I despise the narrative that Cannon’s films with Bronson and J. Lee Thompson are poor. Having already worked together on St. Ives, The White Buffalo and Caboblanco, they would also make 10 to Midnight, The Evil That Men Do, Murphy’s Law, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown and this film at Cannon. And you know, while this is not the best movie they made together, it is in no way a bad movie (that said, Thompson got sick during the making of this movie and it was finished by second unit director Robert C. Ortwin Jr. ).

The film starts with Orville Beecham’s (Charles Dierkop) three wives and children being murdered by masked men. Chief of police Barney Doyle (Daniel Benzali) arrives with reporter Garret Smith (Charles Bronson) to the scene of the crime. Smith soon discovers that Beecham is the son of a Warren Jeffs-like Mormon preacher and the murders have something to do with a family feud over a doctrinal dispute. As that sect supports blood atonement for perceived crimes, Smith decides to push his investigation and soon learns that someone even more brutal is behind the crime: The Colorado Water Company.

The red trucks that the water company uses are actually Lincoln Hawk’s trucks from Over the Top painted red with signs covering the Hawk Hauling logo on the side doors.

Wait — is this Bronson’s Chinatown?

Written by Paul Jarrico, who endured the blacklist in Europe, where he wrote La Balada de Johnny Ringo, and based on the book The Avenging Angel by Rex Burns, this might not be the Bronson film you expect — he’s a reporter who doesn’t carry a gun instead of a killing machine — this was an attempt from Bronson to do something different after Death Wish 4: The Crackdown. He told Newsday, “I prefer to play different characters in films. And I wouldn’t want to be in a weekly TV series. I imagine a lot of series stars fall asleep playing the same guy every week. Some of them relax when they know their show is signed for a whole season. I admire Tom Selleck; he keeps bringing new things to his series.”

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode about this film, click here.

Directed by William Tannen and written by Dennis Shryack (The Car, Cannon’s Fifty/Fifty, Murder by Phone) and Michael Blodgett (Lance Rocke from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls; he also wrote the novel that this is based on), this Cannon film stars Chuck Norris as Danny O’Brien, a cop who put away a serial killer known as Simon “The Terror” Moon (Jack O’Halloran, who beat up Superman a few times) three years ago. Since then, he’s had a series of dreams about the murderer and is in a relationship with his therapist Kay (Brynn Thayer). Actually, they’re now married and about to have a child, which would make this the worst time for Moon to break out.

What could make this movie better? What if Steve James played Chuck’s partner Robinson? They did it. And it’s great, because the world needs more Steve James.

Chuck just wants to be with his new wife but the mayor of Los Angeles (Ron O’Neal) wants him on the case. He also wants him to admit that Moon is dead, but we all know that Chuck doesn’t listen to authority.

Somewhat similar to Silent Rage, this has Norris against not just a near-unstoppable slasher, but also his doubts as to whether or not he can live up to “The Hero” name that the press has given him.

Chuck would follow this up with another film for Cannon, one where he’s back in a familiar role — Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Eugene Marner (who also directed Cannon’s Beauty and the Beast) with a screenplay by his wife Carole Lucia Satrina (who wrote three episodes of Tales from the Darkside, as well as Cannon’s Beauty and the Beast and Red Riding Hood), this Cannon Movie Tales has quite a star in its cast: Christopher Walken as Puss, the cat who can change into a man when he wears a special pair of boots. As for his master Corin, he’s played by Jason Connery, the son of Sean.

Corin was the son of a poor man who gave him his cat — Puss — in his will and when the cat becomes a man he makes it seem like Corin is a very rich man. That fake wealth gets him introduced to Princess Vera (Carmela Marner, the director’s and writer’s daughter), who he falls in love with and there’s also an ogre who can turn himself into a lion, a tiger and a bear. So that may be frightening to kids, but despite Golan and Globus making this to play in their British theater chain for matinees, I’m not sure how many kids wanted to watch this.

Then again, seeing Walken as a singing and dancing cat is definitely worth your time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You know when you’ve seen too many movies? When you review something twice. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to invest in himself by trying comedy. As Universal Pictures saw this as a major risk, he gave up his salary in exchange for a share of the film’s profits. Seeing as how this movie made $216.6 million dollars on an $18 million dollar budget — director Ivan Reitman and Dabby DeVito made the same deal — I think it all worked out. Some sources say that Arnold made 20% of the profits, which added up to $35,000,000 through international sales, video/DVD sales, and cable and TV airings.

Schwarzenegger and DeVito play Julius and Vincent Benedict, fraternal twins who were created in a secret experiment that combined the DNA of six fathers to produce the perfect baby. Well, they also got Vincent, who received none of the Doc Savage-like upbringing that Julius had.

