You know how Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups old commercials used to go? Well, the makers of this movie got a real smart idea. They took the two big trends of the early 70s — blacksploitation and martial arts — and made one movie with both of them.
Stud Brown (Timothy Brown, a former NFL player who was also on M*A*S*H*) and Larry Chin (Alan Tang) unite to battle drug dealers and find Chin’s brother Wei (James Hong). They’re up against a corrupt cop named Detective Burke (Aldo Ray!) and the disappearance of our hero’s brother may not be as tragic as it seems.
What makes this movie worth watching is the dream team of director Al Adamson and producer Cirio H. Santiago. Lovers of truly bottom basement movies see these two names and feel a certain twinge, the kind you get when you remember young love or holidays gone by.
Another important thing for lovers of 70s exploitation cinema to notice is that the deaf mute love interest Sarah is played by Carol Speed, who is known and loved as Abby. And don’t forget to check out other Karate Blaxploitation reviews with Force Four, Velvet Smooth, Devil’s Express, and The Black Dragon’s Revenge.
“Take This Job and Shove It”, was written by David Allan Coe and sung by Johnny Paycheck, the only number one song Paycheck would ever have. Beyond Coe doing his own version, it was also covered by the Dead Kennedys, Canibus with Biz Markie and Chuck Barris and the Hollywood Cowboys during the last episode of The Gong Show.
Shot in Dubuque, Iowa at the Dubuque Star Brewery and in Minneapolis, Minnesota, this is the very first movie to feature monster trucks. Bob Chandler’s Bigfoot #1 is Ray’s (Tim Thomerson) pick-up truck and Everett Jasmer’s USA-1, called “Thunderin’ Lightning,” is also in the film.
Take This Job and Shove It is all about The Ellison Group, run by Sam Ellison (Eddie Albert), who buys up local businesses and makes them profitable by making them just like every other business. His two hatchetmen are Dick Ebersol* (Martin Mull) and Frank Macklin (Robert Hayes). Macklin usually goes well at assignments like this, but now he has to go back to his hometown and just might have to fire his childhood best friends.
This film has an amazing cast, with Art Carney as brewery owner Charlie Pickett and Barbara Hershey as Macklin’s old girlfriend J.M. Halsted, plus David Keith, Royal Dano, James Karen, George Lindsey, Len Lasser, Penelope Milford and cameos for Charlie Rich, Coe and Paycheck.
June 17: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is Lucio Fulci.
Lucio Fulci was born in Trastavere, Rome 94 years ago today. The son of a single mother from a Sicilian anti-fascist family, he was raised by her and a female housekeeper who encouraged him to be a lawyer, but he ended up going to medical school. After dropping out, he worked as an art critic before apprenticing at the Centro Sperimentale.
While he’s become known as the Godfather of Gore, Fulci didn’t start making his most famous horror work until 1979, a full 21 years after he wrote his first script, Toto in the Moon. He worked with the famous Italian director Steno on several of Toto’s films before directing the films of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia (How We Robbed the Bank of Italy, The Swindlers).
So while Fulci may be known for his eye-popping horrors — and rightfully so — I wanted to celebrate his birthday by checking out another genre he covered, the commedia sexy all’italiana.
If you’re making one of those movies, you need an attractive female lead. And this movie boats perhaps the finest example of an actress in the genre, the French-born Edwige Fenech, who like Fulci also had a Sicilian mother. While she’s known for her work in giallo such as The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, All the Colors of the Dark, The Case of the Bloody Iris and Strip Nude for Your Killer, Fenech also found her greatest box office success in this very Italian sex comedy genre, making appearances in movies like Ubalda, All Naked and Warm; Giovannona Long-Thigh; Poker In Bed; Confessions of a Lady Cop; The Schoolteacher and many more.
La Pretora, which translates as My Sister In Law, stars Fenech in two roles. She’s Judge Viola Orlando, a tough arbiter of the law who is feared in the Veneto regions (which includes Venice, in case you wonder where this takes place). She’s made plenty of enemies, who soon learn that her sister Rosa is a woman of loose morals who appears in adult magazines. They hope to confuse her images and reputation with that of our protagonist.
