Dir: Peter Knight
Star: Sybil Danning, Jack Taylor, Karin Schubert

When I bought this for $3.99, Chris suggested that my selection of it had been influenced by Sybil Danning’s breasts rather than any intrinsic qualities. While acknowledging their charm, I rejected this claim completely, and confidently expressed the belief that Panther Squad would extend Sybil’s long and distinguished track record of quality B-movies such as Reform School Girls and L.A. Bounty.

Ok, I admit it: I was wrong. Horribly wrong. For it is actually a dismal piece of jaw-droppingly bad dreck which makes dire mis-steps in Danning’s career such as The Howling II look like Oscar-calibre material. Before watching it, my original plan had been to review it in the upcoming Trash City, as part of the A-Z of action heroines (a sequel to a similar piece in TC22), but it was simply deemed too bad – yes, falling short, even of the low standards of Model By Day.

It may only be 77 minutes long, but long before that, the prospect of being savaged by a large member of the cat family will seem like paradise in comparison. It struggles from the get-go, beginning with stock footage of a rocket taking off, part of a new space initiative led by NOON, the New Organisation Of Nations, a UN-like group who have nicked the flag of the European Union and are headed by a Henry Kissinger lookalike. But the craft is hijacked by ‘Clean Space’ (a group dedicated to…well, clean space), despite the best efforts of Noon’s space centre, which consists of about four people in a power station, saying things like “Move from H to 6” while alarms make wheeee-wheeee noises. Clean Space also kidnap backup astronaut Jane Dantine, followed shortly after by the most pathetically-staged car crash I’ve ever seen, largely consisting of waving the camera about while pointing it at some trees.

To crack this tough case, they need “the toughest cookie in our job”, Ilona (Sybil Danning, of course), as we learn in a barely coherent section which leaps from location to location, and character to character without explanation, punctuated by shots of Ilona with binoculars. “Wander around – you could learn some stuff,” someone tells her, so Ilona wanders around, and Ilona learns some stuff, despite being involved in a fight scene, which occasionally switches into slow-mo for no real reason, and is intercut with a sublimely pointless shot of the now totally-empty room she just left.

Ilona teams up with local agent Frank Randall (Jack Taylor), to whom I couldn’t help warming, since he is laidback to the point of being almost horizontal – largely through alcoholic consumption – and fond of saying things like “Beautiful women are my favourite pastime.” The root-beer drinking Ilona isn’t impressed. The jeep carrying Jane (remember her?) gets stuck in mud, and she escapes. briefly. To no point at all. Oh, well. Frank and Ilona meet a contact in a restaurant which features the least-convincing guitar playing of all time. Their contact – “the one with the Julio Iglesias haircut” – gets killed by someone who looks like a dwarf version of Danny Trejo, but inevitably passes on crucial information to Ilona. She has had enough, and brings in the rest of the ‘Panther Squad’. Seeing them clad in hotpants, halter tops and mini-skirts, I had to agree with Frank: “The Dallas Cowboys must be in town.”

Some confusion occurs here, as the name of the enemy group seems to change from ‘Clean Space’ to ‘The Circus’. Or perhaps they are an entirely different evil force; by this stage, you may well have had to adopt ‘defensive apathy’ with regard to such things, purely to survive. Whatever they’re called, they launch an attack on the bungalow, but since any count of the attackers would stop at round about…well, two, it’s not very effective. While Sybil watches through her binoculars (yes, the same shot used in the earlier scene), the Panther Squad set out to investigate a boat that seems to be involved, but their professionalism seems to leave a bit to be desired: they take out the guards okay, but leave them their guns… “Oh, I’ve been captured”, as Eddie Izzard would say.

The rest of the team head for the bad guys’ base, who are now obviously ready. Says one, “the two guys keeping watch have been attacked” – which is odd when I counted at least four. Never mind. However, the villains’ accents are so heavy, they are near-impossible to understand, so a mere inability to keep count in English may be forgiven. Less acceptable is the way all their guards relentless fall for the oldest ruses in the book, whether it’s Ilona pretending to be a tourist, or the dumb “lobbing a stone behind you” trick, and they respond with the reaction speed of slugs on Valium. How did this lot ever manage to become a threat to the world?

“The insects are bad here, but we’ll need more than Raid to kill off that pest”, says Ilona in a somewhat bemusing one-liner before her amazons attack. Jane (still remember her?) is spirited away, and the girls give chase, pausing only to ask the conveniently-passing Frank for directions. He shrugs and has a drink, perhaps wondering why they prefer to jog off down the road on foot, rather than taking his car. Ah, but they manage to get transport from somewhere, as they are next seen in a car being chased by a helicopter: they get out, the car is strafed, Frank turns up, Frank gets strafed too. “Think we might need some guns”, says Ilona, somewhat superfluously. Luckily, Frank has some in the back of his car. The helicopter crashes in a blaze of stock footage depicting an explosion on a mountain, using totally different film-stock.

