Scorned (1993)

This is one Jon Cross from After Movie Diner and the PM Entertainment Podcast and I will be covering on an upcoming episode of the DTVC Podcast, which makes this one unique, because I usually do the podcast episode first and the blog post after, but I wanted to get some Shannon Tweed up this month and this felt perfect for that post too, so I figured why wait?

Scorned features Tweed as a woman married to a man who's trying to move up the corporate ladder (Dan McVicar), and in so doing, has her sleep with a potential client. When Andrew Stevens swoops in and gets the position her husband was supposed to receive, said husband does the most sensible thing in that situation and kills himself in his old office before he has to vacate it for Stevens. As if this isn't bad enough, Tweed discovers the company won't pay out his life insurance. At this point she has nothing to lose, so she takes on a fake identity as a high school tutor, and gets herself moved into Stevens's family's pool house, where she seduces him, his son, and his wife, while trying to make their lives hell as payback. Will Stevens find out what she's doing in time to stop her?

This is a classic of the Erotic Thriller genre for a reason. You have iconic images like the one above, it hits all the Erotic Thriller bingo card spots, but then you have Tweed turning in this chilling, yet sympathetic performance, a supporting performance from Kim Morgan Greene as Stevens's wife that was better than it had any business needing to be, and then Stevens as a director who understands what makes these movies work, and is able to deliver them at a higher level than most. It has some plot holes, which I won't discuss to avoid giving anything away, but they leave you thinking "why didn't they see that before?" There are also some stunt moments that look a little silly--though we won't put the blame on our man Cole S. McKay as stunt coordinator for that, I don't know if he had the freedom he'd have on a PM flick, because I don't remember a PM flick featuring two dummies falling down the stairs meant to represent two women falling down the stairs together. Overall though, as I said, this is a classic. If you haven't seen it before, or you haven't seen it in a while, definitely try to track down a copy and check it out!

With this movie Shannon Tweed moves into a tie with Kathleen Kinmont for third all-time among women at the DTVC with 10 films, one behind Julie Strain's 11, and way behind Cynthia Rothrock at 47. Obviously we'd like to get that number up, but when you go through her IMDb bio, a lot of the stuff she's done isn't available anywhere. The streaming world is still coming around to embracing the 90s Erotic Thriller, but also some of those films she made then had very limited releases, or only a cable TV release, and now they're possibly gone to us forever. Even this one, something considered a classic in the genre, isn't on any streamers and isn't easy to track down as a physical copy. It's a world that deserves to be seen, so hopefully as many of these movies can be made as available as possible. Back to this one, out of all of the films of hers we've covered so far, this is probably her best performance, and the film itself might be best of those too. She goes for it in every way, and gives us a femme fatale that we almost root for. Out of the ten, I think this is only the second Erotic Thriller of hers we've done, so I think as we get deeper in on this genre, it'll be fun to see more of these, because she's one of, if not the Queen of Erotic Thrillers, and a big part of why that genre was so popular in the 90s.

Another part of that was Andrew Stevens, who directed, produced, and starred in this. While the Queen of the Erotic Thriller could be up for debate (though Jon and I had it between Tweed and Joan Severance), it feels like Stevens is the King. In the We Kill for Love documentary, he talked about how he was transitioning from actor to producer, but understood that as an actor he still had enough of a name to get funding for a movie and sell it better to distributors. What that means, at least for me, is that as an actor he wanted Tweed and their other co-stars to have more of the spotlight, which helps make this a unique entry, because it's told from Tweed's standpoint, when most of these are told from the male lead's point of view. Also, Stevens and his DP, Christian Sebaldt, crafted some really inspired shots, like the one above that looks like something out of a De Palma film. He knew how to make an Erotic Thriller, and the genre wouldn't have been what it was without him, which really comes through in this one.

As I mentioned above, we do have another Hall of Famer in this, stunt coordinator Cole S. McKay, who does stunt coordinating on a lot of Erotic Thrillers. I don't know if I'd say it's his hallmark, but we do get someone thrown through a window. It is interesting that the film decided to go with the dummies falling down the stairs instead of hiring two stuntwomen to do it, and maybe it's safer that way, but beyond PM, I've seen stuntmen fall down the stairs in other Erotic Thrillers McKay was stunt coordinator on, so I wonder if it was a budget and safety thing here. Watching all of these in the 90s when they were new, I had no idea who Cole S. McKay was, but we do take for granted that stunts should look a certain way, without considering who's doing them and what kinds of risks are involved. It's fun now since I've been doing this site and I know who he is to go back and watch these, and admire his work in making it all look realistic--or not if he needs to go with dummies instead of actors.

