Devil's Express (1976)

... aka: Death Express
... aka: Devil Express
... aka: Gang Wars
... aka: Gang Wars: Devil's Express
... aka: Phantom of the Subway, The

Directed by:
Barry Rosen

China. 200 B.C. - A group of monks put a amulet inside a coffin with a corpse and drop it down into a cave. Afterward, the leader (Yoshiteru Otani) decapitates all of his followers with his samurai sword and then slashes his own throat. Cut to present day New York City. Martial arts instructor Luke Curtis ("He's not one of the best... he is the best!") finishes up a lesson with a "pig honky" client of his and gets ready for his big trip over to Hong Kong, where he'll do some more training with martial arts guru Master Leung (Duncan Leung). Accompanying Luke (Warhawk Tanzania) on his trip is one of his students, Rodan (Wilfredo Roldan), a coke dealer / gang banger who really could use some soul cleansing. The two men arrive in China, go to the camp for some laughable training exercises and then venture into the woods to meditate. While there, they stumble upon the cave. Despite Luke's "bad vibes," Rodan finds the coffin and, unbeknownst to his buddy, pockets the amulet. Both men get on the midnight flight back to the U.S. ... but they're not alone. As it turns out, after they left the cave, a living corpse (actually a resurrected demon) busted out of the coffin, made its way to a dock, possessed a businessman (Aki Aleong) and then hitched a ride aboard a ship heading to, you guessed it, New York City.

Once the ship arrives in New York Harbor, the possessed dude (now blinded and sporting some huge white eyeballs; an effect achieved by having the actor close his eyes and painting his eyelids white!) stumbles down the street and disappears into a tunnel. His chest bursts open and something comes out. Not long after, mangled corpses start turning up in the subway. The amulet, which Rodan now wears around his neck, seems to have some kind of power over the demon / monster / zombie or whatever it is and the creature would like it back. Lt. Cris Allen (Larry Fleischman) of the NYPD is put on the case, and he's assigned new partner Mike (Stephen DeFazio) for a clichéd odd couple pairing. Cris is street-smart and tough while Mike loves tennis and country clubs and thinks mutant animals (!) may be responsible for the killings. The two men hit the streets to try to figure out what's going on and don't seem to take an eyewitness who claims to have seen "a deformed monster" in the subway all that seriously. Meanwhile, there's a vicious rivalry going on between two rival gang factions: one a Chinese gang called "The Red Dragons" and the other a black gang called "The Black Spades" (seriously... ).

If you're sitting there at home pulling out your hair because you can't decide whether to watch a blaxploitation movie, a demon movie, a kung fu movie, a gang movie or a buddy cop movie then don't fret: Devil's Express has got you covered on all fronts. So does it actually pull any of that off successfully? No, it does not... but that is not necessarily a bad thing depending on what kind of viewer you are. Most of the acting is terrible, the characters aren't the least bit likable, the editing is ragged, the dialogue is boring, the blood is tomato soup and the action is just pathetic. The subway horror scenes are few and far between to begin with but the lighting is so dark (even in the restored version) you can barely even see anything. The demon itself is not fully revealed until the very end but, again, it's difficult to really make the thing out because of the lighting and editing. Where this truly shines for fans of bad movies is in the fight choreography, which is some of the worst ever. For starters, the black actors clearly have no real martial arts training and are pitted against Asian actors who do, which is extremely awkward to watch (and makes it extremely difficult to believe that the "Spades" could whip their asses). That's made even more awkward than it already is by the fact fists and feet typically don't come within a foot of their desired target. Add some canned 70s-style kung fu sound effects for the body impact and the back alley brawls are a laugh a minute. I am still laughing writing this up a few days later.

This film is also odd in that there's no real central focal point. Top-billed Warhawk Tanzania (whose name cannot be said enough in its entirety as far as I'm concerned) features prominently in the beginning, but is strangely absent from the majority of the mid-section when it focuses its attention over on the cops, the gangs (of which Luke has no involvement because he's an upstanding guy) and the murders. Though Tanzania's acting skills and on-screen charisma border on nonexistent, he does at least come through for a hilarious finale; strutting around, doing various cliché kung fu poses and beating up a bunch of guys (and the demon) while wearing gold lamé bellbottoms. The "actor" had appeared in another kung fu blaxploitation flick called Black Force (1975) before this one, but nothing after.

