Based on the real case of Audrey White — who was a consultant on the movie — at a chain of Lady at Lord John boutiques, this Lezli-An Barrett directed and written film finds Babs Flynn (Glenda Jackson) managing a Liverpool shop and accusing the regional manager of sexual harassment after the way he treats an employee (Cathy Tyson). Babs gets fired, she goes to court and that’s our movie.

This did play Cannes, but I wonder what Cannon saw in it for American audiences. Maybe it was one of those movies a company threw in on another deal? As it is, it’s a fine movie, but not one you have to go out of your way to track down. Unless you’re a Red Dwarf fan, as Craig Charles is in the cast. Or Inspector Morse, because Jason Thaw plays Babs’ husband, who once tried to do the right thing just like his wife and ended up paying for it.

A semi-autobiographical version of Charles Bukowski’s life during the time he spent drinking like his life depended on it — as seen through the author’s alter ego Henry Chinaski — with a script by the author that was commissioned by director Barbet Schroeder. And somehow, it’s one of those Cannon movies that aspire to art.

Bukowski wanted Sean Penn to play him, but Penn insisted that Dennis Hopper direct. That was a problem as Bukowski had written the screenplay for Schroeder and he saw Hopper as a gold-chain-wearing Hollywood phony. Despite that issue, Bukowski and Penn remained friends.

Henry Chinaski (Mickey Rourke) may write stories and poetry for small change, but his real job is drinking at the Green Horn and fighting with Eddie the bartender (Frank Stallone). After one brawl, he heads to another bar, the Kenmore, where he meets and falls for fellow drinker Wanda Wilcox (Faye Dunaway).

Their relationship is one of drinking and fighting, while book publisher Tully Sorenson (Alice Krige) also chases after him. But while a life with her would give him access to limitless money — and booze — as well as an opportunity to finally live for his art, he realizes that she  lives “trapped in a cage with golden bars.”

The bar is filled with various lowlifes to fall in love with, including Bukowski as Oldtimer, Fritz Feld (who turned a popping sound into a career that saw him act in 140 movies in 72 years), Pruitt Taylor Vince (who is in Cannon’s Shy People), Joe Unger (Sgt. Garcia in A Nightmare on Elm Street and Tinker in Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III), Gloria LeRoy as Grandma Moses, Sandy Martin (Grandma in Napoleon Dynamite) and a detective played by Jack Nance who follows Henry.

Barfly is also the first movie to use a Kino Flo light. It was specially created by director of photography Robby Müller’s electrical crew for the movie as so much of the film was difficult to light because so many of the locations were quite cramped. The film’s gaffer Frieder Hocheim and best boy Gary H. Swink designed the high-output fluorescent light with a remote ballast, creating a lamp unit light enough to be taped to a wall. Hochheim and Swink went into business as Kino Flo Incorporated and now the light is a part of the standard motion picture lighting package.

I always say that crazy stories about Hollywood are usually kayfabe tales done to drum up publicity, but when it comes to Cannon, they have to be true. So here’s the one story on Barfly. Cannon was going through major financial problems and had to limit how many movies it could make. They decided to not make Barfly as there were other movies that could make more money. However, Schroeder allegedly appeared at the Cannon offices with a battery-powered portable saw, telling everyone that Cannon was cutting off a piece of him by abandoning the film.

Jerry Belsen, who directed and wrote this movie, along with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Fun With Dick and Jane amongst many others, may have invented the phrase “You know what happens when you assume…”

Sean Stein (Michael Caine) is a successful novelist, but he’s been through so many divorces and bad relationships that he never wants to fall in love again, until he has his meet cute with artist Daisy Morgan (Sally Field) when they’re forced to strip and bound together by thieves at a charity dance. Yes, this actually happens.

Working with his lawyer Jay (Peter Boyle), Sean decides to hide who he is and actually win Daisy over with no money being involved. The problem is that she already has a boyfriend, the not so great Marty (Steve Guttenberg).

Then she finds out who Sean really is and tells him that she truly loves him. The problem is that he still thinks it’s all about money. This will rinse and repeat throughout the movie.

