Friday's best pop song ever

Man Chased by a UFO, aka Man of Ganimedes (Spain, 1976)

As movie titles go, Man Chased by a UFO is about as descriptive as they come. The film is the product of Spanish amateur filmmaker and UFO enthusiast Juan Carlos Olaria, who shot it in 16mm over the course of a few months in 1972, using a park in the scenic Garraf region of Barcelona for most of his locations. The film then remained largely unseen for several years, only finding distribution in 1976 once Olaria had spiced it up with some nudie and soft core footage. Why it is today known by the alternate title Man of Ganimedes I can’t say, but I mention it here because that’s the only way you’re going to find it on IMDB.

Man Chased by a UFO kicks off with a flying saucer heading toward Earth with its crew intent on abducting a human being. For reasons undisclosed, the hapless schmo they’ve set their sights on is Alberto (Richard Kolin), a middle-aged author of pulp fiction in the middle of one of those episodes of writers’ block that movies think suffice as character development when dealing with writers. And so the chase begins. Unfortunately for the aliens, Alberto is from the Bloody Pit of Horror School of writing, and is just as willing to bring Jack Johnson and Tom O’Leary to the party as a steno pad when confronted with extraterrestrial aggression. (“I gave them a good beating”, he later tells an interlocutor.)

Rather than dirtying their hands with the whole abducting business, the aliens delegate the task to a team of “mutants”. These are basically a bunch of guys in turtlenecks and slacks with what look like plastic shopping bags tied over their heads, and their first order of business is to undo the parking brake on Alberto’s car and roll it off a cliff. To further punk Alberto, they then take off with his car and set it adrift in space, so that when he returns to show the authorities what happened, there is no evidence to support his story. And this is central to Alberto’s dilemma: despite his distinguished bearing and all around tweedy-ness, no one believes him when he tells them he was “assaulted by aliens” who want to abduct him. WHY WON’T THEY BELIEVE HIM?

On a positive note, Alberto does seem to find a sympathetic ear in police detective Duran, who’s played by the director’s dad, Juan Olaria (Juan Jr., for his part, can be seen playing the pilot of the UFO). While not buying all of what Alberto’s selling, Duran suggests that he retreat to his summer cottage to wait things out, which Alberto does. Once there, he’s unexpectedly joined by his mistress, Carmen, whose open marriage with Alberto’s friend Ricardo seems to have Alberto as its primary beneficiary (just in case you forgot this was a European movie from the 70s). This sets the stage for a Night of the Living Dead style siege upon the cottage by the mutants, and finally those scenes of Alberto being chased around by a flying saucer that the movie’s title has lead us to expect -- or, dare I say, demand.

Man Chased by a UFO was Olaria’s first feature length film, following upon a series of 8mm shorts that he made throughout his youth. Because of this, it will likely surprise no one that it’s an amateur affair, as evidenced by its dopey special effects, unfathomable editing choices, numerous under-lit shots, and leaden dialogue. On this last count, Olaria displays one of the common weaknesses of novice screenwriters: never knowing when to stop writing words into people’s mouths. As a result, we get a lot of expositing about things that don’t need to be exposited. Until, that is, the final act, when the aliens finally divulge to Alberto their reasons for wanting to kidnap him. This involves something about the alien’s planet being a mirror image of Earth, as well as something about “anti-matter”, and ultimately ends up sounding like something that should be scrawled in very tiny writing on a sandwich board.

In a recent interview with Fantastique magazine, Olaria reconciled himself to being referred to as the “Spanish Ed Wood” by noting with approval that Wood often sacrificed quality for the sake of fun and entertainment. And in this I think he is spot on; while Man Chased by a UFO doesn’t provide much evidence that Olaria is capable of quality, it nonetheless continues a tradition of which he should be proud.

The Cultural Gutter needs all the $$$

The Gultural Gutter have been supporters of 4DK since way back, and now it's time to throw a little back their way. You see, the Gutter Gang have suffered a cut in their funding from the Canadian Council for the Arts and are now having to subsist on a measly ration of sub-par government poutine.

