There’s a subset of maniacs who want to see movies where women are impregnated by aliens and give messy and brutal birth to them. Trust me, there’s no other way Inseminoid and Galaxy of Terror would all come up with the same concept if there wasn’t a willing audience for this sort of thing.

Now you can add The Terror Within, a movie that doesn’t just have alien assault — well, mutant in this case — but bloody births and abortions, too. It’s basically a family night film ready to entertain one and all.

After the end of the world, the human survivors battle what they call gargoyles, which are really mutant humans. The few normal people left alive are looking for a cure and are working at labs, like the ones in Mojave and Rocky Mountain.

An injured girl named Karen is brought back to civilization, but she quickly gives birth to the spawn of one of these creatures. Think Alien — as this movie quickly moves to rip that off, a switcheroo when you were expecting Mad Max.

If I’ve learned anything from my lifetime of watching 1980’s VHS movies, its that George Kennedy was married three times — twice to the same woman — and had six kids. At the age of 71, he also adopted one of his grandchildren as his daughter so that he and his fourth wife could legally raise her. I’m telling you these facts to explain why I think George never turned down a role. Seriously, he suffers through some of the worst films ever — Uninvited, Wacko, Deathship, The Concorde … Airport ’79 and so many more — yet he does it all with a quiet grace. Even when a haunted ghost ship sprays sewage right into his mouth in the aforementioned Deathship, I get the idea he’s thinking, “Do it for my grandkids. Do it for my grandkids.”

Former Miss Teen Hamilton Starr Andreeff plays the victim of one of these beasts. Terri Treas, who was Newcomer Cathy Frankel on the Alien Nation TV series, also appears. And for the ladies, there’s Andrew Stevens, who beyond being the son of Stella Stevens is also the star of all of the many Night Eyes films.

This movie becomes an abortion debate, as one of the characters is pregnant, either by a mutant or her human lover. Either way, she overdoses on drugs to prevent what happens next. Trust me, this is the least nuanced debate on the subject ever, as most abortion related movies don’t star clawed mutants that can’t be killed by flamethrowers yet are susceptible to dog whistles.

You can watch this on Tubi. Or you can get it on a double disc with Dead Space from Shout! Factory.

About the Author: Paul Andolina is back to share a sports-related end of the world movie with us. If you like his stuff, check out his site Wrestling with Film. 

I’ve never been super into sports as entertainment but I have recently got into football. Not liking sports, however, has not stopped me from liking movies with made up sports in them. In fact The Blood of Heroes is my absolute favorite sports movies and if you count movies that are centered around professional wrestling I have seen quite a few.

The Blood of Heroes, or as it is known internationally as The Salute of the Jugger, is a post-apocalyptic film about a fictional sport that incorporates placing a dog skull on a pole, weapons, and hard hitting action. It was released in 1989 and it stars the late Rutger Hauer, Joan Chen, a young Vincent D’Onofrio and Hugh Keays-Byrne who not only played Toe Cutter in Mad Max but also Immortan Joe in Fury Road.

I cannot explain the movie very well despite seeing it twice within the past 24 hours. There are two cuts: a shorter R-rated cut that was released in the states and a 13-minute longer version that saw play internationally. On the Bluray I own — which is a region A copy from Japan — there are both versions. The R-rated cut is a remastered version and it is the most beautiful version of the film I have ever seen visually. The colors are nice and the picture is so much clearer than the copies I remember renting constantly. I prefer the longer cut because I feel the ending makes a bit more sense than the one we are given in the rated cut.

Sallow (Rutger Hauer) is a slash for a traveling band of juggers who go from dog town to dog town entertaining their denizens of dirty, desolate citizens. Juggers are treated very well in these towns and eat well and drink well despite their surroundings. Kidda (Joan Chen) is a young lady who wishes to play the game and she gets her chance when the local team looses their qwik (the player who wrestles for the dog skull and races through the field to place it on the stake) after a particularly brutal round of the game.

