Kill Or Be Killed (1976)

Some karate people are training in karate for a karate tournament run by a karate dwarf and a Nazi.  Only some of them qualify, so Chico, the karate dwarf, goes in search of the best karate people in the world although he finds himself in competition with the Nazi’s Japanese nemesis who is recruiting his own karate team of karate people for the karate tournament.  Cue lots of karate.

One reason I wanted to check this movie out is that the original UK VHS release bears the following legend: “The greatest Hollywood Martial Arts movie!” whereas the film is actually an independent production from South Africa.  That’s some quality barefaced lying right there.  In fact, as these things go, the movie’s okay.  There’s a campy title sequence with the credits projected onto the leading man’s ripped torso (the word “karate” appears a lot).  The tournament setting owes everything to Enter The Dragon although it lacks the Bruce Lee flick’s quality, style and iconography.  The music isn’t a patch on Lalo Schifrin’s … Dragon score either; lame and cheesy, it even does that “dodgy oriental music” thing every time the Japanese nemesis appears.   Tangential point of interest: Kill Or Be Killed may have been an influence on 1984’s The Karate Kid.  Said nemesis is called Miyagi and one scene has a fly being caught with chopsticks mid-flight, predating the famous Karate Kid sequence by nearly a decade. 

There are some attempts at humour here, most falling flat and almost all featuring the aforementioned Chico (Daniel DuPlessis), who – in context – turns out to be a surprisingly rounded character.  The rest of the humour is delivered via the main couple, James Ryan and Charlotte Michelle, a handsome pair who seem to fall into gales of hysterical laughter wherever possible.  He proposes: they laugh like matching drains.  They invent a new kind of sail-car while staging a daring desert escape: they laugh like drunk pirates. He shows up to rescue her from a dungeon: they laugh heartily for a bit before he gets on with breaking her out while she continues to piss herself hollow.  Come to think of it, I may have missed some kind of troubling mental health subtext on first viewing.

There are, of course, lots of spirited, if perhaps slightly clunky, karate sequences.  Everybody, it seems, knows karate in South Africa with bar fights and building site brawls invariably turning into stiffly choreographed kickfests.  Ryan adopts a weird “wind whistle” vocal effect for his fights throughout, which is slightly baffling, and he is the king of back-flips (elaborate Hong Kong-style wire-work here having been substituted with some trampolines).  Also, there’s a reversed-film sequence to give the effect of him effortlessly jumping backwards up a hill which is quite endearing.  Strangely, action packed as it is, Kill Or Be Killed isn’t particularly violent.  It’s all relatively bloodless, the body count not memorably high.  The whole point of the tournament is that it’s supposed to be to the death – hence the title and its USA alternative, Karate Killer – but this is forgotten during the fights themselves and when it looks like the stakes have been raised to “deadly” by the later rounds, everybody seems surprised.

Seemingly a semi-amateur production largely from the luminaries of the South African karate scene of the day (although IMDb tells me this was director Ivan Hall’s fourteenth feature), production values are surprisingly okay.  Performances are a tad am-dram and the script is rudimentary but, all-in, Kill Or Be Killed makes for a diverting ninety minutes. 

Original UK big box ex-rental, about £8 online.

Aftermath (1982)

A couple of astronauts return to Earth only to find they’ve missed the apocalypse.  Wandering the ruins of L.A., they encounter mutant-zombie things, a kindly museum curator, hot hippie chicks, a wee boy, radioactive storms and a crazed gang of murderous rapists.  Along the way, they somehow knock up a handy laser cannon out of spare parts.

Seemingly a vanity project by Steve Barkett (star, writer, director, producer, film editor), Aftermath is also a family affair, with several additional Barketts credited.  A low budget indie production, it’s nothing if not ambitious.  Shot when affordable digital technology was still decades off, here the film stock, impressive designs and use of glass/matte-painting add up to a visually more pleasing confection than the kind of thing regularly offered up today by the likes of the SyFy channel for the DTV/VOD markets.

Another plus point is the enthusiastic stunt work, firmly rooted in the school of “why walk when you can do a forward roll?”.  In this age of gym-bred bodybuilding protagonists, Barkett himself is perhaps a little unimposing, more like Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation than any other of today’s pop culture he-men.  He nonetheless proves capable in action scenes and appears to be doing most of his own stunts, leaving pretty much no element of any set or location unclimbed or un-jumped over by the end titles.  In one scene he is skipping between buildings at a fair old height just because, well, why not?  There’s a hint of the spirit of the silent movie era about it all, with stars risking life and limb for The Shot. 

Aftermath (also known, misleadingly, as Zombie Aftermath) draws liberally from the post-apocalyptic, dystopian sci-fi movies of the ’70s.  As it was reportedly shot in 1978, Aftermath actually predates the release of Mad Max but there are certainly echoes of Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run, The Omega Man, A Boy and His Dog and Damnation Alley.  In the end, the vibe is actually more like an extended and unusually violent episode of The Twilight Zone.  That helps to lift the whole project, along with an orchestral score that sounds like it could have come straight from an old Flash Gordon serial and some canny B-movie casting.  Roger Corman veteran Dick Miller lends his voice as a broadcaster, while legendary science fiction superfan, B-actor and originator of the term “sci-fi” Forrest J. Ackerman is onboard as the museum curator.  Perennial TV heavy-of-the-week Sid Haig, who would go on to B-movie immortality as Captain Spaulding in House of 1000 Corpses and The Devils Rejects, makes a great OTT villain.

This is exactly the kind of movie I want to stumble across.  I’d never heard of it when I saw a copy of the original UK VHS on eBay.  It was the box art that initially drew me in, spread out across the insert like a gatefold album, highlighting the film’s matte painting design.  Sure, the film itself displays many of the flaws you’d expect from a low-budget sci-fi/horror release – stilted dialogue, acting performances that vary wildly in quality, awkward pacing, sound issues, unintended humour.  All present and correct.  It’s got something, though. 

What I appreciate most about low budget independent filmmaking is the way that creative solutions are needed to realise creative ideas, something largely absent from a franchise-focussed modern mainstream industry built around tent-pole releases, where exploding spaceships and collapsing skyscrapers are an expensively rubber-stamped keystroke away. The enthusiasm, commitment and sheer determination that must have been involved in Aftermath‘s production shine through.  I used the term “vanity project” earlier, but I suspect “passion project” would be closer to the mark.

Original UK big box ex-rental, about £9 online.