Somehow, I got this far into a month of erotic thrillers without doing a Gregory Dark movie. Well, as it is, I’m close to seeing all of his non-adult films. And yes, you know, I’ve seen all of the Dark Brothers movies and wish someone was willing to unleash a 4K of one of them. Today is not about dreams, however. It’s all about Animal Instincts.

Joanna (Shannon Whirry; Entertainment Weekly referred to Whirry and Dark as “the Dietrich and Von Sternberg of the soft-core set”) is in a sexless marriage with police officer David Cole (Maxwell Caulfield). They love each other, but he can’t get it up, and seeing as how he’s married to Shannon Whirry, he really should see a doctor. She ends up sleeping with the guy who comes to fix their cable. He watches — trivia note, Paul Vatelli’s I Like to Watch was the first adult movie I ever saw — she gets it on. Soon, he’s as hard as Chinese algebra, ready to doodle-bop, crush guts, play Chesterfield rugby and bend her over a barrel and show her all fifty states.

The problem is that they start inviting all sorts of men—and women—Delia Sheppard needs something to do, right—over and the mob, in the form of William (David Carradine), finds out and tries to use them to get some scandal leverage on politician Fletcher Ross (Jan-Michael Vincent). I love it when a suburban romance turns into sleaze and this movie knows exactly the kind of movie it should be. Plus, as gorgeous as Whirry is, she also knows how to act, as does most of the cast, which puts this above the normal saxophone sex scene slapdash sinema.

Did I cast this movie? It has Mitch Gaylord from American Rickshaw and John Saxon in it. Yes, if you want to connect actors, you can use Gregory Dark to link John Saxon to Brittany Spears, Madison Stone, Jamie Gillis and WWE superstar—and now right-wing mayor—Kane.

Dark doesn’t stray much from his adult movies, as Kelly Royce appears. The same year, he’d make Mirror Images, Secret Games, Night Rhythms and just one XXX movie, The Creasemaster. Did I even have to look up that it starred Tiffany Mynx on IMDB? No, of course I didn’t. And man, Erika Nann is in Animal Instincts, and she makes any movie better, such as her role as the queen in Legion of Iron.

Written by Georges des Esseintes and Jon Robert Samsel, who worked with Dark several times, this was shot by Wally Pfister, who would go on to work with Christopher Nolan on Memento and Inception, as well as shoot the movies I’m more into: Amityville: A New Generation and The Unborn.

I want to call out Radio Times for talking down on this, saying, “Director Gregory Hippolyte, who became one of the genre’s leading directors, presents the many couplings with some panache, but he can’t hide the fact that this is really just Emmanuelle for the 1990s.” Come on. This has nothing to do with the plot of this movie,e and this review came directly from someone who didn’t know a single thing about erotic thrillers and just needed one to relate it to. Do your research. Your one-handed research.

There are all kinds of sex symbols, but for boys who grew up in the 80s and 90s, erotic thrillers gave us a secret world of actresses who boiled our barely contained passions. Shannon Tweed. Shannon Wirry. Monique Parent. Yes, I realize the genre contains actresses like Glenn Close, Meg Ryan and Linda Fiorentino, but we’re not talking about the big-budget films. We’re talking about Cinemax After Dark, USA Up All Night, and the boxes in the video store that said “must be 18 to rent,” yet weren’t in the back room.

When I think of Sally Kirkland, I often associate her with high-end cinema, given her Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead, not to mention her Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for Anna. However, her roles in Fatal Games, Best of the Best and Two Evil Eyes remind me that she’s not confined to a single genre. So, when she graces an erotic thriller, it’s not a shock, but it does add a surprising twist to her versatile career.

The Schlock Pit, always a go-to reference, has an interview with her where she claims, “I love In the Heat of Passion. If somebody were strategizing my career, they probably wouldn’t have let me do it. But I’m very proud of that film. A lot of people would have said, “She made a lot of wrong choices,” thinking that I should have continued to do Anna (1987)-type films and wondering why I was doing this B film but I owed Roger Corman so much. I owed him a favor. Roger asked me to do In the Heat of Passion and I’d grown up with him. He taught me — I was a casting director for him and his wife Julie back in the late ’60s and ’70s, and then he had mentored me on producing. He mentored me from day one and I’m godmother to his oldest daughter, so, yeah, it was a payback… Roger paid me well and, as you know, Roger doesn’t pay. So to get paid well by Roger was really something.”

