SANTO VS. THE DIABOLICAL BRAIN (1963) ***

Detective Fernando (Fernando Casanova) disguises himself as a cowboy to track down his journalist girlfriend Virginia (Ana Berthe Lepe) who is working undercover as a saloon girl to get the goods on the notorious Canales (Luis Aceves Castaneda, who also played the human villain in the Aztec Mummy series).  Fernando’s partner is none other than El Santo, and whenever he gets in a jam, he can call the Silver Masked Man on his Dick Tracy-style watch and he arrives just in the nick of time to save the day.  

Lepe makes for a fine leading lady.  She gets a terrific introduction scene where director Federico (Santo in the Hotel of Death) Curiel’s camera follows her gyrating rump across the cantina dancefloor.  Another great moment comes when the leering Castaneda makes her show off her legs against her will.  Neither of these scenes are what we would call politically correct nowadays (especially the part where Casanova takes her over his knee and spanks her while El Santo is like, “Oh, whatever”), but she always leaves a memorable impression whenever she is on screen.

Part western, part Lucha Libre movie, and boasting a couple of musical numbers (including a mariachi number and a hilariously overly melodramatic love song), Santo vs. the Diabolical Brain has a little something for everybody.  As with many early El Santo pictures, he often feels like a supporting player in his own movie.  While this does prevent it from being one of his best, it remains an entertaining entry, despite the long El Santo-less stretches.  He does get one wrestling match against an opponent named “Frankenstein”, and while it is a tad brief, it’s a well put together sequence with some strong camerawork and tight editing.  

It helps that the fight scenes that take place outside the squared circle are more exciting than usual.  We get a great nightclub brawl where even the knife throwing act gets involved in the fracas.  There’s also a fun western-style barroom brawl later in the flick, and the scene where El Santo teams up with Casanova to lay the smackdown on some corrupt cowboys is slam-bang fun.  I think my favorite fight sequence though was when El Santo came charging in on horseback like The Lone Ranger to save Casanova’s bacon and soon starts tossing numerous henchmen off a steep cliff, plummeting to their death.

The climax is equally exciting as El Santo prevents the bad guy’s plane from taking off WITH HIS BARE HANDS.  In nearly all the other El Santo movies, he’s just as strong as normally he is in real life.  I particularly enjoyed seeing this superhuman feat of strength from our hero and it makes me wish he did Superman shit like this more often.

AKA:  Santo and the Diabolical Brain.

BLUE DEMON AND THE INVADERS (1969) ***

I’ve seen a lot of crappy special effects in low budget science fiction movies before, but the crappy special effects in Blue Demon and the Invaders is some of the crappiest I have ever seen, and if that doesn’t make you want to see it, I don’t know what will.  The alien’s spaceship looks like a Pogo Ball (or at least the transparent image of a Pogo Ball) that flies around on a string past close-ups of knickknacks that look like they came out of your grandma’s China cabinet.  I’m sure the director would’ve loved to have ILM working for him when the time came to show the spacecraft landing in a lake.  Instead, he had to settle for a shot of a Christmas ornament sinking to the bottom of a fishbowl, and if that doesn’t make you want to see the movie, I don’t know what will.

It gets better.  

The aliens aboard the spaceship are a bunch of moderately attractive women who dress like Dean Martin’s Gold Diggers and materialize out of a humidifier.  To get an idea of what the planet is like, they turn on television and watch a women’s tag-team wrestling match.  Their goofy, semi-lobotomized expressions are worth the price of admission.  

The women then go around kissing men and turning them into their slaves.  The specimens they want to keep for themselves get sent back to their spaceships mid-kiss by the magic of a jump-cut.  Naturally, it’s up to everybody’s second-favorite Mexican wrestler, Blue Demon to stop them.

What’s great about Blue Demon and the Invaders is that usually in these kinds of movies, it’s the alien men who want to mate with Earth women.  Having the alien sexpots be on the make for human husbands gives this a unique flavor.  In fact, I was having such a good time that I kind of forgot I was watching a Blue Demon film since he doesn’t even show up until the start of the second act.  

