A mid-80s comedy about the charming pastime of gaslighting, Overboard is, in retrospect, an extremely… odd Hollywood picture, whose more bizarre elements are carried by the charm of its lead performers, Hollywood golden couple Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. It’s a film that seems an off-piste choice for Severin Films to release on Blu-ray, but their disc of Overboard offers a welcome chance to revisit a Hollywood picture that developed a strong cult following in the years that followed its theatrical release.
In Overboard, Goldie Hawn plays Joanna Stayton, a privileged and obnoxious socialite who is married to Grant Stayton III (Edward Herrmann). Whilst the yacht is anchored close to the town of Elk Cove, Oregon, Joanna hires local carpenter Dean Proffitt (Kurt Russell) to remodel her wardrobe. Proffitt designs a wondrous shoe closet, but Joanna is dissatisfied because he has used the wrong wood, and refuses to pay him the $600 dollars she owes.
One night, Joanna falls overboard whilst searching for her wedding ring. She is rescued and taken ashore, but is suffering from amnesia. Grant visits her in the hospital, but seeing an opportunity to flee from his married life and dally with starlets on the coast of L.A., he claims not to recognise Joanna.
Proffitt, a widower with four distinctly wild sons, sees a golden opportunity: by claiming Joanna to be his fictional wife, Anna, and tying her to a month of domestic chores, he can teach the snooty millionaire a lesson in humility whilst also getting some recompense for his unpaid labour aboard the yacht. The school has also threatened to have Proffitt’s sons taken from him, believing that as a single father he is unable to cope with the responsibilities of raising them: by recruiting ‘Anna’ as his sons’ ‘mother’, Proffitt hopes to stave off an investigation into his domestic situation.
An impractical woman used to being waited on hand and foot (by her butler Andrew, played by Roddy McDowall), Joanna struggles with the household chores at first, and baulks at the behaviour of the children. She sees a disjuncture between her expectations and the reality of her life in the Proffitt household, though her amnesia prevents her from understanding why this is.
However, Joanna soon develops strategies for coping, and the house evolves from a hovel to a home. She also develops feelings for the children, treating them playfully and kindly, even defending them when a teacher unfairly chastises them based on their reputation for bad behaviour. She realises the honesty and integrity of Proffitt, an unpretentious labourer; and she helps him realise his dream of building and opening a unique crazy golf course – which soon becomes Elk Cove’s main attraction.
However, pushed by Joanna’s mother, who wonders what has happened to her daughter, Grant commands the yacht be returned to Elk Cove, and begins a search for his wife. But will Joanna return to her privileged existence, or will she choose to stay with the humble Proffitt clan?
Overboard establishes Joanna’s outrageous haughtiness from the outset. Hawn plays the character with a high society accent, and early in the picture there’s a wonderful moment in which Joanna’s highfalutin ways are deflated when she is served caviar by Andrew. (The caviar does not meet her required standards.) ‘Caviar should be round and hard, and of adequate size’, Joanna says, seemingly blissfully unaware of the Finbarr Saunders (Fnarr-Fnarr) levels of double entendre in her monologue, ‘And it should burst in your mouth at exactly the right moment’. When Joanna chastises Dean for making an incredibly impressive rotating shoe cupboard in the ‘wrong’ wood (Dean has used oak – not Joanna’s preferred cedar), she refuses to pay him, telling Dean that ‘The job was not done to my satisfaction’. ‘I got news for you’, Dean fires back, ‘No job will ever be done to your satisfaction’.
Meanwhile, Dean is depicted as a man-child, with a similar level of emotional maturity to his rabid sons – the boys are introduced when a teacher runs out of Dean’s home, Dean telling her that his sons are ‘going through an arson period’ – and an equivalent lack of grace. ‘I’ve been doing this kind of shi… er, work for years’, he tells Joanna when he boards the yacht to remodel her wardrobe. (‘I doubt if he’s even housebroken’, Joanna grumbles in a telephone conversation to her mother, unaware that Dean can overhear her conversation – which kickstarts his initial enmity towards her.) However, in the film’s early scenes Dean’s rough proletarian exterior is undercut when he demonstrates a hidden artistic flair: an aptitude for carving ornate sculptures using a chainsaw, which comes into play later in the film, when Dean tells Joanna of his desire to build a crazy golf course in which each hole is housed within a sculpted representation of iconic buildings or natural formations. (The film suggests a disjuncture between the artistic aspirations of Dean and his deeply blue collar existence – moonlighting at a fertiliser factory.)
Where Dean teases out of Joanna an ability to act in a nurturing, maternal manner – and to engage in domestic chores – Joanna exerts a similar influence on Dean, providing him with the confidence and support to enable him to pursue his dream. Fundamentally, it seems, Joanna’s problem was predicated on too much of the good life and not enough activity: ‘You’re so bored you got to make up things to bitch about’, an angry Dean tells her after she refuses to pay for the wardrobe remodel on the yacht. (In response, the yacht’s crew, who have heard Dean’s furious response to Joanna, begin to cheer.)
When Joanna falls overboard and finds herself, suffering from amnesia, in Elk Cove’s hospital, she initially speaks in the clipped RP-like tones of New York’s privileged classes. (‘I don’t know who I am’, she says after being placed in a psychiatric ward, ‘but I’m sure I have a lawyer’.) Though she does not know who she is, her haughtiness alienates both the hospital staff and the sheriff, who are keen to place her with Proffitt when he turns up at the hospital and says that Joanna is his missing wife. (‘Well, he seems to like you, and he’s a nice guy’, the sheriff tells her when Joanna says that she doesn’t recognise Proffitt as her husband.) Proffitt takes delight in building a backstory for Joanna that undercuts her high society socialisation: he tells her that her mother was an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver, and her father is a jailbird. As the film progresses, and as she becomes more accustomed to life with Proffitt, her accent and dialect evolve and become more proletarian.
The film trades on two familiar archetypes from Hollywood films: the spoilt ‘ice queen’, and the incompetent, irresponsible (single) father. (Both are equally negative.) Overboard throws these two types together, allowing them to clash within the context of the chaotic Proffitt household: what results is a process of growth for both Joanna and Proffitt. Some aspects of the film seem outrageous to modern sensibilities: at one point, Dean convinces Joanna that a huge, short dress belongs to her, and tells her that they slept together on their first date. ‘I’m a short, fat, slut’, Joanna weeps. (Can one imagine a film scripted by a male writer getting away with that line today?)
Given some of the oddball sexual politics on display in Overboard (they were oddball at the time, it has to be said – not necessarily solely through a post-#MeToo lens), it might be tempting to assume that the film’s narrative voice is male. However, Overboard was scripted by a female writer, Leslie Dixon (who, coincidentally, is the granddaughter of the great documentary photographer Dorothea Lange – a personal hero of mine – and the artist Maynard Dixon). Earlier in the year, the Dixon-scripted Outrageous Fortune had been a huge hit, and Dixon was approached to write another picture with the aim of achieving a similar sense of economic success. (Overboard recouped its budget and made a small profit, but became something of a cult favourite on home video and via television screenings.)
Dixon’s inspiration was a true case, of a woman who washed ashore with amnesia in Florida. However, the premise of Overboard also bears some similarities with Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 film Swept Away (Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto), in which a wealthy woman (Mariangela Melato) and a crewmember (Giancarlo Giannini) of the yacht on which she is traveling become stranded on a desert island. A number of Dixon’s most high-profile subsequent projects – such as The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Freaky Friday (2003), and Hairspray (2007) – have been reworkings/reimaginings of other movies. (Swept Away was remade more directly in 2002 by Guy Ritchie.)
Dixon’s script is sharp and witty, though the direction by Garry Marshall is flat and insipid. (Is it controversial to suggest that the films for which Marshall is chiefly remembered as a director – Pretty Woman, Frankie and Johnny, Beaches – coast by on the quality of their scripts?) The film was the subject of an insipid Hollywood remake in 2018, which unnecessarily tried to add a ‘spin’ to the material by reversing the gender roles, but failed to replicate the chemistry of the pairing of Hawn and Russell.
Video
Overboard is presented on Severin Films’ region ‘A’-coded Blu-ray release in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1. Filling slightly under 34Gb of space on a dual-layered Blu-ray disc, the 1080p presentation uses the AVC codec.
Shot on 35mm colour stock, this presentation of Overboard is based on a new 2k scan (of the interpositive, it seems). The colour palette is deep and naturalistic, and there’s a pleasing level of detail throughout the presentation. (A gauze is noticeably used over the lens for some of the on-water shots: the evident presence of this is testament to the level of detail in this HD presentation.) The film’s photography is fairly uninspiring but nevertheless allows the performances to take centre-stage. Contrast is very good, with a pleasing curve into the toe of the exposure and balanced highlights. An organic, film-like grain structure is present, though the coarse nature of this underscores the (reputed) IP source – rather than the finer grain structure that would have been facilitated by a scan of the negative.
All in all, this is a very pleasing, film-like presentation of Overboard.
Audio
In terms of audio options, Severin Films’ presentation of Overboard provides the viewer with the option of watching the film in English (natch), French, or Spanish. All audio tracks are DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. The English track is fine, with some pleasing bass. Range is more than acceptable, though this is a dialogue-heavy track and certainly not ‘showy’. Optional English subtitles for the Hard of Hearing are provided: these are easy to read, and accurately transcribe the film’s dialogue.
Extras
The disc includes, as its key contextual feature, ‘Writing Overboard – Interview with Screenwriter Leslie Dixon’ (14:19 mins): a sit-down with the film’s writer.
Dixon talks about how she came to be a writer, moving to Los Angeles after an epiphany that occurred whilst she was working as a singer with a band in San Francisco – something she realised wouldn’t provide a future for her. Once in LA, she taught herself how to write screenplays by reading scripts that she borrowed from the AFI.
Dixon was partly inspired by the screwball comedies of the 1930s, and by Preston Sturges’ work in particular. Overboard was her second professional writing job, and she bonded with studio executive Alan Ladd, Jr, over a shared love of golden age Hollywood films.
She says that she struggled to write Overboard, because she realised that she was trying to ‘make something up out of arguably a creaky premise [amnesia]’. When the script was completed, it was sent to Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell rather than the director – and the actors loved it, as it presented them with an opportunity to work together.
Dixon also talks at length about her original intentions for the film’s ending, which differ quite substantially from what we see in the final film. She suggests that the film’s success largely hinges on the ‘chemistry’ between Russell and Hawn.
Also included is the film’s trailer (1:55 mins).
Overall
Overboard is a film whose interest, to a greater extent, rests on the chemistry of its two lead actors: Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell had fallen in love with one another after appearing together in Jonathan Demme’s Swing Shift (1984). (Since then, they have co-starred in a number of films.) Hawn and Russell’s charisma and interplay helps to blindside the viewer, preventing them from seeing how Joanna and Dean’s relationship, when divorced from the broad humour, is deeply… well, the word ‘abusive’ wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Importantly, Dean’s ‘gaslighting’ of Joanna is not just about sexual politics (something which is all too easy to acknowledge in the post-#MeToo era) but also, fundamentally, an example of class-based revenge. Both parties evolve and become domesticated as a response to their experiences with one another: Joanna is knocked from her high society perch and learns to be maternal and nurturing, and Dean is encouraged to become more responsible whilst also allowing some of Joanna’s confidence to rub off on him (leading him to develop the crazy golf course). On a personal level, I find it difficult to detach this film from the love that my grandmother (who passed away in the 1990s) had for it, and I vividly remember watching it with her when I would visit my grandparents at weekends. Overboard is an entertaining film, with a certain je ne sais quoi, given by the leads and Dixon’s script, that the cynical 2018 remake failed miserably at emulating.
Severin Films’ Blu-ray release of Overboard contains a very good, film-like presentation that is supported by an excellent interview with the film’s writer, Leslie Dixon. (A feature-length documentary about Dixon – who has worked as writer and producer on a series of Hollywood films – would be more than welcome, in all honesty.)
Overboard (1987) is available from Severin Films now. For more information, please click here.
The Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia is a mercurial, intriguing figure. His work has long been underappreciated, neglected, or simply misunderstood – amongst both Spanish audiences and English-speaking cinephiles. Severin Films are remedying this with several Blu-ray releases of de la Iglesia’s pictures, including his most (in)famous – and arguably, for many years, his most deeply misunderstood film – Cannibal Man (or Le semana del asesino).
An outspoken, openly gay socialist, director Eloy de la Iglesia’s early career seems like something of an anathema in the context of General Franco’s Spain. The filmmaker’s feature debut was a portmanteau children’s film, Fantasia… 3(1966), produced at a time when family-oriented features attracted significant funding from the Spanish government. However, de la Iglesia’s name, at least amongst English-speaking cinephiles, is largely remembered for a core group of genre films from the early 1970s – from thrillers such as The Glass Ceiling (El techo de cristal, 1971) to the hugely underrated Clockwork Orange pastiche Clockwork Terror (Una gota de sangre para morir amando / Murder in a Blue World, 1973). (Seriously, I could write a thesis on Clockwork Terror: hit me up!)
From the mid-1970s, with the death of Franco and the liberalisation of Spanish culture (and film censorship), de la Iglesia made films that were more openly political, often focusing on youth subcultures – with which de la Iglesia had an apparently Pasolini-like fascination. In the 1980s, de la Iglesia made El pico (The Needle, 1983) and its sequel (El pico 2, 1984): both films dealt with delinquency and addiction. At around the same time, the director himself developed a heroin habit which accompanied, and most likely exacerbated, a slump in his career, before a major retrospective in the mid-90s revived interest in his work. His final film, in 2003 (Bulgarian Lovers / Los novios búlgaros), was produced after a 16 year hiatus from cinema.
Made amidst two distinctive thrillers that de la Iglesia directed (The Glass Ceiling and No One Heard the Scream / Nadie oyó gritar, 1973), Cannibal Man sits apart from them in the sense that it continuously attempts to negate more traditional models of suspense, its narrative focusing on a cycle of violence that feels utterly inevitable in the manner in which it escalates. What results is a film that feels profoundly bleak, the acts of brutality – motivated by desperation rather than cruelty – escalating and threatening to spill over the edges of the film frame. Notably, when Cannibal Man’s script was first submitted to (and rejected by) the Spanish censors, it was classified as ‘horror’ owing to the ‘accumulation of crimes and blood’ within it[i]. In the midst of the film’s violence is the protagonist, Marcos (Vicente Parra), who is ‘forced’ to commit murder after murder in order to cover up the accidental killing of a taxi driver.
As Cannibal Man opens, Marcos (Vicente Parra), a slaughterhouse worker, lives in a run-down shack near a modern high-rise building. Marcos is pursued romantically by Rosa (Vicky Lagos), the waitress in the café that Marcos frequents; but Marcos is involved with a significantly younger girlfriend, Paula (Emma Cohen).
One Sunday evening, Marcos and Paula become involved in an argument with a taxi driver, who takes umbrage at their heavy petting in the backseat of his car. Marcos strikes the taxi driver with a rock, accidentally killing him. On Monday, when Paula suggests they should go to the police, Marcos strangles her and puts her body under his bed.
On Tuesday, Marcos’ brother Esteban (Charly Bravo), a truck driver, returns home earlier than expected. (He and Marcos live together.) Marcos confides in Esteban, but Esteban refuses to assist Marco. (‘If you won’t help me, who will?’, Marcos wonders.) Marcos kills Esteban by bashing his skull in with a wrench, and hides the body in the bedroom with Paula’s corpse.
Wednesday: Esteban’s fiancée Carmen (Lola Herrera) arrives, looking for her lover. She discovers the corpses of Esteban and Paula, and Marcos slits her throat with a carving knife. On Thursday, Carmen’s father, Mr Ambrosio (Fernando Sanchez Polak), knocks on Marcos’ door, searching for his daughter. When Ambrosio discovers the bodies of Carmen and Esteban in bed together, in a perverse mockery of the marital bed, Marcos kills Ambrosio by burying a cleaver in his face.
In the midst of this chaos, Marcos is given a promotion at the factory: he is commanded to operate a huge, computerised meat mincer, which is sold as the future of the industry. Operating this machine, Marcos sees an opportunity to dispose of the corpses that are littering his home, and sets about dismantling them with a saw in his shack, and carrying the parts to work in a bowling bag in order to feed them into the mincer.
Meanwhile, in a flat on one of the upper floors of the nearby high-rise building, a wealthy young man, Nestor (Eusebio Poncela), has been watching the events unfolding in Marcos’ shack with an erotic fascination.
