Based on Le Cinquieme Singe by Jacques Zibi, this film has Ben Kingsley playing Cunda, a man who catches snakes for scientists to earn money to catch the eye of a widow. He ends up being bitten by serpents, which leads to a dream about four chimpanzees and then they show up in his waking life, leading him on a series of misadventures. While he just wants to make money off the monkeys, he finds himself growing to love them.

The Fifth Monkey was directed and written by Éric Rochat, who yes, made multiple versions of The Story of O and produced Jodorowsky’s Tusk, but he’s the man who made Too Much, the story of a robot with a heart for Cannon.

According to The Unknown Movies — and a reader of that site named Maurice — “…after 20% of the movie was completed, Golan wanted to replace the director of photography and partly also Rochat, which really killed the movie. The Brazilian crew quit, Kingsley insisted that Rochat stayed, and a new contract was written which made Kingsley, Rochat and the new director of photography, all directors of the movie.” This same writer also claims that Bubbles the chimp was in this.

Rochat himself emailed that site too, saying: “For your information, I was actually the producer of the film as well by contract, then the titles were made in LA by Menahem Golan. At the screening of the first copy, to my great surprise, Menahem had given himself the credit of producer. When I complained about it, he came up with the following line: “You have enough credit as it is, writer, director! You’re not going to fight me over this, are you?” I was so exhausted by the whole fight during the shooting that I let it go. Now one word in favor of Menahem, he loves movies and gave a lot of people the opportunity to have a go at it.”

I love that 21st Century keeps being an untapped mine filled with magical gold.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared on the site on May 2, 2022.

Written by Stephen Tolkin and directed by Albert Pyun — who interned on a Toshiro Mifune TV series under Akira Kurosawa’s director of photography before making movies like Cyborg, Alien from L.A., Radioactive Dreams, The Sword and the Sorcerer and so many more — this film started at Universal, who got the rights after the CBS TV movies.

The rights were then sold to The Cannon Group with the idea of Michael Winner directing a script by James Silke (Ninja 3: The Domination) and supposedly starring Michael Dudikoff as Cap and Steve James as the Falcon, the sheer idea of which makes my brain delirious. The Variety ad that announced this movie initiated Jack Kirby’s lawsuit against Marvel, as it claimed that Stan Lee created the character and not he and Joe Simon, who invented Cap all the way back in 1941 and Lee didn’t bring the character back until 1964.

After two years of development, Golan left Cannon in 1989 — stay tuned for August on this site for a sequel to Cannon Month — and as part of the settlement, he was given control of 21st Century Film Corporation and the film rights to Captain America.

Then, comic book fans waited. And waited.

It premiered in 1991 in the Phillipines as Bloodmatch as part of a double feature with Snoopy, featuring an ad that trumpeted Golan as the producer of Superman. Maybe it was better to say that instead of saying that he produced Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Also, Jean Claude Van Damme is not in this movie, no matter what that ad claims.

So that’s how we got a Captain America played by Matt Salinger, the son of the writer of The Catcher In the Rye, and fighting Scott Paulin as the Red Skull, who was a child prodigy that the Axis experimented on, sending Dr. Maria Vaselli (Carla Cassola, Demonia) to America where she creates the Super Soldier Syrum.

There’s some good casting here, and by that, I mean character actors that get me a -typing. those would be Ned Beatty, Darren McGavin (the younger version of his General Fleming character is played by Billy Mumy while his A Christmas Story wife Melinda Dillon is in the cast as Steve Roger’s mom ), Ronny Cox as the President and Michael Nouri.

The one thing I do like about this film is that in the years after World War II, the Skull has built a conspiracy crime family with his daughter Valentina De Santis (the character Sin in the comic books, she’s played by Valentina De Santis) that has assassinated everyone from the Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King to Elvis, which he claims was the one time they did the wrong thing. Now, they want to brainwash the President and Cap, along with Sharon Carter (Kim Gillingham, playing that role and Bernice, the 1940s girlfriend of our hero), must stop him.

So how weird is it that the son of J.D. Salinger, whose book was often in the hands of programmed assassins, is battle the man who programmed said assassins, at least in this movie?

