EMPEROR OF THE NORTH: Pound for Glory

The year is 1933. The United States of America has been brought to its knees by economic disaster, resulting in the Great Depression. Across the country, millions of people find themselves out of work and no longer able to keep roofs over their heads. Men become transients who survive by any means necessary and travel the land looking for work by stowing away on trains. One conductor who refuses to let hobos ride his train for free is Shack (Ernest Borgnine), a fearsome brute unafraid to murder any unwanted passenger. He is a despised legend to both the hobos of the country and the railway workers forced to deal upfront with his violent tactics, but the Shack may have just met his match in the most famous tramp of them, A-Number-One (Lee Marvin).

A-Number-One is a legend in his own right and he is determined to get to Portland by way of Shack’s train no matter what. The gauntlet has been thrown down, and with his fellow bums cheering him on and the rail men taking bets on his possible fate, A-Number-One accepts the challenge of outwitting the sadistic conductor with the help of the brash younger hobo Cigaret (Keith Carradine) and seeing if he has what it takes to become “Emperor of the North Pole”.

Robert Aldrich’s harrowing, gritty period adventure Emperor of the North didn’t stand a chance at the box office when it first released; its own studio 20^th Century Fox was confused as to how it should be effectively marketed to the masses, and films aimed at younger audiences made on modest budgets were finding greater success and profitability. It would take several decades for this criminally underrated masterpiece to find appreciative viewers through home video and cable television.

Few filmmakers were able to take advantage of the Hollywood studio system to make entertaining features with subversive undertones as effectively and memorably as Robert Aldrich did in the 1950’s and 60’s. After all, this is the man who directed the seminal Atomic Age film noir Kiss Me Deadly, the creepy thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and the exhilarating WWII action epic The Dirty Dozen. Emperor stands as one of Aldrich’s greatest achievements behind the camera, one that stands the test of time thanks to its unflinching approach to addressing the poverty and unlawful brutality that has been all too present in America since it was founded. Income inequality and unpoliced abuses of the free market by major corporations and their political puppets help to create the situations in which most unemployed Americans find themselves presently, and the excessive force practiced by this country’s law enforcement professionals against its citizenry is worse than it ever was.

Screenwriter Christopher Knopf (20 Million Miles to Earth) drew upon two of Jack London’s autobiographical accounts of his days traveling across the U.S. as the basis for a script that is rich in evocative imagery and hard-boiled dialogue seeped in the sad yet cautiously optimistic poetry of the open road. Under Aldrich’s brutally harsh direction, Emperor of the North comes to embody the ongoing battle between the besieged working class and the authoritarians granted almost unlimited power to bend the proletariat to the will of the oligarchy, only told in the broad strokes of mythology. A-Number-One, portrayed with playful wisdom and true grit by the legendary Lee Marvin, is the classic hero who is beloved and lionized by his fellow man to heights that will ensure his legacy will endure long after he is dead. He is given the perfect villain in the form of the sadistic Shack, brought to sweaty, bug-eyed, yellow-teethed life by the late Ernest Borgnine, a god among character acting who always made the movies he appeared in just a little bit better just from his presence alone.

My next dating profile pic.

Borgnine imbues Shack with a fury that borders on demonic and his flaring blue eyes cannot conceal, and his character is granted enough justification for his unforgivably atrocious actions against the men who commit the cardinal sin of simply wanting a free ride they would otherwise pay for if they had the money. To this day, pundits and politicians alike complain that lower and middle class Americans are always wanting a “free ride”, and by that they naturally mean government-funded social programs that are created to assist those who do not have massive bank accounts, golden parachutes, and million dollar book deals to fund their lifestyle. If the character of Shack wasn’t meant to personify the right-wing viewpoint that the poor are only that way because they are lazy and need to be taught to respect authority and the value of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and learning the value of an honest day’s work, he ends up being that personification when you analyze the film from a contemporary social and political perspective. Perhaps that is what Aldrich, who turned an exciting WWII action epic into a subtle yet scathing critique of the Vietnam War, had in mind all along.

