DAY 14. Cannon!

Wow, you have no idea how excited I am about this.

I saw VHS art for the movie Urban Warriors and saw something I have never seen before: the Michael Dudikoff Presents Action Adventure Theater line.

If you’ve spent any time looking at the history of the Cannon Group, you know that the company was essentially a house of cards held together by Menahem Golan’s ambition and a lot of pre-sold tape rights. They didn’t even bother starting their own domestic home video label until 1989. By that point, the wheels were already coming off the Go-Go Boys’ wagon and they were slashing their production budgets to the bone.

They needed product to fill the shelves of that new home video arm and they needed it cheap. That’s how they ended up dumpster diving into the international market, picking up some oddball productions.

I went to the source of all things Cannon, Austin Trunick, who already covered this four years ago on the Cannon Film Guide Facebook page, saying “In the late ’80s, Cannon tried to squeeze some money out of several of their older distro titles that hadn’t been fully exploited on the video market. Their idea was to have modern stars introduce the films, which resulted in the “Michael Dudikoff Presents Action Adventure Theater” line of tapes.”

Much like the 22-26 action adventure films that bear the title Sybil Danning’s Adventure Video for the USA Home Video company, this was a way to use an action star to make some money with no risk.

There are only four of these, so why don’t we get into them?

The Bronx Executioner (1989): Welcome to a post-apocalyptic wasteland where humanoids and androids are locked in a nonsensical war for supremacy. These androids bleed human blood, look like guys in leather jackets and apparently spent their entire R&D budget at a RadioShack clearance sale. If one of them had an Italian name, it would be Roberto Batty.

The film follows our rookie deputy, James (Gabriele Gori, Attrazione Pericolosa), who arrives in the Bronx to replace the legendary Sheriff Warren. And here is where the fun begins: Warren is played by the iconic Woody Strode, but every single frame of him is shamelessly recycled from the 1984 movie The Final Executioner.

As for the Bronx itself? It’s a series of mounds of dirt and a derelict country villa that has never seen a New York City zip code in its life. James, fresh from a police academy that apparently consists solely of doing chin-ups on a metal pole, is tasked with policing this chaos. But the movie quickly gets bored with him, and shifts focus to Dakar (Alex Vitale, Jakoda from Strike Commando!), a humanoid leader who spends the better part of the runtime screaming into a walkie-talkie while driving a jeep through the Italian countryside.

When a cyborg goes on a killing spree, you’d expect some stakes, right? Forget it. You won’t get an explanation of who, why or what the hell is happening. The narrative is a patchwork quilt of stock footage, recycled scenes and incoherent voice-overs. As for the big bad, Margie is the quintessential evil android, strutting around in a dog collar and proclaiming, “Violence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” She’s the heart and soul of this mess. And she’s played by Margie Newton, who got all painted up in Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead and was Aphrodite in Cozzi’s The Adventures of Hercules.

Director Vanio Amici is an equal-opportunity recycler. Why film a new action scene when you can just use the one you already shot five minutes ago? It saves time and prevents you from having to rewind to watch the faceless extras get blasted again. For a long time, people thought he was Umberto Lenzi, as the name on the credits is Bob Collins. Amici only directed one other movie, Detective Malone, which remixes two of Lenzi’s Black Cobra movies, further muddying the movie waters and making nerds like me wonder who really made it. As for the rest of his credits, he mainly worked as an editor with a resume that includes Black Demons, Karate Warrior 6, Aenigma and many adult films. Perhaps his toughest challenge was being the editor for Troll 2. I wonder how he was able to make it make as much sense as it does.

As for co-writer Piero Regnoli, his IMDb is the kind of magical place I could get lost in. His credits include Voices From Beyond, Penombra, Malabimba, Burial Ground, Patrick Still Lives, Cry of a Prostitute, The Third Eye, The Playgirls and the Vampire, and so many more. He also directed I’ll See You In Hell, Maciste In King Solomon’s Mines, Appuntamento a Dallas and the aforementioned Playgirls and the Vampire.

This has it all and by all, I mean perms, leather jackets, headbands and a finale so dramatically deep that it tries to mimic Blade Runner before hitting a hard freeze-frame.

Dakar: James, can I tell you something?

James: Sure. What?

Dakar: I always envied you. I wanted to be like you.

James: You mean human?

Dakar: It was just… a dream.

It’s a total mess. I loved it!