Beyond dealing with an outraged populace who can’t believe that a judge could appear nude in a magazine, Viola is also dealing with her love life — or lack thereof — with her fiancee, who wishes that she was as open as her bad seed sister.
Working from a script by husband and wife Franco Marotta and Laura Toscano(, who also wrote the original Inglorious Bastards, this movie finds Fulci not working with an unfamiliar crew, such as cinematographer Luciano Trasatti, who was the director of photography on And God Said to Cain.
I understand that these movies were made so that guys could ogle Edwige Fenech — seriously, there’s a moment in this movie where men literally become Tex Avery wolves with their eyes bugging out so much that Fulci had to just be dying inside with the need to smash or pierce them — many don’t take the time to notice just how good she is in these films, able to master comedy that transcends the time and language barrier.
As for Fulci’s work here, the movie looks great, but if only knew him from his 1979 and beyond — pun unintended — films, you may never guess that this was him. He also made another sex comedy, The Eroticist, that I want to check out. And it’s pretty amazing when you think about the fact that more than a quarter of his films were comedies.
Originally known as Demon Nun, this film was obviously retitled to take advantage of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. But hey — if you’re looking for another movie where a woman who is struggling with her faith defends herself against the spirit of a demonic nun, then here you go!
I wonder how we got away from nuns getting possessed and all making out with each other or getting Oliver Reed killed and instead, they’re trying to kill civilians.
I’d have liked this movie much better if it were 70 minutes instead of 114. Brevity is the soul of wit or Sam has a bad attention span, isn’t that way they say?
Director Max Dementor under the name Brian Schiavo also made Lifeform and Shapeshifter. The script is by Brian Schiavo for this movie, so are they one and the same person? Or has an evil nun made this movie? I demand to know!
Woe takes an interesting take on grief. A year after the death of their father, Charlie (Adam Halferty) has lost himself in the endless repairs to his family’s house. When his sister Betty (Jessie Rabideau) sells the car that their father killed himself in, the two must come to grips with their relationship with one another. However, there’s a hunchbacked monster who has been tracking them, as well as their possibly dead Uncle Pete (James Russo, who has been in everything from Once Upon a Time In America to The Ninth Gate).
Betty and her fiancee Ben (Ryan Kattner) want to invite him to their upcoming wedding, but he may have become so lost inside that unfinished house or in the loss of his father that he may never come back. Or perhaps the same demons that haunted his father, which could be emotional or straight-up supernatural, what with all of the red eyes in the paintings he left behind that match the visions in the forest surrounding the house.
Writer/director Matthew Goodhue doesn’t give any simple answers here. If you’re looking for a ghost story filled with jump scares, this would not be the film. It feels deeply personal and a film that may need several watches to fully comprehend. This is Goodhue’s first full-length movie after creating some short films. He’s smart, keeping this compact and focused.
Woe is available on demand and on DVD from Gravitas Ventures and Kamikaze Dogfight.
June 16: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is a film from Cannon Studios.
The ’80s were the comeback decade, for both William Shatner and Lee Majors returned to our small screens with T.J Hooker (1982 – 1986) and The Fall Guy (1981 – 1986)*, respectively. And both were shows good ol’ dad and I could enjoy together. And we were both equally perturbed when they were simultaneously cancelled.
Now you would think, with a second hit TV series, that Lee would have been back in mainstream Hollywood’s good graces and return to his stalled theatrical career from the early ’80s. But it seemed the contractual dust-up during the last year of The Six Million Dollar Man back in 1977 wasn’t forgotten. There’s two sides to the story: Majors either caught a case of the Tinseltown Flu to force Universal into accepting his Fawcett-Majors Productions as a series co-producer or he held out for a pay raise. Either way, the executive suites in la-la land don’t take kindly to their actors pulling a creative coup.
So after saddling up in the late ’80s as Mountain Dan alongside Dolly Parton (with Henry “The Fonz” Winkler directing!) inA Smoky Mountain Christmas and two Six Million Dollar Man-Bionic Woman telefilms, Majors made it back to the big screen . . . well, it was only a matter of time until Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus wrangled Lee Majors into one of their deadbeat, direct-to-video productions.
