Based on Le Cinquieme Singe by Jacques Zibi, this film has Ben Kingsley playing Cunda, a man who catches snakes for scientists to earn money to catch the eye of a widow. He ends up being bitten by serpents, which leads to a dream about four chimpanzees and then they show up in his waking life, leading him on a series of misadventures. While he just wants to make money off the monkeys, he finds himself growing to love them.
The Fifth Monkey was directed and written by Éric Rochat, who yes, made multiple versions of The Story of O and produced Jodorowsky’s Tusk, but he’s the man who made Too Much, the story of a robot with a heart for Cannon.
According to The Unknown Movies — and a reader of that site named Maurice — “…after 20% of the movie was completed, Golan wanted to replace the director of photography and partly also Rochat, which really killed the movie. The Brazilian crew quit, Kingsley insisted that Rochat stayed, and a new contract was written which made Kingsley, Rochat and the new director of photography, all directors of the movie.” This same writer also claims that Bubbles the chimp was in this.
Rochat himself emailed that site too, saying: “For your information, I was actually the producer of the film as well by contract, then the titles were made in LA by Menahem Golan. At the screening of the first copy, to my great surprise, Menahem had given himself the credit of producer. When I complained about it, he came up with the following line: “You have enough credit as it is, writer, director! You’re not going to fight me over this, are you?” I was so exhausted by the whole fight during the shooting that I let it go. Now one word in favor of Menahem, he loves movies and gave a lot of people the opportunity to have a go at it.”
I love that 21st Century keeps being an untapped mine filled with magical gold.
I’m really in love with what 21st Century did with their Poe movies, which was to barely skim the originals and then just do whatever they wanted, as long as they had some of the names and events inside. Just hire the right actors — Oliver Reed, Donald Pleasence — and let’s have some fun.
Molly McNulty (Romy Walthall, The Howling IV) and her fiancee Ryan Usher (Rufus Swart, Space Mutiny) are on the way to London to visit his uncle Roderick (Reed) when he swerves to miss two ghost-like children standing in the road (I really need to do a Letterboxd list of movies in which ghost children cause car crashes). Barely surviving, Molly makes it to Roderick’s mansion. When she awakens the next day, she’s told he’s receiving care, but the truth is that the old man wants her — and the way that she can help him escape the cursed incestual Usher bloodline — all for himself. Also: he’s imprisoned his brother Walter (Pleasence) in the upstairs of the house.
PS: Those kid ghosts never figure into anything else in this movie.
Shot in the same South African house that director Alan Birkinshaw and writer Michael J. Murray made The Masque of the Red Death in for 21st Century — are they starting to feel a little Empire or nascent Full Moon with all these castle epics? — this movie goes off the rails in the best of ways, featuring a scene where Roderick drugs McNulty and marries her himself, shoving a piece of cake in her mouth and eating it while still in her open mouth, topped by a later scene where she imagines that she’s making love to her fiancee in the shower — she thinks he’s dead — and wakes up to a nude Reed pounding it out. Also: for some reason Pleasence has a drill mounted on his hand. An oh, before I forget — and how could I — Roderick deals with a doctor who wants to have sex with his new bride by feeding the man’s cock to a rat that he has starved for this exact purpose. That’s planning.
There’s also an outright ripoff of the hands coming out of the wall from Day of the Dead and it nearly made me cheer and run around the room I got so excited.
There’s also a butler named Clive (Norman Coombes), his maid wife (Anne Stradi) and their daughter Gwen (Carole Farquhar) all living in the house or they were before Walter escapes and kills them before dancing a little jig. Then Roderick heaves him down the stairs, the house catches on fire and Molly decides to open a sarcophagus and finds her drugged fiancee, although I have no idea how they plan on getting married after all this.
And then it’s all a dream! We go right back to the beginning!
This movie looks so lavish and I just fell in love with every bit of its look. The interiors were shot in South Africa, while the outside of the Usher house is actually Blenheim Palace, which you may recognize from The Legend of Hell House, Barry Lyndon, King Ralph and so many more movies. I adore that this film is at once a gothic romantic horror and a direct-to-video mindwarp.
Of course this was produced by Harry Alan Towers. I mean, who else? This is literally everything I want in movies, the kind of junk that most people would laugh off and yet I find so much to gush over.
