We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Sword and sorcery, martial arts, action, and thrills, all from the 1980s.
DEATHSTALKER AND THE WARRIORS FROM HELL (1988)
After he missed out on Deathstalker II, original Deathstalker writer Howard Cohen was brought back to craft the script for the third film in the franchise, Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell, which was then brought to the screen by director Alfonso Corona – who clearly had the lowest budget yet to work with. The mystical land these stories take place in isn’t quite as impressive as it used to be, as this movie couldn’t afford to show us the sort of creatures we had previously seen. This one is short on the likes of pig-men, ogres, and imps, but it does still feature a lot of dangerous people.
When we catch up with Deathstalker, he’s now being played by John Allen Nelson rather than the first film’s Rick Hill or the first sequel’s John Terlesky – and I can’t say I liked Nelson’s performance as much as his predecessors’, as I found something off-putting about him. He has been said to have an “irritating cockiness” in the movie, and I was certainly irritated by him at times. At this point in his life, Deathstalker is traversing the countryside, making festival appearances alongside a wizard named Nicias (Aarón Hernán). Princess Carissa (Carla Herd) shows up at their latest festival, carrying a magical stone and hoping that Nicias will have a second magical stone that, when paired with hers, will reveal the location of Arandor, a lost city that’s said to be made entirely of treasure like diamonds, crystals, and gold. She hopes to find the treasure of Arandor to make her own ailing kingdom more powerful. Unfortunately for her, a sorcerer named Troxartes (Thom Christopher) is also seeking the magical stones and Arandor, wanting to access the magic of a thousand generations that is also housed in the lost city. Troxartes already has the second stone that Carissa is seeking and sends his henchmen to bust up the festival, as he also thought Nicias had a stone.
Nicias vanishes and Carissa ends up in the company of Deathstalker – but then there’s a surprising twist. Just when Deathstalker is lamenting the fact that he keeps getting mixed up with Princesses, marauders ride through and kill Carissa, taking her out of the picture within the first 15 minutes. But that’s not the end for Carla Herd and Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell. Like Monique Gabrielle in the second movie, she has dual roles in this film, with her second role being that of Carissa’s twin sister Princess Elizena, who is on her way to Troxartes’ territory Southland to marry the sorcerer in an arranged marriage. With Carissa’s stone in his possession, Deathstalker also heads into Southland. Along the way, he crosses paths with a woods-dwelling young woman named Marinda (Claudia Inchaurregui), who proves to be quite helpful – and quite eager to sleep with him.
Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell is not a particularly exciting movie. It’s filled with scenes of wandering through the countryside, chatting in the woods, and Troxartes discussing the situation, usually with his torture-loving mistress Camisarde (Terri Treas). Even when action does break out, it’s still not very exciting. As for why the title mentions “Warriors from Hell,” well, that is one of the more interesting elements of the film. In his effort to prevent Deathstalker from thwarting his plans, Troxartes resurrects a bunch of dead warriors. These sword-wielding ghouls are the warriors from Hell, and they are involved in some twists and turns that take place as the story winds down. They would have been cooler characters if they looked like something out of the Blind Dead movies rather that regular dudes with messy faces, but you have to take what you can get in this movie.
This movie is pretty dull and lame compared to what came before – but if you want to spend some time watching low budget sword and sorcery, it’s not a bad way to kill 85 minutes. It was also mocked on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which probably made it much more entertaining.
ARMED RESPONSE (1986)
Armed Response sounded like it was going to be an awesome movie. An ‘80s action thriller, it’s about David Carradine and Lee Van Cleef, playing a father and son duo, taking violent revenge against the American-based Yakuza they blame for the death of a loved one. You go into something like this hoping it’s going to be packed with awesome moments – but while there are some awesome moments to see in Armed Response, it takes a while to get to them, and even then they’re few and far between.
Carradine plays Jim Roth, a bar owner who’s tormented by flashbacks to and nightmares on his time in the Vietnam War. His best customers are his retired police officer father Burt (Lee Van Cleef) and his two brothers, Clay (David Goss) and Tommy (Brent Huff). During the extended opening stretch of the film, while we cut away to multiple moments set inside Jim’s bar, private investigator Clay takes a questionable job to exchange an explosive-rigged suitcase full of cash for a statue that was stolen from Yakuza boss Akira Tanaka (Mako) – whose right-hand man is F.C. (Michael Berryman of The Hills Have Eyes), a strange and dangerous fellow who likes to pass out fortune cookies to the people he meets.
