EDITOR’S NOTE: I originally saw this at Fantastic Fest and am so fired up that it’s on Shudder. This was first posted on October 1, 2021.

Bangui’s Hyenas, an elite mercenary team, have already extracted a drug dealer and his treasure from the chaos of a coup and are heading straight for the payout in Dakar. Yet as much as we love it when a plan comes together, we also seem to love a movie where things fall apart. And the Hyenas have found themselves stranded in the Sine-Saloum Delta, a group of isolated islands filled with local legends and dark magic. Now, the police — and maybe much worse things — are coming down on them.

The Hyenas — Chaka (Yann Gael), Rafa (Roger Sallah) and Minuit (Mentor Ba) — have survived so many wars and missions thanks to their skill and trust in one another. But this time feels different. That’s because it seems like Chaka, their leader, is hiding something. And as they stay within a small lodging camp until they can figure out their escape, the mute Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen) threatens to expose them to the police unless she can go on the run with them.

Yet by the end, this movie goes from Italian western to American action to a supernatural take on Predator. What a strange ride this movie takes you on and the effects totally work, feeling as real as the gunplay at the start of the film.

At one point in this movie, the female inmates begin to fight and Crazy Daisy (Tiffany Million, once a GLOW girl and later an adult star) says, “I seen this in Chained Heat!”

Yes, you sure did.

While Cirio H. Santiago also made a movie called Caged Fury just six years earlier, this one — directed and written by Bill Milling (who also wrote Silent Madness and Savage Dawn; he also directed adult films under the named Philip Drexler Jr. (A Scent of Heather), G.W. Hunter (Heart Throbs), Craig Ashwood (All American Girls), William J. Haddington Jr. (When A Woman Calls), Chiang (The Vixens of Kung Fu (A Tale of Yin Yang), Jim Hunter (Up Up and Away), Luis F. Antonero (Temptations) and Bill or Dexter Eagle (Virgin Snow).

Wikipedia claims that Fernando Fonseca (The Unholy) and one of my obsessions, Philip Yordan, wrote this, but I see no other evidence anywhere. Fonseca only wrote one other film, South Beach Dreams, and Yordan and Cannon never worked together, which is a fact that still makes me sad.

Kat Collins (Roxanna Michaels) is living out the first stanza of Poison’s “Fallen Angel:”

“She stepped off the bus out into the city streets

Just a small town girl with her whole life

Packed in a suitcase by her feet

But somehow the lights didn’t shine as bright as they did

On her mama’s TV screen

And the work seemed harder

And the days seemed longer

Than she ever thought they’d be”

After kissing her daddy (Michael Parks) goodbye and leaving Utah for Hollywood, she meets Rhonda Wallace (April Dawn Dollarhide) who gets her work with a photographer named Buck (Blake Lewis). After posing, the girls head off for the Sunset Strip and get into it with some bikers, which seeing as how this is a 1990 direct-to-video movie gets rapey and then they get saved by good guy bike enthusiast Victor (Erik Estrada) and American Combat Karate school leader Dirk (Richard Barathy).

Buck then introduces the ladies to a porn director, but that ends up setting them up as prostitutes and sent off to Honeywell Prison, which is where this movie really gets going. You know exactly all of the WIP moments you’re getting and the guards are as bad as you’d think they’d be. They’re led by Spyder (Gregory Scott Cummins, former San Diego Chargers punter) and include Pizzaface (Ron Jeremy), Paul Smith remembering everything he once did years ago in a similar role in Midnight Express and Mindi Miller (Sugar from Penitentiary III) as Warden Sybil Thorn, an S&M catsuit wearing evildoer named for two WIP legends: Sybil Danning from Caged Heat and Dyanne Thorne, who forever will be Ilsa.

So while Roxanne is getting indoctrinated into white slavery, her sister Tracy (Elena Sahagun) figures that the best plan is to do the exact same things her sister did and get put in the same prison. She’s also helped by giallo-level policework from Detective Randall Stoner (James Hong). Of course, Estrada and Barathy have to rescue her, but Estrada catches a bullet, so the white kung fu expert has to fight his way out of this lingerie hell, which magically releases them right in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater.

