Based upon the novel Quicksand by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, this is the story of Louise von Hollendorf (Gudrun Landgrebe), whose husband Heinz (Kevin McNally, who much later ended up in the Pirates of the Carribbean series) is the senior diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She’s lonely and decides to take up art, but really takes up falling for another student, Mitsuko Matsugae (Mio Takaki), the daughter of the ambassador from Japan, a romance that Heinz attempts to stop.

Of course, he falls for Mitsuko, who soon turns their relationship into a triad with her in control, using sleeping pills to keep husband and wife from ever making love without her. You know, for a love affair that starts with a fake suicide, can you expect things to go well? And you can just imagine how the Third Reich feels about all of this. And then there’s more suicide, as all three lovers decide to die from drinking poison together.

Director and writer Liliana Cavani is perhaps best known for another movie that plays in this same space — sex and control in the midst of war — The Night Porter. This was the first film produced by Cannon’s Golan and Globus in Italy and it’s actually more art than sleaze, despite the movie’s description.

It’s also never been released in DVD in the U.S.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally wrote about this movie on February 1, 2019 and are bringing it back — with some edits and new additions.

Luigi Cozzi decided to bring back Lou Ferrigno to be Hercules one more time. Now, Hercules must search for the seven thunderbolts of Zeus, which have been stolen by renegade gods. There was only one trouble: he only had three weeks to film this one, so plenty of the story is padded out by showing scenes from the last movie.

Actually, according to Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984 — and Luigi Cozzi — Ferrigno had been lured to Italy to do reshoots for Seven Magnificent Gladiators when Menahem Golan came up with a plan to get him to stay for four weeks instead of two and secretly make a sequel. No one was allowed to inform Ferrigno that they were making a new movie, as they couldn’t afford to pay him for one.

The movie begins by telling the story of Zeus’ Seven Mighty Thunderbolts that have kept peace throughout creation. But one day, Aphrodite, Hera, Poseidon and Flora (Margit Evelyn Newton, Maria Rosaria Omaggio, Ferdinando Poggi and Laura Lenzi) steal them, taking away the leader of the god’s power and sending the moon flying at Earth.

The Little People tell the sisters Urania and Glaucia (Milly Carlucci and Sonia Viviani, who is in Nightmare City and The Return of the Exorcist) that only Hercules can save them. Zeus — remember how he had no power — sends Hercules back from the stars to help mankind, but the evil gods resurrect King Minos (William Berger) from the last movie and have Dedalos (transgender actress Eva Robin’s) help him with her powers of science.

Hercules battles everything in this movie from giant apes to Slime People, a Gorgon, a knight that fires lightning bolts and hangs people from trees, the fire monster Antaeus, the Queen of the Spiders and then Minos, who transforms into a giant laser dinosaur, to which Hercules says, “Watch this” and becomes a laser King Kong. No, that’s not the drugs talking. This really happens.

Zeus then grows Hercules as big as the universe and he moves the moon and Earth back to where they belong. Then, Urania sacrifices herself, as her body contains the last thunderbolt. Zeus then allows both her and Hercules to live amongst the gods in space.

While not as amazing nor as entertaining as the original, the end — with the laser monster fight — must be seen to be believed.

For more info on all things Hercules in the universe of Cannon, get Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

Check out The Cannon Canon episode about this movie here.

The first in a six-film deal that Chuck Norris signed with Cannon after Missing In Action, this was inspired by Chuck thumbing through Reader’s Digest and learning that terrorists — real terrorists — were running loose in the U.S. by the hundreds.

Chuck was interviewed by the Sun Sentinel and his inspiration: “I thought, “Boy, that’s scary. What if some guy on the order of a Khomeini or a Khadafi mobilized those guys and started sending them out to every major city? I know it’s going to happen, and even in the movie, the head terrorist says, “It’s so easy because of the freedom of movement in this country.” So we’re really accessible to this. The movie is not meant to scare people, but to make us aware of a potential problem.”

Not only did this movie cost $12 milion, but it was spent the right way: the houses that get blown up real good are all real, as is the Avondale Mall. The Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport was going to bulldoze an entire suburban neighborhood to extend a runway and the mall was also being rebuilt, so the filmmakers paid enough that they could explode some real lhonest-to-goodness slice of America.

