Shi Zi So Hou Shou is the Shaolin Handlock, a fighting skill created by Li Bai (Dick Wei) and given to his children Cheng Ying (David Chiang) and Meng Ping (Chen Ping). He’s killed by Fang Yun Biao (Chan Shen), a man who he thought was a friend, and then two of his students — who Fang Yun Biao thought were Cheng Ying and Meng Ping — are also murdered, as the evil martial artist knows the only weakness in this style.

The Shaolin Handlock is pretty much a headlock. A front chancery, if you will, except you flip over someone’s head to do it.

Directed by Ho Meng-Hua, this has Cheng Ying learn that his father’s killer was hired by Lin Hao (Lo Lieh), so he becomes that man’s bodyguard, despite others in his employ suspecting him. His goal is to get closer and get back for his dead dad.  I really liked Fang Yun Biao’s hidden blades and the fact that after he kills people, he blows off steam in brothels. He’s a guy that causes death yet knows how to live life.

How long can the hero stay hidden and not show off his family’s well-known martial arts move? And when the bad guys take his sister, how can he save her? These are the questions that this answers and you’ll be pleased by what happens next. At least I think you will. I don’t presume to know if everyone will be happy. I hope so.

Cannonball is why I watch movies.

It stars a cast of people that honestly, only someone like me would care about, and it’s made by people just as colorful, a crew of folks that would go on to dominate the film industry after emerging from the Roger Corman film cycle. It’s everything great about Cannonball Run, but both more serious and ridiculous, sometimes within the very same scene.

Much like the aforementioned Cannonball Run, as well as Speed Zone and The Gumball Rally, this movie was inspired by Erwin G. “Cannonball” Baker, who raced across the United States several times and by the race named after him, the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. This illegal cross-continent road race was started by Car and Driver editor Brock Yates to protest the 55 MPH speed limit.

David Carradine plays Coy “Cannonball” Buckman, who has just been released from serving time for the death of a girl while he was driving drunk. He’s been entered into the illegal Los Angeles to New York City Trans-America Grand Prix in the hopes that he can get his racing career restarted.

That’s because Modern Motors has promised a contract to either him or his arch-rival Cade Redman (Bill McKinney, Deliverance, First Blood). Meanwhile, Coy has to somehow convince his lover/parole officer Linda Maxwell (Veronica Hamel, When Time Ran Out) to allow him to race.

Redman doesn’t have it easy either. His expenses are being paid by Sharma Capri (Judy “The Ozark Nightingale” Canova, who hosted her own national radio show from 1942 to 1955) and her client, country singer Perman Waters (Gerrit Graham, amazing as always, just like he is in Terrorvision and Phantom of the Paradise).

Other racers include:

• Young lovers Jim Crandell (Robert Carradine, Revenge of the Nerds) and Maryann (Belinda Balaski, every Joe Dante movie), who take her daddy’s Corvette and enter the race
• Terry McMillan (Carl Gottlieb, one of the writers of Jaws!), a middle-aged man driving a Chevrolet Blazer
• Beutell (Stanley Bennett Clay), who has taken a Lincoln Continental from a kindly old and rich couple and promised to get it to New York City safely
• A tricked out van driven by three waitresses — Sandy (Mary Woronov you have my heart), Ginny (stuntwoman Glynn Rubin) and Wendy (Diane Lee Hart, The Giant Spider Invasion)
• German driver Wolfe Messer (James Keach, Sunburst) in a De Tomaso Pantera
• Zippo (Archie Hahn, who was one of the Juicy Fruits in Phantom of Paradise), who is Coy’s best friend and drives a Pontiac Trans Am just like his buddy.

What Coy doesn’t know is that his brother Bennie (Dick Miller) has bet that he will win and will do anything to ensure that happens, including killing Messer. Meanwhile, McMillan has his car — and mistress Louisa (Louisa Moritz, Myra from Death Race 2000) — flown to the finish line.

Redman kicks Perman — who becomes a big country star when his song about the race takes off — and Sharma out of his car, but in his final battle with Coy, a piece of Perman’s guitar gets stuck in the gas pedal and he dies in a big crash. While all this is going on, Zippo is in the lead, so Bennie sends out a hitman to off him. Coy had put his girl in that car as he felt it was safer — actually it was Zippo who did the drunk driving and Coy covered for his friend — but a major crash ensues and Linda is taken to the hospital by Jim and Maryann.

Terry and Louisa arrive first at the finish line, but Louisa accidentally tells the judges that they flew most of the way. The girls in the van get lost and crash, while Coy makes it to the finish line. Just before he’s about to win, he learns Linda is in the hospital and races off to see her. This leaves his brother to be killed by gangster Lester Marks (Paul Bartel, who also directed the film) and his men (Sylvester Stallone makes a cameo, as does Martin Scorsese, as mafioso).

Jim and Maryann win the race and the $100,000, while Coy gets his racing contract and the girl, and Beutell delivers the now destroyed Lincoln to its owners.