Clay and his partner Corey Thornton (Ross Hagan) go to the exchange, meeting up with a pair played by Dick Miller and Laurene Landon... but it’s a double cross. Corey wants the cash and the statue for himself, so he turns the situation into a shootout and fires a fatal shot into Clay. Clay makes it back to his father before succumbing to his wound – and that’s when Jim and Burt set out for revenge. They get even more upset when Tanaka has Tommy tortured to death in his search for the statue.
But even though Jim has a cache of weapons that he managed to bring back from Vietnam with him, the action scenes rarely manage to be as exciting as they should have been – at least, not until the climax, when the movie does become pretty cool for a few minutes.
Directed by Fred Olen Ray from a script he crafted with T.L. Lankford and producer Paul Hertzberg, Armed Response is strictly for fans of 1980s action movies who have already made their way through all of the mainstream offerings and are now making their way down to the bottom of the barrel. This one isn’t down there at the bottom, it’s actually a decent flick overall, but you still need to have tempered expectations when you start it. Still, it’s finding new fans to this day – so if love ‘80s action, give it a try.
EYEWITNESS (1981)
Directed by Peter Yates from a script written by Steve Tesich, the neo-noir thriller Eyewitness centers on an unusual lead character: New York City janitor Daryll Deever, played by William Hurt – a Vietnam veteran who has trained his dog to viciously attack him every time he enters his apartment. Daryll is infatuated with news reporter Toni Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver) and has been for two years, so when a wealthy Vietnamese business man is murdered in the office building that he cleans up, he lets Toni believe that he knows more about the murder than he actually does simply so she’ll spend more time around him, even though he already has a girlfriend, played by Pamela Reed.
Toni engaged to Joseph (Christopher Plummer), a wealthy man old enough to be her father, but she gradually falls for Daryll – who partially seduces her by sensually describing how he buffs floors – and decides to cheat on her fiancé with him. Then she backtracks and decides that she should stick with Joseph.
The police, represented by Steven Hill as Jacobs and Morgan Freeman as Black, suspect that Daryll’s friend and fellow janitor (and his girlfriend’s brother) Aldo (James Woods) may have had something to do with the murder... and since Aldo is exactly the sort of questionable, sleaze-dripping character Woods always excelled at playing, it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that he was responsible.
Eyewitness isn’t always as interesting or thrilling as you might hope it would be, but the story takes some good twists and turns and there are some moments of action, as the victim had some violent associates, drugged meat makes Daryll’s dog crazy, and the killer is still lurking around. It all adds up to a decent flick that’s worth checking out.
RIGHTING WRONGS (1986)
Martial arts expert Cynthia Rothrock made her feature film debut in the 1985 film Yes, Madam!, which was directed by Corey Yuen – and soon after making that movie, Rothrock and Yuen went back to work together on the crime thriller action movie Righting Wrongs... but that wasn’t their original intention. Rothrock had been cast to play a villain in the Jackie Chan movie Armour of God, which got delayed when Chan had a near-fatal accident on set. So production company Golden Harvest moved Rothrock over to Righting Wrongs – and since she injured her right ACL while practising her moves for the film, she had to do her kicking with her left leg during some scenes. But if she was hurting while shooting these scenes, it doesn’t come through on the screen at all. She still handled all of the fight choreography in dazzling style.
The film stars Yuen Biao as Jason Ha Ling-Ching, a prosecutor who has lost faith in the system and decides to take the law into his own hands. We know he’s fully capable of this because there’s an opening sequence where Ha’s mentor is gunned down in front of him and he goes after the perpetrators in a car chase sequence that ends with him shooting their flipped vehicle, causing it to explode and kill them. So when the murder of a witness (and the witness’s entire family) ruins a case he was working on and he decides to take out the criminals himself, we can be fairly certain he’s going to succeed in his goal. However, the script by Cheuk-Hon Szeto and Barry Wong gives him some twists and turns and obstacles to deal with.
Rothrock plays one of those obstacles, Senior Inspector Cindy Si, who is assigned to bring the vigilante prosecutor to justice – but, of course, over the course of her investigation she discovers that her boss is corrupt and joins forces with Biao’s character. Rothrock works alongside a character played by the director and called Bad Egg, a comic relief character who brings some laughs to a movie that gets shockingly serious at times.
There are some excellent fight scenes in Righting Wrongs that deliver the good time you expect to have when watching an action movie, with a shopping mall showdown between Rothrock and a steel whip-wielding assassin played by Karen Sheperd being one of the highlights – but you need to beware when going into this one, because one of the multiple endings shot for the film is one of the all-time bummers of a downer ending, and it truly ruined my entire viewing experience the first time I watched the movie.
So check out Righting Wrongs, enjoy the action and the overly complicated plot (as Joe Bob Briggs would say, this movie has way too much plot getting in the way of the story), but watch out for those final ten minutes.
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