Granted, we love Cannon Films around the B&S About Movies offices, for their imprint was ’80s VHS-rental de rigueur, with all of the Death Wish sequels and Chuck Norris flicks, such as Invasion U.S.A. and The Delta Force series. And all of the Ninja-suffixed films. And all of our beloved Micheal Dudikoff flicks. In fact, by 1986, Cannon reached a production milestone of distributing 43 films in one year, as the studio broke away from their usual direct-to-videoesque potboilers to big-budgeted theatrical features such as (the less than stellar) Lifeforceand Masters of the Universe, (and the cheesily awesome) Cobraand Over the Top.
Sadly, by the time the Israeli cousins of the celluloid frontiers roped the services of Lee Majors, Cannon was in financial and creative ruins . . . and four years away from its inevitable demise. So, instead of putting Majors in a halfway decent flick sidekickin’ with Chuck Norris in something like Firewalker or slipping him into Roy Scheider’s role in (a pretty decent Elmore Leonard film adaptation) 52 Pick Up, our ex-Bionic stunt man ended up in Keaton’s Cop.
Huh?
You know, the48 HoursLethal Weapon buddy-cop rip-off film that paired Lee Majors with Don Rickles. Yes. You heard me right. Mr. Warmth from all of those The Johnny Carson Show reruns on Antenna TV. The guy who did all of those goofy “beach party” movies with Frankie and Annette back in the ’60s. The guy who you’ve seen many a-cable-replay times as casino manager Billy Sherbet in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. But the younger kiddies ’round these wilds of Allegheny country probably remember Don Rickles best as the acidic Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story. Oh, and if you’re a horror hound like most of B&S’s readers: Don was Manny Bergman in the (pretty cool) mobster-vamp hybrid Innocent Blood by John Landis.
But here’s ol’ Don . . . twenty-years later, following up his last big screen role in 1970’s Kelly Heroes with Clint Eastwood, in the Danny Glover role as Jake Barber: the aged detective sidekick paired with Mike Gable, a burnt-out, on-the-edge veteran cop with a penchant for throwing suspects out windows — and losing partners, via death. Oh, and speaking of Cobra . . . guess who their boss is . . . hey, it’s Art LaFleur rippin’ through a Xerox redux of his role from that Stallone flick. (Plot spoiler: we lose Don early in the movie, natch, and he’s not funny here; he plays it straight, as he did in Innocent Blood and Casino.) Oh, and speaking of Cobra, again: Remember the big “character development” scene when Marion Cobretti cut off a slice of three-day-old pizza with a pair of scissors? Well, Keaton’s Cop has one: Mike Gable brushes his teeth with beer. (Remember when Brian “Boz” Bosworth mixed that “health drink” in a blender during the “establishing scene” in Stone Cold (1991) and we wondered, “how can he drink that” . . . and it ended up being gruel for his bet iguana? Hey, all of these action flicks needed one of those “character development” moments, natch.)
So, I see you noticed the name of Abe Vigoda on the box. Yes, he from those endless AMC and TNT reruns of The Godfather and those old Barney Miller episodes you’ve Antenna TV-channel grazed as you surfed the couch after a long Saturday night of partying. Eh, maybe you remember Abe in The Cannonball Run II, The Stuff, or the oddest Christmas flick of them all, Prancer.
Anyway, Ol’ Abe is Louis Keaton, an aged-out mobster living his days incognito in a Galveston, Texas, nursing home. When Gable is dispatched to the nursing home to investigate a shooting, he comes to discover the intended target was Keaton and the shooter was a mob hitman. And since Barber and Vigoda go “way back,” Barber convinces the guff n’ grizzled Gable to take part of the action-comedy-romance (with a home nurse that is way too young for him) that ensues.
