Kill and Kill Again is a sequel to the film Kill or Be Killed and tells another adventure of Steve Chase (James Ryan), a secret agent martial artist who has been hired by Kandy Kane (Anneline Kriel, whose life should be a movie, between having singer Richard Loring writing the song “Sweet Anneline” about her, followed by nude photos she took for his friend Roy Hilligenn being leaked — in 1977 — as well as being present when boyfriend Henke Pistorius — father of Oscar Pistorius, the legless South African athlete who would shoot and kill his girlfriend — shot himself while cleaning his pistol, as well as a singer and Playboy South Africa cover girl, as well as Miss South Africa 1974 and was later crowned Miss World 1974) to find her father Dr. Horatio Kane (John Ramsbottom), a scientist who has learned how to control minds while trying to turn potatoes into an energy source.

Yes, if you thought Kill and Kill Again would be normal, oh no. Oh no.

The government gives Steve $5 million dollars to pick his own team of super agents, which includes former martial arts champion Gypsy Billy (Norman Robinson), the mystic mystery man who only answers to The Fly (Stan Schmidt, a South African master of Shotokan karate), the goofball Hot Dog (Bill Flynn) who when we first meet him is challenging men to stand in a room while he shoots bullets at them and the former pro wrestler and now construction worker gorilla (Ken Gampu, King Solomon’s Mines).

They’re sent to stop Wellington Forsyth III, a billionaire who has now become Marduk (Michael Mayer), who has taken over the town of Ironville and is looking to create an army of warriors to take over the world. He has wanted Steve to come to challenge his champion, The Optimus (Eddie Dori), an unstoppable fighter.

Yes, in the world of South African martial arts, white men are the greatest fighters in the world.

In the commentary track for this movie, James Ryan said that the third film would have been called Most Dangerous Man and had him appear opposite Sharon Stone. However, FVI went out of business and he headed back to South Africa.

This comes from the same director, Ivan Hall, and was written by John Crowther, who also wrote The Evil That Men Do, Missing In Action and Hands of Steel.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Martial arts movies make little to no sense most of the time. Then, there’s this movie.

Steve Chase is a martial artist who goes to the desert for what he thinks is an Olympic style meet. Nope. An ex-Nazi general was defeated at the 1936 Olympics by a Japanese martial artist named Miyagi, so he’s out for revenge.  Luckily, Steve and his girl Olga escape.

To fix up his team, von Rudloff’s miniature henchman Chico goes around the world to recruit a new team. And Steve ends up meeting Miyagi and joining his team, which leads to the madcap fight between he and his girl when she is kidnapped and forced to join his team.

Finally, Steve must fight and defeat Luke, the ultimate fighter, leading the Nazi to killing himself rather than face defeat.

I’ve given you a straight reading of the film. To see it is to know how different it is, as it’s either filmed by someone who wants to be an artist or someone who has been in the sun too long. This is often the same thing.

This movie was a success for four years in its native South Africa, where many Japanese martial arts forms were done to perfection. It seems bizarre that a South African martial arts movie became a cult hit, but there’s a historical quirk here. During the 70s, international film boycotts due to Apartheid meant South Africa had to get creative. They produced a string of genre films (often dubbed for international release) that attempted to mimic Hollywood and Hong Kong trends with a fraction of the budget and ten times the weirdness.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by John Landis and written by the ZAZ team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (who would go on to Airplane! and The Naked Gun), this movie is a complete mess, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve probably watched this film more than any other, thanks to a taped-off HBO copy I had throughout my teenage years.

Containing a number of exploitation films produced by Samuel L. Bronkowitz (a combination of everyone from Samuel Bronston and Joseph L. Mankiewicz to legendary American International Pictures producer Samuel Z. Arkoff), this movie just never stops or lets up. If a scene isn’t funny for a little bit, stick around. Something really comedic — or strange — is right around the corner.

How can you not adore a film that begins with a news anchorman warning you, “The popcorn you’ve just been eating has been pissed in?”

