June 19: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is free! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Daria (Elizabeth Kaitan, Vice Academy 3, 4, 5 and 6) and Tisa (Cindy Beal) have escaped from a space prison and made their way to a planet that only has two robots — Vak and Krel — and the scar-faced Zed (Don Scribner). They’re soon joined by Rik (Carl Horner) and his sister Shala (Brinke Stevens) for dinner, which soon becomes The Most Dangerous Game in space, with Zed hunting them down when he isn’t trying to assault them.
Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity was cited by Senator Jesse Helms, who had voters complain they had seen the movie on cable, and he wanted the rights to block objectionable cable content as part of the Cable Act of 1992. Luckily, that never happened.
Director and writer Ken Dixon also made The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The Best of Sex and Violence, Famous T&A, Filmgore and Zombiethon. He originally had Ginger Lynn playing Daria, which is ironic as Kaitan also became a lead in the Vice Academy series when Lynn’s Holly character went to jail.
It’s got a great title and Brinke Stevens. Sometimes that’s all you need.
This was originally called Cheerleader Conspiracy which I think is a pretty wonderful title. It even starts with some drama, as Beth Hartford (Tommi Rose) gets named cheer captain of Bridgebay High School, which some see as fishy as her mother Den (Mena Suvari, whose career spans American Beauty to American Pie movies to the TV series American Horror Story and American Woman and then goes off to be the lead in The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson) is the coach.
All of the girls are competing for a scholarship to Rossmore Carmel University and Beth is in the lead until a video of her underage drinking and slambooking her fellow cheer team members — yes, I have seen too many teen films and yes, my terminology is old and analog — and that’s when this movie asks all of us to know what a deepfake is and believes that high school cheerleaders have the skills — or is it their parents? — to make one.
By the time this is over, you’ll wonder who the bad guy is. Is it rival Ashley (Jazzy Kae Williams) and her mother Marisol (Karla Mosley)? The way too nice Olivia (Alexa Sutherland) and her mom Rebecca (Ashley Scott)? Or are our leads horrible people who don’t even realize just how much they’ve made everyone else absolutely detest them?
Spoiler warning — this movie has an astounding ending in which Beth goes to jail for murder and the killer — whose mother screams, I should’ve aborted you the minute I had the chance!” — gets the scholarship and steals Beth’s boyfriend. That’s the kind of weirdness that never happens on Lifetime, where it feels like this movie kind of should be.
I was going to say that this is the kind of movie where people start worrying about deepfakes without knowing that they take a lot of effort to make, but this is based on a true story. Raffaela Spone, a Bucks County, PA cheer mom, was accused of making deepfake videos of her daughter Allie’s cheerleading rivals vaping, drinking and posing nude, then sending them to coaches, along with texts that told the girls “you should kill yourself.”
Raffaela was arrested on six counts of misdemeanor harassment and cyber harassment of a child. According to Cosmopolitan, Bucks County DA Matt Weintraub said to the press, “This tech is now available to anyone with a smartphone. Your neighbor down the street, somebody who holds a grudge, we just have no way of knowing. It’s another way for an adult to now prey on children.”
Except that, well, that wasn’t true.
The cops had made a judgment call and experts in deepfake started commenting online and in the media that there was no way that someone with no training could do this. And all those texts and threatening images — and even the videos — had no evidence of ever coming from Raffaela’s phone. A digital-forensics expert who’d made a complete copy of the confiscated phone testified that there was no way that that phone could create and had never sent any of the threats or media that implicated the girls.
A detective even went on to admit — under oath — that he had never even bothered to look at Raffaela’s phone.
And then the officer who first said that it was all a deepfake, Matthew Reiss, got busted for possession of child porn yet his report remains on record. Bucks County DA’s office dropped the deepfake accusation and finally convicted Raffala with three counts of misdemeanor cyber harassment n May of 2022. The media stories I’ve found never point out that all of the police evidence against her doesn’t even exist.
Filipe Leite — who shot most of this footage — leaves behind his adoptive home of Canada to travel from Calgary all the way to Brazil riding his two horses Frenchie and Bruiser. He’s following a trail inspired by Aimé Tschiffely’s 1925 equestrian journey that will take him eight years to travel as he adds up 15,000 plus miles across twelve countries.
