FRANCO FEBRUARY/TUBI CONTINUED… CROSSOVER: ESMERALDA BAY (1990) *

Traditional action has never been Jess Franco’s strong suit.  Esmeralda Bay more or less sinks because the action is so lousy.  The opening action sequence is so dark that it’s hard to tell what’s going on, the slow motion is often laughable, and there’s a car crash and explosion that has got to go down as the worst in screen history.  What’s worse is that the finale is a non-stop barrage of stock footage taken from various decades, wars, and sources, rendering the last battle scene virtually incomprehensible.  It’s enough to make Ed Wood’s use of stock footage look downright competent.  

There’s a lot of stuff going on in this movie, but never ever happens.  Fernando Rey is the President of a small country who is under the thumb of his war-happy Colonel, played by Robert Forster (seven years before revitalizing his career in Jackie Brown).  Ramon Sheen (from Franco’s Night of the Eagles) is a revolutionary who buys weapons from an arms dealer (George Kennedy).  There are setbacks, betrayals, and double-crosses, but most of it is too dreary to even care.  

Forster’s performance is kinda fun.  There’s a scene where he gets a new gun and goes running all over the house pretending to shoot it like a kid with a BB gun.  This was made during the time he was still stuck playing ethnic villain roles (see also The Delta Force, which also coincidentally featured Kennedy).  He shouldn’t be confused with Franco mainstay, Robert Foster, who also appears as a priest.  

Speaking of other members of Franco’s Stock Company, Craig Hill and Daniel Grimm were also in Night of the Eagles.  Rey was also in Commando Mengele:  “Angel of Death”, and it looks like they once again shot all his scenes at his home.  Oh, and Franco’s muse, Lina Romay has a small role as a madam too.  

The only worthwhile part in this boring mess is the final scene when Kennedy goes mano y mano with a helicopter.  I won’t tell you if he wins or loses, but I will say that when the scene was all over, I laughed for about three straight minutes.  That amazing minute of insanity is not enough to make anyone sit through the other ninety-four minutes of Esmeralda Bay.  However, the scene taken on its own accord, is a ripe slice of WTF cinema. 

AKA:  Countdown to Esmeralda Bay.  

FRANCO FEBRUARY/TUBI CONTINUED… CROSSOVER: NIGHT OF THE EAGLES (1989) *

The same year Harrison Ford fought Nazis in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, his Star Wars co-star, Mark Hamill starred as a Nazi in this dull WWII drama directed by Jess Franco.  Yes, you read that right.  Mark Hamill starred as a Nazi in a Jess Franco movie six years after Return of the Jedi.  Read it again.  Mark Hamill stars as a Nazi in a Jess Franco movie.  You might as well read it again, because the fact that Mark Hamill starred as a Nazi in a Jess Franco movie is about the only memorable thing this boring ass turd has going for it.  

I guess if Hamill starred in a Jess Franco movie that was more… Jess Franco-y, it might have worked.  I mean, Jess has made countless Nazi flicks, so what could go wrong by bringing Luke Skywalker into the mix?  Unfortunately, Jess was going for a prestige picture with Night of the Eagles.  Instead of Nazi sex, Nazi experiments, and Nazi sex experiments, we get a boring love triangle between Mark Hamill and Ramon Sheen.  

That’s right.  Ramon Sheen.  They couldn’t even get Charlie Sheen, let alone Emilio Estevez for this thing.  Heck, even Joe Estevez wouldn’t have been caught dead in this.  

They might not have been able to get Joe Estevez for this thing, but lo and behold, Luke Skywalker was ready and willing.  This has got to be his all-time worst.  Man, if you thought Time Runner was bad, wait till you see this one.  

Hamill kind of phones it in, and I guess I can’t blame him.  He sort of hides inside his Nazi uniform, thick glasses, and oversized hat.  He’s probably hoping Indiana Jones doesn’t punch his lights out.  His awful deathbed marriage scene has to be his career low point.  

I think the biggest problem (aside from… well… EVERYTHING) is that Franco completely misread the audience.  Does he really think we’d want to see a Nazi love triangle movie?  Especially one that fails so spectacularly at being “respectable”.  At least Franco’s Naziploitation flicks had some stripping and whipping.  This feels like a bad Masterpiece Theater episode, but… you know… with swastikas.  

There are ways this resembles other Franco movies.  Chief among them is the recycling of footage.  This time, the action and battle scenes come from other (much older) war movies and the seams are obvious as the film grain, vehicles, and uniforms don’t really match the new material.  Franco’s use of the slow, lazy zooms and camera pans are kept to a minimum this time out (again, he was trying to be “respectable”), but he does give us a lot of padding in the form of nightclub numbers.  

