WONDER WOMEN (aka THE DEADLY AND THE BEAUTIFUL, THE WOMEN OF TRANSPLANT ISLAND)

 

Robert Vincent O'Neill, director of the teenage hooker classic Angel, made this kung fu chicks quickie in 1973. The sexy-but-evil Dr. Tsu (played to the yellow-peril extreme by Nancy Kwan) houses her base of operations on a secret island where her elite team of female kung fu commandoes kidnaps the world's greatest athletes in order to harvest their perfect parts. This may be a PG movie, but it's an early 70s PG movie, so it begins with underwater topless swimming shots to a funky disco beat, punctuated with sniper killings and a good kick to the face. Soon, the Wonder Women are taking out jockeys, basketball players, and even lacrosse players for the intense and deadly experience that awaits them on Transplant Island.

 

Tsu's lavish and pseudo-futuristic complex (think Barbarella, or worse yet, Galaxina) is quickly ablaze with activity as the illicit surgeries commence, amazing even the kidnappers themselves. $10 million from a mysterious benefactor is at stake, and everybody vaguely smiles. Meanwhile, a crack private eye with a spray-on tan (Ross "Hellcats" Hagen) is cruising around the Philippines (where else?) sounding tough and rocking a white suit á la Sonny Crockett. He is Mike Harbor, and he's onto Dr. Tsu's wicked scheme! But Dr. Tsu is already onto Harbor being onto Dr. Tsu's wicked scheme! And what's more is that Harbor isn't onto Dr. Tsu being already onto Harbor being onto Dr. Tsu's wicked scheme! Uh…..anyway, representing Tsu on the mainland where rich guys are apparently shelling out big bread for better body parts is henchman Gregorius (Sid Haig) who insists that his boss is 100 years ahead of her time and bullies old dudes into going for the weird operation.

 

Back at the ranch, the girls are violently squabbling over who gets to screw the new arrivals before the transplants take place, all while oiling themselves up and playing chess. ('Cuz they're smart as well as sexy, see?) Too bad, because Harbor is only getting closer in his investigation of a missing Jai Alai player, which is apparently a real sport. As is cockfighting, which we are treated to in this flick, but which isn't at all what you might expect (it involves chickens – no priapistic men dick-fencing here! En guard!!).

 

When the Wonder Women finally go after harbor, he screws one of them, she tries to shoot him afterward, and he disarms her by way of an impromptu pillow fight. Some underwear kung fu, a blast from a sawed-off shogun, and an unnecessary tumble down a flight of stairs later, and Harbor is beating the shit out of everyone who crosses his path in the streets as he pursues the vixen in his jammies. This leads to each of them jacking buses that amount to little more than motorized rickshaws and a surprisingly fun chase sequence through the highways and byways of whatever the hell city they're in. Ultimately, Harbor ends up on the island and gets a Bond-style tour of the facilities by the doctor herself – including an amazing collection of caged mutants, her initially experiments in brain transplants.

 

Then comes the brain-sex. Yeah that's right – BRAIN-SEX. It's exactly what it sounds like. Maybe. At any rate, some of the chicks rebel, the doc gets a throwing star in the spine, and the day is saved, more or less. In the end, Wonder Women is more fun than it probably deserves be, but given its pedigree one should not be surprised. Exploitation giant Arthur Marks executive produced this one, and Hagen himself served as producer. With creds like that, who can ask for more?

 

Highlight of the Film: While inspecting their inventory of cryogenically frozen athletes, one of the nameless karate chicks gazes at a saran-wrapped body and moans, "He sure turns me on!" Another crows, "He turns me on, too!" "What are we going to do about it?" "You take the top half, I'll take the bottom half!" Totally unfair. The guy is, for all intents and purposes, dead. But since he's frozen, his dangly-doo can still offer some use, whereas cunnilingus is absolutely out of the question. May I offer taking turns, ladies? Flip a coin for the first ride. Come on, sex with the clinically dead needn't turn friends against one another.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hey there, fans of smut and trash. It’s your friendly neighborhood Mr. Trash, and this week I’ve got a picture about an experimental procedure gone terribly wrong, another picture about an experimental procedure gone just as terribly wrong, and just to mix things up, a Eurotrash haunted cemetery flick. It’s all horror, all the time this week at the Wrap-Up. Why, you got a problem with that?

