Menahem Golan Movies

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, All Movie Guide

In 1938 Berlin, Gudrun Landgrebe, wife of Nazi functionary Kevin McNally, begins taking art lessons. She makes the acquaintance of another student, Japanese ambassador's daughter Mio Takaki. Soon afterwards, the two women begin a passionate lesbian affair. This leads to a chain reaction of disaster and tragedy, culminating with the inevitable intervention of the Gestapo. Despite the film's galloping sexual passions, The Berlin Affair is an exercise in aloofness, keeping the characters at arm's length-surprising, considering that the director was Liliana Cavani, auteur of the erotic classic The Night Porter (1974). The film was based on The Buddhist Cross, a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The action in this routine adventure film would be modeled on the enormously successful Indiana Jones but it is too much, too fast, too deja vu. It all starts when Jessie Huston (Sharon Stone, before stardom) talks adventurer Allen Quatermain (Richard Chamberlain) into helping her find her father, an archaeologist. He has been kidnapped in Africa by a Turk (John Rhys-Davies) and a German colonel (Herbert Lom) who are determined to extract the secret location of King Solomon's mines from the stubborn man. As Jessie and Quatermain head off into the unknown, there are crocodiles, lions, and other human beasts to conquer before the father or the mines hove into view. A sequel was soon to follow. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

While the first Missing in Action film told of a rescue mission by ex-POW Colonel James Braddock (Chuck Norris), the second concerns his original stay in a Vietnamese prisoner camp. The camp is governed by the crazed Colonel Yin (Soon-Teck Oh), who forces the POW's to grow opium for French drug runners and tries to get them to admit to and sign a long list of war crimes. Braddock must escape the camp and liberate his fellow prisoners to have any hope of surviving. The third installment in the series, Braddock: Missing in Action 3, was released three years later. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide

Robert Mitchum plays as U.S. ambassador to Israel whose efforts at reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians run afoul of the somewhat questionable ambitions of security advisor Rock Hudson. Meanwhile, Mitchum's wife Ellen Burstyn embarks upon an affair with a PLO leader. When this fact comes to Mitchum's attention, he refuses to pay the prescribed "hush money", sparking a deadly chain reaction. You may need a microscope to discern this, but The Ambassador was adapted from Elmore Leonard's crime novel 52 Pick Up. Though a more faithful-to-the-source cinemazation of the Leonard book was lensed in 1986, The Ambassador remains the better of the two versions. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