At least the participation of Franco stalwart Christopher Lee prevents it from being a total debacle.  He plays a sad banker who is devastated when his daughter (the object of the love triangle) enlists in the Third Reich.  He gives a fine performance, which is easily the best thing about the movie.  Honestly, the only thing of note here is, of course, LUKE SKYWALKER STARRING AS A NAZI IN A JESS FRANCO MOVIE.  I guess if they knew Lee would go on to become Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels, they could’ve had them do a Jedi battle or something.  As it is, they share no scenes together, which is a shame.  Oh well.  

Sheen (who looks and sounds like his old man), along with co-stars Robert Foster, Daniel Grimm, and Craig Hill all reteamed with Franco for Esmerelda Bay the next year.

AKA:  Fall of the Eagles.

FRANCO FEBRUARY/TUBI CONTINUED… CROSSOVER: COMMANDO MENGELE: “ANGEL OF DEATH” (1985) ***

I’ve been running a bit behind on posting reviews for both the Tubi Continued… and Franco February columns, so I figured I would kill two birds with one stone and check out a few of the Jess Franco movies Tubi has to offer.  He only co-directed this one as he apparently quit before filming was complete.  The producers brought in Andrea Bianchi, the madman who gave the world Burial Ground, and the results are a bit of a mess, but it is a fun, and sometimes surreal mess.  

Fernando Rey and Jack Taylor are Nazi hunters looking for the vile Nazi Josef Mengele (Howard Vernon) in South America.  Robert Foster’s girlfriend gets killed by the Nazis who patrol Mengele’s fortress, and he teams up with her best friend (Suzanne Andrews) to get revenge.  The Nazi hunters accept them into their fold with the provision they gather evidence to bring Mengele to trial, but he decides to blow him the fuck up instead.  

Here's the thing, though.  Mengele isn’t exactly hiding.  I mean his guards patrol his fortress wearing red armbands in broad daylight and fly around in helicopters with “4R” painted on the side of them.  (You know, for “Fourth Reich”.)  It’s shit like this that endears crappy movies like this to me.  

Even if you didn’t know the behind the scenes drama, Commando Mengele:  “Angel of Death” looks like a cut-and-paste affair.  (I mean, the title has two titles for God’s sake.)  There are scenes that are played silently while narration tries to explain what’s going on, the same random insert shots of Andrews’ shocked face are reused a couple of times, and some plot points (like Andrews being artificially inseminated by Mengele) are haphazardly (or never) resolved.  However, when it’s Franco doing the cutting and Bianchi doing the pasting, the results are entertaining more often than not.  

This movie has a lot of movie for your movie dollar.  It has Chris Mitchum sleepwalking through his performance as Mengele’s top bodyguard who walks with a limp, but can still snap into action for slow-motion, echoey Kung Fu fights.  Foster’s “Dirty Dozen” style team are also a lot of fun (even though there are only four of them).  There’s a Bud Spencer looking guy who uses knives and crossbows, an acrobat, a computer geek, and a Kung Fu master who’s always exuberantly practicing his karate chops and kicks in the background (who also gets his share of slow-motion, echoey Kung Fu fights).  Then, of course, there’s Howard Vernon chewing the scenery like only Howard Vernon can as Mengele.  I think my favorite moment came when he shows Andrews his big experiment and it’s nothing but a room with a monkey lying in bed next to two half-human/half-monkey freaks.  Most movies would make this a major plot point, but for Commando Mengele:  “Angel of Death”, it’s just a random WTF throwaway scene.  

Speaking of which, the final siege on Mengele’s fortress is a head-spinning onslaught of “…HUH?!?”  There’s badly choreographed action (including more slow-motion, echoey Kung Fu fights), bizarre plot twists, and one of the worst model explosions of all time.  I think I laughed six times and said, “Wait… WHAT?” at least twice in the last three minutes.  A lot of the movie never comes close to matching the weirdness of the final reel.  There are a few moments along the way though that flirt with being totally bonkers, but ultimately wind up being completely bananas.  And I’m not saying that because of the scene where the monkey and its half-human brethren are liberated by the Nazi hunters.  

It's kind of easy to tell what scenes Franco was responsible for thanks to the slow zooms and pans.  Also, the flick is chockfull of his regular stock players like Taylor, Foster, Vernon (the De Niro to Franco’s Scorsese), and Mitchum.  I’m not sure if he was responsible for the monkey business (pun sorta intended), or if that was Bianchi’s doing.  All I know is that when the WTF is flying freely, Angel of Death is heavenly.  

