Rambu, The Intruder [1986]

As another entry into our canon of Indonesian rip-offs, we have The Intruder also known as Rambu. I'm not going to get into the specifics of the plot, mainly because the plot is specifically difficult to follow but trust me when I say its a pretty good one.

Rambu is a guy who didn't finish the police academy and so he mostly goes around beating up bad guys for fun while his girlfriend financially supports him. Then she gets killed (and raped; it's an Indonesian film after all) by some guys Rambu beat up. He quickly ends up in a new romance and she gets kidnapped and he saves her. Throughout the film there is this expectation that Rambu is supposed to get a job with a man called Mr. Andre. We have no idea what he does but it's unsurprising that he is in cohoots with the bad guy drug dealer, Mr. White. The film is set up basically for Rambu to get into fights with guys. 

This movie is pretty solid even though it's incomprehensible. There are a lot of completely random lines, acted poorly, some fighting with a bouncy ball, and overall basically nothing having to do with the Rambo movies it borrows from. Even the more common title, The Intruder, is confusing. Is Rambu the intruder as a white guy in a Pacific island nation? Is Mr. White the bad guy for the same reason but with crime? Who knows? Either way, its worth a watch.

Spoon Rating: 6

New York Ninja [2021; 1984]

In an effort to boost morale, we have had two weeks of solid choices. Last week Kay was not in attendance so there was a rewatch of Neil Breen's Pass Thru. This week is a new one for us and a recently discovered classic overall that has been gaining popularity in bad movie circles. The story behind this film's two release dates is pretty unique. The reels for the film were found even though the film wasn't finished and didn't have any sound. Luckily, the reel told a coherent story and most of the scenes show the actors clearly enough that dubbing wasn't actually difficult so a full film was pieced together in 2021. Initially we were a bit skeptical about how the voice acting might ham up the performances, but they honestly didn't go any further than the actors were already going. The movie also has an amazing surreal vibe to it because it was put together so recently. The film has insanely high definition for something so clearly shot in the 80s, and the music added, while definitely time period appropriate, still put Adam and Kay in the mindset of the soundtrack to Drive and instantly endeared all of us to it even though none of us are specific fans of the 80s.

So what's the plot of this new discovery? The film starts in a pretty standard martial arts film way. The main character (played by the director and writer; another sign of quality) finds out his wife is pregnant and she's immediately killed. In this version of New York, there is a problem with gangs kidnapping women and those gangs get their style tips from Mad Max side characters and A Clockwork Orange (jockstraps). We are briefly introduced to the leader of this crime ring, a man who wears steampunk welder sunglasses and makes excellent facial expressions. The main character decides to get revenge by dressing like a ninja in a pale yellow robe, and occasionally roller skates, and beating up bad guys. At one point he saves a child and adopts him. This is most of the first half of the film with this one notably bizarre scene where Sunglasses opens up a glowing box that seemingly melts his face and hands but he's into it. 

After a "Several Weeks Later" screen, we learn that this man has now been given the name The Plutonium Killer and he apparently can't look into the sun and maybe he needs that radiation to live or something? It's unclear both how he got this way and how his thing works at all. Our main character's character of the New York Ninja has since become a real sensation and people have t-shirts saying "I Love NY Ninja" on them. He can also now defy physics when he fights. Soon a detective lady is kidnapped by the gangs and our main character is on the case. He finds the lair where all the women are being kept and frees them. For reference, we never really learn what the kidnapping was for. We can assume sex slavery or something but we are never told. Ninja has a ridiculous fight with The Killer's driver, a man who somewhat resembles Elijah Wood with a rattail and black tie attire. Then the Killer does some sort of ritual(?) where he is able to take the face of this cameraman he captured to try to convince a reporter to go with him. Either way, he kidnaps the reporter and just drags her around with the Ninja chasing them until the end where the Ninja is able to save the day. Ninja is in the process of getting arrested when a bunch of child fans swarm him and he is able to escape. The film ends with the Ninja hugging the detective lady and breaking the hell out of the fourth wall with a wink and a point.

This film is wild. It's cliché is so many ways, but then it's completely off the wall in others. While the plot mostly makes sense, there are little details that throw you for a loop and are never explained, especially about our main villain. The face acting is over-the-top, the weapons are Party City, and honestly, we can all be grateful this film was saved. Disappointingly, while John Liu, our original director and lead actor, seems to still be alive at 77, I can't seem to find anything about his thoughts on the film. I'd like to think he'd feel his vision was maintained.

