EDITOR’S NOTE: Hollywood Harry was not produced by Cannon but was sold on videotape by Cannon / Media Home Video.

Robert Forster is one of those actors who just makes me happy when he shows up in movies. The son of an elephant trainer for the Barnum and Bailey Circus, his first major starring role was in Medium Cool; he mostly shows up to be the best part of movies like Alligator, The Black Hole and Vigilante.

Harry Petry (Forster, who also directed and produced this ode to detective movies) is down on his luck and not even speaking to his partner Max Caldwell (Joe Spinell, another actor whose small roles in films always seem to be a good portent of how much I’ll like a movie and how much better my day will be) and secretary Candy (Shannon Wilcox, Forster’s wife at the time). But then he has two changes in his life: a case where he has to find the adult film of Regina (Mallie Jackson), a rich man’s daughter as well as raise a surrogate daughter of his own, his niece Danielle (Forster’s daughter Kate).

Writer Curt Allen was also the man who wrote Walking the Edge (which also had Forster and Spinell in it and there’s a meta scene where they watch it on TV in this movie),  Deadly Passion, Bloodstone, Blind Vengeance and the Forster-missing Alligator II: The Mutation, which seems like a lost opportunity.

So yeah — a neo-noir that’s also about Forster being shirtless for most of the movie and dancing with his secretary for four sexy minutes that meanders and is way talky and really a hang-out movies and you know, I’m there for all of it. Forster was so happy that Cannon distributed this that he did The Delta Force for them, a movie where he improbably plays a Middle Eastern terrorist despite in our reality being born to an Italian mother and English/Irish father in Rochester, New York.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Heat was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Columbia-Cannon-Warner in the UK.

Burt Reynold read Heat by William Goldman and supposedly got this film moving. The first director was supposed to be Robert Altman- — Carol Burnett encouraged him to work with Reynolds — who hated how commerical Goldman’s script was. He met with Goldman and somehow got along with him, but Goldman wouldn’t change a word. So then Altman used a technicality to escape the film. His cinematographer Pierre Mignot could not get the necessary immigration permits to work on the film.

Altman was replaced by Dick Richards, who didn’t get along with Reynolds, who hit him causing the director to leave and be replaced by Jerry Jameson. Then Richards eturned, only to fall from a camera crane and need to be hospitalized.

A Directors Guild of America arbitration ruled that Richards was responsible for 41% of the finished film and Jerry Jameson 31%. There were four other directors and Richards, who never directed a major motion picture again, won a lasuit against Burt for punching him in the face.

Nick Escalante is a former soldier of fortune, deadly with his hands and an expert with sharp objects. At one point, someone refers to him as the most lethal man in the world. He’s a bodygyard but he really just wants to move back Venice, Italy.

Cyrus Kinnick (Peter MacNicol) wants Nick to teach him how to be tough. He soon learns what’s kept Nick in Vegas: as soon as he gets ahead, he blows all of his cash gambling.

After getting revenge for one of his friends, Holly (Karen Young), Nick becomes the target of Danny DeMarco (Neill Barry), the man who assaulted her. He defies the orders of mob boss Baby (Joseph Mascolo) and tries to kill Nick, who wipes out every single one of his men and then talks the young thug into killing himself.

I liked Heat. It has a fun relationship between Nick and Cyrus, as well as showing that even though Burt can easily speak the physical language of violence, he can barely interact with the world.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Robotech is the opposite of most films on the site. Instead of an American property being remade overseas and remixed into something new, the TV series was three different Japanese cartoons: Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada, all with new dialogue, some minor added animation and connections between the three shows that never existed. This series was made this way because Macross didn’t have enough episodes for U.S. syndication. Ideally, 65 episodes were what most series had as that allowed a show to air five times a week for thirteen weeks.

Director/producer/co-writer Carl Macek — the man who put together all these shows — wanted Robotech: The Movie to be a redubbing of another unconnected cartoon, Megazone 23, with its hero renamed Mark Landry and connected to Macross hero Rick Hunter. The new dialogue would be about Mark trying to inform the world of the fate of the main ship in that series, the SDF-1.

