Ninja Champion (IFD Films, 1986?)

Ninja Vs. Ninja (Filmark?, 1987)
A look at the wonderful world of IFD Films

[Note: Due to issues beyond our control, UR was unable to obtain the Korean death metal CD mentioned in the original "The Autumn of Asians" article. To make matters worse, technical issues kept this article from being posted before Autumn ended (December 21st). As a result of that, I figured that I'd make my debut on the site by fulfilling the promise for bad movies and Godfrey Ho. And since I'm running low on time, I figured I'd pay tribute to the man known for editing different movies together to make a new movie by stitching together some stuff I've previously written on the subject! Get ready for a bumpy ride, as we look at the final entry in the 2006 Autumn Winter of Asians...]

In the 1980′s, Sho Kosugi’s ninja movies (REVENGE OF THE NINJA, etc.) were extremely popular with American audiences, and imitations soon followed. Noting the newfound popularity of “ninja movies,” a film company in Hong Kong called IFD Films and Arts Limited hit upon a brilliantly sneaky idea; Instead of simply translating martial arts movies into English for Western markets as they had done in the past, they’d take footage from unfinished or otherwise “unreleasable” Asian movies, edit in some footage of white people in ninja costumes (under the idea that Americans would be more likely to see movies with stars who weren’t “foreign-looking”), and then use creative editing and redubbing the entire movie to make a single, semicoherent storyline.

This practice let IFD churn out a massive number of new “ninja” movies quickly and fairly inexpensively, allowing them to make a killing in the American home video market (along the home video market in several other countries). IFD paid close attention to what titles sold well and then gave other movies similar titles. For example, if a movie with the word “Thunderbolt” in the title sold well, they’d pump out more movies with the word “Thunderbolt” in the title.

They were also smart enough to use a “name” actor that audiences would be would be familiar with for their first batch ninja movies: Richard Harrison, an American actor known for his work in Italian spaghetti westerns, spy movies, and peplums (“gladiator” movies). One story has it that they hired Harrison to do a single movie and then chopped up his footage so that it could be spliced into multiple movies! No matter what the case was, Harrison stopped working with IFD and they sought out other actors to fill his place (often from local modeling agencies).

Another popular practice at IFD was to redo the film credits so that IFD employees were given credit for creating, directing, etc. (A practice similar to what American companies did while importing Japanese monster movies in the 1950′s and early 1960′s). Said employees almost always had “Western” pseudonyms, with the most famous one being that of the director “Godfrey Ho” (Real name: Ho Chi-Keung). Although he supposedly only directed the ninjas scenes and supervised the dubbing, Mr. Ho was credited with directing the entire movie. The story goes that since people started to catch on to the idea that “Godfrey Ho” meant that they were about to rent a “cut and paste” movie, IFD changed his pseudonym repeatedly.

Even after he left the company, their continued use of the “cut and paste” forumla and director psuedonyms have led many a person to conclude that Godfrey Ho has directed more movies than he really has. As a result, “Godfrey Ho” has become synonymous with any Asian movie where footage of caucasians gets spliced in (especially ninja movies.) and it’s still not known how many movies he actually “directed”.

Despite the fact that many martial arts movie fans hate these movies for not being “real” martial arts movies, many love them for the sheer entertainment value they provide. Although the movies themselves were nowhere near what most people would consider “good”, they are constantly hilarious and rarely boring (although they occasionally had some disturbing scenes). For example, their ninja movies often featured ninjas wearing multicolored costumes and headbands with the word “Ninja” written on them. Said ninjas often had supernatural powers that would give the ninja antics discribed at Real Ultimate Power a run for their money.

Just as funny where the scenes that attempted to show the “ninjas” communicating with characters from the Asian movie footage, in which it was obvious that the characters weren’t in the same room, let alone the same movie. Some IFD movies tried to get around this by having the characters ineract through telephone conversations (sometimes using a Garfield telephone). As you can guess, that didn’t really help much in the realism deparment. However, it does help a great deal in the “unintentionally hilarious” department.

One such movie is NINJA CHAMPION (1985 or 1986, it’s hard to say due to the conflicting information on this movie online). Sadly, this is one of those IFD movies with a disturbing scene in it. In fact, NINJA CHAMPION starts with a gang of criminals with painted faces (think Kabuki mixed with KISS) attacking a couple in the forest. After beating up the male, they grab the bikini-clad female, punch her in the stomach, and rape her. This is followed by the woman being treated (operated on?) in a hospital, demanding that she not have any anesthetics since she “deserves the pain”! Not exactly what I was hoping for from a ninja movie.

At some point in the future, we find that the couple has split up-the man (George) got married to another woman and the woman (Rose) has become a diamond smuggler who’s trackling down and killing her attackers on the side (one of them she kills using poisoned nipples). I should note that you don’t learn the characters’ names until much later in the movie. Later, it’s revealed that it’s been three months since the incident. That’s right folks, George dumped his girlfriend and got married in under three months.

Anyway, Interpol gets involved because of their interest in stoppping the smuggling (and in order to justify the ninja footage), with footage from the two movies being edited and dubbed to make it look like two characters are talking on the phone. Speaking of phones, when (stock footage of) Richard Harrison makes a cameo appearance, he’s shown using a novelty Garfield phone! So while the good Interpol agent/ninja goes after the evil ninjas behind the diamond smuggling ring, George tries to get back with Rose (As you can imagine, she’s less than thrilled to see him again) and Rose tries to kill off the rest of the rapists. But when Rose seems to die and George sets out to avenge her death, he notices a woman that seems to be Rose. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will tell you that it involves some insane plot twists and a gun-toting retard. Seriously.

The “source movie” has some decent fights, including a bizarre sequence in which George displays supernatural powers in order to fight off some bad guys. I’m guessing that he got those after being attacked at the beginning of the movie. Either that, or Rose has an even better reason to hate him.

Judging from some of the signs at an airport sequence and a brief cameo by Bruceploitation legend Dragon Lee, I’m guessing that the “source movie’ was made in Korea. Although the propaganda van in the parade scene makes me wonder if the “source movie” is North Korean in origin. The ninja footage has some pretty interesting fight sequences as well, such as an evil ninja who likes using a giant ring as a weapon (which was apparently recycled in the movie NINJA CONNECTION). If you can find NINJA CHAMPION and like bad movies, it’s well worth a look. Just be prepared for the beginning…

But just as IFD piggybacked on the success of Sho Kosugi movies, others noticed the popularity of IFD’s ninja movies and copied them! One of these movies is a little gem from 1987 called NINJA VS. NINJA, and it plays out almost exactly like a typical IFD “cut and paste” ninja movie (only without the headbands):

Non-Asian ninjas being the source of the problems seen in the footage taken from another movie? Check!

Goofy “special” ninja techniques? Check (The multiple arm trick and dividing scene are must sees)!

Hilariously bad dubbing? Check!

Music lifted from American sources? Check!

