June 13: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Italian Horror! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Ring of Darkness is about four women who made a pact with the Devil a decade ago. Now, Carlotta (Anne Heywood) has lost control of her daughter Daria (Lara Wendel, who so famously died in Tenebre), who has started to develop Satanic powers of her own, casting spells and hurting everyone in her way, including a boy with a crush who submits to her burning touch.

Carlotta and some of her friends enlist the help of a priest (John Phillip Law) to help them rid themselves of the pact that they made with Lucifer all those years ago.

Also known as Satan’s Wife, this is a nice Danger: Diabolik reunion as Marissa Mell is in it with Law. And man, nobody does a Satanic movie like Italian Catholics, huh? When interviewed on set in 1977, director and writer Pier Carpi (who also wrote the Diabolik comic book) denied that his screenplay was inspired by The Exorcist and claimed that it was based on his novel Un ombra nell’ombra which he wrote in the 60s and was published in 1974.

You know what I do love about this beyond the Black Mass nude opening? The synth heavy score Stelvio Cipriani! You know who else liked it? Whomever ripped it off for the American edit of Pieces.

I’ve seen people online critical of this movie and the score. Come on. We should be so lucky to have more Italian takes on American occult movies!

June 12: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is prison! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Leon Isaac Kennedy made Body and Soul, a movie for Cannon in which he got Muhammad Ali to show up as himself. In the second of three boxing in prison movies, Mr. T and Archie Moore do the same, appearing as their real world selves in this near comic book of a movie. Then again, Mr. T feels like a movie character in our real world most of the time.

Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone (Kennedy) has earned his parole from jail by winning a prison boxing tournament, so you should forget anything about this movie taking place in the universe we accept as our own.

He moves in with his sister and her husband while getting a job sweeping floors at a boxing gym. He wants nothing to do with the ring, staying on the outside, content with his life as a free man. “Too Sweet” even hooks back up with Clarisse (Eugenia Wright) but that’s when this movie decides that he’s had things too easy, because the enemy from the last movie who tried to assault him — physically and sexually — at every turn, “Half-Dead” Johnson (this time played by Ernie Hudson) has broken out. On a rare night that his sister and her husband go out, the lovemaking between our hero and his lady turns into a horror movie when “Half-Dead” locks her in a bathroom and treats her like he wanted to treat “Too Sweet,” who responds by beating the man into oblivion and leaving him near brain-dead with his head in the toilet.

This movie defies film logic, because “Too Sweet” gets destroyed in his first pro match back — yes, it takes his lover’s death to make him fight — by Jesse “The Bull” Amos (Donovan Womack), it’s the fact that he won’t get knocked out that makes him a star. At the same time that his career is on the rise, the rest of “Half-Dead’s” gang is targeting “Too Sweet’s” family.

To add even more weirdness, you’d think the hero would be the one to get revenge on the villain, who attacks him before his big fight. Nope. It’s Mr. T who saves the day.

This is also a movie that starts with a way too long Star Wars text that made me laugh out loud.

Director and writer Jamaa Fanaka made every movie in this series, as well as Street Wars and Welcome Home, Brother Charles. I am excited to report to you that if you thought this movie was strange, Penitentiary III goes even further, existing in a world beyond your wildest boxing prison movie dreams.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 11: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is free! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

The youngest of five children born in Hollywood to a Greek father and a Latino mother, Mimi Lesseos started learning martial arts at the age of six. She came to the attention of wrestling fans in 1988 when she wrestled for the American Wrestling Association and feuded with Madusa Miceli over their women’s title. She also teamed with Wendi Richter on occasion and was even featured in the December 1989 issue of Playboy holding — well, lying face down on a bed nude — the AWA World Women’s Championship belt, even though she never won it.

She was wrestled in the LPWA (Ladies Professional Wrestling Association), for CMLL in Mexico and in Japan before going into stuntwork, appearing in Man on the Moon, The X-Files, The Scorpion King and Million Dollar baby, as well as often working as Jane Kaczmarek’s stunt double.

After appearing in the wrestling movie The American Angels: Baptism of Blood, the Erik Estrada biker movie The Last Riders and the Lorenzo Lamas kickboxing film Final Impact, Mimi decided to make her own movie. as she wanted to play a fit and strong female character who was not “sleazy or muscle-bound”.

She wrote, starred in and produced the movie, raising half of the $600,000 budget through an investor while she provided the other half, by selling property and fighting in Japan. That’s also where she found a distributor and got worldwide distribution after taking Pushed to the Limit to the Cannes Film Festival.