Finally, what do we have here? A Red Sox cap? How do you not love that? Maybe if you're a Yankees fan, but I can at least appreciate a Yankees cap in the wild too (though to be fair, I didn't mention that Traci Lords's character was wearing an oversized Yankees shirt to bed in the Intent to Kill review--must've slipped my mind!). The team was pretty rough at that period, I couldn't have imagined them not only winning four World Series in the 2000s and 2010s, but also that the ownership group that brought those World Series would be so disliked by Red Sox fans after--me included--because they decided to stop spending and are now treating the team like "hey, aren't you happy we've won four?" Yes, it's been 30 years since that hat was shot in this movie, but it would only be a short 11 years between that and 2004, when the Red Sox broke the curse, which to me that 11 years felt much longer than the 20 years since. With baseball season starting, I'll still be rooting for my Red Sox, even if the owners don't care as much about spending to win as they used to.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is not an easy find, but if you can find it, it's worth checking out. I believe there are some used VHS and DVDs out there, so as long as the dealers aren't gouging you'll be good. And keep an eye out for that podcast episode later this month!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111093/

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Intent to Kill (1992)

For this month's PM flick, I thought I'd do the last of the three early 90s PM flicks Traci Lords did that I needed to review. In addition to us, this is a Superfecta movie, because Christ the Brain at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, and Mitch at the Video Vacuum have all covered this; plus Jon Cross at the PM podcast did an episode on this as well.

Intent to Kill has Traci Lords as a cop on the edge. Her chief and mentor (Yaphet Kotto) wants her to be safe, so he takes her off the assignment she had to take down a Colombian drug cartel member (Angelo Tiffe), only to have her find more trouble elsewhere. Her live-in boyfriend (Scott Patterson) is a deez, dem, and doze Italian American from North Jersey who does his hair and slaps on cologne to get the paper so he can flirt with the neighbor who likes to ride her bike in her dental floss bikini. As you can imagine, she catches her beau in their waterbed with a lady he met at the bar, then proceeds to go Mitchell on his antique car he loves so much. Now it's on her to stop this Colombian and his cronies, only she not only has to deal with them, but her jealous ex that's trying to sabotage her career.

This one is a lot of fun. It's everything you want in a PM flick: a strong lead, great car flips and stunts, fun supporting stars, and this crazy PM world where danger is everywhere and our hero needs to shoot her way out of it at a moment's notice. At the same time, there's a lot you wouldn't expect about Lords's character being a woman in a man's world, and how even the people that want to help her succeed, like Yaphet Kotto's character, still impede her progress. The end was a little bit off for me, because Lords's character gets herself in a bad situation that wasn't consistent with how she was in the rest of the film, but I also understood it was their way of getting rid of Scott Patterson's character, and considering how he was, in PM world he had to go--hey hey, ho ho, Scott Patterson's got to go! You either like PM flicks or you don't, and if you do, this is right up your alley.

These three Traci Lords early 90s PM flicks all feature great performances by her, which is kind of crazy when you consider how young she was acting opposite all of these older guys. It's not just that she holds her own, it's believable that she would be the best and most capable among the older male characters she's acting opposite of. Looking at her career, in '95 she was starting to get parts on network TV shows like Melrose Place and Roseanne, and I think there was a sense that a bigger breakout was coming, but it never quite came, and she ended up coming back to PM to close out the decade with two more films. This is now her sixth film on the site, which doesn't sound like a lot, but there's a five-way tie for sixth most all-time among women on the site at seven movies, so she's one away from that, and we have another film coming this month with her in it, so she'll be hitting that in a couple weeks. The question from there is, is the Hall of Fame in sight? Everyone in the top five all-time for women on the site are in, and the bottom of that list is nine films, so I'd say it's in sight.

We're now at 56 PM films at the DTVC, which sounds like a lot, but we have another 50 or so to go to have them all, and if we're doing one a month, we won't get there until 2030, so we still have some work to do. This has a lot of what you want in a PM flick. For example, when Lords catches Patterson in bed with another woman, the bed is a waterbed. Like when Patterson runs after Lords, the woman he's sleeping with is bobbing up in down due to the waterbed waves. That alone is amazing, but then he chases Lords out to his car, where she proceeds to do a Mitchell with the woman's panties and the gas tank of his car, lighting the panties and blowing up the back of the car. How amazing is that? Only PM would think to do the waterbed/Mitchell combo like that, because they're probably the only ones who could pull it off. I also mentioned above the DP duo of Blakey and Pepin. We get these beautiful shots of the LA streets at night from Blakey, and then Pepin gives us these fantastic, clean looks of the action moments. Finally, we have the stunt team of Red Horton and "Broadway" Joe Murphy working on this one, combined with Scott McAboy as second unit director. It gives you that quality of PM you want when you fire one of these up and want to escape for 90 minutes.

