Crime Zone

Crime Zone – 1988 – United States/Peru

In the grungy, dystopian future, poor people are forbidden from having sex (except in specially approved brothels). The reason for this law isn’t clear, but to enforce it, police break into people’s homes, hold them at gunpoint, and inspect their dicks to make sure they aren’t horny. This sounds like a porn parody of 1984, but it isn’t porn, and it isn’t really a comedy.

Two poor people fall in love. To escape oppression, they become spies for a rival country. The twist (also borrowed from 1984) is that the rival country doesn’t really exist. The lovers (now wanted criminals) are just pawns in a government propaganda campaign to perpetuate a fake war.

The Warrior and the Sorceress

The Warrior and the Sorceress – 1984 – United States/Argentina

Michael Weldon’s The Psychotronic Video Guide describes this movie as “an outer space post-nuke samurai Western”. I don’t know if that’s really accurate, but it confirms this: The Warrior and the Sorceress definitely has its own thing going on.

The Warrior and the Sorceress takes place in a savage desert land with two suns. David Carradine plays Kain the Dark One, a cynical swordsman with an awful haircut. He wanders into a fortified village where two cruel warlords fight over a well in the center of town, and the villagers are caught between them. In a plot reminiscent of Yojimbo (1961) and A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Kain tricks the warlords into destroying each other so the villagers can be free.

Evils of the Night

Evils of the Night – 1985 – United States

Human-like aliens in glittery silver jumpsuits invade a “secluded college town”. They need the bodies of young people for their experiments, so they hire two dumb mechanics to abduct college students. The aliens pay the mechanics in handfuls of quarters that are supposed to be gold coins. The kidnapped college students are taken to an abandoned hospital, and when they try to escape, the aliens shoot them with laser-emitting jewelry. One group of young people fights back. They become trapped in the mechanics’ shop, and they attack their abductors with a drill, an air compressor, and a hydraulic jack. When the mechanics are killed, the aliens leave Earth and suffer no repercussions for their evil deeds.