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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Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, they say, and Diamond Connection’s prologue tells us why: “We lust for them to the point of madness for their power to solve all of life’s problems.” I’ll take your word for it, Diamond Connection.

In this confounding Italian adventure from In the Folds of the Flesh director Sergio Bergonzelli, a French airliner goes down in a storm, killing all passengers except an attorney with a briefcase of diamonds intended to swap for automatic weapons. While he’s suffering from amnesia and his head wrapped in bandages from emergency plastic surgery (“I hope you like your new face, Mr. Ferguson!”), various people thirst to get their grubby mitts on those presumably sunken gems.

There’s Ferguson’s daughter (Oya Demir), race car driver Alan Roberts (Lorenzo Bonaccorsi), hospital physician Karen (Barbara Bouchet, The Black Belly of the Tarantula), someone named Mark from Amsterdam and Sammy, a professor who’s “a great deep-sea diver and a smart fellow all around.” There are others whose names I didn’t catch and you won’t, either.

In fact, I have more questions: Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Who’s chasing whom? Where do their allegiances lay? Why is a little boy wearing a penile novelty nose and what purpose does he serve? I still don’t know. Keeping it all straight is, as Alan says, “just like looking at a needle in a mud stack.” (Another: What’s a mud stack?)

But I do know William Berger (Sabata) is in it, as are a goofy fight at a discotheque (partly involving a broom), a literal upskirt shot, karate chops traded aboard a docked boat, fisticuffs on moving trucks, stock footage of sharks, a shitload of helicopters, double-crosses, a parade, a car chase, a speedboat chase and a desert trek with camels. It’s as if Bergonzelli sought to adapt the poster without connecting any dots. Arrivederci, logic. —Rod Lott

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Whether known by Savage Harbor or Death Feud, this flick is one of those direct-to-video numbers in which nameless bad guys get shot while standing at the top of hills and stairwells so the camera can catch them taking a tumble, because such action is cheaper than an explosion on the beach. But there’s one of those, too.

And also Frank Stallone (Terror in Beverly Hills), so this sack of garbage already is three-for-three.

Stallone dons a stupid cap to play Joe, a longshoreman on leave who saves a woman named Anne (Karen Mayo-Chandler, Out of the Dark) from being raped. Joe and Anne immediately fall in love, and why shouldn’t they with such deep conversations as this, presented in full:

Joe: “Do you like avocados?”
Anne: “What?”
Joe: “Just a thought.”

Annnnnd scene.

After a romantic montage featuring outercourse in the park, Joe proposes to Anne before he has to leave for six months. She accepts. Unfortunately, Anne is on the run from Harry (Anthony Caruso, Mean Johnny Barrows), a human trafficker whose goons catch up to her, kidnap her from a grocery store and plunge her full of so much smack that she’ll work as a sex slave.

The horse works so well that she thinks every trick is Joe, rubbing her gartered-and-pantied self all over random guys as she groggily coos his name on loop. When Joe returns to shore, he sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong in order to find his beloved. And when he does, ooh, Harry better watch out! I’d say the rest of this sentence were a spoiler if it weren’t a compelling reason to watch: Joe shoots him in the dick.

Meanwhile, in a parallel plotline existing to achieve the magic 90-minute running time, we follow Joe’s fellow sailor buddy, Bill (Christopher Mitchum, The Executioner Part II), who claims he “can eat 40 eggs an hour.” Bill also finds love, with two-bit bar stripper Roxey, she of the Santa-hat pasties. That she’s played by Lisa Loring, The Addams Family’s former Wednesday all grown up (and out), makes the match — and the movie — that much weirder.

One could accuse the final film of writer/director/producer Carl Monson (Please Don’t Eat My Mother!) of being misogynistic … and one would be right. Outside of extras, each and every one of its female characters toils in the trade of transactional flesh. However, it would be unfair to reduce Savage Harbor to that label … because it’s also homophobic. What DTV actioner of the time wasn’t?

By no measure is Savage Harbor good, but it does feature Don’t Answer the Phone’s corpulent killer Nicholas Worth as one of Harry’s minions, another minion being dragged through California traffic by a rope, as well as an attempted assassination by trash truck. Not every movie can make such a double-barreled claim. —Rod Lott

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