Death Machines - 1976

Once again we venture into the world of "The Poster is Better than the Movie" with this stupid flick, but then how could it not be if the poster looked like this:

Holy fucking shit!  Some evil Gothic tower comes alive, grows gargoyle style faces that have massive butt-chins, and sports some evil ass spike mouth that people would literally rather throw themselves out of all willy nilly than face.  How could this movie be anything except the best movie ever made in the history of mankind?

Well, extremely easily, that's how.  At first I thought, you know for a sci fi this movie has a lot of bland kung fu in it.  That thought early on led me to look up the movie on IMDb where I read the trivia and discovered....it was given this poster by some hack who decided they should do exactly what they did to me:  lead people on with awesome art only to fail to deliver.

The plot is about three "machines" who look like humans, there's an Asian one, a black one, and a white one.  They kill people in the first couple minutes, demonstrating their power.  Then there's also nudity 7 minutes in so I get my hopes up, then I slowly kill myself over the next hour and 15 minutes as bad actors say dull things and nonsensical scenes randomly pass while I consider watching something else.  This movie may not have any deserved holy shit moments, but the holy shit experience it got was "Holy shit this movie is bad".

The action in this is badly choreographed, boring, and makes you want to bash your head against a wall.  The "death machines" are all pretty stupid, and it's unclear as to whether they are actually machines in the technological sense or they are just referred to as machines.  They don't do very much throughout the film, mainly just dull fighting.  They are led by tall-haired Asian lady Madame Lee, who is also a bad actress and is obviously dubbed.

This is the type of shit that came flooding out to support the kung fu crazy that Bruce Lee started, and why they decided to market it as a sci fi movie with the cover art is unknown.  If any movie was half as cool as the poster art, I'd buy that on DVD right now.  What's that you ask?  Were any of these actors in anything else?  Why, of course not!  Only 2 of the 5 top billed actors have been in more than 2 movies.  Nice.

So what, so it's a bad martial arts film.  Is it worth seeing?  I doubt it.  I was slightly intoxicated during parts, that didn't help.  Riffing fodder could be a reason to see it,...but there's so many other, better films to riff on.  It's too slow and uninteresting to drink or smoke to.  It's just bad.  Bad bad.  I'll give it no stars.  Fuck it.