Another Weekend of Schlock

This is getting to be a habit - another weekend of doing little else other than watching schlock movies.  At least, that's the way it felt.  Personally, I blame B Movie TV, the Roku channel which serves a lot of this stuff up.  You see, they've now set up an 'on demand' version of their channel, with lots of tempting titles on offer.  It was watching an Italian Indiana Jones knock off there late on Friday night which set me off on another lost weekend of schlock.  After that, the floodgates just opened.  But getting back to that first film, Hunters of the Golden Cobra (1982) is one of a number of Indiana Jones inspired movies shot in Italy in the early eighties.  None, of course, had the budget of the Spielberg films but they did, in their own way, sometimes have the star power, often featuring Italian schlock superstars.  In this case, the lead is taken by David Warbeck, one of the giants of Italian exploitation - a legend in Italy, but still virtually unknown in the UK, where his screen roles were confined to a couple of Hammer movies, sex comedies, (most notably Martin Campbell's The Sex Thief) and guest starring appearances in episodes of TV shows like UFO and Minder.  If anything, in the UK he is best known for not being James Bond, (he was allegedly one of the actors considered for Live and Let Die, as a possible alternative lead in the event that the producers hadn't be able to sign Roger Moore).  Here, he's backed up by John Steiner, another British actor who found fame in Italy, spending most of his career there and Luciano Pigozzi, the seemingly ever present character actor, usually in villainous roles.

Partly filmed in the Philippines, (in common with many other Italian movies of the era), and set just after the war (with a 1944 prologue), the film sees Warbeck and Steiner as an American and British soldiers respectively, who are sent on a mission to recover the titular object by the Us and UK governments.  The Golden Cobra, which may have supernatural powers, is the totem of a particularly troublesome sect of extremists.  Also involved in the hunt is Pigozzi's shady archeologist and twin girls who are not only hot, but one of them is also a Jungle princess.  In the hands of exploitation veteran Antonio Margheriti (aka Anthony Dawson), it all moves along at a brisk pace, with plenty of action, plot twists ans snappy dialogue.  There is also a fair amount of the director's trademark (and excellent) miniatures work.  The film is also full of the sort anachronistic vehicles and planes (post-war T-28s pretending to be Japanese Zeros, for instance) you expect from movies of this sort of budget.  It  is all tremendously good fun, a better watch certainly than the most recent Indiana Jones film. It was popular enough that a couple of years later the director and three main actors were reunited for a similar film: The Ark of the Sun God.

It was all downhill for the rest of the weekend, with a switch to the American Horrors streaming channel yielding such delights ans the Phantom of the Ritz, a comedic take on Phantom of the Opera, transposed to a smell town US theatre staging fifties revival acts, and Edge of the Axe, a real curio of a slasher movie. The latter was a US-Spanish co-production, one of the last films directed by Jose Larraz.  Despite Larraz considering it his worst film, it is extremely well made, with beautifully shot northern California exteriors.  Telling the tale of a series of grisly small town axe murders, it never really offers anything novel in plot or character terms, but the murderous set pieces are well staged and often very suspenseful.  Interestingly, it features as a plot point an early use of a precursor to the internet - the linking, via modems, of remote terminals to a central computer (usually based at a university), allowing data requests to be made to the central servers.  In terms of production values and direction, it is streets ahead of the majority of eighties slasher pics and well worth a look.  By pure coincidence, having had Invasion of the Bee Girls as a Random Movie Trailer on Friday, the complete film turned up on American Horrors on Sunday.  Inevitably, I ended up watching it again.  I'm still unclear on several plot points, but it is a nicely shot film with some striking imagery, particularly during the laboratory scenes.

I eventually abandoned American Horrors for another, more dubious, streaming channel, where I was able to watch The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood, a piece of seventies softcore pantomime. The title tells all, really.  It is rather like a US equivalent to a costume British sex comedy.  The chain mail costumes worn by the soldiers reminded me of the ones we'd worn in a school play I was in when I was ten.  Which gives you some idea of the budget.  I really don't know why I watched it - it certainly wasn't remotely erotic. Which might have more to do with me - I'm at an age where I spend more time worrying about the lack of historical accuracy than the number of boobs and bums on display.  I mean, for one thing, the swords they were carrying were rapiers, whereas, in reality, the broadsword was still the main bladed weapon during this era.  Then there's the fact that nobody addresses Prince John by his proper title or form of address, ('Your Majesty').  Oh, and I really don't think that the Regent of England would actually go around personally assassinating foes, (to be fair, he leaves the raping of the women-folk to his underlings).  Most crucially, I'm pretty sure that he wasn't killed with an arrow by Robin Hood.  After Richard I's death he became King in his own right and his son, Henry III succeeded him.  Moreover, I'm also pretty sure that he and Richard I didn't have a wicked sister who liked to play sadistic lesbian sex games with a chained up and naked Maid Marion in the dungeons.

Actually, that's one of the purely porno criticisms I could level at the film - it really doesn't exploit the S&M possibilities of those dungeon sequences - I mean, chained up heroine and all that torture equipment, yet she doesn't even get tied to the rack?  Surely no self-respecting porno film-maker should ever pass up a bondage opportunity like that?  It is an especially puzzling omission in view of the way that, at every other opportunity, women are brutlalised, with the general merriment of the Merry Men being punctuated by the raping of various fair maidens.  For what its makers clearly thought was a light hearted historical porno romp, The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood all too often resembles a violent rape fantasy.  Now, if only it had starred Robin Askwith as a fumbling and sexually nervous Robin Hood, Anthony Booth as a scheming Will Scarlet and Blakey from On The Buses as the Sheriff of Nottingham, with Linda Hayden as Maid Marian, then it might have been more entertaining.  But as it stands, it is actually quite depressing.

Despite that downbeat ending to my second consecutive weekend of schlock, I'm gearing up already for another one, perusing the titles in B Movie TV's on demand service.  While a lot of the titles are the usual public domain stuff that turns up on every streaming service, they also have a significant number of titles unavailable free-to-air anywhere else.  So, who needs so called 'legitimate' cinema when you can get trash like this on tap?