Category Archives: Movie reviews

CANNON MONTH 3: Broken Mirrors (1984)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

Known in Holland as Gebroken Spiegels, Broken Mirrors is split between two stories. In one, Diane (Lineke Ripman) and Dora (Henriette Tol) are Amsterdam brothel workers at the Happy House Club who begin to tire of their lives. And in the other, a housewife named Bea (Edda Barends) is kidnapped by one of the johns and is slowly starved to death while her captor takes photographic evidence.

Directed and written by Marleen Gorris (A Question of Silence), this film sets forth the belief that all women are captives of men, whether that means that the patriarchy that they’ve created or quite literally the situation in the second story.

Dora explains to Diane that these men rent their bodies, not who they are, so they don’t need to give them anything more than seconds of fumbling sex. They’re supported by the lady of the house, Ellen (Coby Stunnenberg), who allows them to turn down customers and gives them a line to call for help.

Bea is in a strikingly similar situation and knows that she’s going to die. But if she does, she will only give the killer brief moments and none of the emotion that he craves. He only has her body as well, not who she is.

It’s also worth noting that we see the women’s faces, learn their emotions and become sympathetic to them, but never really see many of the men, even the killer. They are near-silent and almost always anonymous.

CANNON MONTH 3: Hennessy (1975)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

Niall Hennessy (Rod Steiger) watched his family die in a Belfast riot. There’s only one thing he can do now. Kill the Royal Family and all of Parliament. As he coldly enacts his plot, both the police and the IRA want to stop him. Steiger is great, as he plays a man who just wants to avoid “the Troubles” — even though his brother is in the IRA — but when he loses those that he loves, he loses his humanity.

John Guillermin was the original director, but he left to make The Towering Inferno. Don Sharp (Psychomania) came on and worked from a script by John Gay. Lee Remick agreed to play her supporting role as it reunited her with Steiger and Gay, as they had just worked on No Way to Treat a Lady.

This was based on a story by Richard Johnson — who played Inspector Hollis — and the movie was accused of making entertainment from terrorism. Samuel Z. Arkoff for American-International Pictures said, “We do not consider this a pro-IRA movie but we are very anxious to avoid public opinion in Britain. I think the film is brilliant. I realize the bombing campaign in Britain must have made people very bitter about the IRA. I ask people to see the film before they make up their minds.”

The British Board of Film Classification refused to classify the film as there was newsreel footage of the Queen altered to appear as if she was reacting to a bomb explosion. Arkoff added a disclaimer stating that the British Royal Family had not participated, but Odeon Cinemas refused to show it and EMI would not distribute it.

It’s wild that this movie came out during such a politically charged time and was either very brave or very exploitative.

CANNON MONTH 3: Rescue Team (1983)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

Jim Goldman is also Jun Gallardo, the director of fifty plus movies like SFX Retaliator and The Firebird Conspiracy. Are you surprised that he’s recruited Richard Harrison for this film mission? If you’ve watched as many movies where the Philippines become the new Vietnam, you’re not.

Also known as Operation Coleman — Frank Coleman is the man who needs to be rescued — and featuring the same cast as Intrusion: Cambodia (coming later this week) this one finds Harrison as CIA agent Robert F. Burton. He’s offered a hundred thousand dollars to save the POW and uses a government computer to choose the best men for the job.

Between pretending to be archaeologists and spending the night before their mission getting drunk at a strip club may not be the best move for these soldiers. Plus, in any gathering of thirteen — or however many people go to Vietnam to get a treasure or rescue someone in an 80s VHS rental movie — expect a Judas.

Somehow, Tetchie Agbayani — who plays Kara in this movie — would also appear as Princess Rubali in Gymkata, get to be in The Money Pit and Disorderlies (of all movies!) and was the first-ever Filipino woman to appear in Playboy (even if it was the German version). She’s still acting today.

This has all your favorite soldiers in VHS films like Mike Monty, Romano Kristoff (who was in a few Mark Gregory movies including Just a Damned Soldier and Tan Zan: The Ultimate Mission), Jim Gaines (Strike Commando, Cop Game), Korea war orphan and writer of this movie Don Gordon Bell (Enter the Ninja, Stryker), Mike Cohen (The One Armed Executioner) and more.

It’s not the best one of these movies you’ll find, but it’ll pass the time. And no, we don’t get to win this time.

Also…

It’s a Cannon (international) movie!

CANNON MONTH 3: The Light at the Edge of the World (1971)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

Kevin Billington was the son of a factory worker who ended up marrying Lady Rachel Billington. He was also a director of plenty of TV movies, like a well-considered BBC version of Henry VIII. He ended up directing this international collaboration of French, Spanish and Italian producers. They paid Kirk Douglas an estimated $1 million dollars to star, which is about $7.2 million in today’s money.

Will Denton (Kirk Douglas) runs an isolated lighthouse to hide from a failed romance and the fact that he killed a man in self-defense. The only people he ever speaks to are the crew, Captain Moriz (Fernando Rey) and assistant Felipe (Massimo Ranieri). They watch over a very strategic trade route near the Tierra del Fuego archipelago at the southern tip of South America.

