EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on July 7, 2019.

Every time I do an in-depth film week, there comes a moment when I go from “most of these movies aren’t very good” and “they just have the same tropes over and over again” to “I love this movie!” It’s digital Stockholm Syndrome and it happens almost every time. It happened at some point during Chained Heat during my Linda Blair week. And now, at some point during Kickboxer, I fell in absolute head over heels love with Jean-Claude Van Damme movies.

This reminds me of a moment in my childhood. It was probably 1979 and local TV independent station WPTT-22 was advertising the heck out of kickboxing, proclaiming it as the most violent new sport around. I became nearly manic with intensity, needing to see this kickboxing for myself and Saturday night at 10 PM, when it would air, felt like months, not days, away. Every single TV and radio commerical stoked the flames of my nine-year-old demand to see these fights. The reality? Just white dudes kicking one another slowly in matches that were no more intense than an average boxing battle. The fight that was inside my head? Well, that would be this movie.

This is but the first of seven Kickboxer films, but it’s a doozy. The good guys are as good as it gets, while the bad guys are the absolute worst people to ever walk the face of the Earth.

Kurt Sloane (Van Damme) is the younger brother of Eric Sloane, the United States kickboxing world champion. Eric is played by Dennis Alexio, who only appeared in two other acting jobs: the TV series Super Force and as Toshi Lum in Picasso Trigger.

His life story should be a movie, as he started his professional kickboxing career by winning seventeen consecutive fights with only a single fight lasting more than one round. He then battled Don “The Dragon” Wilson to a loss for the WKA World Super Light Heavyweight title on NBC before continuing to move up in weight divisions and even boxing professionally for a year.

After slowing down his career — if you can call it that, he won eight different titles — by fighting lower level K-1 fighters and gaining a rep for avoiding top level fighters, Alexio retired after winning the WAKO Pro World Heavyweight Full Contact Championship. But his crazy life wasn’t over yet.

In 2003, he was first convicted of bank fraud. Charges like that would come back to haunt him, including failing to pay past child support. A decade later, Alexio and his wife were charged with thirty-six counts, such as filing false tax claims, wire fraud and money laundering, as well as charges of sending false documents with the goal of obtaining gold bars and coins worth hundreds of thousands of US dollars. He was finally convicted of twenty-eight of those counts and now resides at FCI Safford, a low-security federal prison in Arizona.

Let’s get back to Kickboxer.

After yet another successful title win, Eric decides to go to Thailand and build on his legend. After all, that’s where the sport was born. Eric doesn’t even train, thinking that he can defeat anyone. But his brother discovers that his opponent, Tong Po (Van Damme’s childhood friend Michel Qissi, who is absolutely the greatest villain of all time) is a maniac. The dude kicks concrete pillars with his bare legs and has a stare that confirms that he is a murderer.

Kurt begs his brother not to fight, but Eric laughs it off. Po murks him round after round, beating him into the ground with ease as the crowd basically laughs at the two gaijin infiltrating their world. Even after Kurt throws in the towel, Tong Po kicks it out of the ring and elbows Eric in the back, turning him into a quadriplegic before tearing his title belt to shreds. And get this — there are two more matches to go. This wasn’t even the main event!

Kurt is now stuck as a stranger in a strange land, with a brother near death, unable to speak the language. Winston Taylor, a retired US Army special forces member, helps them get to the hospital where they learn that Eric will never walk, much less kickbox, again.

Kurt vows to get revenge and is introduced to Xian Chow, a trainer of Muay Thai. Basically, this training involves him torturing our hero, so if you’d like to see a muscular young boy from Brussels get trussed up by an older Asian daddy that wants to teach him the ropes, you can watch this and still feel pretty manly about it. I kid — although that sequence at the beginning where the shirtless brothers cavort about Thailand seems a little romantic.

