SHAWGUST: Five Elements Ninjas (1982)

Chang Cheh directed ninety movies from 1965 to 1993*, as well as all of the lyrics to the songs within his films. The majority of his most well-known movies in the west feature the Venom Mob of Kuo Chui, Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, Sun Chien, Lo Mang (along with Wei Pai), a group of martial arts masters who appeared together and separately across numerous Shaw Brothers films.

Also known as Super Ninjas, Chinese Super Ninjas and Chinese Super Ninja, this movie seems as if the weirdest and most violence obsessed kid in your grade school class was suddenly given enough money to stop scribbling in his notebooks and instead allowed to make a movie that is pretty much non-stop ninjas horribly murdering one another.

This is quite frankly the highest praise that I can give to a movie.

I mean, let me sum up the first five minutes: Chief Hong (Chan Shen) has challenged his rival Yuan Zeng (Kwan Fung) for the title of martial arts master, which mostly entails sending each others’ students after one another in battles to the death. Hong has cheapened these wars of honor by inviting a foreign samurai to the contest. He kills one of Zeng’s students before being stopped by Liang Zhi Sheng (Lo Mang). Before he commits seppuku, he throws a spiked ring to Zeng, which poisons the master and keeps him from doing kung fu until he heals.

There’s no time to heal, as a new challenge arises from the Five-Element Ninjas. Zeng asks Sheng and Tian Hao (Cheng Tien Chi) to fortify the school while ten of his best men answer the challenge. What follows is a series of increasingly brighter colored ninjas basically showing you every Mortal Kombat fatality nearly a decade before the game came out. The ninjas also send Senji (Chen Pei-Hsi) to infiltrate the school. Yes, Hong and Mudou (Michael Chan, who didn’t just play triad gangster roles, but left the police to become one), the leader of the ninjas, are pretty much the winners before the fight even gets started.

Within a few weeks, she has mapped out the entire school and Mudou’s ninjas attack as she offers herself to Sheng. He refuses her, but allows her to play the flute for him. As she entertains him, everyone in the school except for Hao, who escapes and visits his old ninja master. Joined by four other fighters, he challenges the Five-Elements Ninjas and Mudou, who has killed Hong and taken the title of master.

This movie is quite frankly amazing. It blew my mind throughout and never lets up, like a children’s show that has wall-to-wall gore. As the first movie in our week of Hong Kong films, it has set a high bar which other films will really have to battle to scale and exceed.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*The Legend of the 7 Golden VampiresFive Deadly Venoms and Crippled Avengers to name a few.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Angel Above – The Devil Below (1974)

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

The adult films of the 70s and the occult cross over pretty often, inspiring movies like The Devil In Miss JonesHigh Priestess of Sexual WitchcraftSex Ritual of the Occult and so many more. In director Dominic Bolla and writer Jon Cutaia’s Angel Above — The Devil Blow, a teen named Randy Maldemar (Linda York, using the name Brittany Laine; she’s also in A Scream In the Streets and Panorama Blue) conjures up Satan (Lamar Gilbert) with the Necronomicon — the Simon one? — and black candles on her bedroom table. She proclaims that the devil isn’t attractive enough, so she spurns him, which leads to him infiltrating her holiest of holes and speaking through it, as this becomes The Exorcist but, you know, with more penetration even though the inspiration also has crucifix diddling.

Her mother Turgid (Starlyn Simone, Video Vixens!) attempts to help her by talking to her about sex, but when your daughter has a pre-Chatterbox possessed vagina that can’t be satisfied, the problem needs more than just the talk. Even modern medicine and psychiatry — Dr. I.M. Moribund (Chesley Noone) and Dr. Max Wanker (Nimrod Sappho), come on down — aren’t enough. She nearly eats Wanker’s tongue and launches another man down the stairs. Meanwhile, her mother is too busy sleeping with handyman George (Robert Bedford) and politician Lucius Watergag (John Keith), using the same trick of bending over and looking for the booze they’ve asked for. I was half expecting her to pull out a bottle of J&B at this point.

