Way back in the stone age – before streaming, before DVDs,
before VHS, and before cable – if you didn’t see a movie at the theater when it
first came out, you had to hope it would show up on broadcast TV. And when it
did, aside from having to deal with commercial breaks, the chances were good
that the movie would be edited for television.
But that began to change in the seventies. That’s when the
earliest VCRs hit the market, and pay cable channels like Star Channel and HBO
began showing movies uncut. While my memory is fuzzy as to the exact dates, I
know my family got both cable and a VCR around 1978 or early 79. And in
addition to basic cable, we subscribed to Star Channel, which would eventually be
rebranded as The Movie Channel in December of 1979.
This interview originally appeared on the old Utter Trash website in
November of 2005. Obviously some things have changed since then, notably the recent passing of The Ghoul aka Ron Sweed on April 1st of 2019. Nonetheless I believe this interview is still of interest, and is presented as it originally ran with only a few minor editing tweeks.
Ron Sweed broke into show business as a teenager, working as an assistant to legendary Cleveland horror host Ghoulardi (aka Ernie Anderson) in the mid sixties. He continued to work behind the scenes for Anderson’s replacements, Hoolihan and Big Chuck, before donning the fright wig and lab coat that had been Anderson’s trademark in 1971. As The Ghoul, Sweed kept Ghoulardi’s legend alive not just in Cleveland, but in Detroit and (briefly) Chicago, as well. His last television stint was on Cleveland's Channel 55 WBNX from 1998 until 2004.
[Once
again I'm going to attempt to do a horror(ish) movie review a day for
the entire month of October. I've done this the last few years on The
Cleveland Movie Blog. Most of the time I succeeded (usually with the
help of a few other writers). Other times I didn't. We'll see if I can
pull it off this year.]
*Note: Well, apparently I didn't pull it off. Missed a couple of days because life. Might get caught up, but don't hold your breath*
FRIDAY THE 13TH
PART VI: JASON LIVES will always have a special place in my heart. Not
because it’s particularly good, but because it entered my life at just the
right time and in just the right context to make a lasting impression. The film
had its theatrical release in August of 1986 and would be the very first FRIDAY film I saw in a movie theater.
This was a pretty big deal to teenage me.
As the film opens, Jason Voorhees, the killer in most of the
FRIDAY THE 13TH films has
ostensibly been killed in the laughably titled fourth installment, FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL
CHAPTER. Jason’s killer was a young special effects artist named Tommy
Jarvis (originally played by then 12-year-old Corey Feldman). Tommy then
returned in FRIDAY THE 13TH
PART V: THE NEW BEGINNING. Now living at a group home for mentally unstable
teens, when a Jason impostor starts killing his house mates Tommy once again
takes out the big bad. But in a twist, he seems to become a crazed killer
himself at the film’s conclusion.
[Once
again I'm going to attempt to do a horror(ish) movie review a day for
the entire month of October. I've done this the last few years on The
Cleveland Movie Blog. Most of the time I succeeded (usually with the
help of a few other writers). Other times I didn't. We'll see if I can
pull it off this year.]
Despite being an avid consumer of straight to video B movie
dreck in the eighties, somehow I never saw SORORITY
BABES IN THE SLIMEBALL BOWL-O-RAMA. Sometimes even for a movie maniac such
as myself, a classic will slip through the cracks. For example, I didn’t see SCARFACE until the 2000s, if you can
believe that. Anyway, I noticed a few friends of mine had been watching this
one recently (it’s on Shudder as part of Joe Bob Briggs’ “The Last Drive-In”),
and that proved to be the push I needed to finally check it out.
The plot is that sorority pledges Taffy (Brinke Stevens) and
Lisa (Michelle Bauer) have to break into a bowling alley and steal the trophy
as part of their initiation. This after sorority sister Babs (Robin Rochelle)
has already given them a gratuitous spanking while the only other two sorority
sisters – Frankie (Carla Baron) and Rhonda (Kathi O'Brecht) watch. Also
watching are a trio of nerdy dudes – Calvin (Andras Jones), Keith (John Stewart
Wildman), and Jimmie (Hal Havins).
