Samson (Review)
Samson
1964
Directed by Nanabhai Bhatt
It’s time for some Bollywood Peplum with Dara Singh! Wait, you ask, Bollywood made Peplum and who is Dara Singh? Where the crap have you been, reader? Bollywood pumped out a few Peplum films because Bollywood does that stuff. And Dara Singh is only the greatest Indian wrestler who ever lived. He did tons of awesome films where he wrestles dudes. And he fights dinosaurs! What more do you want?
So Samson is a Bollywood feature disguised to look very much the part of a 1960s Italian Peplum movie. If they didn’t break into song every twenty minutes or so you might be fooled into thinking this was just another crazy Peplum film. It has all the same tropes as the genre it is copying, including funky awesome costumes, giant army battles, evil kings, genies, magic midgets, and fake-looking monsters. It’s available on unsubtitled vcd, but at TarsTarkas.NET, we don’t need no stinkin’ subtitles! What we also don’t need are stupid watermarks on the vcd, but practically every Indian vcd has them (and also Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Pakistani, and several other countries vcds as well.)
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Ameeta, BM Vyas, Bollywood, Dara Singh, Feroz Khan, India, kaiju, little people, Mumtaz Banoo, Nanabhai Bhatt, Peplum, We don't need no stinking subtitles
Flyer of Young Prodigal (Review)
Flyer of Young Prodigal
aka Xin An Ping Zhui Xiang Qu
1978
HKMDB Link
Directed by Yueh Chien-Feng
Another crazy Taiwanese fantasy film, complete with some random kaiju, dragons, people puking gas, sexy women seducing heroes, evil rapists dudes, a midget, guys who turns into lizards, and an annoying flying kid.
Annoying flying kids seems to be a common occurrence in Taiwanese films, which is a shame because they are annoying.
The film follows standard video game format of rescuing the princess (Mom) and fighting all sorts of various baddies on a mission, including several boss characters and gaining a few helper dudes along the way. And you get weapons upgrades. The video game connection is solidified by actual video game sound effects used in Flyer of Young Prodigal, even though this is years before video games were rescuing the princess.
Not much info on this one. Chang Yeong Yeong is listed as a star, but I don’t know who that is. Most of the other names I cannot read thanks to them being chopped off due to the fullscreen framing. So if anyone wants to send me a widescreen copy, go right ahead! We’ve reconstructed as much of the cast as we possibly can in the Roll Call.
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: damn flying kids!, Guan-yin, Hopping Vampires, little people, Taiwan, Taiwanese kaiju, You Shean-Long, Yueh Chien-Feng
Wheels of Fire (Review)
Wheels of Fire
1985
Starring
Gary Watkins as Trace
Laura Banks as Stinger
Lynda Wiesmeier as Arlie
Linda Grovenor as Spike
Joseph Anderson as Scourge
Jack S. Daniels as Scag
Directed by Cirio H. Santiago
Mad Max and it’s sequels were a big influence on post-apocalyptic action films. They spawned a long string of imitators, mostly created from low-budget film grinding countries like Italy and the Philippines. Hey, amazingly enough, this very film is a knock-off of Mad Max, and it was made in the Philippines! It’s almost as if I prepared the opening sentences for some sort of reason… Not only is this film a low budget rip-off that is nowhere near as good as the film it is aping, the film has a bonus feature not found in the Mad Max series: It hates women. Brutally. This movie takes women and knocks them around like they were Nazis or something. There is more misogyny in this movie than tea in China. More misogyny than bad films made in the Philippines. Hey, directed by Cirio H. Santiago of The Destroyers and T.N.T. Jackson fame, so it’s got to be….just as sub-par.
It’s the future, all cities are destroyed, and everyone drives around in the desert. What country is this? Maybe it’s Australia, which explained the deserts in Mad Max, but everyone is American, except for the non-main characters, who are all Filipino. So not only did all the cities die off, but the world has become a desert wasteland. This would lead one to wonder where food is coming from, except one is instead distracted from wondering where they get all the gasoline they use for their massive fleets of automobiles. Our hero is a man named Trace, the manliest name in the universe. Mad Trace. I can see it! Wait…I just lost it. Trace doesn’t have the screen presence of Mel Gibson, or even Gary Coleman. Mad Max had the Last of the V-8 Interceptors, while Trace has a late ’70s four-door with some painted plywood on the bumper and a fake Batmobile-style rocket engine on the end.
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Turkish Wizard of Oz
Turkish Wizard of Oz
aka Aysecik ve sihirli cüceler rüyalar ülkesinde aka Aysecik and the Bewitched Dwarfs in Dreamland
1971
Starring
Zeynep Degirmencioglu as Aysecik AKA Dorothy
Suleyman Turan as Korkulu AKA Scarecrow
Metin Serezli as Teneke Koruadam AKA Tin Woodman
Suna Selen as Kotu Cadi AKA Wicked Witch of the West
Ali Sen as Korkak Aslan AKA Cowardly Lion
Cemal Konca as The Great Wizard Keskin Zeka
Another Turkish remake??? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This time, the land of Turks and Keys has brought us a remake of The Wizard of Oz, which is amazingly more faithful to the book at certain points than the big budget Hollywood version. It still manages to veer off into random directions, and is full of insane dancing, a gay scarecrow, and special effects that can be done better by three year olds. The previous Turkish filmsTurkish Exorcist, Turkish Spiderman, Turkish Star Trek, Turkish Star Wars, and Kilink Istanbul’da, have all been a barrel of laughs, horrors, and monkeys. Okay, no monkeys. No monkeys in here, either. Not even the winged variety. Sigh… This film continues the fine Turkish film tradition of making the audience say “What in the Hell?”
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