Known as Zong heng tian xia, this was directed by Godfrey Ho and written by one and done screenwriter Herb Borkland. It stars Cynthia Rothrock as FBI agent Tracy Pride, who like many a Rothrock character is hunting an evil banker. She’s also backed up by her sister Joyce (Donna Jason, who was also the film’s assistant director) and their CIA agent father John (Leo Rocca).

It also has a guy named Jake (Chuck Jeffreys) who is supposed to be a Bevery Hills Cop-era Eddie Murphy.

The banker is Jason Slade (John Miller), a banker so evil that he blows off a prayer breakfast with Ronald Reagan.

The sisters get the name of the movie into their dialogue, as Tracy says to Joyce, “I chase honor, you chase glory.” How this wasn’t called Pride and Glory makes no sense.

More movies need to have their title said in the movie because I celebrate it every single time that it happens.

I’m just amazed that Godfrey Ho made an entire movie without taking footage from another movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Cynthia Rothrock holds seven black belts and sashes in Tang Soo Do, Taekwondo, Eagle Claw), Wushu, Northern Shaolin, Ng Ying Kungfu and Pai Lum White Dragon style Kung Fu. She is also an 8th degree black beltr in Tang Soo Do Moo Duk Kwan and in her first 38 tournaments, often competing against men, she took first place in forms 32 times and first place in weapons 12 times.

So beyond being in some pretty fun films, there’s a good chance she can kick your head in.

Richard Norton has studied Judo, Karate, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Aikido, Thai boxing and several Japanese weapons systems, which he worked with Bob Jones to synthesize into a hybrid martial art called Zen Do Kai. He’s also a 5th-Degree Shihan rank Black Belt in Goju Ryu, 8th-Degree Masters rank in Chuck Norris’ Chun Kuk Do, a 5th-Degree Black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and a 10th-degree Black Belt in Zen Do Kai Karate.

So beyond fighting Chuck Norris at the end of The Octagon and acting as his stunt coordinator for the series Walker, Texas Ranger, there’s a good chance he can also kick your head in.

This was not the first time the Rothrock and Norton team had come together, as they appeared in Magic Crystal, Lady Dragon and China O’Brien.

Kris Fairfield (Rothrock) is a teacher who has no problem fighting a gang al by herself when all she wanted to do was use the ATM. Preston Michaels (Norton) is an Australian cop and vacationing bodyguard for the band Skab Faktory who stops a mugging and ends up not only getting arrested, but getting screamed at about jurisdiction by LAPD Captain Murdock (Catherine Bach!).

Meanwhile, music conniseur and industrialist Conrad Drago (Brian Thompson) and his business partner Rita Carrion (Terri Treas, who was in the Alien Nation TV movies) are up to no good and for some reason, come to a martial arts seminar given by Fairfield. As she spars with Michaels, one of her students named Paris Armstrong (Patrick Malone) follow Drago and Carrion to an alley and catch them not only moving weight but also end up killing one of the dirty cops who arrested Michaels just hours ago. He gives away is position and the chase is on.

Paris gets beaten into near-oblivion while Michaels gets blamed for multiple crimes and ony Fairfield can exonerate him. Well, one hopes, but when the police is this corrupt who can say, you know? There’s also a female-centric gang led by Hanna the Hun (Alex Datcher) who go from forcing our leads to fight to being part of their team against Drago and then they decorate their headquarters before the big battle, which I can respect.

Director and writer Terence H. Winkless also made Bloodfist and wrote the script to The Howling. This has no werewoves, but it’s still pretty good.

Directed by Joseph Merhi — oh man, that dude is my new obsession — and writer Stephen Smoke (who also wrote Street Crimes, Living to Die and Magic Kid), Final Impact is the very definition of tickling you with a feather.

See that shirtless Lorenzo Lamas playing kickboxing champion Nick Taylor? Well, Nick is a drunken mess who never recovered from losing his title and his wife to Jake Gerard (Jeff Langton, who often did stunts in movies like Cobra and Road House).

Speaking of his wife Roxy, that’s Mimi Lesseos who I just want to watch do dropkicks and pro wrestling moves in real fight situations instead of just being insulted by a drunken Nick.

