Alan Amiel Movies

A young couple gets a great deal on a foreclosed home, but winds up fighting for their lives after a gang of heavily armed drug dealers turn up determined to recover a fortune in heroin they had left hidden in the walls. Dave Nash wanted to give his wife Emma the perfect birthday gift. When he found a gorgeous home in a gated neighborhood, he knew it was the one. But shortly after moving in, Dave and Emma make a shocking discovery. The walls of the home are lined with heroin, and the men who hid it there have come to get it back. Outnumbered and outgunned yet determined to stand his ground, David decides that if he can't escape, he'll just have to fight back with everything he's got. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

A former MMA star (Michael Jai White) trains four young fighters to compete in The Beatdown, a brutal tournament from which only the strongest will emerge victorious. Todd Duffee, Scottie Epstein, and Lyoto Machida co-star. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Exploitation king Fred Olen Ray was well entrenched in his "Erotic Thriller" phase (typified by films like Inner Sanctum) when he turned out this oddball mix of salacious schemes and demonic possession. When creatively blocked horror writer Howard (Ted Prior) buys an oversized jar containing a silly-looking pickled monster from a tiny shop in Chinatown, he quickly falls under the thing's supernatural influence. Not only can he churn out reams of manuscript pages like never before, he also becomes more sexually aggressive -- a change which troubles his reserved wife Peggy (statuesque Sandahl Bergman), particularly after the arrival of sexy blonde live-in secretary Carol (Shannon Tweed, whose presence had become ubiquitous in films of this kind). The plot thickens when we learn that Carol is also conspiring with her partner Murray (Frank Sivero), Howard's greedy agent, to steal his manuscript. Carol soon becomes the puppet of the thing in the jar as well, playing violent sexual games with the couple, terrorizing Peggy at every turn, and ultimately turning on Murray -- leading to a hyper-violent climax which has nearly every character blasting away at his/her co-conspirator with automatic weaponry. Despite the heftier financial backing of Columbia Home Video, this is still exploitation in the classic Ray tradition, filled with the usual bucketloads of nudity and kinky sex, and featuring cameos from such familiar B-movie faces as Ray Silva and Turhan Bey, as well as Kato Kaelin as a busboy in the restaurant scene with Bey. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

Policeman-turned-trucker Travis Blackstone (Lorenzo Lamas) is forced to use almost all of his exceptional martial arts skills after his screw-up brother Franklin (Hank Cheyne) begs him to return a fortune in embezzled money from the ruthless Mr. Chang's (Joe Son) money-laundering bank. The hard-driving, ham-fisted action begins when Travis learns that while Franklin claims he only swiped a few hundred thousand bucks, in reality his brother siphoned off five million and invested it in a bogus real estate operation. The decoy money is stashed in a trash can, but before Travis can get it, his own girlfriend sells out to Chang who immediately sets off for bloody revenge. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Three stalwarts of made-for-TV productions -- Harry Hamlin, Michael Ironside, and Steve Railsback -- team up for this erotic thriller. Hamlin plays a mild-mannered accountant who takes up with an intriguing stranger (Lysette Anthony), who happens to harbor multiple personalities: seductress, prude, and saint. ~ Michael Hastings, Rovi

An invalid suspects that her husband and her sultry new nurse are plotting to do away with her. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi

A surprisingly slick flick from Emperor of Exploitation Fred Olen Ray, the story (which Ray co-wrote with T.L. Lankford, borrowing heavily from the director's earlier Biohazard) begins when a satellite carrying top-secret bio-engineered mutants plummets to Earth and disgorges its slavering contents in a scrap-yard outside Los Angeles. Hot on the beast's slimy trail are a pair of L.A. cops (Russ Meyer-veteran Charles Napier and the miscast Ann Turkel), who butt heads with their chief (Bo Svenson), the military, and the scientists who bred the monster -- until the inevitable confrontation, which features a no-holds-barred grudge match between the toothy slime-demon and a chainsaw-wielding Napier. Campy, fun performances by the talented leads (especially Julie Newmar as a psychic who assists the investigation) elevate this material far beyond the limitations of its hoary premise and Alien-esque monster. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

In this provocative and scary supernatural thriller, a brides happy honeymoon aboard an Acapulco-bound yacht with her husband, two of his buddies from Vietnam and their girl friends, turns to terror when someone or something begins to kill them one by one. In the end, only she lives to tell the grisly tale via flashback. It seems that the killings have something to do with the terrible things the veterans did to the innocent back during the war. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this martial-arts actioner, a gentle Japanese immigrant endeavors to quietly run a business in America. Unfortunately, gangsters refuse to leave them alone. Finally the quiet storekeeper has enough and reveals that he is in reality, a highly skilled Ninja master. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Sam Firstenberg directs Sho Kosugi in the martial arts action film Revenge of the Ninja. Kosugi plays a former ninja assassin whose family is killed by other ninjas. He begins life anew in America, but unexpectedly comes to work for drug traffickers who he must face off against. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi