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.

All around auteur — he was a writer, director, producer and editor — Charles Vincent began his show-business career in regional theater as a director and stage manager in his native Michigan. He worked for the Yale Repertory and the Negro Ensemble Company before making his cinematic debut in 1971 with the adult film The Appointment. He worked in X-rated film until the mid-1980’s while also dabbling in mainstream fare with films like Summer Camp, Deranged and Hollywood Hot Tubs.

This movie comes late in his career and features Linda Blair and Troy Donahue alongside actors better known for their adult work. Gregory Patrick, who plays the main character, is really Randy Spears. And the villain of the piece, played by Ruth Raymond, is, in reality, Georgina Spelvin, who starred in The Devil In Ms. Jones and also shows up as the hooker in Police Academy (trust me, that’s a pivotal role). Veronica Hart, Vincent’s favorite actress, also makes an appearance.

A young man (Patrick/Spears) finds out that his mother (Raymond/Spelvin) isn’t who he thought she was, but a wealthy artist who lives as a recluse. His parents had taken him and raised him as their own. Meanwhile, his possessive birth mother begins to ruin his life, even poisoning his wife Evie (Blair).

It also might not help that his mother can’t tell the difference between him and his dead father, whose painting of him initiated this whole mess. This makes me worry that I’m going to have to make a Letterboxd list for movies I’ve watched about incest, which is far greater than I’d like to admit to you, dear reader.

This movie is also way better than it would seem that it should be. It aspires to be a movie closer to Misery than outright exploitation without forgetting that it has to deliver the goods. And by goods, I mean mind-bending mother on son assault.

I always wondered: Could Dan Haggerty and Linda Blair be in the same film someday? Happily, I can report that 1989’s The Chilling — also known as Gamma 693 and The Thawing — exists.

Should you watch it? That depends. Have you seen Return of the Living Dead and always wanted someone to make a way worse version of it, but also confuse the plot with the moral dilemma as to whether freezing someone after death is right or wrong? Then good news! This one has you covered!

You have to love a movie that starts with this initial scroll:

Universal Cryogenics is a successful business, freezing the recently dead until science can revive and cure them. The only problem is, once the power goes out in a storm, the frozen dead rise from their coolers and turn into zombies.

Who’s to blame? Dr. Miller (Troy Donahue, yes, the former 1950’s sex symbol who was also Hatchet’s dad from Cry-Baby), who has been harvesting organs and selling them Mexican clients.

Only his secretary (Linda Blair, who seems to play as many secretaries as she wears large thick belts) and client Joseph Davenport can save the day. Or maybe save themselves. Luckily, they have Sergeant Vince Marlow, played by Haggerty, backing them up.

Co-directors Deland Nuse (Return of the Boogeyman) and Jack A. Sunseri (who produced The Dead Pit) really have a lot to answer for. The effects are abysmal. And at the end, it just feels like everyone gives in and this becomes a comedy.

After all, in the closing credits, we learn that Joe Sr. and Blair’s character have gotten married and have a son named Joe Jr., while the thuggish Joe Jr. becomes the leader of the zombies — sorry, cynoids — that live in the Kansas City sewers. Dan Hagerty’s character Vince has a black and white flashback to the death, rebirth and second death of his best friend before moving to the mountains of Colorado with Luke the dog and his pet bear, who we assume is named Ben. And then there’s a shot of a zombie limo driver for no reason before five minutes of long credits.

That said, I never thought I’d see a movie where Troy Donahue uses a sword to cut a zombie’s head off. And there’s one dialogue scene where Haggerty has a conversation with Linda where he laments that he won’t be able to dress up like Freddy Kreuger.

Honestly, watch it for yourself. It’s still not the best movie Dan Haggerty has been in, however. But man, I could talk about Elves all day.

Also known as Bail Out and Wings of Freedom, this movie gives the world what we’d been waiting for. One year after Witchery (also known as La Casa 4), the dream dup of Hasselhoff and Blair are reunited. Sometimes, Amazon Prime just knows what I need. And what I needed was this.

White Bread (Hasselhoff), Blue (stuntman Tony Brubaker) and Bean (Thomas Rosales Jr., Speed and the Paul Weller film Running Scared) are three bounty hunters who’ve been asked to protect Nettie Ridgeway (Blair), a wealthy socialite who just saw Colombia drug runners kill her ex-boyfriend. She’s kidnapped and taken to Mexico, so the boys have to rescue her so she can testify against the cartel.

