Mill Creek Invasion: FUGITIVE ALIEN (Star Wolf, 1978/1987)

Jo Shishido, the Japanese action star and Nikkatsu Noir icon, is probably best known in particular for his starring role in director Seijun Suzuki's directorial kamikaze run Branded to Kill and in general for his decision to undergo surgery to expand his cheeks to make his face more distinctive. How this was to benefit him -- distinct isn't the same thing as handsome -- was always mysterious, but an advantage suggested itself decades after the procedure. As Captain Joe of the Bacchus 3 in the Japanese TV series Star Wolf, Shishido's face seemed specially designed to withstand the rigors of high-pressure space flight. While his fellow crew members get their cheeks and jowls set to rippling, just as if they were being blasted by a wind machine, Shishido the human chipmunk is unperturbed. Of course, Captain Joe is better lubricated than his subordinates. He's a hard drinking, hard smoking spaceman even before his wife and child are killed in an alien attack, and afterward his vices make it easier to cope. He even keeps a flask dangling from the ceiling of the bridge to supplement the bottles he drains at every opportunity. He's dubbed into English with a vaguely Noo Yawkish smartass voice that seems exactly right for the swaggering I-don't-give-a-damn performance Shishido gives; maybe only Cameron Mitchell's voice would be more perfect.  Captain Joe isn't really the hero of the series or the TV movie Sandy Frank (that purveyor of many things Japanese to North American audiences) assembled from the early episodes, but he was my hero throughout.

It's Captain Joe's universe; the rest of us just fly around in it.

The actual hero of Star Wolf, aka the Fugitive Alien, is Ken (Tatsuya Azuma), a Valna Wolf Raider by profession, whom we meet while he and his buddies are attacking Planet Earth. Part of the ground force, he leaps about committing random acts of murder, vandalism and jewel theft alongside his comrades, all dressed like deadly hippie space clowns with long blond hair flowing out from under his helmet. Despite his exuberant rapine, Ken has a code. There's a line he won't cross. Or at least when he encounters a Japanese child named Ken, he becomes profoundly confused. He sees himself superimposed over the child, as if all Kens are the same (only Barbie knows for sure), and this seizure of fellow feeling makes him incapable of killing the kid. Worse, it compels him to prevent his best buddy from killing the kid. In the resulting scuffle, Ken accidentally frags his pal, who dies denouncing him as a traitor to Valnastar. Now friendless on a hostile planet, he decides his best option is escape to outer space, but his ship is damaged in a crossfire and he's forced to ditch. He doffs his helmet to do so, revealing that those hair extensions are actually part of the Valna Wolf Raider uniform, presumably designed to terrify primitive people like Earthlings or make them lose their composure through laughter.

Fugitive Alien carries a 1987 date, but these guys are all Seventies.

Ken is rescued from a lonely fate floating through space by the Bacchus-3, whose crew is initially uncertain of whom they're dealing with. He tells them that he's an innocent astronomer observing the stars, but his superhuman strength (he's even stronger on Valnastar, he tells a fellow Valnastarian while on Earth) makes some of the crew suspicious. As it develops, Captain Joe matches a piece of fabric from Ken's clothes with a Wolf Raider uniform found near his dead child. He confronts Ken, is disarmed, disarms Ken back with the old "shouldn't you check to see if it's loaded" trick, but is dissuaded from killing the Star Wolf by Ken's tale of treason. Assuring Ken that "the world is mad," Joe decides to take him on as a crew member, the idea being that Ken, at least, will obey all his orders (and maybe not question his drinking), lest Joe expose him as a Valna Raider and render his life forfeit. Joe's second-in-command, Rocky, has his suspicions about Ken confirmed when he tries to run the stranger over with a forklift, but Captain Joe insists that Ken's superhuman strength doesn't make him a Wolf Raider.

Joe: I know Ken's a lot stronger than we are, but there's a reasonable scientific explanation for that. He's spent a lot of time in another constellation. That increases strength.

