The third Seven Samurai remake provides examples many things I severely wanted out of the unimpressive second, Kill a Dragon: It is a non-American take on the story. Furthermore, it is a genuine wuxia effort. It is Liu he gian shou (1979), itself an incredibly minor part of the overall ‘70s kung fu craze. What little info I can dredge up suggests it involves seven masters with seven different styles (well naturally!) banding together to defeat a greater single master with a greater single style. No word on if there is a village in need of defense, and “a multitude of fighters with unusual styles” is common enough in kung fu cinema (see Five Deadly Venoms).
Then we move ahead one year, to the ‘80s [dad dum dum!] and reach Battle Beyond the Stars…
You have no idea how much it pisses me off that I cannot find a copy of this movie! This is the one I most wanted to see! Consider, it’s the sci-fi version of Seven Samurai, meaning there’s a healthy dollop of Star Wars influence, the highest budget (at the time) motion picture ever produced by filmmaking uber-legend Roger Corman. That’s the same Roger Corman who practically invented independent cinema in the post-monopoly days of Hollywood, whose cheapo exploitation flicks paved the path indirectly for directors such as George Romero, and who more is directly responsible for creating the careers of (among many others) Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard, Jack Hill, etc. ad infinitum. The man whose no-budget productions include cult classics Piranha, Death Race 2000, Boxcar Bertha, Rock ‘N’ Roll High School, Galaxy of Terror, and about 500 other movies, including the recent trash that is Sharktopus! Damn I wanted to see his take on Seven Samurai!
I mean, we’re talking the movie which created James Cameron’s big break in film, doing special effects with almost zero money (a low budget, James Cameron?!), in service of a sci-fi pulp pastiche to rival Flash Gordon or Buckaroo Banzai. A mighty top drawer entertainment, by Corman standards, boasting a score by James “Aliens” Horner, a screenplay by John “Lone Star” Sayles.
The story is as purely Seven Samurai as possible…in space! Just replace “village” with “space planet,” “bandits” with “space mutants,” and “samurai” with “space mercenaries from beyond the moon.” Such a fantastical setting surely allows a playful approach to the set-in-stone scenario, as now every universal detail can be altered for maximum strangeness. So we have, apparently, a gruesome mishmash of robots, reptilians, alien clones, and a character actually called “Space Cowboy” (he’s a trucker)! And Robert Vaughn returns from The Magnificent Seven to play Gelt, a perfect updating of his old Lee character – an aging assassin looking to lie (Lee) low.
Reverence to its past doesn’t stop there. Battle Beyond the Stars christens its planet Akir, as in Akira Kurosawa. As a pulpy space opera, other names and concepts sound equally foreign: Shad, Sadodr, Malmori, Stellar Converter, Zed, Nell, Kalo, Tembo, Hephaestus, Nanelia, Planet Earth, Nestor, Mol, Cayman of the Lambda Zone, Saint-Exmin, Zymer, Quepeg. Sybil Danning’s in this, back when she was smokin’. John Saxon’s in it! George Peppard, the guy originally cast for Steve McQueen’s role in The Magnificent Seven, he’s in it!
Damn, I really wanted to see this movie!
Sigh. Moving on…
Okay, now this is getting frightening. The next, 1983’s The Seven Magnificent Gladiators, is a part of the early ‘80s’ peplum revival, along with the same year’s Hercules (with Lou Ferrigno), or ‘84’s Hercules 2 (heh?!), ‘83’s Ator, the Fighting Eagle, and the mightiest and earliest of this set, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian. This is the Second Wave of the Italian-styled sword-and-sandals genre, like those movies I’m taking a break from. Movies from the ‘60s like Seven Slaves Against the World and Seven Rebel Gladiators – and no, those aren’t official remakes of Seven Samurai, so we get to ignore ‘em.
The Seven Magnificent Gladiators is an Italian movie, as evidenced by how awkwardly exploitative that title is. Story-wise, it’s the old village-bandits-warriors situation. As in any of these remakes, it must distinguish itself through specifics, notably the new setting: some generic sword-and-sorcery Neverland. All evidence suggests this is well in keeping with those damned pepla, celebrating lunkheaded brawny idiocy over any of the swifter, cleverer battling shown by the Magnificent Seven – who are undoubtedly being picked up on here, and it seems one could argue many of these Seven Samurai remakes are in fact Magnificent Seven remakes. Oh, and Lou Ferrigno stars in this one too (as “Han”), for he really couldn’t extricate himself from this bizarre little Italian pseudo-movement.
Even given The Seven Magnificent Gladiators’ status as an Italian second-generation peplum from the ‘80s, even then it sounds horrible. Credit, if it so may be called, goes to the directors, Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei. Mattei is the “real” director here, a feared figure even amongst Italian genre makers (and I love a lot of Italian genre fare), a man whose car accident-style cult mostly focuses upon travesties such as Zombis 3 and 4, which ignores other equally terrifying works such as SS Girls, SS Extermination Love Camp (see a theme?), Mondo Erotico, Violence in a Women’s Prison, Caligula and Messalina, Virus: Hell of the Living Dead, Scalps, Robowar, Strike Commando, Strike Commando 2, Shocking Dark (aka Terminator 2 – whaaat?!), Killing Striptease, Killing Striptease 2, The Jail: A Woman’s Hell…you know, nothing but the classiest of cinematic masterpieces.
