You have to love a movie that has a rubber dinosaur effect and also the budget to get Diane Ladd in its cast, much less one based on a book.

Dr. Jane Tiptree’s (Ladd) plan to exterminate the human race with a lethal virus and replace them with her own genetically created dinosaurs, which seems like something I can get behind. She’s been creating special chickens — Death Laid an Egg? — that hatch lizards and give people the flu and you know, that’s a very specialized plan for taking over the world.

Doc Smith (Raphael Sbarge) and Ann Thrush (Jennifer Runyon) are our protagonists and man, they’re ineffective throughout this movie and pay the price for it. I mean, for a movie with an obvious rubber dinosaur this is a movie that will shock you with scenes of families getting gunned down like they wandered onto the set of The Crazies.

Within a secret bunker, the new world order plans to repopulate the human face through artificial wombs and strict fertilization rules; Diane Ladd gets herself sick off her own disease and dies but not before she gives birth to a baby dinosaur and Smith crashes a backhoe into another big lizard. But — and man, I feel like saying spoiler warning but I doubt anyone cares about Carnosaur as much as me — he gets the cure to Ann just in time for government troops to shoot them and burn their bodies.

The really funny part is that Roger Corman rushed this out before Jurassic Park and had Laura Dern’s mom — Ladd — in his movie, which is some kind of casting miracle.

“The last thing we need is a biotech panic about chickens!”

2-4-5 Trioxin gas is the U.S. Army’s greatest weapon and will create nearly unkillable fighting machines, a fact that Curt Reynolds (J. Trevor Edmond, who is also in Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings and Meatballs 4) and his girlfriend Julie Walker (Melinda Clarke, Lady Heather from CSI and Jessica Priest in Spawn) learn as they snoop around the military base which is commanded by Curt’s father.

A SNAFU in the lab causes Curt’s military dad to be demoted and they need to move, but his son refuses and only wants to be with his girlfriend, who grabs his crotch while they’re riding a motorcycle and just like The Devil’s Honey, bad things happen.

Unlike that Fulci erotic madness, Julie is reanimated as a zombie and just when you think this movie is going to get silly, well, it gets pretty great. She’s consumed by ravenous hunger and is continually upset by the idea that she can no longer feel her heart beating inside her body. How does a sequel to a reimagining of another franchise end up doing the best job of explaining what it’s like to be the undead of any other film I’ve seen?

To keep the hunger at bay, she begins skewering herself with metal, leading to a fetishistic zombie dream — nightmare? — look, which totally makes this movie work. Plus, you have a cast with people like Kent McCord from Adam 12, James T. Callahan (Walter Powell from Charles in Charge), Sarah Douglas (Ursa from Superman), November 1988 Playboy Playmate of the Month Pia Reyes and Waxwork director Alex Hickox as a doctor killed in the bloody opening.

Man, Brian Yuzna has had some decent films. There’s Society, Bride of Re-Animator, Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation, The Dentist, Faust, Necronomicon, Beyond Re-Animator, The Dentist 2 and he also wrote From Beyond, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker. Writer John Penney also did the scripts for The Power, The Kindred and directed and wrote the baffling Zyzzyx Rd.

Zombies with exoskeletons, doomed romance, movie punks, a lead heroine who hates who she has become and the military being as ineffective as ever. Man, this one has it all. It’s that rare sequel, the one that’s so much better than it has any right to be.

Tales of the Red Chamber finds our pal Joe D’Amato making a movie as Robert Yip, which may be one of my favorite of his many stage names. And this movie has been reviewed by exactly no one — so far — on Letterboxd, which makes it one of the few D’Amato movies with little to no attention.

A Filmirage presentation, this tells the story of an elderly traveler seeking shelter from the rain in a bordello. As he warms himself by the fire, he repays the kindness of the madame with a series of stories, starting with a young man who does everything to win over a woman who is already married, only to learn that she’s a man. In the second story, a jealous ruler uses a special chastity belt on his bride to destroy the manhood of three men. Yes, it’s a mini-guillotine. Then, an old man buys love potions to calm his wife and also cure his impotency and ends up mixing them up. And finally, a cloth seller pulls off the old adult film pizza delivery story, as he needs to get paid and the lady of the house wonders if there’s another way she can settle the transaction.

Strangely, this softcore movie was made in the midst of D’Amato making nearly all hardcore movies and many folks thought Robert Yip was a real person and this was actually an imported Asian film.

Man, this movie is just filled with everything that I love:

Multiple titles: It goes by Troll 3, Creepers and Contamination .7 while having nothing to do with Troll 2 (not that Quest of the Mighty Sword does either), Phenomena or Contamination.

Fake names: It has Fabrizio Laurenti (Witchery) directing under the pseudonym Martin Newlin while the man of many names, Joe D’Amato, goes uncredited even though he directed a fair amount of this film. He also wrote this — with Laurenti and the always dependably insane Rossella Drudi. Also, Daniele Stroppa as Daniel Steel and man, his resume has Convent of Sinners, High Finance Woman and Blue Angel Cafe on it just to name a few.