According to Zimmerit, Macross creators director Noburo Ishiguro, character designer sHaruhiko Mikimoto and Toshihiro Hirano and animator Ichiro Itano worked on the OVA as well as Mospeda mechanical designers Shinji Aramaki and Hideki Kakinuma. That meant that this film would look quite close to Robotech.

It was a great idea.

But things didn’t work out that way.

First, Tatsunoko Productions, the creators of Macross, was releasing Macross: Do You Remember Love?  and wouldn’t allow Macek to use any Macross story elements.

And then Cannon Films got involved.

When Macek first showed the first to Cannon, Menahem Golan responded that he didn’t like it. It wasn’t Cannon. It had a downer ending, too many girls and not enough guns and robots. So in just days, Macek roughly re-edited the flm and was nearly embarrassed by how slapdash it all was.

Menahel Golan stood at the screening and shouted, “Now that’s a Cannon movie!”

Macek rewrote the story to take place between the first and second seasons of the television series — Macross and Robotech Masters — and had the Robotech Masters kidnapping and replicating B.D. Andrews to steal the memory core of the SDF-1.

One of the big problems was that you can totally see the difference between animation. Megazone 23 was shot on 35mm while Southern Cross was 16mm.

Throw in a disastrous screening in Texas — it was dumped there and any parents that did bring kids were shocked at the violence while Robotech fans were upset at how little it had to do with the show — and Cannon walked away from this movie. Macek and Harmony Gold went out of their way to block it from coming out on video, so the only way to see this was in bootleg form.

The Robotech: The Complete Series collection has a 29-minute version that only has footage from Southern Cross and a disclaimer stating the film “has been edited for licensing and content. That said — if you know where to look online, you can find this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on November 13, 2017. Never Too Young to Die was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Scotia/Cannon.

I grew up on James Bond. More than that, at a young age, I was obsessed with Bond. One magical Christmas, the only gifts I got were the James Bond role playing game from Victory Games and all of the expansions. I saw every single one one of the movies, even the original Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again, the bootleg Sean Connery film that came out of Kevin McClory’s legal battles with Eon Productions, the Fleming estate and United Artists. I’ve seen every Bond ripoff, from Flint to Matt Helm to Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (it helps that Mario Bava directed that one). Post Timothy Dalton, I grew bored with the more realistic Bond and never came back. I grew up with the ridiculous world of Roger Moore.

I get the feeling that plenty of other folks have had similar experiences, thanks to comics like Jimmy’s Bastards and Kingsmen (also a series of movies). And this movie — Never Too Young to Die guest stars the Bond from my favorite of the series, the only appearance of George Lazenby, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as Drew Stargrove, but we can just pretend he’s James Bond.

Stargrove has a son, Lance. He has a theme song. And he has a mission, to stop psychopathic hermaphroditic gang leader Velvet Von Ragner (Gene Simmons, sure he’s in KISS, but let’s celebrate his ridiculous IMDB page, where he’s either played himself or been in some amazingly insane films, like Trick or Treat and Runaway). But his luck has finally run out. He’s dead and his somewhat estranged son must leave behind his gymnastic days at college to take over his role as the best secret agent in the world.

Lance is played by John Stamos, mostly known for TV’s Full House. This is his star turn, all fresh faced and ready to break hearts. He’s joined on his mission by Vanity, who may have had a short and sweet film career, but got to be in some incredible stuff, like The Last Dragon, Action Jackson, Tanya’s Island, 52 Pick-Up and Terror Train.

Your ability to enjoy this film depends completely on your ability to enjoy ridiculousness. And facts like this — the nightclub outfit that costume Gene Simmons wears in the nightclub scene is the same one that Lynda Carter wore for her 1980 ENCORE! special, where she sang KISS’ “I Was Made for Loving You.”

Writer Steven Paul also created the Baby Geniuses series and had uncredited help from Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (TV’s Batman, Flash Gordon), which shows. Paul also wrote 1992’s The Double 0 Kid, where Corey Haim dreams of being a secret agent.

