Samurai Cop (1991), by Amir Shervan

Samurai Cop starts off pretty normal. Two cops, Joe and Frank, are going after some cocaine smugglers, aided by Peggy, their eye in the sky. Everything is straightforward and by the book. And then the car chase begins.

It's a familiar thing, in a way, though I can cite no other movies off the top of my head that do it. There are actions films just like this that have a few scenes right near the start that mimic "real" movies almost perfectly. Perhaps this is the footage they shot first, and showed to investors, to trick them into thinking they were getting anything other than Samurai Cop. And then, once they had their budget secured and squared away, they filmed that car chase scene. And Amir Shervan's apparent desire to be the world's biggest ten year old began.

Joe is a samurai as well as a cop, and with Frank he chases these coke dealers through the requisite City of Boxes, all of which are smashed. Yes, it's one of those car chases. At this point in cinematic history, it's not a true car chase if there aren't some conspicuously-placed boxes (fruits and veggies optional) for everyone to smash into. Anyway, once they arrest/slaughter the coke dealers, Joe and Frank start going after the Katana Gang, controlled by the mulleted Mr. Fujiyama. Aiding Fujiyama in his drug empire are martial arts master Okamura (a creatively named character played by Gerald Okamura) and evil samurai Yamashita. Yamashita must be a codename of some kind, because he's played by Robert Z'Dar, who, for those of you unfamiliar with his work, is as white as a sheet of printer paper. He turns in a legitimately great performance here, which easily rises over what most of his colleagues turned in. Fujiyama commands him to kill one of the hospitalized victims of Joe and Frank's coke bust: "I want his head! And I want it right here, on this piano!" "I will take his head, and I will place it on your piano," Yamashita replies.

Joe ends up getting involved with Jennifer, whose family owns a restaurant that Fujiyama helped raise out of debt. This angers Fujiyama, who wanted Jennifer all for himself. The war between the Katanas and the Samurai Cop heats up until Fujiyama is torturing Joe's friends--threatening to castrate Frank, burning Peggy with hot grease, and killing a cop he worked with on raids, along with his wife. But this is an action movie, so you better believe all the bad guys end up dead, one way or another.

There is so much that is just done wrong in this movie. The sex scenes are astonishingly bad, even by the usual "sex through the undies" standards. We get many scenes of men in Speedos with full cock outlines visible, and none of it is welcome, especially if it comes from Joe. Joe is perfect, though. His beyond-shoulders hair and ludicrously intense face make him seem like the opposite of someone who should be a cop. The fact that he runs around shooting wantonly and chopping people's limbs off doesn't help matters. This is yet another movie where laws are more like guidelines, along which those in authority may impose their own moral beliefs rather than following those that might be "popular" or "ethically acceptable." I think there are a few moments though where it questions its own stance on police brutality (which is that it's okay as long as the people you're dismembering are bona fide evil). There's an amazing bit were Joe is making full of Chief for "not wanting no more dead bodies," plus a later bit where he says, "If it's Okamura [at this house] we'll arrest him; if it's the wrong house we'll apologize the owner, standard police procedure." They don't go in guns blazing for this scene but it's easy to imagine them doing so. In this universe, unarmed civilians are shunted to a pocket dimension for safekeeping when fights break out, unless they're romantically involved with the main characters--then they can be used as hostages.

This movie does some other stuff wrong besides saying that police brutality is an okay thing to do. It's kind of hella racist? Joe messes up the Japanese characters' names on purpose (calling them "Omaha" and "Yamaha"), brings up their ethnicity for no reason, and calls Jennifer, the white girl in Fujiyama's company, "all-American." There's also an oddly-inserted gay waiter character from Costa Rica whose "comically" long name is brought up for no other reason than to drag Hispanic people. Finally, there's the bizarre incident where, when Frank (a black man) is threatened with castration, his dick is called "a gift--a black gift." I don't even know what to make of that. This movie is fucking weird.

Finally, there's a wonderful cascade of trash besides all this. When sneaking into the hospital to put that guy's head on Fujiyama's piano, Robert D'Zar disguises himself as a doctor--for no reason. This never comes up in any way. While he and his assistant are escaping the hospital, they're confronted by two security people who have the same dub actor. When someone asks Joe what katana means, he translates it as "Japanese sword," which is, um, not exactly correct. Fujiyama sends guys to break Joe's legs twice, because the screenwriter keeps forgetting scenes that have already happened. Then, when we see Robert D'Zar having sex, we have the opposite problem of the sex scene from The Room--here, the woman in question seems to think that Robert Z'Dar's dick is in his belly button! (You fool, everyone knows Robert Z'Dar's dick is in his chin.) Oh, and I can't consider this review complete without quoting this scene--an exchange between Joe and a random nurse.

