When Franco Nero declined to return for an Enter the Ninja sequel, Sho Kosugi raised his hand and rode that shuriken-throwing train as far as it would take him: more or less to 1989, as the Bruce Lee of the two-night-rental era. However, Kosugi did more than just play ninjas in the Cannon Group’s Ninja trilogy; he also played ninjas outside of it, including Pray for Death, a stand-alone from unlikely helmer Gordon Hessler of KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.

In Japan, Akira Saito (Kosugi) is a loving family man and hardworking salaryman, but his wife (Donna Kei Benz, Looker) longs to move to Los Angeles. So they do, with the intent to open a restaurant, but without the intent to be in an area so seedy, it could be a Chia Pet. Unbeknownst to the Saitos, an abandoned annex of their rundown place is where some crooks have hidden a valuable necklace. When those jewels disappear, the local mob boss known as — brace yourself for a name that screams “rejected Dick Tracy villain” — Limehouse Willy (Airport ’77’s James Booth, who also wrote the screenplay) wrongly assumes Akira and his family have something to do with it and will kill to get the necklace back.

Seeing as how Pray for Death is a revenge picture, take a good guess where things go from there. This is the kind of movie in which a low-speed fender bender causes a vehicle to explode as soon as bumpers touch. In which Akira always knows where to find his enemies. In which a woman is knocked unconscious before being fatally stabbed, with a quick round of sexual assault in between. In which the ultimate showdown takes place in a warehouse full of mannequins.

It’s in that last 20 minutes when Pray for Death comes, um, alive, as Kosugi drops the pacifism, applies the black eyeliner, puts on enough armor to resemble a Mortal Kombat character and ninjas up the place. Before that, thanks to the genial but cardboard acting of Kosugi, the movie is desperate for action. It could use a lot more of Akira leaping and flipping over a moving pickup truck, which Hessler shows in slow motion — as it should be, being the pic’s coup de grâce as far as visuals goes. Heck, I’d settle for just a little more of Akira’s kid’s tricked-out bicycle with jets of red smoke, a dashboard slingshot, hidden blow darts and more, all to make buffoons of mob goons and help Ninja Dad extract vengeance, sweet vengeance. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Considered a seminal martial arts film more for concept than execution, The Flying Guillotine is about your basic greedy Asian dictator who delights in his staff’s development of a new weapon for his armies. This unusual device looks like a basket affixed to a chain, but when thrown onto the head of your enemy and yanked back, blades within the basket pop out to chop off the unfortunate wearer’s head! Every movie could use one.

This is first demonstrated on a dog, much to the evil guy’s delight. It’s sick, yeah, but it should be even sicker. The movie often cuts away so you rarely see any decapitations. I wanted to see twitching headless bodies running loco for several seconds, like Anne Ramsey in Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend, right after she gets beaned with a basketball.

But I’ll give the Shaw Brothers and director Meng Hua Ho (The Oily Maniac) points for even pursuing something this demented in the first place, even if they weigh down the second half with needless chitchat. For an infinitely more entertaining flick, Jimmy Wang Yu’s Master of the Flying Guillotine from 1976 is, um, heads above. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Part sports documentary, part biopic and part clip job, Fist of Fear, Touch of Death is all steaming pile. It’s also all comedy — and not that intentional kind, either. Matthew Mallinson’s film is so inept and pathetic on every level that it deserves to be known as the Plan 9 of not just Bruceploitation pics, but martial arts movies in general.

As it begins, ’70s trailer narrator king Adolph Caesar (Oscar-nommed for A Soldier’s Story, but certainly not for this) discusses the big impending karate championship at Madison Square Garden, where someone will walk away with the honor of the title of Bruce Lee’s successor. But will they also walk away with Lee’s curse — aka the Touch of Death? That’s the conflict set up by the — how you say? — “script,” and then completely discarded 80 minutes later.

Credited as “Hammer, the Ladies Man,” Fred Williamson (Vigilante) wakes up next to some skanky white ho in a hotel room. He’s gotta get to the Garden for the match, but his mattress partner wants to “make it a six-pack,” not fully satisfied with being Hammered the mere five times prior. In a running gag, the Hammer is continually mistaken for singer Harry Belafonte. This, my friends, is what the dictionary means by “funny.”

