Written, directed and starring Lau Kar-leung (Executioners From Shaolin, Drunken Master II, Return to the 36th Chamber), Legendary Weapons of China has eighteen different weapons, including the rope dart, double tiger hook swords, double hammers, a battle axe, the snake halberd, Kwan Dao, twin broadswords, the double-edged sword, a Chinese spear, the three-section chain whip, double daggers, double crutches, a monk’s spade, a staff, the tiger fork, a rattan shield, the single butterfly sword and the three-section staff.

Having been defeated by the gunpowder and bullets of the West during the Boxer Rebellion, multiple Chinese fight schools are trying to learn how martial arts can defeat guns. However,  Lei Kung refuses to allow any more of his students to die trying to use their fighting skills to block bullets. In retaliation, the rival schools brand him a traitor and send their greatest fighters to kill him.

The foremost of them is Master Li Lin-ying who has hired Lei Ying, Tieh Hau and Ti Tan (Gordon Liu!) to get the job done. But if you’re expecting a straight martial arts film, this one has voodoo martial artists controlling other fighters and no small dose of the supernatural.

It also has long segments of comedy which have led many to disike it. I had no issues with it, as this is a big movie filled with big ideas that tries to break a lot of the mold of the form. Also, I’m always amazed at what gets cut in the UK, as every scene of throwing stars and nunchaku was eliminated there (which helpful reader Scott Napier pointed out to me is four countries and not just England: Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland).

This is worth it just for the final battle in which all of the legendary weapons are used in combat by a master so wise in their handling that he doesn’t even need to defeat his opponent to win the fight.

The 88 Films blu ray release of Legendary Weapons of China features a high definition 1080p version of the film with English and Cantonese (with newly translated English subtitles) dialogue. It also has two audio commentaries, one with Asian cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, as well as one with Frank Djeng. There are also interviews with David West, Gordon Liu and Titus Ho, the original trailer and gorgeous slipcase art by Robert “Kung Fu Bob” O’Brien with a poster and booklet. You can get this from MVD and Diaboik DVD.

It has been 25 years since the 1957 Fillmore High School basketball team won the Pennsylvania state championship. For some of the players, this has been a moment that has dominated everything that has happened in their lives ever since.

George Sitkowski (Bruce Derk) is the mayor of Scranton and fighting to stay in office, while James Daley (Stacy Keach) is a school principal struggling to provide for his family as his brother Tom (Martin Sheen) is headed for rock bottom. Phil Romano (Paul Sorvino, who originated the role in the play) may be the most successful of the team, but will betray anything and anyone. Their coach, played by Robert Mitchum, still sees them as teenage boys, not men much closer to the close of their lives.

From the bigotry and cruelty of the coach* to the fact that the star player refuses to attends these reunions, the team soon realizes just how hollow it all is.

Starting as an off-Broadway in 1972. this moved to Broadway and played for 844 performances before Cannon produced the film, working with creator Jason Miller — yes, from The Exorcist — to make this in Scranton, a place he grew up in. In 1999, Sorvino directed an update for Showtime in which he played Mitchum’s role and cast Vincent D’Onofrio, Gary Sinise, Tony Shalhoub and Terry Kinney in the roles of the team.

While this movie failed to make money, it did legitimize Cannon as a real studio.

*Speaking of issues of bigotry and cruelty, Mitchum was accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial after he gave an interview to Esquire. According to this article from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, when “…Mitchum was asked about the slaughter of six million Jews, the actor replied, “So the Jews say,” He added. “I don’t know. People dispute that.””

In a letter to the JTA’s Hollywood columnist Herbert Luft, Mitchum said that early in his meeting with the interviewer, he recited a racist speech delivered by Coach Delaney, which was “mistakenly believed to be my own. From that point on, he approached me as the character in the script and in playing the devil’s advocate in a prankish attempt to string him along we compounded a tragedy of errors.”

Then, at the premiere of the movie, he assaulted a female reporter and threw a basketball from the movie at a Time photographer, smashing the camera into her face, knocking out two of her teeth and losing his salary from this movie to pay her for the damages.

