It’s always intriguing to me when I look up a director and discover that I’ve watched more of their films than I realized. Case in point — Jon Amiel. As I started writing this article about The Man Who Knew Too Little, I was surprised to learn that I’d seen so many of his films, like Copycat, Entrapment and The Core.

Beyond its title being a play on Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, it was written by British musician Robert Farrar, whose book Watch That Man was the inspiration for the movie, and Howard Franklin, who co-wrote and co-directed Quick Change with Bill Murray.

Speaking of Bill Murray…

This movie wouldn’t work with anyone else. As Wallace Ritchie, he’s an idiotic everyman that you just have to fall in love with. As he goes to London to visit his brother James (Peter Gallagher), he’s set up to be part of an interactive improv theater group. Nine years before The Game, a very similar series of events occurs.

Joanna Whalley, who was once married to Val Kilmer and was a member of the post-punk Manchester music scene, shows up as a femme fatale. And Alfred Molina is wonderful in his role as an assassin.

In a perfect world, they would have made numerous versions of this. Think of it as an American Mr. Bean.

After discovering just bad Lucio Fulci’s health was, Dario Argento decided to help him find a new project in the hopes that directing would lift his spirits and his well-being. Sadly, pre-production and Argento’s work on The Stendahl Syndrome went on a few months too long and Fulci died before production could begin.

The two directors rarely got along and disagreed throughout pre-production. Ironically, Fulci wanted a classical horror movie while Argento wanted to increase the gore. Go figure.

Argento turned the project over to special effects artist Sergio Stivaletti, who created the effects for Demons, Hands of Steel, Opera, The Church, Cemetery Man and many more Italian horror films. He adjusted the script to increase the special effects. It brought a tear to my eye to see the dedication to Fulci before the film began.

We open in Paris in 1900, as a moving camera gives way to black-gloved hands, revealing a couple who has been murdered by a masked killer with metal claws.

Fast-forward to 1912. There’s a new wax museum in Rome and much like House of Wax, it’s known for having lifelike murder scenes. Meanwhile, the daughter of the couple we saw murdered in the opening, Sonia Lafont, is now a costume designer who wants to work for the museum’s owner and main artist, Boris Volkoff. Yet all is not as it seems. As people disappear and others die inside the museum, new figures begin to appear in its exhibits.

What makes this movie isn’t the story or the acting, but the gorgeous production design and strange combination of Victorian machinery with Terminator-like machines. Sure, some of the animation and fire effects look rough today, but the creature and gore effects are incredibly strong even twenty-plus years after its release.

While this will be streaming on Shudder as of October 14, you should just order it from the awesome people at Severin. Their release is absolutely loaded with extras, including interviews with Argento, Fulci, Stivaletti and more. There’s also a limited edition with an exclusive slipcover and the soundtrack to the film.

Once upon a time — let’s say 1997 — Sylvester Stallone agreed to a cameo appearance in his brother Frank’s passion project, a film about three golfers who move from New Jersey to Miami, with two of them killing the third. It was called The Good Life. And if you can’t remember it, that’s because unlike nearly every movie that eventually leaks and is released, it’s just gone. Poof. Thin air. Beyond the curtain invisible, as it were.

According to this amazing article on Little White Lies, this film from producers Alan and Diane Mehrez focused on the three main characters being involved with organized crime, such as an unpaid debt to Mr. B (Dennis Hopper). Most folks associated with the film compare it to The Sopranos and it was to start with a disclaimer about how often the characters would swear.

Other than the aforementioned Stallone brothers, the film also featured Andrew “Dice” Clay, Peter Dobson (Elvis Presley in Forrest Gump), David Carradine, Beverly D’Angelo (National Lampoon’s Vacation), Frank Vincent (Phil Leotardo from The Sopranos), Tony Sirico (another character from The Sopranos, Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri), Burt Young (Rocky, sure, but I love him from Amityville II: The Possession), former boxer Vinny Pazienza, stuntman Erik Betts and David Anthony Pizzuto (the voice of Willem Dafoe on Family Guy).

Even when the film hit production snags and moved from Miami to Mexico, bringing in Alan Amiel (Shootfighter: Fight to the Death) to help, the crew was impressed with the footage they were getting. However, by the time filming was done, Frank Stallone and the Mehrezes were not getting along. Then, the worst thing that could happen happened.

A promotional reel featuring clips from Sylvester Stallone’s scene — making him seem like the main character — started making the rounds of Hollywood.

If we’ve learned anything about Sylvester Stallone over the weeks that we’ve explored his films, it’s that he takes no shit. He agreed to do this film for two sets of custom-made Kenneth Smith golf club. And he worked hard — a ten-hour day — on his lone day on set, longer than all of the other principal actors. But he also had a clause in his contract that limited the use of his name and likeness in the film’s advertising. Once that got invalidated, he hit the movie with a $20 million dollar lawsuit — 4 times its overall budget.

