DVD Review: Starcrash (1978)

Beautiful Caroline Munro as space-bikini babe, Stella Star!  Gold-clad Christopher Plummer using mystical powers to "halt the flow of time"!  Kung fu fighting Amazons, acrobatic Troglodytes, and lightsaber battles with stop-motion robots!  The Hoff firing frickin' laser beams from his eyes!  Is Starcrash the greatest movie ever made?  Probably not, but it's awfully good fun.  Second best of the late seventies Star Wars rip-offs, behind Kinji Fukasaku's mind-blowing Message from Space (1978). 

Italian writer-director and sci-fi buff Luigi Cozzi weaves a wild yarn full of in-jokes and genre references.  The magnificent super-spaceship "Murray Leinster" (named after the s-f writer/magazine editor) goes missing and is sought by the Emperor of the Stars (Christopher Plummer) and his cape-swishing arch-enemy, Count Zarth Arn (erstwhile Maniac (1980) Joe Spinell).  Fleeing the Galactic Police, interstellar rogue Stella Star and her bubble-permed, mystical sidekick Akton (faith healer-turned-trash film star (yes, really) Marjoe Gortner) stumble on some survivors who babble about "red monsters."

Sabrina Siani

If you're familiar with the innumerable sword & sorcery flicks Italian cinema churned out during the 1980s, chances are you've seen Sabrina Siani.  Either naked or in extremely skimpy outfits.  The beautiful, blonde starlet (real name: Sabrina Seggiani, but sometimes billed Sabrina Sellers) graced many a cut-price fantasy epic, typecast as an Amazonian princess or gutsy jungle girl.  Jess Franco wasn't a fan (calling her: "the stupidest person I've ever met"), but what does he know?  Siani may not have set the screen alight as a teen cannibal queen in Franco's dreadful Mondo Cannibale (1980), but at least she didn't direct it. 

Following a brief stint in sex comedies and Franco's calamitous gut-muncher, Siani soaked up the sun in Blue Lagoon rip-off Blue Island (1982) and played a feisty, female Tarzan in Umberto Lenzi's Incontro Nell'Ultimo Paradiso (1982), before making her mark as a sword-swinging maiden in Aristide Massaccesi's Ator the Fighting Eagle (1982).  Contrary to Franco's sentiments, Siani had a lot to offer: a winning athleticism, sex appeal, and a charismatic screen presence.  Whether slaying monsters, befriending bears (!), or smouldering seductively, she frequently upstaged bland beefcake, leading men like Peter McCoy (Pietro Torrisi) and Miles O'Keefe. 

DVD Review: Venus in Furs (1970)

"A woman nude in furs is somehow more erotic...inducing pleasure so great it becomes painful."  Quite.  Not to be confused with the Jess Franco movie lensed the same year, Venus in Furs is a more faithful adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's infamous novel.  It benefits from the seductive presence of the awesome Laura Antonelli, a sexploitation starlet who went on to a respectable art-house career.  Severin (Regis Valee), an obsessive voyeur, craves to be whipped and humiliated following a childhood trauma.  He spies on his beautiful neighbour Wander (Antonelli) masturbating nude in furs and discovers she's happily aware of being watched.  What follows is a twisted love story between voyeur and provocative exhibitionist.  After marriage, Severin moulds Wanda into the perfect vessel for his fantasies, goading her into sex with strangers while he watches.  Happy at first, Wanda comes to resent his games and rebels.  Reborn as an unstoppable love monster she beds a succession of mustachioed hunks and drives Severin away.  The peculiar conclusion has Severin discover his wife's identical double: a gum-chewing prostitute more compliant to his desires.  As music swells, she whips him silly - a happy ending, of sorts...

Cinematographer-turned director Massimo Dallamano is best known for his excellent, "schoolgirls in peril" gialli (including What Have You Done to Solange?  (1971)).  His languid camera glides across Antonelli's silky flesh, fetishising every inch of her body, yet somehow avoids outright misogyny.  The dreamy, romantic tone softens the sleazy subject matter, coming across like a skin flick antidote to Love Story (1970). 

DVD Review: Sleeping Dogs (2006)

Comedians don’t generally translate well into script-writing, especially when it comes to film. Not nowadays, anyway. Britain’s seen enough of its finest comic talents who trod the boards on Saturday Live or The Secret Policeman’s Ball go on to make crappy big-screen adaptations of their best-loved characters (Kevin And Perry Go Large, Ali G Indahouse) to reinforce the point. Trouble is, most characters are a one-note joke – you can’t do a lot with a character that’s so ubiquitous thanks to a catchphrase or an action. Borat only really succeeded because he was a “sleeper” character, and as such was able to get away with a lot more than Ali G, for example, couldn’t. We knew what Ali G would say, but not Sacha Baron Cohen’s other creation.
   
Even in America, comedians tend to shy away from writing their own film scripts because they’re either too outrageous or they prefer the safety of television, where they only have to fill half an hour and they call the shots. Jerry Seinfeld, for example, will never make a Seinfeld film. There won’t ever be a Cheers or Frasier movie. Dave Chappelle, who was so successful with Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, only went with a ‘concert film’.

DVD Review: The Night of the Sorcerers (1973)

Voodoo! Zombies! Vampirism! Leopard Women! Amando de Ossorio’s Spanish horror film The Night of the Sorcerers (a.k.a. La Noche de los brujos, 1973) has all of this and more, but even with all those terrific elements the movie failed to keep me entertained.

The film revolves around a group of naive jungle explorers who find themselves camping near a sacrificial alter used by a group of mysterious “sorcerers.” These voodoo practicing natives enjoy capturing women and torturing them before cutting off their heads and drinking their blood. Afterward the women return from the dead as leopard skin clad she-demons who roam the jungle in slow-motion trying to find more unwilling victims for the ghostly sorcerers.

The movies basic premise is interesting, but it never really comes together. It often feels like Amando de Ossorio can’t decide if he wants to make a kinky sexploitation film or a horror movie. The film suffers from its uneven direction that never fully exploits the films basic horror elements or erotic themes. The special effects are occasionally worthwhile, but they’re often hampered by the films low-budget and half of the films great international cast seems to be sleepwalking through the film.