Year Of The Knockoff! Saturn 3 (1980)

Farrah Fawcett looks like she knows she made a huge mistake. Kirk Douglas looks like he just doesn't care.

I know I just covered an Alien knock off, but I had forgotten that 4.26 was Alien Day, so I figured why not jump right back into the Alien pool with another 1980 quick cash grab attempt that had a higher budget than Contamination, but somehow has a plot that makes less sense. Let's take off for the land of weird sex urges and tiny headed robots, Saturn 3.  

One of the few occasions where the trailer 

tells you more story than the film did.

Here is the wikipedia page, and the imdb.com listing. 

The film starts off with Captain James running late to his shuttle to start his mission on Saturn 3. While in the locker room (?) changing, Captain Benson (Harvey Keitel.. in face only, he wouldn't change his Brooklyn accent, so he was overdubbed the entire film) is upset he wasn't given the mission as he had failed a mental exam and decides to do what any stable person would do: open the roof of the locker room to space and let Captain James get shattered/torn apart.

I don't think gravity or anything at all works like that.

Shortly thereafter, Benson is on his way to Saturn 3 with some very specific cargo. Once he lands, he is met by Adam (Kirk Douglas) and Alex (Farrah Fawcett). Saturn 3 is an 'experimental food research station (this facet of the film and story is never mentioned again and it makes me wonder why it was needed at all)' and they are the only two on the station. Well them and their dog. Also, Adam and Alex are a couple. I mean, there isn't too many other options on a space station with two people. 

They also have a control room that looks like it would be the coolest pinball parlor in the whole solar system.

Benson is very agitated by their lack of productive research and is there to help them start getting results. He immediately sees Alex and asks if he 'can use her body for pleasure'. That's how he asks it. He states that on Earth, people use each other all the time for pleasure. Since that sounds really sexy, Alex says no. Benson will not let go of his fixation on her. Adam doesn't see Benson as a threat as we all know that Adam is just secretly playing himself and Kirk Douglas is not afraid of any man. 

Benson's cargo is soon revealed to be a robot. Not just any robot, a new 'Demigod Series' robot named Hector. Hector looks to stand about 7 feet talk, with large legs and a hefty torso that holds a tube full of pure brain tissue (it looks like 10+ human brains all jammed together). He is intended to learn the roles of Adam and Alex, increase efficiency and then replace one of them.

Two things to know about Hector:

1. Hector can learn on his own but his learning is accelerated when Benson takes over 'direct control' via a remote control port in the back of his neck. This has the side effect of Hector knowing everything about Benson, including his unhealthy attraction to Alex and that Benson zero gravity murdered that other guy earlier.
2. He looks like this:

Tiny head, tiny head, Hector's got a tiny head.

It is hard to take a film about a large and potentially killer robot seriously when its head looks like a rejected Erector Set project. When I learned that that this film initially had a higher budget but another film being made by the same company at the time was running over budget and caused this one to run short, decisions like the design for Hector kind of make sense. "Hey guys, I got the legs and torso built. This robot is going to be a hulking killing machine. Hector is going to be the new face of terror." "Bill, we have to tell you that we only have 15 more dollars for the robot." "Oh, I will figure something out that will look just as cool as what is in my head." I thought poor Hector was just the victim of money drying out...

...I then learned the Hector design at the time cost around a million dollars. "Bill, we gave you a million dollars for a robot, what did you do?" "Don't worry guys, I just won't build a head. Problem solved."

To be fair, Nintendo tried the same thing a few years later with about as much success.

Anyway, Hector is also attracted to Alex and tries to remove anything that stands in the way of it and her having a weirder relationship than the 32 year old Farrah Fawcett and the 62 year old Kirk Douglas. 

Hector tries to seduce Alex through the power of well played Chess.
He heard that Deep Blue got a lot of trim that way.

Alex is not interested in Hector, so he does what any robot that has been imprinted by a psychopath would do: He kills her dog and then proceeds to grab her and pick her up off the ground.

That's probably the right number of alarms for something like that.

So Benson gets trapped trying to save Alex and Adam runs in to save the day. Seriously, they make it a point through out the film to show how spry and in shape Kirk Douglas is (more on that later). Adam convinces Benson to dismantle Hector and for him to leave with the robot as soon as he can. Benson does as he is told, but as soon as he leaves the room, Hector somehow is able to use the other shitty robots on the station to reassemble him. Now that I think about it, Hector is just a shitty version of Ultron.

Hector is then back on the slowly moving rampage. Benson decides he has had enough of Alex not letting him use her body and decides that he is going to take her with him on his ship off of Saturn 3. This results in two amazing moments:

1. Kirk Douglas nude wrestling and choking Harvey Keitel.

You're welcome.

    

  2. Harvey Keitel getting dehanded by Hector.. and then Farrah Fawcett's appropriate reaction.

"Unhand her!" says Hector from the tiniest robot mouth ever.

Benson is then drug away, leaving Adam and Alex to figure out how to escape the station and Hector. As they run around the station, they discover that Hector is using all the cameras to track their every movement. They break the camera in their hydroponics lab and set the the ultimate trap...

...just kidding, they figure out that the top heavy robot is easily knocked over as if it were a badly posed He-Man figure.

Will robot on robot violence ever end?

Film over? No, then this is where it gets odd. As Adam and Alex try to escape, Hector somehow manages to free himself of the watery grave he was tipped into and destroys their escape ship and then subdues the both of them. They awake to find that Hector has taken control of the station and can now use their voices to communicate to the outside world. He tells a patrol ship that everything is fine and they say they will be back in six months. Soon it becomes apparent that Hector wants to take direct control of Adam's brain and keep Alex alone on the station.

