Wei Chung is a newcomer to prison and immediately starts fighting with Ma Siu Tien, a one eyed old man who is his cellmate. The Ma Siu Tien repeatedly defeats him and on the night before he’s to be executed, he gives the young man half of a medal, telling him that there’s a great secret if he can find he other half. Can Wei Chung escape prison and discover the secret? Or will he be stopped by Tung Hei Fung?

Now chained to another inmate named Zhou, Wei Chun soon learns that the man, who he once saw as a nobody, has the other half of the key to the treasure, which contains all of the secrets of monkey boxing.

Director Lo Mar mainly worked on comedies for the Shaw Brothers, like the Country Bumpkins series. There’s a wild fight on a bed when Wei Chun refuses to pay a woman what she’s worth in a brothel, a scene that never leaves the bed. I haven’t seen that in a martial arts movie before!

Known as Hooray the Bonebreakers Are Here in Germany and Stroke of Death in the U.S., Monkey Kung Fu and Drunken Monkey, this also has an incredible final battle with amazing staff fighting against the drunken monkey boxing style.

88 Films has just released Monkey Kung Fu on blu ray with a high definition 1080p presentation of the film, along with English and Cantonese dialogue with newly translated English subtitles. There’s also audio commentary by Kenneth Brorsson and Phil Gillon of the Podcast On Fire Network, an interview with choreographer Tony Leung Siu-hung, a trailer and new artwork by Robert “Kung Fu Bob” O’Brien. The packaging is amazing and also comes with a poster and lobby cards. You can get this movie from MVD and Diabolik DVD.

F/X (1986)

The unsolicited screenplay was written by actor Gregory Fleeman and documentarian Robert T. Megginson and they’d never tried to sell a movie before. When producer Jack Wiener first read it, they told him they saw it as a made-for-TV movie, but he encouraged them to make it into an actual film, which he produced along with Dodi Fayed.

Yes, the same one who died alongside Princess Diana.

Director Robert Mandel (School Ties, The Substitute, the pilot of The X-Files) isn’t an action movie director yet he’s turned the script into a great action film with real heart.

F/X expert Roland “Rollie” Tyler (Bryan Brown) has been hired by the government to fake the murder of mob informant Nicholas DeFranco (Jerry Orbach) so that he isn’t murdered before he testifies against his former crime associates. Edward Mason (Mason Adams), the agent in charge, tasks Tyler with firing the shots at DeFranco, a job for which he’ll be paid $30,000. Yet when he’s picked up after the job, he’s told that they want no loose ends and the agents try to kill him.

He escapes, but everywhere he goes, people close to him die, including his girlfriend Ellen (Diane Venora). Her murder puts Detective Leo McCarthy (Bryan Dennehy) on the case. He’s been after DeFranco for years and wants to put him in jail instead of witness protection.

F/X has the twists and turns that I love in a mystery film. Plus, between Orbach, Dennehy, Brown and Tom Noonan, so many of my favorite actors show up in this movie. The special F/X idea is pretty great, too. You can see posters for Zombi and Fade to Black in Tyler’s studio, plus he mentions working on I Dismember Mama.

F/X 2 (1991)

Richard Franklin came to America to make movies after success in his native Australia with films like Fantasm, Patrick and Road Games. He made Psycho II, Cloak and Dagger, Link and this movie here before he went back home.

The script was written by Bill Condon, who also wrote Strange Behavior and Strange Invaders before moving on to direct movies like Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, Chicago, Dreamgirls and the final two Twilight films.

Rollie Tyler (Brown) has moved from simply practical effects to building a robot clown named Bluey which is controlled by a telemetry suit. This leads to an amazing fight where both Tyler and his robot are both battling a henchman. But before we get to that, we get to why Tyler is in another adventure.

This time, his girlfriend Kim (Rachel Ticotin, Con Air)’s policeman ex-husband has been assigned to stakeout a killer who has already murdered one model. He asks him to entrap the man so they can get him off the streets, but the cop gets killed and Tyler is the only one with the evidence showing that he was murdered. He calls his old friend Leo McCarthy (Brian Dennehy) for help.

The real story concerns stolen solid gold medallions that were cast by Michelangelo which show the figures in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Now, Tyler has to use his F/X abiities and Leo his detective skills to get those coins back to the Vatican while avoiding the killers on their trail.

While not as good as the first, the team of Brown and Dennehy is a winning one. Both F/X and F/X 2 aired often on cable when I was young, so they’re comfort food to enjoy whenever I need them thanks to their blu ray release.

The Kino Lorber blu ray release of F/X and F/X 2 has an on-camera interview with F/X director Robert Mandel and making of features and trailers for both movies. You can get it directly from Kino Lorber.

