Oh Cannon. You make an Emile Zola movie and it ends up being directed by Dan Wolman, who also made Up Your Anchor for Cannon and written by Marc Behm, who would write X-Ray for the studio. He also wrote the novel that Eye of the Beholder was made from, as well as The Beatles’ Help!

And the result ends up being the type of movie that winds up on our site.

Katya Berger (who was in Absurd and is the daughter of William Berger; her half sister Debra is also in this and her resume is even more made up of movies that make our site, like Born for Hell, Emanuelle In Bangkok, The Inglorious Bastards and another Cannon film, Dangerously Close) starts as a girl who has no idea how to use her carnal abilities, yet is in a bordello, but by the end, she’s destroying lives. Sleeping with bankers, dumping them for royalty, making counts act like human dogs, cucking them for their sons…what is this, a Joe D’Amato movie?

The thing is, if D’Amato had made this, it would have been way better. Sure, this looks classy, but it forgets that if it wants to be a classy literate film, it shouldn’t have so much nudity. Then it can’t put together that if it wants to be sleaze, it’s way slow and never really gets to the madness that a Mattei, a Franco, a Tinto Brass would remember.

But hey! 1960s Profumo scandal figure Mandy Rice-Davies — who is also in Black Venus — and Annie Beale from House on the Edge of the Park and D’Amato’s L’alcova are in this so it can’t all be boring. Plus, it has Ennio Morricone making the music, so that’s a positive, right? And then they spelled his name wrong!

Speaking of Franco, there’s a scene with rich people hunting naked women, which is the kind of thing that he would make an entire movie about. More than once, if you want to get down to facts. This scene also has all sorts of inserts and male and female full frontal, which the main actors seem to be kind of like, “What are we doing?” as it happens.

And really, the sleaziest part of this — and you’d have to watch the credits to get it — is that both of the Berger sisters end up having movie sex in this, which feels totally D’Amato in nature. William Berger had to be a bit shocked, right? I mean, aren’t you scandalized?

Armando Nannuzzi was the cinematographer on this movie and if his name sounds familiar, well, he’s the guy who Stephen King blinded in one eye while making Silver Bullet.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For an alternate take on this film, check out R. D Francis’ October 17, 2020 article.

Producer Pancho Kohner had worked with Charles Bronson and director J. Lee Thompson several times, so when they purchased The Evil That Men Do, it seemed the perfect movie to pitch to Cannon, who wanted to make more films with Bronson. However, the rights to that novel and the screenplay were way more than Cannon wanted to pay, so as Menahem was in Cannes, he asked Kohner to come up with a new movie and title, which ended up being 10 to Midnight, which was sold at the festival with no script and just Bronson. It sold immediately.

Warren Stacey (Gene Davis) is an incel before we knew what that meant, a man that has taken the rejection of women so hard that he starts killing them, showing up nude in their homes and butchering them, usually after they turn him down. We first see him kill an office worker named Betty Johnson after she makes love to her boyfriend in a van. Stacey easily takes out the man, then chases Betty through the woods, making her beg for her life before snuffing it out.

Stacey even attends her funeral, where he hears that her diary — which goes into detail on all of her sexual conquests — is somewhere in her home. He breaks in to find it and ends up killing her roommate, Karen.

The diary is already gone and in the possession of Detective Keo Kessler (Bronson) and his partner Paul McAnn (Andrew Stevens). They think Stacey is the killer, but he always has an alibi and as he does his killing nude and with gloves covering his hands — and this was made in the days before DNA, mobile phones and surveillance cameras watching our lives — so he evades being jailed.

Kessler becomes even more involved once Stacey targets another nurse: the hardened cop’s daughter Laurie. His mania over catching the killer even makes him plant evidence to get the man arrested, a plan that McAnn disagrees with. As a result, Stacey kills all three of Laurie’s roommates.

As a naked Kessler is finally caught, surrounded by police cars, he tells Kessler, “Go ahead, arrest me. Take me in. You can’t punish me. I’m sick. You can’t punish me for being sick! All you can do is lock me up. But not forever. One day I’ll get out. One day I’ll get out. That’s the law! That’s the law! That’s the law! And I’ll be back! I’ll be back! And you’ll hear from me! You and the whole fucking world!”

