To understand Street Wars, you have to understand the man behind the curtain: Jamaa Fanaka.
He was part of the famous L.A. Rebellion at UCLA alongside guys like Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, but while they went high-art, Fanaka went straight for the exploit-o-meter. He gave us the Penitentiary trilogy and the absolutely mental, killer-dick classic Soul Vengeance (aka Welcome Home, Brother Charles). By 1992, Fanaka was frustrated with Hollywood and decided to make Street Wars.
Our guide through this madness is Sugar Pop (Alan Joseph), a deep-voiced, striking dude with piercing blue eyes who looks like a model but talks like a voiceover god. Any hero in a Fanaka movie gets a sugary name. Witness Too Sweet in those three prison boxing movies. As for Sugar Pop, he just graduated as the Top Gun of the Exeter Military Academy and is heading to West Point. His brother Frank (Bryan O’Dell) paid for it all. How? By running the local crack industry out of a spot called The Regal Social Club. A place with specials posted on a board and a drive-thru.
Frank’s right-hand man is Humungus (Clifford Shegog), a giant of a man. They belong to a secret council called The Knights of the Round Table, but they meet at a long, rectangular table. Forget logic. Anyway, when Frank gets taken out, Sugar Pop inherits the empire. Naturally, he rides around the hood on a scooter he rigged with a fire-spewing jet engine and applies military logic to running the streets.
Street Wars is torn between lamenting the neighborhood’s tragic conditions and treating Sugar Pop like a superhero. When he goes to war with rival gangs, the local news reports on him like a folk hero. At one point, the movie pauses the plot for Frank’s funeral, which turns into a full-blown gospel choir and choreographed dance number against a minimalist background. Real-life Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Muhammad himself shows up as himself to give a eulogy!
But nothing will prepare you for the third act. Sugar Pop’s ultimate plan to win the drug war? He trains his lieutenants to fly ultralight motorized gliders and hang out of them, shooting Uzis. The news calls them the Ghetto Air Force. As Sugar Pop’s paraplegic buddy enthusiastically yells, “Looks like fun to me! Up there, I don’t need no legs!” Fanaka, who served in the Air Force, wanted to pay tribute to WWII dogfight movies. Sadly, he didn’t have the budget of a movie like Red Tails, so the dogfights are just limited, choppy footage of gliders buzzing around.
It’s great.
There’s also a moment that cuts between Frank and Humungus having sex with their ladies in different rooms while a song called “I Wanna Sex You Down” plays, all while cutting back to a random kid playing a furious drum solo. Humungus actually lifts his girlfriend completely onto his head and carries her up the stairs while going down on her. This is a highly advanced, Olympic-level bedroom maneuver that I would not recommend to the weak.
If this whole movie feels like a work-in-progress, well, it was. Fanaka actually sued the distributors for accidentally releasing an unfinished version with terrible sound mixing and dubbing. But that just adds to the dreamlike, surreal charm. What other gang movie would have the good guys have a trans member, and no one even brings it up?
The movie ends with a text crawl saluting African-American filmmakers, listing everyone from Spike Lee to obscure exploitation directors like Dr. Roland Jefferson. Fanaka eventually got blacklisted by Hollywood for filing a massive lawsuit against the Directors Guild to force them to hire more women and minorities. He lost the suit, but he forced the industry to change.
When you pair the steely gaze of Franco Nero with the unhinged, lip-smacking energy of Telly Savalas, you expect a certain level of Euro-crime carnage. Redneck, known in its native Italy as Senza ragione, delivers that in spades, though it’s a strange, disjointed beast that feels like two different movies glued together by a madman who loves sleaze.
The premise is pure, high-octane 70s trash: Memphis (Savalas, channeling maximum camp) and his partner Mosquito (Nero) botch a jewelry store heist. While fleeing the scene, they carjack a vehicle, only to realize they’ve accidentally kidnapped Lennox Duncan, the 13-year-old son of a British consul. Naturally, this brat becomes their passport out of the country. He’s played by Mark Lester. Yes, the star of Oliver and the man who was a close, long-time friend of Michael Jackson. They were godfathers to each other’s children, and he has claimed to have donated sperm to Jackson, saying that Paris Jackson could be his daughter. Is that the strangest thing that happened in his life? Or would it be when a drunken Oliver Reed brought a prostitute for him for his 18th birthday?
But back to the movie, which is an unpredictable road film that shifts from a gritty crime thriller to a weirdly meditative, occasionally uncomfortable character study of an impressionable kid dragged into a world of violence.
The film starts strong with a frantic, albeit poorly planned, robbery and a classic Italian car chase. However, once the dust settles and the trio hits the road, the pacing hits a wall. Memphis descends into genuine, teeth-grinding insanity, while Mosquito, who is supposed to be the Lennie to Memphis’ George, somehow ends up being the surrogate father figure for young Lennox.
The movie’s middle act is where things get truly bizarre. There’s a strange, unsettling bond that forms between the kidnappers and the kid, culminating in a sequence where the boy watches Mosquito shave that has sparked decades of “Is he looking at the butt?” debate on the internet. It’s exactly the kind of sleazy, confusing Euro-cinema moment that makes me keep watching these movies. And yes, I may be straight, but when Franco Nero bares his ass, you look.
Savalas is clearly having the time of his life, but he leans so heavily into the camp that his incessant whistling and twitchy mannerisms threaten to swallow the entire movie whole. If you love him, he’s going to push you to hate him, between assaulting and murdering Maria (Ely Galleani), shooting a child, forcing Nero to wear her tiger stripe robe, murdering a dog and then killing an entire family of Germans by pushing their mobile home into a river.