After giving Williamson a lift to the Garden and then interviewing him, Caesar brags about having discovered Lee, and then gives us the whole story about Lee’s pre-stardom years, courtesy of poorly dubbed black-and-white sequences. In these, Bruce often dreams of his great-grandfather’s prowess as a samurai warrior, which we see flashbacks of, courtesy of color clips from 1971’s kick-ass Invincible Super Chan with a fighting midget and a guy who uses an abacus as a weapon.

Caesar briefly mentions Lee’s breakthrough role as Kato on TV’s The Green Hornet, and in present day, we see karate champ Bill Louie decked out as Kato, beating up would-be rapists in the park, killing one with hurled ninja stars. The whole ugly scene starts when some horny redneck, spotting a comely jogger, exclaims, “Shit! Fuckin’ cantaloupe tits!”

As for the much-discussed karate match, we see precious little of it, but that’s okay. At least we get to see a bit of one bout, ending with one guy’s eyes being ripped out of their sockets, complete with cartoon sound effects! So what the hell are you waiting for? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

According to this Lee-alike flick, before he died, Bruce Lee wrote a book about how to kill people using only your fingers. Like the ghouls they are, the criminal underworld wants a copy of it so bad that they go as far as to kidnap Lee’s ex-girlfriend.

It’s up to a young martial artist — luckily named Bruce Le — to not only find the book, but rescue the girlfriend as well. He does this using not only public domain (?) clips of Lee, but masterfully by going from San Francisco for five minutes and then switching to another movie in Hong Kong after the credits and then to another one in, I think, Taiwan. With plenty of fights in open fields and courtyards, the book … is never really discovered.

I guess no one noticed that black-and white composition book peeking out from under the couch over there?

While Bruce’s Deadly Fingers really is, for the most part, your standard Bruce Lee death-curse rip-off flick, the one area of true maliciousness where the scummy nature of the film shines is when the assorted mob types torture the various girls who don’t wish to hook their bodies, including one mildly graphic scene with a deadly snake. It’s a scene where I could’ve used Bruce’s deadly fingers to poke my own eyes out. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Cüneyt Arkın, one of the proud futuristic freedom fighters from Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam — also known in the States, rather dumbed-down if you ask me, as Turkish Star Wars — is back on the small screen in a rather good-looking print of 1975’s Kiliç Aslan or, for the sake of argument here, The Sword and the Claw.

In this bargain-basement flick, a king with a birthmark of a lion on his back is killed by his sleazy mustachioed rival. When his concubine, pregnant and on the run, has his baby in the woods, said child is kidnapped and raised by lions, mostly done through a quick vignette of a small child feeding an equally immature lion some raw meat, which couldn’t have been safe, but the kid and the lion look like they’re having fun.

As the child grows up into strapping vine-swinging man Arkin, he immediately runs afoul of the same corrupt leader and, for his troubles, has his hands burnt black, Cajun-style. Thankfully, an old man forges a pair of new unwieldy metal hands — lion’s claws, if you will — and, in the last 10 minutes of film, rips out the throats of the supreme leader’s army and, of course, the big boss. Roll credits.

That seems simple enough, right?

A prime example of the popular Turkish costume dramas of the time, The Sword and the Claw has choppy editing, uneven music and the worst dubbing in history, but damned if it isn’t an entertaining flick, with Arkin jumping off the screen, somersaulting into every fight scene, with particular abandon being given to the bloody finale and his angry lion-face.

If memory serves me, I vaguely remember the VHS box for this movie when it was called Lionman, always overlooked and gathering dust. Still, the American Genre Film Archive’s Blu-ray — from the only 35mm print in existence, natch — is the nicest I’ve even seen of a Turkish film of this ilk, a genre usually reserved for 10th-generation burns.

As a bonus feature, the AGFA disc includes the kung-fu foible Brawl Busters starring Black Jack Chan, produced by the “Official Chinese Black Belt Society.” Yep, that sounds totally legit. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.