Intimate Stranger (1991)

This was one I watched on cable when it first came out, because my friend's parents had a descrambler box, so we could watch anything on Showtime, HBO, or even the pay-per-view channel. I'd always wanted to review it for the site, but when it first appeared on Tubi, I missed my chance. When it came back recently, I made sure I didn't miss it again.

Intimate Stranger has Debbie Harry (yes, that Debbie Harry, only under the name "Deborah") as an aspiring singer who makes money as a phone sex operator. When a man calls (Tim Thomerson) and claims to be killing a woman while he's on the phone with her, she goes to the police, only to have the detectives laugh at her. Luckily James Russo was listening, and as he's trying to make detective, he sees this situation as his opportunity. So he borrows a bunch of call tracing equipment and had his buddy in the department run some credit checks on the caller's credit card. As they get closer, will they be able to stop someone when they don't even know what he looks like? But can he kill her when he doesn't know what she looks like either? 

Beyond the fact that this was a fun Erotic Thriller, my biggest takeaway was that 12-year-old me shouldn't have been watching this. It's explicitly sexual and really dark. It's possible too that I didn't see the beginning where Thomerson kills a woman he has tied down to a bed, while telling Debbie Harry over the phone that "my inside stuff comes out, and her inside stuff comes out. My inside stuff is white, her inside stuff is red." The thing that did make more sense to me at the time than it did now, was Debbie Harry in the lead. I knew her from Blondie, so why wouldn't she be in a cable Erotic Thriller? But now I'm like, I know her from Blondie, why is she in this cable Erotic Thriller? It's a novelty that makes it stand out, and we even get a couple of original songs from her that are only in this film, like her cover of "Piece of My Heart." In addition to that, Thomerson is fantastic as the killer, always love seeing young James Russo in these early 90s films, Paige French was great as Harry's younger sister, and we have nice one-off scene with Tia Carrere. While this is available on Tubi, you should go check it out.

If my friend and I did start this in the middle, the thing that got us to keep watching was Debbie Harry. At the time though I didn't know that this was a novelty, that she really didn't have any other lead roles like this; but because she was in it, it made it much easier to track down 35 years later, I just had to search her name on IMDb. Watching it now, when I'm roughly the same age Harry was when she made this, I see that she was supposed to be playing a younger character, but the maturity of her personality makes that impossible. Like when she's in the police precinct reporting the murder she heard, and the detectives are laughing at her, it doesn't work, because there's no way to not make Harry come off like she's in complete control of that room. In a way though that makes it all the more interesting, because she's such an immense artistic talent that it's there in every thing she does, every scene, like when she's reading Leather Nun, or sitting in a dimly lit bar drinking Wild Turkey, or sticking her cigarette between her toes while she's lying on her couch taking a phone sex call. I can see why she didn't do more of these, because even though it's stylish and fun to watch, the story is a bit all over the place, and it ended up direct-to-Showtime, so I imagine if you're Debbie Harry the juice of these films isn't worth the squeeze. But at least we have this one.

As a 12-year-old I wouldn't have been dissecting why I was drawn to these movies beyond the sex and the hot women, but looking at it now, I can see how it informed some of my tastes later on as I grew up. In addition to Erotic Thrillers, I was watching other Film Noir at that time, like Humphrey Bogart films on The Movie Loft on TV38, and episodes of Miami Vice, which had a lot of Film Noir elements, so my brain was tuned to enjoy stuff like that. Ten years later, as the DVD market exploded in the early 2000s, Erotic Thrillers became more straight-up soft core porn and less stylized Film Noir with a lot of sex in them, but now I could get all five seasons of Miami Vice on DVD, and I could pick up both the more famous Bogart Film Noir films, and get some of the lesser-known ones in DVD bargain bins. I think as a result, I forgot how great the Noirish elements were in these 90s Erotic Thrillers, but coming back to them like I have, especially now that many more of them are available on streaming, I can see the aesthetic that I more subconsciously appreciated back then. I mean, look at that first screen I posted of Harry sitting at the bar, between the light, the composition, the colors, all of it is fantastic, and it's part of why I love these movies so much.

