Writer and director Lam Ngai Kai’s films combine comedy, action, adventure and horror, often less concerned with narrative. Despite a long career, starting with films for the Shaw Brothers all the way to several standouts in the 80’s and 90’s such as The Ghost Snatchers and The Cat, he’s best known in the west for this film.

Riki-Oh started as a manga, or Japanese comic book, and ran for three years in the magazine Business Jump. Created by Masahiko Takajo and Tetsuya Saruwatari, it tells the story of a post-apocalyptic world where prisons have become privatized and their populations used for slave labor. One of the prisoners is Riki-Oh, who is there for killing the Yakuza boss who was responsible for the death of his girlfriend. He’s the one man that can’t be broken, as he’s learned Qigong from one of Chiang Kai-shek’s bodyguards. Now, he’s so strong that he can punch holes through literally anything and everyone.

Qigong is “a holistic system of coordinated body posture and movement, breathing and meditation” that is all about cultivating life energy, known as chi. I don’t know if it can be used to punch a man’s head clean off, but who am I to go against Hong Kong cinema by the way of Japan?

Ricky starts the film by earning the ire of the gangs within the jail by stopping Wildcat, the captain of the cells, from abusing an older inmate named Omar. This all leads to Omar killing himself, realizing he’ll never leave the prison, and the gang sending the obese Zorro after our hero, only to be absolutely obliterated. That’s when we learn through flashbacks why Ricky is in jail and how he learned exactly how to become pretty much invincible. Seriously — he still has five bullets inside his heart and he can even restitch the veins in his arm in the midst of combat.

This brings Ricky into conflict with the Gang of Four, the leaders of each of the cells, and Warden Dan, who has one eye. The other has all of his drugs inside it. The first battle between Ricky and Oscar ends up Oscar trying to commit seppuku and slicing into his own stomach before choking Ricky with his intestines. Oh yeah — this is when I should warn you that this movie has absolutely no restrictions. If something can explode in a shower of blood and gore, it will, over and over and over again.

Ricky spends the rest of the film battling the other leaders — Rogan, Brandon and Tarzan — as well as the brutal warden. Everyone that tries to help our hero is killed and he must survive being buried alive and covered in concrete to rise up and finally kill the warden and punch his way through the wall of the prison to discover freedom.

There are so many strange moments and characters in this film that it’s almost impossible to list them all. This is simply a movie that must be experienced, as it’s literally a comic book come to life. It also has a dub so poor that most giallo is a step up in quality.

My favorite character — other than Ricky — is the warden’s spoiled son. He eats candy constantly and his clumsy nature leads to numerous deaths. This is a film in love with slapstick as much as violent death.

Star Fan Siu-Wong would return for Dint King, Inside King, a spiritual sequel of sorts that is set in the distant future. He wears the same camouflage poncho in this film, but has a different name and the film isn’t an official Riki-Oh movie.

There’s also an anime of this story, but what’s amazing is just how much this movie is a real-life cartoon. It’s like Cool Hand Luke mixed with Dead Alive, a film that shows you how Luke could have really done better if he just knocked people’s jaws off instead of eating all of those hard-boiled eggs.

You can watch it for free on Tubi.

Screen icon Meg Foster (Stepfather 2, They Live, Masters of the Universe) was the draw that made me watch this film. Sadly, she only appears in the movie for a very short amount of time, but trust me. She’s the best part.

The PR materials for this film promise that it combines “traditional narrative story-telling, as well as numerous forms of pioneering technology, including found footage, hand-held cameras, surveillance cameras, and smart glasses.” That’s true — and you can also tell where they ran out of budget and had to resort to shooting the storyboards as animatics and decided to treat that as an intentional choice.

This is literally about the thirteenth investigation that a group of college science students makes, this time delving into the urban legend of The Mole Man, an ex-patient of the Black Grove Asylum.

