SYNDICATE SADISTS (1975)

 Seven years before FIRST BLOOD we get Tomas Milian as a hero named Rambo(apparently Milian was trying to get a movie of the FIRST BLOOD novel made but only got as far as using the name here). Original Italian title of THE VIGILANTE CHALLENGES THE CITY. Instead of a Vietnam vet we get a biker sort-of helping the police take on some mobsters. It has some DIRTY HARRY elements thrown in thanks to director Umberto Lenzi and despite feeling a bit long makes for a decent action flick. AKA RAMBO'S REVENGE

The DVD I own of this has this for a cover which reflects nothing that happens in the movie. Maybe they were thinking of Lucio Fulci's CONTRABAND which features some torch hijinks:

OUTRAGE (2010)

  Director and star 'Beat' Takesh Kitano took a little break from these types of films for a few years to make more artsy/weird stuff but then returned to what people know him best for with this Yakuza flick. Fairly typical stuff here with some extremely violent scenes including devious use of a dentist drill, a near decapitation involving a car and some rope and tons of gun-fu. Nothing unexpected but still an entertaining watch for folks into the mobster movie genre. 

 Might be the last Asian action movie Blu-ray I ever pick up at Big Lots since they just announced that they are going out of business.

LETHAL ANGELS (2007)

  Picked this Hong Kong girl-power kung-fu flick up on DVD under the title of NAKED AVENGERS where it compares itself to NAKED WEAPON from 2002 which I wasn't a big fan of but I am a big fan of NAKED KILLER from 1992 so I was hoping for something along those lines. While it's not up to the heights of it's 90s predecessor it is pretty decent for something from the 2000s and I'd put it over NAKED WEAPON just for invoking a more classic category III feeling in some of it's gruesomeness which includes a scene of a whole family, including some young kids, being slaughtered by some mobsters with machetes. There is unfortunately also a love story shoehorned in to slow things down which I have to minus points for. All in all though for something made in 2007 I'm not complaining too much.  

 There's a different LETHAL ANGELS series of movies from the 1990s that has nothing to do with this film.

RACKET GIRLS (1951)

  This feels like the American version of one of those Mexican wrasslin' women movies, but since it came out a decade before those I guess this actually set the blueprint. Of course it's really a mobster movie with a whole bunch of wrestling scenes thrown in. Not exactly the sexiest spectacle but this was way before the days that porn became widespread so I guess you took whatever thrills you could get back then.  This has a few aliases including THE BLONDE PICK-UP, PIN-DOWN GIRL and WRESTLING RACKET GIRLS. Another MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 watch and it's undoubtedly better that way. 

FIRST LOVE (2019)

 You could call this one director Takashi Miike's version of TRUE ROMANCE where you take a couple and drop them into the middle of some mobsters fighting over drugs. Miike seems to have gone the David Cronenberg route where he starts out making really strange oddball cinema and then ends up making more straight forward gangster movies. Of course Miike has made way more fims then David so he's really ventured outside of any strict genre guidelines over the years. A bit overlong at almost 2 hours but it does manage to maintain a high energy level throughout. Heads roll, arms roll and lots of gun-fu commences.

 

LITTLE LAURA AND BIG JOHN (1973)

  Crappier and lower-budgeted version of BONNIE AND CLYDE(not actually based on Bonnie & Clyde but on a different real life criminal group out of Florida known as the John Ashley Gang(no relation to BLOOD ISLAND-star John Ashley)). Karen Black and 50s pop star Fabian do a decent enough job with the acting I guess but the movie itself is fairly boring and forgettable. One of the weirder aspects in this is the music, some of which seems totally out of place and way too 70s for a movie set in the 1920s. Bruce Dern was originally supposed to star in this but I doubt if that woulda helped much. 

THE UNDERGROUND BANKER (1994)

  So the message of this category III Hong Kong flick is don't ever borrow money from Triad gangsters. Got it! Starring Anthony Wong, best remembered as the cannibal Bunman from THE UNTOLD STORY. Here he actually plays the victim who turns out to be a hero role(though they do homage his most famous role when he threatens to turn the main villain into a pork bun). Unfortunately it takes his wife getting raped, turned into a prostitute and her and his son burned alive for the revenge portion to kick in. He gets help from his neighbor, recovered serial killer Dr. Lamb(which makes this actually a sorta sequel to another bloody Cat III flick DR. LAMB though he's not played by Simon Yam this time but Lawrence Ng) which leads to some fun knife-fu fights. Not particularly gory but there is quite a bit of violence and nudity on display to make this a memorable entry in this ultra sleazy category. 