The script for Cannibal Man was originally submitted to the Spanish censors under the title Auténtico caldo de cultivo, which translates as ‘Genuine Breeding Ground’ – presumably, a breeding ground of violence and brutality. (One may speak of a ‘breeding ground’ of a destructive ideology: a caldo de cultivo del fascismo, for example.) However, the script was rejected. Unfortunately, days before this decision was reached, production had already begun – illicitly. Subsequently, the filmmakers were forced to hastily revise the script, and resubmit it to the Spanish censors a month later, under the title Le semana del asesino – only for it to be rejected once again. A third pass at the censor was made; production continued with this new script in place.
Sticking points for the Spanish censors were the film’s scenes of violence and the implicit homosexuality of the characters. This implicit homosexuality was made very explicit in an early cut of the film, which featured Marcos and Nestor in, for want of a better phrase, a passionate snog, complete with circling camerawork: this footage, deleted from the film’s final edit, is featured as a silent outtake on this Blu-ray release, alongside other footage excised from the finished picture. (Poetically, the scene would have echoed the heavy petting of Marcos and Paula in the cab, and the more functional bout of coitus that Marcos and Rosa participate in.)
Three of the principals involved in the film were gay: de la Iglesia, and actors Vicente Parra and Eusebio Poncela. Parra seems to have been conflicted about his sexuality and ‘closeted’, largely owing to roles which positioned him as a heart throb for female audiences. These tensions seem to work their way into the film, with Marcos’ apparent Latin ‘machismo’ – his dalliances with his significantly younger girlfriend, Paula, and with the sultry proletarian waitress Rosa – being undercut by his encounters with Nestor, culminating in the sequence in which Nestor takes Marcos swimming at night in the pool of the club to which Nestor belongs. The pair frolic in the water like lovers, an underwater shot of the two reinforcing the sexual ‘chemistry’ of their pairing. Nevertheless, with the excising of the aforementioned scene in which Marcos and Nestor engage in tonsil tennis, the sexual tension that exists between these two characters remains buried (albeit fairly close to the surface) in the final version of the picture.
Originally, Marcos and Nestor were to have been much younger – in their late teens. However, in the interview on this disc, film critic Carlos Aguilar – who came to know de la Iglesia during his final years – says that the suggestion of a gay relationship between two young men of that age was considered taboo, so the characters were made significantly older, and when the final version of the script was submitted to the censors, de la Iglesia added a disclaimer about Nestor’s sexuality: ‘There is not the slightest hint of homosexuality in Nestor’, this disclaimer told the censor, adding that the note was added to the script ‘to avoid any possible confusion and misrepresentations concerning the behaviour of the character’[ii]. The finished film was not released in Spain until 1974, and at that time it was subjected to 62 cuts by the national censors (though some sources claim that even more cuts were made). These cuts were to reduce moments of violence and sexuality; the censor also stipulated that the film must end with the punishment of Marcos, and the final version of the film ends with a scene in which Marcos telephones the police and waits outside his shack for them to arrive. (The original, intended ending was apparently far more ambiguous.)
When talking about thrillers, comparisons with Alfred Hitchcock are often lazy and all too convenient, but nevertheless Cannibal Man seems to be driven by a very overt love of Hitchcock’s American thrillers. The opening sequence (of the Spanish version, at least: the export cut opens with some of the slaughterhouse footage spliced in before the credits) features the juxtaposition of the ultra-modern high-rise in which Nestor lives and the nearby proletarian shack that is Marcos’ home. The camera pans from the high-rise to Marcos’ shack, with a series of pull-ins to the shack, dissolves, and a dolly in to the doorway of Marcos’ home. Dissolve to an interior shot of the house, as Marcos listens to the radio and glances at the nudie pics on his wall. He reclines in a chair. (There is a clear suggestion that he is masturbating.) Cut to: Nestor in the tower block, using binoculars to spy on Nestor through the skylight in Marcos’ house.
The slow pull-in to Nestor’s shack, with the dissolve marking the transition from the exterior to the interior, seems intentionally to quote the opening sequence of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) – with its similar transition to the interior of the hotel room in which Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is involve in a sexual tryst with her married lover, Sam Loomis (John Gavin). The sexual confusion of Marcos, subtly revealed as the narrative develops, perhaps also has parallels in Psycho’s depiction of Norman Bates’ sexual repression, and sublimation of this into violence: as Carlos Aguilar says in the extra features on this disc, the people Marcos murders represent various agents of repression – economic, sexual, familial, and social pressures. Paula criticises Marcos because she believes he is not ambitious enough, too happy with his proletarian existence, and she wants him to earn more so that they may marry: he strangles her not when she suggests going to the police about the death of the taxi driver, but when she spits at him, ‘After all, you just want to live in this shack and continue being a worker all your life!’ Rosa criticises Marcos’ relationship with the younger Paula, suggesting that he should pursue a more mature woman (i.e., herself); and so on.
Meanwhile, Nestor’s use of the binoculars to spy on his neighbour – and his ‘accidental’ witnessing of the murders Marcos commits – seems deliberately to invite comparisons with Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). De la Iglesia’s previous film, the thriller The Glass Ceiling, had touched on the theme of voyeurism, the character of Ricardo (Dean Selmier) suggesting that cinema and photography are ‘an escape valve for this voyeur instinct’; but in Cannibal Man, de la Iglesia makes voyeurism a core element within the film’s oblique examination of social, economic, and sexual inequalities. Clearly drawing on the premise of Rear Window, Cannibal Man frames Nestor as a voyeur and accidental witness to murder.
From his luxurious apartment in the modern high-rise building, Nestor uses his binoculars to spy on Marcos through the skylight of Marcos’ shack: in the aforementioned opening scene, Nestor watches as Marcos masturbates to the posters of pin-up girls that adorn the walls of the shack’s measly living room – another expression of the voyeuristic / scopophilic instinct. Nestor is distanced – socially and economically – from Marcos, but is able to monitor Marcos’ activities using a symbol of his wealth: the binoculars. It is through these binoculars that Nestor witnesses some of the murders Marcos commits, and subsequently Nestor breaks down the barriers between the watcher and the watched by staging a series of ‘chance’ encounters with Marcos – eventually leading to the two men becoming friends / lovers, Nestor attempting to help Marcos escape from the cycle of escalating violence in which he has become trapped. The social difference between Marcos and Nestor is allied with the sexuality of the two characters: Nestor, from a comfortably bourgeois existence, seems quite openly to be gay, but the proletarian Marcos seems to have sublimated and repressed his homosexuality to the extent of extending his machismo through the acquisition of a much younger ‘trophy’ girlfriend. (Marcos’ truck-driving brother Esteban is an equally macho character: his fiancée, Carmen, refers to Esteban as a ‘hooligan’ and a ‘brute’, dryly commenting on their upcoming wedding that ‘At least I’ll get some jewellery’.)
When Marcos and Nestor encounter one another outside Marcos’ shack, Nestor wonders why Marcos always addresses him formally: the answer to seems clearly to be that Marcos considers Nestor to be his social better. In a later scene, Nestor tells Marcos that he plans to let his dog roam free at night, because his dog is looking for a bitch in heat. Marcos tells Nestor that all the local dogs are stray mongrels, not pedigrees – a metaphor for the class difference in the relationship between Marcos and Nestor themselves – and asks if Nestor is worried that his dog may be killed by the others. ‘I’m not worried’, Nestor tells Marcos, ‘A well-fed animal is always stronger’. (This, again, seems to be a metaphor for the relationship between Nestor and Marcos: that Nestor, thanks to his bourgeois upbringing, possesses a greater sense of emotional resilience.) When Marcos asks Nestor why the young man is so interested in him and must instead have numerous important friends, Nestor comments that ‘Important people are very boring. They have solutions for everything’.
The violence that Marcos enacts is offset by the graphic footage of animals being killed in the slaughterhouse in which Marcos works. We see beeves being strung up, their throats slit and their bodies convulsing as their blood spills out on the stone floor. Carcasses are bisected with cleavers; blood is washed down drains. The sense of desensitisation that this engenders amongst the slaughterhouse workers is communicated in a scene in which we see Marcos snacking on his sandwiches with the bloody slaughterhouse behind him. The use of documentary footage of the slaughterhouse – integrated into the naturalistic, verité-style photography of the rest of Cannibal Man – as a counterpoint to the main narrative recalls, intentionally or otherwise, Georges Franju’s 1949 short film ‘Le sang des bêtes’, in which Franju cuts graphic documentary footage of the operation of an abattoir against shots of normal life occurring in the streets of Paris. (Franju once said that the black-and-white footage of the slaughterhouse in ‘Le sang des bêtes’ would be too repulsive if presented in colour: Cannibal Man is arguably a testament to the veracity of this statement.)
The slaughterhouse is a symbol of a system that oppresses and mangles its inhabitants. As the narrative progresses, Marcos’ shack becomes itself a veritable slaughterhouse, with bodies piling up in the bedroom as each day passes – so much so that Marcos is forced to sleep on the sofa in the living room. The effect of this is articulated on the film’s soundtrack, via the sound of buzzing flies which accumulates as the story develops and the bodies presumably begin to decay.
When Marcos is ‘promoted’ to operating the huge computerised mincing machine – the only slightly absurd element in a film that is dominated by a profound naturalism – which is sold as a symbol of the inevitable future, this is in effect a ‘de-skilling’ that marks him for mockery amongst his peers – but it provides him with an opportunity to dispose of the corpses in his house. ‘That machine will be your new boss’, a manager tells Marcos, ‘Together you can perform interesting work’. (In the scene in which Marcos is given this new job, the manager convinces Marcos to agree by speaking in cliches, telling Marcos that ‘this factory is as much yours as it is ours’, and that ‘We have all raised it’. Meanwhile, Marcos can’t help but stare at the bare legs of the manager’s pretty secretary.) This sense of the changing times – a transition from a more community-oriented existence to the depersonalised lifestyles of the high-modern – is established in the film’s juxtaposition of Marcos’ humble shack and the grandiosity of the nearby high-rise building in which Nestor lives, and also in an early scene in which Marcos visits the café and Rosa serves him soup made in the factory: ‘It tastes like mother used to make’, Rosa quips, the line referencing advertising slogans that attempt to blur the line between mass-produced food and nostalgia for home-cooked meals.
Lumbered with its deeply-lurid, ever-so-slightly-misleading English-language export title (Cannibal Man or The Cannibal Man), in the UK, Eloy de la Iglesia’s film hacked its way onto the official ‘video nasties’ list in 1983 before being released in a BBFC-classified version, with only three seconds of cuts, by Redemption Video approximately a decade later. However, despite a few instances of grue, Cannibal Man is a relatively chaste, though profoundly bleak, psychological study. For those who first encountered the film after the ‘video nasties’ moral panic (this writer – who first saw the film via the aforementioned Redemption VHS release – included), expectations were most likely torn asunder – much like the cleaver that Marcos uses to bisect the face of Mr Ambrosio, Carmen’s father. (This is the image that graced some of the film’s artwork, including the cover of Severin Films’ Blu-ray release.)
The film is much better served by its original Spanish title, La semana del asesino (‘The Week of the Killer’), which offers a far more accurate attempt to capture the plot than Cannibal Man. Certainly, the film’s protagonist does not participate in cannibalism, other than to feed the hacked-apart bodies of his victims into the new, computerised meat mincing machine at the food factory where he works. (In one scene, Marcos becomes nauseous when he visits the café and Rosa presents him with soup made in the factor in which he works.)
Video
Severin Films’ release of Cannibal Man includes two versions of the film on a region-free Blu-ray disc: an extended cut (107:19 mins) with the title La semana del asesino, which is the main presentation, and the English-dubbed export cut (98:25 mins) titled Cannibal Man. It’s worth mentioning that the extended cut is not the version that originally played in Spanish cinemas: where the censored Spanish cut (not included on this disc) trimmed some of the violence and sexuality – abbreviating the sex scenes between Paula and Marcos, and Rosa and Marcos, and gutting the sequence in which Marcos and Nestor visit the swimming pool at night – the Cannibal Man export cut truncated the scenes set in the factory (whilst also placing one of the grisly slaughterhouse scenes in front of the opening credits). The extended cut contains all of this footage, essentially compositing together both the Spanish version and the export cut.
The extended cut is comparable to the ‘integral’ version of the film that was released on Blu-ray in Spain by Divisa. (A previous Blu-ray release from Subkultur in Germany contained the export cut, with the scenes exclusive to the domestic Spanish cut presented in the disc’s extra features as ‘deleted scenes’.) This ‘integral’ cut of the film incorporates all of the usable footage from the various versions of the picture that have been released. As a result, if the Spanish language audio track is selected, some of the footage originally excised from the domestic cut of the film is presented with English dialogue.
Both versions of the film are presented in 1080p, using the AVC codec. The extended cut takes up slightly under 27Gb of space on the dual-layered disc, and the export cut takes up 16Gb. Both cuts of the film are presented in the intended aspect ratio of 1.85:1.
The presentation is excellent, and appears to be taken from the original negative. Contrast levels are superb, particularly in the night-time scenes. There’s a pleasing sense of gradation in the curve to the toe, where deep, inky blacks reside. This results in a very strong sense of depth to the scene set at night. Highlights are even and balanced. A superb level of detail is present throughout, the image being richly textured. Colours are consistent and deep. Damage is limited to a few white blobs and scratches, indicative of wear and tear on the emulsions of the film negative. There is some very slight gate weave evident in one or two scenes too. The encode is pleasing too, ensuring that the natural grain structure of the film is retained. The result is a very, very pleasing, filmlike viewing experience.
Both cuts are presented with the option of viewing the film with its Spanish language audio (as a DTS-HD MA 2.0 dual mono track) or the English dub prepared for the export version (also as a DTS-HD MA dual mono 2.0 track). (The English dub for this film, which will be familiar to those who first saw Cannibal Man via its pre-cert VHS release or the Redemption Video rerelease from the 1990s, is very good.) As noted above, as the extended cut is essentially a composite of the domestic Spanish version and the English-dubbed export cut, both of its audio tracks flit between Spanish and English at times – for scenes that were never dubbed into English or Spanish. Optional English SDH subtitles which transcribe the English dub, and separate optional English subtitles translating the Spanish dialogue, are available. These are easy to read and free from errors.
Extra features
In terms of extra features, the disc includes two interviews and promotional material for the film.
In ‘Cinema at the Margins’ (26:11), Stephen Thrower and Shelagh Rowan-Legg (the author of The Spanish Fantastic) are interviewed separately about de la Iglesia’s work. Rowan-Legg situates de la Iglesia’s films within the censorious climate of Spanish cinema. She suggests that Spanish filmmakers found various ways to circumvent the wrath of the censor, including casting non-Spanish actors in order to make the films appear to be more ‘foreign’.
Thrower argues that de la Iglesia was at heart a ‘politically-minded’ filmmaker. He compares de la Iglesia with Jess Franco (who incidentally wrote some music for one of Iglesia’s films Cuadrilátero, 1970), who chose to work outside Spain rather than battle the Spanish censors. Thrower discusses de la Iglesia’s early career, working in television, and his first film: the children’s picture Fantasy 3 (1966), and the progression of his career into the realm of the thriller.
Discussing Cannibal Man, Thrower refers to it as a ‘strange film’, with an emphasis on social inequality. The film has ‘the texture of real life to it’ but the plotting has a sense of ‘sustained implausibility in the way that the crimes unfold’: thus a sense of naturalism is placed in counterpoint with the surreal. Thrower argues that the protagonist is strikingly passive, a trait that Thrower suggests evolved from the original script in which the lead character was to be an 18 year old youth. This changed when Vicente Parra was cast in the role, though the character’s passivity remained.
Rowan-Legg talks about the manner in which de la Iglesia embeds homosexuality in the narrative through the character of Nestor, suggesting that Nestor’s homosexuality within the film is unchallenged because the character comes from a privileged background – another way in which de la Iglesia criticised the hypocrisies of society.
Thrower discusses the film’s release history in the US, where it played on a double-bill with Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil. Initially released in the US as The Cannibal Man, the film was eventually retitled for US audiences as The Apartment on the 13th Floor. He reflects on the film’s association in the UK with the ‘video nasty’ moral panic, arguing that the film’s place on the list of ‘video nasties’ was simply owing to the use of the word ‘cannibal’ in its title.
Thrower talks about the ‘two distinct periods in de la Iglesia’s career’: prior to 1975, the director was making genre pictures with political subtexts, but after the mid-70s and the death of Franco with the resultant liberalisation of social mores and film censorship, de la Iglesia began making films that were more explicitly political and often dealt with homosexuality and disenfranchised social groups. After making El pico (The Needle, 1983) and its sequel, about drug addiction and delinquency, de la Iglesia became a heroin addict himself; this led to a slump in his career.
