EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing gives me greater joy than when our site gets mentioned on my favorite podcast, The Cannon Canon. There are a few movies they’ve covered that I haven’t, so it’s time to fix that.

Steven Segal has barely been on our site and that’s for a reason.

I don’t get it.

I’ve known plenty of action movie lovers that were obsessed with him. I dated a girl who would always rent his movies when given the option. And yes, I am old, we rented video cassettes from a mom and pop store and made out while watching Steven Segal movies.

This is Segal’s first movie. Now, finding the exact facts about the man’s life is tricky, but here’s what I think is true. He was born in Lansing, Michigan to an Irish medical technician mother and Jewish math teacher father. I have no idea where the Italian and Asian mystic parts of him come from. Confounding me further is the fact that his grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants with some Yakut and Buryat heritage.

Seagal is the Hulk Hogan of action movies and by that, I don’t mean he’s orange and on steroids. He has the same propensity for lying and his nontruths are easily proven wrong. Like how Seagal was a student of the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, yet Ueshiba died in 1969 when Seagal was 17 and Seagal didn’t move to Japan until the of 22, to allegedly avoid the draft by marrying a Japanese national named Miyako Fujitani.

Fujitani doesn’t mince words about her ex-husband. In an infamous article that got Spy Magazine sued, she said that the actor worked in her family’s aikido school and received his degree under dubious circumstances: The only reason Steven was awarded the black belt was because the judge, who was famous for his laziness, fell asleep during Steven’s presentation. The judge just gave him the black belt.” He told her “I never will betray you”, right before he took all her savings and moved back to America. She claims that she “scrimped and saved for years, even denying herself and her children necessities, to help pay his way home.”

Without seeking a divorce, Seagal went ahead and married Adrienne La Russa in 1984, followed by actress Kelly LeBrock. La Russa told Spy that she couldn’t say much, “Because I am afraid of Steven and his friends.”

That’s because for years, Seagal has claimed underworld and black ops ties. Seagal told People early in his career, “They saw my abilities, both with martial arts and with the language. You could say that I became an advisor to several CIA agents in the field, and through my friends in the CIA, I met many powerful people and did special works and favors.”

After opening a dojo with stuntman Craig Dunn in New Mexico, he also started the Aikido Ten Shin Dojo in Hollywood with his senior student Haruo Matsuoka. That’s where he trained Michael Ovitz, at the time the biggest agent in the business.

“Michael and I are very close–we love each other,” Seagal said. “I’m like a guru to him.”

As for Ovitz, it was claimed that he believed that he could make anyone a movie star.

Now, Above the Law is before all the blues records, the TV reality show that has him teaching cops, the horrifying SNL appearance, the lawsuits, the collusion with Russia — I have no idea how anyone can still be a fan of him. Actually, I totally do, because if anyone symbolizes the MAGA side of action movies — even more than Bronson or Norris — it’s Steven Seagal.  He can do interviews where he says that Vladimir Putin is “one of the great living world leaders,” teach cops how to shoot guns, be against athletes protesting before games and writing the novel The Way of the Shadow Wolves: The Deep State And The Hijacking Of America. Let’s go further. He’s been shown in photos with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, been referred to as the “brother” of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and celebrated his birthday in Russian with pro-Kremlin friends as the invasion of Ukraine was happening.

Oh man, Steven Seagal.

I didn’t even mention that the double entendre — actually, it was just outright being a jerk — he made to a production assistant who he caught brushing her teeth.

Man, I don’t even want to talk about this movie.

I’ll try.

I mean, he’s prohibited from promoting bitcoin at this point. Or that he broke Sean Connery’s wrist on the set of Never Say Never Again. Or that he has been known for brutalizing stuntmen who appeared in movies with him.

Ah, OK. Let’s just get to the movie.

Sergeant Nico Toscani is exactly the person that Steven Seagal wants us to believe that he is. A tough Chicago vice cop who can trace his roots to Palermo, Sicily, he moved to Japan was a young man to study martial arts and was recruited by the CIA and assigned to covert operations on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border during the Vietnam War. He left the CIA when he refused to be part of torture, moved back to the U.S. and started being a cop.

