EDITOR’S NOTE: Mannequin was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by w ild Cerebus-like triple headed bease known as Columbia-Cannon-Warner.

Michael Gottlieb directed and wrote Playboy Mid Summer Night’s Dream Party 1985 before this and one imagines being part of that star-filled TV special — Timothy Leary! Sarah Douglas! Buck Henry! Robert Culp! Ed Begley Jr.! Fred Dryer! Hef’s coming out party after his stroke! — informed his ability to write two movies about unliving life-sized models, this one and the absolutely deranged Mannequin 2: On the Move. He also wrote and directed Mr. Nanny, as well as The Shrimp On the Barbie (he got an Alan Smithee credit to cover his name on that one) and A Kid in King Arthur’s Court. After that? Video game producer — lots of Mortal Kombat titles — and working as professor of film at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before sadly dying in a motorcycle accident.

Regardless, he left us with two movies about mannequins coming to life. He claimed he got the idea walking down Fifth Avenue and thinking he saw one move in the window of Bergdorf Goodman. Or maybe he saw One Touch of Venus, read the myth of Pygmalion or watched the Twilight Zone episode “After Hours.”

Yet credit where due — Gottlieb got his idea on the screen twice.

Shot in John Wanamaker Department Store in Philadelphia, PA (the rival store Illustra is a Boscov’s in Camp Hill), Mannequin starts with Ema “Emmy” Hesire (Kim Cattrall) hiding in a pyramid, begging the gods to let her find true love. She disappears and reappears thousands of years later as the mannequin work of art made by Jonathan Switcher (Andrew McCarthy). He’s continually attacked for trying to make the mannequins look too good and is fired for putting too much work into something that should be a simple task.

Dumped by his girlfriend Roxie Shield (Carole Davis), he drives to Prince & Company where he saves the life of its owner Claire Timkin (Estelle Getty) from a falling sign and is given the job of making the store’s windows look artistic alongside Hollywood Montrose (Meshach Taylor; with Getty and Taylor in the same movie, this is as close as we might get to a Golden Girls/Designing Women crossover), all under the watching and suspicious eyes of security guard Captain Felix Maxwell (G.W. Bailey, forever an authority figure with bluster ever since Police Academy) and secret spy trying to ruin the company yet for now the manager Mr. Richards (James Spader).

Emmy comes to life while he’s working one night. She’s a muse, often living in the work of the artists that she inspires. Now, she’s here to do the same for Jonathan. Hijinks ensure, Starship sings “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” and no one wonders if it’s weird that this is a movie about having sex with an inanimate object.

Leonard Maltin said that this was “absolute rock-bottom fare, dispiriting for anyone who remembers what movie comedy should be.” But hey — did he watch HBO all day?

Directed by Joel Schumacher and written by Peter Filardi, for some reason I never saw Flatliners. I would assume in 1990 I was somewhere between my gorehound and art film phases and a mainstream Hollywood horror movie with major stars would hold no interest for me. But as I grow older, I see the mistakes of my past and can admit: this is a well-made film with some interesting ideas.

Nelson Wright (Keifer Sutherland), Joe Hurley (William Baldwin; what is it with him playing characters that film people having sex? He does it in this and Sliver), David Labraccio (Kevin Bacon), Rachel Manus (Julia Roberts) and Randy Steckle (Oliver Platt) are medical students that want to learn what comes after death. So they use their skills in the ER to kill each other for one minute and then bring the body back to life to see what happens. Nelson has an experience where he sees his old bully and can’t describe what it was like, so everyone has to see it for themselves.

As they say, nothing good can happen from any of this. Basically, each of them has an unresolved trauma and until it is fixed, it will destroy them from beyond.

This would be a basic movie if not for the look that director of photography Jan de Bont brings to the film, as well as the incredible lighting and colors of the film. That said, what emerges is a movie that’s better than you’d think it would be and one worthy of watching several times.

There was a remake/sequel/reboot in 2017 that had a Sutherland in it as a different character, except that in a deleted scene it was shown that he really was Nelson Wright. I mean, make up your mind, Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev!

The Arrow Video release of Flatliners has a brand new 4K restoration from the original negative, approved by director of photography Jan de Bont. Plus, there’s new audio commentary by critics Bryan Reesman and Max Evry, as well as new interviews with de Bont, screenwriter Peter Filardi, chief lighting technician Edward Ayer, first assistant director John Kretchmer, production designer Eugenio Zanetti, art director Larry Lundy, composer James Newton Howard, orchestrator Chris Boardman and costume designer Susan Becker. There’s also a trailer, an image gallery, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gary Pullin and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Amanda Reyes and Peter Tonguette. You can get the 4K Ultra HD and blu ray from MVD.

