EDITOR’S NOTE: Hollywood Harry was produced by Orion Pictures but was sold on videotape by HBO/Cannon Video.

Screenwriters Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack originally wrote this movie as Dirty Harry IV: Code of Silence. After a few years of it being in development, it ended up getting bought by Orion, Kris Kristofferson being attached and then Chuck Norris coming on.

Sergeant Eddie Cusack (Chuck Norris) and his team of Chicago Police detectives — including Dennis Farina as his partner Dorato; Farina was an actual Chicago cop at the time and was moonlighting — had the perfect sting set up on cocaine supplier Victor Comacho (Ron Henriquez). Then, a rival gang mafia drug lord Tony Luna (Mike Genovese) reveals themselves and kills nearly everyone. Even worse, a drunk cop named Cragie (Ralph Foody) accidentally kills a bystander and plants a weapon on him; Lieutenant Kobas (Joseph Kosala) catches him.

With the ruined op and refusing to support Cragie, Cusack isn’t every cop’s favorite officer right now. Somehow, things get worse as Luis Comacho (Henry Silva), Victor’s older brother, initiates a bloody gang war that rips the city to shreds. Tony Luna tries to leave town as his entire family is gunned down and Comacho has targeted his daughter Diana Luna (Molly Hagan) as next to be killed.

By the end of the movie, Chuck is shooting everything in sight and is backed up by the Prowler, a three-axle robot. I mean, how incredible is that? Chuck Norris and a robot killing gang members? I also love that John Mahoney is the guy selling the Prowler to the police.

Andrew Davis directed The Final Terror before this and would go on to be known as an action director, making movies like Above the Law, Under Siege, The Fugitive and Collateral Damage.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on August 21, 2019. Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf was not produced by Cannon but was released on video by HBO/Cannon Video.

Even though Gary Brandner, author of The Howling novels, co-wrote the screenplay to this movie, it has nothing to do with his 1979 novel The Howling II,much less the original The Howling. It tries, but this movie is just too weird to fully close the loop.

There’s never been another werewolf movie like this one. Whether that is positive or negative all depends on how much you like werewolves having sex.

Ben White (Reb Brown, who is in a little movie called Yor Hunter from the Future that I could tell you about for many days) is dealing with the death of his sister Karen White, who just so happens to be the heroine of the first of these movies. He joins up with Jenny (Annie McEnroe, who was in Snowbeast and Battletruck) and the mysterious Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee, who apologized to Joe Dante for making this movie) to battle werewolves.

This brings them on a journey to Transylvania and a battle against Stirba (Sybil Danning!), the queen of the werewolves, who is joined by Mariana (Marsha Hunt, who the song “Brown Sugar” is about) and Erle (Ferdy Mayne, who is in another film I can discuss for days and days, Night Train to Terror).

What follows is complete lunacy: werewolf witchcraft, lycan orgies, Sybil Danning repeatedly ripping off her top (the same shot repeated again and again to no complaint), dwarves, priests being killed and punk rock from the band Babel.

Director Philippe Mora actually made some pretty good films, like Mad Dog Morgan, The Beast Within and The Return of Captain Invincible. I’m insane and love this movie, so I will include it in my list of his good ones.

Finally, let’s talk about another subject I can hold court on: Christopher Lee. Mora didn’t know that Sir Lee was a war hero in Czechoslovakia, where this was filmed. Actually, no one did, because he wasn’t allowed to talk about his intelligence work during World War II. When he showed up for filming, he was greeted with a hero’s welcome, as he had killed a top Nazi official named Reinhard Heydrich. In fact, before he became an actor, Lee remained a Nazi hunter for several years.

I also love that this movie was sent the wrong costumes by 20th Century Fox. Instead of wolf suits, they were sent the monkey suits from Planet of the Apes. Lee tried to help fix this by ad-libbing, “The process of evolution is reversed.”

Want to know more about The Howling movies? Check out this article.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on August 21, 2019. Rambo: First Blood Part II was not produced by Cannon but was released on video by HBO/Cannon Video.

When it came time to do a sequel to First Blood, there was a thought that Rambo needed a partner.

Producers wanted John Travolta, but Stallone vetoed the idea. Lee Marvin (who almost played  Colonel Trautman in the first film) was offered the role of Marshall Murdock, but declined.

In fact, that sidekick character is in the first draft James Cameron wrote for this film. Stallone said of what he wrote, “In his original draft it took nearly 30-40 pages to have any action initiated and Rambo was partnered with a tech-y sidekick.”

What ended up on screen was very different.

