After a career in stage musicals (West Side Story) and choreography, David Winters directed Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare, The Last Horror Film and Thrashin’ before directing, producing and distributing movies for Action International Pictures, the folks who unleashed Space Mutiny and Blood On the Badge. He also dated Linda Lovelace for some time. 

But of all those things, Dancin’: It’s On! may have brought me the most happiness.

Wendi Carson comes from the reality shows So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars, where she was the partner of Cody Simpson, season 19 winner Alfonso Ribero, Chris Soules, Carlos PenaVega, Von Miller, Vanilla Ice, Chris Kattan, Frankie Munoz, Chris Mazdzer, Mile Manheim, Kel Mitchell, The Miz, Wayne Brady, Danny Amendola and season 34 winner Robert Irwin. Here, she’s a college student, Jennifer Gabriella August, getting to spend the summer at the Hit Parade Hotel with her estranged father, Jerry (Gary Daniels, yes, the martial arts star of Fist of the North Star). He runs a fanciful hotel that seems to feature cosplayers in scenes from movies and lots of dancing. Jennifer has no interest in seeing her dad again, but her mother (August 1986 Playboy Playmate of the Month Ava Fabian) tells her this could be good for her.

She meets a young man named Ken (Chehon Wespi-Tschopp, also from So You Think You Can Dance), an orphan who works as a dishwasher at her father’s hotel. Of course, her father hates him because he’s of a lower caste, which is a lot like Dirty Dancing, as is the dance competition at the end. Her dad would rather she date Danny (Matt Marr, who was on So You Think You Can Dance Canada), a rich kid who belittles Ken, calling him an orphan in dialogue that feels like Charles Dickens, but if Charles Dickens were really David Prior, of all people, who co-wrote this.

Man, this is a weird place. It’s run, sort of, by The Captain (Russell Ferguson, winner of So You Think You Can Dance season 6). You get picked up at the airport by a mime, which is more terrifying than being picked up in a rainstorm on the way to the Tanz Akademie. 

The Hit Parade Hotel has a website, made just for this movie and looking very 1995, much less 2015. It says, “Everyone who works at our resorts and at our restaurants is an entertainer. Our waiters are great but they are also great singers and dancers. Our bartender can mix great drinks but they can do magic while juggling the bottles and the mixers. When our chef cooks your crapes or your jumbo shrimp both vegetarian and not, they fly through the air, spinning and surrounded by rings of fire. The food is delicious and we encourage you to play with your food. Our bellhops, the concierges, the receptionists, the porters and even our cleaning and security staff all provide great services but they also go out of their way to entertain you and to make your stay pleasant, enjoyable and exciting. Your kids will love it and you will feel like a kid again, as you are serviced by staff dressed in costumes and acting out scenes from your favorite movies. We also provide ample opportunity for you to participate in the fun and to appear in one of our television programs, music videos and films that we are producing on premises almost every day.” 

Ken is in love with Jennifer in like, a second, so he forgets all about his dance partner Shotsy (Jordan Clark, the winner of So You Think You Can Dance Canada season 4 and if you’re like me and prefer redheads, well…you’ll be debating Ken’s life choices), who he’s supposed to dance with in the Florida Statewide Dance Contest. Jennifer is jealous that Shotsy dances with Ken, so she decides to dance with Danny, but Hal Sanders (Winters) is a vet who has late-night flashbacks of helicopters exploding and oh yeah, he also used to be a dancer. He decides that Ken and Jennifer should be a dancing couple and choreographs their routine.

This movie has moments like Ken breaking out into an angry dance that goes on seemingly for hours, as well as Jennifer’s sad walk through the tourist town of Panama City, surrounded by giant penguins and SUVs that pull up and start instant salsa dance parties. She’s also crying in public, and the mime shows up and cries too. Wow. I don’t think I’ve genuinely laughed this hard in decades.