Why is Telly — a Greek-American born in Long Island — playing an American Southerner who speaks jive? Who thought having a teenage boy watch a naked Franco Nero and then examining his own naked body was a good idea? How many taboos is this movie ready to shoot in the face?
Maybe it was director Silvio Narizzano, who was born in Quebec and started his career in Toronto-based television before directing movies like Die! Die! My Darling!, Georgy Girl and the insane Carroll Baker and Denis Hopper-starring Bloodbath. Or perhaps it was writers Win Wells, who was also behind The Greek Tycoon, and Masolino D’Amico, a writer on Olivia Hussey’s Romeo and Juliet, as well as Caligula and the Cannon version of Otello.
Anyways, Lester’s father Michael, must have made some contacts in Italy, as he would go on to write and produce Antonio Margheriti’s Codename: Wild Geese.
If you’re expecting the poetic, trench-coat-wearing, dual-pistol-sliding grace of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow or The Killer when you see Chon Yun-fat’s name on the poster, check your expectations at the door. We’ve seen the mismatched partner trope a million times, but Tiger On the Beat pushes the dynamic to its absolute breaking point.
On one side, you have the legendary Chow Yun-fat as Francis Li. Instead of playing the ultra-cool gun-god he usually plays, he shows up as a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing womanizer who would rather scam a suspicious husband or down a glass of raw eggs for a hangover than do actual police work. Within the first twenty minutes, he literally pisses his pants because a crook sticks a gun in his mouth. It is wild to see the coolest actor in the world work so hard to be a goofy buffoon.
On the other side, you have Conan Lee as Michael Tso, a muscle-bound rookie who looks like a bodybuilding Jackie Chan and wants to fight everyone in sight. The real-life bickering between these two on set apparently leaked into the film because they have zero traditional buddy-cop chemistry, which actually makes their constant screaming matches and petty fighting hilariously entertaining.
What makes this movie such a fascinating piece of celluloid history is the man behind the camera: Lau Kar-leung. He directed Disciples of the 36th Chamber and choreographed some of the greatest traditional, old-school kung-fu films ever to come out of the Shaw Brothers studio. But by 1988, the audience wanted modern urban violence. They wanted guns, cars, and explosions. Seeing an old-school master try to navigate the gritty, neon-soaked era of heroic bloodshed is like watching a classical orchestra conductor suddenly forced to lead a hardcore punk band.
For the first hour, the tone is all over the place. The comedy is pure, low-brow, 80s HK slapstick. Plus, the movie drops a heavy, uncomfortable dose of period-typical misogyny onto Nina Li Chi’s character, Marydonna, which halts the fun dead in its tracks. You’ll scratch your head, wondering what movie you’re actually watching.
But then… the final twenty minutes happen.
Lau Kar-leung decides that if he has to make a modern action movie, he’s going to make the most dangerous, jaw-dropping finale possible. First, you get Chow Yun-fat dropping the comedy act, picking up a shotgun, rigging it to a rope and throwing it around corners like a deadly, buckshot-blasting yo-yo to waste bad guys. It’s beautiful, chaotic genius.
And then, the piece de résistance: Conan Lee vs. Gordon Liu in a chainsaw duel.
Yes, that Gordon Liu. The star of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Johnny Mo from Kill Bill shows up here with a full head of hair playing a psychotic villain. He and Lee spark up two massive, roaring chainsaws and start acrobatically fencing with them. They are hacking through wooden floors, grinding sparks off steel railings, and flipping through the air with live, spinning blades. It borrows the pure, raw energy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and fuses it with high-flying Hong Kong stunt work.
Tiger On the Beat isn’t a flawless masterpiece. The tonal shifts will give you whiplash, the humor is an acquired taste, and the plot is standard-issue drug-bust filler. But as an ’80s time capsule of anything goes Hong Kong filmmaking, it’s pretty fun.
Eight years after the biggest band in the world broke up, their least loved member Ringo Starr — “Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles” is a quote often attributed to John Lennon, but it actually comes from British comedian Jasper Carrott, who said it on Radio Live, a British talk show; John actually said that Ringo was “a damn good drummer” — was probably wondering what to do.
Most of the time, that was to party. He said of his friends and fellow Hollywood Vampires Nilsson and Keith Moon, “We weren’t musicians dabbling in drugs and alcohol; now we were junkies dabbling in music.”
Yet Ringo still had enough cachet in 1978 to turn that existential dread into a prime-time NBC special.
By the time of the filming, he was miserable and depressed. He’d divorced Maureen Cox three years earlier, and in his outtakes, it’s said that he’s “testy, short-tempered and disinterested in working on the special.”
What a start, huh?
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Welcome to Ringo, a TV movie that sits comfortably in that sweet, strange spot between classic rock vanity project and absolute late-70s insanity. If you ever wondered what happened when the guys behind Police Academy got their hands on a Beatle and a copy of Mark Twain, well, here you go.
The premise is classic Prince and the Pauper, but instead of jolly old England, we’ve got Hollywood grime. Ringo plays himself—bored, pampered and totally over being famous—and he also plays his doppelgänger, Ognir Rrats, which is totally the Alucard trick. Then again, Ringo was in Son of Dracula.
While Ringo is being chauffeured around in limos and dealing with his horrid agent Marty Flesh (John Ritter), Ognir is out there selling maps to the stars’ homes, getting his bike pulverized by city buses and dodging an abusive father, played by Art Carney.
