Maxine (Carey Lowell) is the kind of person who will do anything for her friends, including her roommate Michelle, who gets her involved in all sorts of hijinks over a stolen religious idol, The Crucible Of San Luca, which ends up getting her kidnapped and meeting a mercenary named Reno Mars (Charles Rocket).

Sure, it’s another trip through Romancing the Stone. The difference is that it’s directed by Albert Pyun, who also made Dangerously Close, Vicious Lips, Radioactive Dreams, Cyborg, Dollman and many more.  That means that it works hard to not be fully normal.

There’s also a cast that genre fans will enjoy spotting, like Thom Matthews (Tommy Jarvis!), Linda Kerridge from Fade to Black, Norbert Weisser (who is in several Pyun movies), Nicholas Guest (Todd, the put-up next door neighbor in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation), Galyn Görg (Cain’s lover in RoboCop 2) and even Courtney Cox.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie has already been on our site on January 30, 2019 and December 2, 2020, but seeing as how it’s Cannon Month and this is one of our favorites, it’s back. You can get it on blu ray from Kino Lorber.

2019 version

Ruggero Deodato brings together Richard Lynch, twin muscleheads called the Barbarian Brothers, George Eastman and Michael Berryman and the results are everything you dreamed that they would be. Within the first ten minutes of this film, I had already screamed from my couch in pure glee, so happy to be alive and watching an Italian barbarian movie — times two! — that was unashamed to be this stupid.

The Ragnicks are a tribe of peaceful traveling entertainers. Think sideshow — as they journey on horseback, one of them is even throwing knives to practice. They’ve recently adopted twins — Kutchek and Gore — and are protecting the magic ruby of their tribe. But soon, Kadar (Lynch) takes Queen Canary hostage. The young twins attack, biting off his fingers. However, he promises that if he takes Canary as one of his concubines, he and his men will never kill the twins.

Kadar is a dude with a plan. A fifteen-year plan, really. He raises each of them separately, telling them their brother is dead, and has them routinely beaten by a masked man — either silver or gold depending on the brother. Then, when they have gone through all the whippings and strength trials ala Conan, they will fight and kill one another. That way, he can keep his promise and keep getting some of that sweet freakshow loving from the queen of the sideshow.

The brothers knock off their helmets — forgot that part of the plan — and escape into the woods where they find their old people who now live in misery. They also find Ismena, a thief who is imprisoned by their old tribe. The Ragnicks believe that this is magic and try to hang the twins, but their necks are just too big to lynch and they win over their old friends.

Hijinks ensue — like arm wrestling George Eastman and battling a dragon in the Forbidden Land. It gets a little long at the end, but the ride there is pretty decent, with the Forbidden Land itself looking like where most of the budget went.

If you’re a fan of the Barbarian Brothers — David and Peter Paul — they also show up in D.C. Cab. It’s kind of amazing to me that they were born in Harford, Connecticut and never ended up in the WWE.

2020 version

Ruggero Deodato has been celebrated on this site, not just for Cannibal Holocaust, but for movies like Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man; Concorde Affaire ’79; House On the End of the Park; Raiders of Atlantis; Cut and Run; Body Count; The Washing Machine and Dial Help. From those movies, you can tell that Deodato has hit nearly every genre. Now, with this one, he returns to his peplum roots — Hercules, Prisoner of Evil was the first movie he directed — and enters the post-Arnold Italian barbarian boom with not one but two American swordsmen who look like living and breathing He-Man toys, David and Peter Paul, better known as The Barbarian Brothers.

I honestly can’t be impartial about this movie, as it’s packed with so much that I love. I mean, just from the voiced over credits, when the names Golan, Globus and Deodato come up, I can’t help but cheer. This is the kind of feel good junk food movie that I love, a film that completely rips off Conan the Barbarian in all the best of ways — times two.

It’s got an amazing cast. And the Barbarian Brothers. Perhaps realizing that the Brothers may look like a 1983 first wave Masters of the Universe figure but have the acting skills of, well, a 1983 first wave Masters of the Universe figure, Deodato wisely fills the film with all manner of amazing people. There’s Michael Berryman as the Dirtmaster, the henchman tasked with running The Pit, or the place where slaves do manual labor. George Eastman shows up for a few seconds to arm wrestle in a cantina scene. Eva LaRue — who somehow is both of the third installments of RoboCop and Ghoulies — as the long-lost adopted sister of the brothers. And perhaps, most importantly, Richard Lynch, who as always turns in a game performance despite the absolute silliness of the proceedings. I mean, the dude has hair extensions and fake fingers after the young brothers bite his fingers off.