Oh! One last thing. This totally recycles Gary Chang’s score for 52 Pick-Up and some of the music from Ten Little Indians. I have no idea how Menahem Golan got those seeing as how he was no longer with Cannon.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This 21st Century Film Corporation movie first was on the site on November 8, 2018. If you want to check out more on the rest of the Death Wish series, click here.
You think Paul Kersey has learned his lesson about love and loss? No way, pal. Now back in New York City in the witness protection program and going by Paul Stewart, he’s keeping a low profile by going to fashion shows with his super hot girlfriend (Lesley-Anne Down) who also has a young daughter named Chelsea who is surely doomed. Come on, everyone. We’ve made it this far. We may as well watch Death Wish 5: The Face of Death.
It turns out that Olivia has been paying protection money to her evil mobster ex-husband Tommy O’Shea, who is Michael Parks! Paul confronts the guy at the fashion show, but one of the villain’s goons shows him his revolver. He tries to do the right thing and brings in a District Attorney.
Paul again proves he has no short or long-term memory by proposing to Olivia, who doesn’t understand what we all have accepted: God hates Paul Kersey like He has never hated another of His creations. Excusing herself to the powder room to piddle in absolute joy after being asked to be the life partner of a man who has personally murdered thousands of scumwads, one of Tommy’s men named Flakes (Robert Joy, Lizard from The Hills Have Eyesand, as my wife would exclaim loudly, Jim from Desperately Seeking Susan) shoves her face so hard into a mirror that she’s disfigured for life. Even surgery won’t fix her face. Such is the life of a woman who gets involved with Paul Kersey.
After meeting two cops, Mickey King (Windom Earle from Twin Peaks!) and Janice Omori, the female cop dies in the very next scene. She must have gotten a little too close to Paul. In the hospital, King tells Kersey not to go back to his old ways. King tells him that he’s been on this case for 16 years. “16 years? That’s a long time to be failing,” replies Kersey.
Even after getting out of the hospital, Olivia still has to deal with the life she’s chosen as more henchmen come after Paul, shooting her in the back and finally ending her suffering. Well, it turns out that Tommy runs all of the police and has taken his daughter back, so Paul goes full on 007 by killing one goon with poisoned cannoli and another with a remote-controlled soccer ball! At this point, this film has gone from boring to right where I want it to be.
What follows is exactly what we want to see: a slasher movie with the righteous Paul going old man nutzoid on every crook there is left, shooting them into sewing machines, slashing their faces with broken bottles and shotgun blasting them into acid baths. At the end, he walks away with his dead fiancee’s daughter, yelling to the cop who couldn’t keep up, “Hey Lieutenant, if you need any help, give me a call.”
After the last three movies coming from Cannon Films, which was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, this one comes from Menahem Golan’s new 21st Century Film Corporation. They were having trouble making money and figured that a new Death Wish was going to be a sure-fire hit. Incredibly, for reasons no one is sure about, Bronson and Golan weren’t speaking during the filming, so they’d only communicate through Allan A. Goldstein.
Sadly, the film failed at the box office (but it did fine on home video). Golan planned to continue the film series without Bronson (!) and was planning Death Wish 6: The New Vigilante before 21st Century Film Corporation went bankrupt. This would be Bronson’s last theatrical film, as he was 71 years old as this was being filmed.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A short break from the 21st Century Films with this non-Cannon-produced TV movie that was released by them in the UK on the Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited video label.
Adapted from the book Deadly Force by Lawrence O’Donnell — who now hosts The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC — this made-for-TV movie was released on video by Cannon yet is at odds with so many of the subjects presents by the action-heavy studio.
In a Cannon film, the near-vigilante tactics of the Boston Tactical Unit would be celebrated. Here, this fact-based tale of the 1975 cover-up of an unjustified shooting of a black man by two white members of this police group presents the police as overactive and brutal.
Despite claims of self-defense, the dead man’s widow Pat Bowden (Lorraine Toussaint) claims that her husband would not be carrying a weapon. She hires former cop and current lawyer Lawrence O’Donnell Sr. (Richard Crenna) to clear her husband’s name.
At one point, Lawrence reveals to his legal team — made up of sons Michael, Lawrence Jr., Billy and Kevin (John Shea, Tate Donovan, Tom Isbell, and Dylan Baker) that his father’s death was listed as a suicide and how that impacted the way that the world saw the man that he loved forever after. The case, for him, has become personal, clearing Bowden’s name being seen as him atoning for the way he saw his father.