Another reason is all the names we get in addition to the lead. James Russo is someone we see in a lot of modern DTV playing a mob boss or a crooked cop, but there was an earnestness in a young James Russo that I always love, going back to his part in Beverly Hills Cop. I decided to finally tag him, and see that this is only his 4th film on the site, which feels low, but I think part of that is he also did a couple that we covered on the pod which I haven't reviewed yet. That's one less than Tia Carrere, who now only has five films on the site, which also feels low. She's only in this for one scene, but this is the same year Showdown in Little Tokyo and Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man were released, so I think she did okay all things considered. Then we have the great Tim Thomerson, who's making his 17th appearance on the site, and is absolutely scary as the killer in this. There's one scene in particular where he's cutting the crust off a sandwich and eating it while Grace Zabriskie lies dead on the floor next to him, which was chilling. Rounding out the cast, Paige French plays Harry's younger sister. You probably don't remember, but way back in December of 2007 we saw her in Meatballs 4, so it's been almost 19 years; and then we had Mel Johnson Jr., who we all know from Total Recall, playing Harry's neighbor across the hall in her apartment. So while Debbie Harry was the biggest name, we had a lot of other great names in this too.

Finally, look at that double bill on that marquee. First off, I would love to have seen Marked for Death in the theater. As it was, my friends and I rented it as soon as it came out on VHS. It's crazy to think that Seagal's first four or five movies were so big, he was able to live off of that reputation to the tune of another six big screen movies, and roughly 40 DTV films. Here in 1990 when this was shot though, we didn't know we weren't going to get much more great Seagal after this, we thought that ride was going to go on forever. And then with The Krays, I bought that on VHS back in the late 2000s because it has the Kemp brothers from Spandau Ballet in it, but I never got around to watching it, and I have no idea what happened to that copy. The interesting thing is, in 1991, PM Dawn released "Set Adrift Off Memory Bliss," which sampled Spandau Ballet's "True." It was kind of mind-blowing at the time, "True" hadn't been released that long ago, and now it's being sampled in a hip hop song? And the video had Tony Hadley in it, giving it his stamp of approval. 35 years later, it was probably the smart move by Hadley and Spandau Ballet, because "True" has like 300 million more views on YouTube than "Set Adrift Off Memory Bliss."

So, with a thrill in my head and a pill on my tongue, I'd say it's time to wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Tubi here in the States. It's definitely worth it. They may not make movies like this anymore, but they made 'em then, and we're lucky we can have them at our fingertips--until Tubi or whatever streaming service decides to take them down, of course.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104519

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

Kill 'Em All 2 (2024)

This is one we covered on the podcast, along with the first movie, back in episode 199, with guest Sean Malloy of I Must Break This Podcast. The plan was to review it here soon after, but when my wife and I dialed down our Netflix subscription to the ad version, I discovered that many titles, including this one, were now gated and unavailable to subscribers at our tier. So that was it, if I couldn't stream it I couldn't get screens, until recently, when Netflix released all of these movies, giving me this opportunity. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof Action has covered this as well.

Kill 'Em All 2 picks up some years after part one left off. Phillip (Van Damme) and his daughter Vanessa (Jacqueline Fernandez) are living in Italy, having a relaxing time, when the brother of the guy he killed in the first one (Andrei Lenart) finds them and tries to exact revenge. Unable to take them on alone, Phillip and Vanessa go back to his extended family for help. It'll take everything they have to take this baddie down, and eventually, kill 'em all.

There are two places we should go with this. First, why do we have this film, especially 7 years later? No one was clamoring for a Kill 'Em All 2, and I don't remember leaving Kill 'Em All thinking this is setting up for a sequel. And it isn't like this was made as something else and repackaged as Kill 'Em All 2 to capitalize on the name--which, again, why is Kill 'Em All a name we're capitalizing on? This story was a continuation of the previous one, with characters returning to reprise their roles, including Peter Stomare and Maria Conchita Alonso (who, in her case, really only has a scene or two). So that's the first question, why do we even have this? But we do, and I'm writing a review on it, so the second place to go is, is it any good? For that I would say yeah, it's not bad, at least if we're grading it on the 2020s-level DTV action curve. And that's probably where it's found success on Netflix. Their algorithm is great at suggesting things to people, and the people the algorithm suggested it to liked it because it's not bad for a 2020s DTV actioner. So maybe we didn't need this and don't know why we have it, but we do, and while it's not a world-changer, it's not bad either, and worth a look if you're a Van Damme fan and curious about what he's been up to recently.

