The Shadow was meant to be a summer blockbuster and the starting point for a new film franchise. It was not.
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Theme song: “Strip Search” by Neal Gardner
Closing song: “Botany 500” by Dawn Davenport and the Window Breakers
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DAY 19. Black Filmmakers!
To understand Street Wars, you have to understand the man behind the curtain: Jamaa Fanaka.
He was part of the famous L.A. Rebellion at UCLA alongside guys like Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, but while they went high-art, Fanaka went straight for the exploit-o-meter. He gave us the Penitentiary trilogy and the absolutely mental, killer-dick classic Soul Vengeance (aka Welcome Home, Brother Charles). By 1992, Fanaka was frustrated with Hollywood and decided to make Street Wars.
Our guide through this madness is Sugar Pop (Alan Joseph), a deep-voiced, striking dude with piercing blue eyes who looks like a model but talks like a voiceover god. Any hero in a Fanaka movie gets a sugary name. Witness Too Sweet in those three prison boxing movies. As for Sugar Pop, he just graduated as the Top Gun of the Exeter Military Academy and is heading to West Point. His brother Frank (Bryan O’Dell) paid for it all. How? By running the local crack industry out of a spot called The Regal Social Club. A place with specials posted on a board and a drive-thru.
Frank’s right-hand man is Humungus (Clifford Shegog), a giant of a man. They belong to a secret council called The Knights of the Round Table, but they meet at a long, rectangular table. Forget logic. Anyway, when Frank gets taken out, Sugar Pop inherits the empire. Naturally, he rides around the hood on a scooter he rigged with a fire-spewing jet engine and applies military logic to running the streets.
Street Wars is torn between lamenting the neighborhood’s tragic conditions and treating Sugar Pop like a superhero. When he goes to war with rival gangs, the local news reports on him like a folk hero. At one point, the movie pauses the plot for Frank’s funeral, which turns into a full-blown gospel choir and choreographed dance number against a minimalist background. Real-life Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Muhammad himself shows up as himself to give a eulogy!
But nothing will prepare you for the third act. Sugar Pop’s ultimate plan to win the drug war? He trains his lieutenants to fly ultralight motorized gliders and hang out of them, shooting Uzis. The news calls them the Ghetto Air Force. As Sugar Pop’s paraplegic buddy enthusiastically yells, “Looks like fun to me! Up there, I don’t need no legs!” Fanaka, who served in the Air Force, wanted to pay tribute to WWII dogfight movies. Sadly, he didn’t have the budget of a movie like Red Tails, so the dogfights are just limited, choppy footage of gliders buzzing around.
It’s great.
There’s also a moment that cuts between Frank and Humungus having sex with their ladies in different rooms while a song called “I Wanna Sex You Down” plays, all while cutting back to a random kid playing a furious drum solo. Humungus actually lifts his girlfriend completely onto his head and carries her up the stairs while going down on her. This is a highly advanced, Olympic-level bedroom maneuver that I would not recommend to the weak.
If this whole movie feels like a work-in-progress, well, it was. Fanaka actually sued the distributors for accidentally releasing an unfinished version with terrible sound mixing and dubbing. But that just adds to the dreamlike, surreal charm. What other gang movie would have the good guys have a trans member, and no one even brings it up?
The movie ends with a text crawl saluting African-American filmmakers, listing everyone from Spike Lee to obscure exploitation directors like Dr. Roland Jefferson. Fanaka eventually got blacklisted by Hollywood for filing a massive lawsuit against the Directors Guild to force them to hire more women and minorities. He lost the suit, but he forced the industry to change.
His movies are never boring, either.
You can watch this on YouTube.
When we talk about the raw, sweating, soul-crushing brilliance of the Ozploitation era, this film isn’t just on the list—it’s the cornerstone.
Yet by the 1990s, Wake in Fright had developed a cult reputation as Australia’s great lost film because its master negative had gone missing, leading to censored, degraded prints used for its few television broadcasts and VHS releases. It’s a film that sat in a vault in Pittsburgh — the film’s editor, Anthony Buckley, tracked the film down to CBS’s Iron Mountain archives in the Steel City, where an initial 60 cans of film were found in a shipping container marked “For Destruction” — for years before being saved. This is a miracle, because this is quite possibly one of the most terrifying movies ever made about civilization and how quickly it peels away like sunburned skin in the Outback.
