Writer/producer Roger Corman’s original The Fast and the Furious should be called The Relaxed and the Rear-Projected. In pure old-school AIP fashion, it’s quick, painless and efficient. And a better movie than the loose Vin Diesel remake from 2001.

Also pulling double duty as director, John Ireland stars as a man wanted for murder, and is given the cold-blooded killer name of Frank Webster. While on the run to Mexico, he stops at a diner and is accosted by a porky cop, so he grabs the nearest hostage he can — dish o’ ice cream Dorothy Malone — and they hightail it in her Jaguar.

She’s headed for the “international” car races, so he thinks that’d be a good place to lay low until they can get across the border. Perhaps — just perhaps — captor and captive will fall in love before 75 minutes is up.

For a delinquent type, Ireland sure does look to be in his 40s. The race sequences are antiquated, of course, but that’s what lends this drive-in movie its charm. It’s hard not to have a good time when it flies by so quickly. Bonus: No Paul Walker saying “bro.” —Rod Lott

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Freelance thief Tommy Lee Jones is hired to steal some accounting reports from a corporation. Lucky for him, they’re marked “ACCOUNTING REPORTS” in big, block letters. Unlucky for him, he triggers the alarm during this assignment and is forced to hide the cassette in the back of the Black Moon — an experimental super-car that runs on water and hits 325 mph — during a chance meeting at a gas station.

He tracks the Black Moon to a hotel, where, unlucky for him, professional car thief Linda Hamilton steals it for boss Robert Vaughn’s chop shop, hidden in the basement of a twin high rise. Lucky for him, Hamilton’s having some issues with her boss, so she agrees to help him steal it. Unlucky for him, she also beds down with him — seriously, she kind of looks like a dude.

The fun of Black Moon Rising is all contained in the final third, with the nighttime break-in of the tower, the theft and the escape, all with cranky-puss Tommy Lee climbing through air shafts and doing donuts.

Any movie set in a high-rise at night automatically carries a cachet of cool (unless it stars Paul Reiser), but imagine how much cooler this would have been if screenwriter John Carpenter had directed it as well. This was an early Carpenter script dusted off after he hit it big, so his involvement is limited. But it’s a fairly well-crafted B-picture that knows every so often, you just gotta focus on the car. —Rod Lott

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If Dobermans can be taught to rob a bank, why not blind guys? That’s the premise behind Blind Rage, an oddball crime film that assembles a multicultural quintet who can’t see for shit, to pull off a money heist to end all money heists. Because they’re blind, yes, but also two of the men have names that are synonyms for penises, Wang and Willie. I don’t think history has seen such a thing.

As with that series of bank-robbing doggie movies, this film’s best scenes are the training sequences: “Let’s begin by synchronizing your Braille watches.” Heck, there’s even to-scale model created out of the barest of wood framing so the guys can soak up the sound of each other’s footsteps, the placement of the deposit-slip table, and whatnot. They’re even taught target practice: “Any foreign sound you hear, shoot.” Solid advice; that’s how kids get killed, you know.

And what would this movie be without a little kung fu fighting when it comes time to doing the crime? Probably just as incredibly average, running a few less minutes.

Who are director Efren C. Piñon and writer Leo Fong kidding? This should all but be credited as a remake of The Doberman Gang franchise, because instead of exploiting animals, they’ve just exploited the handicapped. They’ve also exploited a top-billed Fred Williamson, who shows up only at the tail end as his Jesse Crowder character (“one mean cat!”) from Death Journey and No Way Back. The fucking IHOP gets almost as much screen time. —Rod Lott

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The cover of Ted V. Mikels’ 10 Violent Women screams “Itching For Action!,” but “Itching with Crabs!” would be more appropriate to the Z-grade auteur’s tiresome take on the women-in-prison genre. An opening credit dares get biblical to kick off the so-called story: “In the beginning … there were 10 good girls.”

However, that’s before they move from mining jobs to a jewelry heist. Among the gems they take is an Arab’s sacred, irreplaceable “master scarab,” which puts them in his sights. Rather than laying low after such a caper, they get involved in the coke trade and, worse, nude hot-tubbing with Mikels, who’s wearing his signature, stupid-ass, boar-tusk necklace. I didn’t sympathize when one of the girls stabbed him to death with her high-heeled shoe.

Roughly halfway in, 10 Violent Women switches gears into WIP territory when the chicks get thrown in the clink. It has all the elements one expects from the subgenre — nude showers, lesbian warden — but none of the punch. The flick’s initial energy peters out right after the heist.

Mikels idea of character development is shooting the female cast in various states of dress and undress; how they look naked is the only way I was able to distinguish one from the other. The sex is as gratuitous as the disco music and Mikels’ chest hair. If you make it to the end, you’ll note such odd credits as “Other Jail Prisoners: Many Other ‘Bad’ Girls,” not to mention “Special Acknowledgements” to “The Fox Hunter (Disco)” and “Filthy McNasty (Limo).” If only the movie were as amusing. —Rod Lott

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If you should see Hero and the Terror — and I’m certainly not suggesting you do — pay close attention to the scene in which Chuck Norris works out at the gym. As he’s lifting weights, all these other muscle-bound guys gather ’round to watch him push it real good. Chuck grunts as he does so. Now, close your eyes during this part and tell me it doesn’t sound like gay porn. You can’t, because it totally does.

Pointless experiment over. Anyway, Norris stars as half of the title, and you get one guess as to which half. He’s Danny O’Brien, a cop, who once upon a time, took down the other half of the title, the serial killer of women Simon Moon (Jack O’Halloran). Danny still has bad dreams of wandering into Moon’s dead hooker depository, which doesn’t exactly bode well for the good guy — now reduced to a minimum-wage worker on a Mexican food truck — when Moon escapes and starts killing them bitches all over again.

We’re to believe, of course, that Chuck Norris could defeat Jack O’Halloran, but c’mon! We’ve all seen Superman II. Besides, Moon busts out of prison simply by bending the bars, because, after all, he is General Zod’s sidekick Non, period.

There’s a subplot about Danny inseminating his girlfriend (Brynn Thayer of TV’s Matlock). I distinctly remember that when Chuck was making the promotional rounds for this so-so, by-the-numbers effort, he appeared on The Tonight Show with the clip of him passing out at the hospital on the impending birth of their bastard child. The audience cracked up, because, as Norman Mailer once wrote, tough guys don’t faint! Or something like that. —Rod Lott

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