Speaking of Van Damme, I wonder what he thought when he was approached with the idea of a sequel to Kill 'Em All. I can't imagine that alone sold him, but maybe a week or two shooting on the Adriatic coast of Italy sealed the deal. (I mean, forget the Adriatic coast in Italy, I would take an all expenses paid trip to Des Moines or Boise or Wichita or something like that to write this blog and record the podcast--not to knock any of those places, I'm sure they're lovely, and if the chambers of commerce or tourism bureaus of those cities or any others in America want me to spend a week there and extoll their virtues, just send me an email, I'm just saying compared to the Adriatic coast of Italy, they'd be a bit wanting, which I think is fair.) In terms of recent Van Damme, it's a bit more action than drama, which is nice, but it's also more of the more mature Van Damme, where he's okay that his leading lady is his daughter and not his love interest. I appreciate that, and I think it makes the movie itself less unseemly, which makes any flaws it might have more forgivable. We're now at 36 movies for Van Damme (he has 37 tags because one is the Van Damme Film Fest for post 400), so if we do The Gardiner, with the three other DTV films of his we need to do, the 40 Club is in range. Maybe we make that happen this year?

As we mentioned above, Jacqueline Fernandez plays Van Damme's character's daughter. She's a Bollywood actor who, as far as I can tell, hasn't done anything else outside of that market other than this film. I wonder if that was the idea though, see if people who are fans of her Bollywood work might stream this the ways fans of Van Damme's career would, and with Netflix having a lot of Bollywood films, it would be easy for the algorithm to push this to people who are watching her other movies on there--and again, maybe for her the draw is shooting on the beautiful Adriatic coast of Italy, which, like Van Damme, I don't blame her. She was value-add here though, I thought she and Van Damme were good together as father and daughter, which is what you need if you're selling this to action fans as a fun 90-minute stream. With how successful this film was on Netflix, maybe they'll be looking to cast her in more movies like this, or other Bollywood stars to cash in on this crossover effect. I'm all for it, it gets someone like me digging through Bollywood films on IMDb bios, which puts them on my radar, and maybe it gets Bollywood fans doing the same thing with these DTV actioners.

The DTV sequel is a multifaceted phenomenon that we've seen in its many iterations myriad times on the site since we started in 2007. The one people most think of is the DTV sequel to the theatrical film, which can turn a one-off into a franchise. Van Damme's had two films in particular do this, Kickboxer and Bloodsport, which both had a series of DTV sequels that didn't have him in them at all; he's also done DTV sequels of his own theatrical movies too, like the Universal Soldier films. There's also the sequel-in-name-only sequel, the best example of which is the Bloodfist films, where Corman got the crazy Grinchy idea while shooting a prison film with Don "The Dragon" Wilson to just rename it Bloodfist III, even if the only connection to the first two Bloodfist films was Wilson, and led to five more "sequels" after that. Another one is the Superman/Superman II approach, where, like those two films, you get the actors in one location, and shoot two or three films all at once. A great example of this is the two Randall Scandal Fortress movies. Adjacent to that is what I call the Godfrey Ho sequel, where footage of the first film is spliced with newly shot footage, or other archival footage. Two great examples of that are Detective Malone, the fourth Black Cobra film, which is just footage of the first two cobbled together; and Gladiator Cop aka The Swordsman II, where new footage with James Hong was spliced with old footage of Lorenzo Lamas from The Swordsman. And then we have where this one falls, the who-was-asking-for-this? sequel. Speaking of Lamas, you could make a case that the Snake Eater films fall into this category. Another would be the Relentless films. I mean, I love Leo Rossi, but who was clamoring for two Relentless films, let alone four? Now some of this might dovetail with the sequel-in-name-only sequel, where a studio gets a script and thinks "what if we rework this into a sequel for another movie we already have out there?", because the name recognition, however scant it may be, does exist on some level; on the other hand, it can be a double-edged sword, because people may think they need to find the first one to understand what's happening in the new one. It's always a gamble in the DTV world, and whether to make a film a sequel or not is part of that. I'll finish this long paragraph by mentioning the late Daniel Zirilli, who seemed to always leave the door open for a sequel at the ends of his movies. There weren't many who understood the DTV market better than him, and I think this was another example.

