EDITOR’S NOTE: Assault of the Killer Bimbos was on USA Up All Night on May 27 (twice!) and October 14, 1989; March 9 and 10 and November 2, 1990; February 23, August 8 and December 7, 1991 and January 31 and February 8, 1992.
Two go-go dancers, Lulu (Elizabeth Kaitan) and Peaches (Christina Whitaker), find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. After being framed for the murder of their employer by the genuinely sleazy gangster Vinnie (Mike Muscat), the duo goes on the run. They pick up a waitress named Darlene (Tammara Souza) along the way, and as the trio heads toward the border to clear their names, they end up in high-stakes car chases and a final, fateful encounter with Vinnie.
The film is the result of a massive pivot. Originally, Gorman Bechard was set to direct an alien-killer version, but Charles Band hated the script, turning that project into Cemetery High instead. They’d already had issues when Bechard was making Galactic Gigolo.
Anita Rosenberg, hot off working on Modern Girls, managed to secure the director’s chair after telling Empire she would write the script for cheap if she could direct. It remains her only feature film.
According to The Schlock Pit, Band’s father, Albert, watched the dailies and hated Rosenberg’s direction. He wanted writer Ted Nicolaou to take over, but he refused. And producer David DeCoteau wanted Linnea Quigley, Michelle Bauer and Brinke Stevens to be the leads! At least Eddie Deezen is in it.
Elizabeth Kaitan told Femme Fatales magazine that when Thelma and Louise was released, DeCoteau and Band) considered suing MGM but changed their minds when they realized how much it would cost in legal fees. DeCoteau added, “The creator (of Thelma and Louise) must have seen Bimbos and was inspired in some way, whether consciously or not. There are just too many similarities. I mean, right down to the car they drive, the characters’ names, and certain plot points. It’s amazing.”
This was the last film released under Charles Band’s original Empire Pictures.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dangerous Curves was on USA Up All Night on May 17 and 18, 1991; January 24 and August 22, 1992 and March 26 and April 17, 1993.
Chuck (Tate Donovan) is the quintessential uptight college student who lands a golden opportunity: deliver a pristine Porsche to a businessman, Louis Faciano’s (Robert Stack) daughter in Lake Tahoe. If he completes the assignment, a great job is his for the taking. Of course, he makes the classic mistake of letting his hormone-driven roommate, Wally (Grant Heslov), talk him into a detour to San Diego.
Naturally, the car gets stolen. Instead of coming clean, the duo decides to play detective to avoid losing the gig. They cross paths with two pageant-bound friends, Blake (Valerie Breiman) and Michelle (Danielle von Zerneck, who is married to the accordion player in The Pogues, James Fearnley).
The car thief happens to be another big business guy, Greg Krevske (Leslie Nielsen, not yet the king of parody), who is using the stolen Porsche as the grand prize for the beauty pageant. After a WetBike chase and a high-stakes infiltration of Krevske’s yacht, the boys and the girls join forces to outsmart the villain, recover the car, fall in love and expose his shady business dealings just in time for the pageant finale.
This is a movie filled with people you will be comfortable seeing again, like Robert Romanus (always Mike Damone) as a cab driver, Robert Klein, Elizabeth Ashley (from Windows!) as a pageant mom, MTV VJ Martha Quinn and Tool Time Girl Debbe Dunning.
It was directed by David Lewis, who was the cinematographer on UHF, Night of the Demons and the Olsen Twins’ Our Lips Are Sealed. It was written by Michael Dugan (who created the MTV series Remote Control), Michael Zand (the suicidal terrorist in the beginning of To Live and Die In L.A.) and Paul Brown, who wrote Thrashin’.
Trying to summarize a Godfrey Ho film is like trying to hold water in your hands, but here goes: An ancient feud between the Black Ninja Clan and the Diamond Ninja Empire is reignited by the discovery of a long-lost tomb. Meanwhile, in what feels like a completely different movie, a guy named Gordon is just trying to take photos of his girlfriend in Hong Kong when he gets harassed by some Caucasian thugs and has to kick some ass. Naturally, all these threads collide in a nonsensical whirlwind of mismatched footage, ridiculous dubbing and enough neon-colored ninja headbands to supply a small army.
