Editor’s Note: We first reviewed this Cirio H. Santiago (July 5, 2019) flick — originally known as Death Force — that came back in a post-Rambo world to video as Fighting Mad, although it’s more blaxploitation that Namsxploitation and more Kung fu than Rambo. Call it what you will, but it’s a Cirio war flick that fits great into our “Philippines War Week” of reviews.

An American soldier — on his way home from the Vietnam War — is left for dead and is saved by a pair of Japanese stragglers from WWII, who train him in the way of the samurai. This movie is also known as Deadly Force, The Force and The Black Samurai, as well as several other titles. It’s a compound of blaxploitation and the Kung fu genres, with some social commentary mixed in along the way.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Japanese soldiers who didn’t surrender after World War II. Here, they help our hero Doug — James Iglehart, who was Randy Black from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls — learn the ancient fighting skills he’ll never to make it back home.

Turns out that Doug and his buddies —  McGee (Leon Isaac Kennedy, Too Sweet from the Penitentary) and Morelli (Carmen Argenziano, Grave of the Vampire) —  have stolen gold on the way back from Vietnam for a crime boss. On the way back, they stab our hero, slash his throat and dump him off the boar. Luckily, those aforementioned Japanese soldiers are ready to teach him that violence really does solve issues.

McGee really wants Doug’s wife Maria, who is played by Jayne Kennedy, who appeared on the cover of Plaboy and was selected by Coca Cola USA as the Most Admired Black Woman in America. She was married to the actor playing McGee — Leon Isaac Kennedy — in real life. And back in the days before the Internet, the two appeared in a sex tape so infamous, it’s referenced in a Mr. Show sketch (it’s at the beginning of the “Show Me Your Weenis!” episode where Wyckyd Sceptre gets caught on tape).

The soldiers that help our hero are played by Joe Mari Avellana, who was the Scourge in Wheels of Fire, and Joonee Gamboa, whose characters constantly bicker back and forth.

This movie has an amazing tagline: “She’s in Playboy. He’s out of Penitentary. Jayne Kennedy and Leon Isaac in Fighting Mad.” A bit misleading, as he’s the villain, but what can you do?

Cirio H. Santiago is to blame — or praise — for this. He made more movies than we’ve probably reviewed on this site like Wheels of Fire, Demon of Paradise and Stryker — and a whole bunch of Rambo knockoffs we’re getting to before the end of this week.

You can get Fighting Mad on Mill Creek’s new Soul Team Six blu ray/DVD collection, along with five other films. It’s also available under the title Vengeance Is Mine on a double disc with Vampire Hookers from Vinegar Syndrome. Or you can watch it on Amazon Prime.

DISCLAIMER: Mill Creek sent us the Soul Team Six set, but we were planning on buying it anyway. It has no bearing on this review.

Norman Tokar only directed one non-Disney film — Where the Red Fern Grows — and also made plenty of episodes of Leave It to Beaver. But he’s best known for his run of films at Walt’s place, including The Apple Dumpling Gang and Candleshoe.

A UFO has made an emergency landing, which leads to the U.S. government taking it to what we can only assume is Area 51. It’s pilor, Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7, escapes because he looks like an ordinary Earth cat. The major difference between this cat and mine is that the majority of my feline friends like to throw up hairballs at all hours while Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 has a special collar that gives him telekinetic and telepathic abilities.

Franklin “Frank” Wilson (Ken Berry) soon takes the cat in and names him Jake. He’s the key to getting the cat back home, even if no one in the Energy Research Laboratory believes in him. He also has a girlfriend named Elizabeth “Liz” Bartlett (Sandy Duncan) who loves her kitten Lucybelle so much that she brings her along on dates.

This is the kind of movie where an alien cat raises the money for gold by betting on sports and playing against pool sharks. I guess that’s what happens when you crash land on our mudball and come up against bad guys like Roddy McDowall.

Ironically, this film pairs McLean Stevenson with the man who replaced him on M*A*S*H*, Harry Morgan. Plus, Dr. Wenger is an actor who knows all about animals who can do magical things. That’s Alan Young, who was Wilbur on Mister Ed.

Jaws 2 wasn’t going to make anyone happy.

How do you recapture the magic of a film that took so many by surprise, even if it was calculated to do exactly what it set out to accomplish? Then again, until Rocky II came out, this was the most successful sequel in history.

Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown realized that if they didn’t make this movie, someone else would. You know who wouldn’t be coming along? Director Steven Spielberg, who referred to sequels as “carny tricks” and had such a bad time making the original that there was no way he was getting back on the boat.