She royally messes up Sallow’s qwik Dog Boy to the point where he cannot even stand. Kidda takes his place and the crew continues to travel town to town until they decide to get the attention of the league in the Nine Cities, an underground dwelling full of the richest most powerful folks in the wasteland. Sallow used to play for the league until he disgraced some lady by being in a public relationship with her.

I don’t know what else to say about this film other than I think everyone should watch it at least once. It is such an unique film in the post-apocalyptic genre since it focuses so heavily on something other than daily survival in a wasteland. The movie can be streamed on Amazon Prime but the cut presented isn’t the best; however it is worth watching still. If you can track down a region 4 DVD copy for cheap enough, it is worth a pick up. But if you are willing to splurge, the Japanese blu-ray is an amazing piece to own. 

SAM’S NOTE: It’s also free on Tubi and Vudu.

Remember Killer Workout? Yeah, that was David Prior. So was The Final Sanction. Now I’ve finally crawled to the bottom of the post-apocalyptic barrel that is Future Force, starring David Carradine, who I would like to think knows better, but he learned how to be in films beneath him from his dad, kind of like that kid in the anti-drug commercial movie from the 1970’s.

Back in 1989, this movie was set in the far-flung future of next year — 2020. That’s when law enforcement has become so bad at their jobs that they turn to metal-armed John Tucker (Carradine) and his bounty hunter team, C.O.P.S (Civilian Operated Police Systems).

All the corruption has led to Tucker becoming a bitter, washed up drunk. One could argue that life is imitating art right here. Regardless, he’s been hired to protect a reporter from the cops, because she can finally prove just how corrupt they are. And oh yeah — Tucker’s partner is evil, so even the C.O.P.S. are against the two of them.

If you should remember Kung Fu, all the better, because Carradine’s denim jacket has one of the symbols from the show on the back. Sadly, it looks and sounds like Carradine would rather be anywhere else but here. It’s even more amazing that he turned up for the sequel: Future Zone.

Amazon Prime has this movie with and without Rifftrax. It’s also non-riffed on You Tube. Honestly, I don’t know how you could watch this without the riffs.

How many times can you lock up Sylvester Stallone? Well, I can count three Escape Plan films, Tango & Cash, him getting placed into frozen jail in Demolition Man, getting sent to the Cursed Earth in Judge Dredd and being locked up in First Blood and in prison at the start of Rambo: First Blood Part II. Oh yeah — he also gets put in the clink in Over the Top.

But if you really want to get your fill of Sly in the big house, there’s only one movie that’ll give you that for the entire running time and that’s 1989’s Lock Up.

Frank Leone (Stallone) is a model prisoner in the low security Norwood prison, enjoying work release and looking forward to serving the last three weeks of his sentence for assaulting the criminals who attacked his mechanic mentor. He even has a girlfriend — Melissa (Darlanne Fluegel, Eyes of Laura Mars, Battle Beyond the Stars, To Live and Die In L.A.) — who he plans on spending way more time with once he finishes this bid.

That all changes one night when he’s forcibly removed from his cell and sent to the maximum security Gateway Prison. It’s run by Warden Drumgoole (Donald Sutherland), who has a grudge against our hero. It turns out that Leone had asked for one hour to see his dying mentor and that was denied, despite him only having a few weeks left to serve. Leone escaped Treadmore Prison and informed the press about Drumgoole’s civil rights violations. The incident led to the warden getting the one black mark on his record, which brought him to Gateway and Leone getting five years added to his sentence.

What follows is an entire movie of abuse against Stallone. He earns the ire of the big man on the block, Chink Weber (Sonny Landham, who was Billy in Predator). He also gets some new friends who all work together in the prison’s auto shop. There’s Dallas (Tom Sizemore in one of his first roles), First-Base and Eclipse (Frank McRae, the police captain in 48 Hrs.). First-Base goes crazy behind the wheel of the car, which the warden deals with by having Weber and his gang — look for a very young Danny Trejo — destroy the automobile.

