EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing gives me greater joy than when our site gets mentioned on my favorite podcast, The Cannon Canon. There are a few movies they’ve covered that I haven’t, so it’s time to fix that.

Directed by John Flynn from a screenplay by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould, based on a story by Schrader, Rolling Thunder is the story of a man who should by all rights be dead. He might be, when you get down to it. U.S. Air Force Major Charles Rane (William Devane) has spent seven years as a POW in Vietnam. They throw a parade for him, but there’s no real joy for him back home in San Antonio. His wife Janet (Lisa Blake Richards) has moved on and who can blame her for needing a man? You can’t blame his son Mark for not looking at him as anything but a stranger. And you can’t fault the town itself for the strange way that they view him as some ghost or as an object, like Linda Forchet (Linda Haynes), the girl who wore his ID bracelet every day, sees him. There’s nothing in him to return affection or even emotion. All they can do is give him some piece of the American dream. A brand new Cadillac and 2,555 silver dollars, one for every day he was captured.

That’s when The Texan (James Best), Automatic Slim (Luke Askew), T-Bird (Charles Escamilla) and Melio (Pete Ortega) — the Acuña Boys — bust in, take those silver dollars and try to torture a man who has been tortured by the best. They mangle his hand in a garbage disposal and when his son tries to save his dad by bringing out those silver dollars, they just shoot him. Kill his wife, too.

Only one person may know how he feels. Master Sergeant Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones). They were in Hanoi together all that time. He’s so disconnected from this world that he’s signed up for another ten years in Airborne. So when Rane uses Linda to get intel, when he finds those boys, he doesn’t even need to be asked to be in on the revenge. It’s just what has to be done.

After a disastrous test screening — Devane said “the Mexicans set the theater on fire! They were really, really, really down on it,” Twentieth-Century Fox pretty much gave the film to American-International Pictures who made a lot of money off it.

Part of the reason why that test screening went so badly was that the hand in the garbage disposal was much worse in the original cut of the film. It was filmed with a lamb shank for the hand and when the scene played, writer Heywood Gould said, “One woman fainted, another person ran into the lobby and demanded his money back, and another guy was so freaked out, that he entered in his car in the parking lot, and crashed into another car.”

Rolling Thunder shows up in the work of Quentin Tarantino quite a bit. Beyond the company that he assembled to re-release movies — Rolling Thunder Pictures — the seven years reference in the Christopher Walken speech in Pulp Fiction is a direct reference to how long Rane was a prisoner. There’s an Acuña Boys cup in Jackie Brown, an actual Acuña Boys gang in the second Kill Bill and an ad for a fake restaurant in Grindhouse. Is it any accident that his acting teacher was James Best?

As you can imagine, Paul Schrader didn’t like the movie. He doesn’t like much. But I kind of love that about him, you know? In Schrader On Schrader, he says that he wrote the movie to criticize U.S. involvement in Vietnam as well as fascistic and racist attitudes in America. Rane was originally written as a white trash racist, with many similarities to Schrader’s more famous character Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. In fact, Bickle was in the script in a cameo. Schrader claims that he wrote a film about fascism and the studio made a fascist film. There is a newspaper clipping about Rane — spelled incorrectly — at the end of Taxi Driver, so these movies are in the same cinematic universe, a term I know Schrader would attack me for using in connection with his art.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of Rolling Thunder here.

Voltati… ti uccido (Turn Around… I’ll Kill You) — also known as Winchester Bill and If One Is Born a Swine — was directed by Alfonso Brescia and written by María del Carmen Martínez Román (Crypt of the Vampire, Jess Franco’s Vampiresas 1930, Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!) and Renaro Polselli.

Ted Shaw (Conrado San Martín) owns most of the goldmines in town, other than just one, the mine of old Sam Wilton (Spartaco Conversi). Shaw sends bandits to take care of the elderly mine owner, but he didn’t count on him hiring Winchester Billy Walsh (Richard Wyler AKA Richard Stapley, The Girl from Rio, Dick Smart 2.007) to protect him. Then, Bill must fight Mexican outlaw El Bicho (Fernando Sancho, Return of the Blind Dead).  

He does have the help of several brothers who get tortured and buried up to their necks while the enemy army bears down on them. Luckily, good saves the day.

I’m always amazed at the longevity of Italian creatives. Brescia would go on to make movies in nearly every genre, often using the name Al Bradley. There’s the strange Ator sequel Iron Warrior, his run of Star Wars clones such as Star Odyssey (see this article for more on those movies), giallo (Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco, the late in the game Omicidio a luci blu with David Hess and 90s crush Florence Guérin), poliziotteschi (Napoli serenata calibro 9), mondo (Nel labirinto del sesso) and even the space, porn and ripoff hybrid The Beast In Space.

As for Polselli…well, I just spent an entire week on his movies.