Nurse: "Do you like what you see?"

Joe: "I love what I see."

"Do you want to touch what you see?"

"Yes. Yes I would."

"Would you like to go out with me?"

"Yes. Yes I would."

"Would you like to fuck me?"

"Bingo."

"Then let's see what you got." *Gropes his pants* "Doesn't interest me. Nothing there."

"Nothing there? What would interest you? Something the size of a jumbo jet?"

"Have you been circumcized? Because the doctor must have cut a big portion of it off."

Both of them deliver these lines like they're kids doing bad impressions of Robby the Robot.

I think that's a good place to end this review.

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Dragon Fury (1995), by David Heavener

I'm not gonna lie, guys, I have trouble reviewing action movies for some reason. Especially post-apocalyptic ones. I love myself plenty of post-apocalyptic action movies, but they make me feel so passive. I can't find the words to describe them. Yet, all the same, I know people out there wanna read about strange action movies, especially ones which might got mutants in 'em. Unfortunately there are no mutants here, just weird pseudo-albinos. Despite the severe lack of disfigured rubbery creatures, Dragon Fury is still a pretty good time, a minor time-travel epic that only the '90s could produce.

Mason is a dragon warrior in the year 2099, in a world ravaged by "the Plague." He saves a woman and her daughter from the evil ninjas who have murdered her husband. They are pursued by a pasty-faced dude in black robes named Vestor, and Mason has reached the end of his patience as far as this whole post-apocalyptic thing. With the help of his scientist friend he and his wife Regina travel back in time to 1999 to find a scientist who once created a cure for the Plague. The Plague, it seems, was the creation of an evil corporation, which Vestor may work for (?). In any case, Vestor sends some of his minions back in time to stop Mason and Regina. And they're on a time limit, too--the time portal can only stay open for 36 hours!

This is the exactly the sort of movie I would love to see on TV if I had a time machine to take me back to 1999. Resembling an unholy blend of The Terminator, Time Chasers, Games of Survival, Jack Kirby's OMAC and Kamandi comics, a Deathstalker/Ator-style adventure film, and a lot of other stuff ripped off that I couldn't even begin to mention, the movie is a perfect artifact of the era it was created in. Everyone has horrible hair and wears leather in places where leather shouldn't go, and the villain is a grungy middle-aged guy in a doofy costume. Just a few degrees in a certain direction and I would hate this movie as well as I love it in its present form.

What helps make this movie a treat is its weird balance between grungy '90s edginess and low-budget '90s comic relief. You can imagine my surprise when we snapped suddenly to a hotel room on a 30ish couple's wedding night. "C'mon, babycakes, daddy's waitin' for you!" coaxes the husband. Suddenly, Regina falls back through the time portal, only half-clothed for...reasons. The wife, of course, assumes that he is already cheating on her. If only they'd had the tact to include wah-wah music.

But then, we have the scene where Vestor's minions arrive from the future. They are confronted by a gang of punks who assume that they are shirtless and passed out because they have just gotten done having gay sex--never mind that they still have their pants on, and they're in the middle of the dirtiest alley I've seen in a movie. After shouting a bunch of homophobic slurs, they threaten to gang-rape them, leading to them getting their asses kicked. I'm always happy to see homophobic rapists get their asses handed to them. Bonus points if it's by shirtless barbarians from the future.

And then there's just the strange stuff, which may not be meant to be funny. For example, time travel gives you amnesia, but don't worry! Regina went along on the trip because she knows that time travel amnesia is curable by sex. The scene leading into their big sex scene is astonishingly scripted, and it's amusing to note that this movie even went so far as to crib the lighting and shadow from The Terminator's sex scene in their desperation to rip off The Terminator.

I don't know what else I can add to that, aside from the possible fact that one of the fight scenes has graffiti in the background of Marvel's Green Goblin. That's pretty fucking cool. So is the rest of Dragon Fury--I'm always happy to have a post-apocalyptic time travel action movie, especially when it involves a metric shitton of samurai swords. May the spirit of the dragon never die.

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Jim Anthony vs. The Mastermind is Here!!!

My new book, Jim Anthony vs. the Mastermind, has just been published by Airship 27 Productions! Check out the official press release below!

Airship 27 Productions is thrilled to present the fifth book in their continuing new adventures of that classic pulp hero, Jim Anthony – Super Detective.

Jim Anthony had battled all manner of evil and villainy in his illustrious career as a globe-trotting adventurer. But now he finds himself challenged by three unique criminals, each with devastating weapons of destruction; the Flame Wizard, Baron Strum and Prof. Meteon. Each is determined to wreak unimaginable havoc on the world and vanquish the Super Detective in the process.