I may have gone on record numerous times of my intense displeasure with most Troma productions, but this was actually produced by The institute, a production company formed by George, Craig A. Colton and Robert Tinnell, and distributed by Troma.

After the earthquake that’s always been prophecized that will destroy the coastline of California finally arrives, Adolf (Barry Brenner) declares himself the Führer of the new beach and has his Surf Nazis attack all of the other rival surf gangs*. But when he murders Mama Washingon’s (Gail Neely) son, he’s finally made the mistake that will undo his foamy Fourth Reich.

The original box of Surf Nazis Must Die used to practically shouts “Rent me!” from the shelves of every video store I ever went to, yet somehow I’ve never seen it until now. Probably the biggest selling point to me was the appearance of Bobbie Bresee, who won my heart in Mausoleum, showing up as Smeg’s mom, who is very concerned about the path her son is going down.

Somewhere in here is an idea for a really fun movie, more of The Warriors on a post-apocalyptic beach, and I love that. But it doesn’t really have a focus, but then again, Mama Washington is such a great character and I love every moment that she’s on screen. So…secret success?

The new Troma blu ray of Surf Nazis Must Die has a new introduction by Lloyd Kaufman, an exclusive interview with director Peter George, an on-set interview with producer Robin Tinnell, deleted scenes, an episode of The Projection Booth with Peter George, scenes from the Tromaville Café!, a feature on the Soul of Troma, promos for Radiation March, Indie Artists vs. Cartels and Gizzard Face II: Return of Gizzard Face, a Blood Stab sort and more #FanTOXIC featurettes. You can get this blu ray from MVD.

*The Samurais, The Pipeliners, the Skate Rats, Biker Bar and Designer Waves, made up of Curl Blow and Dry. Thanks Edith on Letterboxd!

During World War II, Alexander Ramati worked as a war journalist, entering Assisi with the Allied forces where he met Father Rufino Niccacci, whose Franciscan Monastery of San Damiano in Assisi worked to give Jewis people during World War II new identities and hid them from the Germans, which is much different than how so much of the Catholic Church dealt with that side of World War II.

After interviewing Niccacci, he would write the book that this is based on, as well as direct the movie. Not many authors have directed their own books, but thanks to this Letterboxd list, you can count Ramati in the same league as Fernando Arrabal (Long Live Death, Car Cemetery), Clive Barker (Hellraiser, Nightbreed, Lord of Illusions), Enki Bilal (Immortal), William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist III, The Ninth Configuration), Bertrand Blier (Going Places), Catherine Breillat (A Real Young Girl, Night After Night, Anatomy of Hell, 36 Fillette, Abuse of Weakness), Emmanuel Carrère (The Mustache), Medgi Charef (Tea In the Harem), Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower), Jean Cocteau (The Eagle with Two Heads, The Storm Within), Michael Crichton (Pursuit, First Great Train Robbery), Ramón de España (Haz conmigo lo que quieras), Margeuerite Duras (Agatha and the Limitless Reading; Baxter, Ver Baxter; The Children; Destroy, She Said; Endless Days In the Trees; India Song; Jaune, Le Soleil; La Musica), Brad Fraser (Leaving Metropolis), Buddy Giovinazzo (Life Is Hot In Cracktown), Sacha Guitry (The Story of a Cheat), Peter Handke (The Absence, The Left-Handed Woman), Václav Havel (Odcházení), Ethan Hawke (The Hottest State), Michel Houellebecq (Possibility of an Island), Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Dance of Reality, Endless Poetry), Junji Ito (Tomio), Elia Kazan (America America, The Arrangement), Stephen King (Maximum Overdrive), Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things), Robert Lepage (Nô), André Malraux (Days of Hope), David Mamet (Oileanna), Thomas McGuane (92 In the Shade), Gian Carlo Menotti (The Medium), Oscar Micheaux (The Homesteader), Frank Miller (Sin City, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For), Rebecca Miller (Personal Velocity, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee), Yukio Mishima (Patriotism), John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), Hayao Miyazaki (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, The Wind Rises), Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints), Laura Mulvey (Riddles of the Sphinx), Ryū Murakami (Almost Transparent Blue; It’s Aigt, My Friend, Raffles Hotel, Tokyo Decadence, Dance With Me), Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Marcel Pagnol (Topaze), Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Accattone), Lucía Puenzo (The Fish Child, The German Doctor), Atiq Rahimi (Earth and Ashes, The Patience Stone), Jean Rollin (Two Orphan Vampires), Ousmane Sembène (Mandabi, Xala), John Patrick Shanley (Doubt, Wild Mountain Thyme), Vasily Shukshin (There Is Such a Lad), Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead), Preston Sturges (Christmas In July), Abdellah Taïa (Salvation Army), Adriana Trigiani (Big Stone Gap), Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun), Petr Zelenka (Wrong Side Up), Florian Zeller (The Father) and for Cannon lovers, Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance.