This movie is also replete with adult stars as prisoners, including Kascha using her more mainstream name Alison LePriol, Janine Lindemulder — who knows a little something about the big house after serving a six-month federal prison sentence for tax evasion — as Lulu (you may recognize her, if you didn’t watch adult movies, as being on the cover of Blink 182’s Enema of the State album cover or for her relationship with Jesse James and Julia Parton (yes, a relative of Dolly and once the publisher of HIgh Society).

As for the bad guys putting this all together, there’s Jack Carter as the big bad Mr. Castaglia, as well as Beano, who you may remember from Deathrow Gameshow, as Tony “Two A Day” Tarentino. This movie feels like it knows way too much about the dark side of Los Angeles, what with Jeremy in the cast and Big G being played by Bill Gazzarri.

So Gazzari’s…

The three hundred feet or so on Sunset Boulevard that started at Gazzarri’s and ended at the Rainbow and the Roxy Theatre was where rock and roll lived in the 90s (although the place was hot from the 60s on, with The Doors being a house band and the Miss Gazzarri’s Dancers counting Catherine Bach and Barbi Benton as alumni). When Gazzarri died in 1991 and the club closed down in 1993, it was damaged in an earthquake and went through many name changes before becoming the nightclub 1 Oak. If you want to see the club, I recommend The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. Nearly every major metal band played Gazzarri’s, including longtime house band Van Halen, Ratt, Cinderella, Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Warrant and Faster Pussycat, as well as bands you may not know if you didn’t read Hit Parader and Rip! like Shark Island, Hurricane and, if you saw the aforementioned Decline, Odin.

This movie is pure sleaze. I mean, it’s a women in prison movie. Would you want it any other way? Why are you watching it if you’re just going to judge me? You’ve read this far. You’re complicit.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Danish city family — Bjorn (Morten Burian), Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) and Agnes (Liva Forsberg) — meet a Dutch family from the country — Patrick (Fedja van Huêt), Karin (Karina Smulders) and Abel (Marius Damslev) — and they decide to get together after getting along so well on vacation in Tuscany.

Of course, this is a horrible idea.

Turns out the Danes and the Dutch don’t get along all that well. And when it comes to getting back to real life after a holiday, vacation friends rarely work out.

Bjorn and Louise are really turned off by how loud and overly romantic behavior from Patrick and Abel. Before you know it, everyone is talking badly about one another in their native languages. But is this a horror movie? We’re going to get to some blood and scares, right? I mean, having someone else discipline your child is starnge but is it scary?

Be patient.

The insults increase slowly: Patrick begs vegetarian Louise to eat roast boar. Karin makes a bed for Agnes on the floor of her son’s room and doesn’t ask if that’s acceptable. Then Patrick gets Bjorn to pay the bill for a meal that’s beyond unaffordable. Then he just casually goes to the bathroom while Louise is taking a shower. One or two of these things is something. All of them building up feels like a trap.

Directed by Christian Tafdrup, who co-write the script with his sibling Mads, this may take a long time to get to the terror, yet when it does, it’s brutal in its sheer intensity. You’ll get what you want out of this, but you just need to be as patient as possible.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Crackhouse wasn’t produced by Cannon or its sister company Pathé but was theatrically distributed by them. For another take on this movie, click here.

There was a whole day of director Michael Fischa’s movies on the site a few years ago. He specializes in the kind of movies that video rental did best: quick, cheap and fun. Good examples of his kind of movies include Death Spa and My Mom’s a Werewolf.

The big names are Richard Roundtree, who plays Johnson, a gang task force police officer, and Jim Brown as a drug dealer named Steadman.  However, the real stars of the story are Rick (Greg Gomez Thomsen) and Melissa (Cheryl Kay).

Rick wants to leave Los Pochos and head off to the Air Force while Melissa has fashion design dreams. One night, Rick borrows his cousin Jesus’ Chevy Nova to take Melissa on a date, but as soon as he gets the keys, The Grays pull a drive-by. Rick forgets his future and heads off for revenge and ends up getting arrested.

Rick refuses to see her; he’s a criminal now and she needs a better life. She doesn’t find it with Big Time (Clyde Risley Jones), who may save her from an assault but has no problem using her to pay his debts with Steadman and turning her into a crack whore. So Rick gets a plan along with Johnson. He’ll infiltrate the gang, turn over the evidence and rescue his girl. And hey — as soon as I saw Anthony Geary playing a teacher, I knew from Penitentiary III that he had to be on the side of wrongdoers.