So the real story of the movie is Danny Davis (Michael Worth), a young kickboxer from Ohio that has aways idolized Nick, whose life — remember? — is horrible despite having Maggie (Kathleen Kinmont, Kelly Meeker herself!) loving him no matter how horribly he treats her.

A Vegas kickboxing championship is the goal for the whole movie, but then Nick gets the idea that he can still beat Jake, who beats him to the point that he dies in a hospital bed and yeah, you realize that you rented this for Lorenzo Lamas and now he’s dead and having Danny beat Jake is kind of anticlimatic especialy when you realize that he’s probably going to end up horizontally dancing with his hero’s common law widow, but direct to video films are wild and you just roll with the punches. Or kicks.

Also: the best karate fighters in the world are all white. Sure, whatever you say.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When his family is murdered, Johnny (Erik Estrada) gets revenge on the ones who did it — his former biker gang The Slaves and the corrupt cops who lied and claimed Johnny sold out the gang.

So why would I watch this?

Mimi Lesseos.

As Feather, she starts this movie wearing a yellow bikini and strutting down Venice Beach with a boom box to deliver drugs from the aforementioned dirty cops to the biker gang inside a psychic bookstore, who all try and assault her because this is a biker exploitation movie, which goes one further by having her start throwing dropkicks in a street fight and taking the drugs and the cash before saying, “You guys wanted to get fucked? Well, you just did.”

Well, the Slavers need to make this right, so they break into the cop’s house and kill everyone — including Feather, so boo, I’m out of this now — and Johnny decides he needs to leave town until the heat dies down, working in the garage of his friend Hammer (William Smith!) and falling for Anna (Kathrin Lautner), who is taking her daughter Samantha across the country to also start a new life.

Everything is as nice as marrying an ex-con biker on the run in Las Vegas can be until the cops — led by Davis (Armando Silvestre, who was in a ton of awesome Mexican films) come back and shoot up their trailer home, killing both Anna and Samantha, so Johnny and Hammer set the whole thing — loved ones inside — on fire and watch it burn.

Johnny then kills every single Slaver and when we get to the final confrontation with their leader Rico (Angelo Tiffe) and once that guy finds out Johnny is innocent, all is forgiven. Really? What?!?

It ends with this dialogue:

Johnny: Here are my colors, Rico. Burn ’em. And piss on the ashes.

Rico: Stay in the wind, Johnny. In the wind.

I really need to dig deep into the films of PM Entertainment because this movie is wild.

There’s also a long scene where Mimi pro wrestles a dude in the backyard that feels very much like apartment wrestling in Sports Review Wrestling or The Wrestler. There’s also a Greek chorus provided by a Vixen-esque girl group called The Sheilas who comment on the action throughout, including a montage where Estrada throws cops off roofs and sets wrongdoers ablaze, accompanied by flute solos. And the guy Larkin in this movie is played by Gary Groomes, who was pretty much blacklisted from Hollywood after playing Dan Aykroyd in Wired.

Syria-born director Joseph Merhi owned a chain of pizzerias in Las Vegas before directing video store junk — in the best of ways — like L.A. Crackdown, L.A. Heat, L.A. Vice, L.A. Crackdown 2, L.A. Heat the TV series and Midnight Warrior. He co-wrote the script with Ray Garmond and Addison Randall, who wrote some movies I’ll definitely be tracking down like Shotgun, East L.A. Warriors, L.A. Wars and Da Vinci’s War.

Man, L.A. was on fire in the 80s and 90s.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Winterbeast is less of a movie and more of a film that feels like it came from another much darker version of our universe, like a VHS tape that was found in a store and someone played it and it was too much for them and it killed them, then the police found it and it caused a few of them to lose their faith in God and they’re all in a sanitarium somewhere writing all over their faces, then the government got involved and one guy snuck the tape out but his son accidentally returned it to a mom and pop rental shop that rented it out so many times that they started making bootleg copies to keep up with the demand and here we are.

