A Nikkatsu Roman Porno and Directors Company collaboration between director Toshiharu Ikeda (Mermaid Legend) and writer Takashi Ishii (Evil Dead Trap), Scent of a Spell starts with Tetsuro Esaka (Johnny Okura) walking home from the bar as rain falls. He glances at the bridge just in time, as Akiko Takimura (Mari Amachi) jumps into the water, hoping to escape her life. He saves her and soon discovers the abusive situation that she’s in. But this movie takes cues from film noir, so perhaps our protagonist is in over his head.

Is Akiko just as jealous as her husband? Are men who try to be white knights destined to fail? Why would Tetsuro think she was trying to kill herself when that bridge is just a few feet tall? So many questions and luckily, this gives you the answers.

The Third Window Films Blu-ray release of Scent of a Spell has extras, including an interview with Tokyo Intl. Film Festival programming director Shozo Ichiyama, a feature-length audio commentary by Samm Deighan, a video essay by Matthew Carter, a slipcase with artwork from Gokaiju, and comes in a 2,000-copy Directors Company limited edition with an insert by Jasper Sharp.

You can get this from Terracotta or Diabolik DVD.

What if they made a budget-friendly version of Hardcore that featured Barbara Crampton as Bonnie, a woman searching for her sister who has been lost in the Los Angeles world of cinema? And what if Dr. Pepper Werewolf David Naughton played tough cop Vince McCarthy, the only man who can help her find her sister, Debbie (Kimberly Evenson, Inga from Porky’s Revenge) escape the clutches of maybe Hugh Hefner but named Victor Nardi (Elvis’ stunt double Lance LeGault), because it’s cool to make Italian stereotypical bad guys even in 2025. And what if Jimmie Walker played a porn store employee? And how about if Charles Napier was the angry cop boss?

This is that movie.

It’s the kind of movie where the cop and the girl sneak onto a porn set and almost have to act in it, with one of the bad guys asking to look at Vince’s cock, who unzips away from Bonnie and then the scumbag replies, “Holy Christ! What do you feed that monster?” Where everyone suddenly knows kung fu. And can we get a role for Robert Dryer, the evil Jake from Savage Streets, please?

Who would make something like this?

Howard Avedis, that’s who.

The man who gave us They’re Playing With Fire, Separate Ways, Mortuary, The Teacher, The Specialist, The Stepmother, Dr. Minx, Scorchy, The Fifth Floor and Texas Detour. A drive-in guy made good, who also realized exactly what Hardcore was missing.

A chimpanzee roommate for the cop.

The cop has a monkey that lives with him and that monkey straight up walks in on a nearly fully nude Barbara Crampton, who just laughs it off. Oh, what a cute little guy! When he just came in, eating a banana, I didn’t know what was happening. That’s the kind of movie this is.

A film that ends with a victim who should be far away from the bad guy somehow getting a gun and killing him in front of tons of cops, who had to have been rock hard watching her kill a man with no due process.

This is why I don’t get to have film series at local theaters: if I did, I would totally pick Kidnapped and stand before audiences, telling them the mystery of moviemaking and preparing them for it. But I couldn’t. In no way could I get them ready. Additionally, there would be no audience, because who, other than me, wants to watch this?

You can watch this on YouTube.

Also known as Hellfighters of the East and its VHS-era name Strike 4 Revenge, this Chang Cheh film is odd for the director, his stars David Chiang and Ti Lung, and the Shaw Brothers. It’s shot overseas in Seoul and isn’t a historical epic. It’s as close to modern day as it gets, nearly, being set in 1953.

Sergeant Feng-xia (Ti Lung) and Private Gao Yin-Han (Wang Chung) are sick of military service and go AWOL, meeting up with another soldier who has run, Jin-yi (David Chiang), and Li Wei-Shi (Chen Kuan-tai). They run into a Yakuza operation led by Yasuaki Kurata.

As this is a Chang Cheh movie, you can expect that nothing ends happily but at least there are plenty of fights and good triumphing over evil — somewhat. There’s also an awesome war bar called Hello John and a final battle inside a gym that finds so many pieces of sports equipment used to destroy human beings.

All four films on the Horrible History box set from Eureka are presented on Blu-ray from HD masters supplied by Celestial Pictures. Extras include two new commentaries by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and martial artist and filmmaker Michael Worth, two new commentaries by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, interviews and essays on these films, an O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Grégory Sacré with a collector’s booklet featuring new writing on all four films in this set by writer and critic James Oliver. It’s all limited to 2,000 copies and you can get it from MVD.