Director Gil Bettman produced and directed tons of 80’s TV, like The Fall Guy, Knight Rider and Automan, a one season wonder that combined police drama with Tron. I may be the only human being to have watched the entire season. His other major movie in 1986 was Crystal Heart, where Tawny Kitaen plays a rock star who falls in love with a boy who lives inside a crystal room because he has an auto-immune deficiency.

This film has an incredibly uneven tone. At times, it’s a family movie. Other scenes, Road Warrior clones are tearing off Vanity’s clothes and threatening to rape her. Sometimes, everything is treated with wacky humor. And then, you see people fall to their deaths and smack into the ground. It’s also a much better movie the more mind enhancing substances you consume, I figure, as I watched it cold sober and it kind of dragged (no pun intended).

Oh yeah — Lance’s roommate, Cliff, is played by Peter Kwong, who was Rain in Big Trouble in Little China. And because this movie was made in the 1980’s, Robert Englund contractually has to be in it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on October 28, 2020. The Hitcher was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Cannon France.

When I first saw The Hitcher, I was probably 14 years old and saw it as a straight-ahead story of violence on the highway. I probably cheered at the end when Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) blew a hole into John Ryder (Rutger Hauer). But age and the miles wear on every man and now when I watch it, it does more than make me raise my fist in the air and shout. It makes me ruminate on the journeys life has taken me and how I’d rather be launched through a window and blasted down a hillside than live a slow, tedious and quiet death.

Halsey starts the film with the kind of confidence that someone at the end of their teens has. He picks up Ryder, who immediately confides to him that he’s killed someone else. But he says something else. Something we don’t expect. “I want you to stop me.”

That’s the whole point of this film. Ryder will transform Halsey into the empty man he is, whether through attrition or forcing him to blast him into oblivion. This road only goes one way.

What does it take to get Halsey to realize this isn’t a nightmare, but reality? Of course, it’s easy to think that this could all be a dream, in the same way that long stretches of drives with no one speaking seem to be visions that last and last. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m still driving and every moment up until here, up until this realization, is just me imagining my life and any moment now, I’m going to wake up with my fiancee asleep next to me.

For our hero, it takes seeing trucks plow into truck stops, station wagons filled with the blood of all American families and the typical movie love interest torn in half by two semis.

Halsey is stripped of his identity, not just because his license and keys — let’s face, the manhood of most red-blooded boys — have been taken away. Everything he may have believed was true — the goodness of giving someone a ride when they need it, that love can conquer fear, even that the role models and lawmakers that society sets up can protect us against one lone man who isn’t just unafraid to die but willingly chases it — is a lie.

Not even suicide can save our hero.

So who is at fault for all the crimes that come out of this spree? If Halsey just shot Ryder in the truck, while Nash (Jennifer Jason Lee, looking like the gorgeous girl who surely will survive all of this madness, right?) is tied between it and another, life would be different.

Look, when a killer says, “I want you to stop me,” you listen.

Eric Red wrote this story while traveling across America, wondering about the lyrics to The Doors ditty “Riders On the Storm.” Pretty simple, really: “If ya give this man a ride, sweet memory will die. Killer on the road, yeah.”

Critics hated it. Both Siskel and Ebert gave it zero out of four stars, with Ebert even decrying the film by saying, “I could see that the film was meant as an allegory, not a documentary. But on its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level it is reprehensible.”

Whatever.

The end of this film, as Halsey stands against the sunset and smokes as we process what has just happened just attacks the viewer. The credits just stand there as we feel no celebration or victory. Maybe not even relief, because while it seems like this is over, there’s no way it is over.

The fact that this movie spawned a sequel and a Michael Bay remake are two things that I have added to the many things that I have tried to forget so that I can keep on living my life*. Kind of like how director Robert Harmon makes the Jesse Stone TV movies for Tom Selleck now instead of getting to create more movies like this (that said, I’ve heard good things about They, a movie he did with Wes Craven and I kind of don’t mind his Van Damme film Nowhere to Run). Red would move on to write a few other films that break the mold and are on my list of favorite films: Near Dark and Blue Steel.

