Made back to back with King Solomon’s Mines, this was directed by Gary Nelson, who also made Freaky Friday and The Black Hole, which is a pretty wild resume when you think about it.

Speaking of King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain (Richard Chamberlain) and Jesse Huston (Sharon Stone) plan to be married but Allan is restless. That’s when a man is chased by two masked men into Allan’s estate, only to be murdered later that night. Before that happens, he reveals to Allan that his brother Robeson (Martin Rabbett, Chamberlain’s long-time partner) is still alive and has found the City of Gold.

Along with Umslopogaas (James Earl Jones), Swarma (Robert Donner) and several Asari warriors, Allan and Jesse go on a new adventure where they discover the city, which leads to a battle between the good Queen Nyleptha (Aileen Marson) and the evil Agon (Henry Silva) and Queen Sorais (Cassandra Peterson, which is strange as she doesn’t speak and at this point, Elvira was already well-known).

In true Cannon fashion, most of the music for this movie is just Jerry Goldsmith’s score for King Solomon’s Mines along with only thirty minutes of original music by Michael Linn. And if that isn’t Cannon, how about the fact that Golan and Globus had no contact with Nelson until he screened it for them. Golan was baffled by the film, thinking he was getting to see Invaders from Mars. He never admitted to his mistake and told Nelson that the film was unreleasable. Nelson then walked down a hall decorated with Cannon posters, all of which were in his opinion unreleasable too.

Million Dollar Madness was a vehicle for Israeli comedian Seffy Rivlin that was co-written by Menahem Golan.

Rivlin plays bank manager Ephraim Rubin who gets institutionalized because of pressure at work and at home. Yet once there, he finds that the mental hospital is much nicer than his real life. He has a friend in inmate Ezekiel Harel (Arik Lavie) and falls in love with nurse Noga (Anat Waxman). However, there’s also a money counterfeiting operation being conducted out of the mental home, but who’s going to believe a crazy person?

It’s a slapstick film where everyone is always at a ten and then tries to go beyond that. That said, I guess it’s nice that Golan never forgot where he came from.

Duet for One is based on the life of conductor Daniel Barenboim and his wife, cellist Jacqueline du Pré, and Cannon originally bought this back when they made The Wicked Lady, as it was a movie that Faye Dunaway and her husband Terry O’Neill had wanted to make.

A stage play by Tom Kempinski, who also wrote the screenplay, this movie was directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, who also made Maria’s Lovers and Runaway Train for Cannon, so he had good luck at making highly regarded films for the lowly regarded studio.

Stephanie Anderson (Julie Andrews) is a world-famous violinist who has lost the ability to play and must redefine her relationships with her husband David (Alan Bates), her accompanist Leonid Lefimov (Sigfrit Steiner), her star pupil Constantine Kassanis (Rupert Everett) and her manager Sonia Randvich (Margaret Courtenay).

She sees Dr. Louis Feldman (Max von Sydow) for help, but he can’t help her with the rage she feels. Her husband will turn to drink, her accompanist will die, her student will leave and she’ll eventually give away all of her music possessions to a man (Liam Neeson) who can only give her physical affection.

As she finally gives in to the pain and attempts to overdose, only her maid remains to try to save her. And by the end, in what may be a dream, she’s grown closer to the doctor, Constantine returns and Leonid comes back from the dead as a ghost.

Duet for One is a hard watch in a good way, as it’s loaded with emotional darkness. I’m always amazed by the movies that Cannon was part of and the fact that they could make both this movie and Going Bananas.

Chuck Norris told the Chicago Tribune, “When I got crucified in my first film, Good Guys Wear Black, I went to Steve McQueen. He said the bottom line is if you get the best reviews in the world and the movie bombs, you’re not going to get work. But if it’s a huge success, whether the criticism is good or bad, you’ll work. The key thing is — does the public accept you?”

Chuck was ready to make the transition that Arnold did in 1988 when he made Twins. It was time to make a comedy.

In this movie, Chuck is Max Donigan, who teams with Leo Porter (Louis Gossett Jr.) as treasure hunters who haven’t ever found any treasure. Then they meet the psychic Patricia Goodwin (Melody Anderson, Flash Gordon), who has a treasure map that will lead them to gold that’s also being sought by a one-eyed cyclops called Firewalker.

The map leads them to a Native American Reservation and inside a cave they find hundreds of skeletons, Aztec and Mayan art and a dagger that frightens a man so much that he throws himself into a pit.

