The Last Match (1991)

Cliff (surly Oliver Tobias) is the super-terrific quarterback of some unnamed football team, and as Fabrizio DeAngelis’ (under the super-terrific nom de guerre Larry Ludman) The Last Match (aka L’ultima Meta) opens, he somehow manages to pull a super-terrific win against another unnamed team out of his ass (not that any of this is shown in any coherent fashion), all while super-terrific Coach Keith (the ever-enthusiastic Ernest Borgnine) cheers him on from the sidelines.  Shortly thereafter, and for absolutely no discernible reason, some anonymous guy slips drugs into the handbag of Cliff’s daughter Suzy (the super-terrifically cute Melissa Palmisano), who has been vacationing in the Dominican Republic with her super-terrifically overstimulated boyfriend George (Robert Floyd).  Suzy is taken to the not-so-super-terrific prison governed by Warden Yachin (Henry Silva), and after Cliff kind of/sort of runs into nothing but red tape, he decides that his only option is to bust his little girl out.  In his football uniform.

Sports films are typically about the triumph of the human spirit.  It is less important that the protagonist emerges victorious in whatever athletic field in which they are engaged than it is that he/she overcomes his/her inner demons and character flaws to become a stronger person in the process (Exhibit A: Rocky).  Audiences love to cheer on the underdog, because they identify with the archetype.  Everyone feels like they’re up against seemingly insurmountable odds at some point or another.  Not being a sports fan, you would think that sports films wouldn’t appeal to me, but the plain fact is that they do, and this is because of what I mentioned above.  The best in this genre play to a broad audience that transcend the sports aspects.  

If anything, the actual sports in a sports film usually play like the fights in an action film or the finale of a horror film.  In the good ones, they are the delicious gravy on the meat of character development and thematic exploration.  In the bad ones, they are filler designed to distract you from the film’s innate shortcomings.  It’s kind of rare that we get a sports film where the athletes are on top and stay on top from beginning to end.  After all, where’s the excitement in that?  What’s the point if the protagonist(s) never have to rise above mighty hardships?  This, then, is the primary reason why The Last Match is a dud.  We’re told (but not until the film’s end) that Cliff’s team starts off poorly in every game, but they always manage to turn it around and win.  As previously hinted, the football games are edited in such a random manner (by Adriano Tagliavia, under the super-terrifically-on-the-nose pseudonym Adrian Cut; get it?), we never see Cliff’s team go through this supposed struggle, because we’re never one hundred percent certain what the hell is going on at all.  In fact, I would go so far as stating that the only shots that make any sense in these sequences are those of Coach Keith doing his coaching thing and those of the cheerleaders doing their cheerleading thing.  We have to take it as writ that Cliff’s team are all winners all the time, which is great if you bet on their games, but it doesn’t work for a film, even one that’s not strictly about football (despite the inordinate amount of time devoted to showing football games onscreen).

Football players are often likened to modern day gladiators; warriors who do battle on a field of honor (we’re talking theoretically here).  Consequently, they tend to be depicted in fictive works as large, scowling thugs (sometimes with a heart of gold, if the classic “Mean” Joe Green Coca-Cola commercial has taught us anything at all).  Nevertheless, this doesn’t really work on film, unless their purpose is as either henchmen or cannon fodder (and make no mistake, the majority of Cliff’s team are exactly that, though I don’t recall any of them getting so much as grazed by a bullet with one exception).  The sports film protagonist needs to have something with which viewers can connect, even if they’re not very nice people (Exhibit B: Raging Bull).  This is the secondary reason why The Last Match is a clunker.  Cliff, as essayed by Tobias, is one of the most miserable pricks I’ve seen as the protagonist in a film in quite a while.  He mildly tolerates everyone with whom he comes into contact.  He is aloof to the point of apathy, even when talking with his daughter, who we have to take it on faith that he loves since he goes through all this hassle to help her out (watch his non-reaction to the injury of one of his pals which is discovered, predictably, on the plane ride home, if the rest of the mountain of evidence in the film up to that point doesn’t convince you).  He is condescending, even to the people who are on his side (including, but not limited to, a perfectly wasted Martin Balsam).  When a character who previously gave Cliff shit (justifiably or not) suddenly pops up and says he wants to talk, Cliff instantly whoops the man’s ass (justifiably or not) rather than hear even one word he has to say.  While we certainly feel for Suzy to some extent or another, Cliff is nothing but a curmudgeon, the blunt, dull instrument this film uses to bang square pegs into round holes.

