I think I’ve seen all the Shaw Brothers non-supernatural films and the HK Database says that this is a drama, so…let’s just agree that it may have demons and magic but it’s kind of its own thing.

Long Fei (Jason Piao Pai) left behind the world of martial arts fisticuffs and now lives in a secluded mountain studio where he and his assistant Fatty (Wong Chun) have spent five years carving a woman out of crystal. Long Fei wishes that his woman had a soul, so he adds some blood because you know, nothing bad would happen, and of course everything bad in this movie happens as the crystal woman (Yu-Po Liu) starts killing people.

Masked Poison Yama (Wei Hao Ting) and his son (Yu Hsiao) want to kill Long Fei, so they spend much of the movie inside a treehouse lab where they mix plants, snake venom — yes, the movie shows us it being extracted, it’s a Shaw Brothers movie — and animals to make a poison that blows people up from inside their stomach. Yes, they show it. You know you want it.

Yet the son is soon killed by the crystal female and Yama declares revenge on everyone, first using poison gas to kill everyone in the family of former fighter Prince Tian Di (Jung Wang). As this is all going on, he sends his men White Judge and Black Judge after Long Fei and Fatty, who are hiding out in an inn where the owner decapitated people and serves their flesh.

This movie is, well, absolutely wild. There are battles in a graveyard, a school of masked female assassins, wire-assisted swordplay and every character coming together for one final battle. I just realized that Hus Shan also directed Inframan, Kung Fu Zombie and Dynamo. Yeah, that makes sense even if this movie doesn’t — like how is the crystal woman related to the assassin academy? — but who cares? It looks good, it moves fast and it’s super weird.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Split Image was on the CBS Late Movie on August 28, 1987 and February 10, 1988.

Danny Stetson (Michael O’Keefe) wants to be an Olympic athlete until he falls in love with Rebecca (Karen Allen) — and can you blame him — and joins her at Homeland, a religious community led by Neil Kirklander (Peter Fonda). His parents Kevin (Brian Dennehy) and Diana (Elizabeth Ashley) run out of ideas to get him back and hire bounty hunter Charles Pratt (James Woods).

Directed by Ted Kotcheff (First Blood) and written by Scott Spencer (Endless Love), Robert Kaufman (Love at First Bite) and Robert Mark Kamen (The Karate Kid), this film is also known as Missing Pieces and Captured. Comedian Bill Engvall shows up in a small part, as does Peter Horton.

This has some great acting in it from Woods and O’Keefe as the deprogramming scenes are really rough. This was an early take on escaping cults and wasn’t noticed in theaters, but Kotcheff had Rambo show up two weeks later.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ator the Fighting Eagle was on the CBS Late Movie on April 12 and July 19, 1985. I am amazed that this was on national U.S. television.

Let’s list the reasons why this movie made it to our site:

Joe D’Amato directed it. Where do we even start with his filmography? Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals? Antropophagus? Endgame?

It’s an Italian ripoff of Conan the Barbarian, which means it’s going to be at the same time better, worse and more inventive than the movie that inspired it.

It’s written by Michele Soavi (Stagefright, The Church, The Sect, Cemetery Man)!

Once, Ator was just a baby, born with the birthmark that prophesied that he’d grow up to destroy the Spider Cult, whose leader Dakar (a pro wrestler who appeared in Titanes en el Ring against Martín Karadagian) tries to kill before he even gets out of his chainmail diapers.

Luckily, Ator is saved and grows up big, strong and weirdly in love with his sister, Sunya. It turns out that luckily, he’s adopted, so this is only morally and not biologically upsetting. His father allows them to be married, but the Spider Cult attacks the village and takes her, along with several other women.

Ator trains with Griba, the warrior who saved him as a child (he’s played by Edmund Purdom, the dean from Pieces!). What follows are pure shenanigans — Ator is kidnapped by Amazons, almost sleeps with a witch, undertakes a quest to find a shield and meets up with Roon (Sabrina Siani, Ocron from Fulci’s batshit barbarian opus Conquest), a sexy blonde thief who is in love with him.

Oh yeah! Laura Gemser, Black Emanuelle herself, shows up here too.

Ator succeeds in defeating Dakkar, only to learn that the only reason that Griba mentored him was to use him to destroy his enemy. That said, Ator defeats him too, leaving him to be eaten by the Lovecraftian-named Ancient One, a monstrous spider. But hey, Ator isn’t done yet. He kills that beast too!

Finally, learning that Roon has died, Ator and Sunya go back to their village, ready to make their incestual union a reality. Or maybe not, as she doesn’t show up in the three sequels, The Blade Master, Iron Warrior and Quest for the Magic Sword.

