EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Director and writer Greydon Clark had $50,000 and the idea to take Shampoo and make a black version, subverting blacksploitation by having its hero — Jonathan (John Daniels) — be a business owner instead of the expected criminal. The director of photography had a car accident and still said he would show up. He didn’t and the film’s gaffer, Dean Cundey, took over.

Mr. Jonathan’s is the most successful hair salon for women on the Sunset Strip and that’s because, well, every old and rich white woman in town is coming to get dicked down by Mr. Jonathan. There’s no other polite way to say it. Backed up by hairdressers Artie (Skip E. Lowe, the inspiration for Jiminy Glick) and Richard (Gary Allen), he lives the kind of life that Machete would later imitate.

He soon falls in love with his receptionist, Brenda (Tanya Boyd), who breaks his heart when she disappears. That’s because she’s been kidnapped by her ex, a white mobster, and Jonathan loses his mind after they tear up his shop and even sexually abuse his hairdressers. So he does what any of us would. He gets a chainsaw and kills everyone.

This is the kind of movie where a white woman looks at a nude black man and says, “Oh my God! Mr. Jonathan, it IS bigger and better!” Perhaps you will not be surprised by just how bad the depiction of its gay characters is. This was made in 1976 and that’s in my lifetime. Also: nearly everyone used stage names as it was non-union, so William Bonner is billed as Jack Meoff. That’s kind of the name you’d expect from a porn, but this feels like an adult movie for the first section — there’s a scene in which two young women in a pool seduce Mr. Johnathan before their mother mounts him and makes them watch — and then it becomes a romance before someone is sodomized with a curling iron and revenge comes with a pool cue, an axe and finally, that chainsaw in a gory climax no one saw coming.

This was released by Dimension Pictures in 1976 and rereleased by 21st Century.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Directed by Darve Lau and star Bruce Le, this true story — you know how much I love those — was made seven years after the death of its inspiration. We learn that an astronomer saw a meteor and told Bruce’s parents that their son would be an incredible person who would do extraordinary things.

For his younger years, the prophecy foretells that those amazing acts are mostly fist fights, staring at sex workers who flash him through the windows of their brothel and helping voyeurs watch people make love. He upsets someone so much that they hang him outside his apartment and that failure makes him settle down and become the fighting force that we all know, but first, he has to get some snakes drunk and fight them.

This also gets meta. as two of the actors who played Bruce Lee’s movie villains, Kien Shih (Master Han!) and Bolo Yeung, show up as fictional bad guys who have issues with the movie Bruce. Master Kim, as the main villain is known, keeps bringing in people to fight Bruce, who mostly does snake fist style instead of JKD.

This movie also wants to be a silly post-Drunken Master film and even one of the fights that costs Bruce’s friend his life is wacky until, well, his friend gets erased. It feels a little bit all over the place, but I’m here for jumping kicks and not an actual story. That means that this delivers.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Also known as Snake Fist vs. the Dragon, this starts with the monkey style kung fu of Koo Ting-sang (Pomson Shi) battling the snake style of Hsia Sa (Charlie Chan Yiu Lam). Monkey defeats snake and is merciful, allowing him to live. This is a mistake.

Years later, Lung (John Cheung Ng Long) starts as a janitor and works his way up to be a student of Teacher Ho (Hau Chiu Sing), who is still rough on him, getting him drunk and leaving him in a field where he’s nearly killed by a snake. Luckily, the much older Koo Ting-sang (Pomson Shi) saves him. He offers to get a real monkey to teach Lung his style, but instead he goes back to the school and learns drunken style. Lung also finally fights back against the Yan brothers (Wan Faat and Cheng Hong Yip), who have been bullying him for most of the movie.

In response, their father Yan Fung Tien (Tong Tin Hei) hires two killers: Hsia Sa and another snake fighter, Lun Chun (Wilson Tong Wai Shing). What are the odds? They go to the school and kill everyone except Lung, He barely makes it to the woods where Koo Ting-sang lives and his second teacher is soon killed by the snakes. That means he must go through a training montage, watching a monkey fight and bite off the head of a snake. He finally learns his drunken monkey style and, as you expect, gets back the honor of those who trained him.

Directed by Cheung Sum, this movie is everything I love about kung fu films. Yes, there’s Brucesploitation but this is Jackiesploitation, making a film similar to Drunken Master while being just sleazy enough to throw in a mondo animal scene. 21st Century sold it by saying, “Bruce Lee is gone by Johnny Chang must carry on!”

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

It seems like every one of my favorite 1970s studios put out a family wilderness movie. I mean, Sunn Classic had their Grizzly Adams movies, Cannon had The Alaska Wilderness Adventure and 21st Century had this, The Legend of Black Thunder Mountain, which starts with a whole bunch of volcano stock footage.

Well, as we soon discover, “Black thunder, you know, is the Indian name for earthquake. They say its the earth speaking from inside her soul. And that fire and smoke from a volcano is a warning, that the earth is angry with man. Well, it turns out the earth had good reason to be angry.”

Anna (Holly Beemer) and Jamie (Steve Beemer) Parrish are lost, their dad (Ron Brown, who was also in Lefty, the Dingaling Lynx and Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar) has been knocked out by two criminals, George (Keith Sexson) and Buzz (John Sexson). As they look for their father, the children meet plenty of stock footage animals, as well as a real bear named Mrs. Mullen, who is played by Bozo the Bear. If he looks familiar, he was Ben the Bear on the Sunn Classic TV series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. There’s also a bald eagle named Balderdash, but he hasn’t been in anything else.

