Kill and Kill Again (1981)

Steve Chase (James Ryan, whose Kiai [the yell martial artists do when practicing their art] my brother and I used to imitate constantly when we were kids) is an agent (or maybe a mercenary or just an upstanding citizen, but he is definitely the top dog in the South African martial arts world) who is approached by Candy Kane (Anneline Kriel, 1974’s Miss World) to rescue her scientist father Dr. Horatio Kane (John Ramsbottom) from the clutches of the evil Marduk nee Wellington Forsythe III (Michael Mayer, who has a fantastic, stentorian voice and a horridly fake beard).  But Steve will need the best team of men he knows to invade Marduk’s compound, rescue Horatio, and foil the villain’s nasty plan to control the minds of the world’s population.  It’s time to get the band back together.

One of the things that struck me about Ivan Hall’s Kill and Kill Again (the sequel to 1977’s Kill or be Killed) was this idea of games of one sort or another that runs throughout the film.  Steve takes on Gorilla (Ken Gampu) in a tug of war.  Hotdog (Bill Flynn) is found playing a game with a bunch of men where he tosses a loaded gun somewhere in a room, and the last one to remain uninjured wins the pot.  The Fly (Stan Schmidt) makes Steve’s pursuit of him into a game, challenging our hero to prove his worth before he’ll follow him.  Later, Gorilla and Hotdog play poker across the hood of their ride while the other characters take out some random minions.  And, of course, you can’t have a film that’s this indebted to the films of Bruce Lee (Game of Death and Enter the Dragon being foremost in my mind) without having an open air tournament where the good guys can defeat the bad guys in single combat.  This game motif appeals to a great many people, because there is no ambiguity about what is happening or who the victor is.  There is a focus, especially when the tournament approach is used, where the truth of the characters can clearly be sussed out.  In a gladiatorial arena, there is nothing to hide behind but your pure wits and your physical skills.  This is the same sort of thing that appeals to many children (of all ages) for the same reasons.  I know when I was young, playing with my action figures usually transformed from some paper-thin storyline into a tournament milieu pretty fast.  It satisfies the jones from questions like, “Who would win in a fight?  The Hulk or Batman?”  It’s why pro wrestling and MMA and fighter video games are so popular.  The one-on-one death match is as primal as our modern society can get, and it serves to prove that, for all the layers of civilization we paper over it, our base nature is ofttimes more animal than man.

Likewise, there are some issues of masculinity going on in the film.  Steve is an alpha male.  He likes his jeans painted on and his shirt opened down to his glory trail (if he had a glory trail).  He lays down the law, and the others must follow.  He even proves that he is the better of the Fly, a character people speak of with great reverence.  All of the men love to go around with their shirts off, displaying their torsos (though this may just be because the film was produced in South Africa).  Naturally, when Candy shows up, Steve has to let his chauvinist pig flag fly hard.  Right off the bat, he states that he doesn’t work with women.  After she gets to go along anyway, he deigns to show her some karate moves…but first she needs to cook them breakfast.  He tells her to stay behind and look after their ride.  The Fly queries about Candy, “why does this soft lady travel with warriors?”  To no one’s surprise, Candy can’t be kept under a man’s thumb and is capable of handling herself in physical situations.  On the flip side, Marduk surrounds himself with hot women in bikinis or small terrycloth shorts or similar, but he has to control their minds in order for them to do it for him.  He wears his brown ensemble with his sexless tunic at all times.  He is petulant when things go askew (like getting upset when Dr. Kane summons Marduk to his lab).  His right hand, Minerva (Marloe Scott Wilson), is unlike the floozies Marduk keeps around.  She has short, hot pink hair.  She dresses in leather and animal print pants (also sometimes hot pink).  She addresses Marduk by pet names (chuckles, dimples, poopsie, popsicle, et cetera), and it upsets him when she does this on front of the other women.  In fact, the oddness of their relationship and the oddness of these two characters themselves makes me think that they are supposed to be coded as a homosexual couple or at the absolute minimum as deviant.  Marduk is effete, and Minerva is rather butch.  So, in a world where the heteronormative is what’s desired most of all, this villain and his henchwoman are somehow even more destined to meet defeat than would normally be the case.    

