Cypher (2002)

Back in September I had screenwriter Tom Jolliffe on the pod to update us on his newest project, The Baby in the Basket, and we also discussed this film. It wasn't one I'd heard of before, but I was intrigued by it, so I was excited to see how it went. For that episode, it's number 134 in the archives.

Cypher stars Jeremy Northam as a meek businessperson who wants to get into corporate espionage. After passing the tests, the company he's hired by sends him to some conferences in some small big cities like Buffalo and Boise. As most noirish thrillers go though, Northam meets an alluring woman who may also be dangerous (Lucy Liu), and she lets him know that there's more going on than he thinks--the company is using him, and may eventually kill him. That leads Northam to trust Liu and to try to infiltrate the company so he can figure out what's going on. Will he find out in time? And if he does, will he get out alive?

This was really good, which made me wonder why it wasn't more widely know--and which was part of the reason why Tom wanted to cover it for the pod. Jeremy Northam is great as the noirish rube, and as the film takes its twists and turns, he navigates them really well. Then we have Liu as the Film Noir femme fatale, who also does a great job. From there, director Vincenzo Natali does really well in creating this future world that's almost like a liminal space, which creates a dreamlike quality to the proceedings that makes it even more mysterious, playing on the themes common in Film Noir but in a sci-fi setting. On top of that we have some great supporting performances from people like Nigel Bennett and David Hewlitt which really rounds out the film. There was a period between like 2000 and 2002 that felt like an extension of the 90s indie wave--which at the time didn't feel like an extension of anything, it felt like a natural continuation, but once we get Spider-Man, the first Harry Potter film, and the second Lord of the Rings film in 2002, things shift to more big tent, big budget projects, leaving films like this out--if you look at it, 2023 was the first year since 2002 that all of the top 3 box office earners weren't sequels in a franchise. In a way that may explain why this isn't as well-known as it should be, it probably should've come out five years earlier, but it definitely belongs with those other indie films of the 2000-2002 period. Either way, it's a great watch, and worth picking up.

As far as I could tell, the only other three Jeremy Northam films I'd seen were The Net, which I didn't really remember him in; and then The Golden Bowl and Gosford Park, both in that 2000-2002 indie period I described above, especially the latter, Gosford Park. The fact that he's such an accomplished dramatic actor is a huge plus for this film, as he's able to take the main character through all his metamorphoses and make the entire thing feel authentic. As much as it's needed in tense, exciting scenes, where he's in a violent confrontation or running for his life, it's also needed in the seemingly banal ones, where he's ordering a drink, or mixing with other people at the conventions. Yes, maybe you're more likely to see him in an adaptation of AS Byatt's Possession, but getting him in a film like this adds an additional layer that it really needed, and made the film that much better.

I was surprised to find out this was the first time we've had Lucy Liu on the site. Yes, she doesn't do many DTV flicks, but I thought we might have seen her in the old Wild Card posts I used to do; plus she did do some DTV stuff and near DTV stuff in the late 2000s, it just wasn't stuff I'd covered for the site--I also didn't realize that the show she was on, Elementary, ran for 7 seasons and over 150 episodes, which, with the kind of money she was making per episode, she could afford to be choosier and not have to slum it in the DTV world. Here it was a little more interesting, because 2002 was right in her big budget prime, in between the two Charlie's Angels films--though she also did another indie flick in that period, Mike Figgis's Hotel, so maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising. Also, this film allowed her to be the female lead, and even though Northam is the central character, she's right behind him with her role, so maybe that also intrigued her that she wasn't further down the pecking order like in Charlie's Angels or Kill Bill. She does a great job here, so if the role did intrigue her, she leaned into that, and a noirish film doesn't work if the Femme Fatale isn't good, so she had a big hand in making this picture what it was. In looking at her IMDb bio, I see her most recent live-action role was in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which was one of the many superhero flops of 2023. I haven't seen it yet, so I don't know if it was really that bad--I didn't think The Marvels was as bad as its poor box office performance--but I think at the very least it shows how viable Liu still is as a star, so I don't think we can expect her in the DTV realm anytime soon. Either way, it was good to get her on the site finally.

The shot below is one of my favorites in the film. It's of a 300-story elevator that takes Northam's character to a bunker one of the companies has where they keep their most valuable information. Today that would all be done with computers, and while we know Vincenzo Natali didn't erect a 300-story elevator shaft for that shot, he did do it with practical effects and I think that helps it look better. I think that's an issue with modern DTV compared to its 80s and 90s brethren, back then they couldn't use computers--only in the 90s virtual reality movies, of course--but because they can now, studios are cutting budgets with the expectation that they will. Why blow up an intricate model of a helicopter, when you can recreate the whole thing on a computer for even less? Why pay the to use real fake blood, when we can recreate it for a fraction of the cost with the computer? In some cases I agree with it--if AIP had that technology, I would've preferred that to actors potentially getting hurt when explosions went off near them; and I especially want all big animals rendered in CGIs, leave those poor lions, tigers, bears, etc. alone and let them live in peace--but for something like this shot, or when we need to recreate blood, practical effects will always be superior.

