EDITOR’S NOTE: Kamikaze Hearts was first on the site on June 18, 2022. Kino Lorber has now released it on blu ray with extras like a documentary on the making of the film and its enduring legacy, featuring actors Sharon Mitchell and Howie Gordon, author and critic Susie Bright, sexologist Annie Sprinkle, artist Beth Stephens and director Juliet Bashore; audio commentary by Bashore, Mitchell, Gordon, Jon Martin and Shelly Mars; Crash, a short film by Bashore as well as the original and 2022 trailers. Get it now — this is a huge recommendation — from Kino Lorber.

Kamikaze Hearts is a film that has fascinated me since I first read about it in the venerable Cinema Sewer. Now that Kino Lorber has released a new 2K restoration of the film, this is the perfect time to dig in, watch it and learn as much as I can about it.

I’ve been just as intrigued by Ms. Sharon Mitchell and perhaps for a much longer time. During the late 90s and early 00s– yes, when you still had VHS tapes and not streaming — when bleach blondes and pneumatic implants were all the shelves had to offer, Mitchell would occasionally show up in films for brief moments and I’d want to know more about her. With short cropped hair and a non-silicone implanted body, she looked closer to normalcy while also having the kind of real punk look and attitude that doesn’t buy its shirts years later online.

There was no internet — only Adam Film World and Hustler rated movies on an erection scale — so i didn’t learn her full life until later, such as how she began her career as an off-Broadway actress and dancer before starring in some of the 70s roughest films, like Waterpower and The Violation of Claudia.

In 1996, a male stalker assaulted and nearly killed her, which led to her finally kicking heroin, becoming a certified addiction counselor and getting both an MA and a Ph.D. from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality all while working a series of odd jobs like catering, dogwalking, being a florist and as a maid.

Mitchell founded the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation (AIM), an organization that provided information and innovated STD testing for all workers in adult entertainment. While a data breach ended that company, Mitchell did so much to make it a safer space.

A decade before that, she was one of the stars of this film. For years, I saw it regarded as a documentary on the relationship that Mitchell had with her co-star Tigr Mennett. The truth is a lot more complicated.

In the incredible oral history of this film conducted by the always astounding The Rialto Report — that will be referred to and used as reference throughout this article — George Csicsery (a documentarian and actor in the film) says, “Some people don’t believe it’s a fictional film and have categorized it as a documentary, while other people see it for what it is; a pure narrative film. But that begs a deeper question: Is anything a documentary? In many ways, I think that is either the genius or the downfall of Kamikaze Hearts.”

Director Juliet Bashore had come from Orange County to San Francisco with no small degree of culture shock. Here was art, punk rock and even adult film — which she was paid well for to work as production assistant. She said, “I’ve got to find a way to make art out of this.  I worked a few more of those gigs, telling myself I was “doing research” but frankly equally thrilled to be paid (and very well) in hard, cold (probably Mafia) cash.”

After meeting Tigr on a set, the two began to talk about the strangeness of the world of adult and decided to make a movie about it. And Tigr was in love — or had been in love or never fell out of love — with the woman she saw as its star: Mitchell.

Bashore was influenced by Spalding Grey — ironically, the Swimming to Cambodia author and raconteur performed in adult himself in the Zebedy Colt movie Farmer’s Daughters — and decided to make real life into art with some guardrails, saying “The whole film was completely storyboarded, leaving space within those boarded shots for improvisation. The final edit matches the original storyboard pretty much shot by shot — with the exception of a few additional scenes that were added later. But even these pick-ups were planned for.”

Keep in mind, this was years before movies were completely ad-libbed or even partially made with improvised moments. This Is Spinal Tap was made around the same time as this movie but that’s nearly all trained comedians. This was…more real.

The film starts with Tigr breathlessly telling us about Mitchell: “When I first met her I thought she was sleazy. She needed to make a living, she was fucking on camera – I thought she was just another dumb porno slut. But I was wrong.” And then we see Mitchell, movie star glamorous even on a porn budget — in the back of a cab on the way to the set, discussing Old Hollywood actors and how she feels like she could go mainstream (she was in Tootsie and The Deer Hunter).

