EDITOR’S NOTE: Patty Hearst was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Cannon France.

Directed by Paul Schrader and written by Nicholas Kazan based on the book Every Secret Thing by Hearst with Alvin Moscow, this film tells how rich college student Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, how she became an active SLA member and her arrest after a series of armed robberies.

The performance of Natasha Richardson and the way that Schrader frames Patty being locked in a closet for weeks with her emergence into being part of her SLA cells’ lives makes this movie more than a cash-in “torn from the headlines” exploitation movie. Plus, there’s Ving Rhames as SLA leader Cinque Mtume, William Forsythe as Teko, Francis Fisher as his wife Yolanda and Dana Delaney as Gelinda.

I’ve always wondered whether Hearst’s Stockholm Syndrome defense was true or if she wanted to escape the shadow of her rich family and live the life she’d only read about in college. Even with this movie and years of books and interviews, I don’t think we’ll ever know.

The film closes with this: “Patricia Hearst was granted a Presidential commutation of her sentence on February 1st, 1979 and now lives on the East Coast. She is married to Bernard Shaw, her former bodyguard. Efforts to overturn her conviction have been futile. Bill Harris (Teko) and Emily Harris (Yolanda) were found guilty of kidnapping, robbery and auto theft and served 8 years in prison. They are now separated. Bill works for a legal firm in Northern California. Emily lives in Los Angeles County. Wendy Yoshimura was convicted on unrelated weapons charges and served a short term in prison. She works at a restaurant in Northern California. None of the later SLA members were convicted of any crimes. Randolph and Katherine Hearst are divorced. He is now remarried. She lives in Southern California. Stephen Weed published a book, My Search for Patty Hearst. To this date, she is not spoken to him. F. Lee Bailey also wrote a book about the case, but to date it has not been published. District attorney Jim Browning is now a judge. The proprietor of Mel’s Sporting Goods sued Patricia Hearst and the Harrises claiming the shooting at his store rendered him incapable of performing his duties as a spouse.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was on the site for the first time on May 27, 2020. Brain Damage was not produced by Cannon but was released to theaters by Scotia/Cannon.

Beyond being a historian of exploitation films, Frank Henenlotter has made some outright insane movies like Frankenhooker and Basket Case. What other kind of mad genius would hire horror host Zacherle to be a worm named Aylmer, who creates drug-like relationships with his hosts while demanding to eat the brains of everyone they love?

That blue phallic worm secretes a highly addictive hallucinogen directly into the brain, forcing Brian to leave behind his life, his girlfriend and any hope of normalcy, all while being pursued by the old couple that had imprisoned the parasite and who know way too much of his history, leading to some of the longest and most hilarious expository dialogue I’ve seen in a film.

During the fellatio scene — yes, a woman puts Aylmer inside her mouth — the crew walked out, refusing to work on the scene.

There’s a great moment where Duane and Belail from Basket Case meet Brian on a train before he ends up killing his girlfriend. I realize that’s a spoiler, but nothing can prepare you for this movie. It’s truly one of a kind.

You can watch this on Tubi or on Shudder with and without commentary by Joe Bob Briggs.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally was posted on October 10, 2020. Amsterdamned was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Scotia-Cannon.

Dutch director Dick Maas started his career directing the videos for Golden Earring, including “Twilight Zone” and “When the Lady Smiles,” which was controversial as it showed a man about to assault a nun. He moved into feature films, including the comedic Flodder and The Lift. He’s also known for the American version of The Lift, which was called Down, and the absolutely deranged holiday movie Sint.

This film is at the crossroads of giallo and slasher, using the canals of Amsterdam instead of Venice to create a place where the killer can appear at seemingly any time and place to murder at will.

The film starts with a bravura scene of violence, as a prostitute is murdered and then her body, hung above a bridge, literally rains blood on to a boat full of tourists.

What keeps it from being giallo and pushes it toward slasher is the fact that its protagonist is not a stranger in a strange land, but instead Eric Visser, a detective struggling to be a single father while solving cases around Holland’s capital.

