Teresa M. Rojas Movies

Gustavo (Rene Lavan) is an engineering student born and raised in Cuba who strongly believes in his nation's socialist ideals at a time when those ideals are crumbling around him. His girlfriend, Yolanda (Mayte Vilan), dreams of emigrating to Miami and making a life for herself as a professional dancer. His father, Tomas (Miguel Gutierrez), is a respected psychiatrist who he can barely support himself working at a state-run institution; he moonlights as a jazz pianist, where he makes four times his medical salary playing for tips to tourists at a nightclub. And his brother Bobby (Larry Villanueva) is a rock musician whose long hair and defiant posture have made him an enemy of the state and an outspoken opponent of Castro's regime; when yet another of his performances is shut down and his equipment is confiscated by police, Bobby, in an extreme act of protest, publicly injects himself with HIV-tainted blood, making clear that when presented with the slogan of "socialism or death," he would prefer the latter. Azucar Amarga was a highly personal project for director Leon Ichaso, a emigre from Havana who has offered one of the few portraits of Cuban unrest in the 1990s from a Cuban point-of-view. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

This red-baiting action film stars Chuck Norris as Matt Hunter, a retired CIA agent who lives in the Florida Everglades. A communist invasion of Miami brings Hunter out of retirement to fight the encroaching hordes led by everyone's favorite low-budget bad guy, Richard Lynch. The film is extremely jingoistic, presenting the evil communists staging an invasion on Christmas, demolishing a church, and attempting to blow up a school bus full of children. From the same school of thinking which produced Rambo and Red Dawn, this film at least features some convincing gore by makeup wizard Tom Savini (Friday the 13th), working on his third gig for director Joseph Zito. Zito and Savini returned with Red Scorpion. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi