STRAIGHT TO HELL (1987) – For a glib, one sentence review of this movie, how about “Quentin Tarantino minus Quentin Tarantino equals Straight to Hell?” Though this flick came out years before Tarantino’s films it clearly influenced him and to this day it feels like a lost, inferior effort by Quentin.
After Alex Cox became known as one of THE up-and-coming directors following his films Repo Man and Sid & Nancy he was trying to arrange a punk concert film (or documentary of an entire concert tour, depending on what source you read) in Nicaragua.
Given the violent and unstable situation in the country at that time, few wanted to invest in a concert film being made under such risky conditions. However, investors WERE willing to shell out a million dollars for a movie directed by Cox and starring many of the punk acts who were going to perform in Nicaragua.
Alex threw in some of his stable of regulars from his two earlier films, slapped together a script in three days (co-written by Dick Rude) and used a mere few weeks to make this oddball genre-bender in Spain.
The result was a movie that the post-Tarantino world can easily relate to, but which audiences and critics of the time dismissed as a rambling mess. Straight to Hell is certainly too self-indulgent and self-satisfied to qualify as a good film, but it’s far from the one-star or two-star disaster that many IMDb reviewers dismiss it as.
THE STORY – A gang of inept Los Angeles hitmen trying to impress their criminal employer botch their assigned assassination. Fearing reprisals from the powerful crime boss, they rob a bank and flee across the border to Mexico, where they bury their loot and lie low in an incredibly strange town full of sweaty, violent weirdos and a lot of gunplay. Continue reading
AMPHIBIAN MAN (1962) – This “mad scientist creates a man capable of living underwater” movie was made in the Soviet Union but frequently appeared in dubbed English on American television decades ago. 
Many online reviewers accuse the makers of The Shape of Water of ripping off this 1962 movie that is based on a 1928 novel. Arguments can be made for that, but it’s important to remember that all sci-fi stories draw from the same general inheritance of tropes. 
ICHTYANDR SALVATOR (Vladimir Korenev) – A young Argentinean man whose scientist father prevented him from dying of a lung disease in childhood by grafting shark gills on to his body. Ichtyandr has been raised and educated in isolation and his father even designed a comical looking underwater suit for our hero to wear, complete with a shark fin. 
PRAY FOR THE WILDCATS (1974) – That’s Wildcats as in the Baja Wildcats, the name given by the villainous Andy Griffith to himself and his fellow over the hill dirt bikers – William Shatner, Marjoe Gortner and Robert Reed! 
ADAM AND EVE VS THE CANNIBALS (1983) – Way back in 2014 I reviewed this quasi-peplum flick starring Mark Gregory, real name Marco De Gregorio. Instead of portraying Hercules or Maciste or Samson taking on monsters and human opponents, Mark played Adam taking on monsters and human opponents. 
THE CASSANDRA CROSSING (1976) – The Andromeda Strain meets the later Supertrain in this railroad version of the Airport movies. I’m sure we all know the formula of Disaster Movies, be they about natural disasters striking cities or manmade disasters striking mass transportation like airplanes, ships and trains. 
In general, the storyline involves a genetically engineered plague covertly developed by government functionaries (think of Anthony Fauci and his ilk) despite international agreements not to conduct such research. Terrorists who want to steal the plague for their own use botch a raid on the International Health Organization (a pastiche of the World Health Organization), which results in a shootout and in two of the terrorists being exposed to the plague. 
THE TERRORNAUTS (1967) – Simon Oates of Doomwatch fame stars as yet another maverick scientist in this effort from earlier in his career. Oates is running a British version of the SETI project and is forever trying to intercept signals from space … signals that might indicate intelligent life forms. 
Wild coincidences like that are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of this ridiculous movie’s plot holes, inconsistencies and lack of logic. 
SANTO VERSUS THE RIDERS OF TERROR (1970) – Called Santo Contra Los Jinetes del Terror in its native Mexico, this is one of my all-time favorite hidden gems among the wacked-out movies about the Mexican wrestler called El Santo. 
THE CHALLENGE aka Surrogate (1970) – This made for tv movie aired in February 1970. The storyline involves a downed satellite that contains American national defense technology. It landed near a fictional Asian nation which is closely allied with Communist China. 
Neither the U.S. nor Red China want to see this incident escalate into an all-out war, so they agree to a solution. Each side will send one man to a small nearby island. Whichever surrogate manages to kill the other within five days will have “won” the downed satellite for its side. 
THE BIG EASY (1986) – An unjustly neglected film starring the one and only Dennis Quaid, who should have been made the new Indiana Jones after The Last Crusade in 1989. The Big Easy is easily one of the most underrated films of the 1980s. 
JUST A DAMNED SOLDIER aka One Damned Soldier (1988) – Balladeer’s Blog concludes its look at all ten films of Italian cult action icon Mark Gregory, real name Marco De Gregorio. I know IMDb states that he also appeared in the made for tv movie Rainbow, but I watched that film and he’s not in it. The error seems to have been made by someone who saw the name MARY Gregory in the closing credits and, because the font for the credits is a bit stylish, mistook the y in Mary for a k. 
I’ll wrap up everything by examining Mark’s final two films before he walked away from the business at age 25 in 1989, with no explanation and after having just made his highest amount of money from a movie role. 
Just a Damned Soldier features Mark in an ensemble cast as one member of a trio of badass international mercenaries who take on any dangerous, high-paying job that comes along. Our hero, whose character is also named Mark, serves alongside Cisco (Romano Kristoff) and their boss Bert Ernst (Peter Hooten). 
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