Doctor Movie: Episode 316: Endgame

Show Notes

Join Doctor Movie for a look at your favorite movies from behind the steering wheel. Its another Italian knockoff dealing with our miserable future. Lets check out the bizarre film that is Endgame. Enjoy!

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Someone's got to save all the mutant people before the evil warlords have them all killed.

And it might as well be Italian Jeff Bridges that makes it happen.

Right here on Doctor Movie.

Wait a minute, I hear something.

Doctor Movie!

Hey, what's happening, everybody?

Welcome back to Doctor Movie, another episode for you right here.

That's right, we have a...

Hey kids, are you ready for some Italian goodness?

Well, this might not be it.

This is Endgame from 1983, from Joe Diamato, using a different name, which he had, I think, 15 different names that he used.

What's the name on this one?

It's gone.

I don't see it.

Anyways, he didn't go by Joe Diamato.

Oh, when you look it up, it does say Joe Diamato.

So yeah, we'll do a little synopsis here for you.

A telepathic mutant recruits a post-World War III TV game show warrior to lead her band of mutants to safety.

And yeah, that's what we got here, folks.

Also, if you're tuning in and you look at this artwork, there is nothing in this movie that looks like the artwork on the cover.

So it's another one of those disappointments, because I wanted to see Mr.

Spandex with spiked boots with a face mask, football helmet, with spikes coming out with, well, there's a guy with a hand crossbow, but it don't look anything like this guy.

So a sci-fi action flick, if you want to call it that.

Really, if you tuned in to the last episode, Wheels of Fire, this movie is pretty much that movie in reverse, but throwing a dash or running man.

Everything that happens in that movie, if you just play it backwards, it's kind of what happens here.

It's uncanny.

Speaking of uncanny, this movie is basically the first X-Men's movie without the X-Men in it.

You got the mutants, but just don't have the X-Men.

So I know I'm throwing a lot at you so quickly here.

Well, let's look at our cast.

We got Al Cliver in this.

Al Cliver from Zombie, from pretty much every Italian B-movie that's made.

This guy's in it.

He's kind of a standard.

I called him the Italian Jeff Bridges.

That's who he looks like.

We've got George Eastman, which pretty much every D'Amato film, George Eastman is going to be involved somehow, either behind the scenes or on the screen.

So it's always a delight to see George Eastman.

I mean, he kind of covers it all.

We got Laura Gimsmer in this.

She's like the main mutant, I guess, who has these telepathy things.

Her name is Lilith in the movie, and she's known for some skin flicks, Black Emanuel, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead.

I mean, she's an Eastman.

Not Eastman, she's a D'Amato favorite.

She kind of pops up in a lot of his smutty stuff.

The only other one I'm really going to bring up is the great Bobby Rhodes, which if anybody listens to any of my other shows, well, specifically Helming Power Hour, you know we love some Bobby Rhodes.

Matter of fact, Court Psyops does the best Bobby Rhodes.

Now, Bobby Rhodes don't have a very big part in this movie, but as soon as I saw him, and I've never seen him without the mustache, so that kind of threw me too.

But he is in this, and ironically, his name is Woody Aldridge.

There you go, I don't really know why.

That's it as far as a cast to really talk about.

We'll get into this.

Like we said, Al Cliver's character is Ron Shannon, and he's like a superstar, right?

They are having, it's a running man, it's a televised running man, right?

Where these guys go out and they face each other, and it's all for money, and they got like sports protein shakes and stuff that are sponsored by the show, and they kind of nailed that whole aspect of all this.

You know, it's kind of just a standard play now, but there's, borrowed heavily from Running Man for sure, there's an Escape from New York feel to it, there's, like I said, it's wheels of fire in reverse, because, you know, in the other movie, you're picking up the team and you're taking them to go fight the bad guys.

You kind of get the story backwards here.

It's kind of hard to explain.

One thing I will say about this movie, it's the first one of these movies I've seen where, it's funny because as soon as I thought it while watching it, I thought, okay, well, there went that out the window.

But it's the first movie like this that I've seen where our main hero doesn't shack up with the female lead role of the movie or shacks up with somebody, right?

Because our hero needs, you know, he needs a stress reliever.

But this is the first one where he's hired after he wins this running man thing, which he's going up against Bobby Rhodes and George Eastman, who used to be his best friend, but now they can't stand each other and they want to kill each other.

