’s lifted straight out of a ‘60s peplum! Once the Moors are routed by the barbarian forces, which include an amazingly cool horizontal gattling-cannon device, The Stranger finds himself strung up by his feet and shot with a cannon mortar while the barbarians take off with the princess. He is, of course, no worse for wear after this and is now pissed off and looking to settle the score. In BLINDMAN he wanted his 50 women. Here he wants his 50 thousand. Sure, it’s pretty simplistic, but I’m fine with that, which is a good thing because that’s all we are really going to get as far as plot is concerned.

One of the most bizarre moments has The Stranger searching for Rodrigo’s treasure in a cavern inhabited by a screaming bearded hermit with a knife. While trying to escape from the hermit, The Stranger is blown up in a black cloud that turns his skin completely black. He finds out that he is completely black by looking down his pants and shouting in horror “I’m black!!”

If there is some symbolism here...
I have no idea what it is.

But wait! It’s not over yet - he then scrambles out of a hole into a small valley that is occupied by a black bull that chases him around until he finally falls into another hole, back into the caverns and is able to steal what he believes to be Rodrigo’s treasure (a figurine of a horse and a scorpion necklace). Narrowly avoiding the hermit’s knife, The Stranger kicks him off of a ledge and escapes right into the clutches of Sombra and Diego who do not even bat an eyelash at The Stranger’s completely black visage. The only thing here that has any bearing whatsoever to the rest of the film is the necklace, called The Scorpion’s Sting, which is used by The Stranger to terrify the villains who believe it to be cursed. At one point he encases it in wax and shoves it down Alphonso’s throat, sending him back to the castle where Sombra has him force-fed on the wheel until he, errm, releases it.

Like many of Anthony’s films, there is a weird mean-streak running through it that is off-set by the amiable, if not downright gullible in this film, quality of his character. Here Anthony plays his character as not the stoic serape-clad loner of the Stranger series proper, but a southern-accented rube dressed in patched up rags. On the other side of the fence, his usual themes of the villains being cruel beyond measure are intact with Sombra forcing a gypsy girl into a duel with fencing swords, only to stab her in the back when she tries to flee. Battista, who co-wrote the script with Baldi, clearly is relishing his obviously self-scripted role by chewing the scenery while being vain, cruel and all the while quoting lines from the Bard’s play, including during his death scene. If nothing else, they were having a damn good time making this movie, that’s for sure. The whole Shakespeare angle is actually great fun and works well in the context of an exploitation film. As much as high-brow scholars pontificate about Shakespeare’s works being great art (which, granted, they were), they seem to skip over the fact that Shakespeare wrote entertainment for the masses. Exploitation plays as it were. Sure there are lots of beautifully crafted soliloquies, rife with subtext and word-play, but the man also worked in groin humor and graphic violence. People meet all sorts of nasty ends, get kicked in the balls and have illicit sex at the drop of a quill. It’s good stuff.

After being roasted like a pig on a spit, The Stranger has had about enough out of the barbarian trio and loads himself up with enough weapons and explosives to make Schwarzenegger shake his head at the excess and says “when things are even up, a man really should fight fair, but oh, when they just keep puttin’ it too ya buddy, and they’re stompin’ on your ass… there’s only one way to fight… get mean!” Yep, for my money, no matter how bizarre the premise, how ludicrous the situations, you just can't go wrong with Tony Anthony and Ferdninando Baldi blowing stuff up.

In the end GET MEAN may not reach the crafted genius that is BLINDMAN, or achieve the dreamlike atmosphere of COMIN’ AT YA!, but it lives in its own little world of surreal weirdness that makes it a must for those who enjoy Tony Anthony’s stuff or just want to see something that is so completely off-kilter that it is no surprise that it hasn’t been released on video in the US and has barely seen the light of day anywhere else. “But wait!” I hear you say, “what’s the deal with the silver sphere?!” That is exactly the question I would ask Mr. Anthony.

Be sure to check out executive producer Ron Schneider's impressive shrine to the film, loaded with interviews, reviews and tons of great info and anecdotes regarding the production.

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Buns and Ammo: MALIBU EXPRESS (1985)

Confession time – before last week I had only seen two Andy Sidaris movies.  One was his 70s action flick SEVEN (1979) and the other was one of his many 90s action epics (sorry, I can’t remember which one it was).  I know my Greek half was definitely disappointed in myself in this cultural gap. All of that is changing though as I’ve recently picked up the DVD set “Girls, Guns, & G-Strings.” This 12-film collection is light on the wallet, heavy on the T&A and will allow me to experience his filmography in chronological order.  1985 here I come!

