River of Death (1989)

Dir: Steve Carver

The Third Reich is crumbling. The Russians have beat back the Hun to the Fatherland. It is 1945, Germany. SS Commander Heinrich Spaatz (Donald Pleasence HALLOWEEN) arrives at a P.O.W. camp, the Russian army just a short distance away. He is there to see the Mengele like Dr. Wolfgang Manteuffel (Robert Vaughn KILLING BIRDS). His orders are to bring the Dr. and himself to Hitler's bunker. But Heinrich has a better plan. He wants the Dr. to join him in South America. Heinrich will be a prosperous businessman and the Dr. can continue his inhumane experiments in his quest to rid the planet of inferior races. The Dr. agrees but at the runway rendezvous point to escape the in flames country he turns on his friend. Shooting Heinrich in the knee, the Dr. leaves behind his former comrade. Heinrich vows to find the Dr. as he watches the plane fly away.

Skip ahead 20 years. It is now 1965. Jungle guide / adventurer John Hamilton (Michael Dudikoff AMERICAN NINJA) leads a Dr. Blakesley (Victor Melleney CYBORG COP II) and his daughter Anna (Sarah Maur Thorp EDGE OF SANITY) through the Amazon jungle. The Blakesley's are on a humanitarian mission to discover the source of and a cure to a mysterious disease that is plaguing the indigenous tribes. Trekking to the unexplored region of the jungle, the group is attacked by an unknown tribe. The Dr. is killed, Anna is kidnapped and Hamilton barely makes it out of the jungle back to civilization. Realizing that the tribe's village is a fabled lost city and vowing to return and rescue Anna, he seeks out the police commander Colonel Ricardo Diaz (Herbert Lom A SHOT IN THE DARK). The colonel isn't buying the tall tale about the city of legend and tries to dissuade Hamilton from venturing back into the jungle. Hamilton, man of daring that he is, and being smitten by Anna, will have none of that.

Hamilton turns to old friend Eddie Hiller (L.Q. Jones THE WILD BUNCH), gun runner and midget boxing promoter, to seed his return trip. Eddie has already heard about Hamilton's adventure in the jungle and so has seemingly every one else in the town. Eddie connects Hamilton with a wealthy businessman interested in traveling to the lost city and willing to fund the expedition. Hamilton agrees to take the man and his secretary Maria (Cynthia Erland DEATH FEUD), not realizing the man is Heinrich Spaatz living under an assumed identity. Even more parties reach out to Hamilton. There's the couple who are secret Israeli Nazi hunters. The government bureaucrat who claims he can speak the tribal tongues and clutches a worn piece of luggage as if his life depended on it. Throw in a couple of helicopter pilots and men who I have no idea what they are doing there and there's plenty of fodder.

Nazis. Gunfights. Tribal warfare. River pirates with a mortar on the bow of their boat. Chemical warfare. Indiana Jones and APOCALYPSE NOW references. A wonderful cast with Donald Pleasence hamming it up and stylin' it with a number of horrendous looking wigs. Double and triple crosses. This film packs it all in. All that's missing is a piranha scene.

Directed by Steve Carver (who helmed LONE WOLF MCQUADE, one of my favourite Chuck Norris films) and based on the Alistair MacLean novel of the same name, RIVER OF DEATH is not what I'd call a good film but it certainly is a fun combination of exploitation and action. Dudikoff acquits himself well as the intrepid jungle explorer who has a knack for getting into trouble. It's obvious Pleasence is having a blast with his character and Robert Vaughn is menacing as the cardboard cut out evil Nazi doctor. L.Q. Jones is a plus to any film he appears in. Oh, Herbert Lom wielding a SMG! Throw in plenty of action and that's my entertainment sorted for the night.

Released by Canon, produced in part by Harry Alan Towers. What a combo.

