There once was a time when Hollywood made moving pictures for our two-fisted fathers and four-fisted grandfathers, solid men who slugged it out with Nazi beasts overseas like they were on the cover of a damn paperback novel. And perhaps the best movie to come from this lost era is the nail-spittin’ POW flick The Great Escape.

Based on the rousing true story, a daring team of Allied soldiers — mainly British — are stuck behind the walls of a Nazi prisoner of war camp, Stalag Luft III. Built especially for those captured servicemen who had been wasting Germany’s precious time and valuable resources with their constant escape attempts, it was supposed to be inescapable.

But with a camp full of hardened men who have only one thing on their minds — freedom — this crew comes up with an ingenious plan to get out at least 250 soldiers by digging three tunnels, right under the noses of the Germans. But you can make sure those kraut bastards are going to make them work for it every step of the way.

With Steve McQueen in a star-making role as Hilts, a captain with a bad attitude and good motorcycle skills, The Great Escape is well over three hours, but doesn’t feel like it, thanks to director John Sturges’ ability to make James Clavell and W.R. Burnett’s script constantly filled with chest hair-riddled action from start to finish.

Co-starring James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Donald Pleasence — to name a few — this is, for me at least, one of the best films ever made, the kind that couldn’t be made today … but thank God they made it yesterday. —Louis Fowler

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It’s May and the only film released in 2020 I’ve seen in an actual theater has been Bad Boys for Life; at this rate, I’m thinking it could take Best Picture at next year’s Academy Awards.

And, even if it did happen, I really wouldn’t be mad because, for all intents and purposes, this third film in the Bad Boys series — set some 15 or so years later — is the buddy-cop film I’ve been patiently waiting for since, at the very least, Bad Boys 2.

Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) are the two titular bad boys of the Miami PD, wrecking cars and blowing up shit, throwing out comedic bon mots with every act of public destruction. The fun comes to an end, however, when, during a fun footrace, Lowery is shot at point-blank range by an enterprising cartel heir on a black motorcycle.

It turns out that, before he was a bad boy, Lowery was an undercover boy, working with a government agency to go deep undercover as a Mexican drug lord’s lover. That mujer (Kate del Castillo, pigeonholing herself) is mad as hell, having spent decades in jail; now she’s a bruja out for bloody revenge that takes the duo — as well as a squad of younger bad people — to Mexico where life is, apparently, cheap.

Taking the high-speed reins from Michael Bay — who cameos as a wooden wedding guest — directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah have got his patented blueprint down for this type of over-the-top film which, really, is pretty basic by now; thankfully, they’ve added plenty of their own stolen touches, obviously inspired by the Fast & Furious flicks.

With a fourth film in the works, my only complaint is they really should have saved this title for the next one, the “for” a stylized number 4: Bad Boys 4 Life … I think it works, right? —Louis Fowler

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When push comes to shove, Charles Bronson shoves back hard — a dildo up a pedo’s hindquarters, a $25,000 watch down a pimp’s throat — in Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, his wide-release swan song as a leading man. Bronson plays Los Angeles vice cop Lt. Crowe, out to bust an underage prostitution ring run by the greasy Duke (Juan Fernandez, 2009’s The Collector) any way he can; per Cannon Films’ 1980s house rules, that means wanton acts of violence and unchecked police brutality.

In other words, see it!

The plot thickens with the addition of an Asian ingredient, as corporate climber Hiroshi Hada (James Pax, Invasion U.S.A.) and his family are transferred from Japan to L.A., whereupon one of his little girls (Kumiko Hayakawa) is kidnapped and “hired” by Duke. Ironically, days earlier on a public bus, Hada molests Crowe’s teen daughter (Amy Hathaway, Last Exit to Earth), who screams and exclaims, “Some Oriental guy touched my holy of holies!”

Bronson fans eager to see Crowe dish out some serious daddy revenge on Hada will be deeply disappointed, as Kinjite inexplicably abandons the matter altogether. The omission of Death Wish-style payback is all the more startling given Hada is portrayed negatively from the start: a salaryman who prefers the company of bargirls to his wife (Marion Kodama Yue, Troop Beverly Hills) because, as he informs her with robotic matter-of-factness, “Your sexual gifts are few and bitter.”

