Sword and Sorcery Tuesdays: Amazons!!

Theme: Song of Women - The Hu

Actual character in Amazons!.

A clear precursor to Xena Warrior Princess, but R-rated and sans the cringe Three Stooges humour (Xena had its moments; it's just that they were all Ares or Callisto scenes), Amazons! stars nobody you've ever heard of and does it wrong by being somewhat competently made and having its two female leads get along (I know it's fantasy, but there are limits).

This sounds like something wahmen ask each other at the end of yoga class or whatever it is they do when they're not having pillow fights and purging.

Queen Budget Judy Dench As M sends Amazons! (1986) to find the only magic sword that can save their people from doom, for the queendom of Whateverland is menaced by Evil William Shakespeare:

"O, that I wore a glove upon mine wang, that I might clap thine cheeks" - Evil Shakespeare.

Bad Will Hunting has a pet lioness, which at first I surmised was just a nod to the curious Frazettaism of leaving big cats lounging around places, but it turns out it's actually a shapeshifting woman, or werelioness(?), whom he despatches to hunt down our heroines and bring him back the magic sword.

I aim to furnish my pad with a big cat just as soon as I can procure one.

I can't remember any of the characters' names, but I think you'll agree it doesn't matter. There's an evil traitor Amazon who sends her young-Britney-Spears-looking daughter along with our main protagonist to backstab her and steal the sword, but the two bond and become history's first genuine female friends. Will Brit Brit be able to slay her new bestie, or will guilt cause her to hesitate at the climactic moment???

"People can take everything away from you, but they can never take away your truth. But the question is, can you handle mine? They say I'm crazy, I really don't care. That's my prerogative."

"That is so deep."

If you remember Wonder Wahman and Captain Marvel releasing in more recent years, you will recall being amazed that the first ever action movie to star a wahman dropped twice in your lifetime. It must then be more astonishing still to learn that movies like this were commonplace and unremarked-upon decades prior. The Amazons! (1986) fight both against and alongside men, have their own internal conflicts, and never have to clap back epic style against a strawman secksist. Sure, it's pure cheese, but compared to the sovlless, sexless turboslop of the enlightened 21st Century, this disposable wad of fluff might as well be Good Shakespeare.

"All's well that ends with a happy ending" - Good Shakespeare.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Wrestler!

Theme: The Crusher - Dee Dee King

RIP Hulk Hogan. While it's true my interest in professional wrestling extends about as far as Miss Hancock's legs, that's pretty far (42.5", or an entire Warwick Davies). But I laud the Hulkster for an unrelated reason: he one-shotted evil gossip rag Gawker in court after they illegally posted his sex tape and refused to take it down. If I were Pope, I'd offer absolution of sins for anyone who puts a j**rnalist out of w*rk, but I'm not sure Hogan ever did anything wrong to begin with (no, saying a popular hip hop word while of the wrong caste isn't doing anything wrong; grow up). Since I know nothing about wrestling, let's celebrate his legacy with this 2008 kino instead.

This movie taught me not to do coke with a mid or you'll wake up in her firemen-themed shrine.

Mickey Rourke (Rumble Fish) stars as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, whose 80s heyday was as far behind him at the time of this movie as this movie is behind us now, but feels more ancient if not mythical, because not even I was alive for most of it. Still, Randy never traded in his ancient console for something as newfangled as a PS1 or Dream Cast, nor his Ratt and Cinderella records for Nevermind.

Uhhh based?

Sadly, Randy's career went off the rails and he's now stuck in a shit job with a snarky hairlet boss and working what looks like a dwindling indie circuit with much younger talent on the weekends, between drowning his sorrows at a strip club, showing off his pixelated likeness in an ancient vidya to half-bored kids, and trying awkwardly to reconcile with his amazingly obnoxious estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, as herself).

Evan, honey, I'm not the one who failed to convince the world that Marilyn Manson was a creepy pervert.

But could Randy make a comeback with a twenty-year-anniversary rematch against his most famous heel, The Ayatollah (Ernest Miller)? While they almost certainly just made the heel The Ayatollah as a pointed stab at the low-status jingoism of the downscale plebs who watch wrestling, it actually works on a few levels: just like the news, the audience are marks, the shoot is a work, and the real enemy isn't Iran, but your own regime of which the entertainment industry is a consensus-fabricating appendage. You can even get into a more esoteric neo-Platonic reading of the kayfabe as the cave, but all that would go over Randy's head. As the ties that bind him to the outside world fray and snap under the pressure, he's both lost and set free. For him, it's the ""real"" world that's fake and gay, and he's not altogether wrong.