**1/2 out of ****

Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014)

aka: Død snø 2

Dir: Tommy Wirkola

Five years after DEAD SNOW was unleashed, co-writer and director Tommy (HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS) Wirkola is back with another gory heaping of Nazi zombies in DEAD SNOW 2. The sequal picks up right where the original ended with hapless, one armed Martin's (co-writer Vegar Hoel with noticeably less hair) vehicle surrounded by the Nazi commander Herzog and his squad of the undead. After a series of darkly comedic events, Martin has Herzog's arm as a replacement for his own (an arm for an arm as it says in scripture) and the ability to resurrect the dead. Utilizing the unique talents of his new friends, a gay military museum worker and the three person Zombie Squad from America, Martin sets out to resurrect the Russian prisoners of war that Herzog sentenced to death and enlist them in stopping Herzog's plan to decimate a nearby village.

Wirkola and company continue the blending of sophomoric and dark humour with outrageous violence that made both DEAD SNOW and HANSEL & GRETEL fun to watch (admittedly it took me a bit to warm up to the mismash of genres in HANSEL & GRETEL but that may have been due to it being unexpected from a mid level budget Hollywood film starring Jeremy Renner instead of a low budget horror film from Norway). The jokes do not always work but the bigger budget and Wirkola's gained experience from the past few years certainly helped flesh out the characters and better set up the jokes and grisly set pieces.

It's a bloody good show.

*** out of ****

Outpost 3: Rise Of The Spetsnaz (2013)

Dir: Kieran Parker

An elderly Russian man sits at a bar downing shots of vodka and twirling a Red Star pin. He recalls the time he led the notorious Red Squad on the Eastern Front in 1945. As squad leader Dolokhov (Bryan BATTLEGROUND Larkin) commands his men through the forest to a road that he believes is connected to a German base. A base that is not on any map, not even the enemy's maps. Trusting his instincts he orders his men to set an ambush on the road and wait for a target to come to them. They are rewarded with three German vehicles rumbling towards them, including a troop transport. The explosives are detonated and the Red Squad rains gunfire down on the Jerries who are so shocked by the brutal attack they can barely put up any resistance. They are slaughtered to a man.

Sifting through the carnage Dolokhov and his men are confounded by what they find, documents that may be blueprints to a devastating secret weapon, a syringe filled with an unknown chemical and a corpse in the troop transport with blackened and shrivelled skin that does not look quite human. Absorbed in thought trying to fathom the meaning of the objects the squad doesn't notice the German counter-attack until it's too late. Out gunned the Red Squad makes a break for the forest but they are captured or killed.

Dolokhov slowly regains consciousness, not understanding the last image he saw before blackness consumed him, a German soldier feasting on the flesh of one of his men. Dolokhov finds himself caged with two of his comrades and an American in the underground base his squad puzzled over earlier. His first thought is escape, the American providing vital information about an escape route, but his next and only thought is surviving the attack of a behemoth of a German soldier with a monstrous visage lumbering towards them as the cell's gate opens. The fight is brutal, taking the lives of two of the prisoners in gory fashion before the beast can be subdued.

Like all good movie villains, the German officer in charge of the base, Strasser (Michael ESSEX BOYS McKell), takes Dolohkov and his remaining comrade on a tour of the secret facility. The base was set up to perform medical experiments to give birth to a super soldier via chemicals and a box that throws out light that somehow uses science to explode human heads. Strasser explains that it will take the correct permutation of drugs and sciency light to achieve their goal and luckily the mad scientists have two new guinea pigs in Dolokhov and his comrade.

The third in the series, this one directed by Kieran Parker who produced the first two and provided the story for the original film, holds true to the adage about diminishing returns. The first two films certainly aren't shining examples of exceptional film making but they did provide goofy fun, a bit of tension, gory action scenes and Nazi zombies. RISE has the Nazi zombies as well but lacks any of the tension or supernatural spookiness of the two films before it. The characters running through the same bunker corridors over and over looking for an exit didn't help. Larkin looks the part of a Russian soldier, although I did notice his Russian accent sounding more Scottish than Ivan in a scene or two, and convincingly plays a man who can be deadly with his fists. McKell seemingly has a blast playing a Nazi bent on world domination via misapplied science. His accent is text book film German, very removed from an actual German accent, but fits perfectly with his maniac performance of a madman with a bright smile.

Those wanting answers or a back story to the first two films will be disappointed. I did not understand how the Nazi zombies of this film evolved into the supernatural entities of the original. The world of the three films in the OUTPOST series is not a cohesive one and that would have been fine had there been a bit more to this film.

*1/2 out of ****