PARTY TIPS OF YORE: THE TWO GREAT ALBUM COVERS FOR CLEANING YOUR WEED

During the now bygone days of me living in an apartment large enough for me to throw a debauched get-together, I quickly discovered that when friends and guests arrived with smokeable “party favors,” one had better have a surface ready for cleaning the stems and seeds out of the merry-joo-wanna soon to grace the bowls of pipes and bongs or be turned into huge joints. In the days before they more or less died out there was nothing better for this purpose than a good old twelve-inch vinyl LP cover, the act of weed cleaning on an album cover helped to reinforce the ancient covenant between stonage and music.

Many people favored the Beatles' “White Album” as their surface of choice, but I always frowned upon that one since weed tended to render that stark bit of cover design dingy over time, and the Beatles catalog had also become a bit of a cliché when associated with music for getting high, so why go there?

My own favorite cover for this purpose is without question the eponymous B-52's album from 1979; while the musical content is admittedly not for all tastes - an uneven pastiche of throwback surf/dance music, wildly screechy/effeminate vocals and some of the most ludicrous lyrics ever scribed - the cover is a bright canary yellow, absolutely perfect for keeping your righteous buds visible in most party-lit situations, even including the often misused black light.


The other great choice is “Trout Mask Replica” by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, an album that even fans like myself find nigh unlistenable without Herculean effort.


This item is a double album, so when unfolded it provides enough space for three to four expert stoners to work their art in a most expedient fashion. The visuals are undeniably strange, and that helps keep the rabid hop-heads occupied while awaiting the illicit lungfulls to come. And when finished, make sure to treat your guests to the head-scratching tracks “Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish, "The Blimp,"” and my personal favorite, “Old Fart At Play.” TRUST YER BUNCHE!

BIRTHDAY GIRL STRIKES AGAIN!

Since the weather has gotten nice and I occasionally have enough downtime to enjoy it, I recently bought one of those high-end folding chairs for sporting events that you can chuck into a shoulder-slung carrying sleeve, and have taken to parking my beige ass either out in front of the barbecue joint or I open the back door in the kitchen and sit in there enjoying the hood fan-coaxed breeze. Armed with a cold beer and with my leather Kangol baseball cap pulled down over my eyes it is a brief respite from the smoky, porky grind. That is until my reverie is fisted in the colon by an annoying douchebag.

Our Sunday shifts tend to be the torturous definition of endlessly boring agony until around six PM, so until that hour Jeff the bartender and I amuse ourselves as best as we can, vainly attempting to find something decent on the tube - no easy feat in the programming wasteland that is NYC - watching DVDs, listening to music or reading whatever is at hand. On this particular Sunday, Jeff was at the bar jotting down new song lyrics in his notebook and I was in the kitchen reading an excellent book on the Black Plague (I'm really into feel-good reading), when we both heard the electronic chime that alerts us to the front door opening.

I briefly craned my neck in the direction of the bar and noted a buxom blonde planting herself on a bar stool. Something about the woman struck me as familiar, but I ignored the mild rumblings of my “looney sense” and went back to my book.

After about fifteen minutes I noticed that the door chime kept going off every five minutes or so, and since we clearly were not being overrun by rabid barbecue-holics I looked out and realized that it was the blonde chick going in and out to constantly yack at people on her cell phone. At that point Jeff (pictured) came back into the kitchen, and if his eyes had rolled any further into his skull they would have rolled down his esophagus and fallen out of his asshole. I asked him what was bugging him and he said, “This fucking annoying psycho bitch is outside and she just WILL NOT FUCKING SHUT UP!” Once he had composed himself, Jeff elaborated:

“Okay, so she comes in with a hello as if she were Rolls (NOTE: one of our regulars who has become family) but pissed off at life. All familiar like, and she's like, 'I'm pissed…' I give her a menu she says, 'No thanks, I know what I want,' then I'm like, 'Oh, okay. What would you like?' She says she doesn't know and then asks for something with lots of raspberry vodka. I make her a raspberry vodka martini and then she's all, 'I went to this Russian bar — I'm Polish — but them Russians… Ya know they only drink shots of vodka, so me and my girlfriends were SOOOO hung over...' Then she's like, 'We were at a wedding, and this guy tried to charge my mother a ton of money and he's like a millionaire...'”

At that point I opened my mouth to say, "Exactly what the fuck does that have to do with anything?” when Jeff beat me to it and blurted, “Yeah, I had no fuckin' clue either as to what the fuck she was talking about, and what the connection between the two stories was! Then she said that her stepfather 'slapped her in the face,' I think at the wedding. In response to my offering her a fourth Chesterfield ale she boasted, "Yeah, I'm not even plastered yet!"

At that point the alarms in my head went off, and I screamed, “OH, SHIT! IT'S BIRTHDAY GIRL!!!” and I swiftly strode out of my smoky sanctum to verify my deduction. Sure enough, it was her, the horrific subject of a previous post, and the second she saw me she happily exclaimed, “Hiya! Remember me? I'm the birthday girl!” I nodded in acknowledgement and immediately returned to the kitchen, staying there for the next few hours while she irritated the living shit out of poor Jeff and Sal, another of our regulars.

When Birthday Girl comes into the barbecue joint, she's on the prowl for dick with a lack of subtlety that would make a she-mink in estrus blush. Pussy a-droolin', she worked her way about the bar, repelling the few men who sat there and attempted to watch the Mets game, even lamely propositioning Sal with a from out of nowhere,”I haven't had sex in a year,” followed up by the world's oldest sports related come-on, namely trying to get him to explain baseball to her since she was just a mere female. Sal instantly twigged to her “strategy” and shot her down in flames with a swiftly executed, “Nah, it'll take too long,” which he punctuated with a long pull on his Schaefer tall boy. The finality of the exchange was as obvious as a thirty-ton bank vault door slamming on someone's skull.

Soon, an aggravated Jeff returned to the sanctuary of the kitchen and immediately vented again: “She didn't like the sausage platter, had me pour sugar in her martini, and when she couldn't finish it said 'Next time! Tee hee!' Whatever, man! Then she asked, 'What are the guys in here, because my girlfriends are all single…' FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!!!!!!”

As if this tableu weren't enough to give any guy a headache and a permanent “man-gina,” Birthday Girl kept trying to gloss over her hyper-annoying drunken behavior by mentioning the fact that she's Polish about 400 times, spicing that huge “who gives a fuck" moment with the killer combo of "Hey I'm Polish AND blonde!!!” Then, after what seemed like an eon, the bar hag left, presumably to haunt some other unsuspecting watering hole and hopefully find some inebriated horn-dog to give her the ol' pork plug.

Ladies, let this serve as an object lesson in how not to go on a quest for Johnson. Take it from me, even as horny as I am at the moment, I wouldn't have gone for what she was offering.

IN THE INTEREST OF CLARITY: WHAT IS “GERMAN?”

After reading my post on adventures in ye olde porne shoppe, many of you wrote to me both here on the site and on my email account asking exactly what “German” porn is and why it was better not to ask if you didn't know what it is. Well folks, “German” is anything relating to shit and the enjoyment thereof.

Yes, you read that right. I'm talking shit, and not the way most niggaz usually talk shit. I'm talking the 98.6 degree payload that emerges from one's distended asshole in direct, inevitable response to a hearty meal. Yes, there are people who love to rub human doo-doo all over themselves and their (presumably) willing sex partners, even worshipping poop to the point of eating the goddamned stuff and washing it down with their own equally warm piss.

I first heard the dark rumblings of such practices when I was a dirty wee youth, but never thought that such horrors could be for real. Then, while in college at a university that was notorious for all manner of deviant sexuality running rampant, I met various people who drunkenly admitted to the previously mentioned chocolate charm and was horrified to the very soul.

Hey, I'm all for you exploring whatever the fuck you want to do, so long as no one gets hurt, but doody games just plain gross me out. It's that simple.

Then, during my infamous years in the Marvel Comics Bullpen, I actually saw a German porno film, entitled “Das Kaviar Dinner,” and what little innocence I had left went up in flames. The photo on the box featured a wide-eyed, attractive young redhead being spoon fed a heaping helping of freshly laid turd cable from a beautiful silver serving dish. The friend who obtained this video Chernobyl claims that the turbaned Sikh porno dealer — in the heart of Times Square during the last days of its true sleaziness, no less! — recoiled in horror when he saw the box on the counter, and screamed, “Aggggh! No! NO! It is too horrible!!!,” after which he scooped it into a plain brown bag so fast that I swear to Christ that there must have been a sonic boom.

