American Dragons aka Double Edge (1998)

We lost another great one last week, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, one of the consummate movie villains, especially in these DTV films that we love. We'd covered most of the films he'd done in a starring role, so I had to go to one where he's more of a supporting character for his in memoriam post, and I figured this one would do the trick. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, and Ty and Brett at Comeuppance have covered this as well.

American Dragons has Michael Biehn as a New York cop who gets demoted back to homicide after his undercover case goes bust on him. The murder he's now investigating involves some high-ranking Yakuza and an origami lotus flower left behind for evidence. That draws the attention of a Korean detective (Park Joong-hoon), who comes to New York to help Biehn--he also wants revenge on this lotus killer, because he killed Park's wife and son. As they investigate further, Biehn sees that this case dovetails with his previous one, and perhaps this lotus killer (Byron Mann) might be working with the mob enforcer he was trying to bring down (Don Stark).

Overall this was a fun one. Tight runtime, nice action sequences, especially the final one, and Biehn and Park were a fun combo. It does have its flaws though. Biehn was 42 when this came out, but his character dressed like 19-year-old me in 1998, with his oversized shirts, backwards scally cap, and Airwalk sneakers. What were they going for with that? Was he supposed to be the X Games Cop? From a tonal standpoint, a lot of it felt like this stylish cop thriller, drawing from similar movies from the late 80s that I loved, but then you'd get these goofy buddy cop moments that betrayed that tonality. Finally, for a tight runtime, the movie still had some instances of padding. We had opening credits padding, which I think took three minutes over a black background with nothing happening; buddy cops fighting padding, where our two heroes get on each other's nerves to the point that they have a drawn-out fight that was only there to add to the runtime; and then to cap it all off, we have gym training montage padding, out of nowhere near the end of the film. We also had these elements that I wasn't sure if they helped or hurt things, like Don Stark as an evil mafia enforcer. He's kind of a goofy caricature of the whole thing, which was maybe more intriguing than anything I guess. Again though, those flaws aside, this is a fun one overall, and getting it free on Tubi makes it worth a look.

One factor that tips it in the direction of working instead of not working is Cary Tagawa was the Yakuza head who's in Mann's crosshairs. It's a really small part, but he takes that small part and elevates it to something more. When we think about his legacy, I know for me, we wouldn't be here with this site if it wasn't for him. Yes, Dolph played a big part in that, but it was two films that Tagawa did with Dolph, Showdown in Little Tokyo and Bridge of Dragons, that were pivotal in my love of DTV movies, and neither of those movies work as well as they do without Tagawa. Other standout moments in his career, everyone knows his video game movie villains in Mortal Kombat and Tekken, which he was fantastic in; but a couple others for us DTV fans have to be Soldier Boyz, which is a ridiculous film, co-starring Michael Dudikoff, but something that Tagawa absolutely sells with his performance; and then his turn as the baddie in Kickboxer 2, anchoring that film as we were getting comfortable with Sasha Mitchell taking over in the lead role. With DTV films, where everyone involved is working on tight margins, to have someone like Tagawa that can some in and deliver something special, he's able to elevate things above the budgetary limitations, which is vital to making everything work at this level. That kind of professional approach, and everything else Tagawa brought to the table, will be truly missed. Here's to you Tagawa-san, you were one of the greatest.

This is the second time in the past couple months that we've seen Michael Biehn in a post celebrating someone else. Back in October we saw him in Billy Blanks's Hall of Fame induction post for Timebomb. The thing about him here is he's clearly in his late 30s/early 40s, and he presents that kind of maturity, so it doesn't make any sense that they dressed him like a 19-year-old. Maybe the part was originally meant for someone younger, but when you get Biehn, you've got an adult, not a twentysomething hosting an eXtreme sports show on ESPN2. In a way though, it kind of adds to the charm of the film, like I don't know what to do with this, and while I'm trying to figure it out, a car blows up or there's a shootout or something. And part of what makes me not know what to do with it, is I think Biehn doesn't know what to do with it either. Like when they gave him the leather scally cap to wear backwards, he had to be like "my kids wear stuff like this!" I'm not saying he needed to wear Dad Jeans, I'm just saying dressing him like a 19-year-old diminished what Biehn brings to the table, and he was kind of working up hill to deliver the goods--which he was still able to do.

We always talk about New York being a character in a movie, but what about when the film is shot in Vancouver with NYC establishing shots mixed in? It's like having Bruce Willis in a Randall Scandal and doubling him for three-quarters of the film. Now we're like "that tall bald guy isn't Bruce Willis!" the same way when a scene takes place in a bus station and I'm like "that's not Port Authority!" The thing is though, does it matter if 75% of the viewing audience haven't been to Port Authority either? And to be fair, in 1998, I would've been one of those 75%, my first trip there was about ten years ago when my wife and I got a bus there from Portsmouth, NH. I will say, when it comes to America bucket lists, going to Port Authority at least once should be on that list. It's right near Times Square and Broadway, so you could go after you take in your Broadway show, maybe get an NJ Transit bus to Hoboken late at night, really get a sense of what the city has to offer. The only thing is, NJ Transit is a mess when it comes to fares, you need an Excel pivot table to find out what your trip will cost, though that might be part of the experience, having to argue with an NJ Transit bus driver about your ticket when they won't accept it because it's not for the correct fare zone.

