Brian Trenchard-Smith is the patron saint of go-big-or-go-home. For his feature debut (along with action scenes directed by star Jimmy Wang Yu), he didn’t just walk through the door. No, he kicked it down, set it on fire and then hang-glided over the ashes. The Man from Hong Kong (aka The Dragon Flies) is the ultimate East-meets-West collision, a 50/50 co-production between Australia and Hong Kong that plays like a James Bond flick on a steady diet of adrenaline.

Originally, this was supposed to be a Bruce Lee vehicle. Can you imagine? But after the Dragon passed, the production pivoted to Jimmy Wang Yu (The One-Armed Swordsman himself). He plays Inspector Fang Sing Leng, a Hong Kong cop who lands in Sydney to extradite a drug courier and ends up tearing the city apart to get to the man at the top. That man? None other than George Lazenby.

Yes, the guy who played Bond once gets to play the heavy here, Jack Wilton, and he is clearly having the time of his life being a total bastard. He’s joined by an Ozploitation who’s who, including Hugh Keays-Byrne and Roger Ward (both of whom you know from Mad Max). Even a young Sammo Hung, billed as Hung Kam Po, shows up to get into a scrap on top of Uluru!

If you’ve seen Stunt Rock, you’ve seen the action from this movie, as legendary stuntman Grant Page hang-gliding over Sydney Harbor like it’s no big deal. This is a stunt show with massive automotive carnage designed by Peter Armstrong that rivals anything coming out of Hollywood at the time. In the final showdown, Lazenby actually gets set on fire. Not movie fire. Real fire. He even got singed during the take, because that’s just how they rolled down under

And let’s not forget the theme song. “Sky High” by Jigsaw is a soaring, majestic piece of 70s pop that has absolutely no business being the intro to a movie where people are getting punched in the throat, yet somehow, it’s perfection. It was also the theme song for Mil Mascaras and his brother Dos Caras in Japan.

If you want to see what happens when you mix martial arts mastery with a complete lack of regard for human safety, make The Man from Hong Kong your destination. Also: No permits were used to film this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Call it Il paese del sesso selvaggio (The Country of Savage Sex). Or refer to it as Deep River Savages and Sacrifice! Or just say it by the name most of the U.S. saw it as, Man from Deep River. Whatever title you see it as, you can claim to have seen the first movie in Italy’s cannibal cycle, which, like all filones, takes another, the mondo, and goes even further.

British photographer John Bradley (Ivan Rassimov, who was Serbian) has been photographing the Thai wildlife. A boxing match is more interesting to him than the woman he’s with and soon, he’s so drunk that he’s stabbing a man in a bar fight. Then, it’s time to go into the heart of darkness and go down the river. He wakes up, and his guide is dead, and he’s been taken, as the natives believe him to be a merman thanks to his wetsuit. 

After some torture, the chief Luhanà agrees to release John to Maraya (Burmese/British cannibal movie queen Me Me Lai), who has shown an interest in him. Her governess, Taima, speaks English and decides to help him escape. That night, a helicopter comes close, and John tries and fails to get away, killing Maraya’s fiancé, Karen. This, for some reason, makes him seem like he could be a member of the tribe, so they start to torture him all over again to see if he belongs. In case you’re wondering, yes, this would like you to think it’s A Man Called Horse.

By the end of the film, he’s had a child with Maraya, but she doesn’t make it. When the helicopter comes to rescue him again, he hides and goes deeper into the jungle, having left the world of civilization behind.

This film was a huge success in New York City’s grindhouses, but it ran into problems when it tried to cross the pond. Even though the BBFC took one look at the celluloid in ’75 and slammed the door on a theatrical release, the flick pulled a fast one, sneaking into UK homes under the title Deep River Savages. But you can’t keep a good exploitation film down for long without the moral crusaders noticing. By 1983, when the DPP was busy clutching their pearls and drafting the infamous Video Nasties list, Lenzi’s opus was right there in the crosshairs. Once the Video Recordings Act of 1984 became the law of the land, the UK government dropped the hammer. Deep River Savages wasn’t just trimmed. It was banned in its entirety until 2003, when three minutes were cut. In 2016, another release saw three more minutes chopped with the same disdain that animals are sliced to bits in this. In the U.S., this got an R rating.

