Fist of Fear, Touch of Death: Feel the Bruceploitation

Bruceploitation does not get much more exploitative than this. If you love Bruce Lee, chances are you hate this cash-in cobbled together by the [in]famous grindhouse distributor Aquarius Releasing. Problems of authenticity abound, but there is still something appealing about the hucksterism of Matthew Mallinson’s Fistof Fear, Touch of Death, which is coming imminently (due to a CCP-virus delay) on DVD and limited-edition collector’s Blu-Ray, from the Film Detective.

Frankly, the behind-the-scenes making-of story of Fist is probably more interesting than its actual narrative, or really narratives. While cataloging some film canisters for Aquarius, Mallinson unearthed The Thunderstorm, an early family drama the teenaged Lee made before he left Hong Kong for the U.S.A. The entertaining bonus feature, “That’s Bruceploitation,” refers to it as “Bruce Lee: Death of a Salesman,” because of its apparently similar family dynamics. Regardless, Bruce Lee had been dead since 1973, so any new footage was a boon to you know, exploit.

Waste not, want not, so Mallinson and screenwriter Ron Harvey were tapped to create a contemporary film around the footage. They were also allowed to plunder the Taiwanese Kung Fu film, The Invincible Super Chan for footage of what became flashbacks to Lee’s celebrated martial artist ancestor (said to be a famous “samurai” in ancient China, which is just so embarrassing for fans to hear).

The film starts out with the eternally cool Fred Williamson (who starred in many blaxploitation distributed by Aquarius), playing himself as he tries to make his way to Madison Square Garden, where he is supposed to do some color commentary for a match promoted by real-life New York dojo-owner, promoter, and minor exploitation star, Aaron Banks. Supposedly, the main event will crown Lee’s successor. To drum up further publicity, Banks holds press conferences claiming Lee was in fact murdered, by someone using the titular technique. However, Williamson takes issue with Banks’ presumptiveness and baseless speculation during his interview with Adolph Ceasar, the actor playing himself (more or less) as a sportscaster, who supposedly discovered Bruce Lee.

Ostensibly, Caesar tells us the Bruce Lee story in flashbacks to the black-and-white Thunderstorm, which then flashes-back to color excerpts of Invincible Super Chan, none of which make much sense. Without question, the best parts of the film were the original contemporary action sequences featuring martial arts-blaxploitation cult favorite Ron van Clief and Bill Louie, who was then a promising potential martial arts star, assuming the mask and mantle of Kato. Both involve the Bruce Lee-disciples saving joggers from predatory street gangs in Manhattan parks, so you cannot accuse Harvey’s screenplay of excessive originality.

Joe Begos’ VFW

It is like Cheers, with attitude and veterans’ benefits. They aren’t getting any younger, but the patrons and staff can still fight as hard as they drink. Society is collapsing around this Veterans of Foreign Wars post, but the regulars still uphold standards of conduct. A pack of drug-crazed punks will learn that the hard way in Joe Begos’ VFW, which releases today on DVD (and is already available on VOD).

Nationwide, VFW posts are struggling because of the organization’s institutional difficulties recruiting veterans of Vietnam and later conflicts. However, Fred Paras and most of his cronies are ‘Nam vets. Doug McCarthy happens to be a Korean War veteran and Shawn Mason has freshly returned from the Middle East, choosing tonight of all nights to grab a beer at the VFW. He is a sharp-shooter—a talent that will come in handy.

The shots and salty talk are about to be interrupted by Lizard, a young street dweller, who stole a shipment of the designer drug “Hype” from Boz, the local gang-leader, to avenge her sister. Even though she rubs Paras and his comrades the wrong way, they still offer her shelter from Boz’s marauding “Hyper” hoards. Things will get bloody and tragic, but they still abide by a code of honor.

Although Assault on Precinct 13 is an obvious source of inspiration for this film, the attitude and razor-sharp dialogue is distinctively its own. This film respects veterans and demands the same of its audience. Of course, it is not exactly shy when it comes to gore either.

DOC NYC ’17: King Cohen

It is mind-blowing, but true: both Bernard Hermann and Miklos Rozsa composed scores for Larry Cohen films. Reportedly, they got along with the exploitation auteur like a house on fire. Heck, even Cohen’s first wife has good things to say about him, so he must be quite a guy. Of course, his body of work is also something else. The horror legend and blaxploitation pioneer gets his due in Steve Mitchell’s King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen (trailer here), which screens during DOC NYC 2017.