Finally, I thought I'd dedicate a second paragraph to Van Damme, even if this might be stealing the thunder of a potential 40 Club post later this year. The fact that he's closing in on that milestone, on top of the great career he had as a big screen action star, is something unique that I think is worth drawing attention to. I can only think of two other people who would be in this category, Seagal and Spiro Razatos. With Seagal, his big screen career, at least for me, is weighted heavily on his first four films, and I don't know that anything after Under Siege I'd put in an all-time classics category--and for me Under Siege wouldn't go in that category either. Compare that to Van Damme, whose 90s stuff includes Hard Target, Timecop, and Sudden Death. And then compare their DTV/post-big screen careers, where Seagal became more and more of a punchline, while Van Damme has stuff like JCVD and The Bouncer. Razatos is a different one, because he was DTV first, then became the foremost stunt coordinator/second unit director of the 2010s. Also, we're only at 27 movies for Razatos, so we have a ways to go to get him to the 40 Club. It just goes to highlight the great career Van Damme has had, and while it hasn't been without its ups and downs, this DTV second act in particular has been much better than it needed to be, and he deserves a lot of credit for making it that great.

And with that we'll wrap this up. This is currently on Netflix, though it may or may not be gated based on your plan. I think if you can get it as part of your Netflix subscription, it's worth checking out, especially if you're a Van Damme fan. And don't forget to check out the podcast episode Sean and I did on this and the first film, number 199 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6549510

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

Cop Game (1988)

This is one I'd been meaning to do for a long time, and seeing it recommended to me countless times on Tubi, plus considering I needed to get more Bruno Mattei on the site, I decided to finally take the plunge. In addition to us, Ty and Brett and Comeuppance (whose review was quoted on the Severin Blu-ray) and Simon at Explosive Action have covered this as well.

Cop Game is about a special forces unit in 'Nam that's gone rogue and is killing officers during the last days of the war. Military Police detectives Brent Huff and Max Laurel are called in to find out what's happening, and end up getting a lot more than they bargained for. This either goes all the way to the top, or is somewhere in the middle but is causing issues for the top, but either way, it's not good for anyone. As Huff and Laurel go in deeper they don't know who they can trust, and it doesn't help that the Vietnam War they're living in looks like late '80s Manila. Will they get out alive?

This one was a fun time, but I think it may only qualify as a fun time for people who like these kinds of movies. Like do you get a little thrill if you see Mike Monty or Jim Gaines? Then it's for you. Do you like seeing what name Bruno Mattei will be using instead of his own? Then it's for you. ("Bob Hunter" if you're wondering.) Do you like Brent Huff yelling at people and dressing like he just rolled out of bed? Then it's for you. Once you get past those things, I think the most it has to offer is Mattei not caring how much his movie that's supposed to take place in the closing days of the Vietnam War looks like it took place in 1980s Manila, which adds to the charm when you're watching it in 2026. Also, Tubi has the Severin version, which looks really nice, and while I think there's additional charm in finding an old Japanese VHS with hardcoded subs, my eyesight is getting worse as I get older, so a cleaned up version helps. Maybe not the classic for me that Strike Commando or Robowar is, but how many things are? If you're looking for some Mattei fun to help you forget your troubles for 90 minutes, this will do the trick.

