Tag Archives: 1991

JUNESPLOITATION: Street Wars (1991)

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DAY 19. Black Filmmakers!

To understand Street Wars, you have to understand the man behind the curtain: Jamaa Fanaka.

He was part of the famous L.A. Rebellion at UCLA alongside guys like Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, but while they went high-art, Fanaka went straight for the exploit-o-meter. He gave us the Penitentiary trilogy and the absolutely mental, killer-dick classic Soul Vengeance (aka Welcome Home, Brother Charles). By 1992, Fanaka was frustrated with Hollywood and decided to make Street Wars.

Our guide through this madness is Sugar Pop (Alan Joseph), a deep-voiced, striking dude with piercing blue eyes who looks like a model but talks like a voiceover god. Any hero in a Fanaka movie gets a sugary name. Witness Too Sweet in those three prison boxing movies. As for Sugar Pop, he just graduated as the Top Gun of the Exeter Military Academy and is heading to West Point. His brother Frank (Bryan O’Dell) paid for it all. How? By running the local crack industry out of a spot called The Regal Social Club. A place with specials posted on a board and a drive-thru.

Frank’s right-hand man is Humungus (Clifford Shegog), a giant of a man. They belong to a secret council called The Knights of the Round Table, but they meet at a long, rectangular table. Forget logic. Anyway, when Frank gets taken out, Sugar Pop inherits the empire. Naturally, he rides around the hood on a scooter he rigged with a fire-spewing jet engine and applies military logic to running the streets.

Street Wars is torn between lamenting the neighborhood’s tragic conditions and treating Sugar Pop like a superhero. When he goes to war with rival gangs, the local news reports on him like a folk hero. At one point, the movie pauses the plot for Frank’s funeral, which turns into a full-blown gospel choir and choreographed dance number against a minimalist background. Real-life Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Muhammad himself shows up as himself to give a eulogy!

But nothing will prepare you for the third act. Sugar Pop’s ultimate plan to win the drug war? He trains his lieutenants to fly ultralight motorized gliders and hang out of them, shooting Uzis. The news calls them the Ghetto Air Force. As Sugar Pop’s paraplegic buddy enthusiastically yells, “Looks like fun to me! Up there, I don’t need no legs!” Fanaka, who served in the Air Force, wanted to pay tribute to WWII dogfight movies. Sadly, he didn’t have the budget of a movie like Red Tails, so the dogfights are just limited, choppy footage of gliders buzzing around.

It’s great.

There’s also a moment that cuts between Frank and Humungus having sex with their ladies in different rooms while a song called “I Wanna Sex You Down” plays, all while cutting back to a random kid playing a furious drum solo. Humungus actually lifts his girlfriend completely onto his head and carries her up the stairs while going down on her. This is a highly advanced, Olympic-level bedroom maneuver that I would not recommend to the weak.

If this whole movie feels like a work-in-progress, well, it was. Fanaka actually sued the distributors for accidentally releasing an unfinished version with terrible sound mixing and dubbing. But that just adds to the dreamlike, surreal charm. What other gang movie would have the good guys have a trans member, and no one even brings it up? 

The movie ends with a text crawl saluting African-American filmmakers, listing everyone from Spike Lee to obscure exploitation directors like Dr. Roland Jefferson. Fanaka eventually got blacklisted by Hollywood for filing a massive lawsuit against the Directors Guild to force them to hire more women and minorities. He lost the suit, but he forced the industry to change.

His movies are never boring, either.

You can watch this on YouTube.

JUNESPLOITATION: Wedlock (1991)

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Day 1. ‘90s Action!

Also known as Deadlock when released on VHS, this made-for-HBO movie stars Rutger Hauer as Frank Warren. He’s an electronics wizard and a master jewel thief who thinks he’s got it made after orchestrating a massive diamond heist. His crew consists of his gorgeous fiancée, Noelle (Joan Chen), and his long-time buddy, Sam (James Remar). But there is no honor among thieves. The moment the diamonds are safely stashed away, Sam and Noelle turn on Frank and leave him for the cops. Frank gets pinched, but he keeps his mouth shut about where the diamonds are hidden.