Finally, we'll end with a second paragraph on Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. In looking further at his legacy, I think he has to go down as one of the best at playing cinematic villains ever. Take Tekken for example. There had to be a thought that "we can't make this movie if we don't get Tagawa to play Heihachi." No one else they could've gotten would've worked as well as he did. And Tagawa wasn't a Hackman or Rickman scenery-chewing villain either, he made sure his baddies were sufficiently bad, there was never any fear of a Destro Effect with him. Even in this movie, where he's a baddie, but not the baddie, you get the sense right away that he's not someone you mess with. Contrast that with Don Stark's mafia enforcer, where we're not sure what to make of the dad from That 70s Show that isn't Kurtwood Smith mean-mugging and killing people. I was trying to think of other baddies in Tagawa's class, like Richard Lynch, but I think Tagawa has more memorable roles; or a Billy Drago, who I think was better at the greasy, dirty baddie, but also doesn't have the memorable roles Tagawa had. We may never see anyone as great as Tagawa again, but that's okay, we saw him, and we have his catalog of movies to celebrate him with.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi here in the States, which I think is a great way to watch it. For your Tagawa movie in honor of him, you're probably better off with Showdown in Little Tokyo or Mortal Kombat, but if you're looking for a fun actioner that you may not have seen before, and get the added bonus of Tagawa, this will do the trick. Again, here's to you Tagawa-san, you were one of the greatest to do it, and you will truly be missed.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118601

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

Diamond Cartel (2015)

This is it, post number 1300! Not only that, but Mr. Don "The Dragon" Wilson becomes the eighth member of the 40 Club, and the fourth member to reach the club primarily as an actor. In trying to find the right film, I went with this star-studded bonkersfest from Kazakhstan, which has also been covered by Ty and Brett from Comeuppance--who have been telling me I needed to do this one for some time, so good to finally make it happen!

Diamond Cartel involves a deal between (I think) crime boss Armand Assante and (maybe) crime boss Michael Madsen, that's been brokered by Don "the Dragon" Wilson. As happens with most deals at the beginnings of movies, this deal goes bad, in this case because of an ambush. Among those ambushers is young lady Aliya (Karlygash Mukhamedzhanova), who takes the money and tries to run off with her boyfriend. Now we don't know who to trust. Assante wants his money. Rival crime boss Cary Tagawa wants Assante's money. Wilson wants Assante to pay him. And then when things can't get any wackier, our young couple get to the coast to get a boat out of dodge, and none other than Peter O'Toole is there to help them escape.

Where do we start with this one? We got a dubbed Wilson, a dubbed Olivier Gruner, and a dubbed Peter O'Toole. The plot is all over the place--I made it look pretty straight forward, but, like the Aliya character is a dealer at Assante's casino, and he sets her up so she owes him a lot of money, but instead of being under his thumb, a guy she grew up with gets her stuck in with Tagawa's gang so she can be trained as a sniper. I'm sorry, what? And when she tells the boyfriend this after they're reunited, he's angry with her about it? Later when she thinks he's agreed to give Assante all the money so he leaves them alone, she shoots him. Luckily he doesn't die? This is like a modern companion to White Fire, it's that bonkers, and features a big diamond too. Plus the names are prodigious. In addition to the ones I've mentioned, we also had Tom "Tiny" Lister and Bolo Yeung, because why wouldn't we? (More on Bolo Yeung later.) Is the action good? I don't know, I don't know that value judgements like "good" or "bad" make sense with something like this, you just go with it, buy the ticket, take the ride, and wake up in Astana--just make sure to check that both of your kidneys are intact!

The 40 Club for Mr. Wilson, one of the best to ever do it; and a very circuitous route to get here, as he's one of the few to ever have tags removed because films that IMDb said he was in, like Siege of Firebase Gloria, we later found out he wasn't. But we're here now, we've made it, and for as bonkers as this film is, including the dubbed voice, it might be a fitting film for his 40 Club entry because he's here strictly due to the name he's created for himself all these years. As a kid, when I was first learning what DTV movies were, he was one of the first names I gravitated to, you knew if his face and name were on the tin, that you were in for a great time. At this point he does more supporting roles like this than he does starring roles, which I'm okay with considering how many great films he's given us. The 40 Club has been a long time coming, but we got there, and there isn't a DTV star who's more deserving.

Among the many other names in this, the star is Karlygash Mukhamedzhanova, who plays Aliya. The problem is, between all the name actors that needed screentime, and the story that seems to be shoehorning all kinds of stuff in, we lose her as the lead for chunks of time. She's also the narrator--at least we think, or her narration could be dubbed too. The thing is, the left-turn-ski stuff we get with her character, when she's telling her boyfriend how she was missing for two years because she had to escape Armand Assante by becoming an assassin for Cary Tagawa, it's not as ridiculous as White Fire's "give a woman at a bar plastic surgery so she looks like Ginty's sister, and then Ginty has sex with her" storyline, but it's ridiculous enough, and I don't know how you sell that, but she does her darndest. I saw on IMDb that she did another Kazakhstan action production, this time starring Vinnie Jones, but no one else with him. Michael Madsen must've been too busy I guess, but based on this performance, there are a lot of direct to video movies here in the States that could use her, so perhaps this won't be the last time we see her.

This film has two other Hall of Famers, Bolo Yeung and Olivier Gruner, the 11th and 25th tag for each respectively. Again, more on Yeung in a second, but the fact that Gruner is only 5 away from the 30 Club is a big deal. And as bonkers as this movie is, check out screenwriter Richard Pierce's appearances on the Comeuppance podcast to hear some great stories about making Sector 4: Extraction with him. To round out everyone else, Madsen is now at 15 films, Armand Assante is at 7--which I couldn't believe we'd done that many of his films!--, Cary Tagawa is at 14, and Tom "Tiny" Lister is at 8 films. And then, craziest of crazy, we have one tag now for Peter O'Toole, right? Actually, I forgot that I also reviewed Supergirl during my DTVC Wild Card series look at comic book films. In 2019 my friend and I saw Lawrence of Arabia in the theater, and now I'm seeing him here, dubbed by someone who may or may not have had a stroke, in what ended up being his final film performance. It's always amazing who we end up finding in the world of DTV.

