The Direct to Video Connoisseur

I'm a huge fan of action, horror, sci-fi, and comedy, especially of the Direct to Video variety. In this blog I review some of my favorites and not so favorites, and encourage people to comment and add to the discussion. For announcements and updates, don't forget to Follow us on Twitter and Like our Facebook page. If you're the director, producer, distributor, etc. of a low-budget feature length film and you'd like to send me a copy to review, you can contact me at dtvconnoisseur[at]yahoo.com. I'd love to check out what you got. And check out my book, Chad in Accounting, over on Amazon.

Saturday, May 27, 2023

Foxtrap (1986)

In our continuing mission to get more Fred Williamson on the site, and into the 30 Club and beyond, this had been in my watch queue for some time, but when I discovered it was on Tubi I knew I had no excuse to not make it happen. In addition to us, there are only two other critic reviews, and one of them is from our friends Ty and Brett at Comeuppance.

Foxtrap has Williamson as Thomas Fox, a bodyguard for hire who's hired by Christopher Connelly to retrieve his niece Susan, who's gone missing in Cannes. Seems simple enough, until Fox gets out there, and discovers Susan is in bed with a local crime boss Marco. After some tangles with Marco's goons, Fox is able to rescue Susan and bring her back to LA. The thing is though, Williamson has been in enough films with Christopher Connelly to know that he doesn't seem like the concerned, benevolent uncle type, and with 20 minutes of movie left, there's plenty of time for Williamson to figure out whats going on. Marco and his goons, and then Connelly and his goons, won't know what it them.


This isn't the best of Williamson's directed films. The plot meanders a bit, we get real time scenes of things like him getting his bags out of his car, there's some brutality of women that's a bit much, a music score that sounds a bit silly at times, and editing snafus like a typo in the credits and a visible boom mic. All of that is mitigated by the Williamson factor though, to ultimately deliver us a fun film. As our hero, he's not a hard-nosed detective on the edge, he's a jet-setting man of the world who's completely at home in Cannes or Rome, but can take out a gang of toughs when he has to too. So with any clunkiness we may have in the film's execution, we have plenty of fantastic Williamson to make up for it, and really, when you come to a Williamson film, what else do you want?

Williamson is now at 28 films on the site. The 30 Club is just around the corner, but I have been slacking a bit in my Williamson posts, with the last one coming back in February. The other interesting thing is he's at 12 directed films with this one, which puts him tied with Keoni Waxman in a tie for fifth-most director credits, and one behind Isaac Florentine and Sam Firstenberg for a tie for third. There are a couple things going on in this film that I think show what makes Williamson great. First off, the film is flawed, but his presence alone makes it work. I thought back to Dolph and some of his clunkers, and I don't really know that he made those work just by his presence alone--granted, those clunkers weren't his directed films, but even the ones he's directed that didn't work as well, like Diamond Dogs, he alone couldn't make them fun the way Williamson does here. The other thing is how he makes his character cosmopolitan and at home in places like Cannes and Rome. A common trope is to have the African American hero be straight out of the inner city and plopped into a European city, and the film will play up the clash of cultures for laughs. Williamson leaves that trope entirely, and I think this movie is much better for it. I don't know if I can put Williamson above Dolph for the number one slot all time for DTV stars, but they're closer between 1 and 2 than they have been.


The music in this deserves its own paragraph, because it is such a huge part of the film. It starts off in the opening sequence of Williamson driving--and as someone who's never had his license and probably can't critique anyone else's driving, I have to say he looks like he's all over the road, often crossing over to the wrong side--and it sounds like what you might hear in a long-form corporate ad video, or maybe an 80s fishing show montage segue between segments. From there we have this synthesizer generated woodwind instrument, which at one point sounds like a big number or letter reveal in a Sesame Street cartoon, as we watch a little French man in a knit cap following Williamson in Cannes. We also get some Smooth Jazz that turns into a Bobby Caldwell-esque late 70s soul song when Williamson has his love scene. We then get this groovy organ sound during a shootout, which makes it hard to feel the intensity of Williamson diving over a car to avoid the uzi fire coming at him, it was probably better used accompanying shots of a grimacing Karl Malden somewhat aggressively driving to a crime scene in an episode of Streets of San Francisco. In some respects, the music adds to the film's charm; but other times, like when the synthesizer-generated woodwind instrument comes on a little more strongly as the chase between Williamson and the French man in the knit cap heats up, I find myself cracking up as I'm mimicking the "doo-dah-lee-dee-doo-doo" sound out loud as I'm watching the movie--which, I guess if I'm honest with myself, also adds to the film's charm.

At the end of the credits, the film teases that we should "watch next summer for the FOX and the COBRA." My guess is "the COBRA" was Black Cobra, which came out in 1987, but unfortunately we didn't get more FOX. This is something with the site and podcast, and even my novels, that I always try to make sure I don't do, and that's get too far ahead of myself by promising things that I don't have in the can yet. Take this review for example. If I didn't get a chance to watch this movie, I'd have reviewed the Zagarino film Project Eliminator instead, because I'd already seen that. Same with the podcast, I don't want to tell people what the upcoming episodes will be, because even if I have guests and subjects lined up for them, you never know when someone's schedule, mine or theirs, will jumble everything up. I did hear that at the time Williamson was able to sell films at Cannes to producers just based on the ideas alone, so he probably thought he could do the same with the FOX, until life got in the way, and we're left to wonder what might have been after we see the credits to Foxtrap.


Finally, typos are such a pain in the ass, right? And in a movie in the 80s they have to be the worst. At least when I have a typo in my reviews--and I have tons because I usually can only do one proofread before I post--if I see them I can go back and edit them if I want. Here Williamson has no such luck, "Produced an story by" will forever be immortalized in his film. It begs the question though, at what point is it better to just get the work out there? I mean yes, it doesn't make a great early impression, but this isn't a job interview, I'm not going through hundreds of CVs for a job I posted online, so a couple typos make it easier for me to reject someone; it's a Fred Williamson movie, he already has the position, I'm just ready to see him get after it. If anything, I feel like I should get on him for that parking job. Look at all that space on the right. Between this and when he left his girlfriend behind to be caught by Marco and his goons, he kinda made himself a tough guy to root for, but then he's beating up baddies and smoking cigars while wearing double-breasted suits and dress shirts with the top buttons undone, and I think, "how can I stay mad at you, Fred?"

Or rather, Mr. Williamson, sir. Anyway, let's wrap this up. Right now this is on Tubi here in the States, which I think is a great way to go. Hopefully someone like Vinegar Syndrome will release all of his directed movies on Blu-ray, but until then, I think Tubi is your best bet, and it's worth it to get your Williamson fix.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091072

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

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