They then find out the sorta gruesome fate of Benson as well. 

"Now you can call me Sorta Normal Head Hector."

Adam figures out a way to lure Hector out of hiding and sacrifices himself to save Alex by blowing up both him and Hector. 

Alex then heads to earth. Lessons learned?

The End.

So the question: what does this have in common with Alien? It is a remote outpost that makes travel to and from it difficult, so it does try have an isolation feel to it. Alien did have robot who went crazy, Ash, and Hector certainly did do that as well. The hallways of Saturn 3 had the grid/grated flooring like the Nostromo and later on Adam and Alex were crawling underneath it while Hector was stalking them from above. The shafts of light coming through were very Alien-esque. The one computer Hector used to initially 'talk' Benson make the same clacking sounds that the Mother computer made in Alien. It has a female lead who survives till the end.

Oh, and the title sequence attempted to ape Alien with how different parts of the letters appear to make the title of the film. (Last gif, I promise):

This is actually on of my favorite parts of the whole movie.
Too bad it is the very beginning of it.

Saturn 3 has no atmosphere and feels flat through out the entire run time. I know I showed some crazy/silly moments above but I think they exist due to the budget and the weird direction the script went. You can see that there was money spent on Saturn 3, the sets are pretty good and some of the imagery is interesting. I do think that as they budget started to fluctuate, the vision for this film did too. Not that it was the strongest to being with, but some of the ideas in it could have had some legs had better thought been put into it. I am not saying that a robot that is imprinted with the mindset of sex driven unstable man is high art, but it could have at least been a lens in which to have the Benson character see how he sees himself as it was projected through Hector. But this isn't what Saturn 3 wanted to be. It was trying to be exploitative by using the success of Alien to make a sci-fi vehicle that would flash Farrah Fawcett's breasts and Kirk Douglas's ass briefly, thinking that would somehow appeal to different generations of audiences. 

Saturn 3 is not a good film. It isn't a bad film (okay, it's kind of bad). It is a forgettable film which I believe is a greater sin. If you are going to have that weird of a robot design, Harvey Keitel being a creeper, and a pretty big budget, then go down swinging. Get weird. Have Kirk Douglas nude wrestle the robot or something for heaven's sake. Make Saturn 3 a trip worth taking.  

On a scale of 1-10, how close did it adhere to the film it wanted to knock off?

I will give Saturn 3 a... 3. They got a little bit right but had I not known this was chasing after the success of Alien, I wouldn't have thought about it.

On the Ator Scale, was it better or worse than Ator?

Like I said before, you can tell a decent amount of money was spent of this film, so production wise it is (tiny) head and shoulders above Ator. Fun wise though? Ator the Fighting Eagle soars above this.

Would you recommend this film to anyone else?

Only for people that have the patience of Job like I do to see what happens when money is spent chasing something that those involved don't quite understand why the original source worked. 

Bonus:

To show how weird this film could have been, here is a deleted scene showing Alex and Adam taking a drug (what they call a Blue Dreamer). Watch how fast Farrah Fawcett changes outfits. 

Bonus Bonus:

If you want to take the trip to Saturn 3, it is free(ish) on YouTube. Weird brief nudity and all.

If you guys have any other suggestions for knockoffs that Steve and I should watch, let me know in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

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Year Of The Knockoff! Contamination (1980)

In honor of the egg related holiday weekend, I thought I would take a look at a not so egg-cellent unofficial sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece, Alien. Contamination feels like if Alien was written over and over again due to budget restraints but at the same time the plot got fuzzier and fuzzier with each rewrite. This is what Alien would look like it there was such a thing as an R-rated made for TV film.

This film, made by director Luigi Cozzi, fresh off his success (?) of the Star Wars cash in, Star Crash (don't worry people, that one is going to be covered on the podcast and we can't wait), wanted to make a direct sequel to the original alien. He literally wanted to call this film Alien Arrives on Earth. 

His producers changed the title against his will. I am not sure if that was a right or wrong decision.

The film starts off with a cargo ship, the Caribbean Lady, heading into New York at a great rate of speed with apparently no crew to be seen. Without explaining how, they get the empty ship to dock and a bunch of cops and science guys suit up in white decontamination suits and board the ship. Among them is Lt. Tony Aris. I mention Tony because he is in the rest of the film and I am not sure what purpose he serves. He and the rest of the investigators eventually find the remains of the captain and the crew. They look like something exploded from inside of them. Everyone takes this in stride, no big deal, all these dudes exploded. Mondays, right?

They discover that the ship is carrying nothing but boxes labeled as coffee. They dismiss coffee as the culprit as it wouldn't make people explode (but we know it can.) Soon, they find an open box.

I mean, I would drink some after it was ground up. I drink
  Monster and it probably has real monsters in it.

One of the eggs is near some pipes and is glowing. The guys that were just openly wondering what would cause all the crew to explode decide to do the rational thing: pick up the glowing egg that is making noise. 

It doesn't go well.

It explodes and its gunk hits most people, except for Tony. After a moment, they all explode. He freaks out, understandably.

Tony is taken into custody by the government and put in quarantine. We then meet Col. Stella Holmes, who is seen here, talking to some guy in a lab coat by the coolest computer ever.

Seriously, this thing could just make toast and it would still be the coolest.

She decides to keep Tony around as he saw what happened and because he is a cop, he may be able to help them find leads (or something, you would think the government would be able to do that part on their own). They then proceed to the rat destruction lab to show everyone what happens when you put the egg juice into a body.

No Patton Oswalts were harmed during the making of this gif.

They determine that the eggs are heat sensitive and once they reach a certain temperature, their contents become toxic. They also determine that they are not earthly in origin. This is when Stella remembers that there was a previously undisclosed mission to Mars in which one of the two men who returned was deemed crazy because he talked about seeing a bunch of eggs. 