Kessler replies, “No, we won’t,” and blows his brains out.

Shot both as a hard R rated and TV-friendly film — in which Stacey’s nudity is covered — this movie is wild, with Thompson fully unleashed and Bronson waving masturbatory devices in criminal’s faces screaming, “You know what this is for, Warren? It’s for jacking off!” while Wilford Brimley tries to get him to simmer down. I mean, Roger Ebert called it “a scummy little sewer of a movie” and that seems like him telling me to watch it as many times as I can.

You’ll also see appearances by a very young Kelly Preston, future Orange County Real Housewife and ZZ Top video girl Jenna Keough, Michael Jackson’s girlfriend in “Thriller” Ola Ray, Robert Lyons as the D.A. and Geoffrey Lewis as Stacey’s lawyer.

You know, in real life, I’m very measured in how I view police militarization and brutality. But when it comes to Bronson, I cheered when he shot a criminal surrounded by police right in the forehead. I don’t know what that says about me.

For more info on all this great film, get Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

You can also learn about what was cut from the movie and how it made it better in Paul Talbot’s Bronson’s Loose Again: On the Set with Charles Bronson.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about 10 to Midnight here.

An amateur boxer and the nephew of famous boxer Jake LaMotta, John LaMotta shows up in a few other Cannon movies like Revenge of the Ninja, Ninja III: The Domination, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo and American Warrior, which all come from director Sam Firstenberg, who made One More Chance his first movie.

Pete Bales (LaMotta) is a criminal fresh out of jail that’s lost track of his ex and son. She’s living in Arizona with their now teenage child and her new husband. His parole won’t let him cross state lines. But a former neighbor, Sheila (Kirstin Alley), knows were they are and sees something in Pete that no one else does.

Firstenberg made this as a student film at Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles before expanding on it and making it into a full feature. He also had two great leads to hang the movie on, as well as appearances by Michael Pataki and Logan Clarke.

This doesn’t have the wild action of his later films –both Ninja III and Breakin’ 2 seem to come from another universe so much more fantastic than the boring world that we stumble through — but as a lot of heart and an ending that is quite moving. Firstenberg also wrote the script, something he wouldn’t get to do again until Cyborg Cop II and I think this film may be closer to his heart.

You can watch this on Tubi.

You can write this movie off as a ripoff of Raiders of the Lost Ark — and it is, right down to the scene with the boulder — but come on. It has an Ennio Morricone score, is a spiritual sequel to Comin’ At Ya! and most importantly it’s in 3D.

Made in “SuperVision” and “WonderVision,” the film was actually shot using the Marks 3-Depix Converter, the same camera that had been used for Friday the 13th Part III. This system stacked its Techniscope-sized left and right images one above the other on a single band of 35mm film. It was projection using the Polarator projection attachment offered by the Marks Polarized Corporation, allowing the audience to watch the film through color-neutral linear polarizers, a system that lead actor Tony Anthony may have invented.

J.T. Striker (Anthony) has been hired to assemble a group of professional thieves to take two of the gems that will open the last two Mystical Crowns. To get there, he’s going to make your eyes hurt with pop out skeletons, the soldiers of Brother Jonas (Emiliano Redondo) and tons of booby traps which pretty much wipe out everyone in his team, which includes the drunken Rick (Jerry Lazarus, who is also in Cannon’s Hot Chili), a dying circus strongman named Socrates (Francisco Rabal, Nightmare City) and his daughter Liz (Ana Obregón, who was Catalina in another Cannon movie we’ll be getting to soon, Bolero).

Roger Ebert himself broke down what gets thrown at the viewing in this one: “knives, spears, darts, bones, jeweled daggers, balls of fire, laser beams, boulders, ropes, attack dogs, bats, shards of stained glass, a set of dishes, a large kettle, a stove, a corpse, a python snake, an empty glove, birds (both real and artificial), arrows, unidentifiable glowing objects shot from guns, keys, letter openers, several human heads, skeletons, large sections of an exploding castle, one bottle of booze and assorted spoons.”

