The democratic nature of exploitation films means that everyone will be exploited and also everyone will be seen. Blacksploitation allowed black actors to star for often the first time ever in films and be seen as heroes while also appearing in movies that often glorify the worst parts of the black experience. In the same way, drive-in and grindhouse films allow groups of geographic audiences — like southern folks who often only saw themselves as dangerous rednecks — being given the chance to be heroes, often in regional films like Charles B. Pierce’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown and The Legend of Boggy Creek which gave Texarkana drive-in audiences a film that showed real stories, legends and people from their own small corner of the universe, a place that Hollywood would rarely if ever portray.

Based on Cockfighter by Charles Willeford, who also wrote the script, this was directed by Monte Hellman, who had already made Two-Lane Blacktop with Warren Oates, who plays Frank Mansfield. When we first meet the mute lead, he’s slicing a chicken’s beak so that it appears weak; sadly this actually makes it weak and causes him to lose a major match which costs him his trailer, his money and his woman.

Frank could settle down, stay back on the family farm, make Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy) an honest woman and just live a life of planned nothingness. But that’s not for him. There’s something else, the draw of putting roosters into the ring, the chance to win everything and lose it all. His goal has put tunnel vision on him, forcing him to never speak until he succeeds yet he has no idea what that success is. His life is just drifting and moving toward an endless nothingness yet if he can make some money along the way, raising his birds knowing that all his work will still mean that they’ll eventually be destroyed in front of him. And yet at the end, he’s willing to sacrifice even his finest fighter to cause a woman to smile, a woman who walks away and doesn’t care one bit.

Warren Oates remains the same stoic heading toward destruction and yet being the resolute person he’s been in nearly every movie I’ve seen him in. Never compromise, even in the face of the end.

Cockfighter just by its title is the kind of movie that people are going to skip and yeah, it’s pretty much an entire movie of roosters killing one another. Yet just as much as Cannibal Holocaust is about more than a turtle getting killed — a boa constrictor, a tarantula, a young pig and two squirrel monkeys also are murdered — but also about inhumanity, this movie tries to break free of that and say something about a life that was — and is — rarely shown.

Much like blacksploitation, I feel like my Yankee upbringing keeps me from fully understanding this experience. I reached out to my friend — and amazing writer, seriously, join his Patreon — Raven Mack for some insight, as he’s from Virginia and knows more than a few things.

B&S About Movies: Maybe I just don’t get Cockfighter and never will. I’ve been raised to not be into animal violence yet I know that we consume animals and never consider all that goes into making them ready for my food.

Raven Mack: Cockfighting is not out in the open, but I did live near a pretty major ring that got busted. I’d heard about it a lot, but never seen it in person, though I’m familiar with guys who were quite obviously raising fighting roosters. You can tell because each rooster is chained up in its own house, and the chains don’t reach the next house. So there’ll be a yard with like 50 little wooden doghouse looking structures, but each one has a rooster in it, chained by its leg to the side of the house.

B&S: I love the drive-in era stuff because it’s so specific for non-urban audiences with racing and country-specific films.

Raven Mack: Cockfighter is one of my all-time favorite movies, not so much because of the cockfighting but because of how country it is, and how Warren Oates just kills it man. Definitely in my top 5 all-time movies personally, and I actually get mad when people talk about Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia as his greatest thing. Two-Lane Blacktop/Cockfighter is dream double feature in the Raven Mack Drive-In.

B&S: Was the drive-in part of your childhood?

Raven Mack: Yeah, my dad worked as a painter for this dude who lived just beyond the drive-in in Farmville. They’d be playing poker inside and us kids would be fighting and wrestling and shit in the yard watching the movies across the way. They had occasional porn late night and the grown folks would make us all go inside and stay in the living room, but me and this other kid would sneak into the kitchen to peek.

Also with the drive-in being part of my childhood, down near where I grew up, there was still a Keysville Drive-in that was for sale at the start of the pandemic. I actually had a half-brained notion of trying to get financing to buy it. But the pandemic period of them playing non-new release movies was temporary, and I’d be miserable if I was working four nights around the weekend every week just to show another fuckin’ superhero movie. It would’ve been hell, so I’m thankful the universe trickstered me in the right direction.