Starting with a commercial for Argon Oil, the first real segment of the film is an extended watch of A.M. Today, as a gorilla (special effects master Rick Baker) goes wild on set. That’s followed by a trailer for Catholic High School Girls in Trouble, which is pretty much every softcore sexploitation movie the late 1960’s and early 1970s foisted on drive-in and grindhouse screens. The sound effects alone make this segment worthwhile.

A segment titled ” See You Next Wednesday” features a theater that offers Feel-A-Round technology. It’s really just an excuse for Landis to get this catchphrase into one of his films, which he repeats throughout his career. It’s the last line that Frank Poole’s father says to him in a letter from home in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And Landis has used it in movies from Schlock and The Blues Brothers to the video for Thriller, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Trading Places and Spies Like Us (among many of his other films). It also shows up in Amazon Women on the Moon, which is pretty much a spiritual sequel to this. It’s called The Cheeseburger Movie, while the original is called The Hamburger Movie in France, plus they both end with the song “Carioca.”

There are so many moments here that it’s hard for me to list them all. I’ll try. Big Jim Slade, making the album The Wonderful World of Sex much better for the ladies. Building “a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude” in the film’s longest movie-within-a-movie, the Bruce Lee ripoff A Fistful of Yen. That’s Armageddon, an Irwin Allen-style movie that stars George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland as “the clumsy waiter,” a part that never fails to make me laugh. A Leave It to Beaver in court sketch that predates the way modern comedy would reinvent old shows, even bringing original Wally, Tony Dow, along for the ride. The blacksploitation (and jewsploitation) film Cleopatra Schwartz. Danger Seekers, which could never — and probably should never — be made today. And literally so much more.

The humor was going to extend to the film’s title, which was going to be either Free Popcorn or Closed for Remodeling, either of which would have led to total chaos.

“In this documentary film narrated by George Kennedy, we investigate the planet Jupiter and the secret power it holds over our planet Earth.  Directors Peter Matulavich and Lee Auerbach have combined years of research and interviews with the nation’s leading scientists and historians.  The result is a documentary with such impact that it must be watched and then watched again to fully grasp the tremendous amount of information and prophetic study packed into all 80 minutes!  Discover the Jupiter Menace!” 

The world is doomed, and nothing can be done about it.

Directed by Lee Auerbach and Peter Matulavich (who wrote several episodes of In Search Of) and written by Matulavich and Alan Coats, this tells us that by the year 2000 — 26 years ago — the poles of our planet would move and send us into space, as a grand alignment would cause volcanoes to explode, earthquakes to shatter cities and, well, you wouldn’t want to live on this planet, let me tell you that much.

That’s because Jupiter and Saturn — “Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania, Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten” — were about to move as well, and the Bible says that will happen, and so do astrologers and the Anasazi. Chester Brooks, a computer programmer and church deacon, explains in this movie how he programmed his computer with every reference to natural catastrophes in the Bible, then uses a simple map to calculate that the Dome of the Rock will be destroyed in the near future. 

So do John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, who said that this alignment of the planets would cause major disasters, including a large earthquake on the San Andreas Fault, in their 1974 book The Jupiter Effect. A rare planetary alignment when Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto would be on the same side of the Sun would produce enough tidal forces on our system’s big star. 

The documentary highlights the San Andreas Fault as a scar and features Peter Franken (a former Pentagon researcher) describing a nightmare scenario where Los Angeles is taken out, resulting in over 100,000 immediate deaths and grotesque injuries. Then, technicians use a computer to simulate a 12-point earthquake on the Richter scale, a force 10,000 times more powerful than the 1906 San Francisco quake.

When the alignment happened on March 10, 1982, no major disasters occurred. Gribbin later disavowed the theory, admitting in The Little Book of Science that he “don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it” In 1982, he and Plagemann published The Jupiter Effect Reconsidered, shifting the focus to a supposed 1980 event linked to Mount St. Helens, though this also lacked evidence, as you would expect.

