The Grindhouse Report

[piranesi]

Flipping over from THE LAST MAN ON EARTH on Cult TV A Go Go over to B Movie TV and I'm dropped right into the middle of:

 

TC 2000: (1993).  This movie stars Billy Blanks who at no point at any time of any day or night is not wearing some form or ripped mesh shirt.

 

Billy Blanks is being trained by BOLO MOTHERFUCKING YEUNG!!! who gets to be a good guy here.

 

They are training to fight someone named Nikki Picasso who seems to be a reverse robocop...a cop who was killed by an evil corporation and turned into an evil assassin.

 

So far, the parts I've seen have included four separate training sequences, two of which were Billy Blanks and Bolo Yeung basically rubbing eachother down against a stark black backdrop surrounded by candles...like the "wrapped around your finger" video but way sexier.

 

 

Also, various people keep saying "TC 2000X" over and over so we know that's the big thing, which is odd because the name of the movie is just TC 2000 without an X so they couldn't even coordinate that corrrectly and OH SHIT the mercenaries working for the evil corporate guy just KILLED THE EVIL CORPORATE GUY!!! THEY"RE GOING ROGUE!!!

 

The TC 2000X is played by Bobbie Philips who honestly is hot as fuck

 

and who you may remember as a brunette from MURDER ONE which was this amazing thing that happened out of nowhere and then disappeared.

 

Wait..Niki Picasso is a dude...so who is Bobbie Philips???  Billy Blanks character is named Jason Storm.

 

JASON STORM!!!

 

Anyway I can't make heads of tails of what's going on.  There are at least three factions of people dressed in either paramilitary garb or stereotypical 90s "post-apocalyptic homeless camp" rags.  And, like, I can't even tell if this is post-apocalyptic.  Like, is Jason Storm fighting to save the world or is the world already destroyed and he's fighting to rebuild it? 

 

Everything is happening in big empty warehouse spaces and boiler rooms, like, junkyards, so there is literally no way to tell if this is set in 1993 or 2073 or 3143.

 

Are they on a ship maybe?  I think maybe the world has ended and the last remnants of humanity are sailing around on a supership like BattleOcean Galactica, but I have as little evidence to support that as I have to support the idea that they are all trapped inside the boiler room of a Costco.  I have never been given fewer context clues to understand something as I have been given by this movie.

 

Maybe the video box will help.

 

Nope. According to that they are nanobots living inside a pentium processor.  The German subtitle adds no information about time or place.

 

They keep talking about a "killzone" and when they get there it looks exactly like every other room in this factory?  Smelting plant? Deep water oil tanker????/ WHERE AREEWE AND WHAT IS THE FUCKING KILLZONE???????

 

Now they are talking about mixing a chemical weapon to wipe out life on "Surface World."  What is surface world?  Are we even on Earth? After Earth?  Mars Colony?  maybe the description on the back of the video box will help:

 

 

“Jason Storm (Blanks) and Zoey Kinsella (Phillips) are two cops under the leadership of The Controller, whose task it is to contain the vicious thugs and roving gangs that terrorize the otherwise unprotected community.

 

“When Zoey is murdered by the notorious Niki Picasso (Jalal Merhi), The Controller converts her body into a cybernetic killing machine that is unleashed upon the gangs without mercy. But Jason knows too much, and eventually must battle impossible odds as he takes on the gangs, The Controller, and the seemingly unbeatable Zoey in a race to save the Earth’s atmosphere from nuclear destruction. This fast-paced chiller boasts furious fight sequences featuring Matthias Hues and legendary martial arts star Bolo Yeung.”

 

That is literal nonsense.  No mention of a Killzone, a surface world, or a chemical weapon...So...it's earth and they are cops...but they are "under the leadership of The Controller" and there are roving gangs terrorizing "the community."  This is just a garble of unrelated words.  If you put a gun to my head and asked me what century or continent TC 2000 was set in I would beg you to kill me.