As for the cast, Richard Harrison remains the undisputed king of the Godfrey Ho era. Harrison was a veteran of Italian peplum and spaghetti westerns who found himself trapped in a cycle of IFD Films productions. He plays the Ninja Master with the weary, thousand-yard stare of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing, but is clearly just here for the paycheck. At least he has that cool Garfield phone again, making me feel like his complaints that IFD kept reusing his footage from one movie to make so many more are true.
Melvin Pitcher, Andy Chworowsky, Pierre Tremblay and John Ladalski are staples of this era. They were often ex-pats living in Hong Kong, rounded up to provide the Western half of the footage so the movies could be sold to international markets. You’ll recognize them from pretty much every other IFD ninja flick, usually sporting awful wigs and mustaches that seem to change size between cuts.
If you haven’t seen one of his movies, Godfrey Ho was the master of the cut-and-paste technique, a hallmark of the IFD Films & Arts studio. The reality behind Diamond Ninja Force—like many of his films—is a Frankenstein operation. Ho would take an existing, unrelated Asian action film (often a low-budget Taiwanese or Thai martial arts flick) and splice in new, original footage of Western actors wearing ninja gear. The tone shifts wildly between a gritty Hong Kong crime drama and a surreal, plotless ninja fantasy. The scenes involving the Western actors rarely interact with the original film’s cast; they just stand in front of a wall or a tree, talk about the mission, and then engage in slow-motion ninja fights. Sometimes, there is a phone call.
This takes the 1986 Taiwanese movie Ghost Rapist/Demons Apartment as its base, and then we have scenes of Harrison fighting and taking photos. Yes, a ninja movie mixed with a movie where a ghost haunts a family and is all horny about it. This is the magic cocktail that only an IFD movie could deliver.
“Fanny, it’s only nerves,” a husband assures his wife, worried about rotting fruit and black cats. Fanny Wong. That’s a name. And then dudes call her while dressed in soccer clothes. Meanwhile, death threats over selling land and a samurai in Mario Bava lighting. Magic.
Godfrey Ho remains the king of just outright lifting music. This time, we get songs from Jean Michel Jarre’s Rendez-Vous, “Endless” by Kraftwerk, a Macross II song, some Orchestral Maneuvers In The Dark, “Who Are You” by The Who, some of the Death Wish 2 and Thief scores and who knows what else. Oh! Some Stweart Copeland? Godfrey Ho movies anticipate the need to use Shazam (or know way too many Tangerine Dream songs).
Also: Fanny has a son named Bobo.
Also also: Lori, Richard Harrison’s wife, is killed by a ninja. She’s played by Maria Francesca, Harrison’s real-life wife, so I can only imagine they were doing the Laura Gemser and Gabriele Tinti trick of getting cast together and then traveling the world.
Well, you know what comes next. Only a ninja can stop a ninja. “I promise I’ll avenge you,” says Harrison, speaking in perhaps another movie, endlessly repeated throughout the IFD catalog, all while ghosts haunt Fanny and family.
This is a movie where a ninja tells another, “You’re on my death list,” and slams the receiver into the back of Garfield, right before a father reminds his son not to wet the bed. Harrison does what he does best — put on a bright ninja suit and guyliner to stop other ninjas while surrounded by enough candles to make a Police video — while Poltergeist moments happen to Bobo and ghost women jill off while watching his parents have sex.
Life is unpredictable and horrible at times, so the joy of knowing I can watch neon ninjas fight Americans on vacation wearing short shorts whenever I want keeps me going. I wish I could inject these movies into my eyes like heroin.
If you’re expecting the poetic, trench-coat-wearing, dual-pistol-sliding grace of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow or The Killer when you see Chon Yun-fat’s name on the poster, check your expectations at the door. We’ve seen the mismatched partner trope a million times, but Tiger On the Beat pushes the dynamic to its absolute breaking point.
On one side, you have the legendary Chow Yun-fat as Francis Li. Instead of playing the ultra-cool gun-god he usually plays, he shows up as a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing womanizer who would rather scam a suspicious husband or down a glass of raw eggs for a hangover than do actual police work. Within the first twenty minutes, he literally pisses his pants because a crook sticks a gun in his mouth. It is wild to see the coolest actor in the world work so hard to be a goofy buffoon.
On the other side, you have Conan Lee as Michael Tso, a muscle-bound rookie who looks like a bodybuilding Jackie Chan and wants to fight everyone in sight. The real-life bickering between these two on set apparently leaked into the film because they have zero traditional buddy-cop chemistry, which actually makes their constant screaming matches and petty fighting hilariously entertaining.
