Invaders Of The Lost Gold

Gemser And Makepeace

Invaders Of The Lost Gold
aka Horror Safari
aka Safari Cannibale
aka Greed
Directed by Alan Birkinshaw
Hong Kong 1982 
Severin Films Blu Ray Zone A

Wow. This is the kind of movie where you really have to wonder how it exists and why it was ever made. Answer... because it was financed by notorious, low budget ‘opportunity seizer’ Dick Randall (who produced and sometimes acted in such films as Pieces, The French Sex Murders and even Bava’s Four Times That Night). He was kind of a green light and a red light for movies both at the same time but, yeah, nobody could deny his passion for cinema, for sure.

This quickie, Invaders Of The Lost Gold, which was made in the Philippines, appealed to me mostly because of the two main actresses. It has Laura Gemser, famous for Black Emanuelle* and a whole host of other ‘single M’ Emanuelle movies (I think she even had a part in one of the ‘double M’ Emmanuelle movies at some point too) and, in the main lead with an ‘introducing’credit, we have Glynis Barber (replacing Britt Ekland who wisely dropped out before shooting started). Remember her? She played, among other things, Soolin in Blake’s Seven (in the later seasons when Blake wasn’t even in it), Jane (in the serialised BBC adaptation of the saucy World War two newspaper strip of the same name) and, of course, Makepeace in Dempsey And Makepeace (going on to marry her co-star Michael Brandon). This wasn’t her first role. I think she was doing Blake’s Seven before this... but I guess it’s her first feature film role, to justify the credit Dick Randall gave her. Either way, she’s probably the most competent of the performers in this movie... which given the big name cast, I think says more about her enthusiasm than anything else. I get the feeling from watching this that the rest of the cast are not exactly treating this film like it’s ‘A material’... which to be fair it decidedly isn’t... but whatever, she comes off as one of the most credible in the cast (as does Laura Gemser actually).

So I teased a big name cast and here it is... we have Stuart Whitman playing the male lead Mark Forrest (he’s twenty seven years older than Barber but she’s supposed to be his love interest), Edmund Purdom as Rex Larson (the villain of the piece), Woody Strode as the bodyguard/butler of the financier of the expedition in the movie (Barber plays the money man’s daughter) and Harold Sakata, who played Odd Job in Goldfinger, reviewed here) as a former officer in the Japanese army.

The film starts off in 1945, when an offshoot of the Japanese army, based in the Philippines, are attacked and almost completely wiped out by headhunters... but not before they hide their chests of gold in a cave to be collected years later when it’s safe to do so. Then, 36 years later, the villain of the piece... after killing one of the officers for non-compliance and then being cheated from collaborating with a second who kills himself... grabs Sakata to help on an expedition to find the lost gold. Much to his dismay, the financier hires Whitman, who Purdom’s character has treacherous history with, to lead the team and he also goes along, bringing his daughter and various other helpers.

And the rest of the film is watching almost the whole team get picked off one by one by, sometimes mysterious, attacks by wildlife or... well I’m not always sure... until we get a stand off between Whitman and Purdom with Barber looking on. The end... really nothing much to see here folks. That being said, the director has gone on record as being rightfully proud of pulling off a... mostly... cohesive adventure yarn under terrible circumstances and with a special Dick Randall budget (aka excessively low) while also rewriting the script day by day as the film shot.

It’s dreadful and not quite exploitative, apart from one scene near the end where Gemser sheds her clothes and goes swimming before dropping out of the picture in the most puzzling manner... and it has the occasional piece of ‘practical effects violence’, which they sometimes get away with but often don’t, in my opinion.

Whenever a major character dies, the film goes into a bizarre slow motion effect so you know something bad is happening... even though the details of that are not really present on screen. For example, a slow motion crocodile attack doesn’t have any shots of the crocodile or victim sharing the screen (and the crocodile in certain moments looks like it might even have been tracked in from another movie) but we’re somehow supposed to surmise that a character has been eaten. Of the slow motion deaths on display though, Laura Gemser’s swimming death is the most perplexing. One minute she’s swimming around backstroke to show some of the movie’s sexy assets... the next she is keeling over in slow motion in the water and, when her body is found, even the other characters can’t figure out how or why she died. I dunno... it’s as much of a puzzle to the audience... maybe a heart attack?