This movie doesn’t tease you with its 3D. It punches you right in the face with it.

By the end of the movie, Striker has the other gems and his ead spins around, gets all burned up and he starts shooting fire out of his hands melting all of the bad guys, then a giant sludge monster jumps out of a swamp and right into your lap, teasing a sequel that never came, as well as a space 3D movie that was announced, Seeing is Believing.

Director Ferdinando Baldi also made Blindman; Django, Prepare a Coffin; Get Mean, Warbus and Ten Zan: The Ultimate Mission, all deliriously strange movies that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Perhaps most amazingly, both Francisco Rabal and Emiliano Redondo are in Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, so the Spanish film industry really does come together to make a movie.

Kino Lorber is releasing this on blu ray soon and I could not be more excited.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve covered this movie a few times — we did an entire Bruno Mattei week — but as it’s part of Cannon’s releases, here it is again. Oh man — I still can’t believe that the reshoots on this movie ended up being a whole other Hercules movie. There’s also added material in this one, because Cannon Month keeps inspiring me.

What happens when Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragrasso ripoff — remake — The Magnificent Seven/The Seven Samurai with gladiators and barbarians instead of cowboys and, well, samurai? This was originally going to be Hercules, according to Variety, but Luigi Cozzi took over that one and supposedly was brought in to save this one. More about that in a bit.

The plot here — again, it’s the same movie as the other two films that gather seven heroes — is about Nicerote (Dan Vadis, a former member of the Mae West Muscle Review who played Hercules in Hercules the Invincible, Roccia in The Ten Gladiators movies and appeared in several Clint Eastwood movies), a bandit leader and his sorceress mother who makes yearly raids on a peasant village. But this year, Pandora (Carla Ferrigno, who was Athena in Hercules and also in Black Roses) and the women of the village have found a magic sword and go off to hire a hero who can use it and anyone else who can finally end the annual destruction of their homes.

Oh yeah — anyone not worthy of lifting that sword gets burned alive. Choose wisely.

Now, the mighty barbarian Han (Lou Ferrigno) wields the mystical Sword of Achilles and soon assembles a team of gladiators to help him win the day. There’s a gladiator whose life he saves named Scipio (Brad Harris, who played Goliath, Hercules and Samson in past peblum films, as well as Durango and Sabata), Julia (Sybil Danning, the real draw of this film, playing the Harry Luck Magnificent Seven character and as you know, she was in another Seven Samurai remix, Battle Beyond the Stars), Goliath (Emilio Messina, Lepto from The Ten Gladiators), Festo (Giovanni Cianfriglia, who played Superargo in two movies) and more.

This was actually made before Hercules, but Cannon found it unreleasable. They ordered Luigi Cozzi to film new replacement scenes with Ferrigno, but then the decision was made to make a sequel to Hercules and not tell Lou, which still blows my mind. Cozzi told Austin Trunick, who wrote the bible to all things Cannon The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984, “After the decision to shoot Hercules II, nothing of what had been planned for Seven Magnificent Gladiators was made. Seven Magnificent Gladiators was left exactly as Mattei delivered it and the movie simply was shelved. It was taken out of the vaults only a few years later, when Cannon was in crisis and short on movies, and just release as it had been edited by its director.”

How much do I love Cannon?

I haven’t just watched every Lemon Popsicle movie, I’ve now moved into the spinoff, in which Yudale enters into his mandatory Israeli army service and helps Sergeant Shemesh defeat a rival base. Maybe that’ll happen, but they’re both obsessed with sleeping with the Swiss ambassador’s wife (Sibylle Rauch, who was also in another movie in this series, Hot Bubblegum).

If you think that Italian and Japanese movies have bad dubbing, let me introduce you to this movie, which sounds like the absolute most deranged voice recording that I’ve ever heard before.

Director Zvi Shisei also made the 2001 reboot Lemon Popsicle: The Party Goes On and man, realizing that I still have so many movies in this series kind of makes me fearful for the extent of the obsessive-compulsive love of Cannon that I have.

It has been 25 years since the 1957 Fillmore High School basketball team won the Pennsylvania state championship. For some of the players, this has been a moment that has dominated everything that has happened in their lives ever since.