“Rambo, John J., born 7/6/47 Bowie, Arizona of Indian-German descent. Joined army 8/6/64. Accepted, Special Forces specialization, light weapons, cross-trained as medic. Helicopter and language qualified, 59 confirmed kills, two Silver Stars, four Bronze, four Purple Hearts, Distinguished Service Cross, Medal of Honor.”

Yep — that’s our hero. Given that he kills 74 people in just two days in this film, he’s somehow more successful in Vietnam the second time. But we’ll get to that.

For now, it’s been three years and Rambo is paying for his actions in the original movie when he’s visited by Colonel Sam Trautman. Even though the Vietnam War is over, people remain convinced that POWs have been left behind. The government has authorized a solo mission to confirm if any are alive and Rambo is one of only three men suited for such a mission (who the other two are, I leave up to you, dear viewer, but if one of them isn’t Thunder, I don’t want to know about it).

Marshall Murdock (Charles Napier) is the suit in charge that tells Rambo that all he has to do is take photos, not rescue anyone or engage the enemy. As Rambo drops into enemy territory, his parachute becomes tangled, leaving him with only a knife and a bow. He doesn’t need all those guns, trust me.

A young intelligence agent named Co-Bao (Julia Nickson) and some pirates take Rambo up river, where he saves an American POW who has been crucified and left to die. The Vietnamese troops attack and the pirates betray Rambo, so he kills everyone. Rambo’s extraction is canceled, as Murdock says that Rambo has violated his orders and tells Trautman that he never intended for there to be any rescue — it would be too expensive and no one wants another war.

Rambo is turned over to the Soviet troops who are training the Vietnamese, Lieutenant Colonel Podovsky and Sergeant Yushin. They demand that he read the US government a message to stay away from future missions. Instead, he warns Murdock that he’s coming for him. He escapes thanks to Co and they kiss, only for her to die seconds later.

Rambo then becomes a slasher villain that we cheer for as he wipes out every single enemy one by one. He even steals a helicopter and uses it to destroy Murdock’s office before demanding that the rest of the POWs get rescued.

Trautman then confronts Rambo and tries to convince him to return home, but our protagonist angrily replies that he only wants his country to love its soldiers as much as its soldiers love it.

James Cameron claims that he only wrote the first draft of the script and that Sylvester Stallone made many changes to it. He claims that the star didn’t like that the sidekick got all the cool dialogue and scrapped most of the POWs backstories.

When the film was released, the political content of the movie was controversial, with many critics not ready to see any heroism in the Vietnam War. For his part, Cameron commented that he wrote the action and Stallone the politics.

That said — at the time of the making of this film, there were 2,500 soldiers missing in action, so you can see where the sentiments were coming from. There were even reports that Delta Force operatives were in training to try and find those prisoners.

Stallone explained the ending of the film quite passionately: “I think that James Cameron is a brilliant talent, but I thought the politics were important, such as a right-wing stance coming from Trautman and his nemesis, Murdock, contrasted by Rambo’s obvious neutrality, which I believe is explained in Rambo’s final speech. I realize his speech at the end may have caused millions of viewers to burst veins in their eyeballs by rolling them excessively, but the sentiment stated was conveyed to me by many veterans.”

This film was beloved by audiences worldwide just as much as it was savaged by critics. It won Worst Picture, Worst Actor, Worst Screenplay and Worst Song (“Peace In Our Time” by Frank Stallone) in the  Razzie Awards. It doesn’t matter — it started an entire genre of military revenge pictures.

Director George P. Cosmatos would go on to work with Stallone again on Cobra, as well as direct the films Leviathan and Tombstone. He was recommended for the film by Stallone’s son Sage, who liked his movie Of Unknown Origin. Of course, Cosmatos’ son Panos would grow up to be the director of Mandy and Beyond the Black Rainbow.

This movie marks a true change from the way American audiences would view Vietnam and its veterans. It could have only been made in 1985, to be honest, and exists within that time to remind us of a completely different era.

EDITOR’S NOTE: When Father Was Away On Business was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Cannon Releasing Corporation.

A Yugoslav film by Serbian director Emir Kusturica, this Cold War film won the Palme d’Or at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

It begins with neighborhood drunk Čika Franjo singing Mexican songs to field workers and avoiding the tunes of the U.S. and U.S.S.R., as Yogoslavia is in a strange time as the country is quite paranoid after the Tito–Stalin Split.

The story is told from the POV of Malik, whose father Meša was sent to a labor camp but his mother Sena tells him that — true to the title — that his father is away on business, not sent to basically prison by his wife’s brother Ziho after Meša’s mistress tells him about a remark that her lover made about a political cartoon.

After working in a mine for several years and his family struggling, they are reunited but must all go to be socially reconditioned. There, Malik falls in love with Maša, the daughter of a Russian doctor, yet she dies quite young and he watches as she is taken away in an ambulance.