What makes this movie such a fascinating piece of celluloid history is the man behind the camera: Lau Kar-leung. He directed Disciples of the 36th Chamber and choreographed some of the greatest traditional, old-school kung-fu films ever to come out of the Shaw Brothers studio. But by 1988, the audience wanted modern urban violence. They wanted guns, cars, and explosions. Seeing an old-school master try to navigate the gritty, neon-soaked era of heroic bloodshed is like watching a classical orchestra conductor suddenly forced to lead a hardcore punk band.
For the first hour, the tone is all over the place. The comedy is pure, low-brow, 80s HK slapstick. Plus, the movie drops a heavy, uncomfortable dose of period-typical misogyny onto Nina Li Chi’s character, Marydonna, which halts the fun dead in its tracks. You’ll scratch your head, wondering what movie you’re actually watching.
But then… the final twenty minutes happen.
Lau Kar-leung decides that if he has to make a modern action movie, he’s going to make the most dangerous, jaw-dropping finale possible. First, you get Chow Yun-fat dropping the comedy act, picking up a shotgun, rigging it to a rope and throwing it around corners like a deadly, buckshot-blasting yo-yo to waste bad guys. It’s beautiful, chaotic genius.
And then, the piece de résistance: Conan Lee vs. Gordon Liu in a chainsaw duel.
Yes, that Gordon Liu. The star of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Johnny Mo from Kill Bill shows up here with a full head of hair playing a psychotic villain. He and Lee spark up two massive, roaring chainsaws and start acrobatically fencing with them. They are hacking through wooden floors, grinding sparks off steel railings, and flipping through the air with live, spinning blades. It borrows the pure, raw energy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and fuses it with high-flying Hong Kong stunt work.
Tiger On the Beat isn’t a flawless masterpiece. The tonal shifts will give you whiplash, the humor is an acquired taste, and the plot is standard-issue drug-bust filler. But as an ’80s time capsule of anything goes Hong Kong filmmaking, it’s pretty fun.
Wow, you have no idea how excited I am about this.
I saw VHS art for the movie Urban Warriors and saw something I have never seen before: the Michael Dudikoff Presents Action Adventure Theater line.
If you’ve spent any time looking at the history of the Cannon Group, you know that the company was essentially a house of cards held together by Menahem Golan’s ambition and a lot of pre-sold tape rights. They didn’t even bother starting their own domestic home video label until 1989. By that point, the wheels were already coming off the Go-Go Boys’ wagon and they were slashing their production budgets to the bone.
They needed product to fill the shelves of that new home video arm and they needed it cheap. That’s how they ended up dumpster diving into the international market, picking up some oddball productions.
I went to the source of all things Cannon, Austin Trunick, who already covered this four years ago on the Cannon Film Guide Facebook page, saying “In the late ’80s, Cannon tried to squeeze some money out of several of their older distro titles that hadn’t been fully exploited on the video market. Their idea was to have modern stars introduce the films, which resulted in the “Michael Dudikoff Presents Action Adventure Theater” line of tapes.”
Much like the 22-26 action adventure films that bear the title Sybil Danning’s Adventure Video for the USA Home Video company, this was a way to use an action star to make some money with no risk.
There are only four of these, so why don’t we get into them?
The Bronx Executioner (1989): Welcome to a post-apocalyptic wasteland where humanoids and androids are locked in a nonsensical war for supremacy. These androids bleed human blood, look like guys in leather jackets and apparently spent their entire R&D budget at a RadioShack clearance sale. If one of them had an Italian name, it would be Roberto Batty.
The film follows our rookie deputy, James (Gabriele Gori, Attrazione Pericolosa), who arrives in the Bronx to replace the legendary Sheriff Warren. And here is where the fun begins: Warren is played by the iconic Woody Strode, but every single frame of him is shamelessly recycled from the 1984 movie The Final Executioner.
As for the Bronx itself? It’s a series of mounds of dirt and a derelict country villa that has never seen a New York City zip code in its life. James, fresh from a police academy that apparently consists solely of doing chin-ups on a metal pole, is tasked with policing this chaos. But the movie quickly gets bored with him, and shifts focus to Dakar (Alex Vitale, Jakoda from Strike Commando!), a humanoid leader who spends the better part of the runtime screaming into a walkie-talkie while driving a jeep through the Italian countryside.
