The man is a demon and I never take a demon as a prisoner.
He is your enemy, American.
He hates and he kills.
He is the devil.
We want you to kill this evil.
No!
I...
Everything is ready, my darling.
Do not be afraid.
So we'll be together again.
[Music]
Hello and welcome to Hello This is the Doomed Show.
I am Richard, folks.
I got Ian here.
Ian Irza.
Hello, sir.
Hey, how's it going?
Really thankful for this opportunity.
I've always loved this show and it's fun to be a part of it.
Yay!
Well, we'll see how you feel after.
You'll probably be like, "Man, what a mistake.
What have I done?"
Well, it's funny.
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who would say, "Let's do strike commando."
When you were messaging me, like, "Pick some movies out that you might want to cover on
the show."
I kind of want to do strike commando with you.
I feel like that would be a fun show to do.
It's a subgenre that we've never touched on this show, which is Italian action.
In fact, this might be like, maybe not the first action movie, but we're pretty close
to untouched, fricking, genre excitement here.
Well, when Greg and I covered The Last Hunter on Land of the Creeps for a bonus episode,
I talked a little bit about the macaroni combat genres that's sometimes called.
Nomsploitation is even more of a specific part of it because in the early '80s, the Italians
had been making war movies before that, but they were all like World War II-based, including
one specific one.
Actually, I think Dario Argento had a hand in writing, Probability Zero with Henry Silva.
Oh, wow.
And then you had Inglourious Basterds, probably the most infamous of all of the macaroni combat
movies, obviously, because of the remake.
But then in 1980, Antonio Margheriti makes The Last Hunter, and that brought a new breath
to the genre in a way because they started making Vietnam movies.
Margheriti went on to make several ones that were sort of mercenary-based, but then Bruno
Matei had his hand in it in the late '80s, and all five of the movies that he made in
the late '80s are ones that I love.
I like Bruno Matei's movies, actually, but my favorite ones are the five or six action
movies he directed.
Robo War is a little separate, but he did Strike Commando, Strike Commando II, Cop Game,
Double Target, and Born to Fight.
All five of those are basically macaroni combat films combined with ripoffs of other movies.
Well, I think you're talking about Vincent Donne.
Yes, Vincent Donne.
I don't know how this Bruno guy is.
Vincent Donne, also the perfect name for a porn director, Vincent Donne.
So yes, this is Strike Commando from 1987.
We're going to do some spoilers, but this is one of those movies where we can spoil it
for you, but honestly, we can't.
You have to see this thing to believe it.
Bruno Matei as Vincent Donne.
We got a co-writer with Clyde Anderson, aka Claudio Fergasso.
And of course, a person that's come up, I think, on a Jeffrey episode is Rosella Drudy.
Yes, she was, I don't know if she's married to Claudio Fergasso, but I do know that they
were boyfriend and girlfriend.
Maybe they still are.
They were writing collaborators on pretty much anything he did.
And most of the time, from like basically the early '80s to 1990, he was working with
Matei on everything.
I believe they had some sort of a falling out on "Night Killer" for whatever reason.
I don't know why, but that was the movie where they kind of disbanded after that.
I had a falling out with myself for picking "Night Killer" to watch, 'cause, man, I kind
of like that one.
Actually, it was the erotic stuff.
It was the not quite rapey, it was the hostage situation, kind of like the sexy hostage thing.
I was like, it might just be the sleazy, it might be too sleazy for me.
Yeah, you got the woman in that from "Silent Night, Deadly Night" giving a way worse performance
than she ever did in "Silent Night, Deadly Night."
And you've got Peter Hood, who's just out of control in that movie.
Oh, my God.
What was she in "Silent Night, Deadly Night?"
She was the mother at the beginning, who gets shot, and yeah.
Holy shit.
Yeah, that's her.
I never knew.
Thank you.
That's hilarious.
I can't remember the actress' name, but yeah, she was--
It is Melanie Beck, oh, no, wait, I'm sorry, no, that's her character's name.
Tara Buckman is the name.
Yeah, Tara Buckman, that's right, yeah.
That's so funny.
Wow.
Wow, you just made a connection to my brain.
I never had.
Yeah, it's like, it's a thing where Bruno Matei, and we'll talk about this as we go
on, but Bruno Matei would have been, to me, actually a really good second unit director
of action, because if you see the action scenes in his films, they're actually pretty good,
at least I would dare to say, and he uses the budget well.
Brent Hough talked about this at one point while making "Strike Commando 2."
He just said, "We could use all the ammo we wanted, we didn't care about that stuff."
And there's definitely no shortage of explosions as well, but when it comes to directing an
entire film, there are some issues with Bruno Matei's direction, especially dramatic scenes.
And he makes every single actor that is normally a pretty good dramatic actor, or at least better
than they would be if they were in a Matei movie, they're all kind of worse in whatever
he's doing for the dramatic scenes.
Not that Rep Brown's a very good dramatic actor, but I think he's better at other movies
with it, that he is in this, and his performance in this.