Let’s take a moment and talk about Art Carney. Perhaps best known for being Ed Norton on The Honeymooners, he also has some wild movies in his history. How about St. Helens, an HBO-TV movie with a Goblin soundtrack? Or being in Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s video for “Say Say Say?” Or playing Steeler’s owner Art Rooney in Fighting Back: The Story of Rocky Bleier? In 1978 alone, Carney played himself on Alice and was in Ringo and the Star Wars Holiday Special.
As Norton would say, “Like we say in the sewer, time and tide wait for no man.”
Anyway, Ringo and Ognir decide to swap lives for a few hours. Because, hey, why not? What could possibly go wrong?
Starr, now masquerading as Rrats, runs into a few 50s greasers (Greg Evigan of TV’s BJ and the Bear and possibly Steve De Jarnatt, who went on to direct Cherry 2000 and Miracle Mile, as well as write Strange Brew) who want to beat him up. But now that he’s Ringo, he has so much money that he can buy their fancy car and drive home instead of taking the bus. That’s when he met Rrats’ girlfriend Marquine (Carrie Fisher), and let me tell you, I broke the third commandment by exclaiming at the screen. 1978 dressed normal, hair down, casual California girl Carrie Fisher may be one of the biggest reasons I’ve found for believing in the Divine and now, I’ve said Her name in vain.
The real problem? Rrats’ father, who beats Ringo as Rrats into submission, right in front of his woman. Also: We’re to believe that Marquine is underage, as Ringo sings “You’re Sixteen” to her.
Be better, Ringo. Or Rrats.
As for Rrats as Starr, he’s screwing everything up, even passing out before an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show and destroying his drum set, basically showing that he can’t play. Ringo gets so mad that he escapes and is arrested by Sgt. Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson and yes, that’s TV’s favorite police lady, Angie Dickinson. He gets out of jail thanks to Marquine, who takes him to the Ringo Starr concert.
Did I mention that this is narrated by George Harrison, and that he mentions The Ruttles?
Marty enlists the help of Dr. Nancy (that is his first name; he’s Vincent Price), who puts Rrats into a trance to remember that he’s really Ringo. Or Billy Shears, opening this all up to my “Paul Is Dead” belief system when George tries to convince the world that Ognir isn’t Ringo. It all wraps up and Ringo makes Ognir his road manager, but before a Ringo concert with his band, including Elton John’s bassist Dee Murray, Doctor John, Paul Revere and the Raiders member Keith Allison and Lon Van Eaton (who was on Apple Records along with his brother Derrek).
Throughout, Ringo keeps mentioning that “Yesterday” isn’t his song. But he does play versions of “Yellow Submarine,” “With a Little Help from My Friends” (complete with a tripped out ending), “Act Naturally,” “I’m the Greatest,” “A Man Like Me,” “Hard Times” and “Heart’s on My Sleeve.” Ringo comes across as a goofy guy who just happened to spend a long time with the world’s greatest songwriting duo and got to do some cool stuff, leaving him with tons of money to do, well, whatever he wanted.
I don’t think Ringo is untalented or a bad drummer, either. He’s also cool enough to write “Early 1970,” in which he fired back at Paul for flipping out on him, attacking the messenger over trying to figure out the dates that Paul’s solo album and Let It Be would be released after the band’s breakup.
“Lives on a farm, got plenty of charm, beep, beep,
He’s got no cows, but he’s sure got a whole lotta sheep,
A brand new wife and a family, And when he comes to town I wonder if he’ll play with me.”
Later in the song, when he mentions John, Ringo sings, “And when he comes to town, I know he’s gonna play with me.”
The solo is by Harrison and follows the line, “‘Cause he’s always in town playing for you with me.”
Ringo being Ringo, he ends the song saying, “And when they come to town, I wanna see all three.”
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Ringo is the kind of mid-tier network weirdness that could only come from 1978 and would only be fueled by cocaine. It was once a film broadcast only once, and then buried by time—only to be rescued by YouTube. The fact that Neal Israel and Pat Proft add just one more cherry on a cherry-rich top.
Then the credits.
After everyone’s name was said, the announcer said, “And a special thank-you to dialogue coach Seymour Cassel.”
What?!? And that announcer? Peter Cullen. Optimus Prime.
This was all directed by Jeff Margolis, whose career includes tons of award shows and weird-out TV experiences like Twilight Time II, in which Leslie Nielsen hosts this, there’s a debate between G. Gordon Liddy and Moon Unit Zappa, and cast members include Dave Thomas, Fred Willard, Don Novello and Mr. T while the Go-Go’s and Toni Basil perform; the Mr. T educational video Be Somebody… or Be Somebody’s Fool!; an episode of Presenting Susan Anton; special for Olivia Newton-John, Perry Como, Captain & Tenille, Beatrice Arthur, Jaleel White and Frank Sinatra; and of course, being second-unit for 46 episodes of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.
As a yinzer, I have seen every Romero movie many, many times. So other than his OJ Simpson documentary and Iron City Asskickers, I had no idea what to do.