George Sitkowski (Bruce Derk) is the mayor of Scranton and fighting to stay in office, while James Daley (Stacy Keach) is a school principal struggling to provide for his family as his brother Tom (Martin Sheen) is headed for rock bottom. Phil Romano (Paul Sorvino, who originated the role in the play) may be the most successful of the team, but will betray anything and anyone. Their coach, played by Robert Mitchum, still sees them as teenage boys, not men much closer to the close of their lives.

From the bigotry and cruelty of the coach* to the fact that the star player refuses to attends these reunions, the team soon realizes just how hollow it all is.

Starting as an off-Broadway in 1972. this moved to Broadway and played for 844 performances before Cannon produced the film, working with creator Jason Miller — yes, from The Exorcist — to make this in Scranton, a place he grew up in. In 1999, Sorvino directed an update for Showtime in which he played Mitchum’s role and cast Vincent D’Onofrio, Gary Sinise, Tony Shalhoub and Terry Kinney in the roles of the team.

While this movie failed to make money, it did legitimize Cannon as a real studio.

*Speaking of issues of bigotry and cruelty, Mitchum was accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial after he gave an interview to Esquire. According to this article from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, when “…Mitchum was asked about the slaughter of six million Jews, the actor replied, “So the Jews say,” He added. “I don’t know. People dispute that.””

In a letter to the JTA’s Hollywood columnist Herbert Luft, Mitchum said that early in his meeting with the interviewer, he recited a racist speech delivered by Coach Delaney, which was “mistakenly believed to be my own. From that point on, he approached me as the character in the script and in playing the devil’s advocate in a prankish attempt to string him along we compounded a tragedy of errors.”

Then, at the premiere of the movie, he assaulted a female reporter and threw a basketball from the movie at a Time photographer, smashing the camera into her face, knocking out two of her teeth and losing his salary from this movie to pay her for the damages.

You can learn more about That Championship Season in Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

EDITOR’S NOTE: No movie shows just how Cannon’s view of America and America itself are so different than this movie. I love it for that while being destroyed by it every time I watch it. If you haven’t seen it, skip this, watch the film and come back. We originally had this on the site on June 12, 2021.

This movie is a destructive force that still leaves hurt feelings decades after it’s been viewed. Sure, it’s a remake of director Boaz Davidson’s Lemon Popsicle and that movie ends the same way, but that movie came back with plenty of sequels. Once The Last American Virgin drops its bomb on you, it lets you watch everything burn and then that’s it. There’s no happiness, no hope, just the song “Just Once” and the destruction of the film’s hero in a way that there’s no coming back from.

When a movie has a title like Lemon Popsicle, you don’t know what to expect. It’s a foreign movie released in 1978 that could be about anything. But when the title is The Last American Virgin and the movie comes out in the middle of the teen sex comedy craze, you don’t expect things to go this way.

Gary (Lawrence Monsoon, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter) is a pizza delivery boy with two friends, the cool ladies man Rick (Steve Antin, Jessie in the “Jessie’s Girl” video) and David (Joe Rubbo). Most of their hijinks revolve around trying to have sex, like telling girls they have cocaine — it’s really Sweet’n Low — or sleeping with a prostitute or Carmello, a Spanish woman who Gary meets while delivering pizza. Everyone gets their turn except for Gary, who is the titular character.

Yet he has better plans for his first time. He’s in love with Karen (Diane Franklin!), but she’s in love with Rick, who plans on sleeping with her once and dumping her. He does exactly that, getting her pregnant. She turns to Gary, who sells almost everything he owns and borrows money to pay for her abortion, then nurses her during the lowest moment in her life. They share a kiss and she invites him to her 18th birthday party.

That’s when the pain hits hard.

This film takes what Lemon Popsicle did on its soundtrack and transports it to the 80s, which is an incredibly smart move. The music is vital to this film’s success, featuring heavy hitters like The Cars, Devo, The Police, Journey, REO Speedwagon, U2, Blondie and the Human League. I mean, how do you think Bono felt when he saw this and his song “I Will Follow,” which is about his mom who died when he was only 14, is used over an abortion montage?