Ben Cross is Rufino Niccacci, James Mason is Giuseppe Placido Nicolini and Maximilian Schell plays Colonel Valentin Müller, while Edmund Purdom probably is in the classiest movie of his late career as Cardinal Della Costa. Yet somehow, even with an hour cut from the movie, it still moves quite slow.

Yet as I must watch every Cannon movie, I watched it. There’s an idea for a good movie here. This isn’t it, sadly. And it was released a year after Mason died, which just makes me sad.

Based on the novel Always by Trevor Meldal-Johnsen, this is all about Gregory (Nigel Terry), a writer who believes that he was reincarnated and that his fiancee Maggie (Jaclyn Smith) was once his doomed ballerina love in a past life. What takes this movie from somewhat boring to Cannon magic is Shelley Winters, who plays a Russian psychic named Olga Nabokova, and no one told Ms. Winters not to start at a 3 or 4 and then turn it up, because you can’t crank down a ten, but she never tries to modulate for the entire film and I’m beyond overjoyed at this fact.

Meanwhile, Gregory was once Michael and Brooke was once Ashley and they all died in an inferno and Gregory is writing a novel about his past life instead of actually writing something that his agent thinks can make money, but you know, when you get obsessed, you get obsessed.

This is the only movie that Anthony Richmond, Nicholas Roeg’s cinematographer for Don’t Look Now, ever directed. There’s a good Pino Donaggio score, too. But the story doesn’t really add up and meanders pretty well with only Winters — and Claire Bloom as Maggie’s mother — realizing that this is a Cannon movie and acting for all of us in the cheap seats.

Only with Cannon can you have the sequel be the prequel when it was supposed to be the first movie. The Joseph Zito-made Missing In Action was considered to be the better of the two movies, so this one was turned into the second movie, but everything worked out pretty OK.

This was directed by Lance Hool, who sold the script to Chuck Norris, who was looking for a movie to pay tribute to his brother Wieland, who had died in Vietnam. They took the script to Cannon, who had a Vietnam POW movie in development, so that’s how we got two movies so quickly. Also, I’m amazed that Vietnam movies were impossible to make in Hollywood before Stallone and Norris changed everything.

Years before he freed US POWs in the first film, Colonel James Braddock (Chuck Norris was tortured in a North Vietnamese POW by Colonel Yin (Soon-Teck Oh, who was also in Good Guys Wear Black). He and his fellow soldiers have been forced to grow opium and if they want to be released, Braddock has to confess to war crimes. I mean, it’s Chuck Norris. Do you think he’s going to do that?

Yet that’s exactly what Captain David Nester (Steven Williams, X from The X-Files) believes should happen and he’s joined the side of the enemy as they subject the Americans to torture like guns being shoved in their faces and fired with no bullets. Then, after a fight that Braddock beats Nestor in, he gets a live rat dropped in a bag covering his face while they tell him that his wife thinks he’s dead and has remarried.

That’s also not a fake rat.

Then, to add even more pain, Braddock exchanges an admission of guilt to Yin’s charges of war crimes in order to get medicine for Franklin, a soldier with malaria. Yin overdoses the soldier with opium and burns him in front of Braddock, who escapes from the camp and — as you can imagine — murders every single other soldier, which includes pro wrestler Professor Toru Tanaka.

This came out three months after the first movie but still made $11 million at the box office.

For more info on all three Missing In Action movies, get Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about Missing In Action 2: The Beginning here.

Somehow, Golan and Globus tried to make 52 Pick-Up three times. First time around, they thought Joe Don Baker would be the star — thanks Austin Trunick — then they hired Elmore Leonard to adapt his book. He’s not on the final credits of this movie, but said, “Menahem Golan hired me to adapt my novel, 52 Pick-Up, and set it in Tel Aviv. I wrote two drafts and then told him to get another writer. He did and the result was The Ambassador which has nothing to do with 52 Pick-Up. It has none of my characters, none of my situations, nothing. But he still owed me for the screen rights and had to pay up before he could release the picture.”

Then, two years later, John Frankenheimer made the actual movie of 52 Pick-Up with Leonard and Cannon.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Peter Hacker (Robert Mitchum) and head of security Frank Stevenson (Rock Hudson) — yes, the slam bang action stars of a movie released the same year as The Terminator — are trying to get Jewish people and Muslims to get along and make some peace, but people keep getting killed.

Meanwhile, Peter’s wife Alex (Ellen Burstyn) is hooking up with Mustapha Hashimi (Fabio Testi, given this movie as a mea culpa from Cannon for getting fired from Bolero), which adds some human drama to the politics. Also, blackmail. Also also Donald Pleasence as Israeli Defense Minister Eretz.