The film is also adamant in its depiction of the local populace.  The Dominicans in The Last Match HATE Americans (I don’t think any Dominican ever refers to any non-Dominican characters by their actual names; it’s always as “American”).  One of Suzy’s jailers states “nothing is denied you people in my country.”  Yachin basically tells Cliff point blank that he’s banging Cliff’s daughter and throwing it in his face simply because Cliff and Suzy are Americans.  Whether or not this enmity is warranted, the filmmakers waste even less time jumping to portray Dominicans as base creatures and their nation as a corrupt hellhole (though I don’t think it has to be Dominicans; I’m sure just about any non-white country/populace would suffice for the filmmakers).  Suzy is stripped and searched after her arrest, and we get reaction shots of the male guards ogling her like wolves eyeing up a lame deer.  Balsam’s character states, “Nobody of any importance ever comes to this godforsaken part of the world.”   A character wants Cliff and his pals to take his son out of the country with them, because he knows just how horrible it is living there.  We’ve definitely seen these sorts of attitudes before in genre films, but ordinarily they aren’t so pointed, so mean, as they are here.  

Finally, the film’s climax seems to miss its own point.  Even while we look forward to the assault on the prison, it doesn’t play out satisfyingly.  The only standout to the affair is that the good guys all wear their uniforms (which boggles the mind if they weren’t looking to be recognized and/or cause an international incident).  After all of the relentless dourness that comes before it, the film needed a win in this regard, but it’s as joyless as everything and everyone else in the film, and it robs it of what appeal it may have had.

MVT:  Borgnine gives it a lot of gusto, but he’s the one brightly over-ebullient spot in an otherwise moribund picture. 

Make or Break:  When Yachin receives his comeuppance, it’s anticlimactic in just about every respect.  Silva (and the audience) deserve better.

Score:  4.5/10

Light Blast (1985)

When CHiPs originally aired (from 1977 to 1983), it was clear early on that co-star Erik Estrada was the lynchpin around which this televisual universe spun.  His Frank “Ponch” Poncherello was a swaggering ladies’ man who was adept at his job but also wasn’t above being taken down a peg when he acted like an ass (which was at least once per episode).  Contrasted against his straitlaced (nay, torpid) partner, Jon Baker (Larry Wilcox), it’s little wonder why Estrada garnered the majority of the popularity from the show.  He had charisma and looks (including a smile usually reserved only for grade school class photos), and sometimes that’s enough.  Of course, part of CHiPs’ fame also rested on the fact that it showcased some truly beautiful ladies being beautiful in tight uniforms, like Randi Oakes and Brianne Leary, and sometimes that’s enough, too.  Add to this the comedic relief stylings of Grossman (Paul Linke) and Harlan Arliss (Lou Wagner), and you get a recipe for success.  But television series don’t last forever, and Estrada rode his popularity as far as he could, appearing in a slew of direct-to-video films that varied in quality from middling to piss-poor.  He also gave a great turn as Marco Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar Diego Garcia Marquez on the animated Sealab 2021, prominently displaying his funny bone (though honestly, the show was only good up until the fantastic Harry Goz passed away, in my opinion).  So, where does Enzo G. Castellari’s Light Blast (aka Colpi Di Luce aka Neonkiller), a film which I believe actually had a theatrical release (but I’m not one hundred percent on that) fit on the Estrada spectrum?  I’d say it sits at the higher end of the curve, but it’s still not very good, and I believe that Estrada himself has very little to do with its quality, regardless.

A randy couple are melted (in imitation of the Nazis being melted at the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark) during Yuri Svoboda’s (Ennio Girolami) testing of his new light-based superweapon.  Cut to: Detective Ron Warren (Estrada) taking out a couple of bank robbers wearing nothing but his gotchies and a turkey (with fries on the side).  Ron and his partner, Curtis Swann (Michael Pritchard, in the Jon Baker/Grossman role), are assigned to track down Yuri and his goons after the physicist (NOT a physician as stated on IMDb) threatens to destroy San Francisco if he’s not paid five million dollars (and then ten million, and then twenty million).

Light Blast is very much a conservative film in how it views the world, particularly with regards to the criminal element.  This is underscored in the sequence of Ron’s introduction.  The bank robbers are filthy scumbags, cackling with glee at their vicious misdeeds.  They even shoot a hostage in the back a few times just for kicks (and to make the audience detest them all the more).  An older woman watching this goes positively bloodthirsty, demanding that the cops murder the bad guys outright.  Naturally, Ron is happy to oblige, taking out the robbers and stating, “It’s maggots like you that make me like my job.”  Crime is not to be tolerated, and its perpetrators cannot be allowed to live (one has to wonder how Ron would deal with, say, a jaywalker?).  This is a black and white world, populated with black and white characters.  The film this most resembles in this respect (or at least the one I kept referencing in my mind) is Cobra which opens in a similar fashion (and to be fair, a great many films of this ilk contain prologue/hero intro scenes in this vein), but was released the following year.  Could it be that for once the Italian film industry were leaders rather than copycats?  Well, no, not really, since Light Blast’s attitude towards criminals is an extension of films like the Death Wish and Dirty Harry franchises, and certainly there were other films in between with a similar outlook (typically with a vigilante hero rather than a cop, but the two quickly intermingled and became a third thing), but the Light Blast/Cobra comparison really sticks out to me.  