I've always described it as just an immaculate performance, because it's so incredibly bad
that it's so incredibly entertaining.
It's transcendent.
So here's a trailer.
I found this fricking bizarro trailer.
My issue with Italian trailers, most of the time, is that there's three minutes, and there's
not a lot of voiceover, there's not that cool voiceover guy, and it's just all the best
beats in the movie.
And so I was just going to play a small snippet of the Italian one, but then I found something
marked in production trailer.
It's two minutes, but it has a very, very...
I've never done a voiceover before voiceover guy.
So we're going to play 30 seconds or so of this thing.
It almost sounds like a fan made, but they're probably just trying to sell the movie to
distributors pre-sales, as they used to do.
So here's that trailer.
Strike Commando.
When they sent Mike Ranson into Vietnam to blow up a vital bridge, they didn't bargain
on him getting out alive.
But Mike Ranson is a highly skilled member of Strike Commando, and there's just two things
on his mind, survival and revenge.
Strike Commando, coming soon.
I'm not going to read the paragraph from the back, because I just usually just grab the
plot synopsis from the back of these VHS tapes, but the International Video Entertainment
Incorporated VHS tape, it is a full, long paragraph detailing the entire movie.
So instead of that, I'm just going to go with the IMDb, which says, "In the Vietnam War,
an American soldier survives a botched mission.
With help from a group of locals who perceive him as a hero, he's sent back for a reconnaissance
mission, only to find his helpers massacred by a brutal Russian soldier."
92 minutes, nailed it.
Before we jump into the plot, we've got music by Luigi Cicciarelli, I'm brutalizing his
names.
I'm brutal.
He did Ratt's Knights of Terror, and he did Vampire in Venice, which Vampire in Venice,
very special movie.
I'm going to cover that on this show, one of these days.
We got cinematography by Ricardo Grissetti, who was shot, God help him, Zombie 3, Robo
War, and Shocking Dark.
Okay, so Matei collaborator there.
Exactly.
Zombie 3, I actually think is pretty good.
I love it.
I think Matei stepped his game up for that one a little bit more than usual.
I think he knew that I kind of have to try on this film, because it's technically a Luchio,
Fulci's name is on it, so I'm going to try a little harder.
I've always thought that that movie felt like a Resident Evil video game, more than almost
any Resident Evil movie does, minus the new one, Resident Evil Welcome to Raccoon City,
which I actually think feels more like a Resident Evil game than any of the other ones.
Yeah, totally.
Oh man, good call.
Yeah.
Now, Zombie 3, never a dull moment, ever.
No slack on that one.
Robo War, I liked it okay, but I would never sit through it again.
It was where them imitating, that was the Predator one, right?
Yes.
Yeah, it's like Predator and RoboCop combined, and it just got, some of the stuff got right.
I actually wished I was watching Predator, whereas with Shocking Dark, I didn't feel
that way.
Well, because Shocking Dark is Alien Meets Terminator, and I love that.
Yeah.
With some, with some actually pretty decent effects work on the Terminator guy at the
end, I will say.
Oh yeah.
Yes.
Oh man.
Yeah, Shocking Dark, that's something special.
I wonder if Stibbilletti had a hand in the effects in that one, I don't remember, because
they almost look like his kind of effects, but I don't, I don't know.
As far as, as far as the cast goes, this is led by our friend and yours, Rev Brown, as Sergeant
Michael Ransom, Rev Brown, I forgot that he was your, the hunter from the future, completely
dropped the ball.
I hadn't thought of that movie in years.
He's in the Howling 2 as well, I think.
Yes, that was the other thing I'm like, that I'm all fired up about Howling 2.
That is one of those movies I hated the first time, and then the second time, I was like,
how could I have hated this?
And that led me to, of course, Howling 3, which is even crazier.
He was also the backup running back to O.J. Simpson at USC.
Well, you know me, Mr. Sports, you barely beat me to that.
No, that's, that's incredible.
Yeah.
Well, one day, you know, O.J. turned him and said, you should be in movies, and he's like,
I'm on it.
Yeah.
Both of them have had pretty competent movie careers.
Crazy.
O.J. up until a certain point.
It's funny.
I don't know.
It's one of those things I watch.
I can watch the three naked gun movies, and I'm like, did he ruin these movies for me
or not?
It's hard.
It's like one of those things.
Every scene he's in, I'm like, oh, I wish he was.
Yeah.
I wish this was someone else.
I wish this was like Bernie Casey or something.
Stopping him.
Stopping a murderer.
Next up, of course, we've got Christopher Connolly, who plays Colonel Radick, and Christopher
Connolly from everyone's favorite Manhattan Baby.
No, not my favorite.
It is no one's favorite.
There's no, I can't even, I can't even play sarcastic with that one, but I love it.
I love it.
It's one of those movies that I totally get why people don't like it.
It just is, I'm so desperate for full chief from that era that that opened up to me after
I was like dying to see it again, and I was like, whoa, this is just like a B side, like
a bad B side to a great record, you know, it's just, it's more of the same, but not.