It’s got the Barbarian Brothers. For two guys who look like they should be serious warriors — or barbarians if the title has anything to say about it — they spend much of the movie making fun of one another. They seem to screw up everything they touch and mostly only escape from situations by being bulls in a proverbial China shop. You have to love that despite the movie being set in what seems to be the distant past — unless Deodato is pulling a Yor Hunter from the Future fakeout on us — they speak as if it were 1987, calling one another bonehead repeatedly.

It’s got a great score. Pino Donaggio has written music for everything from Don’t Look Now and Tourist Trap to Dressed to Kill, The Howling and Body Double (and yes, Giallo In Venice and Gor II), so you know that when you hear his music, it’s going to elevate anything it plays behind.

It’s got fun effects and sets. One of the craziest things about the new blu ray of this is that it’s so crystal clear that you can see the strings moving a dragon’s mouth up and down, which is rather disconcerting. That said, the swamp set — where most of the film takes place — looks awesome otherwise. This is also a movie with magical belly button jewelry, which is a sentence I’ve never written before.

It’s got Mad Max wrapped up in its sword and sorcery. Despite — again — being set in the past, most of Kadar’s warriors look like they should be in the employ of Immortan Joe. Also, Kutchek and Gore — our heroes — live with a band of traveling circus performers who use their skills to throw knives and blow fire at their attackers. It’s like the hard-driving armada of — again! — Immortan Joe, but only 28 years earlier.

If you ever want to sit down and have me talk over a movie and extol its virtues — of which many would say there are none — then let it be this movie.

To learn even more about this movie there is so much in Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume II.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about The Barbarians here.

Ah, that most popular of all mismatched buddy cops, Robert Carradine and Billy Dee Williams.

Written by Rob Riley, Andrew Kurtzman (both writers from Saturday Night Live), Gail Morgan Hickman (Murphy’s Law and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown) and James Belushi — yes, the James Belushi — and directed by Jack Smight (No Way to Treat a Lady, The Illustrated Man, Damnation Alley), this is the story of two cops, the borderline psychotic Nick “Berserk” Barzack (Carradine) and smooth jazz playing ladies’ man Frank Hazeltine (Williams).

Not many buddy cop movies have the cops dealing with one of their relationships with their mother and ex-wife, who are played by Doris Roberts and Valerie Bertinelli. And in case you’re wondering why Belushi wasn’t in this, it turns out that his schedule was too busy, so they called in Carradine.

Hey! Peters Graves is in this! And John Gries! Man, John Gries, you’re in so much stuff that no one gives you credit for, making movies like Real Genius better as Lazlo, Joysticks as King Vidiot, O.D. in TerrorVision, you steal the show as Louie in Fright Night 2, you’re great as the wolfman in Monster Squad and yeah, everyone knows you were in Napoleon Dynamite but those roles, man — you’ve done so much with them.

And yes, if you have mud wrestling or any wrestling in your movie made in the 70s or 80s, Gene LeBell must legally be in it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared during a week of Stallone movies on August 15, 2019. A major film in Cannon’s journey to respectability, I was inspired to go back and update and add to this.

Stirling Silliphant wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, as well as The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Village of the Damned,  Telefon, The Enforcer, Shaft In Africa and more than 700 hours of prime-time television drama to his credit. He was also a close friend and student of Bruce Lee, who he featured in the movie Marlowe and four episodes of the series Longstreet. They also worked together on a script called The Silent Flute, which was eventually filmed as Circle of Iron.

Those are some fantastic credits. Somehow, someway, he eventually found himself working with Sylvester Stallone to write the screenplay for the movie that would take arm wrestling from the bar to the mainstream. And who was ready to direct?