[This article was originally posted on Myspace back in 2007. It’s one of a few things I wrote back then that I still kind of like, and since it’s not there anymore, I figured I’d post it here in time for Halloween. I wish I could say people were less prone to believing in crazy conspiracy theories these days, but as anyone who follows the news can easily discern, that’s obviously not the case.]
A lot of ridiculous things went on in the eighties, but one of the most ridiculous was the “Satanic Panic” hysteria that gripped the nation for much of the decade.Without any evidence whatsoever, a surprisingly large number of people came to believe that there was an underground conspiracy of Satanists operating all throughout the world.To all appearances, these devil worshipers were ordinary average citizens.They had infiltrated all aspects of society.One of them might even be your next-door neighbor.
The primary activity of this vast and powerful network of evil was sexually abusing and murdering people, usually children.When they weren’t raping and murdering, they were making rock music. Depending on whom you asked, the degree to which the Devil had infiltrated the music industry ranged from just the usual suspects (i.e. Ozzy and Judas Priest) to every rock musician in existence, including Christian rockers like Stryper and Amy Grant.And if the rock music didn’t hook ‘em, the cultists could always lead kids down the path to darkness with role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.
I absolutely loved Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl
Whissell’s previous co-directorial effort TURBO
KID, a spot-on homage to low budget 80s sci-fi/action films. That film had
a sense of humor about itself, but never descended to the sort of “we’re so
above it all” mockery present in similar efforts like KUNG FURY.
With their latest film SUMMER
OF 84, the trio of filmmakers have decided to set their sights on a more
reputable strain of eighties cinema, the sort of mainstream adventure films
that Stephen Spielberg and his pals produced under the Amblin banner. Only SUMMER OF ’84 takes viewers to a darker
place than those comparisons might lead one to expect. It just takes a while to
get there.
This interview originally appeared on the old Utter Trash website in
August of 2004.
Photo courtesy of Marty Sullivan
Although the opening of the show claimed “mild mannered
Henry Bookerstein” was the secret identity of Superhost, in reality it was
WUAB channel 43’s newsman, Marty Sullivan, who donned the cape and tights.
For 20 years, “with powers far beyond those of ordinary men”, Superhost was
responsible for bringing Saturday afternoon to legions of fans spanning all
ages and backgrounds. It’s thanks to Superhost that I saw my first Godzilla
movie, and literally hundreds of horror, science fiction, and fantasy films
ranging from the classic to grade z schlock. In 1993, Marty moved to
Oregon, but he still has fond memories of the time he spent as Cleveland’s
own super hero.
In 1985, English pop band Duran Duran (Simon LeBon, Nick
Rhodes, and Taylors Andy, John, and Roger) were at the peak of their popularity.
Back then I wouldn’t have been caught dead
listening such a non-badass bunch, as it was about the same time my teenage
identity solidified into that of “metal head”. And you can be darn sure I
didn’t watch the hour-long concert film, ARENA
(AN ABSURD NOTION), that the boys released that year. I wasn’t even aware
the thing existed.
Times and tastes change, though, and these days I have more
appreciation for Duran Duran. So when I recently stumbled across ARENA, I figured what the heck, I’ll
take a look. It should be fun at the very least. Plus, I might score a few points with
my wife, a long-time fan of the group.
I couldn’t possibly have imagined what was in store.
Remember the song “Smokin’ in the Boys Room”, originally performed by Brownsville Station in 1973, and later covered by Motley Crue in 1985? No? You say you’re not some shriveled up old geezer? Way to hurt a guy. Anyway, I assure you whippersnappers the song was popular, and very much based on reality. But I had a somewhat different reality when I attended Cuyahoga Falls High School in the eighties.
For years, Falls High had tried to keep their student body from smoking on campus as you might expect. During lunch breaks, young nicotine addicts could go off school grounds and enjoy their cancer sticks without fear of being hassled (yes, we were allowed to leave school grounds for lunch, something that would never happen today). But if you got a craving during class time, you had to sneak into the bathroom or some other inconspicuous place to get your fix. And of course if you did that, you ran the risk of getting busted.
By 1979, the administration at Falls High had evidently given up, deciding it would just be easier to keep the smoking contained in one small, unsheltered area of the parking lot rather than play whack-a-mole with determined youthful tobacco addicts. And so it was that The Pit was born.