Kirkland is therapist Lee Adams, who falls for an actor named — of all things — Charlie Bronson (Nick Corri, who is also Jsu Garcia), an actor who is currently doing oil changes. While not dipping his stick into Kirkland, he’s acting on a crime show called Crimebusters. Soon, her husband Sanford (Michael Greene) is accidentally dead at his hands, and the role Charlie’s been playing, a Night Stalker-styled serial killer, is still at large. As you can start to put together, Adams may know who that masked murderer is and use him and Charlie to get what she wants.

This was released as an R-rated movie in theaters — a rarity for erotic thrillers not made with a vast bankroll — before being released on video unrated and with two very suggestive oral sex scenes. Also, if you ever wanted to see Sally Kirkland’s iced gems, good news. They’re all over this movie. But you know, show some respect. She was nearly fifty and could sexually outshine young actresses through her attitude and talent.

Also: Yes, that is Lisa Kudrow in a small role.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Back when they were child chess prodigies, David Willerman (Charles Bailey-Gates) and Peter Sanderson (Christopher Lambert) had a significant match. This match, which ended with Peter victorious and David stabbing him with a pen, had a profound impact on both their lives. It led to Peter’s father leaving and his mother committing suicide, and David’s obsession with his chess board, which he kept in the group homes and orphanages he grew up in.

When Peter grows up, he ascends to the status of a chess grandmaster and becomes a widower, left to raise his daughter, Erica (Katharine Isabelle), alone. The plot thickens when his latest lover, Debi (Kehli O’Byrne, Ginger Snaps), is discovered dead. The police, led by Police Captain Frank Sedman (Tom Skeritt), Detective Andy Wagner (Daniel Baldwin), and psychologist Kathy Sheppard (Diane Lane), launch an investigation, with Peter as the prime suspect. However, the mystery deepens as David, the potential missing link, enters the picture.

Directed by Swiss-born Carl Schenkel and written by Brad Mirman (Body of Evidence), this film, a part of the Giallo genre, features all of Peter’s lovers showing up with their faces painted like clowns and drained of blood. It also takes a page out of The Cat o’ Nine Tails by having Peter’s daughter Erica being best friends with his blind coach, who is played by Ferdy Maine (the devil from Night Train to Terror).

I always wonder how the Giallo police work. In this example, Sheppard goes from psychoanalyzing Peter to being a skewered queen. See, I can make sex jokes about anything! But seriously, defund the Giallo police. Sleeping with a suspect? Well, they were married in real life at the time.

It’s not the best Giallo-adjacent movie I’ve seen, but it’s not the worst. I did like how excited Lambert was when he won at Battle Chess.

You can watch this on YouTube.

When you see the phrases neo-noir or erotic thriller, read them as Giallo. Isn’t that what it all is, anyway? And who thought that one day, we’d have Jim Belushi as the protagonist of a psychosexual murder movie?

Director Andy Wolk would one day make The Christmas Shoes, but for now, he’s putting this together from a script by Jim Piddock, who has been in a lot of Christopher Guest’s films as an actor but wrote this and two episodes of Silk Stalkings before being the writer of Tooth Fairy.

Belushi is Jack Dobson, a Palm Beach homicide cop who we initially find flat on his back, dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. His narration takes us back to one evening that shows off just how smooth Jack is, defending a waitress from a rude customer and then immediately taking her back to his place, where he plays some smooth jazz before waking her up to coffee in bed. This movie wants you to know two things: Belushi fucks. And Belushi fucks good.

Along with his partner, Detective Steve Frayn (Tony Goldwyn), Jack is trying to figure out who is sending him lipstick-sealed threats. Is it meant for his brother Michael (William Russ), who is running for office? And is Jack so on the make that he’s willing to potentially sleep with his brother’s wife, Susan (Victoria Bass), his partner’s wife, Beth (Faye Grant), and definitely get horizontal and Belushi-sweaty with femme fatale Ellen Schofield (Lorraine Bracco)? This movie also wants you to know that every old man in Palm Beach has a filthy mouth, and they all have something to say about how badly they want to schtup Ellen, even if she rode her last husband into a heart attack.

