A year after the second Sleepaway Camp, Angela is back to terrorize another camp full of teenagers. Now, after running over a young camp counselor named Maria with a truck, she’s assumed that identity and ready for even more murderous mayhem and flashbacks set to sing-a-long campfire songs.

Before things even get started, Angela (the returning Pamela Springsteen) kills news reporter Tawny Richards by giving her Ajax cleanser instead of cocaine. Then, she starts wipining out the troubled kids and counselors at camp.

There are some pretty inventive murders in this, like burying a woman up to her neck and then running her over with a lawnmower, dropping another teen off a flagpole, burning someone alive, blowing a firecracker in yet another camper’s nose and even some paramedics that get attacked with syringes. It’s pretty much open season on campers.

There is some star power — in my universe at least — as Michael J. Pollard (Four of the Apocalypse) plays camp counselor Herman Miranda and Sandra Dorsey, who was in Grizzly, plays his wife Lily.

There are plenty of easter eggs in this, like all of the characters being named for Brady Bunch, The Munsters and West Side Story characters. There were also originally going to be even more elaborate deaths, like Angela stabbing Herman in the crotch with a flaming hot poker and yelling, “A weenie roast!” But that’s probably just as well, as when this was screened for the MPAA, one of the screeners for physically ill during the flagpole scene.

You have plenty of options if you want to watch this. We’d advise getting the Shout! Factory blu ray, because physical media never gets taken away from you and streaming is unreliable. But if you want to see this immediately,  it’s free on Tubi, Vudu and Amazon Prime.

Scott Spiegel is the great uniter of the 90’s film scene. When he first moved to Los Angeles, he shared a house with film directors Sam Raimi, the Coen Brothers and actresses Holly Hunter, Kathy Bates and Frances McDormand. Not content with that star-packed household, he later shared a house with Bob Murawski, the Grindhouse Releasing co-founder. This may be part of the explanation for how Sam Raimi came to use a shot from The Beyond, a film that Murawski helped bring to the US, in his first Spider-Man movie.

To top all of that off, in the early 90’s, Spiegel introduced Lawrence Bender to Quentin Tarantino. Together, they got Reservoir Dogs off the ground.

But before all that, Spiegel worked at the local grocery market across from Walnut Lake Elementary School back in Birmingham, Michigan. His teenage best friends? Oh, only Raimi and Bruce Campbell.

Drawing on that grocery experience — and based on an old Super-8 film he created called Night Crew — Spiegel and Bender would make this film. Paramount Home Video hyped up that Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi and Ted Raimi were the major stars, along with Renee Estevez. They’re all barely in it and Renee is the first — SPOILER WARNING — to die. Hell, the DVD art gives away the killer!

As a supermarket closes, the crew begins restocking the shelves. Craig and Jennifer are broken up, but they get in a fight. This upsets Linda (Estevez, who yes, is Charlie’s sister and was in Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers), who hits the panic button. Craig is chased away, the cops are called and then the bomb gets dropped — the store is getting sold and they need to do an inventory before the store changes hands.

As the night goes on, person after person is killed. Is it Craig? Or can it really all be that simple?

This movie is packed with gore, courtesy of KNB. In fact, five minutes of it was cut for its eventual VHS release. And look out — the police officers are Alvy Moore and Tom Lester, who played Hank Kimball and Eb Dawson on Green Acres. Intruder then raises the bar even higher on cameos that only I would care about by having Emil Sitka, the fourth Stooge and the only man other than Harold Brauer to work with all six Stooges. He even says his famous line, “Hold hands, you lovebirds.” That same phrase appears on his tombstone.

Spiegel wanted the final shot go all the way down Jennifer’s throat and inside her body to her heart, where the film would stop on a freeze-frame of her heart as it stopped beating. I would have loved that!

The director has gone on to create films like Hostel: Part III, The Temple, From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, My Name Is Modesty and the completed yet never released Spring Break ’83.

You can watch this for free on Tubi. Or grab the uncut version from Synapse!

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.