At least this has an interesting cast, with Jackie Cooper in his last role as Daisy’s father, along with Julie Kavner, Louise Lasser and Iman.

Supposedly, this movie is based on Belsen’s real life, with him claiming that every single thing that happened to Sean happened to him. Sadly, that experience could not help the death throes of Cannon, as this movie made $5 million on a $15 million budget.

Based on Giselle by Adolphe Adam, Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, Dancers tells the story of Tony (Mikhail Baryshnikov), who is trying to stage the final dance of Giselle in his career — much like Baryshnikov as this was to be a film record of his dancing in that play — just as he falls in love with Lisa (Julie Kent), but then she learns that he’s used the same romantic lines on every other lover he’s ever had.

Director Herbert Ross started as a dancer, became a choreographer and debuted as a director with the movie Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Some of his better regarded films are The Owl and the Pussycat, Play It Again Sam, Pennies From Heaven, Footloose, Steel Magnolias and Boys On the Side. His wife Nora Kaye was a ballerina and produced several of his movies, including The Turning Point, Nijinsky, Pennies From Heaven and The Secret of My Succe$s. She executive produced this movie, but ssadlydied before it was released.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Harry Hook, who also made the 1990 Lord of the Flies, The Kitchen Toto is about Jonathan Graham, a regional police officer in the British colony of Kenya dealing with the uprising of the Kikuyu tribe. When they kill a black priest who’s condemned them, he takes in the man’s young son Mwangi (Edwin Mahinda) as his houseboy. Or kitchen toto, which is where this gets its name from.

Mwangi is trapped between two worlds, the independence his country needs so badly and the British who have treated him so well. Well, except for John’s son Edward, who uses him for target practice with his air rifle. When the Kikuyu tribe tries to recruit the servants to push out the English rulers, our protagonist has a life choice to make.

Look, not every Cannon movie is ninjas and explosions. Sometimes, they’re stiff upper lip explorations of the United Kingdom’s past. But yes, they really should all be ninjas and explosions.

This was the last film of Edward Judd, who was in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Because of the Cats and The Vault of Horror.

I honestly have no idea how to classify this movie and you know what, let’s not put it in an easy bucket. Let’s just enjoy it for what it is.

Whatever it is.

Roger Ebert tried. He said that it had “an impressive content of sex and violence, but beneath that is a strange nostalgia that seems to have nothing to do with anything else. The nostalgia is for Provincetown, seen in a cold winter season with the weathered gray houses against a pink and purple sky, the gulls’ cries lonely in the twilight. This place is so deeply seen that the people in the movie sometimes seem like ghosts, occupying it for a time.”

Written and directed by Norman Mailer based on his novel of the same name, this feels like a David Lynch movie made by people who would make fun of David Lynch if he drank in the same bar as them, the kind of, well, tough guys who only order whiskey and whatever local beer is on tap.

As for the title, it comes up early and out of the mouth of Dougy Madden, played by real life tough guy Lawrence Tierney. It’s something boxer Roger Donahue told the writer: Frank Costello, the Murder, Inc. boss and his girlfriend met three champion boxers in the Stork Club. Costello demands that each, in turn, dance with his woman, and each nervously complies. The last, Willie Pep, who had a 229–11–1 record with 65 knockouts, who was described as “trying to fight a grass fire,” simply replied, “Tough guys don’t dance.”

Determining the moral of that story is like trying to divine what this movie is all about.

On the surface, it’s a noir about Tim Madden (Ryan O’Neal), former bartender, current ex-con and struggling writer, whose wife Patty Lareine (Debra Sandlund) has left him, who wakes up to a new tattoo that says Madeline, blood all over his car, a severed head where he keeps his marijuana and the new Provincetown police chief Luther Regency (Wings Hauser) showing up living with his former girlfriend named, you may have guessed it, Madeleine (Isabella Rossellini).

How did he get here? How did he lose the love of his life? Why did he answer that ad in Screw and swing with Madeleine and preacher Big Stoop (Penn Jillette) and his wife, who eventually became his wife? Why did he do that to Madeleine? Why did their argument cause a crash that cost him the child that he and Madeleine wanted? And now why would life take the only person he can depend on, his father Dougy, the guy who may be disappointed in him but who always tells it straight?

