The Sisterhood (1988)

Having now seen six films from Cirio Santiago, I know what I’m in for when I hit play on one of his movies.  A paper-thin plot, wooden acting, explosions, sloppy fight choreography, shoot-outs, and female nudity.  Santiago knows how to check off all the boxes for genre filmmaking.  His films are never great but I never find them to be boring or truly awful, either.  I like to describe Cirio Santiago’s films as cinematic junk food.  They satisfy when you have a craving but they’re not going to have much long lasting value.  The Sisterhood is yet another example of Santiago’s vending of cinematic junk food and that’s OKAY!  As long as you go into his movies knowing what to expect. 

The Sisterhood is a sort of mashup of the post-apocalypse and sword and sorcery sub-genres that flooded VHS rental shops back in the 80’s.   The characters’ costumes are either made up of tattered shirts and shoulder pads or capes and furs.  Most of the locations used in this film were either shot in a rock quarry or a desert location; AND the two primary modes of transportation in this post-nuclear landscape seems to be either horseback or repurposed combat vehicles.  Tropes from both sub-genres are present.  We even get some sorcery and magic powers, likely mutations brought on by nuclear fallout, and the “sisterhood” are even referred to as witches.

Santiago attempts a female empowerment angle to the proceedings, which isn’t new territory for the director.  Previous films, such as Silk and The Muthers, also showcased strong women capable of holding their own against the vicious men who act as their adversaries.  Unfortunately, Santiago’s good will and efforts towards feminism is undercut by topless shots and female characters scantily clad and dolled up with makeup.  Cosmetics are a necessity in a post-apocalyptic world?  Granted, this is a low budget genre film targeted at a specific audience and I appreciate the effort, but still, it comes off as disingenuous.  This film would actually make an interesting double with Mad Max: Fury Road as a contrast and compare exercise.

There’s little to no plot to speak of in The Sisterhood.  Basically, we follow three female characters as they travel across “the wasteland” in an effort to free their fellow sisters from slavery in a male dominated world.  As to be expected, there are plenty of battles and adventures along the way.  Obviously, this is a low budget affair.  The soundtrack, specifically, sounds like some dude banging away on a Casio keyboard in his parents basement somewhere in Ohio.  So, don’t go in expecting anything on the level of Beyond Thunderdome.  Keep your expectations mitigated and turn your brain off after you hit that play button.  A six pack of your favorite beer will likely help increase your level of enjoyment.

MVT: Cirio Santiago: He consistently does a lot with a little.

Make or Break Scene: The Sisters storm a rock quarry hideout with a tank!

Score: 6/10

Silk (1986)

We’re all familiar with the expression “smooth as silk” (even the titular character in Cirio Santiago’s film knows it; “Because I’m so fuckin’ smooth”).  We’re all familiar with how the material is produced, as well (from the butts of caterpillars, amongst other creepy crawlies, just in case you weren’t).  For the life of me, however, I’ve never understood its appeal.  Sure, it looks nice and shiny and supernaturally wrinkle-free.  I get that it’s considered a luxury due to the arduous process of harvesting it (have you ever tried to milk a caterpillar?  Me neither, but I can’t imagine it’s easy).  I get that it’s exotic due to its origins in ancient China (at least to Westerners; Do people in the East just think of it like we do polyester?).  Thing is, I don’t particularly care for the feel of it.  It’s too smooth.  Despite its organic nature, it feels unnatural (again, like polyester, which I would, frankly, prefer).  I wore a pair of silk boxers once.  Once.  The constant, smooth sensation it provides just made me very self-conscious about how things were rearranging themselves down there every time I moved.  I can’t even imagine how much this gliding would irritate my nipples were I wearing a shirt made of the stuff.  I could see its worth in the ascot department, but I think that’s as far as I’m willing to go.  If you dig on silk, more power to you.  Give me cotton any day of the week.  Nice, plush, sweat-absorbing, snug cotton.

After massacring a bunch of thieves, intrepid cop Silk (Cec Verrell) finds herself following the trail of head gangster Austin (Peter Shilton) as he smuggles something somewhere.  Meanwhile, a couple of Nam vets run around killing and mutilating people.

Silk, the character and the film, is practically a carbon copy of George P Cosmatos’ Cobra, the main differences being that the protagonist is a woman, and she doesn’t cut her pizza with a pair of scissors.  Silk also borrows heavily from the Dirty Harry playbook (at one point, she has a villain dead to rights and says, “How do you feel, Slick?  Feel like takin’ the big ride?”; Of course, he does).  She wades into action in a heartbeat, climbing trestles, jumping on trains, leaping from rooftops, and shooting the shit out of bad guys with unerring accuracy.  And Silk is as disassociated with the violence she causes as any male action star ever was.  Maybe moreso.  In the opening sequence, she watches as the thieves’ car explodes into flames.  Santiago shoots Silk’s reaction in slow motion, her ice-blue eyes peering satisfactorily and disinterestedly at the deaths she brought forth.  The loss of life means nothing to her, because criminals, from the pettiest to the vilest, don’t deserve to live.  Her first rule of dealing with the lifestyle of a cop is “Don’t let it get to you.”  On the one hand, this makes sense, because there are surely a great many things about the livelihood that could desensitize a person.  On the flip side, though, it also means that one must be desensitized in order to kill crooks.  They must be dehumanized in the eyes of justice, unworthy to exist.  