Director Michael Mileham, the godson of Jessica Tandy, ran camera on Blazing Stewardesses and The Glove, as well as serving as the director of photography on Psychic Killer, Uninvited, Revenge of the Cheerleaders, The Lonely Lady and Black Shampoo.

Mimi claimed this movie was autobiographical. Then again, we already know Bloodsport was supposed to be that way for Frank Dux and he was stretching the truth too.

Well, imagine if Van Damme stopped the action to go visit his parents, catch his racist brother doing blow and then went to Vegas to be a showgirl — a moment that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie — instead of just doing the splits straight for the Kumite?

Because Pushed to the Limit has a Kumite too.

Her brother Johnny (Greg Ostrin) gets shot up being a moron to crime boss Harry Lee (Henry Hayashi) and her man Nick (Michael M. Foley) gets hurt too, so she decides that she needs revenge. As she tells her Miyagi-figure Vern (Verrell Reed), “I’ve been pushed to the limit.” As you may know, I react to the title of a movie being said in a movie as if Pee Wee just said the secret word. Imagine my sheer joy when the mentor answered back, “You’ve been pushed to the limit?”

To be fair, the stupid brother said this joke to a Triad gangster: “What do you call two gooks in a fast car? The Gooks of Hazzard.” He deserved to die.

So how does she get her pound of flesh? By entering Harry Lee’s basement casino Kumite and kicking the hell out of Ms. Inga (Christl Colven, who only acted in this movie and otherwise has done makeup for Full Moon movies) but not until that gigantic butch brawler breaks the neck of Mimi’s best friend.

The training that she gets to get to this point is without a doubt the dumbest martial arts training I’ve ever seen committed to a film and I’ve watched tons of Jackiesploitation ripoffs of Drunken Master. I get what Miyagi wanted to teach Daniel-San with fence painting. I have no idea what Vern’s lesson of hide and seek around palm trees, much less his “become the tree” mantra and then asking her to punch the tree is supposed to teach. She also uses flying dropkicks in an actual fight and then Vern sends four dudes to jump her in an alley and the moment she starts killing them, everyone gets an extended sitcom end credits laugh out of the whole misunderstanding. Vern may also have low level ESP and never takes off his headband; he seems like every sensei I’ve ever met making a killing from teaching the secrets of the Orient to white kids who only learn synchronized katas and never the much needed way of the exploding fist or poison hand Dim Mak Death Touch of Count Dante.

There are also notable people in the cast, like “Dirty White Boy” Tony Anthony, Paula Meda (who is in several of the Donald Jackson Rollerblade movies), Vivian Wickliffe (an amazon fighter from Armour of God), a guy named Ulf Ranger playing Jack Stud making me wonder which fake name is better and Amy Barcroft who was Amazing Amy in the aforementioned The American Angels: Baptism of Blood.

None of the sitcom level music matches what is happening on screen. Phones randomly ring in the middle of dialogue which isn’t microphoned well at all. The action is so poorly directed that you wonder if the old WCW camera crew made this. The ending — the ending! — has a misdirection kill of the boss, a total pro wrestling ending where Inga gets knocked out, Lee runs in with a gun and Inga comes to and breaks her boss’ neck instead of her opponent’s because she’s confused. Also body slams are used in fights to the death.

I tell you all of this to tell you that I loved this movie. I loved every single second because it seems like — and is — a vanity project that made its way to me thirty years after it was filmed, aging like only finest of wine can.

I’m saying none of this to be ironic. I legitimately loved every single frame so much so that I tracked down every single other Mimi Lesseos movie and am practically devouring them. Guess what — they’re all as good as this. Maybe better.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 10: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is sex comedy! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Also known as Club Earth and Galactic Gigolo, this movie comes from a strange source: Gorman Bechard, who made Psychos In Love and a movie that has obsessed me since I saw it the first time, the telephone-based slasher Disconnected.

Eoj (Carmine Capobianco, who co-wrote the movie with Bechard) is a game show winning sentient stalk of broccoli from the planet Crowak who is on an all expenses paid vacation to Earth, a place where he transforms into a man and discovers that he really likes to have sex with human women.

Bechard has disowned this movie thanks to Charles Band(he also made Assault of the Killer Bimbos and Cemetery High for Full Moon), who got way too involved in the color correction and editing of the film.

Debi Thibeault plays the reporter out to get the story of the alien, Ruth Collins from Lurkers and Prime Evil shows up as does LeeAnne Baker who is in Necropolis, a movie that more people should download directly into their brain.