                                      DEXTER ain't got nothing on Dr. Lamb!:

YAKUZA LAW (1969)

  I caught this one recently, right after watching director Teruo Ishii's other insane masterpiece HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN, and the one-two punch of both of these violent epics has made him my new favorite Japanese director of the moment. This movie starts out with all sorts of bloody torture and assassination scenes portraying various ways Japanese mobsters deal with those they perceive as going against the rules of the Yakuza. It's also an anthology movie told in 3 chapters that spans a large amount of time taking us up to the present day(of 1969 anyway). I know a few American movies were starting to display the ol' ultra-violence but this film takes it to almost-HG Lewis-levels of extremeness. Definitely a good one for fans of violent cinema with a strong stomach for eyeball-gouging, limb-chopping and other various acts of gruesomeness.  

  

                                      Just a small taste of the gore buffet!:

VIOLENT NIGHT (2022)

  Appropriately enough I watched this at a Christmas Day gathering. I can't say I gave it my undying attention for most of the opening segments but luckily this isn't the sort of film that you really have to invest much energy in watching. It's basically a mobster film where our action hero is Santa Claus who's not afraid of getting quite violent with those who are naughty. Fairly predictable for most of it's runtime it's at least a mildly entertaining series of bloody wacky kills. Also Santa here has a Viking origin and uses a big hammer like Thor so that's kinda unique. Also he looks like Hacksaw Jim Duggan so old-school wrasslin' fans can enjoy that.

SCORE (1995)

  Obviously director Atsushi Muroga  was very influenced by RESERVOIR DOGS when he made this Japanese gangster flick. From the bank job leading to a wounded crook begging to be taken to a doctor to the undercover cop infiltrating a gang of mobsters this has quite a few touches of the Tarantino classic sprinkled in. It is way more action-packed than it's inspiration though even if it lacks some of that films more stylish touches. There's also a bit of TRUE ROMANCE thrown in with a couple trying to get away with some jewels. It's also unique in being a Japanese film that takes place in America(even though it was actually filmed in The Philippines). An entertaining mix of 90s action clichés that moves very quickly.

 There was a SCORE 2: THE BIG FIGHT in 1999 but I'm not sure if they used any Hollywood films as a template for that one.

                                          Seems even nuttier in German!:

 

HIGH SCHOOL BIG SHOT (1959)

  So just about everything bad that happens to everyone in this movie can be blamed on 1 female character(Virginia Aldridge, who was in mostly T.V. stuff) and her terrible manipulative charms. It's a pretty simple plot about a nerd who gets taken advantage of and goes down the wrong path and since it's the 50s we have to learn that crime doesn't pay before it's all over. Besides the anti-crime message it has a pretty downer ending for the 50s. So for that I give it props and recommend this one for some gangsters vs. juvenile delinquent thrills.

 I own this in a DVD set of Roger Corman flicks. Corman was the executive producer who financed the production.

 Originally released on a double bill with T-BIRD GANG(another Corman deal).

The story here is apparently an adaption of Stanley Kubrick's THE KILLING which came out 3 years earlier and I really need to watch one of these days.      

DEVIL KILLER (1981)

  

 After having viewed the other Taiwanese DEVIL KILLER from the previous year I figured I would give this one a watch. I thought it would be a similar kung fu epic but there's actually very minimal martial arts in this and it relies mostly on gun-fu and drama concerning a hitman's quest for redemption. Sadly the version I watched was severely cropped on the sides and subtitled so that anytime someone said more than a few words it was cut off on either end. I don't expect something this obscure will ever be cleaned up but if it was it would be a way less disappointing viewing experience. 

 Two things I didn't expect  from this Taiwanese gangster flick: 1. the classic arcade game Missile Command puts in an appearance 2. Music from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST showing up multiple times for dramatic effect. One other thing I really didn't expect is the one character that pretty much does a goofy Jackie Chan impersonation for much of the film(Hsaio-Fei Lee?) getting brutally gunned down by the bad guys so that's something.

Shitty cropped YouTube version!: 

GOLGO 13: ASSIGNMENT KOWLOON (1977)

 I have this movie on a DVD set of Sonny Chiba movies and it was the last one I watched. Maybe because of the Chiba burnout I couldn't really get into it all that much. It seemed like a pretty standard Japanese gangster flick with Chiba playing the super tough guy hitman who luckily also knows his martial arts. 

 I don't know much about the Golgo 13 character, he sorta seems like a Japanese version of James Bond but way more cold-blooded. I do recall playing a Nintendo Golgo 13 game back in the 80s and I know he's based on a manga and a follow up anime series but that's about it. Apparently there was an early live-action version in 1973 and a bunch of follow up films after this but I've yet to see any of those.   

