Guilty Pleasure No. 64: Karate Warrior (dir by Fabrizio De Angelis)

Posted on September 30, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Oh, come on,” I said last week, “this is a perfectly fine film.”

I was saying that because I was watching the 1987 film, Karate Warriors, with a group of friends. They felt that it was a largely pointless film that didn’t really have much of a plot. I felt that it was an interesting piece of history, seeing as how it was an Italian rip-off of The Karate Kid that was made by several associates of Lucio Fulci. And while Fulci himself wasn’t involved with the film, the scene where the lead character, young Anthony Scott (Kim Rossi Stuart), is savagely beaten up with the bad guys is so unnecessarily bloody that it feels like an homage to Fulci if nothing else. The scene, which makes this rip-off of The Karate Kid too graphic for the film’s target audience, really does epitomize everything that made the Italian exploitation industry so memorable.

Teenager Anthony Scott is in the Philippines so he can visit his father (Jared Martin, who starred in Fulci’s Warriors of the Year 2072), a journalist who is apparently in semi-hiding because of a series of articles that he wrote that exposed government corruption. (Don’t worry too much about the father’s backstory because it doesn’t really play any sort of role in the film.) Anthony runs afoul of the local teenage crime lord, Quino (Enrico Torralba). Quino is not only running a protection racket but he’s also the local karate champion. When Anthony stands up to Quino, he gets beaten up and Anthony’s girlfriend, Maria (Janelle Barretto), nearly loses her home when Quino’s gang sets it on fire. The half-dead Anthony is discovered by Master Kimura (Ken Watanabe — no, not that Ken Watanabe). Master Kimura takes Anthony into the forest and teaches him the “Stroke of the Dragon.” One montage later, Anthony is ready to enter the local karate tournament and take on Quino. For some reason, it never occurs to Anthony to let his father know that he’s now living with Master Kimura so, while Anthony is training, his father and his mother (Janet Agren, who co-starred in Fulci’s City of the Living Dead) are desperately searching for him in Manila.

Karate Warrior is only 84 minutes long and, for reasons that are not quite clear, Anthony’s training and the final tournament are all crammed into the film’s final 20 minutes. Before that, the film is a travelogue of Anthony wandering around Manila, getting conned by nearly everyone that he meets, and trying to flirt with Maria. So yes, the film is a bit plotless but I found the film’s meandering spirit to be a bit charming. It’s rare to see a film that’s so honest about only having 20 minutes worth of plot. The English language version also has the extra treat of some really bad dubbing. At one point, it sounds as if a totally different actor took over dubbing Anthony. The cheerful of ineptness of it all was rather likable.

The film was directed by Fabrizio De Angelis, who produced Fulci’s Beyond trilogy. My friends may have disliked it but the film was a big enough of a success in Italy that it led to 6 sequels. I can’t wait to watch every one of them!

Previous Guilty Pleasures

International Horror Film Review: Manhattan Baby (dir by Lucio Fulci)

Posted on October 6, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Manhattan, baby!”

That’s what a friend of mine yelled a few years ago. Jack was a choreographer who had just received a call from someone in New York City, offering him the chance to come work on an off-Broadway show. He accepted, of course and then he hugged everyone who had been standing nearby, listening to the call.

“Manhattan, baby!” he shouted.

Now, the show itself didn’t really work out but Jack did get a trip to Manhattan out of it and really, I think that’s what everyone was excited about. No matter how many bad things you may hear about New York City, it’s hard not to get excited when you hear the word Manhattan. For many, Manhattan represents culture, sophistication, and wealth. For others, Manhattan represents crime, inequity, and alienation. Across the world, Manhattan stands for everything that is both good and bad about America. Just the word Manhattan carries a power to it. You would never get excited if someone announced that they had gotten a job in Minnesota, for instance. If Jack had shouted, “Minnesota, baby!,” we all would have been concerned about him. Minnesota? Who gives a fuck? But Manhattan …. Manhattan has power, baby!

Manhattan also lent its name to one of Lucio Fulci’s post-Zombi films and the title just happened to duplicate Jack’s proclomation, Manhattan Baby. Released in 1982, Manhattan Baby is often cited as being the last of Fulci’s “major” productions. While his career was reinvigorated by the success of the films he made with producer Fabrizio De Angelis (including Zombi 2 and the Beyond trilogy), Fulci and De Angelis had a falling out over Manhattan Baby. Fulci claimed that De Angelis essentially forced him to make the movie, despite the fact that Fulci himself did not have much interest in the script. Initially, the film was to be a special effects spectacluar with a large budget but, after the controversy surrounding Fulci’s The New York Ripper, the budget was drastically scaled back and the special effects were done on the cheap. Fulci later said that he felt the movie was terrible and that it set back his career.