The movie lets you know a few things right off the bat. It’s a Joe Zito (The Prowler) film, it’s uncompromisin and it’s villains are simply villains. They off an entire boat of Cuban refugees in the guise of being coast guardsmen, but they’re really an internationall collective of scumbags led by Soviet operative Mikal Rostov (Richard Lynch, the best of all 80s bad guys). Their first move, after killing all those Cubans and taking the cocaine in their boat, is to try and take former CIA agent Matt Hunter (Norris) off the board. They decimate his Everglades home and kill his best friend John Eagle (Dehl Berti), which makes the retired hero re-enlist to deliver death.

As boats full of soldiers unload on the beaches of Miami while another group pretends to be cops and sow chaos. Churches are targeted, a mall is destroyed, a carnival gets bombed to bits and suburban neighborhoods are under attack. During all this, the FBI arrests Hunter for his vigilante attacks on the terrorists, but come on. You know that he’s going to be found innocent, strap on some guns and fire a rocket launcher directly at Richard Lynch. We demand blood.

This is the kind of movie where shoving a cocaine straw up a woman’s nose, launching her through a window and shooting Billy Drago in the dick is an afterthought. That’s how pure evil Lynch is.

I wish that they made twenty of these. Avenging Force may have been a proposed sequel, but Chuck wanted to do other things, so Michael Dudikoff played Matt Hunter, who may or may not be the same character. And that movie is just as deranged as this one. Perhaps slightly more so.

But yeah. Invasion U.S.A. Inspired by Reader’s Digest and then 129 people get killed. Chuck killed thirty of them. Invasion brings every state leader together with no politics. Chuck watches Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. God bless America.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon podcast about Invasion U.S.A. starring the Molasses 2×4 here.

Directed and written by Simon Drake and originally called The Angel on the Ceiling, this movie is all about Lisa (Sascha Harman), who has come back to the island she grew up on after the death of her sister Melanie (Kim Lyzba). She soon learns that her sister’s death was no accident and that she may have been involved in something quite dark.

Staying on the island and working as a museum cleaner where she meets a guide named Rich (Fintan Shevlin) who knows a little too much about her sister…like how she somehow both overdosed and hung herself at the same time.

There are two things Lisa is about to find out. The first is that her sister’s death leads to some places and people far beyond what she expects, as the very people who have power on the island have something to do with it. And second, that Rich is a ghost.

There are some surprises in this movie and it’s way more than I expected it to be. For a movie released recently, that’s a major accomplishment.

Lost Angel is now available from Left Films.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally shared this review back on October 10, 2019 when Arrow Video released this movie on blu ray. Now there’s a new version on UHD with literally tons of extras. 

It starts with a brand new 4K restoration by Arrow Video from the original camera negative which has two audio commentary tracks, one by Beware the Moon filmmaker Paul Davis and the second by David Naughton and Griffin Dunne. There’s also Mark of The Beast: The Legacy of the Universal Werewolf, a feature-length documentary by filmmaker Daniel Griffith, featuring interviews with John Landis, David Naughton, Joe Dante and more; An American Filmmaker in London, an interview with John Landis in which he reflects on British cinema and his time working in Britain; I Think He’s a Jew: The Werewolf’s Secret, a video essay by filmmaker Jon Spira (Elstree 1976) about how Landis’ film explores Jewish identity; The Werewolf’s Call, in which Corin Hardy, director of The Hallow and The Nun, chats with writer Simon Ward about their formative experiences with Landis’ film; Wares of the Wolf, a featurette in which SFX artist Dan Martin and Tim Lawes of Prop Store look at some of the original costumes and special effects artifacts from the film; Beware the Moon, Paul Davis’ acclaimed, feature-length exploration of Landis’ film which boasts extensive cast and crew interviews; two 2008 features by Paul Davis (An American Werewolf in Bob’s Basement and Causing a Disturbance: Piccadilly Revisited); Making An American Werewolf in London; interviews with Rick Baker, John Landis, footage of Baker’s workshop, outtakes, storyboards, trailers, TV ads, radio ads, a huge image gallery, a double-sided poster, a reversible sleeve featuring original poster art and artwork by Graham Humphreys; six double-sided, postcard-sized lobby card reproductions and a limited edition 60-page, a perfect-bound book featuring new writing by Craig Ian Mann and Simon Ward, archival articles and original reviews.

It comes out on March 15, 2022 and you can order it directly from Arrow Video.

There must have been something in the waters of the Los Angeles River in 1981, as The Howling, Wolfen, Full Moon High and this film all came out in those same twelve months. While all three are interesting films for different reasons, An American Werewolf In London astounded audiences with its special effects.