Truth be told: Even though this a pinch-o-rama rip off, Majors is solid here, the comedy is funny (both of the sometimes-intentional and non-intentional variety), and it’s nice to see a then 69-year-old Abe Vigoda digging in his heels and getting banged around with film’s promoted “hard-edged action.” But still. Lee Majors deserved better. Way better. Like the very similar Martin Brest-directed and Robert DeNiro-starring Midnight Run from 1988-better (which Majors’s old bosses, Universal, backed). But that’s how the dice in Hollywood roll across the green felts of fate.
No freebie streams? What the hell, You Tube uploaders? What gives, ye executives at Tubi TV? Ah, but we found a rental-stream on Amazon Prime. Keaton’s Cop has never been officially reissued on DVD, so watch out for those bogus-cum-defective grey market rips out there, kiddies.
* Stock footage alert: Action scenes from our “Fast and Furious Week II” review of Flash and the Firecat ended up in The Fall Guy (the clip is included in the review).
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
We previously reviewed Keaton’s Cop as part of our “Lee Majors Week” blow out featuring reviews for 30 of Lee’s flicks. We also took another look as result of our “Cannon Month” blow out of reviews.
Armando Spatafora was known as an Italian “flying squad” police officer who drove a Ferrari 250 GTE as his patrol car. That’s because the Alfa Romero cars they were driving just couldn’t keep up with the crooks any more. This fast response unit — known in Italian as Squadra Mobile — was tasked with catching cops by any means necessary.
According to Super Car Tribe, Enzo Ferrari was involved with the project because he thought that he could sell police cars to all major cities in Italy. Amongst all the police officers, Spatafora proved to be the fastest and showed so much skill that Enzo offered him a place on the Ferrari factory racing team. Spatafora was loyal to the police force and said no.
This film features several of the real stunts from Sparafora’s police career, such as jumping over the famous Spanish Steps in the center of Rome.
Highway Racer was also the first of six films that Maurizio Merli (The Tough Ones, Mannaja) made with director Stelvio Massi (Mark of the Cop, Convoy Busters). If you’re looking for a high speed Italian crime movie with some out of control stunts, well, you really can’t do much better.
Highway Racer is one of five movies on Arrow Video’s Years of Lead: Five Classic Italian Crime Thrillers 1973-1977. These films are great examples of the Italian poliziotteschi genre and the set includes high def versions of this movie, Savage Three, Colt 38 Special Squad, Like Rabid Dogs and No, the Case Is Happily Resolved. There’s also an interview with historian Roberto Curt on this disc. You can get it from MVD.
You may have seen this movie as Giant from Devil’s Crag and The Diablo Giant. It’s directed by Richard E. Cunha, who also directed She Demons, Missile to the Moonand Frankenstein’s Daughter. It tells a story that started way before it became a big deal in the 70s — cattle mutation by alien forces!
It stars Buddy Baer — the man who nearly beat Joe Lewis and the brother of Max Bear — as the gigantic Vargas. And even better, it has makeup by Jack Pierce, the same man who did the effects for the Universal Monsters.
Just as interesting in light of UFO theories that also became more popular years later, the alien creatures in the film are thought to be demons or gods by the Native Americans that have encountered them for centuries.
This movie nearly didn’t come out. Dirk Benedict, who stars in Body Slam, has said that he and director Hal Needham (Megaforce, Rad) fought with the film’s writer/producer team of Steve Burkow and Shel Lytton. Burkow didn’t have any other writing credits, but Lytton wrote a series of teen books titled Mustang and a few episodes of Death Valley Days. However, they were lawyers, and between the verbal and physical fights, lawsuits kept the movie out of theaters for an entire summer. It ended up going straight to video.
Also, and this is my favorite part of this movie, Benedict needed smartened up to the wrestling business. He plays M. Harry Smilac in this, a music promoter who only has one band left, Kick*. After falling for Candace (Tanya Roberts), Smilac tries to hire Rick Roberts (Roddy Piper in his second acting role after playing Leatherneck Joe Grady in The One and Only; his nickname is “Quick Rick,” which is ironic as Piper feuded with “Quick Draw” Rick McGraw in WWF before that man’s untimely death) to be a performer before learning that he’s a wrestler. So he ends up managing Rick and his tag partner Tonga Tom (Sam Fatu, the Tonga Kid who was wrestling Madison Square Garden at the age of 18, ironically feuding with Piper; you can also see him teaming with Greg Gagne and Jim Brunzell to battle The Fabulous Freebirds in Highlander; he’s considered a relative of The Rock) and they have a pretty good run until they start dealing with politics.
