Most of Invader was produced independently by director Philip Cook and producer John Ellis, since Cook’s previous film Beyond the Rising Moon wasn’t a big success. Cook shot all the inexpensive dialogue sequences and after showing them to Menahem Golan, he agreed to finance the rest of the movie.

It starts with four men running from military police. Three are shot and killed before the fourth sees a UFO and is destroyed by an energy weapon. This ends up being discovered by Frank McCall (Hans Bachmann), a reporter for the National Scandal. After sneaking into the base and watching a secret plane equipped with A.S.M.O.D.S, software, McCall is arrested by Captain Anders (A. Thomas Smith). Before he can take him in, men in black — six years before the movie, but they had been part of UFO culture for several years by then — take McCall and try to brainwash him. He’s saved at the last minute by Anders and Colonel Faraday (Rick Foucheux). In response, the men in black kill themselves.

A.S.M.O.D.S. was taken from an alien ship that crashed in New Mexico and it’s taking over the base. McCall and Anders escape in a jet. It has also built a giant robot named HARV that has absorbed America’s nationalist and wants to rain nuclear hell on China and Russia. Can they stop the robot and save the world?

When this was released on DVD in 2006, Cook went back in and fixed up some of the effects with CGI.

This was made two years before The X-Files aired on Fox. That’s pretty wild.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Why yes, director and star Richard Gabai made a sequel to Virgin High and stuck with the same concept. He plays Jerry Kaminski again — the same name as the co-writer of this movie

According to David Wain on The Schlock Pit, all it took were a few stills from Gabai’s original movie to get him to sign off on a sequel. In this one, he has a new girlfriend named Monica (Melinda Clarke, who let’s face it, Tracy Dali was very cute, but this is Melinda Clarke) who is in a convent due to hypnosis gone wrong. Now our hero has to become a priest again and get his girl out of there.

This film also has a supreme meta moment for Cannon fans, as one of the nuns in training, Sherry (Karman Kruschke), confesses to Monica that she was thinking impure thoughts about Mel Gibson. Monica replies, “It’s fine. I was thinking about Menahem Golan.” Also Bruce-sploitation star (Bloody Fists, From China with Death) Bruce Ly (also known as Yung Henry Yu) wanders in as himself and saves Gabai’s character, attacks the camera crew and then realizes that he’s in the wrong movie.

To top that: Burt Ward as the Pope, somehow topping his work in Gabai’s original.

And there’s a musical number!

I have no idea why this movie exists but I’m not sad that I watched it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

As Michael Winner was to Cannon, Albert Pyun was to 21st Century Films under Menahem Golan.

In this film, Pyun is telling us the story of Brick Bardo (Thom Matthews, who has already been Tommy Jarvis in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives and Freddy in Return of the Living Dead). He’s hunting down the people who killed his brother and the first is Davey O’Brien (Michel Qissi, Tong Po from Kickboxer) who he knocks out and ties up in the middle of the desert. He wants to know how his Brother was pushed into fixed kickboxing fights and murdered. In pain, Davey spills four names: Brent Caldwell (Dale Jacoby, No Retreat, No Surrender), Mike Johnson (Thunder Wolf, Shootfighter: To the Death), Billy Munoz (Benny “The Jet” Urquidez) and Connie Angel (Playboy Playmate for June 1985, Hope Marie Carlton, who is also Taryn in Andy Sidaris’ films Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Picasso Trigger and Savage Beach).

Brent also has a paerner by the name of Max Manduke — man, can Pyun put names in his movies or what? I mean, Cyborg has every character named for a guitar — who sleeps with kickboxing champion Brent and knocks him out with ether while still on top of him. Mike is running from some hooligans and Max saves him to go to Vegas. Brick kidnaps Billy’s daughter. As for Connie, she’s now an executive for the World Martial Arts Council — is this a WMAC Masters crossover? — and has been sleeping around behind her husband’s back. Brick arrives, destroys her boytoy and then knocks her out. The team of Brick and Max bring all four to Vegas. There, a kickboxing ring will be the courtroom so that they can get the answers about Wood, the dead brother, who was forced to put over Connie in a man vs. woman match.

