DEADBEAT AT DAWN (1988) – Four years in the making, Deadbeat at Dawn is rightfully called America’s Street Fighter – as in the 1974 Sonny Chiba movie, NOT the later video game. Writer and director Jim Van Bebber also starred in this 81-minute film as street gang leader Goose.
That antihero wields a self-taught bone-crushing, blood-spurting, throat-ripping mongrelized form of martial arts that makes Sonny Chiba’s beatdowns in Street Fighter look almost gentle by comparison.
Audiences not only wince at the violence in Deadbeat at Dawn, they thrill to the stunts that Van Bebber and his collaborators were able to pull off without the benefit of professional stuntmen or fight choreographers.
The risks taken by our auteur and his cast embody the ballsy guerilla filmmaking spirit as surely as Jorg Buttgereit’s efforts on both sides of the Berlin Wall in the early 1980s. The makeup and special effects for the butcher’s shop of injuries and dismemberments suffered by various characters are more like horror films than action flicks. Continue reading






GIANT OF THE EVIL ISLAND (1965) – Also released as The Mystery of the Evil Island, this film starred Mission: Impossible‘s Peter Lupus going by the name Rock Stevens. After mild success in a few Italian peplums, Lupus got his one and only swashbuckler movie with this little honey.
Pedro’s predecessor as captain of his ship has retired after a career of fruitlessly trying to nab the pirate Moloch. Newly arrived Captain Valverde meets cute with the local governor’s daughter Bianca (Dina DeSantis) and the two fall in “love.” 
Can they name at least 7 or 8 previous presidents and their political party affiliation without looking online? Can they trace the process through which a bill becomes a law? Can they name the sources where the general public can look up political contributions? Can they use their own words to explain their political opinions – if “political opinions” isn’t too strong a term for their childish “Trump is evil” babbling. 





Democrats flushed the justice system down the toilet in their unhinged political persecution of President Trump. The cases against him were clearly travesties all along. 