John D. Hancock, who wrote and directed Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, was the pick to make it instead but after execs saw the dark movie he was making, they let him go. Of course, the fact that he didn’t want Universal President Sidney Sheinberg’s wife Lorraine Gary (Ellen Brody) to be on the boat rescuing people may have had something to do with his firing.

There’s also the matter of what his version of the movie was going to be about. Taking the idea that the town of Amity was in debt to organized crime, the film would open with a boarded-up ghost town with no tourist economy — and the mob coming to collect — being saved by a new resort being built on the island before a second shark appears.

Strangely enough, this is when Spielberg considered returning, planning a movie based on to direct Quint’s Indianapolis speech. However, the sequel would have to wait a year until he could make Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Production designer Joe Alves and Verna Fields proposed co-directing the film, but the Directors Guild of America objected to one of their members being replaced by a crew member who was not in their union. Jeannot Szwarc, who made Bug and eventually Santa Claus: The Movie and Supergirl, came in.

You know who wasn’t all that happy at this point? Roy Scheider.

The actor had quit The Deer Hunter two weeks into production due to creative differences, so Universal offered to just let him out of his three-movie contract if he made Jaws 2. He claimed that there was nothing new to do in the movie. He went so far as to act mentally deranged so they would fire him, but his new deal made him 400% more than the first movie and got a percentage of the film’s net profit.

However, he pretty much got along with Szwarc like a human and a shark. He felt that the director ignored the principal actors and was wasted time with extras and technical shots. In a mediation meeting, talks devolved into physical violence and then letters were exchanged.

You have to love that the very day a new hotel opens on Amity Island, a new great white shows up and starts killing divers and water skiers before surviving a boat explosion to murder even more people and a killer whale. Take that, Orca!

Police Chief Brody knows it’s a shark. He tells Mayor Larry Vaughn again and you’d think Larry would learn by now, but he claims there’s no way a second shark could come to Amity. And you’d think that Brody’s son Mike would know by now that sharks are out to kill you and all of your teenage friends, but if people weren’t stupid, we wouldn’t have a movie.

In the second Witch Mountain movie, Ike Eisenmann, Kim Richards and Denver Pyle all come back as Tony, Tia, and Uncle Bené, a family of extraterrestrials with special powers. How could they make this even better, you wonder? How about by having Bette Davis as the film’s villain, a woman named Letha Wedge, who is financing the mad science of Dr. Victor Gannon (Christopher Lee).

Just imagine how many bad movies I’ve enjoyed just because Ms. Davis or Sir Lee appeared in. Both of them in the same film? You know that I jumped up and down for most of the run time of this.

It’s funny because the bad guys have such cross purposes: Gannon wants recognition and power, while Letha merely wants to achieve better ROI. They see Tony using his power, kidnap him and turn him into a robot that steals gold for them.

This movie also has kids living in a destroyed mansion — the Earthquake Gang — and Jack Soo from Barney Miller as Mr. “Yo-Yo” Yokomoto, an adult on the side of the good guys. Sadly, Soo was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the autumn of 1978, several months after the film’s release. He’d die just a few months later, making this his final appearance.

While John Hough would return to direct, the script for this was written by Malcolm Marmorstein, who wrote 69 episodes of Dark Shadows, the incredible Juan López Moctezuma-directed Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary; Pete’s Dragon and wrote and directed Dead Men Don’t Die and Love Bites.

William Goldman — who pretty much owns cinema when you think of it, between writing Heat, The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man and so many other great scripts — wrote the book and screenplay for this one, which concerns the relationship between Charles “Corky” Withers (Anthony Hopkins) and his foul-mouthed dummy Fats.

You’ve seen it before with The Great Gabbo, but have you seen it with Ann-Margaret hooking up with a mentally ill man who channels his rage through a wooden doll? Or a scene where Burgess Meredith is killed by being bludgeoned with said inanimate person and then drowned?

Richard Attenborough may have directed this, A Chorus Line and Ghandi, but did he get an action figure made from any of those movies? Many kids will know him only as the man who welcomed us to Jurassic Park, John Hammond.

When asked what role he’d always wanted and didn’t get, Gene Wilder revealed that it was the role of Corky. Attenborough and Goldman wanted him for the part, but producer Joseph E. Levine said that a comedian would take away from the emotional story.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Welcome to yet another movie that got me in trouble when Becca came down and saw a scene out of context, 1978’s Israeli coming of age movie Lemon Popsicle/Eskimo Limon.

This takes place in the Israel in the 1950s, a time when most of this film’s budget is spent on the music. The poster claims it has 24 different artists, including Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent and Chuck Berry. Producer Menahem Golan — one of the saints of scummy cinema who ran Cannon — claimed that the music rights cost more than making the rest of the movie.