Aldrich lets the audience know he doesn’t intend to play around in the opening scene where Shack clubs a hobo over the head and watches as the poor man gets pulled under the train and cut in half, and the camera refuses to turn away from the bloody aftermath. Such shocking imagery was not exactly common in PG-rated studio features, but Emperor of the North manages to skirt the draconian laws of the MPAA by not being a wall-to-wall festival of violence and gore. The film runs nearly a minute of two hours but doesn’t fall victim to slow stretches and scenes that go nowhere thanks to the sharp editing of longtime Aldrich collaborator Michael Luciano (Twilight’s Last Gleaming). The time between action sequences is wisely spent setting up the characters and the times they now live in with art direction by Fox veteran Jack Martin Smith (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, M*A*S*H) and set decoration by Raphael Bretton (The Towering Inferno) that adds immeasurably to its authentic atmosphere of grime and desperation. Another favored member of Aldrich’s behind-the-scenes talent is composer Frank De Vol (who worked on some of the director’s best features, as well as creating the theme music for The Brady Bunch), contributing a jaunty original soundtrack that ideally underscores the quieter moments of Emperor as well as the scenes where the tension is thick enough to cut with a chainsaw.

The climatic set-piece features a thrilling showdown between A-Number-One and Shack atop the moving track where the two combatants duel to the finish with any weapon they can get their hands on. Aldrich shoots the action with a respect for the geography of the final battle and achieves an unforgettable effect through a combination of tight close-ups and professional stunt work that you just don’t see on the big screen anymore. Keith Carradine, in one of his earliest film roles, rips into the character of Cigaret with swaggering confidence and a brash, loud-mouthed personality that could only come about from the need to conceal embarrassing inadequacies. His chemistry with Marvin is convincing enough to power their unlikely mentor-student relationship. Aldrich stocks the supporting cast of Emperor of the North with some of the finest character actors there ever was, including Matt Clark (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) and Vic Tayback (Alice) as railroad yardmen, Elisha Cook Jr. (The Killing) and Sid Haig (The Devil’s Rejects) as a pair of A-Number-One’s fellow bums, and Simon Oakland (Psycho) as an overwhelmed policemen made to look the fool in one of the film’s comedic highlights.  

In Need of a Gory Getaway? Plan Your Escape to BLOOD ISLAND Today!

Six decades ago, a group of Filipino filmmakers and a few English-speaking actors in need of an easy payday birth one of the wildest and bloodiest franchises in the history of exploitation cinema. I am referring, of course, about the infamous “Blood Island” series – a quartet of insane low-budget horror flicks that delivered to audiences around the world a non-stop parade of slime, sex, and slaughter.

The beginning was a little rough.

1959’s Terror Is A Man, a lo-fi riff on H.G. Wells’ classic science fiction novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, sowed the seeds for the monstrous mayhem to come. But the movie itself is an overly talkative affair about a shipwrecked sailor (Richard Derr) whose lifeboat lands on an island in the middle of who-the-hell-knows where scientist Dr. Charles Girard (Francis Lederer) and his wife/assistant Francis (Greta Thyssen) have transformed a panther into a sort of Man Panther (Flory Carlos), or Panther Man if you will.

Nothing much happens for the first hour of Terror outside of Francis falling in love with the sailor and a surgery scene with less blood than a papercut. For that scene, the producers added a warning bell to cue the audience for mondo disturbing stuff about to happen. That bell sounds like a telephone ringing and when I first heard it, I half-expected Girard to shout, “Will someone answer that damn thing already?” By the time Panther Dude finally breaks free from bondage and goes on a very mild rampage in the movie’s last twenty minutes, you may or may not care one bit. The laughable make-up on the misbegotten mutant does not help either.

Terror was co-directed by Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero, with only de Leon getting screen credit, and produced by Kane W. Lynn. During World War II, Lynn was a pilot in the U.S. Navy stationed in the Philippines. Once the war ended, he decided to settle down there, and it was then that he met Romero and the two men became friends and formed Lynn-Romero Productions. Back in the States, Lynn met up with producer Irwin Pizor, and together with Romero they founded Hemisphere Pictures to ensure American distribution for their Filipino projects.

Out of the partnership between Lynn and Romero came several other movies including The Scavengers (which played on a double bill in the U.S. with Terror Is A Man) and The Raiders of Leyte Gulf, the latter a staple of exploitation trailer compilation DVDs. Few of these did well at the box office, compelling the producers to make a return trip to Blood Island in 1968 for Brides of Blood.

After the sleep-inducing Terror, there was nowhere for the series to go but up. Introducing color and upping the ante in terms of sex and violence made Brides a vastly more entertaining movie. It also one of the Blood Island quartet’s most enduring staples – actor John Ashley. At the time he received the offer to star in Brides, Ashley’s marriage to Deborah Walley had ended and he needed immediate escape. He enjoyed the experience of working in the Philippines so much that he stayed on long after the Blood Island series concluded and produced several exploitation movies in the country that saw release in the U.S. through distributors like Dimension Pictures and Roger Corman’s then newly-formed New World Pictures.

