Terrorist (South Africa, 1978)

You get a good idea of where Terrorist is coming from early on, when the mother of its subject white family, upon discovering her husband being held at gunpoint by a black intruder, murmurs in hushed dread, “Terrorists!” You also get a good idea of where it’s coming from when you learn, as I did, that it was originally titled Black Terrorist and was produced in South Africa at the height of Apartheid. It’s pretty racist, is what I’m saying.

Terrorist is what today would be called a “home invasion” film (think The Purge, or The Strangers). It begins with a nice white family returning unexpectedly from a nice white family occasion to find their isolated home in one of South Africa’s most godawful desert regions occupied by a trio of gun wielding black men, aka the terrorists of the title. In the terrorists’ favor, it should be said that they had not expected the family to be home, as they were depending on faulty information from one of the family’s treacherous black servants, whom they subsequently tie to a tree and fill with bullets for his mistake. This later prompts one of the white characters to remark upon how “they” treat their own. (Look, it gets worse from here. I’m just warning you.)

Like so many cinematic bands of kidnappers, the terrorists include among their number a psychopathic loose cannon who acts as sort of a group id, raping and brutalizing the hostages so that the other two can be freed up to spout lofty rhetoric about reclaiming their homeland. Among the bloody hijinks that summarily follow are the murders of both parents, which leaves their pair of toe headed super children to fend for themselves. The oldest of these, Anna, played by former beauty queen Vera Johns, manages to make a break for it and flee off into the savanna, leaving her little brother, who I’ll just call Junior, in the terrorists’ clutches.

To say that Anna then assembles a rag tag band of rescuers to save her brother taxes the meaning of the term “rag tag”, as her choices are limited to the random dregs of humanity who have happened to collect in the dusty hell hole that her parents had chosen to call home. These include an alcoholic Scottish loner and, most conveniently, a scruffy, camo-clad mercenary with a literal fuck ton of weapons at his disposal. Finally, there is a hunky American journalist (Robert Aberdeen) who just happens to be motoring by. This last character provides the mouthpiece for the film’s lone instances of mild anti-apartheid sentiment, although it is expressed in such terms of lightweight hippy idealism that it is easily dismissed by the other white characters. (“You know nothing about living with these bastards”, spits crusty mercenary guy.)

This motley band of saviors stages a bloody siege upon the house in which the terrorists are holed up, leading to gory casualties on both sides. In the aftermath, the remaining two terrorists take Junior and flee in their van, making for the coast and the boat that will take them back to Terrorist Central or wherever. Meanwhile, the savagery that he has witnessed has turned our peace loving American friend’s mantra from “can’t we all just get along” to “let me at ‘em”, leading him to eagerly take up arms and join Anna and company in hot pursuit.

While it is unquestionably poisoned by ideology, I found Terrorist to be less a work of pure propaganda than it was an especially cynical attempt at making a crowd pleasing thriller. And at this it is depressingly competent. Director Neil Hetherington reels out one time tested thriller trope after another—the near escapes, the nail-biting standoffs, the instances of help being near at hand but frustratingly out of reach, etc.—with a, for the most part, numbingly adequate level of technical acumen. Of course, this is not to say that the film is without its technical failings, especially in the areas of lighting and sound, and those walk blissfully hand-in-hand with the deeply shitty movie that Terrorist is at its core. Ironically, its one saving grace may be its (uncredited) musical score, which has an unmistakable, blaxploitation inspired, funky vibe—though this, sadly, has the effect of making the film overall even more of a “fuck you” to black culture.

I have no idea how much of a hit Terrorist was in its day, but it shares with successful thrillers both before and after the fact that it exploits a popular anxiety of its time. And by that I refer to the obsessive fear of retribution that comes with being the unrightful usurpers of a land. Perhaps this is why Hetherington chooses to end the film on an uncertain note, suggesting that the return of the terrorists is inevitable, much like the proverbial crows coming home to roost.

Rating: Fuck this movie.

The Virgin Goddess (Argentina/South Africa, 1974)

Helmed by Dirk De Villiers, a South African director of prolific output but little renown outside his home country, The Virgin Goddess is proof that Argentinian sex bomb Isabel Sarli was more than just a buxom puppet in the hands of her director paramour Armando Bo. Don’t assume, however, that Bo was not close at hand. He shares a co-production credit on the film and also appears in a supporting role. Furthermore, his son, Victor Bo, plays the male lead. Victor, I should mention, would go on to give Armando Bo a grandson, also named Armando Bo, who would grow up to share screenwriting credit on Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Oscar nominated film Birdman. And thus is a membrane-thin veneer of contemporary relevance laboriously attained.