Scenes wahmen will never understand, thy name is this one from The Wrestler.

The ubiquitous Bush-era shakycam may have aged like ass (inb4 >implying it was ever good), but it fits better here than in a lot of other movies from the 2000s, and there's a running motif of tracking shots following Rourke around like a third-person vidya that gives it a bit of a visual signature. It's a rough, gnarly little gem that's sometimes hard to watch, but I return to it at times and it holds up. Had I ever had a heyday of my own, he'd be a literally me up there with Vincent Gallo and Tom Noonan in Manhunter. Watch The Wrestler.

Stop Motion Dreams: Q the Winged Serpent!

Theme: The Aztec Rock - The Aztecs

And speaking of David "Is That Rigor Mortis Or Are You Pleased To See Me" Carradine, it must not pass without comment that he was in Q, a movie whose premise sounds like something I would have made up: in the New York City of the early 1980s, an Aztec cult offers sacrifices to the god Quetzalcoatl, whose name I presume the producers thought no one who wanted to see this flick would be able to pronounce, hence the truncated title.

If nothing else it raised the bar for Halloween costumes.

It's widely believed that in the original lore Quetzalcoatl was supposed to be the one god who refused human sacrifice, making this whole premise a nonsense of routine Hollywood proportions. Furthermore, since the victims are flayed, it would have made more sense to have them offered up to Xipe Totec, as Aztec priests would wear the flayed skins of their victims in his honour.

There's a neat little but of foreshadowing here with the waiter slicing some meat before the big gore payoff of the next scene. Never let it be said they phoned this one in.

Xipe Totec was the Tezcatlipoca of the east, while Quetzalcoatl was the Tezcatlipoca of the west. Just to confuse and annoy you, the Tezcatlipoca of the north was simply named Tezcatlipoca. That Tezcatlipoca's victims could be voluntary: if you had the dubious distinction of being chosen, you could cosplay as him for a year, serviced by four wives, themselves LARPing as Xochiquetzal, Atlatonan, Huixtocihuatl and Xilonen, before being dispatched to meet the real deal. Most sacrifices, however, were of slaves (tlacotin) taken in flower wars, and thus not voluntary at all. But fuck all that, because making it Quetzalcoatl allows the filmmakers to do this:

And you thought you'd go to the grave never once seeing Shaft yeeted to his death by a stop-motion dragon-bird-thing. Actually, you probably never thought that specifically.

The main plot actually involves this Norwood scale victim discovering Quetzalcoatl's giant egg in this nest in the Chrysler building, presumably because King Kong already used the Empire State.

This scene is like the ending of Lovecraft's The Outsider for dudes with thinning hair.

I can't remember the guy's name but he gives a stellar performance as a terminally annoying no-hoper roped into a heist who loses the money and leads the goons hoping to beat it out of him to their deaths in the nest before revealing its location to Carradine and Roundtree's bickering detective duo. The male pattern baldness poster boy is quite the charmer: an ex-junkie who we're told beats up his gf when he's not crying into her pillows. On learning he has an incredible secret to trade to the cops for his freedom, he has the brass balls to angle for a book deal and a cool million bucks too.

He's literally me (just kidding, I have a great hairline).

You watch the flick not knowing if he's going to have some kind of redemption but he never does, even when saved by Carradine from the Aztec priest, making him the most authentically repulsive protagonist ever to get away scot free after all his bullshit. Amazingly, after shooting the priest dead in baldie's hotel room, Carradine takes a do-not-disturb sign from the opposite door and hangs it with the please-enter side facing out on the room with the corpse inside. I don't know why he did that, other than to prank the hotel staff like the world's biggest dick.

"Lol" - David Carradine.

Alas, Quetzalcoatl itself (they sort of hedge on whether it's the actual god or a near-extinct animal simply worshipped by the cult) gets shrekt by heavy machine gun fire and craps out on this building that looks pleasingly sort of like a step pyramid. No sequel ever emerged, but the creature lives on in the hearts of stop motion and shitty B-movie enjoyers everywhere.

"No, it wasn't the airplanes...it was getting shot 5,236 times that killed the beast" - actual dialogue.

Sword and Sorcery Tuesdays: The Warrior and the Sorceress!