The only people who might be able to help her are Bible salesmen Peter (John Barnum) and Dennis Harp (Robbie Roberson), who arrive just in time. Sure, Registered Nurse Prudence Enfusoria is being assaulted by the handyman downstairs, but somehow Dennis falls in love with the devil-owned Randy and his strong, confident and romantic lovemaking is enough to push the Devil out of her and…into the nether regions of se Prudence. And she’s played by Rene Bond, so of course if I were a demon who could infiltrate the anatomy of women, that’s exactly where I would enter the devil, so to speak.

Beyond just Chatterbox, this predates another talking ladyparts movie, Le sexe qui parle. I have no idea who wanted this in the 70s, but someone did.

Bolla only made this movie, while Cutaia would go on to make the adult film Judgement Day in which Saint Peter stands before Heaven and reviews the final sex acts of numerous dead people. It has an actress named Morning Star in it, which is another name for Lucifer, in case you want to get hellish.

It’s kind of incredible that this movie exists, another version of the possession movies that I love so much, except, you know, with adult moments. I laughed out loud quite a few times during this and it actually has some cool effects, using slow motion and its small budget to be way more effective than it should be.

The amazing Barefoot and Independent YouTube page has posted a PG cut of this, which is about a quarter of the film’s length. But hey — you could watch it at work. Maybe.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: A Name for Evil (1973)

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

I know Bernard Girard more for the movies he didn’t finish — he was replaced with Lee H. Katzin on What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? by producer Robert Aldrich and started the movie We’re All Crazy Now with The Runaways that was completed by director Alan Sacks and released as Du-beat-e-o — but he did actually direct some efforts, including The Rebel SetThis Woman Is DangerousThe Happiness CageThe Mad Room, Gone With the West and Dead Heat On a Merry-Go-Round. He also directed and wrote this movie and man, why are people not clamoring for this to get a blu ray release?

John Blake (Robert Culp) is dissatisfied with the rat race and dealing with the pressures of his family’s architecture business. So he takes his wife Joanna (Samantha Eggar) and moves into his great grandfather’s home The Grove in the countryside and you know what happens when city folk go back to their roots in 1970s movies.

Distributed by Cinerama Releasing Corporation — who also released AsylumWalking TallThe Vault of Horror, The MackAnd Now the Screaming Starts!Terror In the Wax MuseumThe Harrad ExperimentYour Three Minutes Are UpDr. Death: Seeker of SoulsThe PyxArnold and Marco all in 1973 — and produced by Penthouse — which will make sense in a little — this starts strange when everyone back home refers to John’s grandfather as The Colonel and many of them want nothing to do with him. Even the man he hires to renovate the house — Clarence “Big” Miller (blues singer Big Miller, who was the title character in Big Meat Eater) — seems to think that The Colonel doesn’t want John there. His wife doesn’t want to be there either, but there are times that it seems that she loves him and others like she might as well be a ghost.

This was shelved by MGM because it made so little sense. It was based on a novel by Andrew Lytle and that book was a definite ghost story. This can’t make up its mind. That voice saying “Go away” also feels the same way. Just when everything feels dreary, John walks out of his house and finds a white horse that brings him to town and soon has him participating in an orgy set to a live performance of Billy Joe Royal singing “Mountain Woman.” Soon, he’s making love to Luanna Baxter (Sheila Sullivan, AKA Sheila Culp, the wife of our lead actor at the time) and running through the woods completely naked. Yes, Robert Culp, star of I Spy, dashing full dong through a meadow and making love in a waterfall.

Yet when he gets home, his wife claims that he had rough sex with her that night and couldn’t stop touching himself. Was it him? Or was it The Colonel? Or could it be all of those things, as this movie seems to have multiple timeline all within one movie. It all ends with Eggar slashing Culp with a straight razor and him throwing her out the same window that he tossed their TV out of at the beginning of the movie.

I’m not saying this is a good movie, but I am saying that it’s a film with an orgy scene that feels like it could be in The Wicker Man except that everyone eats spaghetti — to be fair, I was once a guest at an OTO lodge party where everyone was eating bowl after bowl of guacamole with no chips, just spoons — before doing a line dance and then having sex and hey, there’s Rene Bond to remind you that Penthouse bought this three years after MGM threw it away. It’s like Antichrist without the cock violence, Dark August but horny, the 70s hippy aesthetic fighting with a movie that wants to be to be something more than it is but possibly made by a director who has no idea how to bring the movie inside his head onto the celluloid. He claimed that it was about “a modern man’s attempt to get away from his contemporary hang-ups by returning to his ancestral home.”