A month later, Frank Stallone sued and then the Mehrezes countersued — O.J. Simpson trial prosecutor Chris Darden was on their legal team — both Stallone’s for $50 million dollars. There was supposedly an amicable settlement but the film has never escaped afterward. In a day and age where everything is available on blu ray and streaming, the fact that a movie made within the last 25 years — one starring known name actors — has disappeared is pretty astounding.

This grainy clip is all the world has seen:

It’s not Sly’s The Day the Clown Cried. But it’s close.

Jeb Stuart has written or co-written some of the biggest movies ever — Die Hard, Lock Up, The Fugitive, Just Cause and Another 48 Hrs. He also wrote an early draft of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull called Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars.

In 1997, he made his directorial debut with this film, whose negative critical reception led to him semi-retiring from filmmaking for over a decade. In 2010, he wrote, produced and directed Blood Done Sign My Name, adapted from the autobiography of author and historian Timothy Tyson.

Dennis Quaid is Special Agent Frank LaCrosse, who has been tracking the serial killer who took his son to get him off the case. That brings him to Amarillo, where he meets Sheriff Buck Olmstead (R. Lee Ermey) and police chief Jack McGinnis (William Fichtner), who are battling over the election. While all that is going on, Dr. Lane Dixon (Jared Leto) is picked up by Bob Goodall (Danny Glover), a drifter driving a white Cadillac filled with cheesecake photos.

The path to discovering who the killer is takes a long time, but this feels like a movie more concerned with the small things. I love Ermey and Fichtner is just about everything they ever did, but this film adds on to the character actor greatness by giving you Ted Levine, Walton Goggins and Maggie Roswell (Maude Flanders from The Simpsons and Donna from Midnight Madness).

Amazingly, Steven Seagal was almost the lead in this movie, which would have totally changed everything. It was originally called Going West In America, too.

Spoiler: This is only the second movie where I’ve seen Danny Glover as the bad guy. The other is Witness.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

Jackie Brown is the only Tarantino movie — so far — based on a previous work, the book Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. Inspired by Coffy and Foxy Brown — just look at that poster — and starring Pam Grier and Robert Forster, who hadn’t had lead roles in years. Although Tarantino took liberties with the novel, Leonard loved the screenplay, saying that not only was it the best adaption of his work, but the best screenplay he’d ever read.

Grier had been considered for Pulp Fiction, but didn’t expect Tarantino to call her back after that film was such a succes. When she showed up to read for the part, Tarantino had posters of her films all over his office. That wasn’t to impress her — the auteur just loved her movies that much.

Jackie Brown (Grier) is flight attendant for a Mexican airline who makes extra money smuggling for Ordell Robbie (Samuel Jackson), a gun runner and ne’er do well. Ordell is being watched by ATF agent Ray Nicholette (Michael Keaton, who plays the same role in Out of Sight)and LAPD detective Mark Dargus, who intercept Jackie as she returns to the US.

Meanwhile, one of Odell’s couriers, Beaumont Livingston (Chris Tucker) is arrested and needs bailed out before he becomes an informant. Odell pays Max Cherry (Forster) for the bond, then puts Livingston in a car trunk and kills hom.

Jackie’s in jail now, which leads Odell to think she’ll rat on him. He pays Max for her bond as well and the gruff older bondsman immediately falls for her. Odell comes to her house with murder on his mind, but Jackie has taken Max’s gun and they make a deal — she’ll pretend to help the cops while smuggling $550,000 of his money so that he can finally retire.

Odell’s partners on this deal are his live-in girl Melanie Ralston (Bridget Fonda) — it’s unsure if they are ever truly lovers — and his former cellmate Louis Gara (Robert De Niro). Melanie is based on Candice Rialson, the 1970’s actress who was in Pets, Chatterbox!, Moonshine County Express and so many more.

The law has a sting to catch Odell, but Jackie plans on double crossing everyone, bringing Max in on the scam.

What follows is a Rashomon like accounting of each person’s role in events that follow at the Del Amo Fashion Center, leaving just about everyone dead. Odell tries to take out Max and Jackie, but he’s led into a trap by the ATF and killed, too. That leaves our heroine, ready to leave the country with just a goodbye kiss for Max Cherry, who isn’t so sure he should stay behind.

This movie was pretty controversial — and still is — for the thirty-eight n-bombs thrown throughout its story. Spike Lee went as far to complain to Harvey Weinstein and Lawrence Bender, concerned that the director was “infatuated with that word.” But Tarantino saw differently saying, “the minute any word has that much power, as far as I’m concerned, everyone on the planet should scream it. No word deserves that much power.” Samuel L. Jackson, who has worked with Lee, defended Tarantino.

