When the master of the Iron Flag Clan and the rival Eagles group’s leader have been killed by the mysterious Spearman. The secret is that he has been hired by Iron Tiger (Feng Lu, Centipede from Five Deadly Venoms), who has allowed Iron Panther (Phillip Chung-Fung Kwok, Lizard from Five Deadly Venoms) to take the rap — even though the Iron Flag are known for being virtuous protectors of decency. Iron Tiger promises to send him money so he can be released, but the money never comes. What does happen is that multiple assassins are seeking to kill Iron Panther and in a surprise, the Spearman saves him.

The Spearman did kill the master, but was tricked into doing so. And now, Chow Feng leads not only the Iron Flag Clan, but their mortal enemies the Eagles. No, not with Don Henley and Timothy B. Schmit.

Now, Iron Panther and his brother Iron Monkey (Sheng Chiang, Crippled Avengers) are about to get revenge. Yet to battle the Ten Killers of the Underworld, they’re going to have to team with the Spearman.

Chang Cheh also directed Chinatown Kid, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, Shaolin Temple and so many other incredible martial arts films. Here, he introduces flag fighting to the form and wow, the battles in this are fascinating. They’re also quite gory with blood spraying everywhere and flags piercing evildoers.

The 88 Films blu ray release of Flag of Iron looks so great and comes in a package that I keep taking off my shelf and staring at, so excited that I own such a dynamic piece of art and a film that I’m sure I’ll come back to several times. It features a high definition 1080p presentation of the film with English and Mandarin (newly translated English subtitles) dialogue, as well as audio commentary by Mike Leeder and Arne Venema. The first run slipcase has art by Robert “Kung Fu Bob” O’Brien and comes with a booklet and poster. You can order it from MVD or Diabolik DVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally watched this movie way back on December 31, 2018, which is a pretty appropriate date to cover this early Cannon film. PS — what came first, the poster for Midnight or the German poster for this movie?

By 1980, every holiday was taken. All writer and director Emmett Alston had left was New Year’s Evil. It would have to do.

TV’s most beloved punk, Diane “Blaze” Sullivan (“Pinky” Tuscadero from TV’s Happy Days) is getting ready to count the night down from a Hollywood hotel. Things are great until Evil himself call, saying that in each timezone, he’ll be killing a naughty girl, with Diane being the last to die.

In an insane asylum nearby, a nurse is the first victim, with the killer audiotaping each kill and replaying them. Who is he? A crazy fan? A religious nut? Her son? Her husband?

Whomever it is — I won’t tell — he dies by jumping off the roof of the hotel. But as Diane is loaded into the ambulance, her son (Grant Cramer, Killer Klowns from Outer Space) is at the wheel, wearing the mask of the killer.

The big selling point of this movie for me? Fake 1980’s punks. There is nothing like the Hollywood mainstream ideal of what punk rockers are like, because it is always far from the truth and always awesome.

This is fine, I guess. I wanted it to be something more, but maybe I demand too much from 1980’s slashers.

You can get this on blu ray from Kino Lorber, who have released it a new 2K version of this movie on blu ray with lots of extras, including audio commentary by director Emmett Alston, moderated by Code Red’s Bill Olsen, The Making of New Year’s Evil, a trailer and new art by Vince Evans.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon review and watchalong here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The first time I saw The Apple, I was in the throes of losing my job and starting a new company and feeling lost. This is the movie that not only made me feel like I could go on, but inspired me to start writing more about films and why they mattered to me. It originally appeared on the site on May 31, 2019. Hey, hey, hey, BIMs on the way.

You know how everyone thinks Cannon put out some completely crazy movies? If you haven’t seen The Apple (also known as Star Rock), you haven’t seen their full power. Directed by Menahem Golan, this slice of sheer madness is a movie I use to test the resolve of anyone brave enough to watch movies with me.

The genesis of this film begins in 1975. Israeli rock producer Coby Recht was signed to Barclay Records and began to feel distrustful of show business. He worked it into a story with his wife Iris Yotvat and brought it to the attention of his longtime friend Menahem. After hearing the demos for the songs, the producer/director instructed Recht to go to Los Angeles immediately. They were making the movie.

Yotvat said, “That was marvelous. That was just fantastic to think that it was going to be a movie all of the sudden. It was just amazing.”

It wasn’t going to stay that way.

Recht and Yotvat lived in a villa that Menahem provided, writing six screenplay drafts in three weeks. As those drafts progressed, the story became more comical and less Orwellian. Soon, things were getting corny, out of touch and out of date. If you’ve seen any of the movies that Golan was involved in, you can see how that might be true.