The hero soon comes to suspect there is a fourth nemesis; a super Mastermind orchestrating these other villains in a cunning, deadly plot for reasons he is unable to fathom. But the Super Detective is never alone thanks to his various allies ala pilot Tm Gentry and British butler Dawkins and along the way he is joined by the beautiful Maria Flores and her All-Girl Squad. 

Writer Adam Mudman Bezecny has plotted a fast-paced, action-packed novel in four parts creating some of the most dastardly pulp villains ever to challenge the Super Detective.  “This is a really interesting collection,” explains Airship 27 Productions’ Managing Editor Ron Fortier. “Although each of the chapters works very much like a stand alone adventure, ultimately they create a longer narrative plot leading to the Super Detective’s newest arch-fiend, Mastermind.”

Artist Richard Jun provides the marvelous black and white interior illustrations and Adam Shaw delivers the stunning cover based on one of those pieces. All of which are assembled under the guiding hand of Airship 27 Art Director Rob Davis.

 “Jim Anthony is one of our favorite pulp heroes,” Fortier adds happily, “and we hope to continue this series of new books for as long as our readers enjoy them.” So buckle up for a wild ride, pulp fans, this is adventure with a capital A …for Jim Anthony!

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTIONS – PULP FICTION FOR A NEW GENERATION!

Now available at Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.

Special thanks to Airship 27, to Adam Shaw for the awesome cover art, and to Richard Jun for the amazing inside illustrations! I'm so excited!

The Instructor (1981), by Don Bendell

Some movies start out letting you know they're gonna be awesome. The Instructor opens with two men jogging, but loses focus on them after mere seconds to instead show a street fight between a bearded punk and a punk woman named "Cookie." She almost cuts his dick off with an axe. Castration is usually a good sign for a movie, and I'm glad this one decided to put such a thing--or nearness to it--at the beginning. It was like being greeted with a hug rather than a handshake. The encounter that ensued proved to be a fulfilling one. Let it be known that The Instructor is something special, even if it's not always entertaining.

Our joggers from the beginning are the titular Instructor and his pupil, Thumper Rhodes. The Instructor, as you might expect, teaches at a local karate school. They exposit for us that long ago, the Instructor's wife was raped and murdered by Bud Hart, who runs a rival martial arts academy. Hart's goons are the punks we saw at the beginning of the movie. We follow the Instructor and Thumper as they increasingly come to blows with Hart and his mob, while they are stalked by a ninja who turns out to in truth be a mentally handicapped man who wants to become a karate tournament champion. At one point this man clubs a fellow martial artist to death with his trophy, in a plot I don't remember going anywhere. In any case, this character exists to provide "comic relief" and to be beaten up by children. In the end, the Instructor probably defeats Bud Hart, and gets the girl I didn't know he was after.

The Instructor is, um. Puzzling. On one hand, it hits all the buttons I want to have hit whilst watching a martial arts movie. It features rugged dudes with mustaches and the whole Godfrey Ho-esque feel (while admittedly still being too American to be as crazy as something like Ninja the Protector). Yet I couldn't keep my focus on it for some reason. Even as I was being charmed by things like people catching ninja stars with their shoes and kicking people off motorcycles, I felt a weird fuzziness over the whole thing that left me feeling disinterested. I watched this movie three times for this review, and I still can't entirely remember if Bud Hart died, and if so, how he did. I don't remember when exactly the Instructor's new girlfriend enters the plot. I do remember being confused when we got a flashback to the Instructor finding his wife's corpse. That happened much later than I feel it should have. This is another movie where I feel like it was edited out of order, while knowing fully that that was not the case. Ordinarily I would find this sort of feeling pleasurable, but something is holding me back in this case.

It may be that there's something off about the fight scenes. They don't grip me as much as the material around them--I wouldn't call them lethargic, or lazy, but those two words nag at my mind for some reason. I just remember zoning out during the fight scenes in particular. I think I was bored by them, only really recalling one segment where an Asian martial artist showed up to very poorly use nunchuks and make stereotypical "Hwah!" noises. I probably remember that because it was rather offensive. I also remember the "ninja" getting his ass kicked by children, because I don't easily forget scenes of people being kicked around by kids. These fight scenes are often set to music, but I'm spoiled on the soundtracks from movies like Miami Connection, so these songs didn't hook my attention either, instead feeling as intrusive as the songs in bad musicals.