Thrower compares de la Iglesia with both Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini, in the sense that like those filmmakers, de la Iglesia was gay, with a similar interest in ‘rough boys from the underclass’ to Pasolini, and was a Marxist fascinated with the intersection of social class and sexuality.
In ‘The Director and the Cannibal Man’ (17:54), Carlos Aguilar (the co-author of a Spanish book about de la Iglesia) talks about de la Iglesia’s career. The interview is in Spanish, with optional English subtitles. Aguilar says that de la Iglesia was from the Basque region of Spain, and after studying film at university made an impact with his first picture, the family film Fantasy 3. During the 1960s, family films were sustained by significant government grants, so there were a number of Spanish filmmakers who broke into directing by making a family-oriented picture.
With Cannibal Man, de la Iglesia set out to make ‘the most shocking film ever in Spanish cinema’, embedding ‘political and social criticism’ into the narrative. For the first three weeks of production, the filmmakers did not have the correct permit; when the filmmakers approached the authorities for the permit, their request was rejected owing to the subject matter of the film. Production was suspended, and the script was hastily rewritten in order to make it palatable to the censors.
Originally, both Marcos and Nestor were to be 18 or 19 years old, and the homosexual relationship between the two was more explicit. However, this wasn’t permitted: the suggestion of homosexuality between two male characters was only allowed if the characters were ‘mature, but not if they were teenagers’. Hence, de la Iglesia changed the ages of the characters. The censors also objected to the original ending of the picture, which was more open-ended; the filmmakers remedied this by writing an ending in which Marcos turns himself in to the police. However, even despite the rewrites, the completed film offended the Spanish censors so much that they demanded those 62 cuts.
Parra, playing ‘an insane and possibly gay proletariat’, was playing against type: the actor was more frequently associated with aristocratic roles in films. However, Parra’s performance in Cannibal Man won awards for the actor, proving to critics and audiences that he was capable of playing a broad range of character types.
The next year, in 1973, de la Iglesia and Parra would go on to collaborate on No One Heard the Scream (Nadie oyó gritar). This film also featured Carmen Sevilla, who de la Iglesia had directed in The Glass Ceiling (El techo de cristal, 1971), in a role that, like Parra’s performance in Cannibal Man, challenged the types of wholesome, innocent characters with which Sevilla had been associated previously.
Aguilar argues that Cannibal Man is not a serial killer picture or a slasher film: its protagonist, Marcos, ‘is a proletariat, not too smart, an uneducated man who has a sad life’. He kills by mistake, and then murders other people in order to cover up his original crime. The characters he kills ‘represent all the repression he has’: ‘Sexual repression, familial repression, social repression, financial repression, and even political repression’.
Aguilar talks about the importance of the set decoration, by Santiago Ontañón, to Cannibal Man, in terms of the naturalistic aesthetic of the film. This was enhanced by the photography, by Raul Artigot.
The film took two years to reach cinemas in Spain, and on its initial release it didn’t perform particularly well at the Spanish box office. However, over time it has acquired a cult reputation, ‘in a false way’, through the perception of it as a ‘sleazy, violent, nasty film’, but in fact, Aguilar says, the violence in the picture ‘has a meaning rather than just being a cheap spectacle’.
The film’s English-language trailer (3:07) is also included, as is a montage of deleted footage (1:35). Some of this material is silent and monochrome, depicting the arrest of Marcos and his journey in a police car; also included is a longer, also silent, shot of Marcos and Rosa engaged in coitus; and a brief scene in which Marcos and Nestor kiss passionately (again, this is silent).
An impactful film ostensibly about the escalation of violence, Cannibal Man seems to contain some deliberate references to Hitchcock’s thrillers but in tone feels much more in line with the paradigms of film noir, with Marcos as a proletarian man who finds himself enmeshed in a downward spiral caused by a momentary loss of self-control. The passage of the week is displayed by the use of onscreen titles denoting the day on which the events take place. With each day comes the death of another victim of Marcos. The overall effect is of a relentless tirade of violence which carries its own seemingly unstoppable momentum. Worked into this is a deconstruction of Latin machismo, and a negotiation of the mercurial boundaries of human sexuality. This was the first of de la Iglesia’s film to explore male homosexuality, which would become an overriding characteristic of the director’s later films – after the liberalisation of Spanish cinema that occurred following the collapse of the Franco regime.
What is easy to overlook, or forget in the space between viewings, is the film’s deep vein of black comedy. ‘Don’t worry, people are only killed that easily in movies’, Marcos tells a worried Paula after he has killed the taxi driver by hitting him on the head with a rock. In another scene, a colleague of Marcos’ blathers incessantly, and in graphic detail, about the death of Marcos’ mother, who burned to death in an industrial accident at the factory – after telling Marcos that he will not recount the incident in any detail.
Cannibal Man is a superb film. Severin Films’ Blu-ray release is excellent, containing a glowing presentation of both the ‘integral’ version of the picture and the shorter export cut, alongside some superb contextual material.
[i] Lazarro-Reboll, Antonio, 2012: Spanish Horror Film. Edinburgh University Press: P.138
Chiefly circulated amongst fans of extreme cinema in a version culled from its US VHS release, under the tacky title Naked Massacre, the 1976 picture Born for Hell offers an intriguing look at the case of Richard Speck, who during a single night in 1966 murdered eight student nurses in a Chicago townhouse – through the disorientating lens of an international co-production. Filmed in Belfast, Dublin, and West Germany, Born for Hell is credited to the Canadian filmmaker Denis Héroux, and seems an unusual fit in Héroux’s body of work. However, Mathieu Carrière suggests that the film was instead largely the product of the Hungarian director Géza von Radványi. Severin Films have released Born for Hell on Blu-ray in an impressive package, including both the director’s cut and the abbreviated Naked Massacre edit alongside some insightful contextual material.
Belfast, during the Troubles. Cain Adamson (Mathieu Carrière), an American soldier returning from Vietnam, stops off on his way home to the United States. He takes lodgings in a seedy hostel, where he meets a young Vietnamese man. The pair engage in quietly hostile dialogue at first, culminating in the young Vietnamese man propositioning Adamson, testing the American’s sense of surety in his sexuality and sense of self. However, soon they engage in quasi-philosophical dialogue with one another, linked by their shared status as cultural outsiders.
Nearby, a group of student nurses are lodging in a house together. These include Bridget (played by Debra Berger, the daughter of William Berger), Amy (Carole Laure), Jenny (Leonora Fani), Christine (Christine Boisson), Leila (Myriam Boyer), Pam (Ely de Galleani), Catherine (Eva Mattes), and Eileen (Andrée Pelletier). Owing to the violence on the streets, the nurses are advised not to leave the house alone, and are transported to and from the hospital by police van.
Adamson begins to frequent a pub near to the house in which the nurses are living. He sees in one of them an echo of the wife he left behind in the States. Seemingly motivated by this, one evening Adamson forces his way into the house. He takes the young women hostage, murdering them one-by-one.
There are clear echoes of the Speck case. In July of 1966, oddball loner Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses after breaking into the South Chicago townhouse that functioned as their dormitory. High on drink and drugs, Speck trapped the women in a room before luring them out one-by-one, whereupon he would kill them using a knife or by strangling them. However, he left a ninth woman, who crawled and hid under a bed, alive. This woman, Corazon Amurao, was the nurse who had answered the door when Speck knocked earlier in the evening – leading to Speck forcing his way into the house. (Speck had presumably lost count of the number of women in the house and forgotten about his ninth captive.) Amurao was later able to offer a description of Speck and his distinctive tattoo, which Speck had acquired whilst serving prison time in the early 60s: this tattoo read, simply, ‘Born to Raise Hell’. During the manhunt that ensued, Speck attempted suicide by slashing his wrists in the seedy hotel in which he was living, and was arrested after a doctor treating his wounds recognised the ‘Born to Raise Hell’ tattoo on Speck’s left forearm, which had been highlighted in the press coverage of the murders.
As Joe Coleman, artist and connoisseur of ghoulish Americana, says in the interview on this disc, Speck missed out on being labelled, by any strict definition of the term at least, as a serial killer simply by the fact that the murders he committed took place in the same location and on the same night. However, the Speck case was roughly contemporaneous with a number of other high-profile incidences of violent murder that shifted the paradigms of public perception of serial homicide (to use a term that would not be officially coined until its use by FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler in 1974). These included the crimes of the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, and the Tate-La Bianca murders – and like those crimes, the Speck case buried its way into the public subconscious, inspiring a number of films, not to mention the strategies used to market them to an audience hot for narratives focusing on serial killers.
For example, Fernando di Leo’s 1971 thrilling all’italiana Slaughter Hotel (La bestia uccide a sangue freddo) was marketed in the US with a lurid one-sheet poster that directly referenced the Speck murders. ‘Carved out of today’s headlines!’, screamed the poster, a black and white mock-up of the front page of a newspaper, ‘See the slashing massacre of 8 innocent nurses!’ Beneath these words was a monochrome photograph of a pile of female corpses, and below this the film’s title: ‘Slaughter Hotel … a place where nothing is forbidden!’ Similarly, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) filters the Speck murders through its proto-slasher lens, using a sorority house as the key setting for its narrative – which focuses on a killer who, like Speck, murders the young women inside one-by-one. Clark’s picture formed a template that many later slasher films would emulate: for example, Mark Rosman’s The House on Sorority Row (1982), and Amy Holden Jones’ The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) and its sequels. Thus Speck’s murder spree arguably anchored the core tenets of a specific subtype of the American slasher picture.
The film that most immediately referenced the Speck case was WakamatsuKôji’s Violated Angels, released in 1967, only a year after the murders occurred. An exploitative Pinku picture, Violated Angels was shot quickly (over three days) and predominantly in black and white – with some colour footage in the final sequence. It is very much dissimilar to Born for Hell, other than in the respect that both films relocate the Speck murders into very different cultural contexts. Where the narrative of Violated Angels is set in Japan, Born for Hell – the title of which alludes to the phraseology of the tattoo that led to Speck’s arrest – takes place in Belfast during the Troubles.
Though Canadian filmmaker Denis Héroux was credited as the director of Born for Hell, lead actor Mathieu Carrière states in the interview on this disc that the film was mostly directed by the Hungarian director Géza von Radványi, who is credited with the film’s story and as its producer. Radványi’s naturalistic style is certainly evident in Born for Hell, which features a heavy use of cinema-verité-style photography and editing. The director’s cut on this disc, which is the main presentation, enhances this through its avoidance of non-diegetic music and use of genuine newsreel footage of the Troubles (and also the Vietnam War). (Chris O’Neill’s video essay, ‘Bombing Here, Shooting There’, states that this emphasis on realism extended to the spontaneous casting of a British soldier – who had stopped the production team in order to ask to see their identification – in the film.)
Most viewers who have encountered Born for Hell after its original theatrical release, however, will have seen the picture via the cut that was released on VHS in the US, under the more lurid title Naked Massacre, in 1984. That version of the film, which has been available via various bootleg VHS releases and grey market DVDs, is included on this disc as an extra feature. It differs from the director’s cut in its abbreviation of the film’s opening moments, eliminating the onscreen scrawl that attempts to outline the tensions in Northern Ireland, and by its inclusion of non-diegetic music, not to mention the manner in which some of the later scenes are edited.
In the video essay contained on this disc, Chris O’Neill suggests that the decision to set the film in Belfast during the Troubles was almost arbitrary, and the dialogue (post-synched, apparently in Canada, with only Carole Laure and Andrée Pelletier providing their own voices) offers a hodgepodge of accents and stereotypes – mostly erroneously associated with the Republic of Ireland rather than Northern Ireland. (The exteriors for the film were shot on location in both Belfast and Dublin, with the interiors lensed in West Germany.)
However, via Adamson’s status as a veteran of the war in Vietnam, it seems that Born for Hell seems quite intentionally to draw parallels between Belfast at the time of the Troubles and Vietnam during the years of American-led fighting against the NVA. Both are sites of colonial violence, in which attempts are made via guerrilla tactics to displace what is regarded as a colonising force. Via both newsreel footage and scenes staged for the film, we see British troops on the streets, asking citizens for their identification papers, and engaged in running combat with paramilitary groups. Heightening the parallels that the film draws between Northern Ireland and Vietnam, we also see similar newsreel footage of the war in Vietnam, via a television set that the nurses watch. (‘Same old news: a bombing here, a shooting there’, one of the young women observes.)
When Adamson first arrives in Belfast, he seeks shelter in a church. However, a bomb explodes, and there is screaming. Endless screaming and smoke. Adamson carries one of the wounded out of the church, where he is told by a British soldier that an ambulance is outside. ‘He’s dead’, Adamson responds curtly, the moment underscoring the protagonist’s casual, matter-of-fact relationship with violence and death. Outside, billboards display government-mandated warnings not to allow children to play with guns, whilst groups of youths are shown mimicking the violence of the adult world. Adamson encounters such a group of children: one boy holds a blindfold, whilst another holds a toy submachine gun. The imagery recalls some of the most iconic images of the Troubles: the documentary photographer Homer Sykes, for example, captured a number of famous photographs of children playing with toy assault rifles amidst British military vehicles. (This is the kind of imagery that, almost 20 years later, would also work its way into the music video for The Cranberries’ ‘Zombie’.) However, Born for Hell’s depiction of childhood’s association with violence is also reminiscent of the work of Sam Peckinpah: viewers may recall the battle of Starbuck in The Wild Bunch (1969), Peckinpah’s own veiled critique of American involvement in Vietnam, and its aftermath, in which a group of children mimic the nihilistic violence they have just witnessed.
In the aforementioned video essay, Chris O’Neill also states that Born for Hell plays into the reductive perception that the Troubles were purely sourced in religious difference and persecution ‘rather than a complex web of deep-rooted political tensions’. At one point, as part of the local ‘colour’ worked into the picture, Adamson visits a pub in which the denizens discuss the Troubles. ‘You know, this is going to be the last of the religious wars’, a man says, to which his friend responds: ‘And this bloody war’s been going on for 400 years’. ‘And I don’t even remember if my parents were Protestant or Catholic’, a woman adds, underscoring the senselessness of the violence that is shown being enacted on the streets of the city.
Against this overt layer of political violence is an undercurrent of gender-based aggression: one plays off against the other, culminating in Adamson’s brutal assault upon the nurses – which carries the violence from the city streets into the relative sanctity of the house in which the women are staying. (A loose equivalence is thus drawn between political violence and Adamson’s misogynistic fury, compounded by a policeman’s onscreen exclamation after the murders have been discovered: ‘Must have been a terrorist’, he tells his colleague.) Mid-way through the film, one of the men in the pub refers to the nurses as ‘The last virgins in Belfast’, to which the young Vietnamese man, whom Adamson meets in the hostel, adds: ‘They’re all hookers. The more innocent they look, the more they cost’. When, later, the young Vietnamese man suggests that Adamson is ‘scared of women’, in a subsequent scene Adamson is shown chasing away two men who are attempting to rob a middle-aged prostitute (who looks far from innocent). The woman, Molly, takes Adamson home for a ‘free one’ in compensation for his intervention in the attempted robbery. She strips naked, covering a statue of Christ in a darkly comic expression of modesty, but Adamson is having none of it: he rejects her blunt attempts to get him to fuck her. He departs, but before he does so, she asks him if he ‘doesn’t like women’. ‘Goddamn pansy!’, she spits in anger as he walks out the door.
Clearly (and deeply stereotypically) gay, the young Vietnamese man functions as a foil to Adamson, his presence a suggestion of complexity, or hidden ambiguity, within Adamson’s apparent heterosexuality – hinting at Adamson’s motive for killing the nurses. ‘I’d do you for peanuts’, the young Vietnamese man tells Adamson camply, ‘I’m not greedy’. It is unclear whether this character is intended to be real or imaginary – a product of Adamson’s experiences in Vietnam fused with his sexual insecurity. Certainly, the character’s presence in the diegesis enables Adamson to reflect on his past. (Though this young Vietnamese man does not participate in the murders of the nurses, the effect is not dissimilar to the pairing of Michael Rooker’s aloof Henry Lee Lucas and Tom Towles’ randy Ottis Toolle in John McNaughton’s later Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, 1986.) Adamson tells this character about his sister, who after a period of time as a teenage prostitute, killed herself at the age of 18; in response to this revelation, the young Vietnamese man goads Adamson by suggesting the latter was engaged in an incestuous relationship with his sister: ‘Did you make it with her?’, he asks, before adding: ‘You’re not psycho, by any chance? Women do that to a man’.