John Grant (Gary Bond) is a refined, prissy schoolteacher who wants nothing more than to leave his desert teaching post for a posh holiday in Sydney. He makes one stop in Bundanyabba, which is known as The Yabba. It’s a mining town that functions less like a town and more like a heat-induced purgatory—and gets dragged into a cycle of booze, gambling and a suffocating brand of mate-ship that feels like a chokehold.
Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence) is a disgraced, alcoholic doctor who has just… given up on life. He’s the devil on the shoulder of every man in town. Throw in a kangaroo hunt, and you’re in the midst of a savage movie where people have nothing left to lose. By the end, John has given up on life too, convinced he’ll never leave The Yabba, yet disliking everyone there. Even a suicide attempt fails to end things after a downward spiral that includes John stabbing a kangaroo and Doc forcing himself on the man.
At the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, Kotcheff is sitting there sweating out the premiere. A young guy behind him was absolutely losing his mind over every frame. Every time something crazy happened, he shouted out, “Wow! What a scene! Boy, I didn’t expect that. This is great!” And when things get… let’s say, intense—specifically during that gritty homosexual encounter between John and Doc—the guy is basically narrating the future of cinema: “This director, he’s going to go all the way. He’s going to go all the way! Oh my God! He went all the way!”
Kotcheff is so buzzing from this guy’s enthusiasm that he has his PR manager track him down. Turns out, it was none other than a young Martin Scorsese. Back then, he was just a nobody whose first flick, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, had tanked at the box office. Talk about a full-circle moment: the guy cheering on a cult masterpiece in ’71 would return to Cannes five years later to snag the Palme d’Or himself for Taxi Driver.
As for Kotcheff, he would go on to make First Blood, Uncommon Valor, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?, Fun With Dick and Jane, North Dallas Forty and, strangely, Weekend at Bernie’s.
Scorsese never forgot that screening. When he curated the Cannes Classics program in 2009, he ensured Wake in Fright returned to the big screen. He called it “speechless”—a quote they slapped on all the marketing for the film’s re-release and even on the promos for the 2017 TV miniseries. When that played, all those years later, people walked out during the kangaroo hunt.
Speaking of going all the way, we have to go into detail on the elephant—or, in this case, the kangaroo—in the room.
That hunting scene.
It’s the moment the film stops being a psychological fever dream and turns into a waking, bleeding nightmare. That sequence isn’t some clever bit of practical effects or clever editing. That is pure, unadulterated reality, and it’s hard as hell to stomach.
The producers slapped a disclaimer at the end of the credits, trying to justify it, claiming it was captured during an actual professional hunt and included because of the dire state of kangaroo conservation at the time. They checked with animal welfare groups, got the green light and put it on the screen to show the world exactly what was happening in the Outback.
But behind the scenes? It was an absolute disaster.
Cinematographer Brian West didn’t mince words about it. He said that it became an “orgy of killing.” The hunters, fueled by the same booze that poisons John Grant’s life in the movie, started getting reckless. They were missing their marks, leaving animals suffering and turning a professional cull into a sloppy, sickening bloodbath. It got so bad that producer George Willoughby actually passed out on set after watching one of the animals get obliterated in the most gruesome way imaginable.
The irony is thick enough to choke on: the crew, who had traveled all the way to the middle of nowhere to capture the truth of Australia, eventually reached their breaking point. They realized they were filming a snuff movie and were accidentally drawn into a slaughter. They actually had to stage a fake power failure just to pull the plug on the cameras and stop the carnage.
It’s a brutal reminder that when you go looking for the dark side of humanity, you might find more blood than you bargained for.
The Arrow Video release of Wake In Fright has audio commentary by director Ted Kotcheff and editor Anthony Buckley and a second commentary by Peter Galvin, author of The Making of Wake in Fright; Return to the ‘Yabba, a featurette tracking down the film’s Broken Hill locations; interviews with director of photography Brian West, composer John Scott, director Ted Kotcheff, Jack Thompson and sound editors Keith Palmer and Eddy Joseph; The Cinema’s Great Squeaky Bald Git, an appreciation of actor Donald Pleasence by film historian Kim Newman; The Filmmaker and the Film Buff, a discussion between Philippe Mora and Paul Harris; a Q&A with Ted Kotcheff from the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival; alternative scenes from the Outback cut of this movie; a 2009 TV report on the rediscovery and restoration; Who Needs Art?, a 1971 TV segment with behind-the-scenes footage; Chips Rafferty obituary by Ken G. Hall; a U.S. theatrical trailer and TV spot; Foreign Visions of Local Stories, a trailer reel of Australian films helmed by overseas filmmakers; an image gallery; a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Jay Slater, Paul Lê and David Michael Brown plus archive materials — all in a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Jeff Marshall. You can get this on UHD and Blu-ray from MVD.
