Soldier of the Night AKA Night Soldier is surprisingly a slasher, a movie in which a man dreams of being a soldier after he is drafted but a problem with his spleen keeps him from service, a fact he keeps from his new lover. As their relationship blooms, she keeps hearing about a serial killer targeting Israeli soldiers. After meeting his father, she’s told that her boyfriend is no soldier, but then what commando missions does he take on every single night?

Dan Wolman also directed Nana, Baby Love and Up Your Anchor for Cannon. I’ve read this is the first Israeli horror film and while it plays slowly, the close of the movie is pretty harrowing, with a series of brutal attacks and the final fate of its antagonist being quite rough.

The idea of a pre-PTSD soldier having a mental breakdown is intriguing and there’s a good movie somewhere in here. That’s often the Cannon way. There’s an idea that demands an incredibly nuanced film to explore it and what ends up on the screen is often the opposite and that’s what’s fascinating.

Originally called The Last American Preppie and the first appearance of Andrew Clay’s Dice character, Making the Grade has Eddie Keaton (Judd Nelson) and Palmer Woodrow (Dana Olsen) making a deal. The con artist will work with the rich kid to keep him in class at the Hoover Academy, which will keep him in money. In return, Keaton gets paid ten grand — which he owes to Dice — and gets to drive away in a brand new Porsche.

Hijinks ensue.

Directed by Dorian Walker (Teen Witch) from a story by Charles Gale (Ernest Scared Stupid) and a screenplay by Gene Quintano (the writer of Comin’ at Ya!, Treasure of the Four Crowns, King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, three Police Academy movies, Operation Dumbo Drop, Loaded Weapon 1 and Pittsburgh’s second best action movie Sudden Death), this plays like any number of 80s bad kid does good comedies. Of course, it’s all for the love of a good woman, Tracy (Joanna Lee).

But hey look — there’s Ronald Lacey, perhaps better known as Toht, the German soldier who had a coin burned into his hand before his entire face melted right off in Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as Gordon Jump and Dan Schneider, who would go from Better Off Dead to creating much of Nickelodeon’s programming before he got canceled.

There was supposed to be a sequel called The Tourista, but it never happened. I think I may be the only person who would have watched that.

For more info about this movie and an interview with Joanna Lee, purchase Austin Trunick’s perfect The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

Whether you know this movie as Breakin’, Breakdance the Movie or Break Street ’84, this film was inspired by a documentary named Breakin’ ‘n’ Enterin’, which told the true story of the talent at the Los Angeles hip hop club Radio-Tron, which included Ice-T and Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers, both of whom appear here.

Menahem Golan’s daughter saw breakdancers perform in Venice Beach and was so excited that her enthusiasm inspired him to rush this movie into theaters, hoping to beat Beat Street. This would not be the last time that Golan was in a mad rush to get a dance-themed movie on screens before anyone else.

Kelly “Special K” Bennett (Lucinda Dickey, a Cannon all-star who is also in this film’s sequel and the magical Ninja 3: The Domination) is training to be a dancer under the direction of Franco (Ben Lokey). To help keep her inspired, her friend Adam (Phineas Newborn III) introduces her to Orlando “Ozone” Barco (Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quiñones) and Tony “Turbo” Ainley (Chambers), two breakdancers who are self-trained and have their own unique style unlike anything she’s seen in dance school.

Kelly is met with disdain by everyone when she attempts to bring their energy into the world of dance. And then Franco gets way too intimate with her, so she quits training and becomes a breakdancer, upsetting the rich side of her life but fulfilling her spirit as she and the newly formed T.K.O. Crew defeat other dance teams like Electro Rock and her manager James Wilcox (Christopher McDonald, who I will always just call Shooter McGavin) starts seeing dollar signs.