Seeing as how this brings back exploitation stars Roundtree and Brown, it should do the same for at least one female cast member, as Angel Tompkins from The Teacher and The Bees is in this. There’s also an appearance — her only acting role actually — by Playboy Playmate of the Month for August 1985 Cher Butler.

It’s got a great title — that’s part of the selling of this movie, you see a film called Crackhouse on the shelf and gotta see it — and the cops get a battering ram in the conclusion. That’s pretty much all we needed in 1989.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Flodder was not produced by Cannon but was released by Cannon Screen Entertainment on video in the Netherlands. 

I know Dick Maas from his movies like The Lift, Amsterdamned, Sint and Prey, so watching a comedy by him is an interesting experience. He also directed the sequels Flodder in America and Flodder 3. The series also produced a TV series that ran for five years and a comic book.

The Flodder family has been moved from their state-owned home on a toxic waste dump to an upper class neighborhood, which works out about as well as you would imagine. That said, Johnny Flodder (Huub Stapel, who has been in several of movies for Maas) ends up falling in love with rich girl Yolanda Kruisman (fashion model Apollonia van Ravenstein).

There was some controversy about how this movie portrayed welfare recipients, but it was popular that eventually people just stopped listening. It’s cute, kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies with lots more sex and  property damage.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on May 30, 2022. It wasn’t produced by Cannon but was released on VHS in the Netherlands by Cannon Screen Entertainment.

Director Sergio Sollima is mainly known for westerns such as Run Man Run, Face to Face and The Big Gundown, the Eurospy movies Agent 3S3: Passport to Hell, Agent 3S3: Massacre In the Sun and Requiem for a Secret Agent and the pirate movies Sandokan, La tigre è ancora viva: Sandokan alla riscossa! and The Black Corsair.

With Violent City, co-written with Swept Away director Lina Wertmüller, he was originally upset that it was going to be a traditional gangster story. He did, however, say that “we had the chance to shoot in the U.S., and I would do whatever it took to do that.” So he worked with Wertmüller to create the non-linear way that the story would be told. He also worked with Telly Savalas, who plays the main villain in a movie of bad people, to bring out the humor in his role. As for Bronson, he found him uncommunicative while his wife Jill Ireland was the exact opposite, which is probably why they worked so well together.

He said that in the end, the movie was a lot like his westerns and all about “the encounter and struggle between the individual and the society which is all around him, and the way he reacts to it.”

During a vacation, Jeff Heston (Bronson) and his lover Vanessa (Ireland) are attacked by killers sent by an old business associate who Vanessa has seemingly left Jeff for. He’s jailed and refuses to name her, even if he receives a lower sentence. As soon as he’s released, crime lord Al Weber (Savalas) wants him to work for him, but he claims he’s retired, which is a lie, as he kills the man who set him up in the very next scene.

Of course, Vanessa has been married to Weber all along and even though Jeff wants revenge on her, he can’t kill her. Weber even tells him that his love for her will be his undoing, that she’s the one pulling the strings, but Jeff’s critical flaw is in thinking that she can’t be such a person.

The movie had two major American releases, with the first distributed as Violent City by International Co-Productions and the second wide release distributed by United Artists as The Family, complete with a logo using the same font as The Godfather and a tagline that shouted “The Godfather Gave You an Offer You Couldn’t Refuse. The Family Gives You No Alternative.”

If this was to be strictly an Italian film, Tony Musante and Florinda Bolkan would have been the leads. There was also an attempt to make the movie with Jon Voight and Sharon Tate.

This is a moody and dark film that predates the poliziotteschi films while boasting a strong soundtrack by the master, Ennio Morricone. It also has a stark ending that I’ve been thinking over again and again in the days since I’ve watched the film.

You can get this from Kino Lorber.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cannon did not produce this movie but released it on video in Denmark on the Cannon/Mayco label.

Between Venom, To the Devil a Daughter and this movie, Peter Sykes is an unappreciated creator of early 70s scummy horror. Written by Christopher Wicking (Cry of the Banshee, Scream and Scream Again), this movie combines insanity, mesmerism, religious fervor, incest, Satanic possession and just plain British weirdness to make the kind of movie that we watch on a rainy Sunday.

