The Noah
Starring: Robert Strauss, Geoffrey Holder, Sally Kirkland
Director: Daniel Bourla
The film: A bedraggled American soldier lands on the beach of what appears to be a Chinese island. It's home to a deserted army outpost, with several battered buildings and more Mao Zedong statuettes and propaganda posters than Hollywood Road.
There's no question that he's in enemy territory, but also lying around are photos of Viet Cong women, Japanese knick-knacks and other non-Chinese items. This suggests either that the war, which has apparently just ended in a nuclear apocalypse, was fought by a pan-Asian alliance, or that art director Henry Wong was working with rather limited funds. The latter seems likely since this long-lost and little-known film was produced on a budget of just US$80,000.
The Noah was made by first-time director Daniel Bourla in 1968, but for various reasons wasn't released for public viewing until 1974, and that was only a brief festival circuit airing. After that, it drifted into obscurity with a few bootleg VHS copies doing the rounds, but for the most part it was known as one of the greatest films that almost no-one had ever seen.