The travels were supposed to be shorter before the trail inspires Fellipe to go even further. Along the way, he deals with bad weather, corrupt border patrols and horrific weather conditions, all so that he can make the journey to his destination and then head back home, alone on the trail.
Filipe is a world-renowned Long Rider, an award-winning journalist and a best-selling author of Long Ride Home and Long Ride to the End of the World. He’s also the youngest person in the world to cross the Americas on horseback, an accomplishment celebrated by two statues of Fellipe being displayed in his native Brazil.
The Long Rider was directed by Sean Cisterna, who also made Blood Creek, War of the Dead and Kiss and Cry. This is an interesting idea for a film and quite the story. Trust me, I don’t think I could do what Fellipe has done.
Kamikaze Hearts is a film that has fascinated me since I first read about it in the venerable Cinema Sewer. Now that Kino Lorber has released a new 2K restoration of the film, this is the perfect time to dig in, watch it and learn as much as I can about it.
I’ve been just as intrigued by Ms. Sharon Mitchell and perhaps for a much longer time. During the late 90s and early 00s– yes, when you still had VHS tapes and not streaming — when bleach blondes and pneumatic implants were all the shelves had to offer, Mitchell would occasionally show up in films for brief moments and I’d want to know more about her. With short cropped hair and a non-silicone implanted body, she looked closer to normalcy while also having the kind of real punk look and attitude that doesn’t buy its shirts years later online.
There was no internet — only Adam Film World and Hustler rated movies on an erection scale — so i didn’t learn her full life until later, such as how she began her career as an off-Broadway actress and dancer before starring in some of the 70s roughest films, like Waterpower and The Violation of Claudia.
In 1996, a male stalker assaulted and nearly killed her, which led to her finally kicking heroin, becoming a certified addiction counselor and getting both an MA and a Ph.D. from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality all while working a series of odd jobs like catering, dogwalking, being a florist and as a maid.
Mitchell founded the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation (AIM), an organization which provided information and innovated STD testing for all workers in adult entertainment. While a data breach ended that company, Mitchell did so much to make it a safer space.
A decade before that, she was one of the stars of this film. For years, I saw it regarded as a documentary on the relationship that Mitchell had with her co-star Tigr Mennett. The truth is a lot more complicated.
In the incredible oral history of this film conducted by the always astounding The Rialto Report— that will be referred to and used as reference throughout this article — George Csicsery (a documentarian and actor in the film) says, “Some people don’t believe it’s a fictional film and have categorized it as a documentary, while other people see it for what it is; a pure narrative film. But that begs a deeper question: Is anything a documentary? In many ways, I think that is either the genius or the downfall of Kamikaze Hearts.”
Director Juliet Bashore had come from Orange County to San Francisco with no small degree of culture shock. Here was art, punk rock and even adult film — which she was paid well for to work as production assistant. She said, “I’ve got to find a way to make art out of this. I worked a few more of those gigs, telling myself I was “doing research” but frankly equally thrilled to be paid (and very well) in hard, cold (probably Mafia) cash.”
After meeting Tigr on a set, the two began to talk about the strangeness of the world of adult and decided to make a movie about it. And Tigr was in love — or had been in love or never fell out of love — with the woman she saw as its star: Mitchell.
Bashore was influenced by Spalding Grey — ironically, the Swimming to Cambodia author and raconteur performed in adult himself in the Zebedy Colt movie Farmer’s Daughters — and decided to make real life into art with some guardrails, saying “The whole film was completely storyboarded, leaving space within those boarded shots for improvisation. The final edit matches the original storyboard pretty much shot by shot — with the exception of a few additional scenes that were added later. But even these pick-ups were planned for.”
Keep in mind, this was years before movies were completely ad-libbed or even partially made with improvised moments. This Is Spinal Tap was made around the same time as this movie but that’s nearly all trained comedians. This was…more real.
The film starts with Tigr breathlessly telling us about Mitchell: “When I first met her I thought she was sleazy. She needed to make a living, she was fucking on camera – I thought she was just another dumb porno slut. But I was wrong.” And then we see Mitchell, movie star glamorous even on a porn budget — in the back of a cab on the way to the set, discussing Old Hollywood actors and how she feels like she could go mainstream (she was in Tootsie and The Deer Hunter).