Robotech is the opposite of most films on the site. Instead of an American property being remade overseas and remixed into something new, the TV series was three different Japanese cartoons: Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada, all with new dialogue, some minor added animation and connections between the three shows that never existed. This series was made this way because Macross didn’t have enough episodes for U.S. syndication. Ideally, 65 episodes were what most series had as that allowed a show to air five times a week for thirteen weeks.

Director/producer/co-writer Carl Macek — the man who put together all these shows — wanted Robotech: The Movie to be a redubbing of another unconnected cartoon, Megazone 23, with its hero renamed Mark Landry and connected to Macross hero Rick Hunter. The new dialogue would be about Mark trying to inform the world of the fate of the main ship in that series, the SDF-1.

According to Zimmerit, Macross creators director Noburo Ishiguro, character designer sHaruhiko Mikimoto and Toshihiro Hirano and animator Ichiro Itano worked on the OVA as well as Mospeda mechanical designers Shinji Aramaki and Hideki Kakinuma. That meant that this film would look quite close to Robotech.

It was a great idea.

But things didn’t work out that way.

First, Tatsunoko Productions, the creators of Macross, was releasing Macross: Do You Remember Love?  and wouldn’t allow Macek to use any Macross story elements.

And then Cannon Films got involved.

When Macek first showed the first to Cannon, Menahem Golan responded that he didn’t like it. It wasn’t Cannon. It had a downer ending, too many girls and not enough guns and robots. So in just days, Macek roughly re-edited the flm and was nearly embarrassed by how slapdash it all was.

Menahel Golan stood at the screening and shouted, “Now that’s a Cannon movie!”

Macek rewrote the story to take place between the first and second seasons of the television series — Macross and Robotech Masters — and had the Robotech Masters kidnapping and replicating B.D. Andrews to steal the memory core of the SDF-1.

One of the big problems was that you can totally see the difference between animation. Megazone 23 was shot on 35mm while Southern Cross was 16mm.

Throw in a disastrous screening in Texas — it was dumped there and any parents that did bring kids were shocked at the violence while Robotech fans were upset at how little it had to do with the show — and Cannon walked away from this movie. Macek and Harmony Gold went out of their way to block it from coming out on video, so the only way to see this was in bootleg form.

The Robotech: The Complete Series collection has a 29-minute version that only has footage from Southern Cross and a disclaimer stating the film “has been edited for licensing and content. That said — if you know where to look online, you can find this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on November 13, 2017. Never Too Young to Die was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Scotia/Cannon.

I grew up on James Bond. More than that, at a young age, I was obsessed with Bond. One magical Christmas, the only gifts I got were the James Bond role playing game from Victory Games and all of the expansions. I saw every single one one of the movies, even the original Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again, the bootleg Sean Connery film that came out of Kevin McClory’s legal battles with Eon Productions, the Fleming estate and United Artists. I’ve seen every Bond ripoff, from Flint to Matt Helm to Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (it helps that Mario Bava directed that one). Post Timothy Dalton, I grew bored with the more realistic Bond and never came back. I grew up with the ridiculous world of Roger Moore.

I get the feeling that plenty of other folks have had similar experiences, thanks to comics like Jimmy’s Bastards and Kingsmen (also a series of movies). And this movie — Never Too Young to Die guest stars the Bond from my favorite of the series, the only appearance of George Lazenby, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as Drew Stargrove, but we can just pretend he’s James Bond.

Stargrove has a son, Lance. He has a theme song. And he has a mission, to stop psychopathic hermaphroditic gang leader Velvet Von Ragner (Gene Simmons, sure he’s in KISS, but let’s celebrate his ridiculous IMDB page, where he’s either played himself or been in some amazingly insane films, like Trick or Treat and Runaway). But his luck has finally run out. He’s dead and his somewhat estranged son must leave behind his gymnastic days at college to take over his role as the best secret agent in the world.

Lance is played by John Stamos, mostly known for TV’s Full House. This is his star turn, all fresh faced and ready to break hearts. He’s joined on his mission by Vanity, who may have had a short and sweet film career, but got to be in some incredible stuff, like The Last Dragon, Action Jackson, Tanya’s Island, 52 Pick-Up and Terror Train.

Your ability to enjoy this film depends completely on your ability to enjoy ridiculousness. And facts like this — the nightclub outfit that costume Gene Simmons wears in the nightclub scene is the same one that Lynda Carter wore for her 1980 ENCORE! special, where she sang KISS’ “I Was Made for Loving You.”

Writer Steven Paul also created the Baby Geniuses series and had uncredited help from Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (TV’s Batman, Flash Gordon), which shows. Paul also wrote 1992’s The Double 0 Kid, where Corey Haim dreams of being a secret agent.