I will spare you the details of the “film” in question, but let me assure you that if I ever see any of the onscreen participants walking down the street I will drop whatever else I may be doing and kick them to death in middle of the tarmac in an effort to keep their possible spawn out of the gene pool.

What really blows my mind is the fact that German porn has become so available thanks to video and DVD that many people who don't normally pursue such diversions know what it is; you know something is truly no longer as underground as it once was the second that jokes are made about it in the popular media, and “South Park” has famously disclosed that resident asshole Eric Cartman's indiscriminate hosebag of a mother once starred in German “scheisse” movies. NOTE: “scheisse” is the German word for shit! Isn't international cultural exchange a wonderful thing, boys and girls?

So now that you know what German is, here are some other kinks that can instantly be identified by the mere mention of the countries with which they are associated:

German = “fun” with doody.
English = bondage and discipline, with the emphasis on discipline, caning and birching specifically.
French = all things oral.
Roman = puking; a reference the historical institution of “vomitoriums” during the days of imperial Rome.
Spanish = the fucking of a lady's titties.
Greek = all things anal.

If you can think of any that I forgot, please write in to the comments section and share the wisdom!

DAY OFF ADVENTURES: AT THE YE OLDE PORNE SHOPPE

Points subtracted for gratuitous apostrophe use.

Usually on one of my two days off per week, I venture into Manhattan to do some DVD shopping or scour book stores and comic book shops in search of yet more stuff with which to pollute my already cluttered noggin and apartment. (Believe me, my flat is so choked with all manner of stuff that it looks like the warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant is stored at the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.) Today my plan was to hit Kim's Video on St. Mark's Place to peruse the week's newly available DVDs, and then on to Jim Hanley's Universe to pick up a collection of commission sketches by one of my favorite illustrators, namely Steve "Nexus" Rude, but on my way into the city I decided to do something I haven't done for a while: check out the wares on display at the first porno shop I could find.

For those of you who don't live in the NYC area, it is no longer kosher to flat-out honestly and openly run a porn shop. Instead of being able to name such an establishment "Scurvy Mike's Cunt-U-Copia," a proprietor must do away with all blatant displays of flesh and just call the place "Videos" or something equally inoffensive in an attempt to keep NYC safe for the kiddies (thank you ever so much, Giuliani administration). While I can understand such a motivation, I am rather saddened by such sanitation of the once "most dangerous city in the world" because when I was an impressionable child it was the birthright of kids in the Tri-State area to come into Manhattan — specifically Times Square — and have our innocence irrevocably shattered by the rampaging filth and violence on view right next to stands selling cheap replicas of the Statue of Liberty to tourists. Thus the appalling whitewashing of the area strikes me as especially idiotic since kids today have the Internet to browse, and there are infinitely more ways to be utterly fucked up by pornography and whatever other material one may find objectionable online than there were when I was a wee young 'un. I mean, I didn't know what fisting was until I got into high school, and that is a shame of epic proportions. Today's youth is simply much better (?) informed and whether or not they are engaging in any of the activities their research may expose them to, at least they have some sort of a clue.

But I digress.

One of the ways the porn entrepreneurs in the Big Apple got past not being able to openly flog their wares was to fill the display window with innocuous family videos — Disney and such — or ultra-cheap kung fu flicks, and stock such items for the first five feet or so of the store. That's all well and good but once past those first five feet, it's a smut freak's paradise. Every conceivable manner of filth unfolds itself before one's stunned and occasionally grossed-out eyes; disturbingly realistic PVC vaginas that would make excellent beer cozies, wobbly dildos in all colors and textures (and in some cases, flavors), "German" flicks (if you don't know, don't ask), peep show booths, "bukakke" extravaganzas, multi-volume video series explicitly depicting women old enough to be your great-grandmother getting a righteous plowing from uber-buffed young studs (most notably the horrifying BUST A NUT IN GRANDMA'S BUTT), human/animal pairings (the immortal RAPED BY A DOG standing tall in the forefront of that particular sub-genre), dwarf porn (a field that goes all over the place, even branching into the combined joys of dwarf/transvestite/fisting/golden showers, a la THE LITTLEST SQUIRT, starring Bridget "the Midget" Powers) and who the fuck knows what the hell else. And the real beauty of it is that in spite of the attempts to rid the Disneyfied tourist nightmare that is the new Times Square of such Sodom and Gomorrahesque detritus, this kind of vile fun can be found right next to the big theaters running exhorbitiantly priced blockbuster musicals such as ELTON JOHN WHORES HIMSELF OUT YET AGAIN. Me, I'd rather shell out ten bucks for a copy of EIGHTEEN AND NASTY-VOLUME 10 — which I highly recommend, by the way — than pay $150 bucks for some fucking musical, and I can take the dirty movie home to be "enjoyed" again and again. Take THAT, Broadway!

So as I made my way up the Bowery, I encountered one of the previously described "video" stores and dared to venture in. As expected, the front area was loaded with VHS tapes for sale that had obviously been untouched since approximately 1992 and were covered with dust and cobwebs, a condition that only helped to further the allergic misery I had been suffering from the moment I walked out of my apartment this afternoon. But all was well when I made my way past that section and stumbled into the extra-sleazy rear of the store. The DVDs were stacked floor-to-ceiling on racks of cheap industrial shelving, all with their covers displayed to maximum anatomical impact, regardless of what the customer's taste or orientation may be, one of the things that make even the most scabrous of such establishments one of the great equalizers of humanity. After a few moments in such an environment, one adapts and can peruse the covers without discomfort (unless, like me, you find "German" flicks and violent/torture stuff off-putting).

I gravitated toward the more outrageously titled items and found a couple of gems, namely BIG, WET, STICKY HOLES (self-explanatory) and AMAZING PENETRATIONS WITH AMAZON WOMEN, which featured a buxom brunette cheerily navigating an enormous, veiny, as-thick-around-as-a-beer-can dildo into her seemingly incompatible cooch. I decided to purchase both since I had wandered in on five-bucks-per-DVD day and seeing as both features were four hours in running time, it was a win/win situation all the way. And there was one DVD there that wins my vote for "Porn Title of the Week," but I figured that two such purchases in one day was probably enough, though I may go back and get it just to have as proof of its existence: the cover was an outrageous closeup of a woman splaying her Mighty Pinkness to such an alarming degree that her vagina appeared downright cavernous, so much so that you could see a great deal of space between its introitus and its back depths. I almost expected to see cars marked just inside of her, positioned to watch a drive-in movie being projected upon her cervix. The name of this landmark in American cinema? SUPERSIZE THAT PUSSY.

An epic worthy of Cecil B. DeMille.

As I was making my choices, I heard the unmistakable sounds of skin flick moaning emanating from a curtained booth, obviously a peep show kiosk. Those moans were soon accompanied by the obviously live vocalizings of the clearly enthusiastic customer within, noises that soon culminated in a breathily-grunted "Unggh," after which the customer sheepishly emerged from the booth only to have the Pakistani shopkeeper ask him if he was "done." The customer nodded in affirmation and swiftly departed, at which point the shopkeeper grabbed the nearby mop and pail and set about making the compartment ready for the next patron. When he returned I paid for my items and left, wondering how the guy not only kept his sanity on that job, but also wondering how he kept any possible interest in women since he was inundated with illicit images and sounds from nine to five. The worst that I have to deal with during the work day is crazy patrons and coming out of the place reeking from head to toe of barbecue smoke, and thank the gods that all I have to use a mop for is getting rid of any grease or food prep residue that may have hit the floor during the day...

THE TRAILER REEL FROM HELL

Movie trailers, also known to the layman as "Previews of Coming Attractions," the short highlights reels designed to lure filmgoers to the boxoffice and part them from their hard-earned cash. The point of trailers is to get you interested in seeing the flick, and if the trailer fails at that then the film itself will likely crash and burn into painful obscurity.

I love trailers because they're short and usually to the point, and when done right they are a hell of a lot of fun, sometimes more memorable than the features that they precede. Even a bad trailer can be a total riot, such as the jaw-dropping preview for KUNG FU FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, a ludicrously outrageous horse turd of a supernatural kung fu flick whose trailer is replete with such mangling of the English language as "Human heart used in sacrifice! Evils are deadly scared!" and the incredible "EVEN COMES THE VAMPIRE!!!," at which point we hear a voice shriek, "I'm coming!!!," immediately followed by the unforgettable sight of Count Dracula flying through the air and interrupting a kung fu battle in the middle of the street.

