Rex Kyōryū Monogatari or Rex: A Dinosaur Story was originally written by Masanori Hata and illustrated by CLAMP. It was serialized in the shojo magazine, Kadokawa Shoten: Asuka, in 1993.

Chie (Yumi Adachi) and her paleontologist father Akiyoshi Tateno discover tyrannosaur eggs and one hatches to bring Rex to our time. Chie becomes his friend and protector. The birth of the dinosaur — he comes from the lost continent of Mu! — allows her to be the mother that her own parent Naomi (Shinobu Otake) never was even when that maternal character comes back into her life to study Rex.

At the end, shaman Mr. Shinoda (Fujio Toneda) takes the cute dinosaur back home, perhaps even to find his mother. There’s also a long sequence where Rex gets to get in all of the Japanese experience of the holidays, which is watching fireworks and feasting on KFC and Coke. If this were an American movie I would be angry at all the product placement but here I find it charming.

The scientists even make Rex into a celebrity and make him appear in all sorts of commercials like anyone who gets famous in Japan. One of them, Morioka (Mitsuru Hirata), even attacks the little creature and decides to become a Yakuza and kidnap Rie and her friend for himself.

Director Haruki Kadokawa was a pretty big deal for some time, producing movies like G.I. Samurai, Virus, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun amongst many others, and directing The Last Hero, Heaven and Earth, Aijou monogatari and more. In 1975, he inherited his father’s publishing company Kadokawa Shoten and announced a new and ambitious plan for his company. They would  produce film adaptations of the best-seller novels and comics of the publishing branch. A few weeks into the release of this movie, Kadokawa was charged with smuggling and embezzling money from his company in order to fund a cocaine addiction. He served two and a half years of a four year sentence, but this movie was pulled from theaters.

He made a comeback and is still making movies.

I loved this movie and if you don’t, stop being cynical. It has a dinosaur dressed in a Christmas outfit running and playing in the snow with the little girl who loves him. It made me tear up numerous times and that’s what all holiday movies should do.

You can download this at the Internet Archive.

Two men have been murdered after hiring an unknown prostitute. Sergeant Peckham (Chelsea Field) and her boyfriend, police psychologist David Stratton (Steven Bauer) are assigned to the case. They believe that it might be Felicity (Pamela Anderson), an amnesiac woman who has a dream where she kills men.

Pamela Anderson’s first movie was directed by Worth Keeter, who got his start making movies like Wolfman, Unmasking the Idol and Tales of the Third Dimension In 3D for Earl Owensby Studios before eventually making TV shows like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Beetleborgs. It was written by Gene Church and Terri Treas, who was Kelly Cobb in House 4.

Matt McCoy, who became the focus of the Police Academy series after Steve Guttenberg left, is also in this.

One of the most infamous movies branded with Hong Kong’s Category III adults only rating, Taxi Hunter is the story of Ah Kin (Anthony Wong), a man who was quiet and kind until he loses his pregnant wife to an unprofessional taxi driver.

If you’ve seen Herman Yau’s Ebola Syndrome, you know the levels of craziness that he can bring to the screen. Now, he puts the Taxi Hunter on the hunt, testing drivers to see if they meet his level of professionalism. If they don’t meet his grade, they die.

The problem? Well, other than all the death and destruction, his brother-in-law Yu Kai Chung (Yu Rong Guang) is a cop who may be forced to kill Ah Kin to stop his path of yellow cab serial killing.

If you’re ready for taxi chases, gunplay and, well, pregnant women being dragged by taxi cabs to their bloody doom, well…you still aren’t ready for this movie.

The 88 Films release of Taxi Hunter has commentary by Hong Kong film expert Frank Djeng, interviews with writer Tony Leung Hung-Wah, action director James Ha and Anthony Wong, a trailer, an image gallery and a reversible cover with new artwork by Sean Longmore and the original poster. You can get it from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Bikini Car Wash Company II was on USA Up All Night on February 24, 1996 — with the first movie — as well as July 13, 1996; January 31 and July 20, 1997 — both times with the first film — and March 7, 1998 — again with The Bikini Carwash Company. 

What questions remained unanswered by the first movie? So many cars need washed, so I guess there’s some reason for this movie, which at least has a different director in Gary Dean Orona who started a career of sexy movies with this effort.

At least this has a reason to be: the carwash gets so big that a gigantic company buys it and the girls need to raise $4 million in a week to get the car wash back. The carwash women — nearly all of them are back, such as Melissa Reese (Kristi Ducati), Amy (Rikki Brando), Sunny (Sara Suzanne Brown) and Rita (Neriah Davis) are here — decide to sell lingerie on TV to get the cash they need.

I applaud that Melissa has become the CEO and Amy the lawyer. They realize their bodies have power but so do their minds. But sometimes, I wonder why so many of my friends are successes. They can discuss strategy and money and investing. I can at length with no research discuss sex comedies.

Ismael (Karra Elejalde, Timecrimes) breaks into the house of a fine art restorer of religious icons and shoots her dead and a second bullet makes her daughter mentally handicapped. It also leaves Leire (Ana Álvarez) traumatized to the point that she will forever be in an institution. Twenty years later, he’s working in a bar and sees her. He’s convinced that she’s seen him, so he kidnaps her and demands a ransom. Yet they soon come together and build a strange relationship, even if he keeps threatening to throw her in the path of an oncoming train.