What do you do with Yaphet Kotto in this? He's the police chief, he sits in his office and tells Lords she's causing so much trouble it's driving him to drink bourbon in the afternoon, yet when he sees her at the bar after she catches Patterson in bed with another woman, he proceeds to drink from her Bud Dry sitting in front of her, so maybe his character has more of a drinking problem beyond Lords's antics. He never leaves the station except for that visit to the bar, the rest of the time he's either in his office or out among the desks that the rest of the detectives are sitting at. We have seen Kotto before, in the Busey film Eye of the Tiger, and it's weird seeing him in stuff like this, but in looking at his IMDb bio, it's closer to 50-50 on the low-budget DTV stuff than you'd expect from someone who had the career he had. That then begs the question, is the Hall of Fame a possibility for Kotto? It looks like it's more in play than I expected.

Finally, going back to the cinematography, and just looking at PM films overall, they did more than just set their films in LA and shoot in LA, they made LA a character in their films the way we think of New York City as a character in movies. And I'm not talking about LA as a novelty location like in Beverly Hills Cop, or suburban LA like in License to Drive, but like really making the city of LA a character, using more local locations, and not being afraid to be specific. Like when Lords is following a lady of the night who was connected with one of the Colombians, we saw places like Frederick's of Hollywood, but in the context of a gritty Hollywood in the middle of the night. I think a lot of filmmakers and studios were afraid to give people that LA, thinking the audience wouldn't get it, but it feels like the PM folks didn't care, which I think is great. And now 30 years later it's a time capsule that we can go back and watch.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Fawesome, or there's a decent copy on YouTube too, which I added to my PM playlist on my YouTube channel. This is another good one from PM and Traci Lords, worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107222/

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Checkmate (2025)

This is probably the perfect movie for a review that was supposed to be the last one of February, but technically is the first one in March. It also has Lorenzo Lamas in it, someone we haven't seen in a long time, so that was a selling point too. I don't usually do the procedural serial killer film, but based on those other factors I thought I'd give this one a try.

Checkmate has Joyce Glenn as Brittany, a police detective in Louisville who's been put on ice after she shoots a hostage in a stand-off. Her psychiatrist (Sarah Pribis) has to clear her to go back to active duty, but isn't sure she wants to do that yet, so office work it is. But when a killer is using a chess theme to toy with the police department, the fact that Brittany knows a lot about chess has Captain Sommers (Lamas) make the tough call to put her on the case. And she's coming up with answers, but when a rich kid ends up as one of the victims, the weight of the state government is coming down on her, and she only has 48 hours to solve the crime before the feds are called in. When the ME gives her a clue to who the killer might be, can she figure it out before it's too late?

Again, this isn't exactly a genre I watch a lot, so some of the issues I have with it might be things that people who like these movies more don't see as a problem, but overall I thought this was a pretty good deal. The main issue for me was the story got repetitive. Person murdered, crime scene moment, Brittany finds a new clue, Lamas tells her she only has X amount of time to solve this, problem with boyfriend or father, wake up from a nightmare, repeat. For me, to get to the 90-minute mark, I could've done with less of that, and more of a few different areas. One, I think more between Brittany and her boyfriend Brad (Andra Fuller) could've replaced one of the murders. Early on we get the sense that he's kind of a creep who can't get the hint that she's not interested, which we find out later isn't the case. And developing that relationship more would've developed Brittany's character more as well. Two, Brittany seems to be the only woman working in their department. If that wasn't meant to be important, we needed at least one other woman, but if it was, that could've been explored more too. Finally, this was shot and takes place in Louisville. That's a unique location, all anyone knows about Louisville is the Kentucky Derby and baseball bats, but the movie didn't lean into that uniqueness at all. It could've been set in Anywheresville, USA as a result. All that said, this does what you want a movie like this to do, Glenn was great in the lead, I liked Dorien Wilson as the father, and Lamas was solid and we got a good amount of him--I don't want to spoil much more beyond that though. I think if you like serial killer procedurals, this one is worth checking out.

