The Madmen of Mandoras (1963)

Directed by: David Bradley
Run Time: 74 minutes

The Madmen of Mandoras promises intrigue, adventure, exotic locations, and a plot to destroy the world. Instead it delivers boredom, a meandering plot, and dollar store nazis.

The movie opens with a public service film about the dangers of G-gas and is being explained by Professor McGuffin to a dark room with people in military uniforms. G-gas is a chemical weapon that once released is lethal in every possible environment and in sealed buildings. Due the lethal nature of G-gas, every country on the planet is developing an antidote to this gas. In the US, Professor McGuffin is leading the efforts to create an antidote.

The protagonist of the film,  Jack Squarejaw, finally makes an appearance to help the plot stagger in the general direction of that way. Jack is Professor McGuffin's son in law and with the C.I.D. (I'm assuming Criminal Investigation Division of the US army, it's never explained and it's never mentioned again). He shows up to remind Professor McGuffin of his two daughters and that Jake is about to go home to have a mid afternoon martini with his wife.

Suddenly someone remembered that this is supposed to be a form of entertainment and stuff happens.  Professor McGuffin's youngest daughter, Suzzie McGuffin,  has been kidnapped by sinister men. When Professor McGuffin goes to investigate why his daughter has been kidnapped,  he in turn is kidnapped by yet more sinister men. Mr and Mrs Jack Squarejaw finished their mid afternoon martini and are about to go out for the evening when they are kidnapped by Juan Exposition. However, the sinister men show up and kill Juan before fulfill his family tradition of explaining the plot.  Also the sinister men have a union and they really hate scabs.

Jack Squarejaw leaps into action and searches Juan's body for any clues that will help advance the plot. Discovering that Juan is from the cough cough American country of Mandoras. So Jack leaves Juan's body for anyone to find and Jack and the wife fly off to Mandoras. In Mandoras, Jack and his wife meet the rather odd chief of police of Mandoras. Apparently Mandoras is a city state in cough cough America. The couple meet the Carlos Exposition after he breaks into their hotel room and he goes about discharging his family's sacred duty of explaining important plot points.

Juan had been a lab tech for Hitler's inner circle and assisted in removing removing Hitler's head from his body and keeping it alive. Also, Carlos warns the couple that Mandoras is crawling with unsavory types that will have next to nothing to do with the plot. Not heading Carlos' warning, the couple go to the only bar in Mandoras and meet up with Suzzie McGuffin. While hitting on Jack, Suzzie explains that the sinister men let have free reign of Mandoras as long as she didn't leave. This leads to a belly dancing slash shoot out were Suzzie and Mrs. Squarejaw are kidnapped. The chief of police cleans up after the sinister men and takes Jack Squarejaw to the next scene.

Everyone gets taken to the governor's mansion and find that Professor McGuffin is being subjected to an annoying  art installation or torture in the basement. In the basement it is revealed that the bloody nazis are behind all of the sinister behavior and are going to use G-gas on Mandoras and this will allow them to rule the world some how. The Squarejaws, Suzzie, Professor McGuffin, Carlos, the chief of police, and the governor of Mandoras all escape the mansion and the nazis and Hitler's head follow them. Jack Squarejaw has had enough of these nazis and Hitler's head, so him and Carlos ambush the nazis and kill them all. The End.

Underneath the D grade sci-fi cheese there was a decent noir thriller that for whatever reason never made it on to the screen. The only evidence I have that this movie did not start out as a weird sci-fi movie is that in 1968 Crown International Pictures, the distributors of this movie, got some film students to shoot an additional twenty minutes of film so it be sold as a TV movie. Repackaged as They Saved Hitler's Brain, the tone of the new footage is much darker than The Madmen of Madoras and leads me to believe that the original premises was more inline with a noir nazi hunt in South America.

As for is this movie watchable, the answer is a sold not really. It's a mess of a film that I fell asleep through on the first two viewings and the third time I watch the whole thing discovered that I didn't really miss a lot it just poorly explained. There is very little one can do to make this movie more entertaining other than to use it to torture people who are easily offended. As of this review being published it is available for free on Youtube and there are two or three Mill Creek DVD collections that include this movie if you are really hellbent on seeing this thing.

MVT: The most valuable thing goes to the mixture of bourbon, lemonade, and iced tea. It saved what little sanity I have left and made the stupidity on screen just fly by.

