In this episode we look at the 1989 Jean Claude Van Damme movie that thrust JCVD into the limelight of 90's action movie super stars while simultaneously hammering the final nail into the Golan Globus coffin. At one time a Hollywood powerhouse, Cannon Films flew too close to the sun and found themselves undone by their own machinery. Cyborg was the ultimate result of this failure, a movie thrown together from the unused costumes and sets from unproduced movies.

In the not-too distant future, mankind is reduced to medieval state by some unspecified disaster and if that's not bad enough, the survivors are being killed off by a pandemic plague. Luckily, the last scientists on earth developed a cure but need some pieces of the puzzle brought back from New York City. They turn one of their own into a cyborg and send her to get it but evil pirates kill off her escort and strand her there. Lucky for her, here comes Gibson Rickenbacher, a slinger who can fight back against the pirates and get her back to her lab.

It's a real dumb good time.

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This week we're returning to Italy for a look at one of the dumbest, most baffling action movies ever made, Raiders of Atlantis, aka Atlantis Interceptors, from the notorious Ruggero Deodato of Cannibal Holocaust fame.

In this film, a pair of mercenary buddies and a team of scientists from a botched attempt to raise a sunken Russian submarine find themselves stranded on a tropical island in the Atlantic as the feral, violent denizens of lost Atlantis arise from the silent depths of the ocean to reclaim the world. Or something to that effect. It's a desperate fight to survive against wave after wave of road warrior freaks, an race against time to translate an ancient tablet that will restore the ancient civilization, and an endless series of violent gun battles and if I'm being honest, I'm working overtime to make this movie make sense. It's 90 minutes of high-flying nonsense but somehow it ends up being a lot of fun.

Shot against the backdrop of Italy's exploitation film industry struggling to find an alternative to the declining horror and giallo markets, it capitalizes on the then-extremely popular trend of Mad Max ripoffs but also tries to tap in to the world's hunger for high-adventure by way of cheap Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoffs only to realize that Raiders of the Lost Ark is incredibly hard to copy on budgets laughably smaller than Raiders. At the same time, the Marcos regime in the Philippines is desperate to draw filmmakers to Manila and as Deodato finds out, it's hard to say no to a totalitarian dictatorship.

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This week our Black History Month series continues with a look at the 1974 blaxploitation martial arts mashup, Black Belt Jones, starring Jim Kelly and Gloria Hendry. Kelly was coming in hot off of his run in the legendary Bruce Lee movie, Enter The Dragon and with Bruce dead and a public appetite ravenous for more martial arts movies it just made sense to spin off one of its stars to their own martial arts movie. Hendry was coming in off her turn as a Bond girl in Live and Let Die and a string of excellent blaxploitation movies like Black Caesar and Hell Up In Harlem.

In this absolute cartoon of a martial arts movie, the mafia has bought into a valuable city project to build a new civic center in South Central Los Angeles but the only thing holding up the development is one holdout, a karate school that refuses to sell out. The mafia calls up a local loan shark to put the pressure on the school and when they accidentally kill the school's owner it's up to Black Belt Jones and the owner's daughter to team up, rip off the gangsters and get justice. Things get a little blurry between the beginning and the end but in spite of it flying by the seat of its pants and barely making any sense, the movie is a hell of a good time.

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