DAY 18: Franco Nero!
When you pair the steely gaze of Franco Nero with the unhinged, lip-smacking energy of Telly Savalas, you expect a certain level of Euro-crime carnage. Redneck, known in its native Italy as Senza ragione, delivers that in spades, though it’s a strange, disjointed beast that feels like two different movies glued together by a madman who loves sleaze.
The premise is pure, high-octane 70s trash: Memphis (Savalas, channeling maximum camp) and his partner Mosquito (Nero) botch a jewelry store heist. While fleeing the scene, they carjack a vehicle, only to realize they’ve accidentally kidnapped Lennox Duncan, the 13-year-old son of a British consul. Naturally, this brat becomes their passport out of the country. He’s played by Mark Lester. Yes, the star of Oliver and the man who was a close, long-time friend of Michael Jackson. They were godfathers to each other’s children, and he has claimed to have donated sperm to Jackson, saying that Paris Jackson could be his daughter. Is that the strangest thing that happened in his life? Or would it be when a drunken Oliver Reed brought a prostitute for him for his 18th birthday?
But back to the movie, which is an unpredictable road film that shifts from a gritty crime thriller to a weirdly meditative, occasionally uncomfortable character study of an impressionable kid dragged into a world of violence.
The film starts strong with a frantic, albeit poorly planned, robbery and a classic Italian car chase. However, once the dust settles and the trio hits the road, the pacing hits a wall. Memphis descends into genuine, teeth-grinding insanity, while Mosquito, who is supposed to be the Lennie to Memphis’ George, somehow ends up being the surrogate father figure for young Lennox.
The movie’s middle act is where things get truly bizarre. There’s a strange, unsettling bond that forms between the kidnappers and the kid, culminating in a sequence where the boy watches Mosquito shave that has sparked decades of “Is he looking at the butt?” debate on the internet. It’s exactly the kind of sleazy, confusing Euro-cinema moment that makes me keep watching these movies. And yes, I may be straight, but when Franco Nero bares his ass, you look.
Savalas is clearly having the time of his life, but he leans so heavily into the camp that his incessant whistling and twitchy mannerisms threaten to swallow the entire movie whole. If you love him, he’s going to push you to hate him, between assaulting and murdering Maria (Ely Galleani), shooting a child, forcing Nero to wear her tiger stripe robe, murdering a dog and then killing an entire family of Germans by pushing their mobile home into a river.
By the way, the girl in that family is played by Lara Wendel, who would be chased by a dog and horribly murdered in Tenebre; she’s also in The Red Monks, Killing Birds, My Dear Killer, The Perfume of the Lady In Black, Ghosthouse, and You’ll Die at Midnight. In my world, that’s what we call a killer resume. Her father was Walter Barnes, a former football player who was a sheriff in High Plains Drifter, Bronco Billy and Smokey Bites the Dust, as well as one of the rangers in Day of the Animals. Her mother and brother also appear in this and are killed by Telly.
Why is Telly — a Greek-American born in Long Island — playing an American Southerner who speaks jive? Who thought having a teenage boy watch a naked Franco Nero and then examining his own naked body was a good idea? How many taboos is this movie ready to shoot in the face?
Maybe it was director Silvio Narizzano, who was born in Quebec and started his career in Toronto-based television before directing movies like Die! Die! My Darling!, Georgy Girl and the insane Carroll Baker and Denis Hopper-starring Bloodbath. Or perhaps it was writers Win Wells, who was also behind The Greek Tycoon, and Masolino D’Amico, a writer on Olivia Hussey’s Romeo and Juliet, as well as Caligula and the Cannon version of Otello.
Anyways, Lester’s father Michael, must have made some contacts in Italy, as he would go on to write and produce Antonio Margheriti’s Codename: Wild Geese.
What a weird movie.
You can watch this on YouTube.