Make or Break: This movie goes through the effort of presenting all kinds of threats and reasons to be invested in the well being of the protagonists. Then minutes later forgets about the threats and hopes that the cardboard cut outs they passed off as characters will be enough to keep you interested.

Score: 0.5 out of 10

The Dragon Lives Again (1977)

I was a fan of Bruce Lee before I had ever seen one of his films in full (which wouldn’t have been until my college years).  Further, he died before I was born, so the fact that he had (and I would argue still has) such a cultural impact is fascinating.  Ironically, the first film of his that I was intrigued by as a youth was Game of Death, the one during the production of which he died.  When I saw that brief shot from the trailer of Lee squaring off against Kareem Abdul Jabar, I was mesmerized.  It had to be a special effect or a trick shot.  The difference in size between the combatants was mind-bending for me.  More than that, it made Jabar into a monster simply by dint of his gargantuan size, something which was right in my wheelhouse.  

Later, when I saw the slow motion shot of Lee preparing for battle (I want to say from Enter the Dragon), his arms duplicating and flowing into one another, reminiscent (again, maybe only to me) of Ray Harryhausen’s Kali statue from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, it made the man into the myth in my eyes.  How many pop culture figures can say that they inspired an entire wave of exploitation films feeding off both their lives and their legends?  I don’t know that Lee would have appreciated films like Law Kei’s The Dragon Lives Again (aka Deadly Hands of Kung Fu; incidentally, also the title of a Marvel Comics magazine that featured martial arts characters like The Sons of the Tiger and Iron Fist), but you must admit, it would certainly catch his attention.

Bruce Lee (Bruce Leong aka Siu-Lung Leung) lies in state before the King of the Underworld (Tang Ching).  Upon waking and learning of his situation, Bruce is shunted off to a local village, where he runs into and makes an enemy of Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman (Wong Mei).  Turns out, Zatoichi is in league with the Exorcist (Fong Yau, dubbed in English with a French accent for absolutely no reason), the Godfather (Sin Il-Ryong, who looks more like a Sonny Chiba character than either Vito or Michael Corleone), Clint Eastwood (Bobby Canavarro, in Eastwood’s Man with No Name guise), Dracula (Cheung Hei), James Bond (Alexander Grand), and Emmanuelle (Jenny), who want to usurp power from the King.  Joining forces with the One-Armed Swordsman (Nick Cheung Lik), Kwai Chang Caine, and Popeye (a very young, fit Eric Tsang), Bruce takes on the villains and stands up for the rights of the common man.  Huzzah!

Bruceploitation is one of the oddest trends to ever hit celluloid.  I can think of no other personage who inspired an entire exploitation cottage industry.  Sure, there have been Nazisploitation, Nunsploitation, Blaxploitation, Mexploitation (which is just exploitation films made in Mexico, not genre films exploiting Mexicans), Canuxploitation (again…), but there has never been Elvisploitation (for the most part, and if there has been, it’s an extremely small pool), McQueensploitation, and so on.  Lee’s legacy carried beyond his actual achievements.  Many of the Bruceploitation films are either factually inaccurate biopic/documentaries (a la Chariots of the Gods) or simply cheap Martial Arts films where its star was given a moniker similar to Lee (Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bronson Lee, ad nauseum) and billed on the poster as the true successor to the genuine article.  The Dragon Lives Again is something altogether different.  It’s a pure fantasy that plays with the legend of Bruce Lee as a symbol.

The film skirts the more unsavory aspects of the whole Bruceploitation movement (but that someone had this idea at all is audacious as hell) by dealing with the man as myth.  Bruce is first shown with a blanket over his dead body and sporting a massive erection.  Said tumescence is revealed to actually be Lee’s signature nunchaku, a weapon he keeps on him at all times.  Right off the bat, we get allusions to Lee’s sexual power and his skill with nunchucks in one fell swoop.  The two are inseparable.  Just about every character remarks about how sexually powerful Lee is, and the women all want to bed down with him (even the King’s wife and concubines, who want to “try him out for size”).  Once Bruce gets to the village, he becomes a hero of the people, teaching villagers Jeet Kun Do (let’s just say that’s what it is), standing up to corrupt policemen, and staving off the machinations of both the bad guys and the King.  Yet, Bruce isn’t exactly a nice guy.  He’s a conceited braggart who knows just how good he is at what he does.  He has posters of himself in his room, for crying out loud!  Conversely, Bruce realizes that he was flawed when alive.  He states that, “I used to play around just too much,” and even apologizes to Linda Lee Cadwell (Lee’s widow) directly.