From here, it’s off to Government HQ, though before heading there, Frank gives Ilona a parcel she’d sent for for Sybil. At the HQ, a mad general is giving a banquet. “There is nothing and no-one to stop me now. I will be the lord and master of the world. Their so-called gate-posts will be reduced to slavery.” Gate-posts? Gate-posts? After four rewinds, I eventually realised that he meant “great powers”, but was burdened with the same dreadful accent as the rest of the crew. I say again, how did this lot ever manage to become a threat to the world? The guns the Panther Squad had in the previous scene have now vanished, and their opponents are too busy shooting them in the air, happy at the prospect of world domination, as their leader makes largely-inaudible threats which appear to involve nuclear power stations.

So, it’s off to the Space Centre, with Ilona now riding a motorbike — though there are two obvious proofs that it’s not her on the bike… The surprisingly loosly-guarded space centre prepares to, er, do bad things to nuclear power stations and…okay, I’m going to write this down exactly as I did at the time. Ilona’s parcel has a gun that makes a jeep invisible. The Space Centre sparks briefly, but is otherwise unharmed. The space program can continue and mankind’s new age of space has begun. Hoorah. You are now every bit as bemused as I was, watching it: “I need a drink”, says Frank, and not for the first time, I find myself in total agreement.

Footnotes

• The final credits give “Special thanks to the Aerospatiale”; one suspects this may be because whatever “aerospatiale” it was, thought it best to remain anonymous.
• Did Jess Franco have a hand in this? This site details the evidence.
• It’s kinda hard to tell where this film was shot. Bits look like Belgium, bits look like Spain, and bits are Japan — but that’s just the stock footage of a Japanese rocket taking off, so may safely be ignored…
• ‘Peter Knight’ is a pseudonym for (and, indeed a literal translation of) Pierre Chevalier, and was the last movie in a dubious career including such work as La vie amoureuse de l’homme invisible, which is pretty much what it sounds like.
• Sybil also co-produced the film. What was she thinking…
• If you’re wondering what happened to Sybil, her ‘agent’, the late, largely unlamented SC Dacy, appears to have been a significant reason. I vaguely recall some correspondence with him, trying to get an interview with Sybil in the early days of TC. I think communications were abruptly ended after he took offense at a sentence in an article which he perceived as being critical of her. I was unimpressed, shall we say.

On Monday, I quit my job. Regular readers will know this is no surprise, and has been in the pipeline for ages as part of plans to move across to America before the end of the year. But to finally hand over that sheet of paper to my boss was both simultaneously uplifting and scary. The former, because I can look forward to three months of…well, let’s just say that the threat of being sacked no longer has any great hold over me. But it’s sobering too, in that this is really the first irrevocable step towards departure. It’s one thing to talk about emigration; it’s quite another to take a leap into the dark and give up your employment for the past 11 years, without any idea what your next one will be.

The clock is now ticking, and I suddenly realised that I’d better get on with the next TC, before I lose access to all my spiffy hi-tech apparatus. The past week has thus been a bit of a blizzard of activity, as I start laying out some articles, hand over others to minions, and get stuck into reviewing material (no…please…not another Carmen Electra movie!). At the moment, I am optimistic, though perversely, I suspect that as the deadline of the end of my employment approaches, I’ll be spending more time in the office. I can see them carting me out of the building on October 31st, as I shriek, “Just five more minutes!” [And here seems as good a place as any to include the traditional mantra: “Oi, Lino! Where are the ‘zine reviews?”]

At least one potential distraction has been largely removed, as my Playstation appears to be succumbing to wear and tear (I’m sure it has nothing to do with the pique-induced slapping it took after a particularly irritating LMA Manager loss). From a TC point of view, this is good. However, having struggled through most of Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid, I feel an odd sense of loss that I’ll never get to finish them. There’s not much point in buying a new machine, given my imminent departure, and I have no interest in starting from the beginning again!

On the other hand, it will be one less item to ship. For I’m already looking (albeit in a vague way) at the prospect of packing all my stuff up. Fortunately, I don’t have much in the way of possessions – at least, not ones without plugs on the end – and most of what I do have, there’s no point in taking over. I like my bed, but my research suggests they have perfectly adequate ones in America. Apart from that, it’s mostly software of various forms, and will provide a good opportunity to engage in some hard-core pruning. For example, do I bother taking any LPs with me? Part of me is going “But…but…but I can’t leave them behind!”, while a rather more realistic part enquires politely when was the last time I even saw my record-player. Keeping stuff is all very well, but paying to ship it does concentrate the mind.