Director Michael Miller made several films that I dug, like Silent Rage, Jackson County Jail and Class Reunion. He turned those movies into a run of TV movies. Writer Dennis Nemec also was a TV movie veteran and they combined to make a pretty solid film here.
How did it take so long for Greydon Clark and Menahem Golan to work together? Well, their team-up started with The Forbidden Dance and certainly another dance movie had to follow. Originally developed as a sequel to the earlier 21st Century Robert Englund-starring vehicle The Phantom of the Opera — it was called Terror of Manhattan — it was still released in Japan as a follow-up.
This movie is a collection of so many of my movie obsessions. It’s a horror dance academy movie, which makes you want to compare it to Suspiria as much as Etoile. It has Englund seeking another role that isn’t Freddy. It has Josef von Sternberg’s son Nicholas Josef von Sternberg as its cinematographer. It was produced by Harry Alan Towers. And, most of all, it’s a Menahem Golan movie.
At a dance academy outside Saint Petersburg run by crippled Madame Gordenko (Englund!) and staffed by American-born teacher Anthony Wagner (also Englund!) and Olga (Irina Davidoff), a new student by the name of Jessica Anderson (Michelle Zeitlin, who shows up briefly in Showgirls). She struggles through the first class, but Anthony sees something in her, as she looks exactly like his lover Svetlana, a Russian ballerina who was injured in a motorcycle crash and became the twisted Gordenko.
Claudine (Nina Goldman) tries to help her learn the moves, but Jessica is better at dancing to rock music. As Claudine goes to the spa, she’s drowned in a hot tub. Meanwhile, Jessica falls for a photographer named Alex (Alexander Sergeyev) who is sneaking around taking photos and has a cool motorcycle. The rest of the school is a mess, as there’s a girl named Ingrid (Marianna Moen) who stays in the attic dancing non-stop while she does drugs.
While dancing with male dancers the next day, Jessica grabs one of their crotches. This upsets everyone, including Angela (Julene Renee), who walks right into a noose. No one notices. In fact, everyone just decides that anyone who dies has decided to leave the school, like Natasha (Natasha Fesson), who is pushed into the path of a train. And oh yeah — when the students all go to a nightclub, Anthony watches Jessica and Alex kiss — it’s a prelude to him sneaking into the dorms and dancing horizontally with her — and starts crying.
The film then reveals that Gordenko is killing the girls as we watch her launch Ingrid from her attic window. Almost everyone leaves the school as the deaths become too hard to get past. Anthony tells Olga that Jessica is the only good dancer left, so she must represent the academy at an upcoming special audition.
Jessica then catches Alex sneaking into Anthony’s quarters. She tries to find him but Olga finds him first. and then they open a cupboard filled with Claudine and Angela’s bodies. Gordenko appears and stabs Alex, getting away in time for Olga to pull the dagger out and Jessica to see her with the murder weapon, just in time for Anthony to arrive. Oh man, red herrings abound, but Olga accidentally stabs herself and Anthony whispers in her ear, telling her that the secret is safe.
Anthony begins to transform Jessica into his long-dead ballerina girlfriend and she soon learns that he and Gordenko are the same person — Svetlana’s dead body is in the attic — as he drugs her and awakens her just in time to dance for the audition, calling her Svetlana. Yet when she rips off the wig and starts her Flashdance moment, dancing to the music that she wants to perform to, Anthony and Gordenko battle for control of his body. That can only end with Anthony throwing himself off a balcony to save Jessica, telling her as he dies that “You danced for me.”
Wow. This movie is absolutely wild with Englund acting as an old wheelchair bound woman with a voicebox when he isn’t being a lovesick dance instructor. And did Harry Alan Towers love Ten Little Indians plots or what?
Christy Murphy’s (Tracy Dali, who was June in Click: The Calendar Girl Killer) strict Catholic parents — Burt Ward is her dad — are worried that their daughter is having sex with her boyfriend Jerry (Richard Gabai, who directed and co-wrote the script; he also made Assault of the Party Nerds). They send her to the Academy of the Blessed Virgin, an all-girls religious school but Jerry shows up as a priest, more determined than ever to finally sleep with Christy.
This is a movie that dares have Linnea Quigley as a character who looks down on teens who have sex, so that’s definitely a twist I didn’t see coming. Michelle Bauer is also in the cast as sex education teacher Miss Bush and this was Leslie Mann’s first movie.