I kind of love that Sid Haig shows up to play a judge in this movie. I don’t know that he’s ever been on that side of the law before.

As for the characters, Louis and Ordell first appeared in Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch. It’s a story about them kidnapping a millionaire’s wife, only to discover he doesn’t want her back. In the book Rum Punch, they complain that a movie producer stole their idea and made Ruthless People.

If you think of directors from the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema, Tsui Hark has to be on the list thanks to directing movies like Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain and the Once Upon a Time in China series, as well as producing The Killer, A Better Tomorrow and Black Mask amongst many others.

In the 1990’s, instead of continually stealing from Hong Kong movies, Hollywood decided to go directly to the source and work with its most well-known directors. Other than this film, Hark also made another Van Damme film, Knock Off, which co-starred Rob Schneider. Frustrated by the lack of creative control, hark would eventually return to Hong Kong.

Somehow, one of world cinema’s greatest action directors ended up working on a film with Dennis Rodman in it. The results? Three Razzie wins for worst new star, worst supporting actor and worst screen couple, all for Rodman with Van Dam helping on the latter. Still, Rodman has no less than six hair color and style changes in the film, continuity be damned.

Jean-Claude Van Dam is Jack Paul Quinn, an anti-terrorism expert brought out of retirement by his nemesis Stavros (Mickey Rourke, so for those of you like me who were always wondering, “Could JCDV beat up Mickey Rourke?” you’ll get your answer). That big bad blames our hero for the death of his son, so he kidnaps Jack Paul’s pregnant wife Kathryn.

Where can our hero turn? To one man: the arms dealer named Yaz (Rodman), who has weapons so new even he doesn’t know what they are.

What Stavros doesn’t know is that Jack Paul tried to stop the mission that killed his boy, but that doesn’t matter. His failure to stop the man led to him being placed in The Colony, which is just like the TV show The Prisoner, in that it’s used to keep agents too valuable to kill but too dangerous to set free. So they all work toward monitoring terrorist threats and are kept from the rest of the world and their families because, you know, spy business.

While Jack Paul is there, his handler is Alex Goldsmythe (Paul Freeman, Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark). When Stavros ends up kidnapping our hero’s wife, Yaz helps him find his enemy and battle him in the bomb-rigged Roman Coliseum (actually the Arles Amphitheater in Southern France).

Somehow, I didn’t ever think I’d see a movie where Van Damme and Rodman battled a tiger and Mickey Rourke while trying to save a baby in a basket. Yet here it is. Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing things in my life the right way. I guess this is proof one way or the other.

There is an amazing scene where Van Damme uses an apartment to train to escape The Colony. Watch him do curls in his bare feet! Watch him light a cigarette to test how long he can hold his watch in a bathtub! Watch him do many, many splits! Also: every single time Van Damme and Rodman fist bump, I would collapse in total guffaws, as Hark decided to do a short Fulci zoom at times into their hands. Amazing.

That said, the fights are decent — perhaps because Sammo Hung was choreographing them. I wonder what the original film — The Colony — was like before JCVD’s lengthy rewrites. I’d assume Rodman was nowhere nearby, nor was there a scene where Van Damme dressed as a street punk.

You can get the new blu ray reissue of Double Team from Mill Creek Entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: Mill Creek Entertainment sent us this movie, but that has no bearing on our review.

One of the best movie-going experiences of my life as seeing Anaconda at the dollar show with a rowdy crowd that was screaming at the screen throughout the entire movie. It probably made the actual film a lot better than I remembered, which is how going to the movies should be.

Terri Flores (Jennifer Lopez in a role that both Julianna Margulies and Gillian Anderson passed on) and her crew are in the Amazon shooting a documentary on the lost Shirishamas tribe.

The crew is made up of her childhood friend and camera guy Danny (Ice Cube, who that out of control dollar theater audience made the hero of this movie); Denise the production manager (Kari Wuhrer, who is moving on up here while nearly everyone else is slumming it); sound engineer Gary (Owen Wilson); rich dude Warren (Jonathan Hyde); book captain Mateo (Vincent Castellanos) and anthropologist Professor Steven Cale (Eric Stoltz). Soon, they are joined by a Paraguayan snake hunter — yes, that’s a thing — named Paul Serone, who claims he can help them find the lost tribe. Honestly, they should have taken away Jon Voight’s Oscar for being in this, as he’s the hammiest ham that has ever hammed.

Before you can say “sss” the titular anaconda and Serone are both vying to kill everyone on the ship. Voight’s character is Moby Dick-ing the big snake, using everyone on board to try and grab it. I mean, what other movie has a badly accented Voight dumping monkey blood all over people so that gigantic snakes will attack them? This is also the movie where a snake throws up the corpse of a still shaking Jon Voight, so there’s that, too.