I collect trailer compilations, mostly the cornucopias of crap available from the unimpeachable SOMETHING WEIRD VIDEO, and on volume two of their "Dusk To Dawn Drive-In Trash-O-Rama Show" series I found what may just be the worst trailer I have ever seen, bar none. It is incoherent, poorly edited, rife with early-1970's hippie types, and to add the icing to this monumental shit cake, the film is actually entitled THE HIDAN OF MAUKBEIANGJOW. I swear to Sam Peckinpah that I am not making that up; look it up on the Internet Movie Database if you don't believe me. I ran the trailer late the other night at the barbecue joint for a bar full of appalled regualrs who refused to believe that it was for real, hence this post. Since most of you cannot join me here in the depths of the Vault I have kindly transcribed the trailer and described the mishmash of its visuals for your benefit (?).

As the trailer begins, cheesy, generic "acid" rock plays on the soundtrack while random scenes of violence, mayhem, escape attempts, people riding motorcycles, drunk hippies wielding machetes and guns, women being tied up and strapping men down in what looks like a well-lit dungeon, a white-robed cult leader, and a zombie whose back is riddled with multiple bloody bullet holes flash onscreen. Then we hear a series of voiceovers:

STONER #1: Hey, man! Help me think of a name for this movie, willya?

STONER #2: Sure! What's it about?

STONER #1: Well, it's about tender young love, see? Between a boy named Casper and a girl named Prudence.

STONER #2: Oh, WOW, man! For that ya want something simple, ya know? Like, not too hokey or overworked. Like, "CASPER AND PRUDENCE!"

STONER #1: Yeah! Hey, hey! How about a movie with lots of violence, greed, murder, suspense and intrigue, hunh?

STONER #2: Hey, far out man! Ya want somethin' really super that'll really gett out and grab 'em, like, "THE KILLERS."

STONER #1: Yeah!

STONER #2: "THE KILLERS," man! That's it!

STONER #1: Great! Now suppose it's a comedy, see? Where everything everybody does works out all wrong, hunh?

STONER #2: Yeah!

STONER #1: Hunh?

STONER #2: Yeah!

STONER #1: Hunh?

STONER #2: Yeah!

STONER #1: Like, uh, like the Marx Brothers, hunh?

STONER #2: Yeah!

STONER #1: Hunh?

STONER #2: Yeah!

STONER #1: Wow, like, uh, like slapstick that you see on TV! Let's see, how about, uh..."LAUGH TIL IT HURTS?"

STONER #2: Oh, WOW!

STONER #1: That's it, man!

Now at this point it suddenly turns more incoherent than before:

STONER #2: Right arm! Hey, but what if it's about a magician and people from another planet trying to take over the earth by killin' young chicks and makin' zombies outta them?

STONER #1: Wow, man! 'Ey, that's the neatest of 'em all, man, like, zombies! Oh, wow...How about, "THE ZOMBIE PLOT?"

STONER #2: Yeah!

STONER #1: Hey, man! That's it! "THE ZOMBIE PLOT!"

STONER #2: Yeah! Hey, yeah, and what if it's got lots of music in it? Hard rock, country, ballads!

STONER #1: Oh, wow, LADY, man!

STONER #2: Oh, hey, that's easy. Just call it..."MUSIC!"

STONER #1: That's it, man! That'll take care of all of it!

STONER #2: Out of state!

STONER #1: Hey, but what would you call a movie with all this stuff in it? Ya know, all the killing and comedy and the music and the zombies and all that shi...

STONER #2: Hey, I got it! I GOT IT! "CASPER AND PRUDENCE LAUGH TIL IT HURTS AT THE KILLERS AND THE ZOMBIE PLOT: A MUSICAL!"

DEEP VOICE FROM OUT OF NOWHERE: How about..."THE HIDAN OF MAUKBEIANGJOW?"

STONER #1 (confused): The what?

STONER #2: Where's that coming from?

DEEP VOICE FROM OUT OF NOWHERE: "THE HIDAN OF MAUKBEIANGJOW!"

STONER #1: Aw, man, I like "CASPER AND PRUDENCE LAUGH TIL IT HURTS AT THE..."

STONER #2: Yeah, but that won't fit on the sign out front, ya know?

STONER #1: Aw, man, I hadn't thought of that...

DEEP VOICE FROM OUT OF NOWHERE: See "THE HIDAN OF MAUKBEIANGJOW!" Coming soon to this theater!

STONER #1: How about "GONE WITH THE WIND?"

STONER # 2: (giggles)

DEEP VOICE FROM OUT OF NOWHERE: "THE HIDAN OF MAUKBEIANGJOW!"

STONER #2: (giggling) "MAFIA MADNESS," man!!

DEEP VOICE FROM OUT OF NOWHERE: "THE HIDAN OF MAUKBEIANGJOW!" If you can't say it, go see it!

STONER #1: "THE TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY?" "THE ODD FATHER?"

STONER #2: "MOON OVER MY ARMY!"

STONER #1: No, it's, "Moon Over Miami."

STONER #2: Hey, who was that masked man?

STONER #1: I dunno, but he left a sliver toilet seat...

Can you believe that shit? I mean, I'm no stranger to the joy of bonghits, but how much were these guys smoking?

CATHODE RAY HELL: THE WORST OF AMERICAN FANTASTIC TELEVISION PART 1

I promised a couple of my friends in the UK that I’d come up with a list of some of the very worst that American television had to offer in the field of sci-fi/fantasy/horror. I’m willing to bet that most of these never made it to the UK (with very good reason!) but I swear that all of these existed and I have personally borne witness to each and every one.

Most of these aired as regular series but a lot of them also went out as part of the pretty much dead genre of the network-funded made-for-TV movies and believe me some of them were staggeringly awful. If you can think of any I missed, please feel free to add comments. And so, without further ado, I bring you…

BAD AMERICAN FANTASTIC TELEVISION: THE NEVER-ENDING CORNUCOPIA OF CATHODE RAY CRAP!

THE MAN FROM ATLANTIS-Before Patrick Duffy found fame as Bobby Ewing on “Dallas,” he was a web-fingered amphibian hero who may or may not have been from Atlantis (we never found out since he suffered from amnesia). After two mediocre TV movies “The Man From Atlantis” graduated to a full-fledged series in which our hero teamed up with a bunch of “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” rejects and fought crime and alien invasions in the deep seas. The sets on this show rivaled “Doctor Who” during its leanest moments but unfortunately didn’t have the scripts to save it. This show was boring to the point of narcolepsy and faded after half a season, but not before spawning an equally bad Marvel Comics series.

THE PHOENIX-Starring that tanned, blonde bohunk who was the most prominent of Khan’s men in STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, this was about a benevolent — and dull — alien who used his powers to dazzle proto-new agers and help the innocent for about five weeks before the network pulled the plug.

SPORT BILLY-For those of us who despise sports, this animated show was like a hot poker up the asshole as personally administered by the Devil himself. For some reason, Zeus decides that kids on Earth need a child demigod to come down from Olympus and teach them about good sportsmanship so he sends the impossibly annoying title character. I only saw this once because a friend told me that it was the worst thing he had ever seen, and it just goes to prove that crap marches on since this show has been eclipsed in awfulness many times over since it first aired back in the early 1980’s.

THE IMMORTAL-A guy finds out that he has a rare blood type that renders him immortal and spends the rest of the short-lived series trying to stay ahead of the evil scientists who want to more or less dissect him. During the course of his journey he helps out those in need, giving blood transfusions that instantly cure the ailing. Every single episode.

LUCAN-The adventures of a young man who was raised by wolves and his odyssey in search of his real parents. Basically a wandering hero scenario, the only unique thing about this was the fact that Lucan’s lupine upbringing gave him wolf-like powers for no apparent reason which lead to lots of sequences of him sniffing about and growling at people before he got into ultra-pathetic fistfights; too bad they never had him mount other males in a display of dominance. This came from a TV movie and as a series lasted for less than half a season.

LOGAN’S RUN-A rock-bottom cheap series chronicling the further adventures of Logan and Jessica — now accompanied by a fey android named Rem — in a devastated future world that looked a lot like off-roads areas of Southern California. Every week — until a swift cancellation — the trio drove around in a hovercraft/van that wouldn’t even have passed muster in a bad B&W serial like THE PURPLE MONSTER STRIKES, encountering “far-flung” future oddballs who dressed in polyester and shower curtains. If you excised the sci-fi elements this would be indistinguishable from any other low budget show that had a couple of guys driving around aimlessly in their cool car solving crimes and helping the innocent. Of note today only because it starred Gregory Harrison before his role on “Trapper John M.D.”

