How did it take so long for Greydon Clark and Menahem Golan to work together? Well, their team-up started with The Forbidden Dance and certainly another dance movie had to follow. Originally developed as a sequel to the earlier 21st Century Robert Englund-starring vehicle The Phantom of the Opera — it was called Terror of Manhattan — it was still released in Japan as a follow-up.

This movie is a collection of so many of my movie obsessions. It’s a horror dance academy movie, which makes you want to compare it to Suspiria as much as Etoile. It has Englund seeking another role that isn’t Freddy. It has Josef von Sternberg’s son Nicholas Josef von Sternberg as its cinematographer. It was produced by Harry Alan Towers. And, most of all, it’s a Menahem Golan movie.

At a dance academy outside Saint Petersburg run by crippled Madame Gordenko (Englund!) and staffed by American-born teacher Anthony Wagner (also Englund!) and Olga (Irina Davidoff), a new student by the name of Jessica Anderson (Michelle Zeitlin, who shows up briefly in Showgirls). She struggles through the first class, but Anthony sees something in her, as she looks exactly like his lover Svetlana, a Russian ballerina who was injured in a motorcycle crash and became the twisted Gordenko.

Claudine (Nina Goldman) tries to help her learn the moves, but Jessica is better at dancing to rock music. As Claudine goes to the spa, she’s drowned in a hot tub. Meanwhile, Jessica falls for a photographer named Alex (Alexander Sergeyev) who is sneaking around taking photos and has a cool motorcycle. The rest of the school is a mess, as there’s a girl named Ingrid (Marianna Moen) who stays in the attic dancing non-stop while she does drugs.

While dancing with male dancers the next day, Jessica grabs one of their crotches. This upsets everyone, including Angela (Julene Renee), who walks right into a noose. No one notices. In fact, everyone just decides that anyone who dies has decided to leave the school, like Natasha (Natasha Fesson), who is pushed into the path of a train. And oh yeah — when the students all go to a nightclub, Anthony watches Jessica and Alex kiss — it’s a prelude to him sneaking into the dorms and dancing horizontally with her — and starts crying.

The film then reveals that Gordenko is killing the girls as we watch her launch Ingrid from her attic window. Almost everyone leaves the school as the deaths become too hard to get past. Anthony tells Olga that Jessica is the only good dancer left, so she must represent the academy at an upcoming special audition.

Jessica then catches Alex sneaking into Anthony’s quarters. She tries to find him but Olga finds him first. and then they open a cupboard filled with Claudine and Angela’s bodies. Gordenko appears and stabs Alex, getting away in time for Olga to pull the dagger out and Jessica to see her with the murder weapon, just in time for Anthony to arrive. Oh man, red herrings abound, but Olga accidentally stabs herself and Anthony whispers in her ear, telling her that the secret is safe.

Anthony begins to transform Jessica into his long-dead ballerina girlfriend and she soon learns that he and Gordenko are the same person — Svetlana’s dead body is in the attic — as he drugs her and awakens her just in time to dance for the audition, calling her Svetlana. Yet when she rips off the wig and starts her Flashdance moment, dancing to the music that she wants to perform to, Anthony and Gordenko battle for control of his body. That can only end with Anthony throwing himself off a balcony to save Jessica, telling her as he dies that “You danced for me.”

Wow. This movie is absolutely wild with Englund acting as an old wheelchair bound woman with a voicebox when he isn’t being a lovesick dance instructor. And did Harry Alan Towers love Ten Little Indians plots or what?

When Ginny Grafton (Ami Dolenz) is kidnapped, so the young man who’s been in love with her all through high school — Fraser Sweeney (Stephen Dorff) — teams up with town rebel Daniel “Mac” MacDonald (Michael Dudikoff) to go across the country to rescue her.

Also known as Street Hunter, William Lucking and Peter DeLuise plays the kidnappers, Dee Wallace-Stone plays Fraser’s mom and even Samantha Phillips (Phantasm II) and Kimberley Kates (Chained Heat 2) show up.

The problem for everybody is that Ginny is no kidnapped princess and uses everyone against one another, even running from the kidnappers only to go to a concert and hook up with the lead singer of the band.

This movie can’t figure out whether it’s a coming of age story, an action film or a comedy. It can be all of those things, but it’s not particularly good at any of them. It’s directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman, who also made Hercules In New York. That should tell you what you’re getting into. That said, I enjoy Dudikoff and Dorff, so this movie was watchable thanks to them.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Director and writer Richard Danus only directed this one movie — he wrote a lot for TV, like on Serpico and Star Trek: The Next Generation — and somehow, Cannon got it.

Drew Barrymore plays Tinsel Harvey — this name feels like a porn star’s or a hardboiled detective’s love interest — and when her ballerina sister Pamela (Lydie Denier, who was in plenty of Zalman King movies) dies while dancing, she ends up being protected by Detective Joe Garvey (Kris Kristofferson) from a killer who dresses like a giallo villain. Also, one of the ways he protects her is by leaving her with a wheelchair-pound, hammer-carrying O.J. Simpson.

Yes, really.

Somehow, Martin Landau is also in this and when asked about the movie, he said, “Why would you want to know about that one?” That’s better than Kristofferson, who often acts like he doesn’t even remember making it.

Kane Hodder is in the cast as well.

Also, there’s a Satanic Brotherhood of Thorn underground conducting all of this from behind the scenes and this inches the movie toward the absolutely dumbness that I need and want so badly.

I mean, it kind of makes sense. If the Italian exploitation industry had been around in its full power or if this was 1972, Drew Barrymore had been in enough public scandal — and done Poison Ivy — that Umberto Lenzi would have totally given her Carroll Baker roles. Alas, what could have been.

Seriously, of all the Cannon movies I’ve watched in the second Cannon month, this has to be my favorite. It takes the Enter the Dragon template and then goes absolutely insane with it. All hail Sam Firstenberg, the director of not just this, but Revenge of the Ninja, Ninja III: The Domination, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, American Ninja, Avenging Force and American Ninja 2: The Confrontation, all of which are worth your time.

Actually, this movie takes a lot of inspiration from American Ninja. Andrew Collins (David Bradley, who took over in the American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt) is the only survivor of a plane crash in the Japanese mountains, which is how he gets raised by samurai master Tatsuya Sanga (John Fujiyoka, who fulfills the same role as Shinyuki in American Ninja). Along with Tatsuya’s son Kenjiro (Mark Dacascos, who beyond being the American Chairman on Iron Chef is amazing in everything he has done), he studies the fighting skills of the samurai and surpasses his new stepbrother. He’s given the family sword and that leads Kenjiro to renounce the samurai and joins the Yakuza and swears that one day, he will destroy Andrew.

Ten years later, Andrew is a journalist on the trail of opium smuggling in Turkey. I mean, it becomes personal when someone breaks in and steals his sword, then goons shoot him in the stomach necessitating him reaching into his own belly to pull out the bullet! — but when he gets there, they kidnap Janet Ward (Valarie Trapp) his photographer — and girlfriend, I guess, but he always negs on her so their romance is one of my least favorite things in this — which means Andrew must enter a weapons-based martial-arts tournament that is totally Kumite, but has weapons in it, which makes it so much better. Of course, the champion ends up being Kenjiro and that means that the once brothers must battle one another.

What takes this movie to the levels of insanity that I demand is that the other fighters in this seem like they came from other eras of time, like Eternal Champions or even WMAC Masters, but this is filled with tons of gore. I mean, there’s a guy named Conan who pretty much fights like Conan (Rocky McDonald, who has done stunts in tons of movies like Dead-End Drive-In all the way up to Mad Max: Fury Road), the singlet-wearing spear-using McKinney (Ron Vreeken), a big dumb American dude with a knife who is totally not Donald Gibb, a pirate, a Viking and so much more. Even better, people are killed and one scene and totally come back in the next, making me think that yes, this is very much a video game world.

This is the only movie that John Corcoran ever wrote — the Pittsburgh native was an editor of several magazines (Black Belt, Professional Karate, Inside Kung Fu, KICK Illustrated, Martial Arts Professional, The Fighter International and Martial Arts Success), was the first-ever PKA events coordinator and co-founded the STAR System World Kickboxing Ratings with Paul Maslak — but man, he did it. Please check this one out. More people need to be talking about this.

Jake Wyer (Peter Weller) and Sam French (Robert Hays) are mercenaries who have been recruited by CIA agent Martin (director Charles Martin Smith) to overthrow a power-mad Tenggaran dictator named Bosavi (Dom Magwili).