The music is bizarre too. Francesco De Masi provided the score but it feels wholly inappropriate to the images and I’d have said it was just needle dropped in from another movie. But the director mentions ‘doing the music’ so I can only assume it’s an original composition. I’d say it harms the film somewhat but, with the amount of harm it does itself anyway, it’s already kind of bulletproof.

I’d have to say though that, even though the film is kinda trashy... and not in a sleazy way, worse luck, just seeming like it’s cobbled together from air (no disrespect to the director, who obviously managed to make a lot more of it than many might)... I somehow really enjoyed this one and don’t regret my purchase in any way. I don’t know why but, I had a smile on my face from beginning to end throughout this one... possibly because of the juxtaposition of the various ‘unlikely bedfellows’ in terms of the acting talent. Severin’s Blu Ray transfer is beautiful (although the state of the slow motion sequences is, I suspect, not something they would possibly have been able to fix) and there are a couple of nice extras on here too. One where the director talks about the filming and we hear stories about the reluctant crocodile and the bizarre, eccentric and aggressive sense of competitiveness between Whitman and Purdom... and another which is two long interviews with the both the director and Dick Randall’s widow (she always has good stories) which are both outtakes from the documentary movie Machete Maidens Unleased (which I reviewed here).

And there you have it... Invaders Of The Lost Gold is not a film I’d recommend to anyone but saying that, it found a warm place in my heart and it’s the perfect film to programme in the middle of an all nighter moviethon to give the audience a bit of a pause before getting their second wind, I reckon. One I’m pleased to have on the shelf. 

*There should be a whole raft of Black Emanuelle reviews coming soon to the blog within the next twelve months or so. I'm eight fims into the box set at time of writing.

Mako - Jaws Of Death

Fin N’ Tonic

Mako -
Jaws Of Death
USA 1976
Directed by William Grefé  
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Silly spoilers swimming under the surface of this review.

Well now, I can see how some people are going to be pretty underwhelmed by Mako - Jaws Of Death (as it’s titled on the actual print... as opposed to absolutely any other title listing for the film) but, you know, I kinda quite liked it and think it’s quite entertaining in a low key kinda way. This is the sixth film in Arrow’s incredible He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection Blu Ray boxed edition and, although the print isn’t in great condition (like a lot of these films included... barely saved from vinegar syndrome before it was too late), it does still retain its widescreen aspect ratio. This is the movie that Grefé worked on trying to get funding for years before and nobody was interested. Then a little movie called Jaws caused a bit of a bloody splash in 1975 and suddenly, everyone wanted their own shark picture. So although this is not actually a Jaws bandwagon movie... and the story certainly reflects that... it probably wouldn’t have been made without the success of Spielberg’s magnum opus.

Richard Jaeckel plays Sonny Stein, the main protagonist/antagonist, depending on your point of view. The film starts off strongly with a wonderful pre-credits sequence where three men on a boat are shark fishing. One of them has one on his line... then a frogman, Jaeckel, swims up to the shark and cuts it loose. He then boards the boat and cuts a swathe of bloody vengeance through the three fishermen, feeding them all to his sharky friends.

Okay, so the film tells Sonny’s story and pictures him as a kind of recluse... but he’s well known in Florida, where the movie is set, as being an expert on sharks. Everyone comes to this lonely man to fulfil their shark needs. He’s not that willing to help but he is pressured into it. He is conned into signing over one of his sharks to a sideshow act in a local bar and a scientific researcher wants him to ‘loan’ them his pregnant shark friend for ‘observation’. Yeah, you can kinda see what’s coming. One of the ‘bad guys’ is Harold ‘Odd Job’ Sakata (of Goldfinger fame) as another ‘shark worrier’... he seems to be turning up in a few things I’ve watched recently.

