Shitty Movie Sundays: Legion of Iron

Legion of Iron 1990 movie posterThere isn’t much information hurtling around in the tubes about Legion of Iron. There isn’t even a trailer anywhere I can find. The closest is a two-minute long video of this flick’s final scene, posted in multiple places. According to IMDb, this movie did get an actual release near the time it was made, on video, but there’s nothing out there about current ownership or who licenses it for streaming. Of the 26 listed cast members, only 4 have headshots. This appears to be a film that was well on the road to being forgotten, saved from oblivion by the fact streaming companies need content, and lots of it.

From way back in 1990, Legion of Iron comes to us via producer/director Yakov Bentsvi, working from a screenplay by Ruben Gordon. The film tells the tale of high school couple Billy and Alison (Kevin T. Walsh and Camille Carrigan). Billy is the star football player at his school and Alison is the lead cheerleader. One night after a game the two head up into the hills overlooking Yuma, Arizona, for some teenaged necking. There, they are kidnapped by two creepy men dressed as police and whisked off to a secret, underground bunker in the desert. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Legion of Iron”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Robowar

Short of watching a mockbuster from The Asylum or its ilk, one would be hard-pressed to find a film that is more of a ripoff of a big time Hollywood production than Robowar, from Italian auteur Bruno Mattei. The victim in this case is Predator. From characters, to plot, to location, to certain scenes, all the way down to individual lines of dialogue, Mattei squeezed everything he could out of Predator short of being sued into oblivion. The only major change was substituting a rogue bionic soldier for the alien hunter. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Robowar”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe

What did I just see? What did I just SEE?!

Well, I saw two leading men in an action film that had no business trying either to emote, or speak lines of dialogue. One was stiffer than a two-by-four, and the other had spent so long cutting promos in the WWF that any emotion other than anger came out sounding like a first read.

Sprung from the mind of writer, director, and producer Damian Lee, Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe stars Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura as the titular Abraxas. He’s a humanoid alien police officer who is part of an elite force of Finders who keep the peace in the universe. The Finders have been around for a long time, too, with Abraxas claiming to be over 11,000 years old. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe”

Shitty Movie Sundays: The Exterminators of the Year 3000, aka Il giustiziere della strada

I’ve seen a lot of Mad Max ripoffs. American ones, Italian ones, Filipino ones…but never one from Australia. Hmm.

This particular Mad Max ripoff is of the Italian variety, and it might be the most barebones of the bunch. It has the most desolate wasteland, the smallest cast, and the least amount of tricked out hoopties. That last note is something of a sticking point. The cars are a big draw for me when watching these movies. I want to see rust buckets with all sorts of doodads welded to them to make them look tough. Crucially, they need to have been decent muscle cars at one point in their lives. In this flick, the auto de résistance is a sixth generation Ford Thunderbird, which was the heaviest coupe Ford ever made. That thing couldn’t outrun a squirrel, and belongs nowhere near a film like this. This was the best the filmmakers could do? Anyway… Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: The Exterminators of the Year 3000, aka Il giustiziere della strada”

Shitty Movie Sundays: The Lost Empire

This flick is for the chest men, the boob guys, the fellas that love nothing more than doing a little motorboating or some light mountain climbing. In short, this movie has breasts. Many, many, female breasts, of the bolted-on variety that is so integral to the economy of southern California. It’s not the most breasts one will see in a b-movie, and the majority of them keep nipples hidden away like some rare commodity, but there is a theme to this flick, and it is breasts. And taxes, as it turns out. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: The Lost Empire”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Equalizer 2000, or, Supergun!

One Mad Max ripoff wasn’t enough for Filipino filmmaker Cirio H. Santiago. After the sublime experience that was Wheels of Fire, Santiago went back to the well in 1987 for Equalizer 2000. It’s a movie about a man, his leather pants, and a bitchin’ gun.

From a story by Frederick Bailey and Joe Mari Avellana (who played the bad guy in Wheels of Fire), Equalizer 2000 follows Max Rockatansky analogue Slade (Richard Norton). Slade is a member of the Ownership, a militia group that is looking to control all of the gravel quarries in the post-apocalypse. They’re the typical baddies of a Mad Max ripoff. They wear black, drive tricked out muscle cars, and are very into pillaging settlements full of honest folk. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Equalizer 2000, or, Supergun!”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Future Kick

What a gloriously stupid movie. Future Kick is a textbook example of a shitty movie of the era. Everything about it is cheap, from its discount action star in Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson, its discount Kirstie Alley in Meg Foster as the female lead, its bargain-basement special effects and sets, and its grainy film stock. There was even producer Roger Corman’s favorite method of saving money on a production: reusing footage from earlier films.

Once upon a time Corman addressed this oft-used technique. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, that back when he started reusing footage and/or sets, there was no such thing as a home video market. He was making films that would show for a week or two at a drive-in, and that was the last anyone would ever see of them. No one would remember when a few months later a different flick would appear reusing footage from the earlier film. Sure, that’s a fine excuse for his Poe films, to which he was referring, but Future Kick was released in 1991, well after the home video market became a thing. Reused footage in this film comes from a duo of space flicks, Galaxy of Terror and Forbidden World, and erotic slasher Stripped to Kill 2, which gives viewers a healthy dose of gratuitous nudity. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Future Kick”