The major talents to emerge from the production were director of photography Paul Glickman, who'd go on to shoot many other films (including a half-dozen for Larry Cohen) and assistant cameraman Stefan Czapsky, who'd move up the ranks to become a cinematographer himself (winning some major awards for Tim Burton's Ed Wood [1994]). David E. Durston (director of the cult classic I Drink Your Blood [1970]), Sherry Steiner (from several early William Girdler films), Domonic Paris (director of Dracula's Last Rites [1980]), Fred Berner (later an Emmy-nominated TV producer) and Brother Theodore (in a truly bizarre cameo as a manic preacher) all have small roles, as well.

Though listed on IMDb under the title Gang Wars, this was filmed as The Phantom of the Subway and was first released theatrically under the Devil's Express title in 1976. The Gang Wars moniker was a re-release title hoping to cash in on the success of The Warriors (1979). There was at least one early U.S. VHS release on the Simitar label (under the Gang title) and one early pre-cert issuing in the UK by FLK Video. In 2005, Videoasia either accidentally screwed up their packaging or intentionally led people astray with their DVD collection "Tales of Voodoo: Volume 3;" which claimed to contain Devil's Express, when in fact the movie on the set was actually The Devil (1981), a gruesome black magic film from Hong Kong originally titled Xie bo. It wouldn't be until 2013 that Code Red finally released the film legitimately.

SBIG

Black Snake (1973)

... aka: Black Snake: The Whip
... aka: Carne cruda (Raw Meat)
... aka: Devil's Mistress, The
... aka: Dutchess of Doom!, The
... aka: Serpent Noir
... aka: Slaves
... aka: Sweet Suzy

Directed by:
Russ Meyer

Russ Meyer is one exploitation director whose work I'm not that well-acquainted with. Sure, I put in the usual Cult Film 101 viewings of Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Beyond of the Valley of Dolls (1970), both of which I liked, but that's been it thus far. So it was about time I checked out another from this guy and what better film than his only genre effort? Black Snake is atypical of the director's usual product. For starters, it's a costume / period-set film with horror and blaxploitation elements. Second, it was filmed on location in Barbados and was, in fact, the very first film entirely shot on that island nation. Third, the cast was comprised primarily of local talent and actors imported in from the UK. And finally, the film deemphasizes the director's usual rampant sex and nudity (which had always ensured his films were slapped with X-ratings) in favor of violence (this one is rated R). In fact, Meyer was actually attempting to make a message movie with this one, believe it or not, whilst simultaneously delivering the usual drive-in good. The message? Well, you know, the usual racism-and-slavery-are-bad kinda things.

The action is set in 1835 on San Cristobal Island in the British West Indies, where a section of the populace has been enslaved by the Blackmoor Plantation and forced to work cutting sugar cane... or else. In charge of the operation is the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, black-clad, whip-wielding Lady Susan Walker (Anouska Hempel), who rides around on a horse barking out orders and is a black widow type who's left behind a string of dead husbands. Susan's latest hubby is Jonathan Walker and he himself has also recently and rather mysteriously disappeared. Since Lady Susan prefers living the life of leisure (i.e. horse riding on the beach and getting her ass massaged by her female servant), she delegates most of the actual slave-running chores to the sadistic Joxer Tierney (Percy Herbert), who's impotent and always pissed off, constantly screams racial slurs at the top of his lungs and uses any excuse in the book to start laying into the slaves with his "black snake" (whip). He's quite the prick. Young, impassioned slave Joshua (Milton McCollin) want to lead a revolt, but his bible-quoting pacifist father Isaiah (Thomas Baptiste) tries to discourage it for fear of even worse repercussions.

Meanwhile, in England, Sir Charles Walker (David Warbeck) is wondering about the disappearance of his brother and gets the blessing of solicitor Lord Clive (Anthony Sharp) to travel to San Cristobal to investigate matters. Posing as "Ronald Sopwith;" Charles goes to the plantation to work as a bookkeeper, is set up in a shack and given a slave girl named Cleone (Vikki Richards) to attend to his every whim. The insatiable Lady soon attempts to seduce the new arrival, Charles' brother (David Prowse) turns up as a maddened mute after having his tongue cut out and balls removed by Susan's flamboyant gay assistant (the memorable Bernard Boston) and the slaves eventually get their bloody revenge on their captors as well as all of the Uncle Tom's who's been aiding them. There's a crucifixion, a burning at the stake, a corpse getting whipped, mass hangings, people chopped and impaled with machetes... and a million and one shots of waves crashing on the beach and sugar cane plants blowing in the wind.