Danny Trejo shows up for a few moments in the opening and if you need a voice to do the sound effects for the snake, who better than Frank Welker to do it?

This was followed by 2004’s Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, 2008’s Anaconda 3: Offspring and 2009’s Anacondas: Trail of Blood before the franchise did a rare dual series crossover with  2015’s Lake Placid vs. Anaconda.

This was nominated for nearly every category in the 1998 Razzie Awards, but lost mostly to the Kevin Costner vehicle The Postman. It’s not that bad — it’s ridiculous but more than willing to entertain you — and even without that dollar movie crowd, you can still find something to enjoy. I mean, it has J Lo in booty shorts before we even knew that was a thing being menaced by a ridiculously huge snake. What’s not to love?

You can watch this for free on Tubi, but we really recommend the new blu ray release from Mill Creek Media.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by Mill Creek, but that has no impact on our review.

When he heard about Lost TV Week, Paul Andolina had the perfect idea for a show that almost made it that tied together his love of movies and pro wrestling. We’re excited to share it with you. 

When Sam told me he’d be doing a week of failed TV Pilot reviews, I didn’t know what to cover. I vaguely remembered that Assault on Devil’s Island, a made for TV movie that premiered on TNT starring WCW’s own Hulk Hogan was rumored to be turned into a series at one point.

Eric Bischoff even claims on an episode of Nitro that TNT had promised them a series run if the movie did well enough in the ratings. It did well but nothing ever came of the series.

A sequel titled Assault on Death Mountain came about though and was aired in 1999. I’ve had this title for a while on a couple of multipack dvds from Echo Bridge but I’ve just now got around to it.

I collect movies that star professional wrestlers and write about them on my blog Wrestling with Film. I usually write about other things for B&S About Movies but couldn’t pass up this opportunity to write about one of my biggest passions in life.

Assault on Devil’s Island stars Hulk Hogan (here billed as Terry “Hulk” Hogan) as Mike McBride, a Navy Seal with a penchant for island culture and oddly gesturing in front of fires as a pre-mission ritual. This odd dancing opens the movie and after uttering obscenities and turning it off a day prior while enjoying some beer I gave it another shot.

This film also stars action movie staple Carl Weathers, who once played for the Oakland Raiders football team, Martin Kove, who would go on to be in another movie with wrestlers in 1994 titled Death Match (starring Ludvig Borga, and Alundra Blayze), and Shannon Tweed, former playmate of the year and co-star of Roddy Piper in 1995’s No Contest.

Mike and his team of seals are tasked with seizing drugs from and capturing Carlos Gallindo, played by Billy Drago. After arriving to Gallindo’s compound, he is betrayed by a compatriot named Fraker, a foreign operative who has been bought out by Carlos. Fraker is played Trevor Goddard, who you may know as Mortal Kombat‘s Kano.

Mike successfully captures Carlos, but Carlos demands his lawyer get a hold of Fraker and tell him to help Carlos escape or he’ll never see his money. Fraker cooks up a plan to abduct a US gymnastics team and hold them hostage so as to exchange them for Carlos Gallindo.

This leads to another mission by Mike, Roy (Carl Weathers), and Hunter (Shannon Tweed). The movie is pretty standard action fare and I can see why it did well on TNT. It is a satisfying action flick and Hulk Hogan though somehow completely out of his element is able to play the distant Mike McBride in a decently believable manner. He’s not as over the top as his character Rip in No Hold’s Barred which is something I’ve come to expect with most of his performances. It’s odd seeing him without his trademark mustache but I have to admit he looks pretty badass with a five’o’clock shadow.

The action scenes are extremely well done and there is a bit where Hogan’s character gets into a tussle with a shark which is worth the price of the movie alone.

The dynamic between Hogan and Weathers in this movie is electric and wildly entertaining. The catchphrase they love to utter, “Nothing to it but to do it!” is an infectious little rally that I’m sure to find myself uttering many times within the coming weeks. All in all I was expecting to dislike this movie, which is not a mindset I like to have going into a flick, opting for a more positive approach of I hope I like this film most of the time. I might have just been in a sour mood when first attempting to watch it.

If you have the time and want to see a movie packed to the gills with some pretty big names in the action world you really can’t go wrong with Assault on Devil’s Island. You may find it a bit easier under its title Shadow Warriors 2 but disregard the misleading title as it is the first movie in the 2 movie cycle followed by Shadow Warriors aka Assault on Death Mountain. It can be obtained pretty cheaply with its sequel and two other films including Maximum Force starring Danish professional wrestler Asbjorn “Bear” Riis on Amazon.

You can also find this movie on Amazon Prime.