Stella goes to see Commander Ian Hubbard, who is now a shut in drunk thanks to her assessment that he was crazy. She make him tell her about the mission from 'a long time ago.' So he starts talking about how all of this happened two years ago (I am not sure how he got there and back so fast). The film then flashes back to Ian and his partner, Hamilton, as they are walking on the north polar ice cap of Mars. They enter a cave that looks a lot like a mouth with gaping teeth and find a tunnel lined with eggs. A bright light starts to appear at the end of the cave.

Look at all of those peas, I mean eggs!

Ian seems to be not affected by the light but Hamilton is a little more so.

This is how Steve looks at me when I try show him anything about Overwatch.

Stella believes Ian is now telling the truth and recruits him to go with her and Tony to South America to investigate the coffee production plant. He reluctantly agrees to go. This sets up a forced love triangle between Stella, Ian, and Tony. It does not serve the film well. 

I should also mention that Stella, a high ranking official in the government, lets Tony slap her across the face during an argument and she lets it go. It was a bit off putting to see it almost be forgotten as fast as it happened and how suddenly she started to respect him more. Go go awkward work place sexual politics. 

Then the gang flies to South America to Scooby Doo around the coffee place. 

This is about the halfway point in the film and for as silly/gory/goofy as it was heading into this point, it had some energy and I was enjoying it. The wheels fall off suddenly as the movie grinds to a halt as there is a prolonged sequences of driving around the country, everyone getting settled into their hotel rooms, Ian and Tony bickering over Stella, and then Stella taking a shower.

The film tries to up the ante by having a mysterious stranger put an egg in her bathroom with her. She notices the pulsing egg (that is supposed to react immediately to heat but seems like it is not bothered by the steam from her shower) and does try to escape the bathroom. Of all the bad decisions this film makes, I can't forgive her for never trying to cover the egg up. She knows it can explode at any moment and that it reacts to heat, but nah, I am just going to try to jimmy the lock open and then sit down with my back against the door. Maybe she was worried she would get charged for using extra towels.

After she is rescued, they investigate the coffee plant. They discover that Hamilton, Ian's Mars mission partner, was compromised by the light in the cave and is now doing the will of 'The Cyclops.'

The big plan was to get its eggs all over the world... for something. It is never clear what the eggs do other than make people and rats explode. Maybe it is just an angry disapproving alien and wants to make everything explode.

Or that it is angry to be in this film.

The Cyclops is kept in the lower floors of the plant and doesn't seem to move much. It does mentally force people to walk towards it so that it can eat them. I wish I had that power with pizza rolls. Tony exits the film by being sucked into The Cyclops, where he can't slap anyone anymore.

The design of The Cyclops looked familiar.

Don't blame me, I voted for the other one.

It makes me wonder if the people behind the Simpsons saw this film and was inspired. If so, kudos (kodos?) to them.

Eventually, Ian and Stella stop The Cyclops, Hamilton explodes for reasons and they world is safe...

...until we see a busy street in New York in which an egg is somehow mixed in with the trash and it explodes. 

The end?! 

So it is clear what elements were taken from Alien:

• A empty ship that happens to be full of eggs.
• Eggs lead to explosions of body parts.
• A tunnel full of eggs that tries to somewhat ape the style of H.R. Giger.
• A female lead that has to face off against the alien at the end.
• The final showdown being in a room that is darkly lift with metal grating on the floor so that shafts of light can come through to mimic the look of the corridors of the Nostromo.

Not even trying to hide it.

Contamination is not the worst film I have seen. It just does nothing with its premise to make it stand out enough to be its own work. Had there been a little more thought put into place about what The Cyclops's plan actually was and showing the eggs doing more than just killing anything they touch, this could have been a cheap throwaway late night cable flick that would be a guilty pleasure. Overall, there are only two things that stand out to me from my time with Contamination: the score and the added 'elements' that the person who put this film on YouTube decided to include.

The score is done by Goblin. This is a band that I have known of but have not really crossed paths with during my horror movie watching but I now look forward to whatever I find that they are associated with. No matter the quality of the film, their music will likely carry me a long way towards enjoying it. Their prog rocky synth and guitar sound is amazing. It feels like they lived next door to John Carpenter and they would have the greatest jam sessions and drive the rest of the neighborhood crazy.

Check it out below. Doesn't it make you just want to go explore the streets of late 70's New York via Rome?

The other thing about the version of the film I liked had nothing to do with the film. The person who uploaded this to YouTube decided to add some vintage 1980's commercials in the middle of it. Moments right after Tony slaps Stella, the film cuts away to three commercials: one for the new Ford Granada!, one for Wendy's with employees way to happy to be working at Wendy's, and Jame Garner selling Polaroid cameras. It was great and weird. I was not expecting it and oddly made me start paying attention to the film more. They even add another car commercial at the end just as the credits start, just to show you they did this on purpose. Hats off to you, internet guy.

Or as my wife thought it said 'New Ford Grandma.' I like her name better.

On a scale of 1-10, how close did it adhere to the film it wanted to knock off?

I will give this a 5. You can tell what they wanted to do. Budget limitations and not the most creative thinking held them back. They understood that pulsing eggs were creepy, bodies exploding (the gore in the film was pretty good for what it was) are off putting, and the final location did look kind of like the dark interiors of the ship from Alien. Having the film transition to South America made it feel more like a cheap action film than a cheap science fiction film, though.

On the Ator Scale, was it better or worse than Ator?

Production wise, better than Ator. Fun wise, Ator is still a more enjoyable watch. Contamination has a better score, Ator has a better end credits theme song. Ator will always have a better end credits theme song. Always.