Just read this IMDB synopsis and tell me you don’t want to watch this: “In the year 1900, China was being invaded by an eight-nation alliance (Japan, Russia, England, France, Germany, the United States, Italy and Austria-Hungary). Meanwhile, three martial artists join a xenophobic kung fu cult, with a large following, whose leader claims that he can teach his followers how to become bulletproof.”

Chi Kuan-chun, Alexander Fu Sheng and Leung Kar-yan play the three brothers who have been taken in by The Boxers and seek to battle the foreign forces that have taken over their country.

Directed by Chang Cheh, this has brave men believing that Taoist magic can protect them from bullets. It goes about as great as that sounds. It has two and a half hours of story, a cast of nearly thousands — and one Richard Harrison  — and if you know Chang Cheh, plenty of people get stabbed.

When this came out in the UK, 45 minutes were cut out — the anti-foreigner elements had to go and it became Spiritual Fists. This upset its director, who believed that it was the best artistic statement he’d made in his career. It’s a big movie but not one afraid to just stop and show you a martial arts demo. If you love Shaw Brothers, you’ll be ready for that.

All four films on the Horrible History box set from Eureka are presented on Blu-ray from HD masters supplied by Celestial Pictures. Extras include two new commentaries by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and martial artist and filmmaker Michael Worth, two new commentaries by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, interviews and essays on these films, an O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Grégory Sacré with a collector’s booklet featuring new writing on all four films in this set by writer and critic James Oliver. It’s all limited to 2,000 copies and you can get it from MVD.

This is the story — well, movie tale — of Cheung Po Tsai, the pirate legend who eventually became a Qing dynasty Navy captain, helping other governments to battle pirates. That’s plenty to do in just 39 years, but the guy lived a life.

Played by Ti Lung in this Chang Cheh-directed movie, it seems like everyone is out to collect the bounty on his head, like former shipmate Hua Er-dao (Fan Mei-sheng),  merchant Xiang You-lin (Tin Ching) and General Wu Yee (David Chiang), who grows to respect the rogue. This would be the eighteenth movie that Ti Lung and David Chiang made as a team!

This is less a piracy film — yes, there’s a swashbuckling scene to start it — and more a chronicle of two good men destined to battle one another. And if Cheung Po Tsai is a familiar name to you, you may remember when he was the villain of Project A.

All four films on the Horrible History box set from Eureka are presented on Blu-ray from HD masters supplied by Celestial Pictures. Extras include two new commentaries by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and martial artist and filmmaker Michael Worth, two new commentaries by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, interviews and essays on these films, an O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Grégory Sacré with a collector’s booklet featuring new writing on all four films in this set by writer and critic James Oliver. It’s all limited to 2,000 copies and you can get it from MVD.

This is also known as Four Assassins, as the story is about a failed assassination attempt on the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, who sends Marco Polo (Richard Harrison) to kill them! What wild revisionist history!

Directed by Chang Cheh, this has Li Xiong-Feng (Sheng Fu), Zhou Xing-Zheng (Kuan-Chun Chi), Huang Zong-Han (Yen-Tsan Tang) and Zu Jianmin (Carter Wong) battling against the Mongols. Once he infiltrates them, Polo learns that they’re on the side of good and that he’s been fooled. So have you! None of this really happened!

This is the kind of martial arts movie where dudes can throw boulders and collapse buildings on people because their fighting spirit is so strong. But hey — Marco Polo also has personal bodyguards in Gordon Liu, Leung Kar-Yan and Johnny Wang Lung-Wei, so he knows what he’s doing.

It’s also a movie that isn’t afraid to just steal the music from Daimajin, either.

If you’re new to Chang Cheh, prepare to see good looking men fight overwhelming odds, often dying, but not before exposing their bare chests to the audience.

Richard Harrison had a wild career. Before he became endlessly recycled in a series of Godfrey Ho movies, he started in Kronos before acting in more than 130 roles, which include South Pacific, Master of the World, plenty of peplum, some Eurospy, some Italian Westerns, poliziotteschi, even showing up in Joe D’Amato’s Orgasmo Nero opposite Nieves Navarro and Mark Shannon. He also directed four movies: Terror Force Commando (with Gordon Mitchell!), Challenge of the Tiger, Acquasanta Joe and Jesse & Lester – Two Brothers in a Place Called Trinity, which has Harrison and Donald O’Brien as ripoff versions of Trinity and Bambino. But most of all, to me he will always be the ninja that uses a Garfield phone.

All four films on the Horrible History box set from Eureka are presented on Blu-ray from HD masters supplied by Celestial Pictures. Extras include two new commentaries by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and martial artist and filmmaker Michael Worth, two new commentaries by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, interviews and essays on these films, an O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Grégory Sacré with a collector’s booklet featuring new writing on all four films in this set by writer and critic James Oliver. It’s all limited to 2,000 copies and you can get it from MVD.