Director Umberto Lenzi really hit almost every filone Italy had to offer, from peplum (Samson and the Slave Queen) and Eurospy (008: Operation Exterminate, SuperSeven Calling Cairo) to comic book movies (Kriminal, Tarzan In the Golden Grotto), giallo (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, Eyeball, Spasmo), pliziotteschi (The Tough Ones), Conan rip-offs (Ironmaster), horror (Ghosthouse, Nightmare Beach) and even VHS era cash-ins (Primal Rage, Hitcher In the Dark). He also made two more cannibal films, Eaten Alive! (which takes scenes from this film) and Cannibal Ferox, which was released in the U.S. as Make Them Die Slowly. 

In case you’re wondering about that scene where Me Me Lai gets raw-dogged on the ashes of her dead fiancé, it’s based on truth and isn’t just the kind of transgressive imagery we expect in Italian movies. It’s based on a traditional African ritual known as widow cleansing. In the internal logic of the culture, a woman becomes dirty when her husband dies. She’s essentially a walking biohazard of bad luck and grief, supposedly possessed by the lingering spirit of the deceased. To stop this curse from spreading like a supernatural virus through the rest of the village, the widow has to be scrubbed clean and the only way to wash away the shadows of the dead is through a three-day marathon of unprotected sex with a purifier, who is usually the dead guy’s brother.

A warning: For many fans of cult and exploitation cinema, scenes of real animal death are often the ones that make the movie difficult to revisit. Here is the breakdown of the animals killed on screen in this film:

• A Crocodile: This is one of the film’s more protracted and famous scenes. The animal is dragged from the water, bound and then cut open and gutted while still alive.
• A Python/Large Snake: The snake is decapitated during a sequence intended to show the dangers of the jungle.
• A Monkey: In a scene that reflects the survival tropes of the genre, a monkey is killed and its brain is eaten by the characters.
• A Mongoose vs. Cobra: True to the mondo style that influenced Lenzi, there is a sequence featuring a fight between a mongoose and a cobra that ends with the snake’s death.

While Man from Deep River is often praised for its lush cinematography and for being more of a fish-out-of-water adventure than the later, more mean-spirited cannibal films like Cannibal Holocaust (intended as a Lenzi-directed sequel, but he turned it down twice), the inclusion of these non-simulated animal deaths remains its most controversial element.

The Florida-based director William Grefe has brought many swamp-tinged bits of exploitation goodness — or badness — to the screen, including Alligator Alley, The Wild Rebels, The Hooked Generation and many more. As one of the first films to capitalize on the shark craze in the wake of Spielberg’s success, this film’s sympathetic view of sharks as victims is a pretty unique take on the genre.

Marine salvager Sonny Stein (Richard Jaeckel, who pretty much had a one-man war against nature with him battling bats in Chosen Survivors, bears in Grizzly and, well, any and all beasts with a chip on their shoulder in Day of the Animals) is given a medallion that allows him to communicate with sharks. He becomes increasingly disconnected from humanity — easy to do, since everyone in this movie is scum — and uses his sharks to take out those who oppose his beliefs.

One of those people is an incredibly chubby club owner who is using high-frequency sound to train his sharks and kind of pimping out his wife, Karen (Jennifer Bishop, Bigfoot), to get Sonny on their side. Have you ever seen a movie where strippers have been trained to swim with sharks? Who would want to see that? This movie provides the what, if not the why.

Another is a shady shark researcher, Whitney, who murders a shark and her pups for “science.” You will stare, unbelievingly, at the screen as Jaeckel overemotes, clutching a dead baby shark in his mitts. Oh yeah — Harold “Oddjob” Sakata is also in this, playing a character named Pete who ends up on the wrong side of a shark’s teeth while trying to poach Sonny’s friends.