Do I go to the George A. Romero Archival Collection at Pitt and write about one of his unproduced scripts like Black Mariah, Cartoon, Chain Letter, Cherubs, Cupie, Dark Secrets, Dark Young Things, Darque Passages, Dead Man’s Catch, Death of Death, Divine Spirit, Dracula, Dreamwalker, Enemies, Figments, Flying Horses, Funky Coven, George Romero’s Scary Tales, Germs, Ghost Town, Gogiro (Loves You), Golem, GPS, Hell, Hell Hotel, Hell Bent, Hot-L Diablo, Honus, House With a Clock In Its Walls, Jack and the Beanstalk, Meatmarkets, Midnight Show, Monster MASH, Moonshadoes, Native Tongue, Night of the Living Dead: The Series, Nuns from Outer Space, Peter and the Wolfman, Scream of Fear, Shop Til You Drop…Dead, The Calling, The Collaboration, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Raven or Jacaranda Joe?
How about Welcome to Dead House, an unproduced adaption of the first Goosebumps book that has the dead of Dark Falls become zombies instead of ghouls? Supposedly Tim Burton was to direct and other scripts were written by John Sayles, Mick Garris and Alan Ormsby.
Then I remembered — Bill and I did a talking head doc about Romero’s Resident Evil project and it never got released, so why not use the research I did?
It all started when Romero directed a live-action commercial promoting the video game Resident Evil 2 in Los Angeles. The 30-second advertisement featured the game’s two main characters, Leon S. Kennedy (Brad Renfro) and Claire Redfield (Adrienne Frantz), fighting a horde of zombies while in Raccoon City’s police station. This commercial was only shown in Japan where the game is known as Biohazard 2.
Trust me — this thing looks great. A million dollar budget for 30 seconds of commercial? Amazing.
Frantz said to Variety: ““It was an honor to work with a legend like Romero,” Frantz said. “All of the zombie TV shows and movies that we see today are because of him. He started an entire horror film revolution.”
That’s true. We wouldn’t even have this video game without him, as so many of the things accepted about zombies come directly from him and his films.
Resident Evil was created by Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara and released for the PlayStation in 1996.It is credited for defining the survival horror genre and returning zombies to popular culture. Game design started in 1993 when Capcom’s Tokuro Fujiwara told Shinji Mikami and other co-workers to create a game using elements from Fujiwara’s 1989 game Sweet Home on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Sweet Home was based on a movie that was released around the same time. The cinematic nature of Sweet Home led to Biohazard.
Capcom was so impressed with Romero’s work, it was strongly indicated that Romero would direct the first Resident Evil film. He declined at first — “I don’t wanna make another film with zombies in it, and I couldn’t make a movie based on something that ain’t mine.” He reconsidered and wrote a script for the first movie. which was eventually rejected in favor of Paul W. S. Anderson’s version.
Romero’s Resident Evil was set in the Spencer Mansion and focused on Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine. It’s a lot more faithful to the game than the Paul W.S. Anderson movies and has giant snakes, man-eating plants and mutant sharks. Barry Burton, Rebecca Chambers, Ada Wong and Albert Wesker were to also appear. Not a gamer, Romero had his assistant Jason play the game for him so he could get a feel for it.
The ending to the film would have been similar to the best ending to the first Resident Evil game. Romero even got Berni Wrightson to do artwork for Tyrant, the villain.
Buts adly, Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto bluntly stated at the time: “Romero’s script wasn’t good, so Romero was fired.” There’s also rumor that the movie would have been NC-17 so he wasn’t picked.
Romero also said in an interview with Paul Weedon, “…this guy named Bernd Eichinger, who came in and said “No, this is not what I want.” And that was it. And he had no idea what a video game was. This is the guy that made House of the Spirits and Das Boot and he just had an impression of what he wanted the thing to be, which sort of flew in the face of all of us – Capcom and his own guys. So that was it.”
While not a gamer, Romero was smart enough to recognize that they led to the return of zombies. He said, “I do think the popularity of the creature has come from video games, not film. Zombieland was the first zombie film to break $100 million at the box office, and therefore Hollywood got interested. The remake of Dawn of the Dead did about $75 million … But dozens of hugely popular video games have had a bigger impact.”
Luckily, he saw the benefits of this new fame for the walking dead. As Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema says, “Whatever criticism one might want to level against the first Resident Evil movie, it had an undeniably positive effect on the zombie’s fortunes. Dragged into the mainstream by the videogame franchise and Anderson’s blockbuster, the living dead suddenly achieved a degree of respectability they’d never had before. It was as if, after seventy-odd years of being ignored, they’d finally received their invite to the Hollywood party. Within mere weeks of Resident Evil‘s opening came a series of press releases and announcements suggesting that the zombie had finally broken free of its marginal roots: a remake of Dawn of the Dead had received the greenlight, a big-screen adaptation of arcade game The House of the Dead was going into production; and, perhaps most exciting of all, George Romero announced at Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors Convention in August 2002 that he was in serious talks with Twentieth Century Fox to complete the fourth and final installment of his trilogy — provisionally dubbed Land of the Dead, with a $10 million budget and a planned R-rated release.”
Wow, you have no idea how excited I am about this.
I saw VHS art for the movie Urban Warriors and saw something I have never seen before: the Michael Dudikoff Presents Action Adventure Theater line.
If you’ve spent any time looking at the history of the Cannon Group, you know that the company was essentially a house of cards held together by Menahem Golan’s ambition and a lot of pre-sold tape rights. They didn’t even bother starting their own domestic home video label until 1989. By that point, the wheels were already coming off the Go-Go Boys’ wagon and they were slashing their production budgets to the bone.
They needed product to fill the shelves of that new home video arm and they needed it cheap. That’s how they ended up dumpster diving into the international market, picking up some oddball productions.