None other than Cannon Group co-owner Menahem Golan, the director of Delta Force, Enter the Ninja and The Apple. Yes, that Menahem Golan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ8d_czhqeA

Lincoln Hawk (Stallone) is a man trying to rebuild his life. While he does that, he’s driving a truck and arm wrestling. His ex-wife Christina (Susan Blakely, My Mom’s a Werewolf, The Concorde … Airport ’79) wants him to bond with their son Michael (David Mendenhall, Space Raiders, Streets and the 12-year-old drug dealer in the Diff’rent Strokes episode where Nancy Reagan shows up) because she knows that she’s dying.

Michael has been in military school and calls everyone “sir.” His grandfather, Jason Cutler (this movie is yet another in my quest to see every film with Robert Loggia in it), hates Hawk and never wants him in their family.

On the journey from Colorado to California, Michael develops a deep bond with his father, who teaches him the art of arm wrestling and the essence of manhood. However, their reunion at the hospital is marred by the news of Christina’s demise. Blaming his father for not being there in her final moments, Michael returns to his grandfather’s home. Hawk, in a desperate attempt to free his son, ends up getting arrested. The mansion where Cutler resides may look familiar, as it was also featured in The Beverly Hillbillies.

Michael visits Hawk in jail, informing him of his decision to stay with his grandfather. Determined to win back his son’s trust, Hawk sets off to compete in the World Armwrestling Championship in Las Vegas, with a grand prize of $100,000 and a new, larger semi-truck. In a bold move, he sells his truck and places a $7,000 bet on himself at twenty-to-one odds. The discovery of the letters Hawk had written to him over the years, trying to establish a connection, further fuels Michael’s belief in his father.

Hawk advances to the final eight but suffers his first loss in the double-elimination tournament and hurts his arm. Cutler summons our hero and tells him that he’s always been a loser, but if he leaves forever, he’ll give him $500,000 and a better truck than the prize.

Hawk refuses and makes it to the finals, taking on his rival, the undefeated Bull Hurley. His son finds him and gives him the emotional energy he needs to survive, just as Hawk doesn’t only beat Bull but gains his respect. Somehow, Cutler gets over ten years of being a complete asshole and is happy about Michael and Hawk being reunited because that’s how eighties movies work. The guys get so sweaty in the final battle that they have to get the strap, and people go wild for it. It’s pretty impressive, and you’ll yell, “Get the strap!” too.

The film’s climactic finals were shot during a tournament organized by Cannon, the production company. This year-long competition, starting in Beverly Hills, featured events across North America, Europe, Israel, and Japan. The actual crowd and the B-roll footage of matches at the Las Vegas Hilton are what you see in the movie. The scene where Michael Bociu breaks his elbow? That’s as real as it gets.

If you’re into pro wrestling, Terry Funk, Reggie Bennett and Scott Norton show up here (Ox Baker, who was in Escape from New York, and Manny Fernandez and The Barbarian almost made it into the movie). Plenty of professional arm wrestlers like professional arm wrestling personalities such as Allen Fisher, John Vreeland, Andrew “Cobra” Rhodes, John Brzenk (who inspired the story) and Cleve Dean are also on hand.

The music in this movie is astounding. Kenny Loggins sings “Meet Me Halfway” numerous times, and there is also some Giorgio Moroder, some Asia, some Robin Zander, some Eddie Money and Sammy Hagar singing “Winner Takes It All,” which was also made into a music video to promote the film.

The film received three nominations at the 8th Golden Raspberry Awards in 1988. David Mendenhall won two for both Worst Supporting Actor and Worst New Star, which seems kind of crappy for them to abuse a kid. Sylvester Stallone was nominated for Worst Actor, an award he’s won four times, but he lost to Bill Cosby in Leonard Part 6 this time.

Stallone has claimed that if he had directed this, he would’ve changed the setting to an urban environment, used scored music instead of rock songs, and made the Las Vegas finale more ominous. These changes would have significantly altered the film’s tone and atmosphere. So why was he in it? He answered, “Menahem Golan kept offering me more and more money until I finally thought, “What the hell – no one will see it!””

Speaking of Stirling Silliphant, he only did the screenplay. Actor/writer Gary Conway (American Ninja 2: The Confrontation) and director/writer David Engelbach (America 3000, Death Wish II) created the original story. Engelbach cried when he saw the finished movie, remarking that his original draft “wasn’t nearly as dumb as the final film and was more about truck driving and arm-wrestling than it should’ve been.”