When first released as Grace Quigley, this odd little black comedy proved too fey and quirky even for the most devoted fans of Katharine Hepburn. The star plays the title character, an old, worn-out woman with nothing to live for. Accordingly, she hires professional assassin Seymour Flint (Nick Nolte) to kill her, albeit gently. As she ponders the prospect of a peaceful death as opposed to a miserable life, Grace convinces Seymour to murder not only herself, but all other poor souls who have grown tired of life. As it turns out, there are several people who'd be willing to pay for this "courtesy," and soon Grace and Seymour, together with his ditsy girlfriend Muriel (Kit Le Fever), are conducting a land-office business! Entered into competition at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, Grace Quigley made no impression whatsoever. Screenwriter A. Martin Zweibeck withdrew the film, recut it to his satisfaction, and reissued it as The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley. Though this version was a marked improvement over the original, the film was still not quite the Harold and Maude-like "cult favorite" that everyone hoped it would be. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The time-worn clash between the rich and poor, brought out by switched identities, is the ploy used here to put a streetwise kid into an upper-crust prep school. Palmer (Dana Olsen) does not want to stay at school for his final year, but he needs to graduate in order to receive his mega-buck trust fund. Eddie (Judd Nelson) is a New Jersey native, used to the streets and handling trouble when it comes -- except Eddie's bookie is after him for a bad debt, and when Eddie jumps the prep school's fence to escape his creditor, he almost knocks down Palmer. From that serendipitous meeting, the two decide to swap identities -- or partly so. Eddie will become Palmer and get good grades in the last year of school, for the sum of $10,000 at graduation. And Palmer will go off on his own planned vacation. Eddie soon learns the ways of the rich and famous, but he is quickly back to crap games and porno movies, this time initiating his new schoolmates into that lifestyle and gaining popularity along the way. What follows is a series of misadventures as the bookie shows up at the school to demand his due from Eddie, Eddie falls in love with the daughter of the school's patron, and Palmer comes back. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Based on the novel by Agatha Christie and set in the late 1950s, this unevenly told film starts when Dr. Arthur Calgary (Donald Sutherland) comes back to England after two years on an Antarctic expedition and discovers that the man he is searching for has been executed for murder. At the beginning of his expedition he had given a ride one night to a hitchhiker and accidentally ended up with his address book. To his horror, the hitchhiker's mother was killed on that night, and he had been the alibi that would have saved him from execution. Spurred on by his sense of shock and guilt, Calgary makes contact with the family and is put off by their disinterest in finding the real killer. It seems that the mother had many enemies among her close family members: her husband was having an affair, there was a blackmail scheme in the works, and many felt that she had already excluded them from any inheritance. Although the acting is uneven and the plot may seem predictable or contrived to non-Christie readers, the story retains interest, and Dave Brubeck's jazz score adds a special dimension to the proceedings. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Breakdancing, hip-hop, rap, and a good time are the main stars of this standard teen movie about youths trying to raise money to save their community club from being razed for a shopping mall. Ozone (Adolfo Quiñones) and Turbo (Michael Chambers) are two master breakdancers who have started a community club to teach other teens how to manage the acrobatics of the dance without literally breaking anything. Their efforts create some choreographed, group breakdancing that is rather innovative. But an evil developer (Peter MacLean) sees their property as ideal for a shopping mall project -- and a crooked politician is willing to back him up for a fee. As the teens do their best to raise money to keep their center, some are also battling with restrictive parents or trying to ease into romantic liaisons that offer their own challenges. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Similar to the 1991 Dead Again starring Kenneth Branagh, this story of reincarnation and murder also features two couples who meet again in a new lifetime. Brooke Ashley (Jaclyn Smith) is a ballerina and Michael Richardson (Nigel Terry) is her lover, and they both perish in a fire that destroys their home. Fifty years go by, and Gregory Thomas (Terry), a screenwriter, sees an old film clip of Ashley who could easily pass for his fiancee Maggie Rogers (Smith). Intrigued by this coincidence, he starts to research a screenplay on the ballerina's life, and to help get more material, he visits a medium (Shelley Winters) who used to know her. The medium reveals that Gregory is the reincarnation of the dead Richardson -- which means the former couple is back together again. Before any celebration is in order, some of the increasingly sinister mystery of how and why the couple died in the long-ago fire has to be cleared up. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

A man is torn between true love and the lure of fine dining in this romantic comedy. Alby Sherman (Elliott Gould) was born and raised in Brooklyn, where he runs a coffee shop. Alby has dreams of doing bigger and better things, and he works up the courage to ask his rich Uncle Benjamin (Sid Caesar) if he'd be willing to front him the money to open a gourmet restaurant in Manhattan. Benjamin, however, doesn't care for Alby's girlfriend Elizabeth (Margaux Hemingway), mainly because she's Catholic, and he makes Alby an unexpected offer -- he'll give him the money, but only under the condition that he breaks up with Elizabeth and marries a nice Jewish woman. The supporting cast features Carol Kane and Shelley Winters. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

One of a string of Ramboesque films dashed off in the '80s, Missing in Action is yet another entry that attempts to exploit the lingering public bitterness over the outcome of the war in Vietnam. Colonel Braddock (karate champion Chuck Norris) travels to Vietnam on a mission to recover lost POWs. A former POW himself, Braddock has the saavy and bad temper to kill droves of communists at a time, not to mention the inclination. Together with former war comrade M. Emmet Walsh, he sets off for the POW camp where Americans are supposedly still held. Of course, there are lots of nameless, faceless Asian communists, and of course, every one of them dies in violent fashion. The chop-socky, shoot-em-up, explosion-a-minute action quickly wears thin. Missing in Action is a crass, dopey film that ultimately fails to connect with anything interesting in the realm of fact or fiction. ~ Jeremy Beday, All Movie Guide