At some point in the film we get to hear Sonny’s back story... which is this. In the war, in the Philippines, he was trying to escape from some bad guys. At some point he has to make a choice between staying on dry land and getting shot or jumping into the local shark infested waters and possibly being eaten alive. So of course, he chooses the latter (just, why?) but the sharks don’t eat him... instead they eat the two guys chasing him. A local shaman... who is a ‘shark shaman’ sitting on his shark throne and who hangs with an unseen tribe of shark worshippers... witnesses what has happened and is impressed. He gives Sonny a big shark medallion and tells him that, whenever he is wearing the medallion, he is a friend of the sharks and they will talk to him. So, yeah, that’s why all of Sonny’s best mates have fins and impressive pearly whites, I guess.

Anyway, things come to a head and, when Sonny finds out that the guy who owns the bar is torturing the shark with sound waves to make it seem more threatening in the tank... and also that the ‘scientists’ have killed the pregnant shark and all the babies, well... he goes on a roaring rampage of revenge, killing all the nasty humans who are being unkind to sharks.

And it was okay... I found it entertaining. It really makes no references to Jaws and even the music is, almost always, completely unlike the iconic John Williams score for Spielberg’s picture. According to the IMDB, the score is by two composers, William Loose and Paul Ruhland but, it never really seems like it was scored to work together or even with the images, to be honest. It sounds more like needle drop to me and I wonder if these composers actually did work with Grefé on this movie or whether he just took existing music by both of them and dropped it into his film.

Jaeckel cut his head open on one day of shooting (the same day the camera was accidentally destroyed and the boat needed for the shoot hit a sand bank)... but he was apparently stitched up at the local hospital and back on the set in no time. I don’t know if this explains why, in some of the ‘swimming with Mako sharks’ shots, he has a big stuntman standing in for him... a stuntman who’s desperately trying to obscure his unfamiliar face from the camera by hiding it behind the shark’s fin. It looks pretty funny, it has to be said.

Not too much more to be said about Mako - Jaws Of Death really. It’s not particularly well put together in terms of the way the frames are designed or anything but it’s a more than competently sewn up movie experience (there are many movies out there by directors where you couldn’t say the same thing), it’s fairly fast paced, it’s entertaining and shark whisperer Jaeckel gives a real good, mean and pyschotic stare when required. Not a bad movie but, like I said, a lot of people are probably not going to give it much time. I liked it though and, yes, I’d watch it again.

They Came from the Swamp - The Films of William Grefé

Swamplimentary Tickets

They Came from the Swamp:
The Films of William Grefé
USA 2016 Directed by Daniel Griffith
Ballyhoo Motion Pictures/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Just a quickie, short shout out review to Daniel Griffith’s interesting documentary They Came from the Swamp: The Films of William Grefé. This plays, in it’s extended cut, on the last disc of Arrow’s nicely put together He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection Blu Ray box, which houses seven of this director’s quickie exploitation films plus this film as one of the extras. Now, I hadn’t heard of Grefé before this movie was put out by Arrow so I decided, much like I’d done with Severin Films’ Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection (although, obviously I knew who Adamson was), that I’d dip into the documentary first and at least find out a little more about the man before watching his works. And, frankly, if you want to know why I bought this in the first place, it’s the lure of one of Grefés early films, Sting Of Death, which has a really hilarious looking Jellyfish Man as the main antagonist... I mean, who doesn’t want to watch a movie about a Jellyfish Man?

The documentary, which I think was made independently of this release but has found a home in UK physical media distribution here, is basically a mix of the usual ‘talking heads’ interviews with people who knew/know Grefé and who tell some interesting anecdotes about their time on the sets of a handful of the director’s movies... not just the ones in this set (I suspect the UK release of a couple of the movies not included might fall foul of a certain ‘red flag’ for the BBFC in this country, so my guess is they didn’t try to release them all).

Of course, one of those talking heads... probably the person most featured for this documentary... is Grefé himself, who is now 92 years old (at time of publishing) and, from the looks of it on the IMDB, might still be working (he was filming episodes of a TV show in 2017 but I’m not sure if he’s still doing that or not). He certainly doesn’t look his age and he has some real stories to tell about his times leading up to him loving movies as a kid (especially those by John Ford), being bitten by the acting bug when he was young and going through the whole ‘Summer Stock’ experience before suddenly becoming a director, due to various reasons and opportunities. The talking heads also include some other directors, the most famous of whom is probably the Godfather Of Gore himself, Herschell Gordon Lewis, filmed for this documentary.