Like so many jungle adventures before it, The Virgin Goddess begins in a modern city, that pinnacle achievement of man in all of his so called “civilization” (but are we really so civilized… ARE WE?). Here, a flinty adventurer—appropriately named Flint and played by director De Villiers himself—regales a table full of sophisticated gentlemen with the story of his latest adventure—in a manner so putatively captivating that, before he is done, the entirety of the patrons and wait staff of the bar they are in has gathered around their table.

Interestingly, Flint’s tale requires a preamble that starts in 1495. It seems a certain, beautiful, monster-titted noblewoman (Sarli) was making a treacherous passage by schooner when a violent storm lead to her being washed up in picturesque dishabille on the shore of some unknown African land (the film was shot in Kruger Park, one of South Africa’s largest game reserves). Because everything that gets left in the jungle—cigarette lighters, old copies of the New Yorker, Jell-O molds—ends up being elevated to the level of a deity, the natives waste no time in scooping Sarli up and making a goddess out of her. And it is at this point that we get the first of many, many travelogue style scenes of natives dancing around and chanting. This provides for lots of National Geographic style nudity, which takes the onus off Sarli, who apparently had some kind of Amy Yip clause in her contract.

Sarli is taken under the wing of the village witch doctor, Makulu (Jimmy Sabe) who acts as her Henry Higgins in terms of teaching her the ins and outs of being a rain goddess. Soon her fevered undulations bring rain. The crops thrive and the village prospers. Meanwhile, Makulu himself has become hoodoo’d by Sarli’s overflowing charms and demands that she become his bride. She refuses, and he puts a curse on her: she will live forever, as will he, as long as she remains a virgin. Makulu, it seems, is running the whole show here, and does so with an iron fist. When a young warrior named Gampu (Ken Gampu) attempts to assassinate him, he ends up being run out of the village and goes into hiding.

The Virgin Goddess is an odd film. Its dialogue is a mix of both spoken and dubbed English and Swahili (and to add to the linguistic chaos, the version I watched had Spanish subtitles). It also, especially in comparison to what Armando Bo—whose mania for Sarli’s attributes seemingly robbed him of all restraint—might have done with this kind of material, comes across as sort of… sedate. The pace is slow but measured, and there is an overall hush that reminds one of those old documentaries where the filmmakers spoke in whispers for fear of riling the natives or causing a rhino stampede. It doesn’t help that, whenever De Villiers cuts to a shot of the surrounding wildlife, the animals appear as if they are about to collapse from boredom.

Like her animal co-stars, the usually lusty Sarli also appears anesthetized, laying back complacently as the natives worship her and carry her around on a palanquin—admittedly, as she well might. It takes the intervention of civilized man, that notorious ruiner of everything, to finally bring her back to her old self. This comes in the form of an exploration party comprised of Flint, handsome devil Mark (Victor Bo), financier Hans (Armando Bo), and Eric (James Ryan), a mustached Chuck Negron look-alike who provides the gratuitous folk music.

The Virgin Goddess does not do a very good job of letting us in on when it has transitioned from the 15th century to the present day, so it comes as a bit of a surprise when Gampu, the outcast warrior previously seen only in flashback, steps forward to offer his services as guide to the explorers. From here, the standard retinue of jungle perils and treacheries commences, as naggingly familiar as the morning alarm clock. Eric reveals himself to be the coward of the group and is killed by a leopard while making an ill-advised run for it. Hans is the backstabbing turncoat, and is fatally bitten by vigilant cobras while trying to steal the tribe’s treasure for himself. Mark is handsome, and immediately falls for Sarli once he spies her fondling her own boobs in the local watering hole. This fateful encounter sets the stage for the cataclysmic fuck that will end the film in a hail of volcanic ash and toppling huts (spoiler).

The Virgin Goddess is not boring, even though it feels as though it should be boring. It is instead mesmerizing; mainly for the oddly somnolent approach it takes to material that, in other hands, would provide for a lot of bombast. Dirk De Villiers, it must be said, is no Armando Bo—and I am startled to find myself admitting that Bo’s over-the-top approach was missed here. Because of that, I will deem The Virgin Goddess a must-see only for Sarli completists, of which the desire-perverting tendencies of the internet guarantees there are some. Others, looking for an introduction to this unique star/director combo, would do best to check out the previously reviewed Fuego. Now that’s a picture, people!