Leone is sent to solitary confinement for six weeks and is tortured the entire time by the guards, except for Captain Meissner (John Amos), who grudgingly becomes to respect the convict and frees him from the hole.

The warden wants to make Leone snap, so he orders Weber to kill First-Base in the gym. Leone goes wild and attacks the man, but stops from killing him, giving one of Weber’s henchmen time to knife him. As he heals in the infirmary, one of the prisoners tells him that he is going to assault Melissa while Leone rots in jail.

That’s when the real escape begins, which is filled with twists, turns, double crosses and violence.  Of course, this being a Stallone movie, everything ends up working out for our hero.

It’s no surprise that this film was nominated for three Razzie Awards including Worst Picture, Worst Actor for Stallone and Worst Supporting Actor for Donald Sutherland, but failed to win any awards.

Stallone told Entertainment Weekly that this was “not a film that was produced and performed with enough maturity to really make a significant impact on the audience or my career. And that’s the truth.”

Director John Flynn (Out for Justice, Rolling Thunder, Brainscan) told Shock Cinema that “Lock Up is a strange lesson in how Hollywood movies are made. Stallone had a window which means the guy was available for a certain window of time. Larry Gordon had a terrible script set in a prison. Stallone calls James Woods and asks if I’m any good as a director. Woods says “Yeah, he’s a good director and you ought to work with him.” So we have a director and a star, but no script. All we have is a theme — a guy escaping from prison. So we hire Jeb Stuart (Sam’s note — who we all remember from directing Switchback after he wrote Die Hard and Next of Kin) who was then one of the hottest writers in Hollywood, to rewrite the script and we go off looking for prison locations. Now we have a star, a theme, a shooting date, a budget, a studio, but we still have no script. So we all go back to New York City, and move into a hotel where Larry tortures Jeb and Henry Rosenbaum (Sam’s note #2 — The Dunwich Horror and Hanky Panky) into writing a script in record time. Meanwhile, I’m going around scouting prisons. We finally found one in Rahway, New Jersey. Jeb and Henry were writing the script as we were making the movie. New pages would come in every day. There was one day when I was on the third tier of a cell-block in Rahway Penitentiary and I had nothing to shoot. I had my movie star, all these extras and a great location — and the pages were on their way. So we sat around and bullshitted with the prisoners. Stallone is a smart guy and a very underrated actor. If I ever needed a better line, he’d come up with one. Stallone is a really hard worker. I had no problem whatsoever with him.”

Interestingly enough, while they were shooting in Rahway, Chuck Wepner, the inspiration for Rocky, was there as a prisoner serving time for cocaine possession. Stallone greeted him and told the other prisoners that he was the real Rocky, which was actually part of a lawsuit that Wepner brought against Stallone that was resolved out of court in 2006.

In Turkey, Lock Up is known as Free Blood, which is just an attempt to get audiences to think that this is a sequel to the Rambo films. I love that level of exploitation being used for a Hollywood film. In Hungary, they call this movie In the Prison of Revenge, which is a much more poetic title.

A group of terrorists led by Abdul (one of Iran’s most well-known actors, Behrouz Vossoughi, who also played Petko on TV’s Falcon Crest) kidnaps Margaret the First Daughter while she’s shopping on Rodeo Drive. She’ll only be released if the President — played by William Smith from Grave of the Vampire and Invasion of the Bee Girls — releases Abdul’s men who are by held by the Israeli’s as terrorists.

The President doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. Instead, he calls in the FBI, the LAPD and Stallone.

Frank Stallone.

Frank Stallone stops singing doo wop on the alleys of Philadelphia long enough to become Hack Stone, a former CIA operative who now runs a martial arts school. Back when he worked in the Middle East, he and Abdul were the best of friends. Sadly, they arrested four men and Hack wanted to take them to trial. Abdul wanted to kill them. Two escaped and killed Abdul’s wife and son, so now the two former best friends are archenemies.

