12. GUERILLAS IN THE MIDST: One involving soldiers or set during a war.

Code Name: Wild Geese is not the sequel to The Wild Geese but don’t let that stop you from watching it and making the filmmaker’s money.

This is directed by an absolute master of the low budget war movie, Antonio Margheriti, written by Michael Lester and produced by a man who made seventeen movies with Jess Franco, Erwin C. Dietrich.

DEA agent Fletcher (Ernest Borgnine) heads an operation to cut off the supply of opium out of Hong Kong. As always with these deep cover government jobs, the money has to come from somewhere. Here, it’s funded by an American businessman named Brenner (Hartmut Neugebauer).

Working with his partner Charlton (Klaus Kinski), Fletcher hires Robin Wesley (Lewis Collins, who is also in Margheriti’s Commando Leopard), a man who has just lost his son to heroin. He’s all for this mission: to burn down heroin operations throughout the Golden Triangle alongside an army of mercenaries like Klein (Manfred Lehmann) and helicopter pilot China (Lee Van Cleef). As you can expect, there are twists, turns and double crosses. Most importantly, it has Mimsy Farmer and a flamethrower mounted on a helicopter.

11. ⬆⬆⬇⬇⬅➡⬅➡🅱🅰: Select and start a movie based on a video game.

Look, I want to say something like, “Dead or Alive series depicts a collection of skilled martial artists in a worldwide competition that’s sponsored by the DOATEC (Dead or Alive Tournament Executive Committee), a massive corporation with unknown motives,” but really the video game series is Street Fighter with breasts and butts. I mean, the spin-off Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball had a mode where you got girls to perform tasks for you and then take photos of them while they posed.

It was created by Team Ninja and Tomonobu Itagaki. Itagaki has said that “violence and eroticism were needed for true entertainment.”

I’m not decrying exploitation.

I’m just telling you this is a different video game experience.

How amazing is it that the movie based on the game is so good? That’s probably because of the cast and the director. Corey Yuen directed this! The same director who made Dragons Forever, No Retreat, No Surrender and the action scenes for Lethal Weapon 4, Romeo Must Die, Kiss of the Dragon, The One, Cradle 2 the Grave, War and The Expendables.

If you’ve played the game, you know the fighters, but let me get into them for those who may not know anything about all of these bikini ladies and ninjas.

Tina Armstrong is a pro wrestler who made it to the finals of the first DOA tournament, won the second, became a supermodel, a rock star and a politician. She’s played by Jaime Pressly and her father, Bass, the pro wrestler who raised her as a single dad, is Kevin Nash.

Kasumi is played by Devon Aoki, daughter of the man who brought Benihana to America. She’s a ninja princess of the Mugen Tenshin Ninja Clan. She’s the main character of the series and also appears in the Ninja Gaidan games.

Christie Allen is a master thief and killer who is way meaner in the games than she is in the movie. She’s played by Holly Valance.

Helena Douglas is the daughter of DOATEC’s founder, who has recently died, and is running the tournament along with Donovan (Eric Roberts). She’s played by Sarah Carter.

Natassia Malthe is Ayane, a ninja assassin who is trying to kill Kasumi, who is being protected by Ryu Hayabusa, the star of Ninja Gaidan, who is played by the son of the man who introduced ninjas to America. Yes, that’s Kane Kosugi. They’re also looking for her brother Hayate (Collin Chou).

Plus, there’s Christie’s partner Max (Matthew Marsden), Zack (Brian J. White) who eventually runs the island that Dead or Alive Xtreme is on, Russian soldier Bayman (Derek Boyer), Robin Shou as a pirate, Brad Wong (Song Lin), Lei Fang (Ying Wang), Hitomi (Hung Lin) and Gen Fu (Fang Liu).

This movie was a lot of work with the actresses all training for three months and Yuen having two crews working 17 hours a day, getting four hours of sleep and then waking up to shoot.

The plot is, well, every single martial arts tournament movie you’ve ever seen, but it’s also a movie as relentlessly devoted to gorgeous women kicking people in the face, smiling right into the camera and then a butt, crotch or breast is seen before more fighting. It’s absolutely shameless and yet, isn’t that what we want from a video game movie? I love how reviewers expected something more, like this was great literature. I’ve played all the games, I won’t lie and they’re relentless and brutal fighters that are a lot of fun. But they also have volleyball mini-games and all of the girls have multiple outfits that are all very revealing. Sometimes, you need to shut off your brain and enjoy things.

You can watch this on Tubi.