 

BRAINWAVES (aka SHADOW OF DEATH) – Before Uwe Boll, there existed another German director who churned out turd after turd, effectively earning himself a top spot in the pantheon of worst filmmakers of all time. Somehow, Ulli Lommel is only barely remembered for this achievement, despite the fact that he is still making movies. In the early 80s, he cranked out all kinds of superb crap like The Boogeyman and The Devonsville Terror, and once in a while he could pull an Uwe Boll and get real actors in these steaming piles - such is the case with Tony Curtis' sad turn in BrainWaves.

 

Our tale opens with the murder of some poor chick by the old radio-in-the-bathtub trick (sufficing as a damn good reason to film a nude woman jiggling relentlessly in water – and why not?). Cut to wealthy white people on a boat, including Keir Dullea (Dave from 2001), Vera Miles, and 80s Lommel regular Suzanna Love. These people are so perfectly rooted in 1983 that they play Space Invaders and Rubik’s Cube simultaneously, although sadly not while jamming out to Kajagoogoo. Anyway, Kaylie (Love) is soon thrown into a coma as the result of getting hit by a car (her heel gets caught in the trolley tracks because she is a vapid broad), and the prognosis sucks ass. Luckily, Dr. Clavius (Curtis) has a novel idea: transplant the brainwaves from the murdered woman into Kaylie’s noodle to jumpstart her gray matter. Nevermind that dead people don’t actually have brainwaves – Clavius knows what he’s doing, damnit!

 

The process works (of course), and after a dreadfully long sequence of physical therapy, the movie actually picks up where it left off. And here is where the movie decides believability is kind of lame and goes for the gold: whenever Kaylie sleeps, she relives the last moments of the dead woman’s life and becomes obsessed with solving her murder. You know, because she was jumpstarted by the DEAD woman’s brainwaves. Um…what?! Anyway, the murderer is detected from a list of exactly one suspect – the boyfriend, whose initials are tattooed on his wrist as seen at the scene of the murder. Really? Christ’s sakes. The late great character actor Percy Rodrigues, who voiced just about every trailer for 80s horror films, also appears in BrainWaves among the doctors in the hospital. IMDb makes a big deal about how “articulate” he was, since he was black and they are racist. More like the KKKDb, if you ask me.

 

Highlight of the Film: As much as I’d like to say the highlight here is the scene where Dullea lies in bed with his 6 year old son and chants “Johnny Whoops!” about a hundred times in a row (which I have on good authority is the leading cause of homosexuality in children), there are actually better moments here. For me, the kicker is when Kaylie visits the bay beneath the Golden Gate bridge with her husband and expresses confusion over her former life and identity. For those keeping score at home, this is Ulli Lommel directly ripping off Hitchcock (specifically, Vertigo). And hey, he even got Vera Miles in this, since she was in The Wrong Man, Psycho, and even an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” Look, if Brian DePalma fucks it up every single time, what on God’s Jesus-Green Earth makes Lommel think he’ll get away with it? Points for balls, though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE REJUVENATOR (aka REJUVENATRIX) - Sort of a half-assed rip-off of The Re-Animator, this 1988 horror flick concerns a spoiled actress who is past her prime and desirous of something to...can you guess?...rejuvenate her. Sigh. In a secret and probably evil research facility, Specimen 5254 breaks out of its cage and later turns up torn to bloody pieces. The scientists worry about losing their funding, so they vow to keep it extra secret. It turns out that their biggest benefactor is an over the hill actress (Vivian Lanko in her only starring role, thank God) who plans on becoming young again once the research is complete. Naturally, the old bitch is impatient and the scientists are unethical (like all scientists, I suspect), so they rush their work and administer a questionable serum into the woman’s brain. It works…kinda. She looks younger, but she’s dog ugly. Is she supposed to be? Hell if I know, but I think they oughta put the bandages back on.

 

Meanwhile, Specimen 7427 raises a creepy monster hand to the bars. Whatever. Anyway, the scientist begins romancing the actress, and they put on fancy clothes and waltz together and screw to sexy flute music. Afterward, he falls asleep (of course – men!) and she mutates just a little bit, enough to make her a little uglier and for her forward to pulsate. “You’re experiencing some complications,” he demurs. Unsurprisingly, those complications get more complicated with time, and ultimately she transforms from a hideous monster to a more hideous monster that kills people. Eventually, the good doctor determines that more “brain juice” is needed to return her to human form, which will require the occasional murder. Until then, our heroine jams out at a Poison Dollys concert at Club Paradise where belly dancers gyrate on platforms and she can pick up some young dude to boink. Unfortunately, she turns into a monster there, so she kills some chick instead. And then twists a security guard’s head off. And then kills the doc’s assistant, Stella. “Stella!” he yells, “STELLLLLA!” To which she replies, “Your Brando needs work, darling.” Wow, that’s good scriptin’.

 

So now she’s got this ginormous veiny brain and Nosferatu teeth, and she rampages through the hospital killing everyone in sight. Then her head explodes in a geyser of goo, followed by some good old fashioned face melting action. Her butler kills the doctor, and some cops bust in the door a wee bit too late. So yeah, this flick blows. And frankly, I don’t get any of this fountain of youth shit. I’m more of a MILF man myself, and I just can’t wait for my wife to get all dry and leathery. Go ahead – have another cigarette, baby.

 

Highlight of the Film: It turns out that the woman’s creepy old butler/chauffeur used to be her lover, until he got too long in the tooth and was demoted to servant status. Now she’s young again and forcing him to take her around town while she flaunts her wares and bones the doc (and every other oily stud she can find). She’s as cold as ice, and willing to sacrifice their love. Also, she never takes advice, but someday she’ll pay the price, I know. I’ve seen it before, it happens all the time – she’s closing the door, she leaves the world behind. Man, Foreigner rules. What? Ladies and Gentlemen – The Poison Dollys!!

 

 

GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE - Why, oh why do I keep watching Lamberto Bava films? Is it just because I dig Demons so much? Is that really enough to make up for Monster Shark and The Ogre? I don't know for sure, but I do know I'll keep watching his flicks until he dies or quits making them. This particular Bava, Jr. movie was done in 1987 for Italian TV, and it deals with the tired old plot of a rough group of young’uns spending the night in a mausoleum in an effort to hide from the fuzz. (And you know they’re tough since they shoplift sausages and they’ve got Madonna airbrushed onto the side of their van!) Soon, they’re hiding in the cemetery where they witness an unmanned carriage driven by horses.

 

This is followed by rolling fog, an ominous bell toll, and a howling wolf (an actual canine, not a lost bluesman). I’ve seen plenty of horror clichés in my time, but for Christ’s sake, Bava. Did you even try on this one? He even has one character moan, “This looks like something outta a B horror movie!” Is that supposed to be metatextual? Managing to cleverly sink their amazing van in a creek, our intrepid heroes hoof out of there only to encounter monstrous screams from the woods and giant animal tracks in the dirt. More bell ringing leads them to the mausoleum, where they instantly find a violent warning etched in Latin into a statue of a hooded demon. So naturally, they stick around. Eventually, they wander into some manner of tavern on the grounds of the cemetery (???), where creepy-looking peasants with oily hair and black eyes serve sausages and beer (these kids really dig sausages). It’s here that they discover an assload of cash, credit cards, and jewelry which they wickedly covet. The barkeep explains that anyone who spends one night in their cursed underground crypt gets the treasure. Huzzah! It may be the “waiting room to Hell,” but that’s a lot of bread, so off they go.

 

The place is cavernous, full of spider webs and rats, chattering skulls, and unexplained wind. Says one smartass, “A TV preacher has got more soul than this place!” What the hell does that even mean? But one frightened young lady in the gang protests even being there: “I like fun, silly things – candy, Christmas cards, Woody Allen, things like that!” I am not making this up. The dialogue is really like this. Finally, 48 minutes into the movie, a monster shows up – in this case, a mummy. Or maybe it’s a zombie. I’m not really sure – neither of those have fangs, and this guy does. It’s some sort of mummy-zombie-vampire hybrid. I think. At any rate, it just wanders around in circles and the kids run away from it.

 

Truth be told, I can just give you a damn list from here. Giant swamp eyeball (á la the trash monster in Star Wars), another zombiesque creature, threatening guys hanging from nooses, a ridiculous monster family banquet, skeletons, and a “maze without exits,” whatever that’s all about. Would ya believe that they actually get out and win the prize? But it doesn’t much matter because their host turns out to be a guy in a really bad K-Mart Halloween mask with glowing eyes, not to mention…gasp!...they’ve been dead the whole time and in Hell! Nah, he’s just kidding – it was just a mask and then they go to jail. For the sausages. Up yours, Bava.

 

Highlight of the Film: Once they reach the haunted mausoleum, they all couple up in their sleeping bags except for the lame-ass fifth wheel, who whines, “Hey guys, go to sleep or you won’t be able to anything tomorrow!” Like what, douchebag? What exactly are these fantastic activities you’ve planned that depend so strongly upon unspent semen? Whoever said “It’s a damn good thing I didn’t get laid last night or I’d be a wreck today”?? That guy’s an asshole. Here is the first 10 minutes of Graveyard Disturbance. The rest can be found in segments on YouTube, if it’s really worth it to you.