As for Culp, he told The Bucks County Courier, “This is the kind of picture you wait for your whole life.” He also said, “The story is that I decided to do it because I couldn’t understand it. “It’s true, I didn’t understand it. But that was because there were 3 pages of the climax missing!”

The amazing caligula.org site has a great article on this film, which explains how Caligula wasn’t really Penthouse’s first movie.

“There is no telling what condition the movie was in when Penthouse Pictures acquired it. It may or may not have still been the authentic version. It may well have been tampered with by Stone et al or some emissary thereof. But it is unquestionable that Penthouse commissioned a firm to film something new, and it was actually quite beautiful to look at: a psychedelic multiple exposure of a topless dancer, as well as a dancer in a skeleton outfit, all accompanied by an acoustic guitar. That footage was intercut into a domestic scene, as though it were a flashback of some sort. But by the time the movie finishes, we realize that it was not a flashback after all; it was merely meddling by Penthouse. Penthouse further enhanced the film with a country singer surrounded by three nude women.”

Billy Joe Royal’s performance was force-fitted into the scene of the hoedown, but the footage simply did not match, and the intercutting is rather jarring. I wish I could see how the scene originally played. Penthouse then hired an editor to simplify the movie, cutting it down to 74 minutes. In this short version, characters and relationships were never developed or explored, leaving so many loose ends that it’s no wonder people had trouble following the narrative. I would guess that the original was far more ambiguous and a bit challenging, and that the haunted-house story was a suggestion, planted into disordered minds, that flowered under duress. It was surely not only the Robert Culp character who was affected, but the Eggar character too, as well as many others.”

Penthouse replaced the credits with some crazy paintings, then this played theaters and drive-ins on double features with Asylum and The Vault of Horror. Penthouse Pictures Inc. went out of business after this and was replaced by Penthouse Productions, Ltd., which put out Good to See You Again, Alice Cooper and Watched, which were four-walled. They also invested in ChinatownDay of the Locust and The Longest Yard.

You can watch this on YouTube.

SHAWGUST: Corpse Mania (1981)

Not all slashers are domestic, as we again test the “Is it giallo or is it slasher?” game with the Shaw Brothers-produced 1981 film Corpse Mania. It’s directed by Chih-Hung Kuei, who would go on to create the strange Curse of Evil and the “I don’t have a word good enough to properly convent the level of strange” film The Boxer’s Omen.

Inspector Chang is beginning to figure out that all of the dead bodies in his area all were visitors to the brothel of one Madam Lan and all fingers point to Mr. Li, a man who has already been jailed for defiling corpses, which really doesn’t seem like the kind of crime you get out of jail for due to good behavior.

Sure, you might know who the killer is from the moment the movie starts, but give this points for his bandaged get-up, inventive stalking scenes and not shying away from the gore, including a scene where the killer gets a corpse ready for, well, love and then admires it the more it draws maggots.

From real maggots crawling all over its actresses and astounding blasts of blood to a dummy thrown off a roof that’s so fake that Lucio Fulci would stand up and laugh out loud, this movie has it all. It’s fog and mood suggest a Hong Kong Blood and Black Lace if  Bava decided to take a break from all the sexualized violence to deliver a kung fu sequence.

SHAWGUST: The Convict Killer (1980)

Also known as Iron Chain Assassin and Iron Chain Fighter, this Chor Yuen-directed revenge movie about Teng Piao (Ti Lung), who has been released from jail after 15 years for a crime he didn’t commit. He wants revenge on the person who sent him behind bars, Black Leopard and his seven killers, and teams with Shang Lin (Li Ching), a widow who lost her husband to the same killer, to find him.

A modern Shaw Brothers film — set in the early 20th century, but there are even guns — this has a true bad ass hero in Teng Piao, a man in a black hat who has taken the chain that kept him stuck in his cell all these years and now uses it as a weapon. He has no idea who the Black Leopard is, other than he has a tattoo on his chest of a jungle cat. There’s also a knife thrower named Mr. Du (Liu Yung) who may or may not be on the side of our hero and Zhou Bai (Jason Piao Pai), the boss of the town who may be one of the seven killers along with his six brothers.

