One of two Cannon movies shot near my hometown of Pittsburgh* — actually Brownsville, West Brownsville and surrounding Fayette County using locations such as the long gone Fredericktown Ferry, the gorgeous Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in West Brownsville and now closed High Point restaurant in Coal Center — this movie amazes me as Nastassja Kinski and Robert Mitchum once walked the streets where I have tread. And the movie’s premiere was at the Laurel Mall Cinema in Connelsville, a place that was turned into a wrestling building and where I bled and sweat for years.

Today, Maria’s house is a refurbished BnB that I’m absolutely certain that Austin Trunick, author of The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984, will be staying at. And according to this local article, Ms. Kinski coming to our small town had quite the impact, as she presented the Brownsville Elks with the Richard Avedon nude photo of herself with a live python wrapped around her. When she wasn’t lounging at the Uniontown Holiday Inn with her chihuahua Paco like an old fashioned movie star, there was a rumor that she had an affair with a local miner, which I’d like to believe is true.

As for Mitchum, he stayed drunk — surprise — throughout most of the movie, stumbling through the streets of Brownsville — allegedly — clutching a bottle of tequila and shouting, “Does anybody know we’re making a pornographic movie in your town?” I must confess that I would put my acid reflux to the test just for the opportunity to get blackout drunk with Mitchum.

While born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Mitchum would tell Roger Ebert in 1971 interview while making Going Home, when asked how long he’d been in Pittsburgh, the great actor said, “I was born here and I intend to make it my home long after U.S. Steel has died and been forgotten. I intend to remain after steel itself has been forgotten. I shall remain, here on the banks of the Yakahoopee River, a grayed eminence…I used to come through here during the Depression. I don’t think the place has ever really and truly recovered.” The whole article is great, as Mitchum faces the realities of just how hard it is to drive and get directions in our City of Bridges.

Reports also say that he had ladies young and old line up for several blocks just for a hug or a kiss and man, Hollywood was once amazing, right?

The first Western movie by Andrei Konchalovsky — and potentially the first movie made by a Russian director with major American actors — this is the story of Ivan Bibic (John Savage, who is also the Beast in Cannon’s take on Beauty and the Beast as well as being in another Western PA after the war movie The Deer Hunter**) and how his time in the war has destroyed him. His father (Mitchum) sets him up with a neighbor, Mrs. Wynic (Anita Morris) instead of allowing him to be back with Maria (Kinski), a woman now married to Al Griselli (Vincent Spano). Her memory kept him alive in a POW camp, yet still his father believes she’s too good for his son.

The real issue that Ivan has, beyond his PTSD, is that he’s put Maria on an impossible pedestal, seeing her as an unapproachable ideal and a chaste angel of purity when she just wants to experience their relationship as a normal woman with very healthy desires. That means that he can perform with Mrs. Wynic, but not her. She, on the other hand, can find herself finally seduced by Clarence (Keith Carradine) and this infidelity, strangely, may save their relationship.

Menahem Golan said that this movie came about quite simply: “Konchalovskiy was introduced to me at Cannes. He told me a story about a soldier in Yugoslavia who returns home after WWI with shell shock, not able to have sex with his wife. I told him, “Go downstairs, get some coffee and start thinking this way: He is not a Yugoslavian soldier, he is an American soldier, the war is not WWI, it’s Vietnam, and make the story contemporary.” Konchalovskiy would go on to make Runaway Train, Shy People and Duet for One for Cannon, but is probably best known for Tango & Cash***, a movie that seems like a long valley between his usual artistic films.

*The other is Rappin’.

**Which wasn’t shot here, but in Ohio (Stuebenville, Struthers, Cleveland) and West Virgina (Weirton) doubling for our region.

***Which really feels like it could have been a Cannon.

Up Your Anchor may be the sixth Lemon Popsicle film, but it truly feels like the sixtieth I’ve watched. Benji (Yftach Katzur) and Huey (Zachi Noy) are back and this time, they’re on a cruise ship.