Tim’s life is a mess. After Patty left Big Stoop, she married his prep school friend Wardley Meeks III (John Bedford Lloyd), then got rich off her next divorced before marrying Tim and then leaving him and then disappearing. So maybe Tim killed her. And why is Madeline writing him to let him know that Regency was having an affair with Patty? It’s like a soap opera we haven’t watched for decades but need to get caught up on, except with great actors who maybe aren’t great actors in this, except they totally are and every frame is perect imperfection.

And just what does porn star Jessica Pond and her cucked husband Lonnie Pangborn (R. Patrick Sullivan) have to do with all this? Why are there now two heads in the marijuana hiding place? Why does Tim say, “Oh man! Oh God, oh man! Oh God, oh man! Oh God, oh man! Oh God, oh man, oh God!” which is ony topped by “Your knife is in my dog.” for dramatic reading? And what are we to make of the tales of the fires on the shore of Provincetown, the blend of The Fog and Messiah of Evil that is left as an aside in the film but definitely informs the storybook happy ending?

This is a movie about, by and for cocaine; a film in which the term imbroglio is said; where everyone is so sexed up that you can almost smell the Pine-sol scent of an adult book store’s neon flashing into the cold and foggy niht beckoning couples that are ready to decimate their lives for momentary and fleeting glimpses of the kind of orgasms they read about in letters to Penthouse; where women say things like, “Well, honey, I am a witch” and throw seance parties; and you wondder how can Tim ever settle down with Madeline with those bodies still floating out there and they’ve seen so much and done so much and the world is aways temptation because you can’t slow down and leave a pretty corpse after you’ve lived this kind of life; I came from this place, but my hometown is a small Western Pennsylvania town that has a brick building that is closed five nights a week but on Saturday and Sunday draws swingers from around the East Coast, a place where the English teacher who told me I’d never be a writer took a little blue pill and got in the hot tub and my grandmother heard on the scanner that he had one of those erections they warn you about in the commercials and they had to cut the blood to his member to stop the pain.

I mean, this is the movie where Wings Hauser and Isabella Rossellini have a shouting match made up of the following words:

“I made you come 16 times in a night.”

“Not one of them was good.”

“That’s because you’ve got no womb!”

You have to love Mailer, who made this his way, and then even read the negative commentary cards from a screening in the trailer.

I told you all this to tell you that if everything that Cannon did, if every line of coke and every wild story from Cannes and every failure was all so that this movie could be made, it was all so very much worth it.

You can get this movie from Vinegar Syndrome.

Yes, Cannon gave Jean-Luc Godard the money to make an experimental French New Wave Shakespeare adaptation written by Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy. It was originally to be written by Norman Mailer, who was also making Tough Guys Don’t Dance with Cannon and that’s a totally different story.

Famously, Golan and Globus signed the contract for this film with director Godard on a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival. Golan refused to sell the famous contract napkin for $10,000 when asked by the New York MoMA, which seems like a low figure.

Only three characters from the story — Lear (Mailer), Cordelia (Molly Ringwald) and Edgar (Leos Carax) — are in this. It’s set in and around Switzerland where William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth (Sellars) is trying to restore his ancestor’s plays in a world where civilization and culture has lost after Chernobyl.

Much of the dialogue isn’t spoken by the characters on-screen, but heard in voice-over or spoken, whispered or echoed by someone else off-screen. If that seems confusing, King Lear deliberately does not use conventional filmmaking techniques or even try to be watchable.

I definitely think that the beginning, where Menahem Golan complains about how long Godard is taking to make the film and demands its completion by the 1987 Cannes Film Festival is completely real.

King Lear did make its premiere at Cannes on May 17, 1987. It played U.S. theaters for two weeks and then disappeared for fifteen years. How many people actually saw it? Well, for years, Quentin Tarantino’s resume claimed that he had appeared in it, as he correctly figured that nobody would have seen it and known he was telling a lie.

You know who is in it? Burgess Meredith and Woody Allen.

Five years after we last saw Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone (Leon Issac Kennedy), he’s back in jail after being framed for murder. And by set up, Too Sweet is given some PCP in his water bottle during a boxing match and he turns his opponent El Cid’s (Madison Campudoni) brains into so much jelly.