Ronnie Cox once said that the script to this movie “remains to this day the finest script I have ever read… how those guys messed that film up, I will never know.” And Stan Lee, ever the PR man, said that the reason for the reshoots was because “Pyun did it so well and so excitingly that everyone in the audience (at the screening) kept clamoring for more.”

Sure, True Believer.

As for Jack Kirby, everything you know in comic book movies is the result of his creativity. Even after his death, his family has attempted to gain the money and recognition that that creation deserves. When most comics these days struggle to be released once a month, Kirby was at one point — according to Mark Evanier — drawing twenty pages of comics a week, up to five pages a day, which is about a full issue of a comic every week. All for no real ownership, no insurance and no promises. For just one month’s example, in November 1963, Kirby drew 139 pages of comics and seven covers. His Fourth World era contract was for 15 pages a week, so Kirby gave then twenty.

Think about that the next time you watch everyone make money from his work.

21st Century Film Corporation put out several Edgar Allan Poe films and why not? They’re all well-known names from a well-regarded horror author and best of all, you don’t have to pay to use them. All four 21st Century Poe movies were produced by Harry Alan Towers and having him teamed up with Menahem Golan is like when the X-Men and Teen Titans united to fight Dark Phoenix and Darkseid.

New teacher Janet Pendleton (Karen Witter, Playboy‘s March 1982 Playmate of the Month) has come to Ravenscroft Reform School, which also has head doctor Gary Julian (Robert Vaughn) and Doctor Schaeffer (Donald Pleasence in a really bad wig and worse accent) in the faculty, so certainly nothing bad can happen, like a Reagan-masked killer walling young women into the basement, right?

You don’t remember that time when Poe wrote about guys in Reagan masks?

How about when he had a girl using a mixer to curl her hair and scalp herself?

Arnold Vosloo from The Mummy plays a cop, Ginger Allen plays the worst of the bad girls, Nia Long plays Fingers who gives her friends switchblades, Gary’s father is John Carradine in his last role and guys from the all boys’ school head down to the dungeon to party with the girls and that’s how murder happens.

Director Gerard Kikoine also made Edge of Sanity and Master of Dragonard Hill — as well as plenty of adult films and editing Jess Franco’s Countess Perverse and Lorna the Exorcist — while writers Jake Chesi and Stuart Lee have only this movie to their credit. Most of the music from Frederic Talgorn is taken from Edge of Sanity. The song “Love Bites” from Ninja 3: The Domination is also in this which makes me wonder if Menahem also got the rights to a bunch of music when he left Cannon.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When this movie was over, I thought to myself, “How has Vinegar Syndrome not released this?” Within an hour, it was in their new releases. Get it now!

Just looking at the IMDB description of this movie has made me crazy to hunt it down: “A rabbi’s son rebels against his roots and becomes a magician. A woman enters his life and turns his tricks into metaphysical phenomena. The son is forced to choose between love and living up to his father’s expectations.”

And that’s it. 33 people have seen it on IMDB with no reviews. It has nothing on Letterboxd. I’ve hunted what’s out there on the internet and can tell you this much: Shemya is a stage magician, as well as the prodigal son of a family of rabbis who wants to escape his “hereditary position as the next leader of a small but zealous community.” Shout out to Killer Movie Reviews for filling me in on so much of this.

He soon meets a mysterious woman named Oshra who can make things catch on fire. Is she the demon Lilith, calling him away from religion, or is she created from Shemya’s subconsciousness? And what’s the story with the prophecy that Shemya must die and rise again?

Director Daniel Wachsmann’s best-known movie is Hamsin, which was selected as the Israeli entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 55th Academy Awards but was not accepted as a nominee.

Directed and written by Albert Pyun to be shot in three days — 35 pages of script a day! — on one set from Cyborg during reshoots for that film — with no special effects other than a single cube, Deceit starts with this quick blast of info: “The following is crucial plot information needed to understand this motion picture. If for some reason you fail to read all of this data in time, then you are really screwed because you’ll end up sitting there for two hours wondering what the hell is going on and realizing that you’ve just thrown away hard-earned money and one-hundred and thirty minutes of your life. So here is the crucial information.”

There is none.