Spoon Rating: 8.5

Warp Speed [1981]

After the rather boring film last week, this movie kind of felt like a bit of relief. Was it amazing? No. In fact, the first 20 minutes or so were kind of boring and a bit hard to follow. But once we got into the rhythm of the film a bit more and some of the crazy really started to come out, we ultimately walked away from it with pretty favorable feelings.

The plot is a story within a story. In the outer frame, a psychic has been brought onto an abandoned ship that was supposed to go to Saturn to investigate the disappearance of the crew. The story of the crew is told through a series of flashbacks that are unchronological at first but eventually move back so we can see the plot unfold. The crew consists of Adam West as the captain, a lieutenant who's maybe dating the blonde bimbo but definitely an asshole, said bimbo, the reasonable black lady, the also reasonable but maybe a bit suicidal engineer, the psychiatrist, and the medical doctor who says everything antagonistically and has daddy issues. Everything starts out chill with a lot of card playing, failed flirting, and trips to a simulation machine called the pleasure center. The problem arises when there's an explosion outside and the math proves that they will need to lighten the load just to get home. After stripping the ship, they realize that people need to go too, which is kind of fine since everyone's going nuts. Asshole rapes doctor after she stupidly wagers sex during a poker game, the captain initially considers just going on with the mission even though everyone will surely die and mutiny almost happens, and everyone is mad or sad all the time. First the psychiatrist draws the short straw and when he resists his fate of death, asshole breaks his neck. Then the doctor tries to throw the black lady under the bus and they decide to go after her instead. The doctor slits her own throat in a delusion. The engineer sacrifices himself. The asshole shoots the captain and the black lady and promises the bimbo they will go out together but just kills her instead. At this point we have an absolutely wild turn where asshole acknowledges the psychic who he can apparently see even though they are in different timelines and goes to stab her before the movie cuts out. We literally screamed in frustration.

While completely poorly written from a logic perspective, this movie definitely had a plot to follow which was really appreciated after last week. The acting was often funny and the comedy was heightened by the fact that scenes were intercut with EKGs that Sarah kept assessing as either, "normal" or "dead" when the film was trying to tell us otherwise. Then, of course, there was the lazy first-semester-of-film-school choices like the ending. All in all, not too shabby.

Spoon Rating: 5

Desert Warriors [1988]

Well, they can't all be winners, especially when they are yet another Mad Max ripoff. Anyone with some craft form, a spare hubcap, and a deserted landscape thinks they can make one of these and Desert Warriors is no exception. Trying to explain the plot is pretty difficult since the film adapted the same Mad Max tactic of dropping you into a setting where you have to piece together the situation. Unfortunately, this movie lacks useful dialogue to provide the audience with this information, has such poor cinematography/lighting/editing that you frequently can't tell what's going on, and somehow neglects to tell us the names of characters or places so much that reading the plot description of this movie made us more confused. 

The plot is basically that in a post-apocalypic land there are three primary classes: the metal-clad fighting men with a vague S&M aesthetic, the barbarians who look like cave people, and the "drones" who live in a technologically advanced bunker and wear all white. One day a woman and man leave the bunker and the man is promptly killed while the woman is kidnapped by the S&M party since all their women can't have babies because of some disease. She is saved by Lou Ferrigno with an eyepatch, they have a very forced romance, and around the same time her father goes outside to find her. At some point Lou and the girl go to the bunker together and he learns about how the other side lives. This all culminates in a showdown between the drones and the kinksters which is literally stopped by Ferrigno when he decides to explain to his former boss that the drones have medicine to fix the disease. They hug. Then Ferrigno and the girl hug and walk off into the sunset for an alarmingly long time. The best scene is when Ferrigno goes to the bunker with the girl and a doctor inspects him saying, "Your eye is useless." The man has been wearing an eyepatch the whole film! I think he knows!

Overall, this film was pretty boring. Don't waste your time.