AKA:  Angel of Death.  AKA:  Commando Mengele.  

TUBI CONTINUED… CAROUSHELL THE 2ND (2021) ** ½

Duke, the killer carousel unicorn (voiced by Steve Rimpici) returns in this uneven, but sporadically hilarious sequel.  This time out, he learns he has a half-human son named Robbie (B. Barnabei) that he never knew about.  Duke tries to put killing behind him in order to make up for lost time with his son, unaware that the Nazis who created him during WWII are hunting him.  When they learn Duke has a son, they kidnap Robbie to ensure his cooperation.  Of course, that just makes Duke even madder, and he goes after the Hitler-loving bastards.

The addition of Nazi villains seems a little desperate.  It’s like the filmmakers are trying to do the Don’t Breathe 2 thing where they take the series’ bad guy (or in this case, unicorn) and make him a de facto hero by pitting him against a more sinister evil.  I guess it might’ve worked had the Nazis not been so overly cartoonish.  They make the Nazis in Hogan’s Heroes look like the Nazis in Schindler’s List by comparison.  I mean the sight of a talking (and killing) carousel unicorn is already WTF enough.  We really didn’t need a bunch of comic relief Nazi villains constantly mugging and shit.  

Fortunately, the rest of the film is just as funny as the original.  The father/son bonding scenes with Duke and Robbie hit the sweet spot between absurdist humor and Z horror moviemaking at its finest.  These scenes almost play like a surreal version of an After School Special.  If there was more of this sublime silliness throughout the rest of the picture, it might’ve been a classic.  As it is, it falls just short of the inspired zaniness of the original.  Even if CarousHELL the 2nd was a bit spotty in places, I am still anxiously waiting to see Duke’s next go-round. 

AKA:  CarousHELL 2.  

ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA (2023) ** ½

Ant-Man and the Wasp:  Quantumania is definitely the least of the three Ant-Man movies and would land in my Bottom Five MCU films overall.  I’m not saying that it’s bad exactly.  It just felt like they were trying to shoehorn Ant-Man into a mold made for the Guardians of the Galaxy.  If anything, it’s proof that the concept and the character work best on a… ahem… smaller scale.  

This time out, Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) looks on as his brilliant daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) opens up a portal to the Quantum Realm.  It doesn’t take long before the both of them, not to mention the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) and her parents (Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas) get sucked into the Realm with no way to return home.  The Quantum Realm is also home to a nefarious villain named Kang the Conqueror (Johnathan Majors) who takes Cassie hostage and coerces Ant-Man into helping him escape so he can go off and rule the galaxy.  

The Quantum Realm looks like a cheesy, overly CGI-ed version of the Cantina scene in Star Wars on steroids.  In fact, every frame of the film that takes place in the Quantum Realm feels like Greenscreen City.  Everything has a loosey-goosey computer animated feel that makes the effects and creatures in Avatar (or heck, even The Phantom Menace) look startlingly realistic in comparison.  That is to say, it looks like a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel.  Heck, even the humor is more in line with the Guardians than Ant-Man (like the little comic relief blobby dude), which is OK, I guess, but I came to see an Ant-Man movie, dammit.

It's telling that the best sequence in the movie comes when Ant-Man must rely on his thieving skills to steal a vital piece of machinery for Kang.  This is the only time the flick really feels like it belongs in the Ant-Man series.  The ensuing “Probability Storm” scene is a lot of fun too.  However, the film really needed two or three more scenes of this caliber to make it a worthy successor to the previous Ant-Man entries.  

The cast is a mixed bag.  The most rewarding dramatic scenes revolve around Rudd and Newton.  Rudd excels at being a likeable goofball, and their scenes together hit the right blend of sweetness and believability.  Their scenes together give the film the only moments of grounded human emotion.  Douglas gets a few laughs, but mostly, he’s just along for the ride.  The biggest laughs come courtesy of M.O.D.O.K. and a special guest star playing a sinister space gangster.  

Pfeiffer gets more screen time here than before, but she’s pretty much wasted as her character is little more than a walking exposition dump.  And for a movie with her character’s name in the title, Lilly isn’t given a whole lot to do.  Majors is a disappointment as the villain too.  He’s much better here than he was in the dreadful Loki series, but he’s a bit of a bore, which is alarming since he’s supposed to be the next Big Bad for this “Phase” of the Marvel franchise.  It doesn’t help that he says all his dialogue in the same disinterested, half-yawning manner.  I guess he was trying to underplay the character’s villainy, but he ultimately winds up not feeling like a genuine threat.  