Admittedly, he’s kind of the weak link in all of this as he doesn’t get a whole lot of wrestling to do.  He only gets to participate in one tag team match, but it’s still a pretty good one.  On the plus side, his tussles with the brainwashed henchman are solid, especially the ones that go down in the alien’s secluded hotel hideout.  There’s also some of the requisite padding in the form of a musical number and a dance routine, although not nearly as much as I was expecting.  

Even when it spins its wheels, Blue Demon and the Invaders remains a silly and fun adventure.  Just when you think it has run out of steam, the hot aliens grab flamethrowers and start torching people, which gives the final act a much-needed lift.  The climactic dueling alien spacecrafts scene is good for a laugh too and ends things on a high note.

AKA:  Blue Demon and the Diabolical Women.  

GIRLS ON THE ROAD (1972) **

Two goody-two-shoes wallflower high school girls make a pact to finally let down their hair.  After graduation, Debbie (Kathleen Cody) and Karen (Dianne Hull) hop in a sportscar and go up the California coast looking for adventure.  Along the way, they pick up a mentally unstable Nam vet (Slap Shot’s Michael Ontkean) who is prone to violence and give him a lift to a hippie commune up the beach.  Unfortunately, there’s a serial killer prowling the area who just might be looking to make the girls his next victims.  

Girls on the Road kicks off with a fun opening credits sequence where all the titles appear as bumper stickers in a beach parking lot.  (You can also spot Uschi Digard in this sequence.)  Both Hull and Cody make for likeable leads, and their engaging presence is enough to hold your attention, even when the plot dawdles.  Ontkean is quite good as the seemingly mild-mannered soldier who occasionally snaps and beats the crap out of bikers.  It’s just a shame that his constant wavy, color-coated flashbacks get a little intrusive after a while. 

At its heart, Girls on the Road is more innocent than exploitative.  There’s a scene where Hull briefly flashes her boobs to a passing motorist, and that’s about all we get in terms of exploitation content.  (It’s PG after all.)  Like the main characters, it often feels like the film was searching for its identity as it often plays like a buffet of other movies.  You got a road trip movie, a coming-of-age movie, a beach movie, and a hippie movie all fighting for supremacy, and none of them really emerge as the clear victor.  

Most of the time, there’s a reason why most of these kinds of films had a bunch of different elements that didn’t exactly gel.  That was so they could be repackaged and sold under other titles, with advertising that played up whatever genre was hot at the time.  (The fact that it has two alternate titles kind of supports that.)  Of all the various subplots, the hippie commune stuff is probably the hardest chunk to sit through.  

Girls on the Road is watchable for the most part.  It’s kind of lightweight, but enjoyable.  That is, until the completely unsatisfying ending.  I don’t know if they were going for one of those downbeat Easy Rider type of endings, and got cold feet at the last second, or if there was supposed to be an epilogue at the end that never got filmed or what.  Whatever the case, it just doesn’t work at all.  I won’t spoil what happens.  Let’s just say it seems a bit out of left field for what had been up to that point a rather innocuous flick.

AKA:  Hot Summer Week.  AKA:  Macho Trip.

PHASE IV (2003) ***

No, this isn’t a remake of the killer ant flick from the ‘70s.  It’s a braindead, albeit rather amusing conspiracy thriller/action flick.  Dean Cain stars as a disgraced former football star-turned-Navy SEAL-turned-journalism student who gets the plum assignment for his college newspaper to solve the death of his best friend who was killed by an evil pharmaceutical company working on a cure for AIDS.  

I have to be honest with you:  “Dean Cain stars as a disgraced former football star-turned-Navy SEAL-turned-journalism student who gets the plum assignment for his college newspaper to solve the death of his best friend who was killed by an evil pharmaceutical company working on a cure for AIDS”, is a sentence I never thought I would ever type.  I’ve typed it twice now and I still don’t believe it.  

You have to think the original script might’ve called for someone considerably younger to play the journalism student.  I’m not saying thirtysomething disgraced football players who used to be Navy SEALS can’t make a career U-Turn and go back to school or anything.  It just seems an oddly convenient way to explain why our hero A) Is a little old to be a college student B) Has a bum knee that the bad guys exploit every time the filmmakers need to wrap up a scene C) The ability to miraculously pull off dime store Jackie Chan maneuvers, even though he has the aforementioned bum knee (he even outruns a speeding car with his bad knee in one scene) D) The ability to use a football as a deadly weapon and E) The ability to turn a football stadium into a death trap (probably the biggest laugh in the movie).  