Ator is played by Miles O’Keefe, who started his Hollywood career in the Bo Derek vehicle Tarzan the Ape Man, a movie that Richard Harris would nearly fist fight people over if they dared to bring it up. He’s in all but the last of these films and while D’Amato praised his physique and attitude, he felt that his fighting and acting skills left something to be desired.

Ator the Fighting Eagle pretty much flies by. It does what it’s supposed to do — present magic, boobs, sorcery and swordfights — albeit in a PG-rated film.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tiger Joe was on the CBS Late Movie on September 7 and November 30, 1988.

Known as Fuga dall’arcipelago maledetto (Escape from the Cursed Archipelago) in Italy, this Antonio Margheriti-directed and Tito Capri-written film stars David Warbeck as Tiger Joe, a former US Army Special Forces Vietnam Veteran who works with “Midnight” Washington (Tony King, Atlantis Interceptors) and Lenny (Luciano Pigozzi) to airlift all sorts of cargo but mostly guns.

When he gets shot down, he joins up with Kia (Annie Belle, who started her acting career appearing in Jean Rollin’s Lips of Blood and Bacchanales Sexuelles; she’s in so many movies by directors and personalities I’m obsessed with: Deodato’s House On the Edge of the Park, D’Amato’s Absurd and L’alcova, the supposed Emmanuelle Arsan-directed Forever Emmanuelle, Marco Antonio Andolfi’s Cross of the Seven Jewels and the Cannon film Nana) and her companion Datu (Abadeza) to get out of the jungle alive.

This has a lot of cast, crew and shots from the much better The Last Hunter, but I just love Antonio Margheriti. He brings something extra to every movie. Sadly, cinematographer Riccardo Pallottini lost his life in a plane crash while filming the final shot of the film.

May I never ever get tired of seeing bamboo huts in the Philippines blow up. If you want more Margheriti in the jungle, check out Tornado: The Last Blood, Code Name: Wild Geese, The Last Hunter, Commando Leopard, The Commander, Indio and Indio 2: The Revolt.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Rocky III was on the CBS Late Movie on September 29, 1989 and October 26, 1990.

Rocky III did more than just extend the franchise. It boosted the careers of two nascent superheroic characters, Mr. T and Hulk Hogan, as they made their way into the 1980’s cultural zeitgeist and even a titanic team-up at WrestleMania. Yet here, they’re just enemies for Rocky to gather his wits and eventually defeat. 1,200 people auditioned to be Clubber Lang, but there couldn’t be anyone else but Mr. T in this role.

Stallone went hard to get into shape for this movie, getting his body fat percentage down to his record low of 2.8%. He did that by eating only ten egg whites and a piece of toast a day, with fruit every third day, along with two miles of jogging, two hours of weight training, eighteen rounds of sparring, two more hours of weight training and swimming every single day.

Rocky has held the heavyweight championship for five years and defended it ten times, leading to fame, wealth and celebrity. In fact, he’s even moved into boxing versus wrestling matches against opponents like Thunderlips (Hulk Hogan). But his manager, Mickey (Burgess Meredith) knows that James “Clubber” Lang (Mr. T) is the man who can beat him.

While unveiling a statue of himself, Lang shows up and challenges him to a title match, claiming that Rocky has been hiding from him. That turns out to be true, because unbeknownst to our hero, Mickey has been keeping Rocky away from anyone who would hurt him as badly as Apollo Creed did. He goes on to tell him that Lang is hungry and that Rocky will never last three rounds with him because he’s become civilized and lost the eye of the tiger.

The training montage here shows that Rocky is distracted while Lang has risen from the Chicago streets and is very much like a younger Balboa, save that he’s cocky and brutal. When the two first meet, it erupts into a brawl that causes Mickey to suffer a heart attack before the match even starts. After the fight — a second round KO title win for Lang — Rocky tells his mentor that the fight is over and that it ended in the second round. He doesn’t tell him that he lost and his father figure dies happily.

Rocky slips into a deep depression that is only stopped when Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), his former arch enemy, offers to train him in exchange for a favor. Along with Tony “Duke” Evers (Tony Burton), Apollo brings Rocky into his Tough Gym, giving him the footwork, style and speed that he lacked, finally becoming the gladiator that he was born to be.

The fight between Lang and Rocky is different the next time — Rocky destroys him in the first round, then allows his opponent to batter him in the second, taunting Land and claiming that he can’t put him away. This is all a ruse, as Rocky defeats him in the third, finally finding, as the song sings, “The Eye of the Tiger.”

Apollo’s favor? One more rematch, this time in private at Mickey’s gym. Now the men have become friends and finally are on the same level as the film ends.