When a cyborg goes on a killing spree, you’d expect some stakes, right? Forget it. You won’t get an explanation of who, why or what the hell is happening. The narrative is a patchwork quilt of stock footage, recycled scenes and incoherent voice-overs. As for the big bad, Margie is the quintessential evil android, strutting around in a dog collar and proclaiming, “Violence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” She’s the heart and soul of this mess. And she’s played by Margie Newton, who got all painted up in Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead and was Aphrodite in Cozzi’s The Adventures of Hercules.
Director Vanio Amici is an equal-opportunity recycler. Why film a new action scene when you can just use the one you already shot five minutes ago? It saves time and prevents you from having to rewind to watch the faceless extras get blasted again. For a long time, people thought he was Umberto Lenzi, as the name on the credits is Bob Collins. Amici only directed one other movie, Detective Malone, which remixes two of Lenzi’s Black Cobra movies, further muddying the movie waters and making nerds like me wonder who really made it. As for the rest of his credits, he mainly worked as an editor with a resume that includes Black Demons, Karate Warrior 6, Aenigma and many adult films. Perhaps his toughest challenge was being the editor for Troll 2. I wonder how he was able to make it make as much sense as it does.
This has it all and by all, I mean perms, leather jackets, headbands and a finale so dramatically deep that it tries to mimic Blade Runner before hitting a hard freeze-frame.
Dakar: James, can I tell you something?
James: Sure. What?
Dakar: I always envied you. I wanted to be like you.
James: You mean human?
Dakar: It was just… a dream.
It’s a total mess. I loved it!
Cross Mission (1988): Leave it to Alfonso Brescia—working under his Al Bradley alias—to decide that what the jungle combat — Rambsoploitation — genre really needed wasn’t just more stock footage of explosions, but literal demons. What else can we expect from the director of Murder In Blue Light, Iron Warrior, The Beast In Space and an entire series of Star Wars rip-offs?
Cross Mission starts off as your standard, run-of-the-mill exploitation flick. General Romero, played by Antonio Poli, is the iron-fisted ruler of a small Latin American nation. He’s got the whole “I’m a good guy” routine down to a science, publicly torching marijuana fields to impress the U.N. inspectors. Of course, once the inspectors pack up their clipboards and head for the airport, it’s back to the narco-trafficking business as usual.
When a marine named William (Richard Randall, whose only other role is in a TV movie version of A Christmas Carol) decides to investigate the racket alongside a crusading reporter named Helen (Brigitte Porsche, her only role, and no, she’s not an adult star), things spiral into the usual jungle chaos. Do huts explode? Do some of the good guys die and need revenge? Does the hero get ready for the last battle in a montage, putting on a special outfit to show the audience he’s finally done playing nice? Yes to all of these things.
But here is where the movie veers off the tracks and into the territory of the sublime. Just when you think you’ve seen every trope in the book, Brescia hits you with the supernatural. General Romero isn’t just a drug lord; he’s a practitioner of the dark arts. He’s got the ability to summon a diabolical small demon named Astaroth, played by Nelson De La Rosa (the mini Brando of The Island of Dr. Moreau and the titular Rat Man), at will. When he’s shooting blue lightning at people, the movie suddenly shifts from a generic war film to an Italian bit of magic.
Brescia would go on to direct Miami Cops the following year, but Cross Mission remains a singular, bizarre experiment. It doesn’t fully succeed as a war movie, and it doesn’t fully succeed as a supernatural thriller, but for the sheer audacity of blending the two? It’s a more than decent one-time watch. You come for the jungle action, but you stay because you need to see how a magic little guy fits into an exploding helicopter subplot.
Lt. Bill Rogers (Andy Forrest, also in Massimo Pirri’s The Kiss of the Cobra, Tonino Valerii’s Sicilian Connection, Lenzi’s The House of Witchcraft, Hunt for the Gold Scorpion and, oddly, the Giandomenico Curi-directed Italian Lambada movie and yes, there were two movies with this title in the same year), Sgt. Mario Pazilbo Esposito (Carlo Mucari, Snuff Killer and Obsession: A Taste for Fear) and Blitz (Paki Valente) have broken out of a POV camp. Rogers is an American pilot who trades a POW camp for the Yugoslavian wilderness after getting shot down. Espozi has the nickname Spaghetti because he’s Italian — in an Italian movie — and Blinz is an Austrian deserter who realized his side was losing.
