The Raid: Redemption (2011) – My son introduced this movie to me with, “It’s Dredd without Judge Dredd but with John Wick-levels of action.” Sold!
The story is little more than a premise: An Indonesian S.W.A.T. team (with rookie member Rama (Iko Kawais) as the protagonist) stages a raid on a thirty-floor brutalist apartment building to take out the crime lord who rules it — an exceptionally dangerous venture, as almost the entire building is occupied by hardened criminals that the crime lord allows to live there rent-free. It gets bad enough when the team is discovered and the building is locked down completely with them inside; but when the cops find out that this is a rogue, unsanctioned mission, and that therefore there will be no backup coming…
And beyond that, it’s wall-to-wall violence, with the occasional gun punctuating the steady stream of hand-to-hand martial arts prowess. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t. I do. And for a $1.1 million budget, it’s exceptional.
I took a quick gander at some other reviews, seeing if any could enlighten me as to how Welsh-born director Gareth Evans ended up directing an Indonesian-language action film. Instead, I found a surprising number (including the one at RogerEbert.com) that tut-tutted about all of the violence and bewailed the lack of a deep storyline. They don’t get it: We aren’t just watching carnage or torture porn here. This is an incredibly well-choreographed and well-shot/edited display of martial arts as an art. In its own way, it’s as beautiful as ballet — testosterone-swamped ballet with blood and bruises — and I doubt those same sniffy reviewers react to the thin story in a staged ballet with the same sense of the aristocrat being forced to view the crude entertainments of the great unwashed.
The Invincible Barbarian, aka Gunan, King of the Barbarians (1982) – I saw this waaaay back in my teenage years, taped off late-night TV. All I remembered was (1) there were a couple of minutes of unrelated dinosaur footage at the beginning, tied in poorly by narration; (2) there was a lot of slow-motion; and (3) I liked some of the costuming.
Well, I was mostly right. The dinosaur bits (only in the Invincible Barbarian cut, not in the Gunan version) borrowed from One Million Years B.C. (1966) follow some cosmic footage with a narration about destiny and the stars and different Illuminations and whatnot. There’s supposed to be a Chosen One™ born in this barbarian tribe, but because of cosmic yadda-yaddas, it’s actually twins that are born, and no one knows which one is supposed to be chosen as the wielder of the super-duper sword of destiny. Right after they’re born, both mother and putative father are killed by an even more barbarous horde, and it’s revealed that the leader of this “Ungat” tribe, Nuriak, is actually father to the twins (the dubbed dialogue says that the mother was “seduced,” but given his general demeanor and grooming, I’m assuming the original Italian says “raped”). Anyway, the twins are spirited off by the midwife to be raised by a nearby tribe of Amazons.
…And they both grow to adulthood, not knowing who’s supposed to be “Zukahn” the Chosen One (obviously musta been “Gunan” in the original Italian), so neither gets a name (1) until they’re old enough that they can fight each other to the death (!!) to determine who’s really the child of prophecy. (One actor was forty years old, and the other was forty-seven — I think that’s plenty long enough, thanks.)
From there, the winner Zukahn (Pietro Torrisi, credited as “Peter McCoy”)(who doesn’t actually kill his brother, but that’s okay, the Ungats to it for him) dedicates himself to killing Nuriak, who still runs the tribe, and all of the Ungats. Problem being, Zukahn is stupid. Like, “Groo the Wanderer” stupid.
There are some really good ideas here which are immediately discarded before they make a difference. For instance, the narration introduces the idea that the Chosen One soul is actually split between two bodies… but that never comes up again. Zukahn also never bats an eye about Nuriak being his actual father. Heck, no one even says what the Chosen One is supposed to do — maybe it’s just to wipe out the evil Ungats, but as there are a couple dozen of them tops, menacing an area about the size of a neighborhood (seriously, the Ungat and Amazon tribes are within walking distance of each other), it doesn’t really seem to be the thing that we need a cosmic prophecy about.
Why’s this movie notable enough that I am writing about it at uncommon length? Mostly because of its bottom-scraping qualities:
- Terrible acting. You know acting has to be really, really bad if you can discern how bad it is through the dubbing.
- Stunningly bad cinematography. I know with a cheapo Italian ripoff you don’t have the freedom for nifty camera angles and smart editing, but could you at least make sure the performers are actually in frame?
- Non-romantic romance. Prior to this, the most chemistry-free couple I had ever seen was either Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry in Die Another Day (2002), or Debbie Gibson and Vic Chao in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009), but the now Zukahn and Lenni (Sabrina Siani) takes top honors. (You know you’ve seen too many of these things when you see Siani’s name in the credits, recognize it from Ator, the Fighting Eagle (1982) and Conquest (1983), and say, “Hmm, bet she spends a good amount of time naked.”)
- Non-wound wounds. They couldn’t afford much fake blood, I guess, so Zukahn slices and stabs his way through Ungats without getting any blood on either his sword or their costumes.
- Slow motion. Soooo much slow motion, you think you’re actually watching a Six-Million Dollar Man YouTube compilation. (It may have been meant to distract from the not-even-trying swordfight choreography. It failed.)
And no, I don’t know why Past Me thought there was anything memorable about the costuming. Stupid teenage Nathan.
(If you want to compare your reaction with mine, the entire movie is free to watch on YouTube — the only place I could find it, in fact.)
The Blade Master, aka Ator the Invincible (1983) – Nothing in the first Ator movie called out for a sequel, which is probably why writer/director Joe D’Amato (excuse me, “David Hills”) went with a completely different story starring Miles O’Keeffe (“HOW MUCH KEEFFE???”) and no script, by reports (and oh, I believe them).