Raven also added:

One reason I’m drawn to this movie, and the idea of cockfighting, is chicken watching. I used to have a decent sized flock, and my girlfriend has a large flock with a wide array of types. Just sitting there in the yard after having tossed scratch out and watching the chickens is very much like watching fish in a tank, which they say is therapeutic for you. I call it a ground murmuration the way the collective moves in weird, disjointed ways, but smoothly somehow. But also, you can’t have too many roosters. Roosters are natural born assholes, or perhaps more likely it’s the result of domestication, and they’re actual natural instincts turn them into paranoid, quick to fight assholes. Whenever there’s been too many roosters in the flock, either back in the day at my old house, or at my girlfriend’s, they end up having to be culled anyways, which I can do as “humanely” as possible, but is always gory, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing, because just axing a chicken head off causes the body to have nervous reactions and it bounces all over the place quite disturbingly. But I used to joke about wanting to start an organic cockfighting ring, because roosters just wanna fight each other, and the way they fly at each other, with their legs dropkicking at each other in air… it’s really a bizarre scene, and about as close as your average dilapidated compound gets to a Renaissance painting scene. Of course, people have to make it worse, and actual cockfighting involves tying sharpened gaffes to the rooster’s legs.

Nonetheless, this movie gets at the slow boil of the better side of rural life, of course with those climactic moments of stubborn, contrarian conflict. Oates’ character is a great embodiment of that, refusing to speak just because he didn’t win the little Cockfighter of the Year award. It’s also an incredibly artsy film for an exploitation era flick in terms of how the cockfighting scenes were shot. Of course, that’s an outlaw practice now, so the film will only survive on the margins of Tubi. But it is one of my all-time favorites, signified by actually getting it on DVD in the past few years, because I hate trying to figure out where the hell some things are streaming (if they even are), so I can always have it available, in my milk crate full of absolute classics.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Marc (John DiMino) has put off his final paper way too long, so that leads him to a late night in the library and falling asleep, at which point his paper gets stolen and he’s lured deeper into the mysterious world of the demonic Dewey Decimal System.

Directed and written by Abie Sidell, this movie puts Marc up against The Master of the Books (Brandon Burton) and the strange creatures and worlds that live within the stacks.

Where the most we can learn from most horror is to not have sex in the woods or go back home to deal with family business, Cram is unique in that it has a real message that’s worth living up to: don’t leave things until the last minute. Also, maybe don’t go to graduation parties where you don’t know anyone and still take a weed-lace cookie.

There’s a lot going on — copy machines printing endless F grades for Marc, a couple making out that disappears, strange monsters lurking — and the story just kind of ambles around, but I found all of it rather charming. Sidell is pretty talented and this is a great film for a first full length.

Cram is now on Tubi from Terror Films.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You know when you’ve seen too many slashers? When you review one twice. Here’s the original take on Lovers Lane.

Based on the urban legend of The Hook, Lovers Lane was directed by Jon Steven Ward and written by Geof Miller and Rory Veal. It starts thirteen years ago with the origin of the hook hand killer, as Dee-Dee (Diedre Kilgore) and Jimmy (Carter Roy) are steaming up their windows when they’re attacked and barely escape, only to find another couple bleeding out in their own backseat. When the cops arrive, led by Sheriff Tom Anderson (Matt Riedy) and psychiatrist Jack Grefe (Richard Sanders), the hook — known as Ray Hennessey (Ed Bailey) — is arrested and one of the victims ends up being Tom’s wife. Even worse, Hennessey was Jack’s patient and had a fixation on Harriet.

Fast forward: Jack’s daughter Chloe (Sarah Lancaster) just tried to down her boyfriend Michael (Riley Smith) for breaking up with her. She gets suspended and Michael’s mother — the principal and, as coincidences abound, the wife of the man Harriet was cheating with — grounds him. If that doesn’t seem like enough drama, The Hook has escaped and taken his weapon back.

How do the kids react to all of this? They go bowling. Yes, Chloe and Michael are still making each other jealous as they hang out with their friends Mandy (who is Jack’s daughter and played by Sarah Lancaster), Bradley (Ben Indra), Janelle (Anna Faris), Doug (Billy O’Sullivan), Cathy (Megan Hunt) and Tim (Collin F. Peacock). Don’t get too used to anyone, like the young cop Deputy David Schwick (Michael Shapiro) protecting them, because The Hook is ready to slice, dice, slash and I guess whatever verb goes with hooks. Poke? Prod? Stick?

If you’re wondering why they all go to Lovers Lane after all that — and what has happened before — you may have never seen a slasher before.

Shot in Seattle, Lovers Lane was originally going to be filmed at Mount Si High School in Snoqualmie, WA. Yet after several real life student deaths — including a triple murder — the school probably correctly said that that would be a bad idea.

Hey, this has 15 deaths, so it gets part of the slasher thing right. It’s just quite late in the game by 1999 — and in a post-Scream world — to be making by the numbers slashers. Bonus points, however, for using Anna Faris — she met first husband Ben Indra on this movie — a year before she’d make fun of movies exactly like this in Scary Movie. And wow, this has the wackiest jazz soundtrack. It’s certainly something.