TRIAD ELECTION (2006)

 

 So there's this one scene, in this Hong Kong gangster flick, where our main character(Louis Koo) starts hacking off a rival gangster's arms and legs and feeding them into a meat-grinder to turn them into dog food. I would imagine that one scene is the entire reason this film was released as part of the "Asia Extreme" dvd series because that's really the only particularly gruesome thing that happens during the whole runtime. The rest of the film is pretty slow for the most part and deals more with Chinese politics(within the criminal underworld and beyond) than anything else. Going into this I didn't know it was a sequel, hence the ELECTION 2 aka, involving some of the same characters. Not sure if that one was more of an action film but I might check it out at some point since this was very well done by director Johnnie To regardless of it's relative lack of explosive elements. To was nice enough to limit this to a sweet 90 minute runtime.  

I ACCUSE MY PARENTS (1944)

  Not only do you get the main character(Robert Lowell) saying the title once in this clunky 40s melodrama but you get him saying it twice in case we forgot what we are watching. This is a story of a fella with some pretty crappy alcoholic parents who are more concerned with partying it up than taking any interest in their son. This then leads to a life of gangster entanglements when he meets a nightclub singer(Mary Beth Hughes). 

 I've only seen this movie on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 and that's probably the only way you should watch it too. AKA ACCUSE MY PAST 

10 years earlier there was GUILTY PARENTS which is basically the same idea but with a female protagonist.    

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE (2019)

  Another one of those long-ass modern Asian films. As with most of them I've seen this one is really well-done if not a little slow and drawn-out at points giving it that artsy-fartsy feel that all the "serious" film fans drool over. You won't find any geese in this but you will find gangster antics involving a cop getting shot and killed by our main character(Ge Hu) and lots of gangsters on motorcycles. A guy gets an umbrella shoved through him at one point which I found to be the highlight. A lot of the rest of it seemed to be moving in slow-motion. If you like modern movies that are trying to emulate film-noirs and have a lot of endurance though check it out.  

Alright I guess those are geese in the trailer but it's very foggy and they look like flamingos!:

THE LADY PROFESSIONAL (1971)

 The Shaw Brothers take on the gangster genre here with this story of a hit-lady(Lily Ho) seeking revenge for her dead dad and other treachery. Surprisingly no kung fu action is involved though there is one scene where Bolo Yeung shows up that almost turns into martial arts but mostly consists of a weird shoving match. You do get gun-fu and Lily's deadly dart-throwing compact. The super red 70s blood flows pretty hard, especially in a scene where a guy gets tossed in some type of industrial strength wood-chipper doo-hickey and turned into chunks of gore. 

   

THE GANGSTER (2012)

 So I guess the award for the most generic title ever for a gangster movie goes to Thailand for this one. That's a shame because this is a pretty interesting movie that's supposed to be based on actual mob activity in the country back in the 50s and 60s. They even get some testimonials from what I'm assuming are actual people from that era that gives the film a partly documentary feel. Like most modern Asian films it runs a bit long at almost 2 hours but mostly moves along pretty well with all the gun-fu, knife-fu and other fighting styles on display. Also might be one of the few Thai movies where you can see guys with pompadour hairdos.

NEW WORLD (2013)

 Modern Korean movies are all way too long and here's another example of that. There's a lot of talky talk parts that could probably be cut down quite a bit to help this. Saying that though I did find this one to be a pretty engaging epic of Korean mafia action. There are some pretty brutal scenes including a guy who gets his head sawed off by a large knife(offscreen) and a poor undercover lady cop who ends up in a barrel. One scene in particular, which takes place in an elevator with one quite tough guy vs. a whole bunch of knife-wielding fellows determined to finish him, is reminiscent of the hammer fight bit in OLDBOY. Of course also reminiscent of OLDBOY is it's star(Choi Min-sik) who has a pretty big role here and is great as an aging policeman. All the acting in this thing is topnotch and the mobsters vs. undercover cops story is done very well so I'll let it's lengthiness slide. There is a weird ending involving a flashback which does feel sorta unnecessary though and seems added on just to test my endurance. For a modern film though this beats pretty much anything made recently in the cesspool of Hollywood. 

GANG WAR IN MILAN (1973)

 Well, like the title says this one is about two warring mobster gangs. One is a prostitution racket headed up by Antonio Sabato and the other is a group of drug dealers led by a Frenchman(Philippe Leroy, who also appears in the superior Eurocrime flick MILANO CALIBRO 9). Lots of back and forth attacks happen; whores get acid thrown in their face, breast get sliced, a guy gets his balls electrified and various hits get carried out. It all gets a bit repetitive by the end, which does seem a bit long with it's 100 minute run time(some versions out there sadly cut out about 4 minutes of the more graphic stuff). Director Umberto Lenzi went on to make some better flicks in this genre as well as his more well-known horror and cannibal classic sickies. AKA BURNING CITY