I’ve used plenty of ride share apps and I’d like to think that if my driver ever said, “if you gotta piss, piss out the window. Cause I’m on a quest … I’m searching for the gates of hell,” that I would launch myself from the moving vehicle ASAP. If I somehow survived, I would never get in a stranger’s car again. This is one of the lessons from BLUE VENGEANCE, a strange film I enjoyed.
If you love weird and wild action cinema of the 1980s, you owe it to yourself to find a copy of this film. It features an incredible cast, a Japanese-influenced sword fight, wild shoot-outs, rocket launcher attacks, dirtbike chases, dirtbike crashes into cardboard, carsplosions, hand-to-hand fights, throat rips, and a single, spiked fingerless glove.
A martial arts special agent travels halfway across the world to help a team of archaeologists hunt for treasure. Along the way, they’ll fight ninjas, zombie ninjas, a zombie ninja final boss, and a jerk from Florida with a mustache.
While the Halloween costumes of today are often clever, shameless, or absurdly referential, their burlap and paper counterparts from last century still hold the all-time crown for creepy (doing an online image search for “creepy vintage halloween costumes” is the new “Bloody Mary”)! The main character in 1953’s HALLOWEEN PARTY brandishes one such mask in a way that inadvertently sets off a chain of events which concludes with him wearing a straw hat and made up in his mother’s lipstick.
Above all other descriptors, LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH is deeply atmospheric, and that’s due in no small part to the choices in location — they are every bit as idyllic as they are menacing.
Kickboxing. Drugs. Radio DJs. Vigilante violence. Virginia exteriors. These are the core elements in the cinematic playbook of PSYCHO KICKBOXER.
An entertaining and low-budget gang-violence-via-martial-arts romp that served as a cinematic launchpad for some of the bigger figures in the American martial arts b-movie scene of the 1980s.
It seems almost far-fetched now, but there was once a time when San Francisco was filled with leather bars and martial arts schools instead of unaffordable housing and tech startups. Like a limp body flying over the bar and smashing only the bottom-shelf vodka, THE WEAPONS OF DEATH comes out of nowhere to surprise and delight.