So again, it's like right opposite of the Wheels of Fire story because they used to be friends, now they hate each other.

And so all that play is going on, but he ends up not killing George Eastman during the running man thing.

He has him at knife point and just decides not to kill him, letting him live in shame, and that may be one of the main reasons why he hates him so much.

But Al Claver's character, Ron, meets up with Laura Gimsbur's character, and she's a mutant.

Now, that's the other thing, too, is you've got these futuristic Nazis that are going around and wiping out all the mutants.

It's funny, they're all dressed very Nazi-ish, and then their commander is not dressed like the same at all.

He's more in World War II attire.

It's very weird.

I mean, the Nazis are, too, except they were in long black trench coats, and it's almost like the Star Wars stormtroopers mixed with the Nazis.

Am I making any sense here?

Probably not, because we know that they're modeled after each other.

So futuristic Nazis, but not white like stormtroopers.

They're all black, right?

Anywho.

So yeah, there's a lot of mutant killing going on.

So Ron Shannon decides that he's going to put together a ragtag team to help assist Lilith and all of her mutant friends out of here and get them to safety.

And she's promised him a buttload of gold.

So there you go.

That's part of the deal here.

I don't know how much a boatload is technically, but that's kind of what he's getting.

I think she even says that.

If you save me, there'll be a buttload of gold.

I really don't recall that at all in the movie.

But anyway.

So that's what's got to set up here.

And as they go along, they run into strange other beings that they have to fight.

But we got to put the team together, which consists of your typical team that you need for any kind of adventure like this.

You got to have the real strong guy.

You got to have the quick reflex guy.

You got to have the guy with the eye patch.

And you got to have the...

What's the other guy?

Dang, it went blank.

Oh, the ninja.

Who's...

You know, everybody else has a name, but the ninja's name is Ninja.

And I'm just going to say, he's not much of a ninja.

Now, he's a pretty bad dude, but towards the end of the movie, you're just going, that's not very ninja-like at all.

So I don't know if they just don't know what a ninja is or is supposed to be.

This is 83.

So this is a word that's being thrown around pretty heavily at this point.

Could mean anything, right?

I mean, we do have teenage mutant ninjas later on.

Maybe they were on to something.

Anywho, he puts this team together, and they end up going to this one place where all these blind monks are there, but all the blind monks have swords, and so they have a big showdown fighting against the blind monks.

And the reason the blind monks can see is because they have a mutant locked upstairs, and they've all tapped into his brain, and they can see through him, telepathically, what's going on.

Now, we're also going to throw a little dash of Flash Gordon in this movie, because remember the whole telepathy booth scene where he's talking to Del and he says over and all that stuff?

So, somehow, Ron, our main character, and Lilith can communicate to each other through brain waves.

Hey, watch out for this, because he's going to try to kill you.

You know, that kind of stuff, even though she's nowhere around.

Now, she's also brought a young boy that she's teaching, who is practicing to be a young Luke Skywalker, looks like, because all she's doing is making him, like, you know, levitate some rocks and stuff like that.

So, you kind of got all that story going on.

You got George Eastman, who's Kurt, again, his best friend slash enemy, who's going along as well and trying to sabotage him every time, everywhere he goes, because he wants him to die, and he probably thinks, hey, I can get this gold.

So, you kind of got that backstory going on, too.

But, yeah, they just kind of keep running into either the Nazis or blind people, or now they're starting to find, oh, there's a professor that's in this, too, who's hanging out, which is kind of the protector of Lilith.

And again, this is where I was like, okay, this is going to be weird because Ron Shannon is not going to, you know, shack up with some lady and have to, you know, her die and then him try to, you know, revenge her or whatever.

But as soon as I said that, the professor gets knocked out or killed, knocked off.

And I was like, okay, well, there's the doorway.

Well, being that he's out of the picture, maybe she and I, maybe me and Telepathy Woman can hook up, which again, with the roles that Laura Ginzer has played in the past, would not surprise me one bit, right?

Anywho, while the professor is still alive, they find some dead mutants on the road.

And here's this weird thing about this movie that kind of makes it different.

The mutants are starting to degenerate, de-evolution, right?

Intervolution, I don't even know what the word is.

They're turning back into the original species.

In other words, you got some who are starting to look like monkeys, and you got some that are starting to look like aquatic creatures.