Somehow — and don’t worry, we’ll get to it — Jerry would return in Hot Under the Collar, another movie in which he had to become a priest and get the girl. One would think that this plan has no way of working but somehow Jerry was able to pull it off both times.
To learn more about this movie, I invite you to check out The Schlock Pit, where the great David Wain interviewed Gabai.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared on the site on May 2, 2022.
Written by Stephen Tolkin and directed by Albert Pyun — who interned on a Toshiro Mifune TV series under Akira Kurosawa’s director of photography before making movies like Cyborg, Alien from L.A., Radioactive Dreams, The Sword and the Sorcerer and so many more — this film started at Universal, who got the rights after the CBS TV movies.
The rights were then sold to The Cannon Group with the idea of Michael Winner directing a script by James Silke (Ninja 3: The Domination) and supposedly starring Michael Dudikoff as Cap and Steve James as the Falcon, the sheer idea of which makes my brain delirious. The Variety ad that announced this movie initiated Jack Kirby’s lawsuit against Marvel, as it claimed that Stan Lee created the character and not he and Joe Simon, who invented Cap all the way back in 1941 and Lee didn’t bring the character back until 1964.
After two years of development, Golan left Cannon in 1989 — stay tuned for August on this site for a sequel to Cannon Month — and as part of the settlement, he was given control of 21st Century Film Corporation and the film rights to Captain America.
Then, comic book fans waited. And waited.
It premiered in 1991 in the Phillipines as Bloodmatch as part of a double feature with Snoopy, featuring an ad that trumpeted Golan as the producer of Superman. Maybe it was better to say that instead of saying that he produced Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Also, Jean Claude Van Damme is not in this movie, no matter what that ad claims.
So that’s how we got a Captain America played by Matt Salinger, the son of the writer of The Catcher In the Rye, and fighting Scott Paulin as the Red Skull, who was a child prodigy that the Axis experimented on, sending Dr. Maria Vaselli (Carla Cassola,Demonia) to America where she creates the Super Soldier Syrum.
There’s some good casting here, and by that, I mean character actors that get me a -typing. those would be Ned Beatty, Darren McGavin (the younger version of his General Fleming character is played by Billy Mumy while his A Christmas Story wife Melinda Dillon is in the cast as Steve Roger’s mom ), Ronny Cox as the President and Michael Nouri.
The one thing I do like about this film is that in the years after World War II, the Skull has built a conspiracy crime family with his daughter Valentina De Santis (the character Sin in the comic books, she’s played by Valentina De Santis) that has assassinated everyone from the Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King to Elvis, which he claims was the one time they did the wrong thing. Now, they want to brainwash the President and Cap, along with Sharon Carter (Kim Gillingham, playing that role and Bernice, the 1940s girlfriend of our hero), must stop him.
So how weird is it that the son of J.D. Salinger, whose book was often in the hands of programmed assassins, is battle the man who programmed said assassins, at least in this movie?
Ronnie Cox once said that the script to this movie “remains to this day the finest script I have ever read… how those guys messed that film up, I will never know.” And Stan Lee, ever the PR man, said that the reason for the reshoots was because “Pyun did it so well and so excitingly that everyone in the audience (at the screening) kept clamoring for more.”
Sure, True Believer.
As for Jack Kirby, everything you know in comic book movies is the result of his creativity. Even after his death, his family has attempted to gain the money and recognition that that creation deserves. When most comics these days struggle to be released once a month, Kirby was at one point — according to Mark Evanier — drawing twenty pages of comics a week, up to five pages a day, which is about a full issue of a comic every week. All for no real ownership, no insurance and no promises. For just one month’s example, in November 1963, Kirby drew 139 pages of comics and seven covers. His Fourth World era contract was for 15 pages a week, so Kirby gave then twenty.
Think about that the next time you watch everyone make money from his work.
21st Century Film Corporation put out several Edgar Allan Poe films and why not? They’re all well-known names from a well-regarded horror author and best of all, you don’t have to pay to use them. All four 21st Century Poe movies were produced by Harry Alan Towers and having him teamed up with Menahem Golan is like when the X-Men and Teen Titans united to fight Dark Phoenix and Darkseid.