Cross Mission (1988): Leave it to Alfonso Brescia—working under his Al Bradley alias—to decide that what the jungle combat — Rambsoploitation — genre really needed wasn’t just more stock footage of explosions, but literal demons. What else can we expect from the director of Murder In Blue Light, Iron Warrior, The Beast In Space and an entire series of Star Wars rip-offs?

Cross Mission starts off as your standard, run-of-the-mill exploitation flick. General Romero, played by Antonio Poli, is the iron-fisted ruler of a small Latin American nation. He’s got the whole “I’m a good guy” routine down to a science, publicly torching marijuana fields to impress the U.N. inspectors. Of course, once the inspectors pack up their clipboards and head for the airport, it’s back to the narco-trafficking business as usual.

When a marine named William (Richard Randall, whose only other role is in a TV movie version of A Christmas Carol) decides to investigate the racket alongside a crusading reporter named Helen (Brigitte Porsche, her only role, and no, she’s not an adult star), things spiral into the usual jungle chaos. Do huts explode? Do some of the good guys die and need revenge? Does the hero get ready for the last battle in a montage, putting on a special outfit to show the audience he’s finally done playing nice? Yes to all of these things.

But here is where the movie veers off the tracks and into the territory of the sublime. Just when you think you’ve seen every trope in the book, Brescia hits you with the supernatural. General Romero isn’t just a drug lord; he’s a practitioner of the dark arts. He’s got the ability to summon a diabolical small demon named Astaroth, played by Nelson De La Rosa (the mini Brando of The Island of Dr. Moreau and the titular Rat Man), at will. When he’s shooting blue lightning at people, the movie suddenly shifts from a generic war film to an Italian bit of magic.

Brescia would go on to direct Miami Cops the following year, but Cross Mission remains a singular, bizarre experiment. It doesn’t fully succeed as a war movie, and it doesn’t fully succeed as a supernatural thriller, but for the sheer audacity of blending the two? It’s a more than decent one-time watch. You come for the jungle action, but you stay because you need to see how a magic little guy fits into an exploding helicopter subplot.

Bridge to Hell (1986):

I love Umberto Lenzi. Whether its Eurospy (Super Seven Calling Cairo, Kriminal), his films with Carroll Baker (Orgasmo; So Sweet, So Perverse; A Quiet Place to Kill; Knife of Ice), giallo (Spasmo, Eyeball, Seven Bloodstained Orchids), cannibal films (Man From Deep River, Cannibal Ferox, Eaten Alive!), horror (Ghosthouse, Nightmare City), cop violence (Almost Human, The Tough Ones)…the guy knew how to make a movie.

Lt. Bill Rogers (Andy Forrest, also in Massimo Pirri’s The Kiss of the Cobra, Tonino Valerii’s Sicilian Connection, Lenzi’s The House of Witchcraft, Hunt for the Gold Scorpion and, oddly, the Giandomenico Curi-directed Italian Lambada movie and yes, there were two movies with this title in the same year), Sgt. Mario Pazilbo Esposito (Carlo Mucari, Snuff Killer and Obsession: A Taste for Fear) and Blitz (Paki Valente) have broken out of a POV camp. Rogers is an American pilot who trades a POW camp for the Yugoslavian wilderness after getting shot down. Espozi has the nickname Spaghetti because he’s Italian — in an Italian movie — and Blinz is an Austrian deserter who realized his side was losing.

Our motley crew of POWs managed to link up with some partisans and a local Orthodox priest. The partisans are desperate, looking for pilots to take their last two functioning planes and turn those German-held hillsides into a fireworks display. But while they’re busy flying for the resistance, the boys get wind of some serious loot. Vanya (Francesca Ferrè), a nun who traded her habit for a submachine gun, tips them off about a haul of priceless gold chalices stashed away at the St. Basil convent.

According to Andy J. Forrest, Ferrè was functionally blind without her glasses and ended one take by walking directly into a tree.

After pulling off two successful bombing runs, the POWs stop caring about the war effort and start plotting a heist. They leverage their pilot skills to score some hardware, then convince Vanya to lead them to the chapel. She thinks they’re on the level, but these guys are just mercenaries in disguise, ready to double-cross everyone for the gold.

There’s a Fabio Frizzi score, which is nice, and Luigi Ciccarese as cinematographer. He shot plenty of Bruno Mattei’s later movies, especially his SOV 2000s efforts, as well as tons of adult. Along the way, Lenzi stole battle scenes from The Battle of Sutjeska and Partizanska eskadrila.