It’s not great, sexy or funny, but it is weird.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 9: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is monsters! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

David Wascavage is probably best known for Suburban Sasquatch, but before that movie, he made this berserk film that is all about a scientist named Silas Purcell (David Weldon) whose parents (played by Loretta and Edward Wascavage, the director’s mom and dad) send him to a bed and breakfast to try and calm down. He brings his work — trust me, I get it — and ends up transforming the woods around the home of Jade Moon (Mary Wascavage, who also wrote the movie with David) into a killing field populated by mushrooms who live on human meat.

Also staying at the B&B are overly stressed and roided out pro wrestler Tony Ignitus (the much beloved Dave Bonavita) and a smarmy real estate agent named Jackson P. Jackson (Dave Wascavage, getting into his own movie), as well as a survivalist named Major Wang (Wes Miller).

By the end of the movie, hundreds of mushrooms of all shapes and sizes have taken over and the only weapon that destroys them is balsamic vinegar, a fact that made me laugh so loudly and for so long that I lost consciousness.

There’s also a moment where a humanoid mushroom vomits a human skeleton, which is everything that I want movies to be. I also absolutely love that every time someone encounters one of these mushrooms for the first time, they think they’re cute and try to pet them, which always goes bad.

More movies should be less concerned about video fidelity and more about having fun. This film proves it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 8: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is cars! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

This movie is the end of an era in so many ways. It’s the last time the Rat Pack — Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Shirley MacLaine — would appear in a movie together as well as the last movie for Martin, Sinatra and Jin Nabors. It’s also the last car comedy from Burt Reynolds, who made his superstar status with movies like this.

Director and writer Hal Needham wouldn’t give up so easily. After making Rad and Body Slam, he’d make four more Bandit TV movies with Brian Bloom taking over from Burt.

After the events of Cannonball Run, Sheik Abdul ben Falafel (Jamie Farr) has angered his father King Abdul ben Falafel (Ricardo Montalbán) and brought shame to the name Falafel. King Abdul demands that he win the next Cannonball; when told there won’t be one, he orders his son to buy one.

Bringing back nearly everyone from the original movie — no, not Cannonball or The Gumball Rally — the race is on, even if Don Don Canneloni (Charles Nelson Reilly) wants to kidnap the sheik after learning that he paid for the debts of Jamie Blake and Morris Fenderbaum (Martin and Davis), as well as the debts of the man hunting them down, Hymie Kaplan (Telly Savalas).

Art by https://www.deviantart.com/cholnatree/art/All-cars-in-Cannonball-Run-2-839845153

In addition to Falafel, who has hired away Doctor Nikolas Van Helsing (Jack Elam) and brought his servant (Doug McClure), the racers this time are:

JJ McClure and Victor Prinzi (Reynolds and Dom DeLuise, who also plays Don Cannelloni and Victor’s other side Captain Chaos), who are dressed as soldiers and driving a Chrysler Imperial limousine. They pick up two fake nuns played by Betty and Veronica (Marilu Henner and MacLaine) as well as soldier Private Homer Lyle (Neighbors, pretty much playing Gomer Pyle).

Mitsubishi engineer Jackie Chan (Jackie Chan, once again playing Japanese) being driven by the gigantic Arnold (Richard Kiel) in a Mitsubishi Starion that can drive underwater.

Jill Rivers and Marcie Thatcher are back driving a Lamborghini, but Susan Anton and Catherine Bach take over for Adrienne Barbeau and Tara Buckman, who was too busy getting her throat slit by Santa Claus in Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Mel and Tony (Mel Tillis and Tony Danza) who are driving a limousine with an orangutang.

Don Don’s enforcers, Sonny (Michael V. Gazzo), Tony (Alex Rocco), Slim (Henry Silva) and Caesar (Caesar) also join in, as does Shawn Weatherly who falls for Jamie. Plus there are cameos by Foster Brooks, Sid Caesar and Louis Nye as fishermen, Tim Conway and Don Knotts  as policemen, Molly Picon as Seymour Goldfarb’s mother (without Roger Moore who regretted his decision to turn down a role in this movie after finding out Sinatra was appearing, saying in his book My Word Is My Bond, “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but too few to mention.”), Joe Theismann as a trucker, Arte Johnson as a German air ace from WWII, George Lindsay (Goober Pyle from the aforementioned Gomer Pyle USMC TV show), American restauranteur Jilly Rizzo (whose name Sinatra would substitute when he sang “Mrs. Robinson” so he didn’t misuse the Lord’s Son’s name), Western character actor Dub Taylor, monster truck Bigfoot* and, yes, Sinatra himself as himself.

