La guerra del ferro / Ironmaster

Though made possible by the post-Conan fantasy boom, and marketed as such, this 1983 entry from Umberto Lenzi is really more a pre-historic adventure.

For the film eschews overt manifestations of magic and the supernatural, as seen in the otherwise comparable likes of Ator and Conquest, in favour of a more naturalistic, quasi-anthropological approach in which the only monsters present are less-evolved Neanderthal and ape-man tribes.


A decidedly misleading, if audience-attracting, poster for the French release of the film

At the heart of the story is the rivalry between two stone-age tribesmen, Vood and Ela, who might be summarised as the Cain and Abel or Shiva and Vishnu of the piece.

Vood’s father is chief of the tribe, but surmises, correctly as it turns out, that his son is more concerned with his own glory than the well-being of the tribe as a whole. Accordingly he expresses his preference that Ela should succeed him.

This prompts Vood to murder his father and proclaim himself chief. But Ela, who was witness to the murder but powerless to prevent it, refuses to accept this and challenges Vood to ritual combat for the leadership of the tribe. He wins, assumes the mantle of chief and duly banishes Vood into exile.

While wandering in the volcanic mountains – not, perhaps, the kind of thing a normal person would do, but something that makes sense in this context, along with allowing for some suitable Promethean connotations – Vood then happens upon a natural furnace and a piece of iron in the shape of a sword.

The value of this new weapon is demonstrated as he kills a lion, whose skin he fashions into a headdress, and is persuaded by Lith, who had watched the battle with the beast, to accompany her back to her tribe to take power.


Vood with sword and headdress

With this duly accomplished, Vood equips his warriors with iron swords and turns his attention towards the other tribes in the area, including his own former one...

As might be Lenzi does not shy away from gore in Ironmaster. In the case of the human on human violence this is perfectly justifiable given the 2001-esque black monolith qualities of the furnace and sword: Progress comes from violence and killing rather than peace, as is most forcefully made when a pacifist agrarian tribe is compelled to change its ways in order to survive the onslaught of Vood’s armies.

The inclusion of a boar being speared and gutted cannot however be justified. A quasi-anthropological excuse, that this is what these people would have done for food, is effectively negated by the decidedly unrealistic fright wigs and fur bikinis worn by the cast.

With the film having been shot in the Custer State Park in Dakota it is also noticeable that no buffalo are subjected to a similar fate. One presumes this was either because they were protected or simply too expensive to make for a cheap special effect.

Cast-wise, George Eastman has a suitably imposing villainous presence as Vood, whilst William Berger’s hippie associations are also useful in relation to his casting as leader of the pacifist, vegetarian tribe. Female leads Pamela Prati as Lith and Elvire Audray are attractive, if decidedly unconvincing as authentic tribeswomen. Unfortunately, with the exception of a bit of nipple slippage from Prati’s fur bikini, neither gets their kit off. Sam Pasco, who plays Ela, was a bodybuilder type. That this was to be his only film role tells you all you need to know.


Pasco and Audray, plus Prati's back

The De Angelis brothers provide a decent, if not terribly memorable, primitive score.

2019 - Dopo la caduta di New York / 2019: After the Fall of New York

In the early 80s films about dystopian near futures like Mad Max 2 and Escape from New York were big box-office. It was no surprise, then, when Italian film-makers quickly moved to rip them off to the best of their abilities and budgets. 2019: After the Fall of New York is Sergio Martino’s contribution to this cycle, in conjunction with his producer brother Luciano and frequent screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi. (Sergio Martino uses his Martin Dolman alias, Gastaldi his Julian Berry one.)


Planet of the Apes? Escape from New York?

The film’s influences are evident from the first two scenes. Scene one gives the back-story, that a nuclear war between the Eurac Alliance (of Europe and Asia) and Pan American Confederation has left the earth devastated and women infertile, with no children having been born for 15 years. The ruins of New York are under Eurac control, with soldiers and mercenaries hunting down survivors who refuse to submit for “voluntary” medical experiments. Scene two introduces our hero, Parsifal – a name with appropriately mythic connotations – as he engages in some Mad Max style car wars in order to win some prize or other.