Not returning would be Jonathan Sagall, who played Bobby in all of the films up until Baby Love. He clashed with Golan and Globus, as well as director Dan Wolman, which is why there’s a scene in the beginning where the remaining boys watch a home movie that replays scenes from the original movie instead of, you know, paying the actor. Boaz Davidson wasn’t involved either. That said series writers Sam Waynberg and Eli Tavor are on board, as is Bea Fielder, who was a frequent sex object in these movies.

There’s even less music, but at least Little Richard’s “Bama Lama Bama Loo” and the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” are on the soundtrack. As for the rest of the film, it recycles what you’ve seen before, but as mentioned before, this is the sixth time this movie has been made and while the first was shocking for showing the sex lives of Israeli boys, by 1985 audiences had seen this all before.

One good thing: Yehuda Efroni is in it and he’s like the utility Cannon actor, showing up in The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype, Nana, Hercules, Night Soldier, Seven Magnificent Gladiators, The Delta Force, Million Dollar Madness, Rumpelstiltskin, The Emperor’s New Clothes, Sleeping Beauty, Braddock: Missing In Action III, American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt, Sinbad, Hanna’s War and Ten Little Indians.

Directed, written and starring Michal Bat-Adam, this adaption of The Lover, a novel by A. B. Yehoshua, had been in development by Cannon for nearly a decade, with Boaz Davidson and Dan Wolman both attached to direct at one point or another.

The novel was a big deal because of the taboos it broke in Israel, telling the stories of a married woman and her lover, a married father and his daughter’s friend, and the forbidden love between a Jewish girl and her Arabic lover.

Adam (Yehoram Gaon) and Asia (Bat-Adam) are a sexless married couple. She quickly falls into the bed of a tutor named Gavriel (Roberto Pollack), who agrees to help her if Adam fixes his grandmother’s car. The young man disappears during the Yom Kippur War and Adam, his daughter Dafi and their co-worker Naim all try to find him, which ends up with Dafi and Naim falling in love and one of her schoolmates throwing herself at the older man.

The Lover was a media scandal in Israel, as all of the infidelity in the movie is presented as normal. Bat-Adam nearly gave up filmmaking, but the film was a success and today she is known as one of the queens of Israeli cinema.

Kelly “Special K” Bennett (Lucinda Dickey), Orlando “Ozone” Barco (Adolfo Quinones), and Tony “Turbo” Ainley (Michael Chambers) are back, seven months after Breakin’ and while that movie is great, Breakin’ 2 exists in a world that is not our own and we’re all the better for it.

Directed by Sam Firstenberg — who delivered some of Cannon’s best movies including Revenge of the Ninja, Ninja III: The Domination, American Ninja — it’s all about the T.K.O. Crew trying to stop the demolition of the Miracles community center by a developer who wants to build a shopping mall, which is very much 1984.

Made back in the days before the term Boogaloo was co-opted by far-right extremists to describe an uprising against the American government that would be the sequel to the civil war — ironic because, you know, most of these groups are incredibly anti-Semitic and boogaloo was a made-up word from Cannon co-owner Menahem Golan — this is the kind of movie I put on whenever I want to change my mood instantly. It somehow unites the best part of the 80s with what I love about big Hollywood musicals and is only concerned with entertaining you as much as it can.

For example, the dance number where Michael Chambers walks on the ceiling was Golan’s idea. A big Fred Astaire fan, he suggested the scene which was inspired by The Royal Wedding. It was made with the same gimbal — a rotating room — from A Nightmare on Elm Street. As a thank you, a picture of Freddy’s glove is hanging on the wall.

Ice-T returns to rap before the end of the movie, there’s a dance number in a hospital that brings a dead patient back to life and every single person in this movie somehow knows how to dance. And it’s great. It’s the kind of world that I wish we lived in, a place where music and dance can save anything and anyone.