At the same time, his father hasn’t stopped having affairs, including one with a woman pilot who tries to hang herself from a toilet cord. All during this, Malik begins to sleepwalk and get into strange misadventures.

This is about a time that I never knew of when Tito refuted Stalinism and wanted a different path for Yugoslavia without becoming too much like the West. And while it became the most liberal Communist country of Europe, Tito suppressed internal opposition and both executed and jailed many of his enemies.

I love when film shows us places we could never go and people we would never meet.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hell Squad was not produced by Cannon but was sold on videotape by Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video.

Whether you call this Hell Squad, Commando Squad and Commando Girls, this film presents you with a very realistic military mission: a group of Las Vegas showgirls train to rescue Jack (Glen Hartford), the son of a diplomat who has discovered the existence of an ultra neutron bomb that wipes out people and animals but not buildings.

Jim (Walter Cox) is the man who will train Jan (Bainbridge Scott, who is also in the similar Mankillers) and her girls and get this, they get paid $500 a week and $25,000 when they bring back Jack. That’s nowhere near the money they should be making!

Hell Squad was directed and written by Kenneth Hartford (The Lucifer Complex, Monstroid), a notorious carny type who started as a film distributor as Herts-Lion International Corp. One of the movies he had was Carnival of Souls and if you guessed that Herk Harvey never saw any money because of Hartford, well, hooray for Hollywood.

From the amazing Video Junkie site: http://www.videojunkie.org/2012/09/cinemasocism-hell-squad-1986.html?zx=b53cd75d82b6d112

You may also say, “Isn’t this movie just The Doll Squad?” Well, yes. That’s also Ted Milkas’ castle that the girls attack at one point.

It’s amazing because the plot of this movie is very much this: girls get mission, girls kill terrorists, girls go back to the hotel and take a bubble bath together while Jack gets abused, repeat.

The funniest part of the whole thing is the Scooby-Doo ending where the evil leader gets his mask ripped off and we learn that it was really Jack’s secretary all along. Jack just sighs and says, “I’m shocked. It just goes to show you can work with a person and never really get to know them.”

Video Junkie even reports that comic book writer Don Glut was the actual writer and got screwed over. Are you surprised? How about the fact that Glut wouldn’t give the ending away until he got paid, which is why the last thirty minutes get so weird?

As for the Hell Squad, they are played by Tina Lederman, Maureen Kelly (who was in some episodic TV), Penny Prior, Lisa Nottingham, Loren Chamberlain, Kathy Jinnett, Kimberly Baucum (who is also in the Sylvia Kristel movie The Arrogant) and Madeline Parquette (who did a few small parts in movies like Casino and a Disney TV movie You Ruined My Life; she played a card dealer in both).

So if you love female soldiers being forged out of showgirls, bubble baths or like me need to see every movie Cannon had something to do with, Hell Squad has what you need.

PS: Gregory Conley sent me this on Twitter:

EDITOR’S NOTE: Flesh+Blood was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Cannon Tuschinski Film Distribution.

Directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by his frequent collaborator Gerard Soeteman, Flesh+Blood started as ideas that Verhoeven, Soeteman and Hauer didn’t get to do on the TV show Floris. It was filmed as God’s Own Butchers and would be released in the U.S. as The Rose and the Sword.

Verhoeven had previously had his movies paid for by the Dutch government. To escape all of that stress, he got money from Orion Pictures to make this; they soon started asking for changes, like adding a love story. Verhoeven would later say, “The triangular relationship of Martin–Agnes–Steven is now the main story line, but in retrospect I think we should have stuck with Hawkwood and Martin. The failure of Flesh+Blood was a lesson for me: never again compromise on the main storyline of a script.”

Shot in an improvisational style, Hauer went against Verhoeven’s wishes of making the character morally ambiguous. After all of the fighting between the two — the crew demanded they fight in English so they could understand what was happening — they would never work together again. When Hauer died in 2019, Verhoeven revealed that they had made amends.

When his city is lost due to a coup, Arnolfini (Fernando Hilbeck) promises an army of mercenaries an entire day to go wild inside the city walls if they succeed in retaking it. They do; they do. In fact, they go so out of control on that day that Arnolfini wants them gone. He pays Hawkwood (Jack Thompson) to turn on his former soldiers and lead a charge against Martin (Rutger Hauer) and his followers, who soon see their madness as divine mandate when Martin’s son is stillborn and interred under a statue of Saint Martin of Tours, the patron saint of both )winemakers and reformed alcoholics.