Let me tell you, as someone who has spent way too many years in independent wrestling, I get it, M. Harry.
Captain Lou Murano (Captain Lou Albano, who had appeared in Below the Belt and Wise Guys before this) and his men, The Cannibals (Sione “The Barbarian” Vailahi and Tom “T. Joe Khan” Cassett) hurt all three of our leads and get them blacklisted, so they start booking themselves on outlaw rock and wrestling shows, getting back to the big time just in time to get a world tag title match.
This movie, beyond wrestling, has lots of 70s stars in it, such as John Astin, Charles Nelson Reilly and Billy Barty. And if you look carefully enough during the main event, you can spot Ric Flair, Freddie Blassie, Adnan Al-Kaissie, Bruno Sammartino and Alexis Smirnoff during the match.
Speaking of that main event, the crowd turned on the match as they could see that the moves were being redone for filming. At this time, there was no such thing as sports entertainment. As fans began to say the f word — fake — all of the wrestlers started brawling for real, even throwing Needham out of the ring. It took a ton of people to break up the fight, leading to chaos amongst the crowd, cast and even the crew. When they all got backstage, Piper finally smartened Dirk Benedict up as to why they had to make everyone believe that it was real.
You can watch this on Tubi or buy the 2K scan blu ray from Kino Lorber.
*Kick is made up of drummer Jack D’Amore (Rock Rose), Kelley Dillard, David Hallowren and Bruce Wallenstein, who composed the soundtracks to Twisted Nightmare and Demon Wind.
June 16: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is Cannon.
Cannon Films need to be on our site more often, but that’s because I want to make sure that I have the time and energy to properly focus on this astounding company. But hey — let’s get things started by talking about Enter the Ninja, a movie written by the man who stole Priscilla from Elvis, Mike Stone, and nearly starred in it before his acting ability supposedly wasn’t good enough for a ninja movie Luckily, Franco Nero was in the Philippines and Stone was nice enough to remain on set as the fight double for Nero and the fight/stunt coordinator.
That’s right — Django as a ninja. Make that a ninja that cucks his best friend and arrdvarking his wife Susan George and then fighting Sho Kosugi.
If you were wonding why I loved Cannon Films so much, just read that last sentence again.
Cole (Nero) is a soldier who has become a ninja — much like Snake-Eyes in the Marvel comics — before he visits his war buddy Frank Landers and his new wife Mary Ann (Ms. George) who own a giant farm in the Philippines that is threatened by Charles Venarius (Christopher George), whose Venarius Industries wants the oil that’s on their land.
After said cuckolding — Frank had already drunkenly confessed to our hero that he couldn’t life his own katana, so to speak — Venarius’ henchmen kill Frank and kidnap Mary Ann. That means that Cole has to battle his way through all of the many soldiers in his way before battling his old sword brother Hasegawa (Sho Kosugi).
Directed by Menahem Golan, who also gave us The Apple, this is actually the exact kind of movie that I want it to be. Golan said, “It started when Chinese karate films became popular. I looked for something new in Asian martial arts and found information about the ninja culture in an encyclopedia. The ninja were middle-class people in Japan — lawyers, government clerks, etc. It was a secret organization that helped the feudal government. It actually preceded the Chinese karate battles. They used very special methods, developing their sixth sense. That fascinated me and I said I could write story ideas out of it, so we made Enter the Ninja and American Warrior later on. Many imitations followed.”
Actually, Emmett Alston was supposed to be the film’s original director. Supposedly Charles Bronson refused to allow Golan to direct Death Wish II. Alston directed Force of the Ninja and Nine Deaths of the Ninja, which is somehow even better than this.
Also, I know that we got a whole bunch of Kosugi ninja movies, which I love, but man, why did we not get another Franco Nero in karate PJs movie?
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