Theme: Squeeze Me Macaroni - Mr Bungle

Say what you like about David Carradine, at least he died doing what he loved. I was trying to come up with an autoerotic asphyxiation joke, but I choked at the finish. But lest Davey-poo be remembered solely for the manner of his demise, let it also be known that he starred in a complete beat-for-beat ripoff of A Fistful of Dollars called The Warrior and the Sorceress. Since Fistful is itself a complete ripoff of Yojimbo, this is fine, although it steps clean over a chance to correct the major flaw in its western precursor: if the Man with No Name is such a slick badass, deftly playing both sides against each other, why does he fuck up, get caught and catch a beatdown like his plan was made up one step at a time?

"Durr hurr I'm retarded, I don't have a clue what I'm doing" - the Man with No Name.

It's vaguely implied that the low-tech fantasy setting might actually be more of an after-the-end type setting, making this extremely possibly a Mad Max ripoff. Evidence for this is one throwaway line at the start, the water shortage device, and the possibility that some of the rogue's gallery of weirdos might be mutants. The sorceress of the title seems to channel her magic only by making a powerful sword towards the end, so The Warrior and the Blacksmith might have been a more apt title. Carradine's character is described as a "homerac", but it's never explained what this is, which is fine, both because I don't care and because fictional worlds feel more authentic if everyone just acts like whatever mumbo jumbo jargon they use is perfectly self-explanatory, like zoomers.

♪Pinky and the Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain...

Anyway, two rival warlords are at odds over the only well in the village. One is grim no-nonsense guy from central casting, while the other is this lardass with an overfamiliar interest in his pet alligator:

At least, I thought it was an alligator, but later in the movie it gets up and walks on its hind legs like a person, so IDK. I suspect it might have been inspired by that little cackling muppet that sits beside Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. This one makes noises, but fatso seems to believe it's giving him advice, none of which pans out well for him. Insane? Fluent in alligator-personese? You decide!

At first Carradine offers his services as a hired goon to the body positivity guru, but it soon becomes clear his real agenda is to infiltrate srs bsns guy's following to free his captive, the sorceress, who has some unspecified past connection with the homeracs. His brilliant plan to do this involves springing her from her cell, then telling the guard it wasn't him. To be fair, it takes several minutes' worth of screentime longer than you'd think for Evil McDourface to catch on to this line of bullshit, making this actually a slightly better-thought-out plan than, say, hanging yourself naked in a closet to get a hardon.

Nevertheless, the bad guy sets a trap for Carradine, pre-emptively one-upping Total Recall's triple-titted hooker with a quadruply-enboobed dancer who knocks out Carradine with some sort of poisoned appendage that shoots out of her. He could have just drugged his drink or bonked him on the head with a mallet or something, but then there wouldn't have been a chick with four jugs in the movie, unless she was just standing around somewhere.

In accordance with our censorship policy, the actress's actual n*pples have been covered with serial child killer and cannibal Albert Fish, to avoid any offence. Since the bottom pair are prosthetics, there is no need to censor them.

The flick grows bored of generic villain and his reptile-rogering rival only slightly quicker than you will, so it ditches both for these dudes who I can't tell if they're meant to be mutants or Star Trek ayys or what:

"Do not keep saying 'got your nose'. That is NOT funny" - these guys.

Fortunately Carradine saves the day with the help of his nearly-always-naked deuteragonist and her blacksmithing ways, but since this is a western pastiche in sci-fantasy dressup, once the showdown is over, he doesn't hang around. I MEAN

"Well, Dave, we did it: we finally became: The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984) HD VHSrip (tops out at 240p)" - actual dialogue.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The General!

Article theme: Mr Confederate Man - Rebel Son

If there is such a genre as epic comedy, Buster Keaton's magnum opus is unquestionably the finest and greatest example. The logistics of The General alone are so much fun to consider, if it never got a single laugh it would still stomp sphincter as an action chase flick, mogging every other effort except arguably The Road Warrior with contemptuous ease. Orson Welles called it "possibly the GOAT, fr".

Me and who?

Keaton plays "Johnnie Gray", whose very name marks him out as an archetypal everyman in the Southern Confederacy. When the civil war breaks out, he rushes to enlist but is denied because the South needs him to fulfil his essential duty as a railway engineer. Like all train enthusiasts, Johnnie is way too autistic to reason this out, and thinks they just rejected him for service because he's a weird literal me with flat affect, which would also be a plausible explanation. His would-be sweetheart (Marion Mack) also runs with this and dumps his ass, despite which he remains resolved to win her back when she is accidentally taken hostage during the villains' Die Hard ripoff-esque plan to hijack a train for the Union.