The stunt footage is pretty amazing and even gets a mention before the movie even begins, boasting that no mechanical sharks were used. Other than the weird premise and a few good scenes, you can nap through most of this and not feel bad, though you might wake up when Sonny tells his shark buddy Sammy that he can’t help it if he was born a man.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Much like The Wizard of Oz, The Magic Christmas Tree believes reality is in black and white, while dreams are in color. Both films have a witch. Both movies have wishes. But only one of them had a budget. And only one of them is a classic beloved by families for generations.

Sorry, Richard C. Parish. Your one-and-done directorial effort isn’t getting a 4K re-release this year. Or any year, really.

In the black-and-white real world, three boys are walking home from school on Halloween. One of them, Mark, helps a witch get her cat Lucifer out of a tree. The moment someone told me I had to climb a tree to save a demonic cat, I would honestly be out of there, but Mark instead falls out of the tree and gets knocked out.

When he wakes up, the witch gives him a magic ring, as well as some magic seeds that need to be planted. On Thanksgiving, while everyone else is sleeping off the turkey, Mark is combining the turkey wishbone with the magic seeds, the magic words and the magic ring to grow the magic Christmas tree. His turtle Ichabod just watches in terror as Mark engages in a rite of eroto-comatose lucidity.

This tree that grows is unkillable, even when Mark’s dad cuts the grass in the middle of November. I guess we should assume that they live in California. Also — Mark’s dad is played by the director, and his dialogue appears to appear as if by magic. In fact, this entire film appears dubbed even when it isn’t.

While Ichabod the turtle eats the grass, Dad has a wacky grass-cutting session that ends with the mower in flames and him acting drunk. The way he talks to his wife gives you a good idea of how he really treats her. This film cuts deeply into the dark underbelly of post-war America. The dream is dead. The power mower is in flames. The Christmas tree is alive.

That’s right. On Christmas Eve, the Magic Tree comes to life and can talk. It grants Mark three wishes. The Magic Christmas Tree also speaks with all the snark and pomp of Charles Nelson Reilly. Seriously, it’s as if the tree has seen it all and is bored with this charade. He’s merely indulging Mark.

Now, Mark’s a smart kid, so he wishes for an hour of absolute power, which he promptly is corrupted by absolutely. That said, he’s not that smart, because why wish for only an hour? Just wish for absolute power. Don’t put any limits on it, Mark. And don’t talk to trees.

What does Mark do with all that power? He makes flowers appear and disappear. Mark has obviously not gone through puberty, because if I had a magic power in 1964, I would have used the entire hour with Barbara Steele. Or Mamie Van Doren. Or Bardeau. Ah, you get the picture, even if Mark doesn’t.

Instead, he makes people run all over the place and throw pies in one another’s faces, but the camera is so far away you may wonder exactly what’s happening. It’s all kind of like Benny Hill, but terrifying instead of madcap. Firemen get pies in their faces while their antique engines careen out of control. Happy holidays, La Verne, California. Hope you survive the experience.

Yes, the same town where the wedding scene in The Graduate was shot (and Wayne’s World 2) is subject to the Magic Christmas Tree, gifting Mark with the power to be a complete jerk.

Mark’s second wish is to have Santa Claus all to himself. He couldn’t think of any other wishes. I mean, you have any power in the world, and you can’t think of a wish?

Santa really seems like he’s senile. He also seems like he can’t stand up from the chair he’s stuck in.

This wish makes every other child in the world very sad, so Mark uses his third wish to send Santa back to the children. That’s because he’s sent to a pocket dimension where his selfishness leads him to meet the very embodiment of Greed. The giant man yells, “You are my little boy!” and offers him a mountain of cake and toys to stay.

Greed is played by Pittsburgh native Robert “Big Buck” Maffei, who uses his 7’1″ frame to his advantage, playing monsters and aliens in a ton of television shows and movies, including a creature (actually a Taurus II anthropoid) in “The Galileo Seven” episode of Star Trek and the giant cyclops on Lost In Space. His last movie appearance was in Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams.

