JFL

The sequel to the excellent campy adaptation of the popular children’s book unfortunately offers only extended slapstick, occasionally diluted with some absurd idea. The first film’s concentrated freshness, inventiveness and exaggeration are sorely lacking in its successor.

An ancient myth reworked through the lens of the Universe People. Hercules is a wonderful example of the Munchausen-esque creativity of 1980s Italian trash flicks – a completely phantasmagorical screenplay, cobbled-together mechanical monsters, DIY special effects, theatrically lit studio scenes, something constantly happening but with zero momentum or dramatic gradation. The wooden Lou Ferrigno evidently mastered only one expression, namely perplexed amazement, which is probably why the filmmakers decided to shoot Hercules as a psychedelic new-age fable, so that they could make dramatic use of his bodybuilder’s physique as frequently as possible.

Though Cobra is breath-taking mainly as one of the most hysterical conservative epics on the theme of frontier justice in American cinema, it also offers a number of somewhat fascinating elements. The project was created as an adaptation of Paula Gosling’s book Fair Game, on which a later film of the same name starring William Baldwin and Cindy Crawford was also based. Cobra thus takes from the source material only the premise of a woman on the run from a killer (a hitman in the original) and the hardheaded cop who protects her. The motifs involving a fanatical sect of cut-throats and a fascist cop who is the cure for a world sick with crime came entirely from the mind of the screenwriter, who was Stallone himself. The stylisation of the film, which evokes the giallo flicks of the day with its bleakness, grittiness and expressive depictions of murder, comprises a chapter in and of itself. Then there is the duo of antagonists, both of whom straddle the line between parody and campy power – at the time, in the context of Stallone and Schwarzenegger’s well-publicised PR feud, there was speculation as to whether the wooden bad guy was meant to be a reference to Arnold’s stiffness, but the more likely explanation is an attempt at portraying the ultra-monstrous essence of evil (which incidentally looks like Arnold ;)). However, Stallone and his hero character give an even worse impression. Without the rose-tinted glasses of boyish enthusiasm through which the character comes across as an extremely tough badass, Marion Cobretti proves to be, from a more realistic perspective, an incredibly ridiculous caricature who combines the iconic attributes of masculinity – John Wayne’s swaggering walk and a matchstick dangling from the corner of his mouth like Chow Yun Fat – with seventies-style sunglasses, ever-present gloves and a bulging package in tight jeans. Upon watching it years later, it is particularly obvious how incoherent and uninteresting Cobra really is.

The Barbarians is an unhinged knock-off of Conan the Barbarian where, instead of one bodybuilder in the lead role, there are two, twins no less, and they are even more wooden and clumsier than Arnold. Instead of the Nietzschean ethos, we get insipid cheerfulness, instead of an epic story of the birth of a legend, we get a fable of goofy mysticism, and instead of glorious bloody battles, we get squabbling along the lines of Spencer and Hill. Fortunately, The Barbarians, like all of Cannon Films’ Italian co-productions, and most Italian trash flicks of the 1980s, abounds with countless WTF moments, insane twists and grotesquely monstrous elements (from terrible mechanical effects to lavish sets – see the main antagonist’s throne). The result is delightful camp from Ruggero Deodato that fits precisely into the Munchausen line of Italian genre cinema based on the attitude that genre boundaries, logic and judgment are for bores.

Even by the standards of Cannon Films, this must have been a tremendously cheap production. Gor is the worst kind of post-Tolkien fantasy. Two-thirds of the film is taken up by quarrelling, during which nothing actually happens. Furthermore, everything is so shoddily filmed that one cannot even enjoy a bit of malicious glee at the expense of the actors involved. And in this case, there would be plenty to gorge oneself on – even the great Jack Palance and Oliver Reed had to pay their bills, so there they stood alongside demon fighter Urbano Barberini, playmate Rebecca Ferratti, Bud Spencer imitator Paul L. Smith and 1990s bad guy Arnold Vosloo. Other aspects of the film also offer the promise of campy fun, from the demented story itself about a nerdy teacher who is transported by a magical stone to another planet, where he can demonstrate his sword-wielding heroism, to the ridiculous costumes and the hopeless sword fights with “just wave it around a bit” choreography. But it’s an exercise in futility, as everything is engulfed in desperate boredom, which cannot be alleviated even by assiduously bombastic music that constantly roars through all of the miserable torpidity.

After decades of stagnation, the zombie horror genre is getting some new blood in its veins. The film’s tagline, “Mad Max meets Dawn of the Dead”, is by no means an exaggeration and the result is an adrenaline rush that artfully disguises its low-budget roots and wins the hearts of viewers with its uniqueness, avoidance of the usual formulas and, to a large extent, the local Australian specificity that further refreshes the narrative together with the innovative treatment of the zombie-apocalypse concept.