A ninja shows someone a picture of a character from the other movie that’s clearly a movie still? Check!

Characters from different sets of footage “interacting”? Check!

However, there are some differences that set this apart from a typical IFD movie. The credits don’t bother to “Westernize” most of the cast’s names, the ninja suits seem to be a size too big, and the ninja scenes lack the “polish” that ones shot by IFD have (And considering how many reviewers look down on the quality of IFD’s stuff, that’s an accomplishment). For example, cuts between different sets of footage in this movie are more abrupt than in a typical IFD ninja movie.

While IFD movies at least tried to establish why characters from different sets of footage would meet, NINJA VS. NINJA often opts to sudden cut to a shot of another character, perhaps under the impression that the audience will come up with an explanation. I didn’t see any indication of what film company originally made this, but I did find a website that claims Filmark, a company known for “cut and paste” movies like ROBO VAMPIRE and whose founder had done work with IFD president Joseph Lai in the past, was behind it.

The movie used to make the bulk of NINJA VS. NINJA is an odd crime drama that’d be extremely entertaining even without the added ninja scenes! It involves a cop (made into a CIA agent in NVN’s dub) who’s out to avenge the death of his wife (and injury of his son) caused by by a bomb set up by two criminals: one who uses his mastery of the iron skin technique(!) to kill people without fear of being injured by knives or guns and the other who is a pervert that was driven insane by the death of his cross-eyed girlfriend. No, really. There are some pretty interesting, non humorous scenes and fighting in this movie as well.

According to this website, these scenes are from a 1981 movie called BOMB SHELL. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, there’s also a scene featuring the worst disguises ever put on film (including a guy wearing swim goggles and plastic vampire fangs). However I forget if it this was in the original movie or if it was a newly shot scene.

Tai Seng Entertainment’s release is a cropped, full frame VHS transfer with faded colors and some tape glitches. Oddly enough, this (to my knowledge) is actually a licensed release from Ocean Shores (their watermark shows up twice during the movie). Back in the 1980′s, someone at Ocean Shores (and sadly, several other Asian companies) decided that it’d be a good idea to make full frame, VHS masters and junk the original films for easier storage! The DVD itself is bare bones, having 8 chapter stops, a semi-animated menu, and some previews. But trust me, the sheer entertianment value of NINJA VS. NINJA makes up for it.

Since Tai Seng released NINJA VS. NINJA onto VHS and DVD years ago, so I can imagine that you can find it cheap on Amazon or Ebay. Or you could do what I did and pick up Tai Seng’s “Ninja Six” set, a collection of titles they had previously released repackaged into a single box. It contains NINJA HUNTER, NINJA IN THE DEADLY TRAP, NINJA IN THE USA, NINJA VS. BRUCE LEE (starring Bruce Le), NINJA VS. NINJA, and NINJA VS. SHAOLIN GUARDS. I got mine for about $16.00. However, you’ll want to buy some empty amaray cases when you get this, since Tai Seng decided to package them by having the DVDs stacked on a hub with foam at the bottom! I should also note that with the exception of NINJA VS. NINJA, none of these are IFD-style ninja movies.

Alternately, you could try renting it through your local library’s rental system (Seriously, I got a lot of library references while looking up information for this title online). Reviews and screenshots for NINJA VS. NINJA and some of the other titles in the Ninja Six collection can be found here. However, the reviews there contain some minor spoilers.

However, the good times couldn’t last forever and the ninja craze eventually died down. Some have even claimed that IFD killed off the ninja craze via flooding the market with “low quality” ninja movies. No matter how the ninja craze ended, IFD survived that setback by appling the “cut and paste” formula of mixing Asian movie footage with footage of white (and occasionally black) people to genres like superheroes, kickboxing, war, horror, and crime thrillers. They also do straightforward (but still unintentionally hilarious) translations of various Asian live-action movies (mostly martial arts movies) and animation. As for Godfrey Ho, he did some (from what I hear) decent movies that didn’t use any footage from other movies and now (at least, according to Wikipedia) teaches at the Hong Kong Film Academy.

Although they were widely available on VHS in the 1980′s, it’s hard to find licensed DVDs of IFD movies in America nowadays. As far as I know, Digiview and DG Distributors are the only American companies who license movies from IFD. Digiview tends to handle fake anime and dubbed “normal” martial arts movies, while DG Distributors did two dubbed martial arts movies and a “cut and paste” kickboxing movie.

However, many unlicensed DVDs of IFD movies are floating around out there; so let the buyer beware. But there is a ray of hope, seeing as how several “cut and paste” ninja movies are on the Turner Classic Movie channel’s film database, where people can vote for movies that they’d like to see on DVD.

Since these movies can be hard to find (and since technical issues kept me from getting any screenshots), here are some links to various IFD movie trailers that I found online:

IFD’s Official Website (Has many trailers, but be warned that not all of them are “safe for work”)

THE ULTIMATE NINJA
NINJA DRAGON
THE NINJA SQUAD
ZODIAC AMERICA: THE SUPER MASTER (aka ZOMBIE VS. NINJA)
NINJA TERMINATOR
ZODIAC AMERICA 2: EVIL
DESTROYER

Space Sentinels & The Freedom Force: The Complete Series
Filmation, 1977/1978: BCI/Ink & Paint/Entertainment Rights, 2006
4:3, 286/55 minutes, English; Spanish Audio Track (Space Sentinels only)
Summary | MORE THAN WOLF…MORE THAN MAN!

Saturday morning cartoons, especially in the 1970s, were a dime a dozen and most flickered on and off within a year (some still do).  I originally planned to review one such cartoon, Space Sentinels, to make fun of Filmation.  Strangely, something happened while watching the series.  I actually liked the show.

Sure, there are problems with the series.  It’s badly acted in places.  The animation is of Filmation standard.  It’s as goofy as every other series of its era.  Still, is Space Sentinels that bad when attempting to pick the show apart as I will with this review?

Well, it can’t be worse than Hammerman, can it?  Then again, nothing is.

MORPHEUS, THE SINISTER SENTINEL (Len Janson & Chuck Menville)

During the course of “Morpheus” we’re introduced to the Young Sentinels and their powers.  To wit:

Hercules, the strongman voiced by George DiCenzo, is an affable health nut.

Mercury is the resident fast-running smartass who knows martial arts since he’s Chinese.  It’s an unfortunate character trait, but this seems to be a part of voiceover artist Evan Kim’s personality so it avoids being stain-your-jeans racist.

Dee Timberlake is Astraea, the black female leader of the Young Sentinels.  She’s actually a well-rounded character, avoiding easy stereotype and being what the Wonder Twins would be if they weren’t so awfully realized.

MO (uncredited voiceover by – ahem – Filmation founder Lou Scheimer) is the cranky Dustin Hoffman-esque maintenance robot.  Sentinel One‘s human interface (DiCenzo) takes the form of a giant holographic head with a bit of personality, but he’s mainly there as a mentor for the Young Sentinels.  Origins are explained during the opening credits, which gets that neatly out of the way.