Our motley crew of POWs managed to link up with some partisans and a local Orthodox priest. The partisans are desperate, looking for pilots to take their last two functioning planes and turn those German-held hillsides into a fireworks display. But while they’re busy flying for the resistance, the boys get wind of some serious loot. Vanya (Francesca Ferrè), a nun who traded her habit for a submachine gun, tips them off about a haul of priceless gold chalices stashed away at the St. Basil convent.
According to Andy J. Forrest, Ferrè was functionally blind without her glasses and ended one take by walking directly into a tree.
After pulling off two successful bombing runs, the POWs stop caring about the war effort and start plotting a heist. They leverage their pilot skills to score some hardware, then convince Vanya to lead them to the chapel. She thinks they’re on the level, but these guys are just mercenaries in disguise, ready to double-cross everyone for the gold.
There’s a Fabio Frizzi score, which is nice, and Luigi Ciccarese as cinematographer. He shot plenty of Bruno Mattei’s later movies, especially his SOV 2000s efforts, as well as tons of adult. Along the way, Lenzi stole battle scenes from The Battle of Sutjeska and Partizanska eskadrila.
It’s not the most exciting war movie you’ve seen, but it does have a genuinely impressive train explosion and watching our guys lean out of a biplane to drop bombs by hand is the kind of practical, low-budget ingenuity that makes these films so charming.
Urban Warriors (1987): You know you’re in for a wild ride when the opening act consists of a montage of mushroom clouds followed immediately by stock footage of volcanoes erupting. Then, we meet Brad (Bruno Bilotta), our hero, and his buddies, Maury (Bjorn Hammer) and Stan (Maurice Poli), who are hanging out in an underground lab when the power goes out. When they finally decide to crawl out of their bunker, they discover that the world has ended. And apparently, the end of the world is synonymous with an immediate, city-wide explosion in the local population of leather-clad biker gangs.
Vari’s vision of the future looks suspiciously like a gravel pit and a single abandoned factory. That’s the kind of set design that makes a Cirio Santiago movie look like a Cecil B. DeMille epic.
The mutants here are a special breed. According to Brad—who, again, as you may remember, was just working at a power station and doesn’t seem like a scientist—these guys suffer from a mutation that apparently destroys their inner ear whenever the sun goes down. Before you can say uno, due, tre, quattordici, all these bad ass post-apocalyptic warriors have vertigo.
The aesthetic is exactly what you’d expect if a group of guys raided a discount S&M shop and then realized they needed to re-qualify for their motorcycle licenses. Watching Brad’s buddy Maury emerge from a shack wearing a full-on studded leather helmet and a white scarf—while manning a bike with mounted weapons—is reason enough for the world to end.
Brad’s journey is a masterclass in survival priorities. After watching his buddy Maury get killed—a tragedy clearly caused by failing to stick to a strict vehicle maintenance schedule—Brad doesn’t weep. He gets himself some leather, finds a woman (Rosenda Scharschmidt, Dark Bar) to get busy with and promptly gets attacked because she wants his spinal marrow. At least he defeats the leader of the mutants, played by Alex Vitale, who will always be Jakoda from Strike Commando. Oh yeah — Malisa Longo from Cat In the Brain and the titular star of Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg –– is in this barterdown bootleg too.
This was Giuseppe Vari’s return to the director’s chair after a decade away, and spoiler alert: it was also his final film.
Much like another Michael Dudikoff Presents film, The Bronx Executioner, this takes scenes from The Final Executioner. Even stranger, I have heard Paolo Rustichelli’s theme described as either a cover of “White Lines” or the Art of Noise cover of “Dragnet.”
Is this a teen movie? It’s in Teen Movie Hell, so good enough.
Father Michael McClaren (Sam Bottoms) is what we call a cool priest. Sure, he teaches college in Florida, but he plays basketball, rides a motorcycle and is popular with the kids. The church wants him to debate former priest C.A. Thomas (Robert Lansing, 4D Man, Island Claws, Scalpel), who has written a novel claiming that man created God, on the Dick Cavett Show. Yes, this is a teen sex comedy — well, it’s closer to a relationship drama, but the poster wants you to think it’s a sex comedy — in which Dick Cavett shows up.
This would all be normal except for two things.