Seriously, though, what the Gutter really needs is the dosh for necessities like web hosting -- things that they literally can't continue to exist without. Which is why they've started this Indiegogo campaign, making it convenient for you to throw what little cash you can their way to help them out. Because, seriously, if you don't think The Cultural Gutter is worth saving, you're obviously someone who can't appreciate the value of a site that provides consistently thoughtful and provocative writing on a variety of much maligned pop culture topics that ranges from genre movies, to comics, to romance novels. So fuck you.

For the rest of you beloved 4DK readers, please do help out if you can, even if it means donating as little as one dollar. As you'll see once you visit the page, the folks at the Gutter have made a range of enticing perks available to coax your wallet hand, so, yes, THERE IS SOMETHING IN IT FOR YOU.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get to work on writing some grant proposals. Until science invents a way to stop chimps from shitting, we're going to need diapers, and LOTS of them.

Friday's best pop song ever

Mondo Bomba

The good folks over at the Mondo Macabro DVD blog invited me to write a guest post about the favored Mondo Macabro release of my choice. While the choices were many (I own a lot of Mondo Macabro discs), I finally settled upon Elwood Perez's Silip, a Filipino film that is at once haunting, poetic, disturbing, and very, very dirty. My vaguely NSFW thoughts on the topic can be read here.

An Aneurysm for Ringo: Four Really Strident 1960s Italian Movie Themes

It just may be that Shirley Bassey's take on "Goldfinger" established the guidelines for all singers of 1960s movie themes -- those guidelines essentially being to belt the thing out as if you were trying to burst every blood vessel in your face while employing a level of vibrato commensurate with being on an out of control tilt-a-whirl. No one, it seems, took those guidelines more seriously than the Italians.

"Man For Me" from OK Connery/Operation Kid Brother, sung by Christy


"Lady Chaplin" from Special Mission Lady Chaplin, sung by Bobby Solo 


"Furore" from The Girl Who Knew Too Much, sung by Adriano Celentano


"Angel Face" from A Pistol For Ringo, sung by Maurizio Graf

Friday's best pop song ever

From the Lucha Diaries Vault: El Asesino Invisible (Mexico, 1964)

Life’s petty obligations have overwhelmed me once again, which means it’s time to mine yet another golden nugget from the retired flagship of my Internet empire, The Lucha Diaries, which is easily the most exhaustively misinformed catalog of Mexican wrestling movies online or on anything else. Disfrutar!

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Of all the lucha films in which classic movie monsters have made an appearance, El Asesino Invisible is the only one that I can think of that features the Invisible Man. There are a number of reasons why pitting a luchadore against an invisible foe is a bad idea, one of the most obvious being that Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras, for all their athletic ability, were not, as far as I know, accomplished mimes, and would have had difficulty selling the idea that they were grappling with a transparent corporeal being -- much less that they were walking against the wind or trapped in a small invisible box. Fortunately for us, the lead here is taken by professional actor Jorge Rivero, essaying the one-off role of El Enmascarado de Oro, aka The Golden Mask. (Unable to beat Santo at his own game, Rivero would go on to join him a couple years later as his co-star in Operacion 67 and El Tesoro de Moctezuma.)

El Asesino Invisible is the type of film that I imagine people are talking about when they refer to a movie as "an entertainment"; There's a sprinkling of plot, a bunch of musical numbers, a little romance, eye candy of both the male and female varieties, and, of course, a couple of wrestling matches shown in their entirety. The adorable Ana Bertha Lepe is the female lead here, and how much you like El Asesino Invisible will depend on how much you like Lepe (I do; she's adorable, remember), because she appears in several full-length song and dance numbers that are distributed liberally throughout the length of the film. Interestingly, Lepe is playing herself here -- or at least a version of famous star of stage and screen Ana Bertha Lepe who exists in a world where she might be stalked by a mad scientist with the power of invisibility -- which I can't help thinking was a move to compensate for the lack of verisimilitude that resulted from having an actor, rather than the "real" wrestler you'd typically see, in the masked hero role.

In a further concession to genre tradition, Rivero forfeits the romantic lead to Miguel Arenas' police detective character, and doesn't even appear unmasked until a very brief moment in the final scene -- an especially odd choice given Rovero's classic movie star looks. On the villainous front, the presence of the ever waxen Carlos Agosti in the cast once again makes a mockery of a film's attempts to create any mystery around the identity of its killer, invisible though he may be in this case.