As if this film couldn't get anymore bonkers, according to the IMDb trivia, Bolo Yeung requested that a cat be present in his fight scene near the end of the film, as a tribute to Bruce Lee and his fight with Chuck Norris in The Way of the Dragon, which also has a cat onlooker. I believe this one was CGI, which, as you may know if you've been on here enough, I'm fully in favor of CGI animals being used in films. Cats want to relax, run around and chase things, and eat, possibly with some head scritches and pets mixed in. As much as I'd enjoy a nice Bolo Yeung fight, for a cat, it's really not all that important, and I respect that and think we all should as well. I do think though if you're going to go CGI cat, why not go full Sebastian from Josie and the Pussycats, right? Maybe have him laugh at them, or put a fishbowl on his head and go snorkeling. Just a thought, but even as simply an onlooker, cats always add value to any film they're in. Why more DTV filmmakers don't add them, especially CGI ones, is beyond me. It's easy points with me. Two simple rules to get you a recommendation: stay under 90 minutes, and add cats.

I figured we'd do a bonus paragraph for Mr. Wilson on getting to the 40 Club, and on us getting to 1300 posts. When I started this site in 2007, I never thought I'd be here 18 years later still plugging away at it, or that the posts would still be getting the kind of readership and reception they still do, especially with me taking a four-year hiatus in the middle. After all the people I've met along the way, the next best thing has been to go through so many films from stars like Don "The Dragon" Wilson, who I love. Some I'd seen before I started the site, like some of the Bloodfist films, but many were things I'd never heard of; and if it wasn't for Wilson, I probably wouldn't be reviewing this gem, but here we are, and I'm still enjoying it. So here's to you Mr. Wilson on making it to the 40 Club; and here's to you, everyone who's still with us after all these years. I wouldn't have kept the train moving--or gotten it back on the tracks in 2019--if it wasn't for the support and readership, so thank you very much for that, it means the world, and hopefully we're all still here for the next 1300 posts!

And with that, let's wrap this up. Right now this is on Fawesome here in the States, after sitting in my Tubi queue for about five years then getting removed by them. You never know when a film like this will get bounced, but luckily the name recognition tends to keep it on at least one of the free streamers.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2538778

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Tekken 2: Kazuya's Revenge (2014)

I first saw this back in early 2015 when I did a solo podcast episode on it, and at that time I planned to give it a proper review as well. Unfortunately I went on an unplanned hiatus, and when I came back almost five years later, this wasn't on any of the streaming services. So I waited. And I waited. Until finally, in the summer of 2022, Tubi got it here in the US. In addition to us, our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has covered this as well.

Tekken 2: Kazuya's Revenge is supposed to be a prequel to the first movie? It has Kane Kosugi as Kazuya, who wakes up in a hotel room and has no idea who he is. A military SWAT team raids the hotel, and as he's escaping, he's captured by a commune led by Rade Serbedzija (and that will be the last time I type his full name in this review). Because Kazuya is blessed with a certain set of skills, Rade makes him work as a hit man for him, but when one of those hits is Bryan Fury (played again by DTVC Hall of Famer Gary Daniels), Kazuya realizes there is a way out. At the same time, who is this mysterious Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa playing Heihachi Mishima that's lurking around spying on things? That can't be good, right?

The enigmatic Wych Kaosayananda, aka Kaos, strikes again. What he was going for here, it's hard to say, and I tried in the IMDb trivia to see if I could find out, but nothing was said about it. We have some good fights and kills by Kane Kosugi, but the same way Patty Smyth and Don Henley said "sometimes love just ain't enough," sometimes some good fights and kills by Kosugi just ain't enough. This did have two writers, so I don't know if that explains the story we got here, and perhaps Kaos's attempt to save it and make it coherent. To be fair, beyond the nicely shot action sequences, Kaos as cinematographer also had some well-framed moments like this, that almost made it stylistically something that worked in spite of itself, but not quite. The whole being caught by Rade and his bad commune and being forced to work for them thing is a tough sell in a movie; not to mention the whole main character has amnesia but we all know who he is is hard to pull off. When we were kids and we played basketball, sometimes if we missed we'd ask for a "do over," and I kinda think a Kaos-Kosugi-Daniels-Tagawa do over could yield some nice results here, and maybe divorced from the Tekken franchise it wouldn't have any expectations to live up to, so it could exist better as its own thing.

With this film Kane Kosugi finally gets his tag here at the DTVC, clocking in at 7 movies, which isn't bad. We first saw him on the site with his dad Sho in Black Eagle, the Van Damme film from the 80s, so he's come a long way since then. He doesn't do a ton of stuff, but his skills are legit, and seeing him in this, he could definitely be an action lead in more movies if he were cast in them. He did Ninja II and (technically did) Zero Tolerance with Scott Adkins, but I'd love to see the two of them team up in a high-octane actioner, maybe directed by any one of Isaac Florentine, Jesse V. Johnston, or Kaos. Like just watching the two of them tear through Bangkok would be fantastic. Kosugi brings a lot to the table in this role, and I think if it didn't have the expectations of the Tekken franchise, it might have worked even better for him--but the fact that it didn't work as well as it could have wasn't Kosugi's fault either.

Gary Daniels is now at 55 films here at the DTVC, which is second all-time behind Dolph. While we have Art Camacho, Albert Pyun, and Cannon Films in the 40 Club, the next closest actor is Cynthia Rothrock with 39 movies, so he's comfortably in second place. He isn't in this one much, but the one fight scene he has with Kosugi is 100% official, and I think that's all we can ask for from him. I was looking at what we have left, and I have two that are watched that I plan to mix in soon, and after that, it's waiting for his newer films to be available free to stream, his Christian movies to be available to stream, and a movie called A Stranger in Paradise with Catalina Sandino Moreno and Byron Mann to be available to stream, and we'll have them all. He's definitely bound for the 60 Club with Dolph, it's just a matter of when.