Tigr goes on to explain how being in the orbit of a being like Mitchell led her down a path she didn’t expect. And this is why this movie feels so real — and not a quasi-documentary — because it obviously has real significance: I became different. I changed. I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be streetwise. I wanted to know how to use a needle… Goddamn irresponsible, gorgeous, sleazy porno slut. And she has it. And I mean, she’s this woman from New York City, who’s Italian, and she’s hot, and she speaks street language, no one can fuck with her, right? And there was some sort of power that she had that a porno person doesn’t have.”
Much like how in pro wresting life imitates art imitates life, we soon see Mitchell on stage dancing, then kneeling nude and answering audience questions. When asked what her next film will be, she says, “Truth or Fiction. It is a surrealistic look at myself and my girlfriend and the way we look at the X-rated film business and our relationship with each other, and it’s very nice…I don’t know whether I’m more truth or more fiction.”
Again, like wrestling, porn is about using your body for money, but also engaging in whole cloth character reinvention. Don’t like that you’re a geek who got bullied all through school and have a fascination with the dark side of humanity? Wrestling can give you a corpse paint covered alter ego and make you way tougher as you fake it — literally — until you make it. In the same way, being nude on screen can create a psychic armor of transgressiveness that allows a star to become more than they are — at least for a time — and become an object of desire. And just like the sychronized violence that happens in the squared circle, fake emotions can become real anger, relationships behind the scenes can become storylines an people can become lost and forget who they ever really were.
Bashore claims that the entire movie was a gift from Tigr to Mitchell, an opportunity to allow her muse to show the world just how talented she could be. That said, it’s hard to say that it’s truly mainstream. In the final moments, in the midst of a breakup, Tigr and Mitchell shoot up coke — real coke in a fake scene — and the camera never breaks for a single moment as Mitchell holds up a needle and says, “This was my dick and I fucked her with my dick. And I waited for this relationship to mature. This is a movie within a movie within a movie. This is timeless.”
In the same way no documentary or narrative movie can show you everything behind the scenes, this feels at once totally false and unabashedly sincere. It exists on a dichotomy that runs through the entire movie like a fault line. And there are real adult figures here — director Charles Webb (Charles De Santos), photographer Vincent Fronczek and actor Jon Martin show up — and musicans like Jennifer Blowdryer and Fast Floyd and the Famous Firebirds appear.
After disappearing for two decades, Kamikaze Hearts was released again. But now, thanks to the world of streaming — and Kino Lorber — we can all decipher for ourselves what is true, what is made up and what is probably both. And none of our answers really need to be right.
Kamikaze Hearts is now available to rent on the Kino Now platform. It will be on all major VOD platforms including Apple TV, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and Kino Now on June 28.
The sequel to Doc West — actually they are both edited from an Italian TV series — Triggerman finds Terence Hill back as Doc West and playing in a gambling tournament in the town of Holy Sands with the goal of using the profits to build a hospital. However, not every payer has the town’s best interests — or even good sportsmanship — on their minds.
In Germany, this was called Doc West – Nobody schlägt zurück (Doc West – Nobody Strikes Back) to cash in on Hill’s famous series of Nobody movies. As for star power, Paul Sorvino is back as the sheriff.
There are two of those players who demand the most attention. The first is the evil Dutchman (Mark Sivertsen, who often plays cops but is obviously not one in this film) and Debra “Tricky” Downing (Ornella Muti!).
You shouldn’t expect the heights of Hill’s Italian western heyday in this movie, but his fans should make a meal of this. In fact, they should make his famous beans that he eats in every movie, starting back in They Call Me Trinity and continuing in so many of his films, including My Name Is Nobody.
On his web site, Hill was actually interviewed about all the beans!
Q: In They Call Me Trinity, we see you eating beans for the first time in a movie, then they became ‘famous’ and a feature in most of your films…
A: Yes, I had to eat a lot in this scene… By the way, I still like to eat beans today! The audience enjoyed that scene so much that I had to keep eating them in following movies…
Q: What are the ingredients of the original bean-dish?
A: It is spicy! For the sauce you need chili peppers, olive oil, tomato sauce, onions, salt and a lot of pepper! Fry the onions in olive oil in a saucepan, add the remaining ingredients and cook until the beans are tender.
Made for Italian TV but shot in English in Sante Fe, New Mexico, Doc West is all about Minnesota “Doc” West (Terence Hill, who co-directed this with Giulio Base) is preparing to send money to a boarding school cross the country when robbers steal everything in the post office. He tries to chase them, but ends up saving a boy named Silver from a rattlesnake and losin their scent.
