Jess Franco and Erwin C. Dietrich go back to prison again, except that this is about a women’s prison camp that really is used to gather sex slaves to serve as comfort women for a revolutionary army. That means that while the soldiers are fighting for some level of equality, they also need inspiration of their own and that means women taken right off the streets and from their homes and even from their wedding and asked to be concubines for the glory of freedom.

It’d be troubling but not the kind of movie that Jess Franco would make until we meet Isla (Muriel Montossé, using the name Nanda Van Bergen; she also used the names Vicky Adams and Anna Marc), the lesbian warden –with a talking parrot which is something I have yet to see in a women in prison movie — who is here to enact all the things expected from the WIP genre as well as something beyond that. Decapitations, sure. How about nude women tied to crosses and shot full of holes by a topless firing squad?

Beyond Franco naming one of the revolutionaries after Spanish Socialist Labour Party leader, you have to wonder what the moral is when heroine Angela (Ada Tauler) leaves her husband for the revolutionary leader who turned her and most of her friends out. And then Isla gets away without punishment?

Why am I looking for a moral in a Jess Franco movie? I should just stare at Monica Swinn and forget about things like morals when the revolution needs a love camp.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared as part of a Cannon Month on March 3, 2022. I’m excited to report that this once out of print film is now available on blu ray from Ronin Flix. It looks great and comes with an interview with Leon Isaac Kennedy and the film’s trailer. You can get it from MVD.

All the way back in his teens, Leon Issac Kennedy was a DJ in Cleveland, a job that took him to Los Angeles and finally into two films with Fred Williamson, Hammer and Mean Johnny Barrows. By this point in his career, he’d already become a star as Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone in Jamaa Fanaka’s Penitentiary and had married Jayne Kennedy, the former Miss Ohio USA and NFL broadcaster. Sadly, they’d break up just as this movie was being released and as part of their divorce case, a sex tape — decades before this became something that anyone knew of — that EBONY Magazine claimed that Kennedy had released. He later sued for a million dollars.

But back before all that ugliness, the Kennedys appeared in this remake* of Robert Rossen’s 1947 boxing move of the same name. Supposedly, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus – those who are all things Cannon — studied marketing research and discovered that Americans wanted to see one thing more than anything else: Leon Isaac Kennedy beating people up.

Leon is Leon “The Lover” Johnson, a boxer who we first meet dancing around an opponent and then getting a few more rounds in with a woman who caught his eye in the crowd. In a public bathroom, no less.

Despite the unclean nature of where Leon chooses to do his loving, he’s actually a somewhat decent man who only became a boxer because it can pay for the medical care of his sister Kelly (Nikki Swasey Seaton). To get to the top, he has to deal with a fight promoter named Big Man (Peter Lawford) and get trained by Muhammed Ali, which seems to be the right person to train you and wow, seeing The Greatest up close in the ring sparring reminds you of just how amazing he was, even this late in his career.

He also falls for Julie Winters (Mrs. Kennedy, of course) who ends up leaving him after all his groupie-loving shenanigans, telling him “I just wish you were double-jointed so you could turn around and kiss your own ass.”

Can he get it all together, get the girl, win the big fight and keep his sister as healthy as possible? I mean, have you ever seen a boxing movie before?

That said, this is like no other boxing movie you’ve seen, as Kennedy does near pro wrestling moves as he boxes, like windmill punches, multiple punches to the face piston style and even runs up the ropes to deliver a big punch near the end. Plus, his nemesis has a very pro wrestling name — the St. Louis Assassin — and is played by former WBC Light Heavyweight Champion J. B. Williamson in a role that demands that he grimace, destroy people and throw babies. Yes, he really tosses a baby in one scene.

Body and Soul was directed by My Tutor and Private Resort’s George Bowers, who edited Galaxina, The Stepfather, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Sleeping with the Enemy and A League of Their Own.

This is pretty much a perfect cable Sunday do-nothing movie. You know the kind — it comes on WTBS and you have no plans other than getting over that hangover and just watch how it all comes out. That’s high praise for a film, actually, as movies can be the balm that soothes your soul.

*Maybe I should say loose remake.

Chris Walas’ special effects work is within the hearts and minds of every single genre fan. I mean, he did the facemelting in Raiders of the Lost Ark, created the Gremlins, designed the makeup for Jereeba Shigan in Enemy Mine and was the creature designer for The Fly, House II, Arachnaphobia, Naked Lunch and so many more films, as well as directing The Fly II and this film.

Richard Jefferies wrote Blood Tide and the script for this movie a decade before it was filmed. It was based on a real homeless person who lived in a vacant lot on the other side of the street from his first house in Los Angeles. He showed the script to William Wesley and that led to them making Scarecrows together and then after rewrites on this movie, Walas came on to direct and brought the script to Mel Brooks, who had produced The Fly II.

Graham Krakowski (Bill Paxton) has just bought his first house and he worries that the homeless man (Marshall Bell, Coach Schneider from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge) across the street is stalking him, a fact that becomes more true when he has the man arrested for urinating on his yard. Soon, he’s sleepwalking and wondering when he’s having a nightmare and when it’s reality. And when a series of murders happen, he wonders if he’s the one doing the killing.

This movie has the kind of cast I love to see in a movie, including Michael Ironside, Colleen Camp, Stuart Pankin, Mitzi Kapture (I may have watched more than one movie with a Silk Stalkings castmember this week) and Marc McClure.

This made me miss Bill Paxton, an actor who could do just about anything. He hits every emotion in this film and owns every scene that he’s in.