Tigr goes on to explain how being in the orbit of a being like Mitchell led her down a path she didn’t expect. And this is why this movie feels so real — and not a quasi-documentary — because it obviously has real significance: I became different. I changed. I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be streetwise. I wanted to know how to use a needle… Goddamn irresponsible, gorgeous, sleazy porno slut. And she has it. And I mean, she’s this woman from New York City, who’s Italian, and she’s hot, and she speaks street language, no one can fuck with her, right? And there was some sort of power that she had that a porno person doesn’t have.”

Much like how in pro wrestling life imitates art imitates life, we soon see Mitchell on stage dancing, then kneeling nude and answering audience questions. When asked what her next film will be, she says, “Truth or Fiction. It is a surrealistic look at myself and my girlfriend and the way we look at the X-rated film business and our relationship with each other, and it’s very nice…I don’t know whether I’m more truth or more fiction.”

Again, like wrestling, porn is about using your body for money, but also engaging in whole cloth character reinvention. Don’t like that you’re a geek who got bullied all through school and have a fascination with the dark side of humanity? Wrestling can give you a corpse paint-covered alter ego and make you way tougher as you fake it — literally — until you make it. In the same way, being nude on screen can create a psychic armor of transgressiveness that allows a star to become more than they are — at least for a time — and become an object of desire. And just like the synchronized violence that happens in the squared circle, fake emotions can become real anger, relationships behind the scenes can become storylines and people can become lost and forget who they ever really were.

Bashore claims that the entire movie was a gift from Tigr to Mitchell, an opportunity to allow her muse to show the world just how talented she could be. That said, it’s hard to say that it’s truly mainstream. In the final moments, in the midst of a breakup, Tigr and Mitchell shoot up coke — real coke in a fake scene — and the camera never breaks for a single moment as Mitchell holds up a needle and says, “This was my dick and I fucked her with my dick. And I waited for this relationship to mature. This is a movie within a movie within a movie. This is timeless.”

In the same way no documentary or narrative movie can show you everything behind the scenes, this feels at once totally false and unabashedly sincere. It exists on a dichotomy that runs through the entire movie like a fault line. And there are real adult figures here — director Charles Webb (Charles De Santos), photographer Vincent Fronczek and actor Jon Martin show up — and musicians like Jennifer Blowdryer and Fast Floyd and the Famous Firebirds appear.

After disappearing for two decades, Kamikaze Hearts was released again. But now, thanks to the world of streaming — and Kino Lorber — we can all decipher for ourselves what is true, what is made up and what is probably both. And none of our answers really need to be right.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Black Moon Rising was not produced by Cannon but was sold on videotape in the UK by Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited. If you want to read another take on this movie, click here.

John Carpenter wrote this film around the time of Escape from New York but didn’t end up directing it. After some rewrites by William Gray and Desmond Nakano, it ended up being directed by Harley Cokeliss (Battletruck, Dream Demon).

Sam Quint (Tommy Lee Jones) is a thief hired by the FBI to steal evidence against The Lucky Dollar Corporation of Las Vegas. He’s being followed by former friend Marvin Ringer (Lee Ving) so he hides the disk on a car known as the Black Moon which is on its way for Los Angeles and being driven by Earl Windom (Richard Jaeckel).

The Black Moon was designed by Bernard Beaujardins and Clyde Kwok and made by Wingho Auto Classique. Based on the 1980 Wingho Concordia II, it only had one model built and the stunt cars were molded after the hero car. The third car used was just an interior. In the movie, the car can go at least 325 miles an hour which has to be completely out of control to drive.

FBI agent Johnson (Bubba Smith) meets with Quint, who demands more money from all the danger. Well, it gets crazier when a gang of car thieves led by Nina (Linda Hamilton) takes it. Now Quint has three days to get the disk back or not get paid.