Would you recommend this film to anyone else?

No, unless you love the original Alien as much as I do and want to see how something so right can go so horribly wrong (and boring).

Bonus:

The whole film is available to watch for free(ish) on YouTube if you want to watch. I made sure to link the version I watched with the commercials added into it.

In space, no one can hear you yawn.

If you guys have any other suggestions for knockoffs that Steve and I should watch, let me know in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

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Year Of the Knockoff! Evil Clutch (1988)

In honor of Ash vs Evil Dead season 3 kicking off, I figured I would take a look at a knockoff of the original Evil Dead film, 1988's Evil Clutch.

The film starts off with a three minute long credit sequence smash up that swings from lighthearted music with a series of polaroid photos showing a happy couple on vacation in Italy to ominus music that just lists the cast and crew. It is trying to set a tone of fun and dread but doesn't really land either. 

Then there is the title card itself. 

Rawr! claw claw claw!

This font/color scheme reminded me of another infamous knockoff. 

Who would have thought people would be upset at a professional
sports team treating mental illness lightly?

After the credits, the film shows a man, I believe his name was Fango (which is either the greatest or worst name ever, I can't make up my mind), being inexplicably drawn to a run down structure to see a woman, Arva. There, Arva seduces him and suddenly, mid passion, she turns demonic/gothy and a 3 talon claw emerges from between her legs and rips Fango's crotch off. He staggers away, now fangoless, and dies. 

And then we get this.

Just in case you didn't know that movies often tell their stories in sequence.

The film picks up with the happy couple we heard in the opening credit sequence. Cindy is an American and Tony is an Italian and I appreciate that the film let them keep their accents even with the Italian overdubbing process. They are driving into the mountains to spend some romantic time alone. Arva, with her clawgina put away and ungothed, appears alongside the road, distraught. The couple stops and picks her up and she tells them that she was being chased by someone and they agree to take her to the nearby town. They become weirdly fast friends.

In town, they exit the vehicle to have Arva freak out at the sight of a goggled man on a motorcycle. She runs away and the man, whose name is Algernoon, asks the couple if they know her. Algernoon has to use a electrolarynx (one of those boxes people that put on their throat to speak if they lost their voice box) to speak. It doesn't add anything to the plot, but it does add a little weirdness to the proceedings. 

Algernoon tells the couple that he is a writer and goes on to tell them a story. He says his story is about them, but only that he uses Cindy and Tony as characters in it. As the film moves forward, I thought Algernoon was going to be telling them different stories, anthology style, but no. It is just this one story about a man killing his girlfriend only for her to come back from the dead and stalk him in his home. This story has nothing to do with the actual plot of Evil Clutch at all. It is just a 5-10 minute aside that is fully acted with gorey special effects that feel like it overall belongs in a different film (and who knows, probably did). The couple, obviously weirded out, leave Algernoon, and head onto the woods for their romantic getaway.  

Somehow they cross paths again with Arva and she convinces them to spend the night in a nearby location in the woods. Cindy is creeped out by the building (it was the same location seen by us at the start of the film) and goes to get some air. Arva offers Tony some cocaine which he promptly drops into a bucket of black goop that happens to be right beside them. The goop explodes in his face and Arva tries to seduce Tony. Turns out Arva is a witch and does weird witch things from that point forward.

The rest of the film is Tony being possessed or not, Arva being gothy witchy or not, Algernoon showing up to immediately get killed and then turned into a zombie, and Fango returning from the dead (evidently mad his junk got ripped off). Cindy spends the rest of the film screaming and running away from things, aside from the time she finds a chainsaw and rekills Algernoon. 

...this film doesn't make much sense, to put it simply.

But that's not why we are here. The question is: how much does it attempt to knockoff 1981's Evil Dead? The answer is: A LOT.

Before we get into that, I just want point out that Evil Clutch came out in 1988, while Evil Dead 2 came out in 1987. Evil Clutch stayed within the lane of the first film released 7 years previously. This film does not attempt to ape the sequel though, which I would think would have been the bigger target if your goal is to attract people that wanted to see something like that. It is a curious choice. I did also see that this film was distributed by Troma, but something tells me that this was after the film was completed, so any input at chasing the sequel of Evil Dead was probably not discussed. 

Evil Clutch used the fast moving, low camera angle that Sam Raimi used very effectively in Evil Dead. Here is the very end of the first film to give you a refresher. 

The story of how that technique came to be is really fun and interesting and well worth the minute to read about. 

Evil Clutch used the 'shaky cam' so much through the runtime that it is clear that they liked it and wanted to showcase it as much as possible. At first I really appreciated it, but as the film carried on, it was obvious they had no other way to pad out the run time of the film. This ruined any attempt at suspense as you would know that the shot/scene would long outlast its welcome. The ending of Evil Clutch is a 2-3 minute running shot of Cindy from behind as she is screaming through the woods that should be redone in a better film. Had there been any emotional connection to what she went through, it could have been painful and haunting, but moments before she rekilled Fango(less) with just the reflection of sunlight cast form a pocket mirror, so I wasn't really relating to her situation. 

Other 'nods' to Evil Dead included a shot of a wall clock with it hands spinning wildly and direct close ups of Cindy's eyes as they dart back and forth. It felt like Evil Clutch had to tick off those boxes as well and did it. If the shaky cam use wasn't so blatant, I might not have noticed those moments, but it was hard to ignore when Evil Clutch was trying so hard to look and feel like Evil Dead. 