Now to the plot of the first episode.  Morpheus is a prototype Sentinel with the power of all three Young Sentinels, but he’s evil.  You can tell because he has no irises and by his, well, looking like Satan.  He steals Maintenance Operator (MO’s “real name”) and plans on building countless Sentinel One duplicates in his plan to conquer the universe.  This backfires on him when the Sentinels One turn on him and take over his ship, banishing Morpheus to deep space.  It’s a simple plot to introduce the show and its particulars, and there’s nothing too goofy about the episode.  That won’t last.

SPACE GIANTS (Len Janson & Chuck Menville)

Now we’re in Filmation territory.  Zyra, a thief posing as an alien from another world, wants to defraud the American government out of gold deposits by explaining that gold fuels her ship.  Needless to say, she’s lying.  Enter the plot twist as the robots realize how imperfect the humans are, gaining sentience and amassing an army to destroy the humans.  Luckily, the robots’ plan – and the army they amass – literally falls apart as the Young Sentinels knock one of the robots down.  Its weight and a domino effect causes the San Alphonso fault to open and the robots to fall into it.  This sort of plot twist will appear throughout Space Sentinels.  Viewers should get familiar with it.

MO’s infatuation with Astraea begins here, by the way.  Why a robot would develop an attraction for a human woman at all is not adequately explained.  Maybe it shouldn’t be.

THE TIME TRAVELER (Kathleen Barnes & David Wise)

David Wise would later write for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  His style is in full display here as this story features time travel, a tyrannosaur (which really doesn’t add to the story), rocket launches and Hercules’ obsession with fragrant cheeses.  Being a time travel story it’s blatantly obvious how the cartoon ends, but villain du jour Kronos’ voiceover is pretty good and the show moves along at a fast and entertaining clip.

Unlike when other writers use the kitchen-sink approach to cartoons, Wise and co-writer Kathleen Barnes use this approach well, even making reference to Kronos’ people being excluded from extraterrestrial politics for being too war-like.  The episode isn’t perfect, but it uses its clichés effectively.

THE SORCERESS (Kathleen Barnes & David Wise)

What’s in Barnes and Wise’s kitchen sink here?  A matter/energy converter, a supercomputer from another dimension, energy duplicates, mind control and the North Pole.  Combining these elements, the results end up the same as with the last episode, except that the cliché of duplicates performing evil deeds isn’t that exciting.  There’s really nothing notable about “The Sorceress” at all aside from Mercury acting out-of-character and MO constantly beating Hercules at 3D Pong.  Well, the Sentinel duplicates did become ape-like perversions of themselves – which is funny since Hercules was plucked from prehistoric Europe, but I digress.  The backgrounds are great as per Filmation standard.

THE RETURN OF ANUBIS (Don Glut)

Three explorers accidentally wake Anubis up from a five-thousand-year slumber, causing the Egyptian god of embalming to turn them into hieroglyphs.  Meanwhile, Hercules and Mercury try to harness their own pyramid power (i.e., for Hercules to nap) until Sentinel One tells them of Anubis’ Power Pyramid.  Anubis announces himself as the “god of darkness” (good research, Glut) and his plan of revenge on humans, using his Power Pyramid to emit a beam that causes a statue of Ramses II to topple.  After the Young Sentinels fix the statue, they enter Anubis’ pyramid base.  In one of those beauteous plot twists common to 1970s cartoons, Anubis is revealed to be an alien and the Power Pyramid an energy device that destroyed his world and harnesses immense power.  Sentinel One suggests that Anubis go back in time with the Power Pyramid to before he destroyed his planet, placating Anubis and causing him to decamp from his Earth base.

No one bothers asking Anubis what evolutionary forces caused him to be a humanoid jackal, whether his people all look like that, why he wears only a skirt and headgear or why the idiot didn’t figure to go back in time earlier.  Then again, it’s never worth it to explain Filmation cartoons – any superhero cartoon from the 1970s, actually.  Ten-year-olds aren’t expected to care about these things.

Barring the obligatory plot holes, “The Return of Anubis” isn’t that bad.  Anubis’ actions are that of a well-meaning alien feared and misunderstood by ancient Egyptians, causing the alien jackal to be entombed in stone and his spaceship to be walled up.  Unlike other villains in the series, his actions are understandable and his motives relatively benign.  He looks cool and has a pyramid-shaped spaceship.  He’s not a god like he says he is, of course, but who’s paying attention to detail?

THE WIZARD OF OD (J. Michael Reaves)

In an interview done for the Space Sentinels box set, Reaves considers this his “throw sods at the wall and see what sticks” episode.  Reality is being altered by some plot device and the Young Sentinels meet an elf named Teaser.  Teaser coerces them to go to the pastiche of The Wizard of Oz he calls a world and goofy shit happens.  The show ends with status quo restored, but you knew that.

I hate this episode with a passion.  If the very fabric of reality is being altered, Reaves could have turned MO into a living being or caused the ship to do more than have a chair turn into a hand.  I don’t care that Reaves had fun writing “The Wizard of Od” if I can’t have fun watching it.  Hercules’ fascination with health food is entertaining enough and the Young Sentinel banter is better than usual, but what happens to MO during the course of the episode?

Underwhelming.  Somehow MO’s eyes still function when his head is a goldfish bowl.  A fighter jet is constantly fighting a battle against its becoming a paper airplane and the Cheshire Cat is thrown into the episode to enhance the homage, but “The Wizard of Od” is one of those episodes where adult viewers watch it and go “what the fuck was the writer smoking?”  Like Filmation writers need to be on drugs to write something bizarre.  No one learned this lesson from watching Isis or Ghost Busters?

To reiterate, I really hate this episode.

THE PRIME SENTINEL (J. Michael Reaves)

The best Reaves story, but since his other stories are awful that’s not saying much.  The Prime Sentinel – basically, a giant computer the size of a planet and the leader of all Sentinels – is being overtaken by “The Force,” one of those seemingly-malevolent-yet-benign beings that this show trades in.  Here “The Force” has absorbed energy from an alien ship belonging to Thon of Dracon and his group of Young Sentinels.  Eventually, Astraea talks to “The Force” telepathically.  She convinces it to go to a nebula for the energy it needs in exchange for the energy it absorbed from the Sentinel ships.  ”The Prime Sentinel” is a straightforward story not different from “The Return of Anubis,” to the point where the basic formula for this sort of story starts to become rote.  At least at the end we get to see the Prime Sentinel’s “face.”

Isn’t that great?  He’s a literal deus ex machina and only MO sees him!  Boy, that’s subtle.  How about a burning space bush, too?

The character mini-bible for this episode describes “The Force” as follows: “Deep distinguished voice.  Doesn’t sound like Norm Prescott.”  Big surprise as to who’s voicing that character, then.  So scoring the show wasn’t enough, “Jeff Michael”?