In Violated Angels, the aforementioned film by Wakamatsu that is based on the Speck murders, the lesbian sexuality of two of the victims is foregrounded for exploitative effect. The same is true of Born for Hell, in which one of the nurses, Christine, is shown almost desperately attempting to seduce her contemporary, Jenny, who appears utterly naïve towards Christine’s very obvious desire for her. When Adamson sneaks into the nurses’ house, he threatens Christine and Jenny first, holding them at knifepoint and demanding money ‘to go home to the States’. Later, as if taking a page from the playbook of David Hess’ Krug Stillo (in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, 1972), Adamson forces Christine and Jenny to engage in coitus whilst he watches, before making one of them stab the other. (One can almost imagine Junior Stillo on the sidelines, excitedly jibbering: ‘Make them make it with each other, man!’)
Throughout the film, there is the suggestion of the psychological cost of experiences in combat, enabling Born for Hell to sit alongside other pictures about combat fatigue amongst veterans of the war in Vietnam – from the likes of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), to Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood (1982) and Buddy Giovinazzo’s Combat Shock (1986). However, despite a clear sense that the protagonist is haunted by his experiences in combat, behind the violence Adamson commits against the nurses are unknowable motives. The film hints at sexual insecurity, and it also suggests traumatic events in Adamson’s youth (for example, his sister’s suicide); but on the other hand, Adamson’s accounts of his experience are not necessarily reliable. ‘Maybe he hates us all’, one of the nurses suggests, ‘Maybe he wants revenge [….] Some men detest women. Frustration. Something in his childhood’.
It is perhaps intentional that the nurses are barely distinguishable from one another, other than the extent to which they conform to various ‘types’: the pregnant one, the naïve one, the gay one, and so on. They are little more than blank cyphers, targets for the violence that erupts within Adamson. Their faces appear in close-up monochrome still photographs at the close of the film, the impassivity of each one’s gaze compounding the seeming inevitability of their murders.
Specification
Coded for playback in region ‘A’ machines, Severin Films’ Blu-ray release of Born for Hell contains two cuts of the film: the director’s cut (running 91:37 mins and filling approximately 22Gb of space on the dual-layered Blu-ray disc), and the shorter Naked Massacre edit (running 85:43 mins and filling approximately 16Gb of space) that has been in wider circulation since the film’s 1984 videocassette release in the states.
Both versions of the film are presented in 1080p, using the AVC codec, and in the film’s original aspect ratio of 1.85:1.
The 35mm colour photography is captured very nicely on this Blu-ray release. There is a pleasing level of detail throughout both presentations of the film. Contrast levels are good, with deep blacks. The presentation is sourced from a new 2k scan of a 35mm print; the use of a print, rather than the (presumably lost) negative, is evident in the sharp drop into the toe, which results in some shadow detail being ‘crushed’, and the slightly ‘hot’ highlights. Colours are consistent throughout, the cinematography emphasising the drab hues of the brickwork and streets of the exterior sequences. In some scenes, there seems to be a slight push towards a sickly green hue, which may or may not be intentional. Natural film grain is present though this is sometimes mitigated by the encode to disc – with the grain structure sometimes looking very slightly awkward in motion. There is some organic film damage to the source, with some noticeable (but not distracting) marks in the emulsions and vertical scratches here and there and, it seems, a few missing frames in a couple of instances. On the whole, it’s a pleasingly filmlike presentation
In terms of audio options, the director’s cut includes the option of both English and French dialogue tracks. (Both tracks are DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0.) Optional English subtitles are included; these are based on the English-language track. On the other hand, the Naked Massacre cut includes an English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track only, also with optional English subtitles.
Both English and French audio options are fine, the English track offering a richer soundscape with a stronger sense of range.
Extras
Alongside the two cuts of the main feature, the disc includes some superb contextual material.
‘The Other Side of the Mirror’ (14:14 mins) is an interview with principal actor Mathieu Carrière. Carrière talks about his career as an actor. The interview is illustrated with clips from Harry Kumel’s Malpertuis (1971), and some of the other films in which Carrière also acted. (Carrière also talks about working on Peter Patzak’s 1975 film Parapsycho, and Werner Schroeter’s 1991 picture Malina.) Carrière reflects on working with Orson Welles for Malpertuis, revealing that Welles refused to remove his cigar for takes and struggled to learn his lines. Carrière says that if he ‘continued in this silly business’, he wanted ‘one day to get as much money as Orson Welles’.
Discussing Born for Hell, Carrière says that the film had to change the name of the killer, the number of victims, and the location – in order to distance the production from the crimes of Richard Speck. Carrière says that his mother had ‘second thoughts’ when he was offered the role in Born for Hell but he was convinced to play the part by Carrière’s father, a psychiatrist. Carrière suggests that what he liked about the finished film was that ‘it made no attempt at being psychological. It had a kind of “flatness” about the facts, the horrible facts, which I liked’. Géza von Radványi, who is credited with the original story and as supervisor but really operated as a de facto director, was asked by Carrière why his character murders the women in the story, and Radvanyi told Carrière that he believed the character was ‘writing his autobiography, unconsciously’; this gave Carrière a ‘good key’ for his performance in the film.
‘Nightmare in Chicago’ (12:52 mins) is a featurette focusing on the Richard Speck murders, featuring interviews with filmmakers John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) and Gary Sherman (Dead and Buried), both of whom are from Chicago.
Both interviewees offer their memories of the Speck murders. They connect this to the Peterson-Schuessler murders that took place in Chicago in 1955, in which three young boys were killed and their bodies dumped in Robinson Woods; this crime wasn’t solved until the mid-1990s. ‘Chicago was a tough town’, McNaughton says, though the Speck murders hit close to him because of their geographical closeness to where he was living at the time. ‘It was a bad time’, Sherman offers, ‘and it only got worse’ with the violence surrounding the Democratic National Convention protests in 1968 – which led to Sherman leaving the country and settling in London.
‘A New Kind of Crime’ (38:20 mins) features podcaster Esther Ludlow (from the Once Upon a Crime podcast) reflecting on the Speck case. Ludlow’s commentary on Speck’s life and crimes is detailed and lively. She describes the circumstances of the Speck murders and discusses Speck’s background, suggesting that Speck’s character was formed largely by his relationship with his cruel, alcoholic stepfather, whom his mother married following the death of Speck’s father, and his experiences at school – which led to a tendency towards petty crime. His defiant attitude escalated throughout his youth. In 1962, he married his wife, and whilst in prison (where his ‘Born to Raise Hell’ tattoo was created), his daughter was born. After his release from prison, Speck was cruel to his family, including enacting violence against his daughter; his violence escalated through a number of incidents, culminating in the murders of the nurses in 1967.
‘Bombing Here, Shooting There’ (17:02 mins) is a video essay by Irish filmmaker and critic Chris O’Neill. O’Neill talks about Born for Hell in the context of Irish film history. He says that the exterior scenes were shot in both Belfast and Dublin (interiors were filmed in West Germany), highlighting the fact that the film ‘is the only extreme cinema production to be associated with either Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland’.
During filming in Belfast with Mathieu Carrière, the filmmakers were stopped by British soldiers and asked to show their identification. O’Neill says that an opportunity was seized, and one of the British soldiers was asked to perform the same action on camera: this is the soldier who is shown asking for Adamson’s identification near the beginning of the picture.
O’Neill suggests that Adamson’s background as a veteran of the war in Vietnam helps contribute to ‘an atmosphere of brutality and pessimism’. The ‘distinctly strange atmosphere’ of the film is emphasised by the post-synch dubbing and the ‘lack of natural acoustics that would have been present on the set’. The film’s dialogue, O’Neill argues, uses ‘cringey and amusing’ Irish stereotypes that are ‘closer to the caricatures commonly associated with the Republic of Ireland than to Northern Ireland’. The film’s depiction of the Troubles, O’Neill suggests, plays into the reductive, but popular, perception that the conflict was simply driven by religious persecution ‘rather than a complex web of deep-rooted political tensions’.
However, the film’s moments of absurdity don’t negate its nihilistic tone, O’Neill argues: he suggests that Born for Hell is ‘a different kind of film’ to the other exploitation films of the era filmed in Ireland (such as Riccardo Freda’s 1971 giallo all’italiana The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire / L’iguana dalla lingua di fuoco). Instead, the film bears comparison with ‘home invasion’ thrillers of the period, such as Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1972) and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972). However, unlike those films, there is no ‘payoff’ to the violence depicted in Born for Hell.
O’Neill also suggests that Born for Hell was so poorly distributed perhaps because of the censorship issues that some of its peers had faced; certainly, he argues it was because of this that Born for Hell was never purchased for distribution in Britain or Ireland.
‘Artist Joe Coleman on Richard Speck’ (14:21 mins) sees Coleman discussing Speck’s murder spree. Coleman talks about Speck’s life, and reflects on the impact of Speck’s crimes on Coleman’s own fascination with serial killer culture – which as Coleman says, evolved alongside the era of (fictional) monster culture. Coleman compares Speck’s crimes to the My Lai massacre and other similar incidents of the war in Vietnam, including the incident at Kent State and the scale of ‘human suffering’ instigated by Richard Nixon’s presidency. Where Speck was caught and punished after his suicide attempt, ‘Richard Nixon never felt that he did anything wrong’. Coleman also talks about his admiration for Born for Hell and the manner in which it adapts the facts of the Speck case.
‘Inside the Odditorium with Joe Coleman’ (9:41 mins) features Coleman discussing some of the items within the Odditorium, his private museum. These include a painting by Speck of a bird, which the murderer painted whilst in prison; Speck’s ‘cameo’ in Coleman’s autobiographical paintings ‘Faith’ and ‘Coal Man’; the wax figure of Speck that Coleman keeps in his Odditorium; and others.
Also included is a trailer for the film’s theatrical release in Italy (2:58 mins), where it was titled ‘E la notte si tinse di sangue’ (‘And the Night was Tainted with Blood’).
One of the most extreme films made in either Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland, Born for Hell is a fascinating film. There is a deliberate lack of suspense, owing to the ‘“flatness” about the facts’ Carrière talks about in his interview: the endpoint of the narrative (the deaths of the nurses, and of Adamson himself) seems utterly, irrevocably, inevitable. The misogynistic fury of the film’s protagonist, the Speck-inspired Cain Adamson, is offset by the political violence of the film’s setting. One is a dark mirror of the other. The film also draws parallels between the Troubles and American involvement in Vietnam. Played by Matthieu Carrière with a similar sense of lethargy to the ‘sleepwalkers’ of Paul Schrader’s films (for example, Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Light Sleeper), Adamson is the character that links these various manifestations of desire, bloodshed, and territorialism.
Though as Chris O’Neill suggests in his video essay, Born for Hell trades on stereotypes (predominantly those associated with the Republic of Ireland, rather than Belfast), given the strange, otherworldly atmosphere of the film – enhanced by the post-synched dialogue – this doesn’t seem to detract from the whole enterprise, instead contributing to the strange spell that Born for Hell weaves. The adjective ‘nihilistic’ is often used with casual abandon in reference to examples of horror and exploitation cinema, but seems deeply appropriate in the case of Born for Hell: the film’s narrative depicts a world in which enmity and violence (either without apparent motivation, or with motivations that have been lost to the mists of time) is an inevitable – nay, essential – part of life. The rephrasing of Speck’s tattoo (‘Born to Raise Hell’) as ‘Born for Hell’ is arguably meaningful here: where the former phrase may be interpreted as suggesting hedonism, the latter phrase has more nihilistic connotations. The blank realism of the film, guided (Carrière says) by the characteristic naturalism of Radványi, results in a picture that refuses to pass judgement on its protagonist’s actions, hinting at the psychopathological motives that lead to such outbursts of violence without offering any reassuringly reductive ‘solutions’.
Long difficult to see in a decent version, and with the Naked Massacre cut seemingly the only version of the film in circulation on home video, Born for Hell has thankfully received an excellent release from Severin Films. The inclusion of both the director’s cut and the Naked Massacre edit is very welcome, and the film is supported with some excellent contextual material.
Born For Hell is available via Severin Films: for more information on this release, please click here.
The production of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in the Pagsanjan region of the Philippines left behind a local filmmaking infrastructure ripe for exploitation. During the 1980s, numerous filmmakers capitalised on this. Severin Films have released one such film, Alan Birkinshaw’s 1982 picture Invaders of the Lost Gold, on Blu-ray for the first time.
Made in the Philippines for Dick Randall, that most notorious distributor and producer of no-budget exploitation films, Invaders of the Lost Gold – or Horror Safari, or Greed (the onscreen title of the print on this disc) – was directed by New Zealand-born Alan Birkinshaw. This was Birkinshaw’s third feature film: his career as a director is nothing if not diverse. Birkinshaw’s debut feature, after a number of years working in television, had been the 1974 sex comedy Confessions of a Sex Maniac (later retitled The Man Who Couldn’t Get Enough, to avoid confusion with the ‘Confessions’ series of films). His second film was Killer’s Moon (1978), which he also wrote; but before entering production on Killer’s Moon, Birkinshaw sought (uncredited) assistance from his half-sister, the novelist Fay Weldon, who helped to hone the film’s dialogue.
Invaders of the Lost Gold was scripted by a man named Bill James, who lived in the Philippines and functioned as a ‘fixer’ during the film’s production. James’ script was based on the rumours of gold left behind in the Philippines after the Japanese Imperial Army surrendered at the end of the Second World War. This gold, looted by Japanese troops from various sites, was claimed to be stashed in around 150 locations – caverns and caves – by General Tomoyuki Yamashita. There have been various suggestions over the years that treasure hunters have found parts of this illicit stash, though the general consensus remains that the gold doesn’t exist and the stories are simply an extension, and modernisation, of fables that have circulated in the Philippines since the 17th Century – and the rumours that Limahong, the Chinese pirate, buried his treasure somewhere near Pangasinan.
Invaders of the Lost Gold opens in 1945, with a column of Japanese soldiers led by Colonel Yakuchi. The column is carrying a number of wooden boxes containing gold bullion. Attacked by tribespeople, the Japanese troops retreat to a cave and conceal the gold. Yakuchi, and his officers (Toyota and Tobachi) make a vow to only return to the cave together.
36 years later, in Tokyo, writer Rex Larson (Edmund Purdom) approaches Yakuchi (Protacio Dee), now masquerading as a businessman under the name of Sugiyama, and demands to know the whereabouts of the 10 cases of gold. Violence erupts, and Larson shoots and kills Yakuchi and his bodyguards, before visiting Toyota and asking the same questions. Toyota’s response is to retreat to a back room and commit seppuku. Finally, Larson approaches Tobachi (Harold Sakata), who is now running a school of martial arts. Tobachi agrees to accompany Larson on an expedition to the Philippines, for 25% of the value of the gold.
Larson asks the wealthy Jefferson (David De Martyn) to bankroll the expedition. Jefferson has the connections required to smuggle the gold out of the Philippines and sell it on the black market. Jefferson agrees, but only if Larson will concede to allowing Mark Forrest (Stuart Whitman), with whom Larson has bad blood, to lead the expedition. Jefferson also takes Cal (Woody Strode), one of his bodyguards, on the expedition. Meanwhile, Jefferson’s pretty daughter (Glynis Barber) demands to accompany her father, despite his wishes, and uses her charms to lure Forrest into agreeing to lead the expedition. During the expedition, Janice begins to fall for Forrest. But danger lurks in the jungle, and the key members of the expedition are picked off one by one.
Exploitation films have often coasted along through clever casting decisions. Like many of its brethren, Invaders of the Lost Gold’s major draw, arguably, is the manner in which it gathers together various stars who were seen as past their commercial prime: Edmund Purdom, whose career as MGM’s next star was halted following his affair with Linda Christian, the wife of Tyrone Power, leading to work in television and various film productions in Europe; Stuart Whitman, whose Hollywood leading man roles had eventually segued during the 1970s into television work, and features with directors such as Rene Cardona, Jr, and Tobe Hooper; Woody Strode, who following his role in Sergio Leone’s Italo-Western Once Upon a Time in the West had appeared extensively in Spaghetti Westerns, Italian poliziesco pictures, and other exploitation genres; and Harold Sakata, whose career had been haunted by his performance as ‘Oddjob’ in Guy Hamilton’s Goldfinger (1964), and who would give his final screen performance in Invaders of the Lost Gold.