MALIBU EXPRESS features the exploits of Cody Abilene (Darby Hinton), a private detective with a mustache on loan from Tom Selleck.  Abilene is hired by Contessa Luciana (Sybil Danning) to infiltrate the family of Lady Lillian Chamberlain (Niki Dantine) as her home seems to be the ground zero for someone who is illegally selling computers to the Russians.  The Cold War is fixin’ to get hot!  There is a wide assortment of odd suspects including daughter Anita (Shelly Taylor Morgan), niece Liza (Playboy Playmate Lorraine Michaels), her transvestite husband Stuart (Michael Andrews) and stud chauffeur Shane (Brett Baxter Clark, the muscle meathead in DEATHSTALKER IV).   Along the way, Cody receives help from a bevy of beautiful babes including cop Beverly (Lori Sutton, the Playmate in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH) and race car driver June Khnockers (Playboy Playmate Lynda Wiesmeier).  And he must constantly be on the lookout for the buffoon Buffingtons, a redneck family looking to avenge their racing loss to Cody’s dad.

Believe it or not, this is the most entertaining film I’ve seen in months.  That means I’ve been watching a lot of crap or it is just a breezy fun film (a combination of both of those really).  The plot is convoluted as hell and I had to keep reminding myself what exactly Cody was investigating. Honestly, though, if you are watching a Sidaris flick for an intricate murder mystery, you are in the wrong place.  Kind of like a straight guy at a Lady Gaga concert.  One thing that really surprised me was the amount of intentional humor in the film. And some of it actually works, like Cody’s inability to shoot right.  The drag races with the Buffington family?  Eh, not so much.

Of course, Sidaris is legendary for one thing – mounds and mounds of nekkid chicks.  And he doesn’t disappoint here.  The man is seemingly incapable of going 5 minutes without a nude scene and it is gratuitous maximus.  Like the bit where Cody is stranded in the desert and finds a used car lot where the nubile owner immediately pops her top when she sees him.  Man, if I had a dime for every time that happened to me.  In addition to Playboy Playmates Lorraine Michaels and Lynda Wiesmeier getting nude, Sidaris also cast Playmates Kimberly McArthur and Barbara Edwards as Faye and May respectively, two horny girls who are always trying to get it on with Cody on his boat (poor guy).  You have to love the shower scene between the two where Edwards glances into the camera THREE times and tries to play it off. There is also porn star Shanna McCullough as a massage girl and softcore star Robyn Hilton (the busty babe from BLAZING SADDLES), who surprisingly stays clothed as the family maid. And, of course, there is the stunning Sybil Danning.  Danning is a favorite around these parts, thanks mostly to her amazing shower scene with the equally topless Linda Blair in CHAINED HEAT (1983).  She only has a small supporting role here, but I’m sure you will remember it.  She wears some of the most amazing outfits that allow her to practice, as Bruce Lee might say, the art of being nude without being nude (full Danning nude here).

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  So rather than bore you with any more of my language, I’ll give you this visual volume of MALIBU EXPRESS.  For educational purposes, naturally.

It's subtle, see if you can spot it:

Sidaris: "Okay, just don't look at the camera...ah, screw it!"

Sybil Danning practicing the fine art of being nude without being nude:

80s exercise according to Lorraine Michaels:

Shanna McCullough suffers for her art:

"This might have been a murder!"

Lori Sutton...OMG, check out that jukebox!

Sidaris: "Sorry guys, we didn't write sex scenes for you."

I'd totally buy a lemon from this used car lot!

The Buffingtons gots skillz:

Robyn Hilton of BLAZING SADDLES fame still has the goods:

Car chase, Sidaris style!

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El Terror de México: THE INFERNAL RAPIST (1988)

I’ve only seen a handful of 1980s Mexican horror films, but everything I’ve seen I have enjoyed.  Titles like CEMETERY OF TERROR, DON’T PANIC, and GRAVE ROBBERS have provided enough cheap thrills and gore that they could easily pass for the cheap-o Italian horror from that era.  Even the action flicks from Valentin Trujillo that I’ve been checking out tend to go overboard in the violence department (check out the drug dealers chopped up and fed to dogs in OCCUPATIONAL KILLER).  Our friends south of the border had no problem trashing things up.  Nothing, however, could prepare me for the pure amount of sleaze that is packed within the 82 minutes that are THE INFERNAL RAPIST.