I went to the source of all things Cannon, Austin Trunick, who already covered this four years ago on the Cannon Film Guide Facebook page, saying “In the late ’80s, Cannon tried to squeeze some money out of several of their older distro titles that hadn’t been fully exploited on the video market. Their idea was to have modern stars introduce the films, which resulted in the “Michael Dudikoff Presents Action Adventure Theater” line of tapes.”
Much like the 22-26 action adventure films that bear the title Sybil Danning’s Adventure Video for the USA Home Video company, this was a way to use an action star to make some money with no risk.
There are only four of these, so why don’t we get into them?
The Bronx Executioner (1989): Welcome to a post-apocalyptic wasteland where humanoids and androids are locked in a nonsensical war for supremacy. These androids bleed human blood, look like guys in leather jackets and apparently spent their entire R&D budget at a RadioShack clearance sale. If one of them had an Italian name, it would be Roberto Batty.
The film follows our rookie deputy, James (Gabriele Gori, Attrazione Pericolosa), who arrives in the Bronx to replace the legendary Sheriff Warren. And here is where the fun begins: Warren is played by the iconic Woody Strode, but every single frame of him is shamelessly recycled from the 1984 movie The Final Executioner.
As for the Bronx itself? It’s a series of mounds of dirt and a derelict country villa that has never seen a New York City zip code in its life. James, fresh from a police academy that apparently consists solely of doing chin-ups on a metal pole, is tasked with policing this chaos. But the movie quickly gets bored with him, and shifts focus to Dakar (Alex Vitale, Jakoda from Strike Commando!), a humanoid leader who spends the better part of the runtime screaming into a walkie-talkie while driving a jeep through the Italian countryside.
When a cyborg goes on a killing spree, you’d expect some stakes, right? Forget it. You won’t get an explanation of who, why or what the hell is happening. The narrative is a patchwork quilt of stock footage, recycled scenes and incoherent voice-overs. As for the big bad, Margie is the quintessential evil android, strutting around in a dog collar and proclaiming, “Violence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” She’s the heart and soul of this mess. And she’s played by Margie Newton, who got all painted up in Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead and was Aphrodite in Cozzi’s The Adventures of Hercules.
Director Vanio Amici is an equal-opportunity recycler. Why film a new action scene when you can just use the one you already shot five minutes ago? It saves time and prevents you from having to rewind to watch the faceless extras get blasted again. For a long time, people thought he was Umberto Lenzi, as the name on the credits is Bob Collins. Amici only directed one other movie, Detective Malone, which remixes two of Lenzi’s Black Cobra movies, further muddying the movie waters and making nerds like me wonder who really made it. As for the rest of his credits, he mainly worked as an editor with a resume that includes Black Demons, Karate Warrior 6, Aenigma and many adult films. Perhaps his toughest challenge was being the editor for Troll 2. I wonder how he was able to make it make as much sense as it does.
This has it all and by all, I mean perms, leather jackets, headbands and a finale so dramatically deep that it tries to mimic Blade Runner before hitting a hard freeze-frame.
Dakar: James, can I tell you something?
James: Sure. What?
Dakar: I always envied you. I wanted to be like you.
James: You mean human?
Dakar: It was just… a dream.
It’s a total mess. I loved it!
Cross Mission (1988): Leave it to Alfonso Brescia—working under his Al Bradley alias—to decide that what the jungle combat — Rambsoploitation — genre really needed wasn’t just more stock footage of explosions, but literal demons. What else can we expect from the director of Murder In Blue Light, Iron Warrior, The Beast In Space and an entire series of Star Wars rip-offs?
Cross Mission starts off as your standard, run-of-the-mill exploitation flick. General Romero, played by Antonio Poli, is the iron-fisted ruler of a small Latin American nation. He’s got the whole “I’m a good guy” routine down to a science, publicly torching marijuana fields to impress the U.N. inspectors. Of course, once the inspectors pack up their clipboards and head for the airport, it’s back to the narco-trafficking business as usual.
When a marine named William (Richard Randall, whose only other role is in a TV movie version of A Christmas Carol) decides to investigate the racket alongside a crusading reporter named Helen (Brigitte Porsche, her only role, and no, she’s not an adult star), things spiral into the usual jungle chaos. Do huts explode? Do some of the good guys die and need revenge? Does the hero get ready for the last battle in a montage, putting on a special outfit to show the audience he’s finally done playing nice? Yes to all of these things.
But here is where the movie veers off the tracks and into the territory of the sublime. Just when you think you’ve seen every trope in the book, Brescia hits you with the supernatural. General Romero isn’t just a drug lord; he’s a practitioner of the dark arts. He’s got the ability to summon a diabolical small demon named Astaroth, played by Nelson De La Rosa (the mini Brando of The Island of Dr. Moreau and the titular Rat Man), at will. When he’s shooting blue lightning at people, the movie suddenly shifts from a generic war film to an Italian bit of magic.
Brescia would go on to direct Miami Cops the following year, but Cross Mission remains a singular, bizarre experiment. It doesn’t fully succeed as a war movie, and it doesn’t fully succeed as a supernatural thriller, but for the sheer audacity of blending the two? It’s a more than decent one-time watch. You come for the jungle action, but you stay because you need to see how a magic little guy fits into an exploding helicopter subplot.
