One thing about IMMORTAL COMBAT (1994) is that it’s called IMMORTAL COMBAT. Pretty good. However, just like the last American Sonny Chiba movie I watched (BODY COUNT, formerly known as CODENAME: SILENCER), you can tell from the opening credits cutting to black for the title that it used to have another title. This time the original title was RESORT TO KILL, because it takes place on an island resort. And some people get killed there.
Another thing about IMMORTAL COMBAT [sic] is that it stars both Roddy Piper and Sonny Chiba. And the villain is Piper’s THEY LIVE co-star Meg Foster as Quinn, who rules the island with her husband Stan (Roger Cudney, TOY SOLDIERS, BARBARIAN QUEEN II) and is behind some scheme with a chemical company called HybriCo to kill fighters and turn them into brainwashed, uh, ninjas or something. I didn’t totally follow it but these companies are always up to complicated shit. What else is new? (read the rest of this shit…)
Thank you again for reading my HIGHLANDERLAND series. It was a thrill to write and share it with you all. I knew it would be wrong for Badass Studies and humanity as a whole to lock such an important topic behind a paywall, but I really owe a debt of gratitude to the Patreon supporters on this one. The predictable monthly extra income from that has allowed me to work one less day a week and that’s truly why I was able to prepare the whole series in advance like I did with the 
I was shocked and saddened today to stumble across the news that wrestling legend “Rowdy” Roddy Piper had died. I didn’t see this one coming. I thought he was gonna be one of the ones that gets to grow old.
One day several years ago I was waiting for a bus near a book store, and in the window there was a book about the philosophy of THE MATRIX. There’s more than one book like that, and I can’t remember which one it was that I saw that day, but it got me thinking: there should be a book like that, except it’s entirely about THEY LIVE.
Yesterday was Roddy Piper’s birthday. I’m celebrating late with the Piper/Billy Blanks picture from 1993, BACK IN ACTION.