Especially as I’ve got a good seven years of accumulated junk to sort out, thanks to my non-nomadic lifestyle. When you move home frequently, there is inevitably regular winnowing of the dross. Not having this means entire rooms to be gone through and the dreck discarded (I’ve got most of the first 100 issues of Empire if anyone wants to come round and pick them up!). If previous experience is anything to go by, these sessions will degenerate into me sitting in the middle of a bomb-zone, reading books I’d forgotten I had, while listening to CDs that had fallen down behind said books. Actually, I’m quite looking forward to this…

“We gave away shillings and pence in 1971, then we had to switch from gallons to liters in 1995. Gradually we’ve been forced to give up Fahrenheit for Celsius.. Pounds and ounces we are going to keep.”
     — Tony Bennett, U.K. Independence Party

“This goes together with red buses and pillar boxes, warm beer and cricket. It’s what England is all about.”
     — Stephen Alambrites, Federation of Small Businesses spokesman

“If it’s good enough for Tony Blair to have his new baby weighed in pounds and ounces, then it’s good enough to sell fish in… We are losing our heritage. We’re being Europeanized through the back door. Pounds and ounces is just the tip of the iceberg, I tell you.”
     — Neil Herron, Sunderland fishmonger

Hello? Are we on drugs? I will admit to being a great fan of Europe in general, with its more relaxed attitude to anything from extended licencing hours to pornography. I have little time for the isolationists who would rather see us waving farewell, as an integrated Europe steams off into the third millennium. But even given this, comments like the ones above just leave me shaking me head in wonder: haven’t people got anything better to do with their time than campaign for the retention of a system of weights and measures that dates back to medieval times or beyond. Never mind the third millennium, some people seem to be having difficulty leaving the first one.

Imperial measures are an anachronism, borne out of an era when balance scales meant a base-16 system e.g. sixteen ounces in a pound meant for easy division, and measurements were based upon items like the length of the king’s arm or three “round and dry” barleycorns (for those unfamiliar with regal limbs or cereals, that’s the yard and inch). Nowadays there’s absolutely no reason for them to be this way: the decimal system is used for almost everything else figured in numbers save time, and there’s no doubt it makes calculation much easier.

However, the quotes above prove it is now also a symbol of Britishness, standing against the tide of centralised bureaucracy that is perceived as washing over us from Brussels and the rest of the Euronation. But, really, what difference does it make? We abandoned the rod, pole and perch without civilization collapsing into anarchy and chaos – though the small-minded probably blame that for the loss of the British Empire. I can see conceivable arguments for not joining the European Single Currency, but these depend on hardcore economics, rather than woolly bleating about losing our “Britishness”. As long as I get enough money to keep me in badfilm and curry, I don’t mind whether it’s paid to me in pounds, euros or sea-shells. And I care even less whether I get a pint of beer or 568 ml; it won’t taste the slightest bit different.

Until recently, the stance of this merry band of metric-martyrs seemed quaint and irrelevant. But recently, Tesco decided to tear down many of its recently introduced kilo signs and replace them with imperial measures as well, after a survey of 1,000 customers found that more than 50% found metric measurements “confusing”. And how will reverting to the old system help them cope? Wouldn’t helping them to learn to handle metric amounts have been more useful? But, hey, that wouldn’t have been worth so many jingoistic points in the tabloids. Sheesh, it’s bad enough when the government dances to the newspapers’ tune, but between this and the GM food panic, it seems the supermarkets want to boogie too.

I can’t help having a nasty suspicion that a large part of this hyper-resistance to metricity, which has been going on since an EU directive in the mid-80’s, is pure xenophobia. It’s a French system, created not long after the revolution there, and I suspect that if the British had come up with the idea, there wouldn’t be nearly as much resistance to it. Perhaps Napoleon was right when he said “England is a nation of shopkeepers”. He just forgot to add that they only use pounds and ounces.

Mine, all mine… I have sole occupancy of TC Towers for the next week, and I am thoroughly looking forward to it. Don’t get me wrong, I like my housemates very much, but there is something about having 100%, irrevocably uninterruptable access to the entire place which is genuinely appealing. I can watch what I want, when I want; use the computer at will; have a bath without prior warning; chat on the phone for hours on end. And all of these, without a stitch of clothing on, if I so desire. Not that I would; merely having the freedom to engage in such anti-social behaviour is sufficient in itself.

For I remain unconvinced that man is a social animal; or perhaps it’s just that our ancestors never had to engage in subtle and largely implicit negotiation over who gets to watch what on the video. The way it seems to work in TC Towers (with the obvious caveat that my housemates’ may see it totally differently), is a complex dance of polite diplomacy and tolerance. If person X is watching a show/film/barbed-wire deathmatch when Y enters the room, X can finish watching it. However, if Y is still there at the end, X should include Y in discussion over the next item. If neither has any specific choice, X may provide a short-list of possibilities, from which Y shall select, or vice-versa.