And what pushes it even further into slasher territory is the film’s propensity to deliver on the gore, from decapitated heads to bloody kills. The antagonist is so brutal that one of the witnesses refers to him as a monster that came out of the water.

That said, where it does flirt with the giallo are the sheer number of red herrings that this movie throws at you, which makes sense, as Holland’s fishing industry continually lands plenty of them from the nutrient-rich coastal waters of the North Sea.

You can watch this on Shudder and Tubi.

Filmed in Yogoslavia as For a Night of Love and is based on the novella Pour une nuit d’amour by Émile Zola, this was directed and written by Dušan Makavejev, who was infamous for making Sweet Movie.

The King’s security chief Avanti (Alfred Molina, quite early in his career) is in charge of what is, for the most part, an ineffectual police force. He has come to the village of Waldheim to protect the monarch while Svetlana (Camilla Søeberg) comes with murder and perhaps love in mind.

It’s also the second movie that Molina and Ronald Lacey would be in after Raiders of the Lost Ark, as both have memorably small roles in that blockbuster. The cast also includes Eric Stoltz, Simon Callow, Lindsay Duncan, Chris Haywood, Gabrielle Anwar  and more.

If you haven’t seen Makavejev’s other work, it’s just as horny and sex-obsessed (and frequently funny). This is just another example of Golan and Globus offering a filmmaker with a strong independent streak and a history of controversy and enabling them to make a film.

Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley get together and things go quickly from philosophical discussions to a wild getaway filled with drugs, sex and mental gamesmanship. Are we talking about Ken Russell’s Gothic? No, this is Haunted Summer.

Directed by Ivan Passer, written by Lewis John Carlino (who wrote The Mechanic, A Reflection of Fear and Where Have All the People Gone? and directed The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea, The Great Santini and Class) and based on Haunted Summer by Anne Edwards, this stars Philip Anglim as Lord Byron, Eric Stoltz as Percy Shelley, Alice Krige as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin — soon to be Shelley, Alex Winter (!) as their drug supplier Dr. John William Polidori and Laura Dern as Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister. By the end of the Villa Diodati Writer’s Workshop, Mary will write Frankenstein. By the end of this movie, you’ll want to punch Lord Byron in the balls after watching him insult nearly everyone and fire a peashooter into a crowd of commoner diners.

This was originally going to be directed by John Huston, which had to have thrilled Cannon at the chance to work with Hollywood royalty.

If you want to see another take on this movie, Frankenstein Unbound, Mary Shelley and Remando al Viento also use the real life story to tell their own yarns.

Hansel (Hugh Pollard) and Gretel (Nicola Stapelton) — Pollard and Stapelton were both on the British show Simon and the Witch — have discovered the gingerbread house of Griselda (Cloris Leachman) and if you know the original Brothers Grimm story, you know that things won’t be easy for them.

With David Warner and Emily Richard as the parents of our child hero duo, this at least has some talented British actors in the cast. It was directed by Len Talan, who had written Cannon’s The Emperor’s New Clothes and had a script by Nancy Weems, who never wrote a thing before or sense at least as far as IMDB is willing to tell me.

Hansel and Gretel also uses songs from the Engelbert Humperdinck opera Hänsel und Gretel. Yes, at one point, the world had an Engelbert Humperdinck version of this fairy tale.

I love that Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus created these Cannon Movie Tales so that their Cannon Theater chain wouldn’t have to show Disney movies as matinees, but after Cannon went out of business, they all aired on the Disney Channel as part of the Storybook Cinema series of films. Cannon had at one point planned sixteen of these and stopped at nine. Much like my insane — and self-abusive — need to watch every Lemon Popsicle movie, I will someday have watched every single one of these films.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on The Diaries of Hanna Senesh and the biographical novel A Great Wind Cometh by Yoel Palgi, this movie tells the true story of Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian woman who was one of 37 Jewish soldiers who parachuted into Yugoslavia during the World War II to rescue Hungarian Jews about to be sent to Auschwitz. She was arrested, imprisoned and tortured, but refused to reveal details of her mission even when her mother was arrested and threatened. She didn’t reveal any information about her fellow soldiers even when she was about to be killed by firing squad. She is considered a national hero in Israel, as her poetry is well-known and several streets are named for her.

