If I were going to be consumed in some way, and I got my choice of the method, I think I would want to be made into a gelatinous doughnut filling. First off, it doesn’t sound particularly appetizing, and secondly, the person eating me would be likely to spill some of me down their shirt. That kind of thing could ruin a day, and if I’m going to have to be killed and eaten, I’m going to serve as an inconvenience at least. What served as no inconvenience at all was the film that Emily from The Deadly Doll's House of Horror Nonsense picked for our film swap this month. For my part I picked the illustriously titled Hot Wax Zombies on Wheels for her viewing pleasure, and her pick for me was Tsui Hark’s 1980 film Di you wu men or We're Going to Eat You.

Hark was a director I knew more by reputation than his filmography. I’ve seen a couple of installments of his Once Upon a Time in China series and knew he had produced John Woo’s 1986 film A Better Tomorrow, but I had never taken a special interest in him. So while I had heard of We're Going to Eat You, I wasn’t aware it was one of his films. After seeing it, that special interest might have been sparked. I watched it early one weekend morning while sipping on a hot cup of coffee, and it was the perfect way to start a day. Watching the combination of horror, comedy, and martial arts unfold took me right back to my childhood when the USA network would air Kung Fu theater Saturday afternoons after cartoons.

We're Going to Eat You stars Norman Chu as Agent 999 is sent to a rural Chinese village to arrest a bandit called Rolex (Melvin Wong), who sports a tattoo of a fist on his chest. Upon arriving, Agent 999 begins to suspect that something is wrong, and he soon discovers that cannibals, addicted to the flesh of strangers, populate the village. Agent 999, a traveling pickpocket (Kwok Choi Hon), and Rolex must band together to take down the town’s villainous, and hungry, chief played by Eddy Ko. Along the way there’s enough slapstick to make a Three Stooges fan happy, enough martial arts set pieces to delight fans of classic Shaw Brothers, and enough cut rate special effects to make a H.G. Lewis fan giddy.

To say that We're Going to Eat You was not what I expected would be an understatement. I don’t know what I expected exactly, but Hark’s film defies classification. Combining a pinch of Italian cannibal mojo with Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, Hark gives Sam Rami a run for his money in the zany horror category. Much of this is due to the great performances. While Norman Chu was wonderful with his neo-noir portrayal of Agent 999, the film really belonged to Kwok Choi Hon who played the pickpocket and Eddie Ko who played the Chief. Ko slinks around the screen with an insane, sweaty looking power that delighted me, and Kwok Choi Hon gave the pickpocket a kind of wimpish likeability that brought to mind the charismatic likeability of Jackie Chan.

We're Going to Eat You is one of my favorite kind of cult films, a genre mash-up. Sometimes directors lose balance between the bits of pieces they are trying to cobble together, but in this case, Hark put together a film that is hysterical, action packed, and a bit gross as well. I can’t thank Emily enough for picking this one out for me, and I can’t wait to see what she has in store for me next month. So head on over to The Deadly Doll’s House to check out what she thinks about Hot Wax Zombies on Wheels, and as for me, I’m feeling a bit peckish. Perhaps a run out to Krispy Kreme is in order.

Recently I was going through a box of VHS tapes at a flea market pushing aside the numerous copies of Beverly Hills Ninja and Urban Legend II when I pulled out a particularly ragged looking copy of Empire Pictures’ Zone Troopers. The cover was partially ripped, it had an odor one doesn’t usually expect from video tapes, and it felt like the set in mildew might latch onto my hand. The actual tape however looked pretty nice, and I knew that the sci-fi WWII tale had long been out of print, and so tattered, smelly, nasty cover, and all; I brought it home with me. I’m so glad I did. Zone Troopers is a true VHS classic. After a short, and extremely limited, theatrical run in 1985, the tape was released by Lightning Video, the same fine folks who brought Hands of Steel, Manhattan Baby, and Massacre in Dinosaur Valley to video store shelves, and I could not help but love watching this long out of print gem in its prime format.

Zone Troopers starts out with a few familiar faces to anyone familiar with Charles Band’s productions, Tim Thomerson, Art LaFleur, and Biff Maynard, who all also appeared in Trancers together. Joining them is Timothy Van Patten, Dick’s half brother, and the foursome make up the core of an American combat unit that we are told is “somewhere in Italy”. Caught behind enemy lines after a series of mysterious events, the squad stumble across a downed UFO and its pilot, a bug eyed alien. When the Nazi’s catch wind of the discovery, they bring their full force down to capture all the evidence as well as eliminate the U.S. forces. From there you get all the laser blastin’, fuhrer punchin’, World War II action that you can handle until it leads up to all out battle where the aliens will decide the fate of the war.

