Mankillers (1987)

I recently had Jacob Gustafson, author of Awful Awesome Action Vol. 1 on the podcast, and we looked at this film. After the Final Sanction post, I wanted to fulfill my promise to do more AIP, and thought that would be a good way to hold myself to that, but also because his book had a lot of AIP in it, it was good for me to get a better sense of these movies. In addition to me and the inclusion in Jacob's book, this has also been covered by Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, and robotGEEK's Cult Cinema, so you can go to their sites to see what they thought.

Mankillers follows AIP mainstay William Zipp as a former fed turned baddie who the feds want to catch. The problem is, as a former fed, he can smell an undercover fed a mile away. That's when the higher-ups call in his old partner to bring him down, and she gets the crazy Grinchy idea of going into a women's prison and taking the 12 worst offenders, and training them to take Zipp down. It's Dirty Dozen meets AIP, but when their training is cut short because the higher-ups want to take down Zipp now, our ladies are put to the test sooner than they expected. With the odds against them, can they beat Zipp and his army of baddies?

The cover of this leads one to believe this is an Andy Sidaris/Julie Strain style sexy actioner, and that isn't what it is. Yes, there's plenty of women clad the way you see above, but there's no sex, no nudity, nothing of that sort. What this is is an AIP actioner from 1987 that, without having a Z'Dar or a Cameron Mitchell or anyone like that, still works in that fun, AIP vein. Zipp as the baddie just straight kills it, whether it's the mullet or the slicked-back ponytail look, as he's doing enough blow to make Scarface uncomfortable and cutting guys up with a chainsaw, you can't help but love it. Yes, the premise is crazy, and yes you see things like the same guy killed twice, but when David Prior is giving us a shoot-em-up on a budget, I'll take all of it.

This is the second of Prior's three 1987 films we've covered here on the DTVC, the other being the cult classic Deadly Prey, and then the third, which we need to get to, is Killer Workout. This isn't the classic Deadly Prey is, and I think Final Sanction is probably the best next film to watch after that, but this one really works as well. I think I've said it before, when people think "Direct to Video Connoisseur," this is the exact movie they're looking at. In the past I did "wild card" posts to spotlight some theatrical junkers, or I took a look at The Irishman as a one-off, but really, this should be our bread and butter, and I'm going to make sure we get back to it more often, especially since a lot of the greats are on Prime right now.

Would you look at that? It's Peggy from Mannix! According to IMDb, this was her last film role, and what a movie to be in. Looking at Prior's age, you have to imagine that he grew up on stuff like Mannix and that inspired him to make the movies he made. To see Gail Fisher here brings that kind of influence full circle. Mannix was one of the best shows of the 70s, and it's on MeTV at like 2 or 3am, so you can still catch it. I had completely forgotten about it, but my wife found it, and she's a fan, so I started watching it again with her. Just typing this paragraph has the theme song in my head. Here's to you Gail Fisher, you were one of the greats.

We're a little over the 1000-post mark here at the DTVC, and the truth is, we don't have many films that pass the Bechdel Test--in fact, I could only think of three: Wild Girl Waltz, Venom, and I think Lethal. That's not a good percentage, so I should probably go back and look through the posts to see if any other do. The point I'm making is this one does. For those who don't know, the Bechdel Test is two named female characters, without any men, having a conversation, and not talking about men. It seems like such a low bar, but so few films meet it, especially in the DTVC world. And here's one that did, but it needed to be marketed to us as an Andy Sidaris action sex romp to get us to buy it.

Finally, when I did the Deadly Prey post, I mentioned the shot of a bottle of New York Seltzer I saw, and here we have another, as heroine Lynda Aldon is enjoying a bottle while watching the fed try to sneak onto her property. That wasn't the only great find in this though, you may have noticed I tagged DTVC Hall of Famer Art Camacho. In one of the battles the women had with Zipp's men, I saw someone that looked a lot like Camacho, and joked that he was in so many films, that he was even in this--then I looked through the cast on IMDb and found out it was him! When I went back through to get screengrabs, I couldn't find the scene he was in, but he was there, and I have IMDb to back me up.

Right now you can get this on Prime, also it's one of the few on AIP flicks on Tubi--and I believe the only David Prior one. On top of all that, it also has a blu-ray release. This is a fun 80s action romp as only Prior and AIP could give us, so it's worth checking out. Also worth checking out is Jacob Gustafson's book, Awful Awesome Action Vol. 1. The link to the book is on our DTVC Book Review page, and if you want more information, he goes into detail about it on the podcast episode, no. 68 "Mankillers," which you can get on TalkShoe, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher. The links are on the left side of the page.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093491