Somehow during all this Kurt falls from Xian’s niece Mylee and helps her battle the crime lord Freddy Li. Xian then convinces Freddy to book a match between Tong Po and Kurt in the ancient tradition. That tradition? Hemp ropes all over the fists, coated in resin and dipped in broken glass while the ring has metal chains instead of ropes and fire is everywhere. This is the exact moment I lost my mind and began screaming at the screen as if this were a real fight that I was watching live and no longer a multipack DVD that I bought for $4.

Freddy Li arranges to have the fight fixed and gets $1 million from syndicate bosses to bet on the outcome. To stack the odds, Eric is kidnapped so that Kurt will do the job. Think that’s bad? Tong Po also assaults Mylee. Remember how I said these guys were the worst humans in almost any movie not starring David Hess?

Xian tells Kurt to go the distance in the fight before losing, which gives him and Taylor time to save Eric, who appears just in time to chant “Nuk Soo Kow,” or white warrior, along with the fickle crowd who turns on Tong Po. Kurt goes buck wild and easily bests the maniac who started the match out by eating broken glass and bloodying up his own tongue.

While Tong Po is listed as playing himself, please know that that is really Michael Qissi. This isn’t a Zeus/Tiny Lister deal. His voice, however, was dubbed by Jim Cummings, who is also the voice of Winnie the Pooh and Darkwing Duck. However, don’t celebrate just yet, as the actor was accused earlier this year of animal abuse, drug addiction and physical, mental and sexual abuse by his ex-wife. After knowing that, it adds some real cringe to the line that Tong Po yells during the fight: “You bleed like Mylee! Mylee… good fuck!”

You can listen to The Cannon Canon podcast about Kickboxer here.

As of the writing of this, one person each has written a user review and critic review on IMDB. Now, I join them, the smallest fan club of a movie that no one else wants or needs to watch. Yes, who was looking for Sally Kellerman and Michael Moriarty in a movie about a mysterious ice cave?

Made by Romanian director Radu Gabrea and writer Mike Werb (who would go on to make Darkman III: DIe, Darkman, Die; Face/Off, The Mask and Food of the Gods II), this movie is essential for those of us who have a David Mendenhall and have already watched Going Bananas and Over the Top. Or maybe you’re doing a marathon of the films of Virgil Frye and need something to pair with Revenge of the Ninja or Up from the Depths.

Mendenhall plays Alex Ostrow, whose mother Valerie (Sally Kellerman) is a scientist looking for a rare Chilean spider. They’re soon joined by Manny Wise (Moriarty) and his daughter Ona (Marcia Christie) on the hunt for the cave of that spider and pursued by Valerie’s husband Victor Talbot (Norbert Weisser) and his underling Frank Hagen (Virgil Frye).

At one point, Alex has to fix a TV for a tribe of cannibals so fierce that they cut off their victim’s manhood and shove it down their throat. He gets I Love Lucy to air, but they’ve seen it before and grow angry. This is a movie for kids — well, it’s PG-13 — but it’s also Cannon.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on July 13, 2019.

Cannon Films — oh Cannon Films, you magnificent maniacs — had big plans in 1989. They wanted to make a sequel to their 1987’s film Masters of the Universe and they had the rights to make a live-action Spider-Man movie.

However, Cannon was out of money, so they had to cancel both of those movies. The trouble was, they had already built the sets for both of them, which were going to have Albert Pyun direct both at the same time.

Yep — those sets cost $2 million dollars. So Pyun wrote the storyline for Cyborg in one weekend with Chuck Norris in mind, but co-producer Menahem Golan wanted Jean-Claude van Damme. The result? 23 days of filming and a budget for under $500,000 — including Van Damme’s salary.

A plague known as the living death has ended the world. Yet in Atlanta, the CDC has been working on a cure. They just need information stored on a computer in New York City, so Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haddon, who played Spermula and was the original Dale Arden before being recast by Dino De Laurentiis for Flash Gordon) gets transformed into a cyborg. Along with her bodyguard Marshall Strat, she finds it just in time to be attacked by Fender Tremolo (Vincent Klyn, Point Break as well as several other Pyun films) and his pirate gang. If you look hard enough, you’ll realize that Fender’s costume uses parts of Blade’s from Masters of the Universe.