We also get a Panama City travelogue moment, and I think more movies should do this. There’s even a song about the city, which made me think they might have gotten a discount for shooting there. In fact, that’s probably exactly what happened.

The dialogue is all looped; Ken yells things like, “You wouldn’t know the first thing about dancing!” and Winters looks like Butcher Vachon, which makes his dancing even more lovely. And why does the dad open all of his daughter’s gifts instead of letting her? Is he that much of a control freak? Did the dance contest move so many people that Dad likes Ken, Mom gets back together with Dad, and even Danny becomes a nice person? Can dance do all of that?

Or how about the song, “Proud To Know I Love Ya?” It may have lyrics like this: “I know you’ve had a history of lovers / I hear it’s turned you off all the others / But I’m the one you’ve been waiting for / I see you scream at people all the time / When you get mad it makes me hot inside / Don’t make me sleep outside your door! / Cuz baby I know, you know, you’re scared to be alone / I’d run five hundred miles to prove I love ya! / I’d hold you in my arms till my final day / I’d kiss your lips all the time to prove I love ya! / I would give up my life / If it’s the last thing I do / Just to prove, Just to prove I love ya!” but Ray Isaac accidentally gave the film the demo version, in which the lyric “I would even try being a lesbian” is sung. This is a family film about the power of dance.

Best of all, this was almost called East Side Story. This is from the man who named his company West Side Studios.

More movies need angry dance scenes where dudes throw chairs into the pool.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The best Letterboxd reviewer, pd187, summed this one up: “nicki clyne (age 21, playing a lollipop-sucking raver teen) married allison mack & now runs the NXIVM cult – the only one who didnt go to prison.”

Imagine a world where everyone wears JNCO jeans and skateboards, a place where an aging stoner can raise Zolar (Jordan Hoffart, a pro skateboarder who now owns Black Plague Brewing), an alien who looks like a blue version of Capricon from Get Street Smart: A Kid’s Guide To Stranger Dangers. If you got that reference, you’re with friends.

A bunch of skater kids add him to their group, and yes, that’s Nicki Clyne playing Keiko, the girlboss of this. She slept with Keith Raniere for ten years and got a green card by marrying Allison Mack. Oh yeah, she was also on the new Battlestar Galactica. Jason Ellis was in this way before he tattooed his whole head. And I have no idea how they talked C. Thomas Howell into being in it, much less playing an evil alien.

Directed by Carl Goldstein and written by John Derevlany, this is all part of the grand awakening project, where we’ll all be fine with aliens coming here, because they can be rad and shred. But they won’t. They’ll eat us.

This was on Kids WB, and remember when there was a network with a singing frog? The WwwwwwwwwwwB!

You can watch this on Tubi.

Pete Vinal made a vanity project: a movie he directed, wrote, produced, and stars in as Pete Weaver, once the most excellent break dancer in the world. But now, he needs to get his daughter an expensive medical treatment, or she’ll die, and he just lost his dad, who has finally invented something amazing, but then bled to death after a heart attack just before they were about to go get ice cream.

It’s time to dance.

Also, to compound all of this, Pete gets fired from his job because a corrupt coworker steals his invention — not the new administrative assistant, whom he keeps yelling at for smoking — and claims it as his own. To make things worse, he then claims Pete stole it from him.

This movie doesn’t understand how patents work: Pete did patent his invention, the Drink Genie, but instead of speaking up, he just gets fired. If you’re wondering, did the real Pete Vinal invent a genuine Drink Genie? You get it. 

Meanwhile, instead of getting a job, he reunites his old dance crew. He doesn’t tell his wife — “because you know how women are” his words, not mine) — and she thinks she’s cheating. When she worries, she calls a friend who basically tells her she’s wrong and that, because Pete goes to church — although he later claims to be lapsed, yet he prays throughout the movie — there’s no way he could ever cheat on her.