But there was still a lot I liked about this. Bud Hart is a particularly interesting villain, being not only an evil martial arts instructor as per action movie tropes, but also functioning as a mafia villain, and blaxploitation villain a little bit as well. There's a scene of him having a fancy restaurant dinner with an Italian dude, where they have one of those hush-hush Godfather-style conversations. He's also racist, calling some of the black characters slurs--one almost suspects that he's trying to buy out Sugar Hill's club on the side. He even dips into sci-fi villain territory, beating Khan Noonien Singh to the punch by a whole year in forcing his enemy to shout his name dramatically. Shatner would be proud.

Overall, I liked The Instructor, but this is definitely one that's not for everyone. Pop in Furious or Games of Survival first to get a feel on what you're stepping into. It may shake your focus a little bit, especially when we get to the kickboxing tournament. Actually, maybe slap some Mexican wrestling movies into the mix while you're at it. You're going to need to pick up a taste for endless spectator fights to make it through this one.

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Plaga Zombie (1997), by Pablo Parés and Hernán Sáez

A young man is wandering through Bubble-Lens Alley after midnight. He is jumped by a gang of skunk-striped punks with incredibly bizarre facepaint--thankfully, he is saved at the last minute by a mysterious beer-drinking interloper. It turns out, however, that said interloper is a zombie! Cut to the apartment of Mike Taylor and his roommate, former doctor Bill Johnson. Johnson is depressed after losing his license to practice following "the accident," and spends most of his day clipping the leaves off of ferns. As we meet Mike and Bill, we also learn the story of John West and Willie Boxer, two ex-wrestlers--the former wants to get back in the ring with his old partner, while the other just wants to sit in bed and smoke. Eventually Mike is abducted by aliens, who cut him open and rub bubble gum on the back of his neck. Okay, that stuff on his back isn't actually bubble gum--it's more that the skin on the back of his neck (and his whole back) is beginning to rot off. And the same thing is happening to Willie, which is the source of his lethargy, in fact. Bill and John join forces, along with Bill's geek neighbor Max, in a desperate struggle against the extraterrestrially-powered living dead. It is this struggle which will consume the rest of the movie until the inevitable downbeat ending.

Plaga Zombie may be Argentina's first zombie film, and if the efforts that follow this one are anything like it, my world just got a little bigger and brighter. It can be tough to watch a lot of horror comedies, especially from the '90s...and especially if zombies are involved. That even the analysis of the idiocy of the scores of thousands of bad zombie movies made over the years is now exhausted is a sign that unless someone does have that startlingly-good fresh idea, the genre is beyond dead, and indeed beyond any sort of topical joke about undeath as well. The one mercy of being bludgeoned with so many of these awful movies is that I've gotten used to knowing when exactly to turn something off. Plaga Zombie, however, looked like a positive outing at first glance, and I'm glad to say it lived up to my initial optimism.

The first realization I came to after watching the movie was how exactly it accomplished its blend of horror and comedy so nicely--besides being just an hour long, that is. Unlike the makers of a lot of horror comedies, directors Parés and Sáez are aware that the best horror comedies are ones where the comedy breaks the tension, and logically plays off of the story the horror parts set up. Rarely are there asides in Plaga Zombie--compare it to Poultrygeist, which will gleefully interrupt its own non-narrative just to bring us a close-up shot of a greasy butthole shitting on the camera. The goofiness comes out in the form of slapstick during the fight scenes, or the actors mugging; sometimes we do cut to something else, but it's always brief, like the cutaway to the zombie giggling stupidly as it tazes itself in the face with a defibrillator. As a result, the movie is actually funny. It doesn't explain its jokes; it doesn't repeat them until they lose all coherence; it doesn't dwell on any one bit for an uncomfortably long time. If you laugh, you laugh. If you don't, you wait for the next part. It's plain and simple.

While the movie never succeeds in being actually creepy, it is still an extremely professional effort. Plaga Zombie was made for a shocking $120, and it contains more actors and extras than movies I've seen made for a thousand times as much. If Parés and Sáez were not film students, they were auto-didacts from having watched a tremendous deal of movies, one of which was almost certainly Evil Dead. The cinematography is almost always appropriate in framing and mobility, and it's one of the few movies I've seen that uses a bubble-lens in a way that works. And the effects are suitably grotesque, as well. Partly-melted Neopolitan ice cream makes surprisingly impressive zombie vomit, while a lot of filmmakers could learn from how cake frosting can be used to make undead face-paint. There wasn't a single moment where I wasn't entertained by the movie, and that's not even getting into the weird shit.

There's one "weird shit" scene in particular I want to highlight, which is Max's introduction. Let's just that as much as this movie threw me, I wasn't expecting to hear Leonard Nimoy rasp out the "Final Frontier" speech as presented in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. What's confusing about this scene is that Max is in a chatroom on his computer, talking to someone named "Kirk"! These circumstances don't really justify themselves outside of establishing that Max, a mathematician, is nerdy, which is funny because Max has a relatively small role in the film.