With a cast that has William Sanderson, Robert Vaughn, Keenan Wynn, Dan Shor, Don Keith Opper and Nick Cassavetes, the lead role was originally intended for Charles Bronson. Also, if you think the theme is familiar, it’s the same tune that plays in Blue Thunder.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared on July 26, 2022. Raw Deal was not produced by Cannon but was released on video by HBO/Cannon Video.

Dino De Laurentiis made this so he could make a quick buck and then make Total Recall. De Laurentiis would eventually file for bankruptcy and sell the rights to Carolco Pictures, who would make the movie with Arnold, who Dino never saw as the lead in that Phillip K. Dick story.

As for Schwarzenegger, if he made this, De Laurentiis would finish out his contract.

I keep thinking back to Roger Ebert’s review* of this: “This plot is so simple (and has been told so many times before), that perhaps the most amazing achievement of Raw Deal is its ability to screw it up. This movie didn’t just happen to be a mess; the filmmakers had to work to make it so confusing.”

That’s true. All they had to do was watch Yojimbo. Or A Fistful of Dollars. Or Django. Or Il conto è chiuso. Or The Warrior and the Sorceress. It’s a simple story that can be told in any way, but this one, well…

At least it has Arnold.

Blair Shannon protects a mob informant with his life, a fact that causes his father — FBI Agent Harry Shannon (Darren McGavin) — to want only one thing: revenge. The object of that pound of flesh retrieval will be Sheriff Mark Kaminski AKA Joseph P. Brenner (Schwarzenegger), himself a former FBI agent who was kicked out for beating the life out of a suspect who sexually assaulted and murdered a young girl. The man who ruined his career — Marvin Baxter (Joe Regalbuto) — is now a special forces prosecutor looking into the same crime family who killed Shannon’s son.

Like some 70s paperback action hero, Kaminski “dies” in a chemical plant explosion and is reborn as the crook Joseph P. Brenner, ready to infiltrate the family — as an Italian it is my duty to inform you that the mafia does not exist and has been created by the mass media as a slander against my people — and has to keep up his fake identity which gets compromised nearly at the cost of Shannon’s life.

It’s a movie filled with character actor tough guys — Ed Lauter, Steven Hill, Dick Durock, Robert Davi and Sven-Ole Thorsen — but the amazing thing is just how brutalized Arnold is by every woman in the cast, in particular his wife Amy (Blanche Baker, Molly Ringwald’s sister in Sixteen Candles and also the daughter of Carroll), who has taken to their isolated small town life with bottle in hand. Yet Arnold remains devoted to her, not giving in to the urge to fall in love with gangster moll Monique (Kathryn Harrold, who was menaced by bats in Nightwing and a large opera singer in Yes, Giorgio).

Directed by John Irvin (Next of Kin — the one with Swayze, who was almost in this) from a script by Luciano Vincenzoni (For a Few Dollars More, Miami Supercops), Sergio Donati (Once Upon a Time In the West, the original Man on Fire) and Gary DeVore (Running Scared), this film seems like a rest stop on the way to Arnold owning Hollywood. However, Arnold has also said that he learned a lot here, referring to Irvin as “a real actor’s director.”

*Meanwhile, Gene Siskel said “it has essentially the same story as Cobra,” which is so wrong.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Something Wild was not produced by Cannon but was sold on videotape by HBO/Cannon Video.

I’ll be perfectly honest: so much of what I find attractive in the opposite sex can best be summed up by a series of Melanie Griffith roles: the toughness of Edith Johnson in Cherry 2000, the smarts of Tess McGill in Working Girl, the unashamed sexuality of Holly Body in Body Double and the dangerous edge of Audrey Hankel in this film. Thanks, Melanie Griffith for if not always introducing me to the right women at least having me find the interesting ones.

Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) has no wife, a job he hates and no excitement in his life when Audrey (or Lulu) blows into his life like a hurricane. The problem is that she also has a violent husband Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta) who tears their new relationship into pieces.

Directed by Jonathan Demme and written by E. Max Frye, I remember staring at the box art for this movie and wondering how nervous I’d be if I ever encountered an Audrey in my life, never mind Ray. Girls always seemed — they still do, who am I kidding? — like a mystery, a frightening thing that could destroy your life and make you do things you never dreamed of. This movie in no way dispelled my thoughts. In fact, it both excited and frightened me.