I love, I love Manhattan Baby, but yeah, no, I don't, no defending it.
Christopher Connolly is giving Cameron Mitchell a run for his money in the sweat, in the sweat
factor.
Yes.
He's sweating like crazy.
God, I can't imagine filming under these conditions, and I live in Florida.
I'm like, what did, what did Christopher Connolly do throughout the 1970s because like, he must
have like smoked a lot of cigarettes or drank a lot because you look at the way he aged.
If you look at pictures of him when he was young, like when he was in a bunch of sitcoms
and stuff, and you're like, geez, what happened in those 10 or 15 years, just once you see
him in like Bronx, in the Bronx warriors in the early 80s, he just looks, he looks rough.
Yeah.
And he had to be smoking and drinking.
He was like, water, I've got whiskey here.
He is a, he is a badass in Raiders of Atlantis, though.
Love him in that movie.
Yeah.
I just got that Blu-ray and watched it with movie party crew where we watched it and tweeted
about it before we gave up on Twitter.
And I, yeah, I really enjoyed that.
That was a instant favorite.
And I don't know how I'd missed it for so long.
I think it was because I just had the VHS rip and I was just like, this has got to have
a DVD one of these days.
And then fast forward and suddenly had a Blu-ray is like, yay.
We've got girl Louise Comsteague as Olga, the Russian soldier.
She this lady, I've only seen her in.
Was it naked?
You die.
No, fashion crimes.
And she was in a bloody psycho.
Those are the ones I know her from.
I've not seen her in anything else.
So not that I know of anyway.
I know I'm mixing up bloody psycho with Massacre.
Oh, I got something to look forward to.
Hey, hey, Italian horror.
I haven't gotten to yet.
Yeah.
Then we got good old Luciano Pagazzi from everything.
He plays la duet.
He's one of those people who, I mean, he's he worked in every genre you can kind of think
of from the sixties to, you know, the late eighties.
And he in the eighties, he started he was he's like he's like a character actor superstar
in the eighties because he appeared in a ton of the the macaroni combat movies, like almost
every one of the ones Margariti made or or Bruno Mattei made.
He was in them.
And a lot of the actually a lot of the Mattei ones, if you look at his filmography, a lot
of his scenes were deleted.
Like he was in a couple of other ones, but it seems pretty deleted for whatever reason,
though he does appear a double target and he gets just about as bad of a death than that
one as he does in this.
I remember.
Yeah, he's in his beardo phase in this one where he's just like every movie he shows
up in his beard is bigger and bigger and bigger.
He's definitely having fun here.
So far as I can tell, it's not like the bloodsucker leads the dance where he just looks like he's
ashamed of himself.
That rape scene in that movie is it's like, man, you've done him dirty by making him do
that.
You're that shit.
I would love to see people's reactions when that gets a frickin blu-ray one day.
It's just freakin hideous.
We got Alex Vitale is the most important character, Jakota.
This guy.
Oh, man.
I don't recognize.
I don't know what character he played in the movie.
But like the other one I've seen with him was hands of steel, but he had like a bit part
in hands of steel.
Oh, no, he was in a beyond the door three trying to think of who you play.
Hands of steel is my I'm kind of ashamed that I didn't recognize him because if he's in
that, I just remember a security guard.
Oh, OK.
Yeah.
I'll have to look for him next time because it's one of those things where I wasn't even
thinking about that.
That is that is my favorite of the Italian post apocalyptic movies.
I love that film.
Yeah, I've seen hands of steel, but it was like like years ago when the on a on a
a rip I found of the VHS tape.
I don't remember it at all.
I remember that.
Yeah, it's Daniel Green, Daniel Green and like Brent Hough, but Daniel Green for sure.
Like my two favorite stars of like late 80s Italian genre films and Daniel Green worked
with Sergio Martino a lot like he was in like five of Sergio Martinez films from that time
because he's in American rickshaw.
He's in the movie The Opponent that Sergio Martino did the boxing movie.
Oh, I haven't heard of that one.
And what's it?
I think Operation Condor or something like that where he plays like a he plays like a
journalist and it's very similar to like the uncharted video games.
I've heard people compare that movie to those a lot.
So OK.
Yeah.
So a character named Major Harry Mann is played by two people, Major Harry Mann or Harry
Mann.
Either way, he's Harry.
It's a Mike Monty and who's in tons of stuff.
He's a zombie three.
He's basically playing the same character he played in zombie three.
He's got tons of stuff.
But also he was voiced by William Berger.
Yeah.
According to the trivia.
And I was like, whoa, that's incredible.
I didn't know that until I looked it up until I saw it.
Yeah, that he was.
Oh, man, imagine William Berger just in that scene because like William Berger was so busy
in the 80s.
Yeah.
It was some movie where he was in 11 movies in one year.
Oh, it was Dial Help.
Dial Help.
Yeah, he played that.
He shows up at the airport because hard explodes or whatever.
Yeah.
I'm like, OK, I'm in 11 movies this year.