Working with Detective Delores “Jacks” Jackson (Pam Grier) are on the trail of drug dealers and suddenly ordered off the case, as those scumbags are working with the very same CIA boss that caused Nico to leave the agency, Kurt Zagon (Henry Silva). Also, to make this even better, Seagal — sorry, Nico — is married to the gorgeous Sara (Sharon Stone) and when she’s threatened, he has to go…above the law.

At least they put together a great cast and crew for this movie. Director Andrew Davis would also direct The Final Terror, Code of Silence, Under Siege and was the cinematographer on Private Parts, Mansion of the Doomed and the DP on Angel. He worked on the story of this movie with Seagal and then polished the script with Steven Pressfield (King Kong Lives, Freejack) and Ronald Shusett, who has big league credits like Alien, Aliens, Total Recall, Phobia and Dead & Buried.

Seagal looks and moves like no one else in movies. I don’t know, maybe Ovitz was right in that he could plug anyone into an action movie and make him a star. Since this movie, Seagal has been in around sixty movies. That’s pretty good staying power for just being anyone. And despite all his controversies, he made a film as recently as 2019’s Beyond the Law.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of Above the Law here.

This movie is why I keep on writing.

Take King of Snake, also known as Da She Wang, a movie directed by Yu-Lung Hsu and starring Danny Lee — Infra-Man! — as Dr. Ling, an inventor who makes R19, a drug that can transform organic matter into gigantic things. Maybe that would be a good idea for fruit or vegetables.

But then a snake gets into it.

Yet in this version, remixed and remade by Godfrey Ho, there’s also a hardass government agent named Ted Fast (Pierre Kirby) who is tracking down some terrorists while the world explodes all around him as a gigantic snake named Moser and his human friend Tingting just try and be a snake and his little girl, except he gets too big and starts killing hundreds if not thousands of people.

As Ted Fast comes after his enemy Bob Solomon (Edowan Bersma), who wants to use the formula to grow giant food and take over the world’s need for groceries, he has only the losest of ties to the reality of the other movie, as always united through one conversation over the telephone.

There’s a moment at the end of this, as Moser lies dying — it breaks my heart just as much here as it does in King of Snake — Tingting loses her mind and starts shrieking at the military about killing her snake. Oh Tingting. Your snake just killed an entire city and some people will never recover from this and most of it is your fault.

As with all movies directed by Godfrey Ho, the soundtrack to this is so much of the reason to watch. There’s “Isadora,” “Catedral de Sal” and “The Night” by Azul y Negro; “Never Land” by Sisters of Mercy; “Sister Surprise” by Gary Numan; “Dance II” by the Duretti Column; “Phaedra,” “Kiew Mission,” “Logos (Part 1)” and “Rubycon (Part 1)” by Tangerine Dream; “Let It Rock” by Bon Jovi; “Better and Better” by A Flock of Seagulls; Richard Band’s Re-Animator soundtrack; “Heartbeat” by Chris and Cosey; “Rendez Vous V” by Jean Michel Jarre; “Agonized by Love” and “Lorretine” by Clan of Xymox; “Witches’ Multiplication Table” by Holger Czukay; “Part 1 (Alien)” by Don Preston and Michael Mantler; The Human Vapor soundtrack by Kunio Miyauchi; a song from Miyauchi Kunio’s Ultra Q soundtrack and part of the Starman score by Jack Nitzsche.

There are reviews of this that talk about how bad it is, how cheap it is and how they wasted time watching it. Anyone who wrote one of those is someone you never want to be friends with. They have a lack of vision, an inability to love life and just are robots sleepwalking through life.

Open your heart and let Moser inside.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Barry Levinson and written by Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow (in fact, the characterization of Raymond was based on Kim Peek and Bill Sackter, two savants that Morrow met and had already written about in the script for the movie Bill), Rain Man is the story of how Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) has a brother, the aforementioned Raymond, that he never knew about. Even more vexing, his father has given all of his estate to Raymond.