According to the movie’s IMDB page, “This first feature will introduce the killer and we’re looking to do a spin-off series where we will then go on to produce Mole Man, Mole Man 2 and Mole Man 3.” This movie finally got scary, because I know at some point I will have to suffer through all three of those movies the same way I did this one.

Investigation 13 is available on DVD and on demand today from Uncork’d Entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR company. That has no impact on our review.

Deathsport unites everything I love about late 1970’s junk film all in one place. It’s set after a nuclear war. It has David Carradine in it. Claudia Jennings, too. Throw in Richard Lynch, motorcycles, lucite swords and strange religion and you’ve discovered the most perfect of all movies for 5:44 AM on a Thursday.

This was supposed to be a sequel to Death Race 2000 with motorcycles instead of cars. Seems simple, right? After all, Corman had a five-picture commitment with David Carradine and already had Charles B. Griffith writing the script.

Corman was unhappy with the script and Nicholas Niciphor, a recent graduate of USC, got the job of writing and directing the film. He had two weeks to write and pre-produce it. And to top it off, Carradine had no real interest in being in the movie and would only give three weeks of his time to the production.

It didn’t get any easier once production began. Niciphor would later say, “The script was too ambitious, the shooting schedule too tight and…the crew and the cast were largely sodden with drugs.” He was including both Carradine and Jennings in that statement. Indeed — this was one of her last films before she died in a car crash at the age of 29.

Years later, Carradine would tell Psychotronic Video that Niciphor was “a very talented and crazy guy. As a director he was erratic and unknowing…The picture, which was brilliantly written, was unable to overcome the madness of the shoot”. He elaborated that his “direction seemed to me to mainly consist of hysteria and episodic tantrums,” including an incident where Niciphor physically attacked Jennings and got his ass kicked by Carradine in response.

For his part, Niciphor did admit to physically removing Jennings from a motorcycle because of how high she was and that Carradine routinely roughed him up on set, including breaking his nose. He had to hurry back from the hospital and finish the actor’s scenes before he left to film Circle of Iron.

After all that madness, Corman ordered reshoots. That’s kind of amazing given his stingy nature. But then the director wouldn’t work with Carradine, so Allan Arkush stepped in. He told Trailers from Hell about this experience, remembering: “Mostly we just blew up motorcycles. Lots of them. We also set some mutants on fire. And the stunning Claudia Jennings got naked. David Carradine…smoked a lot of high-grade weed and helped us to blow stuff up…Sad to say, I couldn’t save the picture.”

One of those scenes added in was a nude scene where Jennings was tortured. Why? Well, Corman felt like this movie needed more nudity. Despite plans for a third film, Deathworld, the movie didn’t perform and Carradine claimed that his career never recovered.

So what’s it all about?

A thousand years from tomorrow, after the Neutron Wars, the world is made up of city states — ala Judge Dredd — surrounded by wastelands populated by cannibal mutants and policed by the Range Guides.

Two cities — Helix and Tritan — are about to go to war with one another with their Death Machines, which are laser-equipped motorcycles. Yes, that’s the absolute furthest technology has taken us.

Meanwhile, the death penalty has been replaced by Deathsport, where criminals battle each other to the death for their freedom. Lord Zirpola (David McLean, one of the two Marlboro men to suffer from cancer) yearns to use his Death Machines on the Range Guides, but the two best, Kaz Oshay (Carradine) and Deneer (Jennings) escape.

As they search for Deneer’s missing child, Oshay must battle the man who turned on the code of the Range Guides and killed his mother, Ankar Moor (Lynch). Of course, they’re destined to battle one another in combat using their Whistler swords. If you’ve always wanted to see Richard Lynch get decapitated, well, this is the movie for you.

Someday, mark my words, I’m going to do a Letterboxd list of Hardboiled Haggarty’s many roles. The ex-pro wrestler is in this as a jailer.