But of course I'm ignoring the main thing I liked about Plaga Zombie: more than any other Kids Goofing Off movie I've seen so far, it reminded me of the movies I used to make with my friends. All those silly half-comedies about ninjas and bigfoot and Sausage Kings...those were the days. We knew what sort of movies we wanted to make ours like, but it was impossible to ignore putting in our own idiosyncracies as well. And in the case of the movies of my past, this meant a lot of dumb inside jokes which were nonetheless pretty hilarious at the time. But the makers of Plaga Zombie, as I've said, took a very professional approach to their work, and consequently their output is more soberingly fluid than anything I put together.

The production company responsible for Plaga Zombie, Farsa Producciones, has been generous enough to put the movie and its two sequels up on YouTube, so you have no excuse to miss this. I will probably never recommend a zombie comedy ever again, so this is a pretty big deal!

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Ninja the Protector (1986), by Godfrey Ho

Oh my God, our first Godfrey Ho movie! There's no time do an intro now! Just understand that Godfrey Ho is that guy who made over 130 utterly cheap, utterly crazy ninja movies throughout the later end of the 20th Century. This is one of the ones he did with sword 'n' sandal superstar Richard Harrison, who appeared in many Ho movies as "Ninja Master Gordon." As ever, Godfrey Ho promises us NONSTOP NINJA ACTION, and as ever, he delivers on it. Ninja the Protector's started without us, let's go!

A gangster named Bruce runs several different crime operations, including a counterfeiting ring, and Gordon and his white-dude operatives face him down. They are confused by the track-suit dressed men who engage them in challenges of martial arts, but learn from one of them that they are "Ninjas." "What's a Ninja?" they ask Gordon. "Ha, ha, ha. Just a fairy tale," he replies. Meanwhile, in Plot B, a salesman works his way up the company, fucking his boss on the beach and failing to protect her from getting raped. This movie incidentally contains what is probably the most tasteless jump cut I've ever seen, wherein we cut from a rape scene to an office where two men are talking with Gordon in front of a poster showing a bound and gagged woman that says "It could happen to you." Full apologies: it's a little disturbing. Just lose yourself in Plot A, with its irreversibly silly ninja battles--after all, that's what people come to a Godfrey Ho movie for, right?

Now that we've caught our breath a little, I can do some 'splaining: this Plot A and Plot B stuff is a reference to the fact that most of Ho's movies, even ones as short as the 67-minute-long Ninja the Protector, are usually made of two older movies that Ho acquired that he sewed together using dubbing. Usually the characters in the two movies would establish the connection by calling each other on the phone, possibly even though a phone that looks like Garfield the Cat. It's a technique that inspired my linking of the two novellas in my book Tail of the Lizard King. In this case, Plot A is made up of footage with Harrison and Ho's other white actors, while Plot B, connected as always by a phone call, is an old Asian film, in this case a drama or rape-revenge thriller of some kind, with the crooks in B being stated to be the goons of the ninjas.

All throughout we encounter other Godfrey Ho tropes, including groups of criminals all independently unleashing a chorus of "Heh, heh, heh, heh"'s. Godfrey Ho makes being a criminal look fun! Plus, the dubs will make you pine for the fjords of Godzilla vs. Megalon. I have unfortunately become desensitized, but if you are alien to the world of Ho, you will be reborn in a new image. Cheapness is the name of the game here, and it permeates deep.

Ninja the Protector is not without flaws. Like almost all of Ho's films, even the action gets tiresome at some point. There are no characters to really latch onto, though I suppose the Plot B romance is okay and sad and the banter between Gordon and the other Plot A commandos about whether or not ninjas exist is pretty hilarious, though perhaps not for the reasons intended. These are moments incidental to the characters, however. Ho has a talent for animating cardboard, but he can't make it flesh. Usually the only emotion that his characters make us feel is testosterone during the fight scenes, which do drag on. This lack of depth makes the rape scenes, of which there appear to be two, even more tasteless than before, because of the lack of effort that could be afforded to it. But if you need to fill an hour, and maybe want to open yourself up to a new world in that time, check it out. Let the excitement power you through the day. 

Holy Sword (1982)/Death Warrior (1984), by Çetin Inanç and Cüneyt Arkin

...these are honestly the only two Turkish movies I need to review on this site.