This is, as I said, a short review (and I’ll certainly be reviewing the films in this set at some point soon for the blog), but this full version of the film runs for just over two hours and includes little snippets of stories such as the man who was in the aforementioned Jellyfish Man costume, which basically had a big, semi transparent plastic bubble for a head, almost suffocating on set because of the lack of air supply. Or another as to how Grefé managed to get Rita Hayworth at a discount rate for The Naked Zoo in 1970. Or how he’d have to shoot many of his films in really short time periods like, writing one overnight and then shooting it in a week to make the drive-in release deadlines. It also mentions the time he was sought out, since he knew how to film Florida and worked with alligators etc, to do the second unit direction in various countries on the James Bond movie Live And Let Die (which he did, my review of that one is here), with the comment that, with the budget he had to work with as a second unit director on that movie, he could have made three films for.

Perhaps my favourite story (which fortunately has a happy ending), is when William Shatner is telling us about the time he was working as the villain in the movie Impulse. There’s a private detective in the movie called Karate Pete, played by Harold ‘Odd Job’ Skata from Goldfinger. Anyway, Shatner tells his story and it’s accompanied by the unused outtake footage of the very thing he’s describing. As he tells it... and as we see it... Shatner was supposed to hang Sakata’s character from his house and then, when Sakata is dangling there and gurgling in the noose, Shatner starts improvising and hitting him in the stomach etc, as the villain would do and then trying to pry one of the gurgling Sakata’s arms away from the noose. As we watch and as Shatner describes it, Sakata’s other hand starts reaching for his pocket to try and get to it to write a note or something. Then, as Shatner realises that the safety rig had been incorrectly put on Sakata and that he was literally choking to death during the sequence, he lifts him up (not easy with a man as big as Sakata) to try and stop him from dying as he calls to the rest of the crew, who rush on to get Sakata down. Wow, a close call for Sakata but the actor would work again for Grefé, opposite Richard Jaeckel in Mako - Jaws Of Death (a film that nobody wanted to finance but then, all of a sudden, the script became a hot property after Spielberg released Jaws).

And, yeah, that’s all I’ve got to say on this little gem of a documentary, They Came from the Swamp: The Films of William Grefé. I’m kind of looking forward to exploring some of the films in this set, although I suspect it may be a very hit and miss affair. I’ll report back on my findings on this very blog, of course.

Death Dimension

Get Sakata

Death Dimension
aka Freeze Bomb
USA 1978 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: There’s a ‘villain reveal’ in here by way of a spoiler.

I’ve been wanting to watch Al Adamson’s Death Dimension for a while now... possibly since before I even knew who Al Adamson was. After the slightly cheap but immensely entertaining Jim Kelly vehicle Black Samurai that Adamson directed (and which I reviewed here) I was really up for watching this one. Alas, asides from a few silly points the film is, sadly, not a patch on Black Samurai and it would be a bit of an understatement to say it disappointed somewhat.

Asides from eschewing the flashier Adamson titles, the film starts off with credits over footage which, I guess, is actually quite impressive. A doctor cuts into the forehead of an actress in close up as she tries to keep still and implants a microdot in her. It actually looks like he’s doing it for real and all I can say is that it’s an impressive looking prosthetic to be able to do that. Similarly, when the thing comes out later in the film... it still doesn’t look fake.

The doctor finishes his surgery and tells the lady to run while he distracts his boss with the test of the new scientific invention which he’d created as a weather control device to end drought. However, the film’s primary villain is using it as a ‘freeze bomb’ and we see it being tested on his prisoners. It basically explodes and then, in the area around the prisoners, it starts snowing until they freeze to death. If that sounds pretty lame, let me assure you, it’s cheaply done and looks even lamer. Luckily, that’s the last time we see the freeze bomb in action because the doctor kills himself and destroys his lab, entrusting the woman at the start of the picture, Felicia (played by Patch Mackenzie) to get the microdot into safe hands.