Further to this is the idea that Ron is a man for whom his job is his life (killing’s his business, and business is fine).  Sure, we’re given a few token scenes of “domestic” life with his girlfriend Jack (Peggy Rowe), but they are totally joyless.  There is absolutely no chemistry between these two characters, and Jack is essentially an expositional tool and a motive for vengeance only.  In the middle of a miserable dinner, Jack races to the phone when it rings and then jets out when work comes a-calling.  He gets more excited investigating a crime scene than he does spending time with his lady friend.  Ron is so myopically intent on taking out bad guys, he neither blinks nor shows any sense of loss when his colleagues are killed or hurt (actually, he is further encouraged to go on the warpath by a wounded co-worker [“get those son of a bitches”]; Ron’s sensibility is the only correct one).  He doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger on an adversary.  He has no compunction about using innocent bystanders to aid him in tailing one of Yuri’s henchmen rather than using the skills we assume he should possess as a police officer.  He is a sociopath, a characteristic remarked upon explicitly by Yuri, who claims that he admires Ron’s “cold efficiency.”  And that’s coming from a guy who liquefies human beings for a living.

This brings us to the character of Yuri himself, an equally forbidding character and the one interesting concept in the film.  Yuri is a pure comic book supervillain.  He employs a super-science weapon to hold power over the masses (the fact that it only affects people in proximity to liquid crystal display time pieces is a flaw, to be sure).  He has numerous henchmen, a notion I’ve always simultaneously loved and questioned, because for how marvelous it would be to have them, the practicalities of recruitment and retention make them extremely implausible (so let’s just take them on face value).  He has an underground lair in an unusual location.  But most of all, he believes that he’s doing all of this horrible stuff with the noblest of intentions driven by a personal tragedy.  Yuri understands that “money buys power,” and that his invention will make him “more powerful than God” (assuming God wears a digital watch; most likely a Casio Databank).  Nevertheless, he declares that his ultimate goal is world peace, might making right and all that.  He is a monster with a cause, just like Ron.  The only difference is that Yuri is indiscriminate in his choice of victims, while Ron is only slightly more discerning.

MVT:  The film’s action sequences stand out for being both multitudinous and well-executed.  They are the glue binding the film together, but I think they ultimately struggle to do so because the non-action scenes are so incredibly hollow, it makes sitting in one spot in anticipation of the next car chase/shootout/et cetera something of a chore.  Unless you enjoy reaction shots without reactions.

Make or Break:  The first body melt piqued my interest, and Castellari doesn’t shy away from the gore.  If only there had been just a few more of them.

Score:  5.75/10       

The Milpitas Monster (1976)

The late, great Paul Frees (trust me, you’ve heard his voice before, even if you don’t recognize the name) narrates a short history of the burg of Milpitas, California and its relationship to excessive garbage dumping (“As goes Milpitas – So goes the State”).  After a scene or two of officials and scientists (none of whom will have an impact on the film whatsoever) declaring concern over the smell of all the pollution in the bay area, we are whisked away to the local “sludge lagoon,” where hobo (in the mode of Foster Brooks) George flops around and tries to fish.  Suddenly, the titanic, titular terror appears from the water to wreak semi-havoc and steal people’s garbage cans, and we’re kind of off to the races.

There is a gang of punk kids in Robert L. Burrill’s The Milpitas Monster, and they are something special to behold.  These aren’t punks in the sense of mohawks and torn clothes.  These are punks in the sense of juvenile delinquents with too much time on their hands and likely overindulgent parents, and despite that, they are utter failures at their calling.  They delight in taunting our non-hero Jeff by calling him “Penguin” For no apparent reason.  They drive to their high school on their day off for kicks and then complain that there’s nothing going on there.  They decide they are going to “stink up the whole town” by painting giant footprints all over the place in imitation of the actual ones that are turning up all over the place (I don’t think they ever get around to actually doing this; they’re all lip).  They sneak George into the big school dance in a garbage can, spike the punch, and then just kind of hang out.  They receive more screen time than almost any other character, but they add nothing to the film other than giving us scenes of brats being bratty.  They create no tension, they suffer no comeuppance, and they advance the story not one whit.  Nevertheless, in a film about a giant monster, they are still the most interesting thing in it, and they are not that interesting at all.