This is the third film directed by Kaos that we've done on the site, the other two being One Night in Bangkok and Zero Tolerance; but, he was also cinematographer on the one Daniels Christian film we've done so far, The Mark, and did additional camera work on the Seagal flick The Asian Connection. He has a very unique style in his storytelling, but then also really likes to have his camerawork and editing showcased as well. In this film there were moments when it worked--Kane Kosugi doesn't look bad walking in slowmotion like a hero in an old Western; but there can be moments when it's obtrusive too. I thought that was more evident in One Night in Bangkok, where letting the scenes breathe more would've helped; but in this movie where it looks like more than one story idea was being put together, maybe he needed to dress it up as much as he could. Either way, he's growing on me, and I'm looking forward to what he has next.

 

Finally, we have to get to my ultimate beef with this: it didn't correct the wrong committed in the first film, which was leaving the Kings out. If anyone could successfully mix in a Mexican wrestler with a jaguar mask, I'd think it'd be Kaos. He needed to come in and giantly swing Rade off the commune; or catch Kosugi in a frankensteiner. When I played Tekken Tag, I almost exclusively used King and Armor King, and won the majority of my matches; then in taking a look through a guide book on that game at a local bookstore, we discovered that they were unbalanced, and I wasn't as good as I thought, I was just using characters who were better. Is that why neither film has featured at least King? How would Kosugi beat him? I remember when people used Kazuya against me, with King I could grab his leg out of midair when he tried to spin kick me. I get it, what do you do with that? Even Kosugi would have trouble.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now, you can stream Tekken 2 on Tubi here in the States. If you're looking for some sweet Kane Kosugi action, are a Daniels completist (me), or you're curious what Kaos has cooking here, this is worth it. Beyond that, it's a bit sauteed in wrong sauce, especially if you're looking for a Tekken tournament movie.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3462696

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Showdown in Manila (2016)

Getting back into things after that long hiatus, I wanted to see what some of the Hall of Famers have been up to, and this one has three: Cynthia Rothrock, Don "The Dragon" Wilson, and Olivier Gruner.  In addition, it has DTVC favorites Casper Van Dien, Mark Dacascos, Tia Carrere, Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa, and Matthias Hues.  I couldn't not review this, right?

Showdown in Manila is about a cop, Alexander Nevsky, who gets his team killed when a bust goes bad.  He starts a PI firm with former LA cop Casper Van Dien, and gets a case dumped in his lap that may get him the revenge on the baddies, Cary Tagawa and Matthias Hues, who killed his team, when Tia Carrere hires them to find the same men who killed her husband, Mark Dacascos.  If Nevsky and Van Dien are going to pull this off, they'll need to call in some DTVC Hall of Famers.

This one was missing something, and I think the problem was there was too much shooting and too little anything else.  And it was that kind of shooting where you see one person firing a weapon in one shot, and then someone else in an entirely different shot getting hit.  The other thing is, when you have the names this had, you need more than just one Mark Dacascos fight and one Cynthia Rothrock fight for that to pay off.  I don't need Olivier Gruner and Don "The Dragon" Wilson to just fire weapons, anyone can do that, I need to see them take out a few guys at once with their martial arts.  I feel bad, because I think I'm judging the movie more on what it could have been as opposed to what it was based on the cast, but the trailer was selling me that too, and in my mind it just didn't quite deliver.

Another issue the film had was, it really was supposed to be Nevsky's, but Casper Van Dien was stealing every scene they were in together.  It made me want more of him, and the scenes that were Nevsky-focused had me waiting for when Van Dien would be back.  Then, as Van Dien is shining in every scene the way he was, I starting thinking "why isn't his character the one this is centered around?  He's more compelling."  That's a situation you never want to be in.  If you look at another "showdown" movie, Showdown in Little Tokyo, Brandon Lee was fantastic, but Dolph could carry it so well that they played off each other and the whole thing worked.  The other thing is I think Dolph had had more acting credits at that point than Brandon Lee, whereas Casper Van Dien has been around much more than Nevsky, and it showed in their scenes together.

Alexander Nevsky has made a few films over the past five years, and I think he could, with the right material, be one of those actors after Scott Adkins and Michael Jai White who could carry the torch after some of the old guard have retired--and to some extent, I think this movie was a bit of a passing of the torch with the names who were supporting him.  The problem Nevsky faces was staring at him in the person of Matthias Hues: the bad guy is usually the hulking Eastern European, and a lot of the stars working with him in this picture made their money taking down their share of Alexander Nevskys in their careers.  What that means is he's working uphill versus the high-octane martial arts of Adkins and White that make more sense to us as action fans.  I would add a Tony Jaa to that list.  I'm not saying I don't think Nevsky can have a career in DTV action, I personally would love to see him make it, I just think he needs the right material as he gets his feet under him, and I don't know that this film was it.

As we discussed, there are three DTVC Hall of Famers, and all three of them come in for the jungle scenes in the last half-hour or so.  Part of the reason why all three of them are Hall of Famers is we're used to them leading their own films--Gruner has 20 films on the DTVC, Rothrock 28, and Wilson 30.  You could also add Dacascos and his 16 films to that list, but seeing that he was also directing, his smaller role was more understandable.  The point I'm making is, adding headliners to this movie without giving them headliner roles I think brings us back to the idea that this film feels like it could have been more.  For example, Cynthia Rotherock had a good fight scene where she took out a bunch of henchmen, but that's the kind of scene an up-and-comer should get to show us what she's got, not someone who has helmed 5 DTV action franchises: China O'Brien, Rage and Honor, Martial Law, Lady Dragon, and Tiger Claws.  She's one of the biggest reasons why I got into DTV action, and to see her in this small role supporting Nevsky didn't feel right.  Same could be said of Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Olivier Gruner.  We may see more of this kind of thing going forward, where DTVC Hall of Famers take smaller supporting roles, and I don't know how we mitigate this issue of how much we're used to them being the lead, unless you only have them be baddies.  I'm not saying I need them in roles where they do a fight scene every 10-15 minutes--they've already done plenty of those for us, and plenty of great ones at that--, but I think you have to give the audience something they can really sink their teeth into so they leave feeling satisfied.