So I can meet you at the airport and we're like, well, we'll write the scene in the airport
instead of a library.
Talk about another Italian genre movie that needs a Blu-ray.
Dial Help.
Thank you.
That's one of my favorite first time watches from last year.
Blew me away.
And The Washing Machine.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
Washing Machine I'd like to see again.
I don't know if I'd buy it.
I liked it.
But I got we got a Phantom of Death Blu-ray.
I'm happy about that.
What the hell?
That's great.
Dial Help.
That's next level.
So anyway, that's that's my main picks from the cast.
Those are my main.
I had one more to add to you guys.
It's it's a guy in a small role.
I'm trying to find him Renee Abedezza.
He plays the Viet Cong soldier that Rev Brown is like, take me to Dakota.
And he you know, he tries to he tries to stab him in the back and Rev Brown ends up killing
him.
He's another guy who appeared in a ton of these movies in the 80s.
Like he's in a ton of Matej's other films.
And I recognize him.
I'm like he plays he plays like a Viet Cong soldier or one of those in every single one
of these movies.
So if you see any of the other films, you'd recognize him from those.
Nice.
Hey there, folks.
It's editor Richard cutting in here.
I totally forgot and I think Ian forgot too.
There's this really racist joke at the beginning of this movie.
It's seriously one of the first lines of dialogue in this movie.
It pertains to watermelon and it is not good.
It is I mean, I don't expect, you know, the Italian filmmakers of this era to be progressive
or anything, but for a movie made this late in the 80s and they're still throwing that
kind of crap around, it's it's pretty bad.
It never comes up again.
And the movie has other racial issues to deal with as we'll talk about as we go along.
But yeah, just want to give you a heads up.
It's gross and bad, but what are you going to do?
Movie is made and as much as I've tried, I can't un-make it back to the show.
So the movie starts.
We get this this fateful mission.
And my favorite thing about this this fateful mission is that holding still makes you invisible.
So so so red brown as Mr. Ransom, they're going into this this Vietnam Vietnamese base to
to wreck shit.
And every time the searchlight passes over them, they just hold really still.
And even though they're completely illuminated and they're the shapes of soldiers, they're
invisible.
It's great.
Radick and his team, they're not strike commandos.
Here's the support crew who are out there.
They have the place wired to explode.
And Radick is going to blow everybody up because he doesn't want the mission to fail.
And Ransom's superior officer is there, just give him time, give him time.
And he doesn't give them time and he blows the shit up while the strike commandos.
So all of the strike commandos are killed except our pal Ransom.
And he magically turns into a tree and and floats down the river.
I mean, he had to have been underwater for what hours hours, brain dead for hours.
And then he's discovered by some very desperate Vietnamese people who rescue him.
One of my favorite things about him waking up is the ghostly faces.
So all of these people just start screaming and they look like you get red browns first
crazy scream of the movie yet.
And then he's hanging upside down, but they cut him loose.
What is this dynamic with him and these people?
Ian, what is going on?
It's almost like it's weirdly serendipitous filmmaking because it's like it's almost like
the biggest stereotype you could think of like the white savior.
You know, it's that was funny how like this movie is almost like parodying the white savior
idea.
And I don't even think it's intentional.
Lietta was watching this with me and her jaw dropped when they were just worshiping him
like American, American, American.
She's like, what is going on here?
It's like, I don't know, we got a white savior problems.
Yeah, he's there with with Lau, his new buddy.
He makes friends with this one kid.
And Luciano Pogazzi is there is Ladoe, the French soldier who's now just, you know, like
a freedom fighter.
They try to get him to kill someone, but he won't do it.
And Ladoe explains to him like, oh, you let him down, man, you can't show mercy.
What's wrong with you?
It's really weird.
So they go on a trek together.
So he's they're going to help him on his mission to go kill is looking for a radic who betrayed
him.
But he's also looking for these Russians.
It's the plot is murky here.
I'm not crazy, right?
It's sort of like, no, I think I really think Pagosi is the one who talks to him about Russians
being there.
Okay.
I think he's just yeah, I think he's just leading them through.
I think he ends up wanting to liberate them because when he yeah, when he gets when he
gets back and radic, basically he does like the whole Rambo to thing, go take some photographs
to make sure we know that there are Russians there is like, OK, only under the condition
that you liberate the people who are with me.
So I think that that was what he was going for at a certain point.
And I think he I think he basically wants to become a father to allow as soon as he meets
them for whatever reason, they talk about going to Disneyland together.
So yeah, get them to Saigon and get them out.
Yeah.
I think I overthought it because it was just like, so he ends up blowing up a boat, which
is there's two blowing up a boat scenes that feature one of my favorite things in this
movie, which is grenades with really, really long fuses.
Yeah.
Which I didn't know that was a thing.
Yeah.
I don't know, like the second blow up.
Is he just activating the grenades or is there another fuse attached to it?
Like because I didn't even think about that, actually.
One of the best examples of that in films is Die Hard 2.