Weller and Hays were not the first actors picked for the film, as originally this was a Chuck Norris and Michael Dudikoff team-up, then a film that would either team Sylvester Stallone with Kurt Russell or Eddie Murphy.

This was director Charles Martin Smith’s follow-up to Trick or Treat (he also made Air Bud and Dolphin Tale) and he was working from a script by Dennis Shryack (Hero and the Terror, The Car) and Michael Butler (The Gauntlet, The Don Is Dead).

Somehow, even in the 90s, this movie is way down on the way the CIA gets involved around the world. And sure, it’s a Cannon action movie — Weller blows up some sharks with a rocket launcher — but death and politics are treated with the darkness that they deserve. It’s an interesting film and I can’t imagine what it would have been like as a straight action movie.

Weller and Hayes had both kind of been stars by this point, so this is a weird movie for them to get involved in. It also has no relation to the Boaz Davidson movie Fifty Fifty. I just imagine Yoram liked that term a lot.

A remake of director Gary Graver’s 1984 adult film Trinity Brown, which starred John Leslie and Sharon Kelly — and had Jamie Gillis and Robert Kerman in the cast — Roots of Evil starts with Brenda (Jillian Kesner, who is in one of my favorite movies, Firecracker) and Jake (Alex Cord, Chosen Survivors) looking for Johnny Malone (Randall Brady), who is their top suspect in the death of mob boss Tony (Paul Grayber). However, he claims that he spent the night with scream queen Candy, played by real-life scream queen Brinke Stevens as an alibi, but the truth is that he’s kidnapped her kid. Or maybe she had a relationship with Tony’s wife Marissa (Deanna Lund, the mom from Elves!) and they both wanted him out of the way. I mean, somehow they need to work a girl on girl love scene into this movie so we can watch it on Friday at 2:07 AM on Cinemax, right? It also helps that Jewel Shepard and Donna Spangler (Hugs Huggins from Guns!) are in this too.

Getting away from the remake of that aforementioned XXX movie, this adds a subplot where a serial killer is taking out strippers and sex workers. Using a prostitute named Monica (Delia Sheppard) as bait, the cops try and find out who is doing all the slashing.

Jake may be more messed up than the criminals he’s arresting, because a decade ago someone shot his wife and blasted her and their kid through a plate glass window, so all he does is drink in strip clubs when he isn’t sleeping with his partner or remembering that he once dated Brinke Stevens, which doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that you forget.

Everyone in this movie is quite dumb and that’s how we want them. There’s also a cut and uncut version. I have no idea if you’ve already decided to watch a softcore cop movie why you’d want to see anything trimmed out, but you do things your way.

At this stage in their near-death, Cannon Films had become the world’s biggest importer of South African karate movies. This is the sequel to American Kickboxer — and not American Kickboxer 2 because why should that makes sense — and has John Barrett return as Quinn, whose name has changed from Robert to Rick. Only I care about this.

Michael Qissi has taken over for Brad Morris as Jacques Denard, the kickboxer who nearly destroyed Rick’s life back in the first movie. Ted Le Plat also is back as Willard, the caustic reporter whose entire beat is kickboxing, kind of like Matt Brock back in the kayfabe days of Pro Wrestling Illustrated.

Denard wants a fight for the belt so badly — Rick is happily retired with his pregnant wife Carol (Claudia Udy-Harris instead of Terry Norton) — that he comes to his home and needs to be warned off with the very with child Carol with a very loaded gun.

But he’s not the only one that wants Rick to start doing spin kicks again. Dominique Le Braque (Robert Whitehead) has an underground kickboxing club. Rick wants nothing to do with it, so Le Bradque takes Carol off the board with a car bomb Newt and Hicks style, negating the romantic journey they made — come on, this is a kickboxing movie, but go with me on this I guess — in American Kickboxer. Rick goes on a bender, as he does, and ends up attacking Denard, who put him in prison — yes, this movie has a lot connecting it to the first one — years ago and back to jail he goes.

Le Braque bails out Rick, puts him up at his home and then Rick learns the shocking secret of this kickboxing group: losers get shot in the head. Rick wants out of things, but he’s trapped, so he starts cucking Le Braque by going from the four corners of the ring to the four posts of the bed with the bad guy’s wife Angelica (Michele Bestbier). Le Braque retaliates by bringing in Denard as Rick’s opponent, but the two resolve their differences, kick everyone really hard and Angelica shoots her husband and gets away with it because the rich live under rules that don’t apply to the unwashed masses.