Almost everyone now has heard of the insanity of Turkish cinema, and of that percentage of the thus-blessed population, most of them have heard of it primarily through Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam, aka Turkish Star Wars, or 3 dev adam, aka Captain America and Santo vs. Spider-Man. I love the former, and have gotten a kick or two out of the latter. Usually people point out that a lot of Turkish movies--at least, a lot of the ones that we Americans have actually heard of--are new, weirder takes on Western films, though one will notice that the most famous of these films, Turkish Star Wars, doesn't resemble Star Wars at all, plot-wise. Today's movies--if they can be describes as movies, in the sense of being plural and actual movies--are original stories, though if they did come close to ripping anything off, it would be the filmography of Godfrey Ho. A man whose filmography looks like this. Yeah, I wasn't kidding when I said I was leaving movies like last week's behind...Holy Sword and Death Warrior are probably the most exciting, unfettered, kinetic, bizarre movies I have ever seen. Because of their weirdness, energy, and Cüneyt Arkin star power--he's Turkish Han Solo and basically the greatest action star of all time--they are quintessential Turkish films for people who dig this sort of thing.

First, some clarification. I've decided to do a "double feature" on these movies because...they're kind of the same movie. As far as I know, both of them aired on TV two years apart, and Arkin didn't serve as co-director on Holy Sword. I encountered these movies via Death Warrior, and when I finally tracked down Holy Sword I was surprised to find a lot of familiar scenes. In fact, the same scenes, just in a different order. I feel as if there may be a few scenes that appear in one movie or not the other but there's nothing in my memory denying that those "scenes" were actually footage from the shared scenes that was cut depending on the version of the movie. But rest assured--Death Warrior is not a remake or repackaging of Holy Sword. It is a bona fide sequel, and I know this because at one point a character explains, "Two years ago in Germany was ninja terror," referencing the movie's previous (ostensible) setting in Berlin. And as if a movie's sequel being composed entirely of remixed footage from the first movie was not enough, there is the trifling matter of the subtitles that adorned my bootleg. God bless Google Translate. I'm sure I'll say more later.

Regardless of which movie you're watching, the plot is the same--an evil Ninja Master is leading his army of supernatural warriors against the world, in the name of controlling everything! And these ninjas are already a force to be reckoned with. Not only do they have an army of zombies, and the ability to breathe underwater and live without food, but they have mastery of alchemy. Who could possibly stop these immortal zombie-controlling gold-creating monsters? It turns out that Inspector Murat, aka Cüneyt Arkin, is on the case. Murat has two things on his side: he is the world's greatest martial arts master, and he is incapable of being surprised or flummoxed by anything. But don't think that means he lacks energy--Arkin action-mugs to every shot and is still charismatic as fuck outside of the fight scenes. Most of these movies are comprised of fight scenes. Are you surprised? If you are, watch Ninja Terminator and reinvent your definition of cinema. Even in the movies' downtime people are having their faces ripped off by mummies or being strangled by garden plants. There is a shockingly generic romance that occurs between Murat and Füsun Uçar, who was also Arkin's girlfriend in Turkish Star Wars. And consequently, there is no boredom here, not for a second. These are movies that threatens to repel its audience through sheer noise rather than a lack of anything interesting--shield your mind well and float downstream, or you will die of an adrenaline overdose.

If you can find this, hope it's the same as my copy, because you don't want to miss the now oft-mentioned subtitles. The Ninja Master instructs his evil pupils in the ways of archery: "Five arrow not enough. But matchstick" Lack of period included. Or how about the endlessly quotable "Zombies coming underground"? And it's hard to not cry laughing over putting "Help." over a woman whose scream sounds roughly akin to "AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH." That the audio people also at least doubled the sounds of people screaming or fighting (so as to make them as loud as possible, you see) makes whatever script these movies had into an audiovisual waking nightmare.

Like many of the Turkish films that have filtered down to us mere mortals, the technical aspects are the final icing on the cake. The shots are all dynamic but not sophisticated--they were shot in a matter of days if not hours for an audience of similar patience. Characters teleport at random, and some shots last for mere fractions of seconds before they cut to something else, usually someone fighting or being killed. The sound and video were probably faded to the garish whining (gorgeous) shit we see today when they first aired. They could also only afford one stock effect for people punching each other, which appears to be comprised of a wet flour sack being hit by a stick while someone grunts off-camera. This sound effect never gets old even people are being punched a million times a second, and it is occasionally intercut with the sword duels (!!!) which also only one "clang" sound effect ad hilarium. These sound effects play even when the punches or slashes clearly miss by several feet.

Bless those in my life who showed me a plethora of good movies in my youth, so that the awesomeness of these ones could break me in my adulthood. Every time I watch them, they leave me at a loss for air, and my head spins. Human lungs can't keep up with speed like this.