I’ve been trying to work my way through the non-horror films of Polselli and they’re fine, but I was missing something, Missing women standing wide-eyed and screaming, tree branches being used for the most nefarious of reasons and strange rituals happening for no reason at all. Thankfully — after much searching through some of the most nefarious of websites — I have found Casa dell’amore… la polizia intervene AKA House of Love… The Police Intervene.

My excitement was palpable just from the IMDB summary: “Three young hobby archeologists witness a Satanic ritual in a secluded villa. Instead of helping poor female victims they decide to secretly document the events.”

Hobby archaeologists! Satanic ritual! Secluded villa! This movie is my new plans for the day.

Directed by Polselli and written by long-time associate and often production manager Bruno Vani, this has Polselli using the name Ralph Brown and also having access to footage from the unfinished movie A Virgin for Satan by Alessandro Santini. That film was co-written by Vani and the ritual scenes in this film come from that film.

According to an article in Nocturno, this was called I torbidi misteri della sensualità (Obscure Mysteries of Sensuality) and was a reworking of another Polselli script for a movie called Tilt that was based on the Manson Family. In that script, a cult named The Children of Satan conducts an occult marriage ceremony with a nude bride covered with the blood of doves. What could have been…

In the interview with Jay Slater that I have been referring to throughout my discussion of the films of Renato Polselli, this is mentioned as the director trying his hands at a Western: “Lo sceriffo che non spara tells of a muscular sheriff (played by Polselli regular Mickey Hargitay) who doesn’t need bullets to rid his town of villains — his brawn will suffice. Polselli is keen to point out that he directed the entire movie and it was not co-directed with Roberto Montero. Apparently, as the film was an Italian and Spanish co-production, the Spaniards asked if they could have one of their directors credited. The Spanish producers felt that it would make financial common sense if it was credited to an Italian and a Spaniard — therefore Montero’s name was plastered on the credits as co-director. Like most Italian directors who worked in the horror and western genres, Polselli discarded his own name and adopted a pseudonym. “I thought Ralph Brown sounded better to an American than Renato Polselli. Besides, they dislike Italian names — too much tongue-twisting for them! This is why us Italians used pseudonyms for all our Spaghetti Westerns. We did our best to fool them!”

Lo sceriffo che non spara was the first film Polselli made with Mickey “Mr. Universe’ Hargitay.” Polselli is eager to spill the beans on Hargitay. “When I came to direct Delirio caldo, the producer called me to say that an actor was wandering around Rome looking for work. I convinced the producer that Hargitay was my ideal choice and even fooled him into thinking he was an American. I remember one night I introduced Hargitay to the producer. As the producer thought Hargitay was American, he spoke in English and Hargitay had to apologize and say “I’m sorry, I don’t speak a word of English!” He was very strong, but hardly a bodybuilder like you see him in the films. He once boasted he could rip a Yellow Pages book in half — and he did!”

Jim Day (Dan Clark AKA Marco Mariani) was once the fastest gun in the Italian West until he accidentally shot his father. He’s hung up his guns and still his father-in-law makes him the sheriff of Richmond. Then, his brother Alanb (Hargitay) is in town, making shady deals with that very same father-in-law, who soon rips him and his gang off for $100,000 grand. Making things even worse is that Jim also takes up with his brother’s wife, Desiree Vermont (Aïché Nana AKA Nana Aslanoglu, a Turkish belly dancer who was also in Images In a Convent, Porno Mondo, A…For Assassin and Due occhi per uccidere. Solvi Stubing also appears as the orphaned daughter of the last sheriff. She’s also in Strip Nude for Your Killer, Deported Women of the SS Special Section and Special Agent Super Dragon.

Polselli used the name Lionel A. Prestol, while production manager Nello Vanin is Bruno Vani, who often served that job under Polselli. 

It’s a pretty basic Western with none of the insane touches that Polselli would later add to his filmmaking. But if we must be a completist, we must finish all the films, correct?

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing gives me greater joy than when our site gets mentioned on my favorite podcast, The Cannon Canon. There are a few movies they’ve covered that I haven’t, so it’s time to fix that.

I have no idea why Lone Wolf McQuade hasn’t been on the site.

I mean, it pits Chuck Norris as McQuade — along with a pet wolf! — against Rawley Wilkes (David Carradine) and has a supporting cast of Dana Kimmell (Friday the 13th 3D, Sweet Sixteen) as McQuade’s daughter, Barbara Carrera as the love interest and Robert Beltran, Leon Isaac Kennedy, L.Q. Jones and R.G. Armstrong as fellow cops.