Mark gives Santa back to the children. But of course, it was all a dream. A horrible, horrible dream. Mark may have learned something. Maybe we all did.

The bastards at Goodtimes released this on VHS in 1992, pairing it with Rene Cardona’s Santa Claus. I can’t imagine a more horrifying double feature ever — the battle of Santa and Patch directed by the man who brought you Night of the Bloody Apes, paired with this film that feels like it was shot on one of those Price Is Right Showcase Showdown sets with all of the lights turned out.

You can watch this for free on The Internet Archive and Tubi. I would advise you to avoid it and ensure that your Christmas Day isn’t filled with relentless horror.

Before he made The Beast Within and Howling II, Philipe Mora made this movie about Dan Morgan, who roamed the New South Wales bush under a revolving door of aliases, including Billy the Native, Warrigal and Down-the-River Jack.

Dan Morgan didn’t just walk through the New South Wales bush; he haunted it. Operating under a revolving door of aliases like Billy the Native, Warrigal and Down-the-River Jack, he was less a man with a grudge and more a one-man insurgency against the Crown.

By August 1863, the authorities had reached their breaking point after Morgan plugged police magistrate Henry Baylis during a high-stakes shootout. As his rap sheet grew longer and his methods bloodier, the government placed a bounty on his head that eventually ballooned to £1,000, which was a fortune at the time. By March 1865, he was officially declared an outlaw under the Felons Apprehension Act, making him “fair game” for any citizen with a rifle.

His reign of terror ended abruptly a month later at Peechelba Station in Victoria. While Morgan was busy holding up the homestead, a stockman crept through the shadows and shot him in the back.

History has painted Morgan as a Mad Dog, a bloodthirsty, erratic lunatic who probably didn’t need much of a reason to pull the trigger. But here’s the thing that makes for a great movie: despite being a total headcase, he was a wizard in the woods. His bushcraft skills and horsemanship were legendary and he had a network of sympathizers who kept him hidden from the law for two years. He was a folk hero to some and a monster to others, which is exactly why he fits right in here.

Based on the book Morgan: The Bold Bushranger by Margaret Frances Carnegie, the film drips with authenticity. Carnegie actually assisted Mora in scouting the real-life locations where Morgan’s crimes took place, lending the movie a haunting, topographical realism.

The narrative kicks off with Dan Morgan (played with unhinged intensity by Dennis Hopper) witnessing a horrific massacre of Chinese immigrants on the goldfields. This trauma, followed by a brutal prison sentence where he is victimized and broken, serves as the catalyst for his transformation. He doesn’t just decide to rob people; he decides to declare war on a world that offered him no mercy.

If the onscreen performance feels volatile, it’s because the offscreen reality was just as chaotic. Dennis Hopper was at the height of his lost years, fueled by substances and a total commitment to the role.

At teh end of the shoot, Mora claims that Hopper lived up to being, well, Dennis Hopper: “Rode off in costume, poured a bottle of O.P. rum into the real Morgan’s grave in front of my mother Mirka Mora, drank one himself, got arrested and deported the next day, with a blood-alcohol reading that said he should have been clinically dead, according to the judge studying his alcohol tests.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

What was in the water in the late 70s and early 80s that we got so many movies about attractive women upsetting the balance of power in the food truck, gas station and restaurant industries? See: Swap Meet, Starhops, The Car Hops, Gas Pump Girls….

Directed by Ernest Pintoff (the director of Jaguar Lives!) and written by Marshall Harvey, Terrie Frankel and Leon Phillips, this has three ladies — Marcy (Pamela Jean Bryant, Don’t Answer the Phone), Shannon (Rosanne Katon, The Swinging Cheerleaders) and Diedre (Candy Moore) — working at Andy’s (George Memmoli) gas station. He’s a peeper, he’s a creep, and soon they inherit a food truck from Dick Van Patten, uncredited as Bernie Simmons, but he’s probably there to see his kids, Nels and James, who were in the cast. They rename it Love Bites, and hijinks ensue.