I'm not kidding, folks. I know I sort of take on the role of a "character" in these reviews, but if that character exists, I break them to let you know that these movies are indispensable. If I found out I missed them in mortal life after my death, I would feel cheated. I would be depressed for the rest of eternity. Do not do that too yourself--you are too good. This is nonstop ninja action, and it is probably the absolute best at what it does. Though as always, I dare somehow to prove me wrong.

High Kicks (1993), by Ruta K. Aras

I have encountered a generation of movies--usually action movies, but it varies--that have managed to contain the very living essence of the '90s, which was a bizarre era for those of us who set out to make movies with no money. A lot of these low-budget productions washed up on the shores of our elementary schools. Some of them distantly haunt my memory, all nameless and indistinguishable from one another; nothing else but old ghosts now. They always featured the immortal VHS hiss, wooden acting, curious accents, and questionable slang. It turns out there were some movies that had all of that, down to the letter, in movies made for adults as well, and High Kicks is one of them. It is a martial arts film. It is also a rape revenge film. But because it's filtered down through classic shot-on-shitteo blandness, it comes across as jarring and flat at the same time. That contrast has always intrigued me for some reason. Maybe I just like being embarrassed by how stupid the decade I grew up in was.

High Kicks starts off on what is probably the weirdest possible note for a rape revenge film: with super-sexualized shots of ladies working out. I feel like maybe this was supposed to set up some sort of guilt in the audience, possibly offense and confusion as well. This workout takes place as a gym called High Kicks!, run by Sandy, mistress of aerobics. When her handyman ditches out on her she takes on a new one, a sailor named Sam, who is secretly a karate master. A group of street thugs, led by a chubby white dude named TC, break into the gym and assault Sandy. Sam helps her recover from the trauma, and he offers her to teach her karate, with the aid of his buddies/practice combatants Jonas (from Germany!) and Maurice (from "OUTAH SPAAAAACE!!!"). Every line of dialogue throughout is unnatural but charmingly Hamill-esque ("I'm kinduva free spirit, actually!" Sam says), and the hair on most of the characters is pretty awful. It's simultaneously dark and whimsical, uplifted by Casio cues and community theater earnestness even after people have been gang-raped. It jumps from unflinching and realistic images of trauma to a weird love triangle between Sandy, Sam, and one of Sandy's students, Tracy, which plays out in the most soap opera-y of fashions. And all throughout, those training montages and synth demos never let us forget what decade it is. High Kicks is vengeance and justice...for the '90s!

The scope of the film never gets too sizable for its trousers, as the saying goes. That is to say, it is a movie that you can believe would happen in real life. There is a five-man criminal organization who is the subject of sweet revenge by Sandy and her three karate buddies, broken down into several ass-kicking sessions. Then, there is the Tracy-Sandy-Sam love triangle, which is endearingly the fault of Sam's bad social skills. Actually, Sam is a pretty great character for this sort of movie--not only is he as awkward as he is good at martial arts, but he, too, is a rape victim. He and Sandy are on equal terms, because one is never above the other in terms of martial arts skills, or at least so. Can I go so far as to call it a feminist movie? It does fail the Bechdel test pretty hard, at least as far as I noticed, but unlike a lot of low-budget action movies, it doesn't glory in or exploit its rape scenes...er, even though those rape scenes become the primary motivation for its lead character. I may be thinking too hard about this--you know the rule of never devoting more time than the director did. 

This movie isn't going to change how your brain works. It is simply entertaining. But entertainment, at least in my opinion, can truly be an end in itself--humans thrive on it. And High Kicks will entertain every time you come back. That means it's a reliable resting place for one to go to when the "real world" gets too intense. You just need something of a strong stomach, a little tastelessness, and a forewarning of the potentially triggering material. (The whole thing's nudity-free--there is nothing explicit in Sandy's assault, though it may still be troubling.) But it is rewarding, and not merely because the acting really does remind you of Birdemic.

This movie is better than Birdemic. For one thing it's only 80 minutes, and also, things constantly happen in it, instead of there being blank seas of hopeless nothing. The special effects are better, too, because there are none. A better comparison movie would be 1987's Killer Workout. That film plus this one would be a great double-feature, providing a slasher take on the world of aerobicizing. (A world lost to time, full of dark and mysterious secrets.) I'm sure Killer Workout will end up on this site at some point or another.

Seriously, though: do not watch High Kicks if you have a dislike of the '90s in any way. It will literally kill you.