One, it’s not that crazy that a girl named September Lane (Renee Coleman) falls in love with Father Michael. You may know her as left fielder Alice Gaspers from A League of Their Own and the evil leaper Alia on Quantum Leap. Or perhaps as the kidnap victim John Candy is trying to save in Who’s Harry Crumb? Man, her IMDb is awesome, because it contains this: “In 1995, Coleman left the film business and returned to school, where she earned her Mythological Studies doctorate (with an emphasis on Depth Psychology) at Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2002. She currently lives with her husband and their four children in Santa Clarita, California, where she works in a private practice as a certified DreamTender.”
The second thing that makes this strange is that, every once in a while, this movie goes back to caveman times, complete with naked women. That’s why this was originally titled Return to Eden. However, those parts really have next to nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
When Thomas and Father Michael do finally debate with Dick Cavett, Thomas wins, saying that every man has to find his own God. So Michael goes off to look up September, and they turn into naked cave people. The end. Really, that’s how it ends.
Things happen in this movie that make no sense, even more than you’d expect, like a priest randomly being into aerobics, September falling for the holy man, and him saying he loves her. Why? She’s moody and constantly argues with him. I mean, that’s almost every woman I’ve dated, so I think I answered my own question.
This was the first role for Sherrie Rose, who would go on to be in movies like Killer Crocodile, Cy Warrior, American Rickshaw and Guns & Lipstick (which has a totally amazing cast of Sally Kellerman, Jorge Rivero, Wings Hauser, James Hong, Sonny Landham, Joe Estvez, Robert Forster, Cassie Yates and girls-only adult star Felicia). Plus, Page Hannah appears, and she’d go on to be a victim of the oil slick in Creepshow 2.
After School was directed by William Olsen, who also made Rockin’ Road Trip, Getting It On, Southern Belles and Mastering the Theremin. This had four writers: Hugh Parks (the director of Shakma!), Joe Tankersley, John Lind and Rod McBrien, who wrote the music for the movie Club Fed, which I must have cast, as it stars Burt Young, Judy Landers, Sherman Hemsley, Karen Black, Mary Woronov, Lyle Alzado, Wally George, Dee “Queen Kong/Matilda the Hun” Booher, Lance “Proctor” Kinsey and Debbie Lee Carrington.
Godfrey Ho (using the pseudonym Joe Livingstone) is the only person who could make this, a movie that doesn’t just cross genres. It violently collides with them in a head-on wreck and invites you to laugh at the debris.
Because this is a classic IFD Films production, the plot is actually two entirely separate movies stitched together with Scotch tape and worse dubbing:
The footage Godfrey Ho actually shot) Tom Saunders (Robin Gould) is an American DEA agent. He’s trying to bust a ruthless drug lord named Drug Lord (seriously, that’s basically his vibe) who is smuggling narcotics using Chinese hopping vampires (jiangshi). Tom gets blown up by a rocket launcher. RIP Tom.
The footage Godfrey Ho stole or bought: A Thai action movie, Paa Lohgan (Against the World), about undercover agents, a kidnapped woman and some gunplay.
It all gets mashed together as a plan to save Tom and stop the drug-smuggling undead comes together.
Soldier #1: Now that Tom is dead, I want to use his body to create an android-like robot. I’d appreciate youapproving my application.
Soldier #2:You’re assured of success?
Soldier #1: Yes.
Soldier #2: Okay, it’s approved.
The military decides to turn his corpse into a cyborg. Enter Robo Warrior. Instead of sleek, multi-million-dollar cybernetics, our hero is wrapped in what looks like dryer vents, tinfoil and a motorcycle helmet. He walks like he desperately needs to piss and shoots lasers that look like they were drawn directly onto the film strip with a Sharpie because they were.
What follows is an endless barrage of him walking slowly through the woods, hopping vampires exploding for no reason and a ghost bride who tries to seduce our metallic hero. It all culminates in a final battle where logic goes to die and art is born.
Obviously, this was used to rip off Paul Verhoeven’sRoboCop, but following the IFD house style of making a movie come together from tons of other elements, just not what is filmed.
Keep your ears on for the sound design. The hopping vampires make a bizarre, echoing boing-boing noise every time they jump and the gunshots sound like someone hitting a piece of plywood with a flip-flop. As for those vampires, traditional Chinese folklore says you can stop one by putting a paper talisman on its forehead. In Robo Vampire, you can also stop them by shooting them with a bazooka, which honestly feels like a solid update to the mythology.
So many IFD movies feature Toto’s “Robot Fight.” One would think this one should have that song.