We're now at six movies for Mattei, which is low, but in looking at his IMDb bio, I don't know that we'll get him that much higher, I see maybe four or five other movies of his that we could review. That's okay though, in this case it's quality over quantity, so to speak, because he's made some classics, and while this one isn't quite that for me, it's plenty fun enough. Nines are wild for the three other names people would recognize here, as this is the ninth film for Brent Huff, Mike Monty, and Jim Gaines--who is finally getting tagged on here, not sure why it took so long. Obviously Huff is the star, and while on the surface he looks like he cares as much about his role as Mattei does about anachronisms, as you watch the film you can see him bring it, which is what gets this thing over the goal line and makes it enjoyable. Monty I believe has one blink and you'll miss it scene that's been taken from another movie where he's piloting a helicopter, which isn't much, but enough to get him another tag. And then Gaines is one of a character named Ludge's henchmen (that's his character name, "Ludge's Henchman), who we're going to get into in the next paragraph. It's definitely more than Monty--and was actually newly shot footage!--but still a small part. Either way, we'll take any Gaines we can get.

Back to Ludge, he's in the shot above, holding Huff at gunpoint. He's getting his own paragraph here because his name is Donald Wilson, credited as "Don Wilson." That's right, the same name as DTVC Hall of Famer and one of the greatest to ever do it, Don "The Dragon" Wilson. You may remember a controversy that came up a few years ago where we didn't know how many movies Don "The Dragon" Wilson had been in based on his IMDb bio, and we here had reviewed two films, Siege of Firebase Gloria and Saigon Commandos, that we gave tags to "The Dragon" for, only to discover IMDb took those movies off his bio. That led to a delay in getting that Don Wilson into the 40 Club. I believe Will at Exploding Helicopter had a similar issue, because removing these movies lowered Don "The Dragon's" films with exploding helicopters count. Now we have a face to put with the other Don Wilson, who's now listed on IDMb as "Donald Wilson" to avoid confusion. He's a bit of a Philippines movie mainstay, maybe not at the level of Monty or Gaines, but he's done a good number of films with greats like Mattei and Cirio H. Santiago, so we'll definitely see him again. As far as the confusion goes, this is what happens when we wade in the murky waters of 80s DTV films, combined with relying on the murky waters of a crowdsourced site like IMDb, but we wouldn't have it any other way--actually we would, we'd like to have a reliable way to know exactly how many movies each actor has done! 

As much as I've been extolling the virtues of this film, it had its flaws, and not all of them were endearing like Mattei not caring about making the film look more early 70s or more Saigon. First, in our quest to find more Presidential Portraits, Mattei teases us with all these shots of governmental offices, yet sans Presidential Portraits! How am I supposed to take these governmental offices seriously as governmental offices without a Nixon hanging on the wall? And we need a Nixon, we've never gotten one before! One theory is these movies didn't want to platform Nixon based on how bad he was, which is an interesting one. Like in 15 years will movies have Trump portraits? I mean I guess if we go full fascist like it looks like we're going, it might be required to have his portraits in everything by then. Either way, the search for a Nixon continues, with no help from Mattei. He also didn't help our friend Will with any exploding helicopters, but the same way he teased us with multiple governmental offices, he teased us as well with not only multiple helicopters, but helicopters engaged in firefights! Come on Mattei, you didn't have a stock helicopter explosion you could mix in? (And I selfishly wanted that exploding helicopter so I could get my number on his Letterboxd list up.) The only thing we had was the Manila Chinatown, which we'd seen before in Bloodfist, but here we also had the Friendship Arch, plus the novelty that it was supposed to be in Saigon, so I guess you take your wins when you can get them.