The Go-Go Boys is a documentary about cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who dominated Hollywood in the 1980s with their company Cannon Films, a factory of (mostly trashy) dreams, only to lose everything by the end of the decade. This magnificent and poignant film was made as the antithesis to the entertaining and mocking documentary about Cannon Films directed by Mark Hartley. By emphasising the personal accounts of the two producers, who refused to appear in Hartley’s film, this counter-documentary gains the appeal of a personal story and a portrait of a big dream, and it is charmingly non-judgmental. The Go-Go Boys is a captivating work about how big dreams and ambition can also be a facet of great art.

The Apple is a bombastically neo-Biblical and post-hippie parable about the malevolence and totalitarianism of pop show business and the purity of songwriting. It could have been entertainingly silly, but in its lavishness and constant WTF effect, it is rather breath-taking to the point of sucking the life out of the viewer. The vision of 1990s fashion and lifestyle is even worse and more traumatising than how the ’90s turned out to be, which is actually praiseworthy. As a musical, The Apple is awe-inspiring in terms of its grandiose staging and the professional determination of everyone involved, but in terms of the music, it is horrible, as not only does it not contain any catchy tunes, but it doesn’t even have any intrusively annoying songs. And yet it indelibly imprints itself in one’s memory. I naïvely thought this silliness would culminate in a sexual orgy depicted as mass musical gymnastics, but then came the most surprising and literally “far out” climax in history – I have seen a lot of things, but this made me stare in disbelieving amazement.

It’s not just bad, it’s Sinbad. The last in a series of Italian co-productions undertaken by that legendary American factory of trashy dreams, Cannon Films, Sinbad of the Seven Seas is an unjustly forgotten gem in the category of amusingly bad movies; in fact, it is one of the most captivating contributions to said category. Lou “The Incredible Hulk” Ferrigno as Sinbad and his crew composed of a dandified Adonis, a queer Asian in make-up, a pseudo-Viking, a buffoonish dwarf and a vagabond alchemist must rescue Princess Alina from the clutches of the most theatrical villain in the history of cinema. Before that, however, he must set sail on a quest to find four magical gemstones, during which he will face many dangers including seductive mulattoes, empty suits of armour, walking rocks, zombie lepers and laser-wielding mutants. Meanwhile, Alina is locked up in some sort of chemical apparatus that is supposed to suck the good out her, in the bad guy’s lair, which is reminiscent of Doctor Manhattan’s glass fortress in Watchmen. In addition to that, we have here a heap of quite imaginatively rendered mechanical special effects, absurd twists, nonsensical dialogue, bombastic stunts, phantasmagorical scenes (e.g. Sinbad charms snakes so that he can weave them into a rope, which he uses to break out of prison) and a nonstop barrage of acting performances that oscillate between Ferrigno’s wooden Sinbad and John Steiner’s magnificently over-the-top villain. And all of this is wrapped up in a narrative that looks like a third-rate attempt at The Princess Bride, with a bit of source material from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe himself (who indeed wrote the parody story The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade, though this film has very little in common with it). As was usually the case with Cannon Films, everything is the result of even crazier production conditions. After the making of Hercules with Lou Ferrigno, its director, C-movie trash master Luigi Cozzi, wrote the screenplay for Sinbad, but due to time constraints, B-movie maestro Enzo G. Castellari was ultimately hired to make the project. Castellari completely reworked the screenplay and received a commission to make a roughly six-part television mini-series. When most of the material had already been shot, Cannon Films was in dire financial straits and the project was suspended. Unbeknownst to Castellari, the producers subsequently rehired Cozzi, who was given the task of turning the rambling multi-hour fragment into a single feature film. Cozzi came up with the solution, which involved filming a passage with a mother reading her daughter a bedtime story about Sinbad, which made it possible to bridge the plot gaps and somehow tie everything together. The problem, however, was that the material that had already been filmed contained lines in different languages (as was customary in Italian productions, each member of the international ensemble spoke their own language and several dubbed versions for various territories would be made after filming had been completed), and because several years had passed since the filming, which took place in 1986, and the screenplay was nowhere to be found, it was not entirely clear what the film was actually about. Cozzi’s contributions often brought even more confusion to the whole thing, and so one day Brad Goldberg, an employee in Cannon Films’ marketing department, got a call asking if he would write a voiceover for a completed film. The next day, according to Goldberg himself, he submitted the first draft, which he had hoped to discuss with the filmmakers and subsequently fine-tune it, but instead his typescript was taken directly to the dubbing studio. Fortunately, the result of all of this is not an incoherent mess as in the case of another Cannon accounting mistake, namely Journey to the Center of the Earth, but a wonderful, crazy bit of camp that manages to amaze and amuse.

The Voices is an unexpectedly empathetic film that offers an entertaining view into a warped mind while striking a balance between playful and chilling.