Similarly, the characters Bruce encounters in the Underworld are myths, cultural icons of the time.  That he is thrown in with them asserts that this is an idealized Bruce, a character of superheroic proportions.  Still, Bruce is Bruce, and though he is the legend, he is also the person (though he’s not really).  Even when the other characters use actual peoples’ names (read: Clint Eastwood), they are still acting as the character that person made famous.  Most surreal in this regard is the appearance of Kwai Chang Caine, a character reputedly created to be played by Lee on the Kung Fu television show but that wound up being portrayed by David Carradine.  Needless to say, Bruce takes potshots at Caine throughout the film, and the floppy-hatted, wandering warrior-philosopher takes it all with a sheepish grin, knowing his place before the true master.  Further, Bruce himself appears in the film in the guise of Kato, the sidekick character he played on The Green Hornet.  Why?  Why the hell not?!  The point is that Bruce is simultaneously the most iconic and the most real of all the legends of the world in this film.  While he’s still a cartoon portrayal of the man, Bruce is less of one than everyone else here.  The sole exception to this is the villagers, and even they are playing the roles laid down in every Kung Fu movie ever made; even they are cultural reference points.

You can’t really judge this film based on its story (it doesn’t really have one that it cares enough to follow, and what is there is standard for its base genre), its acting, its success as a comedy (it isn’t, or at least, not intentionally), or even its fight choreography (which is passable but unremarkable).  Instead, The Dragon Lives Again should be judged on how far it’s willing to go, on how imaginative the producers were willing to get with their premise.  For example, whenever Bruce squares off against one of the villains, they suddenly all appear in a rock quarry, and the film essentially becomes one shade away from a Japanese Tokusatsu effort.  The film pushes every limit it has (budget, scope, taste, you name it), and though it’s ultimately a wildly hot mess, it’s still wild, and, I would argue, one of the most unique films ever made to cash in on a pop culture icon.

MVT:  The size of the balls it took to make this film.

Make or Break:  The opening credits where Bruce spars with each of the fantastical characters he’s about to meet in the film.  This itself is a common trope in the Martial Arts genre, but it’s somehow more insane in this instance.

Score:  7/10       

Tarkan Versus the Vikings (1971)

Even though Conan the Barbarian had been around since his first appearance in 1932 in the pages of Weird Tales magazine, it was a little more than thirty years before the most iconic depiction of him appeared in art form.  In 1966, Lancer Books got the rights to reprint Robert E. Howard’s original tales (edited, revised, and/or completed with the assistance of L. Sprague de Camp), and the painted covers were handled by the late, great Frank Frazetta.  Frazetta’s visuals solidified the Cimmerian’s look for all the years to come, and they encapsulated perfectly what the character was all about, being as beautiful as they are savage.  It can be argued that all barbaric characters created after have followed in Conan’s image, both as written and as drawn.  Now, I can’t say I know all that much about Turkish comic books (okay, I know nothing at all), but I believe that I can state confidently that Sezgin Burak’s Tarkan character is likely one that does.  If nothing else, Mehmet Aslan’s Tarkan Versus the Vikings (aka Tarkan Viking Kani aka Tarkan and the Blood of the Vikings) does a solid job of capturing the flavor of barbaric adventure stories and adorns it with enough garish, comic book accoutrements to make for a singular viewing experience.

Bloodthirsty (and I mean BLOODTHIRSTY; they gleefully slaughter infants) Vikings led by the bathroom-mat-wrapped Toro (Bilal Inci) attack a Hun Turk fortress and kidnap Yonca (Fatma Belgen), the daughter of Khan Attila (who is never seen) and her squadron of female warriors.  During the assault, loyal friend and loner Tarkan (Kartal Tibet) is wounded, and his “wolf” Kurt is slain.  Together with Kurt’s son (also named Kurt, apparently), Tarkan sets off to exact bloody revenge, more for the murder of his pet than to get Yonca and the other Turks out of captivity.

Tarkan Versus the Vikings is about as wild a film as you’re likely to see.  The emphasis is on energy, though it’s not something I would call competent, per se, and combined, they form the wealth of the film’s charm (from what I’ve been able to glean, this is the entire modus operandi of Turkish pop cinema).  This movie looks like it was edited in a blender, but here this is a strength not a detriment.  The lightning fast, almost nonsensical cuts form a montage akin to the layout of a comic book page (the key difference being that, in a comic book, the reader paces the story in tune with the artist/writer; with this film, the viewer is thrown in and left to his own defenses).  It jams as much as it possibly can into every minute (nay, second), then tries to pack it all down to stuff some more in.  There’s more action and convoluted plotting in this film’s initial thirty minutes than in the entirety of the last three Fast and Furious films combined.  