Sonny Landham — Billy from Predator — is El Coyote, the man who wants to be the Firewalker and can only achieve that by sacrificing Patricia. And hey — it can’t be an Indiana Jones movie without John Rhys-Davies, right? You also can’t make a Native American-themed movie in the 80s without Will Sampson, right?

Gene Siskel said that Firewalker was “one of the most derivative films in years, splicing elements of Raiders of the Lost Ark with Romancing the Stone,” while Roger Ebert would say, “In literature, it’s called plagiarism. In the movies, it’s homage.”

Even though Firewalker made almost $12 million at the box office, it wasn’t the success that other Chuck Norris movies had been for Cannon, which sadly was due for some big changes.

This was written by Robert Gosnell and directed by J. Lee Thompson, who Melody Anderson had some interesting words about: “J. Lee was a character. Some days the heat got to him worse than others. He would get tired and cranky, but we got along great. At the time, I had no idea the director in The Exorcist was based on him.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Lucy Irvine wrote the book Castaway all about the year that she spent living with writer Gerald Kingsland on the isolated island of Tuin, between New Guinea and Australia. Director Nicolas Roeg made this adaption, working from a script by Allan Scott.

Irvine is played by Amanda Donahue, while Kingsland is Oliver Reed. Donahue said of this film, “Well, naked on a desert island with Oliver Reed – it was a tabloid fantasy, wasn’t it? He was an alcoholic and his behavior was erratic, but he was always a courteous and good actor.”

Yeah, Reed lost weight to be in this movie by using the vodka diet.

Kate Bush was the initial choice to play Irvine but didn’t want to be nude for the entire film. Instead, she sent her song “Be Kind to My Mistakes.”

As I brought up during The Ambassador, Cannon had been hoping to make Elmore Leonard’s 52 Pick-Up into a movie since 1974. John Frankenheimer read the book and wanted to direct a more faithful adaptation, which almost happened in Pittsburgh, which would have stood in for the Detroit location of the novel. It ended up being shot in Los Angeles.

With a screenplay by John Steppling and Leonard himself, this movie is lean, mean and rough. Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider) has gone from decorated war veteran to owning a steel company that’s finally worth some money, while his wife Barbara (Ann-Margret) is running for city council.

Their lives fall apart when Harry is visited by three blackmailers who demand $105,000 a year for life, as they have a videotape of him and his mistress Cini (Kelly Preston). He can’t go to the cops or he’ll ruin everything his wife has worked for. But he doesn’t have the available funds to pay them. And his guilt makes him confess to his wife, even as she tells him she wished that she never knew.

The three men — Alan Raimy (John Glover, who is a revelation in this movie), Bobby Shy (Clarence Williams III) and Leo (Robert Trebor) — get found out by Harry, who refuses to pay them, even after they murder Cini with his gun. Soon, he’s turning the gang against one another, with Raimy slowly going even wilder, finally kidnapping Barbara and injecting her with drugs.

This movie is one of those “oh you men” films, because men and their impulses drive every single violent action. It also has a great cast, including Doug McClure, Debra Berger, Blackie Dammit and Vanity as the dancer that gets Cini mixed up in the blackmail and a party scene that’s a who’s who of American adult film actors in 1986, including Tom Byron, Herschel Savage (his wife at the time Ines Ochoa is also in this scene), Amber Lynn, Ron Jeremy, Erica Boyer, Barbara Dare, Jamie Gillis, Cara Lott, Randy West, Honey Wilder, Pat Manning, Barbara Summers, Miss Sharon Mitchell, and Lorrie Lovett. Seka claimed in her book Inside Seka that she passed on being in the movie after Frankenheimer asked her for a date.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Originally a sequel to Invasion U.S.A., Avenging Force got horrible reviews upon release but why shouldn’t it? It’s a Cannon action movie made for people who wanted to watch and rent action movies. It’s also absolutely berserk in the best of ways, made by a dream team of director Sam Firstenberg (Ninja III: The Domination, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, American Ninja), writer James Booth (Pray for Death) and stars Michael Dudikoff and Steve James.

Dudikoff is Captain Matt Hunter, a retired Secret Service agent who has retired to his family’s cattle ranch with his sister Sarah and grandfather. After meeting Matt’s old military friend Larry Richards (James), he discovers that his friend is planning to run for senate but has had numerous threats on his life, which show up at a parade during which Larry’s son is killed.