Oh, let us not discount Claudio Fragasso, who is perhaps a far greater contributor to the wonderful realm of the terrible Z-movie, who bested (or worsted) Mattei’s claim as the “Ed Wood of Italian filmmaking” in a single, stunning bound….Fragasso wrote and directed Troll 2. Haven’t seen that beast yet? Go get drunk, stoned, and surrounded by friends and watch that NOW.
And Sybil Danning is in this one too!
It’s amazing, seemingly once a property has entered the realm of cheapo, exploitative genre fare, it cannot extricate itself. The next remake comes from 1990, and filmmaker Ciro H. Santiago – who is somehow not Italian, though his filmography would suggest otherwise. Rather, here’s another erstwhile director/producer of any and all potentially profitable niche fare. Movies to his credit include Pistolero, T.N.T. Jackson, Vampire Hookers, Caged Fury, Naked Vengeance, Silk, Future Hunters, Demon of Paradise, The Expendables (no, not that one), Silk 2, Caged Heat II: Stripped of Freedom (but somehow not Caged Heat), and this year’s upcoming (surely on DVD) Road Raiders. It’s clear I just love picking out the most sensational titles, and listing ‘em. I could do likewise for the things Santiago has merely produced, but I’ll spare ya.
Dune Warriors takes the Seven Samurai routine and applies it to a Mad Max/Road Warrior rip-off, when in 1990 those things were surely on the way out. Well, seeing as these post-apocalyptic desert epics are really just redressed westerns (as is Seven Samurai, let us not forget), the new details are solely cosmetic. Again, bandits are now mutants. Some dreaded swords-and-sorcery nonsense somehow remains, as the solution to this problem (apart from the standardized seven warriors) involves a magical sword, once held by none other than mighty Achilles – No, wait, I’m actually thinking of The Seven Magnificent Gladiators here.
Either rate, the casts continue to showcase only the best that genre fare can afford. Headlining Dune Warriors is the late David Carradine, American martial artist spanning a career from TV’s “Kung Fu” to QT’S Kill Bill (he’s Bill). This means we can again add a certain wuxia flavor to the mix, surely the sort of desperate gambit a late-period Mad Max wannabe would tout.
No more Sybil Danning, sadly. But Luke Askew’s in it, and he was in The Magnificent Seven Ride! That’s how far we’ve fallen from Battle’s Robert Vaughn.
Dikiy vostok, the last remake I didn’t bother to watch (because I couldn’t) is another international epic, though you’d never guess which nation…
Kazakhstan!
In researching this one, brainchild of Soviet director Rashid Nugmanov, there is absolutely no way to improve upon the plot summary found on IMDb. So here it is:
“The Solar Children, a group of dwarves who left the circus, are trying to start a settlement in the Kyrgyzstan wilderness just after the breakup of the Soviet Union, but are harassed by a gang of bikers. With their meager savings, they hire a ragtag group of heroes to drive off the bikers.”
Midgets…er, dwarves? Mongolian biker gangs? Damn, here’s another one I’m pissed off I didn’t see!
…Hell, it sounds like an early Werner Herzog movie, specifically Even Dwarfs Started Small, with a bit of Kaspar Hauser, Fata Morgana and Aguirre for flavor. Apparently, all international distribution of Dikiy vostok (aka The Wild East) highlighted its status as a sheer oddity. And in the early years following the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., apparently this is how filmmakers lashed out against their overlords’ former stringent restrictions. The one other thing Dikiy vostok is apparently noted for follows that pattern. ‘Tis a quote, about the Soviet Union: “There is no sex in our country.” Hmm, today’s internet culture begs to differ (link not provided).
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That nearly wraps it up for Seven Samurai remakes. There is one more official remake, China Gate, which I will get to see. (There’s a little more to top off this tale, also to be seen tomorrow). In the meanwhile, I have intentionally neglected certain films which clearly use Seven Samurai and its ilk as inspiration, but are not direct enough to be counted as remakes. These are mostly comic efforts, as broad as ¡Three Amigos!, A Bug’s Life and Galaxy Quest. What’s interesting is how they all use the same comic conceit: The “warriors” are entertainers, mistaken for real heroes. This in itself would make for an interesting exploration, but that’s beyond this blog’s mission, so we’ll leave it be.
One final thought: In evidently every Seven Samurai updating, the bandits gain status as visible villains, with a leader to match wits with the head of the seven. Compare that to the unseen force of nature in Kurosawa’s version. Which approach is stronger? Draw your own conclusions.
RELATED POSTS:
• No. 1 Seven Samurai (1954)
• No. 2 The Magnificent Seven (1960)
• No. 3 Kill a Dragon (1967)
• No. 9 China Gate (1998)
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