Silver tells Doc that the gang probably went to Holysand,a place where they learn that Silver’s stepfather Nathan Mitchell (Boots Southerland) has set a fire and is in the middle of battling with rival rancer Victor Baker (Adam Taylor). They’re stopped by Sheriff Roy Basehart (Paul Sorvino) and school teacher Denise Stark (Clare Carey).
After a poker game with Siver’s ranch hand Garvey (Alessio di Clemente) lands Doc in jail — he’s accused of cheating which isn’t true — he ends up fixing Sheriff Basehart’s back problems and winning his trust. Over another game of poker, West tells Basehart that he was a doctor, but had killed a patient while drunk. He vows to never drink or touch a scapel again and rides the west, looking for work so he can send money to his daughter Estrella.
West becomes integral in redeeming the town through his adventures with Silver often getting him in trouble. This movie seems similar to the lighthearted films that Hill is known for and would make a good family introduction to the Italian west. Speaking of family, one of the writers was Marco Barboni, son of Enzo Barboni, who directed the Trinity movie that made Terence Hill a worldwide name.
Arizona si scatenò… e li fece fuori tutt means Arizona Went Wild…and Took Them All Out. It was released in the U.S. as Arizona Colt Returns and it’s a sequel nearly in name only, as Anthony Steffen takes over for Giuliano Gemma, changing the character from a cocky rogue to a near Eastwood Man with No Name. Only sidekick Double Whiskey (Roberto Camardiel) is on hand to remind us of the first movie.
At the start of the story, Arizona and Double Whiskey are living in peace. Then, he learns that there’s a price on his head, so he fakes his death. While in town doing that — as if it were another daily errand — Arizona is asked by a landowner named Moreno (José Manuel Martin) to rescue his daughter Paloma (Rosalba Neri, who was killed in the first movie) from Keene (Aldo Sambrell), an old enemy who of course is the one who set him up. Arizona refuses the job, as he just wants to settle down with his girlfriend Sheena (Marcella Michelangeli). However, Keene makes his mind up for him when he captures Double Whiskey.
It’s time for the hero to live up to his theme song: “I think I’m gonna get my gun. I think I’m gonna shoot someone. Bang bang.” The bad guys even crucify him on an X and dunk him in water, but nothing is going to stop Arizona.
This was the first non-documentary movie directed by Sergio Martino. He’d direct The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardhthe next year and be remembered for an incredible four year run of giallo films. I’d rank him as close to Argento and Fulci as it gets for his films, which span several genre.
June 18: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Cannon! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
To read my five-part interview with The Cannon FIlm Guide author Austin Trunick, click here.
To catch up on the 145 — so far! — Cannon reviews on the site, check out the Letterboxd list.
If there was ever a movie that checked off nearly everything that I’m looking for in a movie, it would be this, which is an even better sequel to Luigi’s Cozzi’s Hercules than The Aventures of Hercules.
I knew that I would love it from the moment it started with an image of Edgar Allen Poe and the claim that it was based on his story The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade, even though that’s complete bullshit. God bless the filmmakers of my people. I mean, both stories have a hot air balloon, so I guess that’s good enough.
Austin Trunick, writer of The Cannon Film Guide, broke down how this film came to be in a series of tweets, explaining how a couple weeks into the shoot for Hercules in the summer of ’82, Menahem Golan was so happy with Cozzi’s rushes that he asked him to come up with another movie. Cozzi pitched Sinbad and Ferrigno — who had not yet been through the weirdness that saw a reshoot for Seven Magnificent Gladiators turn into The Aventures of Hercules. Yes, Cannon made a movie that everyone in the cast and crew other than Lou and his wife knew was a sequel and not a reshoot. That’s some Badfinger level kayfabe.
After making those three movies, Cozzi finally wrote Sinbad, but Cannon’s Italian division — unlike its American side — could only make one movie at a time. The Assisi Underground was their movie of the year, so Cozzi waited until Dario Argento asked him to work on Phenomena.
Meanwhile, Cannon’s Italian officer finally decided that instead of making a movie, this would make a great Italian kids TV show. They hired Enzo Castellari( 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Street Law, Keoma) to direct, padded out the script to four hour-long episodes and shot as much as they could, seeing as how it was 1986, the year Cannon made hundreds of movies and suddenly had to start cutting budgets. I mean — couldn’t they have floated over the ship from Pirates — it was docked at Cannes for years — and saved even more?
