Chang Cheh directed ninety movies from 1965 to 1993*, as well as all of the lyrics to the songs within his films. The majority of his most well-known movies in the west feature the Venom Mob of Kuo Chui, Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, Sun Chien, Lo Mang (along with Wei Pai), a group of martial arts masters who appeared together and separately across numerous Shaw Brothers films.

Also known as Super Ninjas, Chinese Super Ninjas and Chinese Super Ninja, this movie seems as if the weirdest and most violence obsessed kid in your grade school class was suddenly given enough money to stop scribbling in his notebooks and instead allowed to make a movie that is pretty much non-stop ninjas horribly murdering one another.

This is quite frankly the highest praise that I can give to a movie.

I mean, let me sum up the first five minutes: Chief Hong (Chan Shen) has challenged his rival Yuan Zeng (Kwan Fung) for the title of martial arts master, which mostly entails sending each others’ students after one another in battles to the death. Hong has cheapened these wars of honor by inviting a foreign samurai to the contest. He kills one of Zeng’s students before being stopped by Liang Zhi Sheng (Lo Mang). Before he commits seppuku, he throws a spiked ring to Zeng, which poisons the master and keeps him from doing kung fu until he heals.

There’s no time to heal, as a new challenge arises from the Five-Element Ninjas. Zeng asks Sheng and Tian Hao (Cheng Tien Chi) to fortify the school while ten of his best men answer the challenge. What follows is a series of increasingly brighter colored ninjas basically showing you every Mortal Kombat fatality nearly a decade before the game came out. The ninjas also send Senji (Chen Pei-Hsi) to infiltrate the school. Yes, Hong and Mudou (Michael Chan, who didn’t just play triad gangster roles, but left the police to become one), the leader of the ninjas, are pretty much the winners before the fight even gets started.

Within a few weeks, she has mapped out the entire school and Mudou’s ninjas attack as she offers herself to Sheng. He refuses her, but allows her to play the flute for him. As she entertains him, everyone in the school except for Hao, who escapes and visits his old ninja master. Joined by four other fighters, he challenges the Five-Elements Ninjas and Mudou, who has killed Hong and taken the title of master.

This movie is quite frankly amazing. It blew my mind throughout and never lets up, like a children’s show that has wall-to-wall gore. As the first movie in our week of Hong Kong films, it has set a high bar which other films will really have to battle to scale and exceed.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, Five Venoms and Crippled Avengers to name a few.

Another movie that I didn’t watch for a long time so that I could be ready for it, Der Fan totally paid off. Man, this is one dark journey into the abyss.

Simone (Désirée Nosbusch, who recorded “Kann es Liebe sein?” with Falco) is in love with a new wave singer named R. Love is such an easy word for how she really feels, as her adoration for him replaces eating and sleeping and school. Now, all she wants to do is wait and wait for a letter for him that never comes. She is nothing without him and becomes nothingness.

When she finally meets him in the flesh, she freezes and he takes advantage of her, making love to her and then coldly rejecting her. In any other film, this would be the life lesson, but instead, Simone kills him with a statue, then consumes his flesh before turning his bones to ash and shaving her head.

The movie ends with one last fan letter, as a pregnant Simone claims that R will always be a part of her. Well, in one way or another, right?

This is yet another film that stands on the side of arthouse versus grindhouse, but that only depends on what theater is showing it. Eckhart Schmidt wrote the book that this was based on and directed this film, as well as Alpha City, which will be on our site in a few weeks.

So often, glam stars seemed to come from another planet. In this one, the fan seems as if she does not exist on the same level of existence as us, a ghost that walks among us, ready at any moment to unleash violence. She is an angel of death walking amongst mortals, which rock stars most assuredly are.

You can get this on blu ray from Mondo Macabro.

Oh man, this movie.

Seriously, this is a film that will challenge your comprehension of time and space, question your ability to exist and then continually challenge you to remain connected to its narrative. A combination of live action rubber suit monsters and vehicle combat with 2D animation taking place for any human interaction, it feels like a forced childhood playdate with that weird kid of your parents’ work friends, a child who has toys of all different sizes and scales and plays with them all at the same time regardless of scale, so that He-Man and Optimus Prime have a picnic with Duke and Matt Trakker, all while numerous Hot Wheels and a Tonka truck race around them. The entire time, you are sure that the child you are playing with is hopelessly deranged and could attack you at any moment.

I never thought I’d know that feeling again.

Attack of the Super Monsters is really four episodes of Ultraman and Mighty Jack creator Tsuburaya Productions’ Dinosaur War Izenborg, which combines the anime and daikaiju tokusatsu styles to delirious effect. It’d be weird enough, but then the American dubbing ads completely bonkers vocal stylings to what is already a psychotronic idea: dinosaurs are back and only twins who can become a hybrid being can stop them.