Evil Clutch tried using the random possession idea that was shown more as a trap in Evil Deah. Ash couldn't trust his girlfriend or his sister as they turned into monstrous Deadites but he wasn't 100% sure they were gone because they would revert to their 'regular' selves and try to convince him they were the victims and they were okay now. In Evil Clutch, Tony was possessed, tried to rape Cindy, and then he himself was almost tree root raped (another rip from Evil Dead) and Arva tried to use her clawgina on him. Algernoon saves him (and then dies quickly after) and Tony is no longer possessed. None of it makes sense. Cindy just accepts him again. I am glad that got wrapped up so quickly.

The gore in Evil Clutch was over the top but just as directionless as the rest of the film. I would argue that the gore in Evil Dead doesn't always make the most sense either, but it (in my opinion) has a certain low budget charm to it. There is a moment in Evil Clutch when a severed head on a hook has the top of the head explode off as it was packed full of bottle rockets and them blood just pumps out (of a severed head... think about that) in garden hose streams. It felt like the makers of Evil Clutch understood that Evil Dead was gonzo with it's effects but not how to dole them out effectively. Even when a chainsaw is used, it is brief and lacking impact. 

I will give Evil Clutch small points for three gore effects that Evil Dead did not have:

• Tony getting his hands smashed off by Fango dropping a rock on them. The set up was easy to see coming, but it still looked wrong in the right way. 
• Cindy getting a fishhook in her cheek. Fango used a fishing pole to snag her at distance. It doesn't make sense but it looked like it hurt. 
• Fango shoving Tony's head into the spokes of an old wooden wheel and then turning the wheel to decapitate Tony. 

 

Evil Clutch is not a good film but you can see they loved Evil Dead, or at least liked it enough to think they could make money by knocking it off. They identified elements that make the original film what it was but didn't have a compelling story or characters to make it stand on its own. 

On a scale of 1-10, how close did it adhere to the film it wanted to knock off?

I will give it a 8 as it did ape the camera work and shot choices of Evil Dead. It really caught me off guard at how much this film adhered to what Evil Dead looked like. Also, the score for the film isn't really like Evil Dead but is way better than it has any right being. Not amazing, but pretty damn good for an Italian Evil Dead rip off. 

On the Ator Scale, was it better or worse than Ator? 

Cinematography wise, it was better than Ator. Entertainment wise, it's not even a film I would show to my friends on a lark. 

Would you recommend this film to anyone else?  

No, unless you can appreciate the time they took to mimic the style of Evil Dead. 

Bonus: 

The whole film is available to watch for free on YouTube if you want to watch it. I would not recommend it. But the terrible forbidden fruit is just a click away.

Bonus Bonus:

The narrator of the Evil Clutch trailer reminded me of this goldie oldie slice of internet. 

If you guys have any other suggestions for knockoffs that Steve and I should watch, let me know in the comments below or on our Facebook page. 

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Year Of The Knockoff! Robo Vampire (1988)

After we just kicked off our Year of the Knockoff with our look at the wonderfully under budgeted and under talented Ator: The Fighting Eagle (you can hear our talk about it here), I decided it would be fun to dive into the wake of another successful film and see what was floating back there. 

Having just watching a midnight showing of Robocop, I decided to take a chance on a film that was suggested to me by Kevin (AKA the guy who was responsible for giving me the wonderful Year of the Western list), 1988's Robo Vampire.

First let's establish what people like about Robocop:

• It has a very dark sense of humor with its over the top news stories, commercials for products (the 6000 SUX can get 8.2 miles to the gallon), and its sexploitative older man saying 'I'd buy that for a dollar!' It is poking its thumb right in the eye of 80's decadent excess and capitalism. 
• The practical effects work of the Robocop suit itself and the brutally effective shots of violence (no pun intended).
• The ED-209 falling down a set of steps and then making animal noises. 
• Kurtwood Smith as Clarence Boddicker.  
• Peter Weller's performance. He is able to make your believe that he is part machine in the way he moves and interacts with others. 

For the most part.

Here's what we get in Robo Vampire:

• A plan from a drug kingpin to smuggle drugs in the coffins of vampires (specifically Jiangshi, Chinese hopping vampires. Check out El Goro's way thorough and thoughtful explanation of the Jiangshi. Highly recommended!)
• This same person gets mad that his smuggling business keeps getting interrupted by law enforcement, so he decides to train a special vampire to just kill the drug cops.
• Once the special vampire is trained (and is wearing a gorilla mask for no real good reason), the kingpin finds out that a ghost is trying to ruin his plan.
• This ghost was previously a girl in love with the vampire before he turned and they made a suicide pact in order to be together forever in the afterlife. The kingpin allows them to get married only if they agree to work for him. They agree and are wed.
• One of the drug cops gets killed and his team decides that they can turn him into android warrior in order to keep fighting drug lords. There is very little debate about whether they can or should do this.
• Somewhere along the way a robot cop will fight hopping vampires.  

Robocops? Hopping vampires? Gunfights? This film has to have some kind of a budget in order to make all of this work, right? Behold. 

I will give the filmmaker accidental credit for the music sounding like something out of Street Fighter and I appreciate the effect it took to make each robotic step sound like a thud (even while on the sand). 

This film is actually the combination of two films (Godfrey Ho, the director, seems to have a track record of doing this) with a lot of the drug smuggling and crime portions separate from the vampires, ghost, and robot cop portions. As much as it doesn't make any narrative sense, I kind of appreciate the bold no cares given approach of just terribly dubbing over whatever dialogue you want in a scene in order to make it connect to the next one. It doesn't make for the most satisfying film watching experience, but I don't think Robo Vampire cares if it makes sense. Just get to more of the sweet sweet badly edited fight sequences.   