The Eurac leader's Picasso pastiche; only thing is he identifies with the bombers rather than the bombees

Following this, the story proper gets started as Parsifal is taken to the Alaskan base of the Confederation. A fertile woman, upon whom the fate of the human race depends, is somewhere in New York. It is up to Parsifal to find her and bring her out of the city. He is to be assisted by Bronx and Ratchet. Bronx knows New York like the back of his hand – presumably not the one that has been replaced with metal pincers – whilst Ratchet, who sports the eye-patch that is about the only aspect of Snake Plissken’s look not in evidence on Parsifal himself, is immensely strong and deadly with his bolas.


Snake, er Parsifal, and one of those early 80s blue laser beams

Good comic-book / pulp fun, 2019’s main strengths are a fast pace once the story is underway and a superabundance of action, combined with the fact that everyone involved seems on the same wavelength as far as the ridiculous and cliché are concerned: At one point a Eurac commander actually remarks to a prisoner that “We have ways of making you talk,” while George Eastman is memorably typecast as a simian mutant called “Big Ape”.

Its main weaknesses are some obvious model work and the state of many of the locations used, not so much post-apocalyptic, as with the models and mattes, as post-industrial. Arguably, however, this could also be read as in accord with the general design of the film, as with the Eurac soldiers being equipped with Wookie-type bow-laser combinations and riding white horses that contrast with their own black vaguely kendo or samurai type armour. That blue laser beam effect gets a look in, as do some blinkenlights devices and general purpose oscilloscopes; here one wonders how you test a woman’s fertility with an oscilloscope?


The Eurac troops are about as effective as Stormtroopers

Oliver Onions provide a moody Goblin-esque score, with their title theme also giving Martino the opportunity for a nice sight gag, as a mournful trumpet plays over the image of a ruined Manhattan skyline, before the trumpeter is revealed to be just off to our side. Elsewhere we also get some gratuitous gore, with a Eurac leader being enucleated and the odd gut-spilling in the fight scenes and, more awkwardly, some rats apparently being impaled for real.

While perhaps one of Martino’s less substantial efforts, 2019: After the Fall of New York is fast, funny and passably stylish.

[The film is screening this Friday as part of the Edinburgh Film Guild's Apocalypse and Beyond screening - more information here: http://edinburghfilmguild.org.uk/film.php?id=44]

Hard Sensation

With the school term over, three somewhat over-aged students, played by Annj Goren, Dirce Funari and someone else, go for a fortnight’s fun in the sun on a private island. The extent to which they can get all-over tans they desire and to sexually experiment individually and collectively is however constrained by the presence of their teacher, played by Lucia Ramirez, as chaperone, and of two sailors who know that any games with the girls are more bother than they are worth in terms of their employment and continuing liberty.

Such concerns are not shared by three escaped convicts, played by Mark Shanon, George Eastman and someone else, who are hiding out on the island after their boat ran aground.

While Eastman remains focused on evading the authorities, Shanon and the other guy are more intent on having fun with the girls and, in the case of the other guy, a homosexual, the sailors...

As any serious student of Eurosleaze can probably tell from looking at the main names among the cast, Hard Sensation is another one of Joe D’Amato’s Dominican Republic pornotropic horrors.


Shanon and Ramirez

Whereas Erotic Nights of the Living Dead combined porn and fantasy horror and Orgasmo Nero porn and cannibal primitive melodrama, Hard Sensation is a combination of porn and the Desperate Hours / Last House on the Left hostage / rape-revenge scenario.

As a slice of sick and sleazy exploitation it does the job in that inimitable D’Amato fashion, with the relative brevity of the film and the sex scenes in the version under review – even when regular hardcore performers Shanon, Funari and Ramirez are involved – appearing more indicative of cuts than self-imposed restraint.


The homosexual convict, a J&B bottle and a symbolic rape / real power scenario

In particular, whilst the rape scenes are not really sufficiently developed to shift from no-means-no rape to no-means-yes porno-rape that they are accompanied by traditional porn funk grooves courtesy of Alessandro Alessandroni (albeit perhaps more likely to be via stock library cues than original compositions) is telling.

