By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Wake of Death is a 2004 Jean-Claude Van Damme revenge thriller in which Van Damme's wife is murdered by a Chinese Triad leader whose son she tried to protect. Van Damme then kills everyone involved with the systematic efficiency of a man who has been making action films for 20 years and knows exactly what audiences want from him. The film is competently made, genuinely brutal in places, and represents Van Damme's late-period DTV work at

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Komodo vs. Cobra is a 2005 Jim Wynorski film in which a group of activists travel to a remote island to expose illegal military experiments and discover that the experiments have produced a giant komodo dragon and a giant cobra. The two creatures eventually fight each other. The CGI is the creature feature equivalent of a child's drawing of a lizard. The human cast exists to run between the creatures looking frightened. This is exactly t

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Raptor Island is a 2004 Lorenzo Lamas film in which Navy SEALs pursue a terrorist to a remote island and discover it is inhabited by velociraptors. The raptors are CGI. The CGI was produced with a budget that suggests the raptors were rendered on a laptop during lunch breaks. Lorenzo Lamas shoots raptors with great commitment. The raptors respond by dying and then appearing again in subsequent scenes. Continuity was not the priority. The

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Virtual Combat is a 1995 direct-to-video film in which a virtual reality fighter escapes into the real world and begins killing people. Don 'The Dragon' Wilson must stop him. The film was made during peak mid-90s virtual reality hysteria when Hollywood was convinced VR would change everything immediately. The virtual reality sequences were filmed with green screen and look approximately like a screensaver. The real world sequences are a

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator The Order is a 2001 Jean-Claude Van Damme film set in Jerusalem involving a secret society, ancient scrolls, stolen artefacts, and Van Damme running through the Old City being shot at. It is competently shot on location with genuine production value and a story that takes its historical elements seriously. Van Damme co-wrote and co-produced and was clearly invested in making something with more substance than his usual DTV output. The re

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Shark Attack 2 is a 2000 Nu Image film in which a marine biologist investigates unusually aggressive great white sharks off the South African coast. The sharks are a combination of stock footage of real sharks and CGI that could generously be described as impressionistic. One shark jumps approximately 40 feet out of the water and onto a boat. Real sharks cannot do this. The film is not concerned with what real sharks can do. It is concer

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror is the fifth entry in a franchise based on a Stephen King short story. By the fifth film the franchise had completely exhausted its original premise and was simply placing young people in cornfields near a murderous cult and killing them in creative ways. This instalment stars David Carradine as a cult leader and Alexis Arquette as a troubled young man drawn to the corn. It was shot in 18 days. It

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Solo is a 1996 Mario Van Peebles film in which Van Peebles plays an experimental military android who develops a conscience, refuses to massacre a village of innocent civilians, and goes rogue into the Central American jungle where he befriends the very villagers the army sent him to kill. He then has to fight the army. The film is essentially a remake of Predator crossed with Short Circuit, made with complete sincerity and a genuine pol

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Project Shadowchaser III is a 1995 direct-to-video film in which a damaged android terrorises a space station. It is the third film in a series that began with a Die Hard on a hospital rogue android premise and by the third entry had moved the action to orbit while keeping everything else the same. Frank Zagarino plays the android with the expressionless menace he brought to the first two films. The space station sets are ambitious for t

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Top of the Food Chain is a 1999 Canadian sci-fi comedy about a small town being invaded by aliens who are drawn there by the town's spectacularly high rate of accidental death and general stupidity. A government scientist arrives to investigate. The film is a pitch-perfect parody of 1950s B-movie science fiction — the performances are calibrated exactly to the era being spoofed, the production design recreates the period aesthetic with l

Dive into the Swamp of Nostalgia Crocodile 2: Death Swamp is a 2002 film that takes you on a wild ride. Picture this: a plane full of bank robbers crashes into a swamp. But wait! This swamp is home to a giant crocodile. Yes, you heard that right! The survivors, along with a rescue team, must navigate not just each other but also a crocodile the size of a school bus. Talk about a bad day at the office! The CGI crocodile? Oh boy! It moves with the grace of a creature that has n

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell is a 2001 direct-to-video sequel that replaces the original film's Andrew Divoff with John Novak as the Djinn. This is a significant downgrade. Divoff's Djinn was genuinely menacing. Novak's version is menacing in a more budget-conscious way. The film is set on a college campus where a student accidentally releases the Djinn from an ancient stone. Wishes are granted with horrifying consequences. The

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Dracula II: Ascension is a 2003 Patrick Lussier film that serves as a direct sequel to his Dracula 2000 and was shot back-to-back with Dracula III: Legacy. Medical students in New Orleans acquire what they believe to be Dracula's corpse and keep it in a warehouse while conducting experiments on it. This goes exactly as well as you'd expect. Jason London leads a cast doing genuinely committed work in a film that takes its mythology seriou

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Chupacabra: Dark Seas is a 2005 Sci-Fi Channel original in which a chupacabra — the legendary Latin American cryptid rumoured to drain the blood of livestock — gets loose on a cruise ship. John Rhys-Davies is the ship's captain. He delivers every line with the gravity of a man who has been in Lord of the Rings and is absolutely not going to let a chupacabra film change his standards. The creature is CGI and looks like a confused iguana.

Black Mask is a 1996 Hong Kong action film starring Jet Li as a former super-soldier from a secret government program. This guy has had his pain receptors removed, making him immune to physical suffering. Sounds wild, right? He’s hiding out as a librarian, living a quiet life. But wait! His old unit goes rogue and starts assassinating drug lords. What does he do? He puts on a mask and fights back. The action sequences? Oh boy, they are choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping — the sam

The Origins of a Cult Classic Before Rachel from Friends graced our screens, Jennifer Aniston was busy being terrorized by a murderous Irish leprechaun in the wilds of North Dakota. Picture it: the year was 1993, the budget a mere $900,000, and nobody involved in the production of Leprechaun had a clue they were kicking off a franchise that would span eight sequels over 25 years. Aniston's performance as Tory Reding is classic early-nineties horror heroine material — she scre

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Solarbabies is a 1986 MGM film that cost $25 million, bombed catastrophically, and was quietly buried. It is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where water is controlled by a totalitarian government and orphaned children are raised in institutional compounds where they play a sport involving rollerskates and a ball. One group of orphans finds a glowing orb called Bohdai that has magical healing powers. They escape the compound on roller

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator In 1981, three friends with a camera, a rented cabin in Tennessee, and approximately $90,000 made one of the most influential horror films in history. The Evil Dead — shot by Sam Raimi, starring the impossibly square-jawed Bruce Campbell, and powered entirely by creative desperation — is the kind of film that should not exist. The budget was held together with borrowed money and sheer insanity. The crew slept on the set. Campbell was cov

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Robot Jox is the 1989 Stuart Gordon film that asked: what if geopolitical conflict was resolved by giant manned robots punching each other? The answer is a film that takes its premise completely seriously, delivers impressive practical effects for its budget, and somehow ends up being a genuinely moving story about sportsmanship, sacrifice, and the ethics of spectator violence. It is also a film where a giant robot punches another giant

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was filmed in 1977 by George Barry, who had no distribution deal, no industry connections, and no clear path to release. He finished the film and it sat in a vault for 27 years. A bootleg copy circulated in the UK. Patton Oswalt did a comedy bit about it in 2004. This led to Barry discovering his film existed on bootleg VHS, which led to a proper DVD release in 2004. Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is about a be