Fender wants the cure so he can have a monopoly on its production. His speech is amazing in this scene: “First there was the collapse of civilization: anarchy, genocide, starvation. Then when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, we got the plague. The Living Death, quickly closing its fist over the entire planet. Then we heard the rumors: that the last scientists were working on a cure that would end the plague and restore the world. Restore it? Why? I like the death! I like the misery! I like this world!”

Method Man sampled most of this speech as the opening lyrics to his song “Judgment Day” from his album Tical 2000: Judgement Day. They aren’t in this video, but you can definitely see the influence of the film.

Other bands that have sampled Fender’s words include Mortician’s “World Damnation,” Chimaira’s “Resurrection” and a grindcore band called Vomitorial Corpulence.

Strat is injured in the fight and sends Pearl to find a mercenary known as a slinger to get her to safety. That slinger is Gibson Rickenbacker (Van Damme), who has only saved her for a brief moment when Fender and his gang take her back, kill an entire family and steal a boat to take them to Atlanta.

Our hero is soon joined by Nady Simmons (Deborah Richter, Candy from Midnight Madness), a girl whose family was wiped out by the plague. But Gibson wants to kill Fender more than save the world. He’s been after him for a while, as the villain killed his lover and ruined his only opportunity to have a family. To make matters worse, Haley — his lover’s sister — has now become one of Fender’s pirates.

Nursing a gunshot wound from Fender, Pearl refuses to accept his help, instead planning on killing Fender herself. She’s probably right, as he’s easily beaten by the pirates and crucified on a ship. Yes, another movie where Van Damme is tied up and left for dead!

Of course our hero is able to get back down and bring his family back together, even if his sidekick dies at the end. They get Pearl to her final destination and that’s about as happy as a post-apocalyptic movie can end.

Or does it? Albert Pyun wanted this movie to be a heavy opera without dialogue, shot in granulated black and white. Even in its death throes — this is the last film released by the studio — Cannon said no. Imagine what it takes when Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus have more common sense than you. Menahem directed The Apple!

In the director’s cut of this film — released as Slinger in Germany — there’s a caption saying “9 Months Later.” Then, during an electrical storm, a flashing sphere reveals a nude female cyborg, promising another film by saying “Next: Cyborg Nemesis: The Dark Rift.” Yes, that’s a total ripoff of Terminator.

The test screening was a disaster with only one out of 100 people liking the movie. Golan and Globus tried to convince JCVD to just release the movie, but just like he did in Bloodsport, he spent two months cutting slow parts so that the movie was nearly all fights. After some violence was taken out to make an R rating, this movie makes even less sense than you’d think.

By all rights, I should love a post-apocalyptic movie where everyone is named for electronic guitars and Van Damme kicks people. I can never enjoy this movie for some reason. It just goes on and on, meandering around. Perhaps it’s because my heart lies in the Italian end of the world films. I want to love this and I just can’t bring myself to enjoy it as much as I should.

You know who really didn’t enjoy this movie? Actor Jackson “Rock’” Pinckney, who injured his eye during a knife scene and lost vision for life. He successfully sued Van Damme after the movie was in theaters.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was on the site on June 18, 2022.

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 Badfingerlevel 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 into 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 Thing looking 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 Mikl 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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally ran on March 6, 2020.

If you’re going to make a second Gor movie, by all means, call up John “Bud” Cardos. Bud started his career as a child actor, a rodeo rider and a bird handler before appearing as a biker in movies like Hells Angels on Wheels, Psych-Out and Satan’s Sadists. Eventually, he’d start directing movies such as Kingdom of the Spiders, Mutant, The Day Time Ended and The Dark.

While drinking alone one night — thinking about all the adventures he had in the first film and that he actually talked to a real live woman — Professor Tarl Cabot (welcome back Urbano Barberini) meets an even bigger loser than himself, Watney Smith. Before you can say strike out, they’re blasted back to that magical planet of thongs.