They got gills, webs between the fingers.

This is the path we're going with this movie.

It's why it's called Endgame, I guess.

Because it's got to end sometime.

So they end up fighting some of these mutants along the way who are transforming or mutating even more.

I mean, it's one thing they're already mutants, but now they're becoming like mutant mutants, right?

Going back to the roots.

And so we got our hero trying to save the girl.

The girl gets picked up by the bad guys and taken off, and he has to go break into there.

And him and George Eastman, his enemy, Kurt, decide to go in there together and try to save the girl.

And they've got a truckload of other people, too, or a buttload, whatever the measurement is.

I can't remember.

It seems like buttload was used a lot.

I don't think it's in the movie at all.

I wish it was, because it would have made the movie better, I think.

So yeah, you kind of end up where everything all comes together at once, where you got George Eastman and Al Cliver's character going in and saving the telepathy woman who's been picked up by this Gill man who's got naked chicks riding on the car with him.

He ends up raping Lilith.

And you know, because that's Italians.

They have to have that in there, because that's how you know that a bad guy is a bad guy.

You know, they can't just be a bad guy.

They have to do something that bad.

So anywho, they save the girl, and they find the strong man in there as well, and he's like been cement blocked into a wall.

He can't get out, but they don't save him.

They end up killing him, because you know, if they tried to get him out, it would wake everybody else up, and they would be in trouble.

So they kill him instead, which to me could be just as noisy.

Anywho, that's what they do.

And they get to check out, and they get back, and when they get everybody back together, and they get to the location they're supposed to be at, all of a sudden all the Nazis show up with the general, and the general pulls out a gun, he's going to shoot Ron Shannon in the head, and then he uses his telepathy powers to reach out to the little boy, and says, all right, this is your time.

It's time for you to save us all, or we're all going to die.

So the kid goes crazy carrying on them, even though he's inside a truck and can't see what's going on, he's picking up vehicles, smashing them down on the Nazis.

He's making a machine gun just start wiping people out.

He makes the general take the gun and turn it back at himself and blow his own brains out.

He makes an avalanche happen.

He makes a big strong wind happen.

And as soon as the general shoots himself in the face, a helicopter shows up.

It's just like the end of Enter the Dragon.

It's like, man, if y'all had only been here about ten minutes earlier, you would have seen all this stuff happening.

But no, y'all show up right when everybody did and land, and these two guys come out with a box.

They set it down at Ron Shannon's feet, opens it up and says, there's your gold.

Thank you.

And they load up the woman and take off, but they leave everybody else.

And I'm like, wait a minute.

Are they not all going to get on the helicopter and go?

I don't know.

Maybe I missed some sort of detail there.

But you know what?

It don't really matter because it's Endgame.

So the helicopter flies off, and then Ron Shannon goes to pick up the box of gold, and some gunshots happen.

And show enough, it's Kurt.

We thought Kurt might have died.

We ain't seen him in a while.

He disappeared, and here he is.

And they say, here we go.

One on one, all or nothing.

Whoever lives gets the gold.

They pull out their knives, they run at each other, and then you get a steel frame, and that's how the movie ends.

So the Endgame was set up for a sequel, I guess, which doesn't surprise me.

So, yeah, that's kind of Endgame.

The only thing that's missing was, you know, a ring laying there, and somebody picks it up and puts it on his hand, and it says, The End?

It's kind of missing that part.

But anywho, I don't know what you expect or what I expected.

It's the Italians taking four or five different popular movies of the year, 1983, and mixing them together and making a movie goulash.

Do they eat goulash in Italy?

I don't think that's an Italian food.

What would they make that's a mixture of everything?

I don't know.

Maybe a calzone.

They made a movie calzone.

Anywho, I'm just blabbering now.

I'll give this movie a three out of five.

It's just kind of there.

It's not bad.

I do like a lot of these people that are in this movie.

Not that the movie would be any better if anybody different was in it, or any worse if anybody different was in it.

It's just kind of there.

Lots of gunplay.

Lots of mutants.

Lot of explanation for things that you really don't need.

Yeah, it's just alright.

It's alright.

So that's it for this one, folks.

Let me know if you got some recommendations.

I keep saying this, but I think I've gotten one recommendation.

So you guys need to give me some advice, give me some stuff, what you would like for me to cover on here.

Alright, folks, that's it for this one.

We will check you later.