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 its star Fred Williamson, this film sees him as Johnny Barrows, a former football star and Silver Star winner who is dishonorably discharged after punching a superior officer. There’s nothing back home for him, as he’s attacked by cops and forced to live on the streets.

However, he’s not in such bad shape that he’s working going to work for mobster Mario Racconi (Stuart Whitman), who he meets while looking for a handout at an Italian restaurant. Instead, he works at a gas station where he’s ripped off again, which leads to him beating up his boss, Richard (R.G. Armstrong).

While Johnny is struggling, the mob has been at war. The Da Vinci family wants to start dealing drugs and the Racconis are an old school gang. They don’t want to get people strung out. A double cross leads to Mario being shot and his entire family being wiped out. Using his girlfriend Nancy (Jenny Sherman) as a go-between, he tries to hire Johnny, who still doesn’t want involved but this being a Fred Williamson movie, she soon sleeps with him. When the Da Vincis kidnap and assault her, that finally brings Johnny into the war.

Of course, it’s not all so simple.

This movie makes good use of cameos by Roddy McDowall as one of the Da Vincis and Elliot Gould as a wise man of the streets, Professor Theodore Rasputin Waterhouse. It also reminds me a lot of The Farmer, which is a better movie, except with the originally shot downer ending.

It ends with this: “Dedicated to the veteran who traded his place on the front line for a place on the unemployment line. Peace is Hell.”

Originally released by Atlas Films, it was rereleased by Flora Releasing and Dimension Pictures. 21st Century got this movie when they bought Dimension.

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.

If you’re going to get into Cüneyt Arkin and you worry, “Will my fragile sensibilities be able to handle sub-VHS prints and an absolute lack of English and therefore no safety net for the absolute phantasmagorical leap into madness that I’m about to take,” permit The Sword and the Claw — or Lionman — to be your gateway drug.

King Suleiman may have conquered the Christians, but he’s a kind man who has spared the women and children. This pleases Princess Maria, who of course gives him a one night all expenses paid guided tour of her spoils of war before Commander Antoine (Yildirim Gencer, who is in Thirsty for Love, Sex and Murder) blackmails her into becoming his wife, then kills the King, but not before Suleiman wipes out nearly hundreds of people. Antoine cuts the hands off of his enemy and then hunts down the King’s wife, who gives birth all by herself in the woods, and servant Rhestim, who promptly loses the baby to some lions.

Antoine rules the land along with his son Altar (Cemil Sahbaz, who was Captain Kirk in Turist Ömer Uzay Yolu’nda, the Turkish take on Roddenberry’s space Western), placing his wife into the dungeon to die. Anyone who can’t pay taxes is crucified and killed, in that order, while Rhestim and his daughters have been starting an army. And the son of the King? Well, he was raised by lions to become a 38-year-old Cüneyt Arkin, a maniac ready to trampoline jump and claw his way into your face, if not your heart.

Of course, one of Rhestim’s daughters wants to get in with the rich and powerful, revealing that the Lionman and the King’s son have the same birthmark, one that can only come from the long-dead king. She narcs on her own sister and when our hero saves her, nearly losing his hands to acid.

This would end the fighting of almost any hero. This isn’t any hero. Now that he gets metallic lion claws, he’s ready to kill everyone — and seriously, I mean everyone and then some — to get his revenge.

Imagine, if you will, that this is the most restrained Cüneyt Arkin movie I’ve seen. Like I said, you should take your first steps into this world slowly. Do not dive headfirst into a shallow pool filled with only whiskey like I did. Take small sips, my friend, before you gulp deeply on films where hundreds of ninjas drive cars through brick walls for no reason at all.

The Sword and the Claw is the kind of movie that I could only dream of as a teenager, hopped up on Lemonheads and too many games of Bad Dudes, wishing of a film where people bounce off the walls and kill with aplomb. It feels like the kind of sub-Conan comic book, something even crazier than Warlord or Kull or even Claw the Unconquered.

Thanks to Temple of Schlock, I can tell you that William Mishkin Motion Pictures released this as Lion Man, Lion Man vs. the Barbarians and The Sword and the Claw. 21st Century also distributed it.

You can watch this on Tubi. Please do.

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 while 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, she 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.

This movie is quite literally the Batman and Superman of Italian sleaze filmmaking uniting to create some art. Those two men have many, many names, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll use the names that they used most often: Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei.

Producer Franco Gaudenzi wanted to bring the movie The Wild Pussycat to Italy, but it would have never made it past the Italian censors. For some reason, if the movie was made in Italy, it would pass. This is the country where it’s legal to call your movie Zombi 2, but illegal to use Mrs. Ward’s name. Let’s forget the complexities of law when it comes to exploitation cinema and move on.

D’Amato and Mattei took up the challenge of remaking this movie for Italian audiences with both writing the script and co-directing the picture, even if only D’Amato got directing credit. What was important for the producers was that the film could play theaters and it passed the Italian censorship board on November 5, 1975 after some lesbian elements and scenes with sodomy were removed.

