VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Patreon for the Video Archives podcast. You can hear a preview here.

My parents were both teachers and I think they would have been offended, as hippie pacificists, by this but they would come around to love it.

Director Robert Mandel also made F/X and School Ties, as well as episodes of Lost and Prison Break. The script comes from Roy Frumkes, who made Document of the Dead and wrote Street Trash. He was joined by Rocco Simonelli and Alan Ormsby, whose career is filled with magic, such as Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Deathdream, Deranged, the movies within a movie in Popcorn and so much more.

Jonathan Shale (Tom Berenger) is a black ops killing machine, forced to return home after a mission gone bad. He meets up with his girlfriend, Jane Hetzco (Diane Venora), who works as a teacher at Miami’s Columbus High School and all seems good for a little rest and relaxation. Except that one of the Kings of Destruction gang has followed her while jogging and broke her leg.

You or I would call the police.

Shale goes to war.

By the end of the first day, he’s beaten several students down and earned the ire of Principal Claude Rolle (Ernie Hudson) but begins to bond with teachers and students, as they have been in a war zone, just like him. Everyone is seeming to get along except the KOD and their leader, Juan Lacas (Marc Anthony, pre-singing days). It turns out that Rolle is dealing cocaine through the gang, which means that Shale beings his mercenary team to battle it out in the high school against the gang, a rival merc squad led by Janus (Willis Sparks) and gangster Johnny Glades (Rodney A. Grant).

Roger Ebert hated this movie. Hated it. “”I am so very tired of this movie. I see it at least once a month. The title changes, the actors change, and the superficial details of the story change, but it is always about exactly the same thing: heavily armed men shooting at one another. Even the order of their deaths is preordained: First the extras die, then the bit players, then the featured actors, until finally only the hero and the villain are left.”

Lovers of action movies, however, adored it, leading to three sequels: The Substitute 2: School’s Out,  The Substitute 3: Winner Takes All and The Substitute: Failure Is Not an Option. Berenger did not come back for those, as Treat Williams played Carl Thomasson (Karl in movies 3 and 4), a man who is friends with the sole survivor of Shale’s mercenary group, Joey Six (Angel David, taking over for Raymond Cruz). As for Shale and Jane, they are married and teach in foreign nations as part of the Peace Corps.

This was filmed in the summer in Miami, where kids stuck in summer school ended up being extras, getting served Papa John’s Pizza every day.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Patreon for the Video Archives podcast. You can hear a preview here.

You have to feel bad for the Vietnam vets in this movie. They go back to Nam with the best of intentions, hoping to destroy the Golden Triangle’s drug empires, but when they get there they learn that their fellow soldiers are the ones behind it all.

How did they get there? Well, Chris Mitchum had a gas station that he stopped some criminals from robbing, so they responded by killing his adopted son and assaulting his wife. Instead of, you know, going through counseling and working through it, she decides that the best thing she can do is kill herself while he’s calling the cops. I’m not one to tell anyone how to deal with their grief, but somewhere between anger and bargaining and acceptance and hope is drawing up the plans for a mobile battle RV and building motorcycles with rockets on them.

I mean, this movie starts out as Death Wish, has our hero get arrested and then the authorities tell him to get together with his old commandos and go do some real killing. This feels like the kind of movie a bunch of strange children with too many G.I. Joes and perhaps too much knowledge of cocaine would film on their parent’s camcorder in stop motion. Inside their mind, the movie looks like the stuff of dreams. To adults, it looks like an action figure just standing there while children scream things about adopting babies in flashback sequences.

This is a movie that has a commando unit named the Rat Bastards and an adopted Vietnamese child named Charlie. If you can commit to that — and you love John Phillip Law as much as I do — then you really can’t lose.

Here’s how the hierarchy of renting movies worked in the 80s: Are all the Stallone, Arnold and Van Damme movies out? Then reach for some Michael Dudikoff. Oh, those are out? Does the store have any Cirio Santiago stuff? Good deal. No? They’re all out? Well, I guess Bobby A. Suarez will do. I recommend Cleopatra Wong and another movie he wrote, Bionic Boy.

And this movie obviously.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Patreon for the Video Archives podcast. You can hear a preview here.