Ellen also sleeps with Steve, even though Steve loves his wife. Everybody is getting with everybody in Palm Beach, which may as well be Rome. Women connected to Jack keep dying, their faces covered with lipstick — yay, Traces of Red! — which his brother reveals is something his first-grade teacher used to do to him before she would rape him. This is a wild departure for the Giallo, not just making its male protagonist vulnerable but seemingly switching him to the villain.

Or maybe not.

Despite being shot by his partner — it looked like he was about to choke out Steve’s wife — it’s soon revealed that the big brother was the one doing all the killing. And hey! There’s Belushi, looking like he just smoked one of his weed strains like Oreoz — they’re from the streets — or Rewrite. His brother grabs his gun and blows his brains out, ending on a downer note.

Despite being in theaters for a few days, this did big business on home video. Maybe it’s because Belushi wore all his own ties, and people recognized him not just as a fuckable prince of a man but as a sartorial style icon. You know, we should be nicer to him. And by that, I should be nicer to him. For all the horrible things on Twitter, I’ve learned that he’s a pretty chill person — growing all that weed will do that — and the more I think about it, the more good roles in movies by great directors he’s been in. He may need a Tarantino casting intervention so that he can complete this late-career reevaluation.

So yeah. Belushi in a Giallo, complete with an investigation into a misworking printer and trying to figure out a shade of lipstick and a certain perfume. Who knew?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Yes, I did watch Body Chemistry 3 and then Body Chemistry 2, while never seeing the first movie, in which Dr. Claire Archer (Lisa Pescia) teaches a man named Tom (Marc Singer) what it’s like to go from The Beastmaster to The Beastbottom. Sure, she’s cosplaying as Alex Forrest, but this is a cheap Concorde cash-in, and you may already know how much I love those.

Pescia returned as the good doctor for the second film and became a radio show host in a small southwestern town. She’s here to replace shock psychologist jock Dr. Edwards (John Landis), who fights with every caller. Her boss? Big Chuck (Morton Downey Jr.). And her real goal? I want to get with former LAPD officer Dan Pearson (Gregory Harrison, former Dr. Gonzo Gates on Trapper John M.D.) despite him reconnecting with high school love Brenda (Robin Riker, Alligator). He’s keeping a secret that he’s been kicked off the most violent police force in the world because he was too brutal, as well as the fact that he was sexually assaulted as a child — or maybe he just saw his dad treating a woman like he was Rocco Siffredi — which makes him crave rough sex as an adult. Are you coming to an erotic thriller for an authentic examination of how people are imprinted with their sexual desires? Or are you here to see bare breasts? Good news. American Emmanuelle Monique Gabrielle shows up and shows out.

For the ladies? Clint Howard as a criminal and Jeremy Piven as a small-town police officer.

Director Adam Simon almost made the first film but chose Brain Dead instead. He also directed Carnosaur and created the TV show Salem. The script was written by Jack Canson (who used the same stage name, Jackson Barr, to write the first movie, Subspecies, Trancers II, Bad Channels and Mandroid) and Christopher Wooden (Kiss Me a Killer, Dinosaur Island).

Why should you spend time watching this? Former “Zip it!” talk show host Downey Jr. is handcuffed, forced to wear a wig and forcibly taken against the glass of a radio studio until he has a heart attack. I didn’t see that one coming.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Tim Burton didn’t want to make a sequel, but he agreed to return in exchange for creative control, which meant he got to change up the script by Sam Hamm and Daniel Waters, with Wesley Strick rewriting things to establish what the Penguin’s plan was. While this was a big success, it wasn’t at the level of Batman and that may be because of how dark, sexual and violent is became, which is one of the reasons why I like it so much.

It’s also totally a Christmas movie.

Unlike Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton), whose rich parents loved him, the Penguin is born to Tucker (Paul Reubens) and Esther Cobblepot (Diane Salinger), who despite giving him the name Oliver (Danny DeVito) treat him like more an animal than a child. They dump him into the sewer, where he is raised by penguins. Yes, this really happens.