When Mr. T took his mother to the premiere, she angrily walked out, upset at the lurid way that he yelled at Rocky’s wife Adrian (Talia Shire), saying “I did not raise you to talk to a lady like that.”

As always, Stallone knows where his characters ended up. He saw Clubber Lang as later becoming a born-again Christian and a ringside announcer.

This would be the last time that Rocky would battle for the title. Now, it would be time to go to Russia and then back to the streets.

Frank Henenlotter is an instrumental figure in grindhouse and exploitation film lore. In addition to rescuing many low-budget sexploitation and exploitation films from being destroyed, he made three Basket Case movies and Brain Damage. This is one of the few movies that upsets Becca so much that she refuses to watch it.

Duane Bradley arrives in the grimiest and scummiest New York City with a locked wire basket that contains his formerly conjoined twin, Belial. They were separated against their will and Belial has always resented it, pushing his brother to get revenge on the doctor who cut them apart.

Our hero — well, such as it is — falls in love with a nurse named Sharon, but Belial tries to rape her, can’t perform and kills her instead. Is it any more frightening if I tell you that Belial is basically a rubber glove on Henelotter’s hand? Duane attacks his brother and they fall out of the apartment to their death.

Don’t worry — the brothers survived to make it to the sequel, as well as another film after that where Belial got a powered exo-skeleton. The brothers also show up in the subway in Henenlotter’s Brain Damage.

Critic Rex Reed’s was quoted on the poster for this movie, saying “This is the sickest movie ever made!” He had heard how gross the film was and sought it out. As he left the theater, someone asked him what he thought. He didn’t realize that that person was Henenlotter and as a result, he was furious that he was being used to promote this movie.

The bar scenes were shot in The Hellfire Club, an S&M bar in Manhattan. The crew had to hide all the sex toys and swing, but left behind the buzz saw that killed the boys’ father as a gift. That very same crew was so offended by Sharon’s death scene that they all walked out rather than continue filming it.

The Arrow Video 4K blu ray release of Basket Case has so many extras that I can’t even get my head around it. There’s a 4K restoration from the original 16mm negative by MoMA along with two audio commentaries (writer/director Frank Henenlotter and star Kevin Van Hentenryck and a second with Henenlotter, producer Edgar Ievins, actor Beverly Bonner and filmmaker Scooter McRae).

There’s also a short film, Basket Case 3-1/2: An Interview with Duane Bradley, interviews with Van Hentenryck, Henenlotter, Beverly Bonner, Florence and Maryellen Schultz, producer Ievins, casting person/actor Ilze Balodis, associate producer/special effects artist Ugis Nigals and Belial performer Kika Nigals and even Joe Bob Briggs.

There’s also a feature-length documentary on the entire series, a location feature, a video essay on conjoined twins by Travis Crawford and Slash of the Knife, a Henenlotter short that has much of the same case.

Want more? There are trailers, TV and radio ads and Belial’s Dream, an animated short by Robert Morgan. All inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck with a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck and a collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by Michael Gingold and a Basket Case comic strip by artist Martin Trafford.

You can get it from MVD.

Directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty, this film remixes newsreels, military training films and other footage made during the Cold War to ease peoples’ minds about the inevitability of nuclear destruction and survivability. I’m so glad to report we no longer — oh, Putin said he’s going to fire nuclear missiles at us, never mind — look, if you grew up in the 80s, you faced nuclear terror and movies like The Day After and Threads every day.

“Viewed from a safe distance, the atomic bomb is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man.” Those words are horrifying but this movie is hilarious. Released as Reagan was leading the largest military increases since the Korean War, this is a movie that shows nuclear clouds “harmlessly” blowing over innocent people and soldiers testing themselves to see how much radiation that had been exposed to. Mutually assured destruction was the aim in 1982;  the U.S. had so many nukes that they could inflict end of the world damage on the Soviet Union even after absorbing everything they had, even if no one would survive. And who would want to? Again, have you seen Threads?

Directed by Jayne Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty, this film has no narration, just music from the era and seemingly bombards you with continually more insane and ridiculous notions. Surely, you can just duck and cover when a bomb goes off. All set to an amazing soundtrack, which hammers home just how pointless this nuclear war idea all was and is.

This movie also inspired Michael Moore, who said, “This is the movie that told me that a documentary about a deadly serious subject could be very funny. Then I asked the people who made it to teach me how to do it. They did. That movie became my first – Roger & Me.”

This Bill Hailey and the Comets song on the soundtrack is absolutely deranged, by the way:

“Last night I was dreamin’

Dreamed about the H-Bomb

Well the bomb-a went off and I was caught

I was the only man on the ground

There was-a 13 women and only one man in town”

You can watch this on Tubi.