New South African DVD releases for December

Plus the added attraction of liner notes written by yours truly. Wink

KILL AND KILL AGAIN

The world is in the grip of a power-crazed mad man, Wellington Forsyth III who has the city of Ironville at his mercy due to a mind control drug accidentally derived from a superfuel supposed to be for the good of humankind and the environment. Now known as Marduk, Forsyth has the inventor of the fuel, Dr Horatio Kane synthesize more of the drug to bring the world under his iron fist and has his elite group of martial artists, including the frightening Optimist, train for this domination of the world. In desperation, the government sends out a distress call to Steve Chase and his motley group of martial artists. Included in this bunch are Gorilla, a construction worker whose pet peeves in life are too tight shirts, overbearing bosses and locked aircraft toilets; the jokester HotDog who doesn’t like people smoking around him but will nonchalantly toss around loaded revolvers and sharp drawing pins; Gypsy Billy, a one time martial arts champion now living in a squatter camp and sharing a broken down bus with a bunch of chickens, and the enigmatic Fly, a martial arts master who can levitate at will and doesn’t react to having a mug of beer poured on his head.

Ivan Hall’s Kill and Kill Again was a sequel to the earlier Karate Olympia and, like that film before it, was a tremendous box office success in the USA and the Far East, making a star out of James Ryan: indeed, this film was the most successful South African release ever until Jamie Uys’ The Gods Must be Crazy in 1984. Marketed as an action comedy and filmed in and around Sun City, this film also presented the first usage of what is now known as ‘bullet time’, the slow motion travelling bullet, popularized by The Wachowski Brothers in The Matrix.

SATAN'S HARVEST

After inheriting a farm in South Africa, Cutter Murdock, an American private detective travels to South Africa to claim his inheritance and almost immediately finds himself in serious danger. Following an attempted assassination whlle leaving the aeroplane at Jan Smuts Airport in which he is shot at while descending the stairs (the unfortunate person behind him is shot dead) and a further attempt on his life when his chauffeur and car are blown to hell, he is also targeted by the gun-toting Marla Oaks who shoots at him as soon as he gets out of his plane. There are a group of people who want Murdock’s farm ~ interloper family members who were excluded from Murdock’s uncle’s will ~ as the farm is a heroin and marijuana goldmine and nothing will stand in their way to have this farm, not even the resourceful American detective.

They are the Grim Reapers ~ their trade is oppression, addiction and death: they reap Satan’s Harvest.

This film is available for free download at www.archive.org ~ but the local rights holders don't want to know this at all. Buggedout

KING HENDRIK

It is a great day for the citizens of Stellendam when they can ignore the fact that the new bypass road which bypasses their town has bypassed them so that they can bypass the government of South Africa and legally declare themselves independent from the rest of Africa, bypassing all the other laws, including the one that requires a farmer to acquire a passport to use the longdrop toilet as the new border with South Africa has cut his farm in two. Unlike the rest of the Stellendam citizenry, the farmer cannot bypass his toilet, so he has to procure a passport or be stopped short by the boom gates and thus be caught short. The English and Afrikaans factions in town are up in arms over this and resort to “gorilla” tactics in order to make the other side see sense ~ the hit and run sabotage campaigns of the later stages of the Anglo-Boer War arise again, as a toilet is blown to smithereens in retaliation for a blown up yacht ~ and the South African government will not stand for declarations of UDI, much less cries of “Uhuru!” in Stellendam.

All of this nonsense and then you still have to “Mind your ear” when you telephone the United Nations to register as a newly independent African nation…..