Mel Davidson – Missile Test

It’s the utter shamelessness of Bruno Mattei’s films that have made him a Shitty Movie Sundays All-Star. There was no iconic scene from a Hollywood blockbuster that he could not find a home for in one of his movies. Strike Commando 2 (Italian: Diabolical trap), his 1988 followup to the incredible Reb Brown vehicle from a year earlier, steals scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Lethal Weapon, but doesn’t lift plot from those movies. And when I write that Mattei steals scenes, I do not mean thematically. I mean there are scenes in this movie that could have gotten Mattei and producer Franco Gaudenzi sued for plagiarism. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Strike Commando 2, aka Trappola diabolica”

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

From 1988, Robowar stars prolific b-movie actor Reb Brown as Major Murphy ‘Kill Zone’ Black, the leader of a squad of commandos called B.A.M., for Big Ass Motherfuckers. For real, that’s the name. Black is the analogue of Dutch from Predator. Others include Max Laurel as Quang, the Billy analogue; Catherine Hickman as Virginia, the Anna analogue; Mel Davidson as Mascher, the Dillon analogue; Jim Gaines as Sonny ‘Blood’ Peel, the Mac analogue; and Massimo Vanni, Romano Puppo, and John P. Dulaney as interchangeable analogues to the remaining main characters in Predator. There’s even a general who gives Black and his men their mission, but he was unlisted in the credits. His only significance is a voice that sounds uncannily like Lee Van Cleef’s. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Robowar”