I just caught an advance screening of Hot Tub Time Machine the other night (you can read my review on the Cleveland Scene film blog). The important thing to know with regards to this blog is that in the film, the main characters travel back in time to 1986, a pivotal year in their lives. The movie does a pretty good job in showing what was going on in mainstream culture that year: glam metal, bad hair, Miami Vice, Alf, the Iran-Contra scandal, and so on. I certainly remember all those things, but the movie also got me thinking about other interesting things that happened that year which, in the interest of moving the story along, couldn’t possibly have been included. So I thought I’d share a few of my own memories of 1986 here on this blog.
Thrashing Like a Maniac
When I first started listening to bands like Metallica and Slayer in 1985, even most of the metalheads at my high school called thrash metal noise. Then Metallica released Master of Puppets in March of 1986, and soon after landed the opening slot on Ozzy Osbourne’s Ultimate Sin tour. Now that they had Ozzy’s blessing, Metallica were cool. Sadly, Metallica bass player Cliff Burton didn’t get to enjoy his band’s success for long. He died while the band was on tour in a bus accident on September 27, 1986.
Seeing Metallica’s success, major labels started looking for other thrash bands to sign. By years end, two of the genre’s most definitive albums had been released: Megadeth’s Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying? and Slayer’s Reign in Blood. Reign is considered by many to be the greatest thrash metal album of all time, and it’s hard to argue. Metallica and Slayer both refused to make videos, but it wasn’t beneath Megadeth, who made a memorable clip for the song “Peace Sells”. The break in the middle where the dad tells his headbanging son he wants to watch the news is one of the great cheesy moments in metal history.
Harmful Matter
1986 was also the year I started listening to punk rock and hardcore, and the first punk rock album I listened to was the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist. In what passed for file sharing at the time, I made a cassette copy of Master of Puppets for my friend Lee, and he copied his Kennedys album for me. I hated it at first, mainly because of the unusual vocal style of lead singer Jello Biafra. Eventually I came around, though, and the Kennedys became one of my favorite bands just in time for them to break up. It seems the poster included with the Frankenchrist album, an H. R. Geiger painting called Penis Landscape, was deemed offensive by an overzealous prosecutor who charged Biafra and the band with “distributing harmful matter to minors”. The band won their case, but by the time the trial was over, so were they.
Going Postal
Patrick Sherrill walked into the post office where he worked in Edmond, Oklahoma on August 20, 1986 and killed 14 of his fellow employees before turning the gun on himself. It wasn’t the first time a postal employee had gone gun-crazy, but for some reason this time it had a wider cultural resonance. Thus was born the phrase, “going postal”.
Geraldo’s Got Nothing
On April 21, 1986, millions tuned in to watch Geraldo Rivera’s syndicated special The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault. I was one of them. We were promised bodies or at the very least a nice collection of stolen goods. After a 2 hour build-up, what we got was dirt and some empty bottles.
Enter the Fox
Until 1986, there were only 3 networks, and about the only original programming on cable TV was Georgia Championship Wrestling (a fine program, by the way). That changed on October 9, 1986 when the Fox network hit the airwaves with The Late Show starring Joan Rivers. Fox didn’t start broadcasting in prime time until April of 1987, but this is where it all started. Here’s Joan interviewing Pee Wee Herman from her very first episode.
Scream Real Loud
Since Pee Wee Herman was in that last clip, it seems like a good excuse to talk about the best show on TV in 1986. On September 13, Pee Wee’s Playhouse premiered on the CBS Saturday morning lineup, and was hands down the strangest, smartest, funniest show on TV at the time. Newhart was the only thing in prime time that was even close to being as good as the Playhouse. Other than that, television comedy was awful sitcoms like Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Perfect Strangers, ALF, Who’s the Boss?, and of course The Cosby Show. Don’t get me wrong, I watched all those shows and liked them just fine at the time. What did I know, I was 16. But I can put on an episode of Pee Wee today and I’ll still laugh. Those others… not so much. Hell, just watching these opening credits still makes me smile.