The last thing that this movie makes me feel is loss. Rutger Hauer is such an essential part of my film nerd stable of actors, someone who always makes a movie way better than it seems like it will be just by his presence. Nighthawks is so intense because of him. Films like Wanted Dead or Alive, The Blood of Heroesand Buffy the Vampire Slayer (with Hauer getting to finally play the vampire lord that Anne Rice, who always wanted him as Lestat, saw him in) are actually great because of Hauer. And Blade Runner means nothing without him as Roy Batty.

Hauer astounded the stunt people in this movie, pulling off the car stunts by himself. And he also intimidated Howell, scaring him even when they weren’t acting. He even knocked out a tooth when he flew through the windshield himself. There is no one who could have played this character quite so well and stayed with me so long after the film was over.**

*The fact that René Cardona III made a Mexican version of this called Sendero Mortal does give me the energy to keep on living.  I’d also like to recommend the absolutely insane Umberto Lenzi in America  Hitcher In the Dark, which makes me wish that more Italian directors made their own versions of The Hitcher.

**Hauer said in his autobiography, All Those Moments, that Elliott “was so scary when he came in to audition that Edward S. Feldman was afraid to go out to his car afterward.”

You can listen to more about The Hitcher on The Cannon Canon.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Highlander wasn’t produced by Cannon, but was distributed by Columbia-Cannon-Warner.

Gregory Widen wrote  Highlander for one of his classes as an undergraduate in the screenwriting program at UCLA. Widen’s teacher told him to get an agent; he sold the script for $200,000. The initial story was darker and more violent, but as Widen saw his lead character Conor MacLeod as Connor as a very serious, grim character following centuries of violence and loss. The film portrayed MacLeod as a haunted man, the film ended up being about an immortal who has suffered great loss but who still believes in being alive and falling in love.

Born in the Scottish Highlands, Connor (Christopher Lambert) is nearly killed in battle with the man who will become his eternal enemy, the Kurgan (Clancy Brown). Connor survives and somehow doesn’t die, which leads his own family to accuse him of witchcraft. Leaving in exile, he finally meets and marries Heather (Beatie Edney), who lives with her eternally young husband until dying of old age.

Connor is an immortal and is soon guided by Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez (Sean Connery), an immortal Egyptian who has fought across the world for untold centuries. Thanks to his heavy schedule, Connery’s scenes had to be filmed in a week. He bet director Russell Mulcahy that they would not finish, but they finished in time. Regardless of the bet, Connery earned $1 million for just seven days of filming.

He teaches Connor that the immortals are all part of a gigantic cosmic game, destined to battle each other until only one is left. That person will gain The Prize, the power of all immortals throughout time, and that evil immortals like the Kurgan must be stopped from winning said prize. The only way to do that? Chopping off his head.

Highlander was literally a movie I watched with my father every single day after school. We’d watch it, discuss it and then watch it some more, not wanting to see it all in one day. Russell Mulcahy, who had followed making videos for Duran Duran and Razorback, transformed what could have been a simple story into something magical; the soundtrack from Queen goes even further into pushing this into a legendary tale.

Queen only was supposed to contribute one song for this movie, but after seeing some of the movie, the band members each ended up having a favorite scene and wrote a song for it. For example, Roger Taylor took the line “It’s a kind of magic” and Brian May wrote “Who Wants to Live Forever” before he even got home from watching the film.

It was nearly Marillion, who turned down the offer because they were heading out on a world tour, on the soundtrack. There was also talk of David Bowie, Duran Duran and Sting, who recommended Brown for the role of the Kurgan after working with him in The Bride.

The opening scene was originally a hockey match, but the NHL refused to allow the crew to film there because they were emphasizing the violence. They switched to wrestling in Madison Square Garden, but any wrestling fan knows that the Fabulous Freebirds (Michael P.S. Hayes, Terry “Bam Bam” Gordy and Buddy Jack Roberts) were only in the WWF for a limited time. This was part of the Pro Wrestling USA shows and was taped at the Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey. Their opponents are The Tonga Kid and the High Flyers, Greg Gagne and “Jumping” Jim Brunzell.