This has horrible stand-up and the Missing Persons (who are also U.S. Drag on the soundtrack, which has “Mental Hopscotch” and “I Like Boys”) showing up throughout. Rose Marie from Dick Van Dyke? She’s here, too. So is Louisa Moritz, who was Myra in Death Race 2000, Carmela in The Last American Virgin, Chi Chi in Hot Chili and Bubbles in Chained Heat. 

In honor of the film’s opening, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley proclaimed September 11, 1981, to be Lunch Wagon Day, which included a parade of eighty lunch wagons. But it was more than just trucks; it was a full-scale Hollywood event. Starting at Hollywood and La Brea, the parade featured the Hollywood High School cheerleaders, stuntmen, the film’s star  and even Playboy Bunnies riding in a Mercedes 450 SL, handing out t-shirts. 

The gimmicks didn’t stop there. During the premiere, promoters reportedly gave out Smell-O-Vision cards to crowds waiting in line.

Also known as Come and Get It, this fits into a very specific window where independent producers realized that scrappy women vs. the system was a goldmine. It takes the male-dominated, grease-stained environment, adds a trio of charismatic leads and lets them outsmart everyone while upbeat synth-pop plays. I’m not sad for the time I spent watching.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Lindsay Finch (Mary Charlotte Wilcox, The Beast of the Yellow Night and Psychic Killer) loves to go to funerals, where she mourns and then kisses the dead men passionately after everyone else leaves. Throw in a theme song that sounds like it comes from James Bond, while we see flashbacks of her relationship with her dead father, visiting his grave and her pigtails, and I’m all in.

She has swinging hippie parties at her pad, and her friend Wade (Christopher Stone, the late husband of Dee Wallace, who appeared with her in Cujo and The Howling) tries to get with her. Just when it seems she’s giving in to his makeout moves, she screams at him to stop, and he calls her a bitch, because this is 1973. She dreams of her father in yellow-hued flashbacks and hugs a stuffed animal.

Later, she goes through the funeral notices to find the services for young men. We then meet Fred McSweeney, a mortician, as he picks up a male prostitute. That job is just a cover for his true love — a Satanic coven that meets at night, inside the mortuary, where they have orgies with dead bodies. McSweeney takes the young man to his workplace, where he pumps the manwhore full of embalming fluid while he’s still alive, all while Lindsay goes to another funeral where she tries to make out with Bobby. She’s surprised by Alex (Lyle Waggoner, TV’s The Carol Burnett Show and Wonder Woman, as well as the honor of being the first nude centerfold in Playgirl and the appointed mayor of Encino, California), the man’s brother.

Speaking of that embalming scene, it goes on and on and on, with the young man screaming, “I’m blind!” over and over. It’s nearly campy instead of frightening. To say this film has a tone issue is an understatement.

Lindsay sneaks out to Bobby’s funeral, where she starts to associate Alex with her father. He’s a wealthy gallery owner, and they begin a romance—one she refuses to consummate, even after they are eventually married. Every time she sees him, she gets yellow-hued flashbacks with a music box soundtrack of her playing with her father. But more about that in a little, OK?

McSweeney speaks to Lindsay after he catches her at a funeral, telling her about a group she should join. Yet she tries to remain normal, even going on a date with Wade that ends in failure. That’s when she decides to see what McSweeney’s group is all about.

She walks into an orgy with the dead, which freaks her out enough to go back home. Then she and Alex fall in love with no dialogue, just a montage. It’s a strange part of an incredibly strange film, with this happy-go-lucky relationship coming out of nowhere in a film otherwise about sex with dead people.

Lindsay keeps talking to the cult and ends up getting a dead body of her very own. But Wade follows her and is killed by McSweeney. She screams in horror. This scene wasn’t in the original script, nor was the Satanic group in the one that follows, but they were used to pad out the film and add more horror elements so it would play better at drive-ins.