As for what the film is actually about, Manhattan Baby deals with …. well, the plot is not easy to describe. Fulci’s films were always better known for their surreal imagery than their tight plots and, even by his standards, Manhattan Baby is all over the place. The film opens in Egypt, where archeologist George Hacker (Christopher Connelly) is struck blind when he enters a previously unexplored tomb. Meanwhile, his daughter, Susie (Brigitta Boccoli), is given an amulet by another blind woman.

Back in Manhattan, George waits for his sight to return and Susie and her little brother, Tommy (Giovanni Frezza, who played Bob In The House By The Cemetery) start to act weird. It turns out that their bedroom is now some sort of demensional gateway, from which snakes sometimes emerge. At the same time, the gateway occasionally sucks people through and they end up stranded in the Egyptian desert. Why? Who knows? Is Susie possessed or does the gateway operate independently from her? Why does she occasionally glow a weird blue color? Why do she and her brother suddenly seem to hate their nannny (played by Cinzia De Ponti, who was also in The New York Ripper)? It all has something to do with the amulet but the exact details of how it all works seems to change from scene-to-scene. Eventually, it turns out that the owner of the local antique shop knows about the amulet and its evil designs. Unfortunately, all of his stuffed birds come to life and peck his eyes out. Meanwhile, Susie’s parents and her doctors wonder why her latest x-ray seems to indicate that Susie has a cobra living inside of her and….

Like I said, it doesn’t really make any sense and, despite the power of the name, the meaning behind Manhattan Baby as a title is never really explained. In fact, more time is probably spent in Egypt than in Manhattan. It’s easy to assume that the film was called Manhattan Baby because it was felt that the title would appeal to American audiences but, when then the film was released in the U.S., it was actually retitled Eye of the Evil Dead in an attempt to disguise it as being a sequel to Sam Raimi’s classic shocker. (This was actually a common practice as far as the Italian film industry was concerned. Many films were retitled to disguise them as being a sequel. Fulci’s Zombi 2, for instance, recieved that title because, in Europe, Dawn of the Dead was released under the title Zombi.)

One can understand Fulci’s frustration with Manhattan Baby but, at the same time, is it really as bad as he often said it was? Yes, the plot is incoherent but that’s to be expected with a Fulci film. Yes, the special effects are cheap but again, that’s kind of part of the charm when it comes to Italian exploitation films. While Manhattan Baby never duplicates the ominous atmosphere of Zombi 2 or achieves the same sort of surreal grandeur as The Byond trilgoy, there are still enough memorable, if confusing, moments to make it watchable. The sequece where a shot of a man standing in a doorway cuts to a shot of him lying dead in the desert works surprisingly well. The scene where the shop owner is attacked by reanimated birds is both ludiscrous and scary, in the grand Fulci tradition. With their emphasis on foolhardy explorers ignoring curses, the Egyptian scenes feel almost as if they could have been lifted from one of the Hammer mummy films. Manhattan Baby may not be Fulci’s best but it’s hardly his worst.

In fact, with its obsession with blindness, Manhttan Baby is actually one of Fulci’s more personal films. Fulci was diabetic and reportedly lived in fear that he would someday lose his eyesight. Many critics, including me, have suggested that he dealt with this fear by having people lose their eyesight in his movies, often in the most violent ways possible. Manhattan Baby is full of people losing the ability to see. George Hacker is rendered blind in Egypt. The mysterious Egyptain woman hands out amulets to people who she cannot see. The store owner loses his eyes. One of George’s colleagues falls on a bed of spikers and, of course, one spike goes straight through an eye. Manhattan Baby is all about blindness and only be getting rid of the amulet can George hope to once again truly see the world and the people that he loves. If only illness could be tossed away as easily as an amulet.

Despite Fulci’s disdain for the final result, Manhattan Baby is hardly the disaster that it’s often made out to be. Those who aren’t familiar with Fulci’s unique aesthetic will undoubtedly confused by the film but, for those of us who know the man’s work, Manhattan Baby may be a minor Fulci film but it’s still an occasionally intriguing one.

The Daily Horror Grindhouse: Zombi 2 (dir by Lucio Fulci)

Posted on October 28, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(After reading my review, please be sure to check out Arleigh’s thoughts on Zombi 2!)

Two questions:

1) Do you love Zombie movies?

2) Have you seen Lucio Fulci’s 1979 film Zombi 2?