This is top tier Cannon. You can watch it on Tubi.

For more info on both Breakin’ movies, get Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

Once upon a time, the story goes that James Cameron wrote a treatment for Rambo: First Blood Part II and everyone in Hollywood wanted to make it. The people that wanted to make it the most were our beloved friends at Cannon, who somehow rushed this out two months before Stallone’s character returned to rescue the POWs still left behind.

Cannon may have not been at the level of working with a star of Stallone’s calibre — and pricetag — as of yet, but they would be.

As for star Chuck Norris, he was approached to make the film by Lance Hool and the idea of making a movie that redeemed American soldiers in Vietnam spoke to him, as his brother Wieland died during the conflict. “Vietnam was a tragic mistake. If you don’t want to win the battle, don’t get involved,” said Norris.

Hool and Norris took the project to Cannon Films, who liked the project, and seeing as how they already had a similar script in development, they signed Norris to be in not one, but two movies. Except that the movie intended to be the first movie, the Hool-directed version, ended up being the prequel, released under the confusing title of Missing in Action 2: The Beginning.

But man, talk about stacking the deck. The film that was the sequel that became the first movie — welcome to the world of Cannon — was directed by Joseph Zito, who mastered the slasher genre between The Prowler and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter before making this as well as the perhaps even better — or wilder — Invasion U.S.A. and Red Scorpion.

This movie is everything Cannon in one film, outside of hiring someone like John Cassavetes to direct it or Norman Mailer to write it.

Colonel James Braddock (Norris) is a US military officer who spent seven long years in a North Vietnamese POW camp — if you want to see that, watch Missing in Action 2: The Beginning — a place that he somehow escaped a decade ago. Against the objections of Senator Maxwell Porter, he joins a government team that has come to meet Vietnamese officials in Ho Chi Minh City about the existence of still-living American POWs.

I love that Braddock has no time for the normal action hero cliches of romance. When he’s invited by Ann Fitzgerald (Lenore Kasdorf, Amityville Dollhouse) up to her room for a nightcap, she feigns mock indignation as he strips down, thinking that she’s about to get some of that sweet Chuck Norris karate directly below her belt. She turns and sees him dressed in full black commando gear, ready to climb out her window and start doing some work.

In order to get the dirt he needs on General Vinh (Ernie Ortega) and General Tran (James Hong, always a welcome actor in any movie), he must go into Thailand and recruit his old buddy Jack “Tuck” Tucker (M. Emmet Walsh), who has become the king of the black market. Then, Chuck does what Chuck does, including blowing up more of the Phillippines than ten other movies shot there and the famous moment when Chuck rises from the water holding a M60 machine gun and blowing gigantic holes in nearly everyone.

“One of the biggest thrills of my life came when I went to a theatre to see Missing in Action, and all the people stood up and applauded at the end. That’s when my character brings some POWs he’s just rescued to a conference in Saigon, where the politicians are saying there aren’t any more prisoners of war,” said Chuck. And you know, more than thirty years later, as I watch this movie on my couch, I shouted in pure joy out loud and I’m pretty much so left wing that I’ve become right and then left again.

Such is the magic that is Chuck Norris.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We watched Knocking at Fantastic Fest on September 25, 2021. It’s now streaming on the Arrow Player. Head over to ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

After leaving a tragic accident — the film begins with our heroine embracing her girlfriend who runs into the water and is never seen again — and a stay at the mental hospital, Molly moves into a new apartment where a strange knocking keeps on getting louder and louder. No one else can hear it. And it’s not going away.

Adapted from a novel by Johan Theorin, this movie lives and dies by the intense performance of lead Cecilia Milocco and the so tight you’re face-to-face cinematography of Hannes Krantz. The tension keeps increasing and much like so many “is it supernatural or mental illness” movies, the questions keep increasing as Molly begins taking increasing risks to determine where the knocking and sobbing is coming from.