Way, way back in time, monster kids formed a small cult of special effects enthusiasts and amateur filmmakers, some of whom would go on to professional careers and acclaim (the most notable I can think of being David Allen, Dennis Muren, and Jim Danforth who all worked on the visual effects for the equally low budget but exponentially more entertaining Equinox).  Magazines like Cinemagic (created by another effects nut, Don Dohler of Nightbeast fame) gave detailed descriptions of how to create special effects on very little bread.  It celebrated creativity and problem-solving (something which has become a lost art, in my opinion), and it came from a grass roots perspective that paid homage to effects pioneers like Georges Melies, even if it didn’t realize or acknowledge outwardly it was doing so.  

The magazine also gave a forum for young filmmakers to advertise and share their work with other like-minded people.  Here’s a random example from issue twenty (volume four, number two): “Company for the Night.  A quiet tale of a corpse who after a hundred years, yearns for the warmth and companionship of the living.  He leaves the grave and joins an elderly couple for the night.  Producer: ONO Productions, Ltd.  Director/Writer/Camera: John Dixon.  FX include: stop-motion, animation, miniature cemetery set and house set.  Regular-8.  Running time: 20 – 30 minutes.”  Now, not all of the stories were this seemingly mature.  In fact, a great many were simply riffs on popular horror/science fiction properties of the time, barebones skeletons existing only to hang some special effects meat on (which can be a perfectly acceptable approach, mind you).  Burrill and company are certainly in this latter category (and for the record, I have never seen Company for the Night, so I cannot comment on its actual quality or even if it ever reached completion).  He and his friends were high school students at the time of this film’s production, and they put this whole thing together for around eleven thousand dollars.  What I found amazing watching the film is how they wrung every last ounce of production value out of that budget.  There are aerial shots (granted, pretty shaky, but still) and a number of cameos from the likes of television horror host Bob Wilkins as well as the aforementioned Frees (both of whom I can only assume did this as a favor, unless they decided they wanted to work dirt cheap for a few hours).  There is the sense that everyone involved wanted to contribute and make this film work in the tradition of “let’s put on a show” storylines the world over.  It’s this spirit of community that imbues The Milpitas Monster with what charms it has.

The enviro-horror angle of the story is underplayed (and it should be stated that this film is intended more as a comedy than anything else, but even comedies can have themes and usually contain at least a few humorous moments) focusing only on the wicked bad smell of all the garbage around town.  It doesn’t delve even slightly into the actual impact of over-dumping, the actual contamination of ground and water, or anything of the sort (outside of the giant monster, but since it consumes garbage, it could be argued that it’s actually a solution to the issue; not the best solution obviously, but a solution nonetheless).  Every character comments about the stink of things (scientists complain about a fish’s odor, officials complain about water odor, Jeff complains about girlfriend Priscilla’s perfume odor) but not about the health risks involved.  

With all this in mind, then, let’s talk about the film’s effects, since they are its sole raison d’etre.  The first effect we see is the monster’s stop motion hand clenching its way toward the surface of the sludge lagoon.  This is quickly followed by a full-sized prop of the beast’s hand emerging from the water, quickly followed by some more stop motion work of the creature taking its first flight.  Even for a god like Ray Harryhausen, the process is both labor and time intensive, and for the resources they had, I’d say the filmmakers here did a competent, if not stunning, job in this respect.  The prop claw works well, primarily because it’s only shown in quick shots, but it’s still good enough to stand up to others of its ilk.  There are some forced perspective shots that effectively place the monster in real environments.  The one area where the effects work really stands out, though, is in its miniatures, particularly a scene involving the monster’s destruction of a local restaurant.  The scale is accurate, there is enough detail to pull off the illusion when compared to the actual building (come to think of it, I don’t recall offhand if the actual building is shown, so kudos for making it seem so), and most importantly, the lighting is correct.  It looks like a building lit by a street lamp, and it sells the image, even with a giant monster crouching next to it.  However, the monster suit itself is simply tragic.  Its head is a glorified gas mask (yeah, we get it, garbage stinks) with bug eyes.  Its body is formless and undetailed, like you might find on a high school mascot costume.  Worse than these are its wings, which are limp, shiny adornments that would make even The Bugaloos (look it up) laugh in derision.  For how much it does right in the visual effects department, it’s a crushing blow that the eponymous character just doesn’t work at all.  Combine this with the stilted editing, the awkward acting, and the lack of any cohesive storyline or compelling characters, and you have a film that’s more curio than captivating.

MVT:  For its myriad flaws, you truly have to admire the level of enthusiasm that gave birth to The Milpitas Monster.

Make or Break:  Once you realize that you’re going to be spending an inordinate amount of time with the pointless antics of George and the J.D. gang with absolutely nothing of consequence happening, you may want to tap out on this one.

Score:  3/10