Who would set up our hero in such a way? Serenghetti (Anthony Geary, yes, Luke from General Hospital) who makes a team of fighters in the big house that once a year challenges the warden’s (Ric Mancini) team of fighters.

The last thing Too Sweet wants to do is ever box again with blood on his hands, so he sends The Midnight Thud to assault our hero and take his manhood. Fog surrounds the jail cell, we hear bestial growling and then realize that Thud is played by Raymond Kessler, who you may know better as small size wrestler The Haiti Kid. Yes, a small but feral beast is unleashed for eight minutes of battle and wow. Just wow.

By the end of the movie, the crack smoking Thud — he smokes so much that he kills the rats in his cell — trains Too Sweet through yoga as he goes for revenge, as his cellmate Roscoe (Steve Antin, Rick from The Last American Virgin and the brother of New York Doll Robin Antin) has been beaten unmericful by another PCP fighter See Veer (Danny Trejo).

This movie has it all and by all, I mean Rick Zumwalt (Bull Hurey in Over the Top) as a prison guard, Magic Schwarz (Stone Cold, Mad Dog Joe DeCurso in Grunt! The Wrestling Movie) as Hugo the final boss, Too Sweet in a leather codpiece/Bruce Lee outfit, Geary having a luxury cell with a French chef and a trans lover, Zap from American Gladiators, female boxers decided to stop fighting and instead start kissing and boxing matches that feel more like pro wrestling.

Jamaa Fanaka directed and wrote all three movies in this series as well as Welcome Home Brother Charles and Street Wars. Somehow, this series went for urgent melodrama to a Mr. T appearance to this and I’m there for all of it.

As a 15-year-old, I absolutely hated this movie. He-Man was a known property with a series that was on TV every day, one of the best-selling toys and just about everyone knew everything there was about the mythos of Eternia, but the movie only spends a few minutes in Eternia and has human characters in the place of ones you’d want to see like Stratos, Fisto and Zodac. Or Tri-Klops, Batros and Man-E-Faces. Or Mer-Man, Ram Man and Sorceress. If by now you don’t realize how deep my He-Man fandom goes, by the end of this you’ll realize just how little I ever believed that I’d date anyone.

If I’d just realized that it was a secret Jack Kirby movie, maybe I would have loved it.

John Byrne, who is one of my biggest artistic influences — well, next to Kirby — called this out, saying, “The best New Gods movie, IMHO, is Masters of the Universe. I even corresponded with the director, who told me this was his intent, and that he had tried to get Kirby to do the production designs, but the studio nixed it. Check it out. It requires some bending and an occasional sex change (Metron becomes an ugly dwarf, The Highfather becomes the Sorceress), but it’s an amazingly close analog, otherwise. And Frank Langella’s Skeletor is a dandy Darkseid!”

To be fair, Star Wars is also a complete pastiche of the New Gods.

Director Gary Goddard responded in the letter page of Byrne’s comic book Next Men: “As the director of Masters of the Universe, it was a pleasure to see that someone got it. Your comparison of the film to Kirby’s New Gods was not far off. In fact, the storyline was greatly inspired by the classic Fantastic Four/Doctor Doom epics, The New Gods and a bit of Thor thrown in here and there. I intended the film to be a “motion picture comic book,” though it was a tough proposition to sell to the studio at the time. “Comics are just for kids,” they thought. They would not allow me to hire Jack Kirby who I desperately wanted to be the conceptual artist for the picture… I grew up with Kirby’s comics (I’ve still got all my Marvels from the first issue of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man through the time Kirby left) and I had great pleasure meeting him when he first moved to California. Since that time I enjoyed the friendship of Jack and Roz and was lucky enough to spend many hours with Jack, hearing how he created this character and that one, why a villain has to be even more powerful than a hero, and on and on. Jack was a great communicator, and listening to him was always an education. You might be interested to know that I tried to dedicate Masters of Universe to Jack Kirby in the closing credits, but the studio took the credit out.”