To his credit, Rocky isn't really convinced by Joe's story, but his loyalty to the captain compels him to tolerate Ken, to an extent. Now a full crew member, Ken joins the Bacchus-3's next mission to assist the beleaguered planet Carrero, whose traditional Cesar (or Viholi; the name changes abruptly) enemy is being aided by Valnastar and its evil blue-skinned ruler Valen. The Carrero mission really puts Star Wolf (or its Fugitive Alien segment) over the top, if it hadn't gotten there already for you, because the series's six writers and three directors have given us a Planet of the Arabs. The civilians are Arab-garbed, at least, while the military wear green, turtle-shell helmets, the sight of which I'll spare you.

These Carreros are ungrateful recipients of Earthly aid. They keep most of the Bacchus crew prisoners on their own ship while their ruler negotiates with Joe and Rocky. But Ken's a rebel at heart. He romps off the ship, which has been left unguarded -- apparently the Carreros believe in the honor system. The male crewmates want to follow him, but the one female officer (the computer specialist) forces them at gunpoint to stay on board -- but then doesn't bother pursuing Ken as he bounds childishly (I believe he actually says "yippee!") into a native town where he gets into a bar fight and is finally arrested for supposedly stealing a jewel. Informed that Ken is subject to the death penalty, Captain Joe tells the authorities they can have him -- but unlike Rocky, he doesn't really mean it.

 

Since the Carreros haven't stripped Ken of his uniform, Joe can still communicate with him via a device embedded in one of Ken's shoulder buttons. Another shoulder button contains a convenient "miniature nuclear device" that Ken can use to blast his way out of his cell -- it's "just like a grenade," Joe explains. Once out of the cell, Ken must break a Cesar prisoner out with him to make it easier for the Bacchus to infiltrate Cesar space. Doing this will require Ken to kill a considerable number of our Carrero allies, but maybe that was agreed upon in advance with the Carrero ruler, when that potentate made his advance payment of three blue crystals for Earth's assistance.

After Ken and the Cesar prisoner make their great escape, they run straight into a dangling subplot. Back on Valnastar, Valen had tasked Rita, Ken's lover and the sister of the man he killed, with avenging her family and her planet. That's the traditional law of Valnastar, and after a presumably traditional period of wandering in the desert, Rita embarks on her mission of vengeance. She manages to track Ken to Carrero, where she proves more adept at infiltration, disguising herself as a native woman, and more adept at tracking than the natives. She gets the drop on Ken, but basically folds as soon as he tells his sob story for the umpty-umpth time.

 

 

In the end, she only appears to convey the plot point that, superhuman strength notwithstanding, Ken is not a Valnastarian but a human, the son of a missionary from Earth. Maybe Captain Joe's theory about extraterrestrial strength is correct, after all. And having conveyed this revelation, and after having been established as the female badass of the picture, Rita is promptly shot down in a crossfire between Ken and a Carrero soldier. True to family form, she blames Ken with her dying breath -- except I have a weird feeling she might not be dead. After all, there's lots of the series left, as the "To Be Continued" card at the end makes clear....
The long journey to Mill Creek Entertainment's Sci-Fi Invasion box set began with American author Edmond Hamilton's trilogy of Star Wolf novels. Tsuburaya Productions adapted these into the Star Wolf TV series, from which Sandy Frank derived at least two Fugitive Alien films, which were in turn subjected to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. That last phase seems redundant, as I can't see how Joel and the robots could have made Fugitive Alien any funnier than it already is. From this account you can probably tell that not only Fugitive Alien but its source materials are probably pretty dumb, but it's all dumb in a charmingly childish, naive way, not in the cynically derivative manner of something like Welcome to Blood City.

The effects are hit or miss, but mostly miss, with some nearly psychedelic scenes of rotating spaceship formations thrown in alongside occasional yet understandable errors in English language labelling, but all of this comes with the territory of Japanese fantasy, where a craft aesthetic outweighed concerns for verisimilitude. But it's technical shortcomings aside, Star Wolf unselfconsciously believes in itself, and its guilelessness makes many of its sins forgivable. On top of that, Shishido seems to be enjoying and loathing himself at the same time in an eminently watchable, winningly decrepit performance. This is a bad movie by any measure, but it's the sort of bad movie that actually left me wanting to see more of Star Wolf -- so how bad can it really be?

