Editor Ira leading off today to talk about film:

Here’s a little peek behind the trivial curtain: at a recent Trivia Mafia editorial meeting, we got into a discussion about whether a team would get full credit for answering “Terminator 2” when the film’s full title is “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” We agreed that just “Terminator 2” should be enough, because it’s not like there’s another “Terminator 2” that you could confuse it with. At this point, I had to inform the team that there is, in fact, another “Terminator 2.” Or at least there sort of is. Let me explain…

Just about every hit genre movie produced in the 1970s and ‘80s spawned a slew of low-budget knock-offs by European directors, mostly working out of Italy. Trash cinema devotees recognize entire subgenres of unabashed imitations of movies like “The Exorcist,” “Jaws,” “Halloween,” “The Road Warrior,” the Dirty Harry franchise, and plenty more. Most of these copycats just lifted some key thematic elements, but some borrowed character designs, chunks of dialogue, musical scores, and other distinctive features from their source material. A few of the boldest even marketed themselves as direct sequels in European markets. (Take a look at this poster and see if you can guess what movie’s sequel Juan Piquer Simón’s “Extra Terrestrial Visitors” is subtly attempting to pass for!)

(Content warning before I get into the films of Bruno Mattei: much of his early canon contains objectively offensive material, including sexist, racist, and homophobic content. We’re focusing on the fun stuff here, but you may wish to avoid digging into his back catalog.)

Director Bruno Mattei was already one of the most prominent of the Italian rip-off artists, but in 1988 he had a revelation: rather than make cheap movies that were sort of like more famous ones, he could just go ahead and do unlicensed remakes of the hits. Even better, he could kill two birds with one stone and market them as knock-offs of different hit movies. That’s the only possible explanation for “RoboWar.” From all outward appearances that film looks like a blatant copy of “RoboCop,” but is in fact an almost beat-for-beat clone of “Predator” filmed for pocket change in the Philippines with former Captain America Reb Brown in the Arnold Schwarzenegger role and a guy in a clunky robot suit playing the Predator. Mattei does throw in a tiny bit of RoboCoppery at the tail end of the film, presumably in the interest of truth in advertising.

Then there was 1989’s “Shocking Dark,” an even more blatant remake of “Aliens” starring an actor who maybe looks a little like Sigourney Weaver from certain angles if you squint, with the little girl role played by a teenager in pigtails who everyone just pretends is a child. I can’t stress enough how much this movie is just cheap “Aliens,” with entire set pieces and extensive dialogue lifted whole-cloth from the original. But then in the final 15 minutes a character in a leather jacket is revealed to be an unkillable android and all of a sudden we’re slouching through a low-rent rendition of “The Terminator.” And that’s why “Shocking Dark” was promoted extensively in Europe as, you guessed it… “Terminator 2.”

Bruno Mattei had one more big knock-off up his sleeve, 1995’s “Cruel Jaws,” a film widely regarded as the worst “Jaws” imitation ever made — and that’s a crowded field! For this outing, Mattei barely even bothered with the remake angle and instead just lifted actual footage from various “Jaws” sequels and rip-offs. He even plugged the theme from “Star Wars” into the score at one point. Pilfering from John Williams is about as brazen as it gets.

Editor Ruby back with you. On the topic of strange remakes of American films, I want to bring up “Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek,” a Turkish film that at the same time was:

The first “Star Trek” movie ever made, in 1973, predating “Star Trek the Motion Picture” by six years
The eighth and final film in the wildly popular Turkish comedy series “Ömer the Tourist,” about a hobo who gets into scrapes, which up to that point was not science fiction inspired in any way

This is kind of like if Charlie Chaplin’s final appearance of The Tramp was him stumbling into a beat for beat remake of “War of the Worlds,” made without Orson Welles’ involvement or permission. How was an American studio going to know their intellectual rights were being violated halfway around the world in another language in the 1970s? Couldn’t Google it! Anyway, if you want to see this movie, it’s currently streaming on Mubi. (Credit where it’s due, I learned about this from the “Blank Check” podcast.)

On the topic of “Terminator 2” derived art, Content Creator Tony alerted us to “William Shakespeare’s Terminator The Second,” which takes lines from Shakespeare plays and uses them to tell the story of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” A cool idea for a play!