Death Machines (1976)

The Worst Film Ever

Strong and Moving!

People are voting emotionally.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

They don't really make films like Death Machines anymore and that's a bit of a shame. It seems to have a bit of a mixed reputation if the reviews on here are anything to go by but for me this is an unqualified success on account of just how entertaining it all is. Its story centres on three fighters – the death machines - who are directed by a female crime boss by way of a mind control drug. She then uses them to carry out a series of hit jobs on her enemies. For reasons that remain unexplained, the death machines are bullet proof.From the outset, you have to give some credit to a film whose three central characters are named in the credits as White Death Machine, Black Death Machine and Asian Death Machine. And you also have to give plus points to a film whose master criminal is an East Asian lady with huge hair. She directs proceedings that amount to a series of scenes of the death machines taking out a variety of shady rival criminals. These set-pieces are connected together, often without much of an explanation. But sometimes sense can be over-rated and sheer nonsense can be so much more fun. I find it hard to understand how so many people can have found this movie boring. As far as I'm concerned, it moved along at a cracking pace and threw plenty of action and insanity at us from start to finish. There are lots of martial arts fights; heads and arms are chopped off; a truck is driven through restaurant window and a bulldozer flattens a man in a phone booth; an aeroplane is taken out by a bazooka; a banker is blown up by a time-bomb and a professional hit-man is thrown off a roof; an assault on a karate school is attempted with predictably action-packed results; there's a biker bar-room brawl; we have a shouting police captain and a 'hero' who is beaten up easily by an angry pensioner. I'm pretty sure there was a lot more than that as well. This is great fun basically.

Bay Area residents probably remember Paul from The Diamond Center, an unctuous late night huckster who flogged easy credit and cheap rocks on late night television throughout the 1980s and early 90s. I mention him only because there is an actor in Death Machines who looks JUST LIKE HIM playing the owner of an Italian restaurant. He appears in the best scene in this positively dreadful and near unwatchable crime drama about a Dragon Lady (Mari Honjo, who wisely hung up her acting spurs after completing this film) who controls the local syndicate. Our hero (let's call him Not Paul From the Diamond Center) plays the restaurateur with all the subtlety of The Simpsons' Luigi ("you lika da spaghetti?") and seems unimpressed when one of his patrons complains about the food. No, there's no fly in the soup or hair in the sauce: there's a Red Buddha in the pasta, the calling card of the murderous crime boss, who sends a statuette to each of her prospective victims. Death Machines is bad by any measure, and pretty boring, which is an even worse crime.

If you remember the great Lee Marvin movie "Point Blank" you'll recognize the "pipe-smoking assassin" character originally played by James B. Sikking. As you watch "Death Machines" you find yourself constantly reminded of some of the great scenes or clichés you've seen in other movies. It's almost as if the makers just grabbed a handful of as much fun stuff as they could remember from other movies and tossed it all into one. Of course it makes for one very silly and (in that context) very entertaining movie. Can you see actress Mari Honjo actually biting the blood capsule after she is shot? Clearly this is one of the reasons she has never been seen on the screen again. Or anywhere else, at least lately. C'mon, how can you not appreciate a movie with a one-armed bartender?

Death Machines. This old classic action film in a kind of tale of a difference...This movie asks us what the plot is all about? Well basically, it's all to do with these highly trained assassins who work for some mysterious chinese woman who sends them out to terminate anyone who stands in her way...Have you got it..? Well, to me that film was dull in some parts especially those "machines" that don't even say a word in this film. Yep! They just basically going round killing people left, right and centre..Another thing that bothers me was that when the film finished, the three men just stood there as they're making their way off somewhere.. I don't know where.. But, as me the viewer, it didn't say "The End" to say that the film has finished. It just plays the music and the men are just standing there like a bunch of bananas..Well, if you ever see that film, see what you think..? You may the plot but you'll never know the ending...