His Red Triangle gang kidnap rich man Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) and force him to work alongside his plan to take over Gotham City. It starts by kidnapping the mayor’s son and rescuing him, making the Penguin a hero. As for Schreck, he’s been planning to steal all of Gotham’s electricity, a plan that his secretary Selena Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer) learns about and is shoved out a window to her death. Well, it would have been her death, but she’s brought back from the dead by alley cats. Yes, again, really.

Bruce Wayne, being Batman, ends up fighting Penguin, Catwoman and Schreck, all while as Bruce he falls for Selena. This all sounds too ordinary for what the movie has happen, because this has so many wild ideas and actors in it, like the Red Triangle gang being made up of Organ Grinder (Vincent Schiavelli), the Poodle Lady (Anna Katarina), the Tattooed Strongman (Rick Zumwalt, Bull Hurley!), the Sword Swallower (John Strong), the Fat Clown (Travis Mckenna), the Thin Clown (Doug Jones), the Knifethrower Dame (Erika Andersch), the Acrobatic Thug (Gregory Scott Cummins) and the Terrifying Clown (Branscombe Richmond). There were even plans for a black Robin, to be played by Marlon Wayans, to the point that even toys were designed.

Everyone in this is a shadow of Bruce Wayne: Selena may be “the same, split right down the center” but she wants vengeance instead of justice; Penguin was born rich as a freak but Bruce became one; Schreck is the rich villain that Bruce could have been. Catwoman embraces her sexuality by covering herself in leather and embracing a BDSM-coded whip; even at the end, she chooses solitude instead of love with Bruce, as he’d be just another man dominating her. She’s content to see his Batsignal in the night and know that he’s close.

This is also a Christmas movie that hates the holiday; a cash-in sequel that hates that fact as well as merchandising, despite having a toyline out in stores in time for its release. It feels like a movie that took chances, back when superhero movies had no rules or template. Compared to the next few Batman movies after, it felt so right, so perfect and still feels that way today.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

I don’t know if I can explain the seismic shift in my film consciousness before and after Reservoir Dogs. Sure, I’d been obsessed by the grimy crime movies of America and the kinetic gunplay of movies in Hong Kong, but I had yet to delve into the worlds of poliziotteschi. I did not know how important the Shaw Brothers were. I knew the films of regional and direct to video filmmakers mattered to me, yet I was certain they were worthless to nearly everyone else. The films of video store educated Quentin Tarantino changed all that.

Today’s viewers have grown to live in a world where Tarantino is available for acerbic interview, to weigh in on what movies matter and to create controversial films yet ones that endure. Yet in 1992, this did not exist. He existed, but he was a different Tarantino. He was about to go from someone working to being a filmmaker to someone the world would pay attention to.

Tarantino was working at Manhattan Beach, California video store Video Archives, a video staffed by film experts like Tarantino, Roger Avary and Daniel Snyder, all of whom would make movies someday. When the store closed four years after this movie came out, Tarantino had grown so powerful that he could buy its inventory and remake it inside his house.

The original plan was to make this movie with friends for $30,000 in black and white 16mm. Producer Lawrence Bender was to play a cop chasing one of the gang’s members, Mr. Pink, but when he gave the script to his acting teacher, that teacher’s wife gave it to Harvey Keitel who became a producer, raising $1.5 million in funds and casting the movie in New York City, where they found a different cast than they’d have in Hollywood. Director Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop, Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!) also helped by cleaning up the screenplay and securing from Live Entertainment (which is now Lionsgate, who released this 4K UHD). He was originally picked to direct but Tarantino lobbied hard to make this. As a result, Hellman was the executive producer.

Even in his first major film, Tarantino was smart enough to not make a traditional story. We never see the actual robbery, only the aftermath. Some of that decision is budgetary. Yet it works, as the story is less about what has happened instead of what happens.