After auditioning thousands of hopefuls, Recht settled on Catherine Marie Stewart for the lead role of Bibi. Who is a singer. Not a dancer, like Stewart. He figured she could learn, but the producers decided to have her voice dubbed.

Tensions only got worse once filming began, as what started as a $4 million dollar movie turned into $10 million and then more. Editor Alain Jakubowicz claimed that Golan shot around a million feet of footage, with six cameras of coverage for every dance number, ending up with a four-hour rough cut.

The movie got way bigger than its scriptwriters intended. Shooting in West Berlin lasted forever, with a five-day shoot for the opening number, the song “Speed” being filmed at the Metropol nightclub (which held the world record for biggest indoor laser show) and some scenes were actually shot inside a gas chamber that had killed people during World War II.

Nigel Lythgoe, who later was a big part of American Idol, choreographed the film, saying that some days were “really, really depressing” and others “very, very stressful.” The cast and crew hated the script, but here they were, making the film.

Menahem and Recht’s battles soon got worse. The writer felt he should be in London mixing the songs (the sessions had more than 200 artists involved), but Menahem demanded that he show up at the shoot. The first day he was there, he witnessed the uncut version “Paradise Day” which featured fifteen dinosaurs and a tiger that broke free and escaped. This scene also contained elephants getting their trunks stuck in the set, actors collapsing while wearing a too hot brontosaurus costume and a set that made it near impossible for people to dance on and cameras to move around. Removing this scene makes the Biblical end of the movie come out of nowhere. That’s right. None of this is in the film.

Catherine Marie Stewart has stated that none of this rattled Menahem. In fact, he was convinced that The Apple was going to be embraced: “Menahem was very passionate about what he was doing. He had very lofty ideas about the project. He thought this was going to break him into the American film industry. It had, you know, all the elements that he thought were necessary at that time. It was the early eighties and there were a lot of musicals. And Menahem thought that was his ticket into the American film industry.”

So what happened?

The plot is basically Adam and Eve meets Faust. Bibi (Stewart) and Alphie (George Gilmour) are contestants in the 1994 Worldvision Song Festival. They’re talented but easily defeated by the machinations of Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal, Kronsteen in From Russian With Love) and BIM (Boogalow International Music).

The evil leader soon signs the duo but they soon fall victim to the darkness of show business. Bibi is caught up in the drugs and sex and glamour, while Alphie is beaten by cops and nearly dies to save her. He also lives with a woman who is either his mother or lover or landlady and no one ever explains it to us.

Eventually, they escape and live as hippies, having a child. Mr. Boogalow finds them and claims that Bibi owes him $10 million dollars, but soon God, known here as Mr. Topps (Joss Ackland, The House That Dripped Blood, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) takes them away in his Rolls Royce and the Rapture occurs.

There are numerous scenes where people put stickers, called BIM Marks, all over their faces. Everyone has camel toe. And the movie is nearly 100% disco.

The movie premiered at the 1980 Montreal World Film Festival. To say it did not go well is an understatement.

Attendees hated the film so much that they launched giveaway records of the soundtrack at the screen. Menahem was so devastated that he almost jumped off his hotel balcony before being saved by his business partner, Yoram Globus. A similar scene happened at its second premiere at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood.

The director said, “It’s impossible that I’m so wrong about it. I cannot be that wrong about the movie. They just don’t understand what I was trying to do.”

I get it, Menahem. You were just trying to get people to understand the power of love and music and being hippies a full decade after any of that mattered. You didn’t care if anyone else got it. You had a vision. And we’re not talking about any of those critics today. No, we’re talking about you. We’re talking about The Apple.

This is a movie that wears its heart messily all over its spandex crotch. The songs are ridiculous. The dancing is, at times, poor. The story makes no sense at all. You’re lucky to sit and witness it. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched it!

You can get the Scorpion Releasing blu ray of this film on Diabolik DVD or watch it for free on Tubi.

BONUS! You can hear Becca and me talk all about The Apple on our podcast.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode with The Apple here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally watched this movie as part of our Not So Classic Monsters week on January 10, 2022. Thanks for checking out another appearance of this early Cannon movie.