Mill Creek Invasion: WELCOME TO BLOOD CITY (1977)

Did you ever have one of those days? One moment Tom Lewis (Keir Dullea) is stuck in traffic in the middle of some sort of evacuation, and in the next he finds himself dressed in prison garb in the middle of a wilderness. He meets a woman, Martine (Hollis McLaren), and several men, all similarly dressed. They tell him to consult a card in his pocket which tells him how many people he's killed. It seems that they're all murderers, though that's news to Lewis, and they seem to have escaped from prison with no idea of where to go. While they ponder their predicament, random letters appear on screen and the camera pans and scans desperately to keep up with them. These reveal that we're looking at an EMI production of a Peter Sasdy film with butchered cinematography, courtesy of Mill Creek Entertainment's Sci-Fi Invasion collection. The presentation doesn't inspire confidence, and that's probably for the best. This film would probably be just as stupid in all its original widescreen splendor.

Our wanderers are soon beset at a creekside by a potbellied road agent and his sidekick who confiscate everyone's boots and rape Martine. Observing from a discreet distance is Jack Palance on horseback, a man in black with a silver cross for a badge. After the rebooted desperadoes go their way, he identifies himself as Sheriff Friendlander and herds the barefoot victims into his town, Blood City, and deposits them in a secure house in advance of their choosing day. Blood City is a place with its own laws, imposed, from the look of things, by the totalitarian dictatorship of the Red Cross.

 

At the choosing day, Lewis and his new friends will be -- you guessed it -- chosen for a period of indentured servitude. Until that time, they're eligible to be killed by established citizens or their bodyguards, and they're not entitled to bear arms to defend themselves. Citizens themselves are entitled to kill one another until someone has killed twenty people. Such a person becomes an "Immortal," like Friendlander, whom no one may shoot at. Lewis isn't having this. When he wants footwear, he goes to a bootmaker and beats the man into providing what he needs. In general, he's full of gripes. He fails to understand why everything in Blood City boils down to "kill, kill, kill!" His complaints get to the sheriff, who suddenly flashes back to a better time when he (or Jack Palance) was a benign academic of some sort. This reverie sets off alarms in a distant laboratory where technicians in modern dress monitor a mannequin on a hospital bed. One of the technicians, Katherine (Samantha Eggar) pushes some buttons and Friedlander promptly forgets what he was trying to remember.

 

 Above, the fantasy of the Blood City Slickers tour package. Below, the sad reality.

 

At this point, Welcome to Blood City veers away from its apparent destiny as a Westworld ripoff and reveals itself as an even more specific ripoff of that old Prisoner episode where Number Six and his tormentors dress up as cowboys. The ripoff is so thorough that Lewis is at one point informed, apropos of nothing, that he is "Number Nine." Gradually, tortuously, Blood City reveals its purpose. The citizens, prisoners, slaves, bodyguards, etc. are being cultivated or culled in the hope of finding a "Killmaster" to do an unidentified government's dirty work in distant parts of the globe. As an Immortal, Friendlander has been the most likely candidate so far (his scholarly background notwithstanding), but Katherine believes that Lewis is something special. She advances his cause by programming herself into Blood City as a citizen who throws Lewis a rifle so he can save his life, kill a man, become a citizen, join the Red Cross, and acquire his own bodyguards from the man he killed. While the real Katherine is in no way hooked up to the virtual reality (avant la lettre) simulation, she gets off watching video footage of her Blood City self done up as a saloon girl getting it on with Lewis, while a colleague complains that her interest borders on the pornographic. Forget about scientific objectivity. Instead, Katherine grows murderously jealous of Lewis's continuing interest in poor Martine. When Lewis plots to liberate her from slavery to the fat robber from the early scenes, Katherine and her posse intervene, and when the big slob uses Martine as a human shield, she coolly puts a bullet in her virtual (?) rival's brain.