Finally, David Hewlitt is in this film, and he's finally getting a tag. Why does that matter you ask? Because he was in our first ever DTVC review, Boa vs. Python, where I (lovingly) referred to him only as "the guy with glasses from Stargate: Atlantis." This is a great opportunity then to announce an initiative I've started on the site for 2024. Over the course of the year, I'm going to clean up all the old posts to remove the bad mattmovieguy links, and replace the Photobucket images (don't get me started on those thieving bastards) with direct Google uploads like I've been doing since I got back from hiatus in 2019. In some cases, like Boa vs. Python, because it's available on streaming, I've been able to grab new images, but still linking to the old image page; while others like The Breed, because it's not on a streaming site, it looks a little off because back then the screens I took were much smaller than they are now, so I'll be keeping an eye out for when they're available on streaming again so I can grab new images for them, and at the very least, the bad links and bad Photobucket pics have been removed. I'm going to try to handle a few posts a day, so that by the end of 2024, everything will be up to date. 2023 was a fantastic year for the site, so I want to lean into that in 2024 and focus more energy on fixing some of the long neglected issues, like the bad links and the Photobucket watermarked images, because a lot of the traffic has been coming from the old posts. We'll see how this goes, and from there work on some other projects, like reviving the clickable, alphabetical archive. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. As best as I can tell, this is available to rent here in the States, and I think it's worth it. This is a great sci-fi noirish thriller, something from the early 2000s that feels like it could've been made in the 90s indie boom. Also check out the podcast episode I did with Tom Jolliffe in the podcast archives, and keep an eye out for his newest project, The Baby in the Basket. Finally, I want to thank everyone for making 2023 a great year here at the DTVC. I'm going to try to take this momentum and make 2024 even better. You can hold me to that!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284978

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Beneath Us All (2023)

This was a screener submission that producer Joe Williamson sent over. It's the newest film from Harley Wallen, and considering how much I enjoyed Ash and Bone, he was excited for me to give it a look. Unfortunately it got lost in the shuffle between between work and other things I had going on, but as we close out the year, I'm finally able to make it happen. Let's see how it did.

Beneath Us All stars Angelina Danielle Cama (from other Harley Wallen flicks Eternal Code, Abstruse, and the aforementioned Ash and Bone) as Julie, a young lady living in foster care in Maine who's about to age out of the system. Social worker Rebecca (Kaiti Wallen, also from the previous three Wallen films I mentioned) suspects something's up with her foster parents (Sean Whalen and Maria Olsen) and the way they care for Julie and her foster siblings, so she decides to keep a closer eye on her, which is fortuitous, because Julie finds a pendant in the woods, which unearths a long-buried Viking vampire, whom Julie nurses back to health, not knowing his sinister intentions. Will Rebecca be able to save Julie from this situation and get her the life she deserves after foster care?

First and foremost, we need to get the spoiler alerts out there. I can't discuss what I liked and didn't like without giving things away, so if you want to watch this, and I suggest you do, hop over to Freevee and check it out. You've been sufficiently warned. 

This is a little dark for my taste. We have a bird getting smashed to death, a cat killed, and two elementary-aged girls killed. That doesn't mean I think it's a bad movie, or that I think it was a bad move for Wallen and screenwriter Bret Miller to go in that direction, it's more a personal taste thing. Going strictly objectively, Wallen and cinematographer Alex Gasparetto do a great job shooting this, I loved the way the scenes were framed, and how they filmed the dark scenes without sacrificing visibility. I also like Wallen going back to his theme of "some lives are worth more than others" which we've seen in his other films, and Angelina Danielle Cama is great in the central role as the young lady who just wants to be a human and has a desire to help others, while her foster father Sean Whalen sees her as a means to cover his gambling debts through the checks he gets from the state for being her foster parent; and Kaiti Wallen sees getting Julie a better life as more her own raison d'etre as she's dealing with burnout from her job. One issue the film runs into is we lose Julie's story towards the end, as we focus more on Kaiti Wallen's Rebecca and her working with local sheriff Harley Wallen to find out what's happening in Julie's foster home. Because it felt like the ancient vampire was a metaphor for say a pimp or other predator that would prey on a young lady in Julie's situation, I would have liked to have seen more of that interplay; or if we wanted more about Rebecca's challenges as a social worker, maybe introduced that more early on so it felt like we were following two stories instead of one. Overall though, I feel like Wallen and everyone else involved here achieved what they were going for, and if you're okay with it being darker, this is a solid film that's worth your time.