I don't know if you know the scene I'm talking about, but Die Hard 2 has a scene where they're
where William Sadler and all his men are tossing the grenades into like the plane that McClane
is taking cover and the grenades, they toss them in and it's like a solid minute before
anything happens.
The fuse on a grenade is like five seconds if that, I don't even think it is that.
It's very, the time is, fuse time is very fluid.
Ransom meets back up with his buddies with Lau and the rest of the freedom fighters.
They've been slaughtered.
They've been completely slaughtered and the only one left alive is Lau and they talk about
a very special place and what very special place did they talk about?
Disneyland, as you say, like cotton candy grows on trees.
There's chocolate and malt and any wish can be granted to you by the magic genie.
It's like, it's such a great, it's like, it's such a, it's such a, it's such a terrible
performance by Red Brown that it's so good, like his emoting is amazing.
His ugly crying is so good.
I love his ugly crying.
"Amanda, tell me, tell me about Disneyland."
They got tons of popcorn there and all you gotta do is go climb the tree to go eat it.
And there's cotton candy, mountains of it, and chocolate milk and malts.
And there's a genie, a magic genie.
And you can't wait to grant your wishes.
Tell me the most important three-syllable word in this entire film.
And then he, then he, then he, it's, Red Brown has like different levels of crescendos
to his screams.
So he first, he like yells it, but then he like really screams it, like he's like, "Jakota!"
The second time he does it, like it's, it's, it's so good how he, it's, and I've always
said this, you know, and I got this from, I think it was Brian Clark of the Attack of
the Killer podcast.
He's like, I think Red Brown thinks that his scream, like increases bullet velocity.
It does, and it like increases the damage.
Like, I've always thought, his, his screaming, I think he thinks is like the, the stopping
power perk from like Call of Duty, where this is like the rapid fire attachment on, you
know, like on guns where it just makes the gun fire faster or do more damage.
Um, it's, he does it, he does it a lot in this movie and in Robo War.
To age myself for, with a video game reference, it's when you scream heavy barrel and then
you kill everyone on the screen with one shot because that's what heavy barrel does.
You're welcome.
Everybody at home who remembers heavy barrel.
Wow.
There's two jacotas that are my favorite jacotas.
There's, I mean, there's many jacotas, but this is my favorite.
So the first one is the one where he's carrying loud, the dead loud and he's got that echo.
So there's an echo effect on the jacota, but then two minutes later, two minutes of screen
time later, he's got his big, like I want to say the big machine gun, not of M 60.
M 60.
Thank you.
I was never going to remember that.
So M 60, and then he suspects that jacota is in a, in a hut and just screams jacota three
times while firing this machine gun.
It's glorious.
It is so good.
He's still mad about Disneyland.
So my favorite scene and my favorite red brown voice acting or just acting with his, his
beautiful voice moment is when he goes and destroys the big boat, not the little boat,
the big boat.
And this time he sneaks on the, he sneaks on the boat and he's got again grenades that
have two minute long fuses because that's how, that's how grenades work.
And he throws tons of grenades in this thing.
And as he's trying to escape, or just doesn't make any sense because he's killed everyone
on the boat.
He doesn't even have to blow it up anymore.
He just take the boat and keep it, but no, he's determined to blow it up.
And as he's trying to escape, one of the guys he thought was dead is alive and attacking
him.
And that, you know, it's clocks ticking.
You can't stay on a boat full of grenades forever.
And then finally he kills this guy, tells him like, shut up.
And then kills him.
And then as he's jumping off the boat, he goes, our father, we're in heaven.
Yes.
I thought I knew, I knew.
I was like, I'm hoping for grenades.
I always signed up.
It's so funny.
So he's like, our father, who are they can't even finish it before the, it's, yeah, you
need to, you need to, you need the green goblin to pop up for the first spider.
Maybe like, finish it, finish it.
Oh my God.
It's totally insane at that.
That moment was really great.
That was like, that was tops.
I get confused about the order of things here.
And I don't care.
I'm already doing it too.
And I watched this movie twice within the past like week and a half.
I'm so confused.
So he's, he's escaped from the prison.
He runs off with Olga, who I really thought Olga was going to be a love interest, but
there's no time for that.
I thought she was going to make it through the end of the movie.
Well, they're like, they, there's a part where he's like, he's being tortured by Jakota.
And like him and Olga make eyes for a second, you're like, Oh, there's something here.
And then of course she has a almost dies, you know, then, but then she turns on her,
her, her team and actually saves ransom by screaming so he won't get killed by one of
the baddies.
Well, yeah.
Cause he, he, he's in the prison.
You get him meeting, um, Martin, Martin Boomer, I think it was Martin, the faint hearted,
as he calls himself.
Oh my God.
I can't withstand physical pain.
Yeah.
I forget all these people.
Yeah.
The prisoner who can't take physical pain.
He's like, that's why they paired me with you because you're so brave.
Oh, and I'm, I'm even skipping the part where he's being forced to read.
Well, that's, yeah, that's right before he makes his, yeah, that's one of the other great
red brown moments.