Arrow Video’s blu ray release of Lovers Lane has a brand new 2K restoration from a 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative. There are two versions of the film: the widescreen 1.85:1 version and the full-frame 1.33:1 version, along with brand new audio commentary with writer-producers Geof Miller and Rory Veal, a featurette on the movie, trailers, image gallery, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ilan Sheady and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Lindsay Hallam and double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ilan Sheady. You can get it from MVD.

Based on an unfinished novel by Jack London published posthumously — it was finished by Robert L. Fish — in 1963, this Basil Dearden-directed movie was written by Michael Relph and Wolf Mankowitz. Reporter and women’s rights champion Sonia Winter (Diana Rigg) doesn’t just want to expose the Assassination Bureau Limited, she wants to destroy them and have its chairman, Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed), assassinated.

This delights Dragomiloff, who goes back to the teachings of his father, who started the killing cabal and said that they needed to only kill people who deserved to be killed. Now, his father’s colleagues kill for money instead of reasons of morality, so he dares them: accept Winter’s contract and kill him before he murders them.

From Paris and Zurich to Venice and Ruthenia, they battle the killer elite in humorous battle, climaxing in the entire Assassination Bureau — and their true leader, Lord Bostwick (Telly Savalas), who was Winter’s boss who got this whole business started — to protect the world’s leaders as they enter peace talks while a bomb-bearing zeppelin hovers overhead.

Later this same year, Rigg and Savalas would battle again in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

I really had fun with this movie, as sure, it’s a 1969 big budget and somewhat aged spy epic from a time unfamiliar to my American eyes. But man, Rigg is a delight and Oliver Reed is wonderful. And Telly seems to be having a great time, too.

The Arrow Video release of The Assassination Bureau has new audio commentary with authors Sean Hogan and Kim Newman; Right Film, Wrong Time, a 30-minute appreciation by critic, broadcaster and cultural historian Matthew Sweet; a trailer; an image gallery; a reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork choices and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Katherine McLaughlin and a set of six reproduction lobby cards from the original release. You can get it from MVD.

Charles Swenson worked on The Point and 200 Motels before this movie, which came into being once Fritz the Cat was such a success. It has the voices of former Turtles members Mark Volman (Flo) as Duck and Howard Kaylan (Eddie) as Willard Isenbaum, an insurance salesman whose brain is filled to overflowing with sexual fantasies.

He’s sent out to check on the insurance claim of an older woman who believes that she will be killed by a bomb that will be delivered by a wizard on Tuesday. As she dies of a heart attack, she gives Willard her duck and they go on a wild series of adentures.

Producer Jerry D. Good pitched the film to Flo and Eddie and production company Murakami-Wolf — who would go on to make Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — prepped to make the movie while Swenson worked on the escript. He wanted to call it Cheap! because it might have been released as Roger Corman’s Cheap! Swenson and studio owner Bill Wolf did most of the animation themselves.

The funniest thing about this film is that because the film was X-rated, The New York Times refused to run ads, despite the ad having a positive review from The New York Times. Making that even more humorous was that the movie was never submitted to the Motion Picture Association Of America and that X rating was just for publicity.

The animation looks really cheap, the story just goes on to anywhere and everywhere, and the credits claim that parts of the story came from people that Swenson encountered during the making of the film. I did, however, love the robotic cop with a John Wayne voice that was played by Robert Ridgely, who would go on to be a voice in The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat.

Director and writer Don Edmonds (of course, you know him from Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS) made this shot in a week and a day film that may have been distributed by New World but has nothing to do with their nurse films. Actually, Corman released it through Filmgroup.

This stars Donna Young (The Naughty Stewardesses), Marilyn Joi (Cleopatra Schwartz!) and Lauren Simon as the nurses, but unlike those Corman nurses films, these three girls have barely any social issues to solve and instead have to avoid Buck Flower as a horrifying sex offender, heal boxer John Daniels and handle Albert Cole’s mobster.

This movie will make you yearn for the subtlety of The Young Nurses. It’s violently not good, but I guess it had the kind of title and frequent nudity that it took to get on screens in 1974.

H. B. Halicki directed, wrote, starred in, produced and even did his own stuntwork to make this movie come to life, even hiring friends and family to keep the budget low. The cops, firemen and paramedics were real ones from Carson, California, as was its mayor, Sak Yamamoto. All of the vehicles they use were bought at an auction for $200 each and the fire trucks during the big chase at the end are Long Beach fire department trucks on their way to put out a real fire.