Roger Ebert said that this movie was “one of the laziest insults to the intelligence of moviegoers that I can remember. Sheer arrogance made this picture” and Gene Siskel countered by saying that it was “a total ripoff, a deceptive film – that gives movies a bad name” and the worst movie he and Ebert had ever reviewed on At the Movies.

There’s a third movie in the series that few no about, Speed Zone, which only has Jamie Farr returning but boasts a pretty fun cast, John Candy romancing Donna Dixon and John Schneider playing a Duke.

*Bigfoot also appears in Take This Job and Shove It, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, Road House, Police Academy 6: City Under Siege, Tango & Cash, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and Ready: Player One.

June 7: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Shannon Tweed! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Canada, thank you.

Beyond movies like Prom Night, Terror Train, Black Christmas, Deadline, Curtains, The Gate, Funeral Home, My Bloody Valentine, Meatballs III, The Pyx, Pin, the early films of Cronenberg, Prom Night 2 and yes, even Things and Wicked World, not to mention SCTV, we have so much to thank you for.

We should also bless March 10, 1957 because on that day, in Whitbourne, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, the Great White North gave birth to Shannon Tweed and any man past puberty from 1981 was better for it. Raised on a mink ranch, third-runner up for Miss Ottawa (I mean, who else was there in Ottawa?) and winner of the singing part of the Miss Canada competition in 1978, Shannon even owned her own metal bar until her modeling career took off. She was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for November 1981 and Playmate of the Year for 1982, as well as appearing in a pictorial with her sister Tracy (who was in Night Rhythms, Night Eyes 3 and Johnny Mnemonic).

While starting small with a body double role in Curtains, as well as roles in movies like George P. Cosmatos (the father of Mandy director Panos) film Of Unknown Origin, Hot Dog…The Movie, Meatballs III (she’s the Love Goddess), Steele Justice and Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death and TV’s Falcon Crest, Tweed really became famous for a career as “one of home video’s most rented erotic thriller goddesses” in the words of Variety. The movie that changed the roles that she’d appear in was Night Eyes 2, the second Andrew Stevens movie that saw her step into a role similar to the one that Tanya Roberts played in the original.

Night Eyes 3, Possessed by the Night, Illicit Dreams, Victim of Desire, Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure, Forbidden Sins — if it sounded dirty and had a piece of tape with marker on it that said “Must be 18 to Rent” at your mom and pop video store, it had Shannon Tweed in it.

Tweed went from living in the Playboy Mansion to dating Gene Simmons for decades to even taking him off the market. She even has a street named after her in the Rosewood neighborhood of Saskatoon where I can only imagine saxophones blast all the time and there’s non-stop sexy fog.

Back when Shannon was just starting her domination of that special section of the video store you don’t need to walk through a special door — or saloon double doors — to see (or anything on Cinemax after 11 p.m. on a Friday), she appeared in the 1984 Canadian erotic film The Surrogate, which is directed by Don Carmody (born in Rhode Island, raised in Montreal and the producer of several of those aforementioned Cronenberg movies). This movie is so Canadian that Art Hindle (born in Nova Scotia), Carole Lauris (born in Quebec) and Jackie Burroughs (born in the UK but moved to Canada when she was nine) as the leads; then doubles down by lensing in Quebec; piling on more Canadian actors in Marilyn Lightstone (the voice of the Answer Box in Abraxas!), Jonathan Welsh (from Canadian disaster movie City On Fire), Vlasta Vrána from Shivers and uber-Canadian Michael Ironside; and even Canuck Daniel Lanois does the soundtrack.

Frank and Lee Waite (Hindle and Tweed) have perhaps the worst marriage in the history of film. He has a high stress job selling Porsches, she doesn’t work because she has a trust fund she never lets him forget about and they can’t get it together in the bedroom because she’s not all that into lovemaking and he’s a pervert.

Get a divorce, guys.

He’s so backed up that he flies into rage-filled episodes that cause him to black out. Instead of, again, instructing them to just get divorced, their marriage counselor suggests they see sexual surrogate Anouk (Laure) who knows how to get couples to fulfill their fantasies while sharing their bed. This sounds like a job invented to get to be on HBOs Real Sex and I have no idea how you would file to get your insurance to pay for this. Maybe in Canada, their public health insurance really does cover everything.