10. “I GOT YOU, BABY GIRL”: A post-apocalyptic film with some emotional heft.

The Prize Of Peril is a game show that everyone in France is crazy about. The rules are pretty simple. A helicopter takes contestants a mile away from the studio and they’re given four hours to get back. If they do, they win a million. But ah, the show also has five hunters who can kill the contestants. No one has ever won. Frederick Jacquemard (Gerard Lanvin) thinks he can do it.

Based on a story by Robert Sheckley and not Richard Bachman AKA U of M graduate Steve King, whose The Running Man came out only one year before, Le Prix du Danger is the second adaption of the story after the German made for TV film Das Millionenspiel.

Directed by Yves Boisset, The Prize of Peril has a great host in the middle of all of this craziness, Frédéric Mallaire (Michel Piccoli), which is also something that, you know it, shows up in The Running Man.

What the Arnold movie does much better is explain the rules of the game show. And have characters who have meaning and that you care about. Frederick seems like someone we shouldn’t like, the journalist character seems like she’s going to stop the show and the other contestants barely register.

But Yves Boisset thought that this movie and Twentieth Century Fox’s films were real close. Too close. He thought the screenplay was the same one, in fact. He sued and IMDB claims that the paperwork for the case was lost in a plane crash in the New York bay, which yes, is IMDBS.But nonetheless, it may have taken eleven years, but Boisset won.

Maybe because the novel The Running Man is nothing like the film.

Looking for more game show movies? Try The 10th Victim, which was also written by Sheckley. I also recommend Warriors of the Year 2072 and Endgame.

9. PASSES LIKE MOLASSES: One with a looooong death/dying sequence.

My grandmother loved this movie. Whenever she would hear about how many movies I watched, she always said that I should watch more movies like Imitation of Life. My grandmother is a few years gone now and I remember that very early in my life, she pulled me aside and told me that this would be our last holiday together. I cried for days and days, worried that after all the gifts that she would be dead. Instead, she lived. And the next year, she did the same thing and my brother reacted like I did. After a few years, we realized that she would tell us this every year or her other Christmas idea, the thought that this year, we would have to cancel the season. I have no idea why Christmas was canceled, but it was often because of something my grandfather — who worked triple holiday shifts to pay for it — had done. To be fair, he drunkenly knocked the tree down every year. But after several more years of canceling the birth of the Christ child, she finally either quit doing this or we just laughed it off.

Decades later, I was picking her up — our tradition, I’d come to town later than everyone else and always pick her up whenever she was ready to be around the rest of the family — and she said to me, “You know, this is out last Christmas together.”

I looked her in the eye and said, “Grandma, that was in 1977, and you’ve told me that every year since.”

“I have,” she said, as she looked out the window and started to laugh.

Anyways, that should explain to you why this is my grandmother’s favorite movie, because she lived to be in her 90s on a diet of Coca-Cola and chocolate. Never any real food. She fell off the couch twice in the same week, cleaning the curtains, and went through a table like a pro wrestler and got up and did it again. Once, she was trying to find something under the bed and used a lit match to look. This was in like 2018, I kid you not. And man, did she like emotional drama and gossip. She still had a scanner and CB radio in her home and absolutely loved Facebook, having two accounts so she could keep up on the small town I grew up in. She had subscriptions to the National Enquirer, the Star, the Examiner and Globe, so my love of scandal and sleaze probably came from her.

I can see what she loved about Imitation of Life.

I mean, first off, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner, who had her own scandal, as her daughter Cheryl stabbed her boyfriend Johnny Stampano in the stomach to save her from a beating; Sean Connery also knocked a gun out of the gangster’s hand on the set of Another Time, Another Place) is a single mom who cares more about being a star than raising her daughter Susie (Terry Burnham as a young girl, Sandra Dee when she grows up). She loses her at Coney Island and the girl is saved by Steve Archer (John Gavin) who will forever be her friend-zoned man, always saving the day to the point that her daughter will realize what she hasn’t and grow up to love him like a woman should love a man, even if it’s kind of incestuous and Steve is too much of a good person to give in to an attractive 16-year-old Sandra Dee but hey, I’d take a 38-year-old Lana Turned over that anyway.

Lora and Steve find Susie with Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) and her daughter Sarah Jane (Karin Dicker as a kid, Susan Kohner as a grown woman). To pay her back, Lora takes in this single woman and her daughter, which seems like a kindness, but she’s really getting a free person to take care of her daughter while she acts in the plays of her boyfriend David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy, yes, the same man who would dominate Old Detroit and the mask and novelty industry as the owner of Silver Shamrock) and the schemes of her agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda).

