THE NEWEST LOOK. THE OLDEST LAW. An eye for an eye…WARNING!! Due to the constant action/violence depicted in this picture, the producer requests that persons under 17 be accompanied by an adult. Watch out for Judy Lee. She will rip your eyes out !!

Yes, grindhouse posters in the U.S. went nuts for Queen Boxer, also known as The Avenger. The story is classic: don’t mess with the wrong family territory. Our protagonist is a kickboxer who returns home to find her brother has been murdered by a local crime lord. A guy who, naturally, has a penchant for gouging out people’s eyes. She teams up with a fellow fighter who’s tired of shaking down for protection money, and together they wage a one-woman (and one-man) war against a literal army of axe-wielding goons. It’s a relentless, bloody climb through the Shanghai underworld that culminates in one of the most brutal, sustained punch-a-geddon finales in the history of the genre.

Directed by Florence Yu Fung-Chi, a rare female force in the male-dominated 70s HK industry, this was the only real shot she and her production company, Fung Ming, ever got, and they were desperate to make it count.

When the film was released, their marketing tried to sell Judy Lee as Bruce Lee’s actual sister. It was a complete fabrication and one that Lee eventually had to publicly apologize for, but it put butts in seats. But forget the marketing lies; the woman had the goods. With years of intensive Peking Opera training under her belt, Lee’s physicality is undeniable. She wasn’t just posing; she was throwing hands and feet with a ferocity that makes most of her contemporaries look like they’re doing a dance recital.

If that doesn’t make you laugh at the PR stunt for this movie, they also tried to sell it as a sequel to Boxer From Shantung.

It starts with Ma Yu Chen rolling into a restaurant looking to settle a debt with the local crime boss, Lee Ying, and his gang of thugs. He cleans house, but gets ambushed and ends up dead in a particularly nasty fashion. See, this crew belongs to the infamous Axe Gang, the kind of psychos who don’t just kill people. They massacre entire families. They thought they had left no loose ends, but they forgot about Ma Su Chen, his sister.

She hits the streets of Shanghai to the tune of the Shaft theme and hooks up with Fan Kao To (Peter Yang Kwan), a local rice bun shop owner who’s had enough of the Axe Gang’s protection racket. When Kao To stops paying, Su Chen steps in to deliver some instant dentistry to the goons who show up to collect. One thing leads to another, and this dynamic duo turns the city into a war zone to settle the score with the Big Boss. 

This was an 18-day quickie, and it shows. The camera angles are often tilted to the point of inducing vertigo, the editing is frantic, and the gore is surprisingly heavy for the era. The producers clearly didn’t give a damn about copyright, so you’ll hear iconic riffs from Shaft and various James Bond themes ripped straight from the studio masters and slapped onto the soundtrack. But this is arguably one of the few Hong Kong action films from that era directed by a woman, which lends the vengeful woman tearing through patriarchy a bit more bite. 

You can watch this on Tubi.

Back in the early 1980’s, the VHS market allowed my family to enjoy movies that never made it to Ellwood City, about an hour from Pittsburgh. Our hometown video store, Prime Time Video, was packed with films that fascinated me. I wish someone had footage of all the movies on the shelf. I know we definitely rented Ruggero Deodato’s Raiders of Atlantis, and this bizarre piece of cinema about an Aztec god loose in Manhattan. What a time to be alive, when you could walk down the street and wander row after row of horror movie choices!

The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, a feather-winged dragon, has found its new pyramid on the Chrysler Building. The film starts by showing us how it finds and devours the heads of its victims in gory detail. Meanwhile, an Aztec cult is leaving sacrificed victims in its wake as Detective Shepard (David Carradine, Death Race 2000) and Sgt. Powell (Richard Roundtree, Shaft) tries to keep up.

The film cuts to a failed diamond heist that leads Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty, who owns this film with a manic Method performance) to the title monster’s nest. He uses his new knowledge to move away from crime (and jazz piano playing) as he extorts the city for the location of the creature’s egg.

Shephard finds out the location on his own, ruining Quinn’s plans. The cops conduct an attack that takes out a baby Q as the creature returns home, wiping out nearly everyone (don’t take Shaft, Q!) until it’s shot over and over, falling dead to the streets below. The cop also saves Quinn, who is almost sacrificed by a crazed Aztec priest.

That said — the magic of the past in man’s modern world is not gone. The film ends with one last egg hatching.

Q is a great movie even without the monster. In Will Harris’ great oral history of the film, David Carradine said: “I thought if Larry had left the monster out of it, between Michael Moriarty and me, there was a real great story there between the detectives and the sleazebag heroin addict/petty-thief character. That’s where the power in the movie is. That’s where the heart of it is… and not in the chicken that ate New York!“

And this is a movie that rose from tragedy! Cohen had just been fired from I, the Jury and didn’t want to waste the hotel room he had already paid for. He wrote the script, hired actors and was done with pre-production in just six days!