At the Movies
I hear this all the time: movies aren’t as good as they used to be. That may be true if we go back to the seventies or earlier, but don’t try to make your case with 1986. Among the top 50 grossing films that year, we’ve got some very good ones like Platoon, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Blue Velvet, Little Shop of Horrors, The Fly, Aliens, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Stand By Me. But most of the list is crap like Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Police Academy 3: Back in Training, Poltergeist II, Top Gun, The Golden Child, The Karate Kid Part 2, Cobra, Three Amigos, The Money Pit, Soul Man, Delta Force and Iron Eagle. And before you say, “but Top Gun was awesome,” or “what about Crocodile Dundee,” I suggest you watch them again first. Speaking from experience, stuff you thought was great when you were 16 often doesn’t hold up so well. And yes, I do enjoy some of the worst films 1986 had to offer, but I still recognize they’re bad. Like this one, Stallone’s amazingly dumb Cobra. Enjoy the trailer and the very eighties-sounding Jean Beauvoir song “Feel the Heat” that accompanies it.
2800 Baud of Blazing Speed
I got a Commodore 64 computer in 1984. The 64 in the name was for the (at the time) impressive 64 kilobytes of RAM in the computer’s processor. It cost $595 when introduced, and that was just for the computer itself. You had to buy a floppy disc drive (that took 5 ¼” discs) and modem separately. You could also buy a monitor if you wanted to, but why bother when you could hook it up directly to your TV? By 1986, Commodore had introduced the even more impressive Amiga, but I never did get one of those. Still, I was pretty far ahead of the technological curve for 1986. I knew how to write programs in BASIC, I had tons of pirated video games, and I had an optional modem, allowing me to go online. The modem’s speed was 2800 baud. I don’t know what that means in today’s kbps terms, I just know it would be really, really slow compared even to a standard dial-up connection.
Getting online in 1986 was a very different experience than the modern internet, though. There were a few large networks like Compuserve that you could get on if you paid a subscription fee, but I didn’t mess with those. Instead, I would dial up local “Bulletin Board Systems” (BBS for short). These were free services run from the homes of other computer geeks like myself. Generally only one person could be logged in at a time, although if you were lucky you might get to chat live with the computer geek running the thing (know as the “Sysop”, short for system operator). The only graphics were ASCII art, and the main activity was engaging in flame wars on various primitive message boards. Just about everybody on these boards used a nickname, which added to the silliness of it all. I was “Metal Warlord”. You may feel free to laugh. Then check out this classic Commodore 64 commercial and marvel at how much we once paid for so little computing power.
Well, that’s enough meandering down memory lane for now. Hope you enjoyed it, and feel free to comment with your own memories of 1986 if you’re old enough to have been there.
In the eighties, few things were more awesome than ninjas. In the past, the only people who owned martial arts weaponry were, you know, people who actually practiced martial arts. In the eighties, however, every redneck who had seen one too many Chuck Norris movies had his own pair of nunchakus. And I’m not gonna’ lie, I would have loved to own a couple of throwing stars or a ninja sword. But I was a kid at the time. I had to make due with toys, like the eighties version of G.I. Joe. And who was the coolest Joe? Snake Eyes, a ninja. A ninja who used an uzi, but a ninja nonetheless.
Why were ninjas so big in the eighties? The credit belongs largely to one man: Sho Kosugi. Sho actually knew ninjitsu, the martial art practiced by ninjas. Beginning with Enter the Ninja (1981), he starred in a series of popular ninja films that did big business for much of the decade. Although Enter the Ninja is not devoid of charm, it’s basically a standard-issue eighties action movie. It’s competently made, has a dumb but passable storyline, and boasts some decent action sequences. Still, this is the movie that made it cool to run around in your pajamas while carrying a sword.
Enter was a hit, and Sho followed it up with Revenge of the Ninja in 1983. In 1984, the ninja formula was expanded to include elements of horror and Flashdance (which is kind of redundant, I guess) in Ninja III: The Domination. Each film was progressively cheaper and sillier, culminating in one of the best bad films ever made: 9 Deaths of the Ninja (1985). From the opening credits sequence, where three girls in skimpy outfits aerobiscise to a terrible eighties pop song while Kosugi swings his sword around, it’s clear that this is something special. Kosugi is his usual bad-ass ninja self, but Blackie Dammett (father of Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Keidis) steals the movie as the wheelchair-bound German drug dealer “Alby the Cruel”. Alby’s gang consists of a band of lesbian mercenaries and Arab terrorist Rahji (Sonny Erang), who proves how evil he is by popping some kids’ balloons.