The plot of this flick – if you can even call it that – is fairly simple.  Super criminal “El Gato” Carlos (Noe Murayama) is experiencing his final moments in an electric chair on death row.  At the precise moment he is dead from the juice, Satan appears to him in the form of, well, a woman seemingly dressed for Carnival.  She offers Carlos the chance to return to a life of wanton sin in exchange for a few souls here and there.  Si Senorita!  The catch is he has to rape and murder his satanic sacrifices and must never, ever forget to carve 666 onto their bodies.  She zaps Carlos in the eyes with some laser beams and – BAM – dude is suddenly living the high life as a drug dealer.  Nice job placement there, Satan.

For his first offering, Carlos opts to kill a man.  Now, this is where director Damián Acosta Esparza throws down the sleaze gauntlet.  Carlos is a man of his word as he not only murders the guy, but proceeds to rape his corpse and then carve 666 in the guy’s buttocks post-orgasm.  Oh, did I forget to mention this is after both men shot up heroin while wearing silk robes? This freakin’ scene happens 10 minutes into the flick!  It is in such bad taste and so sleazy that I immediately thought “I have to put this up on Youtube” the first time I saw it.  For educational purposes, of course.

Needless to say, a clip titled “worst gay rape ever” has gotten a lot of hits.  The punch line of the scene is the gay guy’s lover coming in and finding his corpse and letting out a girly shriek. Subtlety, thy name is not Mexploitation cinema.

The rest of the film is just rinse-and-repeat as Carlos seduces four different women from a beauty salon he frequents (?). He then proceeds to rape them and kill them.  He even uses his satanic powers to off a couple of nosy cops during his second attack.  For some odd reason he decides to get real creative during his final kill and makes the topless and bloody victim fly around her apartment.  Really!  All this showing off, however, results in his demise as the cops arrive before he can carve 666 onto her body.  Carlos flees from the cops to the roof, but his master appears and she is pissed that he didn’t perform his duty.  So after the cops shoot him a couple of times, she launches his body off the building.  El final magnífico!

Man, where do I start?  Well, first we have the title, THE INFERNAL RAPIST (EL VIOLADOR INFERNAL).  Sounds so much better in Spanish, doesn’t it?  This is the kind of film title you feel embarrassed writing on an order form (I know I sure did).  The kind of title you fear your not-so-understanding friends would see laying about. You are so scared they will judge you by seeing it that you cover it with porn flicks.  A title the staunchest exploitation film defender (me) has a tough time defending.  “Well, at least it ain’t…uh…I got nothing,” I say.  Even worse, this is one of those exploitation films that actually live up to their titles.  Jeez Louise, look at all this sleaze!  There is a rapist and he is indeed infernal. There is plenty of nekkid female flesh on display, but it is uncomortable to watch at times due to the rape implications (and Murayama’s “O” face as evidenced in the clip above).  The fourth murder that takes place in a hotel room is particularly unnerving. Had director Esparza made every attack unfold like the over-the-top final one with the topless woman spinning around in the air, it might have been more enjoyable. There are a few bits of unintentionally entertaining bits here and there.  For example, the cops figure out the satanic angle and figure they can catch the killer by stopping him before he can carve 666 into his victims to complete his ritual.  Uh, catching him before he kills them might be a better game plan. Even though I haven’t seen that many, I think I am safe in claiming this is one of the sleaziest Mexican exploitation films ever.

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The Gweilo Dojo: WHITE PHANTOM (1987)

The previously reviewed SAKURA KILLERS (1987) left me with such a warm ninja afterglow that I decided to see what else the filmmakers had done.  We describe that here as Video Junkie Side Effect # 36 – ninja nightmare.  This led me to SAKURA co-director Dusty Nelson’s WHITE PHANTOM and the VHS sleeve had all the 1980s trappings of a classic.  Ninja silhouette? Check.  White guy with sword? Check. Odd subtitle? Check.  Semi-big star with their name in a box?  Check. Hold on a sec, what does that say there *looks closer* “and Bo Svenson as The Colonel.”  Holy crap!  Is this somehow related to Nelson’s SAKURA KILLERS where we got Chuck Conners as the Colonel?  I’ll have more thoughts on that later in the review.

