Judd Bernard Movies

Cannon Productions' first foray into the martial arts milieu, Enter the Ninja stars Franco Nero. While visiting old pal Frank Landers (Alex Courtney) in the Philippines, master ninja Cole (Nero) is approached by villain Charles Venarius (Christopher George). Coveting Lander's plantation, Venarius tries to strong-arm Cole into turning against his friend. Our Hero refuses, whereupon Venarius brings in his own ninja Hasegawa (Sho Kosugi), the first step towards the battle-royal climax. The stunt choreography by Mike Stone is enough to make one completely forget the film's lapses in taste and logic. Enter the Ninja was followed in short order by Revenge of the Ninja. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Telly Savalas, James Mason and Robert Culp join together to discover a hidden cache of $6 million in Nazi gold in this action caper retitled both Hitler's Gold and The Golden Heist. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi

John Moulder-Brown plays a teen-aged London bathhouse attendant who forms a business alliance with female attendant Jane Asher. The object is to obtain better tips from their clients, but soon the impressionable Moulder-Brown falls in love with the older Asher. Brushed off by the girl in favor of a handsome swimming instructor, Moulder-Brown makes several halfhearted attempts at revenge. When the boy and girl finally do get together sexually, the event is motivated by lust and has tragic results. Deep End observes how adolescent obsession can mushroom into disaster if one doesn't have the emotional equipment to cope. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

An international collection of second-string actors grace the cast of this bargain-basement Sergio Leone knock off. Terence Stamp stars as Azul, the son of evil Mexican bandit Ortega (Ricardo Montalban). Although Azul is a mean, low-down, varmint like Ortega's three other sons, there is a slight glimmer of goodness in his soul since he is adopted. He proves it when he kills one of his brothers who was attempting to rape beautiful Texan maid Joanne (Joanna Pettet). Renouncing his adopted family and claiming a new moniker by the name of Blue, he helps Joanne and her father on their farm, and soon Blue and Joanne are in love. Remorseful at the loss of Blue, Ortega tracks him down to regain his love. Instead, Blue rejects him, and Ortega, humiliated and disgraced by his son's rejection, gathers together an army in order to return to wreak revenge upon the Texans. Now Blue must organize the Texans into a fighting force to face the bandit army of his father. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

A female film editor falls in love with a handsome man while shooting the film Blue in Mexico in this off-beat romance that was never released theatrically. On video, the film is titled Iron Cowboy. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, John Boorman's gangster film hauntingly merges a generic revenge story with a European art cinema sensibility. In Alcatraz to divvy up the spoils from a robbery, thief Walker (Lee Marvin) is instead shot point blank by his double-crossing friend Mal Reese (John Vernon) and left to die while Reese takes off with Walker's wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) and his $93,000. Resurrected, the stone-faced Walker returns to Los Angeles a couple of years later to seek revenge on Mal with the help of the enigmatic Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). Wanting little but his cash, Walker implacably penetrates Mal's lair and the hierarchy of the shady "Organization," registering no emotion about the string of murders left in his wake, as his thoughts repeatedly return to the past that brought him there. In his first American feature, Boorman transforms a stripped-down revenge plot into a surreal meditation on the gangster's spiritual demise, using flashbacks and startling shifts in setting to interweave Walker's fractured memories with his extraordinarily photographed odyssey through L.A. Marvin's chillingly stoic presence further hints at the ambiguities in Chris's observation that Walker "died at Alcatraz, all right." Brutal in the violence that it shows and suggests, Point Blank opened in the U.S. in the same period as Bonnie and Clyde, becoming one more testament to the genre-bending and ground-breaking possibilities of the nascent Hollywood New Wave. Although Point Blank was mostly overlooked in 1967, Boorman's visual adventurousness, and Marvin's amoral and apathetic antihero, have since made Point Blank seem one of the key films of the mid-late '60s, a precursor to revisionist experimentations from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino. It was remade as the 1999 Mel Gibson vehicle Payback. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi