Lone Runner

Lone Runner

Italy - 1986

Director - Ruggero Deodato

Media Home Entertainment, 1989, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour 23 minutes

Predating 1987's Swayze soaked sleeper Steel Dawn by a full year, Lone Runner confirms (because I saw it second of the two films) that after the apocalypse there will be a big demand for metrosexual hair styles. Of course that's entirely because the 80's were so damned awesome that the future, even if it's a post-apocalyptic one, will be just like the 80's. When society falls to its knees only heroes will have designer sculpted stubble.

Last time I found myself at the short end of the Deodato stick was back in 1968's Phenomenal, but Lone Runner offers a strong challenge for supremacy of the bummer pile. Fortunately, Deodato had the good sense to kindof remake it a year later, or at least re-imagine it in a far more entertaining way with 1987's Barabarians. I've seen my share of post-apocalypses, even Italian post-apocalypses (the best kind), and to be honest, most of them are pretty lame. Lone Runner's robed nuke-mutants and endless wandering can't be any worse than She Wolves of the Wasteland right?

I feel like I should give Lone Runner another chance just to be fair, but the memory is such a disappointment that I'm not sure I can muster it. Perhaps it's one of those films that is a drag the first time because you have such high hopes that the crash is all the more profound. Next time I'll be ready for you Lone Runner, next time your stupidity will be fun.

Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen

Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen

Italy – 1969

Director – Ruggero Deodato

Wizard Home Video, 1984, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 26 minutes

It is no exaggeration to say that Wizard Video’s 1884 big-box version of Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankamen is the most shocking of VHS disappointment in recent memory. Wizard was Charles Band’s first distribution enterprise specializing in graphic exploitation films. Ruggero Deodato may not be one of the finest directors that Italy has offered up, but without regard to the quality of his work, he is one of the more interesting. As I slowly work my way through Wizard’s and Deodato’s respective catalogues (which only overlapped here,) I have come to expect at the very least banal entertainment.

Here we have the famous mask of Tutankhamen, stolen from a museum and replaced with a forgery the night before the opening of its Paris exhibition. The forgery is passed off as the original and then stolen, the original passed off as a forgery and one or the other put in place of the original. Several groups of shady characters vie for the treasure which never appears after the opening scene. Phenomenal is actually the name of a masked character who pops up randomly throughout the film to fight people involved with the thievery and keep the mysterious quotient unnecessarily high. Actually the dwindling plot is so bent on confusing the real identity of both Phenomenal and the authenticity of various copies of Tut’s mask and who has them that I got tired of the switches. I actually sat through it twice, but stopped giving a fuck about 30 minutes in.

I am looking for someone or something to blame for Phenomenal’s great disappointment. There are a number of factors that are important to consider here when looking for a suitable culprit, let us start with the sources. Production funding for Phenomenal was provided by star Mauro Parenti. Based on the result, most of it funded his vanity. Not to be forgotten is that Phenomenal is a knockoff of the already intellectually undemanding formulaic heist/caper movie pattern that gave us the James Bond franchise and Danger: Diabolik; the ad-nauseum repetition of predictable individualistic male-fantasy violence and sexual innuendo. It is also important to remember that Phenomenal was also Deodato’s first feature length film. He was fresh from assistant directing various exploitation movies as assistant to better known genre mentors like Antonio Margheriti.

But in my opinion the most important thing to consider is Wizard Video’s big box release which I have in my possession. Although they’re known for packaging low budget films in great box art, but it’s not looking promising here. This is the only version that I know of available in the States. It runs a generous 85 minutes, yet clearly lacks the “rampant nudity” which Fab Press's book on Deodato had promised. If you’ll forgive my shallowness in lieu of the foregoing evidence, breasts might have been a welcome relief from the tedium which I have just twice undergone for the sake of “history.”

Although theis scene was in the movie, all nudity has been cut from the Wizard cassette.

 Each of these elements is necessary for Phenomenal’s failure, but none is alone sufficient. The catastrophe that has just unfolded makes me glad for the concept of director as auteur/artist and the invention of the “Director’s Cut”. Unfortunately though, if such a version of Phenomenal were to exist it would likely still be hard to watch. That box is so big and beautiful and I wanted so badly to enjoy myself, but such a thing is not to be.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Paracinema # 12. Lost Video Archive appears in each issue of Paracinema. Number 16 is coming out soon, with a new installment of LVA, we of course recommend that you pick it up ASAP

The two smaller images come courtesy of Tele Port City whom was also rather disappointed with this film..

Waves of Lust

Waves of Lust

Una ondata di piacere (original title)

Italy - 1975

Director - Ruggero Deodato

Deodato's Cut and Run and The Barbarians

Cut and Run

Italy - 1985

Director - Ruggero Deodato

New World Video, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 27 minutes

Director Ruggero Deodato is most famous of course for Cannibal Holocaust, his contribution to cannibal cinema and the fake documentary which many, including The Blair Witch Project copied to such success. But like many Italian exploitation directors of his time he was willing to do just about anything, including coat-tailing popular themes. His House At The Edge of The Park is a direct spin-off of Wes Craven's Last House On The Left, though more viscerally brutal, and Camping Terror AKA Body Count was a sad attempt to cash in on the slasher genre already waning by the time it came out..

But that's one of the things we should love about exploitation film, its attempts to replicate success. Here we have Cut and Run (aka Inferno in diretta) another cannibal film, this time stacked with exploitation workhorses Michael Berryman and Richard Lynch. The theme here attempts to deepen the intrigue of Deodato's prior cannibal films by drawing the jungle and the modern world together more closely, namely via some strange things called sympathetic characters, plot and narcotics. Much of Cut and Run is standard 80's intrigue, but nevertheless quite entertaining. This VHS tape unfortunately takes after its namesake and has at least three minutes cut. One nice thing about it however is the cover art by Chris Consani. I have been unable to find any sources that explicitly credit him with this art, but the signatures match, so I'm satisfied. Nor does Consani have website, Googling his name results in page after page of paintings of Humphrey Bogart, Elvis, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe playing pool. Well rendered, but, I just don't get the appeal. In any case, this is the only movie related artwork I can atribute to Consani, but there are several different versions.
The following two are UK sleeves from It's Only a Movie.co.uk and feature what appear to be alternate versions of the Consani artwork:

 

 The above version, while not quite as intimidating as the following, does feature the suspended Fran character (Lisa Blount) which ads a different sort of menace to the whole thing.

 

Furthermore, according to the book Cannibal Holocaust: The Savage Cinema of Ruggero Deodato, Cut and Run was originally titled Marimba and slated to be directed by Wes Craven. Obviously it didn't end up that way but as you can see above it does prominently star the unforgettable Michael Berryman who also glared out from the screen, posters and VHS boxes of Craven's The Hills Have Eyes parts 1 and 2 (1977 and 1985 respectively.) Deodato really has a thing for Wes Craven.

Deodato also re-hired both Berryman and Lynch for Barbarians, his entertaining last minute entry in the barbarian/fantasy craze that briefly swept the post-Conan 1980's.

 

Barbarians

Italy - 1987

Director - Ruggero Deodato

Media Home Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

Strangely this post began as a short write-up of this amazing VHS tape, but upon remembering my Cut and Run tape, I got sidetracked, so this is what you get. Suffice to say that Barbarians is pretty tongue-in-cheek funtastic as well, despite what should just be skull mashing stupidity. No matter what, ol' Ruggero hits his mark.