Director Gil Bettman produced and directed tons of 80’s TV, like The Fall Guy, Knight Rider and Automan, a one season wonder that combined police drama with Tron. I may be the only human being to have watched the entire season. His other major movie in 1986 was Crystal Heart, where Tawny Kitaen plays a rock star who falls in love with a boy who lives inside a crystal room because he has an auto-immune deficiency.

This film has an incredibly uneven tone. At times, it’s a family movie. Other scenes, Road Warrior clones are tearing off Vanity’s clothes and threatening to rape her. Sometimes, everything is treated with wacky humor. And then, you see people fall to their deaths and smack into the ground. It’s also a much better movie the more mind enhancing substances you consume, I figure, as I watched it cold sober and it kind of dragged (no pun intended).

Oh yeah — Lance’s roommate, Cliff, is played by Peter Kwong, who was Rain in Big Trouble in Little China. And because this movie was made in the 1980’s, Robert Englund contractually has to be in it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on October 28, 2020. The Hitcher was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Cannon France.

When I first saw The Hitcher, I was probably 14 years old and saw it as a straight-ahead story of violence on the highway. I probably cheered at the end when Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) blew a hole into John Ryder (Rutger Hauer). But age and the miles wear on every man and now when I watch it, it does more than make me raise my fist in the air and shout. It makes me ruminate on the journeys life has taken me and how I’d rather be launched through a window and blasted down a hillside than live a slow, tedious and quiet death.

Halsey starts the film with the kind of confidence that someone at the end of their teens has. He picks up Ryder, who immediately confides to him that he’s killed someone else. But he says something else. Something we don’t expect. “I want you to stop me.”

That’s the whole point of this film. Ryder will transform Halsey into the empty man he is, whether through attrition or forcing him to blast him into oblivion. This road only goes one way.

What does it take to get Halsey to realize this isn’t a nightmare, but reality? Of course, it’s easy to think that this could all be a dream, in the same way that long stretches of drives with no one speaking seem to be visions that last and last. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m still driving and every moment up until here, up until this realization, is just me imagining my life and any moment now, I’m going to wake up with my fiancee asleep next to me.

For our hero, it takes seeing trucks plow into truck stops, station wagons filled with the blood of all American families and the typical movie love interest torn in half by two semis.

Halsey is stripped of his identity, not just because his license and keys — let’s face, the manhood of most red-blooded boys — have been taken away. Everything he may have believed was true — the goodness of giving someone a ride when they need it, that love can conquer fear, even that the role models and lawmakers that society sets up can protect us against one lone man who isn’t just unafraid to die but willingly chases it — is a lie.

Not even suicide can save our hero.

So who is at fault for all the crimes that come out of this spree? If Halsey just shot Ryder in the truck, while Nash (Jennifer Jason Lee, looking like the gorgeous girl who surely will survive all of this madness, right?) is tied between it and another, life would be different.

Look, when a killer says, “I want you to stop me,” you listen.

Eric Red wrote this story while traveling across America, wondering about the lyrics to The Doors ditty “Riders On the Storm.” Pretty simple, really: “If ya give this man a ride, sweet memory will die. Killer on the road, yeah.”

Critics hated it. Both Siskel and Ebert gave it zero out of four stars, with Ebert even decrying the film by saying, “I could see that the film was meant as an allegory, not a documentary. But on its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level it is reprehensible.”

Whatever.

The end of this film, as Halsey stands against the sunset and smokes as we process what has just happened just attacks the viewer. The credits just stand there as we feel no celebration or victory. Maybe not even relief, because while it seems like this is over, there’s no way it is over.

The fact that this movie spawned a sequel and a Michael Bay remake are two things that I have added to the many things that I have tried to forget so that I can keep on living my life*. Kind of like how director Robert Harmon makes the Jesse Stone TV movies for Tom Selleck now instead of getting to create more movies like this (that said, I’ve heard good things about They, a movie he did with Wes Craven and I kind of don’t mind his Van Damme film Nowhere to Run). Red would move on to write a few other films that break the mold and are on my list of favorite films: Near Dark and Blue Steel.

The last thing that this movie makes me feel is loss. Rutger Hauer is such an essential part of my film nerd stable of actors, someone who always makes a movie way better than it seems like it will be just by his presence. Nighthawks is so intense because of him. Films like Wanted Dead or Alive, The Blood of Heroesand Buffy the Vampire Slayer (with Hauer getting to finally play the vampire lord that Anne Rice, who always wanted him as Lestat, saw him in) are actually great because of Hauer. And Blade Runner means nothing without him as Roy Batty.

Hauer astounded the stunt people in this movie, pulling off the car stunts by himself. And he also intimidated Howell, scaring him even when they weren’t acting. He even knocked out a tooth when he flew through the windshield himself. There is no one who could have played this character quite so well and stayed with me so long after the film was over.**

*The fact that René Cardona III made a Mexican version of this called Sendero Mortal does give me the energy to keep on living.  I’d also like to recommend the absolutely insane Umberto Lenzi in America  Hitcher In the Dark, which makes me wish that more Italian directors made their own versions of The Hitcher.