PLANET OF THE APES-See the above entry, swap the hovercraft/van for sneaking around on foot and hiding in the bushes, and add Roddy McDowell in chimp makeup yet again. Two interchangeable astronauts crash land near Ape City and get into watered-down variants on the scenarios found in the feature films. Died a quick death and bored the living hell out of “Apes” fans from coast to coast. Occasionally turns up on syndicated television with two episodes edited together in a sorry attempt to pass itself off as an actual feature. In a stunning example of flogging a dead horse, this was actually followed up with an equally bad animated series.

THE POWERS OF MATTHEW STAR-A young alien prince is sent from his embattled home world to Earth so he can master his powers and eventually return to save his planet from would-be conquerors. Aided by his mentor (pre-Oscar Louis Gossett Jr.), Matthew uses his powers to help the innocent, blahblahblah. Cancelled quicker than it would take you to go to the fridge for a fresh beer.

GALACTICA 1980-As if the original “Battlestar Galactica” wasn’t bad enough, this cheapjack series plumbed new depths of the moronic by having the Galactica finally make it to the Earth and opt to observe rather than contaminate the Earth with their advanced technology. So what we’re left with is a couple of blow-dried shitheads on flying motorcycles running around doing things that would have seemed pitiful even on “CHiPs.” No more space battles, no more exotic alien worlds; none of the few things that were good about the parent series, therefore an utter waste of time. No joke, this show looked like a test-run for “The A-Team,” which isn’t all that surprising since that was also forced upon the public by one Glen A. Larson, the creator of this turd. Cancelled in the blink of an eye, this show has dated to the point of being physically painful to sit through nowadays. Avoid like lemonade made at Chernobyl.

HOLMES & YOYO-In this alleged sitcom a detective is assigned a new partner, a bumbler in the Gilligan mold named Yoyonovich (Yoyo for short), who happens to be a robot. Laughter did not ensue and the series died after a month or so.

VOYAGERS-Following the adventures of two time travelers whose job it was to fix temporal glitches in history, this one season wonder was painfully juvenile and is now remembered solely as the starring vehicle of John Eric Hexum, the guy who accidentally killed himself on the set of a low-budget movie by firing a blank round directly into his temple. His co-star, Meeno Peluce, was one of the all-time most annoying and treacly child actors ever and he now languishes in well-earned obscurity. The only reason I ever saw this was thanks to the girls who lived on my hall during my second year of college who never missed it because of the Hexum eye-candy, and it never hurts to take a look at what the girls are into. Well, almost never…

STRUCK BY LIGHTNING-Cancelled almost immediately, this was a sitcom about what if the Frankenstein monster was revived today (1980), a question that no one asked and no one stayed tuned to see answered.

SMALL WONDER-At the top of the list of most people’s Top Ten Worst Television Series In The History Of The Universe, this Cthulhu-level atrocity followed the purportedly humorous antics of V.I.C.K.I., an emotionless, allegedly cute robot fashioned to look like a dark-haired little girl in a pink dress. Inexplicably running for nearly a decade in syndication (much like that equally atrocious Auschwitz of non-comedy “Momma’s Family”) at all hours of the day and night, words cannot adequately communicate just how terrible this show was. Much like the Mi Lai massacre you just had to be there. There is nothing sadder than unfunny comedy since when comedy fails there is absolutely no entertainment to be garnered from it; at least if a horror film blows you might be able to find humor in it (HALLOWEEN VI-THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MEYERS is a textbook example of this point) and not feel utterly robbed of the short amount of time wasted in your existence. Every second spent on “Small Wonder” amounts to grand larceny on a cosmic scale and will make you want to kick your own mother right in the box for being so cruel as to bring you into a world that could create such crap.

PROJECT UFO-A pitiful attempt to cash in on the success CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, this snooze-a-rama weekly delved into the files of “Project Bluebook” and took the viewer on a low budget tour of U.F.O. sightings and investigations headed up by two actors portraying Air Force operatives with less emotion than that expressed by your toothbrush. If you actually got a good look at one of the bogeys they invariably were composed from various sundries found around the studio on any given day, most memorably a Millennium Falcon model kit which had been inverted, spray-painted gold and covered with discarded Kodak film canisters. Cancelled with blinding swiftness, which was odd since NBC was running some of the most infamously bad programming on the air at the time (such as “Pink Lady and Jeff,” “B.J and the Bear,” “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo,” “CPO Sharkey,” “Supertrai”n and a plethora of other intelligence-leechers).

THE CLONE MASTER (TV MOVIE)-A boring white guy (Art Hindle) clones multiple, equally boring duplicates of himself for reasons that were far too dull to go into.

THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN NEMO-Jose Ferrer as Captain Nemo returns from who-knows-where in the late 1970’s and proceeds to do not much of anything worth mentioning.

WONDER WOMAN (TV MOVIE)-This aired the year before Linda Carter boosted the sale of Kleenex and featured Cathy Lee Crosby as a blonde version of the Amazon heroine. Bearing no resemblance whatsoever to anything that you know about the legendary comic book character, Crosby runs around in chic couture in pursuit of villain Ricardo Montalban. It’s very, VERY bad but I have to admit that I like it a lot. And the coolest thing about the story is that Montalban’s villain views his relentless chasing by Wonder Woman as sort of a mating dance between equals, and when he’s lead away in cuffs at the end he looks at her and says — in that smooth-ass voice of his — “Won-dair Woo-mon, I luff you.”

THE GEMINI MAN-Thanks to an underwater accident involving radioactive waste and scientific logic that would make Ed Wood cringe, a scuba diver gains the power of invisibility which can be controlled by a wristwatch (???). He immediately becomes a secret agent and goes on a series of run-of-the-mill mid-‘70’s adventures that captured the imagination of absolutely no one. Cancelled after maybe five installments. And what the hell did that title have to do with anything?

CITY BENEATH THE SEA (TV MOVIE)-Irwin (“Lost In Space”) Allen strikes again with this festival of stock footage from “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.” Dealing with an underwater city of the future, an attempted gold heist, a giant underwater kelp monster and a physician who happens to be able to breathe underwater, this is one colossal mess that was intended to serve as the pilot for a series that never happened.

THE HIGHWAYMAN-I only saw one episode of this attempted ROAD WARRIOR rip-off and as near as I can determine it had something to do with two leather-clad guys (one of whom was that annoying Aussie battery pitchman and Popeye lookalike “Jacko”) cruising the post-apocalyptic highways in an eighteen-wheeler and handing out justice when needed. The one that I saw was so low budget that it may as well have been a blank screen, and featured the heroes traveling back in time to the 1980’s so they could spend a half hour showing an eighteen-wheeler driving down the LA freeway in regular traffic. Whoa, dazzling! Cancelled after around four episodes.

THE DARKROOM-A weak descendant of “The Twilight Zone” and “Night Gallery,” this was hosted by James Coburn who would be seen developing strange pictures in his darkroom and then telling us the not-so-scary tales contained. The only story I remember liking had to do with a scientist who had developed a headset that allowed him to hear and understand the whisperings of the plants in his lab. He hauls his skeptical wife into the lab and forces her to listen to the plants, which confirm her suspicions about her husband’s infidelities with his lab assistant. She then whips out a pistol and plugs the stupid bastard. Very swiftly cancelled.

MANIMAL-A guy can shapeshift into all sorts of animals to fight crime, but can’t hold the audience’s attention enough to avoid lightning-swift cancellation.

AUTOMAN-See the above entry and substitute the shapeshifting guy with a sentient computer-generated hero who can turn into a car.

MISFITS OF SCIENCE-Sort of a really, REALLY feeble version of the Fantastic Four only minus costumes, cool gadgets, aliens, monsters and anything else that made the FF rock so hard. The four sorry heroes drove around in an ice cream truck (no, really!!!) and fought the usual assortment of low budget bad guys before falling into the maw of cancellation. Remembered now solely for being the launching pad for the unwelcome TV series career of Courtney (“Friends”) Cox.

CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-HEROES and LEGENDS OF THE SUPER-HEROES (TV SPECIALS)-These two live-action landmarks of just how bad television can be featured nearly all of the prominent DC Comics heroes doing schtick comedy that would have embarrassed even the most shameless of Borscht Belt comedians, and as if that weren’t agonizing enough Adam West and Burt Ward reprised their roles as the Caped Crusaders in a move that actually made their fans embarrassed for them. The first special dealt with the heroes fighting the villains during sketches best described as anti-comedy, and the second show was the now-infamous super-hero “roast,” in which the DC villains insulted the heroes with jokes that were about as funny as a children’s AIDS ward. But the moment that really sent this into the stratosphere of crap was the insult monologue delivered by perhaps the most offensive black character ever seen on television, namely “Ghetto Man,” a pimped-out super-mack in purple-lame bellbottoms and enormous platform shoes. These are often found in bootlegged form at conventions, so be forewarned. They’re not funny, they’re not clever and they’re certainly not entertaining. If you choose to sit through these you will live to regret every second.

THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL-So bad that it is worthy of a ten page article all its own, this was cranked out to appease fans who were drooling in anticipation of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and it managed to please none but the dangerously insane STAR WARS loons. Aired only once during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1979, this two-hour atrocity has since earned a well-deserved place of dubious honor in the annals of TV infamy not just for its shameless, bald-faced attempt to milk a rabid fan base, but also for the fact that it is just plain kicked-in-the-balls-with-a-titanium-ski-boot bad. The plot, such as it is, centers on Chewbacca’s family anxiously awaiting his return home to celebrate “Life Day,” a nebulously defined holiday that apparently blends Thanksgiving and Christmas. Chewie’s family consists of his wife Mala, son Lumpy and aged patriarch Itchy. There are lengthy sequences of them communicating in the signature Wookie growls, moans and warbles, all without benefit of subtitles or entertainment value. Endless awful “comedy” and musical sequences happen and one by one all of the heroes from the movie finally show up (after lots of stock footage of space dogfights that anyone who was a kid in the late 1970’s had seen many times after May 25, 1977), with Harrison Ford so clearly not wanting to be involved that he seems ready to tell the audience to go fuck itself with an apple corer, and Carrie Fisher looking so stoned that I’d bet good money that she didn’t even know where she was. The only good sequence in the entire show is an outstanding animated sequence by Canada’s vastly underrated Nelvana animation studio, a sequence that introduces bounty hunter Boba Fett. Another perennial found at the dealer’s tables at sci-fi conventions, this show is nearly unwatchable, even for the unprecedentedly high kitsch factor, so beware!

THE GREEN HORNET-Despite my love of all things Bruce Lee related, I would like to go on record and state that this show was utterly unwatchable when Bruce wasn’t putting his foot through some baddie’s skull. There was only one good episode and that featured Bruce versus Mako (the sorcerer from CONAN THE BARBARIAN) in a fairly tame fight to the death. Dead after less than twenty episodes.

THE CHARMINGS-A truly terrible sitcom about all of the classic fairytale characters falling under a witch’s spell and waking up in modern day Los Angeles circa 1992. It followed the utterly run-of-the-mill domestic escapades of Snow White and her husband, Prince Charming and was cancelled after less than a month. The only real gag on this show was that the Charmings and all of the other fairytale folk were the neighborhood weirdoes, what with wearing their period costumes all the time in modern LA; in all other respects it was a totally average show.

WOOPS!-The Fox network has absolutely no qualms about foisting utter shit upon the unsuspecting American public and “Woops!” just may be the absolute nadir of their output. How’s this for a series concept: World War Three breaks out and wipes out the entire human race except for about seven people who each represent a certain facet of human nature. They all just happen to be located within range of the house that will be the one location for the entire short-lived run and they promptly get down to the business of post-holocaust survival. If done right, that could have been a decent setup for a very tense drama, but “Woops!” was a sitcom and each episode was meant to teach some sort of moral to the gobsmacked viewer. The survivors had to contend with potent narcotic berries (the anti-drug story), giant arachnids, a giant turkey (the Thanksgiving episode) and other such stupidity before the show was quickly (and mercifully) cancelled. And with everyone else in the world being radioactive ash, there was pretty much no chance of mixing things up with guest stars or new characters. The one episode I wish I had on tape was the Christmas episode, which featured the only other survivor of the nuclear war, namely Santa Claus. At the same time both horrifying and hilarious, you haven’t lived until you see Santa recount being safe in his toyshop as the bombs fell and how he ignored the pleas of his wife, the elves and his reindeer for shelter from the atomic fire. He was too terrified to let them in and as he tells the story he pretty much has a nervous breakdown. At the end he flies off in search of people with whom to share the Christmas spirit. Merry Christmas, kiddies! My then-roommate Mark and I watched this show each week in sheer disbelief and Mark is the only other person I know who ever witnessed this train wreck. If I’m not mistaken, “Woops!” was axed after approximately eight episodes.

THE NEW PEOPLE-When a jet liner crash lands on an uncharted island in the late-1960’s, the teen survivors (in garish “mod” outfits) find an abandoned fully furnished city that was apparently built but never used for nuclear bomb testing and promptly decide to start their own society. A new utopian society free of all of the hang-ups of the Establishment, man! A society where blacks and whites, guys and chicks, hippies and straights can all integrate and do their own thing, man! And then nothing interesting happened, man! And it was quickly cancelled, man! Bummer, man…

TO BE CONTINUED

EL BUNCHO’S VIDEO RENTAL RECOMMENDATIONS: CLASSICS OF MARTIAL ARTS ASS-WHUPPIN’ THAT YOU NEED TO SEE

WARNING: this is a long post and if you have no interest in the subject or my recommendations regarding it, stop reading now. If not, enjoy!

Every now and then a would-be movie renter needs a bit of help when choosing from an unfamiliar genre, and perhaps no genre is more misunderstood and maligned than that of the martial arts flick. Most Americans roll their eyes at the mere mention of “chopsocky” films and the incredibly stilted — and often hilarious — dialogue that goes with the territory, along with a perceived sacrifice of story in favor of mindless violence and ass-whuppin’; admittedly, these criticisms are not invalid, but much like any other genre one must sift through a lot of real shit to get to the gems, but a feature unique to this kind of picture is that sometimes the pieces of shit can be more fun than their more serious-minded brethren.

Marilyn D. Mintz in her 1978 study of the subject, THE MARTIAL ARTS FILMS, defines a martial arts film by pretty much any content that portrays the act of physical combat between people, a ridiculously liberal interpretation that allows her to classify such films as ROCKY, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, and THE MARK OF ZORRO as such, a position that I heartily disagree with; yes, boxing, swordsmanship and the like can be applied as both sport and combat arts, but for the purposes of clarity I would like to define the martial arts film as any film that features combat involving mostly Asian forms of hand-to-hand and weapons fighting, whether the combatants are of Asian descent or not, although I will be focusing on films produced in China and Japan since virtually all entries produced anywhere else on the globe are generally horrendous specimens indeed.

And now that I’ve gotten the requisite film-fuck horseshit out of the way, let’s get down to it!

There are literally thousands of martial arts films to sort through, featuring just about every possible permutation of ways in which to do harm to one’s fellow man lovingly depicted in glorious Technicolor sanguinity, and it’s the job of die-hards such as yours truly to endure the utter garbage out there so that we can advise you laymen on what to avoid and what to treasure.

Even if you have a limited knowledge of the subject, or none at all, you have no doubt heard of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, both of whom have unquestionably done more to popularize the genre to the world at large than any other actors, and they have both contributed their share of classics and clunkers. I’ll spare you an analysis of their respective output and just give you the films of theirs that you need to see; Bruce only made four complete features before his untimely death in 1973, and Jackie has an uninterrupted catalog of films that encompasses three decades, so remember, the following are their quintessential works and should not be missed:

BRUCE LEE

FIST OF FURY (aka THE CHINESE CONNECTION)
Thanks to a moron at the American film distributor fucking up, the film that was to be released as FISTS OF FURY in the States had its new title switched with that of THE BIG BOSS, which was retitled THE CHINESE CONNECTION to riff off of the then-current THE FRENCH CONNECTION and the heroin-related content, so seeing this film as THE CHINESE CONNECTION lead to a bit of confusion as this film has nothing whatsoever to do with drug smuggling. Instead, FIST OF FURY is an archetypal “You killed my master!” revenge flick that has Bruce as the top student at a kung fu school in Japanese-occupied China whose master is poisoned by the dastardly Samurai fuckheads at a local karate/swordsmanship/Japstuff dojo. Bruce and his schoolmates endure all kinds of shit from the intolerably obnoxious Japanese because their teacher did not believe in vengeance, but since this is a Bruce Lee movie it’s only a matter of time until Bruce puts his slipper-clad foot right up the collective ass of every motherfucker in the dojo, all while firmly standing up for Chinese pride in the face of imperialist racism. Intense and violent as hell, complete with some of Bruce’s — and martial arts cinema’s — most spectacular fights, and the mother of all downbeat endings, this is simply the best film Bruce Lee ever made, and it’s painfully obvious when Bruce stepped in to stage and choreograph the fights with his Hollywood trained eye since the hack director handles every other sequence in a rather pedestrian style that was common to much of Chinese cinema at the time.

