Ellen (Traci Lords) and Charley Reed (Phillip Troy) are burglars who are on the right side as they work for insurance companies, stealing back things that have been taken by others. This job brings them to the safe of organized crime kingpin Vito Malta (Jorge Rivero), which contains gems taken by his men from a jewelry store. Before you can say, “Why is Traci Lords a never nude in this?” she’s in the shower, fully clothed with her husband, the mission complete.

Her husband, however, is an idiot. Instead of marveling at his luck at getting to take pants on showers with Traci Lords whenever he wants, he decides to not give the jewelry back to the insurance company and fence it with Ellen’s brother Rick Corbit (Zach Galligan). Malta figures this out and his men chase them down, killing Charley, nearly ending Rick’s time on this planet and sending Ellen to the police station.

Detective Alan Little (Jaime Alba) remembers Ellen when she was a jazz singer, so he has a crush on her and allows her to go get revenge.

A PM Entertainment action film, this was directed by Lords’ husband at the time,  Brook Yeaton. It’s the kind of action film that if it came on Cinemax at 2:45 a.m. and you were high, you’d probably not get up to turn the channel. In short, the movies that I spend most of my life finding and writing up.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This movie is everything I love about Italian exploitation films.

It’s logo looks exactly like Top Gun while the title refers to Blue Thunder.

It has a cast partly made of American TV actors — Dirk Benedict and Ted McGinley — and international stars like Patsy Kensit and David Warner.

It’s directed by Antonio Bido, who also made The Bloodstained Shadow and Watch Me When I Kill, who co-wrote it with Gino Capone, who also wrote Conquest.

It stars as a ripoff of Top Gun and somehow has some amazing shots of real jets in action instead of stock footage. Obviously, Bido got access to some Italian military bases and uniforms to make this look good. So when it starts like any flyboys against the establishment movie, you may be fairly shocked — spoiler warning — when aliens show up.

As they work on new flight maneuvers, Colonel Alex Long (Benedict) — he’s Maverick but his call sign is Firebird — and Philip (McGinley) — he’s Goose but answers to Thunder — see mysterious lights. After being warned off, Phillip wants to see exactly what it is and flies directly into the light, disappearing and his plane showing up the next day. Alex is accused of sabotaging his friend’s plane and making up the UFO tall tale. He’s finally able to convince his commander (Warner) to take another trip which costs NATO several more jets. Finally, he becomes friends with a UFO expert named Isabella (Kensit) and prepares to find Phillip by climbing a mountain, guided by Phillip’s dad who just so happens to be a mystic mountaineer.

I thrilled to Lieutenant Starbuck (or Templeton “Faceman” Peck) being best friends with Jefferson D’Arcy. The best part is when Alex gets to the mountain’s peak, his friend is just standing there, backlit by a UFO and they just leave. That’s the ending. Pals, walking down a mountain, after literally finding aliens, no words need be said, I guess.

In Aenigma: Lucio Fulci and the 80s, Bido claimed that Fulci saw a private screening of this movie, then got up on stage and said, “Nobody in Italy would have been able to do something like that.” This does not seem like something Fulci would do or a movie he would like.

How wonderful is it that this movie ends with the quote  “There’s life on every star” from Goethe?

You can watch this on YouTube.

28° minuto is the story of the Monster of Florence, which has also been the plot of The Killer Is Still Among Us and Il mostro di Firenze. It’s directed and written by Paolo Frajoli and Gianni Siragusa.

As the city of Florence deals with the serial killer, Fabrizio (Christian Borromeo) and Patrizia (Antonella Sperati) have just been engaged and are ignoring the danger. There’s also a police officer, Mauro Poggi (Marzio Honorato), who is in charge of catching the killer. He’s also dealing with a love story, yet his is much longer and sadder with Paolo (Corinne Cléry), who is still in love with him despite being married. He works with a criminologist (Paul Muller, Nightmare Castle) and they discover that the Monster once watched him mother cheat on his father, which made him want to kill any couples that he finds steaming up the windows of cars on lover’s lanes.

This was originally shot back in 1986, as Siragusa started the film and was blocked by the legal actions of the relatives of the serial killer’s victims. For some reason, five years later, this was no longer a problem. Frajoli finished the film and if numerous web sites are to be believed, he used scenes from Bakterion — the couple watches it when they go to the theater, which has posters for Phenomena, Inferno and Body Count — and some moments from The Killer Is Still Among Us along with his footage.

Also released as Tramonti fiorentini (Florentine Sunsets) and Quel violento desiderio (That Violent Desire), this even has the killer dress in a motorcycle outfit, as if somehow it wants to remind us that it’s trying to be as shocking as Strip Nude for Your Killer. Sadly, by 1991, it seemed as if so many gialli — even those based on actual killings — were sadly bloodless.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Ethan (Ethan Randall who would grow up to be Ethan Embry) and Hallie O’Fallon (Thora Birch) want their parents Catherine (Harley Jane Kozak) and Michael (Jamey Sheridan) to get back together. Ethan has a plan, Hallie has Santa Claus (Leslie Nielsen). To keep mom from marrying Tony Boer (Kevin Nealon), it will take mice, an ice cream truck and help from Stephanie (Amy Oberer).

