Also known as Bruce’s Revenge, Return of Fists of Fury , and Ninja vs. Bruce Lee, this was made under the title Zhong lie Jing Wu Men. It’s superstars — that’s what they said — Bruce Le as Bruce Wong, who comes to Manila to visit his uncle, who has apparently forgotten and just left home. So he wanders the streets and meets a young thief named Piggy and saves a girl from the deadliest pimp in the Philippines, Mr. Cross.

One of the women Bruce saves is his cousin, who runs a martial arts school with his other cousin. He helps them fight Mr. Cross, who has one henchman who is such a gay stereotype that even far-right people will be offended by this movie’s homophobia. Anyway, Bruce shuts almost everything down, so the bad guys hire a killer named Sakata to kill everyone, starting with his male cousin.

This movie features an instrumental version of Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” that completely made me insane, with me screaming out the lyrics. “I’m standing on the edge of time, I’ve walked away when love was mine, Caught up in a world of uphill climbing, the tears are in my mind, and nothing is rhyming.”

Also: This ends with the police all coming to bust up the final fight between Mr. Cross, Sakta, Sakata’s brother, a hundred goons and Bruce. Piggy watches, all alone on the beach, crying, realizing that he will forever be alone. So…an unhappy ending?

If you were Asian, did martial arts and looked like Bruce Lee with aviator sunglasses on, you always had a job in 1977.

Director Joseph Velasco also went by Joseph Kong and made Bruce’s Secret Kung Fu. Thundering Ninja, The Clones of Bruce Lee, Treasure of Bruce Lee, The Young Dragon, Enter the Game of Death, Bruce’s Deadly Fingers, Bruce and the Shaolin Bronzemen and Kung Fu Master: Bruce Lee Style. He made more off Bruce Lee than Bruce Lee made off of Bruce Lee.

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.

By the way, the girl in that family is played by Lara Wendel, who would be chased by a dog and horribly murdered in Tenebre; she’s also in The Red Monks, Killing Birds, My Dear Killer, The Perfume of the Lady In Black, Ghosthouse, and You’ll Die at Midnight. In my world, that’s what we call a killer resume. Her father was Walter Barnes, a former football player who was a sheriff in High Plains Drifter, Bronco Billy and Smokey Bites the Dust, as well as one of the rangers in Day of the Animals. Her mother and brother also appear in this and are killed by Telly.

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.

What a weird movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Also known as Soul Soldier, Black Cavalry and Buffalo Soldier, this John “Bud” Cardos-directed movie is about Eli Brown (Robert DoQui), who escapes all the trouble his sex life gets him into by joining the 10th Cavalry at Fort Davis, which is led by Col. Grierson (Cesar Romero, who we all know from Gilbert Gottfried liked having oranges thrown at his butt). 

Soon, Eli befriends Native American Walking Horse (Robert Dix) and plans to settle down with Julie Brown (Janee Michelle). However, her affections are divided, as she is also attracted to Sgt. Hatch (Lincoln Kilpatrick), creating a complex love triangle that drives the story.

Here’s what’s wild: After this was filmed on 16mm and released under the title The Red, White and Black, producer Stuart Hirschman asked John Cardos to salvage the film. Cardos, after looking at the existing footage, said it needed to be reshot at 35mm and got away with it. This feels like absolute BS, but Wikipedia says it was released in 1970 and 1972.

Barbara Hale, Della Street on Perry Mason and Dr. Jenny Lager in The Giant Spider Invasion, shows up, as does Louise Jefferson herself, Isabel Sanford. 

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Jim Markovic (Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor, the American editor for Zombie Holocaust AKA Dr. Butcher, MD) and written by Larry Dolgin and Dick Randall (yes, the maniac who brought us Pieces, The French Sex Murders and The Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield), this starts by telling us that Bruce Lee is dead. Then, we watch four of his childhood films: Bad Boy, Orphan Sam, Kid Cheung and The Carnival, all dubbed into English and given a disco soundtrack.

After seeing Bruce’s funeral — never had so many people come to a funeral, which is BS — we meet Bruce’s imitators, Bruce Li and Dragon Lee, who appear in fight scenes from the movie Last Fist Of Fury. Actually, we get to see the whole movie with a wild dub and a steel baseball-glove weapon. Japan has invaded China and started putting shame on Dragon Lee’s school. One of his students is killed, so every Japanese person in the movie must die. 

This movie must have confused the hell out of people who think China and Japan are the same thing.

It goes without saying that Bruceploitation movies are scummy. You should n ot be afraid and watch it in the worst dub possible. 

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

Andy Milligan was a maniac who made movies filled with maniacs. By all reports, he was in the same constant bad mood as nearly every one of his characters, just as willing as them to start screaming no matter what, no matter when. This may have been because he inherited the same bipolar disorder or schizophrenia that his mother had. Forget the words of Stephen King, who said that Andy’s films were made by “morons with movie cameras” and instead, just imagine the chaos of each film’s shoestring budget set with a fastidious Andy melting down and then savor the results.

The other thing about the Milligan Cinematic Universe is that often there will be supernatural beings. The Mooneys in this movie are all werewolves who transform once a month on the night of the full moon. Pa (Douglas Phair) has spent nearly all of his near-two hundred years of life trying to cure his family, which includes his caretaker Phoebe (Joan Ogden), the sadistic Monica (Hope Stansbury) who mutilates vermin and Malcolm (Berwick Kaler), who is so far gone that he’s kept locked up.

There’s also Diana (Jackie Skarvellis), who has come back home from medical school along with a new husband named Gerald (Ian Innes). She’s the last hope for the Mooneys, as she is the only one who doesn’t gain fur once a month.

Shot in London — along with The Body Beneath, Bloodthirsty Butchers and The Man with Two Heads — new scenes were added when producer William Mishkin wanted to cash in on the success of Willard. Those scenes — one has Andy in it — were shot in his Staten Island home. Milligan had a hard time getting rid of the rats, even when he tried to give them away to the audience that would come to see this film. He also plays the gunsmith who creates silver bullets and Mr. Micawber, a man who sells flesh-eating rats that have already bitten off one of his arms and a lot of his face.

Despite being set a century before, we can see and hear cars, as well as see electrical outlets, but man, Andy made all the costumes himself by hand and I can just imagine him getting out the patterns and swearing the whole time, shouting about thimbles.

The greatest thing about this movie is the title, which had to lure people in because it’s so good and then people would be confronted by a toxic family just shouting and snipping and screaming and that’s the real movie, not the furry masks or flesh-consuming vermin. That’s what I’m here for.

Here’s a drink recipe to get you through the film.

Red Eyed Black Rat

• 1/3 cup orange juice
• 3 oz. dark rum
• 2 oz. cola
• 2 maraschino cherries

This one is pretty simple. Pour the juice, rum, then cola over ice and enjoy. For extra fun, drop in the cherries and pretend they’re rat eyes staring at you in the dark of the wasteland.

You can watch this on Tubi.