Again — tone being all over the place — we’re treated to a nude cult disrobing Wade’s corpse and having their way with it before Lindsay awakes screaming. But the marriage isn’t working out well, with Alex following her all over town and their maid — complete with the most stereotypical Irish accent ever — telling him that his wife spends her days at her father’s grave, wearing pigtails and dressed like a little girl. You should see the look on Alex’s face when he catches her as she yells, “This is not your place, go away!”

Alex tries to get Lindsay to go on a holiday to visit his mother, but he discovers a registered letter from McSweeney to his wife for a meeting at 10 PM. He follows her to the mortuary, where he discovers his wife surrounded by nude devil worshippers as she makes love to a dead body. She looks frightened and then McSweeney murders Alex, which calms her.

McSweeney drugs her as she lies in her bed, then brings in her husband, now embalmed so he can last forever, finally a man whom she can be attracted to: the combination of her father — who we see in flashback being shot accidentally by her — and the man she fell in love with. The editing here — combined with dissonant instruments and a remix of the title theme — is crazy, like this film has suddenly become Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

We see intercut shots of Lindsay getting under the covers with her dead husband and her getting in the coffin with her father as everything goes sepia tone and the theme song returns.

Love Me Deadly isn’t for everyone. It’s one of those films that I hesitate to recommend to normal folks. But it is the kind of movie I text people about in the middle of the night.

This is…well, it’s something. If you enjoyed The Baby, well, then you’re on the right wavelength for this one.

You can watch this on Tubi.

It’s time to stop fighting it and just embrace the neon-soaked, low-budget glory. I am a Jim Wynorski apologist. It’s a support group with surprisingly high membership. Wynorski is the ultimate cinematic high-wire act: a man who realized early on that if you have enough smoke machines, a few former Playmates and a script that moves at 90 miles per hour, nobody cares if the ancient temple is clearly a rented warehouse in Van Nuys.

The director may have flunked out of film school, but he turned an introduction to Roger Corman into a lifelong career. He didn’t just survive the grind of the B-movie circuit; he thrived in it, starting with a writing credit on one of my favorite Corman sci-fi riffs, Forbidden World, and moving on to Sorceress, Screwballs, Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time and so many more.

He stepped behind the camera and never looked back, giving us the mall-horror essential Chopping Mall, as well as Deathstalker II, Big Bad Mama II, Sorority House Massacre II and III, Return of the Swamp Thing, and 976-EVIL II, another film of his that, yes, I admit I enjoy. I even like his Cinemax After Dark movies, like the Body Chemistry sequels and  Munchie.

So alright. I like his movies. I’ve learned something. I can even respect that he’s gone the way of most horror directors of my youth, alternating between children’s movies like A Doggone Christmas and A Doggone Hollywood with the softcore stuff he’s known for, SyFy-style creature movies and weirdness like Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre.

But if every movie Wynorski made was like The Lost Empire? He’d probably be one of my favorite directors.

We start in Chinatown, where three masked intruders try to steal the glowing eye of a statue. Everyone dies in the battle except for one cop, who barely makes it. And then, the next day, terrorists take over a school before Inspector Angel Wolfe (Melanie Vincz, Hunk) takes out everyone, which almost includes an undercover fed named Rick Stanton (Paul Coufos, 976-EVIL II). Luckily, she stops from killing him just in time and then, as is customary in police and federal working relationships, they aardvark.

When they wake up the next morning, Angel and Rick learn that her brother Rob (Bill Thornbury, Jody from Phantasm!) was the police officer who survived the jewelry store shootout. In the hospital, he hands her a throwing star and says, “The Devil exists, and the Eye knows where.” Instead of being freaked out, Rick launches into exposition mode to tell us all about Lee Chuck (when I realized this was Angus Scrimm, I lost my mind), a man who has become immortal yet must give Satan a new soul every day.

Keep in mind that we are about fifteen minutes into this movie, and we’ve already had a cop-versus-ninja battle, terrorists fighting a lone cop, a sex scene and an occult backstory. I already was head over heels for this one.