Shot for a meager $75,000, Brides found Ashley playing Peace Corps member Jim Farrell, who escorts Dr. Paul Henderson (Kent Taylor, another B-movie veteran) and his wife Carla (Beverly Powers, credited as “Beverly Hills”) to investigate evidence of atomic radiation at the tropical paradise nicknamed “Blood Island” by the fearful natives. There they encounter Esteban Powers (Mario Montenegro), a 50-year-old man who looks half that age, mutated vegetation with life of its own, and a hideous monstrosity who terrorizes the islanders unless it is offered two naked female sacrifices.

Once again, de Leon and Romero co-directed, but Romero was able to minimize his colleague’s artistic intents behind the camera while amping up Terror Is A Man’s few memorable aspects and frosting the finished cake with plenty of fake blood and a plethora of nude women. When Hemisphere released Brides in the U.S., publicity representative Sam Sherman came up with a marketing gimmick that offered a pair of cheap plastic engagement rings to female moviegoers so that they become Brides of Blood themselves. Sherman’s idea to include fake marriage licenses in the ring set was vetoed because of the potential legal nightmare they could create.

A year after the release of Brides, the series hit its peak big time with Mad Doctor of Blood Island, the most entertainingly lurid and trashy of the quartet. Ashley was brought back to play a different character, pathologist Dr. Bill Foster, while voluptuous film and television actress Angelique Pettyjohn supplied the sex appeal. Foster and Pettyjohn’s character Sheila have come to Blood Island for different reasons: the doc is investigating an outbreak among the natives of a chlorophyll disease, while Sheila is hoping to find her estranged father. Their host Dr. Lorca (Ronald Remy) stays mum about mysterious happenings on the island, which includes people bleeding out green before perishing with faces covered in mossy infections. And once again, there is a rampaging monster in the area and this one both bleeds green and randomly murders islanders.

Mad Doctor opens with a prologue, filmed at an Air Force base in Manila, inviting audiences to take part in the “Oath of Green Blood” by drinking “of the Mystic Emerald fluids herein offered” and becoming ravenous for either sex or murder. Packets of green liquid were handed out to paying patrons during the movie’s American release, another Sam Sherman marketing innovation, though one he later claimed made him sick to his stomach when he tried the stuff himself. Following the oath, we get a cold open with a terrified native woman running naked through the jungle before the chlorophyll beast rips her face to shreds. We are clued into the monster’s presence with a series of wild, repeated zoom-ins. This flick wastes no time whatsoever.

The third and best entry in the Blood Island series boasted its best trailer, narrated with frothing, cackling hysteria by the German-born actor, monologist, concentration camp survivor, and frequent David Letterman guest Brother Theodore (The ‘Burbs).

With de Leon opting out of 1970’s Beast of Blood, Romero returned to bring the series to a close. Picking up immediately after the end of Mad Doctor, Ashley returned as the heroic Dr. Foster, the sole survivor after the previous movie’s green-blooded creature murdered the others and destroyed their boat. Months later, he returns to the island (because some people just never learn) with reporter Myra Russell (Celeste Yarnall) and they find the still-alive Dr. Lorca (played this time by Eddie Garcia), now sporting an eyepatch and continuing his diabolical experiments. He also has the monster from Mad Doctor in his lab, its disembodied head kept alive on machines while its body lays strapped to Lorca’s surgical table.

Though it rarely hits the delirious heights of Mad Doctor, Beast of Blood – which marked Ashley’s debut as producer – has enough sleaze value to justify its existence even as it retreads familiar territory with little inspiration. Severin Films released all four movies on Blu-ray in an attractive box set in late 2018. The set is now out of print and fetching ludicrous prices online, but you can still purchase individual releases of Terror Is A Man, Brides of Blood, and Mac Doctor of Blood Island. If you are in the mood for a cavalcade of carnality and carnage, plan your escape to Blood Island today!