RETURN OF THE DRAGON
Originally THE WAY OF THE DRAGON, this was released in the West after the success of the US/Hong Kong Warner Brothers collaboration ENTER THE DRAGON, hence the cash-in moniker. The story, involving Bruce as a badass country bumpkin sent to Rome to protect a relative’s Chinese restaurant from abuse by the Mafia, is no great shakes, but this is the only film completely directed by Lee from start to finish, and the fights rock some major ass. The highlights include Bruce decimating the mob’s attempts to fuck with his countrymen, and a stunning one-on-one battle between Bruce and Chuck Norris in the Colosseum that has justly been hailed as one of the classic set-tos of the entire genre.

ENTER THE DRAGON
Perhaps no other film exemplifies what Westerners think of as a kung fu flick as much as this textbook tournament story. Bruce is a Shaolin monk/bad motherfucker sent by British intelligence to participate in an exclusive competition on a kung fu megalomaniac’s private island while simultaneously searching out a missing British operative/mole and gunning for the gweilo scumbag (Bob Wall) who caused his hapkido badass sister (Angela Mao Ying) to kill herself. The James Bond angle is a bit of a reach and in no way fits in with Bruce’s established “badass for the little guy” persona, but when you have this much wall-to-wall, balls out ass-whuppin’ who fucking cares? Lee’s fighting skills verge on the superhuman and there is not one other character in the whole piece that is even remotely a challenge for him — certainly not an out-of-his-league John Saxon — with even the final battle against the claw-handed main baddie being pretty much Bruce Lee kicking an old man’s ass, but it’s pleasure nonetheless to see him and the God of the over-the-top Afro, Jim Kelly, beat the pus out of all comers. For me the highlights are Bruce’s so-unfair-that-it’s-embarrassing beat-down on Bob Wall (in which Lee’s movements were so fast that the film had to be undercranked so they could be seen on screen) and the battle in the underground dungeon/heroin processing plant where Lee takes on about a hundred guys using his fists, feet, a pole, two billy clubs and a pair of nunchaku, with a very young, pre-eye surgery Jackie Chan on the receiving end of a savage neck-snapping. Simply put, a perfect Sunday afternoon popcorn muncher with enough violence for the guys and shirtless Bruce Lee and Jim Kelly as eye candy for the ladies and gay dudes.

BRUCE LEE: A WARRIOR’S JOURNEY
Of the many Bruce Lee documentaries, this is hands down the best and it does the Nobel Peace Prize-worthy service of including the full-length fight sequences from the unfinished Lee-directed GAME OF DEATH, thereby sparing you the torturous experience of sitting through that posthumously-released act of cinematic necrophiliac rape. You see, before Bruce took the dirt nap he had begun shooting a film that he both wrote and directed, and all that exists of this work is a sequence wherein Bruce and two other Chinese dudes who are best left out of it ascend a pagoda and Bruce fights a martial arts master of a different style on each level, finally ending up in a visually bizarre and stunning throwdown against one of his real life students, namely all seven feet and two inches of NBA legend Kareem Abdul Jabbar. The greedy bastards at Warner Brothers and Golden Harvest took the footage and crafted a “movie” around it featuring an utterly unconvincing double for Lee, and the film is not only stultifyingly boring but it also has the nerve to paste a photo of Bruce to a mirror while his double peers into the looking glass. But never mind that bollocks; the documentary is both fun and informative, with a wealth of screen tests and home movies, and of course the ass-whuppin’ footage.

JACKIE CHAN

SHAOLIN WOODEN MEN
A young nobody when he made this one, Jackie plays a silent serf at the local monastery who seeks to learn kung fu skills for reasons that are revealed late in the story. Not great or spectacular by any means, this is worth a look at Jackie’s pre-superstardom output and is strictly optional for the casual viewer.

SNAKE IN THE EAGLE’S SHADOW
This is the first inkling of what was to come, insomuch as it is a hell of a lot of fun and is the first pairing of Chan and the scene-stealing Simon Yuen — father of Yuen Woo Ping, the genius who later went on to choreograph the fu on display in the MATRIX trilogy, among other stunners — as student and teacher. Jackie plays an abused servant at a martial arts school who is taken under the wing of the last master of the snake fist style, a style the master keeps secret since he is the last of the line and is being sought by a murderous Eagle Claw proponent who seeks to wipe out the snake fist once and for all. After being secretly tutored in the discipline, Chan engages in a series of set-tos and eventually incorporates a house cat’s fighting technique as witnessed against a cobra into his own skills, a bit of thinking that figures heavily into the final fight. A surprise hit, this was remade the next year as…

DRUNKEN MASTER
Without a doubt, this is Jackie Chan’s finest hour and is also simply the funniest martial arts film ever made. Realizing that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the producers pretty much remade SNAKE IN THE EAGLE’S SHADOW, only amping up the humor and fight scenes, and coming out with a five star masterpiece. Jackie plays an outrageously irreverent version of legendary real life martial arts hero Wong Fei-Hung, here reinterpreted as a young-but-talented trouble-making kung fu asshole who is the bane of his father’s existence, and is so incorrigible that his father enlists the lad’s uncle, the drunken master of the title, to train him and set his ass straight. What ensues is a cornucopia of spectacular and downright hilarious ass-whuppery replete with weapons, rude behavior and jaw-dropping choreography, basically a feature length highlight. Trust me, there is not one boring moment in the entire movie, and films this fun are more rare that tits on a fish, so under no circumstances should you miss this one. This also unsurprisingly proved to be box office gold, and was remade the following year as…

THE FEARLESS HYENA
Pretty much the same as the previous two, though not quite as good, but worth checking out if you can’t find the other two. Plus it has what may be the first time we see Jackie in drag.

WHEELS ON MEALS
Typical of Chan’s mid-1980’s output, this entry greatly benefits from the presence of Jackie’s “brothers” from his Peking Opera school days, namely Samo Hung and Yuen Biao. Shot in Spain and with a distinct emphasis on comedy rather than action, this film goes down in history for the riotous final half hour in which the heroes engage in melee combat with a series of opponents, most memorably when Jackie takes on Benny “the Jet” Urquidez in a fight that rivals the Bruce Lee/Chuck Norris match in RETURN OF THE DRAGON. Trust me and skip straight to the last half hour, and you will not be disappointed.

DRUNKEN MASTER II
Up there with THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and THE GODFATHER PART 2 as a sequel that may be better than the film that spawned it and makes you say, “Holy FUCK! That was a KICKASS movie!,” this fifteen-years-later sequel is simply amazing from start to finish and is considered by some to be the finest martial arts film ever made. I don’t agree with that assessment, but this sure is one entertaining mammajamma, and a more than worthy companion to the original. I won’t recap the plot in order to save the surprises for the first time viewer, but if you can track down the Hong Kong version since the American release — titled LEGEND OF DRUNKEN MASTER — chops off the politically incorrect ending in which our hero has quite by necessity drunk himself into a broadly-played state of mental retardation. As a catalogue of stunning beatdowns this film is hard to surpass and may actually be a bit more palatable to the layman than the original because of the slicker, faster production values.

Now that you have the skinny on the gods of kung fu cinema, here are a few picks that may or may not be found at your local Cocksucker, er, Blockbuster Video, but each has virtues that make them all special and a lot of fun, so here we go:

13 EVIL BANDITS (aka FLYING CLAW AGAINST 14 DEMONS and AGAINST THE DRUNKEN CAT PAWS)
Chia Ling — also known in the West as Judy Lee — stars here as a badassed kung fu chick who gets two poisoned darts fired directly into her eyeballs and spends the rest of the movie doing the DRUNKEN MASTER thing, a prescribed treatment that is guaranteed to cure her blindness (???). Yeah, she’s blind, but that doesn’t stop her from kicking the ass of pretty much everyone she encounters. In fact, if we weren’t told that she’s blind we’d never have known it. There’s also a nearly incomprehensible main plot that has something to do with a bunch of bad guys out to get revenge on the magistrate who imprisoned their leader (I think), the inevitable final melee that involves an over-the-top comedic government official who may be cinema’s only pipe-smoking kung fu flaming homosexual badass, the bizarre antics of “the Poison Dwarf,” and there’s even a ludicrous romantic subplot in which the male half of the couple turns into a demon for no adequately explained reason. Feeling like it was edited by a weed whacker-wielding psycho on some bad brown acid, this film makes virtually no sense whatsoever, but it’s lively as hell and never goes much longer than two or three minutes without a fight breaking out. In fact, this is what I’d imagine a kung fu movie lensed by a nine-year-old might look like, and it even exudes a childlike sense of sheer fun.