Sergeant Whitman (Tim R. Morgan) and Forest Ranger Stillman (Mike Magri) have just spent the first ten minutes of this movie talking about all the mutilated bodies around the Wild Goose Lodge. Instead of the plot, this is where you’ll start to wonder why Whitman talks so close to everyone. In nearly every scene, nearly every time he talks, he’s within kissing distance of every person he speaks to, a moment topped only when three characters stand shoulder to shoulder, the camera gives a little dutch angle, they all look to the horizon and speak one at a time in a way that can’t be a conversation.

Someone has opened the Native American gate to hell — not to be confused with the traditional Italian gate to hell — and our heroes have to figure out how to put it back together. Standing in their way is Dave Sheldon (Bob Harlow), the owner of the lodge, who is given to red and plaid suits and screaming like a New England skinnier clone of Harvey Fierstein. Then, he goes wild in a scene that really I fear I don’t have the words for, slapping dead women in the face, shoving his digits into their neck wounds, dancing to strange otherworldly music and caressing other dead bodies he’s arranged around the room. It’s a big leap from someone who has been the Mayor Larry Vaughn character up until now to wildly doing some kind of vogue-like dance to “Oh Dear! What Can the Matter Be.”

It took six years, three video formats and ten grand to make this movie or so they say. I don’t think Winterbeast was made. I think it escaped. I can’t explain a movie that has multiple monsters that don’t match — demonic humans, stop motion things out of The Gate, a gigantic chicken that nearly devours Stillman, a murderous totem pole covered in skeletal bodies, a skull bursts out of a man’s chest for no reason, Sheldon wearing a mask and dancing — as well as moments where the camera lingers forever on a chicken coop or someone driving while synth just drones away.

There’s also a moment when the investigation of the box of Native American medicine man Charlie Perkins (Charlie Majka) finds not just a monster tooth, but also a dildo and not a single person mentions it.

Director and writer Christopher Thies made one movie and this is it and it’s so much more than enough. Does he have too much creativity or audacity? And how dare someone name a movie Winterbeast and it takes place in the autumn? Why would you do that? How is there so much plaid in one movie?

You know Evil Dead straight up ripped off Equinox and everyone is too polite to say something about it? This movie gets the stop motion part of those films and then says, “What if we just had a man’s head burst into flames for no reason at all?” Also, there’s a theory that the totem pole and Indian skull were ripped off from Dokken’s “Burning Like a Flame” video, which makes way too much sense.

Nothing in this movie matches. It never seems to end as in every ending there is a new beginning, which feels like a painted sign that someone puts up on their wall as if they have any idea what it means. I can come to you and say that I have no idea what Winterbeast means but also that I loved every single second of it.

It also has music by Michael Perilstein, who scored The Deadly Spawn.

Vinegar Syndrome released this on their Home Grown Horrors Volume One box set along with Fatal Exam and Beyond Dream’s Door, two movies that also push your mind into places it is not ready for.

Based on the novel by Georges Simenon, Betty is, well, about Betty (Marie Trintignant), a young alcoholic woman whose affairs cause her to be removed from her family and not allowed to see her two children. One night in a bar, she meets Laure (Stéphane Audran), who takes her in, gives her a luxury hotel room and the opportunity to tell her story within a series of flashbacks.

The last film that director Claude Chabrol and his former spouse Stéphane Audran (Audran was also married to the father of her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant) made together, it features a character deprived of the love of her husband, used as a womb to create children for a rich family and left to only feel through alcohol and sex. But behind her eyes and those bangs, is she trouble for anyone she comes into contact with?

Is this a realistic story of life? A horror movie without the supernatural? A formless movie with no plot instigated within a 1960s conversation between Simenon and Chabrol? All of those things and more? Watch and see.

Arrow Video’s Lies And Deceit: Five Films By Claude Chabrol collected five high definitions (1080p) blu ray versions of Cop Au Vin and Inspector Lavardin to Madame Bovary, Betty and Torment. Each movie has an introduction by film scholar Joël Magny and select scene commentaries by Chabrol. Additionally, there’s an 80-page collector’s booklet of new writing by film critics Martyn Conterio, Kat Ellinger, Philip Kemp and Sam Wigley, trailers and image galleries for each movie and limited edition packaging with newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella.