The LAPD is led by Captain Stills, who is the magical Cameron Mitchell, snarling and dropping f bombs in every scene. He’s perfect in this movie, doing what he does best, making a movie that’s boring into something so strange that you can’t stop watching it.

This is a movie where terrorists decide to hold the President’s baby girl in an old bean factory. That’s right. That’s actually the plot. But hey — that poster is pretty great, right? Sometimes, if you can’t say anything nice, compliment the poster.

You can watch this on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

Andrei Konchalovsky directed the 1985 Cannon Film Runaway Train, which was based on a script by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, as well as a plethora of films that seem more like passion projects than cash grabs. In fact, his last two films, The Postman’s White Nights and Paradise have both won Silver Lions at Cannes.

So how does an artist like Konchalovsky come to direct a buddy cop film with Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell?

Well, let me tell you, the entire production of this film was a gigantic mess and is probably way more interesting than what was filmed.

Let’s start with the original cast. Patrick Swayze was the original Cash instead of Kurt Russell, but he dropped out to do Road House instead, which was probably the right move. After all, shooting had already started without a script and Stallone had director of photography Barry Sonnenfeld (The Addams Family, Men In Black and, yes, Wild Wild West) fired.

After three months of filming, Konchalovsky was fired by producer Jon Peters (the former hairdresser and boyfriend of Barbara Streisand) after they fought continually over the direction of the film. Konchalovsky was initially hired to make a buddy cop movie with plenty of humor, but Peters wanted more than that — he wanted a movie that had no seriousness at all. Konchalovsky refused. Essentially, the two men were making two different movies.

Brion James, who plays Requin in the film, said that by the half-way point of the seemingly unending shoot that the director and producer were no longer speaking. The reason for Konchalovsky’s ousting was supposedly the budget. He was given impossible demands and was the scapegoat when things went off the rails.

Meanwhile, Konchalovsky has nothing but praise for Stallone in his 1991 book Elevating Deception. He claims that Sly was the one person who held the project together and was a constant voice of reason on an increasingly chaotic set.

By the end of shooting, Stallone was unofficially the producer, director, writer and star of the film.

Konchalovsky was replaced by executive producer Peter MacDonald, who was also one of the film’s second unit directors. He’d stepped in and done the same duties on Sly’s Rambo III. Albert Magnoli (Purple Rain) then directed the chase scenes and the fights at the end of the film.

There was also a legal battle between Peters and his partner Peter Guber against Warner Brothers, as well as self-censorship that led to jump cuts every time someone gets shot in the film. The prints of the film were completed days before it played theaters. This all led to a great quote by one of the crew members: “This was the worst-organized, most poorly prepared film I’ve ever been on in my life. From the first day we started, no one knew what the hell anyone was doing.”

Beverly Hills LAPD Lieutenant Raymond Tango (Stallone) drives a Cadillac, wears Armandi and starts the film by using a small revolver to take out a semi filled with cocaine. Yes, this stunt is 100% stolen from Jackie Chan’s Police Story, but Jackie would repay the favor by doing an even more out of control version of the zip line stunt from this movie in Police Story 3.

Downtown Los Angeles Lieutenant Gabriel Cash (Russell) drives a Corvette, dresses like a cowboy and has a shotgun in his boots. He beats the hell out of suspects with no respect to the rules.

Surely, these guys are either going to love or hate one another. Or get married. Maybe all three.

There’s one guy who really hates them: Yves Perret (Jack Palance, seemingly choking on every single word he spits out in an amazing performance) is the crime lord of Los Angeles who decides that killing them is too easy. They need to be discredited and humiliated and tortured and then killed. So he uses his vast resources to set them up and send them to jail where they’re trapped with the criminals they themselves had put away.

