Born to Fight ( 2004 )
So why did Dragon Dynasty release this Thai film? Because it was directed by Panna Rittikrai, the genius who choreographed the fights in Ong Bak. My only problem with this film is it barely has any fighting. It is mostly gun battles. The police arrest a drug Lord in a raid. But he also happens to be a general of some sort of mercenary army. They capture a village near the border and hold the villagers hostage, demanding the Thai government set the drug Lord free or they will execute everyone in the village. Among the hostages is the police detective who arrested the drug lord, who was there helping his sister an the Thai Athletic League she belonged to hand out food to the poor villagers. When the detective finds out the mercenaries have a nuclear missile that they are going to fire at Bangkok once the drug lord has been freed, he encourages the villagers to brave the machine guns of their captors and fight back.
Panna Rittikrai died in 2014 leaving behind an impressive body of work that included the Ong Bak trilogy and Chocolate, ranking him among cinemas legendary fight choreographers. Usually when those legends were given the opportunity to direct, the results were martial arts classics. Yuen Woo Ping gave us Drunken Master ( 1978 ) and Iron Monkey ( 1993 ). Sammo Hung, The Prodigal Son ( 1981 ) and Pedicab Driver ( 1989 ). Lau Kar Leung, 36th Chamber of Shaolin ( 1978 ) and Legendary Weapons of China ( 1982 ). But what did Rittikrai give us? A film with not that much martial arts, and endless machine gun battles. A missed opportunity for Rittikrai to give us a martial arts classic, made even more frustrating knowing his untimely death left us with a limited body of work. That is not to say this movie does not have fantastic action. There are a lot of unbelievable stunts involving moving vehicles. And while the gun battles are not as good as John Woo, they are pretty decent. So it is a really good action film. But it could have been better if there were no guns.
Metal Man ( 2009 )
Once again, with Saturday Night Live on hiatus for the Olympics broadcast I have enough time for more than one movie, and am going to use the extra free time to watch two more superhero mockbusters, get that all out of the way as soon as possible. This film, a rip-off of Iron Man, stars Reggie Bannister, who plays a character in one of my favorite horror films, Phantasm. At least that is something. And it is not another Brett Kelly monstrosity. The director this time is Ron Karkosa, the only film he directed. Otherwise most of his film career has been costumes and special effects in mostly low budget films. ( He did the costumes for Sky High ( 2005 ) and effects for Starship Troopers 3 as career highlights. )
Much like the TomCat films, this was a no budget film shoot on video. The Metal Man costume is actually a plastic Iron Man costume, the kind found in any costume shop, with a few minor alterations. The production was extremely flawed with sound problems ( actors not properly miked; outside noises heard on the set; Metal Man is often unintelligible ) and continuity problems ( the clothing characters are wearing changing back and fourth during the same scene ). Even the DVD itself was flawed. The anamorphic didn't work, resulting in a full screen picture that was compressed, and needed to be fixed by changing the picture dimensions on the television itself. The acting just bordered on good, because unlike TomCat, the producers of this film sprung for actual actors. Not that they were paid enough to deliver a good performance. Effects were kept to a minimum, so basically all Metal Man could do was mostly martial arts. A cheap effect to make Metal Man look partially invisible ( like a ghost ) was ruined by not locking the camera down. Amazingly thought, during the ending credits footage is shown of Metal Man flying through the air via repulsor rays ( as Iron Man does ) over a city, and taking down a jet fighter. Why the director didn't incorporate this footage into the film is a mystery.
The plot is a mishmash of ideas ripped off from various films, including Max Steel and Star Kid and I am sure a bunch of other films I haven't seen yet. A teenaged lab assistant is helping his college professor ( Bannister ) test Iron Man style armor he is developing. When the film's villain and his thugs invade the lab, the professor does something that fuses the armor permanently to his assistant ( without his permission ) so the villain can't get his hands on it. The professor is killed, but he has uploaded a computer program with his intelligence into the armor's helmet so the assistant can continue talking to him. The AI professor instructs his assistant as to how to use the armor, as well as leading him on a mission to stop the film's villain from building his own armor.
Metal Man is another bad film, but nowhere as bad as any of the TomCat films. It is not a torture to watch.
Avengers Grimm ( 2015 )
Another mockbuster from The Asylum, with a cast that includes Casper Van Dien and Lou Ferrigno. Four princesses, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, along with Little Red Riding Hood, travel to from magical Storybook Land to Earth to stop Rumplestiltskin and his zombified hoards from conquering it. Each princess has her own superpower. Snow White the power to freeze things, Sleeping Beauty the power to point at people and put them to sleep, Rapunzel the ability to use her hair as a weapon, and Cinderella the power to use white magic. Little Red Riding Hood doesn't have any powers, but is a master in martial arts who is an expert in archery.
I wasn't expecting it, but this movie was actually pretty good. Something unusually for an Asylum production. At best their films are bad but goofy enough to be entertaining. My only real problem with the movie is it fails to set up the characters. Only Snow White and Rapunzel are mentioned by name. The only reason I knew the other two princesses we're Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella was by reading the back of the DVD box. Little Red Riding Hood is only called Red, but her costume is iconic enough that you know exactly which character she is the moment she is on screen. The movie is supposed to be Avengers with fairytale characters, but aside from the film's title is nothing like The Avengers.