Like all of Cohen’s films—do I sound repetitive yet? — This is a movie that outdoes its small budget and looks like a million bucks. It has heart — and plenty of other organs — and verve and panache and any other hyperbole you’d love to bestow upon it.

Released in Italy as L’uomo senza memoria (The Man Without a Memory), Puzzle was directed by Duccio Tessari, who like many Italy exploitation directors had a career that went from genre to genre: peplum (he wrote several, including Goliath and the Vampires and Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World),  westerns (he wrote and directed A Pistol for Ringo and The Return of Ringo), Eurospy (Kiss Kiss…Bang Bang), blacksploitation (Three Tough Guys) and the giallo with The Bloodstained Butterfly and this film.

Tessari took the amnesia trope and gave it a cold, sharp, European edge. It’s less about a masked killer stalking fashion models and more about a man trapped in a labyrinth of his own making.

Eight months ago, Ted Walden (Luc Merenda) woke up from a brutal car crash with a clean slate and a vacant mind. He’s been trying to piece his life back together, but the universe seems to have other plans. Every time he crosses paths with someone from his former life, one of two things happens: they either pull a gun on him or they end up dead.

His ex-wife (Senta Berger) has moved on, thinking he’s been dead this whole time, which, in a way, he was. But the syndicate hasn’t forgotten him. They know he stole a million dollars before that fateful wreck, and they aren’t looking for an apology. If Ted can’t find the cash, he’s going to lose his life—and he’s going to take his ex-wife down with him.

What makes Puzzle stand out in the crowded Italian thriller landscape of the 70s is the character arc. It’s fascinating to watch Ted slowly realize that the man he used to be was an absolute piece of work. There is a delicious tension in watching a man use the ruthless instincts of his former, evil self to protect the decent man he’s accidentally become. And, because this is an Italian production from the 70s, let’s be honest: the man has taste. For an amnesiac, Ted knows his way around a wardrobe—the suits are sharp, the setting is moody, and the style is top-tier.

While it lacks the hyper-violent, glove-wearing killer obsession of some other Gialli, it leans hard into the “discovery of identity” thriller subgenre. It’s a mystery that feels like it’s constantly folding in on itself, leading to a crowd-pleasing, high-stakes finale that lands with a punch. Interestingly, this movie hit the screens the same year as a certain grisly little film from Texas (you know the one), but Puzzle brings its own distinct brand of Euro-cruelty that demands your attention.

I kind of love that Ted slowly learns what a horrible person he used to be and how he can use it to remain the better person he has become. Also, for an amnesiac, he has not forgotten how to dress well. Less a murder-based giallo and more an exploration of identity — with a crowd-pleasing ending made the very same year as a certain film from Texas — this one surprised me.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Dude, Richard Rush has sure made some disparate movies. There’s Thunder Alley, Hells Angels on Wheels and The Stunt Man, then there’s Air America and Color of Night. But he also made this, which reminds me that if I were alive in 1968, I would have died young.

Jenny (Susan Strasberg) is a deaf girl looking for her brother Steve, who left behind a note that said, “Jess Saes: God is alive and well and living in a sugar cube.” That leads her to Haight-Ashbury and the band Mumblin’ Jim, led by Stoney (Jack Nicholson).

Henry Jaglom, who wrote My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, is an artist who does the band’s posters. When they go to see him, he’s so messed up on 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine that he thinks everyone is the living dead and threatens them with a saw. But that’s where Jenny sees some of her brother’s art and learns that he’s become a traveling preacher known as The Seeker. Dave (Dean Stockwell), who left the band, offers to help them find him, but everyone nearly dies in the junkyard when the gang — led by John “Bud” Cardos — attacks.

The Seeker shows up, and yep, he’s Bruce Dern. He reveals that Jenny was beaten so badly by their mother that she had a stroke and went deaf. He wants to be clean from drugs when they meet. Meanwhile, his sister is caught between Stoney and Dave.

This movie ends as all hippy films must, in death and fire, as Stoney sets his shrine ablaze and Dave saves a tripping Jenny from a car coming right at her by sacrificing himself, remarking that he hopes death will be a good trip as he dies.

Dick Clark produced this, and like a true square, he wanted the drug message to show how wrong it was to get hooked. Ah, I’m being mean.

Let’s be nice — the stunts and special effects are by Gary Kent, whose adventures make up the documentary Danger God. The Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Seeds and The Storybook made most of the music in this, and the concert scenes are worth watching the entire film. Plus, Garry Marshall plays an undercover cop!