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.

Directed by Joel Schumacher and written by Peter Filardi, for some reason I never saw Flatliners. I would assume in 1990 I was somewhere between my gorehound and art film phases and a mainstream Hollywood horror movie with major stars would hold no interest for me. But as I grow older, I see the mistakes of my past and can admit: this is a well-made film with some interesting ideas.

Nelson Wright (Keifer Sutherland), Joe Hurley (William Baldwin; what is it with him playing characters that film people having sex? He does it in this and Sliver), David Labraccio (Kevin Bacon), Rachel Manus (Julia Roberts) and Randy Steckle (Oliver Platt) are medical students that want to learn what comes after death. So they use their skills in the ER to kill each other for one minute and then bring the body back to life to see what happens. Nelson has an experience where he sees his old bully and can’t describe what it was like, so everyone has to see it for themselves.

As they say, nothing good can happen from any of this. Basically, each of them has an unresolved trauma and until it is fixed, it will destroy them from beyond.

This would be a basic movie if not for the look that director of photography Jan de Bont brings to the film, as well as the incredible lighting and colors of the film. That said, what emerges is a movie that’s better than you’d think it would be and one worthy of watching several times.

There was a remake/sequel/reboot in 2017 that had a Sutherland in it as a different character, except that in a deleted scene it was shown that he really was Nelson Wright. I mean, make up your mind, Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev!

The Arrow Video release of Flatliners has a brand new 4K restoration from the original negative, approved by director of photography Jan de Bont. Plus, there’s new audio commentary by critics Bryan Reesman and Max Evry, as well as new interviews with de Bont, screenwriter Peter Filardi, chief lighting technician Edward Ayer, first assistant director John Kretchmer, production designer Eugenio Zanetti, art director Larry Lundy, composer James Newton Howard, orchestrator Chris Boardman and costume designer Susan Becker. There’s also a trailer, an image gallery, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gary Pullin and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Amanda Reyes and Peter Tonguette. You can get the 4K Ultra HD and blu ray from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This Van Damme movie first appeared here on July 9, 2019.

Death Warrant is the first movie sold by David S. Goyer, way before he wrote Kickboxer 2, Demonic Toys, Pet Sematary 2, Dark City, the three Blade films (he directed Blade: Trinity), Ghost Rider, the Christopher Nolan Batman films, Man of Steel, Batman vs. Superman and Terminator: Dark Fate. It’s directed by Deran Sarafian, who directed To Die For, a 1989 vampire rental favorite, as well as episodes of House and Lost. He also directed another rental favorite, Claudio Fragasso’s (Monster Dog, Shocking Dark, Rats: Night of Terror) apoc-romp Interzone that stars Bruce Abbott (Re-Animator).

Detective Louis Burke (Jean-Claude Van Damme) of the Quebec Royal Canadian Mounted Police has come to Los Angeles to confront the man who killed his partner — Christian “The Sandman ” Naylor. After finding bodies hanging from the ceiling, he’s able to defeat his enemy, shooting him multiple times in the chest.

More than a year later, Burke joins a task force to solve a series of murders inside California’s Harrison State Prison. Burke will pose as an inmate while attorney Amanda Beckett (Cynthia Gibb, Jack’s Back) acts as his wife in the undercover sting.

Burke soon becomes friends with his cellmate Konefke (George Jenesky, who played Francis “Psycho” Soyer in Stripes before changing his name to Conrad Dunne) and an older clerk named Hawkins (Robert Guillaume!). Despite saving the two men multiple times, they refuse to speak about the murders. In fact, no one wants to talk.

Luckily, with the help of a teenage hacker (Joshua John Miller, who would later write The Final Girls), they discover that human organs are being sent out of the prison. That’s when Burke learns that the Sandman is still alive inside the prison.

While Beckett attends a party hosted by the state attorney general Tom Vogler (George Dickerson, Blue Velvet), she plans on telling him that her boss is behind everything. At the last minute, she finds out that he’s behind it all — his wife needed a liver transplant and even all his money and power couldn’t get her one. So he used the prison as a way to murder healthy prisoners and harvest their organs and kept making money from it after she got better.

Sandman has been sent to the prison to kill Burke and shut it all down. During a riot, Hawkins is injured but saved by Priest, but seconds later, Sandman kills the younger man. Finally, we get a big battle in a boiler room between Burke and Sandman that has all manner of craziness — burning against the metal door, kicking the bad guy in the flames and having him walk out and keep fighting and finally a bolt going through the Sandman’s head to kill him.

There’s also some conjugal romance between our hero cops, if you’re coming here for some tender moments. I think not. I think you’re coming for Van Damme kicking a serial killer into a furnace.

American musician Rickie (Steven Weber) has fallen for a prostitute by the name of Sara (Belinda Becker) who acts as if she is a princess. They escape from their lives together before things grow dangerous.

This was director and writer Jacob Berger first film and guess what? I can’t find it anywhere. In my OCD need to see every Cannon movie ever, I’ve listed what I do know about the film and hope someday to update this post with some better information.

I would assume that Cannon only picked this movie up for distribution, as none of their regular producers worked on it.

Have you seen this? Want to let me know more about it?