It’s not the most exciting war movie you’ve seen, but it does have a genuinely impressive train explosion and watching our guys lean out of a biplane to drop bombs by hand is the kind of practical, low-budget ingenuity that makes these films so charming.

Urban Warriors (1987): You know you’re in for a wild ride when the opening act consists of a montage of mushroom clouds followed immediately by stock footage of volcanoes erupting. Then, we meet Brad (Bruno Bilotta), our hero, and his buddies, Maury (Bjorn Hammer) and Stan (Maurice Poli), who are hanging out in an underground lab when the power goes out. When they finally decide to crawl out of their bunker, they discover that the world has ended. And apparently, the end of the world is synonymous with an immediate, city-wide explosion in the local population of leather-clad biker gangs.

Vari’s vision of the future looks suspiciously like a gravel pit and a single abandoned factory. That’s the kind of set design that makes a Cirio Santiago movie look like a Cecil B. DeMille epic.

The mutants here are a special breed. According to Brad—who, again, as you may remember, was just working at a power station and doesn’t seem like a scientist—these guys suffer from a mutation that apparently destroys their inner ear whenever the sun goes down. Before you can say uno, due, tre, quattordici, all these bad ass post-apocalyptic warriors have vertigo.

The aesthetic is exactly what you’d expect if a group of guys raided a discount S&M shop and then realized they needed to re-qualify for their motorcycle licenses. Watching Brad’s buddy Maury emerge from a shack wearing a full-on studded leather helmet and a white scarf—while manning a bike with mounted weapons—is reason enough for the world to end.

Brad’s journey is a masterclass in survival priorities. After watching his buddy Maury get killed—a tragedy clearly caused by failing to stick to a strict vehicle maintenance schedule—Brad doesn’t weep. He gets himself some leather, finds a woman (Rosenda Scharschmidt, Dark Bar) to get busy with and promptly gets attacked because she wants his spinal marrow. At least he defeats the leader of the mutants, played by Alex Vitale, who will always be Jakoda from Strike Commando. Oh yeah — Malisa Longo from Cat In the Brain and the titular star of Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg –– is in this barterdown bootleg too.

This was Giuseppe Vari’s return to the director’s chair after a decade away, and spoiler alert: it was also his final film.

Much like another Michael Dudikoff Presents film, The Bronx Executioner, this takes scenes from The Final Executioner. Even stranger, I have heard Paolo Rustichelli’s theme described as either a cover of “White Lines” or the Art of Noise cover of “Dragnet.” 

Good news: Cauldron just released this.

DAY 13: 90s horror!

Henry Pinkle (Michael St. Gerard, Link from Hairspray) is a nobody living in the L.A. sprawl, a guy so hollowed out by the flickering glow of his television that when his favorite show, The Robertson Family, gets canceled, his life effectively ends. He’s ready to jump off a bridge, but he’s interrupted by Sam Bones (John P. Ryan), a guy who might be a guardian angel or just the manifestation of Henry’s own suicidal intrusive thoughts.

From there, it gets real weird, real fast. Sam isn’t here to save Henry’s life; he’s here to make Henry a star. And in the world of this movie, stardom is all about becoming the Baby Mask Killer and murdering all over L.A. But this isn’t just another body-count flick where someone in a mask chases teenagers. It’s a psychological nightmare. There’s a scene where Henry breaks into a house to commit a murder, but he’s so mesmerized by the TV set that he just forgets to kill the guy. It’s a pitch-black, brilliant jab at how we prioritize screen time over real-world connections. 

Now, Henry is lost in a world without his favorite show, a terrifying mentor and a social worker, Wendy (Maureen Teefy), who is his only friend but would never understand why he’s a slasher. 

The way this film ends—with Henry dying on a live broadcast, finally achieving his dream of being on TV even as his life drains away—is brutal and cynical. It’s a perfect, ugly capper to a story about a man who finally understands his place in the ecosystem of the entertainment industry.

As for St. Gerard, he had a spiritual awakening after leading a Sunday School class and retired from acting to focus on religious instruction. He became a pastor at Harlem Square Church in New York City.

DAY 11: Disasters!

Is the Alex Proyas who directed this and Gods of Egypt the same guy who made The Crow and Dark City?

Because wow.

If you read the critics, they said things like ‘absurd,’ ‘messy,’ and ‘overly serious.’ But once I saw Nicholas Cage dodging a train and screaming at — spoilers! — aliens, well…this was for me.

It’s not good. But it’s for me.