Charles B. Griffith — the Quentin Tarantino-named “Father of Redneck Cinema” — is credited with 29 movies but he probably wrote plenty more. From 1955 to 1961, he was Roger Corman’s main screenwriter, starting with two unfilmed Westerns (Three Bright Banners and Hangtown) and moving on to an uncredited rewrite on It Conquered the World and his first credit Gunslinger. He went on to make Not of This Earth, The Flesh and the Spur, The Undead, Teenage Doll, Naked Paradise, Attack of the Crab Monsters and Rock All Night before making two movies — Ghost of the China Sea and Forbidden Island —  for Columbia (which didn’t go well).

Griffith reunited with Corman after and really went into the prime of his career of making movies, writing stuff like Beast from the Haunted Cave, Ski Troop Attack, The Little Shop of Horrors, A Bucket of Blood, Creature from the Haunted Sea and many, many more.

His films rank among some of my favorites of all time — The Wild Angels, Death Race 2000, rewrites on Barbarella — and he went on to direct, act and — as all must in the 80s — work for Cannon Films.

Beyond a script Cannon tried for years to get made — Oy Vey, My Son Is Gay — Griffith made this movie, which started as part of a series of joke movie titles that he shared with Francis Ford Coppola at a Christmas party. He showed them to Menahem Golan — half of all things Cannon — and after writing The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington didn’t work out, Griffith made up a story to go with the title, all about a hippie who creates a drug that makes anyone that takes it into an ad exec. Golan bought it, as long as the ugly guy became the good guy.

In typical Cannon fashion, Griffith had three weeks to write and do preproduction, four weeks to shoot and two weeks to edit. Then, as always, the rug was pulled out Cannon style: They wanted Oliver Reed. Great actor. Maybe not a comedic actor.

Griffith told Sense of Cinema, “Heckyl and Hype could have been a very good picture. Oliver was great as Heckyl. Wonderful. He played the part with a kind of New York accent and everything, but when he was Hype, he didn’t know how to do it… Reed played Hype as Oliver Reed, slow and ponderous.”

It’s a good looking movie, but man, it’s a movie that has no idea what it wants to be. Kind of like Cannon at the time, which had just been bought by two Israeli madmen who were about to take the small New York studio and make it into something so much bigger than it was supposed to be.

Boaz Davidson, the man who brought us Lemon Popsicle, the American remix The Last American Virgin and The Expendables, directed this early Cannon film, which is all about two kids who fall in love (Danny and Alice, played by Timothy Wead and Mary Cannon), move to New York City and watch it all fall apart.

There’s a good supporting cast — there’s nothing that I ever disliked Vincent Schiavelli , T.K. Carter and William Sanderson in — and hey look there’s Shirley Stolen from The Honeymoon Killers.

The kids fight, they reconcile, they work hard, they hit a wall, they nearly break up and almost lose their kid, but the end brings it all back together in a joyous courtroom moment that had me say, “You know, they’re still going to lose that kid to CPS, right?”

This really seems like an afterschool special made by maniacs that don’t really feel like giving you a moral or a lesson, which really seems to be a description of so many Cannon films when you get right down to it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As part of an American Giallo week, we watched Schizoid on January 9, 2018. Now it’s back as part of this month of all things Cannon. 

Also, this isn’t the retitled America edit of Fulci’s Lizard In a Woman’s Skin.

Julie (Marianna Hill, Messiah of Evil, The Baby) writes the lonely hearts column for a newspaper, but she’s suddenly getting more than letters from the lovelorn. An anonymous person is sending her letters threatening to murder people. And at the very same time, members of her group therapy session are getting stabbed and killed, one by one. Is there a connection?

Schizoid has all the markings of a giallo — the main character is in the middle of a murder investigation and has no idea who is behind it, while many of the killings are from the murderer’s POV. And let’s not forget the black leather gloves!

It’s missing the insane devotion to fashion and interior design, but we can’t hold that against it, as at least Dr. Pieter (Klaus Kinski, a legit real life maniac who always plays maniacs on screen) has an interesting home.

Right from the beginning, when the ladies of Dr. Pieter’s encounter group luxuriate in a hot tub, we get the idea that someone is watching. When one of them leaves, she is run off the road, chased into a farmhouse and repeatedly stabbed with a pair of scissors. Several days later, a couple that’s trying to have sex is surprised by the body.

Are the letters connected? Why do they mention a gun when the murders are done with a knife? Who is the killer? Is it Gilbert (Christopher Lloyd, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension), the weirdest person in her therapy group? Is it her ex-husband, Doug (Craig Wasson, Body Double) who argues with her every day because they work in the same place? Or how about Dr. Pieter, because he’s Klaus Kinski? Beyond that, he’s having sex with every single one of his patients, including a stripper named Pat (Flo Gerrish, Don’t Answer the Phone) who he takes against a hot water heater! And hey — his relationship with Alison, (Donna Wilkes, Jaws 2, Angel) his daughter, feels super incestual. Maybe that’s who the killer is!

