After the early ’70s, things made an interesting turn inside American-International Pictures. Company head Samuel Z. Arkoff slowed down considerably in the movies he personally produced, relying more on pickups made by others. And the product A.I.P. was releasing started to have appearances of movies the company had shown little to no interest before – movies that were more serious in nature. There was the Annie Hall rip-off Something Short Of Paradise, the teen drama California Dreaming, and the movie being reviewed here, the teen drama Our Winning Season. Was Arkoff striving for respectability at this point? Who knows.

Cuneyt in June continues, along with some other goodies as well…

VAHSI KAN The first ten minutes of Vahsi Kan are perhaps the purest and most potent distillation in existence of the Turkish action film as interpreted by exploitation kingpin Cetin Inanc. They are also ten of the seediest, sleaziest, most hilariously lascivious and violent ten minutes you’re likely to see this side of the opening montage from Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive. It’s made even sleazier by the fact that, due to a crackdown on nudity by Turkish film censors — who had previously tolerated a surprisingly vast amount of perversion and decadence in the 1970s — there’s no actual nudity on display. Somehow, the simple honesty of a bit of gratuitous nudity would have made the opening minutes of Vahsi Kan substantially less dirty.
KARA MURAT FATIHIN FERMANI It is after one of Kara Murat’s especially prolific episodes of Byzantine bashing that Nikol (Kenan Pars), the Emperor’s unscrupulous Commander-in-Chief, suggests that a village of Turkish civilians be massacred in retaliation. The Emperor, still hoping to effect a truce with the Turks, forbids this, so Nikol and his men just go ahead and do it anyway behind his back. Sadly, the village they choose is the one in which Kara Murat’s gray haired old mom lives, and what’s worse, she ends up being dispatched by Nikol himself, who takes as a prize a necklace that we have just seen Kara Murat give to her. Soon after, Kara Murat comes upon her lifeless body. Heartbroken, he nonetheless realizes that continuing the cycle of violence won’t accomplish anything constructive, and instead pledges to seek grief counseling and move on with his life as best he can. The end. Oh, I’m totally kidding. Of course he vows to get revenge.
WORLD OF DRUNKEN MASTER Look at all the promotional materials for The World Of Drunken Master and you’ll see the Drunken Master himself, Simon Yuen Siu-tien, all over them. The main selling point of the film is that Yuen, star of the original movie, is in it. And it’s true, he is, for exactly 1 minute and 14 seconds. Yes, we’re at the mercy of the Hong Kong movie hype machine here, something that managed to sell at least 10 times more ‘Bruce Lee’ movies after Bruce’s death than he ever appeared in while alive. So the only place you’ll see the elder Yuen as Beggar So in this film is during a short opening credits sequence, practicing his drunken boxing on a beach somewhere.

Since you have no doubt seen German actor Klaus Kinski in a movie before, you would know that the idea of casting him as an American soldier in World War II – which is what Salt In The Wound does – would be the most obvious decision. Seriously though, despite this unlikely decision, the movie works all the same. In fact, the movie packs a real punch, just like… well… salt in a wound.

.

MAGDALENA, POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL (1974)

And the Exorcist rip-offs just keep coming…

After her grandfather is murdered and crucified, the innocent young Magdalena Winter begins to behave strangely, using foul and blasphemous language, having convulsions, drooling, and tearing her clothes off at the slightest opportunity.

You know – the usual.

The makers of this film evidently felt that we wouldn’t be able to tell when Magdalena is herself and when she isn’t, so they beat it into our heads with a soundtrack that is 50% sickly sweet piano, 50% Theremin.

Oh – and this probably goes without saying, but – NSFW.

DISCO GODFATHER

When angel dust dealers move into his neighborhood, Rudy Ray Moore becomes the avenging disco godfather of legend. Yes, he avenges his nephew. Yes, he is a godfather. And yes, dear God, there is disco.