COMMANDER NEMO (Kathleen Barnes & David Wise)

Yet another evil-but-not-really villain as Commander Nemo and his mutant squid/manta Domino attack factories and oil rigs while Nemo abuses his mind-control device.  His Neptune Society has built an underground city powered by, and built around, an active volcano.  The first half of the episode deals with Nemo trying to launch his factory-destroying warship and the second half sees the volcano that powers the city overheat due to an undersea tremor.  The Neptune Society, of course, is saved but Nemo eventually succumbs to the effects of the mind-control device and the city is destroyed.  It’s a familiar plot, but the Domino character is awesome.

At this point there have been three episodes out of eight dealing with variations on the exact same theme.  The weird thing about this factoid is that the same plot structure has been used by three different writers/writing teams.  I’m beginning to wonder if Filmation recycled more than just animation cels and backgrounds.

MO tends to have the hots for Astraea, since his eyes/scoreboards make little hearts whenever he sees her.  Mind you, MO isn’t as bad as 7-Zark-7 from Battle of the Planets at lusting over women, but this running gag tends to get annoying after a while.  At least MO’s not as annoying as H.E.R.B.I.E. from The New Fantastic Four, so he has that going for him.

VOYAGE TO THE INNER WORLD (Jerry Winnick)

The Sentinels end up in a hidden civilization near the Earth’s core.  A variation of the “civilization is at risk of crumbling” theme is used for the second week in a row, but MO is actually used as more than comic robot fodder here.  To be honest, MO isn’t a bad character – he basically repairs Sentinel One when needed, which is often, and his Dustin Hoffman routine is surprisingly tolerable.  Queen Dakari is just Ra’s Al Ghul from Batman, except her Lazarus Pit is Astraea’s brainwaves.

This is one of the few Space Sentinels episodes that doesn’t reaffirm status quo at the end as a character (Queen Dakari) actually dies and Dakari associate Aurania becomes de facto leader of the underground civilization.  I wonder why Winnick didn’t write more episodes for this show.

LOKI (Dale Kirby)

One of the best episodes of the show.  Norse mythology is loosely appropriated as Loki is a criminal freed from interdimensional imprisonment.  Balder, the man who imprisoned Loki, controls a city in Loki’s dimension.  Essentially, the entire episode is Loki doing the things a mischievous evil being like him would do – take over the Sentinels’ ship, match wits with Sentinel One, and have minotaurs riding dragons do his bidding.

Pity that Loki is defeated by accidentally having a “mental zinger” bounce back to him.  In other words, he hypnotizes himself.  Sad that such an entertaining villain falls prey to such a lame plot point.  Up until then the Norse-mythology-as-dimension idea was surprisingly faithful to the source.

The minotaurs on dragons are kind of silly, though.  The Midgard Serpent couldn’t be dredged up here?  Then again, I am talking about a show that appropriates Roman and Greek mythology by having a multicultural cast wear spandex tights and capes, so maybe I shouldn’t nitpick.

FAUNA (J. Michael Reaves)

For the eleventh episode we’re back in Michael Reaves territory.  Here two plot devices, a genetic research facility located in a forest and a feral 16-year-old girl with the ability to mentally control forest creatures, converge.  Scientists led by Dr. Kurland have discovered how to mutate creatures by means of a ray.  Fauna and her animal friends have been diligently working on destroying the research facility, and a wolf eventually enters the compound.  It takes about five seconds to figure out where this story is going.

Apparently Kurland and his associates have been mutating the local wildlife for years.  Don’t worry, they reverse the process afterwards – can’t be unethical playing God, now.  It never crosses Kurland’s mind to mutate himself with the ray, but that sort of thing wouldn’t become common until Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beat that plot device into the ground.

Anyway, “Fauna.”  Having forcibly been advanced untold numbers of years as a lifeform by the magic ray, the manwolf decides to dissemble the ray and…build a mind control device so that he can control the minds of all animals on Earth.  Never mind that humans are animals themselves and his idea is shit, but that gets in the way of Astraea turning into a monkey and Hercules/Mercury banter.  The manwolf almost succeeds in his quest for world domination, but Fauna distracts him enough for the scientists and the Young Sentinels to reverse his mutations.  Basically, “Fauna” is a status quo story, except that the animals distrust Fauna afterwards because she helped humans.  This story is a trainwreck with bad science, a megalomaniac talking werewolf with a speech disorder and a girl that talks in stunted English so you know she’s feral.  I hate you, Michael Reaves.

THE JUPITER SPORE (Kathleen Barnes & David Wise)

Plot elements here: a jalopy thrown into space, alien flora, yet another character that attacks the Young Sentinels but is actually kind of a decent alien (thank you, Sonny Fox) and Hercules suffering from Jupiter-induced dementia.  The Sentinels have to stop a plant species that threatens to overtake the world by collecting and introducing a predator species into Earth’s atmosphere.  Both species kill each other in mutual interdependency, but not before the nonvillain of the moment tries to stop the Sentinels and Hercules succumbs to a radiation/virus hybrid.

The only big surprise in “The Jupiter Spore” is that the virus Hercules picks up can be killed by penicillin.  The episode shows a surprising amount of scientific accuracy (well, more than “Fauna”) and any show that uses a jalopy both as plot device and as character development (Hercules loves Model Ts) can’t be bad.  ”The Jupiter Spore” is actually an enjoyable episode, but enough with the misunderstood aliens already!  I will admit that the hallucinations caused by the Jupiter spore are a nice touch, since Hercules punching his own ship is kind of funny.

THE WORLD SHIP (Douglas Menville)

Myarr and Rissa are humanoid cat-like creatures called Slrr (presumably with character designs reused from Star Trek: The Animated Series), survivors of a planet destroyed by pollution and general poor handling.  The planet has been converted into a spaceship and is on a collision course with Earth.  Myarr is the typical inflexible male, Rissa the compassionate female in the manner of all stereotypes.  During the course of the episode, Myarr suddenly deigns to take over Earth, but is talked out of it by the Young Sentinels.  Since the suggested m.o. of Space Sentinels (and of Filmation itself) is to be morally responsible, Sentinel One points out some uninhabited planets that the Slrr can inhabit and another crisis is averted by the Young Sentinels.  Thus ends the episode, and by proxy Space Sentinels itself.

Note: during the course of the episode, a mistake in animation is made.  Here it is:

Normally I’m not worried about animation flaws like this as Filmation is the epitome of budget, but THE EARTH IS UPSIDE DOWN.  Space Sentinels at its worst isn’t half as sloppy as Superfriends on a typical day, but I’m amazed no one noticed this basic flaw in background.  It’s like the Hall of Justice being upside down, which I imagine happened at least once during Superfriends‘ run.  While I’m picking nits, where’d Europe and Africa go?

Overall, Space Sentinels is a flawed series – few cartoon shows weren’t during the 1970s – but there’s no way this show should have been low-rated.  It was competing against ABC behemoth Scooby’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics, and no one’s going to beat Captain Caveman in the ratings and kids’ minds.  CBS’ What’s New, Mr. Magoo? was the one that failed to blink first, replaced midseason by reruns of Speed Buggy.