WHITE PHANTOM opens with a group of camouflaged ninjas stealing a small case of plutonium from a transport vehicle in broad daylight in California. We know this because of the huge close up on a California license plate.  It is a really intricate plan that involves pulling the hamburger-eating driver from the cab of the truck.  Back in his office in China (!), The Colonel (Svenson) receives word of the heist and the top suspect is the Sakura family (another carry over from SAKURA KILLERS, duh!). Selected for the job of locating this stolen nuke material is Mai Lin (Page Leong), an undercover agent/dancer who poses as a stripper.  Yes, she is the top choice and her first onscreen routine involves her stripping out of a ninja outfit (don’t’ get your hopes up as the film has no nudity). Maybe she did this to please her boyfriend Hanzo (Jimmy Lee), a real-life ninja who is also the top son in the Sakura family.  What a coincidence!

Also in the crowd for this ninja strip-o-rama is Willi (Jay Roberts, Jr.), a drunken American playboy who is prone to playing the harmonica.  Is there any worse kind of person?  Willi also just happens to be a white ninja.  No, really, he dresses all in white whereas Hanzo is all in black.  Ah, the complex symbolism of a 1930s b-western. As Hanzo’s father, whose face is never shown, explains, the white ninjas are a “renegade clan whose only weakness is compassion.”  Anyway, Hanzo’s job is to sell off the plutonium but he bungles that because his girlfriend/spy Mai Lin tells the Colonel when and where the sale is going down (shocker: it is by the water at night).  Shoved into the film are random scenes of the white ninja taking out members of Hanzo’s crew.  Who on earth could this man be?  Naturally, Willi and Mai Lin begin to fall in love too.  Why? Because he is the film’s hero and she is a chick.  Duh!  But not before she berates him as “a drifter who spends his time playing basketball and sleeping with whores.”  Wait, did she just call him Dennis Rodman?  But when Mai Lin is killed onstage during a James Bond-esque strip routine by Hanzo, it is on. After all, these lovebirds have known each other a full three or more days and slept together.  Is there any deeper love?  So Willi heads to the Sakura family mountaintop home to get his revenge.  Oh, and do something about that plutonium just sitting around.

Sorry if I accidentally made this sound entertaining, because it is not and the film definitely doesn’t reach the dizzying heights of SAKURA KILLERS.  Nelson, who I believe only helmed the US shot stuff in SAKURA, places his ninja action in China. So, yes, they are getting their ninja action even further away from Japan than SAKURA’s Taiwan location. Hey, what do Americans know about ninjas other than they are from Asia, right?  Now having a harmonica blowing white guy as your lead is dubious enough, but Nelson ups the annoyance factor by having Willi be a totally unlikable putz.  His second scene has him cavorting with two prostitutes while drunk and wearing panties on his head, neck and biceps. Do I need to say more? They also include harmonica stings any time the white ninja zips across the screen.  The fights are also nothing to be proud of and lack that distinct craziness offered in SAKURA.

Of course, these are filmmakers who, for no real reason, were averse to having their titles have anything to do with ninjas.  You know, ninjas, the most popular martial arts movie phenomenon of the 1980s.  The word “ninja” in a title would have more teen boys yelling “sold!” than an auctioneer at Sotheby’s during a Picasso sale.  WHITE PHANTOM? What the hell is that?  If you want your title to jump off the shelves into 13-year-old boys’ hands, you call your damn film WHITE NINJA! WHITE PHANTOM makes me think of that 1970s TV basketball TV series THE WHITE SHADOW.   At least the filmmakers stayed consistent when it came to offering military authority figures (The Colonel).

Now, that leads me into my SAKURA KILLERS/WHITE PHANTOM same universe theory.  I burst out laughing at the opening credit of “and Bo Svenson as The Colonel” and the villains once again being the Sakura family.  Hell, they even have the same logo for the gang in both films.  The big question is – which came first as both films were released in 1987? After watching both, I would like to believe that WHITE PHANTOM features the adventures of the young Colonel where he first encounters the Sakura family; SAKURA KILLERS features the older Colonel living up his life in semi-retirement on his ranch back in the USA.  Hey, this line of thinking even fills in the SAKURA plot hole of why ninjas are even attacking the Colonel in the opening.  It all makes sense now – WHITE ended with the Sakura head family getting away and vowing his revenge; so SAKURA opens with them trying to get their payback on the man who shot their master in the arm.  Makes perfect sense!  Oh Jesus, did I just waste several brain cells inventing what basically amounts to Sakura family fan fiction?  Stop me before I show up at Comic-Con dressed as the white ninja with my harmonica.

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