*****SPOILER ALERT*****SPOILER ALERT*****SPOILER ALERT*****
I wanted to discuss the very end of the movie, so if you don't want to know what happens, don't read this paragraph.  The way the film ends, the guys capture Tagawa, and take him back to Manila, where Matthias Hues has been lying in the trunk of their car.  They have the guys in handcuffs sitting in chairs in their office, when Tia Carrere's character comes in, and shoots them both in cold blood.  I don't want to get into the idea of victim's rights in real life, and whether or not a victim's family should have the right to get revenge like this.  Real life is one thing, but a movie is different, and it seems off when the heroes do it.  Again, this isn't real life, Mark Dacascos didn't really die, so in the construct of a movie, I think you have to have the baddie go for a gun or do something threatening to justify killing them.  They can't be restrained and defenseless, it just doesn't play well, at least to me.
*****END SPOILER*****END SPOILER*****END SPOILER*****

For me, I unfortunately can't fully recommend this.  It had its moments, but I feel like the bigger cast made me wish they had done more.  I like Nevsky, and think he could have a big future, but there were a lot of names that overshadowed him.  In fact, many of the big names made their careers in films where they defeated Nevsky-types, and I think that undermined what they were going for.  You can find this on Amazon Prime, so if you're a Prime subscriber, this won't cost you anything more.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4586626

Skin Trade (2014)

It's been a while since I've made a new post, and this film was a reminder that I hadn't intended to take as long a hiatus as I ended up taking.  I think I saw this sometime in 2015 or 2016, with the idea of writing a review on it that never materialized.  It's funny, because when word first came about this film back in 2012/2013, I couldn't wait to make it happen; but life took over and suddenly it became 2019 and nothing had been done.  Well, we're making happen now.

Skin Trade stars DTVC Hall of Famer Dolph Lundgren as Nick, a cop in Newark, NJ, trying to take down a Serbian mob boss played by Ron Perlman--which means we're already knee-deep in the hoopla of what is a great cast.  Perlman blows up Dolph's house, kills his wife and daughter, and almost kills Dolph in the process--but doesn't, so Dolph heads over to Cambodia to get his revenge.  At the same time, Tony Jaa is trying to take down Perlman's white slavery ring in Cambodia.  Looks like Dolph and Jaa are on a collision course to whackiness!

This wasn't too bad.  Dolph and Jaa were both great, there were some solid fight scenes; plus DTVC favorite Michael Jai White was in this in a supporting role, and his one fight with Jaa didn't disappoint either.  In addition to Perlman, we had DTVC Hall of Famer Peter Weller, and Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa had a small part, making this the third film after Showdown in Little Tokyo and Bridge of Dragons he's done with Dolph.  I think you could do a lot worse than to stream Skin Trade for 90 minutes on Netflix if you're looking for a movie to watch.

We had had some misses with Dolph films lately, so to have something solid like this was a relief.  He co-wrote the script for this, and the movie had a strong anti-sex trafficking message he wanted to get across, but he made sure that in getting that message through to us that the plot didn't take away from the action.  While I have been on hiatus the past four years, Dolph has been busy, so we have a lot of catching up to do with him.  Hopefully we'll be able to take care of that.

I believe this film is Tony Jaa's America debut, and he was great as always.  The one thing I would say is, for the film that would be his US debut, I would want it to be more of a Jaa vehicle, not a Dolph-Jaa vehicle, if you know what I mean.  The fight scenes he had with Dolph were great, and then the one he did with Michael Jai White was fantastic.  There was a sense that White and Jaa were looking forward to shooting that scene, which is something I love in a DTV actioner, stars that enjoy putting out a high-quality product to such a degree that they look forward to what the end result could be on-screen for us.  In the current DTV age where stuff gets pumped out assembly-line style with a spate of big names flashed across the cover mailing in performances to pay off alimony and child support claims while scenes are cobbled together with split-second edits in post, it's refreshing to see some stars really get after it, especially the way Jaa and White did, and hopefully we'll see more of that in the future.

As I mentioned above, this film had a strong anti-sex trafficking message, which I think is great.  I don't know that you can make villains more despicable with less work than to have them selling young girls into slavery.  When Dolph and Jaa rampage through the warehouse that's holding the girls, the baddies can't die enough, or die painfully enough.  The film also tries to address two themes that adjoin the sex trafficking plague: one, that there's a market for it--Perlman's character tells Dolph that he's just giving his buyers what they want--; and then the idea that it's such a big problem, what is saving a few girls going to do when there are millions of others out there--White's character's rationale for why he sold out and took Perlman's money.  With the first one, it's a tepid message that the film tries a couple other times to drive home when we see Americans at the clubs in Cambodia where the trafficked girls are, but never really gets into enough.  Maybe we needed to see an America guy bring a girl out to a back room and then see Jaa kick his ass to fully flesh out that message more--what would it have taken, five more minutes of screentime?  The second one also isn't really addressed.  The fact that Dolph's family was killed gives him a motive beyond simple altruism to take these guys down.  To really rebut White's character's assertion that the struggle against sex trafficking is a futile endeavor, it would have been better if Dolph had no motives other than taking down a sex trafficker to make it stick.

Among the many DTV stars having a small part in this, one of my all time faves, Peter Weller, plays Dolph's boss.  I almost feel like they could have done more with the few scenes he was in.  I'm not saying give him a bigger part, but maybe give him better lines, really bring out the fast-talking, no-nonsense guy we've loved in his other films.  This is something I think could be done with a lot of DTV flicks that have big names in small parts.  We don't need everyone to be Brando in Apocalypse Now, but it would also be nice to say "only Weller could have done what we saw there," or "that's what we love about him, it's great to see him in this." 

Finally, before I wrap up, I wanted to mention one of the main baddies.  His character name was "Janko," which reminded me of JNCO jeans.  Did anyone have a pair of JNCOs back in the late 90s?  I did, a pair of wide-leg khaki ones that had back pockets so deep, I could literally fit a 40 in them.  I'm not kidding, I would walk across the UMaine campus on a Friday or Saturday night with a Bull Ice 40 in my back pocket.  God, those were the days...