Somehow, this film is both the prequel to Devil’s Dynamite and Robo Vampire 3: Counter Destroy/The Vampire Is Still Alive, which is also a Freddy movie. Never change, Godfrey Ho. Keep putting tinfoil Officer Murphy in every movie.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 24 and 25, 2026. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
After trying to turn the franchise into an anthology, Moustapha Akkad realized that if there isn’t a white mask on the poster, fans aren’t buying tickets. So, ten years after the night he was blown up in a hospital, Michael Myers wakes up from a coma during a standard-issue let’s transport the serial killer in a rainstorm ambulance transfer.
Michael heads back to Haddonfield to wrap up some family business. Laurie Strode is dead (killed off-screen in a car accident because Jamie Lee Curtis had moved on to A-list things), leaving behind a daughter named Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris). While Jamie deals with school bullies — Haddonfield may have the worst children ever — and connecting with her foster sister, Rachel (Ellie Cornell), Michael is busy impaling mechanics and shoving thumbs through skulls. Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) returns, looking more scarred and frantic than ever, trying to convince a skeptical town that the Boogeyman is back. It all culminates in a rooftop chase and a twist ending that promised a dark future the sequels immediately chickened out of.
This film feels nearly bloodless after the second film. It trades the John Carpenter dread for a slasher-by-the-numbers aesthetic that feels more like a made-for-TV movie than a cinematic nightmare. And don’t get me started on the mask. Michael looks like he’s wearing a department store knock-off that’s permanently surprised to be there. But wow, the opening credits may be the best Autumn mood moments ever. As more Halloween movies have been made, this has moved up on my list, however. I really love the idea that Loomis has lost his mind and been hunting Michael ever since; there are some wonderful small moments, like him sharing a drink with the preacher.
April 7: Jackie Day — Celebrate Jackie Chan’s birthday!
While the world celebrates the man, the myth, and the jumping-off-buildings legend, there’s no better way to honor Jackie Chan than by revisiting the high-octane, bone-crunching sequel that defined his Golden Era: Police Story 2.
If the first film was a lightning bolt, the sequel is a sustained thunderstorm of choreography and pyrotechnics. Here is a deeper look into the chaos, the comedy, and the literal blood, sweat, and tears that went into this masterpiece.
Chan Ka-kui (Jackie) is back in a film directed and co-written by Jackie. After Police Story, he’s been demoted to highway patrol, a change that delights his girlfriend May (Maggie Cheung), who is thrilled. No more death-defying stunts, just speeding tickets. But peace is short-lived. The man he arrested, Chu Tu (Chor Yuen) and his henchman John Ko (Charlie Cho) have already been released from prison, as Chu Tu claims that he only has months to live. During that time, he plans to ruin Chan Ka-Kui’s life.
After they keep trying to get him to snap, he finally does once John Ko and some bad guys beat up May and her aunt (Lisa Chiao Chiao). He finds them in a restaurant and gets revenge, but is so embarrassed that he resigns from the police. He and May plan a vacation, but he can’t even go to a travel agency without a bomb threat calling him back to duty, just in time for the mall to blow up. At least he’s seen as a hero and welcomed back to the Royal Hong Kong police.
Now he has four new enemies — Tall Pau Hung (Ben Lam), Ken (Yun-Kin Chow) and two bomb experts, one who is both deaf and mute (Benny Lai) — and by the end of the movie, they’ve kidnapped May and forced Jackie to wear a vest covered with explosives.
Jackie learned to put bloopers at the end of the movie after making Cannonball Run. He didn’t really understand that these bloopers shouldn’t be life-threatening. In a terrifying sequence involving falling metal frames, a stunt went sideways. Maggie Cheung suffered a massive scalp laceration. The injury was so severe that she couldn’t finish filming her close-ups, which is why, in the final act, May is often seen from behind or with her face obscured. That’s actually Crystal Kwok filling in.
Jackie himself didn’t escape unscathed. During a stunt in which he was supposed to jump through a pane of glass, he accidentally aimed for the wrong one. Unlike the sugar glass used in Hollywood, this was real, thick glass, resulting in severe cuts across his body.
While Jackie is the face of the franchise, the Jackie Chan Stunt Team is the backbone. Mars (Cheung Wing-fat), Jackie’s long-time friend and stunt double, is the MVP here. Not only does he play a fellow officer, but he also stepped in for some of the most dangerous physical impacts. That iconic, wince-inducing moment where a character is kicked through a bus windshield? That’s all Mars.