Finally, we get a great theme song in this, one of the best parts of the movie actually, but despite that, I had "Head Games" by Foreigner replaced with "Cop Game" in my head. Growing up in the 80s, I know Foreigner is a big deal, but they haven't had a hit in a long time, and I worry that they'll be a victim, if they haven't been already, of this growing trend of kids saying a huge band or artist from the past is "underrated," just because they've never really heard of them. Again, maybe I'm creating a strawman here because I haven't seen anywhere that anyone has said Foreigner is underrated, but they're the kind of act that would be labeled as such by the kids. The worst offender was one my wife told about where a kid said George Michael was underrated. No, he was rated, and a quick check on Wikipedia would tell you that. "Regarded as a pop culture icon, he is one of the best-selling recording artists of all time... [h]e was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. The Radio Academy named him the most played artist on British radio during the period 1984–2004." That's literally in the first paragraph about him, he was never "underrated." For any of you kids reading this, if you have a notion to say "Foreigner is underrated," I also suggest looking them up on Wikipedia, where, again, in the first paragraph, it says: "Foreigner is one of the best-selling bands of all time, with worldwide sales exceeding 80 million records, including 38 million in the US."

And with that, it's probably best that we wrapped this up. If you're into physical media, Severin has a Blu-ray that's on sale as of this writing--and again quotes Ty and Brett's review on the cover. If you want to give it a test run first, the Severin transfer is on Tubi, which maybe doesn't have the charm of hard-coded Japanese subs, but it looks nice. Either way, this is a fun time and worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094909

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

Midnight Warrior (1989)

For our PM review for April, I wanted to get this one in, because I had discussed it recently on an episode of the PM Entertainment Podcast, where I was part of a three-person weave along with host Jon Cross and Chris the Brain from Bulletproof Action. In addition to us, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance have covered this as well.

Midnight Warrior, aka "Mid-night Warr-ee-orr," stars Kevin Bernhardt as Nick Branca, a young Italian-American man who doesn't know how to eat spaghetti properly, but is great at finding provocative footage of news stories that he can sell to local TV stations for good money. One night as he's out chasing one of these stories, he saves a woman from a burning car after a PM-style crash. That makes him a hero, and everyone wants him to cover their stories now. The problem? Branca has found a nice girl from up the street named Angelina Mantucci (Lilly Melgar), and after a date or two he decides he wants to leave the Mid-night Warr-ee-orr life and settle down. His slimy boss Buddy (Bernie Angel) doesn't like the idea of his cash cow calling it quits, so he makes a decision on his own to do something to bring Branca back. But will this decision be his undoing?

We're do you go with this one? Great soundtrack? Check, as I'm writing this, I have the theme song in my head, which was just "Mid-night Warr-ee-orr" repeated as B-roll of LA at night flashed before us. Well-shot? For sure, Joseph Mehri's direction with Rick Pepin's cinematography was great. What about the acting? For the most part it worked--though poor Nonna in the extended family scene having to follow Bernhardt's all over the place card tricks and riffing for Rick Pepin's daughters was a tough spot to put her in. It's the story where we lose it I think. The premise was great, but early on we kind of don't know where it's going, then when we think we do, the rug is pulled out from under us in the kind of bonkers twist only PM could give us. We also get our PM car explosions and pizza joint owners getting shot through plate glass windows that mitigate any of the missteps. The fact that this would be number 2 on the spine if all the PM films were rereleased in original release order is a mark in its favor as well. If you've seen a lot of PM films, and you're looking for one to kill 90 minutes, I think this is a great choice.

This is our 57th PM film on the site, and I'd say if I were ranking them all, I'd put this in the bottom half. It's not horrible, but it's not one of those all-time PM classics either. As Jon, Chris, and I discussed on the PM pod, it seemed like the PM crew were still figuring things out, so this was the film where they learned to walk so later in the 90s they'd be able to drag Jack Scalia on a satellite dish from the back of a bread truck that's speeding down the highway. An interesting note on this, it's Joseph Mehri's 16th directing credit, which puts him one behind Fred Olen Ray for second all-time on the site, after Albert Pyun's 44ish (depending on how we count some of his films that were finished by someone else). That begs an interesting question: could he go into the Hall of Fame again? He and Richard Pepin are both in together as the P and M of PM Entertainment, and I only tag them separately for their directing work--which may not be fair to Pepin, because he did a lot of great cinematography work that he's not tagged for. Because my Hall of Fame is based off of sports halls of fame, I did some digging. The Baseball Hall of Fame says no, you only get inducted once, and that covers everything. The Basketball one on the other hand, does allow for multiple inductions, like in the case where a team was inducted, then allowing for an individual to be inducted as well. An example of this would be Michael Jordan, who was inducted as part of the Dream Team, and as an NBA player. So maybe not only Merhi, but Pepin as well should have their own individual inductions. It's worth considering.