It almost came out in American theaters: We should all be so lucky! It did come out here as a direct-to-video Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment VHS.

Italians in America: Much like the beloved Troll 2, it was shot in the big lights, big city of Porterville, Utah.

Earth vs. the Earth: Nuclear radiation makes vegetation go wild and kill people. Where can you run when there’s nowhere to run?

Costumes designed by: Laura Gemser, making the wardrobe person the most attractive person on the set.

A cast of people you may know from: Mary Sellers from Ghosthouse; Stagefright; Eleven Days, Eleven Nights and La maschera del demonio! Jason Saucier from Hitcher in the Dark and Top Model! An uncredited Gabriele Tinti — there on vacation with his wife!

A wild soundtrack: Carlo Maria Cordio, you have gifted us with the soundtracks of Endgame, Killing Birds, Night Killer, Troll 2 and this movie. Thank you for your synth.

There are a lot of people that live to make fun of bad movies. I say that the only bad movie is a boring film. This movie is neither bad not boring. I mean, plants eat people, then people hack up the plants and put them into radioactive barrels and ship them off for somewhere else. The end.

There’s also a scene where an intelligent plant stops a car by doing the banana in the tail pipe trick from Beverly Hills Cop.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We love all things Van Damme, so much so that we watched more than twenty of his movies in one week a few years back. This review comes from then — July 13, 2019 — but now Kino Lorber has released UHD and blu ray versions of this film. They include a brand new 4K restoration of the unrated international cut from a 4K scan of the original camera negative, plus new interviews with John Woo, Lance Henriksen, Yancy Butler and stunt coordinator Billy Burton. Plus, there’s a newly restored trailer and new commentary by action film historians Brandon Bentley and Mike Leeder.

Was there some kind of boot camp that Hong Kong directors had to go through to make movies for Chinese audiences that required them to work with Jean-Claude Van Dam? Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and John Woo all made their first Western movie with the actor. It seems like too much of a coincidence to believe otherwise.

Chuck Pfarrer wrote the script, which is based on the 1932 film adaptation of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game. He also wrote or contributed to the films Darkman, Navy SEALs (based on his own time as a SEAL), Barb Wire, The Jackal, Arlington Road, Shooter and The Green Hornet.

Beyond Hard Target being Woo’s first American film, it was also the first major Hollywood film ever made by a Chinese director. Universal Pictures was nervous about having Woo direct a feature, which kind of blows my mind. By this point in his career, he’d already made A Better Tomorrow, A Bullet In the Head and The Killer by this point, movies that are legendary action movies that are more memorable than any action Hollywood was churning out in the 1990s.

They sent Sam Raimi to look over the film’s production and possibly replace Woo if he started to fail. That said, Raimi was a big fan of the director and confident in his skills, saying, “Woo at 70% is still going to blow away most American action directors working at 100%.”

Kurt Russell was Woo’s original choice of a star, but he was too busy. The director then went with Universal’s selection of Van Damme, which allowed him to ramp up the action.

Amazingly, it took twenty different cuts of the film to secure an R rating. While all that was going on, Van Damme hired his own editor to create his own cut of the film. Van Damme’s version cuts out whole characters while including more close-ups of himself. When asked why, Van Damme said, “People pay their money to see me, not to see Lance Henriksen.”

The movie begins with a homeless veteran (scriptwriter Pfarrer) being hunted by Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen), Pik van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo, The Mummy and Zartan from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Darkman in two direct to video sequels), Stephan (Sven-Ole Thorsen, Conan the Barbarian), Peterson (Jules Sylvester, a noted snake wrangler) and a businessman who has paid half a million dollars for the chance to hunt a human being. The man is killed before the credits roll.

We soon meet his daughter Natasha (Yancy Butler, TV’s Witchblade), who is looking for her father. She hires homeless martial artist and ex-Marine Chance Boudreaux (who would be in that role other than Van Damme?) to be her guide and bodyguard.

What follows is a veritable smorgasbord of fight scenes and bullets being fired by all manner of guns, including an amazing sequence inside a Mardi Gras float graveyard. Somewhere out there exists the original 116-minute long cut — outside of bootleg releases — that has even more mayhem still intact. That said, what survived is still action-packed.

I was let down when this movie was released, but realize now that Woo still had some adjusting to do when it came to Hollywood — beyond improving his English. Last year, he told the Hollywood Reporter that “…in Hard Target I was too ambitious, and tried to do everything in one film. This is unlike any traditional films in the States, so the audience didn’t understand what’s going on with these techniques. It’s not a typical Hollywood action movie. And slow motion. And also the violent moments, too, the audience couldn’t take it. And some people left the theater in the middle of the movie. Although the film didn’t achieve great success, it sold well.”