As for Steve, he never wanted her to be a star and that’s the one bad thing we can say about him. Maybe he knew how sleazy it was all going to be. But he should have let her have her career. That said, it was 1959, but eh, that’s just trying to make up for men being men.

More troubling, but again, it was 1959, is that Sarah Jane wants to be white to the point that when she finally runs away from home, her mother has to act like she was her maid so she doesn’t give away the fact that her daughter is white.

Lora also goes to Italy to be in a movie so I assume that she’s either Carroll Baker or Jennifer North.

The end of this movie, man. After a whole two hours of denying her blackness — then again, if blonde boys were slapping me in the face when I confessed that I wasn’t white, would I feel any other emotion? — Annie dies after an entire marathon of being depressed and weakened. Like, she’s dying from the first time we see her and she dies for this whole movie until she dies with her daughter throwing herself on the coffin screaming, “I killed my own mother!”

In the book, the white woman is Bea Pullman, who becomes rich when she sells her maid Delilah’s family waffle recipe. The white woman gets all the money and the kindly black woman doesn’t even take the 20% she is offered and remains working in the house.

Anyways, Lana Turner wore like a million worth of gowns in this and as I said before, you can watch this just to stare at her. I’d never seen a Douglas Sirk movie before this. It was the movie he went out on. R.E. M. sang the words, “That’s sugarcane that tasted good / That’s cinnamon, that’s Hollywood / Come on, come on, no one can see you try” in the song named for this movie but they never saw it.

Oddly, my grandmother’s favorite song was “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. and she would play it over and over for hours, the same 45 single, knowing all the words.

8. IN YOUR DREAMS: Heavy on the dream sequence, Jack.

Samantha (Cassandra Leigh AKA Lisa Boyle) is an exotic dancer at Club Fugazi and her fantasy life is even wilder, as she dreams that she’s at the center of fetish-heavy sex scenes with murder always moments away. But as for her real-life dancing, it’s the kind of performance art pretty dance that’s more burlesque than bump and grind, finding her dressed as a schoolgirl complete with lollipop or part of a BDSM wedding number. No strip club you will ever go to will have outfits and routines at this level, unless Zanzibar from Flashdance was real. It’s not, I’m from Pittsburgh.

After she starts going to therapy with Dr. Saul (Justin Carroll), Samantha learns that her dreams are her working out the incest she survived from her father and the guilt that is still harming her as she watched him kill himself. As for the girls getting killed in the dream and then dying in real life, well now you’re in a giallo. Or an erotic thriller. Or a stripper in peril film.

The other girls in this include Stephanie Champlin (Witchcraft VI, Ice Cream Man) as Tiffany, Rachel Reed as Amy, Ashlie Rhey (Ring of Fire II: Blood and Steel, Hell’s Bells) as Mantra, Melissa Dutton (Forbidden Hearts) as Satchi, Nicole Grey (Joe D’Amato’s Il diavolo nella carne) as Dusty and Lisa Collins as Whiplash. The music is, as you would expect, perfectly 90s adult club music and the repetition will destroy you.

Director Scott P. Levy also made the TV remake of Piranha, as well as House of the Damned and The Alien Within. Writer Daniella Purcell also wrote the remake of The Wasp Woman and Burial of the Rats.

While not the greatest erotic thrill of the 90s — or even 1994 — the sequel was directed and written by Richard Styles, who made Sorcereress II. It has Kimberly Kelly, Tane McClure, Griffin Drew, Kim Kopf, Antonia Dorian and the reason why I’ll watch it, Julie K. Smith.

7. “META” MILITIA: Be on the lookout for any one of an enemy squadron of self aware films operating in your area. Report if seen…

This film takes the 2018 short film of the same name by the comedy troupe 3Peat and makes an entire horror film around a Juneteenth weekend spent at a cabin in the woods. Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharaoh) arrive first and find an old board game from the racist past that challenges them to trivia to the death. She’s shot with an arrow and he’s captured before the credits.

Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), Allison (Grace Byers) and Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins) are the next to arrive, followed by King (Melvin Gregg), Lisa’s ex Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), Shanika (X Mayo) and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler). And just like every 80s slasher, the town is full of dread, scarred up convenience store clerks and authority figures like Ranger White (Diedrich Bader) who get in the way of drugs and sex in the woods.

