Kommando Leopard (1985) – An almost plotless exercise from director Antonio Mergheriti (excuse me, “Anthony Dawson”), in which a generic rebel leader fights against the forces of a generic two-bit dictator in a generic third-world country (possibly meant to be Central American, though obviously shot in the Philippines). The only thing not generic is the commander of the dictator’s foreign mercenary force, played by Klaus Kinski.
Despite the absence of any background to the whole political scene (which would tell us exactly why we should root for the rebels instead of the government), it’s an enjoyably brainless production, especially with the well-done miniature work allowing a dam, a passenger liner, and a fuel train to be destroyed convincingly (reportedly, the miniature FX accounted for half of the budget). All accompanied by a synth score that reeeally wanted to be the themes from Airwolf and Streethawk.
Blood Feast (1963) – Okay, look. When I started reviewing B-movies twenty years ago, every bad movie review site already had a feature on Blood Feast. It’s not like the internet needed yet another review of the “first gore movie,” right? So I never got around to watching it before. Get off my back!
Anyway: If you can get through the leaden acting, the worse-than-high-school production makeup, the monotonous music, the violence done to Egyptian mythology, the idol of Ishtar that’s nothing more than a department store mannequin spray-painted gold, the buckets and buckets of bright strawberry-red blood, and the script that doesn’t really make sense… there’s nothing left.
Class of 1999 (1989) – Someone tried to put Robocops in the classroom, but they turned out to be more like Terminators! In the far-flung future of 1999, youth gangs have gotten so bad that police won’t go into whole sections of cities. But one test program from the Department of Educational Defense (spearheaded by Stacy Keach in a bleached-blond rat-tail and icy contact lenses) places three human-appearing androids in the classroom in one such inner-city high school. Unfortunately, they’re actually repurposed military surplus battledroids, and their primary programming starts to resurface… Now it’s up to one semi-reformed gangbanger, plus the daughter of the principal (Malcolm McDowell), to keep the three androids — John P. Ryan, Pam Grier and Patrick Kilpatrick — from just killing all the gang-affiliated students (which is pretty much everybody)!
I didn’t go into this expecting much, so there was no reason to be disappointed. Pretty good Terminator-ripoff effects clash amusingly with ’80s-trying-to-be-futuristic fashions. But there’s nothing that unites opposing racially diverse youth gangs like sticking it to The Machine!
Abandoned movies: Rebirth of Mothra, El Topo