An unknown man commits suicide by bleach and his body is possessed by an alien named Bailey (Norbert Weisser). A month or so later, a group including Wilma (Diane Defoe) and Eve (Samantha Phillips) is on her way to Las Vegas for a wedding and pick up a hitchhiking Bailey. He kills everyone in the car except for Wilma, telling her that he’s here to destroy the polluted Earth but first, he wants to have sex with her.

Bailey could be an escaped mental patient as his therapist Brick (Scott Paulin) soon arrives, but he also claims to be a planet-destroying alien. He also wants to have sex with Wilma, who is saved by Eve, now possessed by a space cop who has an all-powerful cube. She places the fate of the Earth onto Eve and tells her that whenever she wants the planet to die, all she has to do is ask.

According to Justin Decloux, who wrote Radioactive Dreams: The Cinema of Albert Pyun, this movie “cost $22,000 and the actors would have to limit themselves to a single take for each shot.” He also thanked Jean Claude Van-Damme for making the movie possible, which is a back-handed compliment, as Pyun wanted to make a gritty western called Slinger and Van Damme just wanted to do another kickboxing movie. That meant that Cyborg needed some reshoots and that’s how Pyun was able to wrap up his real job on a Thursday night and could shoot for free — other than film — all weekend long.

You have to admire the sheer maniac zeal it takes to make a movie like this within the system outside of the system against the system.

After an entire movie of people yelling at one another, the cop takes a look at Wilma and says, “Today is almost tomorrow. And remember if you’re looking for someone to fall in love with – try yourself.” And then realizing that she can stop life as we know it at any time, she looks right into Pyun’s camera and says, “Today is tomorrow. And things better get better. Or else.”

The film closes by catching on fire.

B.D. Sweetman (James Brolin), July (Richard Roundtree) and John T. Coleman (John Clark Gable, yes, the son of Clark, born four months after his death) buy Billy the Kid’s horse and decide to become outlaws themselves. The men only need ten grand to get their dream of opening a farm, but after their first job, they end up killing two members of the posse after them.

While Ty Hardin appears as a wagon master, Rory Calhoun as a ranch hand and Harry Carey Jr. is here as well — their last westerns — this movie is an absolute mess, from wanted posters that look like they were made with modern desktop publishing software and pencil drawings to a long montage scene set to the song “Renegade” by Jeff Scott Soto — the lead singer on Yngwie Malmsteen’s first two albums as well as a member of Journey from 2006 to 2007 and also a member of holiday metal band Trans-Siberian Orchestra — that is a mix of outtakes, still action photos and posed model shots of the cast.

I wonder if Gable asked Brolin about the time the future Mr. Streisand played his father in Gable and Lombard.

This was directed and written by Clyde Ware, who also wrote All the Kind Strangers and 12 episodes of Gunsmoke.

Anyways, it ends badly, as most westerns do, with the three stuck in a gunfight trap in a small town. And there you have it, a movie possibly made to cash in on Young Guns and Silverado but getting there a few years too late.

But man, that montage!

Director John H. Parr also directed The Pin-Up Girl, Nightslave and Pursuit while writer Paul S. Rowlston did much of his career in TV. In this movie, four big game hunters end up getting bored with animals, so they start paintball hunting journalist Simon Rush (Todd Jensen) but come on, there’s no way that that’s going to be good enough either.

If four rich dudes offer you some money to be hunted while they carry paintball guns, I’m telling you right now to say no. Rush ends up beating them pretty easily and that’s when the richest guy, Bob Jenkins (Andre Jacobs) tells everyone that they’re switching to real guns. The others in the group, Alex (David Butler), Eric (Alan Granville) and Jason (Evan J. Klisser) have to just agree because they’re all rich white guys and that’s how they do murder business.

Or course, Rush is too busy romancing the girl who got him into all of this, Yvonne Pearl (Michelle Bestbier), all while the other members of the elite start getting killed off and he gets blamed for it. Oh man, The Most Dangerous Game, you know? Have you played it?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Matt Butler (Deon Stewardson) has joined soldiers battling Communist rebels and — yeah, this movie was made in South Africa during Apartheid when people were like, “Hey, don’t make movies there” and 21st Century and Menahem Golan were like, “I’m sorry, I’m going into a tunnel.” — the white mercenaries get the black tribesmen to fight their battles for them by murdering their families and obviously, hell is South Africa.