Okay, if I'm digressing into JNCO jeans and Bull Ice 40s from twenty years ago, it's probably time to wrap this up.  My final verdict is that this is pretty good, certainly worth checking out through Netflix streaming.  Good cast, good fights, nice action overall.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1641841

Bulletproof (1988)

"Matt, say it ain't so! An Adam Sandler buddy pic on the DTVC? It's not April 1st, is it? Did someone hack your Blogger account?" Nope, it's me here, you just have the wrong Bulletproof. This is one that features DTVC Hall of Famer Gary Busey and DTVC fave baddie William Smith. We're gonna be okay, I have no plan to sell you out for the short end cash reviewing bad Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider comedies. Also, our buddy Ty at Comeuppance Reviews has covered this one-- not the Sandler one either.

Bulletproof stars Busey as McBain, a crazy, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants police officer that makes his partner guzzle Pepto and his chief swear up a storm. Anyway, for some convoluted reason, the US military has purposefully sent a high-tech tank to Mexico to be captured by insurgents, along with the troops guarding it, one of whom is Busey's old flame-- Darlanne Fluegel, not LQ Jones, though the latter would've been awesome--, and it's with her capture that Army intelligence recruits Busey back out of non-active duty to be a "one-man suicide squad" (his words, not mine) to get them and the tank out, and destroy the insurgents.



This started off like it might be the best Busey film this side of Point Break, and then it did something unfathomable: it went away from Busey and stuck us with some boring developing story surrounding the prisoners. What? But I thought this was a too sweet Busey flick, how could you do that to me? On top of that, as the action got rolling again in the last 20 minutes or so, a good chunk of that was wasted by some crummy rigmarole about how Busey and his woman don't know how to use the tank. Come on guys, cut that shit out. It's Busey, he should just be able to drive it. Get on with things. It felt like watching a soccer game between Barcelona and Real Madrid, where I'm like "stop diving and pretending you're dead and play the damn game, you're annoying me!" This was annoying me too.

And that's a damn shame, because this had some too sweet Busey moments. First you have the opening scene. Busey up on a scaffolding telling Danny Trejo "I'm your worst nightmare butthorn!", and everything immediately after lives up to that line! The shootout, the chase, Danny Trejo throwing grenades out the back of an ice cream truck, then the explosion, and the angry police chief lecturing Busey. I was hooked. I wasn't expecting to get more LQ Jones and Darlanne Fluegel shackled in a dirty bombed out church plotting escapes and being defiant to baddie Henry Silva than I was more Gary Busey kicking ass. Then I thought we might be back in business around the hour mark, when Busey is roped to an enormous wooden cable spool, which Fluegel detonates a grenade next to, sending him rolling off into the sunset. Amazing! But then we're back to more silliness with the captured troops, followed by the annoying "we don't know how to run this thing!" when we know full well you're going to know how to run that thing. I'm sorry, but you can't give me that first scene and then mail it in for the rest. Come on Butthorn, let's get real here.



They kind of snuck William Smith in here on us. He's listed in the opening credits as "Bill Smith". Sneaky bastards. Not only that, but in his first scene he plays a Mannix villain whose partner is none other than Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. It was so fantastic. Then, to make it more fantastic, he shows up in the end as a Russian military officer. Yes! How does someone make a movie with this level of awesome combined with such an enormous level of suck? I blame you, story writer Fred Olen Ray, I blame you.

I liked Henry Silva as the baddie, but they went too far and made his character too dark and realistic. I didn't get it. Load him up as a big time DTV baddie and let 'er rip. He was too obsessed with Darlanne Fluegel. He needed to be obsessed winning, like Charlie Sheen. I don't know what his ethnicity was supposed to be either. Arab? Italian? Korean? That part was good. Him raping Darlanne Fluegel, not so much.



I had to wrap up with "I'm your worst nightmare Butthorn!" Utterly fantastic, but when a film maker tosses something like that in, that's a lot to live up to, especially when it's at the very beginning. They spent that nickel too soon, but because they spent it so freely, we thought they had all kinds of cash, only to find that that was it, and we were stuck paying the bill. But that should in no way diminish how great a scene that was-- if only they could've built on it, as opposed to forgotten about it completely.

If you can get this cheap-- and that's very cheap, like almost free--, I'd do it for the great opening scene, and a few other great Busey moments. Overall though, it's more blah than butthorn, which is a shame, because it could've been fantastic. You decide how much it's worth it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094813/

Tekken (2010)

This is one we've been waiting for for a long time. First off, I absolutely love the game. My buddies and I used to play Tekken Tag all the time in my dorm, and I would clean up with the Kings (not knowing until later that the game was unfairly weighted in their favor-- though I prefer to look at it as me being so awesome...); second, and almost as important, DTVC Hall of Famer Gary Daniels plays Bryan Fury, which was something I needed to see. Finally, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa was cast as Heihachi, which just seems like a perfect casting choice.

Tekken follows the young Jin Kazama, who works as a high risk courier in a slum outside of Tekken City known as the Anvil. After he transports some vital Tekken technology to an insurgent group, Heihachi's son Kazuya sends troops in to get Jin, killing his mother Jun instead. Jin swears revenge on Heihachi, and to get that revenge, enters the Iron Fist fighting tournament. Kazuya smells something fishy about this new kid, and while wanting to take over his father's empire, he wants to stop this Jin kid at all costs.