Cut to Camp Holliday, an experimental future prison that makes your standard maximum-security joint look like a country club. Run by the deliciously sadistic Warden Holliday (Stephen Tobolowsky, who seems to be having the time of his life), there are no iron bars or barbed wire fences here. Instead, the facility relies on the Wedlock system: every inmate is fitted with a bulky, electronic collar containing a proximity-fused explosive charge. Every collar is secretly linked to another random prisoner. If you move more than 100 yards away from your unknown partner, or if anyone tries to tamper with the hardware, BOOM—both of your heads get blown clean off your shoulders.

Naturally, Warden Holliday tries to torture the location of the diamonds out of Frank (using a sensory deprivation tank, which is for relaxation, not interrogation) but Frank isn’t talking. Things get complicated in the yard when Frank’s collar starts chirping, leading him to discover that his explosive soulmate is Tracy Riggs (Mimi Rogers), a woman claiming she was completely framed. One afternoon, when Frank fights a fellow inmate named Emerald (Basil Wallace) to the death, Tracy takes the ambulance he’s in and makes a run for it.

Sam and Noelle are working with the Warden to get the diamonds while Frank and Tracy are on the run. They hate each other’s guts, they’ve got the cops and a pair of heavily armed betrayers on their tails, and they have to stay within a football field’s distance of one another at all times or face instant decapitation.

What follows is an awesome mix of roadside tension, an underground collar-removal operation gone wrong (resulting in Noelle icing Sam) and a final showdown with the Warden himself, who has been tracking the duo via helicopter. Frank proves he’s the smarter criminal, tricking the Warden into wearing a collar and tossing the linked match into the departing chopper. Distance limit breached, chopper goes kaboom, and Frank and Tracy ride off into the sunset with a bag full of diamonds to live happily ever after.

Yes, in a 1990s action movie, there’s not much of a line between love and hate.

Wedlock is pure, unadulterated cinematic comfort food. Lewis Teague, as always, brings genuine studio-level competence to a B-movie premise, keeping the action moving fast enough that you don’t have time to question the prison logic. The chemistry between Hauer and Rogers works surprisingly well, turning the film into a twisted, high-stakes romantic comedy masquerading as a dystopian action flick. Tobolowsky steals every single scene he’s in as the Warden, playing him not as an imposing brute, but as a petty, bureaucratic psychopath. 

Hauer has weird hair, strange fashion choices and seems barely awake at some points. There are also some weird plot points, like how everyone in prison gets named after a color, can go to Magic Hour and sleep with anyone they want, and in the meantime, work on electronics. And while Frank is out for revenge, Noelle is just out to ruin the wedding of the ex who set her up.

Writer Broderick Miller recycled this same idea for another cable movie, Deadlocked: Escape from Zone 14, where Esai Morales is breaking out Nia Peeples. 

Shout out to Vern, who points out. that despite this being set in the future, there’s a movie theater showing a double of Graffiti Bridge with the Seagal movie Marked for Death. That’s amazing. Basil Wallace was also in the movie, playing Screwface and his twin brother. And oh yeah, Camp Holiday Prison is totally the command center from Power Rangers. Really — it’s the House of the Book on the American Jewish University’s Brandeis-Bardin Campus in Simi Valley, CA.

No other movie has Rutger Hauer and Mimi Rogers wearing traditional African clothing.

You can watch this on Tubi.

CULTPIX MONTH: Little Kickboxer (1991)

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I love: 

  • Beat up kids rising up against the odds
  • Foreign movies that make no sense
  • Godfrey Ho cinematic universe films

This has all those and more.

Also known as Thunder Ninja Kids: Little Kickboxer, Kickboxer Kid and Korean Boy, this is the story of Biao (or Choi, depending on where you watch this movie), a kid with a heavy burden and a surprisingly high pain tolerance. After his father is murdered by a ruthless gang leader, Biao realizes that stranger danger is the least of his worries. Under the tutelage of a wise (and likely underpaid) taekwondo master named Don, he undergoes a rigorous series of training montages to dismantle the criminal syndicate threatening his family and find closure for his father’s death.