You can learn more about That Championship Season in Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

EDITOR’S NOTE: No movie shows just how Cannon’s view of America and America itself are so different than this movie. I love it for that while being destroyed by it every time I watch it. If you haven’t seen it, skip this, watch the film and come back. We originally had this on the site on June 12, 2021.

This movie is a destructive force that still leaves hurt feelings decades after it’s been viewed. Sure, it’s a remake of director Boaz Davidson’s Lemon Popsicle and that movie ends the same way, but that movie came back with plenty of sequels. Once The Last American Virgin drops its bomb on you, it lets you watch everything burn and then that’s it. There’s no happiness, no hope, just the song “Just Once” and the destruction of the film’s hero in a way that there’s no coming back from.

When a movie has a title like Lemon Popsicle, you don’t know what to expect. It’s a foreign movie released in 1978 that could be about anything. But when the title is The Last American Virgin and the movie comes out in the middle of the teen sex comedy craze, you don’t expect things to go this way.

Gary (Lawrence Monsoon, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter) is a pizza delivery boy with two friends, the cool ladies man Rick (Steve Antin, Jessie in the “Jessie’s Girl” video) and David (Joe Rubbo). Most of their hijinks revolve around trying to have sex, like telling girls they have cocaine — it’s really Sweet’n Low — or sleeping with a prostitute or Carmello, a Spanish woman who Gary meets while delivering pizza. Everyone gets their turn except for Gary, who is the titular character.

Yet he has better plans for his first time. He’s in love with Karen (Diane Franklin!), but she’s in love with Rick, who plans on sleeping with her once and dumping her. He does exactly that, getting her pregnant. She turns to Gary, who sells almost everything he owns and borrows money to pay for her abortion, then nurses her during the lowest moment in her life. They share a kiss and she invites him to her 18th birthday party.

That’s when the pain hits hard.

This film takes what Lemon Popsicle did on its soundtrack and transports it to the 80s, which is an incredibly smart move. The music is vital to this film’s success, featuring heavy hitters like The Cars, Devo, The Police, Journey, REO Speedwagon, U2, Blondie and the Human League. I mean, how do you think Bono felt when he saw this and his song “I Will Follow,” which is about his mom who died when he was only 14, is used over an abortion montage?

So much of this movie is very Cannon Films and that’s also the joy of it. It also leaves me with so many questions. Why does Gary bring Karen a bag of oranges when she’s lying in the hospital? Why would they make this seem like a teen movie and give it that ending, when if it was a date movie it’s filled with way too much raunchy sex? And how about the fact that the actors who played Gary and Rick, who come to blows in the movie over the girl who got between their friendship, have come out? How does Gary not realize that Karen’s friend Rose, who he gets set up with, is geeky hot (maybe this makes more sense in 2021 than 1982)? And how did cinematographer Adam Greenberg (who also filmed Terminator 2, 10 to Midnight, Near Dark and many more) feel about recreating so many of the same shots that he’d made in Lemon Popsicle?

Director Davidson also made Hospital Massacre, Salsa and American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, movies that would not even hint at the art that he would make with this movie. If you’ve ever seen the poster for this and laughed it off as a simple teen comedy, I want you to take a chance on this movie. But be prepared for the final moments.

I’ll be honest: I can’t find this movie anywhere. But in my quest to cover every Cannon movie, I feel like it’s important to share an overview.

Directed by Joel Silberg, who would direct Lambada, Breakin’ and Rappin’ for Cannon, as well as the pro wrestling movie Bad Guys, from a script by Ei Tavor, who wrote Lemon Popsicle, Going Steady, Hot Bubblegum, Private Popsicle, Salsa and Lemon Popsicle: The Party Goes On, this is the tale of a gorgeous deaf-mute who has both her riding instructor and her guardian in love with her.

Yes, it has sex on a horse, and yes, I only know about this movie because of Austin Trunick’s perfect book, The Cannon Film Guide: Volume I, 1980–1984.

If you have a copy, I’d love to see this. But after reading what Austin saw, I may not be fully invested in my need to see this.