Review Snippet:
The “disco” part is the reason you should not go into this movie unawares. When the film starts, we are inside of a hopping disco club. Get used to the disco; you are going to see a lot of it. You are also going to see a lot of the disco club’s patrons, henceforth known as the disco dancers. Collectively, the disco dancers are the film’s main character. I am harping on this, but you just cannot imagine how much disco padding the film contains until you see it. The only time I have ever been exposed to more disco dancing was a 1977 episode of “American Bandstand.”

Lesson Learned:
During the 1970’s the difference between business formal and business casual was the size of the collar.

Sledgehammer (1983)

Not so much a slasher as a smoosher flick, Sledgehammer has the added distinction of being the first horror movie to be made and distributed entirely on video.

(Hey, wait! Where are you going? Come back here!)

Forget everything you know about the legions of direct-to-video dreck that followed, because this movie just happens to be one of the most indelibly weird movies of the era. True, it’s so weird that at a certain point I had to start hallucinating messages in it… but then again, maybe it’s only natural that a movie that changes gear midway through would inspire a review that does the same.

The family movie Trap On Cougar Mountain is yet another “boy and his animal” movie, this time the animal being a cougar. The fact that the cougar isn’t exactly one of the most lovable animals in the animal kingdom is just one of the many problems this movie has.

Well, not exactly, but this still kicks off Teleport City’s “Cuneyt in June” parade.

NINJA KILLER There are a lot of fights strung together by scenes of Cuneyt doing manly stuff like sneering at the camera, looking sternly at the camera, looking stoically at the camera, walking stoically thorugh the streets and piers of the city, and for some reason I think we can all understand, playing leap frog with a bunch of bikini chicks on a beach — although his version of leap frog seems to be having the girls squat down in the surf while he trots toward them and sort of kicks them over. It’s all pretty awesome, but nowhere in it will you find Bolo, Carter, or ninjas. That’s where Godfrey Ho and Thomas Tang come into the picture.

SHAOLIN INVINCIBLES  At the time, though my friends and I were voracious consumers of any and every kungfu movie on which we could get our hands, we were also operating more or less in a vacuum. Pre-internet days, you know. So while I wanted to know more about the movies I was watching, there simply didn’t exist the resources that would help me complete the task. I learned to recognize various stars and directors, I didn’t have much historical context beyond that I could paste together based solely on movies I’d seen. There was no way for me to tell a Hong Kong film from a Taiwanese film, and no way for me to understand that I should know the difference — I didn’t suspect that the most bizarre kungfu films we were renting were the product of a Taiwanese film industry that seemed to think acid-fueled fever dreams were the best source material for kungfu movie scripts.

… which is, coincidentally, what I say every time I glance at my DVD collection. Presenting, in the center ring:

Following on from Teleport City’s review of the first movie of the series, here’s the movie that stopped the series in its tracks. It takes place in and around a circus — definitely not the kind of Ring these guys are used to — but the circus is a bastion of normalcy compared to the goings-on behind the scenes.

This time, the Champions of Justice meet some Little People who are more than a match for them, while joining forces with an exiled interplanetary genius… as well as the one Earthling of whom it may be said that he could truly tell Uranus from a hole in the sky. It’s a mess… but it’s also one of the few films of its kind to co-star Little People as full and equal participants in the story.

Guest reviewer Carol Borden from The Cultural Gutter takes a look at…

SATAN RETURNS

Satan Returns is a Wong Jing film written for his favorite actress, Chingmy Yau. It’s actually a pretty good role for Chingmy Yau. Before she stopped making films in 1999, Yau starred in a lot of Wong Jing films, many had some variation of “Rape” and “Angel” in the title. In fact, according to the HKMDb, her last film was, Raped By An Angel 4: Raper’s Union. (Which I have never seen, what with my presumption that there would be raping, but I wonder about it. Do scabs get beat up by union rapists? What are the dues?). With no rape, and very little nudity, Satan Returns is mild in comparison to the angel/rape films. Chingmy Yau doesn’t really play the pretty girl and the camera — and the comic relief — don’t leer at her breasts the entire film. So she gets to act.