Brenda Venus also appears as Adriann and her life could totally be a Roger Corman movie. When she was in college, Venus purchased a book at an auction that contained an envelope with the address of famed writer Henry Miller. She wrote to the ailing author and soon, the two became romantic pen pals with over 1,500 letters exchanged between the two of them. This relationship led to Miller becoming her mentor and Venus his muse.

Ed Millis wrote, “Venus was a source of inspiration to the aging and ailing Miller. Brenda was all of 24 years of age, Henry was 84. She was a beautiful Southern belle, “The Boticelli of Mississippi” — he called her. Henry, the renegade intellectual, the writer, had taken millions of us to the sexy Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. Now he was sick and slowly recuperating. He needed a lift in spirits… Brenda the Muse breathed life into her mortal charge and gave him reason to live.”

After appearing in the June 1997 issue of Playboy, Venus wrote a column for the magazine called “Centerfolds on Sex.” She also wrote the books Secrets of Seduction and Secrets of Seduction for Women, which have been translated into 37 languages.

In 2002, prime minister Vladimir Putin requested that Venus visit Moscow as his guest to attend the opening performance of Venus, a play about her life. I can only imagine how bonkers that play was.

Even stranger, the music in this movie comes from The film was scored by Andy Stein (A Prairie Home Companion’s Guys All-Star Shoe Band and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen) and Jerry Garcia.

My favorite part of this movie is the strange speeches that the Range Guides give to one another. They also heal one another through sex, which is very 1970’s. Carradine wrote in his memoirs that when the time came to shoot those scenes, Niciphor told him he hadn’t slept with a woman in six months, so he couldn’t trust himself to be naked in the same room as Jennings. Carradine to directed those scenes instead. He also probably punched Niciphor in the face afterward.

In true Roger Corman fashion, some of the footage from this film was sold to the TV show The Fall Guy, where it appears in the episode “Baker’s Dozen.”

You can get this on a double disc with Battletruck from Shout! Factory. It’s also free on Tubi.

Shevenge is made up of 12 different stories that the filmmakers say range from subtle psychological scares to all-out gore, including sociopaths, serial killers, spirits, and avenging angels. Some of these have been previously released and some are brand new.

Staci Layne Wilson assembled these different stories and directed the Psycho Therapy segment within. There’s also a story — Karma Is a Bitch — inspired by the Michelle Carter text/suicide case, Glass Ceiling where women bringing guns into the discussion of equal pay and even a killer mom — Hooker Assassin — going after men that have wronged women.

Plus, Tristan Risk from American Mary appears in For A Good Time, Call…and stories called All Men Must Die, Just A Girl, Lady Hunters, Doll Parts, Recipe #42, Metamorphosis from Hong Kong filmmaker Elaine Xia, The Leftovers and The Fetch, which has Kathleen Wilhoite from Witchboard in it.

As with most modern portmanteau movies, this is a mixed bag of assorted shorts assembled around a general idea instead of the Amicus films, where each movie leads to something bigger and better. Some stories may be better — or worse — than others.

You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime. Wilson also has a limited edition DVD available on her site. Net profits are going to go to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, so even if you don’t like the film, you’re helping a good cause.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this by the movie’s PR company. That had no bearing on our review.

Imagine you’re a Hollywood studio. Let’s say you’re New World Pictures. You want to ride this wave of post-apocalyptic goodness from Mad Max, but you’re just been hit by the 1981 Writers Guild of America strike. What will you do now?

Go to New Zealand, that’s what.

Also known as Warlords of the 21st Century and Destructors in Italy, this film doesn’t really break any new ground. But it does live up to its title — it has a battletruck.

As it usually happens in thee films, Earth has been wiped out as the result of a thermonuclear war that started over fossil fuels. Now, gas is the most precious of all commodities.

The opening narration that tells us all of this is awesome. That’s because its actor Randy Powell, who also plays Judd in the movie, transmitting a ham radio broadcast in Los Angeles, California to the filmmakers back in New Zealand.