Into this mix, Invaders of the Lost Gold adds ‘Black Emanuelle’ herself, Laura Gemser, as Forrest’s former love interest, Maria, who joins the expedition to accompany her current beau, the expedition’s guide, Fernando (Junix Inocian). Gemser’s role in the film seems essentially to provide Invaders of the Lost Gold with its exploitative linchpin: a sequence in which Gemser takes time out from the expedition to go skinny-dipping in a small natural lake, the camera caressing her nude form, before… something happens, and Maria drowns. This something is indescribable, because all the audience is presented with is extreme slow-motion footage of Maria thrashing about in the water.
This elliptical presentation of Maria’s death is characteristic of the film’s scenes of violence. As the expedition travels (oh-so-slowly) along the jungle river, making various stop-offs for overnight camps along the way, a number of disasters befall its members. A porter is attacked and killed by a crocodile; Fernando is bitten by a venomous snake. The death of the porter is depicted in a similar manner to the demise of Maria: extreme slow-motion, rendered almost incomprehensible through the use of very tight close-ups of the action, with no master shot to anchor them.
In the interview with Birkinshaw on this disc, the director states that he found Bill James’ script to be lacking: Birkinshaw would redraft scenes on the evening before they were to be shot, ‘and give the actors their scripts in the morning at the breakfast table’. This ad hoc approach to the script is evident throughout the production, with scenes feeling dictated by a degree of randomness and disconnection, and a curious lack of thrust in the storytelling. Coverage is most often minimal; and to describe the film’s dialogue as frequently ‘clunky’ would be an understatement, with many narrative loose ends that are less tantalisingly ambiguous and more frustratingly underdeveloped.
For instance, the nature of the bad blood that exists between Forrest and Larson is never fully explained, though it is hinted at in the dialogue. Larson, played with constantly brooding menace by Purdom, baulks when Jefferson suggests that Forrest should be approached to lead the expedition, and why Jefferson is so concerned with hiring the profoundly sozzled Forrest is anybody’s guess. Later in the film, there is an oblique confrontation between Forrest and Larson, Forrest telling Larson that ‘For two years, I’ve been searching and hunting for you. I thought you were dead’, adding that he was ‘locked in my concrete cell, with only one thought in mind’ for five years prior to this. ‘Somebody had to be the fall guy’, Larson notes, ‘and you drew the short straw’. Larson, it seems, stiffed Forrest on a former adventure, and Forrest fell into the role of patsy. This event presumably led to Forrest’s decline into alcoholism, and his habit of haunting seedy strip clubs. Afterwards, Forrest tells Larson that he ‘didn’t come for the gold. I came for you. So you can start thinking of when, and how’. This declaration of intent, in terms of Forrest’s desire for revenge against his former compadre, finds its payoff in the film’s final sequence; but it is arguably introduced far too late in the narrative to have any kind of import, making it an almost throwaway aspect of the story. A more thorough revision of the script before production could perhaps have led to such thematic threads being more carefully woven into the fabric of the film’s plot.
Whitman is characteristically grizzled in his role as Forrest, exhibiting the same charisma he demonstrates in some of the other low-budget exploitation films he made during the late-70s/early-80s (such as Alberto De Martino’s poliziescoUna magnum Special per Tony Saitta/Blazing Magnums, and Rene Cardona, Jr’s Guyana: Crime of the Century). However, in the early scenes of Invaders of the Lost Gold, Whitman’s character is given little room to breathe, and is simply positioned in a number of scenes in which he is required to drink alcohol – or show the boozy effects of overconsumption.
In one particularly memorable scene, most likely inspired by the opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) – in which a drunken Willard is shown awaiting new orders in a hotel room in Saigon – Forrest is shown in a hotel room, playing drunkenly with an empty bottle of J&B whisky, that staple of exploitation films of this period: he spins it under his bed, tries to stand it on its neck, and endeavours to use it as a telescope before throwing it at the door when Jefferson knocks on it. The scene is clearly intended to show the alcoholic Forrest ‘bottoming out’ before accepting the chance to redeem himself that is offered by Jefferson’s expedition – but Whitman looks convincingly hammered, to such an extent that it’s difficult to buy Jefferson’s insistence that Forrest join the expedition. (After this scene, the film cuts to the departure of the expedition, a much more sober and purposed Forrest – presumably having cleaned up his act very swiftly – commenting that ‘I hit the skids there for some time, but now things are looking up’.)
Jefferson also uses his daughter, Janice, to encourage Forrest to join the expedition. Janice prowls various seedy nightspots, looking for Forrest. When she finds him, she tells him that she is ‘prepared to talk all night if you’ll listen’, and an elliptical edit implies that she sleeps with Forrest in order to persuade him to accept her father’s proposition. Inevitably, once the expedition is underway, Janice falls for Forrest – in a bizarrely contrived romance between the ageing, albeit charismatic but utterly penniless, alcoholic and Jefferson’s bright, attractive daughter. This leads to a scene of seduction, during one of the expedition’s overnight camps, which feels – for want of a better word – deeply icky.
As Cal, Woody Strode steals many of the scenes in which he appears. Thanks to his height, Strode was always a memorable screen presence, even when slumming it in no-budget productions, and Invaders of the Lost Gold is no exception. (In this film, Strode’s 6’3” stature is in many scenes extended through the tall, straw ten-gallon hat he wears.) Whitman and Strode had worked together previously on a number of films, including Mircea Drăgan’s Oil: The Billion Dollar Fire (1976), also produced by Dick Randall, and Chuck Workman’s Cuba Crossing (1980). The two actors work well together here, a clear sense of warmth underpinning their relationship. Sadly, once the expedition gets underway they have too few scenes together.
Cal is introduced, alongside Forrest, in a local strip club, where the camera lingers over a group of Filipina strippers, their provocative dancing – to the repetitive music on the soundtrack – bathed in red light. A group of American sailors become rowdy and hurl abuse at Cal, their language drenched in unpleasant racial epithets. We see American racism at play, directed by representatives of the US Navy against a man of the same nationality, in a context that is both overseas and predominantly non-white (ie, the Filipino strip club). Cal keeps his cool, maintaining his composure until the inevitable fight breaks out, and Forrest comes to Cal’s aid – though it seems that Cal is perfectly capable of holding his own in hand-to-hand combat, even when outnumbered. Afterwards, Cal observes to Forrest, ‘First time in my life a white man ever helped me out in a fight’. ‘I didn’t like the odds’, Forrest responds. This scene finds its echo later in the film, when during the expedition Cal and Tobachi come to blows in an extended fight scene, the two men seemingly quite serious in their attempts to harm one another. The fight begins after Tobachi sneaks up on Cal whilst the latter sits against a tree, strumming his guitar. However, the brawl ends as abruptly as it started, with Cal and Tobachi laughing with one another fraternally – no overt explanation offered for the shift from violence to good humour.
These two scenes, of male characters bonding in combat, are amongst the film’s most memorable moments – alongside Laura Gemser’s protracted moment of skinny-dipping, which provides the film with its most easily-exploitable sequence, captured in the film’s theatrical posters and video art.
Specifications
Severin Films’ Blu-ray release of Invaders of the Lost Gold presents the film on a region ‘A’ locked disc. The film is presented in 1080p, using the AVC codec, with the feature filling approximately 19Gb of space on the disc.
With a running time of 87:38 mins, the film appears to be uncut. The presentation is based on a 2k scan of unspecified film materials, though would seem to be a composite of more than one source. The optically printed titles sequence, bearing the film’s alternate title ‘Greed’, are in particularly rough shape, with a lack of definition and moderate print damage. However, this soon abates once the titles sequence has ended. The bulk of the film looks very good indeed, with a pleasing level of fine detail and some nicely-balanced contrast levels: blacks are deep and rich, with good gradation into the toe and shoulder. Nevertheless, the (brief) slow-motion scenes suffer from some very prevalent print damage, black scratches and marks in this footage suggesting it is from a positive source rather than the negative. The presentation retains the structure of 35mm film, but sometimes the encode struggles to resolve the grain of the film stock. (This is, admittedly, something that is barely noticeable when watching the film in motion.)
Audio is presented via a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 dual mono track. This is clear and free of issues, with good range. However, it should be noted that the film’s sound mix is at times funky, with some scenes featuring a jarring mixture of live sound and post-sync dubbing. For example, the scene in which Jefferson attempts to recruit Forrest features Whitman’s dialogue recorded live, whilst the lines of David De Martyn are clearly dubbed.
Extras
The disc includes an interview with Alan Birkinshaw. Entitled ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, this interview runs for 16:33 mins. Birkinshaw talks about meeting Dick Randall, and signing the his contract for Invaders of the Lost Gold on the back of a napkin in the Champs-Élysées. Randall ‘made a couple of quite good pictures, and he made a lot of dubious ones’, Birkinshaw says, adding that Randall could come up with good ideas but usually struggled to ‘execute them brilliantly’.
The film was shot in Pagsanjan, using the infrastructure left behind following the production of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in that region. Production was scheduled over five weeks, with post-production taking place in London.
Randall reveals that Britt Ekland was to play the role of Janice, but when one of the film’s backers pulled out suddenly, the part was recast owing to cuts to the film’s budget. Glynis Barber was eventually cast instead. Apparently, Whitman and Purdom both thought they were playing the lead role, and would refuse to leave the breakfast table before one another – because they feared this would undermine their authority on the set.
The film was promoted under a number of different titles: Horror Safari, Greed, Invaders of the Lost Gold. Birkinshaw admits: ‘I have no idea what the official title is now’.
Also included as an ‘extra’ are outtakes from Mark Hartley’s 2010 documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! Hartley’s documentary focuses on the genre films produced in the Philippines. The outtakes presented here feature interviews with Birkinshaw and Corliss Randall, the wife of Dick Randall. These cover much of the same content as the interview with Birkinshaw that is also included on the disc. This extra feature runs for 22:25 mins.
Clearly impeded (in any conventional sense) by the ad hoc approach to its scripting, Invaders of the Lost Gold nevertheless has a great cast who all display a considerable amount of screen charisma, even if the two lead actors (Whitman and Purdom) seem to be acting in separate films in which each has the starring role over the other. It’s a formulaic picture, certainly, with a narrative that stops and starts – sometimes for its most marketable scenes (notably, Gemser’s bout of skinny-dipping), and sometimes simply owing to a lack of momentum – but the charisma of the actors means that it is eminently watchable.
Severin Films’ release of Invaders of the Lost Gold contains a very pleasing presentation of the main feature, and the extra features help to contextualise the production – particularly the new interview with Birkinshaw. The golden rule of exploitation films (ie, ‘if you know, you know’) applies here, and certainly fans of exploitation films of this era will find much to enjoy in this release, though the film’s offkey charms may very well be lost on casual viewers.
For more information on this Severin Films release, please click here.
Motivated by the popularity of 1986’s Strike Commando, the first of a number of films they shot in the Philippines, Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso and producer Franco Gaudenzi sought to emulate its success by making a sequel, Strike Commando 2 (Trappola diabolica), released in 1988. Along with the first film, Strike Commando 2 has been given an impressive Blu-ray release by Severin Films – though we recommend reading this review of Strike Commando 2 in conjunction with our article about Strike Commando, which establishes a context for the ‘macaroni combat’ films of the 1980s – and in particular, the trend in ‘Namsploitation’ pictures, shot in the Philippines, popular with Italian filmmakers following the successes of Cimino’s The Deer Hunter and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
In the interview on Severin’s release of Strike Commando 2, Claudio Fragasso talks about Bruno Mattei’s predilection for copying wholesale scenes from popular Hollywood movies. Where Strike Commando was clearly modelled on Rambo: First Blood, Part II (George P Cosmatos, 1985), with some overt nods to other pictures – for example Antonio Margheriti’s The Last Hunter (L’ultimo cacciatore, 1980), the progenitor of the Italian ‘Namsploitation’ films made in the Philippines during the 1980s – Strike Commando 2 takes more inspiration from other Hollywood films: in particular, Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the clear influence of which Strike Commando 2 bolts onto its Rambo-esque narrative structure.
In Strike Commando 2, Ransom (Brent Huff) is introduced mourning for the death of his former commanding officer, Major Vic Jenkins (Richard Harris). However, Ransom soon discovers that Jenkins’ death has been faked: Ransom’s mentor is alive, and being held in a CIA safehouse. Ransom attempts to free Jenkins, but his rescue attempt is interrupted by another group of men, who overwhelm the CIA agents and manoeuvre Jenkins away in a helicopter.
A ransom of $10 million in diamonds is demanded by the captors for Jenkins’ safe return. Ransom is tasked by CIA agent Peter Roeg (Paul Holmes) with journeying into the jungle and bringing Jenkins back – dead or alive. Jenkins, it seems, is being held by a group involved in the manufacture of heroin, which Ransom is told is led by Huan To (Vic Diaz), a Chinese KGB agent with a penchant for sexual sadism.
Along the way, Ransom stops off at the tavern of Rosanna Boom (Mary Stavin). However, he has been pursued by the sinister white-suited Kramet (Mel Davidson) and his team of black-clad ninjas(!), who destroy Rosanna’s drinking establishment. Rosanna and Ransom escape to the jungle and team up, Ransom promising to aid Rosanna in establishing a new business elsewhere.
Ransom infiltrates Huan To’s compound but is captured and tortured by Kramet. Nevertheless, Ransom manages to escape and rescue Jenkins – only for Jenkins to turn his gun on Ransom, revealing that it is he who is really behind the heroin operation, and Huan To is his associate and not his captor.
Though the film is positioned as a direct sequel to Strike Commando, misleadingly featuring the likeness of Reb Brown on its poster and video art, Strike Commando 2 is its own beast of joyful absurdity. The character of Ransom (played by Reb Brown in the first film) returns, but here he is played by Brent Huff, who is of a very different appearance to Reb Brown: most obviously, Brown, who had played Captain America in the television movies of the late 1970s, was at the time known for his wavy blonde hair; whereas Huff’s hair is much darker, and more tightly cropped. (Truth be told, of the two actors, wearing his bandana and hip-firing an M60 on full auto, Huff bears a closer resemblance to Stallone… just. Actually, Huff bears a striking similarity on-screen to Paul Michael Glaser.) Huff would go on to work with Mattei on two further films shot in the Philippines: Cop Game (Giochi di poliziotto, 1988) and Born to Fight (Nato per combattere, 1989).
Strike Commando 2 was filmed essentially back-to-back with Claudio Fragasso’s Zombi(e) 4: After Death (Oltre la morte, 1989). Scenes for Strike Commando 2 would be shot during the day (chiefly by Mattei), and footage for After Death would be shot at night by Fragasso. (In the interview on this disc, Huff says that this caused some problems for his love life, as at the time he was dating Candice Daly, who was one of the principal actors in After Death. Daly and Huff would go on to star together in Mattei’s Cop Game.) This enabled camera equipment to be shared by the two productions – along with a number of key crewmembers, including makeup artist Franco Di Girolami, art director Vic Dabao, production manager Giovanni Paolucci, and production supervisor Manrico Passerotti, as well as some of the stunt crew (stunt co-ordinator Ottaviano Dell’Acqua and stuntman Dante Abedeza) and camera team.
Both films were scripted by Rosella Drudi. (There’s a thesis to be written about Drudi and fellow screenwriter Elisa Briganti’s contributions to the sphere of largely male-dominated Italian exploitation films of the late 1970s and 1980s.) Interviewed on Severin’s release of Strike Commando, Drudi said that Mattei and Fragasso, both of whom were credited as writing the story and script of that film, contributed ideas – mostly, in Mattei’s case in particular, derived from scenes in popular American movies of the period – and Drudi cobbled together a screenplay without onscreen credit.
Here, in the interview on Severin’s release of Strike Commando 2, Fragasso says that in pre-production meetings, Mattei would sit with Fragasso and Rosella Drudi ‘and start ripping off dialogue and scenes from famous films. We kept telling him you can’t just copycat a movie from start to finish, dialogue included, because that’s not how the creative process works [….] I told Bruno that we shouldn’t just copy but take inspiration instead’. However, according to Fragasso, Mattei would watch ‘a film over and over, noting down what to copy, with me telling him he couldn’t do that [….] To totally rip off other movies, that was his spirit’.