If your answer to the first question was yes, then you should definitely have had the same answer for the second. Along with launching the long and extremely influential genre of the Italian zombie film and being one of the best zombie films ever made, Zombi 2 is also one of the best horror films ever made.

First off, a few words about that title. Zombi was the Italian title for George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Zombi was a huge hit on Italy and, in that shameless way that is beloved by all Italian horror fans, producers Fabrizio De Angelis and Ugo Tucci decided to take advantage of Zombi‘s success by naming their upcoming zombie film Zombi 2. And, while I have always liked to think of Zombi 2 as being a prequel to Romero’s Dead trilogy, Zombi 2 is actually in no way related to Dawn of the Dead.

It has often been assumed that Zombi 2 was directly inspired by Dawn of the Dead. While Romero’s film certainly provided more of an influence than just providing a title, Zombi 2 was actually in production before Dawn of the Dead opened in Italy. And, ultimately, Zombi 2 is a far different film from Romero’s film. Eschewing the social commentary and satire that ran through Dawn of the Dead, Zombi 2 is instead a work of pure horror. They’re both excellent films but Dawn of the Dead ultimately inspires debate while Zombi 2 inspires nightmares.

Opening with a previously dead body being shot in the head as it slowly sits up on a stretcher and ending with a haunting vision of apocalypse, Zombi 2 is coated in a palpable atmosphere of doom. A boat floats into a New York harbor and the two cops who investigate are greeted by a lumbering and hungry corpse. Tisa Farrow plays the daughter of the boat’s owner. When she and a reporter (Ian McCulloch, giving a likable and bemused performance that often finds him playing straight man to a bunch of decaying corpses and which provides a nice run up for his openly subversive performance in Zombie Holocaust) team up to find her father, their investigation leads them to an isolated island where the haunted and alcoholic Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson, bringing so much gravity and self-loathing to his role that he literally elevates the entire film) is struggling to deal with an outbreak of zombies. Along with a boat captain (Al Cliver) and his girlfriend (Auretta Gay), McCulloch and Farrow try to escape the island before they end up joining the ranks of the undead…

As a director, Lucio Fulci was known for bringing his own unique visual flair to the horror genre. Fulci, perhaps more than any of the other great Italian horror directors working during the Italian horror boom of the 80s and 90s, literally brought nightmares to cinematic life. As a result, Zombi 2 is probably one of the most visually memorable zombie films ever made. From the minute that McCulloch, Farrow, Cliver, and Gay arrive on the island, you can literally feel the oppressively hot wind and dusty wind that blows through every scene. When the dead walk across the desolate landscape, Fulci emphasizes the decayed state of these zombies, forcing the audience to consider just how fragile the human body truly is. The fact that the undead manage to be so pathetic and so dangerous at the same time only serves to make them all the more frightening. When a group of conquistadors come back to life, Fulci films it from their point of view and, for a few minutes, we literally are one of the undead, clawing our way out of a grave. Needless to say, Fulci doesn’t shy away from the gore of a zombie apocalypse either. His zombies are ravenous and destructive. The Walking Dead may be bloody but it’s got nothing on Zombi 2.

Along with the conquistador scene, Zombi 2 is especially remembered for two scenes, both of which showcase the best of both Fulci and Italian horror.

One is the scene where Dr. Menard’s wife (Olga Karlatos) is menaced by zombies after taking a shower. Even after she slams the bathroom door, a zombies hand breaks through the door and grabs her by the hair and starts to pull her through the jagged hole in the door. As she is slowly pulled to her doom, her eyeball is pierced by a splinter of wood. It’s definitely an over-the-top moment, the type of thing that we expect from an Italian horror film. But, as over-the-top as it may be, it’s also incredibly effective and terrifying. It’s a scene that lets us know that there is no escape from our fate. It’s a scene that reminds us that the zombies will always win because there is no way to lock out death.

(In fact, it’s such an iconic scene that almost all of Fulci’s subsequent films would feature a character losing an eye. Adding a certain poignancy to his trademark scenes of ocular destruction was the fact that Fulci, himself, was diabetic and reportedly often feared that he would lose his eyesight.)

The other is a scene that always seems to bring a smile to the face of anyone who see it. That’s the scene where a zombie gets into a fight with a shark while Auretta Gay swims nearby. Again, it’s a bit ludicrous but it’s also incredibly effective. If nothing else, it invites us to wonder how — if a shark can’t beat a zombie — can there be any hope for humanity?

The answer, of course, is that there isn’t. Ultimately, in the world of Fulci’s film, whether by causes natural or unnatural, we’re all destined to become one of the zombies.