As it was, the look of this movie was created by William Stout, who has drawn several comic books as well as drawing the storyboards for Raiders of the Lost Ark and First Blood and concept and production art for Invaders from Mars, Conan the Barbarian, The Hitcher, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Willies, Return of the Living Dead, Theodore Rex, Predator and The Warrior and the Sorceress, which he also wrote. Obviously, I’m also a huge fan of Stout’s work.

He was joined by Jean “Moebius” Giraud, an artist whose influence on movies can’t be measured, from working on Jodorowsky’s Dune to being in the art department for Alien, TRON, Willow, The Fifth Element and The Abyss. So much of Blade Runner and its visual style is deeply in debt to Moebius.

Cannon claimed that Masters of the Universe would be the Star Wars of the 1980s and if we go just on the look of the characters, they tried. The hard part is that the end result is very Cannon: a lack of budget, focus and understanding of what they had on their hands.

Screenwriter David Odell had worked on The Muppet Show and The Dark Crystal. His original take on the material was closer to the cartoon, with He-Man’s mother coming from Earth, more of Beast Man and more time on Eternia. There was a rewrite by Goddard and Stephen Tolkin, who also wrote Albert Pyun’s Captain America, which was produced by Menahem Golan as part of his 21st Century Film Corporation after Cannon broke apart.

Instead, the movie begins at an apocalyptic ending, with Skeletor’s (Frank Langella, one of the major bright spots of the film; he was incredibly excited to make the movie as He-Man was his son’s favorite cartoon) army finally taking Castle Grayskull and capturing the Sorceress (Christina Pickles).

There’s one chance to save the day and it involves He-Man (Dolph Lundgren), Man-At-Arms (Jon Cypher) and Teela (Chelsea Field) mounting a rescue mission to get Gwildor (Billy Barty) free and find his Cosmic Key, which has been stolen by Evil-Lyn (Meg Foster, forever staring directly into your soul). Their escape takes them to Earth and meeting up with orphaned schoolgirl Julie Winston (Courtney Cox), her boyfriend Kevin Corrigan (Robert Duncan McNeill) and Detective Hugh Lubic (James Tolkan, pretty much playing what you hire James Tolkan for, an incredibly angry authority figure like he was in Back to the Future).

Skeletor sends Saurod (Pons Maar, who was the body model for The Noid), Beast Man (Tony Carroll), Karg (Robert Towers, who was Snoopy’s voice in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown) and Blade (Anthony de Longis, The Warrior and the Sorceress, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Dangerously Close and the voice of Lord Zygon in Starchaser: The Legend of Orin; he’s also one of my favorite people in this film and trained Lundgren in sword fighting) to battle the heroes.

The battle eventually does take them back to Eternia, but I can tell you, when I first saw this movie, I never wanted to see any action on our boring planet. But as I’ve watched this numerous times, I’ve come to really enjoy the look and feel of what Goddard was able to capture with the budget that he had.

Goddard has claimed that Cannon forced the movie to be mostly on Earth to keep the budget down. He did ask for more money so he could at least start and end the film on Eternia. However, Cannon’s financial woes — there was so little money that Goddard did every pickup and second unit shot — saw them shut down filming three days early and the final battle between He-Man and Skeletor was unfilmed. Luckily, Goddard was able to get a day to shoot the end, but as sets were being torn down throughout and the need to get it done quickly, that’s why the final battle has no background in it.

A supposed sequel was written and would have been directed by Albert Pyun and star surfer Laird Hamilton. In it, Skeletor would return to Earth and destroy it, making this a post-apocalyptic movie. After Masters of the Universe wasn’t the Star Wars of the 1980s, Pyun rewrote the script and made Cyborg.

As for Goddard, he had quite an interesting career after He-Man. Producer Edward R. Pressman (who executive produced this movie) hired him to create, write and direct a Universal Studios show, The Adventures of Conan: A Sword and Sorcery Spectacular.

Goddard also wrote Tarzan the Ape Man for the Dereks, as well as developing the Captain Power and Skeleton Warriors shows and toy lines. He also helped develop Spider-Man, Terminator and Jurassic Park rides for Universal Studios.