On that point, I've got to say that the movie's invisibility effects, while not groundbreaking, are always competent and, in a couple of instances, quite striking; in particular the creepy "empty mask" effect when the killer tries to masquerade as El Enmascarado de Oro, and a bizarre, supernaturally-tinged moment when the hero sees the killer made visible as the reflection in a cat's eyes. I like to point out such technical accomplishments, because I've been troubled by some online reviews I've read of later luchadore films which seem to mistakenly interpret those films' shoddiness as being typical of the product of a backward, "Third World" film industry. The fact is that, at the time El Asesino Invisible was made, the Mexican film industry was the major provider of film entertainment for all of Latin America, was making its films for a worldwide audience, and had an established studio system that was a magnet for first rate technical and artistic talent from throughout the Spanish speaking world and beyond.

The real reason that those later lucha movies are shoddy is that, by the time they were made, the genre had fallen out of favor with audiences to the point where they were no longer an acceptable risk for the larger studios, and so became the provenance of smaller studios and independent producers looking to make a quick profit on as small an investment as possible. Still, I can understand how, if the only Mexican film someone has seen is, for instance, the first Superzan movie, they might not have the most charitable view of the country's film industry as a whole -- because that movie looks like it was made by some kind of cargo cult after some camera equipment washed up on the beach. (Hey, I'm not saying you shouldn't make fun of those movies; I'm just saying to be careful about the generalizations you make from them.) Still, even a glossy piece of fluff like El Asesino Invisible, which is entertaining but far from the best the industry had to offer, should serve to handily refute such notions.

Friday's best pop song ever

Three Supermen in the Jungle (Italy/Spain, 1970)

It seems that, during the late 60s to mid-80s, every couple of years someone in a room full of people somewhere in Europe would say, “Aw, what the hell. Let’s make another Three Fantastic Supermen movie”. And thus, by 1970, we had Three Supermen in the Jungle, the third film in a perplexingly long-lived series that would ramble on until 1986, all the while becoming more underfunded and increasingly Turkish.

This entry begins with Brad Harris’ FBI agent, Brad Scott, attempting to get married, only to be called into the field by his superiors mere moments before walking the aisle. It seems a gang of Soviet agents are poised to lay claim to a uranium rich African mine, having murdered the FBI agent in charge of keeping them from it. Now it has been decided that only the Three Fantastic Supermen -- with their matching, gymnastics enabling, bulletproof red long johns -- can succeed where that lone agent failed, making Scott, who is one of them, the only agent for the job. Scott objects, referring to the shabby treatment the trio received at the hands of the bureau during their last adventure, which was chronicled in 1968’s Three Supermen in Tokyo. This is an interesting point for Scott to make, seeing as neither he nor the actor playing him was in Three Supermen in Tokyo.

Three Supermen in the Jungle, in fact, marks Harris’ sole return to the series, after having starred in the first entry alongside his Kommissar X co-star Tony Kendall. Tokyo replaced Kendall and Harris with Spaghetti Western mainstay George Martin (who returns here) and Willi Colombini (who does not). Meanwhile, Kendall’s mute sidekick Nick, played by Aldo Canti in the first film, was replaced by another stuntman-turned-actor, Salvatore Borghese, in the role of mute sidekick “Dick”. The name of Borghese’s character would change throughout the series (in Supermen Against the Orient, for instance, he was “Jerry”), but the actor, from Three Supermen in Tokyo on, would remain one of its few constants, as I fear would be his portraying a speech impaired man as a gibbering, hyperactive idiot. In truth, consistency wasn’t exactly a strong point of this series, as it appeared less concerned with establishing distinctive tropes than with merely being a reliable source of generic tongue-in-cheek superhero hijinks -- which, I have to admit, it is.

Anyway, it turns out that, before he can reunite with his fellow supermen, Dick (Borghese) and Martin (Martin), Scott must first free them from a Middle Eastern prison, where, incorrigible master thieves that they are, they’ve been thrown after trying to make off with a sheik’s gold. Interestingly, their captors have not seen fit to free them of their super suits before imprisoning them, which makes rescuing them a lot easier than it might otherwise have been. To demonstrate its staunch commitment to cartoon logic, Three Supermen in the Jungle then has Scott travel to the Middle East by rocket to save time, and then use a nifty burrowing machine called an Earthworm to affect their breakout. Then it’s off to Africa for a brisk course in boilerplate jungle movie shenanigans 101.