New teacher Janet Pendleton (Karen Witter, Playboy‘s March 1982 Playmate of the Month) has come to Ravenscroft Reform School, which also has head doctor Gary Julian (Robert Vaughn) and Doctor Schaeffer (Donald Pleasence in a really bad wig and worse accent) in the faculty, so certainly nothing bad can happen, like a Reagan-masked killer walling young women into the basement, right?
You don’t remember that time when Poe wrote about guys in Reagan masks?
How about when he had a girl using a mixer to curl her hair and scalp herself?
Arnold Vosloo from The Mummy plays a cop, Ginger Allen plays the worst of the bad girls, Nia Long plays Fingers who gives her friends switchblades, Gary’s father is John Carradine in his last role and guys from the all boys’ school head down to the dungeon to party with the girls and that’s how murder happens.
Director Gerard Kikoine also made Edge of Sanity and Master of Dragonard Hill — as well as plenty of adult films and editing Jess Franco’s Countess Perverse and Lorna the Exorcist — while writers Jake Chesi and Stuart Lee have only this movie to their credit. Most of the music from Frederic Talgorn is taken from Edge of Sanity. The song “Love Bites” from Ninja 3: The Dominationis also in this which makes me wonder if Menahem also got the rights to a bunch of music when he left Cannon.
Just looking at the IMDB description of this movie has made me crazy to hunt it down: “A rabbi’s son rebels against his roots and becomes a magician. A woman enters his life and turns his tricks into metaphysical phenomena. The son is forced to choose between love and living up to his father’s expectations.”
And that’s it. 33 people have seen it on IMDB with no reviews. It has nothing on Letterboxd. I’ve hunted what’s out there on the internet and can tell you this much: Shemya is a stage magician, as well as the prodigal son of a family of rabbis who wants to escape his “hereditary position as the next leader of a small but zealous community.” Shout out to Killer Movie Reviews for filling me in on so much of this.
He soon meets a mysterious woman named Oshra who can make things catch on fire. Is she the demon Lilith, calling him away from religion, or is she created from Shemya’s subconsciousness? And what’s the story with the prophecy that Shemya must die and rise again?
Director Daniel Wachsmann’s best-known movie is Hamsin, which was selected as the Israeli entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 55th Academy Awards but was not accepted as a nominee.
Directed and written by Albert Pyun to be shot in three days — 35 pages of script a day! — on one set from Cyborg during reshoots for that film — with no special effects other than a single cube, Deceit starts with this quick blast of info: “The following is crucial plot information needed to understand this motion picture. If for some reason you fail to read all of this data in time, then you are really screwed because you’ll end up sitting there for two hours wondering what the hell is going on and realizing that you’ve just thrown away hard-earned money and one-hundred and thirty minutes of your life. So here is the crucial information.”
There is none.
An unknown man commits suicide by bleach and his body is possessed by an alien named Bailey (Norbert Weisser). A month or so later, a group including Wilma (Diane Defoe) and Eve (Samantha Phillips) is on her way to Las Vegas for a wedding and pick up a hitchhiking Bailey. He kills everyone in the car except for Wilma, telling her that he’s here to destroy the polluted Earth but first, he wants to have sex with her.
Bailey could be an escaped mental patient as his therapist Brick (Scott Paulin) soon arrives, but he also claims to be a planet-destroying alien. He also wants to have sex with Wilma, who is saved by Eve, now possessed by a space cop who has an all-powerful cube. She places the fate of the Earth onto Eve and tells her that whenever she wants the planet to die, all she has to do is ask.
According to Justin Decloux, who wrote Radioactive Dreams: The Cinema of Albert Pyun, this movie “cost $22,000 and the actors would have to limit themselves to a single take for each shot.” He also thanked Jean Claude Van-Damme for making the movie possible, which is a back-handed compliment, as Pyun wanted to make a gritty western called Slinger and Van Damme just wanted to do another kickboxing movie. That meant that Cyborg needed some reshoots and that’s how Pyun was able to wrap up his real job on a Thursday night and could shoot for free — other than film — all weekend long.
You have to admire the sheer maniac zeal it takes to make a movie like this within the system outside of the system against the system.
After an entire movie of people yelling at one another, the cop takes a look at Wilma and says, “Today is almost tomorrow. And remember if you’re looking for someone to fall in love with – try yourself.” And then realizing that she can stop life as we know it at any time, she looks right into Pyun’s camera and says, “Today is tomorrow. And things better get better. Or else.”
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