Emperor Tyrannous* (known as Dinosaur Satan Gottes in Japan) is the leader of the rubber reptilians who have declared war on mankind from their empire beneath the Earth’s surface. The only hope Earth has is the Gemini Command, which has brother and sister team Jem and Jim Starbuck (D-Force, Tachibana Ai and Tachibana Zen in the land of the rising sun) as its front-line defense. At one point in the original cartoon, they were nearly killed and their bodies were replaced with machinery. Later still, they get even more upgrades that let them become a giant robot, as is necessary in shows of this nature.

There’s also a genius scientist Dr. John Carmody (Dr. Torii) and his two absolute morons of assistants, Jerry Fordham and Wally Singer** (Goro Kanbara and Ippei Kurosawa) who have a pet sloth. Small animals are a major part of this story, as the underworld super monsters tend to possess animals like rats and dogs against their will instead of just realizing that they are fire-breathing beasts that by all rights should be eating all humanity or at the very least eviscerating Tokyo.

Just imagine if you crushed four episodes of an American kids show into a sprawling narrative, then translated it into multiple languages and beamed it all over the world. That’s what happened here, with this airing in Italy and Arabic counties, who loved it so much that Tsuburaya Productions and a Mr. Jarrah Alfurih from the Kuwait and Cultures Factory produced a documentary called The Return of Izenborg in 2016.

While the original series was directed by Toru Sotoyama (who was also behind the Ultraman-related Iron King) and written by Masaki Tsuji (who wrote series such as Cyborg 009, Urusei Yatsura, KImba the White Lion, Tiger Mask) and Ifumi Uchiyama from a story by Hiroyasu Yamaura (who wrote numerous Ultraman series, as well as Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, the Star Wolf series that Fugitive Alien was dubbed from, Galaxy Express 999 and Godzilla 1985, so he graduated from this to, well, the real thing), the American dub is the brainchild of Tom Wyner, who scripted the first English work on Super Dimensional Fortress Macross (which is the first part of Robotech), did the ADR writer and directing of Fist of the North Star and has wild credits like being an uncredited extra in An Affair to Remember, a crew member on The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and doing voiceover work for everything from the Japanese adaption of Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula to numerous voices on Robotech, several Star Trek games and as M. Bison in the Street Fighter cartoon.

In an even more goofball connection to horror movies, the producers of this were Sidney L. Caplan and Mark Cohen, who a decade before made the Orson Welles-starring Necromancy.

You really need to see this, if only to understand that Japanese cartoon sometimes have rats eating clothes and sidekicks who contemplate suicide to bring back their honor, then American kids get cheap VHS tapes of this and their parents use it as a babysitter and no one explains just how strange it all is until nearly forty years in the future.

*Dan Warren, a voice actor who is in a ton of stuff, for some reason does the giant dinosaur’s voice in a style that can best be described as Pacino in Devil’s Advocate but with more cocaine.

**Those who have watched way too many cartoons will recognize Wally’s voice as Cam Clarke, who was Kaneda in Akira as well as Leonardo and Rocksteady from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

You can watch this on YouTube.

As a ten-year-old, this was the absolute pinnacle of all things amazing when it aired on HBO at odd intervals. It starts as an exploration of the divide between arcades in 1982, as video games had been pushing pinball out.

Pinball advocate Geoff Harvey and Space Invaders champion Stephen Highfield both explains their theories of why their respective games are the best. It’s an interesting time capsule and if that’s all this was, it would still be a great movie.

Yet at the end, as the arcade closes and characters from pinball machines come to life to battle video aliens, you will be amazed. Even now, probably thirty years since I last saw this, I’m still so excited about this movie. You can’t even know how many hours I sat in class and dreamt of this movie, drawing its characters when I should have been paying attention to my teachers.

Thanks to the internet, you can now watch this and imagine just how happy the kid version of me was every time this aired. You can watch this on YouTube.

The fourth of the Cheech and Chong movies, this opens with our heroes driving in the desert, not using drugs and talking about rock and roll. Turns out that they’re working at a car wash for the rich Mr. Slyman and Prince Habib (also Cheech and Chong), who then send the boys to Chicago on a rock and roll tour, driving the limo that we saw them in at the start of the movie. Unbeknownst to our high heroes is the fact that the car is packed with cash.

Somehow, everyone ends up lost and wandering in the desert and it all ends with Cheech and Chong as porn stars. There’s also a lot of peyote.

This movie came as the mainstream began to accept Cheech and Chong, with the National Association of Theatre Owners naming them the Comedy Team of the Decade. You can see the plan was to make this film have less drug humor, with Chong saying, “Cheech & Chong and dope are redundant. It’s a challenge to see if we can do it. I know we can.”

As always, this movie is packed with people, like Rufus drummer Richard “Moon” Calhoun, Dave Coulier, Evelyn Guerrero (as Donna again), John Paragon, George Wallace, Ruby Wax, Rip Taylor,  Lance Kinsey (Proctor from the Police Academy films) and Dorothy Neumann (Private Parts).

Unlike the past films, this was not directed by Tommy Chong. Instead, Thomas K. Avildsen , who had edited the past three films, would make this the first and only movie that we would helm.