The best thing about the movie Water Wars is that it reminded me that I want to make my own Catman movie one day. Parts of this movie were directed by Cirio H. Santiago (Angelfist, Future Hunters, Equalizer 2000, TNT Jackson), but he took sick and was unable to finish. The producer (Roger Corman) gave the rest of the movie to Jim Wynorski (KvC: Komodo vs Cobra, The Hills Have Thighs, Chopping Mall) and Jim finished the movie.

A fun game to play while you’re watching this movie is trying to figure out who directed which parts. Is the scene set in a grimy, dusty environment? Santiago. Is there dust or mud but somehow the actors are pristine, even Michael Madsen in his all-black clothing? Wynorski. Are there many fantastic battle cars, practical effect explosions, maybe some artillery? Santiago. Are the SFX done by CGI? Wynorski. Is the scene shot with honest-to-gosh quality film stock? Santiago. I said it was a fun game, but it’s not a difficult game. The transitions of image quality are jarring.

I will go a step farther and say that all of the transitions are jarring. The most legible word on my notes for this movie (ironically enough) is the word “incoherent.” The two movies supposedly are parts of the same story, but (apart from some very blatant audio looping in one of the Santiago-directed scenes) clearly have nothing to do with one another.

Michael Madsen plays Bane. He owns a complex that monopolizes the water after an apocalypse or a collapse or a catastrophe is handwaved in the opening credits. His wells are running dry. A random half-naked woman is captured who has a tattoo that suggests she knows the location of a secret spring. Torture occurs.

Cars drive around. Actual film stock! Explosions! Gunfire!

The captured woman’s sister goes and hires a gunslinger to rescue her. The gunslinger Puts The Team Back Together. They rescue the woman, with difficulty. She is injured as they escape and dies before they can all return to the secret spring.

Cars crash into each other. A woman is hauled from a car, cursing and fighting. She is stripped, and tied to the hood of a car. She is driven to a camp, and tortured for information (this is where the blatant audio looping comes in).

The secret spring is in a place of such lush verdure that it’s shocking they have remained a secret (cough it’s completely visible from the surrounding desert cough). It also includes a sizable waterfall, the perfect backdrop for the world’s most boring sex scene. One of The Team sneaks away and kills a few of the secret spring’s guards.

Michael Madsen’s crew captures him and makes a deal with him. He leads them up toward the secret spring at the same time as the rest of The Team are being kicked out due to his treachery.

They have a fight. You know who ultimately wins. Do you care? No, by this point, you do not.

The Dark One makes his airslaves fight each other. The winner is taken to the power plant and never heard from again. When a group of airslaves decide there should be no fight winner, The Dark One removes their oxygen as punishment. Three people are unaffected by this: a scientist, his daughter (Deeja), and Neo of the wastes. Neo hides with a freebot, and Deeja fakes being affected. The Dark One is surprised to see the scientist unaffected by his removal of breathable air, and asks Torque to capture the scientist and bring him to the power plant.

Torque is a large red robot with an underbite face covered with a mouth veil. Or perhaps they are feeder tentacles. There are freebots and guardbots and … well … Torque. The freebots are sort of homeless robots without a place in the society post-robot-holocaust. Guardbots work for The Dark One. We only ever see them in pairs because apparently they only had two actors.

Robot Holocaust has two different vibes, and rather than competing with each other, they enhance. One vibe is that of the third movie in a trilogy. Characters are introduced, speak their backstory as though they’re summarizing from what happened before, and get on with the plot. There is no attempt to explain any of this backstory, for the hero Neo, for the villain The Dark One, for the apocalypse that left New Terra as the last remaining city. It just is. The second vibe is a sort of low-tech bizarre creepiness. As the movie keeps going on, there are more and more small details, characters, and images that would have been stark nightmare fuel as a child. Cut the scene with the pleasure chamber and the fight with the mutants where heads go flying, and it’s a third or fourth Doctor story of Dr Who.

Deeja explains that her father invented a device to protect humans from The Dark One’s air control, but only had time to build two of these. She needs to get to the power plant to save her father from The Dark One. Neo is looking for a missing friend, and also needs to get to the power plant. Neo, Deeja, a couple of the airslaves, and the freebot Klyton head off to the power plant.

On the way, they pick up travelling companions (the leader of a fierce tribe of female fighters, and the mute male these warrior amazons were just about to kill), fight dangerous foes (irradiated mutants, sewer worms), and cross perilous landscapes (one of which is ominously labeled CENTRAL PARK).

