By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Ninja III: The Domination is a 1984 Cannon Films production that asks: what if The Exorcist but with ninjas? A ninja is killed by police after massacring a golf course. His spirit possesses a female aerobics instructor. She becomes possessed by his ninja spirit and begins hunting down the cops who killed him. She also has a love interest who is himself a ninja. A Japanese exorcism is eventually required. Breakdancing is involved. Sho Kos

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator C.H.U.D. stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. The film is about exactly that. New York City's sewer system is full of homeless people who have been mutated by toxic waste illegally dumped by a government agency. They emerge at night to eat people. A photographer, a soup kitchen operator, and a police captain piece together what's happening while city officials cover it up. It is a New York film through and through — gr

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Gymkata is a 1985 film premised on a genuinely brilliant idea: what if a US gymnast was sent on a secret government mission to a deadly country, and the obstacles he faced happened to include things that were exactly like gymnastic apparatus? A pommel horse appears in the village square at the exact moment he needs one. Parallel bars are conveniently located. Director Robert Clouse, who made Enter the Dragon, directed this with complete

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Krull is a 1983 Columbia Pictures production that cost $47 million and attempted to fuse science fiction and fantasy into an epic franchise. A planet is invaded by an alien force called the Slayers. A prince must retrieve a magical weapon called the Glaive from a mountain. He assembles a fellowship of misfits including a cyclops, a magician, a shape-shifter, and a group of bandits. The sets are enormous. The creature effects are impressi

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Mac and Me is a 1988 film financed directly by McDonald's as a marketing vehicle, disguised as a family adventure film in the tradition of E.T. A family of aliens is accidentally vacuumed up by a NASA probe. The youngest alien, MAC, is separated and befriends a boy in a wheelchair. The film climaxes with a birthday party at McDonald's. Ronald McDonald performs. The aliens are revived by Coca-Cola. They are eventually granted US citizensh

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo is a 1984 breakdancing sequel that became more famous as a phrase than as a film. The subtitle has been applied to every conceivable sequel, follow-up, and return since 1984. It is one of the most referenced film titles in pop culture history. The film itself is about a group of breakdancers trying to save their community centre from a developer who wants to demolish it. They do this by dancing. It works. Th

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Howard the Duck is a 1986 George Lucas production that cost $37 million, introduced a duck from another dimension to 1980s Cleveland, and destroyed the careers of nearly everyone involved. It is also genuinely strange in ways that distinguish it from ordinary blockbuster failures. Howard is sarcastic, cynical, and deeply unhappy about being on Earth. Lea Thompson falls in love with him. The film treats this with complete seriousness. The

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator TerrorVision is a 1986 Empire Pictures film about a suburban family who accidentally receive an alien monster through their satellite dish. The monster arrives via transmission, materialises in the television, and starts eating family members. The family is a collection of 1980s suburban archetypes taken to their extreme limits: a swinger couple redoing their home in the worst taste imaginable, a grandfather who has built a nuclear bunke

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator The Sweeper is a 1996 direct-to-video action film starring C. Thomas Howell as a vigilante cop who joins a secret organisation of police officers who execute criminals rather than arrest them. He is initially enthusiastic. He gradually has moral doubts. The film is a genuinely competent mid-90s DTV action thriller that takes its subject matter seriously and delivers exactly what its audience wanted — a man shooting people while questioni

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Cypher is a 2002 Vincenzo Natali film starring Jeremy Northam as a bored suburban accountant who takes a corporate espionage job and rapidly loses track of who he is, who he's working for, and what is real. It is a genuinely intelligent, cerebral science fiction thriller that ended up straight-to-DVD because distributors had no idea how to market a smart film starring people known for other things. Lucy Liu co-stars and is excellent. The

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Submerged is a 2005 Steven Seagal film in which Seagal plays a mercenary hired to rescue hostages from a submarine. He spends much of the film sitting in chairs. Other people do the action. Seagal delivers his lines in the particular mumble he developed around this period — a low, gravelly sound that requires subtitles and conveys absolute confidence that whatever he is saying is correct. The film was shot in Bulgaria. The submarine is m

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman is a 2000 sequel in which the mutant killer snowman from Jack Frost (1997) follows the sheriff who defeated him to a tropical island resort. He reconstitutes himself from the ocean water. He cannot be killed by heat because he has evolved. He can produce murderous baby snowmen from his body. The film takes place almost entirely on a sunny beach, which creates a visual comedy the filmmake

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Bloodfist VIII: Trained to Kill is the eighth entry in a Don Wilson martial arts franchise that began in 1989. By the eighth instalment the series had completely abandoned any connection to previous films and was simply a vehicle for Don Wilson to fight people in a new setting. This one involves a Navy SEAL mission, a mole in the organisation, and a considerable amount of kicking. Don Wilson kicks people with great professionalism. He ha

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Python is a 2000 Sci-Fi Channel original film about a giant python that escapes from a military transport and terrorises a small California town. The CGI snake is enormous, moves at impossible speeds, and eats people in sequences that the budget cannot fully support. The cast includes Casper Van Dien, Jenny McCarthy, and Robert Englund, which is an extraordinary collection of people to have in one direct-to-video snake film. None of them

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