John Cabrera – Missile Test

After a 3-plus year absence, Shitty Movie Sundays hall of famer Enzo G. Castellari is back! Today’s film showcases Castellari’s most prominent skills. The film takes place in the desert, things blow up, and when they do, it’s filmed in glorious slow motion. Castellari knew what he was good at, and it wasn’t storytelling.

Mark Harmon (that’s right, Mark Harmon) plays a North African Tuareg, one of a nomadic people who span the Sahara. This is the type of role that Harmon couldn’t take, much less be offered, today. It would be considered an egregious case of whitewashing. And, if the project had managed to get made, all those involved would have to spend at least a week apologizing on Twitter before the mob moved on to the next outrage. But, in 1984, this type of casting decision could still be made, especially in Italy and Spain, which were free from Hollywood politics.

In my mind, having a white guy play a Berber tribesman only adds to this flick’s shitty movie creds. It’s icing on the cake that Harmon made only a token effort to disguise his SoCal accent, taking on an inflection reminiscent of stereotypical Native Americans. It’s possible this isn’t his fault. He may have been told his voice would be dubbed in post, or that the film wouldn’t be released in an English-language version at all. Or, he just gave a performance of stunning ineptitude. Or, it’s no different than any other Mark Harmon performance. It’s up to the viewer’s imagination. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Tuareg: The Desert Warrior, or, Let’s Cancel Mark Harmon!”

What an absolute pile of trash. I loved every minute of this film. Well, almost every minute of it. I loved the exploding heads and zombies munching on guts. I loved how director Bruno Mattei slipped in some nudity and pretended it wasn’t gratuitous. I loved how wild and unrealistic were the main characters. And I loved how no one in the movie seemed to absorb, for more than a second at a time, that zombies have to be shot in the head to stop them.

What I didn’t love was Mattei’s liberal use of footage from the 1974 documentary Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali (New Guinea: Island of Cannibals). Specifically, the footage of tribal mortuary feasts, wherein natives eat parts of their dead and rotting relatives, was hard to stomach. But, I cannot deny that this did much to make Hell of the Living Dead a memorable shitty movie watch. (As an aside, Island of Cannibals has, as of this writing, one of the weirdest IMDb pages one will come across. It’s an Italian documentary, with a Japanese writer and a Japanese director, and the only people listed in the cast are Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, in what I can only assume is archival footage. There isn’t even a description of what the film is about, nor have any of IMDb’s unpaid army of users posted a review. Even more strange, the only footage of this film I could find on the internet, outside of Mattei’s usage, is a short intro and title screen.) Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Hell of the Living Dead”