Same, bruh.

Keaton chases the hijackers, they chase him; it's a plot born at the intersection of high-stakes action and Looney Tunes cartoon, but the progression of events, the tricks employed to hold up pursuers and the desperate scrambles to catch up to the trains in between flipping railroad switches and scavenging for firewood ramp up an only halfway-comic tension. Scenes behind enemy lines are as suspenseful as any Hitchcock picture. Throughout chase, counter-chase, evasion and climactic battle, Keaton's deadpan expression remains as constant as in all his classics. Given the real danger he faced on practically every project (YT comments sections remain packed with Joe Rogan fans echoing his account of how the master broke his neck in one stunt), the commitment to expressionlessness speaks of balls beyond our mortal comprehension.

Timing is everything.

"But Paaat, how can you praise a film in which the heroes Fought In Defence Of Slaaayveryyy?" You know, I could (and did, in a first draft) write a long, boring screed refuting every brainletism cited in defence of the boomer truth narrative of the American civil war, but I don't need to, because in 2022, ninety-six years after The General first dropped, Hollywood released a movie called The Woman King that lionised the Dahomey Amazons, a real historical faction of warrior women who fought (extremely poorly) on behalf of a guy literally called the Slave King because he captured and sold so many slaves. This means pro-slavery action is officially endorsed by the main propaganda organ of the libtard regime, proving damningly, if thunderously unsurprisingly, that all reb-bashers are completely full of shit and just hate white people.

*Dixie intensifies*

Presumably Keaton turning the tide of battle leads to a third timeline even better than the Berenstein one (let's call it the Berenstöön timeline) where the South goes on to win the entire war, executes L*ncoln, Sh*rman and Sh*ridan, phases out slavery peacefully, and establishes a pan-American Confederacy that stays out of World War 1 (if not prevents it through some butterfly-effect hoodoo), outlaws usury, bans advertising, crushes communism and cancels SNL in 1998. In such a timeline, we'd get movies like The General every year.

Sword & Sorcery Tuesday: Sorceress!

Theme: (Flesh and Blood) Sacrifice - Poison

In 1982, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred as Conan the Barbarian (1982). But did you know that 1982 also saw the release of 1982's Sorceress, starring hot twins as hot twins?

A threesome with hot twins is not incest unless their clits touch. A wise wino taught me that.

Evil sorcerer Traigon has promised evil god Calamari his firstborn as a sacrifice, but his wife refuses to tell him which twin was born first, buying enough time for Krona, the wise mentor from every shitty martial arts flick, to intervene and defeat him. Traigon's magic saves him to return twenty years hence, in which time Krona hides the twin girls with a family of his acquaintance, who decide to raise them in disguise as boys to throw off Traigon's goons who might come looking for them in the meantime.

Their magically glowing slow motion Baywatch run does nothing to make them less visibly stacked.

This might be the least convincing boy disguise since Princess Fawzia's in The Adventures of Hajji Baba, but it's got nothing on the authentic period detail of the setting, for Sorceress is best described as noncommittally ambiguously set in India:

This chick with the pet Bigfoot is as convincing as it gets.

This is more readily inferred from random dialogue and randomer plot beats than from the sets and costumes, most of which look more Greco-Roman: the warriors are referred to as kshatriyas throughout and, when the wise Krona returns in the wake of our heroines' adoptive family getting killed, he immediately commits suicide by sati:

Japanese men when they clock into work at 07:01.

There's also a Viking who joins our underachieving crossdressers for no reason, along with his sidekick, a satyr who looks like Satan and communicates only in goat noises. I think this character was meant to be an endearing animal companion sort of like Chewbacca in Star Wars, but instead he's the creepiest little shit I've ever seen in a movie (though, in the interest of full disclosure, I've never watched anything with Ezra Miller in it).

Look out, Gimli! Fucking Beelzebub is behind you!

Finally, our discount fellowship pick up Erlick, the failson of a noble line of kings or something who is bumming around Eurasia cheating at dice and hoping to score. He's an amiably fun counterpart to the twins, and provides the movie with a scene of hilarity and suspense in which he's nearly impaled by sliding down a greased pole onto a sharpened stake:

I wish this dude had won an Oscar so they could show this clip of him narrowly avoiding getting bummed by six feet of spike set to some soothing classical.