Why Space Sentinels didn’t compete against Superfriends is amazing.  Instead, CB Bears served as Space Sentinels‘ lead-in.  Good counterprogramming there, Sonny Fox.  A show based on a fad competing against Wile E. Coyote and Superman.  That’s like Sledge Hammer! competing against Dallas and Miami Vice, except that Sledge Hammer! was genuinely funny and CB Bears was damn near scraping the Hanna-Barbera chum bucket.

I’m not going to go into detail about The Freedom Force, the series only having five eleven-minute episodes.  Suffice it to say that this was Filmation’s own-brand Superfriends based on public domain characters.  Merlin (Michael Bell) has his magic.  Hercules is voiced by Bob Denison and is not related to the Space Sentinels character despite sharing his clothes.  Isis (Diane Pershing) is the star of the segment with her power over the elements, her character being as ill-defined as ever.  Sinbad (Bell) has a sidekick and barely appears in the series.  This leaves the genuinely interesting character Super Samurai (Bell), a boy who turns into a purple-headed…giant samurai.  All the boy needs to do is say the character’s name, and his voice goes guttural in the middle of his spiel.  It beats the shit out of Black Vulcan, for sure.

The Freedom Force segments basically follow Superfriends protocol.  A child dragon, for instance, is taught the way of the warrior by Toshi/SUPER SAMURAI after being told he’s not fit for war against flying machines.  There’s also a personal rivalry between the dragon rider’s father and his dad’s former advisor thrown in there somewhere, hence the war.  That episode goes through the motions and the child dragon does cute schtick too often.  A more successful episode features Toshi’s friendship with Kyoto, the son of a magician.  Kyoto is jealous of Toshi and frees a spirit from the underworld to become Scarlet Samurai.  The spirit wants vengeance against Kyoto’s father and…well, I won’t spoil the ending here.  This episode is just more engaging overall.  Time travel, giant robots, bad appropriations of myth and general Filmation goofiness abounds.

Maybe it’s because I don’t have fond memories of pre-1980s cartoons, but the only thing that interests me in The Freedom Force is Super Samurai.  At least The Freedom Force have a great home base.

As for DVD bonus features, there are interviews of certain people involved with Space Sentinels and Freedom Force.  The Space Sentinels part of the set has interviews with David Wise, Michael Reaves and Robert Kline along with the obligatory Lou Scheimer bit.  Scheimer also lends his bad self to the Freedom Force interviews, along with Buzz Dixon (who looks like Sgt. Slaughter) and Darrell McNeil, who shills his book about Filmation.  As with all of BCI’s Filmation-based DVD releases, there’s the obligatory Andy Mangels documentary about Filmation.  Images and other random backstage stuff about Freedom Force and Space Sentinels, like the actual scripts, are included.

The best bonus feature is test footage for a proposed Young Sentinels live-action series.  Evan Kim is even goofier live than in animation, and it’s amazing that there wasn’t a live-action series since the test footage is actually pretty good.  The footage is sketchy – this is, after all, just a run-through – but live-action Young Sentinels could have worked.  Evan Kim is actually more comfortable in live-action than doing voiceovers, and he looks somewhat like his animated counterpart.  Why wasn’t this show made?

To sum up, Space Sentinels is a good Filmation series and one of the better series in the studio’s repertoire.  The Freedom Force I can take or leave, but even with the obscure titles Ink & Paint does a good job with regards to audio, video and general presentation.  I’d love to see more of this stuff come out.  Even though I dog Filmation a bit, the studio at least put out some good stuff in its time and it is a better studio than I’ve given it credit for.  While Space Sentinels isn’t much more than a Saturday morning cartoon, it at least shows surprising intelligence and might finally find the audience it deserves on DVD.  I hope Ink & Paint continues to do right by Filmation and give more of its obscure titles a dusting-off, because titles like this are certainly more interesting than GI Joe: Sigma 6 or Kong.

Well, maybe not Kong.

IT CAME FROM…
Solson Christmas Special featuring Samurai Santa #1 (Solson Publications, 1986)
JIM LEE! SAMURAI! REAGAN’S RAIDERS!

No opening salvo here, folks.  This is a wade through the bog of Solson Publications, the comics company that brought the world Reagan’s Raiders, The Amazing Wahzoo, Daffy Qaddafi, a hundred ninja comics and Rich Buckler Jr.  Was it the worst comics company in history, as some people claim?  It’s hard to say, but Solson was as bad as its reputation suggests.  Not everyone is going to take a chance on a title like Samurai Santa, and for good reason.  Solson was already filling the demand for Japanese swordsmen around this time with titles like The Bushido Blade of Zatoichi Walrus, Codename: Ninja, Ninjutsu: Art of the Ninja and Samurai the 13th.  Considering Solson’s exploitative nature, Samurai Santa fit like a glove.

Oh, the proper title of this comic suggests an ongoing series of Christmas specials like Samurai Santa.  Not long after, both ninjas and black-and-white comics stopped being trendy – due at least in part to the glut of horrible black-and-white comics about ninjas.  Solson stalwarts Gary Brodsky and Rich Buckler have since moved on to other pursuits like How to Pick Up Girls and surrealist erotic art.  It’s a great legacy, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Samurai Santa begins by introducing your artists for the comic, Don Secrease and…Jim Lee.  Yes, WildC.ATs creator and Wildstorm’s public face Jim Lee.  Samurai Santa is his first published work.  Let’s find out a little more about Secrease and Lee, shall we?

Americomics, Vista Graphics and Solson?  Hot damn!  What a talent!  Secrease is a journeyman who may or may not have survived the black-and-white comics boom.  He does most of Samurai Santa‘s art.

According to Wikipedia, Jim Lee only inked the cover to Samurai Santa.  Even if Jim Lee did ink more than the cover, Lee didn’t actually draw the comic.  For this he gets a shared art credit.  That he doesn’t show his face here might be his best career move ever.

“Solson Christmas Special Featuring Samurai Santa #1 is published annually by Solson Publications, Inc.”  Is that a threat?

It’s Christmas season at Kruger’s.  A Mr. Endicott is being threatened to find a replacement Santa by a Mr. Osborn after the previous Santa comes in drunk to work.  No one else wants to play the role (a black character giving the excuse that “the kids don’t dig a black Santa”) until one of the wage slaves suggests “that new guy running the Jap robot counter”, Sam, as a possible stooge.  Enter our title character wearing a kimono.  As he is Japanese, he of course knows how to operate a Transformers action figure, which two kids then fight over.  Boy, the writing’s subtle.  Sam takes the job while talking in aphorisms.

Barely four pages in, I know the writing’s horrible.  The concept of a samurai working at a department store is bad enough, but Philip Clarke Jr. can’t even go four pages without piling on clichés.  It only gets worse from there, as Samurai Santa listens to spoiled children and their requests for toys.  Mr. Osborn is “impressed” with Endicott for finding Kruger’s first “Mongolian Santa Claus,” leaving the nebbishy underling sweating as he frequently does.

