EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Jennifer Baylor  (Lisa Pelikan, Ghoulies) takes care of her father Luke (Jeff Corey), a man obsessed with religion and who can’t cook for himself. When she was seven, she accidentally killed a preacher’s son with the snakes that she can mentally control and has refused to be near them ever again, even if her father begs her again and again to help at his pet store.

Somehow, she goes to Green View School. Everyone else is rich and protected by Mrs. Calley (Nina Foch). As for Jennifer, her only friends are lunchlady Martha (Lillian Randolph) and a teacher by the name of Jeff Reed (Burt Convy) who sees just how horrible of a school this is. Jennifer is targeted by the richest of the rich kids, Sandra Tremayne (Amy Johnston). This includes taking her clothes when she’s naked in the shower and being photographed unclothed and the only other girl who stands up for her, Jane (Louise Hoven), being assaulted by Sandra’s man Dayton (Ray Underwood).

The part where Sandra deserves death — well, she did deserve something, but this is as far as it gets, let me tell you — is when she buys Jannifer’s favorite pet store cat, kills it and leaves it in her locker. Then she kidnaps Jennifer and throws her in a car, then leaves her tied up as cars circle her. At that point, every snake in the city comes to Jennifer’s aid, killing everyone left and right in a scene of cathartic snake revenge right out of a Category III movie. At the end, Mrs. Calley is bit by a snake from her desk and Jennifer and Jane laugh.

Director Brice Mask was a Disney background artist and was produced Ruby. He wasn’t tired of ripping off Carrie, so we got Jennifer. This was written by the same writer, Steve Kranz, who was joined in the scripting by Kay Cousins Johnson, who was an actress before starting as a writer.

Originally released in 1978 by American-International Pictures, this kept playing drive-ins — 21st Century had it for a bit — even when it was playing on TV as Jennifer the Snake Goddess.

I love that it was called Horrible Carnage in France.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Directed by Frank Roach, written by Doug Ferrin, Celeste Hammond and Michael Sonye (the writer of Blood Diner, Cold Steel, Star Slammer) from a story by producer and star* Renee Harmon (Lady Street Fighter, Cinderella 2000, The Executioner Part II), Frozen Scream was originally shot for 28 days in Los Angeles before sitting until 1981, when Harmon did post-production shooting in Salt Lake City. Then it sat, unseen, until 1983, when it was released as a double feature with The Executioner Part II.

Harmon plays Dr. Lil Stanhope, who is working with Dr. Sven Johnsson (Lee James) to figure out the secret of immortality. They have a strange way of going about it, as they turn people into zombies and freeze them. When one of the scientists working with them, Dr. Tom Girard (Wolf Muser), refuses to work with them any longer, hooded men show up at his house and take him away, an act which makes his wife Ann (Lynne Yeaman) hysterical.

Lil informs her that men broke into her house, but they weren’t under hoods and no one injected her husband with drugs. Det. Sgt. Kevin McGuire (Thomas McGowan) wants to speak with her, but he keeps getting blocked by Lil. It turns out that in a moment of movie coincidence, she left him and married Tom the next day. There’s also the small matter of Ann watching a Halloween ceremony where people chanted “love and immortality” while fires were all over the beach. Is this next to Point Dume? As for where her husband was, he was confessing to Father O’Brien (Wayne Liebman), telling him that they were freezing rats and bringing them back to life. And when they returned, they had no souls.

The priest is soon killed and Ann is given a zombie caretaker nurse named Cathrin (Sunny Bartholomew). She starts getting phone calls from her dead husband, complaining that he is freezing, and more of the hooded men come to her and threaten to kill her. She escapes with Kevin and they make love. He confesses that he has never stopped caring for her. She says nothing.

Spoilers abound…but by the end, Lil has transformed Ann into a zombie and they come to Kevin’s hospital bedside. As she tells her lost lover that she has truly loved him all along, Lil injects him in the eye with the zombie formula. Is this next to Potters Bluff?

Roach went on to make Nomad Riders and would make Hell Riders and used footage from this movie in her movie Run Coyote Run, in which a psychic tries to find the murderers of her sister.

This was a Section 2 video nasty in the UK. This was not well-reviewed — many called out the narration over top of the dialogue — yet this is a movie where computer chips get put into peoples’ necks and they get frozen to become the living dead. Then, they get robes. And then a band turns Bill Haley and the Comets’ song “Rock Around the Clock into “Jack Around the Shack.”

There are movies that work way too hard to be strange.

This one was effortless.

*In Nightmare USA, Harmon told Stephen Thrower, “I thought that if I wrote and directed and produced and starred, it would be too much, so I gave the credit away. Frank Roach was a cameraman but I decided it would be better to have another director on the film. I didn’t want to be credited as director, for business reasons. I directed the film.”

She also proclaimed, “It was filmed as I wrote it. No one could interfere with me.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Director and writer Greydon Clark had $50,000 and the idea to take Shampoo and make a black version, subverting blacksploitation by having its hero — Jonathan (John Daniels) — be a business owner instead of the expected criminal. The director of photography had a car accident and still said he would show up. He didn’t and the film’s gaffer, Dean Cundey, took over.

Mr. Jonathan’s is the most successful hair salon for women on the Sunset Strip and that’s because, well, every old and rich white woman in town is coming to get dicked down by Mr. Jonathan. There’s no other polite way to say it. Backed up by hairdressers Artie (Skip E. Lowe, the inspiration for Jiminy Glick) and Richard (Gary Allen), he lives the kind of life that Machete would later imitate.