He's like, he's saying all this and he's like, that's why I want you to keep fighting.
Stay here.
Give them hell.
It's one of those things where they, they were trying to do them, the, the, to break
the morals of, of the, the soldiers listening by having, you know, someone like ransom,
like being, being a turncoat and, you know, saying he'd gone to their side, but he uses
the mic to do a mic drop of like an inspirational speech.
Thank you for catching.
That's part of his escape right out of Rambo too, where he puts the guy right on the electric,
like the little electric fence thing in the, in the hut.
Very shamelessly ripping off Rambo too.
It's funny when we get to strike commando two at some point, like that movie has way more
versions of it.
Like this is actually fairly tame in terms of the stuff it's ripping off compared to
that film.
Oh yeah.
But anyway, then you have his escape where he grabs like an AK-47 shoots a couple people
uses some grenades and then he takes the flamethrower in the cave.
You have his great scream when he uses the flamethrower surrounds them all with fire.
And then he's doing, he ends up doing like more Rambo two stuff.
Like at one point he, he camouflages himself with like a bunch of grass and stabs a guy.
Like just then you have the moment, the great moment, the slow motion moment where he pops
up out of the water with the AK-47 and shoots a bunch of people.
Oh man.
Well, you know what's funny is I haven't seen Rambo or Rambo two in well over 30 years.
You know, my brain is like, yeah, I know this has got Rambo stuff in it, but I forget how
much Rambo stuff is in it.
I'm glad I, well, yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's there and like you have two,
like the, the, the infamous scene of Rambo, you know, destroying the control room at the
end of Rambo two.
I mean, then you have two, you basically have two versions of that in this cause the Jakota
scene is kind of one of those, but then you have it the moment at the end where he goes
to control him and he's like, radic, you traitor, and then he shoots everything in the control
room.
That's the other.
Yeah.
But then we get the ultimate fight.
We get, well, the first ultimate fight where ransom takes on Jakota, finally faces him.
And this part, this is where the skills of our director are the most or stretched the
most thin.
This fight choreography is hideous.
Like, yeah, it's, it's pretty terrible, but it's, it's pretty entertaining as well.
It's very entertaining.
I definitely not complaining.
You have the one scene where they're charging each other and they like do this, like they
both bang their heads and then the makeup on them, like as soon as they do that is so,
it's such a weird like cut.
Then you think the fight's going to go on longer and it just kind of, and ransom just
throws him off the waterfall.
And yeah.
It's like right after that, like there's no falling action or whatever within this fight.
It's just very, very, it's, it starts off with a lot and then it ends very, very quickly.
Yeah.
The, the headbutt scene is my favorite.
That is one of my favorite moments when it's like, and then the other guys and they just
butt heads, but it's such a non moment, like as soon as they collide, it's over.
And I'm like, what they, oh man, it's so good.
When he throws them off the cliff, I could not have predicted how Jakota is going to
come back.
I could not have predicted that.
I mean, how could anyone have predicted that?
Fast forward to the end of the war.
Our pal, ransom is in Saigon and everyone's fleeing to get out of there, but ransom's just
walking down the street, looking like that thousand yard stair broken, like a broken man
just carrying that fricking M 60 down the street.
I love that part.
It's so like trying to do a deer hunter or a insert any, you know, quote unquote, serious
movie about Vietnam here where he's got to make a statement.
You know, I love that part.
It's so good.
Of course, he meets back up with his pal, Harriman, and Harriman gives him the lowdown
of where Radick is located now.
So he's got to go and finally settle the score with Radick.
Well, and you get the end of the war, but then doesn't it like flash forward to like
six months after and they're both in Manila or something watching a cock fight?
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
I didn't need that in my movie.
You know, like one of the pieces of trivia was that some country just completely cut
the cock fighting scene out.
And because they cut every time they referred to the cock fighting scene, it was like 48
cuts had to be made.
Is that is that an actual like is that is that a like I didn't even know that that was
a thing like is that a thing in other countries?
Oh, making two roosters fight each other.
Yeah.
That's the thing that happened here.
That's the thing that used to happen right here in America.
There's a movie called Cockfighter that was in the 70s.
It was one of my favorite actors, Warren Oates.
Warren Oates.
1974.
Oh, I like him.
Yeah.
I like him.
Oh, Harry Dean Stanton.
Oh, yeah.
Nice.
Ed Bagley, Jr. I've never seen this movie.
I just know about it.
I just won't surprise.
It's not directed by Sam Peckinpaw.
It's a 70s movie with Warren Oates in it.
Exactly. But also Peckinpaw, he had that scene in one of his movies where they're shooting
the heads off of roosters.
So he loved.
Yeah.
Well, they also they also had like the at the beginning of the wild bunch.
You had the ants in the scorpion.
That was that was cool.
Of course.
But yeah, it's always funny, like how many movies you see with with like movies where
you'll be in a foreign country and you see stuff like this.
Like I always think of the beginning of Casino Royale, where I think it's like the snake
in the mongoose in that.