Is there an actual character in this comic book underneath all these archetypes?  Racism, generic “Christmas has been commercialized” sentiment and pop culture references!  Neato!  Never mind how Sam seems to have been hired without having to go through a background check!  Logic gets in the way of the story!

There’s an evil Santa Claus, too!  He tells some kids that their parents don’t love them enough to buy them new things like bicycles and footballs.  They then cry as Santa breaks their hearts.  Yojimbo has nothing on Samurai Santa!

Samurai Santa walks back to his apartment as two thugs try to mug a lady of no fixed age or character description.  Samurai Santa breaks out the weapons as the customary fight scene begins.

Not surprisingly, Samurai Santa becomes a hero, receiving a standing ovation from on-lookers and convincing Osborn to rethink his firing of Sam.  The greedy Osborn smells a marketing gimmick, of course, so subtle is the characterization in Samurai Santa.  Meanwhile, Endicott is faced with Sam’s resignation (cue Endicott sweating), which Endicott talks him out of.  Evil Santa Claus continues on his commercialization-and-despondency spree as more kids are told that their parents don’t love them.  Boy, I wonder if Evil Santa Claus is actually Mr. Osborn?

Several days later, Sam is conflicted with the true meaning of Christmas.  Osborn comes in and tells Endicott and Sam that sales are brisk and a toy giveaway to the underprivileged is underway.  This convinces Sam to continue being Santa.  As Sam goes home he meets a bum on the street and, in a rare display of good storytelling and art for Samurai Santa, gives of all but his kimono and pants for him.  It’s the one thing in Samurai Santa that’s actually touching.

Jonah Kruger flies to his New York store from Los Angeles to begin the next day’s festivities.  Turns out that Kruger’s just as commercially-minded as Osborn as the toy giveaway consists of unsalable crap.  Sam turns the tables on capitalism as he replaces the unsalable crap with copies of The Religious Soul.  The incensed Osborn exits stage left suddenly, for no…oh, to hell with it.  I hate spoilers.  Turns out that Mister Osborn is Evil Santa Claus.

Seemingly unfazed by the fact that the manager of a department store in one of America’s major metropolitan areas just tried to kill an employee with a crossbow, Kruger tells Sam to give out the bargain-bin fare as promised.  Sam does not, as he chastises everyone (aside from himself, of course – he is a samurai) for helping to pervert the true meaning of Christmas.  As he leaves the store, Kruger tries to look for the samurai.  The footprints stop and a picture of the New York skyline is seen.

Boy, wasn’t that fun?  It ended in such an upbeat and non-didactic manner, too!  Samurai Santa taught me the true meaning of Christmas!

Somehow, I blame John Belushi for this comic.

Since this is Solson, there are no ads save for the usual Solson fare.  Solson put out a lot of fare.

Ads for Solson product include Reagan’s Raiders #3, Amazing Wahzoo #2, Solson’s Call For Talent (that picture of Gary Brodsky’s face around his legions of comics sure did get used a lot) and Escape to the Stars.  I have no idea what Escape to the Stars is aside from there being a talking bear and Randomly Capitalized Concepts, but it’s by far the most professional comic in Solson’s repertoire (and only because it wasn’t originally created for Solson).  As for Codename: Ninja, it looks appropriately sleazy.  Interest is perked by the appearance of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but drops back down when the TMNT book turns out to be an “Authorized Martial Arts Training Manual” (it still managed to last six issues).  Ads also appear for “ninja secrets revealed” comic Ninjutsu: Art of the Ninja, random superhero comic Animism and “comic book trade secrets revealed” comic How to Publish Comics.  Why a man who sold piranha through the mail should have the moral authority to tell people how sleazy the comic book business is remains a mystery to almost everyone except Brodsky.

Finally, this curio appears on the back cover:

I grew out of the “overreact to every mildly strange thing I see” writing phase some time ago (some people never do), but this makes no sense.  Literally the only link Google provides for the film – or at least the notion of same – is at Ye Olde Comick Booke Blogge.  Did this film ever get made?  Somehow, I doubt the creators of Codename: Ninja ever got Last Hour of Honor off the ground.  Maybe they did considering the home video glut of the 1980s (Trans World Entertainment would have made this film in a heartbeat), but what a shitty ad for a possibly non-existent film.  Rich Buckler is a weird man.

Solson has continued to exist in some form since the 1980s.  Has the company progressed beyond this level of quality?  What do you think?

This is the first of what I hope will be a number of reviews and articles this fall dealing with What You Like About Asian Culture – ninjas, samurais, bad comics, bad films, bad Godfrey Ho films about comic samurais, etc.  Oh, and Korean death metal.  Expect a lot more from UR in the coming months as…UR actually gets updated!  IT’LL BE ASTOUNDING!  A UR UPDATE!  RARE!

It Came From The Comic Mill: Shuriken #6 (Victory Productions, April 1987)
The road to American manga started with this series, and aren’t you glad?

WOW!  AN UPDATE?  TO UR?  WHAT SORT OF BEFOULMENT IS THIS?  Seriously, though, I’ve been neglecting my duties as Reichsmaster of sweetposer.tk for far too long.  Lately, I’ve been looking at my referral logs and, when people don’t care for girlfeet or gay porn (and, by God, that’s what most fans of UR seem to want), they want to know about – strangely – comics of the 1980s and early 1990s.  Today, I begin to fulfill a promise I made to the readers of UR and talk about these comics.

Hell, I’ve got to do something to make people believe I didn’t lose interest in UR two years ago.  Inertia moves faster than this site.

The 1980s were interesting for the nascent and still relatively novel interest in Japanese manga.  This was in the days before companies like ADV, Tokyopop, Viz and Antarctic Press overflowed the market with any title they could nail down and dub.  Not that I hate manga, granted – the odd horror title and Hyper Police make for good reading, but the kids are supposed to be more into Shonen Jump’s One Shaman Dragon King Piece Ball NFL on NBC or whatever the perceived big trend is at the moment.  In the 1980s and 1990s, choices for manga were relatively limited – Akira, Golgo 13, Robotech, Barefoot Gen and whatever had made it into the American public’s consciousness at the time.  One has to remember that independent comics companies of the 1980s were more into funny animal comics, Cerebus the Aardvark, ripoffs of Cerebus the Aardvark, British imports, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, ripoffs of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, ninjas, poorly-done superhero comics and poorly-done superhero comics with ninjas in them.  Oh, and Tales From the Beanworld.  People were generally trying to cash in on whatever money was supposed to be in the comics explosion at the time.

For some reason, people also liked Dreadstar.  It was a strange time.