I think I may have said this on the podcast but I want to state that I think I enjoy these out of left field trash heap films more now than I used to because I find it hard to be suprised by any mainstream film. This is partly my fault because as I am interested in what's coming out and so I read up on it and in the process likely spoil some of the initial discovery that should come with the first time you watch a film. I also blame the marketing as it does a great job of showing a few key things that should be held back to surprise the audience but want to make sure the audience knows what they should be excited about. A film like Robo Vampire has no footprint (outside of Kevin and a handful of people on the internet that have found it before I did) and so I can honestly be satisfied that I have no real idea where it was going. Granted, I don't think the film knew where it was going either, but it had just enough sparklers and bad edits to get to the finish line.

Steve and I asked this question about Ator: The Fighting Eagle, did it learn anything from the film it was trying to copy? I will give Robo Vampire a very small yes.

Here's what it kind of sorta got right from Robocop:

• Crime was so bad that law enforcement was desperate for anything to turn the tide.
• A fallen officer becomes the subject of an operation to turn him into a android.
• Robo Warrior has a brief flashback to his life before involving an argument he had with his wife. (Side note: this occurs as he happens to see the ghost and the super vampire start to consummate their marriage. He leaves them in peace. They then decide to attack him for.... reasons?)
• There is a lot of over the top violence that looks halfway decent at times (budget considered).
• A very abrupt ending. 

I am now going to use three metrics that I am going try to apply to this film and to any of the other films we cover during The Year Of The Knockoff:

On a scale of 1-10, how close did it adhere to the film it wanted to knock off?

I will give it a 3 as it did have a guy in a suit attempting his best to mimic the the slow robotic movements of Peter Weller. The crazy dubbed in sound effects kept me smiling the entire time. 

On the Ator Scale, was it better or worse than Ator? 

Production wise, this was way worse than Ator. However, it is rare for a film to make me laugh by myself while was watching it, and Robo Vampire did do that. At least 3 times I found myself busting up. Had I not been as entertained, this film would have been a complete waste of time.

Would you recommend this film to anyone else?  

There are only a handful of people I know that would go out of their way to watch a film like Robo Vampire. I can't recommend it for most people, but the few of you out there that are tickled by the idea of a guy that looks like a silver oven mitt that is supposed to be a robot fighting hopping vampires that disappear only with the help of a quick edit, then this is truly a feast to enjoy. 

Robo Vampire is a bad movie that badly tries to cash in on Robocop. None of it really works but that's probably why I like it. I like living in a world where someone looks at an incomplete drug trafficking film and says to themself, 'You know what this film needs? Shitty Robocop and vampires.'

Bonus: 

The whole film is available to watch for free on YouTube! 

You may still ask for your money back.

If you guys have any other suggestions for knockoffs that Steve and I should watch, let me know in the comments below or on our Facebook page. 

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Year Of The Western! #30 The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

And here we are, the last film on the list for my journey into the western. I would say it has been long, but it really hasn't been. I have torn through this list of 30 at a pretty breakneck pace and it was a lot of fun. I am glad that I will now get the opportunity to watch other things that aren't westerns but I don't begrudge any of the time I have spent expanding my knowledge in an area that I was only superficially familiar with. This has been a fun experiment and I might try it again with another genre soon. 

Let's mount up for one last ride and see where Clint Eastwood takes us. 

Film #30 The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) 

Here is the imdb.com cast listing (and a surprising amount of trivia about Clint Eastwood's sex life). Here is the wikipedia page about the production.

This film starts off with Josey (Clint Eastwood) tilling his soil with his son. His wife calls the son to get cleaned up, and shortly after Josey sees smoke in the distance and runs home to see his house ablaze and that his wife is being taken forcibly out of it by a bunch of men in with red leather leggings. He tries to fight back but is knocked unconscious. He wakes up to find the ashes of his house and his family. He buries his wife and child and just sits at their graves, broken.

Soon a large group of Confederate soldiers appear and tell him that the men that destroyed his home and killed his family are Union raiders, called Red Legs, and that they are going to go look for them. Josey joins them and fights for the Confederacy. He fights along side these men until the Civil War is over and the has South lost. The North is saying they are giving them full clemency if they just swear their allegiance to the Union. Most of the men leave to do so, Josey stays back, his war is not over.

One of the men to surrender, Fletcher (John Vernon) was given the word of the Union leadership and a leader of the Red Legs, Captain Terrill (Bill McKinney), that his men would be unharmed. As his men take the pledge, the Union army open fires on them and kills them all except for Fletcher and Josey, who is watching in the distance and sees Terrill and other member of the gang that killed his family. Josey rushes the camp and lays waste to most everyone and then goes on the run. He is a wanted man for the shooting of Union soldiers and for not surrendering. 

Josey is trying to get to the Indian nations so that he can lay low and figure out his next move and Fletcher is being forced to assist Terrill to hunt down Josey. As Josey stays free of the army and the law, the legend of The Outlaw Josey Wales grows. People in equal parts are trying to hunt him down for the bounty or are assisting him because they hate the government for what the war has done to them as well.

As Josey travels, he starts picking up people along the way. He is joined by an older Native American who is fed up with the government trying to make him civilized while they keep taking his land, a younger Native American woman who was ostracised by her tribe and was working under duress at a trading post, a family of Kansas folk who think they have a better life ahead of them based upon the promises of a wayward son, and a roughed up dog that just happens to show up along the way. Slowly Josey is starting to care about those that are following him and it almost seems like he is finding a life after the one he lost, but violence is always looming on the horizon as Terrill and his men and bounty hunters are trying to take out Josey.