Meyer was extremely dissatisfied with his own creation. In an interview with Ed Lowry and Louis Black, he admitted the film "...had a lot of things wrong with it," wrote it off as "a weak Mandingo" and noted it was equally disliked by both black and white audiences of the day. The vast majority of critics hated it and even Barbados' Minister of Tourism couldn't appreciate it on travelogue value alone and called it "nauseating." I can see everyone's point. The editing cuts are often jagged, the dialogue is terrible, there's not much in the way of plot and the entire cast seems completely lost, with some taking the proceedings completely serious and others wildly overacting and turning their characters into massively irritating one-dimensional buffoons in the process. The film never seems to find the right tone. It's too ridiculous to be taken seriously and takes itself too seriously to work as camp. Still, I didn't find it to be a complete waste of time, though. The scenery is utilized well throughout, there are a couple of genuine laughs (the best the slave master can come up with while pleading for his life in front of an angry mob of slaves is "Some of my best friends are niggers!") and the blood-thirsty revenge portion during the final 20 minutes is fairly potent.

Another major issue Meyer had with his movie is that he didn't like his female lead, who'd been brought on board at the last minute to replace another actress who overdosed just three days before filming was to begin. The pouty-lipped Hempel was born in New Zealand under the name Anne Geissler and eventually moved to the UK to began her acting and modeling career. After playing a brief role as "The Australian Girl" in the Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), a sultry vamp in Hammer's SCARS OF DRACULA (1970) and a few minor TV roles, she landed rare leads in this film and the sleazy sex comedy Tiffany Jones (1973). Her third and final top-billed role was in William Webb's extremely difficult-to-find Double Exposure (1977), which is listed as horror on some sites but as a "standard crime-thriller" in the book "The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film." In 1980, Hempel became socialite Lady Weinberg (or "Lady Nou Nou" to friends) after marrying filthy-rich London businessman, insurance tycoon and hotelier Sir Mark Weinberg (her third husband). Now known for her refined taste and hobnobbing with A-List British royalty and celebs, Hempel actually attempted to buy up all the rights to both Snake and Tiffany at one point in order to keep them from ever being sold or publicly shown again. It doesn't appear she succeeded - at least with this particular film - considering it received a UK DVD release (from Arrow) in 2005.

This extremely hard-to-find VHS (released on the Astral Video label out of Canada)
featuring Hempel in a rare starring role recently sold for 250 bucks (!!) on eBay.

The director never met an enormous rack he didn't want to photograph so needless to say he wasn't all that impressed with Hempel's sleek physique, telling the press she had "Tiny tits and a big mouth." In fact, while he had no issue filming her ass, he didn't use her topless shots at all and later spliced in close-ups of a larger-breasted body double. The casting of Hempel also caused issues on the home front for the director. Apparently, then-wife Edy Williams (whom he'd met on the set of Dolls and also cast in The Seven Minutes [1971]) became angered when she was not given the lead role. In order to appease her, Meyer promised her the title role in an upcoming project called Viva Foxy! Roger Ebert penned a script for the film, Meyer photographed Williams for a special 1973 Playboy spread to promote it and he even shot a teaser trailer (one of the first of its kind) that was inserted after the end credits of Snake to get the ball rolling. For some reason, the film was never actually made and Meyer and Williams divorced in 1975.

Black Snake (filmed in Panavision in the spring of 1972 for about 300,000 dollars) premiered on the same day in both Little Rock, Arkansas and Bridgetown, Barbados. It was later reissued numerous times theatrically under new titles like Sweet Suzy and (in the UK) Russ Meyer's Slaves. For a short while it was even promoted (with inappropriate artwork featuring a skull-faced woman with large breasts) under the new titles The Devil's Mistress and The Dutchess of Doom! In America, it was distributed (on both video and DVD) by RM Films.

★★