LEGENDARY WEAPONS OF KUNG FU (aka LEGENDARY WEAPONS OF CHINA)
Considered in some circles to be the best kung fu film ever made — an opinion I do not share — this tells the story of a warrior cult who believe in a quasi-magical form of pugilism that will make them immune to bullets. Learning nothing from the deaths of wave after wave of adepts during tests against rifles fired at point blank range, the head of the cult orders the assassination of their former top instructor, now deemed a traitor thanks to his denouncing their belief in bullet proof kung fu as suicide and leaving the cult to become a recluse. The student sent to kill him has been brainwashed into a state of homicidal zealotry, and it’s up to a female adept who has remained loyal to the former instructor to stop the assassin and/or find and warn the elder, both difficult tasks. When the assassin and the adept clash, it’s great fun as they both seek to accomplish their missions in secret while steering clear of an abbot who also wants to plant his foot in the former instructor’s ass. It all snowballs to the inevitable conclusion, and to say more would spoil the surprises, but I will say that you get many incredible displays of classical kung fu styles performed by the cream of the Shaw Brothers studio crop.

THE STREET FIGHTER
Without question this is my favorite martial arts film that doesn’t have a classical setting, and is also my absolute favorite karate flick. The incomparable Sonny Chiba stars as Terry Tsurugi, a lethally skilled thug for hire in 1974 Tokyo who must protect an oil heiress from the combined forces of the Mafia and the Yakuza (who for some reason are said to be based in Hong Kong, which would actually make them Triads, but why quibble?). That’s pretty much the basic plot, but as the story unfolds we get to know Tsurugi and see the source of his animalistic rage, rage that is frequently expressed in a graceless ballet of maiming, bones broken in x-ray, and spewing blood, all of which won the film the first X rating for graphic violence. Not for the squeamish or easily offended, this is an exploitation milestone and should be seen at least once. And Sonny Chiba’s performance is simply unforgettable.

KIDS FROM SHAOLIN
An early Jet Li film, this is a charming and light-hearted comedy/romance about two families who live on opposite sides of a river; one family has nothing but sons, the other has nothing but daughters, and all of them are masters of kung fu. Li shines as the eldest son, and the two families continually war against each other in an effort to see whose style is better. The fu on display is exemplary, particularly that of Li and a kid called “Monkey Boy,” and it all comes to head when an army of bandits attempt to abduct the girls. The would-be abduction ignites a twenty-minute martial arts free-for-all replete with flying limbs and spectacular weapons forms that must be seen to be believed.

MY YOUNG AUNTIE
Beautiful Shaw Brothers regular Hui Ying Hung gets her only starring role as a proper, traditionally raised girl from the country who marries a man old enough to be her father, much to the chagrin of his Western-influenced son. Our heroine must endure her new nephew’s disapproval and attempts to get her to leave, all while trying to adapt to a more sophisticated life with modern trappings. And as if that wasn’t enough, she also has to thwart a plot to screw over the government. Good thing she also happens to be a hardcore kung fu phenom! The film culminates in a multi-person nonstop kung fu brawl that goes on for over a half hour and is so exhausting that I had to stop the DVD about halfway through to take a break.

SEVEN BLOWS OF THE DRAGON (aka THE WATER MARGIN)
Imported by Warner Brothers at the beginning of the Seventies kung fu movie boom, this Shaw Brothers epic tells the story of the Mountain Bandits, a bunch of Robin Hood-esque folk heroes, and their rescue of the unjustly imprisoned Jade Dragon, a pole fighting master who is framed for treason by his adulterous wife and the steward of his house. Loaded with colorful characters — Black Whirlwind and Young Dragon steal the movie — and crazy fights, this is more fun than it has any right to be and includes a scene where a bad guy warns one of his men against the technique of one of the heroes thusly: “Watch out! The Double-Kick of Death!!!,” at which point the wielder of the aforementioned technique proceeds to kick the guy THREE times. Entertaining as a motherfucker.

CHINESE SUPER NINJAS (aka SUPER NINJAS and FIVE ELEMENT NINJA)
It’s the old Chinese versus Japanese thing again, but this time it’s in the hands of infamous director Chang Cheh, widely hailed as the most bloodthirsty of the Shaw Brothers helmers. A bunch of sneaky ninjas slowly decimate a Chinese kung fu school with the help of a female spy and “the five element ninjas,” and the one surviving student escapes to train in a
style specifically designed to defeat the five elements. Old school kung fu at its best, and the final fight against the master ninja has a shockingly explosive ending that is understandably edited for television airings.

FIVE DEADLY VENOMS (aka THE FIVE VENOMS)
The five students of the Poison Clan have left the temple and entered the outside world, and their ageing master sends his last pupil to find out what has become of them. What’s the big deal, you may ask? Well, the five students are each masters of individual skills that give them superhuman powers to complement their prodigious kung fu expertise; there’s the Toad (invulnerability), the Snake (penetrating strikes), the Centipede (multiple fist attacks), the Scorpion (stunning kicking prowess), and the Lizard (ability to cling to walls like Spider-Man), all of whom were groomed in evil skills that if misused could threaten the world at large. The remaining pupil has been schooled in a bit of each technique and must determine if the Venoms are using their abilities for good or ill, and if they have become villains they must be stopped, which is only possible by allying with at least one of the wayward Venoms. Much intrigue and creative violence ensues, culminating in an outrageous fight with the Lizard standing on the wall and kicking ass.

MARTIAL CLUB (aka INSTRUCTORS OF DEATH)
A character study of two warring schools who each seek the spotlight position in a traditional lion dance festival, this film features several great fights but really focuses on the importance of taking one’s training seriously and not using it for purposes of showing off, a lesson painfully learned by one of the protagonists.

MASTER KILLER (aka THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN)
One of the best Shaw Brothers films and unquestionably the film that made Gordon Liu a star, this recounts the supposedly true story of San Te, the man who brought Shaolin kung fu to the outside world. Basically a feature-length look at one man’s years-long training for the cause of justice, the film holds the viewer riveted from start to finish, each frame made more involving due to Liu’s ultra-expressive, sad-eyed visage. The kung fu is exquisite and the hero’s accidental invention of the three-sectional staff is a gem; this is a perfect film to show to people who aren’t into martial arts films since the movie intimately focuses on San Te’s personal struggle, a struggle that just happens to involve half a decade’s grueling study in the killing arts.

SHAOLIN CHALLENGES NINJA (aka HEROES OF THE EAST)
A young man (Gordon Liu) dreads entering into an arranged marriage with the daughter of his father's Japanese business partner, that is until he sees his bride. The two marry and all goes swimmingly until the wife is revealed to be a mistress of the Japanese fighting arts, a fact that ignites an ongoing battle between the spouses over which is better, Chinese kung fu or Japanese budo. The two square off over hand-to-hand and swordsmanship, with the husband soundly defeating the wife, while gloating over Chinese superiority the whole while. Having had enough, the wife attacks her husband with ninja trickery and defeats him, which leads her husband to denounce her abilities as "murder" and not martial arts. The wife immediately leaves her husband and returns to her family home, and at his servant's insistence the husband gets shitfaced drunk and writes his wife a scathing letter that pisses all over Japanese martial arts. The letter is intercepted by her male relatives, each one a hardcore master, and HOO BOY!!! are they insulted. The Japanese masters then show up at the husband's home and declare that each of them will take him on one at a time each day in order to disprove his insulting comments. What ensues is a joy to behold as Gordon Liu puts his money where his mouth is and kicks much Rising Sun ass while simultaneously gaining his in-laws' respect and winning over his fiercely traditional wife (she stops wearing her formal kimono and adopts Chinese garb while cheering him on). Nobody gets killed and the film ends on a note of two proud cultures reaching an understanding, something you never see in a Chinese versus Japanese scenario. Perhaps the perfect martial arts date movie because love — and being a total badass — conquers all.