Demme has a great cast in those too, like Tracy Walter (Bob the Goon!), John Sayles, Charles Napier and John Waters as a used car salesman. I love that he went from movies like Caged Heat and Crazy Mama to Married to the Mob, The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. His death left behind a major hole in American cinema. He also wrote Angels Hard as They Come, The Hot Box, Fighting Mad and White Mama Black Mama, along with writing Stop Making Sense and directing videos for The Talking Heads. Speaking of them, when you see the older ladies running the re-sale shop, that’s Demme’s and David Byrne’s mothers.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on October 8, 2019. Night of the Creeps was not produced by Cannon but was released on video by HBO/Cannon Video.

“The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they’re dead.”

Has any movie so perfectly been a synthesis of the gore aesthetic of the 1980’s and the science fiction angst of the 1950’s? I doubt it — Night of the Creeps takes on those genres and adds zombies to the mix, making for a crowd-pleasing bit of popcorn filmmaking.

Between writing the story for House and bringing The Monster Squad to the screen, Fred Dekker’s name generally signifies that you’re about to watch something pretty darn interesting. This was his directing debut, working from a script that took him only a week to write.

Back in 1959, a fight on board a UFO leads to a mysterious canister being shot out into space, crash landing on Earth. It looks like a falling star to a couple on lover’s lane. As they try to see where the star has landed, the girl is killed by an axe-wielding mental patient and a small slug jumps into the boy’s mouth.

Decades later, Chris Romero (Jason Lively, Rusty Griswold from National Lampoon’s European Vacation) is trying to get over being dumped. His friend J.C.  is trying to help him out. Luckily — or perhaps not — our hero falls for Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow, Twice Dead).

To try and win her heart, he decides to pledge a fraternity. Unfortunately, he decides to pick the Beta Epsilon house — the very one that Cynthia’s boyfriend is in charge of. He charges Chris and J.C. with stealing a corpse from the morgue as part of their initiation.

That’s when the plot kicks in. That corpse is still alive and they run from it after setting it free. That dead body — now very much alive — is the boy who ate the slug in the opening.

The reanimated dead kid heads back to the sorority house where its head explodes, releasing more of the slugs. Soon, they’ve started to take over more bodies who then start killing everything in their path. Meanwhile, Cameron (Tom Atkins) reveals his stake in all this — the girl killed in the beginning was the woman he never fell out of love with. He’d hunted down and killed her murderer way back in the late 50s and buried the body near the sorority house. Now that axe killer is back among the living thanks to the alien slugs.

Things move even faster now, as the slugs infect a dog that causes a bus crash filled with frat boys that transform into zombies that come after our heroes. Can the suicidal and bitter Cameron, Chris and Cynthia survive?

I’ve always been struck by the relationship between J.C. and Chris in this film. It’s really obvious that J.C. is in love with his best friend and he pretty much says so in the message he leaves for him after the bugs infect him. It’s not presented as humorous, but as very much matter of fact.

There’s also an alternate ending that shows Cameron transformed into a zombie, causing more slugs to worm their way into more graves before the spaceship from the beginning of the film returns. That ending is somehow even darker than the one that made it into the released film.

Back when I was a teenager, this movie ran on Cinemax at 5 AM nearly every night. I remember that it would still be one when my dad and I ate breakfast together. It’s packed with so much head exploding gore that I was worried that I might not be able to keep my toast and cereal down.

Also — if you didn’t notice from the character names, Dekker named every character after famous horror directors — George A. Romero (Chris Romero), John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper (J.C.’s full name is James Carpenter Hooper), John Landis (Detective Landis), Sam Raimi (Sgt. Raimi), David Cronenberg (Cynthia Cronenberg), James Cameron (Detective Ray Cameron) and Steve Miner (Mr. Miner is the janitor’s name) And the college setting is named for Roger Corman.