As for American manga – for you pedants, American comics done in the Japanese style, just so we’re clear on this – it’s still as much of a crapshoot as it was when I wrote about the topic in 1999.  (Note: I am not linking to the article.  No one needs to read about how much I hated Super Information Hijinks: Reality Check when I was 18.  Surprisingly, I namechecked Hyper Police in that article seven years before I read the damn thing.)  There’s Gold Digger and its thirty-seven variants, Ninja High School and whatever one-shots and series Marvel, DC and American-based manga presses put out, but American manga has always seemed like a niche market with a growth level not commensurate to the popularity of Japanese manga or even Korean manhwa.

In the mid-1980′s, one man tried to buck this prevailing trend.  That man was Reggie Byers, formerly of the American Robotech:Macross series, and Shuriken is his legacy.

Frankly, it’s not much of a legacy.  I’ve owned three Shuriken/The Blade of Shuriken comics for more than a decade.  In 1999, I thought Shuriken was awful, deriding Byers for being a born-again Christian and abandoning his manga style.  Seven years later, I can accept Byers’ lifestyle choice and current style, and seven years’ worth of maturity and broader understanding of the world of manga should have changed my feelings about Shuriken.

It doesn’t.  The comic’s still awful.  Time has not been kind to Shuriken.

The editorial for the April 1987 issue of Shuriken starts with an introduction to Byers’ Victory Productions (“printed at Solson Printing,” it says here), which put out Shuriken.  The comic at the time was being segmented for two psychographics.  The Blade of Shuriken, an Eternity Comics title, was for the shonen, or action-oriented crowd.  This Shuriken was for the shojo, or character-driven crowd.  Essentially, there was a comic for “boys” and a comic for “girls,” although there isn’t much difference between the two comics at all.  Around this time, Byers also handed over control of Shuriken to an associate, although Byers still drew, wrote and lettered this issue.  Andrew Murphy is credited as “guest inker” here.

Right away, lead character Kyoko Shidara is seen at a carnival, using her ninja skills to win a milk bottle game.  I call shenanigans.

Kyoko and friend Joan Harlowe celebrate their victory by comparing kewpie dolls.  Right away, Byers uses the time spent creating his comic to do something common to comics creators of the 1980s.

Yeah, that’s right.  Remember, this is the 1980s.  Everyone in self-publishing idolized Cerebus the Aardvark.  It was a tradition.  The off-model kewpie doll is compared to a Usagi Yojimbo doll as Byers draws every character slightly off and with ugly-looking facial outlines.

Reggie Byers does a self-insertion next and draws himself into the comic.  Sure, the character’s only named “Reggie” and does nothing except duck a throwing star, but it’s still a self-insertion.  One of the interesting things about Reggie Byers is that, like Gold Digger creator/franchiser Fred Perry, he is black.  A black man drawing manga (hell, being in the comics industry in general) isn’t a common thing, but it doesn’t change my impression of Shuriken.  It took me years to figure out that there are black characters in Shuriken since almost every ancillary character looks the same.  Byers takes the time to do some shading on “Reggie’s” sweater and foreshadow ninja action, though.  Strange priorities, Byers.

The comic goes back to Pittsburgh police officer Doug Jordan, Marlowe and Shidara talking about camouflage.  Apparently Shidara has dyed her hair blond.  Marlowe lets slip that Shidara has “enemies”, arousing Jordan’s suspicions.  This leads to some mutual ass-covering and Shidara’s internal monologue about quitting the corrupt security firm she works for.  I was actually paying more attention to the band T-shirts, hidden reference to another Victory Productions title (I’m not spoiling the “surprise” for you people – oh, what the hell, it’s Shrike) and a “HIMOM!” hidden in a blade of grass.  Glad to see Byers isn’t easily bored.

The action kicks off in earnest as Weird Al Yankovic in an Anthrax shirt beans a random punk with a ball.  Ah, but the punk is not “random” at all!  As the punk grimaces at Weird Al (oh, sorry, “Neil”) Shidara hears a scream.  Cue fight scene.

This is why I can’t take Shuriken seriously.  A punk character in Stinko Man 20X6 pose and Bigg Nife proving his worthiness as “the great organization’s biggest and best assassin” by killing an random bystander who beaned him with a baseball?  Makes sense.  This leads to Shuriken punching out Max (“created by Gary Williams!” as if anyone really knows or cares who he is – I know, it’s self-publishing, but still).  The punch seems to propel Max past three onlookers as the fight scene proper begins.  Remember, this is the character-driven Shuriken.

Yeah, character-driven.  I know.  The fight scene is a bit protracted, of course – CHARACTER-DRIVEN Max throws some CHARACTER-DRIVEN throwing stars at Shuriken, leading to Shuriken and Max throwing CHARACTER-DRIVEN weapons at each other and Shuriken ending the short and uneventful fight with a CHARACTER-DRIVEN kick to Max’s sternum.  Out come the CHARACTER-DRIVEN police to arrest Max and Shidara.  SHOJO MANGA!

The onlookers defend Shidara.  A sexist cop is put in his place.  Marlowe fears for Shidara while Jordan gets angry at Shidara for fighting the punk.  Jordan is put in his place.  A poorly-done epilogue appears where Shuriken asks for, and receives, a resignation from her corrupt security firm.  So ends another cross-hatched, adequately-realized chapter in the life of Shuriken.  You can smell the “Shuriken might be assassinated by her former employer” angle from space.

I guess Shuriken isn’t as bad as I thought it was back when I first bought these comics.  The artwork isn’t that good, and there’s way too much reliance on standard “action lines” and clichés like the angry punk, ninjas throwing around weaponry right in front of people (without masks, yet), and the standard dialogue that seems to come from a Godfrey Ho film.  Removing the manga-style trappings and better-than-average attention to small details, Shuriken is a standard American ninja comic.  It’s still better than Ninja High School, mind.

Up next is Andrew Murphy’s backup feature, “Firebringer.”  Even though Murphy’s artwork is much better than Byers’, the comic seems like the sort of standard “man on Earth is actually son of God” stuff that one would have seen in Cerebus the Aardvark‘s back pages in the early 1980s.  Apparently Victor’s mother is the Goddess Koltos, stuff about the Panthearchy, God King, that sort of thing.  It’s pretentious and derivative, but what wasn’t in the 1980s.

Finally, we come to some ads for Syn’ik and Shrike, plus some Shuriken pinups.  They’re so thrilling I could fart.

Could Shuriken see print in the world of today?  Probably not.  Nothing against Byers or his love of self-publishing, but the world of American manga has advanced far too much artistically for this to make much of a dent in the world of modern-day, aren’t-gradients-cool comics.  The world of comics has deteriorated far too much for self-publishing to be as commercially viable anymore.  Shuriken is a product of its time – one of the first, not-entirely-successful salvos in trying to establish a manga community in North America.  I’ll like Reggie Byers for at least trying – and even pioneering – a proper manga comic, but Shuriken will never be more than a relic of a bygone era.  Maybe that’s just as well.  At least Reggie Byers never did The Bushido Blade of Zatoichi Walrus, so he at least has that going for him.