Additionally, the movie is as hyper-stylized and scintillating as any four-color comic book (or comic book movie, for that matter).  The Kraken-esque octopus that the Vikings sacrifice their captives to is as ridiculous as the titular beastie from The Giant Claw (also, I couldn’t help thinking that Robert Altman saw this film before making his adaptation of Popeye back in 1980).  The Vikings’ hair almost universally consists of poorly attached, vibrant wigs (one of which flies off an extra’s head when Tarkan gives him the business).  Those whose hair was merely dyed for the production are even more unnatural than those wearing hairpieces (they’re not blonde, they’re yellow).  Their shields are dotted with radiant puffs of fur.  The female Vikings are decked out like the flag for the Rainbow Coalition.  To wit, Viking King Gero’s (Atif Kaptan) daughter Ursula (Eva Bender) is togged in lustrous pink fur, and so on.  This whole review could simply be a list of every gaudy, slapdash bit of costuming, scenery, etcetera, but I’m comfortable with stopping at these.  Suffice it to say, this film isn’t merely a comic book projected on screen; it’s a cartoon in live action (ironically enough, the polar opposite of every blockbuster action film made today).

The film takes an odd perspective on women.  They are generally regarded as strong and strong-willed.  Yonca’s platoon of female furies that guard the fortress are described as worth ten men each.  Ursula and her shipload of female Vikings bear as much responsibility for plundering as any other boat full of seamen.  The Chinese villainess Lotus (the breathtaking Seher Seniz) commands her minions with ice cold practicality.  She also uses her sexuality prominently.  She beds down with men she either respects for their masculinity and/or wants to put in a vulnerable position to drug (something she loves doing).  Her death strip/dance in the film’s back third is equal parts tense, bizarre, and titillating.  Since these women are posited as equals to the men in the film, there are zero qualms about killing them in the same brutal fashion as a man would be.  Needless to say, many a hatchet is planted in a woman’s cranium throughout the picture.  By that same token, women are also very much sex objects to be used and abused.  Women are hung by their hair for hatchet-tossing practice (sometimes over a pit of vipers, sometimes not).  On the Vikings’ big festival day, the Hun Turk women are brought in to be raped and killed at will (and often at the same time, as women are stabbed and then groped and kissed as they writhe in their death throes).  Women are whipped often (but, in fairness, so are men).  Despite what power they are allowed to wield, the women in this film still cater to the prurient interest of both the male characters and the audience.  It’s an uneasy balance (if a balance is even struck).

If you thought that the motivation for revenge in John Wick was a bit farfetched, you’d best strap yourself in for Tarkan Versus the Vikings.  His wolves, Kurt and Kurt, are, in Tarkan’s mind, true Turks, as worthy of respect and loyalty as any human.  The elder Kurt teaches the younger how to be a good Turk, training him on table manners (and these dogs…sorry, wolves…eat up at the table the same as any person would).  Kurt’s son helps Tarkan heal (I assume by finding herbs and shit around the area).  The wolves are so equivocated to man, there’s a sequence where Tarkan and the younger Kurt attack a group of Vikings, and the viewer is treated to an entire sequence vacillating between Tarkan lopping off men’s heads and Kurt ripping out their throats.  It feels a bit like a fight scene from the 1966 Batman television show sans the hard Dutch angles and onomatopoeic effects overlays.  

For all its disjointedness and ludicrously po-faced absurdisms, Tarkan Versus the Vikings is a damned good time.  Obviously, it will never make a hall of fame for technical prowess, but every moment of its runtime is dynamic.  It’s a constantly moving predator, like the myth about how sharks can never stop swimming.  I was just a bit reluctant to dive into this film, but having come out the other end of it a different man, I feel the need to indulge in as much Turkish pop cinema as I possibly can.  Will it be as entertaining and worthwhile as this little gem?  Absolutely not, but the first step in finding gold is to just start digging.

MVT:  The energy of the film is infectious.  It sweeps you along like some half-crazed, drunk idiot friend who wants to hit every bar in a ten-mile radius.  And somehow manages to do so.

Make or Break:  The attack on the Hun Turk fortress.   It fully illustrates where the film’s bloody heart lies, veins and all.

Score:  7/10