First things first: this movie has a major identity crisis. It was originally shot way back in 1975 under the title Wheeler by directors Jack Collins and Jim Feazell. But they didn’t just stop in Texas, as the production actually set up camp in El Dorado, Arkansas. Over the years, distributors kept shuffling the deck, re-releasing and re-titling this poor movie as The Mama’s Boy and The Hurting before it finally settled into its most infamous exploitation moniker: Psycho from Texas. They even dragged the movie back to the editing room in 1978 to shoot entirely new insert footage just to crank up the sleaze factor.
The story centers around a complete drifter and hitman named Wheeler (John King III, The House of the Dead). Wheeler is your textbook exploitation psycho, raised in absolute squalor by a violently abusive mother, which left his mind thoroughly scrambled by beating him and — as in all 70s and 80s psycho movies — sleeping around.
After he grows up, Wheeler gets hired by a local businessman to kidnap a wealthy oil baron. To pull off the heist, he teams up with a local backwoods hillbilly named Slick (Tommey Lamey). The oil baron manages to escape almost immediately, turning the entire second half of the movie into a chaotic, endless, slow-motion foot chase through the swamps and muddy backwoods of the South. It’s mostly just Slick screaming wildly into the wind while everyone gets covered in mud. Throw in a stereotyped, bumbling country sheriff (co-director Jack Collins himself) and a screaming maid named Joann Bruno, and you have a recipe for pure drive-in gold.
The absolute main attraction here is an incredibly early, pre-fame appearance by the future Queen of Scream herself, Linnea Quigley. During that 1978 pick-up shoot, they cast a young Linnea for a completely gratuitous, jaw-droppingly sleazy sequence where Wheeler holds her captive and forces her to dance naked while pouring beer all over her. Looking back on one of her very first film gigs, Linnea didn’t exactly have warm, fuzzy memories of the El Dorado shoot, later saying: “They made me take my clothes off and poured beer on me. It was stupid.“
Though this is listed first on Linnea Quigley’s filmography, it is not her first role, as that was Fairy Tales.
My absolute favorite piece of trivia about this movie has nothing to do with what’s on the screen and everything to do with how they tried to sell it. When the movie premiered in New York City back in 1976, the distributors ran a legendary cowboy-style promotional stunt. They hired a massive truck, plastered it with a giant Psycho from Texas banner, mounted a set of high-powered loudspeakers on the roof, and blasted threatening country-fried warnings at people walking the Deuce.
You can watch this on YouTube.
William Girdler said that Project: Kill was “…the beginning of what I can do if I’m given the opportunity. Here I’m not pinned down by cliches or lousy material. It’s the only picture I’m really proud of.”
John Trevor (Leslie Nielsen) has spent six years as part of an MK-ULTRA experiment that gives American soldiers better killing abilities through training, drugs and hypnosis. It’s kind of like a cult for killers, and now, he wants out. He even tells his second-in-command, Frank Lassiter (Gary Lockwood), that he’s about to escape. It’d all be great if the withdrawal didn’t make John incredibly violent, or if an Asian gang wasn’t looking for him in the hopes of taking the drugs from his system and using them for their own army.
Come for Nielsen dressed like a 70s dad despite being billed as an action star, stay for his romance with Nany Kwan and by all means, come back for his fight with Lockwood on a beach. It even ends a lot like Scorpio, where the older killer tells the younger one, “Now they’re going to come after you.”
On the William Girdler website, Girdler’s insurance man Joe Schulten said, “Project Kill was supposed to be distributed in a lot of countries. Nancy Kwan was an international star at the time, and it was booked up everywhere. But the man who was going to distribute the movie was either killed or committed suicide right before the film was scheduled to come out. So the release was tied up in an estate dispute. I don’t think Project Kill was ever released to movie theaters. I think it only showed up on cable in the eighties.:
Producer David Sheldon had the answer: “Project Kill was released in the theaters, though not a very wide release. It’s been on television quite a bit, and there’s a home video in stores. We pulled the picture from Arnold Kopelson (Inter-Ocean Films), who was supposed to distribute the film overseas, but was taking too long. A company called Sterling Gold tried to take it next, but the owner was found murdered in an organized crime style. Finally, I put it with Picturmedia, which released it theatrically and sold the home video rights. The CEO of Picturmedia is Doro Vlado Hreljanovic. Picturmedia has done a poor job in releasing the picture. It deserves more.”
That said, it does feature Vic Diaz.
Writer Galen Thompson went on to script Superstition, The Evil and several Chuck Norris projects, while David Sheldon was part of Grizzly, Lovely but Deadly and Foxy Brown.