This is a movie packed with action, sure, but it’s also a movie packed with actors who have amazing stories and work, the kind of small part people that I adore. Sure, Teri Hatcher is in an early role as Tango’s sister Kiki. But in addition to the aforementioned Brion James, we also have:

• Geoffrey Lewis, the frequent Clint Eastwood collaborator who also appeared in Salem’s Lot, plays Captain Schroeder, Tango’s superior in the LAPD.
• Edward Bunker, whose career of bank robbery, drug dealing, extortion, armed robbery and forgery made him a felon until 1975 before he became a screenwriter and actor, plays Captain Holmes, Cash’s superior in the LAPD. He wrote Konchalovsky’ss Runaway Train and was Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs.
• James Hong, who will always be the villain of Big Trouble In Little China, Lo Pan, is Quan, the leader of the Triads.
• Michael J. Pollard, who is in Fulci’s The Four of the Apocalypse, Bonnie and Clyde and so many others films, appears as Owen, Cash’s weapons creating friend. Why a regular cop needs a special weapons expert is just another reason to love this film.
• Robert Z’Dar, a man whose face was the best special effect in several films, plays the aptly titled Face, a psychotic convict who has a grudge against Tango. You may know Z’Dar better as the titular character in Maniac Cop.
• Lewis Arquette, the father of the entire family that pretty much ruled movies through the 1990’s and 2000’s, plays FBI Agent Howard Wyler.
• Roy Brocksmith, who you’d probably remember as Dr. Edgemar from Total Recall, plays FBI Agent Gerard Davis.
• Clint Howard, who you know that I love from Evilspeak and The Wraith, plays Slinky, the crazed cellmate of Tango.
• Finally, we have martial arts legend Benny “The Jet” Urquidez, Tai Bo teacher Billy Blanks and Breakin’ star Adolfo “Shabba-Doo” Quinones.

This is a movie where the two main characters being sent to jail is merely the set up for them to get an armed to the teeth assault vehicle and blowing up the bad guy’s headquarters. Yet despite its wildly varying tone, the movie is presented as a serious movie the entire time.

Well, I say that, but it’s also a film where Stallone’s character remarks how much he hates danish, meaning the pastry, but also meaning Danish women, as he was getting divorced from Brigette Neilsen at the time. And any movie that ends with a fake newspaper headline that looks this silly has earned my adoration.

Cannon Films — oh Cannon Films, you magnificent maniacs — had big plans in 1989. They wanted to make a sequel to their 1987’s film Masters of the Universe and they had the rights to make a live-action Spider-Man movie.

However, Cannon was out of money, so they had to cancel both of those movies. The trouble was, they had already built the sets for both of them, which were going to have Albert Pyun direct both at the same time.

Yep — those sets cost $2 million dollars. So Pyun wrote the storyline for Cyborg in one weekend with Chuck Norris in mind, but co-producer Menahem Golan wanted Jean-Claude van Damme. The result? 23 days of filming and a budget for under $500,000 — including Van Damme’s salary.

A plague known as the living death has ended the world. Yet in Atlanta, the CDC has been working on a cure. They just need information stored on a computer in New York City, so Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haddon, who played Spermula and was the original Dale Arden before being recast by Dino De Laurentiis for Flash Gordon) gets transformed into a cyborg. Along with her bodyguard Marshall Strat, she finds it just in time to be attacked by Fender Tremolo (Vincent Klyn, Point Break as well as several other Pyun films) and his pirate gang. If you look hard enough, you’ll realize that Fender’s costume uses parts of Blade’s from Masters of the Universe.

Fender wants the cure so he can have a monopoly on its production. His speech is amazing in this scene: “First there was the collapse of civilization: anarchy, genocide, starvation. Then when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, we got the plague. The Living Death, quickly closing its fist over the entire planet. Then we heard the rumors: that the last scientists were working on a cure that would end the plague and restore the world. Restore it? Why? I like the death! I like the misery! I like this world!”