Silk, the cop, is, in effect, a macho hero with female genitalia (which we don’t get to see, in case you were wondering).  She wears her hair slicked back.  She pauses before working to don a fingerless glove, but she doesn’t balk at getting her hands dirty.  The filmmakers, simultaneously, enjoy showing off Verrell’s female attributes.  Pulling herself over a ledge, we get a nice view of her hard nipples poking through her tank top (I guess it wasn’t made of silk?).  The camera also delights in focusing on her butt in various tight pants.  You can’t fault the filmmakers or the audience for this stuff.  Both know what they want, and both get it (plus, Verrell is strikingly beautiful).  For all of her testosteronic attributes, there are attempts to feminize Silk.  As the police celebrate a solid bust (you know, the kind where most of the perps are dead), Silk sits to the side, aloof.  Fellow cop Tom (Bill McLaughlin) approaches her to join in on the fun.  Silk tells him to meet her at her place.  This romantic relationship with a fellow officer carries tones of a teacher/student affair, Tom being a bit older and Silk’s superior.  When they go out, Silk wears dresses and does her hair up in curls, the opposite of her masculine appearance at work.  She needs Tom to provide a grounding against the rough life she leads, even if only physically.  Their romance never comes across as being between equals.  Tom leads the dance, and Silk follows, taking away some of her badass cred.  Part of the problem lies in the fact that Verrell is simply not a very good actress.  She can swing the deadpan delivery necessary for wasting bad guys, but she’s incapable of changing it up and actually showing emotion when it’s called for.  She tries to act everything with her piercing eyes, and it just doesn’t work (this is not helped at all by her covering them up with sunglasses in several scenes; Instead of playing enigmatically cool she’s simply inscrutably wooden).

The film’s plot is incredibly convoluted.  I’m sure it made sense on paper to Santiago and company at some point, but it’s confusing on screen.  For this film, however, it’s also unnecessary, and Santiago understood this.  All we need to know are these are the good guys, those are the bad guys, and there are a lot of punches, gun shots, and explosions between the two.  The stuntwork is well-handled, and it appears that they actually allowed Verrell to do quite a bit of it, which helps sell the copious action.  I suppose on the one hand it’s unfair to criticize Silk for being so devoted to its action aspects, as it delivers on them so well.  That being said, without a strong story to hold the set pieces together, it becomes little more than a highlight reel.  Granted, a slick (dare I say, smooth as silk?) highlight reel, but one, nonetheless.  For the undiscerning action junkie, this movie will work a treat.  For everyone else, it’s more like a snack you’re unsure if you regret or not after the fact.

MVT:  Santiago’s direction is tight and slick.  It’s his writing that needs to catch up with this skill set here.          

Make or Break:  The opening action scene sets the table for the film, both good and bad.

Score:  6/10

Up From The Depths (1979)

 When Up From The Depths was originally released, I was enthralled by the trailer. This wasn't just a big fish like in Jaws. This was a monster fish, and that's even cooler. One of my siblings proclaimed to have seen the film. I kind of doubted this, as he was not old enough to get into an R-rated movie (and we all know how strict theater owners are about adhering to the age limits). Regardless, I asked my brother how the film ended, because at this time, monster movies tended to climax with a memorable setpiece, usually involving dynamite and a last minute leap to safety for the protagonist, and I would act out these spectacular finales with my friends (or action figures, if no one was around). It didn't matter if I had seen the movie or not. After my brother told me the end, I was incredulous. This was just too morbid and odd to be true. He had to be pulling my leg. Nevertheless, I used this scenario when playing and got a good bit of mileage out of it. After finally seeing the film, I can honestly say, it was more satisfying when I did it.