Cabot and Talena (man, did everyone sign contracts for the sequel? Because Rebecca Ferratti is back, too) reunite. Her father King Marlenus (Larry Taylor also signed one of those contracts it appears) married a girl named Lana (yes, she was in the first movie briefly and she’s played in both by Donna Denton) and is stepping down from his throne. Of all the men in Gor, he picks the accounting professor from Earth to assume the crown.

Of course, Lana and Xenos — yes, Jack Palance is back — frame our hero, try to kill Talena with female gladiators and toss young Watney aside. I think the dude is missing a t in the front of his name.

All manner of hijinks ensue and if you thought the first Gor was rough, well, at least that one had Oliver Reed in it. There’s one funny scene here, though. The main bad guy — the Hunter — is told that Lana killed the king and he’s like, “Oh OK” and kills her without even thinking about it. Who knew it’d be that easy to defeat these villains?

I guess this movie was shot pretty much right after the original, because surely horndog boys would want more of the world of Gor. Before the internet, horrible movies like this were all we had. It was a rough time to be alive. When people remember the 80’s, I don’t recall them quite so fondly.

You can watch this on Tubi with and without Mystery Science Theater 3000 making it better.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode for Outlaw of Gor here.

Arabella Black Angel (1989): Also known as Angel: Black Angel, this is one of the sleaziest giallo that I’ve come across. Seeing as how I’ve watched Play Motel, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Giallo In Venice and own multiple copies of The New York Ripper, that’s saying something.

Director Stelvio Massi was the cinematographer or director of photography for plenty of great movies like The Case of the Bloody Iris, Sartana’s Here…Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin and Giovannona Long-Thigh. He knows how to make things look gorgeous, particularly in the way he shoots women, which comes in more than handy here.

Arabella is a woman obsessed with the carnal act. Sadly, her husband has been rendered impotent and confined to a wheelchair ever since he wrecked his car while she was dirty facetiming him (he was driving, because the opposite is impossible) on their wedding day. She’s filled his role with trips to brothels, including one that gets raided while she’s assaulted by a cop. She gets back at that officer by inviting him back to her place and while he’s yodeling in the valley, she bops him upside the head with a hammer. Her cucked husband, who has been watching all of this hammer smashed face action go down finally feels the blood flow down below, which means that he has to keep setting up his wife to kill off more and more people. He also finally gets back the urge to write and they start to fall in love again, but of course, he has to keep watching her make love to other people.

Also: lots of genital mutilation.

Ida Galli plays the mother-in-law. You’ll remember her from The Sweet Body of Deborah and Fulci’s The Psychic. Rena Niehaus, who is in the absolutely baffling strange film Damned In Venice, is also on hand.

The problem for our heroine is that everyone she makes loves to dies, including a cowboy who gets his member sliced clean off. The next day, as the cops are gathering evidence, one of them is so upset that he can’t stop eating his sandwich. The world of this movie is insane, because there’s a photo of that mutilated wang on the cover of the next day’s newspaper.

There’s also a scene in the Freak Boy Zone, a place where Arabelle cruises all the gay men and picks one to take home. This entire moment is absolutely insane, as the homosexual side of town feels like it came out of an Enzo G. Castellari post-apocalyptic movie.

This movie looks grubby, makes little to no sense and will offend pretty much everyone that watches it. That means that you’re definitely going to want to watch it.

The Killer Is Still Among Us (1986): Also known as Florence! The Killer is Still Among Us and The Killer Has Returned, you have to admire the chutzpah — or the gall — of a film to have the disclaimer “This film was made as a warning to young people and with the hope that it will be of use to law enforcement to bring these ferocious killers to justice,” after you’ve just watched 83 minutes of a killer graphically mutilating women and their most intimate of parts, as if this were some bid to outdo Giallo  In Venice or The New York Ripper.