When Angel examines the crime scene, one of the glowing eyes makes its way into her purse — all on its own — before Inspector Charles Chang (Art Hern, Simon King of the Witches) goes into even more exposition, explaining the Eyes of Avatar, two jewels that the Dragon-God blessed with the power to rule the world. He tells her that Lee Chuck is real, has one eye and has joined the cult of Dr. Sin Do (also Angus Scrimm!).

With her brother dying from his wounds, Angel decides that she must destroy Sin Do, who has begun recruiting an army of terrorists, including Anthony Kiedis’ dad Blackie Dammit and Angel Pettijohn as Whiplash. So she does what any of us would. No, she doesn’t file the paperwork to get a task force and involve multiple police and federal units. She instead learns that Dr. Do — no relation to the video game character Mr. Do, although both have castles — only accepts groups of female soldiers in threes. And that means that she has to bring in her old friend, the Native American supersoldier Whitestar (Raven De La Croix, perhaps the greatest of all Russ Meyer’s women next to Tura Satana; she was also the associate producer, costume designer and animal handler of this movie while doing all of her own stunts) and Heather (Angela Aames, Fairy Tales, H.O.T.S.), a convict who she promises to parole — how does she have that power? — if she helps like some nascent version of the Suicide Squad.

Whatever. Logic be damned, the ladies are off for Golgotha, Dr. Do’s castle fortress, where more ninja battles and a cast that includes Robert Tessier (who was one of the four members of Stunts Unlimited along with Hal Needham, Glenn R. Wilder and Ronnie Rondell Jr.), Linda Shayne (Miss Salmon from Humanoids from the Deep who would go on to direct Purple People Eater), Kenneth Tobey (who was in so many movies, like the original The Thing, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, The Howling and more), Anny Gaybis (who was in a movie with one of my favorite titles, Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman!) and Tommy Rettig (Jeff Miller from the Lassie series and the star of one of the strangest movies to ever escape Hollywood, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T) await.

I mean, this movie is so close to being in the same continuity as Big Trouble In Little China that Alan Howarth did the music for it. I’ll go ever further and say that thanks to Blackie Dammit being in it, it might even be in the same universe as 9 Deaths of the Ninja. It’s a total blast, a movie that is somehow the answer to the unasked question, “What if Russ Meyer directed Enter the Dragon?”

This is definitely the movie to put on if you’re down. I mean, how can you be sad after watching a movie where Angus Scrimm’s bad guy character has a giant snake and can survive losing his head, much less one that features a prison shower flashback just to prove that one of the heroines was in jail at one point and hints that Raven De La Croix has supernatural powers? We’re going to have to go through a black hole and come out the other side to figure out how many I’d give this movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as Nam Angels, this Jack Starrett-directed film (he also made Run, Angel, Run!, Race with the Devil and Hollywood Man, among others) has a great high concept: a biker gang called The Devil’s Advocates is sent to Cambodia to rescue an American diplomat because they are the only ones who can get the job done.

They’re led by a Vietnam vet — and the brother of the Army Major who has recruited them — Link Thomas, played by the always dependable William Smith. They’re under the orders of Captain Johnson (Bernie Hamilton, who was Captain Harold Dobey on Starsky and Hutch) and include fellow vets Duke (Adam Roarke from Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and Frogs) and Dirty Denny, as well as Limpy (Paul Koslo, Vanishing Point) and Speed (Eugene Cornelius, who was Space in Run, Angel, Run!).

They head to Vietnam,  but come on, we all know it’s the Philippines because the mechanic who works on their bikes, Diem-Nuc, is played by Vic Diaz. It doesn’t matter because by the time you start trying to figure out locations*, our heroes are doing wheelies and blowing things up with rocket launchers and machine guns while they do wheelies.

This movie does have some basis in reality. Sonny Barger, the Maximum Leader of the Hells Angels, sent LBJ a telegram offering the skills of his club in the Vietnam War. That inspired Alan Caillou, who originally wrote that The Losers would live. Starrett and Smith rewrote the script to the ending we know now.

If you watch Pulp Fiction, you can see a scene from this movie being watched by Butch’s girlfriend the day after his fight. When he asks what she is watching, she says, “A motorcycle movie, I’m not sure the name.”