On his 35th birthday, Werner tells Julius about Vincent. He tracks down his brother in a jail in Los Angeles due to unpaid parking tickets. They also discover that their mother may still be alive, all while dealing with paying off Vincent’s mob debts.

Written by Will Davis (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot), William Osborne (The Scorpion King) and Timothy Harris (Kindergarten Cop, My Stepmother Is an Alien), this movie helped prove that Arnold was more than an action star.

There were plans to do Triplets, which had both Eddie Murphy and Tracy Morgan attached, but with Reitman dying, those plans may have been canceled.

Walter Hill and Arnold Schwarzenegger had wanted to work together for some time and Hill kept playing with concepts, saying “I didn’t want to do sci-fi and it’s tough to use Arnold credibly in an American context with his accent. I thought it would be interesting if he could play a Russian cop in the US. I wanted to do a traditional John Wayne/Clint Eastwood larger-than-life movie. You then ask the question: Will the American audience accept an unapologetic Soviet hero, someone who will not defect at the end of the movie?”

It was a success, but not as much as expected. Arnold would later say, “It wasn’t the smash I’d expected. Why is hard to guess. It could be that audiences were not ready for Russia, or that my and Jim Belushi’s performances were not funny enough, or that the director didn’t do a good enough job. For whatever reason, it just didn’t quite close the deal.”

At the time, I saw it as a step down for Arnold from Predator and The Running Man. Of course, he’d follow this up with Twins, which was a huge success that showed Hollywood that he was more than action.

Captain Ivan Danko (Schwarzenegger) has lost his partner to crime boss Viktor Rostavili (Ed O’Ross), who has come to the U.S. and been arrested for a traffic violation. Danko is sent to bring him back to Russia and meets Sergeant Art Ridzik (James Belushi) and Detective Max Gallagher (Richard Bright), but when they transport the villain to the airport, they’re ambushed and Rostavili gets away.

Both Danko and Ridzik have lost a partner and want revenge, as well as to stop the crime boss from working with Chicago street gangs to smuggle uncut cocaine into the Soviet Union.

It’s a buddy cop movie with two men from different countries who are ultimately very much the same. It also has Gina Gershon as Rostavili’s American wife, Larry Fishburne as the lieutenant and Brion James as a henchman.

Belushi and Arnold would work together again in Jingle All the Way and Last Action Hero. They work pretty well together. A sequel that would have had Ridzik come to Russia was planned and never happened.

It’s funny that Arnold was forty when he made this and had not yet ascended to being the biggest star in the world.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on January 21, 2020 and is back for the week of Larraz movies.

Al Filo del Hacha, or Edge of the Axe, is a very late in the slasher game film directed by José Ramón Larraz, who also directed Estigma, a movie that I’ve been obsessed with for some time. Other films from him include Symptoms, Vampyres and The House That Vanished, which was also released under the titles Scream… and Die!, Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom, Psycho Sex Fiend and Psycho Sex. The posters for that movie are great, as they shamelessly steal from The Last House on the Left’s ad campaign.

The crazy thing about this film is that it’s set in the rural Northern California mountain community of Paddock County, yet it’s a mixture of scenes shot in Big Bear Lake, California and Madrid, Spain. Most of the exteriors are in the U.S., while the interiors are a world away. For example, the car wash killing that starts the movie is split, with the signage and cars in America and the actual killing in Spain. It’s a seamless transition, which makes it even more interesting.

Before the credits even roll, nurse Mirna Dobson dies at, well, the edge of the axe at the aforementioned car wash. Just from this first incredibly shot scene, you realize that this is anything more than your basic stalk and slash.

Our hero is Gerald Martin (Barton Falkes, Future-Kill), whose cabin is filled with computers and video games, in direct contrast to the natural world all around him. This puts him at odds with his landlord, a hermit named Brock.

Gerald hangs out with Richard Simmons — no, not the guy who danced with the oldies, but instead a wanna-be lady killer — who works as an exterminator when he’s not acting as a kept husband to his much older wife. He’s played by Page Moseley, who was in Girls Nite Out, Open House and The Jigsaw Murders. And his much older wife? None other than Patty Shepard, who was Hannah Queen of the Vampires and appears in Assignment: Terror, The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman, and Slugs).

Gerald and Richard check out the smell coming out of a bar, which ends up being the corpse of one of the barmaids, who it appears has killed herself. As this is a small town, the police ask them to keep it quiet, kind of like how they ignored someone slaughtering pigs and leaving their heads in the bed, as if these California farmers were Jack Woltz.

Paddock County is a lot like my hometown. All that’s there are bars. Lillian Nebbs is the daughter of the owner of another of those many bars and she’s home from school. She loves technology and video games as much as Gerald, which makes this movie into some sort of science fiction story. Of course, she does wonder why he has a list of all of the dead women on his computer. He replies that he loves making lists of data, you know, as you do.