Rick Baker’s vision was to have the main transformation — set to Sam Cookie’s “Blue Moon” — happen in real-time, with no cutaways or dissolves. Director John Landis compounded the difficulty of this sequence by insisting that it be shot in bright light. This all led to six ten-hour days of prosthetic make-up, but the results were an Oscar — the first of its kind — for special effects make-up and Baker became a household name. Well, in the house of kids who subscribed to Fangoria.

While he was a production assistant in Yugoslavia on the film Kelly’s Heroes, he witnessed an elaborate gypsy funeral where a criminal was wrapped in garlic and buried feet first in the middle of a crossroads so that he would never rise again. This moment of real-life horror stayed with him for over a decade as he built his career in Hollywood.

The money people thought that this movie was too funny to be scary and too frightening to be hilarious. Time has proven them wrong.

David Kessler and Jack Goodman (David Naughton from March Madness and Griffin Dunne from After Hours) are backpacking through Europe. As they make their way across the moors, they stop at a local club called the Slaughtered Lamb. In the midst of all the fun they’re having, they innocently inquire about the star on the wall and are asked to leave. Seriously — the bar just shuts down and forces them into the night, knowing that they’ll die out there.

Look for Rik Mayall in this scene, playing chess with former pro wrestler Brian Glover. Adrian Edmonson had been invited to be at the shoot but blew it off.

As they walk into the night, the pub owners can only say, “Keep to the road, stay clear of the moors and beware of the full moon.” Of course, that means that our heroes wander off the path and are surrounded by a creature that howls at the full moon. Jack is milled and David barely survives when the pub’s patrons come out to save him. As he passes out, he sees that it wasn’t an animal that attacked, but a nude man.

Three weeks later, David wakes up in a hospital where Inspector Villiers tells him that he and his friend were attacked by a lunatic, while our hero insists that it was a wolf. That’s when things get even weirder — Jack appears, even though he’s dead, and demands that David kill himself before the next full moon. As long as the bloodline of the werewolf continues, Jack will be undead, forced to haunt the world.

As David heals up, he moves in with Alex Price (Jenny Agutter, Logan’s Run), a nurse who helped him get back on his feet. Instead of being able to celebrate young love, Jack’s warnings — and decay — grow more insistent as we get closer to that epic transformation scene.

The rest of the film is a rollercoaster of werewolf attacks and David trying to reason with Jack, who is joined by all of David’s victims inside an adult movie theater. Finally, the police — and Alex — close in.

Today, Landis regrets some of his choices as he made the film, such as cutting certain sequences to earn an R rating. For example, the sex scene when Alex and David finally consummate their relationship was a lot more explicit and there was an action sequence where David as a werewolf would wipe out the homeless along the Thames.  The director also felt that he spent too much time on the transformation scene sequence because he was so fascinated by Baker’s effects.

That said, Landis and Baker were never on the same terms after this film. It took eight years to make the movie and Baker decided to use all of the work he’d created so far for The Howling. Right around the same time, Landis finally got the movie greenlit and called Baker, who had to tell him he was already lining up a werewolf project. After getting screamed at over the phone, Baker left the project in the hands of his assistant Rob Bottin and only consulted on that film.

Special effects would never be the same after this film. Today, the entire transformation would be computer rendered, with those amazing monsters only truly existing on the screen. This film’s effects were so upsetting to even the actors that it caused depression when they first saw how damaged their faces were.

PS — Please, by all means, avoid An American Werewolf In Paris (starring Tom Everett Scott of Tom Hank’s That Thing You Do!), a movie made by none of these people that has extreme bungie jumping in it. That’s probably the only reason to watch it, actually.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

U.K. comedy — with horror overtones — All My Friends Hate Me is chock full of dark, uncomfortable humor as a birthday party for thirtysomething Pete (Tom Stourton) thrown by friends he hasn’t seen since their university days grows increasingly uncomfortable. Pete has changed a bit from the posh pals he used to hang out with back at school, even eschewing a comfortable life for working with refugees, which no one in the group seems to want to hear about. 