 

So the cyborg is being used by the Controller to fight the gangs, which is good because the gangs are bad.  But the Controller is bad, so Billy Blanks is fighting the Controller to save the gangs, but the gangs are bad.  So he is also fighting the cyborg who is really a cop and is good, so that's bad.  and what the fuck does any of this have to do with NUCLEAR DESTRUCTION????

 

They just walked out a door and suddenly there is a voice over and the movie is over.  The voice over said:

 

"Mother Nature is healing herself.  And the Controller Knows it.  And if Nature can fix itself.  So can we."  I don't even know if they killed The Controller or if there is a Controller. If he was one of the 30 or so greasy mercenary guys who all kind of looked like Brion James, then he's dead, I guess.  If he's not what was the point?  But without the Controller, who will fight the gangs?  And WHAT THE FUCK IS SURFACE WORLD??? YOU'VE BEEN ON THE SURFACE OF THE WORLD THE WHOLE MOVIE AS FAR AS I CAN TELL!!!!

 

They never fight either cyborg...I think there are two but who knows...and the Bobbie Phillips one just stops being evil and leaves.  The movie ends with Billy Blanks doing exercises in an empty room.  The movie kind of was Billy Blanks doing exercises in an empty room.  I have gained no deeper knowledge from Billy Blanks.  No new knowledge can be extracted from my summarizing Billy Blanks.  This movie has meant...nothing.

[nate]

It had a pretty good fight scene between Bolo Yeung and a guy wearing a Demolition Jason mask, who underneath looked like the Barbarian and looked like he was 8 ft tall. Bolo won after holding hands with a young boy.

[piranesi]

It had a pretty good fight scene between Bolo Yeung and a guy wearing a Demolition Jason mask, who underneath looked like the Barbarian and looked like he was 8 ft tall. Bolo won after holding hands with a young boy.

 

I missed that part but I believe you.  Everything you typed there makes exactly enough sense to have been in this movie.

 

But I think we're okay because Mother Nature is healing herself and the Controller knows it.  So....we got that going for us.

[piranesi]

It's 2:00 a.m. and B Movie TV is showing:

PREY (aka ALIEN PREY) (1977): A British sci fi movie summarized on Wikiwiki thusly:
 

 

A bloodthirsty alien lands on Earth and assumes the identity of a young man. The alien is then befriended by a lesbian couple who lives nearby.  Jessica and her possessive lover Josephine invite "Anders" in when it appears he's hurt. Soon Jessica becomes suspicious of Josephine's overbearing ways, and relies more on the alien for support, but his purpose on earth remains unclear.

It also mentions this:  The film was certified "X", precursor of the "18" certificate after unspecified cuts had been made. The submitted running time was 85 minutes.

I am, therefore, quite optimistic over all this, but also way too sleepy to probably make it.

I can tell you that the Alien immediately does the "kill the couple making out in a car' thing and that he is just a british dude with bloodshot eyes and plastic fangs.

 

I can also report that the British lesbians are kind of adorable

 

and the in the UK lesbians live in little country villas with little ceramic jars labelled "Bread" and spend the day wandering through the woods and laying about in gazebos talking about, like, nature and stuff.  I think I'd like to be a British lesbian.  It's a very appealing lifestyle and I am getting way more drawn into thinking about it than I probably should be.

But, sadly, it doesn't seem to be working out as they start bickering because Jo only wants to stay in the cottage and Jessica wants to go hang out with other people.  I really think Jessica needs to get with the fucking program and realize just how idyllic a thing they've got going here and how many of us watching would be happy to trade places with her.

I am getting way to invested in these two and that tells me that PREY (AKA ALIEN PREY) is probably a really great shlocky movie.

A little digging tells us that the VHS box was waaaaaay explotive looking, like just gross and low fi and...gross:

 

 

It's the kind of video box I would have been highly disturbed by when I was an adolescent and also tells me that I probably don't want to know how this ends, because any ending that does not involve Jessica and Jo sipping hot tea while crocheting by a fire and listening to Mornington Crescent on "Sorry I haven't Got a Clue" on BBC Radio 4 is going to be a huge disappointment to me because I am way more invested in this movie as a glossy lifestyle pictorial than as a horror movie.