 

 

Not satisfied with this result, Katherine resolves to terminate Lewis once and for all. From her control post in the lab, she can manipulate reality in Blood City to make Friendlander appear out of nowhere like Droopy Dog whenever Lewis tries to elude him. When Friendlander isn't sufficient to her purpose, she empowers one of Lewis's erstwhile fellow victims to whack the renegade. But something goes wrong here as well. Lewis is killed fair and square in Blood City, but he wakes up in the real world -- that's not supposed to happen, at least not so soon. But before Katherine can follow through terminating the man, her boss (Barry Morse) appears to insist that Lewis be retained to lead an Elite Force. In the meantime, in Sasdy's big would-be mindfuck finish, Lewis staggers around his room (where he'd at first looked a lot like the dummy previously playing Jack Palance), discovering first a bunch of TV monitors showing atrocity footage from around the world, and then a reject room where the real Friendlander, Martine, etc. stagger about in a white-clad stupor. Confronted with such horror, Lewis takes the only escape route available to him, somehow reprogramming himself into Blood City and riding off into the sunset.

 

Pay no attention to the people behind the curtain.

I see what Sasdy and his writers were trying to say, but no -- no one in their right mind, and compared to those other poor souls Lewis is in his right mind, would put themselves back in the idiot universe of Blood City. Hell, given a choice between becoming a Killmaster, or getting an apparent lobotomy, and watching Welcome to Blood City, I can cut the choice down to two pretty quickly. Sasdy finishes a remarkable two-part cinematic coup here; after making one of the worst horror films of the 1970s in the form of The Devil Within Her/Sharon's Baby/ I Don't Want to Be Born, he bounces right back to make one of the worst sci-fi films of the decade. It qualifies for that ranking because it confuses incoherence for originality when it isn't brazenly stealing used ideas and wastes an otherwise capable cast of stars. If anything, Blood City is worse than the baby movie because its ineptitude is less amusing. It's no surprise that it was television from then on for Sasdy, with the somehow fitting exception of the Pia Zadora vehicle The Lonely Lady. Need I add that Mill Creek's atrocious rendering does the film no favors? Since it does none for itself, I guess you can't blame Mill Creek too much.

Mill Creek Invasion: ESCAPE FROM GALAXY 3 (1981)

Now this is why I buy Mill Creek box sets. Bitto Albertini's space opera is no mere Star Wars knockoff. Watching it, I had the feeling that it was even more of a Starcrash rip-off, a second degree of exploitation, than a homage to Lucas's original. And wouldn't you know: in many European markets, Escape was in fact marketed as Starcrash II. It apparently uses some effects footage from the older film, and apes it in its vision of a galaxy of kings and emperors, a heroine named "Star," a frizzy-haired man of action and some strenuous genre-bending. It may in fact surpass Starcrash in raw stupidity, to such an extent that it may rival its model for entertainment value.

A long galaxy ago, in a time far, far away, the planet Ixilon, ruled by benevolent King Zenon (?), is under attack by Oraclon, the "powerful king of the night" (Don Powell, a onetime Hollywood dancer who also composed the score for this film). From his appearance, Oraclon earned his kingdom by being a kind of beacon in the darkness, from his glittery beard to a costume out of the Golden Age of Comics. But he wants more, and despite Princess Belle Star's assurance that "we'll overcome the dark forces of evil," Zenon prepares for the worst.

Oraclon kinda reminds me of the old Psycho-Pirate in DC Comics. He certainly runs the gamut of emotions.

After some desultory maneuvering and laser combat in space, he delegates Belle (Sherry aka Cheryl Buchanan) to be his ambassador to the Antaen Empire, a potential ally, with loyal lunkhead Lithian (James Milton) as her protector. In the confusion of battle our heroes make good their escape while Ixilon goes down fighting, even though Oraclon has technology that enables him to look into the cockpit of their escape craft.

 

Belle Star and Lithian flank their doomed monarch above, and fly their way out of Dodge below.

Both sides have a lot of technology to throw around, and one of the joys of the English version is the avalanche of technobabble, with special emphasis on the babble. Try some samples:

Oraclon: Prepare the uranium vapor rockets!

Zenon: We'll throw up a shield of mega-rays.

Oraclon: Use the hypersolar missile systems!

Lithian: The hydrogen booster units are already at 6000 mega-degrees.

Lithian: We're protected by the omega unit.

Oraclon: Use omegametric teleprobes and scan the whole eastern galaxy! Wait!...Including the equidistant conic tangents!