From frequent Bronson collaborator J. Lee Thompson (The Evil That Men Do), the film more than earns its reputation of being aggressively sleazy and possibly racist. Collectively, the icky bits — such as a not-yet-legal Nicole Eggert (The Haunting of Morella) in black panties that appear to be cut 3 feet high — become the movie’s star, as Bronson barely seems invested enough to show up and flash a badge. While exhibiting that Cannon touch, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects is not among his most memorable, beyond keeping cult favorite Manos: The Hands of Fate company in the small realm of movies whose titles inadvertently translate themselves into redundancy. After this, Chuck continued the aging-cop roles, but mostly in network originals — you know, the kind that don’t open with a sex worker’s jar of Vaseline. —Rod Lott

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In this Belgian waffler, sex symbol Sybil Danning assembles a team of six tough ladies to help take out an eco-terrorist group. Together, they form … The Panther Squad! Individually, they have … no names — one of a bounty of cues director Pierre Chevalier (Orloff Against the Invisible Man) put less effort into the movie than it takes to watch it.

When the U.N.-esque New Organization of Nations (N.O.O.N., get it?) announces a move into space exploration, the aforementioned anti-pollution activists/signal jammers who brand themselves Clean Space kidnap an astronaut in protest, hoping to convince N.O.O.N. to put the kibosh on their star-trekking initiative. After many scenes of Important White Guys shop-talking the crisis over the phone, Ilona (Danning, Cuba Crossing) is called into duty to administer swift, sultry defeat.

Partial to root beer “on the rocks” and a curves-hugging, black leather getup not too far removed (wink) from Howling II, Danning’s ass-kicker takes down thugs in regular speed and slow motion. It’s a toss-up which more fails to hide her lack of combat skill. In a battle of cleavage, however, she wins hands down — here, take mine.

For supposedly crackerjack commandos, Ilona and her fellow Panthers travel not-so-inconspicuously in a Jeep painted in the bright, bold colors of Pan-African nations’ flags. The girls don’t exactly wear camo, either, opting for showy bikinis, halter tops, cutoff shorts and matching headbands. Chevalier and producer Jess Franco (X312 — Flight to Hell) don’t bother giving any a distinguishable trait — pointed out when this film’s Bosley, Jack Taylor (Wax), is introduced to the lineup and deigns to demean each lady with a spoofy Seven Dwarfs moniker. I would not be surprised if the (alleged) script by Georges Friedland (Moonwolf) refers to them as Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, Genitalium, Syphilis, Trichomoniasis and Papilloma.

As with the items on that list, The Panther Squad should be avoided at all costs. —Rod Lott

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Remo Williams and Mack Bolan are the two biggest names in men’s paperback fiction and have been for decades. We’re politely asked, however, to add another adventurer to this roster: Jake Speed.

Sure, I guess.

When her sister is kidnapped by some dirty white slavers, Margaret (Karen Kopkins), on the advice of her senile grandfather, seeks out the help of pulp hero Speed (Wayne Crawford, God’s Bloody Acre). With the help of his typist, Desmond (Dennis Christopher), they head to a stereotypical African country beseeched by civil war and, even worse, unclean showers.

After stopping for a drink in a bar where an African band plays a delicious cover of Michael Sembello’s “Maniac,” they find her sister in a fortified jungle villa, kept prisoner by the vicious Sid (John Hurt); it’s at this point when the film truly becomes pulp fiction instead of pop parody, with Hurt squeezing every bit of scum out of his detestable villain.

I remember when this flick came out in the summer of ’86. I confused the hero for many months with the also-recently released Big Trouble in Little China’s Jack Burton, both with similar ad campaigns in the Dallas papers that focused on the macho swagger of these characters. And while Burton has the advantage of being portrayed by Kurt Russell, Wayne Crawford as Speed ain’t no slouch, either.

Still, Jake Speed, though not entirely great, much like a $2.99 drugstore paperback, does its job and does it admirably, providing the world with one of its last true heroes of dime-store fiction and all the derring-do that entails. But forget the movies—I’m just more surprised that it didn’t inspire a series of cheap novels on the spinning rack. —Louis Fowler

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