Arabella Black Angel (1989): Also known as Angel: Black Angel, this is one of the sleaziest giallo that I’ve come across. Seeing as how I’ve watched Play Motel, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Giallo In Venice and own multiple copies of The New York Ripper, that’s saying something.

Director Stelvio Massi was the cinematographer or director of photography for plenty of great movies like The Case of the Bloody Iris, Sartana’s Here…Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin and Giovannona Long-Thigh. He knows how to make things look gorgeous, particularly in the way he shoots women, which comes in more than handy here.

Arabella is a woman obsessed with the carnal act. Sadly, her husband has been rendered impotent and confined to a wheelchair ever since he wrecked his car while she was dirty facetiming him (he was driving, because the opposite is impossible) on their wedding day. She’s filled his role with trips to brothels, including one that gets raided while she’s assaulted by a cop. She gets back at that officer by inviting him back to her place and while he’s yodeling in the valley, she bops him upside the head with a hammer. Her cucked husband, who has been watching all of this hammer smashed face action go down finally feels the blood flow down below, which means that he has to keep setting up his wife to kill off more and more people. He also finally gets back the urge to write and they start to fall in love again, but of course, he has to keep watching her make love to other people.

Also: lots of genital mutilation.

Ida Galli plays the mother-in-law. You’ll remember her from The Sweet Body of Deborah and Fulci’s The Psychic. Rena Niehaus, who is in the absolutely baffling strange film Damned In Venice, is also on hand.

The problem for our heroine is that everyone she makes loves to dies, including a cowboy who gets his member sliced clean off. The next day, as the cops are gathering evidence, one of them is so upset that he can’t stop eating his sandwich. The world of this movie is insane, because there’s a photo of that mutilated wang on the cover of the next day’s newspaper.

There’s also a scene in the Freak Boy Zone, a place where Arabelle cruises all the gay men and picks one to take home. This entire moment is absolutely insane, as the homosexual side of town feels like it came out of an Enzo G. Castellari post-apocalyptic movie.

This movie looks grubby, makes little to no sense and will offend pretty much everyone that watches it. That means that you’re definitely going to want to watch it.

The Killer Is Still Among Us (1986): Also known as Florence! The Killer is Still Among Us and The Killer Has Returned, you have to admire the chutzpah — or the gall — of a film to have the disclaimer “This film was made as a warning to young people and with the hope that it will be of use to law enforcement to bring these ferocious killers to justice,” after you’ve just watched 83 minutes of a killer graphically mutilating women and their most intimate of parts, as if this were some bid to outdo Giallo  In Venice or The New York Ripper.

Based on the true story of the Florence serial killer “The Monster of Florence,” this was written by Ernesto Gastaldi (The Whip and the Body, All the Colors of the Dark, My Name Is Nobody) and Giuliano Carnimeo (who directed four of the Sartana films under the alias Anthony Ascott, as well as The Case of the Bloody Iris, Exterminators of the Year 3000 and Ratman).

Directing this movie — and helping with the script — would be Camillio Teti, who produced The Dead Are Alive and Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s attempt at a non-mondo, the ironically named Mondo Candideo.

Much like a scene out of Maniac, a couple on lover’s lane is blown away mid-aardvark by a gloved killer. What separates the uomini from the ragazzi is that the killer then uses a knife and a tree branch to do things that made me turn my head from the screen for an extended period of time.

Christiana Marelli has been studying the killer in criminology class to the displeasure of her boyfriend, the cops and her teachers. This leads to her being stalked via phone and in person by the killer. Of course, seeing as how Alex, that formerly mentioned boyfriend, is never around during these killings, you can see why she starts thinking he could be Il Mostro.

The film moves from the giallo into the supernatural as our heroine attends a seance where the medium has a vision of the killer decimating a camping couple, soon developing the same wound that the victims just received.

What does Christina do? Run to the theater to see if Alex is there or not, proving that while he is waiting for her, he certainly could still be the killer. If I were her professor, I’d have given her a zero out of thirty.

After all this, she just sits down to watch a movie with him and it ends up being the same film we’ve just been watching. That’s either a huge cop out or just how you expect a giallo to end.