Lt. Bill Rogers (Andy Forrest, also in Massimo Pirri’s The Kiss of the Cobra, Tonino Valerii’s Sicilian Connection, Lenzi’s The House of Witchcraft, Hunt for the Gold Scorpion and, oddly, the Giandomenico Curi-directed Italian Lambada movie and yes, there were two movies with this title in the same year), Sgt. Mario Pazilbo Esposito (Carlo Mucari, Snuff Killer and Obsession: A Taste for Fear) and Blitz (Paki Valente) have broken out of a POV camp. Rogers is an American pilot who trades a POW camp for the Yugoslavian wilderness after getting shot down. Espozi has the nickname Spaghetti because he’s Italian — in an Italian movie — and Blinz is an Austrian deserter who realized his side was losing.
Our motley crew of POWs managed to link up with some partisans and a local Orthodox priest. The partisans are desperate, looking for pilots to take their last two functioning planes and turn those German-held hillsides into a fireworks display. But while they’re busy flying for the resistance, the boys get wind of some serious loot. Vanya (Francesca Ferrè), a nun who traded her habit for a submachine gun, tips them off about a haul of priceless gold chalices stashed away at the St. Basil convent.
According to Andy J. Forrest, Ferrè was functionally blind without her glasses and ended one take by walking directly into a tree.
After pulling off two successful bombing runs, the POWs stop caring about the war effort and start plotting a heist. They leverage their pilot skills to score some hardware, then convince Vanya to lead them to the chapel. She thinks they’re on the level, but these guys are just mercenaries in disguise, ready to double-cross everyone for the gold.
There’s a Fabio Frizzi score, which is nice, and Luigi Ciccarese as cinematographer. He shot plenty of Bruno Mattei’s later movies, especially his SOV 2000s efforts, as well as tons of adult. Along the way, Lenzi stole battle scenes from The Battle of Sutjeska and Partizanska eskadrila.
It’s not the most exciting war movie you’ve seen, but it does have a genuinely impressive train explosion and watching our guys lean out of a biplane to drop bombs by hand is the kind of practical, low-budget ingenuity that makes these films so charming.
Urban Warriors (1987): You know you’re in for a wild ride when the opening act consists of a montage of mushroom clouds followed immediately by stock footage of volcanoes erupting. Then, we meet Brad (Bruno Bilotta), our hero, and his buddies, Maury (Bjorn Hammer) and Stan (Maurice Poli), who are hanging out in an underground lab when the power goes out. When they finally decide to crawl out of their bunker, they discover that the world has ended. And apparently, the end of the world is synonymous with an immediate, city-wide explosion in the local population of leather-clad biker gangs.
Vari’s vision of the future looks suspiciously like a gravel pit and a single abandoned factory. That’s the kind of set design that makes a Cirio Santiago movie look like a Cecil B. DeMille epic.
The mutants here are a special breed. According to Brad—who, again, as you may remember, was just working at a power station and doesn’t seem like a scientist—these guys suffer from a mutation that apparently destroys their inner ear whenever the sun goes down. Before you can say uno, due, tre, quattordici, all these bad ass post-apocalyptic warriors have vertigo.
The aesthetic is exactly what you’d expect if a group of guys raided a discount S&M shop and then realized they needed to re-qualify for their motorcycle licenses. Watching Brad’s buddy Maury emerge from a shack wearing a full-on studded leather helmet and a white scarf—while manning a bike with mounted weapons—is reason enough for the world to end.
Brad’s journey is a masterclass in survival priorities. After watching his buddy Maury get killed—a tragedy clearly caused by failing to stick to a strict vehicle maintenance schedule—Brad doesn’t weep. He gets himself some leather, finds a woman (Rosenda Scharschmidt, Dark Bar) to get busy with and promptly gets attacked because she wants his spinal marrow. At least he defeats the leader of the mutants, played by Alex Vitale, who will always be Jakoda from Strike Commando. Oh yeah — Malisa Longo from Cat In the Brain and the titular star of Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg –– is in this barterdown bootleg too.
This was Giuseppe Vari’s return to the director’s chair after a decade away, and spoiler alert: it was also his final film.
Much like another Michael Dudikoff Presents film, The Bronx Executioner, this takes scenes from The Final Executioner. Even stranger, I have heard Paolo Rustichelli’s theme described as either a cover of “White Lines” or the Art of Noise cover of “Dragnet.”
Henry Pinkle (Michael St. Gerard, Link from Hairspray) is a nobody living in the L.A. sprawl, a guy so hollowed out by the flickering glow of his television that when his favorite show, The Robertson Family, gets canceled, his life effectively ends. He’s ready to jump off a bridge, but he’s interrupted by Sam Bones (John P. Ryan), a guy who might be a guardian angel or just the manifestation of Henry’s own suicidal intrusive thoughts.
From there, it gets real weird, real fast. Sam isn’t here to save Henry’s life; he’s here to make Henry a star. And in the world of this movie, stardom is all about becoming the Baby Mask Killer and murdering all over L.A. But this isn’t just another body-count flick where someone in a mask chases teenagers. It’s a psychological nightmare. There’s a scene where Henry breaks into a house to commit a murder, but he’s so mesmerized by the TV set that he just forgets to kill the guy. It’s a pitch-black, brilliant jab at how we prioritize screen time over real-world connections.
Now, Henry is lost in a world without his favorite show, a terrifying mentor and a social worker, Wendy (Maureen Teefy), who is his only friend but would never understand why he’s a slasher.
The way this film ends—with Henry dying on a live broadcast, finally achieving his dream of being on TV even as his life drains away—is brutal and cynical. It’s a perfect, ugly capper to a story about a man who finally understands his place in the ecosystem of the entertainment industry.
As for St. Gerard, he had a spiritual awakening after leading a Sunday School class and retired from acting to focus on religious instruction. He became a pastor at Harlem Square Church in New York City.
