by Patrick Bromley
Great movies from a Junesploitation mainstay!
New World Pictures, like Cannon Films and AIP, is one of those studios that we've celebrated several times during Junesploitations past. They're a company for which I have a great deal of affection, as they released the kinds of movies I grew up loving. For the purposes of this article, I'm sticking to the 1980s. I could easily expand this list to the 1970s and include a bunch of Roger Corman productions that I love, but instead I decided to cap it to a single decade and focus on their output on which I was raised. Happy New World day!
1.
Shogun Assassin (1980, dir. Kenji Misumi/Robert Huston)
This is kind of a cheat because it practically a fan edit that New World just happened to distribute. Robert Houston (the younger brother from the original Hills Have Eyes) recut Kenji Misumi's first two Lone Wolf and Cub movies into one amazing, violent, 90-minute blast of pure cinema and got Mark Lindsay (of Paul Revere and the Raiders) to write an amazing new synth score and the result is one of the best movies ever made. Roger Corman and New World Pictures were smart enough to recognize a great thing when they had it and released the film into grindhouse theaters beginning in 1980. I know that the two Lone Wolf and Cub entries are technically better movies but this is the one I go to when I need a fix. It will also always remind me of my daughter because we watched it a lot together overnight when she was a newborn. She doesn't remember any of it.
2. They're Playing With Fire (1984, dir. Howard Avedis)
Thanks to the late lamented
Killer POV podcast for turning me onto this one probably over a decade ago. It's is a movie that shifts gears -- and genres -- multiple times before the credits roll, starting out as a teen sex comedy about horny Eric Brown (of Private Lessons fame) and ending as something very, very different. Words alone don't do justice to Sybil Danning, who is less an actress than she is a Valkyrie goddess sent from another planet to act in a bunch of cheap exploitation movies. She commands the screen in a way most actors only wish they could, and while her character in They're Playing With Fire doesn't have the same strength as many of her other roles, the film still puts her appeal to very good use. She's the whole show.
3. Night Patrol (1984, dir.
Jackie Kong)
Night Patrol was director Jackie Kong's biggest commercial success both at New World and overall, as well as a movie seemingly made for USA Up All Night. It stars Murray Langston (the Unknown Comic made famous on The Gong Show and also a writer on Night Patrol) as a beat cop who dreams of being a stand-up but who has to do jokes with a bag on his head so as not to violate the department's policy on moonlighting. Simultaneously, there's a bank robber taking down scores all over L.A. with a bag on his head. The movie has supporting roles for Linda Blair, Billy Barty, and a young Andrew Dice Clay. Released about six months after Police Academy, it's easy to accuse Night Patrol of being a cheap cash-in, but it's not. Aside from being set amongst wacky cops, the two films are totally different; Kong is much more concerned with absolutely assaulting us with jokes, using the Zucker/Abrams/Zucker approach of "see what sticks" but somehow going even sillier, even stupider and sometimes raunchier. I'm not proud of the fact that it makes me laugh.
4. Tuff Turf (1985, dir. Fritz Kiersch)
I know I've been talking this movie up a lot recently both on the podcast and on the Patreon, but this one deserves it. James Spader is at his '80s coolest as a teenager who gets transplanted to a rough Los Angeles high school and begins pursuing Kim Richards to the dismay of her gang leader boyfriend. It's part drama, part thriller, part musical, all awesome. This was apparently a pet project of Donald Borchers, a regular New World producer who came up with the movie and willed it into existence. Thank goodness he did.
5. House (1985, dir.
Steve Miner)
The back half of the '80s found New World releasing a bunch of horror movies I really like, beginning with Steve Miner's House. Re-teaming with Friday the 13th producer Sean S. Cunningham, Miner directs this horror comedy in which a Stephen King-like author (played by William Katt) inherits a house full of crazy shit, including (but not limited to) the ghost of his best friend (Richard Moll) who was killed in Vietnam. Working from a story by the great Fred Dekker, Miner proves adept at mixing horror and comedy, successfully launching a second horror franchise in the process. The effects and creatures are practical and super fun, a word that best describes House overall: it's a super FUN take on a haunted house movie. RIP George Wendt.
6.
Hellraiser (1987, dir. Clive Barker)
New World didn't release a ton of flat-out masterpieces, but Hellraiser is for sure one of them. The feature directing debut of Clive Barker, the original Hellraiser (which launched something like 10 sequels and at least one remake) is one of the best horror movies of the 1980s: grisly, nightmarish, sexual, and mature. It is, an many ways, a total outlier in terms of what was most popular during the decade, but of course Pinhead and the Cenobites became so iconic and marketable that a franchise was born. New World was only responsible for Hellbound: Hellraiser II in 1988, the very best of all the sequels.
7.
Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988, dir. Donald G. Jackson/R.J. Kizer)
A late-night staple for me as a kid because of my love for wrestler-turned-actor Rowdy Roddy Piper and my affection for oddball shit, Hell Comes to Frogtown might be trying too hard to achieve cult status out of the gate but I don't much care. I love it no matter what. Piper plays Sam Hell, the last fertile man in a post-apocalyptic wasteland overrun by mutant humanoid frogs, and it's up to Sandahl Bergman and Cec Verrell (
Silk) to accompany him to Frogtown where he must rescue and impregnate a group of human females. Everything about the movie is knowingly ridiculous, but credit to the director(s) and actors for playing it mostly straight. Yes it has a sense of humor -- any movie with a character named Sam Hell has to -- but I appreciate the movie's commitment to the bit and New World's willingness to take a chance on oddball material.
8.
Heathers (1988, dir. Michael Lehmann)
One of the best comedies of the '80s and one of the best teen movies ever made -- arguably the entry that killed the genre for the next decade (in a good way). Winona Ryder falls in love with a rebellious new student (Christian Slater in a career-defining performance) and the pair begins murdering the popular kids. Daniel Waters' script is so blunt, so funny, so sharp, and so full of quotable dialogue ("How very.") that it immediately became an all-timer for me and my family. The rest of the world took a few years to catch up. Movies like Heathers and
Better Off Dead bring up a real chicken/egg debate in my life: did I respond to this movies so strongly as a kid because of some sensibility I was born with, or did movies like this help develop my sensibilities? My guess is that it's a little bit of both.
9.
The Punisher (1989, dir. Mark Goldblatt)
It was a toss-up between this movie and director Mark Goldblatt's first film as director, 1988's buddy cop comedy horror Dead Heat, also made for New World. I feel like I've written quite a bit about Dead Heat in the past and just revisited this one with Mike and Adam Riske and Adam Thas so it's fresh in my brain. I maintain that it's a bad Punisher movie but a fantastic '80s action movie, filled with squibs and carnage, directed to maximum effect by former (and current) editor Goldblatt, who understands what we want out of movies like this.
10. Revenge (1990, dir.
Tony Scott)
Another cheat to the end the list. Until doing some research for this list, I had no idea that Revenge -- one of my favorite Tony Scott movies and one of my favorite Costners of this period -- was a New World production and only distributed by Columbia Pictures. Sure, it's trashy and violent and sexy but it just seems too A-list for New World. Costner plays a guy who falls for Madeleine Stowe because who wouldn't; unfortunately, she's married to Costner's friend Anthony Quinn, who doesn't take kindly to being a cuck. I know I'm in the minority when I say I actually prefer the longer theatrical cut to the shorter, tighter director's cut (I wish the theatrical cut was available on Blu-ray, but fuck me I guess). I'm glad this was one of the very last New World productions because it means they went out on a high note.
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