How serious are they? Well, they already killed the promoter and as a carny who has worked for way too many bad wrestling promoters, I am full behind making Brick the hero of this movie.

Brick lays out the rules: if Mike fights him an dwins, everyone gets to go free. If Mike dies, the trial continues. Mike puts up a decent battle but just as Brick is about to, well, drop a brick on him, Billy offers what he knows. Brick responds by informing him that he already killed Billy’s little girl. Billy goes shithouse and nearly kills Brick, but he’s too emotional. As he lies there nearly knocked out, Brick claims that he will spare Billy’s son’s life if he says who set up his brother. Billy says he doesn’t know, so Brick informs him that he plans on killing his son and then, to hammer his point home, he breaks Billy’s back, killing him.

Mike pulls a knife on Max but gets shot. Brent jumps in to fight and Connie realizes from his words that he’s the guilty one. Connie, still tied up, deciphers that Brent is the one who killed Wood Wilson. Brick tells Brent, who is begging for his life, that Wood didn’t beg. He knows because he was there. Meanwhile, a nearly dead Mike hands Connie the knife.

Connie frees herself and kills Max. She faces off with Brick and learns the truth: Brick is Wood.

Huh?

He was destroyed by Brent five years ago and changed his face through plastic surgery. Connie tells him the truth: she set everything up because she was in love with him and wanted to escape the fight underground, but Wood wanted nothing of her plan. So Brick/Wood reveals that Billy’s kids are alive and they’ll be set free if she wins a fight against him. So, to affirm that this is a 90s direct to video movie, he tries to sexually assault her, so she ends up killing him.

And that’s, well, a happy ending I guess.

The name Brick Bardo also gets used in a few other Pyun movies, like Dollman, Cyborg and Radioactive Dreams. And this was probably made — I agree with the always awesome Bulletproof Action — at the same time as Pyun’s Kickboxer 2: The Road Back, which also has Qissi and Jacoby in the cast and was also choreographed by Urquidez.

As a bonus, Vincent Klyn, who was Warchild in Point Break, Fender Tremolo in Cyborg and Wild One in Double Dragon, has a brief part in this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Stephen Cornwall (who also made Philadelphia Experiment II), who co-wrote this with Andrew Deutsch (Mercenary Fighters, Platoon Leader, River of Death) from a story by Menahem Golan, Killing Streets is about Chris Brandt (Michael Paré), who learns that his twin brother Craig has been possibly killed in action in Beirut. The government — in the form of diplomat Sandra Ross (Jennifer Runyon) and operative Charlie Wolff (Lorenzo Lamas) — has done nothing, so he decides to head over there himself and get answers.

Now, Chris is just a basketball coach, so he’s going to need some help. Luckily, Wolff comes to his side and he has an amazing cab driver named Gilad (Gabi Amrani) who is really going all out for that 5 star review. Oh yeah — being twins, Chris and Craig have a mental connection, so he knows his brother is still alive. So there’s that.

This is no Streets of Fire. But I mean, really what is? Paré is kind of wooden and double Paré means twice the wood. The last ten minutes, once everything starts blowing up real good and guns get shooting and terrorists begin to pay for their crimes, well, that’s what we wanted all along.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Christy Murphy’s (Tracy Dali, who was June in Click: The Calendar Girl Killer) strict Catholic parents — Burt Ward is her dad — are worried that their daughter is having sex with her boyfriend Jerry (Richard Gabai, who directed and co-wrote the script; he also made Assault of the Party Nerds). They send her to the Academy of the Blessed Virgin, an all-girls religious school but Jerry shows up as a priest, more determined than ever to finally sleep with Christy.

This is a movie that dares have Linnea Quigley as a character who looks down on teens who have sex, so that’s definitely a twist I didn’t see coming. Michelle Bauer is also in the cast as sex education teacher Miss Bush and this was Leslie Mann’s first movie.