Looking back on it a quarter century later, I can appreciate a lot more of the film. Arnold Vosloo and Lance Henriksen make the perfect team of bad guys. And any movie that gives you both Van Damme with a magnificent mullet and Wilfred Brimley kicking ass as JCVD’s Uncle Douvee really made me enjoy this way more than I remembered. I mean, how many movies will you see this year where the hero shoots a bad guy five times with an upside down gun and then still spin kicks him?

Hey — we also have this ten things to know about Van Damme article too!

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie originally appeared on our site on October 12, 2019. Now that it’s been released on UHD and blu ray by Blue Underground, we’ve edited that article and added some new information.

Their new UHD and blu ray set includes Ultra HD Blu-ray (2160p) and HD Blu-ray (1080p) Widescreen 2.35:1 feature presentations, as well as new audio commentary with director Alan Smithee*, a making-of documentary, deleted and extended scenes, the trailer, a gallery and the original synopsis.

You can order Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence from MVD.

But what if the Maniac Cop found love?

This is the question we must answer.

Aren’t we all worthy of adoration?

Even those of us who have risen from the grave and killed numerous people in an obsessive quest for bloody revenge?

But first, the problem of bringing back the Maniac Cop, Officer Matthew Cordell, played once again by Robert Z’Dar. Leave that to Houngan Malfaiteur, played by Julius Harris from Hell Up In Harlem, Black Caesar and Superfly. I love the character names that Harris had in movies, like Tee Hee Johnson in Live and Let Die, Gravedigger in Darkman and Speedbagger in Prayer of the Rollerboys. He uses the dark powers of voodoo to bring our favorite boy in blue back from the beyond.

Meanwhile, there’s also another cop named Katie Sullivan (Gretchen Becker, who is also in Firehead and was Martin Landau’s partner until the end of his life) who gets shot in a convenience store holdup. Thanks to more police corruption, she’s painted as using excessive force and the man who shot her is due to go free, which upsets investigating officer Sean McKinney (the returning — and always awesome — Robert Davi).

It also upsets the Maniac Cop, who shows up to the hospital ready for mayhem. He kills one guy with defibrillator paddles and another with straight-up x-ray radiation. And the four reporters who joined in on Kate’s frameup? Toast.

McKinney joins up with Doctor Susan Fowler (Caitlin Dulany, who along with Jesica Barth, formed Voices in Action after the multiple accusations against Harvey Weinstein) to investigate the murders and Kate’s strange behavior, even though she’s braindead.

The Maniac Cop is interested in Kate, who Houngan claims refuses to return from the land of the dead. So he does what any of us would do. He sets everything — including himself — on fire.

Despite getting blown up real good, the body of the titular protagonist survives enough to hold Kate’s charred hand, even in the morgue.

This movie is packed with talent, including The Breakfast Club‘s Paul Gleason, one-time Freddy Krueger actor Jackie Earle Haley as holdup man Frank Jessup and Doug Savant from Melrose Place and Robert Forster as doctors.

The church used in the film is the same location as Prince of Darkness, LA’s Union Center for the Arts.

Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence had a troubled production. Despite director William Lustig’s rough cut clocking in at just 51 minutes, he refused to shoot the additional scenes the producers wanted. That’s why the Blue Underground release has Alan Smithee listed as director. To fill in the gaps, there are several scenes that are obvious outtakes from Maniac Cop 2.

*When we interviewed producer — and one half of the Alan Smithee mentioned above — Joel Soisson, he said that he had just finished the commentary track for this and that it was a sparring match with William Lustig and said that it was not your typical commentary track lovefest.

There are people that are just going to watch this movie — which combines Freddy Kreuger, Michael Jackson, Bollywood song and dance numbers and a low budget — just to laugh. And you know, I kind of dislike that foreign remix cinema is seen as such a joke. You try making a movie that lives up to a Hollywood big budget movie within a country that can’t raise those funds while working within the confines of the way movies are presented. Most of u slack the imagination and sheer nerve to do it.

So when Seema has a nightmare of a scarred man wearing steel claws, our western minds instantly see this as a cheap knock-off. But the film plays with expectations, as the villain is not some average custodian, but the evil magician Shakaal, who needed children to increase his magical powers and was only stopped by Anita’s father, who has kept the claw glove in a drawer all these years later.

An American — even an Italian — remix film would not take everything. Bad Dreams may have a burned up villain and Taryn from Dream Warriors, but it is very much its own film. Night Killer only takes the mask. Mahakaal takes everything, even the actual music from the first two A Nightmare on Elm Street movies and keeps on giving.

There’s also the Michael Jackson-loving Canteen, who becomes a werewolf by the end of the movie because, well, who knows. This isn’t the kind of linear cinema that you grew up on. Strangely — or not hat much when you think of it — there’s another Bollywood Elm Street cover called Khooni Murdaa that even takes the end of Dream Warriors but redeems itself because it tells the origin story of Ranjit — Fareed Krueger — who escapes prison and gets thrown into a campfire, creating the dream version that destroys everyone else.

You can watch this on YouTube.