The hard part here is parsing out the Me as a Tekken fan and the Me as (wannabe) movie reviewer. The latter Me thinks this wasn't too bad. The fights were good, the plot wasn't too bad, and the cast was pretty sweet. As a tournament flick, I dug this one all right. As a fan of the video game though, this left quite a bit to be desired. First was the choice of characters. No King and no Paul, two of the franchise's biggest names. Hey, I understand if you don't want pandas and boxing kangaroos-- though I would've loved to have seen those-- but you can't leave out some of the heavier hitters too. On top of that, there were some, like Tiger, who would've made great inclusions to give this movie more umph-- in Tiger's case as a way to bring in some Jim Kelly style flair. With some of those characters that they could've gone with instead of the ones they did, I can see from the movie reviewer Me how this could've been a much better movie than it was, so while I liked it, I wanted to like it more.

Gary Daniels as Bryan Fury was another area that was good, but could've been better. When I think of the great tournament film heavies, Bolo Yeung foremost among them, we see them do more sinister things than just squat thrusts and busting cinder blocks-- which is all Daniels did here, and before his fight with Jin, he has only one other. Something that would've been great is to draw from Bolo Yeung's fight with Donald Gibb in Bloodsport and have Daniels beat up either Kelly Overton's Christie Monteiro or Luke Goss, and give our hero Jin that added incentive to take Fury down-- even better in the former's case, because her character devolves into a damsel in distress role. It would've been a way to both build Daniels's character, and keep Overton's consistent as a hardened fighter recouping in the hospital instead of a worried damsel in distress hoping Jin saves her.



I thought I'd devote an entire paragraph to Luke Goss, even with all of the other actors that were in this film, because in the Blood Out review I made some comments about the way he was sold to us as a tough guy and hero. This movie did everything right that Blood Out did wrong. First, they kept his English accent. Much cooler calling guys "wankers" than using American Jackass speak. Second, he was never handcuffed to a bathroom sink while dressed in a Mayberry sheriff's deputy uniform. Third, because he wasn't already starting in the hole as far as coolness points go, he had a solid base from which to build his character and make him believable as Jin's corner man and mentor. This is the Luke Goss I've been looking for, and I hope I see more of it.

Tagawa as Heihachi is an obvious choice-- few do lead baddie like he does-- but then Ian Anthony Dale as Kazuya, and John Foo as Jin and Tamlyn Tomita as Jun were equally stellar. I don't even care that Dale was playing Foo's father, and he's only 4 years older. There were hints at the end of a sequel in the works, and I hope they really bring it with those characters that much more: for instance, I'd love to see Dale playing both Kazuya and the Devil. No matter what, though, they gotta get those Kings in next go around too. I need to see me some Giant Swings.



You might not be able to see exactly what's going on in this picture, but what we have here is Butt Cleavage. Kelly Overton's leather pants don't quite fit, and are laced up in the back, revealing the top of her buttcrack, pushed together so it looks like a miniature version of chest cleavage-- or just cleavage until the advent of Butt Cleavage. I wonder if this was a wardrobe malfunction, like "oh my God, the leather pants aren't fitting on Kelly! I thought you took her measurements!" "Calm down, I'll take care of this. They don't call me the MacGyver of Wardrobe for nothing." "Who's 'they'?" Well, he or she lived up to their reputation, because this was a great save, worthy of an Oscar nod.

Did we really just do a paragraph on "Butt Cleavage"? I guess it's time to call it a post then. Overall, this is a decent tournament fighting flick, with solid and well choreographed fights, a good cast, and a nice plot. Could it have been better? Yes, definitely. But do I think you'll enjoy it? Probably, and I think that's good enough for a recommendation.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411951/

Elektra (2005)

We continue our look at comic book movies with Elektra, the 2005 spin-off/sequel to the Ben Affleck Daredevil film. I never saw this one when it came out in the theaters, and only saw it recently when I got it from Netflix for this review. It looked bad, and from what everyone told me it was bad, so I didn't have high expectations. When the imdb box office numbers suggest they may have barely made their money back by selling the TV rights to FX, it doesn't give one much hope.

Elektra takes place some time after Daredevil. Garner reprises her role as the heroine, who is now working as an assassin. When she's hired to kill the dude next door and his daughter, she decides not to and protects them instead. They're being chased by The Hand, an evil order of ninjas headed by Cary Tagawa. His son and four of his friends with special powers work to track her down, and she has to summon all her strength if she hopes to win.



All right, so this was bad, but not as bad as I expected. Something about it didn't feel right though. The story didn't lend itself to a big budget actioner, but the production was too big budget actioner to fit with such a small story, if that makes sense. The best way to put it is this was a graphic novel style story, but a comic book style movie, and the two didn't work together. The director said in one of the featurettes that he didn't want to make a "Chinese Wire Movie", but it would've worked better as a Chinese Wire Movie than the mess that was searching for an identity that we had on the screen. If anything would've benefited from the Frank Miller 300 or Sin City style of direction, this was it. Imagine Garner as Elektra in her red outfit against the gray backdrop from those movies.

It's kind of too bad, because Jennifer Garner was really good, which was hard to believe after when I watched the extras and heard her talk like a Valley Girl, but I guess that's why she's an actress. I saw in one of the featurettes that she did a lot of work to learn martial arts so she could do her own stunts. Too bad we didn't get to see that with the overly cut fight scenes. As far as I could tell the director was trying to make up for Garner's lack of ability by not allowing us to focus on her for more than a split second during any fight, but it turns out this wasn't the case. I don't blame the director either, because he doesn't have many feature film credits, so I have to assume someone else was telling him to make it all Bourne Identity-ish. They probably also told him they didn't want another "Chinese Wire Film". Unlike Catwoman, that was just all kinds of wrong, this one could've been perfect if they'd just not gone the Hollywood blockbuster route.



Two cool people were in this. Cary Tagawa had like two or three scenes as the head of The Hand. Would've liked to see some more of him, but I'll take what I can get. The second was Terence Stamp. He played Garner's blind sensei. I've always liked Stamp, ever since I saw him hurling through space in that parallelogram. I've never really done the legwork on that deal, but was the flying parallelogram from the comics, or did they invent it strictly for the movie? This movie had nothing as cool as that, but I think by casting Stamp, they were hoping some of that coolness would rub off on them. Didn't work.