I am guessing this was originally meant to be a rip-off of the series once Upon A Time but then had the Avengers name tagged on. But the women in this movie do have powers and do fight a supervillain, so by a thin margin this mockbuster actually counts as a superhero film. And a good one too. But wait, the worst is yet to come. ( That is a hint as to next week's scheduled mockbuster. )
The Gorilla ( 1939 )
It was the early 90s ( or perhaps the late 80s ) when I saw the interview with Billy Crystal on Entertainment Tonight. He was talking about the comedians who influenced him, and mentioned his biggest influence was The Ritz Brothers. The who? I had never heard of them before. And yet Billy was talking about how he would watch their films all the time on television as a kid.
How come I didn't know about the Ritz Brothers? I knew all the other screen comedians from that era. Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, W. C. Fields, Mae West, Our Gang, The Bowers Boys/East Side Kids, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Mable Normand, Harry Langdon, Charlie Chase, Zazu Pitts, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Lewis and Martin, Burns and Allen, and many others. But that was the first time I ever heard anyone mention The Ritz Brothers, and the way Billy talked about them, they sounded like major screen comedians.
Now that The Ritz Brothers were on my radar, I began to notice when others mentioned them. As a Laurel and Hardy fan, I began buying books about the duo. A couple talked about the later films L&H did for the B movie division of 20th Century Fox. The films that most L&H fans detest to the point of accusing Fox of deliberately sabotaging their careers with the worst scripts they could find. A couple of the books mentioned that The Ritz Brothers had made comedies for Fox just a year earlier, and attributed a quote to Harry Ritz about working for Fox that to this day still cracks me up. But more on that quote in a moment.
The reason I never heard of The Ritz Brothers was simple. 20th Century Fox withdrew their films from television in the mid 70s and didn't issue them on home video until recently. The lone exception was The Gorilla which appears to have been allowed to become public domain. This resulted in the movie being released by numerous budget video companies ( including the one that released the Sons of Kong set ), although most releases of the film don't even mention The Ritz Brothers are in it, opting instead to feature the name of costar Bela Lugosi on the box.
The Gorilla was a popular Broadway play from the 1920s. Made during the height of the haunted house craze ( the plays that had the characters spending the night in an old creepy house and usually involved a murder mystery, ) and was a parody of the genre. It was first made into a movie in 1927, and two more times in the sound era. The Ritz Brothers were nearing the end of their contract with 20th Century Fox when the studio bought the rights to the play for a fourth adaption. Midway through principal photography the Ritz Brothers staged a well publicized walk out, refusing to return to the set to finish the film. They cited the reason being the poor quality of the script, however the real reason for their revolt was personal. They had worked on the film all through their father's terminal illness, and when he finally passed away, the brothers asked for one day off so they could attend his funeral. But the studio refused to give them the day off. Outraged, they took the day off anyway, and refused to return to the set.
For the studio, each day the Ritz Brothers refused to return to the set lost them hundreds of thousands in production costs. And they had a looming deadline for the film's release. The studio ended up rewriting the script so that other characters would replace the Ritz in the scenes they hadn't yet shot. Some accounts say the Ritz Brothers eventually returned to the set to complete the film, others that the director used the Ritz Brothers footage that was already shot and rearranged it so that they would appear at the beginning, middle and end of the film.
Fox wasn't just going to allow the Ritz Brothers to get away with this. The studio publicly demoted them to the B movie division. At the time it was under the control of producer Sol Wurtzel, notorious in the industry for not having a good sense humor. It was Wurtzel who would go on to produce the Fox Laurel and Hardy films that their fans hate as much as Star Wars fans hate the prequels. It was on the set of their first B film for the studio, Pack Up Your Troubles ( 1939 ) that Harry Ritz said to his brothers: "Gentlemen, things have gone from bad to Wurtzel." And that is the quote that had me laughing. ( I guess you need to be a die hard L&H fan and to have known Wurtzel was one of "those Fox guys" that Stan Laurel held responsible for the quality of the teams final films to truly appreciate it. )
The brothers didn't work for Wurtzel that long. After completing Pack Up Your Troubles they got out of their contract and left the studio. They moved to Universal where they thought they would be the stars of their own movies again, but instead ended up supporting other Universal stars as comedy relief characters. ( Then again, that's also what Universal did with most of the Abbott and Costello movies, but at the least gave them star billing on the films they were in. ) After a few films for Universal, The Ritz Brothers stopped making movies and returned to the stage, only to make brief cameos from that point on.
Ever since I learned they existed, I have wanted to see a Ritz Brothers film, just to see if I would like them or not. But I never got around to it. The Gorilla will be my first Ritz Brothers film. But will it be a fair representation of the team? After all, it is a film they only partially completed, filmed while their father was dying which should have effected their performance, and on a script they said was terrible. It is also a film 20th Century Fox thought so little of that they never bothered to renew it's copyright.
Actually, it is really not a bad film. It is not the best example of the old dark house genre, but not the worst. The basic plot, a criminal called The Gorilla has been terrorizing the wealthy. His MO is to send his victims a note saying the date and time he intends to kill them, then succeed in doing so even when they are being protected by the police. ( This sounds a lot like the original MO of The Joker when he debuted in Detective Comics a year later. ) One of The Gorilla's intended victims hires detectives to protect him, and they turn out to be The Ritz Brothers. Things get even more complicated when a real gorilla escapes from it's cage and enters the house.
What follows is your standard old dark house tropes. Creepy butler ( Lugosi ), raging storm outside, secret passageways behind the wall, closets opened to find bodies that proceed to faceplant on the floor. Of course, the big question is are the Ritz Brothers funny? The answer, I did find myself laughing at a few of their one liners. While they may have not had the best material in this film, their timing was excellent. I am sure I would enjoy a Ritz Brothers film with better material. The question is, does it exist?