Can Kelly unite art and the street? Of course, the story is very basic. But it’s the sheer joy of seeing this dance on screen, the amazing soundtrack — which has everyone from Rufus and Chaka Khan, Kraftwerk, Art of Noise, Hot Streak and Ollie & Jerry — and the time capsule 80s nature of this movie that make it a winner. Somehow, Cannon would top it with the sequel, somehow, someway.

Critics were all over this movie’s lack of a story, but who cares? We’re here for the music and the dancing choereographed by West Side Story dancer Jamie Rogers. It’s also one of the rare times when Cannon was making the trend instead of trying to be part of one.

Israeli director Joel Silberg went from this movie to a spiritual third film in the series, Rappin’, as well as Lambada, which was choreographed by Shabba-Doo. That movie — and its competition The Forbidden Dance — is a story we’ll get to soon.

Breakin’ is the final Cannon film production released by MGM/UA — to find out why, check out Bolero — which made Cannon become its own distribution company again. I wonder if MGM/UA had second thoughts, because Cannon turned this $1.2 million dollar movie into $38.7 million dollars at the box office. Breakin’ opened at number one and even outgrossed Sixteen Candles, which played on two hundred more screens in their first week.

Also, you probaby already know that this is Jean Claude Van Damme’s first movie appearance. He’s on the beach dancing next to Michel Qissi, who would be his rival Tong Po in Kickboxer. We should all aspire to the same joy that Van Damme has in this scene.

For more info on both Breakin’ movies, get Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about Missing In Action 2: The Beginning here.

And if you love this movie as much as me, you may want to get Super 7‘s ReAction three pack of Special K, Ozone and Turbo.

Directed by Menahem Golan himself and with a cast of Cannon regulars like Shelley Winters (Déjà Vu, The Delta Force), Jerry Lazarus (Treasure of the Four Crowns, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Hot Chili, The Delta Force, Murphy’s Law, Surrender) and Victoria Barrett (Hot Resort, Hot Chili, America 3000, Three Kinds of Heat), this is the story of Alby (Elliott Gould, who is also in Cannon’s The Naked Face), a Jewish man child who dreams of a restaurant of his own if his Uncle Benjamin (Sid Caesar) loans him the money he needs. Uncle Ben agrees, but only if Alby dumps his Catholic live-in-girlfriend Elizabeth (Margaux Hemingway).

Gould was between success and had already had people talking about how hard he was to work with. Production on the film was shut down after he and Golan got into a shouting match over the scene where Alby confesses that he loves Elizabeth, ending with Gould calling Golan a cocksucker. Filming started up two days later after Gould apologized.

To Gould’s credit, Sam Weisberg’s Hidden Films says that he stood up for John Cassavetes, who was making Love Streams with Cannon at the time. The actor heard that Golan and Globus were giving Cassavetes a rough time, so he said, “Leave John alone. Let him make the movie. Give me a hard time, I can take it.”

Burt Young shows up as the foul-mouthed best friend and Carol Kane as astounding as the new age pill providing sexpot in disguise Cheryl and you know, I can’t think of two actors that make me happier — well, American actors — when they show up. And the mob boss Mr. T, who has a very memorable scene, is Lou David, who was Cropsy in The Burning.

This movie led to a new law in New York City where movies made under $3 million dollars would be able to hire union talent at cheaper rates. Cannon had already tempted the unions with Executioner 2 and Grace Quigley, so they ended up changing the rules.

It’s also a film where the Manhattan Bridge is shown instead of the Brooklyn Bridge during the opening title. There’s also no shortage of stereotypes and racial jokes, if this may upset you, but there’s also plenty of authentic looking and feeling 70s New York filth.

If you’re looking for this movie, Epix’s ScreenPix streaming channel has it, along with several other hard to find Cannon offerings.

Research for this article came from the bible of Cannon, Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

Ha-Meticha Ha’Gdola AKA The Big Tease: Here Comes Another One is pretty much Candid Camera in Tel Aviv. Made by Yehuda Barkan and Yigal Shilon — Barkan had already made another movie like this, Hayeh Ahaltah Otah — this has a UFO land in the middle of the city, an ATM that speaks English and a woman auditioning for a movie who is asked to get topless.