Once he thinks back to his childhood, Charlie realizes that Raymond was the Rain Man of his childhood, someone that the adult version of himself saw as an imaginary friend. Instead, he was a real person who was eventually put in an institution when their father believed that he tried to scale his younger brother in the bath.

After seeing how Charlie treats his brother, his girlfriend Susanna (Valeria Golino) leaves him. Yet the more time the two brothers spend together, the closer they become, even if Raymond is difficult for him to deal with and costs him his latest deal to sell four collector cars.

Originally, Dennis and Randy Quaid were going to play the brothers, then Bill Murray as Raymond and Dustin Hoffman as Charlie. Luckily, things in our universe worked out the way they did, as I couldn’t see any other actors in these roles. That said, when Hoffman studied Peek’s Savant Syndrome, he felt that the character of Raymond needed more, so he also made the character autistic. As this movie was such a big deal, it led to many in the public thinking that all savants are also autistic or that autistic people are all savants, when only 1 in 200 have these gifts. To be fair, Hoffman was really concerned with his performance, telling Levinson, “Get Richard Dreyfuss, get somebody, Barry, because this is the worst work of my life.” He and Cruise felt like the movie would bomb and called it Two Schmucks In a Car.

This was also filmed during a writer’s strike — completed just hours before it began — which is why the ending wasn’t debated and an alternate ending shot.

I’m fascinated that Sir Michael Caine is such a big fan of this movie because he actually lived it. He found out late in his adult life that he had a brother that he had never met before, one who had been hospitalized due to an extreme case of epilepsy.

The MVD 4K UHD release of Rain Man has a 4K Ultra High Definition version of the movie that was scanned in 4K from the original camera negative and approved by director Barry Levinson, who also provided an audio commentary. There are also two other commentaries, one by Barry Morrow and another by Ronald Bass.

This set also includes a trailer, a featurette on the making of the movie, another on autism, deleted scenes and a limited edition slipcover.

You can buy it from MVD. There’s also a blu ray edition.

John Carl Buechler’s special effects work can be seen in so many movies, including Ghoulies, Sorceress, Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype, TerrorVision, Dolls, and Hatchet amongst others, while he also directed Troll, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College, Deep Freeze and Under ConTroll.

Colin Childress (Jeffrey Combs) is a Johnny Craig or Reed Crandall E.C. Comics-style artist who is inspired by a book that he found of evil artwork called the Book of the Ancient Dead, which says “To contemplate evil, is to ask evil home.” By the way, the artwork of Childress was created by Frank Brunner, who is best-known for his Dr. Strange artwork. He also designed the characters for Fox’s X-Men cartoon. Ironically, as the book in this movie is kind of like the Necronomicon, he did the artwork for the metal band Necronomicon’s Escalation album cover.

Back to Childress. Somehow, while drawing one rainy and foreboding evening, he conjures up one of those spirits and disappears. Years later, his home has become an art school run by Mrs. Briggs (Yvonne De Carlo) and where Whitney Taylor (Debrah Farentino) comes to continue working on her comic book art, which is influenced by Childress.

The other artists at the school include love interest Philip (Brian Robbins, Head of the Class), performance artist Lisa (Miranda Wilson), detective fiction writer — huh? — who likes to fire guns and act out his stories named Norman (Vince Edwards) and Whitney’s art school rival Amanda (Pamela Bellwood), who conspires with Mrs. Briggs to ruin our heroine’s life. Whitney finds the book in the basement — get the title now? — and unleashes it on the school. At first, it only kills her rivals, but soon it starts taking out all of her friends.

It’s silly, but in the best of ways, and looks great thanks to it being shot by Sergio Salvati, who was also the cinematographer or director of photography on Puppet Master, Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond and so many more. And its writer, listed as Kit DuBois, is really Child’s Play creator Don Mancini.