Director Max Kleven has an interesting set of films he’s directed. While primarily known for stunts and second unit directing, he has the films The Night Stalker (which stars Charles Napier!), Deadly Stranger and Ruckus on his resume. The latter also features Blair and you know I’ll be watching it soon.

John Vernon is on hand to play Blair’s dad and you can look for an improbably young Danny Trejo here. Otherwise, there’s not much for anyone other than Linda Blair completists. Like me.

However, I am pleased to report that this DVD cover was so lazy, it just has a picture of Hasselhoff from Knight Rider.

You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime.

Don’t worry if you never saw Bedroom Eyes. This Chuck Vincent directed film has nothing to do with it. Yes, the characters have the same names, but it’s all different actors. So this insane film can really stand on its own, as it combines a Cinemax After Dark film with a giallo, because if I’ve learned anything from the films of Mr. Vincent, it’s that you have no idea where they’re going.

Harry Ross (Wings Hauser) lives in a world of little to no morals. His business partner gets an inside trading tip that could make them rich from one of his friends with benefits. But when it comes to love, his life is an even bigger mess.

Let me see if I can summarize it for you: His ex-wife JoBeth (adult film star and Vincent’s favorite actress Veronica Hart) tried to kill Harry five years ago and went to prison. Meanwhile, his wife Carolyn (Kathy Shower, Playboy Playmate of the Year 1986) has been all messed up since Harry broke up with one of his girlfriends, Alexandria, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident the very same night that Harry broke up with her.

Things get worse when Harry catches his wife aardvarking with Matthew, a hip young artist. To fix things, our hero — such as it is — decides to get horizontal with Sophie (Blair), an artist. He promises her that his wife can make her famous, but he soon falls for her.

Somehow, Sophie is Alexandria’s sister, there’s some murder and there’s plenty of fishing for kippers. Moistening the Pope. Punching the cow. You know what I mean — sweet, sweet lovemaking. Even after Harry gets stabbed multiple times, he is still able to play some slophockey.

Linda Blair week has brought me down many dark corridors. This is one of them, a movie that takes Wings Hauser through hell and finally jumping across rooftops and beating up cops. That’s what happens when you go in too deep.

Impressed by writer/director Victor Salva (Jeepers Creepers, Powder) short Something in the Basement, Francis Ford Coppola gave him $250,000 to make Clownhouse, gave him the same cameras George Lucas shot American Graffiti with and even allowed him to film it in his Napa Valley home. Clownhouse premiered at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival and believe it or not, it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize in the dramatic category before finally reaching theaters in 1990.

This is where it all goes wrong.

This is a film that has been controversial ever since it was released, as Salva plead guilty to sexually abusing the film’s child star Nathan Forrest Winters, as well as procuring child pornography of said sexual assault. The theatrical release was protested by Winters and his family. This issue came back up when MGM released the movie to DVD before it was pulled from the shelves, making this a hard movie to find.

Casey (Winters) is afraid of clowns and not as brave as his brothers, Geoffrey and Randy (Sam Rockwell!). They drag him along to the circus against his will on the very same night that an insane asylum sends several of its inmates to the very same event, which seems like two of the worst ideas ever. Here’s a third bad idea: seeing a circus fortune teller, who says to Casey, “Beware, beware, in the darkest of dark. Though the flesh is young and the hearts are strong, precious life cannot be long  when darkest death has left its mark.”

Fulfilling those ill portents, three of the most dangerous patients get loose, kill three clowns and take their identities. Those very same clowns follow the boys home, turn off the power to their home and kill them.

It’s hard to say which is creepier: the clowns skulking around the house of the obvious fetishization of the lead, who often appears in his underwear or in a bathtub. I’m not being homophobic — it’s strikingly obvious that this movie was made by someone in love with young boys.

Oddly, the movie ends with these words: “No man can hide from his fears. As they are a part of him, they will always know where he is hiding.”

While this movie isn’t available on DVD, you can get a copy from VHSPS.

Bonus: You can listen to our podcast all about this movie.