This film also follows the giallo tradition by having police officers that are so ineffectual that they depend on the heroine to do her own investigation with no protection and only a special phone line to help her.

Alison and Dr. Pieter argue repeatedly, especially after he grows closer to Julie, bringing her home to dinner. She begins to dress in her mother’s clothes or as a little girl and even steals her father’s gun.

The police put in the phone line, but every single call seems to be cranky readers who are angry about Julie’s column. Then, Alison calls her from a payphone, gun in hand. Julie gets Alison to come visit her at her house, where her husband (she doesn’t call him ex-husband) is doing some repair work. Alison throws out a whole bunch of the letters and brandishes her gun, but it’s unloaded. Then, the phone rings.

It’s Dr. Pieter, who demands to know where this number reaches Julie. He comes to visit, but someone takes a shot at him. We don’t see who, but he assumes that it is Alison. The lights go out and we have no idea who is in the room with him. The phone rings again, but it’s not Alison or Julie on the line. They’re both tied up and a man is on the other line — but who!

Should I reveal it here? I won’t. But I will say that this movie is truly a giallo because it’s the person that is the least likely suspect and the police come running at the last moment. And by that, I mean just in time for the credits.

Director David Paulsen also brought Savage Weekend to the screen, but is more well known for his primetime soap opera work on shows like Knots Landing, Dallas and Dynasty.

Want to see this one for yourself? Vinegar Syndrome has just released this on 4K with X-Ray.

You can also listen to The Cannon Canon episode that discusses this movie here.

There aren’t many movies that have a scene where Adam West is nude in an Austin Powers way and has a famous madame go down on him while he takes a long satisfying puff on a cigarette, but here with this early Cannon film, which was the third and final in the series* of films about Xaviera Hollander, a Dutch call girl who grew up in a Japanese-run internment camp and going on to be New York City’s top madame before writing the best-selling The Happy Hooker: My Own Story, acting in My Pleasure Is My Business, releasing a board game and recording the album Xaviera! which has spoken word thoughts on sex, her singing The Beatles’ “Michele” and then some early JOI content including her having audio sex with Toronto rock star Ronnie Hawkins.

Martine Beswick (Zora in From Russia With Love, Paula Caplan in Thunderball, a cavewoman named Nupondi who battles Racquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., Sister Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, the Queen of Evil in Oliver Stone’s Seizure, plus From a Whisper to a Scream, Critters 4 and the Fred Olen Rey movie Cyclone; more people should be worshipping her) is Xaviera, who has been flown to Hollywood to discuss the movie of her life that she doesn’t want to make. She’d rather just have fun with her business, which she’s still a very hands — and other body parts — on part of, servicing a cop played by Dick Miller in the first scene. Martine may be following Lynn Redgrave and Joey Heatherton in the role, but if she can’t measure up to their acting — actually, she totally does — she’s more willing to toss off her clothes.

Warkoff Brothers Studios — run by Phil Silvers! — wants to get the signature from her to make this, but they want it cheap, so they use Lionel Lamely (West) to get her to fall in love. Come on, people. This is the Happy Hooker! She turns the tables by getting her girls to make the movie cheap and bringing young Warkoff Brothers exec Robby Rottman (Chris Lemmon) to her side, making an independent version of her film financed by horizontal assets.

Her ladies are Tanya Boyd from Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks; January 1977 Playboy Playmate of the Month Susan Kiger from Death Screams; 1969 Miss Utah Lindsay Bloom who was Maybelle on The Dukes of Hazzard; twins Candi and Randi Brough and Dana Feller, who was only in one other movie, the Cannon weirdness that is Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype.

This is the kind of movie that has Army Archerd play himself and satirize Hollywood while completely being Hollywood. But it’s fun, all of the women have way more brains and agency than the men and maybe we can overlook that the end of the movie has Richard Deacon — yes, Mel Cooley from The Dick Van Dyke Show — and West dressed as women. And hey — Edie Adams is in this, too.

It’s total fluff, but the kind of fluff that makes me happy. There’s never any real tension, nothing other than the trans jokes at the end that are troublesome and carefree late 70s nudity. 15 year old me gives this movie unlimited stars; 49 year old me can’t believe that I still watch and write about stuff like this.

*There are two other movies inspired by her, The Life and Times of Xaviera Hollander and The Best Part of a Man.