When this movie came out, my brother and I were in our early teens and couldn’t wait for it. There was an entire line of toys that had knobs in their backs that allowed them to arm wrestle and, even better, an actual competition table. We begged our parents for it nearly every day for six months, but our mother continually told us to use an actual table. She had no vision. At this point, I could have a father-in-law who hates me, a bedridden ex-wife and a son who doesn’t know me, but I could flash anyone and put their arm down in no time. Get the strap!

Even more magical, fifty miles from the filming of this movie, Sergio Martino had assembled an Italian/American crew to create Hands of Steel, the only Road Warrior by way of The Terminator truck driving movie that also has arm wrestling in it. Coincidence? Do you know anything about Italian cinema?

You can listen to The Cannon Canon podcast about this movie here.

The first full-length movie from director and writer Hamza Zaman, who also plays Yogi, The Institute is about Marie (Victorya Brandart) and Dan Sullivan (Ignacyo Matynia), who find the remote clinic of Dr. Arthur Lands, who they hope can finally help them to have a child. His methods are bizarre, but are they sinister?

Of course they are.

Why else would be watching this movie?

Actually, the baby making on display in this movie is basically tripping out in a roomful of strangers while lights flash and a radiation machine does its scientific magic, which seems quite out of the blue, but I was there for it.

What I really love is that the official site for this movie is really for the Lands Institute, located in the gentle hills of the Ipswich mountains. Far far away, behind the mountains, far from the teeming diseased cities we lay our plans, says the site, which stays in character.

The Institute is available on demand and on DVD and blu ray from Gravitas Ventures.

The Assault won the 1986 Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, which fulfilled some of the dreams of Menahem Golam and Yoram Globus, but they only distributed the film instead of producing it.

An adaption of The Assault by Harry Mulisch, it’s a story about the end of World War II and the evening that a Nazi collaborator is shot dead on his bicycle. He falls in front of a house, but the family there moves it to the Steenwijk house. The Nazis assume they are the killers, so they kill Anton’s (Marc van Uchelen as a child, Derek de Lint as an adult) parents and brother in front of him.

Over the rest of his life, he comes to grips with what happened that night. His memories are filled in and he tries to get past the horror that he’s lived through, even as he becomes a successful doctor.

This movie — and the book — were inspired by a real event. Fake Krist, a Dutch police officer and national-socialist who helped the Nazis hunt Jews and resistance fighters was killed in 1944 and in retaliation, Nazi forces executed ten inmates and torched four houses. The way that the man is shot on his bike by a man and a woman was taken from the death of W. M. Ragut, which inspired The Girl with the Red Hair.

Director Fons Rademakers also made Because of the Cats and Lifespan, one of the first mainstream movies to show shibari bondage.

Shot in 17 days with a budget of $25,000, Bryan Loves You is a movie that truly surprised me. I usually can’t deal with found footage films, but this uses the form in a way that creates a story that couldn’t be told any other way.

After Tony Todd starts the film with a warning about what we’re about to see and how it could psychologically harm us, we learn about Jonathan (director and writer Seth Landau, who just directed Take Out this year), a psychotherapist who is concerned that a cult that worships Bryan has taken over his small Arizona town.

He’s right.

I wish that the film stayed in the first stage of the film, as we saw how the cult has taken over the town and established such a foothold on the people. Once it moves into the mental hospital, it loses a bit of steam, yet it finds its footing again with the psychodramas that have to be acted out as therapy.

It’s definitely not like any movie I’ve seen before as it plunges you directly into a world that feels fully formed. It’s frustrating that there’s so much world-building and we don’t get to see everything.

That said, there are tons of cameos in this. Everyone from George Wendt and Tiffany Shepis to Bobby Slayton and Brinke Stevens are in it. It’s not for everyone, but there’s something here. I’m not certain what that something is, I wish that it had been explored more, but I can’t say that I’m upset with the time I spent watching Bryan Loves You.

The MVD blu ray of Bryan Loves You is packed with extras, including new audio commentary from Landau and the 2008 commentary from the Anchor Bay DVD that features Landau, the cast and crew along with JoBlo critic James Ostar, Elissa Dowling and professor and religious expert Dr. Phillip Baker. There are also interviews with Wendt, Shepis, Stevens and Daniel Roebuck as well as a new trailer for the movie.