With appearances by Lauren Bacall and Andrea Martin, this was directed by Robert Lieberman (Fire In the Sky) and written by Thom Eberhardt (Sole Survivor, Night of the Comet and the original director for this movie) and Richard Kramer, who has mostly worked in TV.

This feels like The Parent Trap. Maybe the parents aren’t right for each other, you know?

Roger Ebert really disliked this movie, saying “All I want for Christmas is to never see All I Want for Christmas again. Here is a calculating holiday fable that is phony to its very bones — artificial, contrived, illogical, manipulative and stupid. It’s one of those movies that insults your intelligence by assuming you have no memory, no common sense and no knowledge of how people behave when they are not in the grip of an idiotic screenplay.”

Leslie Neilsen was Santa in more movies than I knew. In addition to this movie, he was Santa in Chilly Beach and Santa Who? 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Banmei Takahashi, who, as Sam Panico wrote in his review of the director’s Door for this site,“has a career filled with movies that infuse sex and violence.” I think Door is a terrific thriller, and although Takahashi’s Door II: Tokyo Diary is a sequel in name only (supposedly executives wanted him to change the film’s title after Door found some financial success) and by no means a thriller or horror film, it does serve up plenty of the director’s two aforementioned calling cards. 

There’s no stalker after a housewife here, and no returning characters from Door. Instead, we follow some days in the life of Ai (Chikako Aoyama in an outstanding lead performance), whose name means “love.” She’s a call girl who works on her own, which a madam (Keiko Takahashi) warns her about in a threatening manner. Ai falls for one of her johns, an art dealer (Joe Yamanaka), which leads to certain emotional adventures. There’s plenty of self-reflecting going on in Ai’s mind throughout Door II: Tokyo Diary, which leads to, in my opinion, the film’s two strongest set pieces: a violent encounter with a sadistic john that should have even the most hardened of fear-fare fans feeling squeamish, and a climactic, jaw-dropping speech at the wedding of two mutual friends.

Door II: Tokyo Diary is a highly offbeat drama with some dark overtones, plenty of R-rated–style sexual encounters including a variety of kinks, lots of existential musing about life along with doors and what happens to men once they get behind them, and some poignant musing. Is Ai an empowered young woman or an exploited one? Takahashi’s nicely directed, wonderfully choreographed, and well acted food-for-thought softcore-style drama will have viewers pondering that question.

Door II: Tokyo Diary is available as a bonus feature on the Blu-ray release of Door from Third Window Films as part of its Director’s Company Collection.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of my favorite movies so it’s been on the site a few times. It’s back as the Kino Lorber blu ray release has me really excited. The new special edition blu ray has a commentary track by action film historians Mike Leeder and Arne Venema and a trailer. You can get it from Kino Lorber.

Enter the Ninja is a movie written by the man who stole Priscilla from Elvis, Mike Stone, and who also nearly starred in it before his acting ability supposedly wasn’t good enough for a ninja movie. Luckily, Franco Nero was in the Philippines and Stone was nice enough to remain on set as the fight double for Nero and the fight/stunt coordinator.

That’s right — Django as a ninja. Make that a ninja that cucks his best friend and arrdvarking his wife Susan George and then fighting Sho Kosugi.

If you were wondering why I loved Cannon Films so much, just read that last sentence again.

Cole (Nero) is a soldier who has become a ninja — much like Snake-Eyes in the Marvel comics — before he visits his war buddy Frank Landers and his new wife Mary Ann (Ms. George) who own a giant farm in the Philippines that is threatened by Charles Venarius (Christopher George), whose Venarius Industries wants the oil that’s on their land.

After said cuckolding — Frank had already drunkenly confessed to our hero that he couldn’t life his own katana, so to speak — Venarius’ henchmen kill Frank and kidnap Mary Ann. That means that Cole has to battle his way through all of the many soldiers in his way before battling his old sword brother Hasegawa (Sho Kosugi).

Directed by Menahem Golan, who also gave us The Apple, this is actually the exact kind of movie that I want it to be. Golan said, “It started when Chinese karate films became popular. I looked for something new in Asian martial arts and found information about the ninja culture in an encyclopedia. The ninja were middle-class people in Japan — lawyers, government clerks, etc. It was a secret organization that helped the feudal government. It actually preceded the Chinese karate battles. They used very special methods, developing their sixth sense. That fascinated me and I said I could write story ideas out of it, so we made Enter the Ninja and American Warrior later on. Many imitations followed.”

Actually, Emmett Alston was supposed to be the film’s original director. Supposedly Charles Bronson refused to allow Golan to direct Death Wish II. Alston directed Force of the Ninja and Nine Deaths of the Ninja, which is somehow even better than this.

Also, I know that we got a whole bunch of Kosugi ninja movies, which I love, but man, why did we not get another Franco Nero in karate PJs movie?

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode where they discuss this movie here.