He soon falls in love with his receptionist, Brenda (Tanya Boyd), who breaks his heart when she disappears. That’s because she’s been kidnapped by her ex, a white mobster, and Jonathan loses his mind after they tear up his shop and even sexually abuse his hairdressers. So he does what any of us would. He gets a chainsaw and kills everyone.

This is the kind of movie where a white woman looks at a nude black man and says, “Oh my God! Mr. Jonathan, it IS bigger and better!” Perhaps you will not be surprised by just how bad the depiction of its gay characters is. This was made in 1976 and that’s in my lifetime. Also: nearly everyone used stage names as it was non-union, so William Bonner is billed as Jack Meoff. That’s kind of the name you’d expect from a porn, but this feels like an adult movie for the first section — there’s a scene in which two young women in a pool seduce Mr. Johnathan before their mother mounts him and makes them watch — and then it becomes a romance before someone is sodomized with a curling iron and revenge comes with a pool cue, an axe and finally, that chainsaw in a gory climax no one saw coming.

This was released by Dimension Pictures in 1976 and rereleased by 21st Century.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Directed by Darve Lau and star Bruce Le, this true story — you know how much I love those — was made seven years after the death of its inspiration. We learn that an astronomer saw a meteor and told Bruce’s parents that their son would be an incredible person who would do extraordinary things.

For his younger years, the prophecy foretells that those amazing acts are mostly fist fights, staring at sex workers who flash him through the windows of their brothel and helping voyeurs watch people make love. He upsets someone so much that they hang him outside his apartment and that failure makes him settle down and become the fighting force that we all know, but first, he has to get some snakes drunk and fight them.

This also gets meta. as two of the actors who played Bruce Lee’s movie villains, Kien Shih (Master Han!) and Bolo Yeung, show up as fictional bad guys who have issues with the movie Bruce. Master Kim, as the main villain is known, keeps bringing in people to fight Bruce, who mostly does snake fist style instead of JKD.

This movie also wants to be a silly post-Drunken Master film and even one of the fights that costs Bruce’s friend his life is wacky until, well, his friend gets erased. It feels a little bit all over the place, but I’m here for jumping kicks and not an actual story. That means that this delivers.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Also known as Snake Fist vs. the Dragon, this starts with the monkey style kung fu of Koo Ting-sang (Pomson Shi) battling the snake style of Hsia Sa (Charlie Chan Yiu Lam). Monkey defeats snake and is merciful, allowing him to live. This is a mistake.

Years later, Lung (John Cheung Ng Long) starts as a janitor and works his way up to be a student of Teacher Ho (Hau Chiu Sing), who is still rough on him, getting him drunk and leaving him in a field where he’s nearly killed by a snake. Luckily, the much older Koo Ting-sang (Pomson Shi) saves him. He offers to get a real monkey to teach Lung his style, but instead he goes back to the school and learns drunken style. Lung also finally fights back against the Yan brothers (Wan Faat and Cheng Hong Yip), who have been bullying him for most of the movie.

In response, their father Yan Fung Tien (Tong Tin Hei) hires two killers: Hsia Sa and another snake fighter, Lun Chun (Wilson Tong Wai Shing). What are the odds? They go to the school and kill everyone except Lung, He barely makes it to the woods where Koo Ting-sang lives and his second teacher is soon killed by the snakes. That means he must go through a training montage, watching a monkey fight and bite off the head of a snake. He finally learns his drunken monkey style and, as you expect, gets back the honor of those who trained him.

Directed by Cheung Sum, this movie is everything I love about kung fu films. Yes, there’s Brucesploitation but this is Jackiesploitation, making a film similar to Drunken Master while being just sleazy enough to throw in a mondo animal scene. 21st Century sold it by saying, “Bruce Lee is gone by Johnny Chang must carry on!”

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

It seems like every one of my favorite 1970s studios put out a family wilderness movie. I mean, Sunn Classic had their Grizzly Adams movies, Cannon had The Alaska Wilderness Adventure and 21st Century had this, The Legend of Black Thunder Mountain, which starts with a whole bunch of volcano stock footage.

Well, as we soon discover, “Black thunder, you know, is the Indian name for earthquake. They say its the earth speaking from inside her soul. And that fire and smoke from a volcano is a warning, that the earth is angry with man. Well, it turns out the earth had good reason to be angry.”

Anna (Holly Beemer) and Jamie (Steve Beemer) Parrish are lost, their dad (Ron Brown, who was also in Lefty, the Dingaling Lynx and Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar) has been knocked out by two criminals, George (Keith Sexson) and Buzz (John Sexson). As they look for their father, the children meet plenty of stock footage animals, as well as a real bear named Mrs. Mullen, who is played by Bozo the Bear. If he looks familiar, he was Ben the Bear on the Sunn Classic TV series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. There’s also a bald eagle named Balderdash, but he hasn’t been in anything else.

Directed by Tom Beemer — yes, whose kids are in this — and who wrote this along with Susan Shadburne (who also wrote the frightening The Adventures of Mark Twain, so it makes sense that Will Vinton was an editor on this), Tyler Johnson (whose only other IMDB credit is writing a Harry Styles video and that has to not be true), Lola Thompson and Don Chasan.

Yes, when we had only a few channels and went to the movies often, producers would make family wilderness movies with weird pop songs in them and sometimes make it look like volcanos were going to kill kids.

You can watch this on YouTube. Watch it in Spanish like I did.