We now have four films directed by Harley Wallen on the site, so it was definitely time to get him his tag, but beyond that, I think you can see a progression where he's getting a better sense of how he wants to make a movie and how he can creatively work around the budgetary and logistical constraints that come with being an indie filmmaker. I preferred Ash and Bone to this one, but I think this was objectively a better movie. What's great was he cast Angelina Danielle Cama in Ash and Bone to be a spoiled rich kid whose penchant for selfish troublemaking almost gets her father and stepmother killed, and does get some innocent locals killed; but then he could cast her here as someone on the opposite end of the spectrum, a child of the foster care system who has endured a lot--more than we probably know--but still cares enough for others to want to protect and nurture them. I was a really big fan of Cama's performance here, she exuded a young Scarlett Johansson presence in the way she delivered her lines and interacted with her other cast mates. It'll be interesting to see what she does next, I see in the upcoming projects section of Wallen's IMDb page that he has a sequel to Ash and Bone on the horizon, which sounds really good. 

After John Wick, if anyone didn't already know the rules surrounding killing animals in movies, they should now. I remember screenwriter Johnny Sullivan (Recoil--the Steve Austin one) said screenwriters know killing an animal is a huge deal in a film, not something to be done without understanding the gravity of it, and he used Wick as an example, having gotten wind of it before it was released. In this we first get a tiny bird that Whalen smashes to death with a shovel, saying he was putting it out of its misery, even though it seemed like it was tweeting along just fine. Then that poor kitty above gets fed to our vampire baddie. While we don't see it happen, we know it's happened, and knowing how adorable she is in the previous scene, it's hard to take. Finally, Julie's two younger foster sisters are killed by the vampire, which we also don't see. Again, it was all too dark for me, but I also know I'm more sensitive to that kind of thing. I think of Do or Die, where the cat eats the poisoned fish before our heroes do, tipping them off that something was amiss. Like this film, they give the kitty a credit, so we think "hey, she's all right, she was just playing her part." Maybe, but if we're all just playing a part, then should I not be moved by Cama's performance as Julie, since she's just playing a part too? Another famous example is Elves, which the case could be made is so ridiculous, the cat murder is just part of the ridiculousness. For me it's one thing that keeps it from being my all time favorite Christmas film, but I get too how Mitch from the Video Vacuum can look past it. Finally, on our most recent "Middle Aged Men Watch 90s Era Jim Belushi," Jon Cross from After Movie Diner and I watched Mr. Destiny, which has Belushi run over his dog while he was in the what if portion of the story, only to find out his dog was okay when he went back to his normal life. I was more okay with it, feeling like the dog never really died, but Jon made the point that in that alternate timeline the dog did die, which I had to agree with as being an issue, so even there, killing the dog was too much. I also think a one-off would've been more manageable, but killing a tiny bird, then a small cat, then two elementary-aged kids--one of whom runs into the woods because she thinks she hears her missing kitty, only to be killed--is too much darkness in one film for me to take.

Probably the most recognizable name in this for people who haven't seen many Harvey Wallen films is Sean Whalen, who plays the creepy and abusive foster dad. He turns in a really great performance here, but for me the issue was the scenes of him losing at poker took away from what we had going on between Julie's struggle as a foster child and Rebecca's struggle as a social worker. I think that was where the meat of the movie was, not Whalen's character, but I also get that having a Whalen in the film, you want to use him more. I would offer a counterpoint: his performance was strong enough here that he gives us what we need in fewer scenes. Or maybe another possibility if we needed more of him, was to give him more scenes with Cama and Kaiti Wallen, so we don't lose their story as much, but we also get the requisite Whalen screentime. The one thing I wouldn't want is the film to be longer to mitigate these issues. 90 minutes is right where this should be.

Finally, this takes place in Maine, even though it was shot in Michigan. They use the fictitious county of Oakland, which is a town in Maine, near Waterville, but isn't a county--unlike in Michigan where it's not only a country, but one of the biggest counties as part of the Detroit metro area. I get wanting to use a fictitious county, as I use fictitious towns and even states in my writing, though I don't know if they had used Kennebec County, the county Oakland is in in Maine, if anyone would've come complaining if they thought the story hit too close to home. (The other thing is, if the story is taking place in Maine, you can't use the generic "the county" to describe anything, because that's the nickname for the largest county by area, Aroostook County.) Anyway, all that to say, one thing I enjoy about Wallen's films is his use of Michigan as a character, and we lost that by setting the film in a fictitious version of Maine. It's not like there's something specifically Maine about the film either, just that you can't use ancient Vikings dropping things off in Michigan. Worse though, it felt like a Michigan version of Maine, especially with people's accents, kind of like that SNL sketch that was supposed to be a courtroom drama in Maine, but everyone had Louisiana accents. I'm not saying Wallen should never make a film that takes place anywhere outside of Michigan, I'm just saying his use of Michigan as a character was a strong point for me in his other films, and the fact that it came through even for someone like me who has never stepped foot in Michigan except for one time switching planes at Detroit Metro Airport, shows how powerful an element it is, and it's something that's lost when the film takes place somewhere else.