 

But I'm going to have to revisit this because now it's 2:18 and for God's sake tomorrow is a fucking Monday and I am decidedly and sadly not an English lesbian living in a cottage just outside the Shire...but some day...some day...

 

[The Comedian]

Anyway, I've never had much luck with cheesy Roku stations, but one that I really do love is Kung-Fu Theater.

Is Kung Fu theater subscription?  I think every time I've tried to watch it I've just seen a commercial on a loop.

 

It does break up the movies with commercials. Sometimes it's only a couple times for the whole movie, sometimes it goes overboard and shows them like every couple minutes. It's kind of a crapshoot. 

[J.T.]

There is a DVD collection of Andy Sidaris movies at K-Mart.  My hand covers with sime every time I pick it up, but one day I will buy it and review every single movie.

[Execproducer]

 

Anyway, I've never had much luck with cheesy Roku stations, but one that I really do love is Kung-Fu Theater.

Is Kung Fu theater subscription?  I think every time I've tried to watch it I've just seen a commercial on a loop.

 

It does break up the movies with commercials. Sometimes it's only a couple times for the whole movie, sometimes it goes overboard and shows them like every couple minutes. It's kind of a crapshoot. 

 

It is really super annoying on some of their doc channels. They're not even clean breaks, like right in the middle of a sentence. And I've watched some where it happens every 3 or 4 minutes.  And the channels connected to adrise are a complete disaster. Your suppossed to be able to go to their website to rent ad-free but every time I have attempted it, I run into a dead-end. I'll never go back to cable, but you have to learn to live with Roku's limitations. The subscription channels are absolutely the way to go.      

[Burgundy LaRue]

There is a DVD collection of Andy Sidaris movies at K-Mart.  My hand covers with sime every time I pick it up, but one day I will buy it and review every single movie.

 

Makes me think of the 50-movie boxes I have.  I was going to challenge Manos99 (is he still around?) to a duel to the death because he was reviewing the contents of the horror version.  Never got around to it, though.

[nate]

Heh, which horror version?

The original version of Chilling Classics is off the fucking charts.

[Burgundy LaRue]

I'll have to look it up.  It's an older version, for certain.

[AxB]

What strange timing. This was just uploaded 3 days ago:

 

[piranesi]

The did LIFEFORCE on "How did this get made" a couple of months ago.  It might still be in front of the paywall on Earwolf.

 

I was just watching the Cannon documentary and they were talking about how Menahem Golan kept pouring money into it because he genuinely thought it was going to be the biggest blockbuster of the year.

 

It also has Patrick Stewart being batshit crazy and genuinely making out hard with a dude in what he later said was his first onscreen kiss.  I would encourage everyone to watch LIFEFORCE once...

 

...once...

[piranesi]

Someone started a Night Flight roku channel:

 

https://channelstore.roku.com/details/76854/night-flight

 

including full episodes of Night Flight.  Some stuff is free but most of the full episodes require a subscription.

 

Anyone brave enough to give it a try and let it know if it's worth it?

[J.T.]

The did LIFEFORCE on "How did this get made" a couple of months ago.  It might still be in front of the paywall on Earwolf.

 

I was just watching the Cannon documentary and they were talking about how Menahem Golan kept pouring money into it because he genuinely thought it was going to be the biggest blockbuster of the year.

 

It also has Patrick Stewart being batshit crazy and genuinely making out hard with a dude in what he later said was his first onscreen kiss.  I would encourage everyone to watch LIFEFORCE once...

 

...once...

 

I will not have anyone badmouthing Lifeforce.  Mathilda May as Space Girl guided many a horror film-centric lad through puberty in the mid 80's.

[J.T.]

 

Billy Blanks may have the most flawless high top fade in all of moviedom.

 

The brawl between Mattias Hues and Bolo Yeung is great, but everyone sleeps on the martial arts stylings of Jalal Mehri.

 

And yeah,  Bobbie Phillips = HOT LIKE LAVA~!

[Burgundy LaRue]

I actually have a 20-movie box set called the Grindhouse Experience.  Pretty sure I have Grindhouse Collection 2, also.  Maybe I'll finally organize my collection and start watching all this, since I've blown a small fortune on them.