 After the mind bender ending of High Plains Drifter, I was wondering if I was going to get another genre challenging western from Clint Eastwood. This film is pretty straight forward in its story telling and it is does feel more in line with a traditional western. The characterization of Josey is a little different as in he is driven by revenge but he still will stand up and fight for decent people when he sees them being abused. He will kill when he needs to, and without hesitation, but that doesn't mean that he wants to. He will survive until Terrill pays for what he did. I don't know if Josey is a true anti-hero, as he does do right by people and it isn't always for his own gain. I think that moments of his previous humanity rise to the surface from time to time. This is what keeps him from just being another grim bastard dealing out justice. Giving him a little complicated personality makes this a better story.

This film is really about family. The one he lost and the one he found. When you finally get to the homestead that was promised to the Kansas family and you see such an odd band of people all working together, you do feel like they are all home; even Josey, but he is uneasy about it. "When I get to likin' someone, they ain't around long," he tells the older Native American. "I notice when you get to dislikin' someone they ain't around for long neither," he replies back. Josey feels like violence will follow him wherever he goes, so he doesn't want to endanger anyone else, but he does like these people. 

This is a great scene where he has come to talk to Ten Bears, a Indian leader that was planning on attacking the Kansas family homestead in retaliation due to an earlier situation where Josey took care of some Comancheros. Josey's talk about his words of death and life to Ten Bears show that he is a man that can bring death but is tired of doing so and just wants to make peace.  

Clint Eastwood is great in this role, but that is not really a surprise. He gets some great badass line deliveries, some sarcastic one liners, and he gets to punctuate a lot of his statements with a spit of chewing tobacco (more on that later). And like I said before, he gets to show some vulnerability here that you didn't see in the other westerns I have watched for this list. This is the most human character I have seen him play and it was great. 

John Vernon as Fletcher was also great. He didn't have the largest role but I really enjoyed his resigned approach that he had while tracking Josey. He knew that Josey would be smarter and more cunning than Terrill's men, and he would try to tell them them but to no avail. Josey was a friend and he didn't want to do this, but he also had no choice. I could have watched a whole film from Fletcher's perspective and I would have been entertained. 

The Outlaw Josey Wales is a good film that provides depth and character to a story that could have easily just been about blood for blood. With the twists and turns of adding people to follow him in his journey, it gives the film a sense of  hope that I have not seen in other films. 

In the end, Josey is given a head start, as he is owed that much. Maybe he will finally outrun his past and get the peaceful future that he wants. Maybe there are army troops waiting over the ridge to take him down. We are left with no clear answers. I reckon that is the way Josey sees it too. You just got keep riding forward. Dyin' ain't much of a livin.'

Western Checklist (nowhere near official or scientific): 

• Weird gang member names? The leader of the Confederate soldiers at the beginning of the film was named 'Bloody Bill' Anderson. That's a badass name. Especially if his real name isn't Bill. 
•  Did a house catch on fire? Oh, my yes. At the very start. It looks like they set a real home on fire.
• Any terrified horses? This is the mother lode of horse scares. There was one or two that fell of a ferry into a river, multiple ones tumbling down a rock hillside, and a couple were dragged down after being shot. Not a friendly horse film at all.
• How many Ernest Borgnines? I am going to give this to John Vernon. He was later cast as Dean Vernon Wormer in Animal House. 
• How many things/animals did Clint Eastwood spit on? He spit on a scorpion, the dog twice, probably a horse, some snake oil salesman's white coat, two dead bodies, and one spittoon. There were other things he spit on too, but I lost track. He was just as accurate with his spit as he was his guns.
• Does it have a theme song with the name of the film in the title? No, but the score by Jerry Fielding (he also did the score for The Wild Bunch) is quite good. 

Rating:

I am going to give this film 4.5 out of 5 tin stars. Good performance by Eastwood, interesting story of man continuing on with his fight after the war is over, good ensemble cast of characters, and an ending that didn't go the way you would expect. Highly recommended. 

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Year Of The Western! #29 Keoma (1976)

I know I have talked a lot about the original Django and how it compares to other films on this list and I have had the pleasant experience of seeing Franco Nero in more light hearted comedic westerns, but I haven't had a chance to see Nero in another serious film. I am glad that the last spaghetti western on this list is a serious Franco Nero one.

Film #29 Keoma (1976)

Here is the imdb.com cast listing. Here is the wikipedia page about the production. 

This film starts off with Keoma (Franco Nero), a half-indian/caucasian ex-Union soldier, returning to his home town to see that the things are not the way he left them. A rich businessman named Caldwell, bought the nearby mine and has slowly taken over the town. The mine started polluting the local water supply and this caused a plague to breakout among most of the townspeople. Seeing some of Caldwell's men taking a wagon of infected people to the mine, including a very pregnant woman named Liza, Keoma frees her and takes her into town in order to get medical treatment. 

Keoma soons finds out that his three half brothers are working with Caldwell in running the town. Through a series of flashbacks it is revealed that due to Keoma's half-breed status, his brothers hated him and made his life hell. His father, William (William Berger, last seen as Banjo in Sabata), loves all of his sons equally but the other three think that he loves Keoma more, which is why they punish him.

Keoma could just leave the town to its misery and just drift across the land, as his brothers point out that he comes and goes as he pleases, but he decides that he is going to help the town, punish Caldwell, and hopefully in the process, find his reason for existence. 

Oh, and there is an old lady, referred to as The Witch in the casting notes, who may or may not have supernatural powers. And the sound track tells the story of the film as it goes on.

Reading up on the film after watching it, it is appears that this was one of the last major spaghetti western productions out of Italy. Its a shame because I feel like they were getting stranger and more interesting as they went along. I am glad that if this was to be one of the last ones that it went with a more serious and surreal tone as opposed to the more outrageous buddy comedy kinds that were more prevalent in the later half of the sub-genre's life cycle. 