That final chase is forty minutes long and had no script. The whole movie had no script. Instead, Halicki showed editor Warner E. Leighton a piece of paper with a big circle, telling him that they went around a dust bowl twice and that was the script. Leighton had no idea what would be given to him each day.

H.B. Halicki Mercantile Co. & Junk Yard was the business that its creator ran and there were times that he would shut down the shooting so that he could fix some cars for money so that he could come back and wreck some for this movie.

Halicki is Maindrian Pace, an insurance investigator who runs a chop shop and is also the boss of a ring of car thieves. He has a code of honor, however, as everything he steals has to be insured so that the owners are compensated.

That code does not stop him from working for a South American drug lord who offers $200,000 to start and $2000,000 to finish taking 48 specific vehicles in five days. Each of the cars — given female names — have different degrees of difficulty to take, but Eleanor, a yellow 1973 Ford Mustang, is the toughest of all. Each time he attempts to find one, an issue keeps Maindrian from completing his order.  The final chase in which he tries to complete the order takes up six California cities and seemingly hundreds of vehicles, ending when he jumps the car thirty feet in the air for 128 feet. Usually cars have a gas-driven catapult or the help of CGI to make the stunt look good. Nope, That’s just H.B. in a car, compressing ten vertebrae and never walking the same way again. At one point, he hit a lamp post at more than 80 miles an hour and when he was finally awakened, the first thing he said was, “Did we get coverage?”

Sadly, his luck would not last. When making the sequel fifteen years later, a water tower fell incorrectly and the cable attached to it snapped. This chopped part of a light pole, which fell on Halicki, killing him. A shame and yet, how many times did he walk away from disaster?

For a movie that has 93 car crashes, of course Eleanor would be listed in the cast. That car deserves it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Călin Cazan and Mircea Toia (who also made Delta Space Mission) this Romanian science fiction animated movie is at once several films you’ve seen before and then like nothing you’ve seen before.

In the year 6470, two married explorers receive a distress signal from a female astronaut who went missing years before. Leaving their son Dan safely on their ship — or so they think — they go missing as well as the ship crashes into an alien planet that their son must soon learn to survive, then find his parents and battle the evil Von Kleefe.

The art style of this film brings to mind Heavy Metal and other 80s fantasy like Rock and Rule and Fire and Ice, particularly as the animation uses rotoscoping. Obviously, it has a debt to Star Wars, but then it has telekinetic blob aliens, a synth soundtrack and so many moments that become purely psychedelic.

This also has the most calming feel of any animated space opera I’ve ever seen. It’s literally a chill out movie and I mean that in the most glowing of ways. It’s the perfect comfort cartoon.

The Deaf Crocodile blu ray of The Son of the Stars has a new restoration by Deaf Crocodile from the original 35mm negative, a commentary track by film journalist Samm Deighan, an interview with co-director Călin Caza and an essay by Stephen R. Bissette. You can get it from Deaf Crocodile.

Tat Fung (Jackie Chan) has a dream of sailing around the world, but he’s trapped taking care of his mentally handicapped brother Dodo (director Sammo Hung). When Dodo gets involved with jewel thieves, Tat must save him one more time.

This film is against expectations. Hung plays a child in a man’s body and never fights once, while the final fight where Jackie defends him is brutal, filled with violence where Jackie usually uses comedy. And then the end of the movie blew my mind. The world of action movies rarely shows its heroes go to jail for acting above the law. It costs him his freedom and for a time, his girlfriend Jenny (Emily Chu).

This doesn’t have a lot of action for most of the film, other than the jungle violence in the open and the closing moments. Maybe they were saving everything up for the last scene where eight different stuntmen all fall from some of the highest of heights.

If I saw this in my early years of watching movies, I probably would have disliked it as all I would have wanted would be more fight scenes with Hung, Chan and Corey Yuen against bad guys James Tien, Dick Wei, Chung Fat, Phillip Ko-fei and Kao Sau-leung. But now that I’m getting old, I see the beauty in this film and why Hung made the movie that he did.

The Arrow release of Heart of Dragon has a 2K restoration from the original negative by Fortune Star, as well as two cuts: the 91-minute Hong Kong theatrical cut and the 99-minute extended Japanese cut, which has commentary by Frank Djeng and FJ DeSanto. It also has two extended featurettes made to promote the Japanese release by Shochiku; interviews with Chan, Rocky Lai, Hung and Arthur Wong; alternate English credits; a trailer; a music video; an image gallery; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sam Gilbey and an illustrated collectors’ booklet featuring new writing by Dylan Cheung and David West. You can get this movie from MVD.

You can also 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.