All right, with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this free with ads on Freevee here in the States. Depending on how dark you like to go in your films, this might work for you. It's a solidly made film, well-shot and well-acted, so if you're okay with how dark it is, this is worth your time.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11027288

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

The Randall Scandal: Love, Loathing, and Vanderpump (2023)

Continuing a tradition I started back in December of 2019 when I covered the documentary on Roger Corman's Fantastic Four film, I'm doing a documentary review for Christmas. This one piqued my interest because of how many films Randall Emmett has produced that we've reviewed on the site, in addition to all the ones Ty and I have been covering on the podcast. It almost felt like I couldn't not do it.

The Randall Scandal is a documentary that accompanied an LA Times report by journalists Amy Kaufman and Meg James on producer Randall Emmett. The film documents his start as Mark Wahlberg's personal assistant, his connection to production partner George Furla, and how he made millions working on "the margins of Hollywood"--or in other words, the space we inhabit on this site--making cheaper direct-to-video action flicks with guys like Seagal, Willis, and De Niro that he could sell abroad. From there, we learn about how horribly abusive he was with his assistants and the people he worked with, in addition to his time on Vanderpump Rules, relationship with Lala Kent, and eventual break-up.

This was an important watch for me, and definitely eye opening. We know many of the people we review here on the site aren't great humans, and in some cases are outright horrible. With that in mind, that Randall Emmett turned out to be this horrible isn't surprising--in fact I think we kind of already knew it, this just put it out there in a way that was so powerful no one could ignore it. What struck me most though was how when I watched his movies, other than the two Scorsese pictures he produced (of which I still haven't seen Silence), the sense I had in watching them was that he had no respect for his audience or the art of filmmaking, and that was every bit confirmed in this film. On top of that though, we get this sense of a guy who is totally abusive and narcissistic that hides behind this idea that "you gotta be tough to make it in Hollywood," which yes, we don't want to let him off the hook for being this horrible, but also Hollywood itself has created this machine that allows for creatures like him to thrive there. Many of his assistants put up with the horrible abuse from him because they expected Emmett to invite them into his world, when all he did was stand on their heads to continue to prop himself up. For all of us who enjoy these movies that exist "in the margins of the industry" as it was termed in the film, this is a must watch, if only to give us a better perspective on what happens behind the scenes.

If we tagged Emmett as a producer, he'd have 26 films on the site, plus countless more that we've done on the podcast, which, once they were reviewed would put him easily in the 30 Club, verging on the 40 Club. Usually for a producer to get a tag, they need to be really influential, like Golan and Globus or Roger Corman; or they need to be known for other things, like Albert Pyun and Isaac Florentine who mostly have director credits, but also have a couple producer ones as well--Daniel Zirilli is one who falls into that category too. Even Joseph Merhi and Richard Pepin have their producer tags connected to PM Entertainment, and they only get tags for the films they've directed. Randall Emmett on the other hand can be credited with doing more to hurt the DTV action industry than anyone else. His assembly line, stuff as many names who have barely any scenes on the tin, just get it out there approach is a massive departure from the Cannons, PMs, Full Moons, and Concorde/New Horizons--hell, you can make a case even The Asylum, who, say what you want, there's still a sense of "we're trying to make a fun movie here." Randall Emmett could care less if his "geezer teasers," as they were termed in the film, were good or bad, as long as they made money. Even Godfrey Ho was employing some level of art when he spliced his new footage with the old films he bought. And what we saw in this documentary was, for the artists involved in making the movie, Emmett didn't care. He'd scream at people, force the crew to sleep on the floor to cut costs, and in some cases not even pay them, which led to the WGA to put out a do not work order against him. I think the fact that he seemed to have this disdain for the kinds of movies we all love despite the fact he was producing them is what keeps me from tagging him for his films.

Back when Sean Malloy of "I Must Break this Podcast" and I were about to do our episode on Precious Cargo, an EFO film where we discussed what Randall Emmett was doing to the DTV film world, he saw the trailer for Midnight in the Switchgrass and wondered if there was an Ed Wood propping up Bela Lugosi thing going on with Emmett and Bruce Willis. As we find out in this documentary, it was much worse, but no one really knew at that time what was happening with Willis as far as his health. It was really more like, Emmett had this idea that a director was someone who yelled and swore at people, and when Willis started to struggle, Emmett freaked out, causing the rest of the crew to scramble to help Willis out to get him over the goal line. This also gets back to my point about Emmett's disdain for these movies, even when he was the director, while that's happening, there is a whole crew that he's mistreating that take a lot of pride in their work who are putting in a lot of effort. It's possible that not many outside of Alicia Haverland, prop master on Midnight in the Switchgrass, and Teresa Huang, screenwriter on the never shot Arnold Schwarzenegger bio-series Pumped, were the only ones who felt comfortable coming forward, but I would've liked more stories like theirs as opposed to the amount of time they spent on the Lala Kent Vanderpump Rules aspect of the story.