Nili or Niki in the American edit is the new girl at school who meets three boys whose whole lives revolve around sex. They are Benzi/Benji, Momo/Bobby iand Yudale/Huey. Of course, nice guy Benzi falls for her, but she’s into the bad boy Momo, who tells his friends that he plans on taking her virginity and will soon get rid of her. Benzi is such a nice guy — we’d call him an incel today — that he doesn’t warn her or tell his friend to maybe not treat her so poorly. And before we know it, she’s pregnant. He becomes her emotional friend and even takes her to get her abotion, which should lead to them as a couple yet just means that she gets back with Momo.

If you’re reading this and saying, “Sam, are you describing The Last American Virgin?” Congratulations. Writer and director Boaz Davidson remade this movie four years later in the United States, destroying minds and reaping souls.

Unlike that movie, there’s no scene where all the boys line up to measure one another’s members or all sleep with the same older woman one after the other. For all the very foreign feeling in The Last American Virgin that don’t really translate, those moments would really stick out.

Since the release of Lemon Popsicle, there have been seven official sequels: Going Steady, Hot Bubblegum, Private Popsicle, Baby Love, Up Your Anchor, Young Love and Summertime Blues. There was also a spin-off, 1983’s Private Maneuvers, and the 2001 reboot, The Party Goes On. That’s because this series was huge in Germany and Japan.

“Evil does not die…it waits…to be reborn…”

Yet sadly this would be the last movie for William Girdler, who died in a helicopter crash while scouting locations for his next movie.

It’s a shame because Girdler had a talent for taking cheap movies with big ideas and making them beyond entertaining. This movie features a wild cast for him, including Tony Curtis as psychic Harry Erskine, Michael Ansara as shaman John Singing Rock and Susan Strasberg as our heroine Karen Tandy — who is suffering from a gigantic growth in her neck that ends up being the reincarnation of Misquamacus, a wonder worker of the Wampanoag tribe.

Misquamacus comes from the book of the same name by author Graham Masterton, who brought the villain back in his novels Revenge of the Manitou, Burial, Manitou Blood, Blind Panic and Plague of the Manitou, as well as the short story “Spirit Jump.”

Plus, there’s Stella Stevens, Burgess Meredith, the “First Lady of Radio” Lurene Tuttle, Ann Sothern and Jon Ceder on hand for this body horror by way of possession films by way of Native American hoodoo bit of lunacy. I also kind of dig how the posters would say, “In the grisly tradition of Alien” when it was made a year before that movie.

I’ve gone back and watched this again and I’m amazed by it. The image of Misquamacus coming out of Strasberg’s body is horrifying and the end battle, with Curtis yelling into the void of space, is the kind of movie magic I want more of.

David Seltzer was asked to write this movie but refused, as he didn’t believe in sequels. Producer Harvey Bernhard outlined the story himself and Stanley Mann was hired to write the screenplay. Mike Hodges — Flash Gordon‘s director! — started the film but was replaced with Don Taylor (The Final Countdown). It was decided that the music of Jerry Goldsmith was the one thing that could not change.

A week after Robert and Katherine Thorn are buried, an archaeologist tries to convince a colleague that Damien Thorn is the Antichrist and he wants to get the means to kill him to his new family. Taking the unbelieving man to a series of ruins that has Damien’s face on several murals, the two are soon buried alive and killed.

Fast-forward seven years and Damien is living in Chicago with his uncle Richard Thorn (William Holden, who passed on the first film because he didn’t want to be in a movie about the devil) and his wife Ann (Lee Grant). He gets along with his cousin Mark, his classmate in a military school. Basically, Damian’s life is awesome, except that his aunt Marion hates him. Well, the night after she makes that known, a raven shows up and she’s dead.

In this movie, if you see a raven*, someone is about to die horribly. Where the first film had some aspirations to art, this film has aspirations to being a supernatural slasher of sorts. And I am more than fine with that.

There are people who fall under the ice and drown, reporters whose eyes are pecked out before they’re run over by a truck, an entire class gets gassed, trains impaling folks and so much more outright decimation of human beings. This is a movie unafraid to wipe out every single person in its cast in abject glee.

I mean, when they analyze the bone marrow and blood of Damian, they figure out that he has jackal DNA. That’s the type of plot twist that I demand that more movies pull on me. The fact that it’s Meshach Taylor and that he’s soon torn in half makes it even better.

*In the novelization of the film, the raven is actually Damien’s subconscious and the murders that it carries out come from Damien’s id.