Lee gets really into their first session and it seems like Anouk has some kind of mental powers, but guilt gets the better of Mrs. Waite and the couple dismisses the surrogate — who had to come from The Black Room or be a distant relative of Bridget and Jason — who keeps coming back and making them perform increasingly more violent scenes with her. At the same time, people are getting murdered all over their neighborhood — is this a giallo, eh? — and police officer George Kyber (Ironside) is obsessed with finding out who is causing all this madness. And yes, you guessed it, the murders perfectly line up with every time Frank blacks up.

Meanwhile, Anouk keeps breaking into their home, tying up Lee and making Frank rough her up. I have no idea how her therapy works or why it’s successful, but I do remember that Laure is also in the absolutely berserk Sweet Movie and the definitely a giallo in Canada Strange Shadows in an Empty Room and wonder who her agent was. Anouk somehow has other single patients like Jackie Burrough’s character gets spanked with a giant lolipop while eating candy dressed as a little girl.

Lee’s best friend is Jim Bailey, who was a female impersonator and is the most out person ever to set foot in a Canadian erotic thriller, a point that the film pounds into your brain by having Frank unleash very non-PC four decades-old slurs his way every chance he gets. And then we get to see Bailey do Bette Davis. This has nothing to do with the movie.

In fact, the murder and mattress dancing never really come together, nor does the goofy too cute ending. But there’s a great idea in here about a fantasy surrogate who unlocks the rage-filled fantasies of a couple too repressed to access them. This movie could use its own surrogate to push it into the kind of shadow world of dark erotic thrills that it promises.

June 6: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is slashers! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Katt Shea finished Dance of the Damned on a Saturday. Roger Corman asked if she could come up with a movie by Monday because he still had the strip club set for a few more days. On Monday through Friday of the next week, Shea and her crew shot topless dancing footage. Then, she and partner Andy Ruben took three weeks to write the movie around all that bump and grind.

This would explain why the dancing scenes in the follow-up to Stripped to Kill seem to come from another universe, the place where patrons disappear and we mainly see music videos of girls doing interprative dance.

As for the slasher part of the story, Maria Ford’s Shady has the giallo problem of passing out and waking up covered in blood. If that happened one time to you, you’d be concerned. But five times?

Marjean Holden (Sheeva from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation), Karen Mayo-Chandler (976-Evil II), Birke Tan, Debra Lamb (who was in the first movie), Lisa Glaser (Humanoids from the Deep) and Jeannine Bisignano all appear as the dancers who are the target of the killer, whoever he or she may be.

This movie is full of hallucinations, love scenes in the rain and a slasher plot that is really hard to follow to the point that I’m tempted to call it a giallo and figure out another slasher for my Junsploitation slasher day movie. That said, I think we all need more movies with saxophone sex dream sequences and if it takes calling this a slasher to make it happen, that’s the price we all have to pay.

Shea has no idea why people like this movie, one she wrote as she went as Corman kept telling her to put more nude scenes into the product. Sometimes when you’re working under rough conditions, weird magic happens.

June 5: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is free! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

As the world has grown smaller thanks to all of us being connected 24/7/365, the weird pockets of regional filmmaking may not exist. After all, you can download the latest Polonia movie or watch it on Tubi, right? But in 1988, odd little movies could still just show up at your video store with nothing telling you what they were all about or where they came from.

Dudley is a nothing happening town that only has a few things for teens to do and all of them get you in trouble. The Blue Lights of the title are both a place for them to have furtive backseat car sex and also see the strange glow that could either be aliens or the ghosts of a train wreck from long before any of these kids were born.

Four kids back from college for the summer — Ken (Patrick Keller), Alice (Becky Golladay), Paul (Clayton A. McCaw) and Sandy (Deborah McVencenty) — and three guys who are probably never getting out of Dudley — Bob (Kent E. Fritzell), Max (Tom Massmann) and Sam (James Asbury) — decide on one of those boring long hot summer nights to go see the lights for themselves.

Oh yeah — that train fire also had a petrified monster within its wreckage known as The Muldoon Man and that’s what they find. Now, if I discovered a ten-foot-tall monster in my drunken teens, I would totally not touch it or even be anywhere around it, no matter how much Pucker, Yuengling or Fireball I had to drink. No, instead they decide to haul it off in a truck — what no one wanted to go mudding instead? — and try and make money off it.