Method Man sampled most of this speech as the opening lyrics to his song “Judgment Day” from his album Tical 2000: Judgement Day. They aren’t in this video, but you can definitely see the influence of the film.

Other bands that have sampled Fender’s words include Mortician’s “World Damnation,” Chimaira’s “Resurrection” and a grindcore band called Vomitorial Corpulence.

Strat is injured in the fight and sends Pearl to find a mercenary known as a slinger to get her to safety. That slinger is Gibson Rickenbacker (Van Damme), who has only saved her for a brief moment when Fender and his gang take her back, kill an entire family and steal a boat to take them to Atlanta.

Our hero is soon joined by Nady Simmons (Deborah Richter, Candy from Midnight Madness), a girl whose family was wiped out by the plague. But Gibson wants to kill Fender more than save the world. He’s been after him for a while, as the villain killed his lover and ruined his only opportunity to have a family. To make matters worse, Haley — his lover’s sister — has now become one of Fender’s pirates.

Nursing a gunshot wound from Fender, Pearl refuses to accept his help, instead planning on killing Fender herself. She’s probably right, as he’s easily beaten by the pirates and crucified on a ship. Yes, another movie where Van Damme is tied up and left for dead!

Of course our hero is able to get back down and bring his family back together, even if his sidekick dies at the end. They get Pearl to her final destination and that’s about as happy as a post-apocalyptic movie can end.

Or does it? Albert Pyun wanted this movie to be a heavy opera without dialogue, shot in granulated black and white. Even in its death throes — this is the last film released by the studio — Cannon said no. Imagine what it takes when Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus have more common sense than you. Menahem directed The Apple!

In the director’s cut of this film — released as Slinger in Germany — there’s a caption saying “9 Months Later.” Then, during an electrical storm, a flashing sphere reveals a nude female cyborg, promising another film by saying “Next: Cyborg Nemesis: The Dark Rift.” Yes, that’s a total ripoff of Terminator.

The test screening was a disaster with only one out of 100 people liking the movie. Golan and Globus tried to convince JCVD to just release the movie, but just like he did in Bloodsport, he spent two months cutting slow parts so that the movie was nearly all fights. After some violence was taken out to make an R rating, this movie makes even less sense than you’d think.

By all rights, I should love a post-apocalyptic movie where everyone is named for electronic guitars and Van Damme kicks people. I can never enjoy this movie for some reason. It just goes on and on, meandering around. Perhaps it’s because my heart lies in the Italian end of the world films. I want to love this and I just can’t bring myself to enjoying it as much as I should.

You know who really didn’t enjoy this movie? Actor Jackson “Rock'” Pinckney, who injured his eye during a knife scene and lost vision for life. He successfully sued Van Damme after the movie was in theaters.

Every time I do an in-depth film week, there comes a moment when I go from “most of these movies aren’t very good” and “they just have the same tropes over and over again” to “I love this movie!” It’s digital Stockholm Syndrome and it happens almost every time. It happened at some point during Chained Heat during my Linda Blair week. And now, at some point during Kickboxer, I fell in absolute head over heels love with Jean-Claude Van Damme movies.

This reminds me of a moment in my childhood. It was probably 1979 and local TV independent station WPTT-22 was advertising the heck out of kickboxing, proclaiming it as the most violent new sport around. I became nearly manic with intensity, needing to see this kickboxing for myself and Saturday night at 10 PM, when it would air, felt like months, not days, away. Every single TV and radio commerical stoked the flames of my nine-year-old demand to see these fights. The reality? Just white dudes kicking one another slowly in matches that were no more intense than an average boxing battle. The fight that was inside my head? Well, that would be this movie.

This is but the first of seven Kickboxer films, but it’s a doozy. The good guys are as good as it gets, while the bad guys are the absolute worst people to ever walk the face of the Earth.

