Cop Game (1988)

There once was a man named Vladimir Koziakin, and about this man’s personal life I know very little (read: nothing).  What I do know is that he produced one of the most entertaining, engrossing, and lovingly remembered books of my youth.  I’m of course speaking of Movie Monster Mazes, the 1976 tome that not only reinforced my love of monsters but also gave me new creatures to track down (if only their films would play on one of our stations; bear in mind this was back when we had maybe thirteen channels that could be tuned in on our television, and you were subject to whatever their programmers wanted to/could afford to run).  The premise is self-evident; there were fifty (“a panoramic journey through FIFTY (not Forty-Nine) FIFTY Monstrous Mazes!”) puzzles in the shapes of different cinematic fiends (as common as Godzilla, as obscure as The Monster of Piedras Blancas).  The accuracy on a few of the pieces would drive monster perfectionists insane (He spells Ghidorah as “Gidra” and calls Ray Harryhausen’s Ymir “Giant Ymu”), but I didn’t care.  I was too intent on running through the mazes (in pencil, of course, because the book cost ninety-five cents [!], and it’s not as if the book was easy to come by [that I recall]), erasing the lines, and doing it all over again (the erasures made their own permanent paths on the paper after a while, but the artwork was still attractive enough on its own to warrant paging through again and again).  There is a PDF of the book you can find online, the great tragedy of which is that many of the mazes have already been solved.  I’ve made it my mission in life to digitally remove all that and print each of these pieces to do again (and to share them with my monster-loving godchild if I can get him to lift his head up from his Nintendo DS or whatever the hell that thing is).  It’s good to have goals.  The relevance of this circuitous circumnavigation to Bruno Mattei’s (under the pseudonym of Bob Hunter) Cop Game (aka Cop Game: Giochi di Poliziotto), is that the film’s plot is so convoluted, you’ll almost certainly need to use the rewind button (the modern film viewer’s equivalent to a pencil eraser on a maze) to get all the way from start to finish with some idea of the plot intact.

During the final days of the Vietnam War, officers are being picked off one by one by former (maybe current?) members of the Cobra Force.  Enter special investigators Morgan (Brent Huff) and Hawk (Max Laurel) who are charged with getting to the bottom of this mess.  And they’re not afraid to break the rules in order to do it.

Post-Vietnam-War, movies set during almost any conflict tend to have a very dim view of the governments who send the soldiers off to fight in them as well as of war itself (though the latter notion in cinema has been around for much longer, it rose in prevalence around the time of this war and carried on ever after).  Typically this stink eye is focused on America, and there is far more anti-colonialist subtext at work (and not wrongfully so in both regards, I think).  Gone is the homogenized “rally round the flag, boys” depiction and attitude of good men fighting the good fight for a good reason.  Having the bloody footage of a war broadcast into homes on a daily basis not only peeled away the clean cut façade of warfare and changed the public perception of the men and women who fight, but it also forced filmmakers to steer toward more realistic portrayals of war time, even when the stories were fantastic in nature.  Things became grottier.  Characters became less idealized, and many began to lean far more to the dark side than to the light.  Italian filmmakers, combining the neo-realist movement developed and popularized by auteurs such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini with the sensational, primal elements which would quickly transform into a sleazy aura that became like a signature writ in giant, glowing, neon letters for exploitation hounds the world over, tucked into this new approach with gusto.  

Naturally, different filmmakers achieve different levels of success with this approach, and, if you know anything about Mattei you know he does his level best to hit all the right notes, though rarely do his compositions orchestrate the way I’m sure they were first envisioned.  I’m also quite confident that his motives were more monetary than artistic, and I have zero problems with this.  So, we get a lot of exterior shots of the Philippines standing in for Vietnam, and the footage from the streets adds the appropriate flavor to the proceedings.  The attitude is present with Hawk telling Morgan that he comes “from a country of assholes,” that America is “playing cowboys and Indians” in Vietnam, and most presciently, “After you get back home, you will forget all about me.  But I will still be here, drowning in a sea of shit.”  Shooman (Robert Marius) commands the Cobra Force, and is alleged to have destroyed a village full of women and children in bloodthirsty pursuit of the Viet Cong (a trope of Vietnam War films inspired by the infamous My Lai Massacre in 1968). 

Likewise, we get the populist components such as plentiful gun fights, chases, and brawls.  Hawk and Morgan break a suspect’s fingers to get him to talk (in broad daylight and full view of anyone wandering by).  What feels like a large chunk of run time takes place intercutting back and forth to scenes in a strip club (with French cut bikini bottoms and fashionably torn half shirts aplenty, but somehow no nudity) which feels more Eighties than anything else in this film, barring Huff’s dangly left earring.  Morgan and Hawk are flippant to their direct superior Captain Kirk (yes, really, and played by the late, great Romano Puppo) and everyone else they encounter, dress exclusively in street clothes, and don’t give shit one about any collateral damage they cause while doing their job.  The film does manage to balance these two perspectives (gritty, yet overwrought) fairly well, but it also piles on plot points nigh unto the breaking point.  In fact, once you add on the idea that a Russian spy named Vladimir has infiltrated the American armed forces, may or may not be a heroin dealer, and may or may not have had a hand in or is just spreading rumors about the village massacre and what any of this has to do with the initial murders, your head will be spinning, especially since the filmmakers don’t care about connecting scenes or ideas until it’s absolutely necessary.  Luckily, the aspects of the film that work (Mattei knows his way around action sequences, and there is a quasi-Noir angle that I enjoyed) do so well enough that the labyrinthine story and the writhing the script has to do in order to attempt resolving it become like frosting on the multi-flavored layer cake that is Cop Game.

