EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie originally ran on the site on September 11, 2019. It’s been updated for Cannon Month.

David Engelbach wrote Over the Top, Death Wish 2 and two episodes of the TV shows Lottery and MacGyver. He also wrote the 1984 TV movie Goldie and the Bears, which starred Hulk Hogan. He’s only directed one film — the Cannon Films produced America 3000 — and you’re about to learn all about it.

“Nine hundred years after the Great Nuke. The world man created, he destroyed. Out of the darkness and ignorance of the radioactive rubble emerged a new order…and the world was woggos.”

After a nuclear war in the year 1992 — surprise! — mankind has gone back to the Stone Age and is ruled by Amazon women who keep men as wild animals to be used for labor and sex.

Two young guys, Korvis (Chuck Wagner, who was on TV’s Automan and is in The Sisterhood; he went on to be a theater actor and was a ringmaster for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus) and Gruss run away and find Camp Reagan, the weapons-filled bunker of the President of the United States of America when they aren’t being captured by the Amazonian Comb of the Friscos.

Laurene Landon (who was in the commercials in The Stuff and Maniac Cop 1 and 2), Galyn Gorg (Angie, the nuke addicted bad girl of RoboCop 2), the first Israeli mime and Father Nicholas in The Delta Force Shaike Ophir, black belt Karen Sheperd (The Enforcer from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys) and a monster named Aargh the Awful — who is a Bigfoot with a boombox played by basetball player Stephen Lawrence Malovic — all show up.

With that kind of description, it should be much better than it is. I’m sad to tell you that it drags and that it seems like only Australians, Italians and Filipinos can make proper post-apocalyptic movies.

You know, Radio Silence, who directed and produced this movie (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are the directors and Chad Villella produced), made the rather wonderful Ready Or Not, so I was pretty excited about seeing where they would take this film. And then I remembered that they also made the frustrating Southbound, a movie that for all its good moments feels like it just doesn’t fully connect for me. And then I recalled just how much I’ve disliked every Scream movie because they make a very fundamental error: As they dissect the slasher rules, they never seem to do anything but fall into the very same errors and on the rails rules that they decry. It’s one thing to point out the silliness of this genre, but if you’re not going to do something new and — even worse — if you’re going to point out something is dumb and then just do it all again despite proclaiming that you’re above this silliness, you appear even dumber.

Well, fool me five times now and I feel incredibly dumb for watching this.

Written by James Vanderbilt (who also scripted The Meg and Ready Or Not) and Guy Busick (Stan Against Evil), it feels like this movie exists simply as fan service for those that enjoyed the past films without breaking new ground. And I can hear fingers pounding back on keyboards to tell me that slashers don’t and that I expect too much from them, but when your entire franchise is predicated on changing up the game and you just repay the game save for a mention of elevated horror, you deserve to be found wanting.

Twenty-five years after the original Woodsboro murders committed by Billy Loomis and Stu Macher, another Ghostface appears and starts killing a group of teenagers connected to the original killings, with Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) as the first attack.

She survives, which brings her estranged sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) back home. Sam has a secret, as after she is attacked by Ghostface, she reveals to her sister that she has been having hallucinations of Billy Loomis, who is her biological father. When she blurted this fact to her mother, her father overheard and this caused their divorce.

To find out who the new Ghostface is — it could be Sam’s boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid, son of Dennis and Meg Ryan), Wes (the son of Sheriff Judy Hicks, played by Dylan Minnette and named for series director Wes Craven because nothing in these movies can be non-obvious, including a house having an Elm Street address), Amber Freeman (Mikey Madison, Sadie Atkins in Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood), twins Chad and Mindy Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad’s girlfriend Liv McKenzie (Sonia Ben Ammar).

The main narrative of the film is how Hollywood remakes or reboots beloved franchises and how Stab 8 has ruined the series, so it must be restarted in real life, which brings Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Dewey Riley (David Arquette) back once again. Other than the reveal that Prescott is married to Mark Kincaid (Patrick Dempsey), one wonders why they feel the need to come back for another run through this movie. Unlike other slashers, Sidney and Gale are the ones that get as beat up, stabbed and abused as Jason does, yet they keep coming — almost inhumanly — back for more.

How much of the movie is fan service or a throwback or a callback or a homage or just outright making an incredibly similar film? I can’t figure it out myself, other than to say that I spent weeks debating even writing this because I really know that these movies are not for me, but perhaps I’ll feel like I’ve exorcized the time I wasted on it by pounding on these keys.

The really weird thing is that the movie makes a big deal out of the mother of Sam and Tara and then just ignores it. Then again, Bettinelli-Olpin said, “She was definitely in the script. But it just never made the cut. It felt like we were kind of opening the movie up too much and making it not as much about the sisters…It’s hard to say, but it sounds like there’s an interesting story there.” Or, you know, it’s a plot hole.

