February Round-Up

Dragon Fury (1995)

Random bits of The Terminator, Highlander and the Masters of the Universe movie converge as a swordsman from the year 2099 (Robert Chapin) is sent back in time to 1990s LA to try and retrieve the antidote to a disease that will wreck havoc in the future, while an evil dictator (Richard Lynch) sends a few henchmen back in time to stop him. Ultra-low budget, much of the film looks as if it was shot in the backstreets and motel rooms of LA, the inner city backdrops and plot lunacy recalls the skid row eccentricity of ‘The Master Demon’, without ever being quite as compelling. Still, Dragon Fury is undemanding 1990s VHS store filler, with the expected amount of action, T&A and the occasional bloody decapitation on hand to save the day. Low-brow humour is very much in evidence too. Lynch’s heavies are transported to 1990s LA in a compromising position and as a result are immediately set upon by a homophobic street gang. There is also a time travelling love interest (Chona Jason) who seems more interested in getting a quick fuck from the hero than helping him recover his lost memory, taking her top off and delivering the film’s best line “I’ll answer more questions after we rest and have sex”.

Aside from the ever dependable villainy of Richard Lynch, the most charismatic cast member by far here is T.J. Storm, who I chiefly remember from the 1990s ‘Conan’ TV series, and really deserved a career as a action movie leading man. Not that he has done too badly for himself, having found a niche in the world of motion capture acting. Anonymous, big budget gigs in that capacity include playing Iron Man, The Predator, Colossus in Deadpool and Godzilla in the 2014 film and the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters. So, at least someone here has gone on to bigger and better things. While the lead actor’s mullet has already been the source of much amusement here, there is also the hilarity of the height discrepancy between him and the two female leads. Either he is excessively tall, or they are excessively short, but the amount of time they spend staring up at him must have given the two women neck-ache for weeks afterwards. Dragon Fury is also the first instance I’ve encountered of a director giving ‘special guest appearance by’ credit to himself, I’m sure he took allot of persuasion to do a cameo in his own movie.

Savage Harbor (1987)

Starring Sylvester Stallone's brother, Robert Mitchum's son and Lisa Loring...if you've ever wondered what a hot, grown up Wednesday Addams looked like...what Robert Mitchum would have looked like with a mullet...or what Sylvester Stallone would have looked like with a Lennie Bennett-style male perm then this film will satisfy your curiosity if not a great deal else. Stallone and Mitchum play a pair of sailors who find love in the same port (if ever there was a sentence that came out sounding all wrong, then that was it). Mitchum finds love with a stripper (Loring) which plays out relatively incident free. Less fortunate is Stallone when he hooks with the British moll of repulsive gangster, who'd rather kidnap her and get her hooked on heroin, than give her up to Stallone. Exploitation movie vet Nicholas ‘Don’t Answer the Phone’ Worth initially features heavily as the gangster’s right hand man, then disappears for about an hour, only to briefly show up again towards the end.

Director Carl Monson had a sexploitation background helming the likes of A Scream in the Streets, Please Don't Eat My Mother and The Takers for Harry Novak's Box Office International films in the 1970s. For what would turn out to be his last film, Monson moves up the Hollywood food chain slightly here, working with B level stars and in the direct to video action realm. Still the specter of Monson's A Scream in the Streets haunts this movie's mixture of crime and sex, most notably during Stallone’s run-in with a transvestite. There is a similar mean spirited aura to Savage Harbor too, with a thick sense of misogyny and homophobia at work. Sad to say though that without regular intervals of lengthy soft core sex, Carl Monson movies are just more dull than anything else.