MAD MONKEY KUNG FU
One of the all time classics, this one relates the story of a Peking opera performer who enjoys his wine a bit too much and endures great tragedy as a result. The hero performs tales of the legendary Monkey King with his beautiful sister and unfortunately the girl’s beauty arouses the lust of a local whorehouse owner (played by perennial all-purpose bad guy Lo Lei, here seen in a rare appearance without his trademark long white wig and beard) who frames the hero for drunkenly raping his concubine. Protesting his innocence, the hero is sentenced to death but is saved when his sister offers to become the brothel owner’s woman, but the bad guy is such an outright son of a bitch that he needlessly and sadistically adds injury to insult by having the innocent actor’s hands savagely crippled. The story then skips ahead a few years to find the actor now barely scraping out a living as a candy salesman, aided by his pet monkey. The hero soon attracts an unwanted sidekick in the form of Monkey, a young street urchin whose apelike demeanor earned him his nickname, and the two soon come to depend on each other. When local ruffians kill his monkey after he is unable to pay protection money, the hero trains Monkey to take the place of his pet. While working at another job to bring in extra cash, Monkey catches sight of the hero’s sexually enslaved sister and attempts to rescue her. After the inevitable ass-kicking, Monkey begs the actor to train him in monkey kung fu so he can save the sister, plunging the story into a grueling training sequence. After much intense hard work Monkey proves to be a natural prodigy at the simian style, and he and his master storm the whorehouse to lay down some righteous payback. Unquestionably one of the most satisfying revenge flicks, this is stunning in every way.

Honorable mention: YES, MADAM and RIGHTING WRONGS
Both of these are recommended due to the presence of Cynthia Rothrock, a petite blonde American kung fu champ who can outfight any man. YES, MADAME pairs her with a young Michelle Yeoh (CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON) and the final fight scene is fucking incredible, so much so that it has been known to make non-believers fans of kung fu movies. RIGHTING WRONGS co-stars Rothrock with Yuen Biao, but for all intents and purposes Rothrock owns the film, especially during her blistering fight with the equally badassed Karen Shepard. Both films are definitely worth checking out for the awesome fights, but both have dated badly and bear all the visual earmarks of mid-1980’s action cinema that very quickly became quite tired.

And with that, let me remind you to add any of your own picks to the comments section.

BY ANY OTHER NAME

Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore in a publicity shot for GOLDFINGER (1964).

Ladies, once again one of my favorite subjects has been greatly on my mind — namely your pussies — and I need your feedback.

I often find myself in situations where I'm in conversation with a group of women and the subjects soon turn ribald; guys, don't let them fool you, women talk about all sorts of raunchy shit all the time and can be far, FAR more filthy and graphic than we usually get. A good example of this was the other night when a few nice young ladies I know were discussing certain aspects of a new boyfriend, exchanging every possible detail about the guy, and the girlfriend in question eventually offered up details about her own equipment that one would think best reserved for her OBGYN. She referred to her genitalia as her "junk," and upon hearing that I thought back to the women I have known intimately over the years and how they talked about their bits. One or two used "cunt" ( a term I rather dislike due to its guttural sound rather than any perceived offensive content), most liked "pussy" and several skirted the issue of using a term altogether, opting instead for "down there" or some other such vague turn of phrase.

So, ladies, when you give voice regarding your own vaginalicious excellence, what do you call it? Write in and lemme know; as you have no doubt gathered by now, I spend much of my time pondering the deeper issues of existence...

THE THINGS YOU MISS WHILE YOU’RE AWAY

I expected to have missed some small bits of drama during my time away from the barbecue joint, but I never expected anything like the story I’m about to relate. 

When I walked in yesterday my boss asked me, “Hey! Did you hear about the brick attack?” I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, so he told me, and along with the eyewitness accounts of those on shift and a few of thee locals I was able to piece together the details. 

Last Tuesday night at 11:19 PM, one of our neighbors, a woman named Magnolia, was awakened by a repeating heavy “THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!” near her rear window. When she got up to see what was happening she was shocked to see a guy atop the roof of a building on 20th Street — right around the corner from the barbecue joint — hurling bricks for no apparent reason. Magnolia then called the police who showed up en masse and the brick hurler quickly directed his attention to them, lobbing bricks with an arm that would have made New York Yankee Randy Johnson green with envy. The guy was atop a roof several houses away from the intersection, yet he managed to nail one cop in the foot, bounced bricks off of the other cops’ riot shields, and crack a couple of police car windshields. 

The barbecue joint’s waitress/goddess, Tracey, had just finished hosting the first of her Tuesday night Battle Hill poetry readings in the restaurant — drop in on the first Tuesday of each month and get some fucking culture, ya douchebag!!! — when she looked outside and saw a gathering of policemen looking up toward a rooftop. Fearless to a fault, Tracey went outside to see what was up, thinking it was the kids who live upstairs chucking wads of wet paper towels onto the sidewalk like they did last summer, and noticed a police car with an enormous hole in its windshield. “Fucking great,” she thought, “those kids have graduated to throwing bricks at cop cars and they’re gonna be in a world of fucking MAJOR trouble!” Ever the chronicler of local goings-on, Tracey whipped out her digital camera and began to snap away, having her husband, Brendan, pose next to the shattered window as though he had punched through it with his fist, at which point they saw a brick go flying toward the gendarmes. 

The thrower was now clearly visible and heaping invective upon his victims. “Nobody protected my girlfriend!” he yelled as he retreated to the roof of the under-construction condo to replenish his supply of ammunition. Meanwhile, Tracey, Brendan, and a few of the regulars gathered across the street in front of the convenience store for a ringside seat, utterly unworried about being pegged with a projectile because the thrower was specifically targeting the cops. By this time it was obvious that the guy was either out of his mind or on drugs or maybe even both, so the confrontation escalated to include a searchlight-equipped helicopter and a fully geared-up SWAT team, complete with snipers. 

As he continued to chuck cement blocks from the rooftop battlements, the SWAT professionals drew a laser-targeted bead on his chest, only to be interrupted by the thrower’s mother who positioned herself between her son and the automatic weapons. “Don’t shoot! He is confused!” screamed his mother in a heavy Brooklyn/Latino accent, a diversion that allowed the masonry-flinger to withdraw the ladder he had used to access the roof. He fled to another building, all under the fascinated scrutiny of Tracey and Brendan, who had themselves climbed onto another rooftop for an unobstructed view. The fleeing masonry pitcher then used a shovel to break into another building in a bid to escape, but the cops had figured out where he would exit so they apprehended him and tasered the shit out of him. 

The next day my boss came in and was surprised to see the remnants of the yellow “crime scene” tape across the barbecue joint’s front door. Upon getting all the details he went outside and retrieved one of the thrown bricks as a restaurant keepsake, an item that now sits on our shelf of oddball tchochkes — a bottle of Laotian snake whiskey with an actual King Cobra in it, a “barbecue Barbie” who looks like a twelve-inch trailer park chippie, a ceramic blackface Minnie mouse, and other hideous excellence — complete with the following day’s news story on the incident from the New York Post.

BACK TO WORK

And so, my not-so-excellent vacation has come to an end and I am back to work at the barbecue joint. How weak-assed was my vacation, you may ask? Let’s put it this way: I was actually anxious to get back to work.
At least my first night back saw the place playing host to my old friend Amanda’s birthday party, a soiree replete with various East Coast comics-biz glitterati. A good time was had by all, and the birthday girl enjoyed herself to no end, and that’s just what I wanted to see.

As for the goals I set for myself to accomplish during my time off, I am sorry to say that very few of them got done. The much-needed osh-osh did not happen, I only managed to rid myself of a few of the boxes that were taking up space in my too small and too crowded studio apartment, and other than my bathroom having been given a proper scrubbing, my apartment still remains the model of disarray. However, I did manage to get some writing done, create perhaps the best pot of gumbo I ever made (substituting the Dungeness crabs with Alaskan King Crab legs gave the brew an incredible seafoody flavor), emotionally and psychologically center myself so that I am no longer openly and hair-trigger hostile to nearly everyone who crossed my path, and I also slept. A LOT. My body obviously needed it.

The one epiphany that I had during my time off is that I will most likely never plan my vacation around someone else, either to visit with them or have them stay with me unless they are my steady girlfriend or wife; in the past couple of years every time I have planned on spending vacation time with a nice young lady something has gone wrong with the party in question, and I so seldom get vacation time that it is too precious for me to map out only to have those plans go down the toilet at the eleventh hour. Perhaps the powers that be don’t want me to be happy in that regard, and so I concede defeat. So now if whichever person I want to see happens to be in town or I happen to be where she is, then that’s fine. I can handle disappointment well up to a point, but I have finally learned my lesson and it’s time to look out for Number One.

And with that, it’s back to work.