Shogun Assassin (1980), by Kenji Misumi/Robert Houston

I know what you're thinking. How could I take a website dedicated to the review of trash movies and have it feature a review of Shogun Assassin, a movie critically acclaimed all by itself, being in turn made from the first two films of the 1970s Lone Wolf and Cub series, which was comprised entirely of films that were all critically acclaimed? Well, I'm going to follow the Rule of Fun and treat this movie rather like a trash movie. I've always viewed it as such ever since it made the rounds a couple times with one of my friend groups in high school. Shogun Assassin is such an outrageously violent movie that it inspires the sort of hilarity that one often finds in the creme de la creme of trash flicks. It's also dominated by a sense of The Weird that similarly plagues or brightens the types of martial arts movies one would find in the gutter. (Some of which I'll hopefully get to soon!) Besides, I'm currently doing a Godzilla retrospective, and Toho was responsible for the Lone Wolf and Cub films, adapted from the Kazuo Koike/Goseki Kojima manga of the same name. I assure you, everything will work out! Now grab your best baby carriage and get running. The forces of darkness are not far behind, and vengeance is a long journey ahead!

In medieval Japan, a samurai works for a shogun who begins to go insane with old age. He helps the shogun carry out increasingly violent purges of the old man's supposed enemies until the shogun turns his efforts inward, and has the samurai's wife assassinated. The samurai, now calling himself Lone Wolf, goes on the run with his infant son--who partially narrates the story, by the way. The shogun also narrates, but he sounds eternally constipated. Because this is a Toho movie the American dub actors didn't take it fucking seriously at all. They may not have been paid enough to. Anyway, Lone Wolf accepts assassination jobs for money, and eventually gets orders to kill the shogun's brother, Lord Kiru. Lord Kiru is protected by three brothers called the Masters of Death. On this quest, he has numerous run-ins with ninjas, which quickly reveal that a lot of the budget must have gone into the literal gallons of blood that spray everywhere in this movie. And that is the primary crux of Shogun Assassin--endless scenes of blades, spears, or claws ripping flesh till everyone is a blood geyser. Even the Cub's baby carriage is a weapon--it has hidden swords in it that cut people's legs off! And a lot of stuff in this film is white, too. It was designed to show off a ton of blood, and tons of severed legs, noses, ears--the works. Somewhere, H.G. Lewis is blushing. Guess what, at the end, the hero wins, and the bad guys end up in piles of chunks. It is a movie with two options: life and death. Some receive the former--most get the latter.

The gore of this film is certainly one of its big selling points. I don't want to dwell on it, but it really is incredible how much work they put into making this film so shockingly violent. People get vertically sliced in half, jugulars are hacked--basically, think of anything horribly brutal a sword can do, and a sword will do that in this movie. That's all I'm going to say.

It is not a very dialogue heavy movie, but when people do talk, it doesn't sound natural. I already sorta touched on that. It's a hard movie to take seriously, from a dramatic perspective, if people are talking in a scene. But again, it is nearly silent. Ambient sound usually replaces music, and what music there is, is pretty awesome. And fortunately, the actor dubbing Lone Wolf is pretty solid, though in all fairness I don't want to seem quite so hard on the dubwork by and large. But when your two narrators are as ridiculous as the ones in this film you do have to joke a little.

The final showdown in the desert is great. One of the Masters of Death, the one with the garden rake/Wolverine claw setup, ends up finding a group of anti-shogun rebels by stabbing the sand with his claws on a whim. It turns out the rebels, who apparently don't need oxygen, are hiding under bamboo mats underground. He lifts him up by the head, and throws him around, and then does that to three or four more guys. Each of the Masters meet their fates in the most overdramatic ways, each losing about a bucket of paint in the process. Life is cheap and immortals are real in this universe. Lone Wolf proves that.

My one criticism of the film probably is that Lone Wolf is basically invincible. Yeah, he gets cut once and develops a fever from the infection, but he basically just goes into a coma for a few hours and is fighting again minutes later. As any action movie fan knows, it is pretty great to watch someone driven by vengeance cut a lot of people down. But at no point did I seriously believe Lone Wolf would meet his maker. Still, the thrill of seeing him wipe out hundreds of ninjas (contrasted to the mere dozens of something comparably crazy like a Godfrey Ho movie) really makes up for it. That's probably why I'm talking about it on this site, in all honesty--it is not bound to reality. We are not expected to view Lone Wolf as someone with ordinary skills, and that's what makes it a great watch.

Shogun Assassin has paled to me somewhat over time, but also waxed in its power to draw affection from me as well. It is no longer as shocking or gratuitous as it was when I saw it as a kid--I've seen much more insane and graphic films at this point, to be sure--but it also will always have a special place in my heart as one of the awful but astounding movies I got to see with some of my favorite people. Things were simpler then--I didn't have my student loans, my tight work schedule, my anxiety over the struggle of career success. Watching it can take me back to a time when I could laugh easier.

Having returned to it today, I'll be feeling good for a long, long while. And it'll make you feel good too.