Of course, Pete is vindicated. He isn’t cheating on his wife. His invention belongs to him, and he’s been rehired, but his enemy has just been demoted, which is weird because now he and Pete have to work together. And then his crew has a twenty-minute-long dance competition with Ice Man and his crew. Ice Man may be younger and, reasonably, black, so one would assume he’d defeat Pete. And then he does, except that he donates his prize money to Pete’s family, but then a charity organization pays for all of Pete’s daughter’s hospital bills, so none of this mattered. Pete could have done nothing, and we’d be back here.

However, the end of this movie is horrifying.

We discover that it’s all been a painting that we saw someone starting in the park at the beginning of the story. Yes, every life, every soul, it’s all erased when it’s painted over. And look at Pete’s face. He knows. The cosmic erasure of this is a fate worse than death.

Pete went through a Jobian nightmare of death, disease, dancing and despair, only to be erased, as if he and everyone he loved were never born.

According to Dove.com, “Through it all, Pete never gives up hope or loses his faith. Prayer and reverence for God are both frequent elements. However, there are several sexual innuendoes in the film, as well as 19 inappropriate uses of God and Oh God. If these references were removed, the remaining proper references to God will uplift the human spirit.”

A religious movie with a hero everyone wants to have sex with for his ability to breakdance, dressed like The Nutty Professor. I am so glad this found its way to me.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Zhong Jian (Alexander Fu Sheng) drives a carriage, but mostly he gets into fights, trying to be on the side of justice. Everyone in town is sick of him because, even with the best intentions, he ends up causing so many problems. Even his martial arts teacher tells him to stop fighting.

However, the fighting lessons of Choy Li Fut will make him a better man.

This even starts with a short history of the style, with Fu Sheng performing it and discussing its origins and how it evolved.

I loved the last battle because, unlike so many movies that have training sequences, here you actually get to see the training footage matched with how Zhong Jian fights and how what he learned has made him the fighting master and hero that he is now.

Chang Cheh, you did it again.

This Eureka release has a commentary track by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and martial artist and filmmaker Michael Worth. You can get it from MVD.

Three stories, three directors, one Shaw Brothers film.

Griffin Yueh Feng directed the first section, ‘The Iron Bow,” which has Master Shi (Tin Ching) fall in love with Ying Ying (Shih Szu), who wants nothing to do with him. She says that only the man who can shoot her father’s sacred bow will be her love.

“The Tigress” is from Cheng Kang. Sex worker Shih Chung Yu (Lily Ho Li-Li) is pursued by many men, but her heart belongs to General Wang (Chung Wa). When he disobeys an order, his superiors want to execute him. She begs for him to be saved, and he is, as long as the two of them hunt down a dangerous criminal.

“White Water Strand” is by Chang Cheh and tells of a swordsman who saves a rebel and his friends. They may be on the wrong side of the law, but he senses something good within them. His own sword brothers are corrupt, however, and the rebels repay him by saving him.

Each part gets just half an hour, so if you’re looking for an epic, this is several smaller stories instead.

This Eureka release has a commentary track by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema. You can get it from MVD.

The wandering swordsman Yu Hsieh Erh (David Chiang) robs bandits and gives their stolen money to the poor. Then he meets a robber named Foolproof Kung, who convinces him he was wrong about the bad guys, so he helps them with a robbery. Bad idea. They’re the bad guys, Wandering Swordsman!

This being a Chang Cheh movie, we have a hero who survives being stabbed right through the middle of his body and keeps fighting for a long time. It’s also light-hearted in parts and has tons of wire and trampoline stuntwork. Then, you know, it turns into a Chang Cheh bloody ending, so if you love any of the players, there’s a good chance your heart will be broken when they’re killed.

The good news? This is the first movie of Bolo Yeung, who is one of the thieves.

This Eureka release has a commentary track by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema. You can get it from MVD.