You can watch this on Tubi.
Before Tom DeSimone became the guy who gave us the sleaze-pop masterpiece Hell Night, the iconic Reform School Girls and the Linda Blair-led Savage Streets, he made what the poster called “The First Real Adult Film in 3D!”
Let’s be honest: this is softcore. It’s the kind of movie you could maybe sit through with your dad, but you’d be sweating bullets if your mom walked into the room.
We kick things off in the prison shower—because, of course, we do. We’ve got Gertie (the legendary Annik Borel, better known as the Werewolf Woman) trying to get intimate with Cindy (the queen of 70s adult cinema, Uschi Digard). But they get cockblocked by the warden, Dr. Reinhardt, who decides to let a group of inmates into the general population for two days as part of a rehab program.
Does this work out? Of course not. The outside world is just as messed up as the slammer. But you didn’t come here for the plot, did you? You came for the 3D experience. And the sleaze. So you want body painting? You got Candy Samples getting turned into a living canvas. You want a cast that reads like an exploitation “Who’s Who“? Feast your eyes on Jacqueline Giroux Trick or Treats and Drive-In Massacre), Tracy Handfuss (A Clockwork Blue, Psyched by the 4D Witch), Maria Arnold (Fantasm), Liz Wolfe (Fantasm Comes Again), Linda York (A Scream in the Streets), Marsha Jordan (Teen-Age Jail Bait) and Neola Graef (Cries of Ecstasy, Blows of Death).
Critics might argue that The Stewardesses beat it to the 3D adult punch by three years, but who cares about semantics? They could also say that this is less a movie and more a series of softcore lovemaking scenes strung together by the thinnest thread of plot imaginable.
Who listens to them?
Lee Marvin—the man who makes granite look like playdough—goes to Kansas to turn a meatpacking plant into a graveyard in Michael Ritchie’s Prime Cut.
Marvin plays Nick Devlin, a Chicago mob enforcer sent to Kansas City to collect a $500,000 debt from Mary Ann (Gene Hackman). Mary Ann isn’t just running a wholesale meatpacking plant; he’s running a human trafficking operation. He buys desperate young women, keeps them sedated on drugs and sells them off to the highest bidder. This grim setup creates a dark, unsettling atmosphere that contrasts sharply with the sunny, Americana backdrop of the Kansas county fair, where much of the film takes place.
It’s a dangerous job. After all, one of Devlin’s predecessors gets turned into a hot dog by Weenie (Gregory Walcott). But Nick is the ultimate cool professional in a world that’s gone completely sideways. And Hackman? He’s playing Mary Ann with a mix of reptilian charm and total instability that reminds you why he’s one of the best to ever do it. Keep an eye out for Angel Tompkins as Mary Ann’s wife and a young Sissy Spacek in her screen debut as Poppy. She’s the soul of the film in a sea of absolute scumbags.
The story might be a mess, but there’s a wheat thresher used as a murder weapon and some of the best actors in an action movie. So yeah, it goes nowhere. But it’s a cool ride.
Based on Pretty Maids All in a Row by Francis Pollini, this combination of sexploitation, comedy and murder mystery — let’s just call it Giallo — was directed by Roger Vadim from a screenplay by producer Gene Roddenberry.
It was sold on the idea that eight new actresses were making their debut- all young and quite fetching. They were Brenda Sykes (Mandingo, Black Gunn), Joy Bang (Night of the Cobra Woman, Messiah of Evil), Gretchen Burrell (wife of Gram Parsons), Joanna Cameron (Isis), Aimée Eccles (Lovelines), June Fairchild (a member of the Gazzarri Dancers on the syndicated variety show Hollywood A Go-Go; she invented “The Statue Dance” with dancer Mimi Machu; she’s also in Up In Smoke, sniffing Ajam powder), Margaret Markov (Run, Angel, Run; The Hot Box) and Diane Sherry (Lana Lang in Superman).
Further sexy moments came from a feature in the April 1970 issue of Playboy, which featured an interview with the director and a nine-page pictorial of stars Angie Dickinson, Burrell, Eccles, Markov and Playboy bunny Joyce Williams, who was also in the film (and Soylent Green). Maybe they should have told the teachers at University High School in West Los Angeles, who would later complain about how dirty — and violent, but this is America, so mostly dirty — the movie was.