I got the sense that Marduk was a classic bullied child who grew up to be an even bigger bully.  This is evidenced not only by his demeanor but also by his relationship with Minerva, the only person (outside his guards, I assume) whom he doesn’t drug and who is clearly the more forceful personality of the two.  But he uses his mind (and, we can surmise if his pre-world-conquest name is any indication, his money) to advance his nefarious scheme, and it is with his mind that he desires to defeat Steve Chase.  For the armies of martial artists that Marduk trains and admires, he likely doesn’t know a leg sweep from a leg of lamb.  Even his champion, the Optimus (Eddie Dorie), is the complete opposite of Marduk: tall, muscular, stoic, a skilled hand-to-hand combatant.  Nevertheless, Steve and his cohorts come out on top at every turn.  Indeed, even when Marduk thinks he has out-thought Steve, he’s still shown up handily.  Whenever the villain attempts to be physical, he’s a failure at it.  This is why he has so many henchmen.  That said, there is a crosscut sequence where both Marduk and Steve explain their martial arts philosophies.  Marduk talks about breaking traditions and transcending the physical and mental being.  Steve talks about elegance, unity, art, and precision.  Neither character is wrong, per se.  As it happens, they are quite similar, and it is easy to see their thought processes interweaving with one another, as if the one were speaking the other’s lines when not on screen and vice versa.  All the same, Steve practices what he preaches, whereas Marduk has others do it for him.  The combination of philosophy and physicality trumps philosophy alone in the same way it can be said that talk minus action equals nothing.  

MVT:  I love the team aspect of the film, and while not all of them are overly distinctive (the Fly and Gypsy Billy [Norman Robinson] are very much alike, especially once the mystique of the former is stripped away and replaced with a lot of hokey, Chinese fortune cookie pontifications), they are all enjoyable, and they mesh extremely well with one another.

Make or Break:  The tournament is the Make.  It was good enough for me when Lion-O and Snake Eyes squared off, and it’s good enough for me today.

Score:  7/10             

        

Demonwarp (1988)

A minister (John Durbin) reads the Bible to his horse whilst trekking along a trail (his extremely clean “Old West” costume is the only indication we get that this is set before the turn of the Twentieth Century [okay, and the fact that he’s reading the Bible], because a subtitle would have been too tricky to put on screen, I suppose) when he catches sight of a “meteor” which crashes to earth nearby.   Cut to: a bright, sunny day, at a cabin in Demon Wood (duh duh DUUUHHHH!), where Bill (bulletproof check casher George Kennedy) and his doting daughter Julie (Jill Marin) are playing a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit™ when a Bigfoot-ian creature bursts through the door, roughs Bill up, and kills his daughter before dragging her corpse off into the unknown.  Cut to: a van full of idiots, including Jack (David Michael O’Neill), nephew of the owner of the aforementioned cabin, wending its way through the woods to investigate (unbeknownst to all but Jack and his girlfriend Carrie [Pamela Gilbert]) the expanding circle of weird goings-on in the forest (including the disappearance of said uncle).  Horror wants to ensue!

And so we come to Emmett Alston’s Demonwarp, an interesting premise in search of a good execution.  It’s set up initially as a slasher film with an animal (even though we can call the Bigfoot an alien, considering the prologue, but it still acts like an animal) as its villain (most precisely, the one we see the most).  It has the group of horny young people going out to a remote location to be killed in gory fashion.  It has bare female breasts galore (including two belonging to the lovely [and wasted, unless you count her boobs, though it could also be argued that they are the long and the short of her, if one were inclined to be a bit mean about it] Michelle Bauer).  It has a crazy old coot, trying in vain to warn the youths away from the area.  It has POV shots from the monster’s perspective (and I’ll get back to this later) as it stalks its prey.  And this got me thinking.  In many ways, a creature feature isn’t all that different from a slasher movie.  Both have antagonists who pop up at the worst possible times to dispose of irritating characters.  Both have antagonists who represent unknown quantities.  Both have antagonists who are non-verbal in the main (characters like Freddy Krueger and the more charismatic baddies notwithstanding), and in this way are even more inscrutable.  After all, if you don’t know why bad things are happening to you, they seem more tragic (this being based on the notion that most people believe that they are, at heart, good people).  The thing that should separate them is the human psyche, yet the way characters like these are regularly portrayed, there is little indication that such exists outside of the impetus for their individual geneses.  The Bigfoot in this film is not going to answer questions and develop a relationship with Jack like Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling.  The Bigfoot is irrational, animal, primal.  So, the Bigfoot (or something like the bear from Grizzly, let’s say) are essentially the same as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, and both types can then be viewed as universal/natural forces.  They do what they do, they do it very well, and they are inescapable because their victims exist in the villains’ world.  