Man, they could have made twenty of these movies and I would have seen every one of them. Police Story 2 perfectly balances Jackie’s signature slapstick with stakes humor and some of the most intricate playground-style fighting ever put to film (the playground fight itself is a masterclass in using the environment as a weapon).
It’s a reminder that back in the late 80s, Jackie Chan wasn’t just making movies. He was barely surviving them. Happy birthday, Jackie!
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Steve asked me to get to this movie and described it this way: “It’s everything that was bad about Australian movies from that period. Characters turned up to 11, and accents that were what a private school boy thought “real” Australiana sounded like. The fact that the lead thought he was going to be a global superstar makes it all the more perplexing.”
World famous hair metal impresario and eco-warrior Black Alice (Rob Hartley, who was also in a short that inspired this movie called Knightmare (co-directed by Yahoo Serious!), using the name Black Alice; that’s also the name of the band, which had Hartley on vocals, Jamie Page playing guitar, Vince Linardi on bass and Joe Demasi playing the drums. They released the album Endangered Species before breaking up, but reformed for this movie with Andy Cichon on bass, Scott Johnson on drums, Paul Radcliffe on keyboards and guitar, and Hartley and Page. They have been imprisoned in a stasis hologram by the dictatorial leaders of OCEANA, a corporate entity that now owns Australia.
After the death of a lover, Black Alice is trapped in endless slumber until Alice is accidentally freed 113 years later. He finds a wasteland where Sydney was vaporized after the peace ferry he was supposed to be on collided with the nuclear sub. Now, he must travel backward in time to fix everything. He is aided by two barbarian warriors, X and J, and a sentient motorcycle called The Shine. He has only 10 hours before his physical body decomposes into smegma.
You may hate every minute of this, but it’s a movie where nearly everyone is wearing face paint. One that starts with a cover of Thunderclap Newman’s “Something In The Air” and ends up being a musical. I have an absurd weakness for the late 80s world of post-apocalyptic visions, kind of like Road Warrior by way of Italy by way of Rinse Dream. It doesn’t hurt that Black Alice sounds like Bowie by way of sleazy late 80s glam metal. Just imagine if bands like D.A.D., Zodiac Mindwarp or the Dogs D’Amour got to make a film of their own! Throw in some ancient CGI, sword and sorcery moments and attractive women in lab coats, and you have a movie!
Director and writer Gary Keady co-produced Black Alice’s Endangered Species album with Steve James (not the action film actor), and it was originally released in the UK before coming out in Australia. According to the Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop, the band indulged in “…the world of sword and sorcery with tracks like ‘Blade of Slaughter,” “In the Hall of the Ancient Kings”and “Man of Metal” (an ode to bushranger Ned Kelly).
Keady even wrote a review of the film on IMDb: “I’m probably biased as I wrote and directed the film. It had its moments. It was a hard film to make. I had to rewrite the original script only six weeks prior to principal photography due to budgetary changes. In a lot of ways the film paid the price for being a first in Australia. It was the first film to be shot employing digital live sync sound and thus pathed the way for others. Sons of Steel was shot at night, at times a mile or more underground Sydney in World War II bunkers (Gen. McArthur’s). It was a tough eight week shoot and in retrospect an difficult task for a first time director. I’m proud of what we tried to do with as little funding as we had. We put a lot of quality up on the screen. Those who I was fortunate enough to work with gave the film a first class look and me first class experience.Some find the story hard to follow, and that would be because so much of it wasn’t shot because of bad scheduling, and plenty ended up on the edit floor for one reason or another.I’m sure that’s generally taken as a directors excuse for a flawed film, perhaps so, but then again maybe I’m right.I did live through the experience of not only writing it a number of times but raising the finance, writing much of the music, directing it and selling it around the world.And for that experience I am eternally thankful.. I hope I can improve with the next picture, and I hope those who see Sons of Steel are entertained enough to appreciate it and perhaps look out for my next film.”
This is a cult movie without a cult, and I’d like to change that! Sure, it doesn’t really have a likeable lead character, but when has that ever stopped us before? Virtually every character looks like they’re auditioning for a glam metal band or a Mad Max reboot, including the corporate drones. It also has a lizard monster named The Freak, with the biggest lizard cock you’ve ever seen. Sure, the acting isn’t all that great, but there’s so much fog that Lucio Fulci was like, “Ha bisogno di tutta questa nebbia?”
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