Cannon hated what they had in the can and thought it was unreleasable. Have you seen Italian movies? I can only imagine what they saw, because the footage here looks really classy for the most part.
A year later, Cozzi cast Cannon exec John Thompson in Argento’s TV series Turno di Notte and Thompson revealed the fate of Sinbad. He had an offer: instead of letting that movie just sit there, what if he fixed it? Cozzi said that they could make a movie, Menahem agreed and with a fraction of the film’s budget, he shot a The Princess Bride opening with his daughter and Daria Nicolodi in his apartment, added some special effects and a voiceover, and somehow put it all together.
As for Castellari, he had no idea that Cannon and Cozzi turned his footage into a movie until he saw it in an Italian video store shelf in the early 1990s. He rented the movie but wasn’t able to finish watching it.
It’s amazing that the film that resulted is as good as it is.
Daria plays a mother reading a bedtime story to her daughter and prepare yourself for Italian to English dubbing. She tells her of how Jaffar (John Steiner) has taken over the city of Basra from its kindly caliph (Donald Hodson). He’s put Princess Alina (Alessandra Martines) into captivity until she agrees to marry him instead of Prince Ali (Roland Wybenga) and you know, normally I wouldn’t ask if they were brother and sister but this is an Italian movie.
Sinbad (Ferrigno) and his crew — which includes Ali, Japanese (or Chinese but definitely Asian because he quotes Confucius and dressed in kabuki gear) warrior Cantu (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), the small Poochie (Cork Hubbert), the cook (Cannon utility fielder Yehuda Efroni) and a viking (Ennio Girolami) — sail on in to town and are captured by the soldiers they once called friends.
What follows are a series of episodic moments — which makes sense, seeing as how these were all going to be episodes of the TV show — like Hercules tying snakes into a ladder to escape a trap, an attack by the undead Legion of Darkness, a battle with rock monsters, Amazons that act like sirens and nearly kill the entire crew before Sinbad exposes the true nature of Queen Farida (Melonee Rodgers), the Ghost King and Knights of the Isle of the Dead, a Swamp Thinglooking beast known as the Lord of Darkness and finally a battle between a good and evil Sinbad that uses the same laser effects that Cozzi throws into all of his movies and we’re all the better for it.
Man, there’s so much more, like Hercules meeting his true love Kira (Stefania Girolami Goodwin) and escaping the Isle of the Dead by inflating a hot air balloon by blowing into it like he’s Jon Milk Thor. There’s also a great villainess by the name of Soukra who is played by the muscle-bound Teagan Clive, who we all know as the Alienator.
This movie is non-stop fun, featuring scenes where Ferrigno bursts out of chains, throws dudes into alligator-filled pits, fights himself, defeats a laser trap, beats up numerous monsters and rips out a zombie’s heart, which has a face on it, and squeezes it while it screams.
Sinbad was intended to be a kid TV show, remember, so you may be surprised to know that this is an Italian movie through and through with blood, guts, impaling and all sorts of muck. It also looks like the cast is having an absolute blast filming it with everyone going over the top. I’d love to have had this be a full series, just like how Yor Hunter from the Future has even more Yor once you track down that miniseries.
You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about Sinbad of the Seven Seas right here.
Mark (Andrew C. Fisher) has always dreamed of buying Blackwood Falls, an old west ghosttown and fixing it up to make it a tourist destination. It’s definitely a fixer upper with no running water or electricity, but that’s no problem, right? Well, his investor (Mike Dell) leaves town in a hurry and his wife Jenna (Mandy Lee Rubio) feels about Blackwood Falls like Lisa Douglas does Green Acres.
I’d say all is well and good, but when a videographer becomes to shoot a promotional video, his girlfriend Lisa (Lauren Lox) goes from demanding that they leave to disappearing without a single trace.
Director and writer Isaac Rodriguez also made Last Radio Callwhich made good use of found footage. He based this movie on a story he saw online about an influencer who sold everything and moved to a ghost town. I actually enjoyed his former film way more than this one. It takes a long time for anything to happen and while the last fifteen minutes are filled with scares — Jenna tries to escape the town and becomes lost in a wooden maze while being pursued like they’re at the Overlook — it’s work to get there.
A Town Full of Ghosts is now available on digital platforms.
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