Another aspect that the film plays with is the concept of fanaticism.  Jack is fanatical about solving the mystery of Demon Wood.  Bill is fanatical about killing the Bigfoot.  The two characters are identical in this way, but they don’t trust one another, fanatics tending to be a bit paranoid.  This fanaticism reduces Jack and Bill to the goal of their myopic quest, and it removes them from the normal world.  They become loners, and, distanced from humanity, they become a bit deranged.  Of course, Kennedy is about ten times (maybe more) the actor that O’Neill is, so it’s possible that Alston and company were trying to delineate the interior conflict between Jack’s crusade into the Bigfoot’s world and his desire to escape from it with his friends and return to the ordinary one.  It doesn’t work, because O’Neill plays Jack as so intense and unlikable (he snaps at Carrie and Cindy [Colleen McDermott] no matter what they say, no matter how much sense or nonsense they talk) that not only do you not want to follow him to the culmination of his journey, but you kind of wish the monster would just appear and rip his head off so that the film would just end.  There is also the fanaticism of the minister, but his fanaticism is purely religious in nature, though, like Jack and Bill, his narrow world view allows him to be lulled in by what he believes to be an angel, though the alien villain (hint: not the Bigfoot) is in actuality a “devil.”  The zealotry of his believer’s mind ultimately makes the minister do evil, because he has essentially met God (to his mind), and since he was devoted to this deity before it asked him to sacrifice human beings (and, of course, there is at least one story with sacrifice at its center in the Bible), it is just a short trip from faithfulness to maleficence (a theme which feels all too easy to believe in the face of what we know about and learn more of in our non-cinematic reality).  All this said, that Jack is allowed to live, even though he doesn’t come to any revelation about his shortcomings, makes no attempt to change himself, and is still a grade-A peckerwood by the time the film ends, makes the film less satisfying than it was already.  His arc is a flatline.  

I’ve said often that POV handheld camera shots do not work all that well when used for an extended period of time (Dark Passage and The Lady in the Lake being the two notable exceptions that always spring to my mind).  In horror films, they tend to work even less, since we know that they are either going to be false (a cat jumps onto a character’s back or whatever) or exactly what they appear to be (yet still somehow unsatisfying in their predetermination).  The effectiveness of this technique varies by filmmaker, and I can confidently say that Emmett Alston is not a director who should employ POV very often, or even at all.  That’s the problem.  Just about every two minutes of Demonwarp, we get either shaky handheld POV shots or shaky handheld shots of legs running or walking (sometimes both).  You may think I’m exaggerating this.  I’m not.  In fact, I may be underestimating the frequency of these occurrences.  I’m guessing that the filmmakers thought this would keep pacing up and build some tension in the stalking scenes.  Instead, it becomes swiftly redundant to the point that I actually groaned every time I saw yet another of these shots (though it does give us Kennedy swinging an ax in direct address, so that’s one in the plus column).  This level of (what I can only surmise is) naiveté, which can be charming even in junk movies, is herein merely annoying, and worst of all, boring.  This is yet another example of a film that has everything I like (mashing up pulp horror and science fiction and revenge and survival genres, amongst other things), but is so breathtakingly dull, it’s a chore to sit through.

MVT:  The Bigfoot costume (and other creature effects), courtesy of John Carl Buechler, are solid fun.  Unfortunately, like a twig placed under a hunk of pig iron, it just can’t hold up enough of the picture to make any of it worth one’s time. 

Make or Break:  The scene where Tom (Billy Jayne of the late, lamented Parker Lewis Can’t Lose television series) goes full Jack Nicholson not only made the large vein in my forehead begin to throb, but it also made me want to grab my television and stomp it to death for showing me this travesty.  Thankfully, the latter never came to fruition.

Score:  3/10