There are a couple of things that Zone Troopers really has going for it. The sheer pulpiness of the story combined with the performances from Thomerson, LaFleur, Maynard, and Van Patten really sell the whole film. Thomerson especially stands out as The Sarge. His character and performance seem inspired by actors like Lee Marvin and Gene Evans in Sam Fuller’s war movies. The tough guy bravado definitely works for Thomerson, and while the story doesn’t revolve around him, the action scenes certainly do. Van Patten has some of the film’s most memorable scenes that display his character’s naivety without resorting to stock situations. His Joey is still quite the kid, acting out the World Series with baseball cards and worrying that he’d cracked up when he discovers the alien.  He makes the character sweet without ever turning saccharine. The other actors get their own high points with Maynard as a war correspondent who gets a little too close to the action, and I can't forget LaFleur’s character Mittens, the scene where he clocks Adolph Hitler is cause enough for repeated viewings of Zone Troopers.

This was director Danny Bilson’s first film, but he knew several of the cast members from when he had penned the script for Trancers. While nothing in the film is shot with mind blowing skill, Zone Troopers is a solid film that uses its low budget to its advantage. Bilson keeps things small, and the only outlandishly bad effects come via the aliens. Yeah, the lasers look shoddy and the alien makeup (other than for Bug Eye) is just a light glaze that makes them look bluish (funny, they don’t look it). Keeping it simple fir entirely with the pulpy feel of Zone Troopers and definitely added to my enjoyment of the film. Bilson would go on to write films like 1989’s alien gladiator film Arena as well as 1991’s The Rocketeer. He also produced and directed some episodes of The Flash TV series, penned a few of the most recent James Bond video games, and was a consulting producer for the videogame The Sims. His film career never took off past his second film, the 1989 comedy The Wrong Guys starring Richard Belzer, Louie Anderson, and Richard Lewis as former Cub scouts on a reunion camping trip, but if he never did anything other than Zone Troopers he’d be OK by me.

Sitting down to Zone Troopers is not like sitting down to an episode of Masterpiece Theater, meaning you won’t be bored to tears and want to claw out your eyes, but for a cross between Critters and The Big Red One, it’s not bad at all. This is a film so strange it is tailor made for cult film status, now if MGM, who owns the rights to the film, would get off their ass and release it to DVD, it might just get there. The trouble with Zone Troopers now is that I would love to tell you all to go out there and grab it, but if you don’t want to get a VHS or track down a grey market copy, then you’re out of luck. However it is worth the effort, and taking a bit if inspiration from the cover, 'I Want You' to check Zone Troopers out.

When I think Joan Collins my mind goes right to her character Alexis from the long running TV series Dynasty, her one shot on Star Trek as Edith Keeler, or her sister Jackie’s salacious romance novels. What I don’t usually think about is Euro-crime films. It was only recently when I was moving all of my “Short Wait” titles on my Netflix queue to the top of the queue that I noticed Ms. Collins name listed after one of my favorites Maurizio Merli. The film in question went under titles such as Magnum Cop, Fatal Charm, Fearless Fuzz, and the original Italian, Poliziotto senza paura, or Police Without Fear literally. The strange thing is that only the international title, The Private Detective, actually accurately portrays the film. (In second place would go to the banal title Fatal Charm.) No matter what title this film might carry, I was intrigued by the idea of Merli and Collins sharing the screen, and with Case of the Bloody Iris cinematographer Stelvio Massi in the director’s chair, I figured on it being an interesting slice of Euro-crime. I just wish I had known how much of my interest it would take.

Merli stars as Walter “Wally” Spada, an ex-cop who now works as a private investigator. The Italian cops hate him, the bill collectors want his last dime, and things are looking pretty grim for his agency. Luckily Wally gets a letter from an Austrian Duke who is looking for his daughter Annalise (Annarita Grapputo) who is living in Italy. Wally finds the girl, but when she runs off, she is kidnapped by a group of thugs. Traveling to Austria, Wally gets paid off by the Duke to drop the case, but soon the investigator gets embroiled in the case of a missing teenager. The clues begin to lead him to believe that both cases are linked somehow. As he delves deeper into the underground of Austrian prostitution, he meets erotic dancer Brigitte (Joan Collins), and Wally soon finds out that danger lurks all around him.