THE LIMEY: Soderbergh + Stamp = Stone Cold Classic

The Limey, directed by Steven Soderbergh from an original screenplay by Lem Dobbs, opens hard and fast and rarely lets up from there. As the Who’s “The Seeker” blasts away in the background we’re thrust into a opening montage depicting the journey of an ex-con named Wilson (Terence Stamp) from his home in England to the suntanned shores of Los Angeles. Wilson has come to the City of Angels for a reason: to find out the truth behind the death of his estranged daughter Jenny (Melissa George). After settling in he meets up with her friend Eduardo Roel (Luis Guzman), the man who sent Wilson the letter telling him about Jenny’s death and no stranger to being a “guest of the state” himself.

Although the official story is that she died in a car accident Wilson knows instinctively that his daughter was murdered. Jenny was romantically involved with Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), a record producer with decadent appetites and criminal associates. With the help of Eduardo and Elaine (Lesley Ann Warren), an acting teacher and another of Jenny’s closest friends, Wilson begins looking into Valentine and his illegal dealings hoping to find the answers he seeks, but they may not be the ones he desires.

Structured as a standard revenge story and ultimately turning out to be anything but, the true brilliance of The Limey is in how it cleverly subverts those tired genre conventions into something wholly original. Before winning Oscar glory and making millions off movies such as Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven, Steven Soderbergh made this intimate low-budget drama virtually under the radar and there’s little surprise that it’s one of his best films. The Limey is a story about failure and regret, and the complex relationships between fathers and their daughters.

At certain points in the film we flash back to Wilson’s younger years and Soderbergh uses this opportunity to seamlessly splice in footage of Stamp in the 1967 Ken Loach drama Poor Cow, in which he played a criminal not dissimilar from Wilson. The director also employs further editing tricks that work in favor of the story instead of hindering it, including the use of sudden time jumps that prefigure the innovative techniques Christopher Nolan would utilize for his breakthrough feature Memento.

Lem Dobbs, who prior credits include Soderbergh’s own Kafka and co-writing the sci-fi cult classic Dark City, contributes the lean, cool, and witty screenplay. Cliff Martinez, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and an accomplished film composer, delivers a great minimalist score. To populate his tale of revenge amongst the fringe dwellers and aging kings of Hollywood Soderbergh rounded up an all-star cast of iconic actors from the 1960’s and 1970’s, the time of the New Hollywood’s dawning.

Lem Dobbs created the role of Wilson with no one but Terence Stamp in mind, and needless to say in a career of many ups and downs this is one of Stamp’s finest hours. Bringing charisma and disarming Cockney humor to his character, Stamp molds Wilson into a genuine human being haunted by his failings as a father and not a engine of destruction with only payback in mind. But don’t let the creased face and graying white hair deceive you because this man is still more than capable of kicking all the ass and taking names he has to in order to get his answers.

Peter Fonda is smartly cast as the record producer Terry Valentine trying to hold onto a piece of his long past heyday while indulging his tastes for younger women and keeping a few skeletons in his rather sizable closet next to his designer suits. The underrated Luis Guzman does solid work as Roel, one of the few good and honest people in Jenny’s life who by the end becomes one of her father’s few real friends. Lesley Ann Warren is given a rare chance to shine as an actress and here she plays her character of Elaine as a friend and surrogate mother figure to Wilson’s daughter who comes to help the aging criminal in his quest.

Barry Newman, who may best be known for playing Kowalski in the high-speed 1971 cult classic Vanishing Point, is quietly effective as Avery, Valentine’s confidante and dirty-tricks man. Nicky Katt, who’s played in everything from Dazed & Confused to Grindhouse, is teamed with 1970’s cult cinema icon Joe Dallesandro as a pair of laconic criminals employed by Avery for his dirty work. The scene where Katt observes the goings-on on the set of a commercial is hilarious.

Did I mention that the one and only Bill Duke was also in this film? Yes, friends, the brilliant filmmaker (Deep Cover) and famed action flick supporting player (Commando, Predator) gets to share a single scene with Stamp where Wilson does most of the talking and Duke just sits in his chair and processes what he witnesses as only he can. It’s pretty goddamn glorious.

The Limey is a small gem of a film, brilliantly directed by Soderbergh on the cusp of his professional comeback and often overlooked because of the fact and skillfully played by a terrific company of actors. I highly recommend it.

TAKE THE….Dadgum Elephant?!: The Godawful DARKMAN Television Pilot

When Sam Raimi came to Hollywood in the early 1980’s following the release of the original The Evil Dead, one of his dream feature film projects was a big screen version of the classic pulp magazine/radio/comic book crime fighter, the Shadow. Unfortunately for Raimi, the rights had been purchased by powerhouse producer Martin Bregman (Scarface), who would ultimately oversee the production of a Shadow film for Universal Pictures under the direction of Russell Mulcahy (Highlander) that was released in the summer of 1994 to middling reviews and box office and failed to spawn a new franchise.

