A FORCE OF ONE (1979) – Fresh off the success of Good Guys Wear Black, Chuck Norris starred in this action film directed by Paul Aaron in only his second directing effort. The prolific Ernest Tidyman wrote the screenplay.
The Story: In a fictional mid-sized California city, a drug operation is thriving, helped along by bad cops who funnel confiscated drugs right back to the head of the narcotics pushers after pretending to have destroyed the seized goodies per department policy. The drug ring uses a sporting goods store as their front and use an aspiring karate champ as their chief enforcer.
That enforcer is a deadly human weapon and when cops keep turning up dead at his hands the department hires a local karate dojo master to teach the police better techniques of self-defense. That dojo master falls in love with a lady cop and winds up helping the police to battle the drug ring.
The Characters:
CHUCK NORRIS is in the role of Matt Logan, a former special forces man from the United States Army. He’s the defending Middleweight Karate Champion and also runs a karate dojo on the side. One of his students is his black adopted son Charlie (Eric Laneuville), whose late mother he had platonically befriended when … oh, don’t worry about it. They might as well have saved time by just having him be one of Matt’s students, PERIOD, since his only purpose is to get killed by the drug dealers, thus giving Logan a personal stake in the crusade to bring them down. Continue reading
With the 4th of July holiday fast approaching, here’s another seasonal post from Balladeer’s Blog. Since too many documentaries and books on the Revolutionary War focus on what seems like the same handful of battles I like focusing on a lot of the overlooked military clashes. This is another go-round. 
In the past Balladeer’s Blog has given shout-outs to various alcohol products that I feel go great with the now-global Frontierado Holiday on the first Friday of every August. Since this is, after all, a lifestyle blog (I’M KIDDING!), here is a shoutout for a brand of rum for the 4th of July celebrations. 
PRIME CUT (1972) – Directed by Michael Ritchie. Prime Cut was released less than 4 months after The Godfather but it’s difficult to think of two more different gangster films. And I say that as a good thing. Prime Cut is not trying for the epic, operatic scope of The Godfather, it’s just a fairly solid street-level gangster flick with a few admittedly silly action sequences. 
The Windy City mob sent a tough-guy “negotiator” to try leaning on the Kansas rebel only to have that Jayhawk State gangster take things to the next level by having the tough-guy killed, then literally ground into hot dog meat. Adding insult to injury the Kansas boss sent the hot dogs/ bodily remains of the negotiator back to Chicago in the package they were supposed to use to send their tribute money.
AIR WAVE 
A FANTASTICAL EXCURSION INTO THE PLANETS (1839) – By an unknown author. An advanced alien life form makes contact with the novel’s anonymous narrator and takes him on a guided tour of other planets in our solar system. Among other things he encounters angelic creatures on Mercury, warlike males and females on Mars, enormous humanoids on Jupiter and a pack of Lovecraftian horrors on Saturn. For my full review click 
WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965) – TWO PETERS, ONE WOODY should probably have been the title of this blog post. Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen starred in this brazen (for its day) sex comedy set in Paris during the Swinging Sixties. 
The end result is still hailed for its pioneering depiction of promiscuity in a major studio release. The relaxing of cinematic standards permitted What’s New Pussycat? to be bolder and kinkier than any pre-1965 production could have been. Compared to films of the past 55 years, however, it often seems as mild and self-consciously “zany” as an episode of Three’s Company, which was daring for television of the 1970s but certainly not today. 
MCGURK (1979) 
LATITUDE ZERO (1969) – My review of the long unavailable Japanese monster/ sci fi movie 
AMERICA: PART OF THE DUNE SERIES – In the spirit of my blog post America: Part of the Alien Series. Click 
I WOKE UP EARLY THE DAY I DIED (1998) – Directed by Aris Iliopulos, this is the film that was made based on that notorious unproduced script written by THE Ed Wood, the master of badfilm behind Glen or Glenda, Plan 9 From Outer Space and more. 
There’s no dialogue, Easter Eggs regarding Wood’s various Golden Turkeys abound and excerpts from the actual screenplay appear on screen at times in case viewers are skeptical that the weirdness they’re witnessing really was in the original script. 