Oh, man, what we'll do for where life is cheap.
That's that's the whole thing.
Yeah.
This doesn't happen in America.
So he goes to to Radix little headquarters there and he uses another one of his super
grenades that has the long fuse on it to scare the secretary.
Yeah.
You got about two minutes to get out of here.
So of course, this time when he fights Dakota, Dakota's got these special dentures like like
Jaws from good old moon raker or something.
I don't understand like we don't know what happened to Dakota's teeth.
Did he punch Dakota's teeth out?
Was that a thing that happened?
No, we never see that.
I don't know if he lost him when he went over the waterfall like I don't know if he landed
teeth first on a rock or something.
It's like I can't think of any any reason why all of a sudden he would have the have
the teeth, but it's it's whatever go with it.
So he shoves a grenade in his mouth and then blows up Dakota, then he goes after Radix.
And this is my last moment from the movie because it's like the end of the movie, which
is Radix is listening to his men getting killed throughout his compound and he's got his little
nine millimeter and he's waiting.
Oh yeah, Michael Ransom, our hero, when he smuggled a gun in to this this compound, it
looked like maybe an M16 and a gun bag, but then it's the M60 again.
And the M60 is a really, the M60 is a huge weapon to conceal, like it is a big gun.
But instead of facing Radix, he just yells at him through the door and says fuck this
shit and then grenade launchers him to a dummy death, which is great.
Oh my God, and then one of the best examples of a disclaimer at the end where he does like
the whole, it is like any similarities to people living or dead is purely accidental
of like, this is like a fourth wall break that is just amazing.
It's one of the best ever.
Talking right to us is like, might be a coincidence, like one in a million.
Any similarity between persons living or dead, especially dead, is purely accidental.
Yeah, very accidental, like one in a million, maybe.
That's freaking, it's like, Amanda, we can't sue them for how similar this movie was to
our lives because of that freaking that post credit thing there or a pre credit thing there.
Other than the trivia that I had a couple pieces like the the the different version
where they cut out the cock fighting and Mr. Mike Monti's voice actor was actually William
Frickin Berger.
Did you have anything else?
Do you know anything about this movie?
Not too much other than I don't I don't know if you have the severant blu-ray.
I do not.
I do.
Well, so there is an extended cut on there and Bruno Matei, a lot of his films for that
that severant foot out there is an extended cut with this like little bits of scenes and
I don't believe I I didn't do any research on this, but there is a scene where Lau talks
to his sister and he's like, oh, the American would make an ideal husband for you.
And I don't think that is in the theatrical yeah, I think that's only in the extended
cut where that woman seems to they seem to hint a little bit more at a possible romance
between her and ransom that ends up not being the case, of course.
And I think missing in action three totally ripped that plot off actually.
The other thing was that this had clips from The Last Hunter in it.
Some of the helicopter footage and explosions was from that movie.
If you watch like Born to Fight and Double Target and any of those movies, there are
there is stock footage you can recognize from some of these films that he uses throughout
some of the like exploding huts.
As Severin would call these the exploding hot movies, that's what David Gregory always
calls these movies.
And yeah, he reuses some of the footage for those explosions and a lot of the films and
like the helicopters.
It's very Godzilla like with how they would always use that same footage for the tanks
rolling up on Godzilla and the tanks getting exploded by Godzilla.
Nice.
Final thoughts about the movie.
How do you how do you feel about Frickin Strike Commando Part One?
It's just a really fun film and there are moments of I think the some of his other movies to
the do the shameless ripoff stuff a little differently like but this film has a Rambo
influence, but it also it works to me as a standalone film just because it's it's it's
fun enough.
There's a lot of explosions.
There's some good like slow motion action like there is moments within this where the
action is actually I wouldn't necessarily say well filmed.
It's not necessarily well crafted, but the budget is there like there's a budget there
for explosions and ammunition that you can feel and it's it's done practically unlike
most modern movies, the explosions and everything are real.
So and like even Claudio Fragaso talked about how the Filipino crew could build like some
of these huts like that scene where ransom destroys like a bridge when he's in the boat.
The Filipino crew built that like whole bridge in a day just to be destroyed.
So you know, you have different things like that where you could use like little things
of production value to to increase the the practicality of some of these explosions and
the stunts that are in the film are all pretty good.
And I think Rem Brown is definitely doing some of his own at times.
It looked frickin dangerous, but no, I like this one.
I am the seams are showing in some parts like that that frickin fight choreography, the little
model buildings being blown up to at the beginning.
I was thinking about Antonio Marguerite when he would do model work too.
I loved it.
Yeah.
The music is jamming.
The frickin music is great.
The white savior thing was mind blowing, totally, totally mind destroying.
I'm surprised I didn't watch this as a kid because in the late eighties, I was obsessed
with guns.
I had like 25 different gun books and I've just draw guns all day.
I love guns.
And so therefore every action movie was like fair game.
If you had a guy with a gun on the cover and then I went through a phase of renting every
Vietnam'sploitation movie I could find like the missing in action movies.