While exploring a compound once thought to be radioactive, Straker (James Wainwright, Killdozer) discovers all the diesel fuel that the world will need. But his orders to kill the owners are ignored by his daughter Corlie (Annie McEnroe, who was in Snowbeast and is married to Edward R. Pressman, who produced Christmas Evil, Conan the Barbarian and all of The Crow movies, amongst many others). On the run and lost in the desert, she meets our hero, Hunter (Michael Beck, The Warriors, Xanadu, Megaforce). 

What’s up with all of the heroes after the end of the world getting names like Hunter and Stryker? I mean, I dig it, but their parents really must have all been consulting the same Refinery 29 articles about “What to name your child after the bomb drops.”

Hunter has a bad ass motorbike and lives in the walled city of Clearwater Farm, an actual democracy in the midst of all this lawlessness, but soon Colie’s father finds her and attacks. As her dad’s mercs destroy the city and torture Rusty the mechanic (John Ratzenberger in a post-nuke movie!) to learn the secret location of where Hunter really lives. 

If our hero is going to defeat Straker and his battletruck, he’s going to need more than just a bike. He’s going to need an armored car of his own. Hunter doesn’t care about anything, even blowing up all of the fuel just to prove a point. Of course, he’s going to kill everyone in his path, save the girl and then take off into the desert all by himself. That’s how these movies work.

Director and co-writer Harley Cokeliss would go on to direct several episodes of Hercules and Xena, as well as Black Moon Rising and Dream Demon.

You can get this movie on a double DVD along with Deathsport from Shout! Factory. It doesn’t break much new ground, but it’s still a fun movie.

Steve De Jarnatt has exactly three theatrical movies on his resume and all three are unique and intriguing works of art. Strange Brew, the blend of Hamlet and Canadian humor starring Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as their SCTV characters Bob & Doug McKenzie, was his first writing credit. Miracle Mile, in which Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham fall in love on the last day of mankind, went unmade for nearly a decade after De Jarnatt wrote it. He bought it back and ended up directing it himself, fighting to keep the film’s tone and downer ending intact. Beyond Cherry 2000, he’s spent most of the rest of his career in television — he wrote the X-Files episode “Fearful Symmetry” — as well as his short story “Rubiaux Rising” appearing in the 2009 edition of The Best American Short Stories.

In the future of 2017, America suffering through an economic crisis brought about by the end of manufacturing. Sound familiar? Well, at least we haven’t seen the country broken down into city states and lawless lands in between.

Society has become so legalized and hypersexualized that all encounters need legal contracts written before they can happen. That’s why most men rely on female Gynoids as romantic partners. Anton LaVey would have loved how this apocalypse ended up.

Business executive Sam Treadwell is one of those men. The love of his life — after a bad breakup — is a Cherry 2000 model (Pamela Gidley, who was also in Thrashin’, The Blue Iguana and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me). But after she breaks down after getting wet, she’s damaged beyond repair. Her memory disk can bring her back, as long as he can find a body in the lawless Zone 7. And for that, he’ll need a tracker.

Edith Johnson (Melanie Griffith) is that person, one of the toughest trackers around. Of course, she’s also beyond gorgeous and melted down my 15-year-old brain the first time I saw this (between Body Double and Something Wild, I think we can see how I ended up with a short-haired blonde firecracker for a wife).

To get Cherry back, our heroes will have to go up against the wasteland overlord Lester (an amazing Tim Thomerson), who is more self-improvement guru and 1950’s household devotee than military commander. It also turns out that Sam’s ex-girlfriend Elaine is one of Lester’s many wives, now calling herself Ginger. The group wants Sam to join after it seems like he’s the lone survivor of their attack, but Edith returns to save him.