After making Evil Dead II in 1986 for the legendary Dino De Laurentiis, Raimi signed on with Universal to develop a film project based on a superhero idea of his own – a tale of a scientist who develops a revolutionary formula that can repair damaged skin for only for a maximum of 99 minutes and must use that formula in a complicated revenge plot against the gangsters that destroyed his laboratory and left him burned beyond recognition and for dead. Incorporating elements of the Batman comics, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Phantom of the Opera among many other influences, Raimi teamed up with four other screenwriters – including his own brother Ivan Raimi (with whom Sam wrote Army of Darkness and Spider-Man 3) and Chuck Pfarrer (Red Planet) – to flesh out his amalgam of ideas into the story he titled Darkman.

Raimi initially cast Bill Paxton, the future star of his celebrated adaptation of A Simple Plan, in the title role of Dr. Peyton Westlake, the disfigured scientist hellbent on brutal vengeance, and a young up-and-coming actress by the name of Julie Roberts as the girlfriend he inadvertently places in harm’s way as a result of his actions. Due to scheduling conflicts the roles had to be recast hastily; Roberts went on to star in the movie that kicked her career into overdrive, Pretty Woman, but in the process Raimi gained two future Hollywood heavyweights in the form of Liam Neeson (replacing Paxton as Westlake) and his old friend and former roommate Frances McDormand as Westlake’s besieged lady love.

Darkman was not the first time Raimi and McDormand had worked together; after playing the female lead in the Coen Brothers’ classic film noir debut Blood Simple, she popped up briefly as a nun in the opening sequence of Raimi’s post-Evil Dead stab for Tinseltown legitimacy, the frenzied, failed screwball comedy Crimewave.

Released in the final days of the summer of 1990, Darkman wasn’t an instant smash hit as Universal and Raimi had hoped. However it did manage to dethrone the season’s reigning box office champ, the supernatural romance Ghost, and with a final domestic gross of $33 million it earned a tidy little profit since it only cost $16 million to make. Five years after Darkman‘s theatrical release, excellent video rentals and sales and the film’s status as a modest ratings success on network television convinced Universal execs to green-light a pair of sequels to be produced for the studio’s home video division.

Since they weren’t going to have but a fraction of the budget Raimi had at his disposal the first time, Neeson was replaced in the role of Westlake by South African actor Arnold Vosloo. Vosloo had previously appeared as a secondary villain in John Woo’s first American action feature, the Raimi-produced, Pfarrer-scripted Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target. Bradford May, a veteran cinematographer who worked mostly in television but also shot the 1987 kid-friendly horror-comedy The Monster Squad, was drafted to direct the sequels which were released on VHS and laserdisc in 1995 and 1996 and enjoyed a fair amount of success with critics and fans of the original.

After Darkman III: Die Darkman Die the franchise ceased to exist. A remake/reboot has been hinted at over the years, and it may likely happen, but there hasn’t been any movement for quite some time. Let’s hope it stays that way. The original was released on Blu-ray by Scream Factory in February 2014 in a jam-packed special edition package. You can order that disc HERE.

In between the release of Darkman and the two direct-to-video sequels, Universal commissioned a pilot for a half-hour television series loosely based on the original in 1992. Raimi and his producing partner Robert Tapert lent their names and credibility to the questionable endeavor, while Christopher Bowen (Tomorrow Never Dies) took over for Neeson as Dr. Westlake and Kathleen York (Crash) was drafted to play a new character named Jenny. For some odd reason, the only actor from the movie to appear in the pilot was Larry Drake, so memorable in Darkman as the odious villain Robert G. Durant, the exact same role he was playing in the much cheaper TV version.

The pilot cannibalized the movie for stock action footage, and even a shot from the opening scene of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner makes a jaw-dropping appearance in the beginning. The movie footage looks terribly out of place when you consider the lower-budgeted scenes shot for the pilot. Everything is barely held together by Bowen’s ponderous narration. For that part we can place the blame on Robert Eisele, who wrote the pilot script and served as an executive producer alongside Raimi and Tapert, and the direction was handled by ace music video helmer Brian Grant. The 22-minute final product never made it to air.

I have included two separate embeds from Dailymotion and YouTube for your viewing displeasure. Enjoy….or don’t.