Directed by Steve Carver (The Arena, Steel), this had the director work with writer B.J. Nelson to “mess up” Norris’ on-screen image by having him grow a beard, drink beer and be in a Sergio Leone-inspired movie. Carradine is also a great for him; he told Psychotronic Magazine, “Chuck had a feeling when I was working with him, that he wanted to be a better actor. At one point, when we were working on the fight, I got close to him, and I said. This is really right man, puttin’ your face in the dirt.’ And he looked at me, you know, and he didn’t expect that from me. And we got to be buddies. For just that period. I don’t hang around with Chuck. Chuck mainly doesn’t like to work with co-stars. His movies are all solo movies.”

Carver had high marks for Norris and spoke of the difficulties of getting the trained martial artist to loosen up and act: If you block a scene with an athlete, if you ask an athlete to move from point A to B, or to pick up something, or do anything, he will do these movements mechanically. Which is not a bad thing, because with every rehearsal the movement becomes more fluid. Whereas a theatre actor will project their movements and their dialogue. It’s a stage to them. That’s the difference. Chuck was a little bit stiff in An Eye For An Eye. He became looser in Lone Wolf McQuade. After that he became better with every picture he did.”

It all worked, as Roger Ebert noted the Italian Western parts of the story and even gave this film three out of four stars. And how can you not love a movie where Chuck Norris uses a supercharged truck to break out of a makeshift grave?

Sadly, Carver and Norris would have a parting of the ways. Norris credits Lone Wolf McQuade as the inspiration for his hit television series Walker, Texas Ranger.  In fact, the pilor had to be rewritten because it was a Lone Wolf McQuade. This Orion Pictures film, much like the other Cannon Pictures movies that Norris worked on, are all owned by MGM. Left in the dust were Carver and his production partner Yoram Ben-Ami, who sued the producers of Walker, Texas Ranger for $500 million dollars. He would say years later that the lawsuit was where he and Chuck stopped being friends, as well as saying, “MGM and CBS had bigger and better and more lawyers than we did, all the way to the Supreme Court. We failed to convince the Supreme Court that there were similarities. Now, you and I and anybody else knows that there are similarities between Lone Wolf McQuade and Walker Texas Ranger.”

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of Lone Wolf McQuade here.

Directed by Pasquale Fanetti, who often worked as a cinematographer on movies like Lady Chatterley’s Passions 2: Julie’s Secret and Penombra, as well as directing Lady Emanuelle and 1990’s Top Model 2, which was written by Ernesto Gastaldi and Roberto Leoni while seemingly having nothing to do with the Joe D’Amato movies, Intimate Crimes has the traditional large Italian writing room, including Albert Barney, Pino Buricchi (who wrote The Red Monks to give you an idea of this film’s quality) and Gaetano Russo (the writer of Trhauma and director of Crazy Blood and Abisso Nero), as well as a late in his career Renato Polselli.

This comes in the time when the giallo has become the erotic thriller and when the sex part of the sex crimes is more important than the crime, so to speak. Yet at the heart of all erotic thrillers beats the yellow blood of Edgar Wallace-influenced murder mysteries and this is no different, even if the nudity is more abundant and some of the sex scenes seem downright painful. I mean, people do not couple in this way ever, their parts do not match or come together in this way and yet we have been instructed by not just Hollywood that everyone ruts together in such a stiff and natural way.

Gabriella Barbuti, who plays Claudia, is in Karate Warrior 6. Sometimes, the deeper you go into watching these movies, the more you realize that you are gaining arcane knowledge. However, unlike in magic or, let’s say, something that would be beneficial to humanity, you only have this knowledge for yourself. She’s also in P.O. Box Tinto Brass, a movie where women write letters to the famous dirty old man director and tell him their fantasies and the Sergio Martino-directed, Umberto Lenzi-written Craving Desire, speaking of giallo masters trying to remain relevant in the 90s. She looks exactly as you would expect an actress in a Tinto Brass movie to look and I mean that as the highest of compliments. Another actress he used was Sara Cosmi, who plays Valeria. She’s also in P.O. Box Tinto Brass.

Sadly, so much of this feels uninspired. I always think the men who made actual giallo would gaze out the window while making these and think wistful thoughts back to the late 60s or early 70s, when life was a bit younger, when it didn’t feel like work to get out of bed in the morning, when the cradle was closer than the grave. It’s for them that I watch these later efforts, as if to put a hand on their sleazy shoulders and say, “I will still be here for you, even if it is only metaphorically and through the tracking of ancient VHS posted digitally through pirated files.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing gives me greater joy than when our site gets mentioned on my favorite podcast, The Cannon Canon. There are a few movies they’ve covered that I haven’t, so it’s time to fix that.

Steven Segal has barely been on our site and that’s for a reason.

I don’t get it.

I’ve known plenty of action movie lovers that were obsessed with him. I dated a girl who would always rent his movies when given the option. And yes, I am old, we rented video cassettes from a mom and pop store and made out while watching Steven Segal movies.