Early in the film when Wally gets his job from the Austrian Duke, one of his friends bluntly tells him, “I don’t dig Austria.” Aside from being a funny line, it should have acted as a bit of advice to Merli, Collins, Massi, and company. The film begins with a shootout in a public park with a suitably intense Merli bursting into action and blowing away the bad guys, but then from the moment Austria comes into the film, the few moments of action are punctuated by long, confusing, confounding plot points. Only fifteen minutes into the film I felt like I needed some kind of chart to keep up with characters, their relationships to each other, and where the story was going. I don’t mind a film with a detailed plot, but Magnum Cop was unnecessarily complex to the point where I had to roll back the film several times to follow it. This continues until the third act of the film, and by time it finally lets loose with the final action notes, I was too mentally frazzled to care that much.

The style that Massi brought to films like Case of the Bloody Iris and Giovanna Long Thigh with his skill as a cinematographer is certainly not on display in Magnum Cop. From the lackluster fashions (I mean seriously. Merli wears overalls for a third of the film, and that is not badass.) to the flat design of the locations, there is little to nothing stylish or eye catching in Massi’s film. The action sequences do yield some interesting shots, but nothing that belies a man of Massi’s reputation as a camera man. Massi was assisted on Magnum Cop by his cinematographer Riccardo Pallottini who had worked on Lenzi’s Man from Deep River. I could see much more of Pallottini on screen than Massi, but where Pallottini’s flat, raw style worked in a jungle cannibal film, it fell flat when added to the exciting world of Euro-crime. Magnum Cop was also hampered by the score by Stelvio Cipriani. The disjointed tracks never enhance either the action scenes or the quiet moments in the film. Cipriani, another Lenzi alum from his work on Nightmare City, relies too heavily on spacey synthesizer rather than go with a more rocking sound. The end result is a soundtrack that annoys more than anything else.

The performances were pretty good on the whole, though the only copy of Magnum Cop I could find was pretty poorly dubbed making it slightly harder to judge. Merli is suitably intense, but this is one of the kind of films that make him look like Franco Nero and Chuck Norris had a baby (That‘s had, not Ate.)  If you’re hankering for a Maurizio fix, you’re much better off turning to Violent Rome or Violent Naples. I did enjoy it that his private eye character had a soft spot for movies. Keep and eye out and you’ll spot Italian posters for Paul Newman’s The Mackintosh Man and Robert Mitchum’s Farewell My Lovely decorating the walls of his apartment as well as several more tough guy films.Joan Collins, appearing here before her comeback in The Stud and Bitch, alternately adds sex appeal or high camp to scenes where she appears. For those that are interested, Ms. Collins does indeed doff her clothes, but at least for me, it wasn’t anything to write home about. Joan has a fraction of the screen time that I would have expected or liked, and the rest of the cast, a collection of random and bland characters, fail to carry the film. The only other partial highlight would be Werner Pochath as Strauss, but only because the Austrian baddie has a badass 70’s handlebar ‘stache.

Magnum Cop isn’t a complete loss. As an example of a Euro-crime film, it distinguishes itself by infusing a kind of neo-noir into the proceedings. It seemed to really want to be a compatriot to the kind of films that Wally idolizes, and in a way that reminded me a bit of a poor translation of Elmore Leonard set in Austria. It kind of succeeded. So the question remains, do I dig Austria? And I have to say that when it comes to the Austrian adventure contained in Magnum Cop, I don’t dig it that much. There are way better Euro-crime ad polizia films out there to check out. So unless you’re a genre completists or a huge Joan or Maurizio fan, there’s not much to draw you into this below average effort.

There's not a trailer out there, but here is a short 3 minute clip of one of the film's more interesting moments. 

When I first saw that Stacia from She Blogged By Night was hosting a William Shatner Blogathon, I was really excited to take part in it. As longtime readers will know, for the last two years, I have done a salute to Shatner each March to celebrate the great man’s birthday. So when it came time to find a film to add to the Blogathon, I was a little stumped until I remembered that there was one I wanted last time I did You Don’t Know Shat that I couldn’t get, 1980’s Kidnapping of a President. Thankfully, after much finagling, Netflix came though for me and delivered a copy of this lesser known and little seen Shatner film to my door. Released only one year after the bloated epic Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Kidnapping of a President stars a Shatner in transition. The success of The Wrath of Kahn and T.J. Hooker was still two years away, and the late seventies had found him stuck in the mire of made for TV films. Kidnapping brought Shatner to the multiplexes with a film that hints at his later, famous cop role and proves that William is a man of action even without a starship.