Oraclon excels at overall villain rant, e.g. "You galactic idiots! Imbeciles! Belle Star and Lithian are excaping! We are not returning to base, until I have their heads at my feet." But despite his big talk the good guys manage to excape all the way to a strange blue planet with a oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. They appear to have landed in the middle of a peplum, on a planet populated by people in togas and tunics. But the architecture is somewhere between Hobbitown and Munchkin Land, and the environment is strange and terrifying to the newcomers.

Lithian: What is this stuff?


Belle Star: It's water! I once saw some in my father's collection of intergalactic minerals.


Lithian: What do you use it for?

A slow learner throughout, Lithian flees in fright when the princess playfully splashes some of the alien substance his way. But their idyll is short-lived once the primitives gather up their courage to surround the strangers and capture them. Lithian reminds Belle that he could have dispersed the rabble with his beta-ray, but Princess Star holds out hope that they can prove their friendliness before they're condemned to be burned at the stake. That's a good hunch, since Lithian soon has an opportunity to make a superhuman vertical leap to save a child from falling off a cliff. He'll later show that he has superhuman strength when he helps the villagers build a dam by tossing boulders into a river. Belle has super strength as well, and both heroes can shoot beams of energy from their fingers when the writer remembers that they can. But basically, like most aliens in Euro sci-fi, they may as well be magical creatures who can do whatever the director can afford to show them doing.

If this is how the male Eloi of post-apocalyptic Peplum Earth react to Lithian in his costume, how will they react when he reveals his loinclothed manliness?

Life on Ixilon was long and dull. We learn that Belle and Lithian are immortal, but like most non-humans, have never kissed and never had sex -- nor, as we've seen, have they ever bathed. Belle proves a quick study in the ways of this strange new world -- bravely taking nude showers in the local waterfall definitely speeds things along -- while I've already mentioned Lithian's more protracted learning curve. Belle tries to demonstrate the pleasures of the body, but leaves that task to the local females when he seems uninterested in her. For a reel or so Escape turns into a sci-fi sex comedy -- and to be specific, it's a post-apocalyptic sex comedy. The village elder informs his guests that his people are the sole survivors of an ancient civilization, and when Oraclon finally shows up, his scan confirms a long-ago burst of intense radiation typical of a destructive war. It all adds up pretty quickly: Star Wars/Starcrash ripoff, postapocalyptic peplum, genre sex comedy. It's a cult-movie trash-heap paradise.

But no sooner have the earthlings celebrated life with a charmingly awkward bump and grind ensemble in the old peplum spirit, and no sooner have our heroes realized, upon finally doing the dirty with each other instead of strangers, that they are no longer immortal, than Oraclon shows up again to rain on the parade with lasers and bombs. Belle and Lithian can save their new home only by offering themselves up to their enemy, who cackles at the thought of their eternal servitude -- little does he know. Meanwhile, the good guys still have a card up their sleeves. They'll use sex as a weapon. Belle puts the moves on Oraclon, offering him a different kind of servitude. As he accepts the offer, Lithian becomes a kind of blue-eyed monster. Is this something he could have done before, or has jealousy and/or sex given him new powers? I'll leave the answer to the Monday morning quarterbacks. All I know is that when he zaps Belle while she's lip-locked with Oraclon, it's good night King of the Night. He's not just relegated to the ash-heap of history; he becomes the ash-heap of history! Good triumphs once again!

As long as you know what you're getting into, it's hard to hate this film. It's so enthusiastically and unselfconsciously stupid that the enthusiasm overwhelms the stupidity. Well, maybe not, but the stupidity actually factors into the enthusiasm and carries you along. Escape From Galaxy 3 has a certain childish charm, despite its arguably adult elements, and that exuberant naivete transcends the cynicism you'd think would be inherent in a Starcrash ripoff. It is definitely one of the dumbest movies you'll ever see, but that's what's fun about it. It's dumb but not dull, and for a film like this, that's probably all you can ask for. Escape is easily the most entertaining stage of the Mill Creek Invasion so far, but there's still much more to come.