This movie remains Tom Atkins’ favorite role. It’s obvious he’s loving every moment, stopping to smell the flowers and dreaming that he’s on a beach when he’s not saying. “Thrill me” and “It’s Miller Time” while shotgun blasting zombies to oblivion.

I pretty much consider this movie required viewing. It’s a roller coaster ride that must be experienced.

You can watch this on Shudder or grab it from Shout! Factory. Sadly, you can no longer get the deluxe version that came with a Tom Atkins action figure. I still can’t believe that they made that.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Haunted Honeymoon was not produced by Cannon but was released on video by HBO/Cannon Video.

Haunted Honeymoon was directed and written by star Gene Wilder, who joins his wife Gilda Radner to play Larry Abbot and Vickie Pearle, two radio actors who decide to get married in the castle that was Larry’s childhood home, one filled with the strange members of his family such as aunt Kate (Dom DeLuise), his uncles Dr. Paul (Paul Smith) and Francis (Peter Vaughan) and his cousins Charles (Sir Jonathan Pryce), Nora (Julann Griffin), Susan (Jo Ross) and the cross-dressing Francis Jr. (Roger Ashton-Griffiths).

Dr. Paul has the idea of solving Larry’s on-air panic attacks with shock therapy that will knock them out by basically frightening him to death. He clues everyone — including Susan’s husband Montego the Magnificent (Jim Carter), the butler Pfister (Bryan Pringle), Pfister’s wife Rachel (Ann Way) and even Larry’s ex-girlfriend Sylvia (Eve Ferett) who is now dating Charles.

Then there’s a werewolf!

Wilder wrote this movie the whole way back on the set of Silver Streak and was inspired by The Old Dark House, The Cat and the Canary, The Black Cat and the Inner Sanctum radio show. Shot in London at Elstree Studios, Wilder saw this as an attempt to “make a 1930s movie for 1986.”

It went over about as well as you’d think. As Radner struggled with the ovarian cancer that would take her life — she and Wilder would only be married for four years before her sad early end — she wrote “On July 26, Haunted Honeymoon opened nationwide. It was a bomb. One month of publicity and the movie was only in the theaters for a week — a box-office disaster.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Desperately Seeing Susan was not produced by Cannon but was sold on videotape by HBO/Cannon Video. 

Inspired by Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating), this movie once almost starred Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn as Roberta and Susan, but who could be in this other than Rosanna Arquette and Madonna?

Roberta is a housewife in New Jersey whose only romance is the personals messages between Susan and Jim Dandy (Robert Joy). Meanwhile, Susan has just hooked up with a gangster named Bruce Meeker (Richard Hell!) and stolen a pair of Egyptian earings. One of his soldiers, Wayne (Will Patton) notices her decorated jacket as she leaves. He kills Meeker and she goes on with her life, unaware, stashing one earing in a Port Authority locker and wearing the other.

Roberta then starts trying to see the couple in person; hijinks ensure, she hits her head and actually believes that she is Susan. This allows her to meet Jim’s friend Dez (Aidan Quinn), who she falls for, and everyone goes on the run from Wayne, who thinks that they can implicate him in Meeker’s death.

This movie has a great cast: Steven Wright, John Turturro, Annie Golden from the Shirts, comedian Rockets Redglare, John Lurie, Carol Leifer and Ann Magnuson. It also has a scene set at Danceteria, the nightclub where Madonna first performed.

Susan Seidelman would go on to direct the American version of She Devil and three episodes of Sex and the City. Writer Leora Barish wrote Basic Instinct 2 and yes, that is a fact that I will be using all of the time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on June 10, 2021. Back to School was not produced by Cannon but was released on video by HBO/Cannon Video.

I always wondered if William Atherton and Billy Zapka had a support group. They’re great actors, but they seemed to excel at one role: being the absolute biggest jerks possible. I’d love to see a movie where they were in community service together, trying to right their wrongs, but slowly seething that society is throwing trash at them when they’re trying to clean a highway, knowing that they’re going to eventually become bullies again, but this time in the service of good. Their case worker? Ron Silver.