They are observed remotely by The Dark One and his minions Torque and Valaria. Valaria’s actress has no other imdb credits, so we must be satisfied to watch her wear bizarre outfits and chew vast quantities of scenery here. Torque and Valaria attempt to torture, scold, and threaten the secret of the scientist’s air tolerance, but he is resistant (even to Level Seven), so The Dark One forcefully merges with him.

At a key moment as the travelling group is reaching the power plant, the airslaves stop feeding the furnaces, leaving Valaria to deal with the resulting power shortages. Many of the adventuring group succumb to the terrors of the post-apocalyptic landscape, but in the end, Neo discovers that his friend — his father — was killed by The Dark One. Neo kills the hybrid Dark One / Scientist, and Deeja tells him to leave and never attempt to talk to her again. Neo and Klyton leave the power plant and New Terra to return to the wastes.

I will leave Valaria’s final fate unspoiled, except to say that her trajectory would have been one of those nightmare fuel moments if I’d seen this movie around age eight or so.

I don’t know what the R-naught factor of Neil Breen is, but he is clearly the gift that keeps on giving, whether you want him to or not. And you don’t.

In Twisted Pair, Neil Breen plays twins. Cade and Cale Altair are touched by an AI entity when young, and granted amazing powers — and a higher calling. Cale doesn’t succeed as often as Cade, so Cale’s powers are removed.

Cade works for a secret government agency to stop evil on a large scale. Cale is a drug addict who kidnaps corrupt businessmen and kills them via CGI bullets and neglect. This movie has all of the incoherent worldbuilding, incompetent video compositing, bizarre writing, and terrible acting that you expect from a Neil Breen movie — but with twice the Neil Breen!

Understanding that I am using the word in an extremely relative sense here, some of the high points of the movie are:

• Multiple characters have moustaches which have clearly been applied with cellophane tape
• The baddies are pronounced “The Kooze Empire” and Amy and I kept speculating whether it was spelled in the French fashion (i.e. Coups), but no — it’s spelled Cuzzx
• Big Baddie Cuzzx has an ice bucket of giant diamonds which he is constantly fondling
• Scenes where the exact same footage is reused because obviously the audience will have forgotten it by now
• A character that we thought of as AI Tinkerbell, but who in fact is credited as “Winged Muse”
• Two characters credited as Dectectives [sic]
• It eventually ends

Amy sums it up well: “At least James Nguyen [the Birdemic auteur] doesn’t believe that he himself is the savior messiah.”

The Zebra Force (1976) has a sequel called Code Name: Zebra (1987). The Zebra Force was also known as Commando Zebra, Codename: Zebra, or Code Name: Zebra. So it is imperative to note that the Code Name: Zebra I am reviewing here is the 1976 film, not its 1987 sequel named Code Name: Zebra. I just want to be clear that this is Code Name: Zebra, not Code Name: Zebra. I thought I had one copy of each film, but it turned out that I have two copies of the same movie, but under separate cover.

I hope the previous paragraph was entertaining, and even if it wasn’t … it’s still more entertaining than the film (Code Name:) Zebra (Force).

A G.I. serving in Vietnam is blown up while fighting. In the hospital, he conceives a cunning plan. After discharge, he and his men hit the local mafia, stealing money. After a few thefts, they will be rich and can retire.

They (a bunch of white guys) disguise themselves as a bunch of black guys — so the mafiosi will never guess who is targeting them. And they don’t! Until the very end, when one of the disguised vets is captured, and the mafioso hits him so hard that his disguise comes off. “Hey, it’s a white guy!”

There is a firefight at the climax. All of the mafiosi die, and some of the vets. There is a twist ending, involving the lieutenant — who has used an electrolarynx throughout the movie. Can you guess what the twist is? You are probably correct.

The one thing I can say to this movie’s credit … when the white guys are disguised as black guys, they are played by black actors and are not just white guys in blackface.

Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor is the “clips” episode of the Sleepaway Camp movies. Only about half an hour of raw footage was shot when the producers ran out of money for Sleepaway Camp IV, and years later, someone spliced in clips from the first three movies.

What is novel in this movie is not entertaining, and what is entertaining is not novel. The new scenes are:

• A woman sunbathing in a bikini
  
• The same woman making out with a park ranger, who pursues her through the woods when she tells him to stop
  
• The woman encounters a hunter
  
• The woman has somehow acquired a pistol
  

Three actors, less than ten minutes of actual screen time. The benefit to watching this movie is if you want a 70-minute precis of the first three movies, including many noteworthy death sequences. And that’s basically it.