Kurt Sloane (Van Damme) is the younger brother of Eric Sloane, the United States kickboxing world champion. Eric is played by Dennis Alexio, who only appeared in two other acting jobs: the TV series Super Force and as Toshi Lum in Picasso Trigger.

His life story should be a movie, as he started his professional kickboxing career by winning seventeen consecutive fights with only a single fight lasting more than one round. He then battled Don “The Dragon” Wilson to a loss for the WKA World Super Light Heavyweight title on NBC before continuing to move up in weight divisions and even boxing professionally for a year.

After slowing down his career — if you can call it that, he won eight different titles — by fighting lower level K-1 fighters and gaining a rep for avoiding top level fighters, Alexio retired after winning the WAKO Pro World Heavyweight Full Contact Championship. But his crazy life wasn’t over yet.

In 2003, he was first convicted of bank fraud. Charges like that would come back to haunt him, including failing to pay past child support. A decade later, Alexio and his wife were charged with thirty-six counts, such as filing false tax claims, wire fraud and money laundering, as well as charges of sending false documents with the goal of obtaining gold bars and coins worth hundreds of thousands of US dollars. He was finally convicted of twenty-eight of those counts and now resides at FCI Safford, a low-security federal prison in Arizona.

Let’s get back to Kickboxer.

After yet another successful title win, Eric decides to go to Thailand and build on his legend. After all, that’s where the sport was born. Eric doesn’t even train, thinking that he can defeat anyone. But his brother discovers that his opponent, Tong Po (Van Damme’s childhood friend Michel Qissi, who is absolutely the greatest villain of all time) is a maniac. The dude kicks concrete pillars with his bare legs and has a stare that confirms that he is a murderer.

Kurt begs his brother not to fight, but Eric laughs it off. Po murks him round after round, beating him into the ground with ease as the crowd basically laughs at the two gaijin infiltrating their world. Even after Kurt throws in the towel, Tong Po kicks it out of the ring and elbows Eric in the back, turning him into a quadriplegic before tearing his title belt to shreds. And get this — there are two more matches to go. This wasn’t even the main event!

Kurt is now stuck as a stranger in a strange land, with a brother near death, unable to speak the language. Winston Taylor, a retired US Army special forces member, helps them get to the hospital where they learn that Eric will never walk, much less kickbox, again.

Kurt vows to get revenge and is introduced to Xian Chow, a trainer of Muay Thai. Basically, this training involves him torturing our hero, so if you’d like to see a muscular young boy from Brussels get trussed up by an older Asian daddy that wants to teach him the ropes, you can watch this and still feel pretty manly about it. I kid — although that sequence at the beginning where the shirtless brothers cavort about Thailand seems a little romantic.

Somehow during all this Kurt falls from Xian’s niece Mylee and helps her battle the crime lord Freddy Li. Xian then convinces Freddy to book a match between Tong Po and Kurt in the ancient tradition. That tradition? Hemp ropes all over the fists, coated in resin and dipped in broken glass while the ring has metal chains instead of ropes and fire is everywhere. This is the exact moment I lost my mind and began screaming at the screen as if this were a real fight that I was watching live and no longer a multipack DVD that I bought for $4.

Freddy Li arranges to have the fight fixed and gets $1 million from syndicate bosses to bet on the outcome. To stack the odds, Eric is kidnapped so that Kurt will do the job. Think that’s bad? Tong Po also assaults Mylee. Remember how I said these guys were the worst humans in almost any movie not starring David Hess?

Xian tells Kurt to go the distance in the fight before losing, which gives him and Taylor time to save Eric, who appears just in time to chant “Nuk Soo Kow,” or white warrior, along with the fickle crowd who turns on Tong Po. Kurt goes buck wild and easily bests the maniac who started the match out by eating broken glass and bloodying up his own tongue.