Yet in one horrible moment, it all changes, as Captain Jonathan Kongre (Yul Brynner) and his pirates — they include actors from Sergio Leone’s films, such as Luis Barboo, Víctor Israel and Aldo Sambrell — kill Moriz and Felipe, smash the lighthouse signal and start to loot everything they can. Surviving their attack along with an Italian sailor named Montefiore (Renato Salvatori), they begin to fight back.

Kongre has also made a change in his life. He always kills everyone on the ships that he takes over, but he’s fallen for one of the women on board, Arabella (Samantha Eggar). Denton tries to save her, but when Montefiore is caught and slowly killed, he puts his friend out of his misery, just as Kongre angrily gives the woman to his crew. Denton sinks the ship and it ends up with just the two men, battling each other to the death inside the lighthouse.

If you’re expecting a light hearted Jules Verne adventure, well, this is as rough as it gets. It’s about a broken man trying to just live out his days coming up against a sophisticated villain who loves murder and carnage. I mean, they kill Douglas’ monkey. That’s how horrible the bad guys are. They deserve everything they get.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: The Naked Zoo (1970)

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BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Rita Hayworth spent the last few years of her life not knowing who she was anymore, painting when she did, and mostly staring out her window at Central Park. She died with many people thinking that alcoholism had robbed her of her career when the truth was Alzheimer’s had impacted her final years and back then, the world didn’t understand that disease at all.

Before she slipped away, she made a movie with William Gréfe, which blows my mind, and that movie is 1970’s The Naked Zoo, which was originally called The Grove, named for Coconut Grove, a former artist’s colony in Miami.

So how did Gréfe — the maker of movies like Sting of Death and Whiskey Mountain — get a big star like Hayworth into a movie made for just $250,000? Well, her agent originally wanted all of that cash, but they were able to make a deal for $50,000 for two weeks of shooting. Her parts were shot in a deserted house near the Pirate’s World theme park (of my dreams, as well as movies like Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny and Musical Mutiny).

Once known as “The Great American Love Goddess,” Hayworth’s life was filled with men who wanted her to be the seductive woman she was in films only to learn that she was a real person. Or, perhaps even worse, men who only sought to control her, like first husband Edward Charles Judson, a twice her age businessman who remade her into a sex symbol that he could buy and sell to Hollywood. Her marriages to Orson Welles, Prince Aly Khan, Dick Haymes and James Hill were also marked with mental and physical abuse, with only Welles not outright beating and humiliating her in public*.

By 1972 — two years after this film — her health and mental state was so bad that she had to read her lines one at a time while making The Wrath of God. She was to be in Tales That Witness Madness, but left the set before she appearing in one scene.

Back to Willian Gréfe. He had hoped to make a movie closer to The Graduate, but you know, as seen through the Florida drive-in movie haze of sex, drugs and crime. And still, this was edited by its distributor, with cuts made to add a masturbation scene and the band Canned Heat playing at a party. Those scenes were filmed by Barry Mahon, pretty much making this movie a team-up of Florida’s two top exploitation experts.

The film itself concerns Hayworth playing Mrs. Golden, a rich woman who lives with her cockolder, wheelchair-bound husband Harry (Ford Rainey, Dr. Mixter from Halloween II!). She sleeps with an author named Terry Shaw (Steve Oliver from Peyton Place) and when her husband finds out — and tries to gun them down — Terry stops him, but despite the death of the old man being in self-defense, Mrs. Golden starts blackmailing him.

That’s really the whole story, although there’s also plenty of party scenes and romance between Terry and Nadine (Fleurette Carter, who was also in The Hookers) and Pauline (Fay Spain, Dragstrip Girl).

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Devil’s Due (1973)

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BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Cindy (Cindy West) is not having a good day. She’s been drugged and assaulted by Dean Carlson (John Buco), who has made her pregnant. She runs to tell her mechanic boyfriend Willie Joe (Davey Jones), but after making love and telling him that he’s the father, he dumps her. She runs to her father, the only man who never let her down, only to discover that he’s balls deep in her best friend Barbie (Lisa Grant). She screams so loud that she has a miscarriage and loses her voice.

Cindy runs again, this time to the big city, where she moves in with Dawn (Andrea True, who would go on to sing “More, More, More) and Nicky (Darby Lloyd Rains), two lesbians who say that she’s the best thing that ever happened to them.

This wouldn’t have this title if it wasn’t for Kampala (Gus Thomas, who would go on to become Cortland, New York District Attorney Mark Suben) and his sex cult. Cindy soon sees right through the leader, as men have ruined her life. The girls all conspire to take over the sex group — Jamie Gillis is also a member, along with Marc Stevens, Georgina Spelvin (the same year that she was in The Devil In Ms. Jones) and Tina Russell — and this movie rewards us with dialogue like,  “You may find this kind of strange, Cindy, but I work for the Devil!” and “You must kiss the cock of Satan!” Also: Death by poisoned nipples.