J. Lee Thompson was pretty much making movies just for Cannon throughout the 80s with films like 10 to Midnight, The Evil That Men Do, King Solomon’s Mines, Murphy’s Law, Firewalker, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, Messenger of Death and Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. Al of those are way better than this movie.

As we discussed in the article on That Championship Season, Mitchum had been accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, which is one of the reasons why he made this movie. Telly Savalas was originally going to play Rock Hudson’s role, but after a scheduling conflict, Rock flew out just a week after he broke up with his lover Tom Clarke. He was sick throughout filming, which may have been the start of the disease that he died from, but regardless he clashed with Mitchum throughout the production.

Hot Resort is an American Lemon Popsicle-style movie without the strangeness of The Last American Teen Virgin. I feel like I could stop writing here, but let’s trudge on.

Directed by John Robins, who worked on The Benny Hill Show which had to have served him well in this film, and co-written by Robins, Boaz Davidson (who, yes, made Lemon Popsicle and the American version, the aforementioned The Last American Teen Virgin) and Norman Hudis, who wrote several Carry On movies and lots and lots of TV, Hot Resort has four guys — Marty (Tom Parsekian), Kenny (Michael Berz), Chuck (Dan Schneider, who ends up being in two Cannon movies I watched in two days) and Brad (Bronson Pinchot) — working at a resort and really, that’s the plot. There’s some Meatballs competition against a rowing team and the winner gets to be in a soup commercial and you know, maybe this movie is pretty strange. Not bringing oranges to the hospital odd, but close.

Also, it seems like every teen comedy has to have some old Hollywood in it, and we all know that Satan is inside every actor from the time, so here’s Frank Gorshin. Marcy Walker — ex-daughter-in-law of Dick Warlock — is in this, as well as Debra Kelly and Linda Kenton, Penthouse Pet of the Month May 1983.

There are good 80s sex comedies. Then there’s Hot Resort. And Hot Chili, which is the same movie just about.

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.

This Norway-set Danish dark comedy finds middle-aged Danish man Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) going through an extreme midlife crisis: he has abandoned his wife (Sofie Gråbøl as Anne) and two daughters — who think he is on a business trip — for life in a Norwegian forest. He is clad in furs and hunts with a bow and arrow, but living off the land isn’t working out too well for him, as after he vomits up a meal of a frog, he heads to a nearby gas station and convenience store to try to barter food for an ax. Martin isn’t very good at picking up on clues, either, when an injured man with a bag filled with money (Zaki Youssef as Musa) crosses his path.

Director Thomas Daneskov, who cowrote the screenplay with Morten Pape, goes more for quirky humor than scathing social commentary, but the balance is fine enough to make Wild Men an entertaining watch. Martin is not the kind of protagonist for whom it is easy to root, but Bjerg gives an intriguing performance as this man-child who finds out that the titular lifestyle is more difficult than he imagined — especially when local lawman Øyvind (Bjørn Sundquist) and his rather inept underlings get involved, without the aid of a police dog that always seems to have the day off.

Wild Men screens as part of Glasgow Film Festival, which takes place March 2–13, 2022 in Glasgow, Scotland. For more information, visit https://glasgowfilm.org/glasgow-film-festival.

Blue Finch Film Releasing are pleased to present the UK premiere screenings of Wild Men at Glasgow Film Festival, running from 2–13 March 2022.

Wei Fung (David Chiang, King Boxer, The Boxer from Shantung) has been given an assignment from the Emperor himself: work his way into the Tien Clan rebels, gain evidence of their connection to a series of enemies and report back. If he fails, his entire family will be punished. Complicating the mission is the fact that he’s already fallen for one of his enemies, Tien Chi-Chi (Huang Hsin-Hsiu), the granddaughter of the rebel leader.

The rebels have already learned that Wei-Fung is a spy, yet Chi-Chi has already fallen for him. Her grandfather Tien (Lau Kar Wing, the choreographer of so many movies, including Master of the Flying Guillotine) doesn’t want to break her heart, so if she can gain Wei-Fung’s hand in marriage — and he pledges to never leave — he may live. However, if he doesn’t come back with the list of spies, his entire family will be decapitated. And what does the praying mantis have to do with an entire new style?

Unlike so many Shaw Brothers martial arts movies, the fighting is part of the story instead of the entire tale. It naturally comes out of the human drama within the movie, making Shaolin Mantis a movie worth discovering. It also has a shock ending that made me love this film.

88 Films U.S. blu ray release of Shaolin Mantis has a high definition 1080p presentation of the movie with both English and Mandarin audio, along with newly translated English subtitles. There are two audio commentaries, one with Asian cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema as well as one with Frank Djeng. There’s a feature on the film with David West, an interview with actor John Cheung, the Hong Kong trailer and the U.S. trailer for its western title, The Deadly Mantis. You can get it from MVD and Diabolik DVD.