Month: June 2025

Shitty Movie Sundays: Pharaoh’s War, aka Pharaoh’s Expedition, aka Pharaoh’s Campaign, aka Desert Strike, aka Hamlet Pheroun

An action flick starring Mike Tyson?! Sign me up! An action flick featuring Mike Tyson in a small supporting role, but he still kicks a little ass? Sure, I’m game for that, too.

Pharaoh’s War, one of the many loose translations of the film’s Arabic title, Hamlet Pheroun, is a straight Egyptian flick. There’s a good chance that it wasn’t ever meant to be seen in the West, but the inspired casting of Tyson, and strongman Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, most familiar to viewers as one of the actors who portrayed Grogor Clegane in Game of Thrones, opened up new possibilities for sales, so here we are.

Tyson appears early in the movie, as a good guy mercenary leading refugees out of a war torn city in Syria. But, he is intercepted by warlord Frank (Björnsson), who forces all the refugees to become his hostages. That’s an adequate setup for a shitty action flick, but it’s also the last we’ll see of Tyson for a bit. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Pharaoh’s War, aka Pharaoh’s Expedition, aka Pharaoh’s Campaign, aka Desert Strike, aka Hamlet Pheroun”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Terminator II, aka Shocking Dark

There isn’t a successful Italian film director from the 20th century that doesn’t have at least one Hollywood ripoff in their filmography. It was practically de rigueur over there. But, no filmmaker did it with quite the shamelessness of Bruno Mattei, and none of his movies approached the level of outright thievery seen in Terminator II.

Trademark law is obviously looser in Italy. Over there, production companies can market and release a movie as a sequel to an unrelated production. This movie is not a sequel to The Terminator, James Cameron’s blockbuster from 1984. But it was marketed as such, down to a poster that evokes Arnold Scwarzenegger’s menacing, uncanny cyborg face. Everyone involved, including producer Franco Gaudenzi, knew how disingenuous it all was, because this flick wasn’t released in the United States until 2018, and then under the title Shocking Dark. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Terminator II, aka Shocking Dark”