So too is that we are told about but not shown any male-on-male rape, as an indicator of where the boundaries of what D’Amato was willing to film in order to shock his audience lay.

On the plus side, the film is better acted than one might expect – again, we must remember that Shanon was an actor who appears to have turned to porn to pay the bills – while the dialogue has a pleasingly authentic air of abusiveness, teaching all manner of useful Italian words and phrases that you don’t get in your average language class.

Those interested in the film should be warned, however, that the video-sourced English subtitled AVI available from Cinemageddon is of rather poor quality, making it for the D’Amato completist rather than the casual viewer.

Rosso sangue / Absurd

Joe D'Amato's follow-up to Anthropophagous opens much as its predecessor had finished, with George Eastman's hulking man-monster literally spilling his guts.

The similarity ends there, however, as rather than consuming his own entrails and thus bringing about his demise, Eastman's character, Mikos Stenopolis, has the capacity to regenerate just about any damage he may sustain within a remarkably short period of time, much to the surprise of the staff at the local hospital.

This ability, it seems, is the result of some experiments carried out on Mikos in his Greek homeland, a plot device clearly intended to further link the character to the previous film, which had actually taken place on a Greek island.

If the experiment has left Mikos's near immortal - he cannot regenerate damage to his brain, leading to a variant on the time-honoured aim for the head scenario - it has also left him even more psychotic than he already was.

Mikos's nemesis, who was responsible for his initial gut-spilling, is a Greek Orthodox priest, played by Edmund Purdom with dubious accent. His role in the experiment is equally unclear. As he tries to explain to Charles Borromel's unsurprisingly uncomprehending police chief, "I serve god with biochemistry."

What is certain, however, is that Purdom's priest is Dr Loomis to Eastman's Michael Myers, with the bulk of the film - scripted by Eastman and possibly Bruno Mattei, under his Jimmy Matheus alias - playing out as a homage / rip-off of the first two Halloween films in setting and incidents. Mikos, an unstoppable force of evil, is even referred to as "the boogey-man" a number of times.

Rather than the occasion being Halloween, though, it is the big game between the Rams and the Steelers for "the championship". Whilst the intention here was clearly to Americanise the film, the attempt fails. First, as Kim Newman noted in Nightmare Movies, since the adults gathered for the game - conveniently leaving their children alone with the babysitter to face the monster - incongruously snack on pasta. Second, because the filmmakers' representation of the game is more like soccer or rugby than gridiron, going from end to end at a frantic pace. (It may also be noted that at one point the supposed quarterback according to the voice-off is clearly a running back from the hand-off play that is made and the jersey number he is wearing; in another a touchdown is scored just before half-time but there seems to be no point-after attempt.)

Whereas Carpenter had his characters watch The Thing from Another World, D'Amato has the children, played by William Berger's daughter Katya and son Kasimir, watch one of his Dominican Republic films. Thankfully, however, Mark Shannon and Lucia Ramirez are dubbed as for an innocent romantic drama rather than a horror-porn hybrid.

If D'Amato skips on the sex and nudity that represents one of the two major components of his film-making approach, he more than compensates for this with horror and gore, whether Mikos holding in his entrails at the start; drilling one victim through the head; subjecting another to an involuntary trepanation with a band-saw, or putting a third in an oven. In other words, the film is just as worthy of its Rosso sangue - Red Blood - name as its Absurd one.

Though D'Amato would be the first to admit he is no John Carpenter, he is also a better director than many would give him credit for, generating plenty of atmospheric and a particularly suspenseful final act in which the kids - one bed ridden - must somehow defend themselves against the unstoppable boogey-man.

Other points of note include an early role for Michele Soavi, as an ill-fated member of a motorcycle gang; a practical joke playing, mask-wearing kid, and on-screen role for dubbing-artist Ted Russoff.

Carlo Maria Cordio provides an eerily effective soundtrack of swirling and droning synthesiser-led themes that build to intense, percussive crescendos in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Goblin or Fabio Frizzi's work on City of the Living Dead, but which ultimately lacks their subtlety and imagination.

In sum, better than you might think.