As far as the reality show, because that was a piece of things I wasn't as familiar with, it was harder for me to make the kinds of judgements on it that I could the depictions of what Emmett was like to work with. One of the biggest things was we only had Lala Kent's mother, brother, and some reality podcasters that were fans of hers to describe what happened, while with something like how he treated his assistants, we had three separate assistants giving similar but unique enough stories that it was hard to question their veracity. One thing that did make sense though was how the reality show ultimately ended up being his downfall, but that he craved the attention he could get from being on the show. If he wasn't on the reality show, would anyone have recognized him with other women in Nashville? Like one of the podcasters said, he'd have had no idea who Emmett was if he hadn't done Vanderpump Rules. I read an article recently that said how reality TV attracts narcissists like Randall Emmett, and that's why you see a lot of fraud, crimes, and lawsuits surrounding them. In fact, he had already tried to push his own reality show documenting his life, The Mogul, which didn't end up getting picked up, but gives us a great view into the kind of "boss" he saw himself as. In a way, he was made for reality TV the same way he was made for reality TV to ultimately bring him down.

Finally, we had images and file footage of all kinds of people that we have tagged on here, including the big fella Steve Seagal. I made the decision that, because they didn't actually participate in the documentary the way Dolph did in the He-Man one, I wouldn't tag them. If I had, this would've been Seagal's entry into the 40 Club. It's an interesting thing, because Seagal is a DTVC Hall of Famer and someone I have in the top 10 all time for DTV action stars, but the way I was saying Randall Emmett did damage to the DTV film industry, you could make the case that Seagal has had that same disdain. Taking roles where he never stands, never does his reverse shots, has doubling for any action, yet he wanted to pump as many films out as he could and bring in the paychecks. I was trying to come up with a good reason for why I treat him differently than Randal Emmett, but I think the reality is just that when I started the site, Seagal was still putting out some decent stuff, the movies were fun enough, and when they weren't, there was a goofiness we could celebrate. As he got into the 2010s though, I think what we saw as quirks became worse, but by that point he was already well-established here on the site. Either way, established as he is, he'll still have to sit on 39 tags.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can find this on Hulu, but as far as I can tell, you need to search for it on there, it won't pop up if you browse around. As fans of the kinds of movies Emmett made, and made a lot of money off of making, it's a must watch.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27761408

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

The Getback (2023)

This is one that was on my radar just for the Theo Rossi factor. I've been a big fan of his since seeing him in the Luke Cage Netflix series. As Ty from Comeuppance and I were looking at more movies to do podcasts on, I felt like this would be a natural one, because it not only had him, but Kim Coates, whom we're both a fan of, and Dermot Mulroney, who had a great showing in Section 8. That episode was released back in October, number 135 in the archives.

The Getback has Rossi as a former police detective turned bounty hunter. His boss, Kim Coates, sends him to get a young hustler (Shane Paul McGhie) who's supposed to testify in the trial of a major crime boss (Naughty By Nature's Treach). Once he secures the bounty, things go wrong. People are trying to kill him, and he doesn't know whom he can trust. Who are the good guys here? Who are the baddies? And what does his former boss, police chief Dermot Mulroney, have to do with everything? Eventually he realizes it's up to him and his bounty to work together if the two are going to survive and get out of this alive.

This is really good, I think anchored by Rossi's performance, and the supporting cast. We also get a streamlined, well-paced story, which is important in these kinds of films where we don't have all the facts right away, and the narrative reveals things as it unfolds. A movie like that can get bogged down easily, or leave too much for the end where we end up needing to put on eye protection with all the loose ends flying together. There's almost a bit of the 90s indie crime flick here, from that pre- to slightly post-Pulp Fiction period where distributors were gobbling up as many of these kinds of films as they could get to cash in on the Pulp Fiction success, but they weren't Pulp Fiction rip-offs or heavily influenced by it yet. Not as gritty or dark as a Bad Lieutenant, but something my friends and I would've discovered around the same time and really enjoyed. With that in mind, especially if you can get this free on Tubi, it's worth checking out.

This is our second Theo Rossi film, the other being the Bruce Willis flick Vendetta. Unlike that one, which had Rossi as a great baddie juxtaposed with Clive Stanton as a one-note, grimacing, bearded white guy hero, this one puts Rossi in the lead and leans on him, which was a great move. He starts the film trying to talk his way into an underground poker game, which makes us think he's some kind of down-on-his-luck hustler character, but once he gets inside and announces he's a bounty hunter and starts shooting up the place, we get the full sense of him as a take-charge kind of hero. What's great about Rossi, is he could be equally believable in either role, he's that talented an actor, and that versatility gives a lot of depth to his performances. I was looking through his IMDb bio, and he has a few others that I could do here, so I may make them happen in the future. Either way, I'm always a fan of his stuff, and this one was another great performance.