Bryan Loves You is available from JAL Smithtown and MVD Entertainment on March 22.

Director and writer Frank Martinez has put together a Hollywood filled with bad cops, drug dealers, prostitutes and social rejects. Ray Balfi (Turk Matthews) is an ex-con trying to get his cartoon made but deals with rejection after rejection. But what happens when a new movie is made from it without his participation?

Now Ray is out for revenge, the kind of getting even that is punctuated by music video sequences. Seeing as how he has no idea who has taken his work for him — after all, he sent the script to a hundred studios — that means that a whole lot of people have to pay.

Originally known as Fade Out Ray, I’ve seen this movie compared to everyone from Tarantino to the Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Wes Anderson and Pedro Almodovar, which feels like people were just reaching for directors and film styles to compare this to. As for me, I have no such comparisons or limitations that I want to put on Martinez, who really pushed himself to make something unique for a first film.

Dreaming Hollywood is available from Cleopatra Entertainment on all VOD platforms and will also be available on blu ray, along with a soundtrack CD, featuring the music of DMX and Onyx.

Made back to back with King Solomon’s Mines, this was directed by Gary Nelson, who also made Freaky Friday and The Black Hole, which is a pretty wild resume when you think about it.

Speaking of King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain (Richard Chamberlain) and Jesse Huston (Sharon Stone) plan to be married but Allan is restless. That’s when a man is chased by two masked men into Allan’s estate, only to be murdered later that night. Before that happens, he reveals to Allan that his brother Robeson (Martin Rabbett, Chamberlain’s long-time partner) is still alive and has found the City of Gold.

Along with Umslopogaas (James Earl Jones), Swarma (Robert Donner) and several Asari warriors, Allan and Jesse go on a new adventure where they discover the city, which leads to a battle between the good Queen Nyleptha (Aileen Marson) and the evil Agon (Henry Silva) and Queen Sorais (Cassandra Peterson, which is strange as she doesn’t speak and at this point, Elvira was already well-known).

In true Cannon fashion, most of the music for this movie is just Jerry Goldsmith’s score for King Solomon’s Mines along with only thirty minutes of original music by Michael Linn. And if that isn’t Cannon, how about the fact that Golan and Globus had no contact with Nelson until he screened it for them. Golan was baffled by the film, thinking he was getting to see Invaders from Mars. He never admitted to his mistake and told Nelson that the film was unreleasable. Nelson then walked down a hall decorated with Cannon posters, all of which were in his opinion unreleasable too.

A movie with many working titles — My Affair With the President’s Wife, then The President’s Wife and The Assassin — star Charles Bronson set the record straight: “Someone thought the original title might be insulting to the presidency of the United States, so they changed it. There’s an assassination involved so they stuck with that. They didn’t want to scare off people who come to see my films with a title like President’s Wife. It’s not what people expect from one of my pictures.”

It was also Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland’s first in three years following an operation for breast cancer. She told The Ottawa Citizen, “I’d thought the cancer might have ended my acting career. They (Menahem and Yoram) asked me to do the film at my birthday party last year and it was the best present I could have received.”

Jay Killian (Charles Bronson) is a senior member of the Secret Service and he’s upset that instead of guarding President Calvin Craig, he’s been put on the detail of the First Lady, Lara Royce Craig (Jill Ireland). Neither of them likes the other at all, but they have to work together when she’s targeted by someone potentially in the White House itself. Meanwhile, Killian has to keep his relationship with co-worker Charlotte Chang (Jan Gan Boyd) alive.

The final theatrical film of director Peter Hunt (he would make the TV movie Eyes of a Witness in 1991; he’s best known for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) and writer Richard Sale, as wel as the last of sixteen movies that Ireland and Bronson would make together, Assassination feels like the end of an era. It was near the end of the glory years of Cannon, so don’t be surprised when music from Invasion U.S.A. gets re-used and whole pages of the script were torn out to cut the budget.

The best part of this? When Chang asks Killian why he doesn’t want to move in with her and he answers, “I don’t want to die from a terminal orgasm.”