Based on the true story of the Florence serial killer “The Monster of Florence,” this was written by Ernesto Gastaldi (The Whip and the Body, All the Colors of the Dark, My Name Is Nobody) and Giuliano Carnimeo (who directed four of the Sartana films under the alias Anthony Ascott, as well as The Case of the Bloody Iris, Exterminators of the Year 3000 and Ratman).

Directing this movie — and helping with the script — would be Camillio Teti, who produced The Dead Are Alive and Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s attempt at a non-mondo, the ironically named Mondo Candideo.

Much like a scene out of Maniac, a couple on lover’s lane is blown away mid-aardvark by a gloved killer. What separates the uomini from the ragazzi is that the killer then uses a knife and a tree branch to do things that made me turn my head from the screen for an extended period of time.

Christiana Marelli has been studying the killer in criminology class to the displeasure of her boyfriend, the cops and her teachers. This leads to her being stalked via phone and in person by the killer. Of course, seeing as how Alex, that formerly mentioned boyfriend, is never around during these killings, you can see why she starts thinking he could be Il Mostro.

The film moves from the giallo into the supernatural as our heroine attends a seance where the medium has a vision of the killer decimating a camping couple, soon developing the same wound that the victims just received.

What does Christina do? Run to the theater to see if Alex is there or not, proving that while he is waiting for her, he certainly could still be the killer. If I were her professor, I’d have given her a zero out of thirty.

After all this, she just sits down to watch a movie with him and it ends up being the same film we’ve just been watching. That’s either a huge cop out or just how you expect a giallo to end.

The Sister of Ursula (1978): After their father’s death, two gorgeous sisters – the sensitive Ursula (Barbara Magnolfi, Suspiria, Cut and Run) and promiscuous Dagmar (Stefania D’Amario, Zombie, Nightmare City) decide to escape to the seaside resort town Amalfi. Oh, if they only knew the madness that waited there!

The island is quite literally awash with the wrong guys, the wrong girls, the wrong couples and a killer who tears people apart with the biggest member this side of Incubus. Get ready for a movie that isn’t sure if it wants to be sexploitation or giallo but is ready to do everything that it can to entertain you.

Director and writer Enzo Milioni also was behind the Lucio Fulci presented Luna di Sangue. In this movie, he’s created a world of pleasure and murder, which at times exists side by side. It seems from the cut I’ve seen that there may have been even longer — and more explicit — lovemaking scenes.

So who is the killer? Dagmar’s new man Filipo (Marc Porel, The Psychic), who just might also be a drug smuggler? The hotel owner (Yvonne Harlow, who claimed to be the great-granddaughter of Jean Harlow)? Perhaps dad isn’t quite so dead? Or are the sisters both insane? After all, Dagmar is given to loving herself just feet away from her sister, who hates just about everyone she meets.

According to Milioni, Porel was a drug addict who had earned a bad reputation as an actor. Magnolfi got him hired for the film and he behaved for the entire shoot and ended up getting clean. Sadly, while shooting a commercial in Monaco, he relapsed and overdosed.

The fourth Forgotten Gialli set is packed with utter sleaze and I say that in the nicest of ways. Each movie is newly scanned and restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative, plus its packed with features like interviews with Enzo Milioni, a commentary track for The Killer Is Still Among Us by Rachel Nesbit and audio essays by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas as well as trailers and image galleries. Get it from Vinegar Syndrome.

As Linet (Amelia Shankley) explores the forest, she is being followed by a wolf. Not just any wolf — the big bad one or as this movie calls him, Dagger (Rocco Sisto). Luckily, she’s under the protection of Peter the Woodsman, who thinks she’s fearless. She’s actually just the kind of brave that has to be in the face of stupidity, because if you knew there was a killer wolf —  the kind that don’t scratch on no doors if we may use the poetry of one Glenn Danzig — in the woods you wouldn’t go there looking for fairies.