The Sister of Ursula (1978): After their father’s death, two gorgeous sisters – the sensitive Ursula (Barbara Magnolfi, Suspiria, Cut and Run) and promiscuous Dagmar (Stefania D’Amario, Zombie, Nightmare City) decide to escape to the seaside resort town Amalfi. Oh, if they only knew the madness that waited there!

The island is quite literally awash with the wrong guys, the wrong girls, the wrong couples and a killer who tears people apart with the biggest member this side of Incubus. Get ready for a movie that isn’t sure if it wants to be sexploitation or giallo but is ready to do everything that it can to entertain you.

Director and writer Enzo Milioni also was behind the Lucio Fulci presented Luna di Sangue. In this movie, he’s created a world of pleasure and murder, which at times exists side by side. It seems from the cut I’ve seen that there may have been even longer — and more explicit — lovemaking scenes.

So who is the killer? Dagmar’s new man Filipo (Marc Porel, The Psychic), who just might also be a drug smuggler? The hotel owner (Yvonne Harlow, who claimed to be the great-granddaughter of Jean Harlow)? Perhaps dad isn’t quite so dead? Or are the sisters both insane? After all, Dagmar is given to loving herself just feet away from her sister, who hates just about everyone she meets.

According to Milioni, Porel was a drug addict who had earned a bad reputation as an actor. Magnolfi got him hired for the film and he behaved for the entire shoot and ended up getting clean. Sadly, while shooting a commercial in Monaco, he relapsed and overdosed.

The fourth Forgotten Gialli set is packed with utter sleaze and I say that in the nicest of ways. Each movie is newly scanned and restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative, plus its packed with features like interviews with Enzo Milioni, a commentary track for The Killer Is Still Among Us by Rachel Nesbit and audio essays by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas as well as trailers and image galleries. Get it from Vinegar Syndrome.

Jessica (Cassandra Delaney, one-time wife of John Denver; also the star of One Night Stand and Hurricane Smith) just wants to take care of an animal sanctuary but now she has to deal with the fury of three kangaroo poachers — Sunny (Peter Ford), Ringo (David Sandford) and Sparks (Garry Who) — after she tries to turn them in for hunting on protected land.

They take things too far when they break into her quarters while she sleeps and take nude Polaroids of her. She responds by messing with their guns, so they assault her and tie her to the hood of The Beast, a specially redesigned Ford F100, and tear through the outback. Then, they destroy her home, smash her car and kill every animal that she’s sworn to protect.

If the police (Don Barker) don’t care, if she can’t get to town and if she’s probably going to die at the hands of these men, there’s no way she’s not taking some of them out with her.

Directed by Mario Andreacchio and written by Rob George — who would also work together on The Dreaming, Captain Johnno, Abduction…Who’s Next? and several episodes of Pals. 

George was inspired by driving through Australia, saying “The original source of the idea for me was driving back from Sydney to Adelaide one night, we left about midnight, and around about West Wyalong we got taunted by some guy who kept driving right up behind us … just sitting a foot or two behind the back of our ute and then he’d pass us and go up and come back on the other side of the road and play chicken with us. It was really distressing.”

Andreacchio would later say, “Fair Game came out of a situation where we were wanting to make a movie that was a B-grade video suspense thriller. I wanted to treat it like comic book violence — it was always like a comic book study of violence. What amazed me and the thing I found quite disappointing was that it started to become a cult film in some parts of the world and people were taking it seriously. And that, for me, became a real turning point. I thought, if people are taking this seriously, then I don’t think I can make this sort of material.”

This movie exudes sleaze and danger, as everything surrounding Jessica is out to hurt her. It’s shot in blazing sunlight by Andrew Lesnie, who would go on to The Lords of the Rings movies. It feels like I Spit On Your Grave and Razorback had a child and then Death Proof was the kid it had when it was just a teenager.

Stick with this. It takes some time to get to where it needs to be. But when it does, it’s ready to deliver on everything you watch exploitation films for.

Farir Game will open theatrically July 8 before a digital release July 12 from Dark Star Pictures, A physical release is planned for August.