Directed by Tom Beemer — yes, whose kids are in this — and who wrote this along with Susan Shadburne (who also wrote the frightening The Adventures of Mark Twain, so it makes sense that Will Vinton was an editor on this), Tyler Johnson (whose only other IMDB credit is writing a Harry Styles video and that has to not be true), Lola Thompson and Don Chasan.

Yes, when we had only a few channels and went to the movies often, producers would make family wilderness movies with weird pop songs in them and sometimes make it look like volcanos were going to kill kids.

You can watch this on YouTube. Watch it in Spanish like I did.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

A guy in a Santa suit has sex with a woman in a filthy alley before they’re both killed by a man in a grinning see-through mask. Another Santa has his head impaled by a spear while his daughter watches. And yet another has his face grilled while roasted chestnuts on an open fire.

Scotland Yard inspector Ian Harris (Edmund Purdom, who wrote and directed this film as well as appearing in 2019: After the Fall of New York and Pieces) and detective Powell are perplexed. Plus, Harris just got a gift that says “Don’t Open Till Christmas.” They question Kate, whose father was a killed Santa, and her boyfriend, Cliff.

The next day, Cliff tricks Kate into coming to a porn studio. She storms off and he takes photos of a model dressed as Santa. A pair of police officers spot them shooting nudes in public, so he runs and the killer finds her, but lets her go. Oh yeah — and there’s a reporter named Giles digging around, too.

Things get worse. A strip club attending Santa gets knifed. The police think Cliff is the killer and the paper Giles says he works for has no idea who he is. And another Santa runs into the London Dungeon (yes, the place The Misfits sang about) and gets killed.

Even after undercover officers go after the Santa killer, they can’t find him and are killed themselves. The killer has a stripper who was there on the night he killed the Santa in her club and says that she will be the supreme sacrifice to Christmas evil. And Caroline Munro (!) is on stage in a nightclub when a Santa is chased on stage and stabbed in the face with a machete. Another Santa is castrated soon after.

It turns out that inspector Harris has no birth certificate and has gone on leave, disappearing to a mental asylum where Kate follows.

It turns out that Giles is Harris’ insane brother. Kate finds out first, but she is strangled and stabbed while detective Powell listens. Then, Giles lures him to his doom, as he electrocutes him in a junkyard.

Sherry escapes and Giles chases after her. She knocks him over a railing and he has a flashback of when he went insane: he caught his father, dressed as Santa, having sex with another woman. When his mother found out, Santa shoved her over a railing. But it’s too late for Sherry, as Giles has survived.

Finally, Harris wakes from a bad dream and unwraps his gift, complete with a card from his loving brother. It explodes, killing him and ending the film.

What I have just done is write about this film in a way that will probably make you want to watch it. It’s a slasher that even references Halloween in its opening credits. But it’s no Halloween.

According to tvtropes.com, “this utter sleazefest of a film is quite a jumbled and confused mess, and for good reason. While production began in 1982, the film remained in Development Hell for two years, due to the title of director continually changing hands; first up was Edmund Purdom (who also portrayed Inspector Harris) who walked off the set, prompting at least three or four others to fill in for him, with one only holding Purdom’s former position for a mere two days before being fired.”

This was released in the U.S. by 21st Century.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

This movie is quite literally the Batman and Superman of Italian sleaze filmmaking uniting to create some art. Those two men have many, many names, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll use the names that they used most often: Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei.

Producer Franco Gaudenzi wanted to bring the movie The Wild Pussycat to Italy, but it would have never made it past the Italian censors. For some reason, if the movie was made in Italy, it would pass. This is the country where it’s legal to call your movie Zombi 2, but illegal to use Mrs. Ward’s name. Let’s forget the complexities of law when it comes to exploitation cinema and move on.

D’Amato and Mattei took up the challenge of remaking this movie for Italian audiences with both writing the script and co-directing the picture, even if only D’Amato got directing credit. What was important for the producers was that the film could play theaters and it passed the Italian censorship board on November 5, 1975 after some lesbian elements and scenes with sodomy were removed.

Ironically, when this was brought to Switzerland by Erwin C. Dietrich, he added in actual hardcore scenes with French actress Brigitte Lahaie (who is in Fascination) and dubbed it into German, releasing it as Foltergarten der Sinnlichkeit (Torture Garden of Sensuality) and Die Lady mit der Pussycat (The Lady with the Pussycat).

Truly, scumbag pictures bring all the nations of the world together, do they not?

Francoise (Patrizia Gori, The Return of the Exorcist) has had enough of the abuse from her gambler cad of a husband Carlo (George Eastman!), so she jumps in front of a train. Her sister Emanuelle — no, not Laura Gemser just yet, she’s played here by Rosemarie Lindt from Salon Kitty — gets revenge by drugging Carlo and restraining him in a soundproof room. There, she teases him through two-way mirrored glass as he’s forced to watch her make love to numerous men and women, all while he’s repeatedly dosed with LSD.

Finally, Emanuelle enters the room and attempts to castrate Carlo, who has been repeatedly fantasizing about killing her and finally does so for real. His joy is short-lived as while he’s hiding in the secret room, he gets locked in and the police closed down the crime scene for thirty days, basically leaving him to die.

This is exactly the kind of movie that you’d imagine D’Amato and Mattei would make together, filled with numerous sex scenes, frequently spinning and zooming camera angles and a cannibalistic feast sequence.

Back when we reviewed Emanuelle In America, the guys at Severin said, “If you thought that was rough, watch this one.” Their release has a great George Eastman interview in which he says that D’Amato had the ability to do bigger and better things, but preferred doing ten B movies a year than one A film. You can get the Severin edition of this film and see just how good-looking a completely irredeemable piece of trash — I say that with love — can look.

21st Century released this — according to Temple of Schlock — as Emanuelle’s Revenge, Blood Vengeance and Demon Rage.