Biao’s mother doesn’t want him to fight. She’s raised him to be kind, and he’s friends with all of the girls in school, while the boys beat on him unmercifully. But in a massive coincidence, Don was trained by Biao’s father Tiger Jack, so mom decides that her son dying in the octagon is a good idea because it all lines up spiritually.

Don and Gloria, the mother of one of Biao’s schoolgirl chums, are both falling in love and in the middle of a protection scheme from organized crime. Don and Biao beat the hell out of some lower-level thugs, so the boss sends his best fighter to break Don’s leg. That man? Well, he’s Pichai, the same guy who killed Jack. It all comes full circle, and everyone just goes along with a literal child facing a man who has murdered before. 

Wouldn’t Don say, “Hey, this guy dropped a literal bomb on my leg, and it’s in so many pieces I may never walk again, and I’m an adult, and you’re, like, 11?” 

No, no one says that.

Let’s let IDF themselves tell us what this is about: “Hyuk-jin is a model student in the 6th grade who is tormented by his physically superior peers. He sees Chloe-ho fight a bunch of hoodlums and is moved to learn Taekwondo. His mother is shocked to learn about Hyuk-jin’s determination to learn the sport that killed his father, who died in a tournament. But she learns that Chloe-ho was her husband’s pupil and on of his acquiesces. Hyuk-jin trains during summer break and is transformed into a physically powerful young boy. He roughens up Nak-joon’s men who come to his mother’s restaurant to collect rent. Nak-joon runs a fake gym while controlling a crime organization on the sly. He brings the Thai kick boxer who killed Hyuk-jin’s father and opens a martial arts tournament. Hyuk-jin sees this as the perfect chance to avenge his father.”

Letterboxd says this was directed by Lim Seon. Other sources say Godfrey Ho. I think Godfrey Ho — yes, I have seen him show up in extras, I know he’s real — is some sort of AI that cuts and pastes these movies. That’s how I want to think of him. It. Whatever.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

APRIL MOVIE THON DAY 2: Liquid Dreams (1991)

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April 2: Get Me Another — A sequel or a movie way too similar to another film.

Eve Black (Candice Daly, Zombi 4: After Death, Cop Game) has moved from Kansas to the big city in the hopes of living with her sister, Tina (Karen Dahl). Instead, she finds Tina’s cooling corpse in a bathtub and a sprawling conspiracy involving NeuroVid, a media conglomerate that seemingly either runs this world or is this world. To solve the murder, Eve transforms into Dorothy, a taxi dancer at The Red Top, guided by the perpetually chain-smoking Lt. Rodino (Richard Steinmetz).

Liquid Dreams is a cocktail of a movie. Some Videodrome, some Wizard of Oz, some Dr. Caligari, lots of The Seventh Victim, some Café Flesh, some Cinemax After Dark and plenty Rinse Dream early 90s adult energy. This mix taste good and isn’t afraid to show bloody lips, BDSM imagery and static bursts of noise and video. Or to have John Doe from X be a cab driver.

This movie seems to reach into my brain for its casting. Bob the Goon, Tracey Walter? Paul Bartel? Mink Stole? Adult star Crystal Breeze? Don Stark, the next door dad from That 70s Show? What is happening?

NeuroVid is more than a building. It’s also a channel that gets inside your brain. The Red Top is like that, too, because the women who dance there all get the men worked up and taken to The Hot Box, where the endorphins are sucked out. Oh yeah, and now Eve is called Dorothy. Her first slow dance — she’s a taxi dancer now? — is with Bartel, who is obsessed with her sweaty feet. Once she sees what they do to him backstage, she’s horrified.

Eve/Dorothy is such a potential star that she’s fast-tracked into a Oz-themed porn that’s not really porn where a reactor (that’s what we call actors in the past future of Liquid Dreams) is dressed like a half-naked scarecrow, two men prance dressed as crows and she shows up as a seriously underdressed Ms. Gale as Mink Stole directs the action and the music and video screens demand that they seek freedom from the flesh.

Dorothy then starts dancing at Twilight, and if you become a star there, you’re asked to be part of The Ritual, which takes place on the top floor of the NeuroVid complex.

Everything is bathed in neon glow. The soundtrack is a rhythmic, industrial pulse that feels like a headache you don’t want to get rid of. All of the music is industrial. And this is such a reminder of that lost early 90s moment where erotic meant cold and thriller meant ritualistic.