Mill Creek Invasion: EXTRATERRESTRIAL VISITORS (Los Nuevos Extraterrestres, 1983)

Some of you will know J. Piquer Simon's E.T. knockoff by another name. Apparently someone in this country thought it might sell better if people thought it was a knockoff of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and as Pod People the film took its lumps from the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I guess some genius thought that hatching from an egg made an alien a pod person, but that's exploitation. The late Simon is perhaps best known as the director of Pieces, the object of a growing film cult, and in keeping with the tone of that film he seems to have wanted to make something closer to a horror film. His studio had different ideas, however, and the result splits the difference like a tight pair of pants.

Los Nuevos Extraterrestres is set in, but not shot in, the United States, where poachers are on the prowl, an aspiring pop band records a new song called "Burning Rubber Tires," and an alien craft with a precious cargo of eggs crashes in the wilderness. One of the poachers discovers the eggs and, confronted with an unprecedented find, promptly sets about smashing as many as he can.

'Eggy weggs! I likes to smash'em!"

We can't blame his behavior on Aliens because that film is three years in the future. Maybe he thought they were pods and just panicked. In any event, he leaves one egg untouched. Meanwhile, a confused, angry adult alien wanders through the woods. It has a death touch. When it kills you, it leaves a glowing star map on your forehead -- it's way of saying "Kilroy was here," perhaps.

The one surviving egg is discovered by a precocious young naturalist who takes it home with him and takes it to bed with him to make it hatch more quickly. The new life starts out sort of looking like the famous "inside-out bear" of Prophecy in embryo before growing into a kind of Cave Alf, a shaggy little creature with a pinhead and a trunk through which he can suck up bowls of milk and Planter's Peanuts.

 

A cautionary tale of what happens when you eat too much of the wrong stuff.

It soon grows "big and strong," albeit not very big, on a diet of American breakfast cereals and junk food and develops strange magical powers as the little boy tries to teach it how to play. "Trumpy," as the boy calls it, can assemble jigsaw puzzles telekinetically. He can lift a rocking chair with his mind and drop it back on the floor. He can make the boy's closet full of shirts parade through the room. He rigs up the boy's telescope so he can see African animal scenes instead of space and stars. Like many cheap films about aliens, there's no rhyme or reason to what Trumpy can do. The only limit to his powers is the budget, and that's pretty tight.

Behold, the magical parade of shirts!

In the meantime, the adult Cave Alf stumbles upon the poachers, who are remarkably undisturbed by their new visitor.

A. What on earth is that?...Looks like a cross between a pig and a bear.
B. By God, it's ugly!...Be careful, it could be dangerous.
A. Ahh, it may be ugly, but it appears harmless enough. Sure is a strange bird. Dja think it could be worth something?
B. Ahh, could be. Keep'im busy.
A. (to alien) Hey, uh, enjoying yourself? Takin' a little night stroll? Trouble is, the weather's a little bit rough for that, isn't it?...
B. Go on talking!

Somehow the Cave Alf survives the poachers' pick-up lines and shrugs off the net they cast over her, this being, we are to understand, the mother of the martyred eggs and the surviving Trumpy. Before it can be united with its only child, it'll bump off some members of that awful pop band, which has come camping to ease the tensions of recording their surefire hit about the burning tires. Some slight effort has been made to make these people into personalities, but it's all for naught, since they're killer-fodder as surely as if they had made camp at Crystal Lake. Regrettably, the results aren't nearly as bloody as they might have been at the lake. Simon's producers apparently thought that if they went easy on the gore, the mass murder perpetrated by the Cave Alf wouldn't really compromise the eetean flavor they were aiming at in the Trumpy scenes.  Inevitably, however, the storylines must converge. Will the innocent Trumpy be mistaken for its malevolent parent and blown away by the surviving bandmembers and civilians? Will little Tommy be able to convince the Cave Alf that not all humans deserve the fatal star tattoo? Will he convince his family not to kill Trumpy? And will no one rid us of that insufferable brat?...

Knowing about the compromised production of this picture really strips Extraterrestrial Visitors of what little naive charm it had. It lacks the wild, stupid edge apparent even in clips from a Turkish E.T. knockoff called Badi. Instead, it's merely stupid in the pathetic manner of films made for children. It isn't a film to watch alone. Better to see it with friends so you can root together for the boy to die, come up with a better name for Trumpy, or try to figure out the lyrics to "Burning Rubber Tires." If there was ever a film that deserved nothing better than to be MSTied, it was this one.

