This week we're getting real stupid with it and looking at Cannon Film's ultimate ninja festival, American Ninja from 1985. This one hits all the high notes for the 80's. Michael Dudikoff makes his starring debut playing an American soldier with a mysterious past who must fight evil ninjas to stop an arms dealer from selling missiles to communists in Central America or maybe it's Angola. Who can say? We also break down the dubious political conditions of The Philippines and the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos that made so many cheesy low budget action movies, the intense, apocalyptic conditions of the late Cold War, and the wild abandon with which Cannon made jingoistic action movies for the American market.

This absolutely ridiculous movie is one of the dumbest movies we've watched so far and we cannot resist its stupid allure. It's got just about everything a twelve year old boy could want in an action movie. They're ninjas! And they're freaking out!

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Grease up your pompadours and get your switchblades ready. This week we're taking a look at Walter Hill's 1984 rock and roll fable, Streets of Fire. Coming in hot off the back of the 1982 smash hit buddy cop picture, 48 Hours, Hill and co-writer Larry Gross could write their own checks and dictate their own destinies and sold Hill's dream project, a retro nostalgia vehicle about tough guys, femme fatales, bad guys, and pop music but when the movie landed in the screening rooms at Universal they knew they had a problem. Streets of Fire is weird as hell and out of step with what movie-going teens of the summer of 1984 were looking for. So dire was the outcome that Streets of Fire ended up getting killed in its opening weekend against one of the weakest Star Trek movies and then the following week Ghostbusters dropped and until Beverly Hills Cop came out it was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about.

In the years that followed Streets of Fire gained a cult following that appreciates what Hill was trying to do. It's an upgrade from The Warriors in many ways and the sound track, paired with powerhouse performances from Diane Lane and Willem Dafoe in early roles, delivers a wildly entertaining, deeply silly action movie with an enduring legacy. Let us tell you all about it.

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We're joined this week by Eli Bosnick of the God Awful Movies podcast to talk about the infamous Hong Kong Category III exploitation movie, Story of Ricky. One man enters a corrupt private prison in near-future China and faces down the evil warden, his assistant, and four villains with terrible strength and magical martial arts prowess. Along the way just about everybody gets their guts kicked out or their head punched off in this extremely gory spectacle.

We also discuss the dawn of the Category III rating in Hong Kong, how great it was to trade video tapes in the mail with total strangers in the 90's, and Eli tries to get Bryan to cop to trading horror movies for weird porno movies in what is easily one of our most inappropriate episodes yet.

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We're getting really bloody this week as we take a trip to feudal Japan for the 1972 samurai movie that set the pace for violent sword fighting movies to follow. This is not your father's samurai movie. This is not Akira Kurosawa. This is Kenji Misumi's epic starring Tomisaburo Wakyama and his wonderful, weapon-laden baby cart.

Adapted from the extremely popular manga by Kazuo Koike, Lone Wolf and Cub tells the story of wandering assassin, Ogami Itto and his son, Daigoro as they walk the demon way in hell. The evil daimyo, Yagyu Retsudo wants them dead but it's going to take an army if they intend to get the job done.

Utterly ridiculous and bloody, Sword of Vengeance sets the tone for the five movies that follow and is a tremendously enjoyable movie. Let us tell you all about it.

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This week we take a look at Bryan's favorite movie of all time, John Carpenter's tough guy action dystopia that definitely shook the Disney off of Kurt Russell and reintroduced him as a premier action movie star for the 1980's. We track the entire trajectory of this movie's production, we'll tell you why everyone thinks Snake Plissken is dead, you'll find out about all the other guys that the production company wanted over Kurt Russell, how director of photography, Dean Cundey engineered an entirely new anamorphic lens just to see the movie at night without sacrificing all the awesome lighting. It's a once-in-a-lifetime action movie that set the pace for the decade and inspired everyone to try their hand (and mostly fail) at making their own version of the movie.

Carpenter had access to more money than he'd work with before and still had to stretch a dollar to make the movie and he managed to knock it out of the park on every front. The cast is stacked. The production design is second-to-none, and the soundtrack is just perfect. Listen in and learn all about it.

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This week Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Rome to check in with Enzo G. Castellari and Mark Gregory on their sequel to the 1982 action movie that exploited the popularity of The Warriors. This time they're exploiting the popularity of John Carpenter's outstanding, Escape From New York. We get more Trash and more Bronx gangs but this time we're joined by the absolute massive screen presence of Antonio Sabato and the movie's appeal rests entirely on the outrageous shoot-y, burn-y, explode-y violence that ups the ante and cranks the volume.

Escape From The Bronx has practically zero plot to speak of and is an incredibly dumb movie at heart but it's a lot of fun and some of the best action that Italy had to offer in the twilight of their once-great exploitation movie industry. Let us break it all down for you.

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Hey! Hey! Hey! BIM's on the way! This week Bryan and Dave take a good long look at the abyss and the abyss stares back when they watch the movie that launched The Cannon Group into the American imagination, a movie musical so poorly received that it nearly drove its director to leap from his hotel balcony at the premier. The Apple is what happens when a producer knows that he wants to make a big musical that's sure to capture some of the excitement that Grease generated but without really knowing what makes a musical work. It's a movie so profoundly bad, with bad acting, bad characters, and the worst thing a musical can have: bad music. Nothing about this baffling movie works and it is plainly obvious for anyone to see. It's simply amazing that the director, Menahem Golan was so caught off guard by its failure.

Some movies are so bad that they end entire careers. This one almost ended Golan's life.

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This week Bryan and Dave celebrate one year of 99 Cent Rental with the mother of all cult movies. Get it? It's a drag queen's dream come true. In 1977, reeling from being written out of her mother's will for reasons well-known to her, Christina Crawford, daughter of Hollywood legend, Joan Crawford published a vicious hit piece of a memoir about the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother and Hollywood couldn't wait to snatch up the option and transform it in a motion picture. Paramount came calling and took a book full of dubious claims and turned it into a movie full of even more dubious claims and a tone that shifts wildly from massively understated to flying dangerously off the handle.

If a crazy story wasn't enough, the troubled production, made even more difficult by Faye Dunaway's horrible diva behavior on set and the meddling of celebrity husbands pushed the studio and producer Frank Yablans to the brink.

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