Sho kept appearing in films through the end of the eighties, notably Pray For Death (1985), Rage of Honor (1987), and the Rutger Hauer vehicle Blind Justice (1989), but by the nineties his star had faded. For whatever reason, ninjas just weren’t cool anymore, at least in Hollywood. Sho made a couple more movies in Japan, but for the most part he faded into the darkness as only a ninja can. Flash forward to November 2009, and we find the Wachowski Brothers and director John McTeague aiming to make ninjas cool again with their new film Ninja Assassin. I still had my doubts, but then I took a look at the cast. Sho Kosugi has returned.
The amazing opening credits sequence from 9 Deaths of the Ninja:
Once again I return to the stack of VHS tapes I purchased for a dollar a piece. Since Halloween is coming up soon, I figured I'd focus on some of the horror titles this time around.
City of the Walking Dead
I had always heard how awful this particular hunk of parmesan cheese was, so until now I had avoided watching it. Now however, having suffered through far too many shot on video homemade horrors in the last few years than I care to remember, I figured I was up for anything this movie had to throw at me. The fact that Umberto Lenzi (one of the biggest hacks of seventies and eighties Italian exploitation cinema) was the director didn't exactly bode well, but I popped the tape in.
The movie starts with a television news reporter rushing off to an airport for an interview with some political mucky muck or something. Instead, he winds up reporting on a strange aircraft that makes an unscheduled landing. Airport security waits with guns at the ready as the door to the plane opens. All hell breaks loose when the occupants rush out, their faces disfigured, and start attacking the forces of law and order.
I'm not really sure if the attackers are supposed to be zombies or mutants or what. You still have to shoot 'em in the brain to kill them, and they infect their victims who subsequently rise from the dead to become zombies/mutants themselves. They chomp down on human flesh, but they also run and use guns. It's strongly suggested that these are victims of some sort of radiation, and they seem to have more intelligence than your average walking corpse. You make the call. Not like it really matters.
The rest of the movie focuses on the reporter trying to rescure his girlfriend, and a few other unrelated supporting characters. The script is uninspired, and Director Lenzi just goes through the motions. The acting can best be described as competent. Every aspect of this film is carried out with the barest minimum of professionalism needed for a theatrical exploitation film of the early eighties, with no one involved expending even an ounce of passion.
Even as an exploitation movie, 'City of the Walking Dead' offers up nothing more than the bare minimum requirements. The zombie/mutant make-up is shoddy, as are most of the gore effects. There's not one single zombie attack scene that comes close to being scary or even interesting. The only thing about the movie that's even slightly disturbing is the ending, where it turns out to have all been a dream. And then, it looks like it's all going to start for real. While this produced some genuine chills when used in 'Invaders From Mars', here it merely scares the viewer into thinking he or she might have become stuck in some awful loop in time, forced to rewatch this mediocrity over and over again. Thankfully the tape stopped when I pushed the button on the remote.
The Dorm That Dripped Blood
Released in 1981 to cash in on the slasher movie craze ushered in by 'Halloween' and 'Friday the 13th', 'The Dorm That Dripped Blood' is easily one of the more forgettable entries in the cycle. While in some ways this is more of a murder mystery, with lots of red herrings and an emphasis on "whodunnit", the attempt at a more complex plot than "insane guy kills teenagers with an axe" isn't interesting enough to really add to one's enjoyment of the movie. If anything, it just slows things down.
The plot involves two couples who are helping close down a college dormitory. There's some creepy guy with a frizzy white guy afro lurking about, too, which gets everyone worked up. After several thrilling scenes like the one where everyone tells how they'd like their eggs cooked, eventually the killing starts. A couple other supporting characters are brought in to up the body count.
Now there's nothing inherently wrong with the basic premise here, but it's handled in such a dreadfully dull manner that I really felt like turning the movie off. It didn't help that the print used for this VHS transfer was dark and excessively grainy, but even a pristine restored version would still be saddled with the same bland dialogue and performances. There's little if any suspense, and even the murder scenes fail to relieve the tedium.
That's it for now, but I'll be back soon with more reviews from my stack of one dollar wonders.