You can see where this is all going to end up. Sam’s going to understand that he needs a flesh and blood relationship and Edith’s hard exterior is going to fall away once she realizes that Sam is stronger than she thinks. But getting there is most of the fun and this film, which confounded Orion Pictures with its combination of genre and tone, is pretty much forgotten. That’s a shame.

Cherry 2000 has some great casting, beyond Thomerson and Griffith, who shine in their roles. Cowboy actors Harry Carey Jr. and Ben Johnson (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Terror Train and so many more) also appear, with this being the ninth film that they acted in together. And keep an eye out for Marshall Bell (Kuato’s host in Total Recall and the evil coach in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge), Laurence Fishburne as a lawyer and perennial baddie Brion James.

If you can find this strange little movie — it went unreleased for years until Griffith became a star with Working Girl — do so. I was lucky to find a DVD for way less than it should be and cherish it. It’s currently playing for free on the Pluto TV channel. If you own a Roku or Apple TV, Pluto TV is absolutely essential.

Executive produced by Final Destination creator Jeffrey Reddick, The Night Sitter has plenty of style and neon color on display. Its trailer is incredibly effective, so I’d been waiting to see this for some time.

Amber (Elyse Dufour, Frankie from The Walking Dead) is a con artist posing as a babysitter to steal from a wealthy occult lover. However, she finds herself growing closet to his son Kevin, who has become a recluse after the death of his mother.

Speaking of mothers, this movie’s villains are known as the Three Mothers, an obvious homage to Argento. This film takes that one step further and emulates Suspiria‘s neon colors. Other reviews are claiming this movie is a tribute to giallo, but let’s be honest. This is closer to Evil Dead than that genre. It’s just lazy reviewing, because you can debate if Argento’s Three Mothers films are even giallo and are instead horror (you can also take me to task for not using gialli as the plural form if you want to take it even further).

The Night Sitter is now available on DVD and on demand.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR company. That has no impact on our review.

Remember when Will Smith was the king of summer? This comes at the end of that and is anything but a crowd-pleaser. In fact, it’s one of the most downbeat major motion pictures I can think of.

It’s based on Richard Mathson’s 1954 novel of the same name, which also inspired The Omega Man and The Last Man on Earth, as well as Night of the Living Dead.

This movie sat in development for decades, as Warner Brothers had owned the rights to the story since 1970.

Mark Protosevich was hired to write the script after the studio was impressed with his script The Cell. His first take took place in San Francisco but was closer to The Omega Man than this film.

All sorts of people were going to star — Tom Cruise, Michael Douglas and Mel Gibson — with Ridley Scott as director, but the studio wanted Arnold Schwarzenegger. The studio came to regret giving Scott creative control, as his movie was dark and had a downer ending. They were looking for action figures.

It took nearly another decade until Schwarzenegger became the producer of I Am Legend for a brief time, bringing on Michael Bay as director and Will Smith as star. Nothing happened there and a few years later, Akiva Goldsman and director Francis Lawrence (Constantine, four of The Hunger Games films) came on board.

Between closing big parts of New York City and a $5 million dollar Brooklyn Bridge scene, the film just feels huge and empty at the same time. And a week into filming, Lawrence decided to scrap the practical monsters for CGI. Trust me, time has not been kind to the effects in this film. I am a fan of how they sound, though, as Mike Patton of the bands Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantomas (and a few hundred other lineups) did some great vocal work for the bad guys.

The film concerns a genetically re-engineered measles virus — once a cure for cancer — that killed 90% of the world’s popular and turned the rest into mutants called Darkseekers who are basically vampires.

Three years later,  US Army virologist Lt. Col. Robert Neville (Smith) lives the same day, day after day, alone with his dog Sam in the heart of Manhattan. Nearly the entire film is spent with Smith slowly going crazy, defending what’s left of the world and talking to anything that looks remotely human.

While the ending of this film isn’t anything like the book, it wasn’t the only one filmed. There was another version where Neville and the Alpha Darkseeker come to an understanding about the female in the lab. This one is the happy ending, but didn’t feel like it fit the spirit of the film.