If you guess that the creature gets away — or someone steals it — you’ve seen enough horror movies. So instead of doing the sensible thing like drinking on someone’s porch, the teens all head to Sunny Hill Cemetery, more specifically the tunnels under the graves. That’s where they learn the truth: the Blue Lights are to signal the return fo Loath (Brent Ritter), a gigantic undead leader of a cult of zombies who want to return the dreaded Muldoon Man to life by devouring the living. Somehow, they get away, with Paul stealing the disc they need to complete their ritual, and the zombies follow.

How do you stop them? Maybe the witch (Bettina Julius) can help.

If you’re reading this and think, “That’s way too much for one movie,” you’re right and also wrong, because gloriously regional movies existed outside the purview of La La Land and studio notes so deliriously madcap things could happen. Like, well, this movie.

Also, perhaps most amazingly, this movie looks like a million bucks thanks to the sets and special effects by Michael Spatola (Return of the Living Dead, Predator 2) and Mark Sisson (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Subspecies). Sure, there are way too many primary characters and yes, perhaps too many monsters to keep track of, but isn’t it nice sometimes to totally lose track of something and have it still be fun?

Even better, Curse of the Blue Lights is based on several suburban — rural? — legends of  Pueblo, Colorado, which is where it was made. The Blue Lights really is a parking spot for teens where they would see mysterious blue lights in the nearby river bottom.

The Muldoon Man was real, too.

This supposedly prehistoric petrified human body was discovered in 1877 — seven years after his infamous Cardiff Giant hoax — by a con man named William Conant at a spot now known as Muldoon Hill, near Beulah, Colorado. The figure had a brief tour of the United States before it was revealed to be a hoax. Named after pro wrestler William Muldoon, it was made of clay, plaster, mortar, rock dust, bones, blood and meat.

Director and writer John Henry Johnson also made two documentaries, Zebulon Pike and the Blue Mountain and Damon Runyon’s Pueblo. Turns out that the Consumer Infomation Catalogue isn’t the only great thing to come out of that town.

You can watch this on YouTube. Maybe technology isn’t all bad.

June 4: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 90s action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Kit Li (Jet Li) is a Hong Kong Bomb Squad police officer who responds to the latest threat of The Doctor’s (Kelvin Wong in his final role) terrorist group. They’ve taken a school bus hostage and his wife and son are on board. He sends one of his team to diffuse it, but the complicated bomb explodes and everyone dies, including Kit’s family. He leaves the force behind and finds a new life as a stunt double for Frankie Lone (“God of Song” Jacky Cheung), a man who claims to do all his own stunts.

After Jacky’s latest movie wraps, Frankie’s father (Wu Ma) and his manager Charlie Tso (Charlie  Tso, who acted in Hong Kong softcore films and Police Story) invite Kit to the Hotel Grandeur for a jewelry show. The Doctor is on his way there and they cross paths as Jacky hears his voice, but no one will believe him. He and his gang destroy the hotel and his partner Fai-fai (Valerie Chow) uses her beauty to lead Jacky to a gang member named Kong (Billy Chow, Fist of Legend and the WKA world Welterweight champion from 1984 to 1986) who has dreamed of fighting the movie star. Jacky barely escapes with his life.

Meanwhile, a journalist named Helen (Chingmy Yau) out to expose Jacky’s secret discovers The Doctor’s identity. She and Kit fall in love over the course of this Die Hard scenario and if you don’t think that he won’t have to solve the same bomb that killed his family you haven’t been watching action movies.

How much does this movie make fun of Bruce Willis’ action epic? Its Hong Kong title was High Risk, Rat’s Bravery and Dragon’s Might which is very close to the name that Die Hard was released as in Hong Kong, Tiger’s Bravery and Dragon’s Might.

Director Wong Jing also made God of Gamblers, Naked Killer, the Street Fighter influenced Future Cops and City Hunter. That last movie is important as after it was released, star Jackie Chan not only disowned the film but also personally went after Wong in the press. Frankie Lone in this movie is supposedly Chan and the claim is that Jackie, like Jacky, is a drunken womanizer who doesn’t even do his own stuntwork. And while Jacky dresses like Bruce Lee, the fact that the Charlie Tso character is so similar to Jackie’s mentor Willie Chan hammers the point home.

The director of this film’s action, Corey Yuen Kwai, really pushed for this to outdo what American action was in the 90s. While Jet Li is, as always, astounding, the final hand-to-hand combat is between Jacky and Kong, as the star who has lived the high life for so long redeems himself.

Look for this movie as Meltdown on Tubi.