Marvel Cinematic Universe Scorecard: 

Spider-Man:  No Way Home:  ****

Avengers:  Age of Ultron:  ****

The Incredible Hulk:  ****

Iron Man:  ****

Thor:  Ragnarok:  ****

Avengers:  Endgame:  ****

Ant-Man and the Wasp:  ****

Spider-Man:  Homecoming:  ****

Iron Man 3:  ****

Captain America:  Civil War:  *** ½

Ant-Man:  *** ½

Guardians of the Galaxy:  *** ½

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2:  *** ½ 

Avengers:  Infinity War:  *** ½

Black Panther:  *** ½ 

The Avengers:  ***

Captain America:  The First Avenger:  ***

Captain America:  The Winter Soldier:  ***

Thor:  Love and Thunder:  ***

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness:  ***

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings:  ***

Captain Marvel:  ***

Spider-Man:  Far from Home:  ***

Thor:  ***

Thor:  The Dark World:  ***

Iron Man 2:  ***

Ant-Man and the Wasp:  Quantumania:  ** ½ 

Doctor Strange:  ** ½ 

Black Widow:  ** ½  

Eternals:  * ½  

TUBI CONTINUED… TWITCH: YOU ARE MY TOY (2004) **

Minori (Yumeka Sasaki) is a photographer with a bad habit of getting involved with unavailable, married, and/or attached men.  Her latest assignment has her working alongside a reporter named Shinichi (Mikiya Sanada) on a story about a reclusive manga artist (Fuyu Ooba).  When the interview proves fruitless, their editor (Masahiko Hori) forces Shinichi into forging a fabricated article.  This action sets into motion a chain of romance and heartbreak between the two co-workers.

Twitch:  You are My Toy is certainly an odd title for such a small, forgettable, and if we’re being completely honest, unsexy movie.  Nobody twitches and I don’t remember anybody getting treated like a toy.  It’s a Japanese flick, so maybe something got lost in translation along the way, but I still kinda doubt it.  

Even though this is technically a Japanese “Pink” movie, it feels more like a cheap soap opera with an occasional dash of T & A and softcore sex scenes here and there.  All the characters are vaguely interconnected and have thinly sketched backstories.  The details of their various histories with one another are slowly doled out throughout the film, but it ultimately never comes together in a meaningful way.  Since we only know fragments of where the characters have been and never get a chance to see where they are going (thanks to the abrupt ending), it’s hard to care very much about them.  It winds up feeling like we’ve caught an episode of a soap opera midway through a season and there’s no real way for us to catch up.  The short running time (it’s only forty-seven minutes long) only adds to the TV soap feeling.  

As far as the sex scenes go, they are OK, I guess.  I would’ve like to have seen more of them, but the ones we do get aren’t bad.  However, they’re not nearly steamy enough to compensate for the lackluster melodramatics.  

TUBI CONTINUED… CURSE OF THE REANIMATOR (2022) ** ½

Curse of the Reanimator is the third and final chapter in Full Moon’s Miskatonic U trilogy.  Brilliant college student Crawford Tillinghast (Dane Oliver) makes an uneasy alliance with the evil Dean (Michael Pare) to restart the dangerous Resonator.  Complicating matters is a grieving mother (Kate Hodge) who wants to use the machine to revive her dead son, and a sexy lesbian witch (Amanda Jones) that wants to control it and bring about the end of the world.  Meanwhile, Herbert West (Josh Cole) continues to attempt to perfect his reanimation serum, with deadly results.  

As you could tell by that plot description, Herbert West doesn’t get a lot to do this time out, despite what’s implied by the title.  Although the film is much more of a conclusion to Tillinghast’s story arc, it does leave things open-ended for more West adventures down the road, which is a good thing.  It does seem like a missed opportunity not to intersect Tillinghast and West’s storylines in a meaningful way, but overall, Curse of the Reanimator remains a decent enough flick.  It just doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the first two movies in the series.  

Cole is once again the reason to watch it as he injects a shot of adrenaline (in more ways than one) into the film whenever he’s on screen.  If Jeffrey Combs refuses to do any more Re-Animator movies, then I’d say Cole is a fine substitute as he is able to breathe new life into the beloved character.  He captures Combs’ voice and mannerisms quite well, but still puts his own spin on things, which helps make it feel like a separate entity from the original Re-Animator series.  I also liked that they gave him a sex assistant (Christina Braa) this time out.  Too bad they don’t get an opportunity to flesh out their relationship more.  Hopefully, they’ll reunite somewhere down the road for future installments.