In summation, though, I love any movie that has a giant wolf monkey creature with a pentagram sliced into its chest that lives as long as creativity does.

Robot Jox is part of the Enter the Video Store — Empire of Screams box set. Extras include new audio commentary by special make-up effects artist Michael Dea, moderated by film critics Matty Budrewicz and Dave Wain from The Schlock Pit, a video appreciation of special make-up effects artist John Carl Buechler, a new interview with special make-up effects artist Michael Deak, the original sales sheet and production notes, a VHS trailer, an Empire Pictures trailer reel and image galleries, including behind-the-scenes photos courtesy of special make-up effects artist Michael Deak. You can get this set from MVD.

After defeating his opponent Quino in the Philippines, Anthony Scott (Kim Rossi Stuart) returns to America for college. He makes friends with Luke (Winston Haynes) and tries to remember his promise to Master Kimura (now played by Leon Elalout) to not fight ever again. That doesn’t stop the Tigers — a martial arts gang so bad ass that they have their own mascot wearing a suit — and their leader Dick (Christopher Alan) from living up to his name and making Anthony’s life rough. Well, Anthony always kind of brings these things on himself, as he has his choice of, you know, thousands of girls at college and picks Dick’s ex-girlfriend Patty (Amy Lynn Baxter, who was Penthouse magazine’s Pet of the Month for June 1990 and the woman Ed Begley Jr. left Annette Benning for).

Obviously, Anthony has forgotten his girlfriend in the Philippines, Maria, in days.

Maybe having a gang of toughs ruin your new car and needing to be rescued by a fan boat will do that to you.

Finally, after an entire movie of haranguing, Anthony and Dick battle. This is a fight that’s been brewing for over twenty years, as Anthony’s father stopped Dick’s dad and his friends from assaulting a woman, which got them all expelled. Anthony will only fight in a real match with scoring and officials, so Luke and his friends put on a show and get an entire audience to show up and I wonder, “Are they the good guys?” They certainly are industrious for neighborhood toughs.

Dick nearly beats Anthony when he pays off his corner man and has him spray some kind of chemical into his eyes and blinding him. He didn’t count on the Stroke of the Dragon, which Anthony uses to win the match. He gets the girl, he wins over the crowd and…we have thirty minute left?

Yep. That’s because Dick seeks out the man who started the Tigers, Mark Sanders (Ted Prior, Deadly Prey) and gives him five grand to beat his enemy senseless in front of the high school. For being a ripoff of The Karate Kid, this kind of goes backward, with Johnny finding Kreese in the sequel. It’s kind of a Cannon movie.

Master Kimura comes to town and teaches Anthony some new moves. The same Anthony who, when asked what he wants to eat, says “Hot dogs, hamburgers or rib food.” The bad guys also use a Ben & Jerry’s location as their hangout, which seems to be a strange place for “karate fanatics” to congregate. This movie is in some strange universe where college classes have bells for classes, an idea that I believed was true when I was 12.

It’s hard to be on Anthony’s side. He’s a rich kid who lives on his own yacht and seems to be getting a free ride to college, as well as the gift of a car. The Tiger, while rude and kind of bullies, are also middle to lower class kids who have the gumption to put on a karate show even with no ring and just throw it up on a stage like it’s a class play. I cheered when they beat up Anthony’s friend Luke, because all these dudes do is drink champagne and caviar. The Tigers are lucky to get government cheese and off-brand Mountain Dew.

That said, I love the ending where yet another fighter shows up spoiling for a fight and our hero, his sensei and the girl he stole drive off laughing.

You can watch this on YouTube.

How amazing is it that when Godfrey Ho rips something off, he goes harder at ripping a movie off than anyone else? Like Bruno Mattei probably looked at him with some level of admiration. This one goes so far that the Spanish VHS box even steals the art from the stolen so many times movie Hands of Steel.

When there aren’t ninjas in this — there are no demons — you get a hero who shoots someone in every limb while two women cheer him on and a bad guy who wants to talk about politics even on his wedding night.