By the time the substances start working, the board game — The Blackening — is back on the table. The voice of the game’s mascot tells them that he has Morgan and if they want to see him alive, they must answer black pop culture questions. One about the black guest stars of Friends — Aisha Tyler, Gabrielle Union and Janet Hubert would be good answers — leads to Morgan being beaten.

Now, the game changes and claims that whoever is the least black will be killed. Well, Clifton did vote for Trump.

Directed by Tim Story and written by Parker and Tracy Oliver, I laughed out loud at a few moments in this movie and was pleased that it remains an actual slasher despite referencing how much its characters know about horror movies. I mean, the tagline is “We can’t all die first.”

From the cabin being referenced as looking a lot like the Sawyer house to the killers making the ch-ch-ch, ah-ah-ah noises like Jason, there’s even a scene where Morgan goes on and on about an episode of Dateline where a brother and sister kept their incest-bred kids under the stairs. Of course, that’s The People Under the Stairs. And if you love Scream, much less Scream 2, the killer asking if Jada Pinkett Smith and Omar Epps survived is beyond movie geek referential.

6. THE TORN TICKET: You guessed it, films/scenes that take place in a movie theater.

Back in 1992, Chaz (Jillian Mueller), projectionist and recovering drig addict Heavy Metal Jeff (Robbie Tann) and ushers Abe (Evan Daves), Ricky (Glenn Stott) and Todd (Larry Saperstein) are working in the family-friendly movie theater of Mr. Pike (Bill Phillips). That night, he allows the five to pick any movie they want to watch, as long as it’s either A League of Their Own or Encino Man.

Then a possessed old man breaks into the theater and tears into a wall where they find the old reel of disreputable film and quite literally, all hell breaks loose in the form of succubus Lilith (Katelyn Pearce), a demon ready to screw their souls.

This is certainly a fun movie but it feels like the cinematic equivalent of junk food. I don’t expect the movie within the movie to look like The Last House On Dead End Street, but it would have been nice if it had. It’s cute but after watching weeks of USA Up All Night, this isn’t as sinful as it promises that it could be.

You can watch this on Tubi.

4. WORKING REMOTELY: One that takes place out in the cut somewhere.

Directed by Kevin and Michael Goetz and written by Kyle Killen, Scenic Route — AKA Wrecked — is about Michael (Josh Duhamel) and Carter (Dan Fogler) broken down in the California desert, an event created by Carter so that he can finally hash it all out with Michael.

For most of this movie’s running time, these two lifelong friends either fall to pieces or come back together, often just moments between those diametrical events, while trying to figure out how to get the truck running again.

Shot in twelve days all in the same location with both leads occupying all of the screen time other than flashbacks and the ending, this was a real test for both actors, including Duhamel appearing with his hair cut into a mohawk. It’s really unlike any role I’d seen either in before.

You can watch this on Tubi.

3. TWILIGHT YEARS IN THEIR CAREERS: An aging American actor in an overseas production.

In the interview with Sergio Martino on the All the Colors of Giallo blu ray from Severin, he mentions that he only lost money on one movie.

This is that movie.

I watched Un orso chiamato Arturo as it was meant to be seen. On a YouTube link with a Rai Movie HD logo in the upper right corner, in Italian with no English subtitles and with someone else yelling translated Russian dialogue over the existing soundtrack.

George Segal was a big star from when he was in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966 until the mid 70s. He was so popular that he would show up on The Tonight Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour playing banjo and singing. That led to two albums, the solo The Yama Yama Man and A Touch of Ragtime with The Imperial Jazz Band.

Notable films of his A-list years include Where’s Poppa?,  A Touch of Class, No Way to Treat a Lady, The Owl and the Pussycat and Fun With Dick and Jane. Segal even hosted the Oscars in 1974 along with Gene Kelly, Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw.

Then things went downhill.

He told the Chicago Tribune: “In the first 10 years, I was playing all different kinds of things. I loved the variety, and never had the sense of being a leading man but a character actor. Then I got frozen into this “urban” character. About the time of The Last Married Couple in America, I remember Natalie Wood saying to me … “It’s one typed role after another, and pretty soon you forget everything. You forget why you’re here, why you’re doing it.” Then my marriage started to fall apart … I was disenchanted, I was turning in on myself, I was doing a lot of self-destructive things … there were drugs … I’m also sure I was guilty of spoiled behavior. I think it’s impossible when that star rush comes not to get a little full of yourself, which is what I was.”