Knowing is a mixtape from a maniac of every major disaster possible, leading up to an extinction-level solar flare. Plane crash? Got it. A prophetic time capsule in an elementary school that sages dates, death tolls and the exact coordinates of major disasters like the Oklahoma City bombing, September 11 and Hurricane Katrina? Sure, why not? It’s very America first in that way. And along the way, Cage and his family — his wife died in the first event — are there for so many end-of-the-world moments.

Rose Byrne is Diana, the daughter of Lucinda (Lara Robinson, who also plays daughter Abby), who made those prophecies. At some point, Cage thinks — yes, I will only refer to him as his name and not his character’s name — thinks he can stop the end of the world. 

I can only imagine that Proyas had a Road to Damascus moment, because this feels like a religious film, bringing in Matthäus Merian’s engraving of Ezekiel’s vision of a UFO, along with whispering alien angels who like to steal SUVs. 

Speaking of those critics — I’m not one, I’m just a dude who watches too many movies — hated the pivot from sci-fi thriller to cosmic, angel-infused religious allegory. I love how hard it swings for the fences. It goes from “MIT Professor solves a riddle” to “Interstellar Arks and White Trees of Life” in about 20 minutes. It’s bold, it’s bananas, and it doesn’t give a fuck what you think. It’s like Proyas saw Signs and said, “I can raise you a twist, M. Night.”

Most people will tell you it’s a failure because the science is absolute bunk.

Look, if you’re coming to a movie where Nicolas Cage spends two hours deciphering numbers on a closet door to figure out when the world is going to end, and you’re expecting a lecture from Neil deGrasse Tyson, you’re barking up the wrong tree. 

Proyas said at a press conference for the film, “The science was important.” I wanted to make the movie credible. So, of course, we researched as much as we could and tried to give it as much authenticity as we could.”

Well, let’s just say the real-world scientists didn’t exactly hand out a gold star.

The critics were waiting with their calculators and textbooks, and they had a field day. Ian O’Neill over at Discovery News pointed out the obvious: those solar flares aren’t exactly going to turn our cities into charcoal. That’s just not how physics works, folks. Then you’ve got Erin McCarthy of Popular Mechanics, who called the movie out for mixing up actual science with straight-up numerology. She rightly noted that the film confuses mathematical modeling—the stuff that actually runs our world—with mystical, occult-style number crunching.

The IMDb goofs page for this is, as you’d expect, packed.

Maybe they also reacted to the tone shifts, which are violent mood swings. It’s grim, it’s moody, and it features one of the most hilariously nihilistic endings in modern cinema as — spoiler — everyone dies right after Cage makes up with his angry old father. 

Then the kids ride those space arks to a place where the Tree of Life lives. 

The end.

Who the hell came up with this idea?

The road to the screen is often messier than the movies themselves. Back in 2001, novelist Ryne Douglas Pearson walked into a room with producers Todd Black and Jason Blumenthal. His pitch was a total hook: imagine a 1950s time capsule being opened, only to reveal a list of every major disaster that’s happened since, and it ends with the cryptic “EE,” standing for “Everyone Else.” 

Naturally, the majors got their hands on it first. It was set up at Columbia Pictures, and for a minute there, it was a hot potato. You had guys like Rod Lurie and Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly attached to direct. Can you imagine a Richard Kelly version of this? Southland Tales follow-up? Please, Mandala Effect, activate.

Writers Stiles White and Juliet Snowden were to take a crack at the script before Proyas came on. He was hooked because the script wasn’t just a disaster flick; it was a character study about how knowing your own end date would absolutely wreck your life.

But guess what? As wild and critically hated as this was, it made $80 million on a $50 million budget. Guess who liked it? Roger Ebert. He gave it four out of four stars and proclaimed, “Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I’ve seen—frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.”

In short: Cage gets apophenia, starts seeing patterns in everything, it rips off a lot of Childhood’s End, yells stuff like “I’m not saying that 81 people are going to die tomorrow, okay? I’m just trying to understand why this is saying they will!” and it ends with him answering his dad like this:

Rev. Koestler: This isn’t the end, son.

John Koestler: I know.

If he had said knowing instead of know, I might have suddenly run into the streets of my small city and screamed, “KNOWING!” as if Pee-Wee had said the secret word.

Proyas hasn’t made a movie — outside of shorts — since Gods of Egypt, but he has said he’s making his own version of R.U.R., which would be interesting after I, Robot. I’m lining up for the first day because he has the insane energy I want. 

I also understand why normal people would absolutely hate this.

Two hundred solar flares out of five.

You can watch this on Tubi.