This was directed and written by Ronnie Isaacs, who was behind a lot of low budget action movies like Cobra Force and Rhino as well as The Pin-Up Girl and a sequel to that one.

There’s a decent amount of gore in this and lots of stuff gets blown up real good and isn’t that why we rented these movies? Ah, maybe it was the synth soundtracks, too.

You can watch this on Tubi.

By all rights, a remake to Night of the Living Dead should be a movie that I absolutely hate. But you know, when you get George Romero rewriting the original script and Tom Savini directing, it already had a great shot of having me be happy. Yet Savini told Film Monthly that there was an even better movie that he didn’t get to make: “It was the worst nightmare of my life. No, I still have nightmares of being on the set directing that movie. It all started before the movie. It was a plethora of why and how dare you?! I’m getting the same slack now because I’m in the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Listen the thing that kept me going on the Night of the Living Dead set was that George asked me to do the FX on the original film back in 1968. But I was in Vietnam when he shot that. You know I had enlisted in the army and they called me in. So what kept me going on the set was that I realized that I didn’t get to do the first movie and now here I am directing the remake. My problem with the remake and the reason I call it a nightmare is because you know I had lots of ideas. I had some eight hundred-story boards and the whole movie was actually shot on paper. See George Romero wasn’t there. George was off in Florida writing the Dark Half. I got stuck with these two idiot producers that didn’t know anything and their careers prove it and you know I didn’t want to make their bad movie for them. You know my hands were just slapped all over the place I couldn’t do a lot of stuff. The movie is about forty percent of what I intended. It would be a much better movie if I had got to put in all the stuff I really wanted to do. Then the MPAA hit us hard. You know with my name on it and George Romero they were waiting for us. And they made us cut some more stuff so it’s kind of a sterile film.”

Those producers would be Ami Artzi, who also produced several movies for 21st Century starting with The Forbidden Dance, and Declan Baldwin, who went on to produce American Splendor, Manchester by the Sea and Captain Fantastic, so he seemed to do pretty well.

Regardless, the whole reason for the remake was that thanks to the court battle over the rights to the film — as well as the mistake that caused the copyright notice not to be included — Romero never saw any money from his original film. Even when he won the case, the distributor went out of business before he got any money.

Romero contacted Menahem Golan when he heard that 21st Century Film Corporation wanted to make a remake. This remake would bring together Romero, John Russo and Russ Streiner for the first time in 20 years. Savini was supposed to only do the special effects but Romero talked him into directing the film.

Sure, we know the story — starting with Barbara (Patricia Tallman) and Johnny (Bill Moseley) getting attacked in a cemetery — and if the players are the same (Ben is the hero and played by Tony Todd, Harry is still a horrible person and played by Tom Towles), the fact that this movie gives Barbara more agency and doesn’t have her grow catatonic worked with me. How great is it that this one ends with Streiner — as a cop — saving Barbara instead of menacing her in Evans City Cemetery?

Despite the fact that filming was on time and on budget, Menahem Golan and his producers insisted on cutting out scenes to keep costs down. Savini could do little to stop them. He also blamed the multiple MPAA cuts as the reason why so few horror fans were excited about this movie.

I know that I was in a theater the first and only weekend this played in Western Pennsylvania and when Bill Cardille showed up and read the cities where the zombies were showing up, there was sheer joy and outright yelling in the theater. I hoped that this movie would be a bigger deal and yet even three decades later, no one seems to think about it.

At one point in this movie, the female inmates begin to fight and Crazy Daisy (Tiffany Million, once a GLOW girl and later an adult star) says, “I seen this in Chained Heat!”

Yes, you sure did.

While Cirio H. Santiago also made a movie called Caged Fury just six years earlier, this one — directed and written by Bill Milling (who also wrote Silent Madness and Savage Dawn; he also directed adult films under the named Philip Drexler Jr. (A Scent of Heather), G.W. Hunter (Heart Throbs), Craig Ashwood (All American Girls), William J. Haddington Jr. (When A Woman Calls), Chiang (The Vixens of Kung Fu (A Tale of Yin Yang), Jim Hunter (Up Up and Away), Luis F. Antonero (Temptations) and Bill or Dexter Eagle (Virgin Snow).

Wikipedia claims that Fernando Fonseca (The Unholy) and one of my obsessions, Philip Yordan, wrote this, but I see no other evidence anywhere. Fonseca only wrote one other film, South Beach Dreams, and Yordan and Cannon never worked together, which is a fact that still makes me sad.

Kat Collins (Roxanna Michaels) is living out the first stanza of Poison’s “Fallen Angel:”

“She stepped off the bus out into the city streets

Just a small town girl with her whole life

Packed in a suitcase by her feet

But somehow the lights didn’t shine as bright as they did

On her mama’s TV screen

And the work seemed harder

And the days seemed longer

Than she ever thought they’d be”

After kissing her daddy (Michael Parks) goodbye and leaving Utah for Hollywood, she meets Rhonda Wallace (April Dawn Dollarhide) who gets her work with a photographer named Buck (Blake Lewis). After posing, the girls head off for the Sunset Strip and get into it with some bikers, which seeing as how this is a 1990 direct-to-video movie gets rapey and then they get saved by good guy bike enthusiast Victor (Erik Estrada) and American Combat Karate school leader Dirk (Richard Barathy).

Buck then introduces the ladies to a porn director, but that ends up setting them up as prostitutes and sent off to Honeywell Prison, which is where this movie really gets going. You know exactly all of the WIP moments you’re getting and the guards are as bad as you’d think they’d be. They’re led by Spyder (Gregory Scott Cummins, former San Diego Chargers punter) and include Pizzaface (Ron Jeremy), Paul Smith remembering everything he once did years ago in a similar role in Midnight Express and Mindi Miller (Sugar from Penitentiary III) as Warden Sybil Thorn, an S&M catsuit wearing evildoer named for two WIP legends: Sybil Danning from Caged Heat and Dyanne Thorne, who forever will be Ilsa.

So while Roxanne is getting indoctrinated into white slavery, her sister Tracy (Elena Sahagun) figures that the best plan is to do the exact same things her sister did and get put in the same prison. She’s also helped by giallo-level policework from Detective Randall Stoner (James Hong). Of course, Estrada and Barathy have to rescue her, but Estrada catches a bullet, so the white kung fu expert has to fight his way out of this lingerie hell, which magically releases them right in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater.

This movie is also replete with adult stars as prisoners, including Kascha using her more mainstream name Alison LePriol, Janine Lindemulder — who knows a little something about the big house after serving a six-month federal prison sentence for tax evasion — as Lulu (you may recognize her, if you didn’t watch adult movies, as being on the cover of Blink 182’s Enema of the State album cover or for her relationship with Jesse James and Julia Parton (yes, a relative of Dolly and once the publisher of HIgh Society).

As for the bad guys putting this all together, there’s Jack Carter as the big bad Mr. Castaglia, as well as Beano, who you may remember from Deathrow Gameshow, as Tony “Two A Day” Tarentino. This movie feels like it knows way too much about the dark side of Los Angeles, what with Jeremy in the cast and Big G being played by Bill Gazzarri.

So Gazzari’s…

The three hundred feet or so on Sunset Boulevard that started at Gazzarri’s and ended at the Rainbow and the Roxy Theatre was where rock and roll lived in the 90s (although the place was hot from the 60s on, with The Doors being a house band and the Miss Gazzarri’s Dancers counting Catherine Bach and Barbi Benton as alumni). When Gazzarri died in 1991 and the club closed down in 1993, it was damaged in an earthquake and went through many name changes before becoming the nightclub 1 Oak. If you want to see the club, I recommend The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. Nearly every major metal band played Gazzarri’s, including longtime house band Van Halen, Ratt, Cinderella, Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Warrant and Faster Pussycat, as well as bands you may not know if you didn’t read Hit Parader and Rip! like Shark Island, Hurricane and, if you saw the aforementioned Decline, Odin.

This movie is pure sleaze. I mean, it’s a women in prison movie. Would you want it any other way? Why are you watching it if you’re just going to judge me? You’ve read this far. You’re complicit.

You can watch this on Tubi.