Other actors who show up for the madness are John Herzfeld (who was in Cobra and wrote and directed the films Escape Plan: The Extractors and 2 Days In the Valley), Patrick Wright (Wicked Wicked, Caged Heat, Graduation Day), future directors and at the time Corman assistants/editors Allan Arkush (Rock ‘n Roll High School) and Joe Dante (more movies than I can name, all of them wonderful), Roger Corman himself as a District Attorney, Jonathan Kaplan (director of White Line Fever, The Accused and The Student Teachers), Aron Kincaid (who was the voice of the Iron Sheik and Bobby Heenan on Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling and Killer Croc on Batman: The Animated Series), Joseph McBride (writer of Rock ‘n Roll High School), Read Morgan (The Car), John Alderman (New Year’s Evil) and even superproducer Don Simpson, who co-wrote the movie with Bartel. This movie is what happens when everyone working for Corman at the time all gets together so the budget can have extras.

Paul Bartel did not enjoy making this film because he felt he was being typecast as an action director. But after he only made $5,000 after spending a year of his life making Death Race 2000, it was the only kind of movie people wanted from him. “Corman had drummed into me the idea that if Death Race 2000 had been harder and more real it would have been more popular. Like a fool, I believed him.”

Bartel wasn’t a fan of cars and racing, so he loaded the movie with cameos and character gimmicks. His favorite scene was when he plays the piano and sings while two gangsters beat up Dick Miller. And the end is pretty rough for a movie that’s so funny, so star David Carradine tried to talk to Bartel about how disturbing he intended it to be.

When Joe Bob Briggs did his How Rednecks Saved Hollywood show, he mentioned that this movie destroys Cannonball Run. As always, he was right.

Perhaps most amazing of all is the fact that this was co-produced by Shaw Brothers. Yes, Paul Bartel directed a Shaw Brothers movie.

Kuei Chih-Hung is one of my favorite Shaw Brothers directors and this feels like the beginnings of the mayhem and gross out magic that he would soon be famous for.

Liu Miao-Li (Liu Wu-Chi) and Chen Liang (Lam Wai-Tiu) are on the bus, excited that they are about to have a child when criminals attack, stealing their money and killing Chen. His wife’s life descents into sorrow — she’s robbed of her husband’s estate and a man tries to drag her into sex work — leading to her suicide. Yet before she dies, she makes arrangements to jump off a cliff wearing a red shroud, which is said to let the afterworld know that she needs revenge. As a Taoist priestess prays for Liu’s soul, she says, “When the door to hell is opened, there’s no turning back.”

Soon, everyone that has wronged her finds their bodies being mangled into all manner of nightmares, like neon boils exploding from their skin, another head growing from the shoulder and Fulci-level eyeball violence. Then, a woman’s stomach grows out of control, she eats a bowl of puke and chases her husband, as everyone involved must atone. Puke drinking is part of the journey. After this, heads will roll.

As this becomes episodic, the different criminals are followed to their grisly fates. This is 76 minutes of green gels, oozing pus and blood everywhere, all over everything. Most revenge movies just stick to guns. This goes all the way to occult torture on a level that few movies can dream of getting near.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Embryo was on the CBS Late Movie on February 25 and December 2, 1983 and March 17 and December 8, 1976.

Directed by Ralph Nelson (Charly) and written by Anita Doohan and Jack W. Thomas — who had stopped screenwriting for more than a decade to become a Los Angeles County deputy probation officer and write a series of books on troubled youth — Embryo finds Dr. Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson) living a life of solitude after losing his wife in a car accident, a fact that his sister-in-law/assistant Martha Douglas (Diane Ladd) reminds him of near daily.

One night, he runs over a dog — maybe he should stop driving — and ends up taking that dog’s unborn child and bringing it to healthy — if murderous — life in his lab. If he can play God like that, well, why not bring the unborn child of a suicide victim to life and have her become just about instantly 22 years old and named Victoria (Barbara Carrera)?

Despite how smart Victoria is, she’s also quickly dying as her body is addicted to the immune suppressant drug methotrexate and has no issue killing Martha to keep her origins a secret. And oh yeah — making sweet love to the much older doctor.

The end of this movie is ridiculous and I love it. I mean, rapidly aging clones drinking dead fetus fluids, the doctor watching her kill his son and chasing after her only to learn that she’s having his baby? 70s science fiction carny BS at its finest.

It goes without saying: Barbara Carrera really must have been grown in a lab. I don’t know if that kind of perfection can come from the coupling of a man and woman. It must have some kind of science added to it.

This also has a party scene with Roddy McDowell and Joyce Brothers during which chess is the main source of fun, not drinking. Sure.

Somehow, due to Cine Artists Pictures going out of business this movie is in the public domain.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Premonition was on the CBS Late Movie on January 29, 1982 and January 19, 1983.

A foster mother has The Premonition: her new daughter’s unstable biological mother is going to come and take her away. It comes true, so what happens next? PS – it’s beyond the power of an exorcist in only the way that an exploitation movie poster can promise.

Originally released as part of Arrow Video’s American Horror Project, this film was once titled Turtle Heaven. I watched this movie because of the always dependable Richard Lynch (Bad Dreams, Invasion U.S.A.), who plays the carnival clown boyfriend of Andrea, whose daughter Janie (Danielle Brisebois, TV’s Archie Bunker’s Place) has been adopted by the Bennett family. Oh yeah — Jeff Corey (who would go from being blacklisted to becoming the premier acting coach in Hollywood) shows up as a cop.

Two mothers — connected by the young girl they love and see as their child, as well as a psychic bond — go to war. That’s my best explanation of this very 1970’s film. But back to Richard Lynch — did you know how he got his scarred looking appearance? The hard way. In 1967, high on drugs, he set himself on fire in Central Park, burning more than 70% of his body. But after a year of recovery, he started to act.

You can watch this on Tubi.