This is Segal’s first movie. Now, finding the exact facts about the man’s life is tricky, but here’s what I think is true. He was born in Lansing, Michigan to an Irish medical technician mother and Jewish math teacher father. I have no idea where the Italian and Asian mystic parts of him come from. Confounding me further is the fact that his grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants with some Yakut and Buryat heritage.

Seagal is the Hulk Hogan of action movies and by that, I don’t mean he’s orange and on steroids. He has the same propensity for lying and his nontruths are easily proven wrong. Like how Seagal was a student of the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, yet Ueshiba died in 1969 when Seagal was 17 and Seagal didn’t move to Japan until the of 22, to allegedly avoid the draft by marrying a Japanese national named Miyako Fujitani.

Fujitani doesn’t mince words about her ex-husband. In an infamous article that got Spy Magazine sued, she said that the actor worked in her family’s aikido school and received his degree under dubious circumstances: The only reason Steven was awarded the black belt was because the judge, who was famous for his laziness, fell asleep during Steven’s presentation. The judge just gave him the black belt.” He told her “I never will betray you”, right before he took all her savings and moved back to America. She claims that she “scrimped and saved for years, even denying herself and her children necessities, to help pay his way home.”

Without seeking a divorce, Seagal went ahead and married Adrienne La Russa in 1984, followed by actress Kelly LeBrock. La Russa told Spy that she couldn’t say much, “Because I am afraid of Steven and his friends.”

That’s because for years, Seagal has claimed underworld and black ops ties. Seagal told People early in his career, “They saw my abilities, both with martial arts and with the language. You could say that I became an advisor to several CIA agents in the field, and through my friends in the CIA, I met many powerful people and did special works and favors.”

After opening a dojo with stuntman Craig Dunn in New Mexico, he also started the Aikido Ten Shin Dojo in Hollywood with his senior student Haruo Matsuoka. That’s where he trained Michael Ovitz, at the time the biggest agent in the business.

“Michael and I are very close–we love each other,” Seagal said. “I’m like a guru to him.”

As for Ovitz, it was claimed that he believed that he could make anyone a movie star.

Now, Above the Law is before all the blues records, the TV reality show that has him teaching cops, the horrifying SNL appearance, the lawsuits, the collusion with Russia — I have no idea how anyone can still be a fan of him. Actually, I totally do, because if anyone symbolizes the MAGA side of action movies — even more than Bronson or Norris — it’s Steven Seagal.  He can do interviews where he says that Vladimir Putin is “one of the great living world leaders,” teach cops how to shoot guns, be against athletes protesting before games and writing the novel The Way of the Shadow Wolves: The Deep State And The Hijacking Of America. Let’s go further. He’s been shown in photos with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, been referred to as the “brother” of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and celebrated his birthday in Russian with pro-Kremlin friends as the invasion of Ukraine was happening.

Oh man, Steven Seagal.

I didn’t even mention that the double entendre — actually, it was just outright being a jerk — he made to a production assistant who he caught brushing her teeth.

Man, I don’t even want to talk about this movie.

I’ll try.

I mean, he’s prohibited from promoting bitcoin at this point. Or that he broke Sean Connery’s wrist on the set of Never Say Never Again. Or that he has been known for brutalizing stuntmen who appeared in movies with him.

Ah, OK. Let’s just get to the movie.

Sergeant Nico Toscani is exactly the person that Steven Seagal wants us to believe that he is. A tough Chicago vice cop who can trace his roots to Palermo, Sicily, he moved to Japan was a young man to study martial arts and was recruited by the CIA and assigned to covert operations on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border during the Vietnam War. He left the CIA when he refused to be part of torture, moved back to the U.S. and started being a cop.

Working with Detective Delores “Jacks” Jackson (Pam Grier) are on the trail of drug dealers and suddenly ordered off the case, as those scumbags are working with the very same CIA boss that caused Nico to leave the agency, Kurt Zagon (Henry Silva). Also, to make this even better, Seagal — sorry, Nico — is married to the gorgeous Sara (Sharon Stone) and when she’s threatened, he has to go…above the law.

At least they put together a great cast and crew for this movie. Director Andrew Davis would also direct The Final Terror, Code of Silence, Under Siege and was the cinematographer on Private Parts, Mansion of the Doomed and the DP on Angel. He worked on the story of this movie with Seagal and then polished the script with Steven Pressfield (King Kong Lives, Freejack) and Ronald Shusett, who has big league credits like Alien, Aliens, Total Recall, Phobia and Dead & Buried.

Seagal looks and moves like no one else in movies. I don’t know, maybe Ovitz was right in that he could plug anyone into an action movie and make him a star. Since this movie, Seagal has been in around sixty movies. That’s pretty good staying power for just being anyone. And despite all his controversies, he made a film as recently as 2019’s Beyond the Law.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of Above the Law here.