He was also smart about who he cast as his characters. Each is named for a color — taken from The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three but then again, the entire story could be said to be stolen from Ringo Lam’s City On Fire — with Keitel’s Mr. White as the main character, if there can be one, the one that we’re supposed to identify with. Tim Roth is Mr. Orange, a man with a secret. Michael Madsen is the sociopathic Mr. Blonde (also Vic Vega, the brother of Pulp Fiction‘s Vincent Vega, as well an inside joke as Madsen is the real-life cousin of musicians Tim and Suzanne Vega). Mr. Pink is Steve Buscemi, while Tarantino himself appears briefly as Mr. Brown and Edward Bunker is Mr. Blue. While both are killed in the heist, Bunker informed so much of this film, as he was a real-life convict turned writer and actor, appearing in movies he wrote like Straight Time, Runaway Train and Animal Factory. Beyond the gang, other actors include Chris Penn as Nice Guy Eddie, Randy Brooks as Holdaway, Kirk Baltz as police officer Marvin Nash and in real life maniac Lawrence Tierney as the boss who gets the gang together — and memorably names them — Joe Cabot. Steven Wright, who never physically appears, is a character himself as the DJ whose voice moves the tale forward.

After a diner scene that sets up each character — but mainly allows Tarantino the opportunity to unleash his pop culture heavy dialogue, mostly about Madonna — we catch up on a heist goen wrong. Orange has been shot and White is trying to save him. They meet Pink in one of Joe’s warehouses and everyone is sure the job was a set-up before Blonde went nuts and just started killing people. An argument over running with the diamonds or helping Orange ends with guns drawn. Then Blonde arrives with Marvin Nash, a cop that they all take turns beating.

Blonde waits until the others leave before the infamous “Stuck In the Middle With You” scene in which he attacks the man with a razor and slices his ear off. When this played Sitges Film Festival, Rick Baker and Wes Craven — of all people — walked out during this scene. Tarantino would say, at the time, “It happens at every single screening. For some people the violence, or the rudeness of the language, is a mountain they can’t climb. That’s OK. It’s not their cup of tea. But I am affecting them. I wanted that scene to be disturbing.”

Tarantino also said, “I can’t believe the guy who directed Last House on The Left walked out of Reservoir Dogs“. Craven replied, “Last House was about the evils and horrors of violence, it did not mean to glorify it. This movie glorifies it.” Yet another in my large list of reasons why I think Wes Craven is overrated.

But I digress.

What follows is death, more death, betrayal, Mexican standoffs and an ending that cements that this filmmaker may not be a force yet, but he was only getting started.

For what it’s worth, Bunker told Empire magazine that this was all pretty unrealistic. He would never pull a job with five people he didn’t know. He also said that they’d never dress up and eat a meal together before a crime, giving people something to remember when they heard about their crime. He had also met Tierney before before, as they had a fistfight in a parking lot in the 50s. Tierney didn’t remember that, but if he remembered every fistfight he was ever in, he’d be overwhelmed.

My favorite thing is that Tierney was literally Mr. Blonde for the cast. Everyone had a difficult time with him because he was easily distracted and kept forgetting his lines. On the second day, he’d arrived directly from a bail hearing as he’d threatened to kill his nephew. Finally, Quentin fired him on the third day of filming. The line where White asks Pink, “I need you cool. Are you cool?” is a real line Tarantino said to Tierney after he got in a fight with Madsen and was holding up shooting. Tarantino rehired the actor, who went drinking afterward and ended up firing a gun into the walls of his Hollywood apartment later that night. He spent the weekend in jail only to be bailed out by his agent so that he could finish the film. These may all be carny BS stories, but when you lived the life that Tierney did, these stories end up getting told.

This is the kind of movie that I find myself watching every few years to remind myself just how good it is. The most amazing thing is that Tarantino’s films would get so much better.

Robert Rodriguez’s 1993 debut El Mariachi was filmed for only $7,000 and has a naive young musician being caught in a deadly case of mistaken identity. It made the director’s career and allowed him to expand the universe in two sequels, which are featured on this Arrow Video box set.

El Mariachi (1992): Made for $7,225,  the original goal for this movie was a Mexico home video release. Columbia Pictures liked the film and bought the American distribution rights, putting $200,000 into the budget to transfer the print to film, remix the sound, and market the film.

El Mariachi (Carlos Gallardo) has come to a border town to be a performer like his father. His guitar case holds, well, a guitar. The problem is that it gets confused with the guitar case full of gun carried by Azul (Reinol Martínez), who is coming to kill a drug lord named Moco (Peter Marquardt).