The premise that this film was based on, "if it bleeds, it leads," was something that has only gotten worse in the intervening 30-plus years, not better. If you watch the news here in Philly, you'd think we were all living in RoboCop's Detroit or something; and the cable news phenomenon just exacerbated things even more. In 2016 Trump became the perfect "if it bleeds, it leads" president, where everything he did warranted a "breaking news" chyron at the bottom of the screen. None of the media outlets could handle it in 2020 when Biden was elected, the chyron looked silly when it was "Biden's dog bit one of his secret service detail." I guess that's the same as starting a coup to prevent a lawful transfer of power, tomato-tomahto, right? But this is what's fascinating about DTV films from this time, they may have missed the mark on a lot of Sci-Fi stuff, but they were spot on about a lot of socio-cultural stuff like this. The thing they couldn't have predicted though was OJ, he took what was happening in the late 80s/early 90s, and supercharged it. Bernie Angel would've had Bernhardt coming out of retirement to follow OJ during the Bronco Chase. And had it been PM, the Bronco would've flipped through a police car barricade, only for Bernhardt to save OJ before it exploded.

Usually this paragraph would be a round-up of all the other cast and crew, but because there weren't many other people to discuss, I thought I'd use it as a round-up of all the other bonkers moments I missed. First, near the beginning, we find out that Bernie Angel's character's base of operations is a diner. He has his own circular booth, with TVs plugged in via extension cords, and all manner of papers and documents strewn about. Even in 1989, who did that? Even in a café today, they'd see that and say "um, no... no, you can't do that here." Later, our hero visits his mom, who makes him some pasta. When he meets the neighbor lady, his face is covered in red sauce, like he'd never eaten pasta in his life, or forgot how to use a fork to put food in his mouth. After he saves the woman from the burning car, a local TV reporter goes to his house so they can hook up. When he gets home though, he doesn't know who's there, he just sees clothes lying around and hears the shower get turned on. His first thought is it's his mother visiting. What? Does his mother use his shower a lot? And does she leave her clothes lying around too? I mentioned above about poor Nonna. I have no idea what that was, it was some extended family thing that Bernhardt's character and Melgar's character were attending, but whose family was it, his or hers? And why was he doing a magic trick for Rick Pepin's kids? Then he finishes by having Nonna do some, while he hits on Melgar's character, and the best Nonna can think to do is sing a song from the Old World. Your guess was as good as mine. Finally, when our hero and the neighbor lady are back at his place, she mentions wanting a dog, and his response is to go on this soliloquy about why he prefers birds. It was so fantastic, Jon created a shirt for it that you can buy on the PM Entertainment Podcast Threadless page. I've been meaning to get one myself!

Finally, look at that image above. Do you see the "Bo Knows" ad in the upper right corner? As a kid in the late 80s, it didn't get any better than Bo Jackson. I'd watch This Week in Baseball and couldn't wait to see what Bo Jackson highlights they had for us, like when he tried to call time out then hit a home run anyway when the ump wouldn't grant it; or when he threw Harold Reynolds out at home on a play he had no business making. His time with the Raiders I didn't see as much, because the late afternoon AFC game was usually blacked out after the Patriots were on in the early window, so we always had the CBS NFC game in that window, but I remember the highlights of him trucking Brian Bosworth to get a touchdown. As a running back, he threw his body into defenders like he had a spare at home in the closet, so it probably wasn't so much that he got injured and it cut his career short as much as he managed to not get injured for so long despite playing like that. Either way, he was a force, and we may never see anyone like him again. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can stream this on Fawesome here in the States, plus there's a decent version on YouTube which is included in my PM Entertainment playlist, which you can find on our DTVC YouTube channel. And also don't forget to check out the episode we did on the PM Entertainment Podcast!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145082

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