Betty has new commentary by critic Kat Ellinger, as well as Betty, from Simenon to Chabrol, a new visual essay by French Cinema historian Ginette Vincendeau and a new interview with Ros Schwartz, the English translator of the Georges Simenon novel on which this movie is based.

You can order this set from MVD.

The Dark Brothers were proud to say that porn was dead and they were here to change it.

They were purveyors of fine filth, as they also claimed.

And they made — well, Gregory Dark — made movies that are fascinatingly unerotic, movies that the mainstream adult industry didn’t understand, that predate the gonzo and internet era, that had the kind of fashion and art direction that wasn’t dated or a soap opera or a parody of a known movie.

And as for Gregory Dark, his life was one of constant reinvention, from earning his MFA from Stanford University, then doing graduate studies in film at New York University, then making a documentary on the adult industry that led to him immersing himself in it, while finding that he could reinvent himself into a whole new person, half of the Dark Brothers, a somehow even darker form of the already shady world of pornography.

Then he realized that there was a market for erotic thrillers that could be sold to video and cable, made for a more female audience, one that nearly always features strong women and feels like giallo, but instead of murder being the driving force, it’s always lovemaking, but incredibly unrealistic, fog-ridden, neon-drenched, sax-blaring sex that challenges the Jacuzzi in Showgirls for gymnastic horizontal dancing. Everyone has a perfect body and a perfect life, but everyone is miserable. Indeed, Dark told The Rialto Report that no one had a happy ending in these movies.

Dark was also counseled by a father figure who was a psyops psychological warfare expert and had a teacher who gave him a voice in his head so critical that he fought himself with every project. So when his adult films were so different that they changed the industry like soap bubbles inside a syringe full of heroin — seriously, listen to that interview The Rialto Report did — slowly but surely making the look, the feel and the madness of his scenes commonplace.

So where would Gregory Dark take mainstream?

Ironically, his films seem to feel like Michael Ninn, who would seem to be the exact opposite of his adult films. He mentioned that he’d consider how Ninn would compose shots and shoot the female form and that comes through in his softcore work.

The story is one as old as Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Emmanuelle. A housewife is bored and strays, but then learns that once she’s become an escort, her fantasy life doesn’t live up to what she’d hoped it would be. That’s simple. What isn’t is the style Dark shows in each scene and yeah, there’s little to no plot, but everyone looks fabulous, like the kind of drawings of humans we’d send to space so aliens would know just how proud we are of our bodies. Between Dalia Sheppard, Michele Brin, Vidal’s daughter Catya Sassoon, Monique Parent, Kelly Royce and Alison Armitage, this movie feels like a Patrick Nagel portrait come to life.

If Andy Sidaris presented us with the light side of free-spirited and innocent sex appeal, of course Gregory Dark must be his reverse. As women sit on lounges combing their hair and relaxing before another love scene, everyone looks absolutely stunning, so ideal that they even wear their high heels to bed but never sleep.

Bonus points for the non-stop voyeur aspect, including a nun that is watching the watching in a continuing motif, and for using Billy Drago as a non-villain character.

David Cole (Maxwell Caulfield) is a cop with married to Joanna (Shannon Whirry), who is frustrated by their sex life, which threatens to end their marriage. Then she finds out that he likes to watch and wants to watch her, so everything seems to go well. But this is an erotic thriller directed by Gregory Dark, so you know that things are going to go wrong.

Based on a real Florida — always Florida — case in which a cop and his wife taped her outcall dalliances with other men for money, this is at once an example of the male gaze and female empowerment through said male gaze, as Joanna finds herself getting exactly what she wants and her husband learns that maybe he just likes looking instead of actually doing anything.

Dark gets his best cast maybe ever — mainstream cast, that is — in this one, with Jan-Michael Vincent, David Carradine, John Saxon and U.S. Olympic athlete Mitch Gaylord (yes, the lead of American Tiger).

This movie casts Carradine as a strip club owner who gets the Coles to help him blackmail Jan-Michael and when the press gets wise, John Saxon, as their lawyer, has a defense that claims that Mrs. Cole became obsessed with carnal crimes because of a prescription drug side effect.

Yes, it’s completely stupid. But how many Cinemax late night movies have you made?