Oceanfront High School has seen many of its most beautiful teens killed by a serial killer. Could it be Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson), who is surrounded by sexually available women all day and is being driven mad by them? Or football coach and guidance counselor Michael “Tiger” McDrew (Rock Hudson), who has probably slept with all of the school’s best-looking ladies by now? That’s what Detective Sam Surcher (Telly Savales) wants to know.
Tiger and Ponce strike up a friendship, as Tiger wants to get Ponce laid. After all, the kid claims that he has a constant erection. He conspires to set the student up with the new teacher, Betty Smith (Angie Dickinson). As this goes down — literally — more women are being killed every day. I mean, Ponce finds a dead body in the men’s room when all he wants to do is jerk off!
Vadim is well-known for his relationships with Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda, as well as for his movies. Perhaps having this many good-looking women on set at the same time—Roddenberry was no saint either, having affairs with Nichelle Nichols and Majel Barrett during Star Trek and supposedly harassing several others—just short-circuited his brain.
But hey, despite how all over the place this is, it has Keenan Wynn as a lawman, Roddy McDowall as the principal and Barbara Leigh as Tiger’s wife. Hudson plays his role well, a man who has won so many times that he starts to think that he can kill and escape the law. Maybe he does. James Doohan even shows up, getting a role from his old boss as one of Savales’ assistant detectives.
Quentin Tarantino included this in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll of the best movies of all time. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s the type of movie that isn’t good, but is definitely entertaining.
DAY 17: Hong Kong Action!
If you’re expecting the poetic, trench-coat-wearing, dual-pistol-sliding grace of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow or The Killer when you see Chon Yun-fat’s name on the poster, check your expectations at the door. We’ve seen the mismatched partner trope a million times, but Tiger On the Beat pushes the dynamic to its absolute breaking point.
On one side, you have the legendary Chow Yun-fat as Francis Li. Instead of playing the ultra-cool gun-god he usually plays, he shows up as a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing womanizer who would rather scam a suspicious husband or down a glass of raw eggs for a hangover than do actual police work. Within the first twenty minutes, he literally pisses his pants because a crook sticks a gun in his mouth. It is wild to see the coolest actor in the world work so hard to be a goofy buffoon.
On the other side, you have Conan Lee as Michael Tso, a muscle-bound rookie who looks like a bodybuilding Jackie Chan and wants to fight everyone in sight. The real-life bickering between these two on set apparently leaked into the film because they have zero traditional buddy-cop chemistry, which actually makes their constant screaming matches and petty fighting hilariously entertaining.
What makes this movie such a fascinating piece of celluloid history is the man behind the camera: Lau Kar-leung. He directed Disciples of the 36th Chamber and choreographed some of the greatest traditional, old-school kung-fu films ever to come out of the Shaw Brothers studio. But by 1988, the audience wanted modern urban violence. They wanted guns, cars, and explosions. Seeing an old-school master try to navigate the gritty, neon-soaked era of heroic bloodshed is like watching a classical orchestra conductor suddenly forced to lead a hardcore punk band.
For the first hour, the tone is all over the place. The comedy is pure, low-brow, 80s HK slapstick. Plus, the movie drops a heavy, uncomfortable dose of period-typical misogyny onto Nina Li Chi’s character, Marydonna, which halts the fun dead in its tracks. You’ll scratch your head, wondering what movie you’re actually watching.
But then… the final twenty minutes happen.
Lau Kar-leung decides that if he has to make a modern action movie, he’s going to make the most dangerous, jaw-dropping finale possible. First, you get Chow Yun-fat dropping the comedy act, picking up a shotgun, rigging it to a rope and throwing it around corners like a deadly, buckshot-blasting yo-yo to waste bad guys. It’s beautiful, chaotic genius.
And then, the piece de résistance: Conan Lee vs. Gordon Liu in a chainsaw duel.
Yes, that Gordon Liu. The star of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Johnny Mo from Kill Bill shows up here with a full head of hair playing a psychotic villain. He and Lee spark up two massive, roaring chainsaws and start acrobatically fencing with them. They are hacking through wooden floors, grinding sparks off steel railings, and flipping through the air with live, spinning blades. It borrows the pure, raw energy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and fuses it with high-flying Hong Kong stunt work.
Tiger On the Beat isn’t a flawless masterpiece. The tonal shifts will give you whiplash, the humor is an acquired taste, and the plot is standard-issue drug-bust filler. But as an ’80s time capsule of anything goes Hong Kong filmmaking, it’s pretty fun.
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