Ironically, when this was brought to Switzerland by Erwin C. Dietrich, he added in actual hardcore scenes with French actress Brigitte Lahaie (who is in Fascination) and dubbed it into German, releasing it as Foltergarten der Sinnlichkeit (Torture Garden of Sensuality) and Die Lady mit der Pussycat (The Lady with the Pussycat).

Truly, scumbag pictures bring all the nations of the world together, do they not?

Francoise (Patrizia Gori, The Return of the Exorcist) has had enough of the abuse from her gambler cad of a husband Carlo (George Eastman!), so she jumps in front of a train. Her sister Emanuelle — no, not Laura Gemser just yet, she’s played here by Rosemarie Lindt from Salon Kitty — gets revenge by drugging Carlo and restraining him in a soundproof room. There, she teases him through two-way mirrored glass as he’s forced to watch her make love to numerous men and women, all while he’s repeatedly dosed with LSD.

Finally, Emanuelle enters the room and attempts to castrate Carlo, who has been repeatedly fantasizing about killing her and finally does so for real. His joy is short-lived as while he’s hiding in the secret room, he gets locked in and the police closed down the crime scene for thirty days, basically leaving him to die.

This is exactly the kind of movie that you’d imagine D’Amato and Mattei would make together, filled with numerous sex scenes, frequently spinning and zooming camera angles and a cannibalistic feast sequence.

Back when we reviewed Emanuelle In America, the guys at Severin said, “If you thought that was rough, watch this one.” Their release has a great George Eastman interview in which he says that D’Amato had the ability to do bigger and better things, but preferred doing ten B movies a year than one A film. You can get the Severin edition of this film and see just how good-looking a completely irredeemable piece of trash — I say that with love — can look.

21st Century released this — according to Temple of Schlock — as Emanuelle’s Revenge, Blood Vengeance and Demon Rage. 

In this film by Chih-Hung Kuei (Ghost Eyes, Virgins of the Seven Seas), three stories of the supernatural are told. It started as 45 minutes of footage and then became an anthology film, with the original footage being the third episode.

In the first story, “The Haunted House,” finds Li (Chung Wang) and Wang (Locke Hua Liu) taking a bet — Castle of Blood-style — with their friend Chou (Wei Szu) that they will all stay overnight in what is said to be a haunted house. Each of them has a plan to frighten the others, but everything backfires and they all die, potentially being the spirits that haunt the next person to take this dare.

The second story, “The Cold Skeleton,”is about a mother and her son Chang Sung-Ken (Lin Wei Tu) who sell flowers in the village. They have a bond that goes beyond death, as she has promised him that she would come back when she passes on to be there for him. Her body keeps showing up again and again, even after he keeps reburying her. The secret? In his sleep, he’s been digging her up so she can come back home. He joins her in death by committing suicide.

In the final episode, “Wolf Of Ancient Times,” a college student named Sung Li Ho (Hong Hoi) and his assistant keep getting kicked out of different places because the scholar — bucktoothed and on the make, like a mix between a Jerry Lewis character and the protagonist of a nude-cutie — keeps attacking women. They finally make their way to a woodcutter’s house in the fog, where he has two gorgeous daughters who team up to seduce the student, yet before they do the deed, they reveal themselves as jiangshi, or the traditional Chinese hopping vampires. Luckily, the assistant is prepared with a charm around his neck! This was going to be called The Sex Wolf if it had been a full feature.

I love that each of these stories switch tones, whether that means that they’re like an EC Comics story, a poignant story about grief or almost a parody of sex films that ends with the intrusion of the unknown.

Corrupt officials have taken bribes and allowed a band of Japanese pirates — which includes Han Yingjie (Han Ying-chieh), Hakatatsu (Sammo Hung) and Simon Yuen as a bald pirate with a bo staff — to terrorize the South China coast. A small band of fighters, led by husband and wife Wu Ji-Yuan (Pai Ying) and Wu Ruo-Shi (Hsu Feng), have come together to stop them.

Made at the same time as The Fate of Lee Khan, director and writer King Hu has made a world where one big fight still solves things, but to get there our heroes must endure corruption at nearly every turn.

Yet what an ending, as Sammo makes for a wonderfully brutal final boss after a film filled with not just amazing action, but plenty of gorgeous coastal scenes. Hu also realizes that the music is not just wallpaper, but instead makes the fights more dramatic and impactful.

The Eureka 4K UHD of The Valiant Ones is packed with extras, including a limited edition O-card slipcase featuring new artwork by Grégory Sacré, new audio commentary by Asian film expert Frank Djeng, an interview with critic and Asian film expert Tony Rayns, a video essay by David Cairns, interviews with stuntman Billy Chan, Ng Ming-choi, Hsu Feng by Frédéric Ambroisine and Roger Garcia. Plus, you get a limited edition collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Jonathan Clements.

You can get this from MVD.