While Tong Po is listed as playing himself, please know that that is really Michael Qissi. This isn’t a Zeus/Tiny Lister deal. His voice, however, was dubbed by Jim Cummings, who is also the voice of Winnie the Pooh and Darkwing Duck. However, don’t celebrate just yet, as the actor was accused earlier this year of animal abuse, drug addiction and physical, mental and sexual abuse by his ex-wife. After knowing that, it adds some real cringe to the line that Tong Po yells during the fight: “You bleed like Mylee! Mylee… good fuck!”

Thanks to the Found Footage Festival, I discovered this completely psychotic video that promises to teach you how to get revenge. Keep in mind that even though host Linda Blair is going to be bringing you the best advice you’ve ever had on getting even, this is for entertainment purposes only. I say that because nearly every one of these revenge schemes goes from simple ways to get back to ways to get people to kill themselves.

The first expert we meet is private detective Quinn Vickers (who looks and dressed a lot like Brockton O’Toole), who explains what he did when one of his clients got involved in a pyramid scheme. Instead of talking to the Better Business Bureau, Quinn sent a death certificate to the IRS and Social Security for starters, then made it look like the guy was having an affair, ruining his marriage.

Then we meet a detective named J.M., who advises that the best revenge is putting your mark on pornographic or Communist party mailing lists. Even better, it turns out that there are several homosexual and bisexual magazines out there. Did you know this? Well, it turns out that they take personal ads, so you should fill out one for your target with the return address of their office. If that doesn’t work, just send their wife a box of chocolate laxatives.

Vickers comes back and one of his nerd clients explains how they worked to get revenge for someone who messed with him in a Chinese restaurant. So they did what any of us would do — they set him up for armed robbery.

Officer P.F. — who is disguised — then explains how to use the phone for revenge. He advises using pay phones, so this 1989 advice will not work thirty years later.

But you might ask — what if I’m a lady and my boyfriend leaves me for a more popular girl? The simple answer is to get Quinn Vickers on the job. He tells us that, “Wherever there is love and romance, there’s also pain and deceit.” The answer to someone choosing someone over you is to convince everyone that your ex-boyfriend’s new lover has syphilis. Maybe that girl got upset, but she probably killed herself as everyone has a good laugh.

Now, private detective Mark Lewis shows us how to get revenge. Wouldn’t you like to be Axel Foley, putting sugar in the gas tank? Good news — that’s how to get…revenge. The worst one is putting cooking oil in the windshield wiper fluid, which seems like something that could kill everyone on the road.

Most of Vickers revenge schemes kind of frighten me. Like how he explains that you should turn minorities you target for revenge over to the immigration service. Or put your boss’s name in a gay magazine, because that’s the best way to humiliate someone. Sadly, I really think this is how some people felt in 1989 (and some people still feel in 2019).

Want to meet another detective? Good news, here comes totally his real name Kyle Pappenpuss who explains how to do some home destruction. Pancake batter in the mailbox? Using weedkiller to put naughty words in the lawn? How about you just adjust their thermostat? How did this dude forget the upper decker? Or mailing a brick with only the mark’s return address, forcing them to pay the postage?

Other than Linda Blair, the only other star to appear here — other than Quinn Vickers — is Gregory Itzin, who would go on to play President Charles Logan on 24. This whole thing was the brainchild of Bob Logan, who also directed Meatballs 4, Repossessed and Up Your Alley, one of the few Linda Blair films I can’t find — it’s never been released on DVD and I truly believe that I’m the only person in the world interested in seeing her in a romantic comedy with an unmasked Unknown Comic.

I really am struggling to do justice to how completely vicious and out there this video is. The VHS era was packed with videos teaching you how to do all manner of things — this was before YouTube for those of you under thirty — and this is perhaps the strangest of them all. It’s even stranger because Linda Blair is so chipper and happy about every single thing that happens.

In a society that is offended by even the smallest of infractions, this video is a screaming maniac begging for you to get upset so that it can sneak into your house and leave dirty laundry in your refrigerator.