Though clearly inspired on a superficial level by Rambo: First Blood, Part II (the key reference point for the first Strike Commando), like a number of other Italian Namsploitation films (Margheriti’s The Last Hunter, for instance), the narrative of Strike Commando 2 bears some overt similarities with Apocalypse Now (or its source, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness). Following the abduction of Jenkins by forces unknown, Ransom accepts the task of finding and ‘rescuing’ Jenkins – who CIA agent Roeg claims is being held by a group implicated in the manufacture of street heroin – and this leads Ransom into the jungle with $10 million in diamonds, the ransom fee demanded by Jenkins’ captors. (Perhaps tellingly, Roeg tells Ransom to bring back Jenkins dead or alive.) However, after ‘rescuing’ Jenkins, Ransom soon becomes aware that this man, who Ransom positioned as a hero and surrogate father, is in fact deeply duplicitous: Jenkins has in fact been orchestrating the heroin operation in the jungle. The film thus positions Ransom as Willard, and Jenkins becomes the narrative’s complex, multifaceted stand-in for Kurtz. (It’s to Richard Harris’ credit that he gives the character a considerable amount of depth through his performance, despite being given very little to work with in the script.)
Foregrounding the inspiration it takes from the Coppola picture, Strike Commando 2 opens with Ransom in a hotel room, in a scene clearly intended as a pastiche of the post-credits scene of Apocalypse Now – in which a drunken Willard (Martin Sheen) trashes his hotel room in Saigon whilst waiting for a mission, fully aware that ‘Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger’. In Strike Commando 2, this is reimagined as a scene in which Ransom, a veteran of the Vietnam war, lounges in a hotel room in Manila, reflecting on news of the ‘death’ of his mentor, Vic Jenkins, in a terrorist attack. (Jenkins’ death is communicated to the viewer via the headline of a newspaper, the Manila Bulletin, which is placed on a side-table.) Mattei endeavours to emulate the expressionist lighting of the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now via the use of coloured gels on the lights, and a touch of chiaroscuro.
Interestingly, this scene features the use of the track ‘The Sound of Fear’ – from the soundtrack to Zombi 3 – as diegetic music, playing on a radio in Ransom’s hotel room. (The track is positioned as the film’s equivalent of The Doors’ ‘The End’, though with New Wave stylings and lyrics that make little sense: ‘I don’t want to go in this sick place / I fear there’s something bad’, indeed.) This track was written by Stefano Mainetti for Zombi 3 and performed by a group called Clue in the Crew, which going by their distinct lack of other published recordings, seems to be a band that was cobbled together to record a few tracks on the Zombi 3 soundtrack. After completing Strike Commando 2, Mattei would go on to complete Zombi 3, when the original director, Lucio Fulci, returned to Italy after either falling ill or experiencing unreconcilable cracks in his relationship with the producers – depending on which version of this story is to be believed. (For what it’s worth, on this disc Fragasso comments that ‘the climate [in the Philippines] was hell’, making working there incredibly gruelling for anyone not in the best of health; and ‘Poor Lucio Fulci suffered like hell when he went there to shoot Zombi 3. He wasn’t in the best of health, and that made it even more unbearable’.)
In Strike Commando 2’s opening sequence, Ransom is dreaming of the heroics of combat: and the film’s opening credits play out over an extended flashback in glorious slow-motion, as Jenkins selflessly aids a downed Ransom in the middle of a firefight. Ransom’s reverie is interrupted by his friend, Ruby (Anthony East), who tells Ransom that Jenkins’ death was faked: he is alive and working for the CIA, under the control of an agent named Peter Roeg (Paul Holmes). Meanwhile, Ransom tells Ruby that Jenkins ‘was like a father to me’. Ransom storms into Roeg’s office (at the offices of Norman Hynde – Import/Export) and demands to know the whereabouts of Jenkins, who is being kept in a safehouse in the countryside. Ransom stages an impromptu rescue of Jenkins, but this is interrupted; Jenkins is captured by another group of men, who lift Jenkins from the safehouse using a helicopter. Ransom presumes this group of men are abducting Jenkins, though in reality it seems that they are liberating him from the CIA.
When Ransom finally hears from Jenkins, it is in the office of Roeg and via a videotape that has been sent to the CIA. In it, Jenkins is shown in a seated position, flanked by two men, dressed in black, who hold rifles; their faces cut off by the top of the frame, these men remain impossible to identify. The content and visual paradigms of this tape refer to the hostage tapes of so many incidents of politically-motivated kidnapping during the 1970s – from the Patty Hearst incident to the activities of the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Brigate Rosse – and their representation in narrative cinema: for example, in the films of Costa-Gavras. In the tape, Jenkins urges that his captors are demanding $10 million in diamonds for his return – or Jenkins will be handed over to the KGB. Roeg explains to Ransom that Jenkins is a ‘frozen agent’: a former CIA operative who is no longer active but holds valuable secrets.
Whether intentional or otherwise, Strike Commando 2’s depiction of the CIA interfering quietly in the affairs of other countries, not to mention the double-dealings of CIA agent Jenkins – who for much of the film seems a passive pawn in captivity, passed from proverbial pillar to post, until the final revelation of his utterly selfish motivations – feels very much a part of the late-80s zeitgeist. Earlier in the decade, of course, the US government had – despite a long-expressed refusal to ‘negotiate with terrorists’ – arranged a covert, and highly illegal, arms deal in exchange for the release of seven Americans who were being held hostage by Hezbollah. Whether Ransom’s mission in Strike Commando 2 (exchanging $10 million in diamonds for a potentially hostile ‘frozen agent’ held by a terrorist group with ties to the KGB) was designed to offer, amidst its whizz-bang action sequences, an oblique comment on this era, or whether this was simply a result of Mattei aping films that did intentionally channel some of the feelings of the 1980s towards such issues, is likely to remain an enigma. Nevertheless, there’s some weight in a line delivered by a local police chief, Lee, to Ransom: ‘It is individuals like you who are not desired in this country’, Lee tells Ransom after the latter has been captured following his aborted attempt to free Jenkins from the safehouse on the hill.
Motivated to make a sequel to the first Strike Commando, a decision was made to up the ante in terms of the film’s budget, and evidence larger production values on screen through the cast. To this end, Richard Harris was chosen to play Ransom’s mentor, Major Vic Jenkins. Harris brings a gravitas to this role; though in the earlier scenes, his performance seems a little telephoned-in, Harris seems to relish the about-turn in Jenkins’ behaviour that comes mid-way through the film: after it is revealed in the plot that Jenkins is in fact a traitor, and has been working against the US government by developing a sideline as a heroin magnate with some vague ties to the KGB, Harris’ performance seems to come alive. His performance is minimalistic, certainly, but after this point, every glance and line seems loaded with a quiet menace. (Huff reveals that in one scene he shot with Harris, he was keen to impress the older actor with his acting chops – only for Harris to tell him afterwards, ‘Cut that in half. It’s too much’. Huff says that ‘He was absolutely right. I learned a lot just from that scene. He saved me’.)
Harris was one of several once-bankable English-speaking actors who at the time were seen as past their prime, and who took work in Italian-produced films photographed in ‘exotic’ places such as the Philippines. Interviewed on this disc, Fragasso suggests that the appeal of such productions was working away from, shall we say, the gaze of the taxman. ‘The difference between Italian and American actors is that the latter aren’t too bothered about a change of scenery […] As long as they get paid, even if it’s under the table’, Fragasso suggests.
Given Harris’ reputation as a heavy drinker, it’s tempting to say that in some scenes, particularly early in the film, he has the clammy-looking brow of the recently-loaded. However, Huff says that Harris ‘wasn’t drinking at the time’ and resisted mingling with the rest of the cast and crew: he ‘didn’t want to be around people drinking’, Huff states. Harris took a hotel room in Manila, whilst the rest of the production team stayed in Pagsanjan: the region in which a filmmaking infrastructure had been built following the production of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now there, and which was used as the base for production of so many Italian exploitation films made in the Philippines. Fragasso has a very different story to tell, saying that soon after his arrival in the region, Harris wanted to talk to Fragasso about his character’s motivations; the two met in Harris’ hotel room in Manila. Whilst holding the conversation, Harris pulled out a suitcase containing 12 bottles of Irish whiskey. The liquid in the bottles ‘was clear, like schnapps’, and Harris explained to Fragasso ‘that it was some special whiskey made by his family’. Harris poured Fragasso a glass ‘while he drank straight from the bottle’. When the first bottle was empty, Harris poured Fragasso another glass whilst he drank straight from the second bottle. Whilst Fragasso was tipsy, Harris ‘was pretty rational’. This continued, and Fragasso says that Harris was as lucid when Fragasso left the hotel as when he had arrived. ‘That was a unique experience, and he was such a smart, well-read man’.
Mattei, as we know, spoke almost no English, making communication with the film’s key cast members on the film set difficult, to say the least. Of course, this hadn’t prevented non-English speaking Italian filmmakers from working with multilingual casts previously: notable examples of Italian filmmakers with a limited grasp of English, but who nevertheless achieved success in directing performances of British and American actors, include, of course, the likes of Sergio Leone, Lucio Fulci, and Dario Argento. On this disc, Brent Huff comments that ‘The fun thing you could do when you have a director who can’t speak English, I could mess up a line, and he’d say, “Print! Fantastic!”’.
Because Mattei spoke such little English, Harris barely communicated with him. However, Fragasso and Mattei soon bonded, Fragasso commenting that ‘It’s the same relationship I’ve enjoyed with Donald Pleasence and a few others’. Interviewed on this disc, Fragasso reveals that Harris needed minimal direction, only small pointers towards his character’s motivation, in order to be able to ‘direct [him]self’: ‘As an actor, Harris was still perfect’, Fragasso says, ‘His delivery was as impeccable as always. He reminded me a little of Giancarlo Giannini’.
Though directing After Death at night, Fragasso was on the set of Strike Commando 2 and functioned ‘more as a directing consultant than an AD [Assistant Director]’: Fragasso directed the actors ‘while Bruno worked more on the technical side’. Fragasso tried to manage the mise-en-scene carefully, ‘despite Bruno’s belief that any flaws could be fixed through good editing’. According to Fragasso, Mattei was committed to the idea that a ‘bad film’ could be saved by the edit: Fragasso was, and remains, of the opposite opinion, believing that ‘No amount of editing could ever save a bad film, whereas a bad edit could never totally ruin a good film’. On this disc, Fragasso suggests that Mattei taught him ‘the tricks of the trade when it came to editing’, and Fragasso learnt a lot from working with Mattei and his ‘more technical attitude’ to filmmaking.
Aside from the film’s obvious allusions to Rambo: First Blood, Part II and Apocalypse Now, Strike Commando 2 draws heavily on Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ransom’s first encounter with Rosanna takes place in her dive of a bar, which she has named the Moulin Rouge, seemingly out of aspiration rather than a sense of irony. There, she is involved in a drinking competition with a burly local named Hog. The scene clearly imitates the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) seeks out his old flame, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), in her bar, The Raven, in Nepal – and finds Marion engaged in a drinking contest with a red-faced Australian climber, Regan (Patrick Durkin). The staging is almost identical, the male and female competitors facing one another over a table. However, where in Raiders of the Lost Ark Marion and Regan are drinking shots of hard liquor (vodka?) until one of them passes out, in Strike Commando 2 Rosanna and her competitor are drinking pints of beer – with the loser being the one who belches first. (And where in Raiders… Marion’s hard-drinking ways pay-off when she out-drinks the lecherous Belloq, enabling her to escape from him, in Strike Commando 2 Rosanna effects a similar escape from Huan To.)
Mel Davidson’s performance as the sinister white-suited, baby-faced KGB agent Svet Kramet, with his Himmler-like round-framed spectacles, is in clear mimicry of Ronald Lacey’s performance as Gestapo agent Toht in the Spielberg picture. However, in Strike Commando 2, Kramet is accompanied inexplicably by black-clad ninjas (presumably present in the film simply owing to Mattei’s desire to tap into another late-80s cinematic fad) rather than Nazi officers. Presumably to underscore his similarities with Toht, Kramet is given some deliriously un-PC lines of dialogue, commenting upon encountering Rosanna for the first time that ‘I’ve never been sure whether women are stupid because they are courageous, or whether they are courageous because they are stupid’. Later, a chase between Kramet and Rosanna results in the latter being cornered by the former. ‘So now you’re gonna rape me, right?’, Rosanna says, ready to fight back. ‘I hate women’, Kramet responds, ‘Yeah? I have a lot of gay friends too’, Rosanna quips. ‘I hate queers’, Kramet adds impassively.
Kramet, it seems, is some kind of sadist, preferring to garrot his victims: perhaps in a quiet reference to Robert Shaw’s Donald ‘Red’ Grant in From Russia with Love (Terence Young, 1963), Kramet’s first onscreen victim, Ruby, is garrotted by Kramet whilst the two men travel on a train. When Ransom is captured by Jenkins, he is tortured at the hands of Kramet, who uses a branding iron. Meanwhile, at the same time, Rosanna has managed to sneak into the camp, disguised as a prostitute, and has been taken to Huan To’s cabin, where the sexually sadistic Chinese KGB agent waxes lyrical about the association of pleasure and pain. (Admittedly, there’s something flinchingly unsubtle about the way in which the film uses music of vaguely Chinese origin to underscore the association this scene draws between sexual deviance and Orientalism.) ‘Your [in other words, women’s] relationship with physical pain has something sublime about it’, Huan To tells Rosanna, ‘That combines the two concepts that interest me the most. Pleasure and pain. Pain and pleasure’. The crosscutting of these two scenes – Kramet’s torture of Ransom, and Huan To’s overtly sexual come-ons to Rosanna – draws a parallel between the characters of Kramet and Huan To, giving the sadism of Kramet a subtly sexual edge which, in the context of his earlier comments to Rosanna, suggests a displacement of any sense of sexual desire onto very intimate acts of violence. (Perhaps, in retrospect, Mattei’s emphasis on the importance of editing had more than a little justification.)
When Ransom finally escapes and turns up to rescue Rosanna, who has already overpowered Huan To, he is faced with a ninja who displays his mastery of form by waving a katana energetically. Predictably, in homage to one of the most famous sequences from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ransom refuses to engage the ninja in honourable combat and instead shoots him with the belt-fed machine gun which he (Ransom) is carrying. If one were to select a scene from Strike Commando 2 that most effectively captures the manner in which the picture offers a mash-up of Rambo and Raiders, this would be it.
This is followed by an extended sequence in which Ransom and Rosanna escape from the compound in a truck, as ninjas climb on the outside of the vehicle and attempt to enter the cab. Yet again clearly inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark – notably the sequence in which Indiana Jones steals the truck which is carrying the Ark of the Covenant from the Well of Souls, whilst fending off attacks from German troops – this scene admittedly features some excellent fight choreography and stunt work, though on a much smaller scale than its model. At one moment, the truck hits some scaffolding on which several workmen stand, and in the interviews on this disc both Huff and Fragasso highlight this stunt, saying that one of the Filipino stuntmen broke his leg quite badly during its filming.
The pairing of Huff and Mary Stavin has more echoes of the casting of Kate Capshaw alongside Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Spielberg, 1984). Like that film, Strike Commando 2 features numerous jarring tonal shifts. The sombre is juxtaposed with the absurd. In one scene, Ransom sneaks into Huan To’s camp and dispatches a guard using a fighting style that seems derived from Bud Spencer / Terence Hill comedies (or perhaps the Three Stooges): a poke to the eyes, a double ear clap, and the coup de grâce – a bonk on the head. Meanwhile, the bond between Jenkins and Ransom is reinforced time and time again, its reassertion developing into something profoundly pathological. Jenkins expresses certainty that Ransom, who owes the older man his life, will not kill him; Ransom states repeatedly that he sees Jenkins as a father figure. When Ransom springs Jenkins from Huan To’s compound, Jenkins reminds Ransom of the Strike Commando motto, ‘All for one and one for all’. Ransom, it seems, is committed to heroic selflessness (‘I don’t like being back in combat again, having to kill’, he tells Jenkins, ‘But if a man like you is at stake I’m prepared to do it’), which is ultimately tainted by his realisation of Jenkins’ betrayal – of both his country and, on a personal level, Ransom. When Ransom asks Jenkins why he ‘had to get me mixed up on all of this’, Jenkins tells him: ‘Because you’re special, that’s why. Part of a dying breed. Fearless and thoughtless heroes. You owed it to me. I saved your life, so you had to save mine’. ‘What happened to you?’, a disbelieving Ransom asks. ‘I woke up’, Jenkins answers.
Severin Films’ Blu-ray release of Strike Commando 2 is presented on a disc that is locked for playback in region ‘A’ players only. The film’s 1.85:1 aspect ratio is preserved, and the 1080p presentation utilises the AVC codec.
