Angels' Brigade (1979)

Excellent but underrated film

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I'm actually surprised this has a rating of 1.9. I mean, it's definitely bad, but not this terrible. I guess I probably have to be a fan of "Charlie's Angels" in order to really loathe this movie. I have never seen anything related to that show and I automatically knew that this was an obvious ripoff. The weirdest thing here was probably all those strange cartoonish sounds. I guess it was meant to be a joke. It was instead really dumb and got old very fast. A lot of this is told through flashback.It seems like even the fading away effects were bad. They really should get rid of those altogether. The acting is of course mostly bad and it's way too basic as it talks about these women who get together to stop people selling drugs to kids. It sound have been like a feature length drug PSA. Instead, the whole thing just really had no style at all. It's as bad as most movies shown on "Mystery Science Theater 3000", which of course isn't good. *1/2

I saw this movie as part of an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The movie is absolutely a ripoff of Charlie's Angels and that being said, I was never a fan of that show, so a vastly inferior ripoff that this film was almost makes my eyes bleed! Horrible and annoying actresses as the good guys and a bunch of television show stars thrown in for 'comedy'. You know it is bad when Alan Hale does the best job and has the most dignified role of the cameos! Then there is Jack Palance, a guy whose looks and voice frightens small children, animals and quite a few adults being one upped by a thrown together super group or something. Seriously? How does that happen? One girl can swing a sword, one can drive a motorcycle, one is a cop, another is a teacher, then there is a singer, and a former junkie...why, how would any organized crime unit survive this onslaught? I really just find that there is nothing to like about this movie except maybe that you get to see the ladies in swimsuits and stuff, but it never lasts long and this gals are not in the league of other ladies from this time frame.The story opens with the girls attacking a drug compound and then the film flashes back to how their little team formed. The flashback pretty much takes up most of the film. A drug dealer has been pushing dope on kids, one of the kids is so hooked he bashes in the head of the dealer and steals his stuff! Jack Palance and the dealer gets the drugs back and administers a beating to the kid. Then we are introduced to a Las Vegas lounge singer and it turns out it was her brother that got the beat down! A school teacher convinces her and some other ladies to form a group to take down these drug kingpins because calling the police would have apparently been too difficult. Much easier to steal weapons, customize a van and formulate overly complicated plans to take out the drug dealers and considering how easily they fall, they probably could have just called the cops.This made for a pretty good episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I was surprised it was not better as I usually like a good Mike episode as he rarely disappoints, but it was just a pretty good one. I was saddened that they completely whiffed on an easy riff as at the end of the film the main drug lord is shot in the shoulder, falls into a pool and promptly dies. The one young girl got hit in a worse place and was fine, but this dude gets hit and just drops dead in the water. No remark at all and I was completely surprised by the absence of a riff commenting on this.So this film was bad. Really bad. I was thinking that perhaps it was a television pilot or something, but no, it was a movie apparently. It did leave an opening for a sequel, but I am going to take a wild guess and say there was not one. About the best part of the film was the ending credits as they did manage to play a catchy tune during them, but that is about it. Most of the film, as I have said, is just a flashback and it takes a while to catch up. Then it is time for the final showdown where you know our girls are going to come out on top! Though, in reality, they probably would have been gunned down in their headquarters. Mob and drug kingpins, are not quite inept enough to be taken down by seven gals with spunk...

I am not a so bad its good fan. I have never been big on the whole ironic viewing experience. Even with mediocre films that I enjoyed there was something I honestly liked about them. But now I am torn because other then the women I can't think of a reason to like this film and yet I did. Does that mean I am shallow, quite possibly. Does it mean I just like staring at cleavage, can't argue with that. But usually it takes a lot more then eye candy to get me to like a film but there is something about this one that gets me.The plot is simple, street pusher (Darby Hinton) sells drugs to children and no one can stop him except of course the seven from heaven. A school teacher, a vegas lounge singer, a martial arts instructor, a model, a stunt woman, a cop and a high school student all join forces to bring down the drugdealer's boss, the kingpin Peter Lawford who along with his right hand man Jack Palance seems to have cornered the primary school drug racket. The women are all gorgeous with special mention going to Playboy playmate and H.O.T.S star Susan Kiger as the singer. If you can keep your eyes from drifting lower during her sequences you are a far better man than I am.The film gets more bizarre as it goes along as these Magnificent Seven (or actually 14 if you consider how they are costumed) seem to bring down the bad guys with relative ease. This film was clearly aimed at young kids so no one ever poses any real threat to them. When one of the ladies are captured they only dump her in a pool tied to a tea set. Director Greydon Clark (a favorite of mine) helps keep everything moving at a fast clip and the actresses are all quite likable which makes it a big improvement over his previous film Satan's Cheerleaders.If you are nervous about watching this film pick up the MST3K version. The movie is shortened so it is even faster paced and their humour helps it through some slow patches. But if you have only seen that version you should keep your eyes out for the original on VHS. You will be surprised at just how watchable it is.

I've been watching a lot of MST3K lately, mainly because my girlfriend and I enjoy them and have thirty of them on DVD. We had been on a roll, blindly picking out some of the funniest MSTs ever (Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, Time Chasers, et al). Then along came Angels Revenge. (That's how the filmmakers title it -- it should be Angels' Revenge.) This is the epitome of bad film-making. The plot comes straight from what must have been a hormone-crazed, cocaine-snorting man with money. There are more holes in this movie than a particularly hole-filled piece of Swiss cheese. Seven completely unrelated women come together to overthrow a drug kingpin (Peter Lawford) and the most ridiculous plot points ensue. The movie opens with an hour long flashback featuring bad singing and dancing routines, "action" sequences riddled with cartoon sound effects (hearing a "boing!" and a "thwap!" during these scenes is pure camp), and it attempts to explain how these seven crime fighters came to be. It's really just a reason to show the T&A on these minorly attractive women. (I will say I laughed when Tom Servo said to the black stunt driving woman of this group, "Hey, Gene Shalit wants his hair back!") The acting is stretching the meaning of the definition of acting awfully thin, despite appearances by Alan Hale (the Skipper), Jim Baccus (Mr. Howell), and even Jack Palance as the middleman in this drug ring. The first time he approaches the teacher-cum-crime fighter character, Crow says (in Jack's voice), "I want to be teacher's pet," followed quickly by, "Hey, what's with this 'incomplete' crap?" Suffice it to say that the "acting" on display here is the reason they make acting schools. None of the leading women apparently attended.I really like MST3K, but even Mike and the 'bots struggled through this one. Some movies are just so bad that making fun of them almost becomes difficult to watch. This is a prime example of one of those movies.