After a completely unrelated opening sequence with two Cro Magnon tribes fighting in a cave…
There’s an older scientist/wizard guy, who has found or maybe invented the purest MacGuffin ever, the “geometrical nucleus” — I don’t know what it does, but I know the bad guy Zor wants it. The only person Wizard Guy will trust this MacGuffin with is Ator — who, since the end of the last movie, has lost his foster sister/intended bride to death, trained under Wizard Guy, and become an ascetic living with his mute Asian sidekick Thong. So Wizard Guy’s daughter Mila runs off to get Ator, who apparently lives about a day’s job away.
Meanwhile, the bad guy, Zor, attacks the Wizard Guy’s castle and walks around with him, chewing the scenery with as much Eurotrash Evil Overlord Abandon as he can muster. Seriously, this guy is the one reason to watch the movie.
Two notable features:
#1:
The initial unrelated caveman sequence takes place in a cave.
Wizard Guy’s laboratory is in a cave.
Ator and Thong live in a cave.
Once they start trekking back to help Wizard Guy, a supernatural mist pushes them into… a cave.
When Joe D’Amato rents a cave to shoot a movie, he uses the hell out of the location.
#2:
Somebody figured out halfway through that they didn’t have enough scriptless plot to pad out full running time, so there’s this massive sidequest as Ator et al. journey to his old home village to free them from an evil Serpent Cult.
Bottom line: If the appeal to you of the original Ator was Miles O’Keeffe wearing nothing but his fur speedo, shaggy moonboots and glorious Farah Fawcett hair, well, you’ll like this. Otherwise, get read to enjoy Zor.
(Also available on YouTube.)
Oh, no, ONE argument with your comments here (I agree with 99% of everything else) but the most chemistry-free couple in the known history of cinema–and I’m making some concessions here for those folks that can never see, hear, or accept movies that aren’t in color (!)–is no doubt, Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou (The DaVinci Code).
That is then followed hotly on its own heels by, yes, shockingly, Tom Hanks, again with Felicity Jones in Inferno. It’s hard to fathom that a guy with that much real talent and charisma (I mean, let’s be real, who doesn’t love Tom Hanks???) can blow it twice in a row like that. Two Dan Brown novels; the same leading man/hero in both and then…kablooey, the worst chemistry on film, ever. EVER. (Don’t get me wrong, left to my own devices, i could probably come up with 100 more lousy couples but…this one, given the source material, the era of filming and the sheer, innate lovability of the male star…it’s hard to figure out how they went THAT wrong, so early and so often. Just sayin’!
Given that I’ve never seen a movie adapted from a Dan Brown novel (for good and legitimate reasons), my statement that those were the most chemistry-free romances I’d seen still holds true.
As I recall from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s novel Inferno (kind of a parody/modern update of Dante’s story), the Italian word sometimes translated as “seduce” in English actually refers more to something like “deceive someone into having sex” or “take sexual advantage of someone in a vulnerable mental state.” So this kind of “seduction” is a kind of rape, but more like statutory rape or rape by fraud than the forcible kind that the Italian word more unambiguously translated as “rape” in English would denote. (Hence in Niven and Pournelle’s story, the circle of Hell in which Dante indicated the “seducers” were kept is shown to have some kind of teacher gal in it who reminds one of the characters traveling with the protagonist that she taught him everything he knew about girls—he having been quite a womanizer in his lifetime—when he was one of her students. While the story never explicitly spells out what she means by that, it’s pretty implicitly clear that this “seducer” was specifically what we would call a groomer and molester in more contemporary parlance.)
In other words, this Nuriak dude did rape the twins’ mother, but by some kind of deceit (e.g. stealing her husband’s clothes and posing as him while slipping into bed with her on some dark and cloudy night) or treachery (e.g. plying her and her husband with liquor until they both passed out and then taking advantage of her) rather than by pinning her down and forcing himself on her or holding a knife to her throat and threatening her into compliance.
All good background. However, Nuriak is about as subtle and deceitful as a brick; I’m guessing, as with many things, that it’s simply stupid writing.
One other point of interest: as was often done with many cheesy low-budget Italian flicks, The Blade Master or Ator The Invicible had several cuts of it released under several more titles as well, one of those titles being Cave Dwellers, which provided fodder for a very amusing episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The parts of it I particularly remember:
* The protagonist and his pals get attacked by “invisible warriors” in the cave, i.e. they spend several minutes staggering around swinging their fists through the air and throwing their heads back pretending (entirely unconvincingly) that someone is punching them in their faces.
* Out of nowhere, the protagonist suddenly takes to the skies on a hang glider because… well, just because, I guess. (Needless to say, Joel and the Bots had a field day making fun of this scene.)
* The protagonist wrestles with a giant snake down in its pit, and by “wrestles” I mean “pretends (also entirely unconvincingly) he isn’t the only one actually moving around by wrapping his arms around what’s obviously a big snake-shaped rubber prop and pretending he’s trying to strangle it while swaying it back and forth to simulate motion.”
It’s all so hilariously absurd that you don’t even need Joel and the Bots to help you make fun of it; just gather your snarkiest fellow movie critics for a movie night and do your own mocking running commentaries on it together.
– Yes, the “invisible warriors” scene is just as you remember it — although, in the defense of the actors, they did as well pretending that they were being punched by invisible assailants as anyone could.
– Yeah, I didn’t get as far as mentioning the hang glider in my review because I was out of give-a-craps. What’s most ridiculous about that is that Ator isn’t exactly towing any luggage — they had just escaped from the snake cult with nothing but their swords — so where the hell did it COME from? (It’s also pretty clearly an absolutely modern hang glider. In close-ups, there’s rattan wrapped around the struts, but the long shots clearly show all it as off-the-shelf modern. I never thought I would be nostalgic for the “gliding from a dead pterosaur” scene in Yor, the Hunter From the Future, but…)