When two doctors from Tel Aviv join Doctors Without Borders, they end up going to Thailand and leaving their ten-year-old daughter Aya behind in a kibbutz (a communal settlement where all wealth is held in common and profits are reinvested) where the kids live together by age, not gender, meaning that she must go from being an only child to suddenly being surrounded by boys who even shower with her.

Made in Israel by director and writer Michal Bat-Adam, this is an early Cannon release by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus as they started to figure out what their new American studio was going to be.

Honestly, if you told me that I’d be watching a movie that has a fight between kids over a stamp collection, I would tell you that you were crazy. But if you said, well, it’s a Cannon movie, then I’d say, “Well, put it on.” I’m a completist. Movies are drugs. This one didn’t get me high, but I smoked it down to the filter and burned my finger to find out if it would.

You can watch this on Tubi.

After Lemon Popsicle, Going Steady and Hot Bubblegum, but before Baby Love, Up Your Anchor, Young Love: Lemon Popsicle 7 Summertime Blues and Lemon Popsicle: The Party Goes On and this movie’s side sequel Private Manuevers,  what else was there to do but to join the Israeli army? That’s what Bobby, Benji and Hughie are up to next. I mean, there is a mandatory draft, so it only makes sense, except that this army allows them to cosplay Some Like It Hot.

These movies are like the Dickie Goodman of teen sex comedies, in that in one scene, you get more needledrops than an Edgar Wright film fest. Just look at the first scene, in which the boys all take turns with a local loose woman — and somehow, this happens in every Lemon Popsicle movie — while Pat Ballard sings “Mr. Sandman” the cucked husband sleeps, only to wake up and chase Hughie to “Charlie Brown” by The Coasters before the boys run to the notes of Bill Hayley and the Comets doing “See You Later, Alligator.*” Yes, just like a Dickie Goodman answer record, but in picture form.

The Sergeant Major is their new end boss and his dubbing makes the lowest grade Italian western feel like a boutique Criterion reissue. I honestly can’t believe that this played in the United States and also am even more incredulous that it took me so long to see it.

If you’re upset by trans humor, homosexual humor, military humor, sex humor, teenage humor…actually, just don’t watch this. You’re just not going to like it. I’d say for Cannon completists only, but come on, that Cannon dragon must be chased.

*Thanks to The Unknown Movies for pointing this out.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cannon didn’t make all that many slashers, but here’s one that makes no sense and is, therefore, better for it. We first ran this during our yearly slasher marathon on October 6, 2020.

How many names can one movie have? A bunch, because this is also known as X-Ray, Be My Valentine Or Else and Ward 13. It’s directed by Boaz Davidson, the man who was behind Lemon Popsicle and the depressing as anything American version The Last American Virgin. Seeing his name in the credits brought me joy, just as much as seeing the Cannon name always sends me into paroxysms of joy.

Back in 1961, a boy named Harold gave Susan a valentine and when she made fun of it with her friend David, he breaks in and hangs her friend from a hatstand.

Susan grew up to be four-time Playboy covergirl Barbi Benton (Deathstalker). Well, that’s who is playing her, but you know what I mean. She’s just gotten divorced and has to head in for some routine tests at a hospital. Literally, the minute she walks in, an evil doctor laughs while looking at pictures of her as a kid.

Better slashers have started with less.

This is the kind of movie that really uses its environment in the best way possible, as orthopedic saws send heads flying and sinks filled with acid melt faces. It’s also a Valentine’s Day-themed slasher, as the opening sets up just how much that holiday can crush the heart of disaffected young boys. It’s also about getting insurance and how they make you get tests that convince doctors that you’re dying while putting you in the steely gaze of a killer, which could be an indictment of our single-payer health care system. Or it’s just a way to get people killed for your entertainment.

Judith Baldwin, who plays a desk nurse, appeared with Tina Louise in The Stepford Wives before taking over the role Louise was best known for, Ginger Grant, in the TV movies Rescue from Gilligan’s Island and Rescue from Gilligan’s Island.

The abandoned hospital this was shot at is a great location and makes the movie much better, as does the vibe that hospitals are horrible places, where every doctor — look for Davidson as one waiting behind Susan as she uses a pay phone — and hallway is filled with dread. Credit is also due to director of photography Nicholas Josef von Sternberg, who also filmed Tourist Trap, Appointment with Fear and Slaughterhouse Rock.