Helena Bonham Carter was originally going to play Hanna and Peter Weir was going to direct before delays caused them to leave the film.

Instead, Dutch actress Maruschka Detmers was Hanna and Cannon boss Menahem Golan directed and co-wrote this movie with Stanley Mann (Meteor, Circle of Iron). Playing the man who would torture her for days, Captain Thomas Rosza, is Donald Pleasence. Ellen Burstyn plays her mother and the cast also includes Ingrid Pitt and David Warner.

And yes, Yehuda Efroni is in this.

Remember when Family Guy did Dingo and the Baby? Well, this is the movie about the real story. How does Cannon figure in? While  Roadshow Entertainment distributed this film in Austalia and Warner Brothers handled this in the U.S., Cannon had the worldwide rights. You may have seen this under its international title, A Cry In the Dark.

Directed by Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Roxanne, Iceman and Six Degrees of Separation), who co-wrote the movie with Robert Caswell, and based on the book Evil Angels by John Bryson, this movie stars Meryl Streep and Sam Neill as Lindy and Michael Chamberlain.

During a barbecue, their two-month-old daughter Azaria was sleeping in a tent when a dingo stole her and devoured her. Even when the couple are cleared of any crime, public opinion turns against them and rumors of them being Satanists — they were Seventh-day Adventists — and sacrificing their daughter begin to spread.

This court of public outrage ends up turning into an actual trial and Lindsay goes to jail, only to be later cleared when the police find the jacket that her daughter had been wearing with teeth holes all over it. Lindsay was seen as unlikeable, which doesn’t mean guilty, but feelings too often are more important than empirical evidence.

Michael Dudikoff as Lieutenant Jeffrey Knight, a new officer from the United States Military Academy who has been dropped off in Vietnam to try to become a leader of men. He proves two things: that yes, he can handle this order, and that Dudikoff is way better of an actor than Cannon’s other Vietnam leading man, Chuck Norris.

Speaking of the Molasses 2×4, his brother Aaron directed this from a script by Andrew Deutsch, Rick Marx and David L. Walker, all based on the book of the same name by James R. McDonough. Harry Alan Towers — yes, the same man who worked with Jess Franco — also worked on adapting the book for the movie.

Knight is helped by Sergeant Michael McNamara (Robert F. Lyons), who talks him through what it takes to succeed in the jungles of Southeast Asia. And proving my theory that all movies are better with William Smith, he plays an officer.

Originally called NAM, the title was changed to obviously be similar to Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Strangely, this is one of the few Cannon movies not produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Instead, Harry Alan Towers is listed as the producer and Avi Lerner as the executive producer.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Walter Matthau’s son Charles and written by a pre-90210, Melrose Place and Sex In the City Darren Star, Doin’ Time On Planet Earth is about Ryan Richmond (Nicholas Strouse), who lives with his family in the Holiday Inn with a spinning restaurant on top that they own in Arizona.

Looking for a date for his brother’s wedding takes him to a computer dating service where he discovers that he’s an alien living on Earth, a fact confirmed by Charles and Edna Pinsky (Adam West and Candice Azzara, wearing a beehive hairdo that’s also a bird cage), who go even further to proclaim Ryan as the alien prince destined to lead his people home.

Roddy McDowell plays a preacher, Paula Irvine (Liz from Phantasm 2) shows up and Hugh O’Brien (one of the dads from Twins), Maureen Stapleton and Dominick Brascia (Evil Laugh, Friday the 13th: Part V, the director of Hard Rock Nightmare) appear.

It’s a strange coming of age science fiction mix that never really seems to go anywhere, but if you can say anything about Cannon, they at least allowed filmmakers to do something even if it didn’t always work out.