I don’t know. I shouldn’t read Twitter when movies come out, because folks celebrated this like the Second Coming. And it’s just OK. I mean, it spoils the major twists all by itself, almost second guessing its twist by making it be the truth instead of a fake out. And I don’t know if it’s the digital ARRI Alexa Mini cameras, but this felt more like a direct to streaming film than a major theatrical feature, at least in look and feel.

And look, I don’t want to spoil anything, but Ghostface’s plan is ridiculous, nearly depending on a character not having an extra inhaler or being able to get one from an all-night pharmacy. It’s so much demands exact planning over months, if not years, that hinging the final blow on something that could go either way feels completely nonsensical.

But yeah. This movie is the very definition of not for me. There’s a ridiculous amount of Easter eggs for fans of the series, though, to the point that it distracted me instead of being fun, but if you find these movies your cup of tea, well, you were probably tweeting them out in the theater one assumes.

They’re already planning a sequel, so you can plan for me to write just about the same things, like how everyone claimed that the new leads breathed new life into the series while I wondered how cardboard cut-outs could breathe, and I should really just get back to writing about Golan, Globus, Mattei and D’Amato.

Before I saw this movie, I had no idea who Swearing At Motorists was.

They’re a two-piece rock and roll band made up of Dave Doughman (vocals and guitar) and drummer Martin Boeters. While the band formed in Dayton, Ohio in 1994, they’ve made the majority of their music overseas, specifically in Hamburg, Germany. And by that, Doughman seems responsible for most of the band’s output.

Directed by Jim Burns, who co-wrote the movie with Angela Slaven*, It’s Not All Rock & Roll is a literal warts and all biography of Doughman, who plays every show like he’s on the biggest stage there is, an escape from the real life of fatherhood, driving a forklift and depression. So whether he’s playing for six people or battling an unruly bar patron who won’t stop playing pool while he’s rocking his heart out, Doughman is devoted to someday being a working musician.

Known as “The World’s Local Band,” I started this film being disinterested in this band and unsure about Doughman, but by the end of the movie, I found myself cheering them on. You get a big window into the world of being a musician, even at the level the band is on. That said, they’ve released six albums and have toured the world, even if they carry their own gear. Take it from someone that’s slowly lifted a giant Marshall stack up a steep staircase in the middle of winter. Angus, Malcolm and Bon weren’t lying when they wrote, “Gettin’ old, gettin’ grey, gettin’ ripped off, underpaid. Gettin’ sold second hand. That’s how it goes, playin’ in a band.”

Whether or not you’ve ever heard of the band or care about their music, I highly recommend this film. Keep an eye out for it, as it doesn’t have American distribution as of yet.

You can learn more about Swearing at Motorists at their site and the movie at the production company’s site.

*They also made Serious Drugs, a documentary about the band BMX Bandits.

Director Sam Firstenberg and stars Michael Dudikoff and Steve James — that’s as Sergeant Joe Armstrong and Sergeant Curtis Jackson to all of us — are back in the second of five (well, six if you count American Samurai) movies in this series.

Now US Army Rangers, our heroes are helping the Marines, led by Captain Bill “Wild Bill” Woodward (Jeff Weston, who is your trivia answer to what actor could be in an Altman movie — The Player — and a Full Moon film, of which you can choose from Puppet Master II or Demonic Toys). Their ranks have been disappearing thanks to ninjas, so they called in the right soldiers.

They’re part of a plan by Leo “The Lion” Burke (Gary Conway from Land of the Giants; he also wrote this movie along with James Booth, who was in Avenging Force) who is creating super ninjas from the research of Alicia Sanborn’s father. He has a cool base on Blackbeard Island, his own ninja named Tojo Ken (Mike Stone, forever providing the stunt power behind Cannon’s ninja films, as he was the fight coordinator) and could have really made something of himself were it not for our heroes.

I love everything Firstenberg directed. And seeing Steve James elevated from sidekick to equal hero in this made me beyond glad. It’s basically a comic book movie made with no budget and all the heart in the world.

87 people die in this movie. Ninja war is hell too.

While not the first one made, Rumpelstiltskin was the first of the Cannon Films’ Movie Tales series to make it to the U.S.

It’s notable because it’s the only movie in which Billy Barty had the lead. It also has Amy Irving as the miller’s daughter, with her brother David directing and writing the movie and their mother, Priscilla Pointer, playing the Queen. Robert Symonds, their stepfather, plays the miller.

Richar Harrington’s Washington Post review said, “Rumpelstiltskin is as bad a children’s movie as has been made in the last 20 years, but in the canon of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’ Cannon films, it’s about average — badly written, badly directed, badly acted and badly made.”