Those who know Cohen probably had their impressions formed by cult classics like It’s Alive (the killer baby horror movie scored by Rozsa) and Q (the winger-serpent monster movie that would be his first collaboration with the great Michael Moriarty), but he had quite a bit of initial success in television. He was even an uncredited creator of the show N.Y.P.D., which would later be the primary inspiration for Leslie Nielsen’s spoof series, Police Squad! However, Cohen wanted creative control and autonomy, so he became an indie filmmaker before that was an acknowledged thing.

Ironically, Cohen started with one of his most serious films, Bone, an edgy comedy about interracial relationships. He then jump-started the blaxploitation genre with Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem. Those films really established his practice of “stealing shots” in public places, without any kind of license or permissions. There are a lot of crazy stories about his guerilla filmmaking practices and Fred Williamson is not shy about telling him. Indeed, King Cohen is laugh out loud funny when Mitchell contrasts the very different recollections of Cohen and Williamson (who still looks like he can throw down like the old days).

Of course, Cohen worked with Eric Roberts, who naturally notches another screen credit talking about the experience. Filmmakers Mick Garris, Joe Dante, Martin Scorsese, and J.J. Abrams all show their respect, as does makeup artist Rick Baker. However, Cohen’s reminiscences of working with legends like Hermann, Rozsa, and Sam Fuller will genuinely deepen viewers’ respect for the taste-challenging auteur.

Cohen emerges as a rather inspiring figure. He is a survivor, who has sold way more produced screenplays than even his fans probably realize (Phone Booth, Cellular, and Guilty as Sin were all his). Mitchell keeps the vibe breezy and upbeat, while incorporating many wonderfully illustrative films clips. King Cohen will definitely put viewers in the mood to revisit or catch-up with Cohen’s films, so many genre festivals have shrewdly programmed it as part of a retrospective tribute sidebar. Alas, DOC NYC will not be screening Original Gangstas or The Stuff. King Cohen is still the most fun you will have during the doc fest. Very highly recommended, it screens this coming Monday night (11/13) at the Cinepolis Chelsea.

Check Point: Invasion North Carolina

According to civic legend, Lincoln had an emergency escape tunnel dug beneath the White House, stretching all the way to Chester Duncan’s farm in Port City, North Carolina. Even the locals admit it seems strange our 16^th president would take refuge in the Tar Heel State, but apparently that tunnel is for real and a band of false flag bad guys intends to make use of it in Thomas J. Churchill’s Check Point (trailer here), which releases today on DVD and VOD.

Port City looks like a pleasant small town. Sheriff Thomas Hancock knows everyone and the decommissioned Navy battleship in the harbor is a nice tourist attraction. Unfortunately, the bad guys intend to commandeer it too. They are what you might call a mixed lot. Some are legit terrorists, like the evil Cyris, whereas others are supposed patriots determined to stage a coup d’état out of disgust at rampant government corruption. They have been stoking national anxiety by abducting and beheading soldiers in the manner of Daesh snuff videos, but local homeless veteran Roy Boyle discovers the executions are taking place right here in Port City.

Check Point features a terrific cast of cult movie stars, including Fred Williamson, William Forsythe, Michelle Lee, Kane Hodder (the best-known Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13^th franchise), your freshly crowned WWE Universal Champion (and Celebrity Apprentice alumnus), Bill Goldberg, and old school martial arts villain (Game of Death, etc.) Mel Novak making a cameo appearance as the town’s Reverend. It is also refreshingly patriotic and sympathetic to the challenges faced by veterans experiencing PTSD.

Unfortunately, that cool cast has to stand around making small talk for the first sixty minutes while waiting for the narrative to start. Granted, people are neighborly down south, but this is an unusually chatty film. Frustratingly, you can also see where corners were cut due to budget constraints. This is particularly true when the battle is finally joined and a platoon of soldiers supposedly comes piling out of a small civilian helicopter, as if they were all crammed in there, clown car-style.

Still, as farmer Duncan, Williamson brings plenty of attitude and sense of fun to the film, like the old pro he is. Lee and model Mindy Robinson share a nice fight scene, while Goldberg is definitely a credible action hero. Just as you might expect, Hodder’s Cyris makes an entertaining non-horror villain, but he frankly doesn’t get enough screen time.

