We were all kind of interested in the 1986 Albert Pyun movie called Vicious Lips until we saw it. Albert wrote and directed this SF film set in the rock n roll world of the future. An annoying manager called Manny steals a space ship to get his all girl band to a big concert. It crashes along the way, leaving the girls and Manny stranded on a desert planet.
Sadly, the script leaves us stranded. It's not very good at best but it is a good soporific. I was struggling to stay awake after the middle went by. The first act gets us into space, the middle gets us crashed with the girls, the third gets us confused until the barely coherent ending. There's a bit of humor but not enough, there's aliens but they're kind of lackluster.
Some of Albert's early pictures are fair to good SF and Horror films, not always the best work, but usually entertaining. I liked Radioactive Dreams, Alien From LA, Cyborg, Dollman, the Nemesis series, Brain Smasher...A Love Story and a couple more. They aren't great films but they are, for the most part, fun and entertaining. By the mid-90s the video market was expanding and there were many more films available on cable. I had sort of lost interest in Albert, his movies weren't popping up on my TV, I didn't return to his early films. I don't own most of them.
Albert is still banging away at directing, though he seems to have slowed down since 2010, he had a couple of projects that year, then a skip to 2014 and another to 2017 when he directed Interstellar Civil War: Shadows Of The Empire. Haven't seen it, probably won't. He still has 4 projects in pre-production. I have a feeling I won't see them but you never know.
I hadn't seen GI Samurai before. It's a 1979 Sonny Chiba film that's based on a novel. It's Japanese title is Sengoku jieital which translates loosely to Time Slip. Sonny is the 2nd Lieutenant of a squad of soldiers. They are on a practice manoeuver when they are sent back in time 400 years to the Warring States era. They spend the movie getting to know the locals. In one's and two they get picked off until the end of the movie when they are betrayed big time stylie.
The movie's long, 139 minutes, and it could have been a lot shorter, it plonks along ponderously at times. The soldier's are the stupidest one's I've seen in a many a day, they continuously devalue the fighting abilities of the locals, they don't seem to be able to use any strategy at all. Sonny and his crew arrive with massive firepower, a helicopter, a tank, a small PT type gun boat, a big diesel truck and two jeep size vehicles. One by one they are destroyed. The vehicles all seem to have a pretty good supply of petrol but eventually that fails and the men are that much more vulnerable to arrows and spears. It's sad to see them be so stupid. The only guy who might have survived gave up the crew and went to live with the locals in the woods. I was glad to see it but I don't think I'll be looking to pick up a copy, unless it comes with one of those cheap movie packs.
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