Based on Wu Cheng’en’s novel Journey to the West — specifically the story of Red Boy — The Fantastic Magic Baby. Chang Cheh pretty much makes Peking opera — there’s even an entire filmed version of one after the main movie — in which Red Boy (Ting Wa-Chung) comes to collect a tribute from the humans who worship the gods Princess Iron Fan and Ox Demon King, who are his parents. He ends up kidnapping Tripitaka (Teng Jue-Jen), a monk whose flesh is said to add thousands of years to your life when consumed, which means that Monkey King (Lau Chung-Chun) and Pigsy (Chen I-Ho) need to fix things.

I tell you that synopsis and it doesn’t matter, because this is basically an hour of long fights, musical sequences, little speaking, wild costumes — stone men and tree people! — and gorgeous visuals filmed against solid colored backgrounds. There’s also so much fog that Lucio Fulci would say, “This is almost enough fog.”

This just washed over me, delighting my senses with its gorgeous visuals and athletic fights. It moves so quickly that you can just sit back and take it all in and feel good in the knowledge that you’re seeing something unlike any other film out there. I love that so many Shaw Brothers movies are shot on sets and this is the extreme version of that, as there’s not even an actual physical location as much as these are shot within a candy colored, misty wonderland.

With fights put together by Peking opera star Li Tong-Chun and Lau Kar-Leung, this is all the action you want in addition to all that arty feel. You can tell people you’re watching high culture.

In 1974, Shaw Brothers worked with Hammer to make The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. That ignited a desire to not only make martial arts films, but supernatural ones. And man, as the studio goes on, these movies grow more deranged in the very best of ways.

Ho Meng-Hua (The Mighty Peking Man, Oily Maniac) directed this and it only hints at how far Hong Kong horror would go. Lang Chia Chieh (Lo Lieh) wants to be with Mrs. Zhou (Tanny Tien Ni), but she’s in love with Xu Nuo (Ti Lung) who only wants to be with the love of his life, Wang Chu Ying (Lili Li Li-li). In order to win her, Lang Chia Chieh goes to magician Shan Chen Mi (Ku Feng) and has him cast a spell on Mrs. Zhou. It works, if just for a night, and she soon learns that she too can turn to the spirit world to win over the lover that she wants.

These magic spells are incredibly organic and gross. Like, you need to cut off someone’s finger and leave it under your intended person’s bed until it turns into a pile of maggots. Or to kill someone, you put worms directly under their skin.

There’s a lot of soap opera in this but every time you think it’s getting slow, someone gets half naked or makes a possessed rice ball with blood and breast milk, so you can never say it’s bad. It’s just the first course for how completely out there these movies will get.

Inspired by the huge success of the Japanese superhero versus monster fare such as Ultraman and Kamen Rider in Hong Kong, the Shaw Brothers produced the first Chinese superhero in 1975, which they called Infra-Man. However, they pushed the envelope created by the Japanese even further, inventing a world where a school bus can crash, Hong Kong can be destroyed, an earthquake can happen and monsters appear all within the first minute of the film.

Let me see if I can summarize the blast of pure odd that I just watched at 5 AM: Princess Dragon Mom (known in the original version of this film as Demon Princess Elzebub) is a ten million-year-old mother of monsters who wants to destroy the Earth. She carries around a whip and has a dragon head on her hand, but can also turn into a monster herself. She also has an entire legion of beasts ready to do whatever she asks, like her assistant She-Demon (Witch-Eye in the original), who is an Asian girl with a hand that has an eyeball in the middle of it. Also: both of these ladies wear metallic bikinis with skulls all over them and have several costume changes. They also have an army of cannon fodder dressed in skeletal costumes, which was obviously the influence for the Skeleton Crew in the new episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

They’re battling with Science Headquarters, led by Professor Liu Ying-de. He’s used the BDX Project to transform Lei Ma (Danny Lee, The Killer) into the bionic kung-fu kicking motorcycle riding Infra-Man, who has whatever powers he needs for any situation. He’s also really good at getting tall and stepping on monsters until their green blood pours out. Bruce Lee tribute actor Bruce Le also appears as Lu Xiao-long, another member of the team.

You get all manner of monsters in this one — the Emperor of Doom, the Giant Beetle Monster, an Octopus Mutant, the Driller Beast, a Laser Horn Monster and the Iron Fist Robots. All of them are given to dramatic pronouncements, overacting and blowing up real good.

Believe it or not, Roger Ebert said, “When they stop making movies like Infra-Man, a little light will go out of the world.” Twenty-two years later, he went even further: “I find to my astonishment that I gave Infra-Man only two and a half stars when I reviewed it. That was 22 years ago, but a fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film. So, in answer to those correspondents who ask if I have ever changed a rating on a movie: Yes, Infra-Man moves up to three stars.”

He’s right — this movie is completely unhinged, with dragon witch women who threaten to throw little girls down volcanos, blotting out the sun and rocket fists. They should have made five thousand sequels to this.

You can watch this on YouTube.