Hunter traces the murder to the Pentangle, a far-right group that is devoted to gun rights and controlling immigration. If this movie feels a little too close to reality for those of us who have lived through the last decade, well, the Pentacle also has a hunting club where its elite members can hunt down human beings.

The Pentangle has five members for each point on the star and is led by Professor Elliott Glastenbury (John P. Ryan, the warden from Runaway Train), who wants to get Hunter to join. Somehow, they think that will happen after they kill his grandfather, Larry and his wife and take his daughter. Oh yeah — they also shoot him in the leg and execute Larry’s other son in front of him, so there’s no way he’s joining up. I mean, they plan on auctioning off his super young sister as a sex slave. Seriously, I’ve never seen a more horrible group of villains in my life. It’s like the filmmakers kept saying, “What if we really made them sleazier? And then they wore slasher costumes when they hunted people down?”

Hard Target is pretty much the same movie, when you think about it, but the villains in this are, again, the absolutely worst human beings that have ever lived. Avenging Force doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. It’s over the top lunacy in the best of ways and it feels good to watch Dudikoff wipe out a mansion filled with guys who definitely want to make America pretty, pretty good again.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I am a beyond fan of this movie and therefore so happy to bring back the article I wrote on September 13, 2017 as part of a celebration of Tobe Hooper. The art used for this post comes from Studiohouse Designs.

In my Fangoria reading youth, there were two constants: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the scariest movie ever and Tom Savini was the master of gore. If you put that chocolate into that bloody peanut butter, what would you get? And in a world where Freddy, Jason and soon, Michael Meyers would all get sequel after sequel, why not Leatherface?

Two failed films into his Cannon Pictures deal, one would assume that Tobe Hooper felt the same way. And even though Chainsaw 2 would double its slim $4 million dollar budget, it wasn’t considered a success by audiences and critics for years — similar to how Halloween fans just could not see Halloween 3 as a great film until the last few years.

Whereas Chainsaw seems to be a nuanced film based on dread, mood and cinema vérité, the sequel is in your face, replete with tons of gore, overwhelming screams and saw noises and near-slapstick moments. Maybe it’s because Tobe Hooper, unlike nearly every other human being on the face of the Earth, saw the first film as a black comedy and this was just the next logical progression. For me, I saw Chainsaw 2 as a middle finger, a fuck you to the expectation that the film needed to be just more of the same. Ironically, Rob Zombie seems to have fallen in love with this film so much that he’s filmed variations of it several times and even used some of the cast.

Tobe Hooper wasn’t the only person in need of some redemption here.

Dennis Hopper’s Hollywood career –actually, his entire life — had gone off the rails. That said, Hopper’s career should have ended numerous times. After appearing in two films with James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, Dean’s passing impacted Hopper so greatly that he had a blowup on the set of From Hell to Texas where he forced director Henry Hathaway to do over eighty takes, leading to Hathaway claiming that Hopper would never work again. After leaving for New York to study with Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio, he would star in Night Tide (alongside Marjorie Cameron, the Whore of Babylon as prophesied in the Book of Revelations, no shit).

Yet for years, Hopper could find no work in Hollywood. Because he was the son-in-law of Margaret Sullivan, John Wayne gave him a break and talked director Hathaway into using him in 1965’s The Sons of Katie Elder. He also appears alongside Wayne in 1969’s True Grit — a film on which the two actors became friends. In both of these films, he dies and says his final words to the venerable screen icon.

Within months, Hopper was in two blockbusters in a summer (and had appeared in Cool Hand Luke the year before) — the aforementioned True Grit and Easy Rider, the film that made his name to so many. Stepping into the director’s chair, Hopper won kudos for his improv style and innovative editing (the truth is, he nearly had to be physically removed from the editing bay), but the film arose out of chaos — Fonda and Hopper had creative differences, Hopper was in the midst of a divorce and drugs, drugs and more drugs. Hopper even pulled a knife on actor Rip Torn during casting, a story that he told on The Tonight Show but placed the knife in Torn’s hands — a storyline switch that cost him nearly a million dollars.