We last saw the great Kim Coates back in 2019 when I did Goon, not long after I came back from that unplanned 4+ year hiatus. There he was playing a hockey coach, while here he was the shifty, don't-know-if-you-can-trust-him owner of the bounty hunter firm Rossi works at. It seems like whatever he's doing, whenever there's Kim Coates, there's always fun, and while this is a smaller role here, he definitely is fun, and that helps underpin his interactions with Rossi. This is only his 10th film on the site, and even though we last saw him 4 years ago, his last appearance before that was 2013, so this is only twice in ten years. I think part of that comes from the amount of roles he does that don't overlap with the kinds of things we do here at the DTVC, but like Rossi, I do see some others on his IMDb bio that look good for us, so we should see him more in the future.

And then we have Dermot Mulroney. This is now his third time on the site, after also being on the podcast three times already too, the other two being the Dolph flick Section 8, where he has a dark Grecian Formula mustache over a gray beard, and then The Courier, which was covered with Will from the Exploding Helicopter when he was on the pod to talk about Olga Kurylenko. He just had another new movie come out, Ruthless, directed by Art Camacho, which makes 9 feature films and two TV series in 2023. That's verging on Eric Roberts territory, and maybe he's headed in that direction. As this movie shows, the more Dermot Mulroney the better, so I'm all in favor of him pumping out as much stuff as possible. He was great here as the police chief who may or may not be corrupt, may or may not want to give Rossi a hand, may or may not want to help him get back on the force. We kind of know where it's going, because it's the only place it can go, but with someone like Mulroney, we enjoy the ride.

Finally, this film is a Tubi original, which, one would think, would mean this would always be up on Tubi, which it is now, but when I did the podcast episode with Ty back in October, that wasn't so certain, as it was listed as coming down within the week. I was so worried I grabbed the images right away--which came in handy when I was short on time this week and needed a movie, this one was ready to go. Eventually they put it back up, but what does that mean? Why would a Tubi original come down from Tubi? I know the response from the people who push physical media out there, but the thing is, one, I don't think this is available on DVD, and two, we rent a two-bedroom apartment, I don't have room for tons of DVDs, so something like this needs to be streamed, and I take for granted that if Tubi is the distributor that they'll always keep it up. We're seeing this in other places. Disney+ takes stuff down, like Spectacular Spider-man, though at least with that, you can buy it on Amazon. I looked at the IMDb page for this, and I'll be the 7th critic review, so in 100 years when people are looking for something to watch, they may stumble upon the IMDb page, see my review, and think "I'd like to watch this," only by then it'll have disappeared, though maybe someone will have a copy on a physical harddrive that'll be discovered, the way a copy of The Passion of Joan of Arc was found in the estate of an Italian priest who used to screen it for mental health patients.

And with that, let's wrap this up. At least right now you can get this on Tubi here in the States, and it looks like you can rent it on Amazon too. This is a fun 90 minutes that does its job, something you can't exactly say for every movie nowadays. And if you haven't yet, you can check out episode 135 of the podcast where Ty and I covered this and the Tony Schiena film The Weapon.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26570494

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Outlaw Johnny Black (2023)

This is one I'd been waiting for for some time, once I saw it listed on Michael Jai White's IMDb bio. After how great Black Dynamite was, 14 years was plenty of time in between to get his next effort, and I was excited by the fact that he was going to take a stab at Blaxploitation Westerns. When my cable company offered their $1 weekend rental deal again, I figured that was the perfect time to make this happen.

Outlaw Johnny Black has White as the eponymous hero. He's searching for a guy named Clayton (Chris Browning) who killed his father, but in the process gets mixed up with the law, and finds himself pretending to be a preacher in the small town of Hope Springs. Beyond his own subterfuge, an evil land baron (Barry Bostwick) is trying to take the old preacher's property through violent and corrupt means, meaning someone with Black's skills are needed. A woman named Jessie Lee (Anika Noni Rose) has been mobilizing the townspeople against Bostwick, and while she and Black don't get along initially, she realizes he's the man to help them. But will his past catch up with him before he has the chance?

This is really good. It's 2 hours and 10 minutes long, which is longer than my usual 90 minutes, but I could tell that White, Byron Minns, and company really wanted to go bigger with this, which is something I could appreciate, and most importantly, I think they pulled it off. This is bigger than just a DTV actioner, and bigger than just White and co. dipping their feet into making Westerns, and I think it worked. Like Black Dynamite, the comedy is there, as is the send up to Westerns, but then also the proper tribute to the Blaxploitation Western, a sub-genre that I wasn't as familiar with myself until I started digging more into Fred Williamson's career--Johnny Black's outfit is a tribute to Williamson's in Joshua. White delivers as the hero the way he does in Black Dynamite as well, giving us a larger than life presence but also excels in his comedic timing; and then the rest of the cast does their thing as well, from Minns as the preacher whose name White steals, Rose as the leading lady, our baddies in Bostwick and Browning, and then like Black Dynamite, a whole host of supporting names like Kym Whitley, Tommy Davidson, Jill Scott, and Randy Couture, among many others. This is the movie I was looking for from White as a next film after Black Dynamite.