And then there was some other American made films that were set in Vietnam that were just
like whatever.
But I just I can't believe I didn't run across like the last Hunter or run across this like
even the David A. Pryor one.
Did they pray?
Yeah.
I've still never seen deadly pray.
I watched David A. Pryor's first one where it's so weird where it doesn't take place
in Vietnam.
It's people like pretending to be in Vietnam, pretending to be in Vietnam to train each
other.
How was that movie called?
This bizarre kill zone.
Yeah.
I've heard of that one.
Yeah.
Kill zone bizarre because it doesn't actually take place in Vietnam.
It has a flashback to wherever they filmed in California that's supposed to be Vietnam.
But then the whole thing is that they're using these tactics to train these guys to be better
soldiers and manage to drive one of the soldiers insane where he thinks he's back and numb
and hilarity ensues.
But yeah, I never got to this one.
But now I'm glad I did.
And I'm very curious about the sequel because yeah, and it's interesting because in the
late 80s and early 90s you had and it's a genre I haven't gotten into much yet, although
eventually I want to were those like the action movies and this would this would fall into
that category even though it's still part of the Italian genre, like the non-sploitation
genre as well.
But like you had a lot of movies that like Richard Harrison was doing with Godfrey Ho
as an example of those kind of the action movies that were being made around that time.
So before we go, I ask my my guests a question and that is, tell me about a I guess this
is more of a statement, tell me about a recently seen and loved film.
So one film you've seen recently any genre doesn't even matter as long as you enjoyed
it and could be a first time watch or something you've seen a million times.
Do you have a favorite recent one you saw?
There were a couple because I've been watching some Hong Kong cinema lately.
Yes, I watched a 36 Chamber of Shaolin for the first time.
Love that movie.
Another one.
Another one I watch, which is a little bit less known from from that movie.
So I'll talk about it.
It's a movie called Undeclared War.
It's a movie that Ringo Lamb directed in the early 90s.
It's I think it's I believe it's a Golden Harvest movie and it's it's one of those Hong Kong
action movies.
And it's got wells playing like this, this revolutionary terrorists in it and Olivia
Hussie also playing like a terrorist as well.
And the guy from Ghouli's, I can't remember his name, Peter or something is the actor
teased up with Danny Lee from The Killer and it's almost like a buddy cop movie between
those two trying to take down Vernon Wells as this as this terrorist is like a master
of disguise.
It's it's some of the most fun I've ever seen Vernon Wells have in a movie.
Really.
You know, I want to say this get a blu-ray recently.
It did.
It got a vinegar syndrome one.
That's how I watched it.
Got it.
That's where I've heard of it.
Man, that that cast and that plot sounds great.
Holy shit.
I'm going to stick with with Asia as well in Hong Kong with a little movie called The
Blue Gene Monster from 1991, which is a interesting movie is a lead role for the heavy Fuyang
Xing, who if you look up Fuyang Xing, that guy, you've seen him before.
If you've seen any Hong Kong action movies or comedies or anything, he's all over the
place.
But this was a leading role for him as the hero.
Blue Gene Monster is stupid, stupid.
The comedy is purile and embarrassing at times.
The horror stuff is really gross and nasty.
And I don't know what I saw, but 88 films brought this out on blu-ray.
And I thought for years that it was like a gritty, nasty, like category three rape movie
or something because of the title and because Fuyang Xing was the lead.
But nope, it's just a weird gross out comedy horror movie that I recommend.
But it's real dumb.
It's really dumb.
I can't stress that enough.
Well, sir, thank you for joining me.
Yeah.
Thank you for bringing Strike Commando into my life.
Would you like to talk about some of the things that you do because I want you to promote,
promote, promote.
Yeah.
I'm on the Land of the Creeps podcast every couple of weeks on the double, double episodes.
Part of the Black Glove mystery segment where me and Greg Morgan, AKA Greg Amortus talk
Jiala movies mostly and really just anything from Italian genre cinema.
I have my own blog, thegoodthebadandthemacabre.blogspot.com.
You can find me on Twitter or X and Instagram @Irzanomics and you can add me on Facebook
if you want.
I sadly did not pass my Erzonomics courses.
Now I'm making up for it.
All right, man.
Well, thank you once again for being here.
And we'll definitely have you back.
I'm intrigued by Strike Commando 2.
I'm intrigued by other picks because you might be leading me down a totally new avenue.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we'll have Strike Commando 2.
We'll have, we'll look forward to Richard Harris absolutely slumming it in a role.
It's just like, I couldn't believe that he was in it when I first, when I first read
about it, like on the Severin Blu-ray, they say Richard Harris, so they, they have in
parentheses, yes, that's Richard Harris.
So I, yeah, looking forward to that.
All right, folks, I'm a man called Horace.
Folks, thanks so much for listening to this episode.
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Go to doomedmoviethon.com and click the podcast button for the archive or go to YouTube and
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And if that's still not enough, I have written some books, you know, about my love of movies
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Thank you.
Bye.
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