If you read the critics, they said things like ‘absurd,’ ‘messy,’ and ‘overly serious.’ But once I saw Nicholas Cage dodging a train and screaming at — spoilers! — aliens, well…this was for me.
It’s not good. But it’s for me.
Knowing is a mixtape from a maniac of every major disaster possible, leading up to an extinction-level solar flare. Plane crash? Got it. A prophetic time capsule in an elementary school that sages dates, death tolls and the exact coordinates of major disasters like the Oklahoma City bombing, September 11 and Hurricane Katrina? Sure, why not? It’s very America first in that way. And along the way, Cage and his family — his wife died in the first event — are there for so many end-of-the-world moments.
Rose Byrne is Diana, the daughter of Lucinda (Lara Robinson, who also plays daughter Abby), who made those prophecies. At some point, Cage thinks — yes, I will only refer to him as his name and not his character’s name — thinks he can stop the end of the world.
I can only imagine that Proyas had a Road to Damascus moment, because this feels like a religious film, bringing in Matthäus Merian’s engraving of Ezekiel’s vision of a UFO, along with whispering alien angels who like to steal SUVs.
Speaking of those critics — I’m not one, I’m just a dude who watches too many movies — hated the pivot from sci-fi thriller to cosmic, angel-infused religious allegory. I love how hard it swings for the fences. It goes from “MIT Professor solves a riddle” to “Interstellar Arks and White Trees of Life” in about 20 minutes. It’s bold, it’s bananas, and it doesn’t give a fuck what you think. It’s like Proyas saw Signs and said, “I can raise you a twist, M. Night.”
Most people will tell you it’s a failure because the science is absolute bunk.
Look, if you’re coming to a movie where Nicolas Cage spends two hours deciphering numbers on a closet door to figure out when the world is going to end, and you’re expecting a lecture from Neil deGrasse Tyson, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Proyas said at a press conference for the film, “The science was important.” I wanted to make the movie credible. So, of course, we researched as much as we could and tried to give it as much authenticity as we could.”
Well, let’s just say the real-world scientists didn’t exactly hand out a gold star.
The critics were waiting with their calculators and textbooks, and they had a field day. Ian O’Neill over at Discovery News pointed out the obvious: those solar flares aren’t exactly going to turn our cities into charcoal. That’s just not how physics works, folks. Then you’ve got Erin McCarthy of Popular Mechanics, who called the movie out for mixing up actual science with straight-up numerology. She rightly noted that the film confuses mathematical modeling—the stuff that actually runs our world—with mystical, occult-style number crunching.
The IMDb goofs page for this is, as you’d expect, packed.
Maybe they also reacted to the tone shifts, which are violent mood swings. It’s grim, it’s moody, and it features one of the most hilariously nihilistic endings in modern cinema as — spoiler — everyone dies right after Cage makes up with his angry old father.
Then the kids ride those space arks to a place where the Tree of Life lives.
The end.
Who the hell came up with this idea?
The road to the screen is often messier than the movies themselves. Back in 2001, novelist Ryne Douglas Pearson walked into a room with producers Todd Black and Jason Blumenthal. His pitch was a total hook: imagine a 1950s time capsule being opened, only to reveal a list of every major disaster that’s happened since, and it ends with the cryptic “EE,” standing for “Everyone Else.”
Naturally, the majors got their hands on it first. It was set up at Columbia Pictures, and for a minute there, it was a hot potato. You had guys like Rod Lurie and Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly attached to direct. Can you imagine a Richard Kelly version of this? Southland Tales follow-up? Please, Mandala Effect, activate.
Writers Stiles White and Juliet Snowden were to take a crack at the script before Proyas came on. He was hooked because the script wasn’t just a disaster flick; it was a character study about how knowing your own end date would absolutely wreck your life.
But guess what? As wild and critically hated as this was, it made $80 million on a $50 million budget. Guess who liked it? Roger Ebert. He gave it four out of four stars and proclaimed, “Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I’ve seen—frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.”
In short: Cage gets apophenia, starts seeing patterns in everything, it rips off a lot of Childhood’s End, yells stuff like “I’m not saying that 81 people are going to die tomorrow, okay? I’m just trying to understand why this is saying they will!” and it ends with him answering his dad like this:
Rev. Koestler: This isn’t the end, son.
John Koestler: I know.
If he had said knowing instead of know, I might have suddenly run into the streets of my small city and screamed, “KNOWING!” as if Pee-Wee had said the secret word.
Proyas hasn’t made a movie — outside of shorts — since Gods of Egypt, but he has said he’s making his own version of R.U.R., which would be interesting after I, Robot. I’m lining up for the first day because he has the insane energy I want.
I also understand why normal people would absolutely hate this.
Hot Fuzz isn’t just a blockbuster. It’s a masterclass in genre homage. It’s the kind of movie that feels like it was curated by a record store clerk who spent his entire teenage years alternating between Michael Bay blowouts and classic British murder mysteries. It’s loud, it’s bloody, it’s hilarious, and it’s absolute perfection.
Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is the ultimate super-cop. He’s so good, so efficient, and so damn professional that he’s making the rest of the Metropolitan Police look like a bunch of muppets. The solution? Ship him off to the sleepy, idyllic village of Sandford, Gloucestershire. The thinking is that if he’s bored to tears by paperwork and lost swans, he’ll just quit.