This is one of my favorite tropes of all movies — a computer that does more than computers in 1988 were actually able to do. This is a pre-Siri world, but the personal computers in this movie are able to speak in a very understandable voice. Trust me — I had a computer in 1988. It was a six-year-old Commodore 64 that took an entire evening to download less than a megabyte of info.

The killings haven’t stopped, as Rita Miller (Alicia Moro, Exterminators of the Year 3000, Slugs) is stalked and killed by someone she seems to recognize before her body is placed on the train tracks and torn asunder. Poor Rita — she has the best slash job I’ve heard of: beautician/prostitute.

This finally puts Officer Frank on the case. He’s just in time, because the farmer’s wife who found the pig’s head is killed and Richard finds the severed head of a nurse while out on the lake cheating with his wife. And oh yeah — yet another woman finds her dog murdered before the killer chops her fingers off and then chops her to bits.

Lillian tells Gerald her family secret — her cousin Charlie has just been released from a mental hospital. And he was there because she pushed him off a swing set and caused the injury. She feels that he’s the one behind the killings. She uses his computer to do research, attempting to learn more about the psychiatrists who treated Charlie.

Later that night, Richard’s wife learns that she’s bankrupt and gets wasted with local drunk Christopher (Jack Taylor, who was in everything from Pieces and Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion to The Ghost Galleon, The Ninth Gate and The Vampires Night Orgy). On their way home, she drunk drives into a tree, only to be further inconvenienced by getting killed by the masked axeman.

At the scene, the cops find a pin from Lillian’s father’s tavern — the same one she pinned on Gerland at one point — which leads them to question her and her father.

So who is the killer, in this movie that feels just as much American/Spanish backwoods giallo as slasher?

Lillian accuses Gerald of being Charlie, which seems like a stretch. He responds by telling her that she is Charlie, as he’s learned that she had a head injury at one point and spent plenty of time in the hospital. It also turns out that all of the victims were either people who cared for her or women interested in her father. So Lillian attacks Gerald with an axe.

As the two fight, the cops arrive and shoot our hero. As Officer Frank tries to help Lillian, we notice that she’s smiling like a maniac.

Larraz considered Edge of the Axe his worst feature film, but it has more quality in it than ten slashers. Seriously, I’ve been holding off watching this for a while, as I had always loved its poster art and felt it could never live up to it. Good news. If anything, it exceeds it.

Unlike most slashers, which are content to ape from Halloween and Friday the 13th, this film spends more time making us care about every character, even the side ones like Richard’s wife. This isn’t kids in the woods screwing around, making us count the seconds until they’re decimated. These are real people caught up in the web of a killing machine.

The killings themselves are bursts of the unreal that intrude upon the problems that all of these characters face — money woes, marital infidelity, family secrets — and that makes each of the very creative death scenes even more effective.

There’s a new Arrow Video blu ray release of this movie, which features a beautiful 2K restoration from the original camera negative. You can choose to watch this in English or Spanish (which also has newly translated English subtitles). There’s also commentary by lead actor Faulks and The Hysteria Continues podcast. Plus, there are interviews with Faulks and make-up artist Colin Arthur.

You can buy this from Arrow Video. It’s also on Tubi.

Also known as The Curse of the Monestary, Blood Screams and The Bloody Monks, this starts with a whole bunch of minks dying to satisfy the blood urges of a demon or to steal gold or who knows what, but it’s non-stop monk death and you know me, I’m in for this movie as of immediately.

Karen (Stacy Shaffer, Cannon’s The Naked Cage) is traveling through Mexico along with a magician named Frank (how if Russ Tamblyn even in this movie?) and she just wants to escape and she falls for a boy named Jaime (Rafael Sánchez Navarro). They jump the train and I start wondering, is Karen Frank’s wife? His daughter? Is there any connection? Is she one of those giallo heroines who is gorgeous yet brings death to everyone around her because she has some strange malady? And hey Jaime, take my advice from watching so many movies: don’t go back home and solve the mystery of your father’s death.

This movie has 75 minutes to share with you enough to fill up ten other films; the magician being racist to Mexicans who laugh at him, a witch (Isela Vega, Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia) who has possessed a woman, Karen’s mysterious past, Jaime’s mysterious past, Karen’s mysterious dreams of Jaime’s mysterious past, zombies who are the monks we saw die earlier, missing gold, Russ Tamblyn doing magic tricks and acting as his own stuntman as he dove off a train in a move that seems ill-advised for anyone much less an actor already 54 when this was made and oatmeal-based makeup.

Jaime and Karen get blamed for a series of murders when we know that it was the zombies that did it because we’ve seen enough Blind Dead movies. Perhaps the biggest mystery of this movie is that it was distributed by Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures and released on video by Warner Brothers.

You can watch this on YouTube.