At just 78 minutes, this is a short film that nearly begs for even more time and it’s rare that I feel that way. The end just arrives after the slowest of builds, but I’ve been obsessed with the moments that exist between waiting for something to happen and the actual second that everything changes.

Knocking is playing Fantastic Fest this week and will soon be available on a wider basis. We’ll update this post when it’s streaming.

When conventional medicine is struggling to keep up with the stress of modern life. That’s why Stronger By Stress expores, as biohackers explain the holistic ways that they have trained themselves within in an attempt to defeat stress and increase their performance.

So what is biohacking? According to the filmmakers, this do-it-yourself biology is a growing social movement in which individuals, communities and small organizations study biology and life science using the same methods as traditional research institutions.
 With the advancement of technology and science, we now have access to more data that helps us to make better decisions and improve our wellbeing.

So is this doing your own research?

Director Andzei and writer Siim Land, whose books Metabolic Autophagy, The Immunity Fix, The Mineral Fix and Stronger by Stress, which this movie is based on, discuss this new sciene, along with The Biohacker’s Handbook author Teemy Arina, breathwork expert Leigh Erwin, Biohacker Center co-founder Olli Sovijarvi and Inka Immonen, who is an expert in neuropsychology, meditation and yoga.

To learn more, visit the official site for the movie.

I saw a tweet the other day where someone was amazed that there are modern westerns that still come out. These are the same folks amazed that Trump won, that middle America outnumbers the cities and that DVDs are still for sale at WalMart. I mean, come to Belle Vernon, PA to my America’s Super Store and you’ll discover several aisles and bins just overflowing with movies like Eye for Eye.

According to his IMB page, writer, director and actor L.J. Martin is the author of over 68 book-length works from such major NY publishers as Bantam, Avon and Pinnacle with titles covering genres like westerns, thrillers, mysteries, and historical; two cookbooks, two how-to write books, a cartoon book and even a book on how to kil cancer, because L.J. hasn’t just beat cancer once, he beat it twice. He’s been a wrangler, camp cook, draftsman, water company manager, sailor, printer, real estate broker and developer, appraiser and contractor. And now, well, he’s making a movie.

With John Savage from The Deer Hunter as one of the leads, this is the story of Quint Reagan (Shane Clouse, who also composed the music Eye for Eye), whose small ranch runs afoul of men who kill his wife Consuela (Ashley Rae McGee) and take his land.

Sold as “a classic western revenge tale,” just go in knowing this is a modern shot on digital low budget movie where some anachronisms seep through. But if you’ve been renting modern films like this at Red Box or buying them from a swimming pool-sized container at WalMart, you already know that.

You can learn more at the official site for the film or the Facebook page.

Starring Chloé Guillot and directed by Chris Rakotomamonjy, Home-Sitters is about a young woman hired as a house-sitter for a mansion in the middle of huge gardens. This assignment looks like a dream job until mercenaries try to break in to get a mysterious McGuffin that’s hidden within the house.

Featuring choreography from veteran fight choreographer Jorge Lorca (The Cursed, From Paris With Love), Home-Sitters is filled with tense action and star Guillot has some pretty great abilities for someone who hasn’t been in many movies. The action never really stops, which is how to handle things if your budget isn’t all that great, right?

The special thanks for this movie are great: South Korean director Seung-wan Ryoo and comics creators Jim Shooter (a Pittsburgh-born comic book writer who started on Legion of Superheroes before becoming the architect of the post-Stan Lee Marvel Universe, as well as Valiant and Defiant comics), Roger Stern (who had an amazing run on Captain America with John Byrne and created the Hobgoblin), Bill Manto (who wrote ROM Spaceknight, Micronauts and created the Guardians of the Galaxy) and David Michelinie (who created War Machine, Venom and Carnage).

You can watch Home-Sitters on Amazon Prime.