Sourced from a 2k scan of the film’s original negative, the HD presentation is very good. A pleasing level of fine detail is present throughout, most noticeable in close-ups. Contrast levels are nicely-balanced, with a delineated curve into the toe, where shadow detail has texture. The colour palette is naturalistic (aside from a few sequences that feature expressionistic use of coloured gels on the lights). There is limited damage present: a few vertical scratches can be seen, and there is one moment in the film in which a hair caught in the aperture gate dances about at the bottom of the frame. As is expected from a Bruno Mattei film, there is some noticeable use of stock footage from varying sources, from different film gauges. Organic film grain is present. Sometimes this seems very slightly muted, perhaps owing to the encode, but taken as a whole this is a very pleasing, filmlike presentation of the film.
Two cuts of the film are included on the disc: the theatrical cut, running for 90:18 mins; and an extended cut, running for 96:08 mins. The extended cut contains some small additions – most notably, an extension of the sequence in which Ransom infiltrates Huan To’s compound. (Ransom spots some of the compound’s guards in a hut with girls, which sets up the sequence in which Rosanna masquerades as a prostitute to gain entry to the compound, and is spotted by a guard before taking him out in the aforementioned Bud Spencer / Terence Hill-style of fighting.)
Audio is presented via a LPCM 2.0 track in English, and a LPCM 2.0 track in Italian. As with Severin’s release of the first film, the scenes in the extended cut feature audio which is noticeable more compressed, perhaps sourced from a tape. Other than that, both audio tracks are very strong, evidencing pleasing range and depth, especially in action scenes featuring gunfire. (That said, the Italian track sounds very slightly louder, and with very slightly less range than the English audio track.) The film seems to have been shot with the entirety of the cast speaking English, so the English track is arguably the best way to watch this film. Optional subtitles for the Hard of Hearing are included: these are based on the English audio. (Translated subtitles for the Italian track would have been an added bonus.)
As contextual material, the disc includes: the film’s trailer (2:40); ‘Michael Ransom Strikes Back’, an interview with Brent Huff (14:29); ‘Guerrilla Zone’ (16:40), an interview with Claudio Fragasso.
In his interview, Huff discusses how he came to be cast in Strike Commando 2. He had met with a casting director for lunch in LA, and was offered the part in Strike Commando 2 on the spot. He was persuaded to work on the film after discovering Richard Harris was to be his co-star. Though Mattei could not speak English, Huff ‘loved working with him. I’ve got nothing but good things to say about Bruno’. Huff also formed a seemingly lifelong friendship with Mary Stavin, the former Miss Sweden and Miss World (1977), who, Huff says, was very willing to participate in the action scenes, and during the evening would stay up all night playing blackjack.
Huff found the stuntwork tiring but rewarding. He enjoyed shooting the M16s and M60s, reflecting that in US productions, ammo is expensive and limited by the budget, but on the set of this film, ‘I’m shooting all the ammo you can shoot [….] They would let me just empty everything’. Huff found it amusing that the Filipino stuntment would insist on ‘doing a backflip and then they die’ after being shot on screen: ‘It’s so over the top and campy, but it’s like… I think that’s what it’s supposed to be’.
Huff discusses a fight scene he was asked to shoot in the pool outside the safehouse in which Harris’s character is being held in the film’s early sequences. The scene didn’t make the final cut of the picture, but the water was stagnant, resulting in Huff being hospitalised. For a time, Mattei and the producers worried that the production would be shut down. During his stay in hospital, a doctor asked after Huff’s wife, and when Huff told the doctor that he wasn’t married, the doctor left – only to return later with his two daughters, telling Huff ‘They’re not married either’.
A wonderfully modest interviewee, Huff seems enamoured with his experiences making Strike Commando 2, saying that ‘I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Couldn’t have been a better experience’.
The interview with Claudio Fragasso takes place in the same edit suite in which Fragasso was interviewed about his work on the first Strike Commando, presumably from the same session.
Fragasso talks about the origins of Strike Commando 2 – how he, Mattei and producer Franco Gaudenzi, were inspired to make the film after the commercial success of Strike Commando. This resulted in a bigger budget for Strike Commando 2 (about three times the budget of the first picture), much of which went into the casting – including acquiring Richard Harris to play Vic Jenkins. (Fragasso describes Brent Huff as ‘Not that much of a thespian, but quite physically fit’.)
The Filipino stuntmen were fearless and would do ‘insane things’. There were times when Mattei and Fragasso feared that one of the stuntment had been killed in a stunt – including the truck scene which Huff mentions in his interview, and the leap off the waterfall at the climax of their later collaboration, Robowar – which was 35 feet into the water below and needed to be carefully co-ordinated. The film’s stunt co-ordinator, Ottaviano Dell’Acqua, thought this wasn’t possible, but a Filipino stuntman complied and completed this highly dangerous stunt not once but three times.
Though Strike Commando 2’s budget was considerably higher than that of the first film, the picture wasn’t as successful. Fragasso and Mattei concluded that this was because they had tried to make a film ‘too American with a budget that was too Italian. The first one had more soul, with the relationship between Reb Brown’s character and the little boy. It was more Italian, in that respect. The second was more like an American action movie, without the same kind of budget they had, unfortunately. The decline of Italian cinema began when we started actively trying to emulate their [the American] productions’, Fragasso suggests, ‘We just couldn’t win that one, as their B-movies had way bigger budgets than ours [….] That’s how our slow but steady decline began. In the end, our genre cinema hit rock bottom’.
Strike Commando 2 is, like most of Mattei’s output, a picture that indisputably apes the paradigms of popular Hollywood blockbusters of the era, wearing its influences on its sleeve and adopting an ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ approach to its storytelling and iconography. The original Strike Commando found an audience on VHS, particularly, where Strike Commando 2 struggled. However, for those who – as this writer does – love Mattei’s films, Strike Commando 2 is a delight and arguably more entertaining than the first picture. (Being a fan of Richard Harris’ screen work probably helps in this regard, and Harris gives a great performance in this, particularly in the scenes following the revelation that Jenkins is working for the other side.) Strike Commando 2 is a bag of cliches and moments of quiet absurdity: when Ransom first encounters Roeg at the offices of Norman Hynde – Import/Export, the CIA agent he is sitting in front of a series of nonsensical-looking charts bearing trite business phrases (‘5 Year Performance Progress’) to suggest a connection between data-minded bureaucracy and espionage. That said, these cliches all pull together to form a film that intersects in fascinating ways with the zeitgeist of the era, offering offhand commentary on policies of interventionism, and distorted echoes of an era of politically-motivated violence that often intersected with the trade in illegal narcotics. Mattei’s reliance on a grab bag of influences results in a picture that almost perfectly encapsulates the era, in all its absurdities.
Severin Films’ Blu-ray release of Strike Commando far and away exceeds any other home video presentation of this film. The main presentation is very, very good, with the option of two cuts of the picture. The contextual material on the disc – the interviews with Huff and Fragasso – are illuminating and entertaining too. Like Severin’s release of Strike Commando, this is an essential release for fans of Mattei, Namsploitation, or macaroni combat pictures more generally.
For more information, including how to buy a copy of Strike Commando 2, please click here.
Starring former Captain America Reb Brown[i], the 1986 ‘macaroni combat’ picture Strike Commando, now available on an exemplary Blu-ray release from Severin Films, is one of a number of pictures that Italian film director Bruno Mattei – that auteur of so many awful-but-oh-so-watchable Italian exploitation films of the 1980s and 1990s – made in the Philippines with producer/co-director Claudio Fragasso, and writer Rosella Drudi.
Italian combat pictures (or ‘macaroni combat’ films, as they are sometimes called) had been fairly popular since the 1960s, often starring ‘over the hill’ English-speaking actors in Second World War-set stories. Essentially Commando comic strips brought to life, many of these pictures were vaguely – or not so vaguely, in some cases – reminiscent of Robert Aldrich’s iconic combat picture The Dirty Dozen (1967): in other words, they featured ensemble casts in ‘men on a mission’ narratives. Like the commedia sexy all’italiana, the macaroni combat films were never as popular with either domestic or international audiences as other exportable filoni of Italian pop cinema – chiefly, the westerns all’italiana (‘Spaghetti Westerns’) or gialli/thrilling all’italiana (Italian-style thrillers)of the 1960s and 1970s. However, many of these films – including the likes of Gianfranco Parolini’s Five for Hell (5 per l’inferno, 1969) and Maurizio Pradeaux’s Churchill’s Leopards (I Leopardi di Churchill, 1970) – have nevertheless earned a cult following in the years since their initial releases.
A sea change occurred in the early 1980s when, influenced by the one-two punch of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Italian combat films lost interest in the Second World War and became instead fixated with the Vietnam War. (This, of course, neatly sidestepped the fact that many of the earlier Italian war films had, in using The Dirty Dozen as their key source of inspiration, involuntarily been shaped by a film that used its Second World War setting to comment on the era of American military involvement in Vietnam.) Further to this, the production of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines had created a local filmmaking infrastructure ripe for exploitation, and Italian filmmakers were quick to jump on this, using the jungles of the Philippines as a stand-in for Vietnam. In 1980, Antonio Margheriti’s Vietnam War-set combat film The Last Hunter (1980), shot in the Philippines, was one of the ‘macaroni combat’ films to trigger this trend in ‘Namsploitation’.
Its narrative clearly modelled on that of Apocalypse Now, with a heavy dose of the love triangle from Sergio Leone’s Duck You Sucker (Giù la testa, 1973) for good measure, The Last Hunter was marketed to Italian domestic audiences as a loose sequel to The Deer Hunter: where Cimino’s film had been released to Italian cinemas as Il cacciatore, the Italian title of Margheriti’s picture was L’ultimo cacciatore. (In fact, promotional materials for the film exist which bear the more on-the-nose title Cacciatore 2, though it is unclear whether the picture was ever formally released under that title.) Many of the subsequent Vietnam War-set Italian combat films owed a considerable debt, in terms of narrative or sometimes in the staging of specific sequences, to Margheriti’s The Last Hunter. Going so far as to utilise footage cribbed from The Last Hunter, Mattei / Fragasso’s Strike Commando is no exception to this, though the core of Strike Commando narrative is cribbed from a more recent American model, George P Cosmatos’ Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985).
Credited to Mattei’s well-worn Anglicised pseudonym ‘Vincent Dawn’, though in actuality co-directed by Mattei and Fragasso, Strike Commando opens with the betrayal of Major Harriman’s (Mike Monty) highly trained special forces team (the titular ‘Strike Commando’ unit) in an excursion behind enemy lines. This betrayal comes at the hand of rival Air Force Colonel Radek (Christopher Connelly), who is jealous of the Strike Commando unit’s many successes. However, one of the team survives: Harriman’s prize soldier Ransome (Reb Brown). Left for dead, Ransome is rescued by a young South Vietnamese boy, Lao (Edison Navarro), and is taken in by South Vietnamese villagers, led by Frenchman Le Due (Luciano Pigozzi) and including Cho Li (Karen Lopez).
Separated from US forces, Ransome nevertheless finds a working radio when he, and the villagers traveling with him, stumble across the corpse of an American chopper pilot. He uses this radio to make contact with the US base. Harriman persuades a reluctant Radek to rescue Ransome. However, back at the US base, Ransome is ordered to head back into the combat zone to investigate claims of a Russian military presence in the area. Back in the fray, Ransome is taken captive by a Russian operative, Jakoda (Alex Vitale), a KGB agent who is working with the NVA. Jakoda tortures Ransome, hoping the Strike Commando will broadcast anti-war messages to US troops. However, Ransome manages to escape with Jakoda’s female counterpart, Olga (Louise Kamsteeg). Olga quickly falls for the hunky American, and aids him in his escape. However, Ransome is once again betrayed by Radek, who commands a chopper gunner to shoot Ransome rather than order his rescue. Olga is killed, and Radek’s betrayal reaffirms Ransome’s desire for revenge.
‘It’s getting tight’, Radek tells Harriman as the film opens. ‘It was tight to begin with’, Harriman responds. Both men watch the Strike Commando unit infiltrate the NVA compound from an observation position which would seem to be all-too-visible to a watchful enemy. Mattei / Fragasso would seem to be either suggesting that the NVA forces are deeply, profoundly unobservant – or, with the film’s opening minutes, willingly sacrifice any pretence of realism. All bets are on the latter, given the joyful, nihilistic absurdity of what ensues. This extends beyond narrative events to the equipment used by the characters in the film, including a pair of binoculars which, when we see through them from Ransome’s point-of-view, make a computerised whirring noise and feature a readout of numbers on the right-hand side, but have no clear benefits over normal ‘bins’.
The parallels with Rambo: First Blood, Part IIare writ large. If Ransome is a poor man’s Rambo, Christopher Connelly’s Colonel Radek is a sneering imitation of Charles Napier’s duplicitous Marshall Murdock, the CIA field operative who sends Rambo into Vietnam to collect evidence of long-held American POWs; and Major Harriman, who acts paternalistically towards Ransome and refuses to abandon him, is a cut-price Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna). Furthermore, the film’s sadistic Russian antagonist, Jakoda (Alex Vitale), is an all-too-obvious pastiche of Steven Berkoff’s Lt Col Podovsky (by way of Richard Kiel’s Jaws, from The Spy Who Loved Me); both characters serve in their respective narratives as symbols of Russian support for / orchestration of the NVA forces in Vietnam.
Strike Commando hits all the major narrative beats of Rambo: First Blood, Part II. Like Rambo, Ransome is sent behind enemy lines, and betrayed by a slimy, self-serving member of his own team. Cut off from US forces, Ransome is forced to work with local guerrilla operatives and uncovers evidence of a Russian presence in Vietnam. Taken captive by a Russian officer, he is tortured with the aim of making him broadcast a message to US forces, dissuading further action in the region. However, he escapes and returns for a confrontation with the man who betrayed him.
Like Stallone’s John Rambo, Ransome also has a tendency to yell / growl / scream[ii] animalistically whilst enacting his vengeance, wielding an identical belt-fed machine gun (an M60) which he shoots from the hip on full auto. (So macho, as Sinitta sang only a couple of years earlier, in an equally iconic piece of mid-80s fluff.) The absurdity and lack of subtlety of this is actually confronted directly within the film. After returning to the combat zone with the mission to prove the Russian presence in the region, Ransome forces an NVA regular to him to Jakoda. Ransome is directed to a small village. Emptying his M60 (from the hip, on full auto, as above) at the huts (whilst yelling ‘JAA-KO-O-DAAA!!!!’), Ransome finds himself spent as NVA regulars surround him, and Jakoda makes his appearance (‘You looking for me, Americanski?’): they have been hiding everywhere but in the huts that Ransome has destroyed.
Strike Commando extends Rambo: First Blood, Part II’s conclusion, however, with the film’s final sequence taking place in Manila, some time after the main events of the narrative. Ransome tracks down Radek, who is now running an import/export business. Carrying the aforementioned belt-fed machine gun, Ransome rips through the offices in a scene clearly inspired by the sequence in James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 destroys the police station in which his target Sarah Connor is being held, before blowing Radek away with an underbarrel grenade launcher. Leaving the building, Ransome encounters Jakoda, who has miraculously survived his previous encounter with Ransome, and who now wears a set of steel teeth clearly paying homage to Richard Kiel’s Jaws in the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. Ransome crams a grenade into these dentures, telling Jakoda, ‘Ah, shut up!’ Jakoda explodes in a shower of grue, managing to cry ‘Americanski!!!’ even after his torso has been obliterated by the grenade. The steel teeth land in Ransome’s upturned palm. ‘These Russian dentists make some pretty good dentures’, Ransome quips, and the film ends with that (intentionally?) corny James Bond-style one-liner.
Mattei, Fragasso and Drudi paint the narrative in broad strokes, drawing on caricatures for characters and dialogue. ‘You know, when I used to steal watermelons down in Alabama, I used to have to climb fences, not cut them’, the only black member of the Strike Commando unit quips as the team sneak into the NVA compound in the film’s opening sequence.