Are there tribes of ooga booga movie savages? Check. Is there a mischievous chimp? Indeed there is -- and the gibbering deaf guy can talk to it! Must a deadly pit of quicksand be traversed? YUP. Are our heroes placed in a giant pot by cannibals? YAWN! In addition to the aforementioned thrills, the Supermen also come upon a tribe of white, leopard skin bikini sporting amazons lead by the self-proclaimed Queen of the Jungle, Jungla (Femi Benussi). So amiably lax is the film in its dedication to having a plot that it then abandons its whole Cold War premise in favor of having the Supermen seduced into a life of domesticity by the amazons, only to find out almost too late that they are destined for the sacrificial altar. Not that much real suspense is forfeited by this shifting of gears, mind you, as the villainous Soviets here are of the type that include a pantsless aparat-chick (see what I did there?) among their number for va-va-voom appeal and celebrate tactical victories by doing a Cossack dance in a chorus line.

It almost begrudges me to admit that Three Supermen in the Jungle has its charms despite -- and more likely because of -- being a signal example of 60s Italian popcorn filmmaking at its most blearily sun-dazed and asleep at the wheel. After all, what do I want? If the Supermen movies were ever to guaranty their audience anything, it wouldn’t be much beyond lots of slapstick fight scenes with complicated acrobatics, and Jungle certainly delivers on that count. And I must say I enjoyed paying witness to the odd gift that Brad Harris, an accomplished stuntman, shows for physical comedy, particularly in how he uses his bulk against itself. You really haven’t seen absurdity until you’ve seen a guy with Harris’s Peplum grade muscles throw himself down in the dirt and launch into an exaggerated kicking and screaming temper tantrum.

Three Supermen in the Jungle wraps up with a return to the States and an egregious Chinaman impersonation by Brad Harris before closing out with just one more massive brawl. Sated, the hypothetical Three Supermen devotee would then have to wait another three whole years before his heroes returned in Supermen Against the Orient. And this was before webisodes, guys.

Kommissar X: Joe Walker finally gets the love he deserves

I don’t usually write DVD reviews. This is mostly because the formats in which I watch my chosen obscurities -- VCDs, gray market VHS rips -- are typically too degraded to warrant mention. (The exception, of course, being when their quality is so harrowing that it presents an obstacle to my assessment of the film overall.) As a result, I’ve become resigned to the fact that watching the old movies I want to see will necessarily involve squinting at them through a tissue of noise and decay. It’s for this reason, then, that on those rare occasions when someone takes a favorite film that’s been poorly served in previous releases and gives it its due share of TLC, I want to give it prominent mention.

Such is the case with Koch Media’s German DVD release of the first Kommissar X film, Jagd auf Unbekannt, aka Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill. The disc is part of a planned box set that’s slated to feature six of the seven total Kommissar X titles (not included will be the perpetually MIA FBI: Operation Pakistan from 1971) and is being sold with a display box to be filled as the individual titles are released. As compared to the cropped and pocked versions previously available, the vivid color and wide screen presentation of this release are a wonder to behold. Yes, these films were low budget, but, as we can now see, they also looked fabulous.

Again, I’m not Consumer Reports, but it seems called for to present some screen shot comparisons between Koch’s version of Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill and the version released by Retro Media several years ago.

 

 

The Koch disc features both the German and English language versions of Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill, with the latter featuring a couple brief scenes cut from the English version that momentarily slip into German audio with English subs. The English version also comes with optional German subs, though no subs are available on the German version. Also included is an extra disc featuring a fan documentary chronicling a convention appearance that reunited an elderly Tony Kendall and Brad Harris with their apparently incorrigible Kommissar X director Gianfranco Parolini. Their discussion flits from German to English to Italian, with no subtitles to help us out (and with Brad Harris, quite impressively, proving to be the only one fluent in all three). Still, the love and good humor are palpable, and there are interview inserts with Harris, conducted in English, that pretty much give you the gist of what was said.

So, do I recommend people buy this? I do. If for no other reason than that I want Koch to have the financial incentive to release the remaining five discs so that I can buy those too. Look, I know I’m not Oprah, but, come on, people. Make this happen for me!

Friday's best pop song ever

Happy Halloween week from Screaming Lord Sutch.