Spoon Rating: 2

The Fighting Preacher [2019]

It's been a bit since we had a bad Christian movie and honestly, it's been a very long time since we dabbled in something specifically Mormon. This particular film dealt with the true story of Willard Bean, the former 1905 middleweight boxing champion of the world, who moves to Palmyra, New York to take care of Joseph Smith's old farm and to try to get the Hill Cumorah property for the church (the location Smith supposedly found the golden plates if you're familiar with the myth). Strangely enough, that short summary really does cover the majority of the film. He and his wife move there, they are refused services for being Mormons, their kids are treated badly, and they endure. After six years, Willard decides to try to curry favor with the town by . . . beating them up in a boxing ring? Yeah, it doesn't work. Then after another stretch of time, they try being actively nice to everyone. This works and they convert a whole bunch of people. The end. 

This movie had some funny moments. There's a scene that was actually meant to be funny and succeeded when Willard's wife mentions something happening in seven months and then we get a "1/2 mile later" title card before Willard turns to her in shock and says, "You're pregnant?!" There are a lot of moments of people being mean that are so over-the-top you have to laugh. Also, Kay had fun giving a running commentary about the accuracy of the costumes because she loves the 1910s and is always mad no one does it right ("That man has a fedora! Did he time travel twenty years into the future?!"). Overall, it's not really worth your time but it wasn't painful either.

Spoon Rating: 3

Who Killed Captain Alex? [2010]

This is a movie that we have had on our list for a while. We maybe actually did try watching it at one point but the quality was so poor that it simply wasn't worth it. Thankfully, you can know just rent it for yourself. This movie, toted as Uganda's first action movie, is kind of a bad movie legend. Overall, it's got a lot of the bad movie staples but what makes it truly unique is the presence of a VJ, a video jockey, who is doing a running commentary throughout. It's very Mystery Science Theater 3000 if the guys commenting were also occasionally acting as hype men for the movie you're already watching (or the country or some other film made there).

The plot of the movie is pretty simple. A military guy named Captain Alex is tasked with bringing down a crime group called Tiger Mafia. The brother of the Tiger Mafia leader gets kidnapped and he flips out. Thankfully for him, he has a spy lady who is fooling around with Captain Alex and can get info about his plans. However, one night when the spy woman left the tent, Captain Alex got killed. No one in Tiger Mafia claimed to do it, but also no one is sure who among the soldiers could be a betrayer. Captain Alex's brother, a martial artist, comes in to find the culprit and ends up becoming friends with the Tiger Mafia leader's wife who he tried to have killed. Somehow the solution to all of this involves bombing Kampala as a distraction. A distraction for what? Who knows? Also, we never find out who killed Captain Alex. Apparently you need to watch the sequel.

This movie is worth your time but only once. It reportedly had a budget of $85 which probably went into buying some cameo shirts, wooden guns, and some blood splatter and helicopter CGI effects. There's a lot of silly in the action and a little bit of silly in the VJ. The best scene was probably when the mafia wife was relating the story of her relationship and said something like, "It started out great" and we got a quick cut to her tied up and getting yelled at by him. Not sure if that was intentional comedy but we laughed a lot.

Spoon Rating: 5.5

REWATCH: The Warrior And The Blind Swordsman [1983]

It may be weird to title this a rewatch since there was never an original post on it, but that's because it was first watched when I was on a trip. The goal was the watch something that wouldn't be too good so I wouldn't miss anything, but they failed. The Warrior And The Blind Swordsman turned out to be so good that it was rewatch worthy. 

The plot kind of revolves around this friendship duo of the blind swordsman and the warrior. During the Dutch colonization of Indonesia, a general sets up a competition that the blind swordsman wins. He fakes the death of the warrior and all is going fine until some sort of evil goddess wants him for her mate and he rejects her. Things get pretty complicated from there with a guy who has a tail and kidnaps some girl child who is important to the swordsman, a bunch of the goddess's scantily clad female warriors, and the occasional involvement of the Dutch army. The plot is a little hard to follow but it doesn't really matter much. What makes this movie so special is the effects. 

Every time you start to have the thought that the movie might be dragging, you will suddenly encounter a special effect so bizarre that you will be howling in laughter. The moment when the guy with the tail first has his tail enter the scene by popping out from under his coat is so startling and unnerving that you can't help but scream. The blind swordman decapitates a man with what amounts to a pipe and the head goes soaring. People occasionally fly but so slowly that running would be more efficient. And then there's the final battle where it seems like everyone is just suddenly combustible. If you throw someone into something, they will explode. It is insanity. The highs are so high that the lows are forgivable. Watch it.

Spoon Rating: 8