Keoma feels like it took at a look at what came before it, and not just with other italian westerns because it clearly has some of The Wild Bunch in its DNA, and tried to bring some of the best qualities forward. I am not saying it is entirely successful, but it is evident it had a large bag of tricks and techniques to pull from. There are Leone style flashbacks with some good long tracking shots, Peckinpaugh style slow motion violence, and Corbucci's quick action cuts. Its a good blend of what makes those other films work really well.

I appreciate that Keoma wants to do some good but he isn't sure why. He doesn't really want to face off against his brothers but he will if that means helping the townspeople and Liza. I believe Keoma is trying to atone for his actions during the war because he wasn't sure why he was fighting in it to begin with. Below is a wonderful scene between Keoma and his father discussing war, love, and life. Check out that camera movement. 

I also liked the idea that a number of the townspeople were suffering from a plague as it brought a little different element to the story. It could be seen as a metaphor for how the town let the rich man take over and take their lives from them slowly, like the disease is doing to them as well. They don't know how to deal with it so they would rather suffer in silence than try to fight back. It also brought a bit of body horror to the film and that made the whole situation seem more desperate.

The look of the town itself felt like it was out of a nightmare. None of the buildings were in good repair and most were in the slow collapsing decay that you see in a ghost town. This is a place that had better days and will never see them again. It looks as diseased and worn down as its people. 

Franco Nero was really good as Keoma. He carried a haunted look through almost every scene. You got that he really felt like he belonged nowhere but he was going to try and fight the good fight. When the pregnant lady asked him why he saved her, he tells here 'Everyone has the right to be born.' You have a right to get to here, but you shouldn't expect anything else to be handed to you. He was just trying to give her child the same opportunity he was looking for: to figure out his purpose. 

There is a point later in the film when someone very important to him is taken away and in slow motion you see Nero break free from his captors and run with pure shock and rage towards the person who did the taking. It is an epic moment for the worst reasons and Nero commits so fully to it that you feel his rage as well. 

I forgot to mention another character in the film, George, played by Woody Strode. I want to speak about him for a moment because this isn't the first film on the list he has been in. He was in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as John Wayne's sidekick and he was also one of the three gunmen at the train station that were waiting for Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West. Here he has his biggest role in the films I have seen and I glad I got to see more of him. George was an associate/worker for Keoma's father and you can see in the flashbacks he always had a smile on his face as he played his banjo, taught Keoma how to shoot a bow and arrow, and just took care of homestead. There is a legitimate warmth to him in those brief scenes. When the film begins, he is a broken down alcoholic with no bow and just three strings left on his banjo. He has been made a free man due to the war but people still treat him the same. His freedom didn't change people's attitudes and now he just drinks to deal with it. When finally given a purpose, to help Keoma fight back, George starts to perk up, even enjoying the shootout at the end saying he feels alive again. Strode never plays stupid or into any kind of stereotype. He is very sympathetic and when he meets his end, he doesn't stop fighting those that kept trying to hold him down. It is a great performance.

I can't say I completely understand the purpose of The Witch. She felt like she belonged more in a Shakespeare play than this film, not with her dialogue but due to her semi-omnipresent ability to be around Keoma and directly question his motivations. It was an interesting touch but I feel that it needed a little more substance or definition in order to have a better impact on the story.

The final showdown with the three brothers and Keoma is haunting as it is set against the sounds of Liza giving birth. There are moments where it is just her screams of pain while you see the brothers trying to stalk Keoma through dry rot in the shape of a barn. As lives are taken, a new life is closer to coming into this world. It shows the pain and cost involved in just surviving, just living.

I also have to say that I equally love and hate the music in Keoma. The instrumental parts are very cool and have some synth notes that are very mid to late 70's that I really dig. The vocal portions are challenging. Mainly there is a female voice that comes in at various points in the film and sings about what is actually going on in the story (this also feels oddly Shakespeare like, or more specifically a Greek chorus), and she is fine but the lyrics don't always fit the pace of the music. Also, she sings in a high warbly pitch that works sometimes but other times is grating. Then, every so often, there is a low gravely voice man that sings as well. He is just terrible. When they sing in tandem, it is... odd. I appreciate taking the chance, and I love the idea of an ongoing song within the film (Jeremiah Johnson kind of does the same thing to a much better effect), especially a western as they already have a different texture to them than other genres, but man I wish they would have chosen different vocalists or something.

Keoma is a interesting movie with some great characters, wonderful camera work, and some awesome shootouts and fights. That it struggles with the nature of one's place in the world and the cost of freedom takes what could have been a simple tale of taking back a town and makes it something more.

If this was the last of the Spaghetti Westerns, then it was a very good one to go out on. 

Western Checklist (nowhere near official or scientific):

• Weird gang member names? All the brothers had the last name Shannon, but that's not that weird.
• Beautiful landscapes? A few lowland hills that I have seen in other Italian films that are pretty but this film was purposefully ugly. 
• Any terrified horses? Yeah, it looks like two get shot back to back. 
• How many Ernest Borgnines? Woody Strode would get the nod here. He is great.
• Any buildings catch on fire? No, but a stiff wind would have knocked most of them over. Seriously, that town looked wrong.
• Does it have a theme song with the name of the film in the title? Yes, kind of. Like I said before, there is a running song through the film about the story. Here is a little bit of it below. You will see what I mean about the actual signing.

Rating:

I am going to give this film four out of five tin stars. Franco Nero is awesome as a man that has no place in the world but is still trying to fight for it. The desperation of the town and the sickness of its people give this film a slight horror edge that I was not expecting but appreciated. The music might be the reason why this doesn't rate higher for me and that's a shame. In spite of that, Keoma is still a really good film and it's worth the time to watch. 

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