Speaking of football, The Boz himself, Brian Bosworth co-stars as the henchman for the evil corporation who is tasked with eliminating Cain.  I like The Boz as much as the next red-blooded American, but he is a bit miscast as a villain.  Seeing him in his three-piece suit, earpiece communicator, and goatee is a hoot.  Remember in Superman 3 when Superman got hit with the generic brand Kryptonite and turned into only a slightly repugnant guy and not really a “bad” guy?  That’s the kind of energy The Boz brings to the role.  Maybe if the film had been made ten years earlier, Boz could’ve played Cain’s role.  The football theme probably would’ve made a lot more sense.

Phase IV kind of gets bogged down whenever it goes into conspiracy thriller mode.  Three Days of the Condor this is not.  The use of AIDS as a major plot point approaches tastelessness at times too, especially for a dumb Dean Cain/Brian Bosworth production.  

You know what, though?  Just when I try to dislike movie, I remember that Dean Cain stars as a former-disgraced-football-star-turned-Navy-SEAL-turned-journalism-student who gets the plum assignment for his college newspaper to solve the death of his best friend who was killed by an evil pharmaceutical company working on a cure for AIDS, and I have to smile a little bit.  (Sorry, I had to type it again.  I don’t when I’ll get the chance to ever do that again.)  

Second Opinions:

Direct to Video Connoisseur:  Direct to Video Connoisseur: Phase IV (2001) (dtvconnoisseur.blogspot.com)

Comeuppance Reviews:   Comeuppance Reviews: Phase IV (2002)

ICE CREAM MAN (1995) *

Did you ever watch a movie that is totally stacked with actors and actresses you’re a big fan of and somehow NONE OF IT WORKS?  A movie that has a premise that sounds like it can’t miss and then it does?  Do they have a name for this phenomenon?  If not, may I suggest they call it Ice Cream Man Syndrome.  

Here is a movie with an unbeatable premise:  Clint Howard is a crazy ice cream man who kills people and then puts them into his famous ice cream.  What could go wrong?  Everything apparently.  

One of the many, many, flaws in this flick is that Howard starts at 11 and there’s nowhere to go.  What kid in their right mind would buy ice cream from a bug-eyed creep with a scary voice who sells a very questionable product that has visible eyeballs in it?  His schtick is paper-thin in the beginning and it gets more grating the longer the movie goes on.  It would be one thing if he had some funny one-liners to at least soften the blow of all this nonsense, but lines like, “You’re ice cream!” and “Are you having a bad day?” are more puzzling than anything.  It might’ve worked if the kills were creative.  However, his big trick seems to be just sticking severed heads on an oversized waffle cone.  When he runs out of cones, he puts the heads on popsicle sticks and does puppet shows with them…?  I dunno.  I exhaled more bewildered exhausted sighs during this movie than any in recent memory.

On paper, this should’ve been a bull’s eye.  The ‘90s were a great time for thrillers where people in seemingly harmless jobs snap and go on a murder spree.  Ice Cream Man certainly fits that description, but it’s halfheartedly put together, with too many moving parts, subplots, unnecessary characters, flashbacks, and God knows what else that it often strays from its central premise.

I was very tempted to give it a No Star review because it is one of the most tedious things I’ve sat through in some time.  The reason it skates by with One Star is for the cast alone.  In addition to Howard, we have the American Werewolf himself, David Naughton as a philandering husband, Conan’s Sandahl Bergman as his suffering wife, David Warner as a priest, Lee Majors… II, and porn star Tori Welles.  

Special attention must be paid to Jan-Michael Vincent’s performance as a cop.  I know he was struggling with the bottle at the time, and I have no wish to slam somebody who was clearly having addiction issues… but… WOW.  Then there is The People’s Court’s Doug Llewelyn as a grocery store manager who gets the only good line in the movie when he asks a patron, “Are you going to take it to court?”  Then, of course I remember a world-class fox like Olivia Hussey is in it, and the filmmakers do her the great disservice of dressing her up like a senile old lady and I start to get pissed off all over again.  