KANNIBAL
METROPOLIS INTERNATIONAL PICTURES, 2001: KABOOM ENTERTAINMENT/CAJUN PICTURES, 2002
4:3 WITH SLIGHT LETTERBOXING, 76 MIN., ENGLISH WITH SPANISH SUBTITLES
SUMMARY | THE POLISHED TURD ONLY EXISTS TO EAT…MONEY.

I know how anemic UR has been since the redesign earlier this year.  Well, that’s because I haven’t had any inspiration or reason to write an article for UR.  Well, that was the case until I came across what MJSimpson.co.uk called “very possibly the worst British horror film ever made.”  That’s a strong condemnation, but after seeing Kannibal, he may not be wrong.

I’m quite well aware that there may be worse filmmakers than Richard Driscoll (not the vicar from EastEnders, mind) out there.  Bill Rebane films are damn near unwatchable.  Andy Milligan already ravaged Britain with his period pieces.  In fact, Driscoll’s oeuvre only extends to a few films, most notably 1985′s The Comic.  None of that matters, of course – if this film is any indication of how bad Driscoll is as a filmmaker, he could yet become one of the infamous names of terrible cult cinema.

Kannibal is about Gideon Quinn’s quest to avenge the deaths of his wife and unborn child by tracking down the Thereshkova crime family and assassinating them one by one.  Georgina Thereshkova leads the crime family after the “death” of her mother Valentina by Quinn.  (Note: Valentina Thereshkova eventually turns out not to be dead, but “mutilated” – teeth are growing out of her bottom lip, such is the quality of the makeup on display in Kannibal.  Like hell this is a spoiler.)  The Thereshkovas are involved in prostitution rings, drug smuggling and pornography, the softcore porn being thrown into the film pretty much constantly.  There’s, like, lesbians kissing and everything!

Gideon Quinn, of course, is a master of disguise.  He also has a taste for fava beans and a nice Chianti.  Get where this is going yet?  That’s right, Richard Driscoll has taken what he likes about Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series and Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, bunging said elements onto film.  That’d be ignorable if Kannibal wasn’t so poorly made and haphazardly assembled as to be an insult to cult filmdom.  I’m honestly not overreacting – the acting reaches Andy Milligan Players levels of inanity.  For those not familiar with Andy Milligan’s work…well, think of the worst aspects of community/dinner theater and magnify them by a factor of two or three.  That’s Andy Milligan, and by proxy Kannibal.

Andy Milligan, of course, never had a budget of more than $10,000 with which to shoot a film.  Driscoll’s film, by comparison, is extremely well-shot.  Technically, Kannibal is well-done and expensive-looking for an independent film.  It’s just that the scenery is lush and Peter Thornton’s cinematography fabulous at the expense of everything else.  The dialogue is pitiful, the “tits” haphazardly bared, the gore often incredibly unrealistic-looking and the whole enterprise just cynically assembled from start to finish.  Kannibal looks expensive, and it’s obvious most of the money was spent on location shooting and post-processing.  It’s bad filmmaking and I don’t like it.

I’m not going to dwell on what MJSimpson.co.uk has already said about the film.  Lucien Morgan’s turn as Inspector Lewis Reid is, quite frankly, mind-boggling in Morgan’s uncanny ability to accent exactly the wrong words in a sentence.  Linnea Quigley’s character comes across more like a generic Nazi dominatrix and less like an actual Russian.  I could go on about how bad the acting is across the board, but Vass Anderson’s role as the head of Thereshkova’s American operations seems to be the best of the lot.  Vass Anderson is given a few minutes of screen time.  Morgan and Quigley are given whole soliloquies in which to ham-fistedly deliver their lines.  Amazing.

As for Driscoll’s acting…well, he really isn’t acting.  In fact, he seems to be imitating Anthony Hopkins, but his acting’s the least of the film’s problems.  The man wrote, directed, produced and starred in Kannibal.  That would be acceptable if Driscoll knew what the hell he was doing in any capacity.  In the making-of bonus feature included on this DVD (which is the height of ego), Driscoll compares Kannibal to an “opera version of Tosca.”  Driscoll comes across as a British Joe Eszterhas, except Joe Eszterhas is self-aware and revels in the fact that he writes sleazy films.  Driscoll makes exploitation films and thinks they’re art because the mise en scène is pretty.

Speaking of Joe Eszterhas, there’s a chapter in Kannibal that comes across as a full-blown ripoff of Basic Instinct.  Seriously, Kannibal‘s seventeenth chapter is titled “Basic Instincts.”  It’s a distillation of Kannibal itself – hell, here’s an MP3 of the most odious part of the chapter.  Inspector Reid comes across as the world’s worst interrogator.  During his spiel (in which Lucien Morgan’s enunciation is worse than Linnea Quigley‘s, AND LUCIEN MORGAN’S PLAYING A BRIT), he allows Georgina Thereshkova to answer his questions with what amounts to a “I don’t know, you?”  Every single time.  The overacting is so obvious as to be damn near oblique.  The conversation sounds like Morgan and Quigley are graduates of the Steve Roman School of Acting.  HEY YOU, HAVE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU E-EVER BEEN INVOLVED – INVOLVED IN DRUGS?  Then the lawyer comes in and says “AH HA!  I THOUGHT SO!  YOU AND MY WIFE, FOOOOLING AROUND!”

Yes, I’m going on a tangent and referencing SCTV.  That last paragraph is still more entertaining than anything I saw in Kannibal.

The soundtrack has not been noted thus far in the…well, one review of Kannibal that I’ve read.  Patrick Bird and Jon Klein’s original compisitions sound like they were performed by some cut-rate pitchshifter clone.  If it turns out Bird and Klein performed the songs themselves, I’ll be amazed.  Either way, the compositions are terrible industrial metal with “fuck God” lyrics or decent ambient pieces, depending on the scene.  Why the hell Richard Driscoll hired two producers most well-known for mastering a Joy Division concert album to compose music for Kannibal, I don’t know, but it isn’t a good idea.  The original compositions and the classical music pieces used to fill out the soundtrack sometimes overwhelm the dialogue, which is a problem usually occurring in high school videos done on a basic editing studio.  Kannibal‘s a lavish production, so why is it full of problems like this?  Did anyone care about making a good film, or was Kannibal just a paycheque for the people involved in making it?  My money’s leaning towards the latter.

Overall, is Kannibal the worst film ever made?  That’s doubtful.  Does Kannibal deserve the level of lambasting that it’s received?  Of course it does.  Kannibal is indicative of the worst sort of independent film there is.  Sure, there are hundreds of independent films ripping off a style, director and/or another film, but the worst one can say about those films is that they’re derivative.  Kannibal‘s trying to be a literal copy of Hannibal, which makes the film redundant by its very existence.  If not for the all-around incompetence on display here, Kannibal might have been ignorable.  With Richard Driscoll at the helm, Kannibal approaches legend.  The man truly is as shit as others say he is.

kaBOOM! Entertainment
Cajun Pictures