I'll send you home with a little music courtesy of YouTube poster DLAbaoaqu:

Mill Creek Invasion: TOP LINE (1988)

Few movie stars have had a more diverse career, to put it mildly, than Franco Nero. For the longest time I knew him only as the guy from the Camelot musical, where he started his epic on, off and currently very much on relationship with Vanessa Redgrave, and some today may know him only as the old guy who was Redgrave's romantic interest in Letters to Juliet. It came as a surprise to me as I became a student of cult and global pop cinema that Nero had such an extensive career in genre cinema, from his international breakthrough as Django to a forthcoming performance as Aleister Crowley -- insert your own exclamation points. There's a lot of strangeness in between, over more than 170 appearances on film so far. Nero seemed capable of doing schlock and prestige almost simultaneously; he seems to have turned nothing down. For instance, before reporting for Franco Zeffirelli's Young Toscanini, Nero was in Colombia shooting a number of films and fathering a child. One of those Colombia-shot shows was this action film directed by Nello Rossati, who had filmed the one-and-only official Django sequel with Nero one year earlier. Top Line (that appears to be its original title) is a kind of compendium of Eighties genre motifs. coming on at first like a Romancing the Stone or Raiders type adventure story before snowballing through blatantly derivative sci-fi conspiracy themes with an inexorably wacky momentum that makes the film entertainingly bad.

Nero plays Ted Angelo, a journalist sojourning in Colombia, where he's pressured by his publisher, who happens to be his ex-wife, into fulfilling his writing contract. The hard-drinking Ted has women trouble all over the place; when he tells his Colombian girlfriend he's feeling tired, she pulls a knife on him. He explains quickly that he didn't mean he was tired of her. Getting back to work, he investigates an amazing find by a local hunter: a trove of Central American trinkets and a ship's log. The log may rewrite history because it indicates that one of the early transatlantic expeditions of "500 years ago" made a hitherto unknown stop in Colombia. For more info about the treasures, Ted tries to interview Heinrich Holzmann (George Kennedy, dubbed by someone else), a prominent collector and Nazi war criminal. After Holzmann rebuffs him, things start falling apart. Ted's apartment is ransacked and one of his friends is killed. He barely escapes from stalkers, only to find himself chased barefoot through a cactus patch by a car driven by a cackling Holzmann. He escapes Holzmann by burying him under a ton of salt, but a Nazi George Kennedy is only a warm-up.

The problem is, Ted's made the discovery of the century. Guided by the hunter, he's found the old Spanish ship -- and a spaceship. As he frantically urges his publishers to pick up the story, shadowy forces close in on him and his new girlfriend (Deborah Barrymore, who is related not to Drew but to Roger Moore). After more hairbreadth escapes, including one where he rides in the bed of a produce truck driven by a drunk and defeats his pursuers by throwing eggs at their windshield, things get still worse in a small town when a bulky, vaguely teutonic looking fellow opens fire on a crowd with a machine gun. This new adversary seems superhuman, tossing people aside two at a time. He can take a fireworks rocket to the eye with only cosmetic damage that reveals him as a termina--oh, let's call him a robot or cyborg or something else. With no heavy machinery that might crush the artificial life out of this mechanical menace, Ted must save himself the natural way. That's right; our hero must trap the relentless automaton in a corral with a bull. And that's all she wrote. It isn't even close. Had Skynet miscalculated and sent the original Terminator back to the Old West, one begins to suspect, the poor thing wouldn't have stood a chance.

Following the recent ban on human bullfighting in Barcelona, Catalonian tourist authorities are testing a futuristic, bull-friendly alternative.

Finally, rescue seems at hand when Ted's ex arrives with a boat. But no; she's part of the conspiracy, too -- a 12,000 year old conspiracy to cover up aliens' mining of a special element essential for space travel. For most of that time, the ex explains, mankind wasn't a threat because we were just too stupid. But "your evolution was a threat, so we took measures." Those measures included disguising as humans and becoming the leaders of all levels of society, including the publishing business, as this so-called woman demonstrates by stripping, vomiting on herself, sweating very heavily and enduring a round of face-pumping until she shows her true, hideously alien form. As his new girl faints, Ted gapes in disbelief. What have you done with my ex-wife, he asks? "Here I am, honey," the alien answers, as the film takes a final, queasy turn. She's now equipped with a projectile tongue that wraps around Ted's neck and yanks him toward her yawning fanged mouth. "You still taste good to me," the beast coos, "I am partial to your flavor." That's just dirty....