Directed by Mark Manos, who wrote the script with Zack Davis and would go on to direct the dance sequences in Playboy: Farrah Fawcett and All of Me, this feels sadly prescient. Sure, this isn’t the future we got, but Daly sadly died 13 years later, found in a rundown apartment, her cause of death listed as polydrug intoxication complicated by severe steatohepatitis. Her boyfriend said that she was a victim of foul play.

This is the kind of movie marketed to the trenchcoat brigade but actually designed to make them feel deeply uncomfortable. It may have been sold as an erotic thriller, but what they got was a film filled with slick visuals and strange rituals, TVs screaming messages like gender is slavery and everyone is unapproachably gorgeous or fascinatingly grotesque. Again, I am obsessed with movies that people rented to goon to and ended up being enraged and upset by. It’s my vice. Watch this immediately.

You can watch this at the Cave of Forgotten Films or YouTube.

Pagan Invasion: Halloween Trick or Treat (1991)

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Did I watch all 13 of these?

You know I did.

Let’s concentrate on perhaps the best of this series, Pagan Invasion: Halloween Trick or Treat.

Let’s go to the sell copy: “Traces the pagan origins and history of Halloween. The Pagan Occult calendar of Druids, Witches, Pagans and Satanists marks Halloween as one of their highest holy days. The occult rituals seen in this video are real and not re-enactments. All the seemingly innocent symbolism of Halloween – black cats, snakes, broomsticks, bonfires, trick or treat…”

This feels dungeon synth, with an early computer-generated castle looming over everyone, which gives me a very warm feeling while also giving me the kind of chill I got from living through the Satanic Panic. This early green-screen technology makes the hosts look like they are broadcasting from a haunted screensaver.

This starts at a video sales convention, and we see some of the most wonderful horror movies of the 80s as the hosts clutch pearls, all before moving to meeting former Satanist Glenn Hobbs, who tells us about how he used to kill infants day and night. Wait, is that Hal Lindsay? It is, and he found a pentagram and a diaper in a shack, so there had to be more baby deaths. Seeing the author of The Late Great Planet Earth poking around a shack with a clean diaper? The peak of investigative journalism.

Like all Christian scare films, this liberally takes from Satanis, because where else are you going to get all that Anton LaVey interview b-roll? 

To understand Pagan Invasion, you have to understand the power couple of the 1980s counter-cult movement: Caryl Matrisciana and Chuck Smith. They weren’t just hosts; they were the architects of a very specific brand of California Charismatic paranoia. Caryl grew up in India, allowing herself to be marketed as someone who had firsthand experience with the darkness of Eastern mysticism. Chuck was a massive figure in American evangelicalism; he founded the Calvary Chapel movement and was a key player in the Jesus People movement of the late 60s. 

You can watch this on YouTube.

Mutant Massacre 2 (1991)

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Imagine if Alien Beasts had a sequel, but one that Boogieman II handled, where you’re never sure if you’re seeing the same movie, a re-edit or whatever this is, a movie mainly having you stare at old monitors while a monotone voice repeats the lines several times. It’s a drone on a drone on a drone, and yet it wrapped me in a warm blanket and coaxed me into a feeling of comotose oneness, a place where I don’t think about the fact that doing five days of emotionally exhausting work only gives you two days off and more than most of those days is spent worrying about the next five days. Instead, let’s discuss monsters, mutants and the hum of old video camera footage. It’s better that way.

Carl J. Sukenick makes movies with titles like Lesbian Beasts 5000 AD, The Toxic Retards, Stamp Killer and Ninja Dream. These movies may all have reused footage from the one that preceded it, but who are we to tell Carol how to do what he does? He doesn’t come to the corner and knock the dick out of our mom’s mouth, after all.

Letterboxd describes this movie as follows: “Aliens are turning people into mutants. Opening scene features claymation.”

What a simple TV Guide one-line take on such insanity.

There is a Mutant Massacre, but again, both movies all come from Alien Beasts, a film — charitably a film — that has dialogue like “My friend Joe put on anti-radiation clothing and tried to stop the female enemy agent! My friend Joe, I repeat, put on anti-radiation clothing and tried to stop the female enemy agent from stealing the weapons from the base.”