Set on an unidentified island in the Hawaiian Archipelago (actually the Philippines, producer Cirio Santiago's stomping ground), the film starts with Dr. Whiting (Charles Howerton) and one of his assistants out on the ocean. The assistant dives down, and we are treated to leering shots of her derriere. While swimming along a ridge, the camera shakes, some rocks fall, and the assistant is killed by...absolutely nothing. But we know she's dead, because we see all of her blood rising to the water's surface. Meanwhile, Rachel (Susanne Reed) is busy at the island's resort, keeping the clientele of drunk, ugly white folks happy. Her boss, Mr. Forbes (Kedric Wolfe) is the ultra-tense Larry Vaughn character, who denies that anything bad is happening and abrogates any and all responsibility to the point of criminal negligence. Rachel's boyfriend, Greg (Sam Bottoms) is a degenerate swindler who dresses alternately like a beach bum or an extra from a Victorian-era-set porno and smirks a lot. He and his drunken, boat captain friend, Earl (Virgil Frye), take tourists out diving and plant fake treasure to con the rubes out of their money. All this time, the monster fish (which was released from its briny prison by the earlier earthquake) is swimming around eating people. Eventually, panic sets in, and the monster must be destroyed.

Since I try very hard to find at least something good to say about every movie I review, I'll make the same effort here. Susanne Reed is gorgeous, and she plays the only likeable character in the movie, but she still has nothing to do in it. In fact, the rest of the movie is so shitty, I'm only going to post images of Ms. Reed with this one, even if they're not from Up From The Depths (but they are anyway). There. I've met my obligation. 
 

Obviously, this is a rip-off of Steven Spielberg's monumental Jaws, and there have been scores of them both before and after. From Enzo Castellari's Great White (aka L'ultimo Squalo) to Joe Dante's Piranha and everything in between, a virtual cottage industry sprang up in the wake (sorry) of the progenitor of the modern summer blockbuster. The films trade on people's fear of the unknown, but instead of the darkness of night, the bogeyman (or in this case, animal) is hidden from the characters and the audience by the darkness of the water (the ones set near water, anyway). It's an elegant conceit that showcases the fact that despite the beauty found below, there is also swift-moving death with rows of jagged teeth. Sadly, director Charles Griffith (perhaps better known as the screenwriter of Roger Corman's The Little Shop Of Horrors and Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000) does not successfully take advantage of this aspect. In Spielberg's movie, the shark is rarely seen, but the attacks are effective, because the effects of the attacks are graphically and stylishly portrayed. In Griffith's film, the monster fish is rarely seen, but the attacks are ineffective, because they are un-dynamically and confusingly portrayed. 

The editing of the film on a whole is terrible. I'm not saying that a picture of this caliber needs to be orchestrated like JFK, but the audience should have some idea of what's going on onscreen. The attacks invariably consist of shots of a person shot from underwater. Cut to an explosion of blood. Cut to a beef shank (best guess) thrusting at the camera. Cut to a hand puppet of the monster thrusting at the camera. Repeat until sequence ends. The duration of the shots is so short, by the time your brain has registered the first cut, there have been at least three other cuts in the mean time.
 

The special effects are about the level of what you'd expect from the Hungarian version of the Universal Studios Tour. The monster fish looks nothing like the creature depicted on the poster, aside from it having fins and a mouth. The full size prop is tugged through the water (in some relatively decent shots; there, that's two nice things I've said about this turkey) and occasionally breaks the surface of the water, consequently breaking our suspension of disbelief. The creature is so ludicrous-looking it makes Larry Buchanan's The Eye Creatures look like John Carpenter's The Thing.

The acting is uniformly god-awful, with Mr. Wolfe taking home the B.E.M. Award for overacting. None of the performances are assisted by the post-dubbed nature of the film. It gives the whole proceeding the feel of a foreign movie (which, technically, it is) and a crap one at that. The music sounds like it was taken alternately from films of the 1950s and Don Ho "Best of..." albums. It is grossly inappropriate, distracting, and worst of all, completely not timed to the onscreen action. The script also partakes of the malfeasance, with subplots brought up and unceremoniously dropped, a pervading sense of "humor" which is broad and unfunny, and a main plot that lays there like a carp wrapped in last week's newspaper.


Don't misunderstand. I'm not down on the movie because it's not as slick as a big-budget, Hollywood film or as nuanced as a Wim Wenders piece. I also bear no malice to filmmakers whose sole purpose is to cash-in on a trend. What I am unforgiving of, though, is when the filmmakers' cynicism and apathy is so starkly apparent onscreen that an overwhelming sense of antagonism is engendered between film and viewer. Up From The Depths takes your money and then delivers absolutely nothing while giving you the finger. Worse than that, it does it all ineptly.

MVT: Susanne Reed. See? Now I'm getting apathetic, too.

Make or Break: The "Break" is every scene in the film, barring a few (and I mean few) where Ms. Reed gets to do something (anything) or look great in swimwear. 

Score: 3/10

Episode #79: Cool Stryker

Here it is!!!
Another episode of the GGtMC for your listening pleasure. This week the Gents cover COOL BREEZE (1972) starring Thalmus Rasulala and STRYKER (1983) from director Cirio Santiago.
We also have a ton of feedback and Actionfest reports from fellow blogger Pickleloaf!!!