Baron Friedrich Zorn (Robert Hardy) keeps his children Emil (Shane Briant) and Elizabeth (Gillian Hills) locked up and away from one another, lest they make sweet sweet brother and sister love in the name of the devil. After all, his own wife had a madness like theirs that led to her suicide in front of both of them — or maybe he just wouldn’t sleep with her any longer and she got so upset at the loss of getting some of little Friedrich that she offed herself — so they both must be constantly treated to the bloodletting that takes out the evil flowing through their bodies.

Meanwhile — if that’s not enough –women s are being murdered in the woods and covered with rose petals. The townspeople think demons are to blame and by the end of the movie, they go absolutely beyond wild and try to wipe out the cause. There’s also Doctor Falkenberg (Patrick Magee) who has a carny method of curing the evil out of the Zorn progeny; he intends to get a village woman named Inge (Virginia Wetherell) to portray their dead mother in a strange roleplaying exercise while another young local named Carl (Paul Jones, who once sang for Manfred Mann) falls for Elizabeth. And oh yeah — maybe the Baron is more to blame than anyone.

Gillian Hills was a last minute replacement for Marianne Faithful, but the early 70s were not a good time for her, as she lost her son and was dealing with heroin addiction, anorexia and living on the streets. She wasn’t able to be insured for this movie.

I’m a lover of late period Hammer, as they move away from the classics and start to make their own weird little movies. Of course, they’re often filled with lots of nudity, madness and Satanic forces, so…look, I’m weak and I love what I love.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on September 29, 2021. You can watch this on Shudder.

Toby Poser, John Adams, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu made The Deeper You Dig, a movie that divided Becca and me. For their follow-up, the Adams family has created a movie all about 16-year-old Izzy (Zelda), whose mother (Toby Poser) keeps her isolated due to a rare illness. Yet as Izzy begins to grow as a woman — beyond playing metal songs (written by Toby and Zelda) as the band H6LLB6ND6R without an audience may not be enough — she escapes to another home in the woods where she meets Amber (Lulu), who gives her a bikini and the chance to drink with teenagers.

Yet when she consumes a live worm, the hunger of being a hellbender opens her eyes and she soon learns exactly why her mother keeps her from others.

At first, I felt like this movie was kind of like seeing an opening act at a show and not feeling the first few songs that they play. It feels inauthentic. Not metal? Silly facepaint? And then before you know it, you’re nodding your head and feeling the urge to headbang by the end of the set. This film took some time to grow on me — The Deeper You Dig had some of the same issues — but when it works, it works.

The effects either look great for the budget or remind you of the budget, yet never feel like they’re organic to the film. That’s fine — this is a very DIY effort — and it actually becomes charming. I’ve never really trusted homeschooled kids who are too close to their parents, but maybe this is one of those families that gets the dynamic right.

It’s intriguing that Hellbender has been playing Fantastic Fest with Luzifer, another film that centers on an isolated relationship between a mother and child, albeit one that’s more sacred and profane at the same time.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This incredible movie is now on Shudder. I first watched it at Fantastic Fest on October 1, 2021.

We shouldn’t have to tell you who Phil Tippett is. He’s the artist who animated everything from the Star Wars miniature chess scene to ED-209 in RoboCop, the aliens of Starship Troopers and the dragons in Willow and Dragonslayer. He’s been working Mad God for thirty years and let me tell you — it was worth it.

An assassin explores a decimated world following a map that is rapidly falling to pieces, taking him through lawless mutant worlds and followed by faceless drones commanded by a monstrous infant. When he finally finds his target, it’s a dud, his life’s mission ruined and he’s captured. Then, the film becomes something else, a metaphor for war, destruction, creation and so much more, all animated by a true master.

While this film was created by dream logic, it also has the destruction of the Tower of Babel, Repo Man director Alex Cox as The Last Man, electrocuted brains, cosmic babies, Hell, Heaven and honestly whatever you want it to be and anything that you see in it. There hasn’t been a movie this formless or as willing to challenge you to answer what it’s all about in, well, forever. It’s a nihilistic apocalypse that somehow makes me want to celebrate being alive.

One of the sales lines for this film states: “Each piece of Mad God is handcrafted, independent and created from the heart.”

This is a film that I feel like I could write thousands of words about and you still wouldn’t know what it was truly about. You must see it and feel it for yourself. It’s begging to be explored and dissected and just plain experienced.

You can learn more about the movie at the official site.