Marc Behm, who wrote this with Davidson, had an all over the map writing career, scripting everything from The Beatles’ Help! to Charade and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Nana and this movie for Cannon.

If you recognize the kids from the beginning, they’re Billy Jacoby and Elizabeth Hoy who were the murderous children in Bloody Birthday, which came out the same year as this one.

You can watch this on Tubi or get the new 4K UHD release from Vinegar Syndrome, which also has Schizoid and Ultra Violet Vengeance: The Talent & Technicians of X-Ray, an extra feature that goes into the making of this slasher.

Check out The Cannon Canon episode about X-Ray here.

I know it’s not exact, but I was struck by a moment in this film that recalls Messiah of Evil as a character stans in a hallway and we’re struck by just how alone she is in spite of being in a very public place.

Mansion of the Living Dead

Messiah of Evil

It’s not a perfect match, but the feeling is right and I’m struck that at times, Jess Franco can render a great horror mood. Other times, he’s moving the camera so wildly that you wonder if he’s going to ever focus on something happening.

Several waitresses — including Candy Coster, who we all know is Lina Romay in a blonde short wig and love her even more for it — visit an out of season resort hotel, only to find that long-dead monks have come back from the dead, watched a few Amando de Ossorio movies and start luring the women one at a time to the basement where they’re assaulted and then murdered to the sound of bells, the wind and an otherworldly song. So yes, pretty much the Blind Dead with dried shaving cream for makeup.

Also, for some reason, Eva León from Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is chained to a wall by Antonio Mayans and taunted with promises of food.

Somehow, someway, Candy is the reincarnation of the witch who cursed the monks all those years ago and perhaps she’s also the one that can free them, except she’s kind of busy making out with Lea (Mari Carmen Nieto, The Sexual Story of O) and hiding that fact from their friends Mabel (Mabel Escaño, Wicked Memoirs of Eugenie) and Caty (Elisa Vela, Cries of Pleasure), thinking that they’d be judged, but then those two are also getting down.

Look, Lina gets possessed, goes wild and ends up making out with an evil monk, which releases everyone from their curse and…yeah. Look, this movie is pretty much exactly what I seek out and often I’m using movies as drugs to erase my consciousness, so go in with that knowledge.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally ran on December 13, 2020, back in the days when the idea of watching more than fifty Jess Franco movies in one month felt either quixotic or just plain insane. Well, as we’re currently in the middle of a month of Franco’s films, let’s bring this back with some more info and thoughts.

Jess Franco wrote, directed, produced, acted and scored around 200 or so feature films and I have been cursed to watch all of them. This one, he made for French producer Marius Lesoeur and its also known as L’Abîme des Morts-Vivants* (The Abyss of the Living Dead), as there are unqiue Spanish and French versions of this movie.

This is where I discovered the drug inside a Franco film and his ability to somehow lull you into a fuzzed out haze, helped by a bad looking print, as you wait and wait and watch and hope and dream of the moment when the zombies that guard some Nazi gold will emerge and kill the treasure hunters.

Tubi has a print that looks like a VHS that has been rented thousands of times, which makes this so much better of a viewing experience than a pristine version would be.

Roger Braden also reviewed this for our site and he said, “Looks and sounds like a decent movie to watch, right? You couldn’t be more fucking wrong.” and “When the zombies finally make their appearance they are some of the worst looking creatures you’ll ever see.”

Yeah, Jess Franco is an acquired taste.

Robert Blabert, the hero trying to find the Nazi gold, should be like forty if this is really set in 1982. And the Nazis hunting him shouldn’t probably be much, much older. But come on, why am I looking for logic in a zombie movie, much less something to make sense in a Jess Franco movie?

*It’s also known as Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies, El Desierto de los Zombies, The Grave of the Living Dead, The Treasure of the Living Dead and for having a Spanish version called La Tumba de los Muertos Vivientes that is blessed with Lina Romay as the Nazi doctor’s wife.

You can watch this on KInoCult.

Oasis of the Zombies is also on the ARROW PLAYER. Head over to ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.