We wish we could be gushier about Check Point, but the script should have gone through more revisions and more funds should have been raised before they started production. Yet even so, it is hard to pass up a film brimming with so many pro wrestlers, crossover-stunt performers, and exploitation veterans. Check Point has its heart in the right place, but it is what it is, when it releases today on VOD and DVD.

Eurocrime!: the Cool Part of the 1970s You Probably Missed

Do you want a congressman who can wage a one-man war against the mob? If so, Chris Mitchum is definitely your candidate in California’s 24^th district. While not as famous as his father, Mitchum still had quite a career overseas that included the Italian cops-and-mobsters genre known as “poliziotteschi.” Originally inspired by American films like The Godfather, they were popular domestically, throughout Europe, and even in Asia, but never found a fraction of the spaghetti westerns’ success in the American market. Yet, the genre has developed a cult following among hip cineastes in recent years, which gratifies and/or amuses the poliziotteschi veterans in Mike Malloy’s documentary Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films that Ruled the ‘70s (trailer here), now available on DVD from Cinema Epoch.

The poliziotteschi were actually meant to be dubbed. It was faster and cheaper to drop the sound in later than to record it live. As a result, the average poliziotteschi shoot was considerably louder and more chaotic than American actors were accustomed to. The dubbing was obviously not a hindrance for Italian audiences, who ate up poliziotteschi on a weekly basis, but it never worked over here. Of course, the spaghettis had been dubbed as well, but they used dialogue rather sparingly. Not so the poliziotteschi.

Nonetheless, they sure cranked out a lot of them. It all started with Franco Nero in Enzo Castellari’s High Crime, but when he passed on the follow-up, the similar looking Maurizio Merli was hired—and a star was born. Quite a few Americans found  regularly work in poliziotteschi, including Mitchum, John Saxon, Henry Silva, Fred Williamson, and Joe Dallesandro, all of whom remember the chaos quite fondly for Malloy. Except for Mitchum, whose heart belongs to the 24^th District, they all say they would love to go back and start doing them again.

Their stories are about as crazy as you would expect, involving real life mafia encounters, dodgy safety precautions, and general run-and-gun filmmaking madness, sans permits. However, Malloy also explores the ironic cultural and political context of these films, largely focused on cops and vigilantes, but often produced by avowed Communists, during a period of violent leftwing terrorism conducted by the Red Brigades.

Throughout the film, Malloy hits the right notes, celebrating the good things about poliziotteschi (cars driving on stairs), while admitting their faults (frequent scenes of violence against women). Although Eurocrime! is considerably longer than you would expect, clocking in just over two hours, it moves along at breakneck speed. Malloy channels the poliziotteschi spirit quite cleverly, reusing an exploding car to introduce each segment, much like the waste-not-want-not films with their well-earned reputation for recycling action scenes.

Who knew Henry Silva was this funny? It’s true, Malloy has the proof in his interview segments. The DVD also features two deleted scenes that have great material, but maybe do not exactly match the tone of the rest of the film. The whole package is thoroughly entertaining, especially for cult film fans who will see the poliziotteschi as the forefathers of the 1980s Cannon action B-movies. Highly recommended, Eurocrime! is now available on DVD from Cinema Epoch, right in time for holiday shopping.

Last Ounce of Courage: Celebrating Christmas and Veterans Day

Don’t say “Happy Festivus” to Mayor Bob Revere.  He is sick and tired of substituting the word “holiday” for Christmas and he is going to do something about it.  In the process, he just might heal his family in Darrell Campbell & Kevin McAfee’s Last Ounce of Courage (trailer here), which opens nationwide tomorrow.

Fifteen years ago, Tom Revere willingly enlisted, with full knowledge he would fight in a Mid East war.  He wanted to serve his country and follow in his decorated father’s footsteps, even though it meant temporarily leaving his pregnant wife Kari.  He never returned.  Nobody took it harder than his father Bob.  Emotionally withdrawing from life, the pharmacist-mayor is basically going through the motions until his daughter-in-law moves back to town with the grandson he hardly knows.

It turns out Christian Revere is something of a rebel, doing subversive things like sneaking Bibles into the public high school.  At one point, he challenges his grandfather as to why his town no longer publically celebrates Christmas.  It is a question the Mayor has no good answer for.  Suddenly, the town’s crèche is out of mothballs and media-lawyer Warren “The Hammer” Hammerschmidt is seriously bent out of shape.