The guitar player has fallen for the gorgeous Dominó (Consuelo Gómez), a bartender and lover of Moco, who herself is in love with Azul. The multiple twists and identity issues will bring all of them together, ending in blood and bullets.

El Mariachi has been deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, who said that it “helped usher in the independent movie boom of the early 1990s.” I love how they describe the way that Rodriguez was able to combine genres to create his movie, saying that it merged “the narcotraficante film, a Mexican police genre, and the transnational warrior-action film, itself rooted in Hollywood Westerns.”

It was only the start of the creator’s career.

Desperado (1995): Steve Buscemi tells the story of El Mariachi in a bar, about how a musician with a guitar case filled with guns was out for revenge before waking up the person he’s been telling everyone about. He has a target for revenge, Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida), who he blames for killing his lover.

Helped by a bookstore owner named Carolina (Salma Hayek), but is nearly killed by Navajas (Danny Trejos), a hitman sent by the Columbians who is soon accidentally killed by Bucho’s men. El Mariachi, in love with Carolina and wanting to protect her, calls in his friends Campa (original El Mariachi Carlos Gallardo) and Quino (Albert Michel Jr.), who kill most of Bucho’s henchmen before discovering that the drug dealer and El Mariachi are brothers.

He gives the dark hero a choice: he can live, if he allows the bad guy to kill his lover. Of course that’s not going to happen.

With small roles for Quentin Tarantino and Cheech Marin, this movie had critic Janet Maslin writing, “Overdependence on violence also marginalizes Desperado as a gun-slinging novelty item, instead of the broader effort toward which this talented young director might have aspired.” A lot of people were upset about the violence and thought it was keeping Rodriguez from being the success that he could be.

As for fans of action movies, they had found the perfect union of modern movies and Italian Western sensibilities in Rodriguez. He still did it on a budget — a thousand times what he spent the first time, but less than Hollywood usually spends — which led Banderas to say, “It was crazy. We did a movie with practically no money. We did a movie with $3 million. For an action movie, that’s practically nothing. There was a guy in the movie, a stunt guy, that I kill, like, nine times. I killed the guy with beard, without a beard, with a mustache, with blond hair, with glasses, without glasses. I mean, I think the guy who made the most money in the movie, was the stunt guy.”

Once Upon a Time In Mexico (2003): A lot has happened since the last movie. El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas) and his wife Carolina (Salma Hayek) had a battle against General Emiliano Marquez (Gerardo Vigil) that ended up with him eventually killing her and their daughter. Now, Marquez is working for drug boss Armando Barillo (Willem Dafoe) to kill the President of Mexico.

CIA officer Sheldon Jeffrey Sands (Johnny Depp) gets El Mariachi and FBI agent Jorge Ramirez (Rubén Blades), whose partner Archuleta was killed by Barillo, along with AFN operative Ajedrez (Eva Mendez) to stop the drug kingpin.

There’s also a plan to use Billy Chambers’ (Mickey Rourke) chihuahua to record Barillo, Danny Trejo as another henchman in a Rodriguez movie, El Mariachi’s friends Lorenzo (Enrique Iglesias) and Fideo (Marco Leonardi) coming to help, Sands having his eyes drilled out but still being a killing machine and Rodriguez making his version of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which upset some as El Mariachi becomes a minor character in a movie most figured would make him the star.

Roger Ebert understood, as he said, “Like Leone’s movie, the Rodriguez epic is more interested in the moment, in great shots, in surprises and ironic reversals and closeups of sweaty faces, than in a coherent story.”

It’s a big mess, but I mean that in the greatest of ways. It’s also the first of many movies that Rodriguez shot digitally, which allowed him to do things on budget despite the challenges of trying to get so many FX shots and even not having real guns for the first two weeks of shooting.

The Arrow Video set includes high definition blu ray presentations of all three films and a 4K UHD version of Desperado. It has an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Carlos Aguilar and Nicholas Clement, reversible sleeves featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Paul Shipper, double sided posters featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Paul Shipper and a collectible poster featuring Robert Rodriguez’s original poster concept for El Mariachi.