Normally we start with the film's Hall of Famer, but I wanted to discuss Joyce Glenn here first because she's the star. The only thing I want from a lead character in a movie is to be able to root for them and care if they succeed, and she gives us that. I think it's particularly important here, because there's this added element of the case is about to be taken away from her, so if we don't care enough, we'd be like "fine, let the Feds handle it." This is one of the things I like about these Tubi Originals, they give an actor like Glenn who's been doing more supporting stuff a chance to lead a film, and while you need to have a thick skin with this kind of thing (some of the reviews of these are harsh, to say the least), if you take it and run with it like Glenn did, hopefully other people making movies will see it and cast you as the lead in their projects as well. I don't know that a movie like this could have a sequel, because you can't have it be "Checkmate 2" and go back to that chess well again, but can it be a sequel if it's not called "Checkmate 2?"; but I think another serial killer procedural with Glenn at the lead and Lamas and Wilson back would be worth the watch.

We last saw Lorenzo Lamas back in October of 2021 when we covered Atomic Eden, where Lamas had a cameo at the end, so he got the tag. And I think that's why I hadn't done another Lamas film in so long, because I was afraid they were going to be like that with scant Lamas, and at least Atomic Eden had more names to discuss. I took a chance on this one though, and I'd say we were rewarded. He has a solid supporting roles as a good leader who cares about Glenn's character, believes in her, and wants her to succeed. This could've done that the other way and had him be a jerk who's opposing her, but doing it the way they did allowed Glenn to lean on Lamas's experience in the scenes they had together, which gave the movie a more organic feel overall. (The same thing is true of her scenes with Dorien Wilson, so I wonder if the filmmakers decided to go with more of that, than her scenes with Andra Fuller's Brad, because there was more chemistry between Glenn and Wilson or Lamas.) This is now 36 movies for Lamas, so the 40 Club is something we should aim for with him. I have him seventh all-time among DTV stars, but with Adkins at 8 close on his heels, we should get him to 40 before Adkins hits that mark at least. I see our old friends The Asylum have another Tubi Original with Lamas in it, President Down, with Gail O'Grady as the Commander in Chief, so we'll have to do that at some point. Also, based on how he looks here, could he play the lead in a Jim Jarmusch biopic?

I want to get into the people involved in creating this a bit, because I think they're worth highlighting as well. First we have director Jamal Hill, who grew up here in Philly. He has a fair amount of directing credits to his name, including Deuces with Larenz Tate and Meagan Good, and that shows in the film we get. It's competently made, even if it was a genre film made on a budget, and in some ways it's the genre film made on a budget that needs a solid professional director to carry it home, because it's easier to miss things when everything's tight and done on the quick. Our DP was Tyler Eckels, whose work I'd also seen in 72 Hours, a Phillippe Phactory film Ty and I covered on episode 224 of the DTVC Podcast. Unlike that film, which wasn't as well-lit or the color was turned down in post-production, here we get some nice shots, especially with the Louisville skyline in the background; and overall this movie looked nice, which we don't often see nowadays, everything's usually darker and more washed out, so that was refreshing too. I did think the screen POV shots like the one below weren't as effective, but that might've just been me. And last but not least, the screenwriter was Patrice Escoto, and I think she does a solid enough job on this. I wondered though how much of her script she expected to be in the final product. There were some lines that felt more like placeholders that look good in an initial draft, but when spoken out loud don't sound as natural. Also the story gives away the game in the opening scene, which may not have been as obvious in writing it, but seeing it live I think they could've used a couple more red herrings. The story does a good job in making Brittany a compelling lead though, and Glenn then takes that and fleshes it out, which is the most important thing. 

Finally, as I've mentioned a couple times, this took place in Louisville, Kentucky. I've been to the state of Kentucky before, but not Louisville. I bring this up because I think for most people, outside of the Kentucky Derby, we don't know much about Louisville, and it felt like this movie missed a trick in not giving us a more complete view of the city. I browsed Google Maps a bit, and saw a place called Burger Boy that looked like a nice deal, and even if they couldn't shoot there, could Brad have brought food from there when he and Brittany had an eat-in date?--instead of the "Thai" he said he was bringing, that ended up just being a salad. I also saw a coffee shop called Blak Coffee that looked nice, and even if you couldn't have shot there, maybe Brittany brings her dad a coffee from there when they meet at the park. It doesn't have to be like Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, but Louisville isn't New York or Chicago, if a film features it we need more to make it its own character in the story--or at least I'd like more.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As a Tubi Original, it's available on Tubi, so you can stream it for free, you just have to deal with commercials (which, there's one for a credit card collaboration with a retail chain that has this song that goes "wake up call," but it sounds like "wake up, Carl," so that gets in my head and my cats are wondering "who's Carl?" as I'm singing it to them). I think this is worth checking out on there, especially if you're a fan of these kinds of procedurals, and hopefully we'll get more like this from the people involved in the future.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt35675045

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.