The problems of Easy Rider would continue — minus the success — on his infamous next effort, The Last Movie. Hopper would say — when speaking of Easy Rider— that “the cocaine problem in the United States in really because of me.” With a $1 million budget ($6.4 million in today’s money) and free reign, Hopper went to Peru to make a movie that had been his pet project since the early 60’s — a meditation on fact versus fiction and how cinema struggles to be real. It’s also a batshit crazy film, not helped by the aforementioned drug usage (Hopper had film cans full of coke and women at the ready while editing), a little longer than a week marriage to co-star Michelle Phillips and a year plus of editing inside Hopper’s home studio in New Mexico. This entire process was documented in The American Dreamer, a documentary by Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Kit Carson (who perhaps not so coincidentally wrote Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, the movie that we should really start talking about soon). Hopper finally created a straightforward cut of the film that was much more conventional before showing it to Alejandro Jodorowsky, who told him it was a piece of shit and urged him to break new ground. Hopper destroyed that edit and the resulting film made him persona non grata in Hollywood for another decade.

Hopper went to Europe, where his drug intake increased, but he appeared in roles in films like Mad Dog Morgan before 1979’s Apocalypse Now brought him back to the mainstream. He also stepped in to direct and act in 1980s acclaimed Out of the Blue, but his old habits came back hard. His behavior on the set of Human Highway delayed the film and Hopper was up to 3 grams of coke a day, plus 30 beers, weed and assorted other substances.

So what did he do next? He staged a suicide attempt by blowing himself up in a coffin with 17 sticks of dynamite at an art happening, then later disappearing into the Mexican desert. Oh yeah — he also went to rehab in 1983.

But the successful mainstream comeback — and this time, he would stay — that happened after David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (Hopper begged for the role, telling Lynch that he was Frank Booth) was far away when Dennis Hopper would step into the cowboy boots of Chainsaw 2‘s Lieutenant Boude “Lefty” Enright. The uncle of Chainsaw’s Sally and Franklin Hardesty, he’s spent the last 13 years searching for the Sawyer clan, hoping to bring them to justice.

There’s finally a lead — thanks to two dumb jocks on the way to the OU vs. Texas Cotton Bowl game. They call DJ Vanita “Stretch” Brock’s (Caroline Williams, who Rob Zombie would later cast in his remake of Halloween 2) radio show and won’t hang up. She keeps them on the air long enough to hear them get attacked by a passing pickup truck. Leatherface appears, the old side of Texas coming roaring back to decimate the new Texas, cutting off part of the driver’s head in a horrific spray of gore and crashing their car, killing both of the boys.

However, Stretch made a tape of the attack and Lefty asks her to play it. He’s old Texas, too. A lawman who has been on a quest for over a decade, one that’s cost him so much (originally, Lefty was intended to be Stretch’s absent father).

This leads to Leatherface and his family attacking the radio station, with Chop Top (Bill Moseley, who Hooper found in a satire of his film called The Texas Chainsaw Manicure. Hooper’s son William would also feature this character in his unreleased film All-American Massacre. You can also see Moseley as the Deadite Captain in Army of Darkness, the 1988 remake of The Blob and in every Rob Zombie movie, just about) leading the charge. A Vietnam vet (which explains his absence from the first film), Chop Top got his massive head wound from a machete, leaving him with a metal plate in his head. He also tends to heat up a wire hanger and burn the skin at the edge of the plate to eat. He’s used his government disability checks to purchase Texas Battle Land, a decrepit theme park that his family now lives in.

Leatherface corners Stretch and slides his chainsaw between her thighs, sawing his way closer to her as her screams become moans in a really discomforting scene. Unable to take the sexual tension, Leatherface runs, telling the rest of the clan that he killed her. They take her co-worker L.G. back to their amusement park home, which has been decorated with skulls, bones and dead bodies — it’s a stunning achievement in art direction for the budget.

Lefty soon arrives and gets himself ready for battle with his own chainsaws. He goes shithouse on the place until finding Franklin’s dead body.

Stretch is discovered by the besotted Leatherface, who gives her her own mask — that of L.G.’s face. He ties her up and leaves, but miraculously, L.G. has enough life in him to help her escape…until she’s found by Drayton Sawyer (who played the same role in the original), the cook. Seems that Drayton has set up a big business, winning chili cookoffs with his special recipe. The family brings her to dinner — Chop Top treats Leatherface as one would bully a little brother — before Lefty saves her. A huge battle ensues, chainsaw versus chainsaw, before a grenade that was pinned to the corpse of Chop Top’s Hitchhiker twin brother goes off, probably (but hey, I was ready for a sequel) killing everyone.

Chop Top and Stretch survive, battling up a rock tower. I mentioned this scene a few weeks ago in my tribute to Hooper. It’s amazing — both a reference and a reversal of the ending of the first film.