But Sandford isn’t just tea and crumpets. It’s a place where people keep dying in accidental ways—decapitations, gas explosions and conveniently falling masonry. Angel, paired with the bumbling, action-movie-obsessed Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), realizes something sinister is rotting beneath the village’s Village of the Year veneer.
Spoiler warning: It turns out the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance (NWA) is more of a murderous secret society than a concerned group of citizens, all obsessed with protecting their pristine town stats at any cost. It leads to one of the most glorious, over-the-top third acts in cinema history. Forget high-brow detective work; by the time the shotgun-wielding, sea-mine-toting finale kicks in, the movie transforms into the very thing it was paying tribute to.
Edgar Wright filled this thing with people we love. Keep your eyes peeled for Peter Jackson as a Father Christmas-clad slasher, Cate Blanchett as Angel’s ex, and Bill Nighy as the Chief Inspector. Just as much as the cameos are the references. Hot Fuzz is a massive love letter to Bad Boys II and PointBreak, while the NWA constantly saying they’re doing things for the greater good makes them seem straight out of The Wicker Man.
But it’s a real action movie, too! Simon Pegg and Nick Frost didn’t just phone it in. They trained with real firearms instructors and studied police procedures to ensure the action sequences looked legit, even when they were shooting while jumping through the air.
In a world of bloated, humorless action movies, Hot Fuzz stands tall. It understands that you can mock a genre’s tropes while simultaneously honoring them. It also has one of the grossest things I’ve seen, as Timothy Dalton falls face-first toward a miniature church steeple.
With references to A Fistful of Dollars, The French Connection, McQ, Death Wish, The Omen and LostHighway, as well as a starring role for the video collections of director Edgar Wright, his brother Oscar and his friend Joe Cornish, this movie is a total joy of cinema for me. I’ve watched it more times than I can count and always come back for more.
Forget your standard-issue action movies where the hero waltzes through gunfire with a quippy one-liner. Henri-Georges Clouzot’sThe Wages of Fear is the cinematic equivalent of a panic attack stretched across two and a half hours. It makes modern thrillers look like Sunday afternoon cartoons.
We find our quartet of heroes — if you can call them that — rotting away in Las Piedras, a South American backwater that serves as a collective drain for the world’s losers. There’s Mario (Yves Montand), a sarcastic Corsican playboy; Jo (Charles Vanel), a washed-up Parisian gangster whose tough-guy veneer is paper-thin; Bimba (Peter van Eyck), a stoic German haunted by the death of his father in a concentration camp and Luigi (Folco Lulli), an Italian cook who has just received a death sentence in the form of a lung condition.
They are trapped, broke and desperate. When a massive fire erupts at a Southern Oil Company well, the corporation — which effectively owns the town and treats the locals like disposable biological hardware — offers $2,000 to anyone willing to drive two trucks loaded with unstable nitroglycerin over 500 kilometers of terrain that would terrify a mountain goat.
We don’t just watch the suspense. We’re passengers. The middle hour is a relentless, pulse-pounding crawl through a series of impossible obstacles, such as a stretch of road so poorly maintained it creates rhythmic vibrations guaranteed to trigger a detonation, a wooden platform that requires driving backward and a boulder blocking the path that requires a precision-timed blast, leading to the harrowing demise of Luigi and Bimba.
The dynamic between Jo and Mario is the film’s psychological core. As the trip progresses, Jo’s legendary gangster grit dissolves into pathetic cowardice, forcing Mario to reconcile his hero-worship of the older man with the reality that Jo is a liability, not a leader.
Everything about this production screams cinematic nightmare, which only adds to the grit on screen. Filming was paused for seven months due to financing issues. When it resumed, torrential rains hit, flooding the set and keeping the cast and crew trapped in a Nîmes hotel for over a month. Then, Clouzot broke his ankle, several dozen local Romani extras went on strike, and the pyrotechnics used for the oil fire sequence nearly turned the actual shooting location into a massive wildfire.
The legendary Jean Gabin famously turned down the role of Jo, fearing that playing a coward would ruin his image as a screen idol. We also almost missed out on Montand; both Gérard Philipe and Serge Reggiani were considered for the role of Mario. The role of Linda, Mario’s devoted and tragic lover, is played by Véra Clouzot, the director’s own wife, adding an intimate, mournful layer to the film’s cynical conclusion.
The film’s ending is the ultimate universe-is-laughing-at-you punchline. After surviving the literal impossible, the triumph is rendered utterly hollow by a moment of reckless, post-traumatic hubris. It’s a gut-punch that cements the film’s status as a bleak, existential work of art.
The Wages of Fear brought Clouzot international fame, winning both the Golden Bear and the Palme d’Or at the 1953 Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals, respectively. Its success allowed him to direct another film that has lived on past the director, Les Diaboliques.
If this all sounds familiar, well, it’s been remade several times, and its influence hasn’t always been called out. Violent Road AKA Hell’s Highway was directed by Howard W. Koch (Ghost, The Odd Couple) and stars Brian Keith; a 2024 French Netflix remake and even an episode of MacGyver, “Hellfire,” in which MacGyver is thrust into an emergency when an oil well erupts into an uncontrollable fire, and he must traverse rugged terrain to retrieve volatile, aged dynamite from a remote mine.
The best-known remake is, of course, William Friedkin’sSorcerer, which is more faithful to Georges Arnaud’s novel. Is it any happier? Let’s ask Friedkin: “I wasn’t prepared for my success or failure. I felt … buffeted by fate without any control over destiny. That’s one of the themes of Sorcerer. No matter how much you struggle, you get blown up.“
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