Somehow — and don’t worry, we’ll get to it — Jerry would return in Hot Under the Collar, another movie in which he had to become a priest and get the girl. One would think that this plan has no way of working but somehow Jerry was able to pull it off both times.

To learn more about this movie, I invite you to check out The Schlock Pit, where the great David Wain interviewed Gabai.

You can watch this on Tubi.

During the Iran–Iraq War, U.S. Marine Colonel Doug Matthews (Michael Dudikoff) is training the Iraqi troops only to learn that America is an evil empire that often surrounds itself with even worse allies in the pursuit of blood for oil. Oh wait. I mean that he learns that some of the Iraqis, led by Ali Dallal (Steve Inwood), who are killing innocent people. He challenges Ali to a fight and loses.

Five years later, America’s enemies have changed because “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” Iraq has invaded Kuwait and Doug’s diabetic teacher brother Ben (Tommy Hinkley) is held hostage so that the Iraqi leader — you guessed it, Ali Dallal — can get one more shot at killing Doug.

Doug has some help, a Kurd named Tanzil (Uri Gavriel) and his ex-girlfriend, Lila (Hanna Azoulay-Hasfari) who is now married to Ali. Ah, what a tangled web!

This was the last film of director Ted Post, who everyone knows made Hang ‘Em High, Magnum Force and Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but I celebrate his TV movies like Night Slaves, Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate and Five Desperate Women as well as his Chuck Norris movie Good Guys Wear Black, the somewhat giallo Nightkill and, most essentially, The Baby.

After Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, director John McNaughton got tons of horror movie offers until he couldn’t hold out any longer. He told The Flashback Files, “When I got the script for The Borrower I was broke. And I got sent bad script after bad script and then came The Borrower, which in some sense was also a bad script, but the conceit that this creature takes the heads off of people and somehow occupies their lives, to me it was like a metaphor for what actors do. That gave me something to take a hold of, other than just the monster that jumps up from behind a tree to scare you and eat you.”

So yes, this movie also has a serial killer, but this one is an alien murderer sentenced to our pitiful backworld planet. His transformation from alien to human didn’t take, so he must keep borrowing new heads every time the old one explodes, using his crab claws to decapitate folks and start wearing their heads.

Diana Pierce (Rae Dawn Chong) and Charles Krieger (Don Gordon) are the cops that have to track it down. The best known people in the cast are Tom Towles — who was Otis in Henry* — as well as Antonio Fargas and Neil Giuntoli, who played Henry in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part II.

Originally made for Vestron, this had an X rating and needed cut, then Atlantic Entertainment Group was going to put it out, but then they closed and the film sat for three years before Cannon put it out in 1991.

*Tracy Arnold also is in it, as well as thirteen crew members from Henry: Ken Hale, Dan Haberkorn, Rick Paul, Cory Coken, Frank Coronado, Robert McNaughton, Jim Moore, Ric Coken, Mic Fabus, Bernd Rantscheff, Richard Fire, Steven A. Jones and Elena Maganini.

Robert James “B.J.” Quinn (John Barrett) is the current middleweight kickboxing champion of the world and he just got past one of his toughest challengers, Chad Hunter (Keith Vitali), narrowly knocking him out with a spinning back fist and doctor stoppage.

But the real battle is after the fight, as B.J. is angered by another fighter, Jacques Denard (Brad Morris), who hits on his girl Carol (Terry Norton right in front of him. They start brawling and when a partygoer named Ken (Gavin Hood) gets in the middle, he gets accidentally dead. Chad tries to stand up for B.J. in court, but Denard’s testimony puts him in jail.

A year later, Denard has his belt and is a cocky showoff who enjoys hurting his opponents. B.J. can never kickbox again — he’s been barred after his convincton — and Chad asks him to train him for a match against the new champ. B.J. has some demons and basically his training is just him beating up the man who spoke up for him in his trial. After their match — which puts Chad in the hospital — B.J. finds Quinn in a bar and beats him so badly that Carol leaves him.