Li Yueh (Jimmy Wang Yu) gets revenge on the man who killed his father. That killer? A high-ranking official, who gets a price on his head and needs him to go into hiding. He doesn’t even tell his girlfriend, Liu (Ping Chin), that he’s disappearing. Later, she meets Fang Chun-chao, a swordsman who defends her from the Flying Fish gang. Fang is hired to train her in swordplay and ends up pining for her. She’s still in love with Li Yueh, however. Because Fang believes in honor, he decides to find her missing love.

The Flying Fish return to hunt down Fang, who is saved by his friend, a lowly stable worker. Of course, that person is Li Yueh. Together, they work to stop the threat of the different gang members. But if you’re a hero — or anyone, really — in a Chang Cheh movie, you may not make it to the end alive.

This Eureka release has a commentary track by film critic David West. You can get it from MVD.

Taoist Priest Yu Ji (Cheng Tien-Chi) is asked to go to the people and perform miracles, healing them of sickness by pulling green slime from their bodies. He’s soon executed by General Sun Ce (Chiu Gwok) thanks to the advice of Prime Minister Xu Gong (Wong Lik), as neither wants the people worshipping a god on Earth. They need to get working in the fields, right? As for Yu Ji, his students find his body and reunite it with his severed head, bringing him back as a spirit.

It gets confusing — is Yu Ji supposed to be Jesus? Is the general a bad guy or is the prime minister? Was Chang Cheh trying to make movies like the new fantasy films that had taken over Hong Kong? Isn’t it cool how Yu Ji can become a woman, the possessed mistress, and cause so much craziness?

Taken from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, this would be the last film Cheh made for Shaw Brothers.

This Eureka release has a commentary track by film critic David West. You can get it from MVD.

Based on Wu Cheng’en’s novel Journey to the West — specifically the story of Red Boy — The Fantastic Magic Baby. Chang Cheh pretty much makes Peking opera — there’s even an entire filmed version of one after the main movie — in which Red Boy (Ting Wa-Chung) comes to collect a tribute from the humans who worship the gods Princess Iron Fan and Ox Demon King, who are his parents. He ends up kidnapping Tripitaka (Teng Jue-Jen), a monk whose flesh is said to add thousands of years to your life when consumed, which means that Monkey King (Lau Chung-Chun) and Pigsy (Chen I-Ho) need to fix things.

I tell you that synopsis and it doesn’t matter, because this is basically an hour of long fights, musical sequences, little speaking, wild costumes — stone men and tree people! — and gorgeous visuals filmed against solid colored backgrounds. There’s also so much fog that Lucio Fulci would say, “This is almost enough fog.”

This just washed over me, delighting my senses with its gorgeous visuals and athletic fights. It moves so quickly that you can just sit back and take it all in and feel good in the knowledge that you’re seeing something unlike any other film out there. I love that so many Shaw Brothers movies are shot on sets and this is the extreme version of that, as there’s not even an actual physical location as much as these are shot within a candy colored, misty wonderland.

With fights put together by Peking opera star Li Tong-Chun and Lau Kar-Leung, this is all the action you want in addition to all that arty feel. You can tell people you’re watching high culture.

This Eureka release has two commentary tracks, one by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema and the other by Frank Djeng. You can get it from MVD.

Directed by Chang Cheh and Pao Hsueh-li and written by Ni Kuang, this is about Wang Wu (Chen Kuan-Tai), the head of a bodyguard company. The work he does is noticed by Tan Si-Tong (Yueh Hua), who watches from a restaurant. As Wang Wu becomes more politically aware, Tan teams up with him to try to reform the laws of the Empress Dowager, who, of course, has none of that.

Tan and the reformists are eventually arrested and sentenced to be executed, with Wang Wu leading his fighting bodyguards in a daring rescue. This scene echoes the historical six gentlemen of the Hundred Days’ Reform, including Tan Si-Tong, who were all beheaded in 1898.

This was remade by Sammo Hung as Blade of Fury.

This Eureka release has a commentary track by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and martial artist and filmmaker Michael Worth. You can get it from MVD.