Barkan would also make Nipagesh Basivuv, Crazy Camera and Smell and Smile (Kompot Na’alyim), other movies that would follow the same formula. He was also in Charlie Ve’hetzi, a comedy directed by Boaz Davidson, so that may be where the Cannon relationsip came in.

Anat Zachor, who shows up in this, is also in another Cannon movie, America 3000.

Look, you don’t need to watch this. You know, unless you’re the kind of lunatic that says, “I’m going to watch every movie Cannon ever made.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: For an alternate take on this film, check out R. D Francis’ October 17, 2020 article.

Producer Pancho Kohner had worked with Charles Bronson and director J. Lee Thompson several times, so when they purchased The Evil That Men Do, it seemed the perfect movie to pitch to Cannon, who wanted to make more films with Bronson. However, the rights to that novel and the screenplay were way more than Cannon wanted to pay, so as Menahem was in Cannes, he asked Kohner to come up with a new movie and title, which ended up being 10 to Midnight, which was sold at the festival with no script and just Bronson. It sold immediately.

Warren Stacey (Gene Davis) is an incel before we knew what that meant, a man that has taken the rejection of women so hard that he starts killing them, showing up nude in their homes and butchering them, usually after they turn him down. We first see him kill an office worker named Betty Johnson after she makes love to her boyfriend in a van. Stacey easily takes out the man, then chases Betty through the woods, making her beg for her life before snuffing it out.

Stacey even attends her funeral, where he hears that her diary — which goes into detail on all of her sexual conquests — is somewhere in her home. He breaks in to find it and ends up killing her roommate, Karen.

The diary is already gone and in the possession of Detective Keo Kessler (Bronson) and his partner Paul McAnn (Andrew Stevens). They think Stacey is the killer, but he always has an alibi and as he does his killing nude and with gloves covering his hands — and this was made in the days before DNA, mobile phones and surveillance cameras watching our lives — so he evades being jailed.

Kessler becomes even more involved once Stacey targets another nurse: the hardened cop’s daughter Laurie. His mania over catching the killer even makes him plant evidence to get the man arrested, a plan that McAnn disagrees with. As a result, Stacey kills all three of Laurie’s roommates.

As a naked Kessler is finally caught, surrounded by police cars, he tells Kessler, “Go ahead, arrest me. Take me in. You can’t punish me. I’m sick. You can’t punish me for being sick! All you can do is lock me up. But not forever. One day I’ll get out. One day I’ll get out. That’s the law! That’s the law! That’s the law! And I’ll be back! I’ll be back! And you’ll hear from me! You and the whole fucking world!”

Kessler replies, “No, we won’t,” and blows his brains out.

Shot both as a hard R rated and TV-friendly film — in which Stacey’s nudity is covered — this movie is wild, with Thompson fully unleashed and Bronson waving masturbatory devices in criminal’s faces screaming, “You know what this is for, Warren? It’s for jacking off!” while Wilford Brimley tries to get him to simmer down. I mean, Roger Ebert called it “a scummy little sewer of a movie” and that seems like him telling me to watch it as many times as I can.

You’ll also see appearances by a very young Kelly Preston, future Orange County Real Housewife and ZZ Top video girl Jenna Keough, Michael Jackson’s girlfriend in “Thriller” Ola Ray, Robert Lyons as the D.A. and Geoffrey Lewis as Stacey’s lawyer.

You know, in real life, I’m very measured in how I view police militarization and brutality. But when it comes to Bronson, I cheered when he shot a criminal surrounded by police right in the forehead. I don’t know what that says about me.

For more info on all this great film, get Austin Trunick’s The Cannon Film Guide Volume 1: 1980-1984.