This is only Michael Jai White's third film of the year, which isn't great considering the number of stuff he has out there, and that was a big reason why I wanted to get this one as soon as I could. When I had Jon Cross of After Movie Diner on the DTVC Extra podcast to talk about Bloodfist III and IV, we talked about my top 5 DTV actions stars of all time, which are 1. Dolph, 2. Williamson, tied for 3. Wilson and Rothrock, and 5. Gary Daniels. He asked me if Wilson could ever move up that list, and I didn't think so, that if any change could happen in the top 5, it might be as we go on with Williamson that he may pass Dolph. With that in mind, in looking at Michael Jai White, he's someone who could crack the top 5 and maybe go higher, based on stuff like this. I mean no one other than Williamson has ever made anything like this before, let alone Black Dynamite as well, and that has to weigh heavily into a ranking like that. If you go 6-10, I have 6. Lamas, 7. Seagal, 8. Dudikoff, and 9. Van Damme. I used to have Adkins at 10, but I think at the very least White is tied with him now, if not passing him into the 10th spot with a film like this. White is not only a dynamic martial artist, but he's a dynamic overall talent, and he shows us that again in this film.

With a Western featuring black and white characters, the issue of the N word is inevitably going to come into play. If you look at Williamson's Westerns in the 70s, white characters threw the word around constantly, to the point one of his movies even had it in the title. Then you had Tarantino's Hateful Eight, where Samuel L. Jackson's character gets called it a lot. White and Minns in writing the script went a different route here by using a word that's similar but not the same. It's still close enough that I feel awkward using it in this review, but I liked that they did that. There's a debate around using that word in an artistic sense. Who should be able to say it or write it, especially in Tarantino's case as a white person writing dialog for white characters that are saying it. White and Minns don't even mess with it, but they do joke about it, like when a baddie goes to call Johnny Black a "Ni--" and gets kicked in the face, and while he's on the ground says "I was going to say nincompoop!" I think it just gets back to the fact that White and Minns and the rest of the people making this and Black Dynamite are working on a different level.

People have sometimes complained that I'm too hung up on runtimes, which is fair, even though it's pretty consistent among the DTV/low-budget movie blogging/podcasting community that anything over 90 minutes is borrowed time, which means as a filmmaker you need to make more out of that time to make it worth it for us. More often than not, those 100-minute plus films don't manage to make that extra time worth it, and for Michael Jai White, Byron Minns, and co. to go in planning to make something over two hours, it was a gamble, but one that paid off. I'd say around the 45-minute mark the film loses steam a bit, but for the most part it manages to stay entertaining throughout. Part of it is the writing, and Jon Cross made a point about this when he was on the DTVC Extra podcast I mentioned above: humans can only laugh or be scared so much before it comes too much. What White and Minns do to mitigate that is they give us enough that's entertaining without while giving us a break from laughing or feeling tense, which, combined with a story that progresses along pretty well except for that one slower patch I mentioned. The thing is though, it is a gamble, and it requires great material. This movie is the exception that proves our 90-minute rule, but it is the rare film that's worth that extra time.

Finally, Fred Williamson has a cameo at the end along with Jim Brown and Michael Madsen. The issue then is that make this Williamson's 30th film on the site! I considered holding off on this one so we could get a better film for his 30th post, one that has him in it more, but I thought that would be too ridiculous, especially when I had this film watched and was planning to review it in this slot, to make it sit for a month or more while I try to get another Williamson post in? The other thing though is, while he only has this one cameo, he has it because the film is paying tribute to his influence and contributions to the world of cinema, so I think that combined with the fact that I can just make his 31st movie be the one where he gets the full accolades, made the decision to just go ahead with this review an easy one. It's a really great scene, where he and Jim Brown are watching everyone from a balcony at the end, and they recognize the job every did making the movie and upholding the traditions they started in the 70s.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can rent this on Amazon Prime or your cable company here in the States. From a money standpoint, you have to decide what your budget is, but I think renting something like this has the added benefit of showing the studios that a movie like this can sell, it doesn't need to be all comic book heroes or Bruce Willis to draw us in.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8667828

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Warriors of the Wasteland aka New Barbarians aka I nuovi barbari (1983)

In the interests of getting more Fred Williamson on the site, this is one that had been in my Tubi queue for a while, so I figured why not finally make it happen. Of course, when I went to watch it, Tubi had taken it down, so I went to Plex--which it turned out was a bad idea, because Amazon had it on Prime, which I'm already paying for. Anyway, in addition to us, Ty and Brett from Comeuppance have covered this as well.

New Barbarians takes place in 2019, after the nuclear holocaust, as civilization is picking up the pieces. A gang of ruthless gay men called the Templars (led by George Eastman and Ennio Giralami as Thomas Moore) is roaming the countryside, wiping out any last vestiges of humanity. When they try to kill Alma (Anna Kanakis), fortunately our hero Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete as Timothy Brent) is there to save the day. But now they want to kill him too, so they track him and his new ladyfriend down, only to have Nadir (Williamson), an archer with exploding arrows, save the day again. After finding a large group of extras from the "Life in a Northern Town" video living nearby, they know it'll only be a matter of time before the Templars come to wipe them out too. Will our heroes be enough to stop them?