Given the above, you can see why I am looking forward to going home and simply slapping on Brawlin’ Broads, or any of the other titles unlikely to make it off the short-list when the rest of the inhabitants are around. I have even done my level best to clear the social diary for the week, so I can make the most of this opportunity for glorious isolation — it’ll be a bit like a solo version of Big Brother, with fewer cameras. This should mean a significant drop in the unwatched backlog (currently sitting at 15 tapes, 9 laser-discs and 3 DVDs), as I rip through the less housemate-friendly titles.

This will mean a back seat for my other favourite indoor pursuit, since it can be done privately, in my own room… No, I mean working on the computer, of course – what did you think I meant? Admittedly, the new TC hasn’t been receiving the attention it should have lately (at least on the design and layout front – I continue writing apace) but I am working on the site, specifically, “enhanced” versions of the Incredibly Bad Film Show series going all the way back to TC 0. And you try finding pictures from Revenge of the Teenage Vixens from Outer Space. This is why it’s instead far more likely is that I will continue beating my brains out against the immensely irritating LMA football management sim on the Playstation. I suspect this game may be a cunning device, engineered by TC’s enemies to prevent me continuing to subvert the population at large.

This week, however, they needn’t bother. I’ll be locking the Playstation away in a cupboard, perhaps the same one as the cooking utensils – with my heavy-on-the-microwavey diet, it’ll be severely out of mind there. Perhaps now would be a good opportunity to try out that long-planned experiment as to whether M&M’s and out-of-date Twinkies are sufficient to sustain human life. Sadly, I’ll still have to come to work, but that doesn’t really count as social interaction: maybe I should take a vow of silence and see whether anyone notices.

And so, I retreat, pausing only to shave my head and don the cassock belonging to the Holy Order of the Happy Hermit. If I’m not back next week, send in a SWAT team.

Anyone who ever doubted Einstein’s statement that time is relative, clearly has never experienced a sunny Friday afternoon in the office. There’s no need to reach a velocity near the speed of light, all you have to do is go down the pub for a lunchtime pint, and time stands still: entire continents rise and fall before the hands of the clock reach 5pm. The more imaginative members of the department have left early, claiming to have “meetings” in other buildings, and a suspicious part of me thinks these were perhaps entirely spurious. Jealous? No: until I qualify for my share options – which paranoia suggests my employers would dearly love to withhold on a flimsy pretext, such as my bunking off early on a delightful summer’s day – I’m far too honest and upright to do anything like that. Still, only two weeks of gritting teeth and being polite to irritating work colleagues (the one with the Star Wars mobile phone tune has gone; the one who whistles the Blackadder theme remains) to go; it’s difficult to believe I’ve been waiting five years for the bloody things.

The moment they turn up, I quit – in fact, I’m thinking of writing my letter of resignation of the back of the share certificate, just to make the point. I’ve only got to give one month’s notice, but my boss wants me to give more; she can’t start recruiting until I have “officially” resigned. It makes no difference to my expected leaving date – the end of October – but I want to cut her some slack, not least because she’s writing a reference to help me get my American visa. It thus seems wise to do unto others. This will be my only plunge into the job market since leaving college (my first job was for a software house, I was shipped out to one of their clients, and jumped ship permanently a year later, where I’ve been ever since). This is a scary thing, playing on standard human fears of rejection: will anyone want me? And will I end up at a company that requires me to actually work? Eeek.

Flicking through the Phoenix press, I notice the large numbers of jobs which require a drugs test. This isn’t a problem in itself (I may be the only person in favour of legalising all illegal drugs, who has never tried any of them), but I confess to some qualms about it from a civil liberties point of view. If you’re a train driver or heart surgeon, I could perhaps see the point, and I wouldn’t want my employees to turn up stoned, but what you do outside of work hours should be your own concern. If I wanted a moral guardian, I would go back home to my mother, not off to the “land of the free as long as you provide us with a urine sample”. Ideally, I’d love to have a company beg me to work for them, only to say “Sorry, I don’t do drug tests”, but I suspect moral qualms will go out of the window, for the first job or two anyway, and I’ll be delighted to have the opportunity to piss in a paper cup.

If nothing else, such dilemmas are a good way to try and pass the time until five, especially in conjunction with comfort eating. Well, “comfort” isn’t actually the word, it’s more “recreational” in this case — you can only look up the latest Open golf scores on the news feed so many times before that begins to pall. Spurious errands are also good: get a sandwich, post a parcel, get the coffees in, anything to get out into the warm summer sunshine while it lasts (probably until roughly 5:01 p.m.). It’s horribly like a hangover. There’s not much in the way of a cure, all you can do about it is hold on and wait for the pain to go away, for you know it will eventually stop….

…until 9 a.m. on Monday morning at least. 🙁