Dona and Taryn are back again, this time flying missions as federal drug enforcement agents based in Hawaii. After a successful drug bust, they are asked to fly vaccine from Molokai to Knox Island. However, they soon run afoul of nefarious forces in the Philippine government and some double agents at home looking for a sunken ship from World War II that is loaded with gold.

Meanwhile, a storm forces Donna and Taryn to land their plane on the island where a Japanese soldier and samurai named the warrior still thinks that World War II is going on.

Michael J. Shane shows up as Shane Abilene, the next member of the family to be in a Sidaris film. He’s joined by Teri Weigel (April 1986 Playboy Playmate of the Month, adult film star and victim in Predator 2), Al Leong (an Asian actor who continually shows up in films, including Big Trouble in Little China), Lisa London (H.O.T.S.) and making her last Sidaris film appearance, Patty Duffek (May 1984 Playboy Playmate of the Month) who plays Pattycakes for the third time.

None of this makes any sense at all. Are you watching these movies for them to make sense? No. You are watching them to have fun and probably see naked people in hot tubs at least every three minutes. I won’t cast any shame on you.

If you like Savage Beach, good news. Eventually, Andy Sidaris makes his way back here. I know I’ll be around for that.

You can watch this for free on Tubi or get the new blu ray from Mill Creek!

Brian Yuzna produced Re-Animator, but didn’t direct his own film until this body horror comedy which took three years to be released. It’s blessed with special effects by Japanese FX master Screaming Mad George that are really the star of the film.

Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock, son of the best Michael Myers, Dick Warlock) has a great life. His family is rich, he’s popular, he has a new Jeep and a hot cheerleader girlfriend. Yet he doesn’t feel that he fits into high society. This feeling gets worse when his sister’s ex-boyfriend gives him an audio tape of his family engaging in a murderous sex act.

Meanwhile, he keeps noticing a mysterious girl named Clarissa (she masturbates in front of him at a pep rally in a scene that’s frankly sexual in a mainstream non-sex film) and falls for her, despite her hair eating mother. If you’ve noticed that Society may be a completely insane movie, you’re right.

Of course, it turns out that the rich are aliens and Billy’s family is incestual and all of the most well-to-do folks in town are part of a ritual called the shunting, where they suck the life out of poor people. So how do you beat an alien like that? Well, you fist him and pull his asshole inside out, that’s how.

While some of this was based on a project that Yuzna started with Dan O’Bannon, writer Woody Keith claims to have based it on real people that he knew in the Beverly Hills. Gulp.

For fans of Halloween 2, that’s the exact same hospital that was Haddonfield Memorial. So there’s another reason to watch this again.

Ready to check it out? You can watch Society with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. You can also get the Arrow blu ray at Diabolik DVD.

Auggie Hamilton is all about making that fast buck. He’s just been kicked out of college for a gambling and drinking party after being there for way longer than four years, as well as trying to sleep with the dean’s daughter. What’s he going to do now?

So when he learns that his friend Samantha (Tracy Griffith, Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland) is about to sell her father’s garage to make way for Wrangler Bob Bundy (Jim Varney, yes, the Ernest P. Worrell playing, Slinky Dog voicing Jim Varney. Trivia note: Blake Clark, who is also in this movie, was friends with Varney and took over the voice of Slinky after Varney’s death) and his constantly growing burger empire.

How do you defeat a megacorporation? Well, you go get some drugs that make people horny and put them in your burgers, that’s how. And if you’re wondering how they get that drug, one of the way they get women in bed is to sneak them into a lab where men suffer from non-stop erections. The girls see  all these bald-headed yogurt slingers and the next thing you know, they’re in bed with the guys. Because you know — that’s totally how romance works. Movies like this are why I didn’t get laid until I was 24.

How does the new fast food place get successful? Well, beyond the date rape drugs in the special sauce, they also cater a fancy preppie sorority bash been thrown by Mary Beth Bensen, who is played by the same person who played the grown-up Angela in Sleepaway Camp II and Sleepaway Camp III. That’s Pamela Springsteen and yes, she’s the Boss’s sister.

Stick around — Traci Lords also shows up as an industrial spy, sent by Wrangler Bob to ruin our heroes. And oh yeah — the judge of their big case is played Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Michael J. Pollard shows up, too.

This isn’t a movie you’d be proud to talk about with anyone, but who cares? Varney is great, Traci Lords is Traci Lords and burgers cause people to get laid. You could do much worse.