**Hauer said in his autobiography, All Those Moments, that Elliott “was so scary when he came in to audition that Edward S. Feldman was afraid to go out to his car afterward.”

You can listen to more about The Hitcher on The Cannon Canon.

Starring and based on the life of Erica Nix, Austin queer artist and fitness guru (and currently a surprising and unlikely Austin mayoral candidate), the filmmakers say that this movie “is a tribute to the disappearing bohemian demimonde of Austin itself; a psychedelic freak-out fantasia of adventure and discovery inspired by Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, Pee Wee Herman, and Linklater’s Waking Life.”

After a divorce and in the middle of a pandemic, Erica is caught in the changing tides of Austin’s value system, as the city that proclaims that it will keep things weird has priced bohemian artists like herself out of being able to live there. To come to terms with this reality, she undergoes a series of hallucinations which lead her to seek the advice of her inner child, God, Gwyneth Paltrow, Mother Nature and Satan.

the debut feature film from the producing team THIS IS NOT A CULT, which includes writers and producers Erica Nix, Jessica Gardner, Jeremy von Stilb and Sawyer Stoltz. The film also has appearances by Austin’s most acclaimed underground performers, artists and musicians, including Christeene (Paul Soileau), p1nkstar (Girls Like Us), Caleb De Casper, Andie Flores (George Lopez’s Lopez Vs. Lopez), Nikki DaVaughn, Lynn Metcalf and many more.

Will you like it? That depends on your tolerance for weirdness and performance art. As for me, I always enjoy some surreal goofiness, so I had fun with it. I hope that you watch it with an open mind and feel the same way.

Erica’s First Holy Shit! debuts tomorrow at PRISM 35: aGLIFF’s 35th Annual LGBTQ+ Film Festival in Austin.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Highlander wasn’t produced by Cannon, but was distributed by Columbia-Cannon-Warner.

Gregory Widen wrote  Highlander for one of his classes as an undergraduate in the screenwriting program at UCLA. Widen’s teacher told him to get an agent; he sold the script for $200,000. The initial story was darker and more violent, but as Widen saw his lead character Conor MacLeod as Connor as a very serious, grim character following centuries of violence and loss. The film portrayed MacLeod as a haunted man, the film ended up being about an immortal who has suffered great loss but who still believes in being alive and falling in love.

Born in the Scottish Highlands, Connor (Christopher Lambert) is nearly killed in battle with the man who will become his eternal enemy, the Kurgan (Clancy Brown). Connor survives and somehow doesn’t die, which leads his own family to accuse him of witchcraft. Leaving in exile, he finally meets and marries Heather (Beatie Edney), who lives with her eternally young husband until dying of old age.

Connor is an immortal and is soon guided by Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez (Sean Connery), an immortal Egyptian who has fought across the world for untold centuries. Thanks to his heavy schedule, Connery’s scenes had to be filmed in a week. He bet director Russell Mulcahy that they would not finish, but they finished in time. Regardless of the bet, Connery earned $1 million for just seven days of filming.

He teaches Connor that the immortals are all part of a gigantic cosmic game, destined to battle each other until only one is left. That person will gain The Prize, the power of all immortals throughout time, and that evil immortals like the Kurgan must be stopped from winning said prize. The only way to do that? Chopping off his head.

Highlander was literally a movie I watched with my father every single day after school. We’d watch it, discuss it and then watch it some more, not wanting to see it all in one day. Russell Mulcahy, who had followed making videos for Duran Duran and Razorback, transformed what could have been a simple story into something magical; the soundtrack from Queen goes even further into pushing this into a legendary tale.

Queen only was supposed to contribute one song for this movie, but after seeing some of the movie, the band members each ended up having a favorite scene and wrote a song for it. For example, Roger Taylor took the line “It’s a kind of magic” and Brian May wrote “Who Wants to Live Forever” before he even got home from watching the film.

It was nearly Marillion, who turned down the offer because they were heading out on a world tour, on the soundtrack. There was also talk of David Bowie, Duran Duran and Sting, who recommended Brown for the role of the Kurgan after working with him in The Bride.

The opening scene was originally a hockey match, but the NHL refused to allow the crew to film there because they were emphasizing the violence. They switched to wrestling in Madison Square Garden, but any wrestling fan knows that the Fabulous Freebirds (Michael P.S. Hayes, Terry “Bam Bam” Gordy and Buddy Jack Roberts) were only in the WWF for a limited time. This was part of the Pro Wrestling USA shows and was taped at the Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey. Their opponents are The Tonga Kid and the High Flyers, Greg Gagne and “Jumping” Jim Brunzell.