The miller’s daughter can spin gold out of straw, so the king (Clive Reville) locks her in his castle and demands that she use that spinning wheel and bae of hay he got her to start making some gold for him.

Her tears bring Rumpelstiltskin, who promises to use his magic to transform the straw into gold if she gives him her first-born child.

If only Cannon had made these movies with the same actors that they used for their regular films, so Chuck Norris could be the woodsman shooting the Big Bad Wolf with a rocket launcher or Charles Bronson shoving a bowl of porridge in Goldilocks’ face and screaming, “You know what this is for?”

You can watch this on Tubi.

I’ve seen all of the Cannon Movie Tales and let me tell you, when I was young and they thought I had promise, well, they were wrong.

Directed by Eugene Marner, who also made Cannon’s Puss In Boots, this was written by his wife Carole Lucia Satrina, who also wrote that film, Cannon’s Red Riding Hood and three episodes of Tales from the Darkside, “Parlour Floor Font,” “In the Cards” and “The Odds.”

This may have the most well-recognized leads in the Cannon Movie Tales, as Beauty is played by Rebecca De Mornay and John Savage is Beast. And playing Beauty’s father is Yossi Graber, who was in Golan and Globus’ Operation Thunderbolt, but I don’t expect anyone other than Cannon Bros to know this.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I wish Cannon made these into fan service films and had the Beauty played by Lucinda Dickey and Bronson as the Beast. When the two of them realize that ninjas, led by Sho Kosugi, are taking over her father’s kingdom, he eats ten cabbages and grabs his specially made crossbow. Directed by Michael Winner, of course. But then as I wrote that, I really don’t want to see Ms. De Mornay get assaulted. So let’s go with Sam Firstenberg.

Hỏa Lò Prison started its use as a political prison used by French colonists in French Indochina before the North Vietnamese used it for jailing U.S. P.O.W.s during the Vietnam War. So while Cannon may have made at least five Vietnam P.O.W. movies that I can name off the top of my head, this is the first serious one they filmed.

Directed and written by Lionel Chetwynd, this film shows a decade in the life of LCDR Williamson (Michael Moriarty, one of my favorite actors) who watches men come, go and die inside the prison camp.

There’s Hubman (Paul Le Mat), a solder recalled to fight after serving in Korea who just wants to get home. Major Fischer (Jeffrey Jones in a rare heroic role) faces death with spiritual strength. Colonel Cathcart (Lawrence Pressman) tries to keep order in the face of chaos. But the only thing the men have is each other to lean on.

In no way is this an easy watch. It was made with the participation of real prisoners of war. While it failed at the box office, it remained popular amongst soldiers and those who have been in this situation.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This movie was a long-time passion project for star Christopher Reeve, but he couldn’t get it financed. When Cannon acquired the rights to Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Reeve agreed to do that movie if Cannon paid for this one.

The story came from David Freeman, who wrote the last draft for Alfred Hitchcock’s final unproduced movie The Short Night, which the author turned into the 1984 book The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock. The script was in a big pile of ones sent to Reeve, who had read a few pages and decided that it wasn’t for him. Weeks later, he picked it up, read it again and decided he had to make it.

It’s sort of based on real life, as Washington Post writer Janet Cooke has won a Pulitzer for her story about the life of a 9-year-old heroin addict. Two days after the award was given, the newspaper’s publisher Donald E. Graham held a press conference and admitted that the story was fictional. To make things worse, Cooke had forged her educational and resume. She left the paper, but after doing an interview with former boyfriend Mike Sager, the twosome sold the film rights to their story to Tri-Star Pictures for $1.6 million. That movie was never made.

This one was.

Director Jerry Schatzberg (The Seduction of Joe Tynan) and Reeve wanted to shoot on location in New York City, but Cannon was in money-saving mode and probably kept $2 million of their money by shooting it in Quebec. In fact, Cannon meddled throughout the movie and finally dumped it in just 300 theaters.

The irony of that is that this is one of a handful of Cannon movies that achieved their dream: co-star Morgan Freeman was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Fast Black.

Fast Back is really a pimp named Leo Smalls, Jr. and everyone believes that he’s the pimp that reporter Jonathan Fisher (Reeve) has been writing about and discussing on his new TV show, Street Smart. Now, his editor Ted Avery (Andre Gregory of My Dinner With Andre) and district attorney Leonard Pike (Jay Patterson) want him to give up his sources. The problem is that he’s made everything up.

But the real world that Jonathan soon finds himself in is dangerous, with him in danger of being prosecuted, being found out as a liar or worse, losing his life and the life of his lover Alison (Mimi Rogers).

With a Miles Davis soundtrack and an intense performance by Freeman, Street Smart is one of the better movies Cannon would make, even if they didn’t know how to sell it.

You can watch this on Tubi.