Linet has bigger problems. Her mother Lady Jeanne (Isabella Rossellini) is hiding in the woods because her husband Lord Percival has been replaced by his evil twin brother Lord Godfrey and oh man, they’re both Craig T. Nelson. It’s been seven years since Percival went to war and he’s legally dead, so Godfrey wants to get to know one of the stars of Tough Guys Don’t Dance biblically. He also wants to teach her daughter the meaning of fear by unleashing Dagger on her, who even eats her by the end of the film and they cut his stomach open and she’s alive inside and wow, this is a movie for children.

There’s also a song where the Wolf tells Linet that it’s good to talk to strangers.

Somehow, the guy — Adam Brooks — who wrote Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Practical Magic — directed this. It was written by Carole Lucia Satrina, whose credits include Cannon Movie Tales: Puss in Boots and three episodes of Tales from the Darkside, including “The Odds.”

The third American Ninja may not be everyone’s favorite, but I feel there are still some wonderful moments in it starting with the origin of new hero Sean Davidson (David Bradley) — Michael Dudikoff, the Joe Armstrong American Ninja we all known and love, was burnt out on martial arts and didn’t want to make a movie aroun South African apartheid — who as a child watched General Andreas (Cannon utility fielder Yehuda Effroni) kill his father and ended up being raised by Izumo (Calvin Jung) as a ninja.

His first mission brings him to the island of Triana and Kumite, err, another martial arts tournament, but this one has Sergeant Curtis Jackson (Steve James, baby!) and wacky Dexter (Evan J. Klisser) as the heroes and the minions of the Cobra (it takes a genius, no, it takes Cannon to put Marjoe Gortner in a kung fu movie), including his ninjette Chan Lee (Michele B. Chan), who has the power of a Maskatron action figure and can change out her face.

Taking a page from another leader named after a snake, The Cobra’s plan is very G.I. Joe. Whoever wins the tournament has to be the toughest person alive, so to prove to General Andreas that his new poison works, they will be injected with it. And die, one assumes.

Produced by real life scandal Harry Alan Towers — he allegedly ran a Soviet vice ring in the United Nations with Peter Lawford and his girlfriend Mariella Novotny and left the country when arrested and moved to Europe; he followed that up by being less sleazy and working with Jess Franco — and directed by Cedric Sundstrom — who also made the fourth movie in this series — this may feel like a step down to some. Writer Gary Conway starred on TVs Burke’s Law and Land of the Giants before writing movies, as well as being married to a Miss America.

In a 1994 interview in Masters of Kung Fu magazine, No Retreat, No Surrender star Kurt McKinney claimed that he was offered the lead role but didn’t want to be away from his new wife for too long.

You can watch this on Tubi.

To learn even more about this movie — and all the films in the series — grab Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume II.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon podcast about American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on May 31, 2022.

The final film between director J. Lee Thompson and Charles Bronson, Kinjitewas the ninth movie they made together and was going to be shot back to back with The Golem, a movie I wish had been made.

When reviewing the movie, the Los Angeles Times said, “If you think you might be offended by it, don’t go. You will be.”

While in Japan, a businessman had watched a woman be assaulted on the subway without complaint. And when he comes to Los Angeles, that moment continues to obsess him to the point that he attempts to recreate it and he learns that American women refuse to suffer in silence. Running from the scene of his attempted crime, he’s mugged and as others in the community learn of the crime and begins attacking men who resemble the businessman.

The woman who was involved is Rita Crowe (Amy Hathaway), the daughter of LAPD vice-squad detective Lt. Crowe (Bronson). And when he learns that the man that tried to hurt his daughter has just lost his own daughter to a child prostitution ring. Now he must get past his hate for the man and prejudice against the Japanese to do his job.

There’s not really a happy ending here — the girl is saved but the experiences she’s endured have ruined her to the point that she overdoses — and Bronson and his partner (Perry Lopez) go against their badges and attempt to murder the gang to stop them from ever doing what they did again.

Beyond the last film they did together, this was Bronson’s last Cannon movie — he would make Death Wish V with Golan — and Thompson’s final movie. It’s a dark movie in two careers where plenty of equally dark corners were explored ending with a man satisfied with finally finishing the job he set out to do.