So now it’s down to heroic cop Ash to find the girl before the villains do. Okay, the plot is set up and... I haven’t mentioned the cast yet, have I. Well, for starters, Ash is played by kung fu guru Jim Kelly but it's the addition of two other iconic actors which make the film so memorable... well, memorable in a way. In Black Samurai, Adamson had a lot of nods to the James Bond-like shenanigans of the main characters. I think it was obvious he liked the Bond films. So in this one he’s got two famous Bond actors on board too and, after seeing how this turned out I have to ask... what were they thinking?

So we have Ash’s police captain boss Gallagher played by George Lazenby, the man who played Bond himself in the greatest of the series, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here). He doesn’t have a lot to do in this one but, when he later turns out to be a turncoat villain, he does have a fight scene at least, where he is electrocuted in a pool by Ash’s Chinese ally. I’ll get to him in a minute.

The main villain of the piece, known as The Pig, is played by none other than... and I’ll write it as he’s billed on the credits... Harold ‘Odd Job’ Sakata. Yep, the guy who played villainous henchman Odd Job in Goldfinger (reviewed here) is the main villain in this one, with a big talking role no less. That being said, he’s been overdubbed with the voice of James Hong for this movie. But to show that he’s just like a Bond villain, instead of stroking a cat throughout the film like Blofeld often did... here Sakata is constantly stroking his pet tortoise. So, yeah, a clever way for the director to highlight the similarities between the Bond films and... well this mess of a movie.

Aldo Ray also turns up in this one as a ‘buyer’ for The Pig’s freeze bomb (when he can get his hands back on the formula in Felicia’s head) and, last but not least, we have Ash’s Kung Fu buddy Li, played by Myron Lee. And, just to push the additional, obvious mood they’re going for, he’s credited here as Myron ‘Bruce’ Lee. He’s not terrible in this and he beats people up just as well as Jim Kelly but, yeah, this was his only movie role by the looks of it.

And it’s all the usual shenanigans. Curiously, just like in Black Samurai, the fight choreography seems to be better at the start of the picture with the end stuff being a bit underwhelming again. There’s not too much in the way of inventive camerawork during the film other than Adamson using that ‘fly’s eye’ lens again (I don’t know what it’s called) to effectively show Felicia’s state of paranoia as she walks the city streets and tries to find a safe haven. Also, the score which is credited to someone called Chuck Ransdell, who has this as his only soundtrack credit plus one credit as an actor in another film, sounds more like a needle drop assembly to me. I don’t know if he wrote the whole thing or just a cue here and there but, for the most part but it doesn’t quite seem to hang together. Most of it is wah wah but oddly generic funky action music but the more effective stuff at the start which is built around a continuous pulse sounds more like something Fabio Frizzi or John Carpenter might have come up with.

The film has some nice ideas for set pieces such as a speed boat chase and ‘on board’ fight but most of them are just not executed with any real flair it seems. And I know Adamson does have a certain style to his work (especially in some of his early crime pictures) so I don’t know what factors combined to give us this. That being said, the sequence where Jim Kelly is in a helicopter and having a shoot out with one of The Pig’s henchman, who is shooting back from a cable car, is a nice idea and it’s not too terrible. I mean, yeah, it’s pretty terrible but... not too terrible.

I’ll quickly mention that there’s a car chase which suddenly winds up in desert roads and, knowing Adamson, I was waiting for the car to go over the cliff in that same footage he favoured from previous films and, sure enough, that happened. Similarly, I knew just how The Pig would meet his end when I saw a light aircraft (probably piloted by Adamson’s sometimes acting and director friend John 'Bud' Cardos, I should think) coming to pick him up in the desert. I knew it would somehow explode with him in it and I knew the exact ‘stolen footage’ moment Adamson would once again cut to in an attempt to fool viewers into thinking the plane had actually exploded. I’ve seen this second or two of film so many times now as I make my way through this boxed edition from Severin, the Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection. Sadly, this is not one of the films in this set which would qualify as a masterpiece by anyone’s standard, I would have thought. This is not the entertaining thrill ride of a film I had hoped it would be but I’m really glad I have it in Blu Ray quality, at least. I now have five more of the 32 films in this box set to watch. Reviews will be coming soon.