Robinson Collins (Stuart Smith) is only here because of Godfrey Ho’s new footage. He’s hunting Willy, a Thai gangster who is so bad that he sells American secrets to the Russians. Hopefully Robinson’s agent Max — who exists in a totally different movie — can solve it all. He’s played by Sorapong Chatri, who was one of the biggest movie stars in Thailand.

There are a lot of ninja fights here that have swords being used with no blood which is a bit disconcerting.

This time around, the music is taken from some different sources, like the Lalo Schifrin soundtracks to Sudden Impact and Cool Hand Luke, as well as Alan Silvestri’s soundtrack to Cat’s Eye.

When you look at either poster for this movie, you may think that you’re getting something amazing. You are and you aren’t. You must open your mind to Godfrey Ho’s films in the same way that you need to vibe with Jess Franco. You get to know the worlds that they create, how they keep going back to the same ideas, how the same shots will appear — this one is very Franco with the shots of planes that last forever and cameras gazing into the skyline for even longer — and then it all starts to become very comfortable and welcoming. You see the same faces as welcome sights that bring you sheer joy.

You can watch this on Tubi.

You may know this movie as Thunderbolt Angels but I saw it as Ninja Powerforce, which sounds like the kind of dumb genre classification some neckbeard that slavishly masturbates over Decibel would give to a band that nine people have listened to.

This is yet another Joseph Lai and Godfrey Ho — which may be the same person depending on who you read — ninja movie made from two movies, this time that the same footage of Richard Harrison dressed as a yellow ninja with a red headband that says “ninja” that was for one movie and ended up in so many films and a Cheung Chi-Chiu movie The Return. That movie is about gangsters who grow up and one trying to go straight. The ninjas work their way into that movie and unlike the stealth experts they are meant to be, they just barge right through the narrative.

Within the movie stolen for this, Frankie is a gangster who kills a friend named Albert and does the time. When he gets out, his old friend Matthew has gone legit and also married his woman Mandy. He also finds a world where Albert’s wife has to become a sex worker to pay for their child after his death. The actual movie is pretty good, but it’s really odd when everyone suddenly develops ninja connections that exist only in thee dubbed dialogue for Ninja Powerforce because otherwise this movie goes ninja free for long stretches.

There’s a lot of dialogue about chivalry to the point that every mention of the word would start to make me laugh. This is something you’d never have in your life if it wasn’t for these ninja films.

The music in this one also goes a bit off script, with Windham Hill artist Mark Isham’s “Many Chinas” and “On the Threshold of Liberty;” Romanelli’s “Connecting Flight;” “Six Pianos” by American minimalist composer Steve Reich; Jean-Michael Jarre’s “Second Rendez-Vouz;” The Alan Parsons Project’s “Psychobabble,” “Silence and I,” “Children of the Moon,” Mammagamma” and “Sirius;” OMD’s “Electricity;” Clan of Xymox’s “Masquerade” and Mark Knopler’s “Going Home (Theme of the Local Hero).”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as American Force Ninja, the boss of this movie is Gordon, a ninja master who has renounced the ways of the ninja and is more concerned with selling heroin. You know he’s the bad guy because he has a swastika on his ninja mask.

His enemy is the so-called Lady Detective — what, is this like Suzy Bannion being called the American Girl? — who is being protected by the CIA Action Men and a ninja — a tame ninja at that — named Captain Scott.

Much of this movie takes place in a disco, which I’m good with, except that it has nothing to do with anything else in the film. Also: this reinforces one of the rules of the Godfrey Ho/Filmark Cinematic Universe: only a ninja can kill a ninja. This goes even further to prove that a ninja can shrug off bullets and grenades, unless thrown by a ninja.

The box art, however, is a million times better than this movie. I want to make whatever movie that it’s for so that I can watch that a million times.

Sadly, this doesn’t have much of the typical awesome bootleg songs on the soundtrack. But if one Godfrey Ho movie lets you down, he has like ten more. Or twenty. Maybe even more.

You can watch this on Tubi.