The Arrow Video blu ray of The Vagrant has a brand new 2K restoration by Arrow Films from a new scan of the original camera negative; new interviews with director Chris Walas, Marshall Bell, Michael Ironside and Colleen Camp; a trailer; an image gallery; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Robert Hack and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film critic Chris Hallock and Vagrant super-fan James Pearcey. You can get it from MVD.

A Fifteen-Year-Old Captain is based on a novel by French writer Jules Verne and when I think “classic Jules Verne book” I would pick Jess Franco to make the movie. I mean, I’d pick Jess to make a lot of movies, to be fair.

The hero is Dick Sand (José Manuel Marcos) and he’s a sailor on the Pilgrim, which soon becomes a ship without a captain, a role Dick ends up taking over. Other than En busca del dragón dorado, this would be the only kid-friendly movie in the Jess Franco Cinematic Universe but who knows, there could be a stash of never seen movies that will prove me wrong.

That said, it’s a kid movie with plenty of death, actual real whaling stock footage, Howard Vernon and William Berger as slave traders, Edmund Purdom as an admiral and a score by Bruno Nicolai and Daniel White.

Sometimes when I encounter one of the many Franco outliers, I think to myself, “This is the same man that zoomed cameras directly into the female anatomy and made Venus In Furs and Vampyros Lesbos and so many movies set in one hotel ballroom where women dance in slow motion.” Isn’t that great? We can jump all over the timeline and watch Franco’s film from any era and be amazed that they are all from him, as time no longer has meaning once he crossed over and all of his work exists all over cyberspace and on the shelves of my home.

Trip to Bangkok, Coffin Included has Jess Franco in pulp adventure mode, making a loose adaption of an Edgar Wallace story. Colonel Daniel Blimp (Howard Vernon) of the British Secret Service is in Bangkok investigating the murder of the British ambassador by a blind man. Blimp is joined by another younger singer agent played by José Llamas who can do the actual fighting because, well, Vernon is pushing 78 or so here.

While this was made in Palma de Mallorca and Benidorm for the interiors, the exteriors really are Bangkok and Singapore, as Juan Soler flew himself there and was a crew of one capturing all the establishing shots.

The killer being blind is the whole plot of a cult leader named Professor Tao, who trains the blind to murder. This is more adventure than your normal Franco sleaze, yet there is a chase scene with a nude woman who stays disrobed on screen for ten minutes, so it’s not like Jess is slowing down at all. I also like the idea that Tao is actually motivated to save the world as he saw world leaders destroy the world in a cave vision, so that’s why he started his cult of doom.

Also: Lina Romay shows up in a wheelchair for less than a few seconds and it still filled me with utter joy.

This year began for me with the deepest of dives into all things Rollin, so when this movie was announced, I was quite excited. Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger have been working for some time to make this film which attempts to get the world to recognize him as “one of genre cinema’s most singular poets.”

The film does a fine job of explaining how the artist was misunderstood and dealt with bad luck, continually having to return to making adult films just to survive and then barely knowing that he was a recognzied cult director before his death. It also adds a lot of depth to his childhood, his relationship with his mother and how he was inspired to make films.

Yet there are moments where — outside of heartfelt words by Brigitte Lahaie and Françoise Pascal, as well as no small amount of tear-inducing emotion over the loss of Rollin from this world — it seems that everyone is so academic in their appreciation that someone who has never seen one of his films may get the idea that they’re just as well-mannered. And the truth is, they’re anything but. Rollin’s films exist somewhere between childhood memory and adult waking nightmare, filled with surrealistic imagery of vampire emerging from clocks, bats affixing themselves between women’s legs and always a beach being wandered or a cemetery to be trapped within.

I realize that Rollin doesn’t need hyperbole to sell his work, but perhaps a bit more passion would go somewhere. That said, it’s obvious that this film’s creators have a worthy mission and that’s to elevate Rollin above more than simple Eurosleaze. Even in his native France, he was not well-considered and that’s a shame. So I’m pleased that this exists and hope that if someone watches it, they immediately go out and start to explore his movies for themselves and get high off the finest strain of movie drugs.

The true shame of it all is that Rollin is not around to know that today he is synonymous with a style of filmmaking that is uniquely his. I was most struck by a quote by Jean Cocteau in this film that sums up who Rollin was and why he remained devoted to making films that are uniquely what he wanted them to be and not producers or even audiences: “What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”

You can stream this movie on the Arrow player. Visit ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

Fok Ming-ming (Michelle Yeoh, as ever amazing) and Secret Agent 001 (Derek Yee) are Chinese secret agents who learn that the city of Kaa Yi is being turned into a weapons manufacturing site by Japanese occupation forces. Along with a drifter (Richard Woo) and Princess Chin-chin (Cindy Lau Chin-Dai), they must rally the people to defeat the Imperial Japanese Army.

Directed by David Chung and written by Kan-Cheung Tsang, this is part World War II movie and part Indiana Jones. How amazing that Yeoh and Yee share the duties of being adventurers and if anything, Yee feels like he has to keep up with her?

It’s also astounding that Yeoh keeps smiling through all this action, including an ending battle that has a cast of hundreds as modern technology meets sharp swords. Between firing a gigantic gun, flying a biplane and numerous hand to hand battles, this is all her film. If you want a movie you can just sit back and enjoy, well, Magnificent Warriors is more than up to the challenge. It feels like a huge video game that you just want more of.

The 88 Films blu ray release of Magnificent Warriors has a new 2K restoration from the original camera negatives, commentary with Asian cinema expert Frank Djeng, interviews with Yeoh and Tung Wei, a poster and a book on the movie. You can get it from MVD.