Plagemann, Jeffrey Goodman and John White, who wrote Pole Shift. appear in this, along with psychics Clarissa Bernhardt (who claims to have predicted over 30 earthquakes and visualizes the San Francisco Bay becoming an inland sea and the East Coast being ravaged by volcanic activity) and Alex Tanous, and CSA leader James Ellison (an American white supremacist and this group means The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, a radical paramilitary and survivalist group active in the 70s and 80s). There is also a group of people who plan on living in the sky, the STEL Community, before they come back to the surface to rule. Located 60 miles south of Chicago, this group planned to build 3,000 airships by 1999 to hover above the Earth during the cataclysm, before building a new community they named Philadelphia.

What’s insane is that both of these groups are presented as sane and not at all fringe.

Why should you watch this? Because George Kennedy needed a paycheck, and I can respect that. It also has a soundtrack by Larry Fast, who is also Synergy. On his site, Fast says, “Larry Fast is best known for his series of pioneering electronic music albums recorded under the project name SYNERGY. He is also recognized for his decade-long work with Peter Gabriel, playing synthesizer on recordings and tours, and serving as part of the production team on many of Peter’s albums. During his career, Larry has worked as an electronic music composer/arranger and producer, contributing to numerous platinum-selling recordings with world-renowned artists. Performers as diverse as Nektar, Bonnie Tyler, Foreigner, Hall & Oates,  Annie Haslam (Renaissance), The Strawbs, Meat Loaf, Barbra Streisand and many others have called on Larry’s electronic production talents.” He also played synth on “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young” and “Nowhere Fast” for the  Streets of Fire soundtrack, as well as on Hall and Oates’ “Private Eyes” and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” 

Much like an off-brand Sunn movie, this has two narrators, the other being C. Lindsay Workman, who was the voice of God in Garfield: His Nine Lives. And hey — the cinematographer was Robert Harmon, who went on to direct The Hitcher and shot stills on Nocturna, Tourist Trap, Fairy Tales, Fade to Black and Hell Night.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Between Pin, Cathy’s Curse and this film, what is it about Canadian families in horror films? Beneath a surface of politeness, is everyone this psychotic north of the border?

Julie (Isabelle Mejias, Scanners II: The New Order) just wants to play with her pet snake, hunt with her dad, and, well, lie in bed with him. But when her mom takes away her snake, she just watches a delivery boy (Paul Hubbard, who played Flash Gordon in the deleted scenes in A Christmas Story) violate her and does nothing to save her life, even though she’s holding a gun. It’s a horrifying scene, as the man is shocked that he’s knocked the woman’s head so hard into the ground. He’s more upset than Julie when he sees the blood seeping out of the back of her brain. Julie just watches, fascinated yet removed.

Julie thinks she has her father (Anthony Franciosa, Tenebre) all to herself, but he soon finds a new wife: the alluring Susan (Sybil Danning)! She brings sex appeal and a stepson. And because she may have been dating daddy before mommy died, maybe Julie’s dad is taking advantage of the death she caused.

One thing he’s definitely taking advantage of is the opportunity to make sweet, sweet love to Susan. He doesn’t know that his daughter is watching the entire time and enjoying things way too much, imagining herself in bed with her father! Ugh!

And it gets worse and worse, as Julie does things like lock her stepbrother in a refrigerator, nearly killing him, and then brings the rapist who killed her mother back to the house to take out her new mom in a blackmail plot. Yep, she even tells him, “You can rape her all you want!” It all adds up to an ending that totally shocked me, and I don’t want to cheat you out of it.

Unlike The Bad Seed, Julie isn’t just born bad; she is a product of a father who is so pathologically oblivious that he borders on being an accomplice.

Yep. This is one rough little film, which makes sense when you realize it’s by the writer and director of Chained Heat, Paul Nicolas (that movie also has Danning in it, plus Linda Blair, Henry Silva, Tamara Dobson, John Vernon and Stella Stevens for a movie that transcends the WIP genre).

It’s not for everyone. But Mejias is great in it. And it’s the kind of movie that you are amazed exists, and even more astounded as it plays in your DVD player (or streams on YouTube).

In a bizarre twist of “it’s a small world,” Cindy Girling (who plays the mother who gets her head smashed) was actually married in real life to Paul Hubbard (the delivery boy who kills her). Talk about taking your work home with you!