[piranesi]

Porno Holocaust was done by Joe D'Amato (he of The Grim Reaper/Anthropophagus, and the amazingly fucked up Beyond the Darkness/Buio Omega) and you left out the legendarily awful/awesome Night of the Zombies/Hell of the Living Dead from Mattei's filmography, just to pick nits. (Goddamn, does every old Italian grindhouse film have at least two titles?)

 

 

 

Speaking of Joe D'Amato, tonight B Movie TV showed ANTHROPOPHAGUS starring Mia Farrow's sister Tisa.

 

I only saw the last few minutes, which means I missed the infamous

cannibal rips a fetus out of a woman's stomach and eats it

 

scene that caused the movie to be put on the UK Nasties list and according to WIKI led to the BBC news reporting it was s snuff film.

 

I did, however, manage to see a man

eat his own intestines as a general act of defiance

 

and that was plenty enough for me.  There's something about the low quality synthesizer soundtrack on these Italian gore movies that gets to me.  They are just so creepy sounding and kind of gross.

 

This music is terrifying but it can only exist in a warped mind and because it reminds me there was a time and place (Italy in the 1970s) when this was considered perfectly acceptable and that in itself is a frightening reminder of the depths of the human mind.

[piranesi]

Tonight at midnight on B Movie TV they showed:

FUTURE ZONE (1990):

A very generic title, right?  It's the sequel to 1989's FUTURE FORCE

 

Here's the WIki syopsis of FUTURE FORCE:
 

 

John Tucker, a bounty hunter, must protect a woman reporter from a gang of renegade cops.

Seriously, totally generic.

Now...what if I told you that what they forgot to mention in all that is that the Bounty Hunter is David Carradine and that David Carradine carries with him a suitcase that contains a robotic arm that shoots lasers and rockets?

 

an artist's rendering:

How do you not mention that in the plot synopsis????

You know what does a better job selling this movie?  The voice over guy from the trailer:

 

A Mercenary Police force...an undercover reporter...

"I want her dead..in a box..under ground!"
A city gone insane...

"Don't. get. in. my. way"

Not bad, especially "A city gone insane"....but do you know what he still didn't bother to mention?

THAT DAVID FUCKIGN CARRADINE HA A ROBOT ARRM THAT SHOOTS LAZERS AND ROCKETS THAT HE CARRIES IN A LITTEL SUITCASE!!!!!

 

It's 1989, so I don't even need to mention how much this movie happened after someone's kid made him watch a commercial for a Nintendo PowerGlove...

 

Now, I'm not watching  FUTURE FORCE, I'm watching FUTURE ZONE, so all of this may or may not apply.

 

It's a bizarre "future" world in which Carradine is driving a 1983 Ford Bronco that is equipped with a "video phone"

 

and mostly uses like a six shooter he wears on an old west style belt...so by "Future Force" they mean "Please force yourself to pretend that bad guys in the future are normally driving Bonnevilles just for the ironic hipness of it."

 

He also has to wear that gun belt the whole time which means his gut is just splayed out and leaking out of every side of his pants like an despondent jellyfish.

Who needs Iron Man when you have very very soft man with one iron appendage?  Jerks that's who!

Apparently there is a whole like platoon of bounty hunters who live in a bunker and spend their days doing quick draw competitions and HOLY SHIT CHARLES NAPIER JUST SHOWED UP!!!!

 

This is the kind of movie where, when you look on IMDB you see that the four top male characters are named:

-Tucker

-Becker

-Adams

-Grimes

 

Yeah...fuck you, Becker!  Hey, eat a dick, Grimes!!  Why don't eat this one, Adams!  Yeah, Like your mom did last night, Tucker?

 

YYYYYEEEEAH!! BANTER!!!! [*note: those are the character in FUTURE FORCE not FUTURE ZONE]

But you know what...nothing I can type will convince you to watch this movie more than this:

yeah...yeah....all of that is a winning argument for you finding and watching FUTURE FORCE now.

If you need more convincing, the Irish indy band Fight Like Apes made a whole EP about FUTURE FORCE:

 

SPECIAL EDITORIAL NOTE: [12:53 a.m.]...I've now been watching this movie for nearly a whole hour and the robot arm has shown up exactly once...in the first five minutes...I'm starting to get seriously pissed and thinking I might be leading you all down a bad path...GODDAMMIT FUTURE WAR/ZONE/FORCE WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU PLAYING AT?????

 

Also note there no reporter has shown up, which is weird 2/3 of the way through a movie about a bounty hunter "protecting an undercover reporter".

 

[Note: I'm just now realizing that the reporter thing is in FUTURE FORCE and I'm watching FUTURE ZONE...and apparently

DAVID CARRADINE"S PARTNER JUST REVELAED HE"S A TIME TRAVELLER HOLY SHIT I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING!!!!! THIS ISN"T THE FUTURE...BUT THE FUTURE IS PRESENT IN THE FORM OF  A GUY FROM THE FUTURE!!!!

 

FUTURE FORCE IS BACK IN THE GAME AND I"M SORRY I EVER DOUBTED FUTURE FORVCE Or FUTURE ZONE I MEAN OR FUTURE WAR MAYBE!!!

 

I should have seen that coming.  Do you know why I should have seen that coming?  Because he spends the entire movie wearing:

 

A mesh shirt under a leather jacket

And that has not been acceptable in any time that has happened yet

 

Note: Here is a video entitled: "Me as an extra in my first film in 1990. Future zone"

 

Neat, guy!

[Meltzing Pot]

I started watching Anthropophogus, and had it in for the maybe the first 30 minutes or so in the background, and it felt like nothing happened, so I turned it off. There was a lot of walking around, and it just seemed like a movie about people on vacation or something. Clearly, I should've waited around a bit!

[nate]

I watched the first kills - the woman swimming and the dude taking the axe to the face - and I knew I had seen that movie before. But when I couldn't place it, I went on off to sleep. I wish I'd stayed awake.

That 8:00 movie - "Zombie 90" - with the dude whose voice sounds like Tom Waits? Booty.

[Meltzing Pot]

Yes!!! They've been showing a trailer the past few nights for a movie called Knights, and it just came on!!! IMDB summarizes the plot as "In the future, a kickboxer and a robot lead a revolution against ruling cyborgs." So yeah, I'm psyched.

[piranesi]

That's an Albert Pyun joint. 

 

Kathy Long + Kris Kristoferson + Lance Henrikson.

 

The poster tell me that it's set in my favorite era:

 

 

The Ancient Future

[Meltzing Pot]

Jesus, the line delivery in this is just ridiculous.

"How can there be cheating in matters of life and death?"

"The right blow could deactivate our systems."

"Do you sleep?" "No."

[Jingus]

I just watched Death Promise (with Rifftrax, since those fine gentlemen recently addressed this one) and holy shit, guys, seriously. There's a genuine sense of anger from the riffers at the shoddiness of the whole project, at the sheer lack of creative effort that the filmmakers put into anything. It's like Rudy Ray Moore was handed a script of River City Ransom: The Motion Picture but then he tried to direct it all like his hazy memories of drunkenly watching The Street Fighter a couple years back.

The boardroom fight scene is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever witnessed, it's the "Tommy Wiseau buys flowers and greets a doggy" of kung-fu battles:

And even that's immediately topped by the single funniest non-Enter-the-Ninja shuriken kill of all time, at about 15:15 on the following playback:

It's well worth watching, if you're a fan of fucking terrible beat-em-ups that strangely pretend to be blaxploitation flicks (despite the majority-white cast). The full movie's here, sadly unRiffed, you gotta buy that part separate:

[Curt McGirt]

Anthropophagus is so slow. And take in mind my bootleg VHS has Greek subtitles too. But if you give it enough time, it actually gains ground on being creepy, and then the gore, and especially how the end wraps up with actual suspense, is pretty cool. Just bring some Red Bull. 

 

My advise is to watch this instead because it is the full Joe D'Amato joint and will fuck you up bigtime. Spoilered for NSFW screengrab

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK5C9UZr4vc