Shatner stars as FBI agent Jerry O’Conner. While he is second in command of the FBI, many people think he’s a paranoid crackpot who can’t get over the assassination of JFK twenty years earlier. Making his job more difficult is populist President Adam Scott (Hal Holbrook), a folksy Jimmy Carter type that wants to wave to the crowds from open top cars and shake the hands of the people. O’Conner ends up in charge of the President’s security during a diplomatic mission of Canada, but his paranoia of assassination attempts is circumvented. South American Marxist revolutionary Roberto Assanti (Miguel Fernandes)  snatches the President and tosses him in an armored car which is rigged with explosives. If Assanti’s demands aren’t met by midnight, the impenetrable truck with the president inside, will blow up. It’s up to Agent O’Conner and Canadian cop Mackenzie (Michael J. Reynolds) to come up with come way to get the President out in time.

For a film that made its debut seventeen years after JFK’s assassination, it was interesting to see how the specter of his killing along with those of Bobby Kennedy and George Wallace hung over the proceedings of this film. From the opening credits, the idea of the Presidency and the men who are charged to protect it are forefront as a montage plays out highlighting the faceless agents of the FBI. All of this is set to the tune of ‘Hail to the Chief’ which becomes the major musical theme of the film. If it ever happens to slip your mind who has been kidnapped, you don’t have to wait too long for the President’s theme song to pop up again. To the modern viewer, the thought of Kennedy’s assassination being so prescient might seem odd (especially in the scenes where Shatner’s O’Conner refreshes a room of top brass on it and other politically motivated violence), but I would imagine for the men charged with protecting Gerald Ford (who survived an attack by Squeaky Fromme) and Jimmy Carter, the idea was never too far from their minds.

Of course what brought me to Kidnapping of a President was Shatner, and he does not disappoint. During the first fourty minutes that lead up to the titular kidnapping, Shatner establishes his FBI agent as a maverick who has been marginalized due to his perceived paranoia. His acting is actually pretty reserved in this part of the film, but watch out. After the President gets taken, Shatner ramps up the intensity and he plays out the rest of the film just under the line of shuddering mania he exhibited two years later while screaming “KAAAAAAHHHNNNN!” As always the Shat is lots of fun to watch, and in particular his scenes with veteran actor Hal Holbrook stand out. He also has great chemistry with Miguel Fernandes who plays the Che Guvera inspired revolutionary. Fernandes, who also appeared in films such as Ghost Story and Trancers, provides a menacing counterpoint to Shatner’s crusading agent. Kidnapping of a President also features performances from a couple of Hollywood legends, Van Johnson as the crooked Vice President and Ava Gardner as his power hungry wife.

The main thing that struck me while watching Kidnapping of a President was how well it was filmed. From the crazed confusion of the crowds crushing down on the President to wonderful shots of downtown Toronto, there are some really striking visuals that elevate the film far above the schlock it could have been. Director George Mendeluk only had one feature film under his belt, 1979’s Stone Cold Dead, and would spend most of the rest of his career in television, but he and cinematographer Mike Molloy (Shock Treatment, Mad Dog Morgan) gave the film a feeling that worked well to heighten tension throughout the film. The same can’t be said of the score by Paul Zaza (Porky’s, A Christmas Story) and avant-garde composer Nash the Slash. Alternating between versions of ‘Hail to the Chief’ and a cross between Tinto Puente and Phillip Glass, the score detected from much of what was being done visually.

As a Shatner fan, Kidnapping of a President was an interesting addition to his body of work. I had a great time watching the Canadian actor play an American FBI agent who has to save the President when they go to Canada, but I don’t know that outside of hardcore Shatnerites if it would hold many people’s attention. As a political thriller, it is no Manchurian Candidate or Three Days of the Condor, but there is enough to like in the acting and performances that I definitely think even detractors of The Shat would find something to like here. That about wraps it up for me, but head on over to She Blogged by Night for more Shatner goodness, and I can’t wait to see what other goodies folks have to add about the man, the myth, the Shatner.