This feels close to a hardboiled detective story as much as a martial arts movie. I’d love to see more with this style; there are some that feel this has too much exposition and not enough combat, but I enjoyed every moment.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Heads or Tails (1973)

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

Directed and written by James Chiara in his only filmed work, Heads or Tails is Harry (Matt Hewitt, Hollywood Babylon) as a virginal office worker whose life is pretty much the worst. His boss Mr. Bennett (John Barnum, The Cremators) treats him like garbage and even his secretary Marsha (Rene Bond) is rude to him. When client Yolanda Wainwright (Uschi Digard) tells him how dumb he is, he’s at rock bottom.

That night, he meets a magician (Harvey Whippsnake) who gives him a pill that he claims will fix his life. Back home, he takes it and four women — Do-It (Becky Sharpe appearing as Becky Pearlman; she was in Angie Baby), Right-Guard (Starlyn Simone, using her Michelle Simone stage name, she’s also in A Climax of Blue Power as Linda Harris), Delicious (Sandy Carey, Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman) and Show-Me (Kathy Hilton, Poor Cecily) — show up and make sweet love to him before disappearing. He finally gets lucky and ends up making love to all of them at the same time.

That’s the softcore version.

A couple of years later, this was re-released as Honey Buns and has a totally inserted scene in which a businessman (John Seeman, who had 116 adult roles and had to be exhausted) has a meeting of sorts with Joan Devlon (Night Caller) and Monique Cardin (who was in a movie called Baby Rosemary). There are other inserts that make it seem like Bond is having sex — not that she didn’t on film — but it’s not her.

That magician looks like Temu Dr. Demento.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Country Cuzzins (1972)

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

Billie Joe Peabody (Rene Bond) is gorgeous, so perfect and beautiful — look, it’s Rene Bond — that her male relatives chase her all day long, hoping to get to touch her. Breaking up these shenanigans is when Grandma Peabody (Zena Foster, The Corpse Grinders) decides she wants the entire family to get together before she dies. That family would be Leroy (John Tull, the assistant director of C.B. Hustlers, Drive-In Massacre and The Witch Who Came from the Sea), Jenny (Pamella Princess), Jeff (Mark Buckalew in his only acting job; he was a gaffer, best boy or assistant director on productions like ButterflyJust Before DawnMasters of the Universe and Sweatin’ to the Oldies 2), Jeeter (Steven Hodge) and Fester (Jack Richesin), as well as Prudence (Ellen Stephens), who left the country for the big city.

Prudence ends up having a great time — the moonshines helps — and drunkenly asks the family to come visit her for a party, if they’re ever in town. Well, they soon are. And she regrets it, as she thinks they’ll embarrass her. So all her friends dress like hillbillies and the Peabody family shows up looking normal. Fester tells her not to worry, as they’re still family. He also brought the goat that she won in a chicken chase at the party.

At the party, Billie Joe meets agent Walter Wimpy, who is George “Buck” Flower doing a Paul Lynde impression, except that he’s trying to get her naked and doesn’t care about her singing career. No matter what Flower did in his career — and he did so much — he got to do a simulated sex scene with Rene Bond which has to be like walking on the surface of the moon or being able to read minds for real. His character has a bad heart and dies and you know, I’m exhausted by life and nowhere close to as old as Flower looks here — he’s 17 years younger when this was made than I am now — but if you’re going to go into sweet oblivion, how else should you leave this reality?

Director and writer Bethel Buckalew lived to be 94 and made nine movies — Tobacco RoddyMidnite PlowboySouthern ComfortsBelow the BeltThe Dirty Mind of Young SallySassy Sue, Mag Wheels (a vansploitation movie I haven’t seen!) and My Boys Are Good Boys — with most of them being filmed for producer Harry Novak.

There are so many country softcore movies and you know, I’ve seen a lot of them. I could blame Cinemax After Dark but I know that only I am to blame.

SHAWGUST: Bloody Parrot (1981)

The bloody parrot of this film’s title is a legend of a bird that was born on the devil king’s birthday when all of the lesser demons gave him their blood so that it may grant three wishes to whomever discovers it. Those wishes, however, have a tendency to go poorly. One example is Guo Fan, a government worker who has lost a treasure and begs the bird for their return. The prize does come back at the cost of his son’s life. He then monkey’s paw wishes for the son back, so his wife kills him and commits suicide.