So much of this movie is very Cannon Films and that’s also the joy of it. It also leaves me with so many questions. Why does Gary bring Karen a bag of oranges when she’s lying in the hospital? Why would they make this seem like a teen movie and give it that ending, when if it was a date movie it’s filled with way too much raunchy sex? And how about the fact that the actors who played Gary and Rick, who come to blows in the movie over the girl who got between their friendship, have come out? How does Gary not realize that Karen’s friend Rose, who he gets set up with, is geeky hot (maybe this makes more sense in 2021 than 1982)? And how did cinematographer Adam Greenberg (who also filmed Terminator 2, 10 to Midnight, Near Dark and many more) feel about recreating so many of the same shots that he’d made in Lemon Popsicle?

Director Davidson also made Hospital Massacre, Salsa and American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, movies that would not even hint at the art that he would make with this movie. If you’ve ever seen the poster for this and laughed it off as a simple teen comedy, I want you to take a chance on this movie. But be prepared for the final moments.

William (Ryan Blakely) has been living alone in a trailer deep in the woods when he finds Emily (Jenny Raven) unconscious and gets her back on her feet over several days. They’re a strange mix, as he’s silent and she can’t stop talking. But when she opens the shed behind his house, what she finds will change everything.

Adam Reider, who directed and co-wrote with Jesse Toufexis, doesn’t spell out the story for viewers and allows the movie to unfurl at its own pace, going from in the middle of nowhere drama to surreal madness by the end of the film. He’s also aided by strong sound design by Martin Cadieux-Rouillard.

While the movie mostly has just the two leads, the flashbacks have Art Hindle (Black Christmas, The Brood) appear. The lead up to the shed, why William is so afraid of it being opened and what happens next won’t be spoiled here, but I found the slow build worthwhile.

I also really enjoyed the film’s soundtrack, which has Skye Klein, Katie Sevigny and one of my favorite musicians, King Dude, whose “Lucifer’s the Light of the World” is the perfect song for the moment it appears.

Woodland Grey plays MidWest WeirdFest on Friday, March 4 at 8:00 PM CST. You can get tickets and more information on the MidWest Weird Fest website.

“We are not making an X-rated picture,” said executive producer and Cannon co-master of madness Yoram Globus. “This will be a cult film. Nudity depends on how you shoot it.”

Star Sylvia Kristel said, “Just Jaeckin and I have been persecuted by this sort porn criticism. I don’t want to go through the same nightmare as I did after Emmanuelle.”

And yeah. Why else would you make Lady Chatterley’s Lover?

Sure, this bombed in theaters, but it would go on to a video and cable life that didn’t seem like it would ever end. I can remember all through school, the whisper of Lady Chatterley’s Lover inspired nervous laughter and knowing glances and blushing. It was literally shorthand for sex.

And Kristel became important for young boys who weren’t interested in the teen stars we were told to like. Or am I just talking about me?

As for the movie, look, it’s a mannered book and a somewhat mannered take on the material and it’s nowhere near what we thought it was going to be. That would be Young Lady Chatterley 2.

Sir Clifford Chatterley (Shane Briant, who was in Hammer’s Demons of the Mind, Straight on Till Morning, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell) has been injured in the war to end all wars, leaving him crippled and — even worse — unable to perform for his wife. He permits her — and maybe even encourages her — to have numerous affairs to produce him an heir. Yet he has an issue when the man she falls for is their groundskeeper Oliver Mellors (Nicholas Clay from Excalibur), a commoner, and that’s when this situation goes wrong due to classism.

With production design by Anton Furst (the man who designed Gotham for Tim Burton); a script by Jaeckin, Marc Behm (who somehow wrote both Help! and Hospital Massacre) and Christopher Wicking (who was behind Scream and Scream Again, Cry of the Banshee and Dream Demon) and the strange idea that this was almost directed by Ken Russell and this is a Cinemax After Dark movie that you can return to and still see something of value in it.

Who am I kidding? I love everything that ever aired after 1:05 AM on Cinemax.

Also: people have sex in a filthy chicken coop that had to have smelled bad, but I guess if you get a shot at Sylvia Kristel, you don’t worry about catching bird flu.