This is an extreme makeover.

Top Line is nonstop zaniness held together by Franco Nero in hysterical action mode. It passes for science fiction without relying too much on special effects, which is a good thing given that the effects, for the robot-man especially, are "special" in the unflattering sense of the word. From the limited evidence of the typically ravaged Mill Creek copy, the Colombia locations keep things consistently picturesque while giving things that edge-of-civilization feel of so many Italian genre films from the Eighties. The film moves fast and gets crazier as it goes along, and for a bad movie that's a good thing. Depending on your mood, Top Line can make for an amusing 90 minutes; for everyone, I hope it was amusing to read about.

Mill Creek Invasion: EYES BEHIND THE STARS (Occhi dalle stelle, 1978)

Roy Garrett, the credited writer and director of Eyes Behind the Stars, was a member of the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena and a field investigator for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. All of that seems to be true except for the man's name. "Garrett" was the sometime screen name of Mario Gariozzi, who is cited as an investigative researcher in some UFO literature online. In his hands, Occhi dalle stelle becomes a cross between Sunn Classic Pictures's Hangar 18 and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up. The Antonioni part is the film's MacGuffin. A fashion photographer inadvertently catches evidence of a UFO landing during a lengthy photoshoot in the woods. The aliens take no chances with him, kidnapping and probing him in ways best left to the imagination. Just laying on a slab is enough to fill the picture snapper with bug-eyed terror. The aliens themselves are not left to the imagination -- unless you want to see them out of uniform.

Maybe the aliens are meant to look menacing, but I just want to pet them.

They also try to zap all film evidence of their presence, without realizing that several crucial frames have been given to ex-cop turned reporter Tony Harris (Robert Hoffman) who becomes our dogged protagonist in an increasingly paranoid scenario. He has to worry not just about aliens but agents of the British government (like many Italian genre films, this one is set in the U.K.) dedicated to silencing all inquiries about UFOs in order to prevent global panic. These silencers are always a few steps and a few punches ahead of him, leading him to suspect that one of his supposed allies is actually part of the conspiracy? Could it be the girl with the suspicious cast on her arm (Nathalie Delon)? Could it be the all-too-convincing UFO conspiracy buff who doubles as an antiques dealer? There are simply too many details that can't be explained normally. Why doesn't Martin Balsam, playing a policeman, speak in his own voice? Was the 1966 Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winner incapable of speaking in a British accent? And where do our heroes find a telepath all of a sudden to probe the mind of an abductee? I guess if UFOs are real, then all things are possible.

Our hero (above center) has his troubles fighting men, but takes no chances with women.

Despite the superficial sci-fi trappings, Occhi dalle stelle is more conspiracy thriller, at least in intention, than futuristic fantasy. There are fewer scenes of saucers in flight, or even of fuzzy-costumed aliens probing victims, than there are of Robert Hoffman fighting conspirators and their goons with fists and guns. Some of the stagings and set design suggest a Vittorio Storaro influence on cinematographer Erico Menczer, but the usual limitations of a Mill Creek disc make a fair appraisal impossible. Most of the alien activity consists of POV camera crawls, flashing lights and vanishing objects. It's a grim affair in more ways than one, capped with a typical Seventies finish that here, given the auteur's own interest in the subject, sounds almost like a cri de coeur against the cover-up that simply must exist. By Mill Creek standards, Eyes Behind the Stars has some camp value thanks to the goofy photo-shoot scene, the funky looking aliens, and the random telepath, but there's also a mean-spiritedness to it, possibly reflecting the director's frustrations as a UFO researcher, that has its darkest expression when the hero takes out his frustrations on a female character. That puts a little edge on the goofiness that viewers might find gratifying, but for its current target audience of Mill Creek fans the film probably could have used more goofiness.