Director Darrell Roodt made the first South African anti-apartheid movie, Place of Weeping, as well as the very well-reviewed movie Serafina! Somehow, he followed that with this and people were confused because critics never really realize that artists need to eat. He’s done that throughout his career, making movies like Winnie Mandela and Little One as well as Lake Placid: The Legacy and Father Hood. His directing resume is a lot like Cannon’s releases: all over the place.

While he was starring on Beverly Hills 90210, Luke Perry was also in a few movies, some well-known like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, well, this film.

In Terminal Bliss, he plays a rich kid named John who treats everyone like garbage, such as reacting to his friend Alex (Timothy Owen) falling for Stevie (Estee Chandler; this was her last acting role and she went into visual effects afterward) by hooking her on cocaine and getting her pregnant. Yes, Perry was trying to break out of his teen heartthrob role by playing a jerk. He tops that by assaulting Stevie’s sister, so when the threesome heads off to a rich cabin in the woods, everyone just watches him drown because this is a lighthearted romp.

You can also spot Alexis Arquette as a drug dealer, acid head and someone who should slow down when she eats lobster.

Director and writer Jordan Alan shot the proof of concept trailer for this movie at the age of 17 and directed this at the age of 25.

I’m certain that this was rented many, many times by fans of Luke Perry, who were confronted by its almost oppressive levels of depression.

Also known as Over the Line, this late Cannon movie was directed by Robert Barrett, who is really Roberto D’Ettorre Piazzoli, the cinematographer of Beyond the Door, Tentacles and many many more, joined by the director of so many of those movies, Ovidio G. Assonitis, who had become the second major stockholder chairman and CEO of Cannon Pictures Inc.

Elaine Patterson (Lesley-Anne Down) is a teacher at a prison outreach program who ends up having a conjugal visit with one of her jailhouse pupils, Dial (John Enos III). She breaks things off when they get too intense; his ex-girlfriend Kandi (Lady B. Pearl) raps about the pain of losing him; he goes after Elaine for shutting down the road to Pound Town.

When Tomas Arana and Michael Parks are both in your movie, you’re doing things right. I mean, this is the kind of movie you’d watch scrambled on Cinemax in the early 90s or sneak rent at a mom and pop shop when you’re too young to walk in the double doors into the dirty side of video rental.

Written by William Clark and Fabio Piccioni (Murder Syndrome), this is a movie that dares to have a scene where Lesley-Anne Down writes “I will prevail” in the sand after all she’s been through. Perhaps we should wonder why she — in a position of power as a teacher — can seemingly be the heroine despite having an inappropriate relationship with one of her students. Ah, 1992, life was simpler and sleazier then.

Seattle policeman and mullet enthusiast Cliff Garret (Chuck Norris) is wounded in a drug bust gone sour and the worst part is that it was his corrupt partner Ronny Delany (Michael Parks) who shot him. And then, he dies but comes back on the operating table. The police cover up his death and he gets a new identity, hitman Danny Grogan, and a new job, getting into the crime family of Marco Luganni (Al Waxman).

Grogan was planning to go all Raw Deal on two gangs — Luganni’s and the French Canadian gang led by André LaCombe (Marcel Sabourin) — but then Iranian drug dealers — oh man, doubling up on Chuck’s two worst enemies in one evil package! — start killing everyone. Meanwhile, our hero is mentoring a young black kid named Tim Murphy (Salim Grant) and teaching him to fight racist bullies, but that ends up getting the kid tied to a chair bomb when Delaney shows up working for Luganni and the Iranians at the same time.

Originally intended for Charles Bronson — who would have worked much better in the role, as Norris isn’t really made for being a bad guy — this was directed by Chuck’s brother Aaron and written by Robert Geoffrion (The Surrogate), Don Carmondy (who directed and co-wrote that very same movie) and Galen Thompson, who wrote Sidekicks, Hellbound and Superstition under the name Donald G. Thompson, this is a movie that at one point wants to be a violent mob story and then also wants to be a tender movie where Chuck bonds with a kid. Can it be both? Kinda.