Chop Top and Stretch survive, battling up a rock tower. I mentioned this scene a few weeks ago in my tribute to Hooper. It’s amazing — both a reference and a reversal of the ending of the first film.

Hooper didn’t even want to direct this film. He originally intended to produce it. Then, there was the idea that the movie (to be written with original writer Kim Henkel) would be about an entire town of cannibals — playing off Motel Hell, itself a satire of Chainsaw — with the crazy title of Beyond the Valley of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Cannon hired new writers for the massive changes they envisioned and with the budget hacked (sawed?) down, Hooper got back in the director’s chair.

Dennis Hopper would go on to achieve more mainstream fame after this film than the counterculture fame that got him there, appearing in films such as Speed, Waterworld and Super Mario Brothers. He said at the time that Chainsaw 2 was the worst film he’d ever been in, but one would have to assume that he said that before those films.

If you’re thinking — hey, this is a comedy — be prepared. The film never was released in England, was banned in West Germany and Australia, and was rated X before being released unrated in the U.S. Tom Savini was at the top of his game here (and there are even more gory scenes that didn’t make the…err…cut (there it is again), like the clan decimating football fans).

This is a film filled with excess that comments on excess. It’s filled with ridiculousness to combat the banal nature of 80’s ridiculousness. It’s also a popcorn film that could make most folks puke up said popcorn.

It’s a shame that this is the last Hooper movie to see a true cinematic release. When this played at the Drive-In Monster Rama earlier this year, I was struck by how well it holds up, as well as the supreme level of onscreen gore. It’s a film that does that rare trick — it’s humorous while being horrific, never descending into banal parody like Scream or a Troma movie. It’s the closest movie have come — other than Creepshow — to getting the aesthetics of E.C. Comics on to the silver screen.

David Landsberg and Lorin Dreyfuss — the older brother of Richard — teamed for this movie and Dutch Treat and I have no idea who was clamouring for their duo to be in any films. They wrote and starred in this movie, which was directed by Filippo Ottoni, who wrote A Bay of Blood.

Three mob families — the Lombardis, the Zanettis and the Falcones — don’t want either of two of their children — Carlo Lombardi (Christian De Sica) and Catherina Zanetti (Valeria Golino, Gina Piccolapupula from Big Top Pee-Wee) — to get married, all while Landsberg and Dreyfuss, as detectives Donald Wilson and Paul Miller, try to keep their families from ending their relationship and lives, thanks to wildman killing machine Bruno Falcone (George Eastman, the only reason I stayed with this movie for so long; have I ever told you how much I love George Eastman?).

While I’m no fan of the slapstick in this movie, at least I can play spot the Italian actor. There’s Giancarlo Prete (Scorpion from Warriors of the Wasteland)! Hey it’s Western henchman Mario Brega! Rik Battaglia of Deported Women of the SS Special Section! Alberto Farnese from Scalps and the shot at the same time White Apache!  Voice of female giallo stars Carolyn De Fonseca as a tourist! Mickey Know from Cemetery Man! John Karlsen from Footprints on the Moon and The Church! Andrew Louis Coppola from Hands of Steel and Escape from the Bronx! Man, watch those movies instead of this one!

Humor is subjective and I’ve read plenty of reviews that love this one. Maybe it hit me wrong. That said, I aways love seeing George Eastman and it’s so strange to see him in a comedy.

I can’t find this movie anywhere, but I’m petty mindblown by the fact that this children’s movie was written by Harry Alan Towers, a man who not only was part of an alleged vice ring with Stephen Ward, Peter Lawford and the Soviet Union, but also the producer and writer of several Jess Franco movies including 99 Women, The Girl From Rio and Venus In Furs.

The husband of Maria Rohm may not be the first person I’d choose to write a kid movie about horses, but then again, I’d probably not think to hire William A. Levey, who made Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman, Blackenstein and Skatetown U.S.A. either.

Then again, if only for the sake of having several obsessions of mine in the cast, I wonder if this movie was made just for me. I mean. Murray Langsdon and Susan George are in this.

Barney Ingram’s (Mickey Rooney) prize stallion Cloverdale III has been stolen by creditor Emmett Fallon, but the horse runs away and two kids end up with it and name it Lightning. Also, the girl is going blind like a Melvins song. Or maybe not. I don’t know, any time Mickey Rooney shows up I’m reminded how much he hated Silent Night, Deadly Night and then ended up starring in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toymaker.