I love that Carl got his dad, some fireworks and some friends to fight in the backyard and turned it into movies that morons like me ponder over and write thousands of words trying to ascribe some meaning to, in a world where meaning is a maelstrom and that making sense of things feels harder by the day. 

“After the meeting, Joe notified Carl that there were traitors on their mission. After the meeting, Joe notified Carl that there were traitors on their mission.”

How did Carl get a woman to put on a mask, take off her top, and, most importantly, show up in this? 

That said, I would rewatch this or another version of this over nearly anything currently playing in a theater.

Vampire Trailer Park (1991)

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The Twin Palms Trailer Park isn’t just a setting; it’s a buffet. Wilma and Buddy’s urban renewal plan via supernatural pest control is peak landlord villainy. By weaponizing John Devereux Laporte, they’ve turned a 17th-century aristocrat into a glorified hitman. A man who once owned plantations and lived in opulence is now reduced to hunting in a trailer park, his refined palate ruined by the gamey flavor of the elderly and the marginalized. His projectile vomiting isn’t just a gross-out gag. It’s his body literally rejecting the low-class blood he’s forced to consume. He’s a bulimic blue-blood in a Walmart world.

Between the vampire and a teenage crime duo, Buzz (Bently Tittle) and Jana (Blake Pickett), they’re clearing the place out and getting ready to sell the trailer park at a profit, even if every old person has to die.
How do you catch a vampire in a regional SOV horror movie? Well, if you’re this Florida-made wonder, you hire Jennifer Baiswell (Kathy Moran), a psychic who is joined by Detective Andrew Holt (Robin Shurtz). I have no idea how they’re getting paid, as their client has been killed by one of the bloodsuckers. And then there’s Aunt Hattie (Ethel Miller), who seems to drive our vampire anywhere they need to go.

Meanwhile, Jennifer has a psychic connection to her grandmother, often finding herself possessed by her. Can you be possessed by someone who isn’t dead yet? As for the vampire, he was a plantation owner and certainly a rich man, now left to be bulimic because he isn’t eating the best of food. Old people are kind of gamey, I guess. Just listen to what the dialogue has to say about him: “John Devereux Laporte, died 1746. Our job was to make sure he died again, this time for keeps. In life, Laporte was an obscenely wealthy Louisiana planter and slaveowner, the last of his line, a true aristocrat, a born leader of men. You know, a real asshole!”

There’s a hypnotic TV, SOV drone, original songs, way too much plot and a few laughs, some of which work.

Director Steve Latshaw would go on to make Jack-O, Return of the Killer Shrews and Biohazard: The Alien Force with Moran writing.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Dead Again (1991)

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I wear yellow glasses, and when I have them on, terms like adult thriller and neo-noir appear as they should: giallo.

Back in 1948, Margaret Strauss (Emma Thompson) is killed during a robbery, and her husband, Roman (Kenneth Branagh, who also directed this movie), is executed for the crime, but not before he whispers something to Gray Baker (Andy Garcia), a reporter.

In 1991, private detective Mike Church (Branagh) is looking into the identity of a woman whom he names Grace (also Thompson), who has appeared– mute, amnesiac and with nightmares — at the orphanage that raised him. Mike asks his friend Pete Dugan (Wayne Knight) to publish her info in the paper, while hypnotist Franklyn Madson (Derek Jacobi) tries to use his skills to bring her mind back. She doesn’t, but does remember a lot about the lives of Margaret and Roman. And oh yeah — Franklyn is really Frankie, the son of Margaret and Roman’s housekeeper Inga (Hanna Schygulla), Grace is artist Amanda Sharp who paints scissor-themed photos and — man, is this an exposition dump? — Frankie killed Margaret with scissors when Roman rebuffed his mother’s love. The scissors were put in Roman’s hand, and that brings us to now, as Franklyn tries the same thing on Mike and Amanda.