Frank Harris has been featured plenty on this site — Killpoint has been written about once before, as well as Low Blow, The Patriot and Aftershock — and he’s movie’s director, producer, screenwriter and cinematographer. Harris was once a news reporter who personally witnessed street violence and also worked on police training films, so he hired real cops and gang members to make this.

What it has going for it is Cameron Mitchell as big bad Joe Marks and Stack Pierce as his henchman Nighthawk. They’re stealing military weapons and selling them to gangs and this leads to a gangbanger having a weapon of mass destruction in his hands that kills the wife of Lt. James Wong (Leo Fong).

And oh yeah, this is 1984, so she was also sexually assaulted before she was killed.

Teaming up with FBI Agent Bill Bryant (Richard Roundtree), they start to track down where the guns are coming from. Meanwhile, Cameron Mitchell is killing hookers, shooting up TV sets, smoking in bed and lavishing attention on his dog Sparky, even trying to teach him how to smoke just like dad. Later, he puts flowers in his hair and soaks in a hot tub, along with grabbing a machine gun and shooting every teenager inside a Chinese restaurant.

Leo Fong has facial paralysis of a sort and a charisma void inside him, as he just stares into you as his dead eyes find the red light on the camera and he listlessly does martial arts montages that have nothing to do with the rest of the movie. He also would come back to play the same role in Showdown, a movie that he didn’t just star in, he directed. He also squares off with Richard Lynch, so you know I’m looking for this movie now, which is not the other Showdown from 1993 which has Billy Blanks in it.

But seriously: Cameron Mitchell should be worshipped for this movie.

Bill “Superfoot” Wallace is in it and the Chuck Norris school gets thanked. What else do you want?

You can watch this on YouTube.

In the video game Elf Bowling, the elves of Santa’s Workshop are on strike so Santa abuses them by using them as bowling pins as they yell, “Is that all the balls you got, Santa?” The perfect game to adapt into a kid movie! I mean, just look at this fact about the game: It became an internet sensation in 1999 when people originally thought it was a computer virus.

This movie even gets the sequel in, where Dingle Kringle — Santa’s brother — hooks up with Mrs. Claus as they all go to a tropical island and meet the Moai statues of Easter Island. There were eight of these games, including Elf Bowling – Bocce Style and Elf Bowling 6: Air Biscuits, in which the elves could fly by way of flatulence.

So…this movie. Take it away, Wikipedia.

“The film was panned by critics for its writing, animation, directing, humor, plot, musical numbers, voice acting, characterizations and for having little to nothing to do with the premise of the game.”

Santa Claus (Joe Alaskey, who voiced many of the Looney Tunes and Droopy the Dog) started in life as a pirate captain. He redeemed himself somewhat by taking took toys from the rich and giving them to orphanages. He battles his half-brother Dingle Kringle (Tom Kenny, yes, Sponge Bob) and like Holmes and Moriarty, they’ve both taken off the board. But you know, instead of the Reichenbach Falls, they get frozen into blocks of ice. Lex the elf sees them and thinking like the Eskimos did to Sub-Mariner, the elves start to worship Santa as some kind of god who will fulfill a prophecy of leadership, at which points he starts bowling with them once he’s thawed out.

Unlike the game, the elves in this love being smashed by a bowling ball. Dingle takes them to Fiji and Santa has to rescue everyone. The Moai also show up, despite Fiji being 4,600 miles from Easter Island. This is topped by dialogue that is quite intelligent, such as “I have a teensy question for you…who pooped in the peanut barrel?”

At least Tom Kenny got his wife Jill Talley (Karen the Computer Wife on Sponge Bob) a job as Mrs. Claus. He would later say that hen he got a call to do the project, he’d never heard of the recording location, which led to him driving around LA and ending up in a bad neighborhood where the recording took place inside a rundown apartment building.

A U.S./Fiji/South Korea co-production directed by Dave Kim with Rex Piano as co-director, this had animated outsourced to South Korea with the editing happening inside a Simi Valley house owned by Kim’s mother. Kim was so hands on that he did the motion capture for the dance scenes.

The credits tell you that Elf Bowling 2: The Great Halloween Pumpkin Heist is coming. Somehow, the world was not ready for that and it was cancelled.

I warn you: this is the kind of CGI that makes strike and spare animation at a bowling alley look like Katsuhiro Otomo by comparison. There are theories the world ended in the 2000s and we’re just the residual memories of dead souls, floating through a lifeless galaxy. This movie is a real argument for the truth of that presumption.