The treasure disappears again and that’s when fighters from around the world learn that if they find the parrot, they will become rich. Swordsman Yeh Ting Feng (Pai Piao) an constable Tieh Han (Tony Liu) start hunting for the truth, which ends up with Tieh killed and Yeh carrying his coffin like some Shaw Brothers Django. There’s also a Parrot Brothel where Pei-yu (Jenny Liang) works. There’s a whole hall of mirrors for her to show off her curves in.

If you liked the gross-out side of Shaw Brothers — HexBlack MagicHuman Lanterns — then this is what you’re looking for. It also has plenty of sleaze and Wuxia moments to make one strange cocktail. Director Hua Shan has so many cards to deal you, from nudity to martial arts battles, sword fights, maggot eating, autopsies and demonic possession to just name a few. Who are we to deny the man who made Infra-Man?

I mean, this is a movie where a woman sews a man’s face onto a Frisbee and uses it as a weapon.

If that doesn’t make you watch this, is there any hope?

As a warning, this movie makes no sense whatsoever and I’m not advising you to engage in mind altering substances — you may not even need them — but if you can’t get high and watch a movie that combines Bava colors with kung fu and obscene levels of puking, then what are you living for?

SHAWGUST: The Chinese Boxer (1978)

Written, starring and directed by Jimmy Wang Yu, The Chinese Boxer moved martial arts films away from fantasy and weapons into a world where one man and his fists could do plenty of damage. He was a martial arts superstar in Hong Kong before even Bruce Lee and this movie proves exactly why. I’ve honestly never seen a bloodier hand to hand combat film, as nearly every punch sends mouthfuls of blood everywhere when they’re not blasting people through walls.

Diao (Hsiung Chao, Five Fingers of Death) was thrown out of the kung fu temple and spent years learning judo, defeating each of the students of the school upon his return until the master defeats him. Not being a man of honor, he sends for Japanese karate mercenaries, who are also defeated, until he sends samurai who not only destroy the school and murder all of the kung fu students and the master but also have the gall to take over the town and make it a city of sin.

Lei Ming (Jimmy Wang Yu) has survived, however, and he’s willing to do anything and everything to take his town back. You may think you’ve seen this before — and you have — but that’s because every other movie like this came after. A training sequence, much less one where the hero punches his hands into burning sand to toughen them? Yep. A room full of men with weapons and one unarmed hero? Here. A man fighting for the honor of his dead master? This is where it all began at least in film form.

There’s also the bad guy KItashima (Lo Lieh, nearly a Shaw Brothers supervillain) who can chop tables in two and provides a more than perfect secondary villain for our hero to fight. And it all looks astounding, because it shares a cinematographer — Hua Shan — with one of the most kinetic and strange movies that Shaw Brothers put out, The Super Infra-Man. Just one look at the fight in the snow and you’ll know that this is a movie to be studied just as much as it was stolen from.

This was released in the U.S. as The Hammer of God.

ARROW 4K UHD AND BLU RAY RELEASE: When Titans Ruled The Earth: Clash Of The Titans & Wrath Of The Titans (2010, 2012)

Clash of the Titans was one of my favorite movies as a kid. When the remake came out, I avoided it for the longest time. With Arrow’s new box set release, I finally watched it. Was it worth the wait?

Clash of the Titans (2010): When they started making this movie, producer Adam Schroeder and writers John Glenn and Travis Wright wanted to drop the “cheesy chessboard manipulation of characters” by the gods. Or, you know, the whole story of Perseus that this is based on and the story that Beverly Cross wrote for the 1981 movie this is also based on. As they dropped out and other creatives joined, the phrase “darker and more realistic” kept getting used and that’s where this ended up.

Director Louis Leterrier (The TransporterThe Incredible Hulk) was a big fan of the original film — his ending of the Hulk movie is inspired by it — and also took in elements of the Saint Seiya anime for this remake. There’s even a fun moment where Bubo the owl shows up to remind you of the first movie.