Puppet Africanus

Interster (1981)

Okay, so 4DK's parade of communist cowboys, Filipino wonder women and Bollywood kaiju movies has left you cold, and I'm left feeling like a man trying to stop a baby crying who's run out of funny faces to make. How about this, babies: A South African children's television series made during the final years of the Apartheid regime that's modeled very closely on the puppet series of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. It indeed seems like no country's young sprouts were immune to the hypnotic appeal of freaky-looking marionettes framed within a fiery landscape of exploding miniatures. And thank God for that. After all, it's things like this that, despite our differences, bring us all a little closer, isn't it?

I could find very little written in English about the Afrikaans language series Insterster other than a modest-sized Wikipedia entry and what's written about it on the blog of one Mike Cane. Those sources tell me that Interster came into being as a result of the South African Broadcasting Corporation's inability to acquire broadcast rights to the Anderson's Thunderbirds, prompting them to try their hand at producing a puppet sci-fi series of their own. The result is a very close approximation, coming more than a decade after the Andersons stopped producing their patented Supermarionation series (moving instead into live-action fare like Space: 1999 and UFO) and a couple of years before Gerry Anderson tried to jump back into the game with the underwhelming Terrahawks. The puppets in this case, rather than being stringed marionettes like those used by the Andersons, appear to be internally wired puppets that are operated from underneath, and I was happy to see that they emulate the big-headed, caricatured look of the puppets from Thunderbirds and Stingray, rather than the dead-eyed, ambulatory mannequins seen in later Anderson series like Captain Scarlet.

I would love to say that I saw all kinds of subtextual echoes of South Africa's then-current political situation in Interster, but having thus far only seen two of its half-hour episodes, I'd have to say that that would require a pretty fanciful reading. There is, however, a captive alien prince, who is being held hostage indefinitely by the ostensible good guys -- themselves one side in a simmering interplanetary conflict -- in order to maintain an uneasy, coercive peace. Once freed by his people, this prince leads them in a stealthy, undercover war against his former captors. Could this perhaps be a reflection of the Afrikaners' anxieties about Nelson Mandela and the ANC? Perhaps not, but that aside, it's certainly difficult to ignore the physical resemblance of one of the show's villain puppets to then-prime minister P. W. Botha.

While the above is all conjectural, I can tell you with absolute certitude that Interster contains most of the elements that could be found in the Anderson's most successful shows, such as a square-jawed (and, come to think of it, square-headed) puppet hero with a trusty side-kick; a futuristic defense force -- in this case headquartered in a megalopolis-like 21st century Cape Town; all kinds of nifty vehicles and gadgets; lots of neato miniature work, and, of course, plenty of explosions. The only thing sorely missing is the grandiosity that one of Barry Gray's thundering orchestral scores might have bestowed upon the proceedings, as what we're left with is some pretty cheesy synth disco and wan electronic noodlings that give an air of ponderousness to much of the action.

The plots of Interster's brief episodes are, as might be expected, pretty basic, but not without their interesting elements. The war between Earth's Space Force and their alien enemies, the Krokons, is a cold one, waged under the cover of an interplanetary peace treaty, a situation that forces the show protagonists, lead by the aforementioned square-jawed hero Bruks De La Rey, to act with more consideration for the appearance of diplomacy than we see in the battles that play out in typical space operas. I also thought it was a neat twist that the Krokons' secret human collaborator on Earth is one Gorman (the aforementioned Botha ringer), a corrupt weapons magnate who makes money coming and going by supplying armaments and machinery to the Space Force while demanding hefty prices from the Krokons for his services as a spy.

But these hints of complexity aside, what I really enjoyed about Interster are the same things that I've always enjoyed about Thunderbirds and the Andersons' other puppet shows: the unfading and mesmerizing strangeness of the human-like puppets, the cool miniature work, the very apparent dedication to craft on the part of all involved, and the unique, completely closed reality that these all combine to create. That said, the show does feel a bit colder than Thunderbirds, and as a result lacks that series' inherent charm, instead hewing more closely to the somber, militaristic tone of the later Captain Scarlet. Of course, this perception on my part might be colored by my perception of the malignant system that was in place at the time of the show's production. I mean, escapism is one thing, but no mere television show should be entertaining enough to make you forget that. Still, I'm fascinated enough by Insterster to seek out more episodes... at least until that fascination fades in the face of some new, fleeting obsession.