Directed by Juanma Bajo Ulloa, who wrote it with his brother Eduardo, this film finds Ismael going from wanting to murder Leire — with the help of his lover Maite (Lio) — before she turns him in. Yet he feels something for her. Is he her savior? Her father? Her lover? Can he be all of these things?

Can a man who casually murdered a mother and crippled a child become someone with empathy and even love? This movie asks that question while not being afraid to get dark and uncomfortable getting there.

The Radiance Films blu ray release of The Dead Mother has a 4K restoration of the film supervised and approved by director Juanma Bajo Ulloa, who also provided a commentary track. It also has a documentary about the making of the movie, a short film titled Victor’s Kingdom, a photo gallery, the trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, a book with writing by Xavier Aldana Reyes, Ulloa, co-writer Eduardo Bajo Ulloa and an appreciation by Nacho Vigalondo. There’s even a soundtrack CD.

You can get this from MVD.

Al Pacino was working out at a New York City YMCA when he met New York state supreme court Judge Edwin Torres, the writer of Carlito’s Way and After Hours, the books this movie is based on. He’d tried several times to make a film version — even facing a 1989 lawsuit where he went back on his agreement to make the movie with Brando as lawyer David Kleinfeld — and screenwriter David Koepp and producer Martin Bregman to develop the shooting script for this movie, one that Pacino felt would work for himself.

Brian De Palma didn’t want to make another Scarface, but that’s exactly what critics said, saying that he was going back to that movie and The Untouchables.

How could they watch the train sequence that closes the film and see Pacino’s character stare at the billboard and have it come to life with the love of his life, Gail (Penelope Ann Miller) dancing as he drifts off and not be in love with all that is cinema?

Five years in on a three decade jail sentence, Carlito Brigante (Pacino) gets out thanks to a technicality found by his friend and lawyer, Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn). He tries to follow the straight and narrow, but follows his cousin Guajiro (John Augstin Ortiz) on a drug deal that goes wrong. The young man is killed, but the $30,000 from the crime allows Carlito to buy into a nightclub and save up for retirement in the Caribbean.

From his interactions with Benny Blanco from the Bronx (John Leguizamo) to trying to win back over Gail and the prison break to try and get Tony Taglialucci out of Riker’s, this is a movie of Carlito torn between wanting to escape this life of violence and blood yet always getting pulled back in.

Despite wanting to distance this movie from Scarface, the nightclub is called El Paraíso which is the same name as the food stand that Tony Montana worked at.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of Carlito’s Way has limited edition packaging with reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Obviously Creative, as well as a double-sided fold-out poster featuring newly commissioned artwork by Tom Ralston and Obviously Creative.

Beyond all that, it has seven double-sided, postcard-sized lobby card reproductions and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Barry Forshaw and original production notes.

There are also two new audio commentaries, one by Matt Zoller Seitz, author of The Wes Anderson Collection and The Soprano Sessions, and the other by Dr. Douglas Keesey, author of Brian De Palma’s Split-Screen: A Life in Film.

Want more? This also has interviews with Judge Edwin Torres, author of the novels Carlito’s Way and After Hours on which the screenplay for Carlito’s Way is based and editors Bill Pankow and Kristina Boden. There’s an appreciation of the movie by film critic David Edelstein, a look at the film’s locations, an archival interview with Brian DePalma and the making of doc that was on the original DVD. Plus deleted scenes, a promotional feature, the theatrical teaser and trailer, and an image gallery. Woah!

You can get this from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dream A Little Evil aired on USA Up All Night on August 6, 1993; Febraury 26 and December 9, 1994 and June 24, 1995.

Also known as Dream Evil, this has an unsuccessful electronics technician named George (Richard J. Sebastian) building a machine in the home he shares with his brother Mark (Tom Alexander) and sometimes with his brother’s girlfriend Veronica (Kathy Smith, whose IMDB otherwise is all workout videos). That machine can make anything in your subconsciousness become real, as Billy (Duncan Rouleau — who would go on to co-create Ben 10 with fellow Man of Action studio members Joe Casey, Joe Kelly and Steven T. Seagle; he also co-created Big Hero 6 with Seagle) finds out when he creates his dream girl Angie (Michele Gaudreau) just by thinking about her. But when Veronica gets angry that all the noise is ruining her sex life, she destroys the machine.

George wishes death upon his brother and you know who shows up? Death (Lyle Waggoner). So does Angie, who is devoted to having as much sex with him as possible, as well as eating as many bowls of cornflakes as one can inhumanly eat in one sitting. And then the demons emerge because hey, the human mind — especially one that loves horror movies — is a wild place, right?

Royce Mathew, who directed and wrote this, started as a production designer working on the films of his former roommate David DeCoteau.

So yeah. It’s very Weird Science until the end, when it goes absolutely insane. That sums up a lot of USA Up All Night movies, I have come to discover. There’s also a role for Victoria Nesbitt, who was Missy in Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout and also appeared in Fortress of Amerikkka.

You can watch this on Vimeo.