When the gods battle the Titans who made them, Hades (Ralph Fiennes) turned the tide with his monster the Kraken. As the gods split up the world, Zeus (Liam Neeson) screwed over Hades and gave him the underworld while he took the Earth and Poseidon the sky. Zeus also made humans, who disappoint him as they no longer worship him. Maybe it’s because he keeps messing with them, like how King Acrisius (Jason Flemyng) tried to take over Mount Olympus, which led to Zeus cucking him and knocking up the royal wife Danae (Tine Stapelfeldt) before throwing a lighting bolt and turning the king into the demonic Calibos — which isn’t in any myth — and then — run-on sentence much? — the king throws his wife and baby into the ocean. An immortal cursed by the gods named Io (Gemma Arterton) saves the child and has fisherman Spyro (Pete Postlethwaite) and his wife Marmara (Elizabeth McGovern) raise Perseus (Sam Worthington) as their own.

As he grows to be a man, King Kepheus (Vincent Regan) and Queen Cassiopeia (Polly Walker) rule the country he lives in, Argos. They go to war with the gods, which cause the Furies to sink his parent’s boat. Only he survives and is brought to the royal throne room. There, he meets Princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos), who thinks her parents are morons for doing this. Well, they are, because Hades soon shows up, gets insulted when Cassiopeia says her daughter is as beautiful as the gods. He ages the queen until she dies and says that he will unleash the Kraken in ten days unless Andromeda is killed. Hades also says, “Oh by the way, Perseus is Zeus’ son.”

Perseus agrees to save Andromeda by defeating the Kraken. His plan is meet the Stygian witches (Ross Mullan, Robin Berry and Graham Hughes) who will tell him how to win and the answer is to get the head of the Medusa (Natalia Vodianova). Working with the royal guard, led by Draco (Mads Mikkelsen), Perseus battles giant scorpions and his father Calibos. Zeus also gives him a god sword that he refuses to lose until Calibos kills Io, so as he strikes his father, it transforms him back to reason. He asks his son not to become a god while Io, as she dies, begs him to save Argos.

While asked, Ray Harryhausen had no involvement in this as he felt his films had didn’t need to be remade. And yes, the ending is overly CGI, but it’s thrilling watching Perseus ride Pegasus and battle the gigantic Kraken (actually Leterrier in a green screen suit) to save Andromeda. All of my cynicism went away at the close of this, as I was happy with the action and how fast this moved.

But what of the sequel?

Wrath of the Gods (2012): Ten years after the first movie, humans have stopped praying to the gods, so the Titans have escaped and Zeus (Liam Neeson) is in trouble. Can he call on his son Perseus (Sam Worthington) to save the gods that he despises?

Despite being saved at the end of the first movie, Io has died — never mind that she’s Perseus’ great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in actual mythology — and Perseus is raising their son Heleus (John Bell). Also, he should be the son of Perseus and Andromeda, but we’re already not following any of the source material. Perseus is now a fisherman when Zeus visits him, telling him that the prison that holds Kronos is failing. Our hero turns him down and soon, Zeus is attached by his son Ares (Edgar Ramirez) and Hades (Ralph Fiennes), who also murder Poseidon (Danny Huston). They make a deal with Kronos for power if they free him.

After fighting a Chimera that has attacked his hometown, Perseus looks for his father but only finds the dying Poseidon, who tells him that his son Agenor (Toby Kebbell), who can lead him to Hephaestus (Bill Nighy) and the prison of the Titans. Along with Andromeda (Rosamund Pike), Perseus goes on a quest that sees him battling a minotaur, cyclops and demons. How can he defeat Ares and the creator of the gods? By combining Zeus’s thunderbolt, Hades’ pitchfork and Poseidon’s trident into the Spear of Trium.

There are some fun moments, but this sequel, directed by Jonathan Liebesman (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning), feels like effects and monsters thrown at you instead of the story of the first, which was a step down from its classic inspiration. This did much worse at the box office, which led to the third movie, Revenge of the Gods, being cancelled.

The Arrow Video When Titans Ruled the Earth set is available in both 4K UHD and blu ray. Extras include an illustrated collector’s book containing new writing by author and critic Guy Adams and film scholar Josh Nelson, a double-sided fold-out posters for each film featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Joe Wilson, six postcard sized artcards and reversible sleeves featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Joe Wilson.

Clash of the Titans has an interview with producer Basil Iwanyk, an alternate ending, deleted scenes, a trailer, an image gallery and several features. Wrath of the Titans also has an interview with Iwanyk, deleted scenes, a trailer, an image gallery and several features.

You can get the 4K UHD and blu ray sets from MVD.