El Mariachi has commentary and a new interview with Rodriguez; an interview with Carlos Gallardo; The Music of El Mariachi, a newly produced featurette on the music in the film, featuring interviews with composers Eric Guthrie, Chris Knudson, Alvaro Rodriguez and Marc Trujillo; Ten Minute Film School; Bedhead, a short from the director; the trailer and a TV commercials.

Desperado has commentary and a new interview with Rodriguez; Rodriguez; interviews with producer Bill Borden, stunt coordinator Steve Davison and special effects coordinator Bob Shelley; Game Changer, a newly filmed appreciation by filmmaker Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption); Ten More Minutes: Anatomy of a Shootout, an archive featurette narrated by Rodriguez; a textless opening and trailers.

Once Upon a Time In Mexico has commentary and a new interview with Rodriguez, an interview with visual effects editor Ethan Maniquis; deleted scenes; Ten Minute Flick School, Inside Troublemaker Studios, Ten Minute Cooking School, Film is Dead: An Evening with Robert Rodriguez, a presentation by the director given in 2003; features on the Mariachi’s arc and KNB FX and trailers.

You can get this from MVD.

To save the Hong Kong Police Force’s Banshee Squad — now led by Madame Lee (Moon Lee) — from being closed down and replaced. The answer might just be the brutal training methods of Madame Yang (Cynthia Khan) and support from retired officers Amy (Sandra Ng Kwan Yue) and May (Kara Hui).

The problem? Amy is a single mother who doesn’t have much time to be a police officer and May is in a mental hospital after a big fall gave her mental problems. Of course it all comes together, just in time for the police commissioner’s son to get kidnapped and terrorists to take over his school, which is just the typical story at the last minute this series does best, all so Moon Lee and Cynthia Khan can have a boss fight against Jeong-il Choi.

Rocket shoes, toilet humor, a bad guy who has a Mr. No Legs wheelchair filled with weapons, Sheila Chan pretty much cosplaying Jackie Chan in Police Story and moments of violence within a movie that is supposed to be for laughs. And like all of the films in this series, I loved every minute of it.

I’m not for AI-made movies, but if someone can create a crossover between the worlds of Andy Sidaris’ ladies of L.E.T.H.A.L. ( Legion to Ensure Total Harmony and Law) and the Banshee Squad, I will accept my robot overlords.

The 88 Films blu ray of The Inspector Wears Skirts 4 has extras including a brand new 2K restoration from the original camera negative, commentary by Asian cinema expert Frank Djeng and a trailer. You can get it from MVD.

If anything, Nico Mastorakis knows how to put together a cast of actors that I get excited about. In this, he has Shannon Tweed, Norman Fell, Bubba Smith, John Vernon, Zsa Zsa Gabor, M. Emmet Walsh, Lou Ferrigno, Erik Estrada, Ted Lange, Billy Barty, Yvonne De Carlo, Little Richard, David Birney, Dick Gautier, Camilla Sparv (a one-time wife of Robert Evans) and former Miss Yugoslavia Natasha Pavlovich.

This is his chance to make Some Like It Hot, with Frank (Robert Caso) and Frank (Kevin Schon) having to become Ethel and Mirabelle when they take evidence against a mob boss in a briefcase switcharound. On the run from hitman Bruno (Brian Thompson, The Night Slasher and Shao Khan!), they end up in a beauty contest for a ketchup king named Rupert Hess (Herb Edelman). At some point, this forgets to be a Billy Wilder movie and becomes Casablanca.

Julie Gray is also in this and not only was she in School Spirit, Dr. Alien and Stryker, but she’s the girl in Ozzy’s video for “The Ultimate Sin.” Yes, that’s Spice Williams as Sam. She was also Vixis the female klingon in Star Trek V and Coach Drew in Fatal Games. And Bogart at the end? Robert Sacchi who is the Sam Spade-appearing detecting in The French Sex Murders.

I have a soft spot for this filmmaker. Reading the reviews of this, it seemed like he had punched some of these folks’ moms in the stomach or something. He just makes movies!

This is part of Arrow Video’s The Nico Mastorakis Collection and has an interview with Dan Hirsch looking back on his role in the film and a trailer as extra features.

This set is available from MVD.