The film depicts the complex circumstances of the war in Vietnam in equally cliched, highly simplified terms, regurgitating the reductive narrative of Rambo: First Blood, Part II and its contemporaries, such as Joseph Zito’s Chuck Norris action-er Missing in Action (1984) and its sequels. Ransome is depicted as the ‘white saviour’ of the South Vietnamese, whilst the North Vietnamese forces (and NLF guerrilla fighters) are largely little more than a nuisance – cannon fodder for Ransome’s M60 – who have so little agency that their every action is dictated by Russian interlopers. When Ransome is discovered by Lao and taken into the South Vietnamese village, Lao introduces the Strike Commando: ‘He’s American, our saviour!’ In response, the villagers excitedly chant, ‘American! American!’ However, they are disappointed when Ransome refuses to captive enemy agents – who don’t appear to be NVA regulars, and instead must be South Vietnamese NLF guerrilla fighters (or Viet Cong). However, Ransome refuses: ‘Why should I kill an unarmed man?’, he asks his new allies. Cho Li is frustrated by this: ‘That man is a demon, and I never take a demon prisoner. He is your enemy, American. He hates and he kills’. Afterwards, Le Due explains to Ransome that the villagers ‘were hoping you’d be their saviour [….] That’s why your gesture, your humanity towards the enemy, has let them down’.
If Ransome is defined by his humanity, then, his Cold War opposite, Jakoda, is defined by his lack of humanity. Jakoda’s sadism is highlighted after Ransome has been taken captive by the NVA, who are working under direction of Jakoda and Olga. Ransome is thrown in a cell with another American captive, Martin Boomer (David Brass). Under duress, Boomer has been broadcasting anti-war statements intended to harm the morale of American troops (much like Margit Evelyn Newton’s character in The Last Hunter). (Cue stock footage of American soldiers in Vietnam, with Boomer’s broadcast laid over the visuals.)
Jakoda tortures Ransome, binding him to a rack and electrocuting him, in an attempt to persuade Ransome to agree to take Boomer’s place in the broadcasts. Ransome refuses, however; and one day, a badly-injured Boomer is returned to the cell he shares with Ransome. Boomer tells Ransome that he refused to read the lines given to him by Jakoda, and dies in the arms of Ransome. Jakoda’s response to this is to order the NVA guards to leave Boomer’s rotting corpse in the cell with Ransome (to place psychological strain on the Strike Commando who has already proven himself to be resistant to physical torture), something which appals even Olga, who calls Jakoda’s decision ‘inhuman’.
However, in the film’s final sequences, Jakoda is revealed to be nothing more than the pawn of the self-serving American Air Force Colonel Radek, the pair working together in Manila – in an import-export business (always coded in popular cinema as a front for espionage and subterfuge) – in the years following the Vietnam War. Where Rambo: First Blood, Part II goes to great lengths to establish how conflict with an internal nemesis (self-serving bureaucracy, represented by Charles Napier’s CIA field operative Marshall Murdock) can exacerbate conflict with an outside enemy (represented in the film by Steven Berkoff’s Russian officer, Lt Col Podovsky), Strike Commando conflates these two spheres of antagonism.
Fragasso was inspired to shoot a film in the Philippines by the actor Luciano Pigozzi (aka Alan Collins, who plays Le Due in the film), who had been living in the country for a while. (In fact, Pigozzi had appeared in a fairly small role in Margheriti’s Philippines-shot The Last Hunter.) Mattei’s other work in the Philippines includes the Miles O’Keefe-starring Double Target (Doppio bersaglio)in 1987; and Robowar (Robowar – Robot da guerra, 1988), an unholy mash-up of John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) and Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987); Cop Game (Giochi di poliziotto, 1988), a pastiche of Christopher Crowe’s Saigon (aka Off Limits, 1988); Born to Fight (Nato per combattere, 1989); and, of course, Zombi 3 (1988), which Mattei completed for Fragasso after the original director, Lucio Fulci, left the production. On many of these films, including Strike Commando, Mattei shared directorial chores with his frequent producer/co-producer Claudio Fragasso, with a generally uncredited Rosella Drudi writing the script.
Fragasso engaged Mattei and Drudi to help construct the script for what would become Strike Commando. Fragasso and Mattei were credited as co-writers on the film (as ‘Vincent Dawn’ and ‘Clyde Anderson’, respectively), but according to the interview with Drudi on this disc, their input was limited to bouncing ideas around and, in the case of Mattei, telling Drudi to ‘borrow’ scenes from George P Cosmatos’ Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985). (There’s even an off-hand nod to Stallone’s Rocky IV from 1985, when the American Ransome and the Russian Jakoda duke it out in an improvised boxing match towards the end of the picture.)
Mattei and Fragasso may have ‘borrowed’ ideas for scenes from Rambo: First Blood, Part II, but they lifted even more from Margheriti’s The Last Hunter, including recycling footage shot for that film alongside some very noticeable 8mm and 16mm stock newsreel footage. (The mixing of different film gauges is much more jarring in this HD presentation than on the old lo-fi videocassette releases with which most of this film’s fans, myself included, will be familiar.) Mattei’s use of stock footage is well-documented: his 1980 riff on Dawn of the Dead, Zombie Creeping Flesh (Virus), featured a good quarter hour of footage from Ide Akira’s 1974 ‘mondo’ documentary Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali, depicting wildlife in New Guinea and graphic funeral practices. In the interview with Fragasso on this disc, the producer / co-director notes that Mattei was an expert at film editing, and this is ‘why Strike Commando features so much footage from other movies’. (Mattei would reuse footage from Strike Commando, as well as other pictures, in Cop Game.)
Even where footage isn’t directly culled from other sources, the staging of some scenes in Strike Commando is strikingly derivative. When Ransome and the South Vietnamese villagers are startled by the decaying corpse of an American helicopter pilot that falls from the treeline and hangs suspended by the straps of the parachute to which it is still attached, Strike Commando borrows its staging from a very similar sequence in The Last Hunter: in fact, the corpse looks remarkably similar to the rotting airman in Margheriti’s film, and one may wonder whether Mattei and Fragasso found and used the same dummy corpse.
Lead actor Reb Brown had previously played a somewhat similar role in the Vietnam War-set film Uncommon Valor (Ted Kotcheff, 1983) as ‘Blaster’, the demolitions expert. He had also worked with another Italian film director, Antonio Margheriti, on the 1983 sword-and-sorcery film Yor, the Hunter from the Future (Il mondo di Yor), and in the late 1980s would appear in a number of Italian exploitation films. In 1989, Brown would play another Vietnam War veteran in Lang Elliott’s Cage, in which he would act alongside Lou Ferrigno: Ferrigno had of course played another Marvel comic book character, the Incredible Hulk, in the television series that was contemporaneous with the television movies in which Brown played Captain America. Brown would go on to work with Mattei again, starring in Robowar, again written by Drudi and produced by Fragasso.
In the interview on this disc, Fragasso says that Strike Commando ‘sold like crazy’. Neither Strike Commando 2 (Strike Commando 2 – Trappola diabolica, 1988) nor Double Target ‘came close to repeating the original’s success’. Fragasso suggests that the commercial success of Strike Commando was because the film ‘had emotions’ that were articulated in the father-son relationship between Ransome and Lao, which Fragasso defines as ‘something intimately Italian’. The other films focused too heavily on action, he argues. English-speaking fans who encountered the film during the 1980s might disagree: the action was the heart of film, anchored by the artwork which depicted Ransome wielding a bizarre assault rifle with seven barrels, underslung grenade launcher and telescopic sight. (This was the artwork contained on the UK VHS release from Avatar, from which 46 seconds of a cockfight were cut by the BBFC before the film could be given an ‘18’ certificate for home video.) Nevertheless, though they could be dismissed as trite padding, the scenes featuring Lao and Ransome offer a moral perspective on the broader cultural differences between the two: Ransome promises Lao that he will one day take the boy to Disneyland where ‘They have popcorn and ice cream growing on trees’, and Lao reminds Ransome that ‘This is not your war’ – when it is finished, Ransome will return home and ‘we will have to stay here’.
Strike Commando goes full sentimental when Ransome returns to the combat zone to investigate the Russian presence in the region, and discovers that the South Vietnamese villagers who sheltered him have been slaughtered. Among the bodies is Lao, who is barely alive. ‘American, tell me again about Disneyland’, Lao whispers. Weeping, Ransome launches into an extended monologue: ‘They got tons of popcorn there. All you gotta do is climb the tree to go eat it [….] And there’s a genie, a magic genie, and he can’t wait to grant your wishes’. As Lao expires, Ransome lets out a howl of pain, an animalistic outburst that is equivalent to his scream of rage.
Severin Films’ release contains a superb interview with Rosella Drudi, the screenwriter whose frequent collaborations with Mattei and Fragasso during the 1980s were largely uncredited: in fact, the story and script for Strike Commando are credited to ‘Vincent Dawn’ and ‘Clyde Anderson’ – the Anglicised pseudonyms of Mattei and Fragasso, respectively. In reality, the pair contributed little to the actual writing of the film, according to Drudi: Mattei and Fragasso simply bounced ideas around the room, and Drudi crafted these into a coherent screenplay.
Drudi’s work on Mattei’s films is particularly interesting inasmuch as it appears to challenge gender stereotypes – at least, those Hollywood stereotypes that associate action and war films with the macho mindset. However, it’s worth noting that Italian cinema had plenty of precedent for this (in terms of female writers writing scripts for exploitation films): for example, in Elisa Briganti’s work with Lucio Fulci on Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2, 1979) and The House by the Cemetery (Quella villa accanto al cimitero, 1981), and Enzo G Castellari (1990: The Bronx Warriors / I guerreri del Bronx, 1982), among others.
Drudi says here that the suggestion women aren’t interested in war films or action films is rooted in chauvinism; as a long-term fan of war and action pictures, Drudi found the writing of Strike Commando to be a rewarding experience and describes it as ‘pretty normal for me. It was like writing any other movie’. Nevertheless, Mattei’s tendency to dictate that the script should contain so many elements lifted from Rambo frustrated Drudi, who wanted to write something a little more original. However, she conceded because of Mattei’s kindly nature: ‘He had that same, cynical attitude in the vein of legendary director Mario Monicelli’, she comments, referencing the director of oh-so-many examples of the commedia all’italiana (Italian-style comedy).
Severin Films’ Blu-ray release of Strike Commando is in 1080p, using the AVC codec, and in the film’s original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1, on a disc locked for region ‘A’ playback. The presentation, mastered in 2k from the original negative, is very good. Shot on 35mm, the film looks very handsome in this HD presentation. A pleasing level of detail is present throughout, and skintones are naturalistic. Contrast levels are solid throughout, with velvety blacks and a delineated curve into the toe. Highlights are evenly-balanced too. An organic level of film grain is present, though this sometimes feels ever-so-slightly muted, perhaps owing to the encode. There is some minor damage present, mostly in optically-printed sequences: for example, the film’s opening titles features some bold vertical lines. All of this damage is very minor, however, and is certainly organic. Projected onto a 100” screen, the presentation looks excellent and film-like, certainly far better than any other home video release Strike Commando has so far endured.
Audio is presented via a LPCM 2.0 track in English and a LPCM 2.0 track in Italian. Both tracks are very good, with excellent range – other than the scenes exclusive to the extended cut (more on that below). Optional English subtitles for the Hard of Hearing are provided, though these are ‘dubtitles’ and based on the English-language dialogue. (The film appears to have been shot predominantly, if not exclusively, in English, so this isn’t too detrimental; but English subs for the Italian track would have been an added bonus.)
Two cuts of Strike Commando are contained on the disc: the theatrical cut, running for 91:45 minutes; and an extended cut, with a running time of 102:09 minutes.
The scenes exclusive to the extended cut are identifiable by a noticeable shift in the quality of the English-language audio track: the audio in these scenes is noticeably compressed – tinny and with some heavy clipping – and sounds as though it may have been sourced from a tape.
The scenes added to this extended cut include
(i) a lengthier first encounter between Ransome, Le Due and Cho-Li, in which Le Due suggests that the discovery of the wounded American soldier ‘may well be the answer to our prayers’, but Cho-Li warns that Ransome’s presence may provoke a violent response from the Russians;
(ii) a sequence set on board a US Navy destroyer, in which Harriman discusses the ‘impetuous, idiotic’ Radek with a General, and the General tells Harriman that Radek ‘has strong support in Washington’. The General suggests the dead members of the Strike Commando unit should receive posthumous medals, to which Radek responds angrily: ‘You don’t win wars with posthumous medals’;
(iii) a scene following Sakoda’s killing of Le Due, in which Lao wonders where Le Due is, and suggests to Cho Li that Ransome ‘could be a big, strong husband for you’;
(iv) a scene towards the end of the film, with Harriman visiting the General, stating that Radek is a spy for the KGB, and the General legitimising a strike against Radek, but acknowledging that Ransome will have no support and will be a ‘one-man show’.
As contextual material, Severin Films’ release includes the film’s trailer (2:05); ‘All Quiet on the Philippine Front’ (13:11), an interview with co-writer Rosella Drudi; ‘War Machine’ (19:44), an interview with Claudio Fragasso; and an in-production trailer (2:32) assembled to appeal to foreign distributors and showcasing some of the footage from the film.
In ‘All Quiet on the Philippine Front’, Drudi talks about the processes involved in scripting Strike Commando, and reflects at length on her work with Mattei and Fragasso. Drudi states that she was driven by the notion that ‘A hero must always succeed, and this is something current films have lost. There’s nothing better than walking tall heroes accomplishing what they set out for, never leaving their inner values behind’. As a screenwriter, Drudi’s approach was to streamline the narrative for the audience, ‘underlining the clear motivations of your hero and your villain right from the start’. She worried about creating a hero and villain that were too ‘toned down’ and accepted that the ‘cartoonish portrayal’ of the film’s principal antagonist (which she identifies as Jakoda, rather than Radek) was necessary. She reveals that she never visited the sets of the films Mattei madein the Philippines though was on set for many of his domestic productions.
Drudi says that Strike Commando was shot in 1985 but not released until significantly later; and on release, the film’s popularity exceeded her expectations. She credits the film’s balance of action and drama for this, as well as the ‘cartoonish’ villain and the moments of intentional excess that verge on self-parody. Drudi suggests that the budget looks in excess of what it really was, thanks to some of the visual effects, and the film overall is anchored by the presence of Reb Brown and his ‘fresh, sincere performance’ to playing Ransome.
In ‘War Machine’, Fragasso discusses the production of Strike Commando, revealing that the film was shot in Pagsanjan, one of the locations in which Coppola photographed Apocalypse Now. (Fragasso refers to Coppola as a ‘mediocre’ American director with an utter straight face: it’s hard to tell if he’s serious or joking.) Fragasso relates a number of amusing anecdotes from the production, including the revelation that he and Mattei were in a helicopter, provided by the authorities in the Philippines, and experienced turbulence, with Mattei quipping that he would die in a helicopter with Fragasso. (The same year that Strike Commando entered production, 1985, the actor Claudio Cassinelli was killed in a helicopter crash whilst filming Sergio Martino’s Hands of Steel / Vendetta dal futuro.) Fragasso also notes that Mattei was ‘a really lazy guy’ and refused to learn English to communicate with members of the cast and crew who didn’t speak Italian, and that Alex Vitale was ‘constantly exercising’ on the set, and this was worked into the film.
Both interviews take place in the editing suite for Fragasso’s film Karate Man, in post-production at the time the interviews were recorded.
Shorn of the all-too-sincere, preachy moralising of their Hollywood models (for example, Rambo: First Blood, Part II), Bruno Mattei’s films skirt on the edges of self-parody and, admittedly, many of them fall off it. They are probably best described as an acquired taste, and I am an unashamed fan of his films: in the college I used to teach at in the early 2000s, I pinned to the wall of my office a collage of posters from Mattei’s films with the caption ‘This office is a Bruno Mattei-friendly zone’, provoking much good-natured mocking from colleagues; and I went so far as to stage a mini-festival of Mattei’s films (including Zombie Creeping Flesh, Rats: Night of Terror, Shocking Dark and Robowar) using VHS tapes and the projector in the lecture theatre. That said, if you have ever wanted to watch a film in which a burly man stares down a cobra; or in which a cutaway to a US base of operations is underscored by an offscreen drill instructor referring to troops as ‘ruptured ducks’ or telling them to ‘stop swinging your butts: you’re soldiers, not hookers’; or, for that matter, in which the protagonist and antagonist go head to head, literally, by running at one another and butting foreheads like rutting stags… Strike Commando will hit your sweet spot. The film is a bag of cliches – from scenes of an elite, highly-trained commando walking, fully exposed to enemy fire, across open paddy fields with a platoon of rifle-carrying villagers, to running in slow-motion from mortar fire – but is nevertheless hugely entertaining.
Severin Films’ release of Strike Commando is excellent, containing a superb release of the film alongside some illuminating contextual material. For more details, please check out the Severin Films site.
[i] Brown had played the titular comic book character in the 1979 television movies Captain America and Captain America II: Death Too Soon.