This is a ton of fun in every way you'd want a movie like this to be a ton of fun. Fun Williamson. Fun cars. Fun outfits. Fun characters. The fact that the baddies are gay puts an interesting spin on it. When our hero gets his prerequisite torture scene, it includes the main baddie Eastman... well, violating him. I wasn't a fan of it happening to Rothrock in Lady Dragon, and I'm not a fan of it here, but they did it, and our hero gets his revenge by jamming a large drill that was built into his car through the back of Eastman's car and into is... well, you know. All of it adds to the overall manic nature of the film though, where shit just seems to be thrown together in this bouillabaisse that in the end all works for a fun time. Why is there an Italian version of Dennis the Menace who lives alone and works on cars for people like Scorpion? Who knows, but it's great, and when he joins Scorpion and Williamson in the final battle against the Templars, it's just as great. The other thing is the Italian touch to this. Enzo Castellari directing, Fausto Zuccoli as DP, and Claudio Simonetti's score give this a feel you don't get in your usual exploitation flick; plus all the great Italian names, like Giancarlo Prete aka Timothy Brent, Ennio Giralami aka Thomas Moore, Anna Kanakis, and Venantino Venantini as the leader of the "Life in a Northern Town" extras. This is the fun Italian post-apocalyptic flick you came for. 

The Hammer is one movie away from the 30 Club, a club he should've been in a long time ago. We've said I don't know how many times that we're going to make an effort to get more of his films on the site, and here we are in December with his last post having been in May. Ugh, what happened? What usually ends up happening, I lose track of him and he goes months without a review. Anyway, we're here now, and this is some great Williamson. He's the cool, slick Williamson you want, even in that ridiculous post-apocalyptic Italian movie get-up. All of it is too fantastic for words. I'm trying to think what a good 30th post would be for him. VFW is one I can get with AMC+--and we're looking to get rid of that streaming service, so probably sooner rather than later for that. He has some great ones I'd like to do from the 80s and 90s, but the availability is limited. There's also Vegas Vampires, which is one he's directed that I'm having trouble finding, but has a great cast. Whatever I decide, I should make sure I just do it and not go another six months before I do a Williamson post again.

The 80s Italian low-budget post-apocalyptic film is a unique piece of cinematic history. The outfits, the props, the actors and the extras, combined with Italian cinematic tradition, gives us something that the people who invented moving pictures couldn't have fathomed, but that we as film watchers are lucky to have. In terms of where this film sits in that tradition, for the most part it not only works, but might be one of the finest of the craft. Where I find fault is with Anna Kanakis's heroine character. They went through all this trouble to give her a sexy, futuristic outfit, but they never really show her full body. Most of the time we only see her from the waist up, and more frequently only the neck up. I'm wondering if there was something wrong with the outfit, because it almost seemed on purpose. Maybe there was a wardrobe malfunction. They definitely didn't do that with Giancarlo Prete's see-through plastic top during the end fight with the baddies, we got that in all its glory.

You can see I got something of an action shot down below there. This is made possible by Prime's desktop browser streaming interface. As far as I can tell, only they and Netflix use one where you can get a clean screen after pausing. For example with Tubi, the time bar and film's title stay on the screen after you pause. Most are like Tubi's unfortunately, which means I need to hit "PrntScrn" while the video is playing, and hope I got it, something that can really limit my options for screenshots. I originally caught this on Plex, and when I went to grab images from that it was a mess. First off, their slider box doesn't give a small box preview of what the later part you're hovering over will be, so I need to remember the times I want for my screens and hope I'm accurate; but then with how their advertisements load, the desktop player constantly crashes. Fortunately I had Prime as an option for this, making my life easier. 

Finally, let's go back to the above image. Is that a fanny pack Scorpion is wearing? I mean there's definitely a cod piece there, but does it also function as a fanny pack? A lot of these futuristic things have multiple functions, so you never know. I was thinking the fanny pack didn't exist back then, but I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it said as early as 1954 a leather version was marketed to skiers. Considering that looks like leather, could the filmmakers have found one for sale at an Italian ski resort in the Alps and just threw it in as part of the costume? Or maybe one of them was a skier and already had it? And again, I wouldn't call it a fanny pack, but rather a "cod piece pack," as it's part of the whole package... like what I did there? Also am I burying the lead on the futuristic golf carts in this shot? I can't say what I would do if I survived the nuclear holocaust, but getting around via golf cart doesn't seem like the worst idea. Something to keep in mind at least, God forbid I ever find myself in that situation.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Prime is probably the way to go. You'll see this listed both as Warriors of the Wasteland and New Barbarians--sometimes within the same streaming service! This is a fun time, and worth checking out, though the main character's prerequisite torture scene involving rape may make it tough for some audiences.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084424

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.