Devil’s Due is really influenced by the Church of Satan photo layouts that often appeared in men’s magazines. Directed by Ernest Danna and written by Gerry Pound, it’s not great but it is fun if you enjoy the occult of the 70s.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Whiskey Mountain (1977)

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BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Bill (Christopher George, taking a vacation from his wife, who is in nearly every movie with him), Jamie, Dan (Preston Pierce, Angels’ Wild Women) and Diana (Roberta Collins, Matilda the Hun from Death Race 2000) are on a treasure hunt deep in the Southern backwoods, seeking an inheritance of prices Civil War rifles. Sure, why not?

After thirty minutes of more of travelogue and dirt bike footage, you may wonder, “Has slasher month gone to Sam’s head? When are we going to get to the senseless violence?” Patience, slashawan.

The deeper into the South our protagonists find themselves, the less hospitality they get from the locals, but hey, there’s plenty of money on the other side of the rainbow on Whiskey Mountain, right? Well, there’s also a drug operation that runs everything around, even the cops, all headed up by Rudy (John Davis Chandler, probably the only actor I know that appeared in both Adventures In Babysitting and High Plains Drifter).

This is a movie that has all real marijuana as props and a soundtrack by the Charlie Daniels Band, along with the exact kind of horrors you know await them yankees when they ask too many questions and push too hard. It’s also filled with Peckinpah-esque slow-motion — most effectively when George is double firing shotguns — to go with a brutal scene where we only hear the assault on the girls and see still evidence as it develops on Polaroids. Also — it’s 1977 and technically a motorcycle movie. so that means that it also has a potential downer ending freeze frame.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: My Tale Is Hot (1964)

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BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Lucifer U. Devil (Max Gardens, AKA Manny Goodtimes) is mad that Hell hasn’t seen any new arrivals of note since Hitler. He wants the soul of Ben-Hur Ova (Jack Little) and is trying to figure out how to lure him away from his wife Miassis (Bea Reddy). So the first of the fallen bets his wife Saturna (Ima Ghoul) that he can get the man who won the “World’s Most Faithful Husband” by Ladies House Companion to break the Seventh Commandment.

This movie has those really tiny pools that only existed when nudie cuties were being made. These pools are so miniature than only one or two women can fit at the same time. I wonder who made these are what their purpose was other than to show off the breasts of young starlets?

Directed and written by Peter Perry Jr., who uses the name Seymour Tokus, this has a dance by famous burlesque queen Candy barr, as well as appearances by actresses with names like Carry Meoff, Lotta Partz and Evan less. More famous actresses include Carol Baughman, Monica Liljistrand, Gaby Martone, Barbara Nordin, Adele Rein and Karen Wyatt, many of whom turn up in Mondo Keyhole.

The secret of Ben-Hur Ova? He’s a sheik and has a hundred wives, so he’s faithful to all of them. Now I ask, who was Ima Ghoul and what is she up to?

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

CANNON MONTH 3: The Freeway Maniac (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

There’s no way that the Gahan Wilson that wrote this movie is the Gahan Wilson who drew all those cartoons for Playboy, right?

Because if he is, then this is a comedy and this movie makes a lot more sense.

And if not, then I have no idea what the filmmakers were going for in this one.

So after this movie completely rips off the open of Pieces and Nightmare, we move to an asylum where the inmates are being given cigarettes as some form of therapy. One of them escapes and kills everyone in his way and that’s Arthur (James Jude Courtney, who would go on to be The Shape in the 2018 Halloween). He nearly kills an actress named Linda (Loren Winters, who was a one and done actress in this, along with producing the film), whose experience ends up getting her cast in a cheesy science fiction movie called Astronette that will use her notoriety for publicity.

There’s no way Arthur would hunt her down, right?

I have so many questions for this movie. How did they get Robbie Krieger from The Doors to write the theme song? Why did they have Linda’s boyfriend cheat on her and suddenly become a sympathetic hero in the last act? Why is there no real freeway in this movie? Why does Arthur howl at the moon? Why is some of this movie well-shot with decent stunts and other portions have the worst acting you’ve ever seen? Are you surprised that this was released by Cannon — well, released on VHS in the Netherlands by Cannon Screen Entertainment, so not really produced by Cannon.

There’s not really another slasher like The Freeway Maniac. It’s…something else.

CANNON MONTH 3: Razorback (1984)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

Between the cinematography of Dean Semler (The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) and the lunatic vision of Russell Mulcahy (who was known for his music videos before making movies like this and Highlander; some of the videos he directed include “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, “Vienna” by Ultravox and tons of Cultre Club and Duran Duran songs), Razorback looks better than any movie about a gigantic rampaging pig should.

But not just any pig. A gigantic razorback that’s so maniacal that it eats its own young and now has the power to implicate men in the murder of their family. That kind of pig. Most of the film’s budget went to making six animatronic pigs that were used for different stunts, including a special boar made to attack cars.

As for real boars, they really are pretty tough. Can they be stabbed in the throat and keep going? I honestly don’t want to find out for myself. But hey — this is a Jaws on land film that even has “New Moon on Monday” show up on the soundtrack. And there are moments where the camerawork gets nearly psychedelic and you think, “Hey, is this art or a movie with a giant pig that eats people?”