Chad gives B.J. another chance, letting him teach at his school, and Carol comes around. Yet Denard wants revenge and challenges B.J. to a $100,000 unsanctioned karate fight. Chad trains him now and even Denard’s cornerman Howard (Roger Yuan) comes over to their side.

Shot in South Africa, American Kickboxer has one true sequel, To the Death, and another in name only, American Kickboxer 2. Directed by Frans Nel and written by Emil Kolbe and Pittsburgh’s John Barrett (he did stunts for everything from The Octagon, Silent Rage, Forced Vengeance and Steel Dawn to being the stunt coordinator on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, this is fun redemption story for those that love people being kicked in the face.

Helmed by perhaps the best action director Cannon had, Sam Firstenberg, and written by the team of Boaz Davidson, Andrew Deutsch and Greg Latter, this Delta Force installment may have no Chuck Norris, but it does have his brother Mike as Greg Lassiter, the Delta Force point man. It’s actually a movie of sons and brothers, as the commander, Major Charlie Stewart, is Nick — son of John — Cassavetes, intelligence officer Lieutenant Richard O’Keefe is Matthew — son of Arthur — Penn and explosives expert Sam is Eric — son of Kirk Douglas.

Terrorist Kahlil Kadal (Jonathan Cherch) wants America out of the Middle East or he’ll wipe Miami off the face of the Earth using suicide bomber Anwar Hussein (Dan Turgeman) who attacks TV producer Wendy Jackson (Candace Brecker) and puts her in a wheelchair, which he later uses to hide his bomb in the hopes of setting it off on national TV.

Meanwhile, Delta Force must team with Russian Spetsnaz commandos and go on a mission to El-Qutar, Sudalia on the hunt for Kadal. Charlie and Captain Sergei Ilyich Leskov (John Ryan),  the leader of the Russians, can barely get along and the mission goes bad, so bad that Russian Pietre Ivanovich (Mark Ivanir) and Sam get killed and Greg gets wounded.

Of course, Charlie and Sergei get it together and get so good at killing as a team that one of them knifes the bombers foot to the switch while the other one shoots him right between the eyes live on national TV. God bless America. God bless Delta Force.

Directed by Cedric Sundstrom and written by James Booth — and produced by Ovidio G. Assonitis! — this movie sees Sean Davidson, the new American Ninja played by David Bradley, battling the ninja army of Colonel Scarf Mulgrew (also Booth, who had already written American Ninja 2: The Confrontation) and Shiekh Ali Maksood (Ron Smerczak), who also plan on dropping a suitcase bomb in New York City.

Working with Carl Brackston (Dwayne Alexandre) — they have to leave his wedding to handle the mission — and a local contact named Freddie (Anthony Fridjhon) and a plucky teen named Pango (Jody Abrahams, they’re looking for a local Peace Corps worker named Dr. Sarah (Robin Stille, The Slumber Party Massacre, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama) before all hell breaks loose. Freddie is killed, Dr. Sarah is assaulted — and learns that Mulgrew killed her father — and ninjas torture our heroes.

It’s time for another American Ninja.

The call goes out to Peace Corps teacher Joe Armstrong (do I have to even tell you that it’s Michael Dudikoff?) who wants nothing to do with the government. Yet he brings along some rebels from Sulphur Springs, a former penal colony led by Dr. Tamba (Ken Gampu), and kills everyone in his path.

Bradley was not happy at all that after making the series his own in the last film that Dudikoff was back. Sure, he gets to kill the main bad guy, but Dudikoff gets the big battle against the final boss known as Super Ninja (Kely McClung, who is also the first Delta Force member that gets murdered by the ninjas).

It takes 45 minutes for Dudikoff to show up and there’s no Steve James. That makes me really not like this one as much as the others, but then Dudikoff remembers that he loves killing pajama clad martial arts fighters more than teaching reading and starts wiping out karate dudes left and right. That makes things so much better.

You can watch this on Tubi.

You can listen to more about American Ninja 4 on The Cannon Canon.