By the 90s, he was a character actor. And for audiences today, well, he may be better known for his work on sitcoms like Just Shoot Me and The Goldbergs.

But for some time…he was a star. A big one.

At this point in his career, Segal was in movies like Look Who’s Talking, All’s Fair, For the Boys, Me, Myself & I and the Dolph Lundgren action movie Joshua Tree.

And this brings him to Italy.

Sergio Martino is a director I celebrate. His five-picture run from The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh to Torso may be the most consistent work of any Italian genre director. But by 1992, he was mostly making TV miniseries like Delitti privati in addition to direct-to-video action like After the Condor and erotic thrillers such as Craving Desire and Foxy Lady.

Martino would direct and co-write this movie with Nino Martino, who also wrote The Throne of Fire and Razza Violenta. It was produced by his regular partner, his brother Luciano and shot by cinematographer Giancarlo Ferrando. He was behind the camera for a lot of Sergio’s work all the way back to All the Colors of the Dark, as well as working on Detective School Dropouts, Cop Target (a Umberto Lenzi movie with Robert Ginty in it. How did I miss this?), Ironmaster and Devilfish, He directed one of his own movies, La ragazza di Cortina, under the name Maurizio Vanni.

Segal plays Billy, a composer on a tight deadline. He soon meets Alice, who claims that she’s his biggest fan, but she’s really a spy. She’s played by Carol Alt, who took her supermodel career to Italy where she first worked in movies like Via Montenapoleone, I miei primi 40 anni (based on the life of Marina Ripa Di Meana), Bye Bye Baby (opposite Brigitte Neilsen!), Duccio Tessari’s Beyond Justice, Treno di Panna, Mortacci, La più bella del reame, La più bella del reame (with Bud Spencer and Jean Sorel!), Miliardi (a loaded cast including Donald Pleasence, Billy Zane, Lauren Hutton, Florinda Balkan, Alexandra Paul — the virgin Connie Swail! — and Sorel), a TV series named Il principe del deserto (Rutger Hauer, Omar Shariff, Elliot Gould, Brett Halsey; Italy was rich in 1991 at least for TV projects!) and a TV movie named Due vite, un destino with Michael Nouri, Rod Steiger, Fabio Tesi and Burt Young, not to mention a script by Dardano Sacchetti!

I’m saying that Carol Alt might be a supermodel but she worked with some of the bigger names of Italian genre and American action film.

The cast also includes Stefano Masciarelli (the mayor in Cemetery Man), Hal Yamanouchi (the only actor I know who can be in a Joe D’Amato movie — Endgame — and a Wes Anderson movie — The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou), David Brandon (Peter from Stagefright, Ariel from Jubilee), Christina Englehardt (Demonia, Skinner) and when Segal wins the Oscar at the end of the movie — only The Lonely Lady and The Howling III: The Marsupials have cheaper looking award shows — it’s presented to him by Edmund Purdom. Of course.

This is supposedly a spy movie and, yes, Alt dressed like a geisha and clubs Yamanouchi with an oar at one point. There’s also a teddy bear named Arthur that is like a Teddy Ruxbin and holds a secret that everyone wants. At one point, the teddy bear is smoking a huge cigar and talking. It was basically shouting in Italian while someone translated it into shouting Russian and all the whole, poor George Segal is mugging for the camera, hoping that someone somewhere loves him.

2. THEY WERE IN THAT?: One with a then unknown actor who is now very known.

Did you see Critters 2: The Main Course?

Charlie MacFadden (Don Keith Opper) from that movie is looking for the last of the Critters and meets a family that includes Annie (Aimee Brooks), Clifford (John Calvin) and Johnny (Christian Cousins).  Charlie warns them all about the Critters — they think he’s a maniac — and the eggs from one of the creatures hitches a ride to their new home, a rundown Los Angeles apartment complex run by Frank (Geoffrey Blake) and his stepson Josh, who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in his first movie role as what he described as “your average, no-depth, standard kid with blond hair.”

Before you know it, Critters are all over the place, space bounty hunter Ug (Terrence Mann) is back to fight them — well, for a little, and he leads into an ending which goes right into the fourth movie, which was shot at the same time — and the humans barely make it out alive.

The real stars are the Chiodo Brothers, as always making magic from these little hairy aliens. Critters 3 was directed by Kristine Peterson, who was second unit on Tremors and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure before directing this and Deadly Dreams, Body Chemistry, The Redemption: Kickboxer 5 and Slaves to the Underground. The script was written by David J. Schow, who also wrote Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III and The Crow.