You can watch this on YouTube.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Patreon for the Video Archives podcast. You can hear a preview here.

Edward Dmytryk may be best known for his film noir efforts like Crossfire, Cornered and Murder, My Sweet. In 1947, he was named as one of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted professionals who refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), serving time in prison for contempt of court. However, in 1951, to save his career, he named names to the HUAC, which destroyed several careers. He went on to direct The Caine Mutiny, Broken Lance, The End of the Affair, The Carpetbaggers and Bluebeard amongst many other movies. The Human Factor is his last theatrically released film; he taught film school, did lectures and wrote books, including Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten.

John Kinsdale (George Kennedy) is an American NATO computer specialist with two kids in Naples, Italy. He’s easy going — he likes to play video games at work — and has a good relationship with his wife, who is looking for a new housekeeper. That night, when he gets home from home and expects to go to a birthday party. he finds his entire family killed. He nearly kills himself until he sees a story about his family on TV.

Now he wants revenge.

After the funeral, Kinsdale meets with Inspector Lupo (Raf Vallone), who is investigating the murders. U.S. State Department officers Janice Tilman (Rita Tushingham) and Mike McAllister (John Mills) are also part of the case and they have two suspects: Andrew Taylor (Tim Hunter) and Eddy Fonseca (Mark Lowell). Kinsdale steals U.S. Embassy credentials and tracks down Fonseca, learning that he’s a tourist. He uses those credentials to meet another agent, George Edmonds (Barry Sullivan), who tells him that terrorists have demanded the release of prisoners and $10 million dollars or they’ll kill an American family every three days.

Taylor and Kamal Hamshari (Frank Avianca) are the ones behind it and the government has run a computer simulation that says that Kinsdale has an 8% chance of succeeding in killing him.

Kinsdale does some detective work and discovers that the housekeeper ad in the paper bring Ms. Pidgeon (Haydee Politoff, Queens of Evil) and the killers into the homes of these families. He hides in one family’s house and is there to shoot back when a van filled with murderers arrives. He then follows clues he finds in the fake maid’s purse and tracks down Taylor, shrugging off being stabbed and using a chain to choke the man into oblivion.

Now, clutching his daughter’s doll and driven by rage, he tracks the killers down to a U.S. Embassy grocery store where he engages in a shootout with them, including a moment where an unmasked Ms. Pidgeon spits in his face. He responds by shooting her in the face and continually gunning down people, bleeding all over the place, until he finally kills Kamal and just keeps firing his gun until its empty, filling the dead man with bullets.

Peter Powell and Thomas Hunter only wrote one other movie, The Final Countdown.

I loved this, because I love George Kennedy. If you only know him as Frank Drebin’s partner Ed Hocken, this is a revelation, as he goes Bronson by the end, killing everyone that has done him wrong. Bonus points for the VHS re-release on the Sybil Danning’s Adventure Video label, as we get a great photo of her holding TNT on the back cover.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Patreon for the Video Archives podcast. You can hear a preview here.

Based on the 1952 film The Narrow Margin, this movie is the first of two RKO reimaginings by Peter Hyams. He also made 2009’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

Carol Hunnicut (Anne Archer) is on a blind date at a hotel restaurant with lawyer Michael Tarlow (J.T. Walsh) when a waiter tells him he needs to call a client. He goes to his suite and brings Carol with him. As she hides, she watches crime boss Leo Watts (Harris Yulin) and henchman Jack Wooten (Nigel Bennett) accuse Tarlow of stealing from them, then killing him.

Watching TV that evening, she realizes that she’s about to be killed, as she’s in the middle of a mob case. She sends her ex-husband and child into hiding and makes her way to a cabin in the Canadian Rockies. Somehow, she’s found by Det. Sgt. Dominick Benti (M. Emmet Walsh) and deputy district attorney Robert Caulfield (Gene Hackman). As they try to get her to testify, a helicopter flies by and shoots hundreds of bullets into the secluded hideout, killing Benti and the pilot that got Caulfield there.

They sneak their way on a train and learn that nearly every cop is dirty and that they have to watch out for everyone. Everyone is a crook, pretty much, even the seemingly innocent woman who tries to romance Caulfield.

There’s not much left of the original film other than the idea that everyone is trapped on a train. But it works, a solid action film that has two great actors in the lead.