While not exactly perfect, Campbell and McAfee step up the Evangelical filmmaking game with Courage.  The main performances are all professional grade, including several from genuine “name” actors and there are some well conceived plot points.  Shrewdly, screenwriter Campbell casts the teenaged Revere and his friends as the rebels in their uber-P.C. high school, which is quite representative of current reality.  The cleverest bit involves their plan to hijack the school’s winter space alien visitation play and turn it into a Christmas pageant.  Though Campbell, McAffe, and company clearly faced severe budget constraints, the war scenes are rendered in rather dramatic fashion.

Indeed, the best scenes in Courage feature the younger cast members, including Hunter Gomez as the grandson and Jenna Boyd as the daughter of his late father’s best friend.  Unfortunately, Mayor Bob’s campaign to save Christmas is pretty clunky stuff.  Still, it is always cool to see Fred “Black Caesar” Williamson, even if he does little more than villainously chomp his cigar as Hammerschmidt.  Action movie veteran and real life veteran Marshall Teague also does quite respectable work as Mayor Revere.  He just has too many over-written speeches down the stretch.

Frankly, you have to dig pretty deep into the cast before you find the awkward performances that have given faith-based productions a bad name.  It is also pretty mind blowing to think Jennifer O’Neill of Summer of ’42 fame is in such a radically different film, but here she is, portraying Mrs. Revere with admirable conviction. 

However, like previous films produced with the Evangelical market in mind, Ounce has a hard time resisting the temptation to preach.  The trick is to embed the message rather than stopping to announce it.  Still, Last Ounce of Courage carries the official Chuck Norris seal of approval, so you’d probably better go see it.  Better safe than sorry.  It opens nationwide tomorrow (9/14) and opened in select theaters, including the AMC Empire in New York, this past September 11^th.

Delivering the Goods: American Grindhouse

It seems like every hipster filmmaker wants to make a retro-grindhouse movie these days, but the results are usually pretty lame. The truth is real deal grindhouse auteurs did not have time for posing. They had to get their shots before the cops shut them down. The subversive attitude of their oeuvre flowed organically from their dodgy working environment, thoroughly infusing the zero-budget cult films Elijah Drenner lovingly surveys in American Grindhouse (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

“Exploitation” films were independently produced movies with some grabby element to “exploit” that audiences could not otherwise find from mainstream studio fare. Though not necessarily limited to sex and violence, those were certainly the biggies. Drugs and circus freaks were also reliable hooks. Such films were typically booked into seedy pre-Giuliani-era Times Square-style theaters, often playing continuously without formal start times (hence the grind in grindhouse).

Drenner and his battery of film scholars start with the silent era, when Universal hit pay dirt with Traffic in Souls, a rather sensationalistic story of white slavery, carrying the fig leaf of a progressive reform message. It established the template many exploitation filmmakers would profitably follow for decades, including the so-called “Forty Thieves” emerging in 1930’s.

Grindhouse surveys a number of rather self-explanatory sub-genres, like the “birth of a baby” movies, the beach party movies, faux nudist documentaries, the “nudie cuties,” the “roughies,” women-in-prison films, Nazi-exploitation (exemplified with class and distinction by Ilsa the She-Wolf of the SS), and the ageless blaxploitation picture. Amongst his many talking heads, Drenner notably scored sit-down interview time with Fred Williamson, of Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem fame, who looks and sounds as cool as ever.

While Grindhouse focuses squarely on the filmmakers, it is not a cheap tease. Indeed, many of the voluminous clips from the seminal classics under discussion are real eye-poppers. Still, Drenner maintains the right balance of (half)-serious cultural history and the crowd pleasing naughty bits.

Well-stocked with wild stories and vintage scenes of pure lunacy, Grindhouse is a whole lot of fun, sort of like an old school Hollywood Boulevard version of That’s Entertainment. Like the “birth of a baby” films it documents, Grindhouse is in fact educational, but its subject matter is definitely mature. Yet ultimately, it is a winning tribute to genuinely independent filmmakers, marginalized and even demonized though they might have been. Heartily recommended to those who already have a good idea what they will be getting into, Grindhouse opens this Friday (2/4) in New York at the Cinema Village.