One of the things I really liked is that most of the art on the walls of Neville’s apartment has been rescued from museums. If you’re the last man on Earth, why not grab something from the Museum of Modern Art?

The Debunkers are a band of amateur detectives, who will do anything to become heroes while getting right — hence the LLC part of their name — but they’re just geeks at heart. After all, their code names come from their favorite video games: Link, Snake and Dr. Mario.

Now with their new intern, Canadian foreign exchange student Sheik, they’re on a question to become the premiere mystery debunking business in the state of California.

On the first day of senior year, the Debunkers are hired by two girls who need someone to discover who killed their friend. Soon, however, our heroes find themselves up against not only a killer, but perhaps the occult.

I had a lot of fun with this movie. It seems like the springboard for a potential series, which I would not mind watching at all. It moved really quickly and had just enough quirky charm to keep me invested.

Debunkers, Inc. is now available on Showtime. You can also find it on Amazon Prime, Vudu, iTunes and GooglePlay.

Martin Davidson made his directorial debut with this film. You may know him better from Eddie and the Cruisers. You may not know him from the John Ritter vehicle Hero at Large. It was written and co-directed by Stephen Verona, who years later would direct the astounding exercise video Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves.

This movie is one of the first that introduced both Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler to a wide audience, as well as the debut film role for Armand Assante.

The four Lords — Chico Tyrell (Perry King), Stanley Rosiello (Stallone), Butchey Weinstein (Winkler) and Wimpy Murgalo (Paul Mace, Rat from Paradise Alley) — chase girls, shoot pool, loiter at the malt shop and steal cars together.

This film is an episodic look at their lives. Chico just wants to win the heart of Jane (Susan Blakely, Capone, The Concorde … Airport ’79, Over the Top and Dream A Little Dream), who seemingly wants nothing to do with him. Stanley gets pressured into marrying his girlfiend Frannie (Maria Smith, Concepcion from The Incredible Shrinking Woman) despite the fact that she may have lied about being pregnant. And Butchey may be smart enough to escape Flatbush, but he hides his intelligence behind his leather jacket.

Funny enough, both Winkler and King were Yale graduates playing Brooklyn tough guys. For his part, King decided to follow Method acting: “Stephen Verona would never have cast a Yale graduate to play Chico, so I stayed in character, and halfway through the film I told him (in thick Brooklyn drawl): “Hey Steven, you realize you cast two Yale graduates as your hoods?” He thought I was kidding!”

He wasn’t the first choice for the role. Richard Gere was supposed to play the character, but he and Stallone didn’t get along. That’s an understatement, as Stallone would tell Ain’t It Cool News: “We never hit it off. He would strut around in his oversized motorcycle jacket like he was the baddest knight at the round table. One day, during an improv, he grabbed me (we were simulating a fight scene) and got a little carried away. I told him in a gentle fashion to lighten up, but he was completely in character and impossible to deal with. Then we were rehearsing at Coney Island and it was lunchtime, so we decided to take a break, and the only place that was warm was in the backseat of a Toyota. I was eating a hotdog and he climbs in with a half a chicken covered in mustard with grease nearly dripping out of the aluminum wrapper. I said, “That thing is going to drip all over the place.” He said, “Don’t worry about it.” I said, ‘”f it gets on my pants you’re gonna know about it.” He proceeds to bite into the chicken and a small, greasy river of mustard lands on my thigh. I elbowed him in the side of the head and basically pushed him out of the car. The director had to make a choice: one of us had to go, one of us had to stay. Richard was given his walking papers and to this day seriously dislikes me. He even thinks I’m the individual responsible for the gerbil rumor. Not true… but that’s the rumor.”

For what it’s worth, Winkler claims that he based The Fonz — the role that for some time made him quite possibly the most famous man in America — on Stallone’s acting in this film.