Silk has Cec Verrell as our eponymous hero, working as a detective on the Honolulu police department. She's as bad as they come, and criminals don't stand a chance. When an affluent English gentleman decides to set up his criminal empire shop in her backyard, there's going to be hell to pay.
When an action heroine has her own Pat Benatar-ish theme song, you know you're in for something great, and this only delivers from there. Cec Verrell is fantastic in the lead, the action is consistent, and when the action isn't there, we have other fun moments. This is the kind of movie the DTVC was made for, and the fact that we're almost 1000 posts and 13 years in and I'm just getting to it now is a travesty. Better late than never I guess, and we're here now making it happen. Cirio H. Santiago reaffirms his place in the DTVC Hall of Fame yet again.
This is back-to-back posts with Cec Verrell in them, with her having a part in Hollywood Vice Squad as well, and her third film overall, the other being Hell Comes to Frogtown. In looking at her imdb bio, there isn't much more that we could do of hers, which is too bad, because you feel like from a movie like this she could've had a bigger DTV action career, maybe not quite at Cynthia Rothrock's, but something in the 30 movie range--she wasn't even in Silk 2, which I can't believe after how great she was here. Alas, while the quantity of films was smaller, we left with the quality, and there is a lot of quality in a film like this for us to celebrate.
I joke often that the biggest trope in movies is film review bloggers using the word trope, but I couldn't think of a better way to describe the damsel in distress trope than as a trope. Anyway, for whatever reason, Cec Verrell couldn't escape it, and despite being the eponymous heroine upon which the film is based, still finds herself captured by the baddies, tied up, and used for bait in the final scene. And the thing is, it felt grafted on, like the helicopter that's only there to be blown up and otherwise serves no other purpose. I'm all for paint-by-numbers, but I think if you're going to make a movie with a woman in the lead who's as badass as Verrell is here, why not skip that part, or have a different female character that you can use for that instead. When we look at some of the other movies we've done this month, Altitude with Denise Richards, Skyscraper with Anna Nicole Smith, Honor and Glory with Cynthia Rothrock and Donna Jason, and Hollywood Vice Squad with Verrell and Carrie Fisher, none of them needed to use the damsel in distress device--the closest I think was Anna Nicole Smith when the baddie in leather pants tries to rape her, and she stabs him with a letter opener and sends him out the window to his death--and all of those movies worked, just like Silk worked. We're okay skipping the damsel in distress, you can trust us to survive if it doesn't happen.
Down below is our good friend Vic Diaz. He, along with our other good friends Joe Mari Avellana and Mike Monty (credited first as Mike Monte, then later as Mike Monty) all make appearances in this. Seeing them in a Philippine action film, especially a Cirio H. Santiago flick, is like watching an old Johnny Carson rerun in bed, or smelling French fries cooking in a fast food joint as I walk by. There's a comfort in knowing they're there, like I know I'm right where I'm supposed to be watching exactly what I'm supposed to be watching at that moment. When we talk about Martin Scorsese's comments about how Marvel movies aren't cinema, maybe what he meant was, they had neither Diaz, Monty, or Avellana in them, and as such couldn't be cinema. I hope that's what he meant...
Cirio H. Santiago is the film's one Hall of Famer, so it's rare to have the Hall of Famer not discussed until this paragraph, but here we are. This is only Santiago's 9th film reviewed on the site, which I believe is the lowest of any Hall of Famer. This is, and has been, a major oversight on my part that I've been meaning to amend. I've mentioned this in other posts, but when I came back from hiatus, I focused too much on newer movies, especially in trying to catch up on all the new Dolph, Seagal, and Van Damme out there, plus the Gary Daniels, Scott Adkins, and Michael Jai White; the thing is though, how often does one of the newer movies hold a candle to something like this? Cirio H. Santiago is in the Hall of Fame for a reason, and one of his films is less of a roll of the dice than a lot of the newer stuff that's out there.
Right now you can stream this on Tubi, or if you have the Shout Factory subscription on Prime you can stream it there too. I think streaming is your best bet, and then you can make the decision after on whether or not you want to ante up for the blu-ray DVD version. However you slice it, this is what you came for, and what we at the DTVC are all about.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091957
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