Roger Ebert said that this was similar to the works of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, saying, “Dead Again is Kenneth Branagh once again demonstrating that he has a natural flair for bold theatrical gesture. If Henry V, the first film he directed and starred in, caused people to compare him to Olivier, Dead Again will inspire comparisons to Welles and Hitchcock — and the Olivier of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. I do not suggest Branagh is already as great a director as Welles and Hitchcock, although he has a good start in that direction. What I mean is that his spirit, his daring, is in the same league. He is not interested in making timid movies.”

But hey, that ending, where — spoilers — a scissor sculpture kills the killer? Ever seen Tenebre? That said, I do like the twist that Mike was actually Margaret and Grace was Roman.

88 FILMS BLU-RAY RELEASE: The Cat (1991)

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A cat from outer space teams up with a young alien girl and her knight, along with a novelist named Wisely, to fight an alien that possesses people.

Sounds pretty simple, but from that description, you have no idea just how strange things can get. Based on Old Cat by Ni Kuang, this is like The Hidden with a cat. 

Wisely (Waise Lee) is a writer who comes into contact with a girl named Princess (Gloria Yip) and her cat, General (is this a Cat’s Eye reference?) and a knight named Errol (Lau Siu-ming). They’ve robbed an archaeological find called the Octagon, hoping to use it in their quest. As it is, Wisely is writing their story, even if he only knows them from afar. That soon changes as Wisley and his friend Li Tung (Lawrence Lau) help them battle the shape-shifting and possessing Star Killer.

This is berserk, filled with neon colors, goopy monsters, eyeball destruction, glittery cats, people set on fire and everything else you want from Hong Kong cinema. The scene where the cat battles a dog in a junkyard took six months to create. It’s just a few moments on screen.

If you like this Wisely story, check out The Seventh Curse, a perhaps even more deranged film. It shares the same director as this movie, Lam Ngai Kai. He also made The Ghost Snatchers, Erotic Ghost Story, and another of the oddest films ever made, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.

The limited edition 88 Films Blu-ray features a rigid slipcase with new art by Sean Longmore, a 40-page book, a premium art card, audio commentary by Frank Djeng, an interview with Gordon Chan, and an image gallery. You can get it from MVD.

88 FILMS BLU RAY RELEASE: Eleven Days Eleven Nights 2 (1991)

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Joe D’Amato and Rosella Drudi reteamed for this sequel in name only to Eleven Days Eleven Nights, even though the character of Sarah comes back. Now she’s played by Kristine Rose and has been married and separated and given the new job of the executor of the estate of Lionel Durrington (James Jackson), one of her past lovers and the richest man in Louisiana.

Guess what? This is actually the third film in the series because Sarah was the lead character in Top Model, which is also listed in plenty of places as Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 2. Look — it wouldn’t be Italian movies if it weren’t confusing.

There are four heirs and one after another, they all get with our heroine, who will determine which one is worthy of the money based on how good they are in bed, one supposes. Sonny is the only one with no interest in Sarah, even when she danced for him at a strip club, but that’s because his last girlfriend was abused in front of him by friend of the family Alfred, who is also trying to get the money.

Because Italian films really don’t care about how insane or twisted — actually, this is what they run toward, not from — things get, Sarah disguises herself as Sonny’s old lover and goes to the impotence institute and gets a rise out of him.

By the end, she realizes that no one deserves the money, so she comes up with a plan. She’ll write a book about the family and its secrets while they split the $500 million with a mystery person. They quickly sign and yeah, the mystery guy is the man who was supposed to be dead and we have a happy ending. We also have Laura Gemser in the blink and you’ll miss it role of Sarah’s jogging publisher and Ruth Collins from Lurkers, Doom Asylum and Prime Evil show up.

For a movie about people getting naked, D’Amato has plenty of women in sweaters show up. I’m all for this.

Also: This has also been listed as The Web of Desire and Eleven Days, Eleven Nights Part 4 because Italian movies are wonderful and confusing.

88 Films has released this in an incredible slipcase with art by Sean Longmore. It also has a booklet with notes by Calum Waddel and Rachael Nisbet. Inside, you’ll find a new 4K remaster from the original negatives, audio commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Nanni Cobretti, interviews with Mark Thompson Ashworth, Piero Montanari and  Pierpaolo De Sanctis, and Italian opening and closing titles. You can get this on 4K UHD or Blu-ray from MVD.