There have been numerous attempts to make a new Masters of the Universe movie. The bar, obviously, is not very high, but perhaps my love of the past and Cannon makes me look at this film — not the first movie for the property, as He-Man and She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword came out in 1985 — in a much kinder light.

As you can see, I’m very influenced by the look of this film. If you’d like to see more of my art, I post a new Masters of the Universe painting every week on Instagram.

The Salkinds had made three Superman movies and planned a fourth if Superman III made at least $40 million. It made $80 million even if people absolutely hated it. As for star Christopher Reeve, he was pretty unenthused about coming back to the role one more time and skipped being in Supergirl, which bombed, as did the Salkind’s Santa Claus: The Movie.

You know how much Golan and Globus loved Cannes, right?

Well, that’s where they made a deal with the Salkinds to buy the rights to Superman movies for $5 million.

They then got Reeve for $6 million, approval over story and director, a focus on ending nuclear weapons and financing his movie Street Smart.

Cannon was already $11 million down and the movie hadn’t even started filming.

Reeve wanted to direct, but other than some second unit, he wasn’t ready for a full film. Wes Craven was supposed to be the director, but he and Reeve didn’t work well together. Reeve asked for Ron Howard and got Sydney J. Furie, the maker of The Entity, Iron Eagle, The Taking of Beverly Hills and two Rodney Dangerfield movies, Ladybugs and My 5 Wives.

Consider that at one point, Cannon was almost the studio that made a Superman and a Spider-Man movie at the same time.

In his book Still Me, Reeve noted that Cannon was cutting budget anywhere they could, even shooting scenes set on 42nd Street in England. He said, “We were also hampered by budget constraints and cutbacks in all departments. Cannon Films had nearly thirty projects in the works at the time, and Superman IV received no special consideration.”

In fact, Cannon reduced the budget from $36 million to $17 million, but would still lose money, as their strategy of selling TV and video rights before the movie was made worked with smaller movies, but not with this budget, even as cut down as it was, even with the crew replaced by cheaper crews, even with shooting Smallville in England.

There was also a really bad test screening that caused 45 minutes of the film was cut, including another nuclear man that Superman destroys. Also by cutting the movie from two hours to ninety minutes, theater owners could get two more showing a day and make more money.

That said, while the movie made $36.7 million worldwide — and still made money on its cut budget — people hated it. It was the last Superman movie for 19 years and Reeves said, “Superman IV was a catastrophe from start to finish.”

At one point, the more monstrous Nuclear Man footage was considered for use as a sequel in which Superman would die at the hands of that creature and would be resurrected in the bottled city Kandor. This was years before the death of Superman story and somewhat close to what happened in the comics.

Anyways…

Somehow, Cannon was able to get Reeve (Superman/Clark Kent), Margot Kidder (Lois Lane), Jackie Cooper (Perry White) and Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen) to return. It starts with a big downer, as both of Superman’s Earth parents are now dead and there’s no way Marlon Brando is going to be in this movie.

Meanwhile, the Daily Planet has been taken over by David Warfield, a tabloid tycoon who fires Perry White and replaces him with his daughter Lacy (Mariel Hemingway). Also, the world is on the brink of nuclear war — which seemed quaint for a few years right? — and Superman grabs all the nukes, puts them in a giant net and throws it into the sun, which seems kind of dangerous.

Lenny Luthor (Jon Cryer) breaks his uncle out of jail and they meet with the military industrial complex who wants to kill Superman like they did Kennedy, so they all make a Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow) who can infect the Man of Steel with radiation and kill him. Also, there was a reason why Superman looked at that Kryptonian energy module in the beginning because it heals him.

What follows is the best kind of dumb: Superman pushes the moon and causes an eclipse, which shuts off Nuclear Man but does not cause giant waves that destroy Earth. Lacy is left in space, floating around with no oxygen but she’s fine while Superman activates a nuclear power plant by dropping Nuclear Man into it and powering the entire world and that should be no danger either, before bringing Lacy back and saving the Daily Planet.

Comic book movies wouldn’t recover until Tim Burton’s Batman.

Cannon wouldn’t live much longer.

Reeve would be paralyzed eight years later.

Superman IV was finally redeemed by just how bad Batman and Robin was.