I’m saving the best for last though.  Do you know who else is in this movie?  STEVE GARVEY!  The Los Angeles Dodgers legend made this the year as his immortal turn in Bloodfist 6:  Ground Zero, and I’m sure the experience of being thoroughly wasted in a nothing role of one of the kid’s boring parents soured him on acting in future film projects.  

I guess I could probably put a lot of blame on the script for the Ice Cream Man’s problems but seeing how it was co-written by David Dobkin who would go on to direct Wedding Crashers, it’s fair to say his original vision was sullied somewhere during production.  Therefore, I think we got to point the finger at director Paul Norman (who was married to Welles at the time).  Norman directed over a hundred porno movies in his time, and this was the only “legitimate” feature under his belt.  You would’ve thought that because of his background in porn he would forget about the plot and get right to the action, but this one is all plot.  After this did nothing for his career, he went back to doing what he knew best, making such classics as Cry Babies Pt. 1:  Anal Scream, Bitches in Heat Pt. 1:  Locked in the Basement, and Bi and Beyond Pt. 6:  Authentic.   

A QUIET PLACE PART II (2021) ** ½

This sequel to the surprise hit A Quiet Place offers more of the same.  Did you like all the scenes of Emily Blunt and her family tiptoeing around a desolate wasteland while trying to avoid detection by CGI monsters in the first movie?  This one has a lot more of them.  

Director John Krasinski starts things off with a bang with a flashback to the first day of the monster attack.  From there, we pick up from the events of the last film.  Part of what made the original a tight, well-oiled machine was the family dynamic.  The sequel splinters the family into thirds, which kind of dilutes some of the power, especially whenever Krasinski is cutting back and forth between the groups as they are simultaneously fighting for their lives.    

The narrative is mostly a series of side quests.  The family meets up with another survivor (Cillian Murphy) who begrudgingly helps Blunt’s daughter (Millicent Simmonds) to a radio station to broadcast a signal that could kill the monsters once and for all.  Meanwhile, Blunt is off looting the ruins of suburbia looking for medicine for her wounded son (Noah Jupe) while he stays behind to guard his newborn sibling from the monsters.

All things considered, it’s a solid, if unspectacular follow-up.  It lacks the freshness of the original and when it tries to open up the world-building aspects of the universe, it’s only a half-measure.  While the third act builds up a little hope for the future of mankind, the abrupt cut-to-black ending doesn’t do it any favors.

Blunt is quite good, and her screen presence helps elevate what could’ve been a ho-hum sequel into something slightly more watchable.  You’ve got to give her credit.  It maybe the end of the world, but her hair and make-up game is on point.  Not many actresses could look this good while evading monsters after the apocalypse.  Sure, you might have to protect your family from alien creatures after society has crumbled, but that doesn’t mean you can’t look your best doing it.  

THE SON OF SANTO IN THE LAWLESS BORDER (1983) * ½

In 1983, El Santo was nearing the end of his movie career.  I think there might’ve been an expectation for the Son of Santo to continue in his father’s footsteps.  Ultimately, the Son of Santo never found the success his father had, as he only starred in a handful of features.  

Mobsters are using strongarm tactics to buy up land along the Mexican border.  A couple of concerned farmers hire the Son of Santo to protect their property from the gangsters.  Sure, that plot description is a little thin, which would be okay if the wrestling action was top notch.  As it is, the wrestling scenes are kind of ho-hum.  The Son of Santo participates in a six-man tag team match, which suffers from some crummy camera placement as much of the match is filmed from afar.  About halfway through, the top-billed Mil Mascaras shows up to give the movie a slight boost, but even his wrestling sequences fail to impress.  

Comparisons to the star’s father are inevitable.  He just doesn’t have the screen presence his old man had.  He fares better during the action as his fighting skills are more Kung Fu-inspired.  However, the staging of the fights leave something to be desired.  (Once again, the erratic camerawork is often to blame.)  

It doesn’t help that the Son of Santo kind of gets lost in his own movie as there’s way too many supporting characters that gum up the works.  (The most egregious being the comic relief priest.)  Add to that the abundance of padding in the form of nightclub performances (no less than FIVE of them), which also helps cut down on Son of Santo’s screen time.  Naturally, the lame modern-day western motif didn’t do the film any favors.  Maybe if Son of Santo had some mummies or werewolves to fight like his old man had, it would’ve made for a more entertaining picture.