Anyways, Back to School was dedicated to Estelle Endler, Rodney Dangerfield’s longtime manager who guided him in his second time as a stand-up and got him into movies, where he’d find the kind of eternal life that he never could have dreamed of in his youth. To say Rodney had a hard life was life saying he told jokes. So many of them — “I was so ugly my parents had to hang a pork chop around my neck to get the dog to play with me.” — come from the pain he felt as an abandoned child.

Born Jacob Rodney Cohen, he claimed that his mother never kissed, hugged or showed any sign of affection toward him; he was also molested by a neighbor. He legally changed his name to Jack Roy at the age of 19, following the father who left him behind by taking his name and telling jokes and working as a singing waiter in the Catskills. After he was fired, he went into selling aluminum siding.

When he went back into comedy in the 60s, he was in deep debt and couldn’t get booked. That’s when he realized he’d need a hook. His new name Rodney Dangerfield came from a Jack Benny routine — indeed, Benny even visited him once backstage and complimented him on his act — and came from a place he understood very well: he got no respect.

In just a few years, he’d headline Vegas and own his own club, a place where young comedians came to get a break. Rodney never forgot what it was like to struggle and gave so many young performers their start. He also kept struggling mentally throughout his life, using marijuana to self-medicate.

Unlike his stand-up persona and maybe even the real Jacob/Jack/Rodney, his film characters in movies like Caddyshack and Easy Money were portrayed as successful, happy and popular men. However, they had gone from nothing to something all on their own, thereby becoming the enemy of the ruling rich. They may have money, but Rodney’s characters would never truly be part of the 1%.

Yet despite their success, the club of Hollywood kept him at arm’s length. Dangerfield was rejected for membership in the Motion Picture Academy in 1995 by the head of the Academy’s Actors Section, Roddy McDowall. His fans protested and the Academy reconsidered, but Dangerfield then refused their membership.

Actually, those fans were really important to him. He was the first celebrity to operate a website and he’d often directly e-mail the fans who visited the site, which had to be a huge surprise.

Rodney used to say, “I tell ya I get no respect from anyone. I bought a cemetery plot. The guy said, “There goes the neighborhood!”” That phrase is emblazoned on his tombstone. Man, I get teared up even thinking about Rodney, because while I never met the man, he meant so much to me and my family. I’d get the opportunity to stay up late if we knew he was on Carson and I can still recall a riotous screening of Easy Money where the film was barely audible from all the laughing from my father and uncle.

Anyways — Back to School is the big starring role from Rodney, the chance to shine on his own. He plays yet another of his regular guys made good, Thornton Melon. His plus-size clothing stores have made him rich, yet he can’t connect with his son Jason (Keith Gordon). After leaving his newest wife (Adrienne Barbeau), he goes, well, Back to School to be part of his son’s life. But he does it as only a rich man can, taking over most of the campus and living it up while his son pretty much is embarrassed.

This film completely understands the pure comic formula: set up a simple premise and allow hijinks to ensue. To wit: A rich regular guy goes back to school and hijinks ensue.

Those hijinks include Burt Young as Rodney’s tough butler and best friend, Robert Downey Jr. as his son’s punk roommate, Kurt Vonnegut as a guest speaker hired by Rodney, a romance with Sally Kellerman*, a memorable Sam Kinison cameo and the aforementioned Zapka being, well, Billy Zapka.

And oh yeah, the Triple Lindy.

This film is pretty autobiographical in parts, as Rodney was a diver and truck driver in his youth. I’ve always loved its message that he may have changed with wealth, but he’s remained a kind-hearted man throughout it all. Harold Ramis was one of the co-writers and his comedic sensibilities really help the picture.

For metal fans, you can hear Michael Bolton’s pre-crooner metal song “Everybody’s Crazy” during a party scene, and the Alice Cooper song “The Great American Success Story” was intended to be in this film. It appears on Constrictor and features the lyrics “Back to school, he’s gonna take that plunge.”

We all need more Rodney in our lives.

*She lives in Tommy Doyle’s house from Halloween. Seriously.