More fun shenanigans later, Traigon attempts to sacrifice one of the twins, but the gang rally to save her, so he just yeets the ambiguously Indian femme fatale into the flames instead, which got a solid retard guffaw out of me and renders the entire plot moot, as Calamari is content with this last-minute substitute.

He looks so pleased.

But wait! The other twin remembers something Krona told them before taking a flame bath of his own: an incantation that summons a good god to do battle with Calamari:

In the cosmic game of rock-paper-scissors, ripped bat-lion shooting lightning out its eyes beats floating head with cosmetic burns.

Sure, you've never heard of Sorceress and it has nothing on Conan the Barbarian or Clash of the Titans, but it's a good-natured lower-budget spin on the same schtick, with enough bizarre left-turns and memorable quirks to make it an endearing also-ran, in the same ballpark as Red Sonja or The Last Legion, at any rate. Watch it after a long shitty day at work sometime.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week DOUBLE FEATURE: Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis! and Melody of the World!

Article theme: Speed of Life - David Bowie

Every list of "great films" features Soviet propaganda staple Man with a Movie Camera as its token silent, and it still makes for impressive viewing if, like an absolute pleb, you've never seen a city symphony before. Too bad it's a complete ripoff of experimental genius Walther Ruttmann's German kino Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, which dropped two years earlier and deserves all the credit for the template. Not that Berlin was the first city symphony of the silent era: 1921 short Manhatta mixed documentary footage of Manhattan with lame poetry, and Berlin itself was profiled in 1925's Die Stadt der Millionen. But Ruttmann's opus ditched intertitles altogether and took on the structure of a day, building from isolated trains at empty stations through the bleary mornings of street sweepers and paper deliverers through the explosive, swirling nightlife of a decadent metropolis.

We even drop in to the Tiergarten where this elephant siestas in the afternoon.

While Man with a Movie Camera features laughably clunky propaganda of young comrades shooting at cutouts labelled things like "UNCLE FASHISM", Berlin spells out no agenda, passes no didactic judgement on any particular subject. You can read into it whatever bullshit has been programmed into you, or simply view it as a frozen moment in history. Ruttmann followed up Berlin with the more wildly ambitious Melody of the World, which likewise sequenced clips as movements in a symphony without taking any particular stance toward its multifarious subjects. Melody combines footage from as far afield as "Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States of America, Holland, Greece, India, Siam, China, Japan, Panama, and Cuba", and packs in some kino match cuts beside its startling, intriguing and exotic depictions of recreations, fashions, religions, customs, conflicts, architecture and languages around the globe.

In fact, the only wholesome messagerino to slap you hard in the face is an earnest lament against the ugliness of war. Ruttmann would later serve as a frontline combat photographer and died tragically in the worst war of all, whose only purpose was to give today's warpigs rhetorical cover for their murderous crimes.

If it's so trite and unsubtle, how come you still haven't got the message?

But violence is only presented as one frayed thread marring the complex tapestry of life. The juxtaposition of images of comparable routines and rituals from different countries highlights as many differences as similarities, and renders the familiar as novel as the alien. The whole thing only further demonstrates how much more profoundly the love of humanity and curiosity about the world runs in problematic shitlords than in shitlib NPCs for whom travel pays off in status points among their bougie social cliques, to say nothing of how many wildly distinctive authentic cultures were still practiced less than a century ago, even in Europe.

I have no idea who these guys are but their Wayne's World headbanging routine is on point.

What does this guy write on his umbrella, and why? I don't know, and no voiceover or intertitle interrupts the moment to explain it.

Ruttmann has fun with the Kuleshov effect, splicing blatantly unrelated clips together to make it seem like the Monopoly guy was watching Southeast Asian Lordi rock the stage. The Kuleshov effect is understood intuitively by all template meme poasters, but clearly Kuleshov was so convinced it was his master breakthrough that it bears his name to this day, which is endearingly like if I dubbed 2+2=4 "Pat Bastard's Formula" or some shit.

And if Berlin and Melody constitute the perfection of montage cinéma, Ruttmann's early experiments like Lichtspiel Opus I-IV confidently blazed trails down which still other poseurs strolled, taking credit that was never theirs. Sure, they sort of look like screensavers now, but Ruttmann was so far ahead of the curve that everyone from his contemporary absolute-film dickriders to Stan Brakhage belong in a footnote to his bio. Use this knowledge to them-apples would-be hipster blowhards in your next /film/ flame war.