Smith was a real-life Renaissance man: a champion arm wrestler, a record holder in reverse curling with 163 pounds ad a 31-1 amateur boxing record. Take it from Miles Spencer: “Fluent in five languages, he held a PhD and served as a Russian intercept interrogator during the Korean War. With both CIA and NSA clearance, he flew secret ferret missions over Soviet Russia.”

When he commands a biker gang in the jungle, you don’t question it. Just like how he makes every movie better just for being in it.

Most biker movies of the era were about terrorizing small towns. The Losers is unique because it attempts to give these outcasts a sense of warped patriotism. They aren’t fighting for The Man. They’re fighting for their brother and for the thrill of the chaos. The nihilistic ending reinforces the title: in a war like this, even the heroes are just losers in a different uniform.

*They’re reused from Too Late the Hero.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as Ninja Turf, this was directed by Woo-sang Park, who, as we all know, directed Miami Connection. It’s about new kid at school Tony (Phillip Rhee, who created and starred in the Best of the Best series of movies) and how he instantly vibes with a gang leader named Young (Jun Chong, whose company Action Brothers Productions made this movie happen; he’s a celebrity martial arts trainer who taught Sam J. Jones, Lorenzo Lamas and Phillip Rhee). Their friendship is enough to get him threatened by another gangster, Chan (James Lew). In the middle of Young saving Tony, they get offered a job as security guards. Yes, that can happen.

In between their security gigs, they rumble with the Blades and Spike’s Gang, which has Biff Tannen as a member. It is genuinely jarring to see Thomas F. Wilson (credited as Tom Wilson) playing a member of Spike’s Gang. Released the same year as Back to the Future, this film shows a version of Wilson that is arguably meaner than Biff. In Ninja Turf, he isn’t a cartoonish bully getting hit with manure; he’s part of a legitimate urban threat. Seeing him in a world where people actually get stabbed creates a strange cinematic cognitive dissonance.

But when they’re not fighting, Tony hooks up with Chan’s sister Lily. This enrages his enemy and his friend, too, as all Young can think about is feeling alone. And oh yeah, his mom, who lives to drink and sleep with men.

Young has some issues. He also screws up when those issues get to him, as he and Tony do security for a mob boss, and he steals a briefcase filled with money from a drug deal. That boss sends a swordsman named Yoshida (Ken Nagayama) and a fighter called Kruger (Bill “Superfoot” Wallace). They meet up with Chan, who eagerly tells them where to find his enemies, and they even torture a whole bunch of Tony and Young’s school buddies. They catch up with Young, who kills Yoshida and breaks Kruger’s knee, all while Tony is studying.

On the way to the hospital with his injured friends, Young is stopped by Chan and his entire gang. His mother comes out into the street and tells him that she’s sorry for everything she’s ever done, and, wow, Chan beats her into oblivion while her son watches. Then, the gang brutalizes him, and Tony gets there too late. Grabbing his friend’s wooden sword, he chases away the gang and probably kills Chan. 

The death of Young is one of the meanest pivots in 80s action. Usually, the best friend dies to give the hero a reason to win a tournament. Here, Young dies because of a series of desperate, human mistakes—stealing money to escape a life that was already suffocating him. When Tony holds him at the end, it’s not just a friendship moment. Instead, this is the immigrant promise croaking out a death rattle. They came for a better life and found James Lew and a briefcase of death instead.

Jaime Mendoza-Nava, who wrote this movie with Ji-woon Hong, was mostly known for composing music for films and TV shows. Some of the 300 works he contributed to include music for The Witchmaker, The Stewardesses, Dream No Evil, Grave of the Vampire, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Mausoleum and Death Wish Club, which is really “The Case of Gretta Connors” from Night Train to Terror.

This isn’t as amazing as Miami Connection, but it’s the dark, opposite-coast version of friendship amid street fights. It’s a lot of fun, even if the ending is nihilistic pain.

You can watch this on Tubi.