Arnolfini’s son Steven (Tom Burlinson) is to marry Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an arranged marriage that is moved forward by a magical ceremony where they eat mandrake together. At that point, the entire wedding party is attacked by Martin’s men. Arnolfini is badly wounded, the dowry is taken, the lady in waiting is stabbed and murdered (it’s Nancy Cartwright, yes, the voice of Bart Simpson) and Agnes is nearly gang raped before Martin does that all by himself. She gives up on her past life and joins with him in ruling the mercenaries. At the same time, Steven has gone mad wanting revenge and forces Hawkwood to leave his now quiet life and destroy his former friends. Thanks to gunpowder, Martin has the upper hand and Steven is taken; Hawkwood cures himself from the plague and decides to use that illness to destroy his enemy, launching a dead dog into the castle.

At the end, nearly everyone must die and everything must be destroyed; Steven and Martin find themselves needing to help one another before battling to what could be the death. Agnes remains aloof and on no side other than her own. Hawkwood yearns to escape all this fighting and return to the nun he’d saved from Martin.

Oh man — Susan Tyrrell shows up in this and so does Bruno Kirby. I did not expect either of them to appear in a medieval war movie!

The financial failure of Flesh+Blood is why Verhoeven moved to America, all to better understand its culture. The central theme of this movie — how horrible the Middle Ages were — didn’t resonate with audiences that wanted fantasy.

Nevertheless, this is a strong film, one filled with big ideas, gorgeous visuals — Jan De Bont was the director of photography — and the ambiguous morality its creator sought.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jungle Raiders was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Cannon Releasing Corporation.

Cannon released several Italian films that they didn’t have a hand in making, like this one, directed by Antonio Margheriti (Cannibal Apocalypse, And God Said to Cain, Yor Hunter from the Future) and written by Giovanni Simonelli (John Travolto da un insolito destino, The Crimes of the Black Cat).

Duke “Captain Yankee” Howard (Christopher Connelly) and Gin Fizz (Luciano Pigozzi) sell fake jungle adventure dreams to rich foreigners who want a story to brag about when they get back home. But one day, U.S. government man Warren (Lee Van Cleef) tells them that he’ll expose their scan if they don’t guide museum curator Lansky (Mike Monty) and Maria (Marina Costa, who is also in The Final Executioner, another Italian movie that Cannon released; she has Carolynn De Fonseca’s voice) and find the Ruby of Doom. Or Gloom. Sometimes both. To get it, they’ll have to fight some river pirates, led by Tiger (Protacio Dee). Luckily, Captain Yankee has a child in his crew that has a near-psychic rapport with a deadly cobra, which is something you don’t see in many Raiders redux movies.

So yes, this might be Raiders of the Lost Ark, but so are two other movies Margheriti made, Ark of the Sun God and Hunters of the Golden Cobra. Video store shelves were starving for more treasure hunting rogues and he was the man to film these ripoffs, remixes and remakes.

Also: the use of miniatures and action figures to get big explosions in this movie is utterly charming. If you’re the kind of person that finds that cheap and off-putting, perhaps stop watching Italian 80s exploitation movies now. Or never start.

PS: The snake even gets a love interest.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Quiet Earth was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by them. For another take on this movie, read this.

Loosely based on the novel by Craig Harrison and kind of, sort of a remake of The World, the Flesh and the Devil, this movie has the world end on 6:12 a.m. on July 5. Hmm…that’s the same time the clock stopped in the Twilight Zone episode “Where Is Everybody?”

Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) is a scientist working on Project Flashlight for Delenco, part of a United States-led international consortium. The goal? A wireless global energy grid that can power military equipment anywhere. He wakes up and is the only person alive. There are no bodies, even when he finds a burning airplane. There are no animals. There’s just him.

No bodies, that is, until he finds the corpse of his boss. The mass disappearance of everything alive was caused by activating Flashlight. He hears his own voice saying: “One: there has been a malfunction in Project Flashlight with devastating results. Two: it seems I am the only person left on Earth.”

Zac then goes insane, declaring himself President of this Quiet Earth and performing for a crowd of cardboard figures before blasting Jesus off the cross within a church. He nearly kills himself — that’s what he was doing before, an overdose of sleeping pills kept him asleep during the Flashlight effect — and it’s good he stays alive, because he soon meets Joanne (Alison Routledge) and Api (Pete Smith). There’s a love triangle, as the ways of the old world continue into the new, but Zac decides that he should sacrifice himself to ensure that the effect doesn’t destroy any more of the Earth; it’s then that he goes on an entirely new journey into another even more quiet world.

Director Geoff Murphy would go on from this art take on the end of the world and make movies like Young Guns II, Freejack and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Laurence not only starred in this, he also wrote the script with Bill Baer.