Pete arrives to find the house where they are having the party empty, pretending that he had only arrived a short while ago when his friends come back from a pub hours after he actually showed up. With barbs and jabs being slung at a high rate from Pete’s ex-girlfriend Claire (Antonia Clarke), married couple Fig (Georgina Campbell) and George (Joshua McGuire), and intoxicated, gun-wielding Archie (Graham Dickson), along with Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), a stranger the group met at the pub, Pete begins to wonder if his friends actually dislike or perhaps even hate him. Harry gleefully skewers Pete and writes down notes about the birthday boy’s behavior, and when Pete’s fiancée Sonia (Charly Clive) finally arrives at the shindig, Pete’s paranoia and suspicions only grow worse.

Director Andrew Gaynord, working from a script cowritten by Stourton and Tom Palmer, mines the nastiness for all its worth and shows a deft hand at cranking up the thriller vibe highlighted by the tension between Harry and Pete. The ensemble cast does a solid job of inhabiting their characters — none of whom are easy to warm up to — and Stourton nailing his turn as the psychologically flawed Pete, with Demri-Burns adding some delightfully devilish work.

Super presents All My Friends Hate Me in theaters from March 11 and on digital from March 25, 2022.

I couldn’t find this movie anywhere, so why don’t I just share what I know and hope that someone helps me track it down?

Jacek Szteinman (Sebastian Keneas) has somehow survived World War II Warsaw and daily threats on his life from German soldiers, all while romancing Halina, who is played by Kyra Sedgwick in her first movie.

It’s based on the Jack Eisner book The Survivor and the screenplay was written by Abby Mann, who wrote Judgment at Nuremberg and helped create Kojak. It was directed by Moshé Mizrahi, the husband of Michal Bat-Adam, who made Boy Meets Girl and The Lover for Cannon.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally posted this movie on May 26, 2020 as we covered several heavy metal horror movies. It’s back for our month of Cannon Films.

Evil Laugh. American Drive-In. Hard Rock Zombies. These are the legacy of producer/director Krishna Shah. This movie is…well, there’s never been a movie exactly like this. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not that’s a good or bad thing.

Jessie, Tommy, Chuck and Bobby are Holy Moses and in order to impress a music business bigwig, they decide to go to a town that has outlawed rock and roll. Of course, these towns were everywhere in the wake of Footloose because they saw how well that went.

The town they pick — Grand Guignol is the name, which is only slightly more subtle than Nilbog — has not only outlawed music, but it’s also full of evil dwarves, sex perverts and not just Nazis, but Hitler and Eva Braun who has become a knife-carrying werewolf who lets other men have sex with her while she cucks Der Fuhrer.

The band gets killed, but thanks to the fact that their new song was based on an occult prayer, they come back to life and bring the town’s dead back from the choir invisible to kill everyone else.

Jessie is also in love with a young fan named Cassie, who is all of 12. So there’s that. And he’s the good guy.

This movie was supposed to be only twenty minutes long and appear as the movie within a movie for American Drive-In. Someone decided to spend a little more cash and finish the film.

Vinegar Syndrome has just released a 2K rescan of this movie, along with Slaughterhouse Rock, in what is literally a must-buy blu ray.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode for Hard Rock Zombies here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We just covered this movie on January 17, 2022, but as we’re trying to cover as many Cannon movies as possible all March long, won’t you join us as we look back at not just the obsessive pop culture force that is Cannon, but the time they worked with Curtis Harrington and Sylvia Kristel?

13 year old me didn’t care about any 80s starlet that you’d care to mention. I’d already discovered the forbidden fruit that was Eurosleaze and with it, probably one of its classier stars, Sylvia Kristel. You know who agreed with me? Well, at least in the theory that he could make money off of her? Menahem Golan of Cannon, who came up with this movie just for her.

Curtis Harrington directed and he wasn’t pleased with the end product, but this was Cannon. He didn’t have final cut. “I wish I could have been involved in preserving what I felt was the integrity of the film. There were moments I felt were unreasonably cut. I’m not entirely happy with the cut. But (the people at Cannon) don’t care what I think,” he said at the time.

Even as a teen watching this with no sound on Cinemax, I knew that it wasn’t historically accurate. It’s about a fictitious love triangle between Mata Hari and two officers, one French and one German, who end up on the opposite sides of World War I. Despite Mata Hari exposing a German plot, she’s still arrested as a double agent and executed, even though everyone knows that she’s innocent, which wasn’t what I was looking for at 1:47 AM on Cinemax After Dark, you know?

This movie was chopped up to avoid an X rating, Kristel was dubbed and she was deep in her addiction by this point. As much as I love Cannon, they were not the studio to make this, but had that ever stopped them before?