You can also learn about what was cut from the movie and how it made it better in Paul Talbot’s Bronson’s Loose Again: On the Set with Charles Bronson.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about 10 to Midnight here.

Princess von Baky (Carmen Carrión) leads a life of wickedness, using everyone around her, like her sickly and impotent husband (Daniel Katz) and her servants Mara (Mari Carmen Nieto) and Mauro (Mauro Rivera), who lure virgins to her home where they all violate and torture the innocence out of them until the well runs dry.

A young American named Odéle (Alicia Príncipe) has been spying on them. As she starts to become part of the carnal games within the home, Mauro falls in love with her and tries to save her, but as the movie moves from a languid soft core feel to a psychedelic burst of blue lights and bloody BDSM violence, everything gets incredible apocalyptic, followed by a walk into the sea that perhaps can wash away the blood. But probably not.

Franco made this movie with an entirely new cast of actors than he usually used in an attempt to shake things up. One wonders if he could have done that by making a film he hadn’t already made before, but I have no interest in questioning Franco, only using his films to send my brain into a level of near drug-induced drone.

Juan (Juan Solar) is a John Cage-style composer and he’s married to Ana (Lina Romay) and their honeymoon gets weird when some spies think they’ve stolen a microfilm, but it was left by hitchhikers Carla and Albert (Alicia Príncipe and Emilio Linder).

Eva Leon plays Irina Von Karlstein, so maybe Jess Franco is reminding us of his bare breasted countess past. There’s also a Radeck, played by Antonio Mayans, so this movie makes me think that I’m starting to see the Jess Franco Cinematic Universe within every movie he made now, which bought delights and kind of scares me, because I’m close to watchin ninety of these movies in four weeks and my brain is soft.

All of these spies, as well as Marga (Analía Ivars), are trying to steal Mariposa 2, a butterfly whose wings carry dust that causes deadly diarrhea. It’s a coincidence that Juan’s newest song is called “Mariposa 2” or maybe Juan is a spy.

There’s so much talking in this movie and probably some humor that you need to know Spanish culture on a much deeper level to get or you can just watch Lina Romay run around, which I do on a daily basis.

Lilian, a German teenager, (Katia Bienert, who had no idea that scenes she shot for another movie would wind up in Spain’s first legal hardcore movie) has been stolen by Irina and Jorge (Lina Romay as Candy Coster and Emilio Linder) who have turned her into their slave. Meanwhile, Mario Pereira — yes, probably Al’s relative, as the role is played by Antonio Mayans — and Jess Franco listen to our heroine’s words of her past.

Franco made this under his Clifford Brown name and you know, if it didn’t have the adult scenes — the really adult scenes — this would be one of his movies that I believe that more people would talk about. But this is Franco, who was able to get success at the time out of the short game of showing sex on the screen versus the long con of making art, but he probably was thinking of the other seven or eight or nine movies he was making at the same time.

Also for continuity obsessed people like me, Candy Coster has a red wig in this. We have to keep track of these things.

Jess Franco kept coming back to the Red Lips, this time to create a pornographic parody of them and this time, Lina Romay plays some kind of spy who programs women by placing a microchip up their asses, which reminds me of how James Shelby Downard shared in his book The Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth: 1913-1935 that when he reconnected with his first love after years apart that she had been co-opted by the labyrinth of sex-magick-occult-conspiracy that plagued him for his entire life, he reached down to her rear end and she had a series of wires and computer chips the likes of which we wouldn’t see for many decades hanging out of her posterior.

Carmen Carrión, who was in Franco’s Alone Against Terror and The Sexual Story of O, appears, as does Rosa María Martín from Lilian and Mari Carmen Nieto from Mansion of the Living Dead and La sombra del judoka contra el doctor Wong. Amongst all the spy on spy hardcore scenes, Antonio Mayans plays a gay character.

With Lina’s limited role in this movie, I wonder if she really did co-direct this movie.