Who says a dollar can’t buy you anything these days? Not me. One of the big video stores in town recently began selling off their remaining stock of VHS movies for a buck a pop, and despite the fact that I’ve been trying to get rid of my own stockpile of tapes for the past couple of years, I couldn’t resist. I wound up going home with a pretty good stack of low eighties trash that for one reason or another I never got around to watching in the past. These are mostly movies that haven’t been put out on DVD, and even if they were I probably wouldn’t buy them. Hell, I probably wouldn’t even spend 3 bucks to rent ‘em. But for a dollar… hey, what do I have to lose besides a few hours of my life?
I’ll be working my way through the stack over the coming weeks and months, but for now I’ll start with a couple of Sho Kosugi ninja movies. For whatever reason, I never saw any of these movies back in their day. As a trash film aficionado, this was a glaring oversight on my part. So when I saw ‘Enter the Ninja’ and ‘9 Deaths of the Ninja’ among the bargains, I picked ‘em up.
‘Enter the Ninja’ (1981) was the first in a loosely tied together trilogy of ninja films featuring Kosugi. Although Kosugi’s ninjitsu skills are ostensibly the selling point here, Italian exploitation legend Franco Nero is the real star of the movie. Nero plays Cole, a former soldier of fortune who has gone into ninja training. The movie begins with Cole’s final exam, and he passes with flying colors. Traditionalist ninja Hasegawa (Kosugi), however, refuses to join his fellow ninjas in a celebratory drink with Cole, exclaiming, “He is not a ninja!”
Cole then heads off to the Phillipines, where Frank (Alex Courtney), an old war buddy of his, is running a plantation of some sort with his wife Mary Ann (Susan George). Cole is given the traditional Phillipino welcome of cockfighting, and then finds out that his friend is having trouble with a local gangster named Venarius (Christopher George). Cole takes on dozens of Venarius’ goons, so eventually the bad guy decides to fight fire with fire. Shocker of shockers, he hires Kasegawa to pit his ninja skills against Coles, ultimately leading to a climactic showdown.
Although ‘Enter the Ninja’ is not devoid of charm, it’s basically a standard-issue eighties action movie. It’s competently made, has a dumb but passable storyline, and boasts some decent action sequences. Nero makes a good action hero, and the supporting cast is solid. This is nothing you absolutely have to see, but if you like martial arts movies it’s a decent enough time killer.
Sadly, I could not acquire copies of ‘Revenge of the Ninja’ or ‘Ninja III: The Domination’. However, I think I came up with the crown jewel in the Kosugi catalog with ‘9 Deaths of the Ninja’ (1985). You really need to be a hardened bad movie fan before you even think about watching this one. The only eighties film I’ve seen that’s on a par with this is ‘The Howling II’.
‘9 Deaths of the Ninja’ starts out pretty so-so, with a pre-credits training sequence for the DART team, a counter terrorist group consisting of Spike Shinobi (Kosugi), Steve Gordon (Brent Huff), and Jeniffer Barnes (Emilia Lesniak). Then we have the jaw dropping credits sequence, where three girls in skimpy outfits aerobiscise to a terrible eighties pop song while Kosugi swings his sword around.
After that, the DART team are brought in by Rankin (tennis star Vijay Armitraj) to rescue a busload of hostages from a group of drug dealers led by the wheelchair bound German “Alby the Cruel” (Blackie Dammett) and his legion of lesbian mercenaries. The drug dealers want Arab terrorist Rahji (Sonny Erang) set free from prison, or they’ll start killing hostages.
While investigating the situation, our team is attacked in a museum by a midget hit squad. During the altercation, a regular size bad guy jumps maybe 10 feet and lands on his feet, but dies from the impact. Later at a restaurant, Kosugi shows his ninja mastery of disguise by donning a dime store beard and a cane to pass as an old man. Intercut with all this are scenes of Alby chewing the scenery and ranting in the worst German accent ever. It’s all too much for the government to take, and the maniacally cackling Rahji is set free. To prove how evil he is, Rahji pops some kids’ balloons.
I could go on for some time listing the sublime pleasures of this film, but I’d rather let you discover them for yourselves. Suffice it to say it all ends in a final confrontation in which a group of ninjas pop in from another movie to do battle with Kosugi. Everything about this movie is awful, but awful in just the right way to add up to pure entertainment.