MVT:  Huff loves giving everybody guff (yes, I made this sentence rhyme; sue me).  He is jaw-clenchingly anti-everything, so much of the joy in watching his character do his thing lies in how relentlessly hard-headed he is in every single way.

Make or Break:  Without giving away exactly why it’s so outstanding, there is a car chase in this film that I would attest can stand up to any in the history of cinema.  Okay, that’s an outright lie, but it’s so much damned fun, I couldn’t help loving every second of it.

Score:  6.5/10     

Alien From The Deep (1989)

Eco-warriors Jane (Marina Giulia Cavalli) and Lee (Robert Marius) infiltrate a jungle island with the aim of blowing the lid off evil corporation E-Chem's dumping-nuclear-waste-into-a-volcano scam. Bob (Daniel Bosch), the quasi-mercenary snake farmer, joins in the fun after his slick moves fail to charm Jane ("Don't touch me, you snake squeezer!") into his bed. They inevitably butt heads with Colonel Kovacks (Charles Napier), the head of the waste-dumping plant, as well as a giant alien who is attracted by the raw power of the radioactive material and can infect humans with its touch. Got all that? Good.

As you're probably aware, Antonio Margheriti (credited here under his "Anthony Dawson" pseudonym) has long been a mainstay of Italian exploitation cinema. And, if you're a fan of exploitation cinema, you know that no one does rip-offs like the Italians. Here, the cash-in is focused on James Cameron's Aliens, but I'm not so sure the film knows that. The whole extra-terrestrial aspect of the story feels tacked on (pretty much beginning and ending in the film's third act), almost as if Margheriti spotted the movie's poster one morning about three quarters of the way through production and realized, "Oh yeah, there's supposed to be an alien in Alien From The Deep. Up until this point, the film has been a decent little jungle adventure, complete with smoldering, papier mache volcano (but more on that in a moment).

The characters are stock for this type of affair. The hero is stoic but not uncaring. The heroine is independent and idealistic but still needs a man to lean on. Her companion is a placeholder for the hero. The villain is cruel and single-minded. And the nutsy-cuckoo nuclear physicist (Luciano Pigozzi) is always right, even when postulating the most outrageous theories. Plus, the henchmen are uniformly incompetent. All the actors ACT with all their might, even in the quietest scenes. And, while it's always fun to watch him growl his way through a performance, even Napier takes it one step beyond.

Naturally, one doesn't watch a movie like this for its thespian excellence. No, movies like this exist for pure entertainment purposes, and, on that score, Alien From The Deep delivers. Margheriti is a skilled craftsman at pacing, and the film never lags enough to bore the viewer. In fact, I would argue that the only time you'll look at your watch while seeing this film is when you start wondering where the hell the alien is. As an aside, the editing in this film tends to favor the non-disclosure of events. By that I mean, something will happen directly offscreen, but we're shown a character's closeup or somesuch. We then cut to the effect of the unseen action, say a tree falling after being hit by something. Whether this technique is due to budgetary constraints or lazy coverage is debatable, but my suspicion lies with the former.

There's a lot of miniature effects work in the movie, and it rarely, if ever, comes off as convincing. Thank God, because it just adds another layer of fun to be had. The island's volcano looks like it's ready for some sixth grader to pour vinegar down the top and take third place at the science fair. The most entertaining miniature use, however, involves intrepid guard Rodney, a boat, and a dock loaded with high explosives. You'll think you're watching something from Sid & Marty Krofft. Additionally, there's at least one nice mannequin death, and there are some okay gore effects, too.

Finally, let's look at the Aliens aspect of the film (I figure, if Margheriti doesn't have to bring it up until the end, neither do I). The creature's first (and second, and third) appearance will leave you thinking it's a giant mollusk with a stiff neck. However, we find out in the sidesplitting finale that there's much more (and much less) to it. The design will not have H.R. Giger fearing for his livelihood. It consists of "stuff" glued onto a stiff understructure with tubing wrapped around it, and it performs like a Punchinello marionette. I mean, it's not as hilarious on first view as Luigi Cozzi's Cyclops from Contamination, but it makes Carlo Rambaldi's Kong robot look like an Olympic gymnast.

Just about every beat from the end of Cameron's film is copied, or at least the ones Margheriti felt were most exploitable. The giant alien is attacked with heavy machinery. It has a version of the pharyngeal jaws of Giger's creation (sort of). There's even flamethrower action and a gut-busting climax involving a long fall. But I can see why James Cameron and Fox never bothered to sue, and you will, too.

There's more, of course, but I wouldn't want to ruin any more of this film for you than I already have. Sure, it's a rip-off flick, but it's so joyfully threadbare, you never really care. Plus, it does what it says it will do: Entertain you for 85 minutes with an adventure which is (eventually) about a giant alien from the deep. Maybe Bob the snake farmer sums it up best at the film's conclusion: "But if it was just a warning, who would want to believe it?" Who, indeed?

MVT: Charles Napier. The man's a consummate professional who plays it totally straight, and your interest automatically picks up when he's onscreen, ready to scowl and growl.

Make or Break: The alien, while not as well-done as Stan Winston's Queen Alien, really is the big draw, and it's a ton of fun watching it act like the star of Warhol's Empire.

Score: 7/10