Another lost opportunity was the use of Daredevil villain Typhoid Mary. She was played by Natassia Malthe, who you may remember as Rayne from Uwe Boll's BloodRayne II. According to imdb, she's signed on to do a third BloodRayne film that's in pre-production as we speak, another Uwe Boll special. Anyway, the first problem with Typhoid Mary in Elektra was she was used sparingly as one of Tagawa's son's henchwomen. Even worse, she wasn't the same as her comic book persona, and for no apparent reason. In the movie, she could make people sick by breathing on them. A better deal would've been to make her a full fledged villain with the powers she had in the comic, and had her be Elektra's final fight. Man, this movie could've been so good, and as I write it irks me more and more that it wasn't.



There's a deleted scene that had a Ben Affleck cameo as Matt Murdock. When I read the reviews, people talked about the scene's deletion as one of its few saving graces, talking about Affleck with the kind of hatred I'd think one would save for people like Osama bin Laden. I mean, I understand not liking this or that actor, but it's not like he killed anyone's mom or something. It's funny, because that first Daredevil came out so long ago, and there's no word of a sequel at all. I guess Elektra is the sequel, but is it really? And probably the most likely new baddie for the sequel, Typhoid Mary, was wasted in this movie, so they're kind of stuck. I think that sucks, because Daredevil was one of my all time favorite comics, and I'm disappointed that it's been killed like this.

Again, these are mostly bad comic book movie showcases here, so no recommendation is needed. My final thoughts are that this could've been way better, and Garner wasn't one of the things that needed improving. Had they gone with the graphic novel aspect of the story and made a film that was a cross between Sin City and Crouching Tiger, it would've played out much better. Also, had they made Typhoid Mary the one from the comics, instead of something else that just happened to have her name, and had her be the head villain, it would've made for a more interesting story. I guess like its predecessor, it was all kinds of wrong, but could've been right.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0357277/

White Tiger (1996)

One of my readers, Elementary Beatbox Operator (who you can find in the Followers section of the blog), said that Gary Daniels should be in the DTVC Hall of Fame based on Bloodmoon and White Tiger alone. We've already reviewed the first one, so now it's time to take a look at the second.

White Tiger has Daniels as a DEA dude whose partner is killed in a bust gone bad. The killer, DTVC favorite Cary Tagawa. Now Daniels is out for blood. At the same time, Tagawa is trying to consolidate his power, and the Chinese mob is less than stoked. They apparently haven't seen Showdown in Little Tokyo or Bridge of Dragon, because they aren't big fans of him. This leads to a collision course with wackiness as all interested parties converge at the end of the film.



This was pretty sweet. It was pretty much every Bloodfist movie after part III. I could've gone for some more fight scenes, but what we had was enough. That's because Gary choreographed his own stuff, and it was of a very high quality. I liked Tagawa as the head baddie, but it would've been nice if they had a solid second in command that Daniels could've really flexed against, maybe an action star from Hong Kong that doesn't speak great English. The car chases and explosions were pretty good, but in a Daniels film I'm going into it more for the martial arts, and I can't complain about what I got.

It's crazy. I was looking up Daniels on the site, and saw that this is only his sixth post. I didn't know I had so few Daniels films up. Of the the five previous ones, two of them, Retrograde and Submerged, have him in only a limited capacity. Not only that, but Bloodfist IV has him as a baddie, so he's barely in that as well, it's just that his final fight with Don "The Dragon" Wilson is so good, I feel like he wasn't entirely wasted like he was in the other two. I'm not sure if this film would be what gets him in the DTVC Hall of Fame, but Bloodmoon definitely is. Just the same, this film certainly won't keep him out.



As I said above, we love Cary Tagawa here at the DTVC. He's a great baddie, of course, but when he's a good guy it works just as well. My younger siblings used to watch a show on the Disney channel where a kid who loved surfing was forced to move from Hawai'i with his parents to Vermont, and he left his awesome surfing grandfather behind. That awesome surfing grandfather was none other than Mr. Tagawa, and he was great. In this film he went from the classic mature, mysterious baddie, to a younger, more impetuous version, and again it worked. What didn't work was that he was playing a Chinese man. I guess he made a better one than David Carradine.

I mentioned above the Bloodfist paradigm. It's a paradigm that started after part III, which was a prison film, and continued through the last Wilson picture, part VIII. The idea is that the hero is all alone with no one, except for a hot woman, to turn to. He's usually a fugitive from justice, so law enforcement wants him; and then he's also being chased by a sophisticated crime syndicate with limitless resources. This film was pretty close to that. The crime syndicate wasn't so sophisticated, but they had resources; and Daniels was definitely wanted by the law. The woman was also hot, so they didn't miss there either. The paradigm actually predates the Bloodfists-- American Ninja is a great example-- but it was such a hallmark of that series that I've always associated it with it.



This film was shot in Vancouver, like a lot of other ones, but this one was supposed to take place in Seattle, which was different-- usually they go for LA or NYC. I was lucky enough to visit Seattle a couple months ago, and I really liked it. Word on the street is it's even nicer in the summer. I've never been to Vancouver, but I've heard that's even nicer than Seattle. I'm curious to see if that's true or not. I do know that for me, San Francisco was nicer than Portland or Seattle, which goes against what everyone else has told me about the three cities, so maybe Vancouver's the worst one of all.

This is a good bad action film. I think it's worth a rental, but if you can, I'd either get it through Netflix, or take advantage of your local video store's two-for-one night. The Daniels versus Tagawa element is as sweet as you'd expect, and the martial arts are hot. There's also plenty to goof on and plenty of action. It just worked for me.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118159/

Nemesis (1993)

This has been a long time coming. Nemesis is one of those movies the DTVC was made for, and it's one of those movies that should've probably been one of my first ever posts. But back then I didn't have a copy of the movie. I finally got around to ordering it on Amazon, and the front end of it was cracked, and it didn't look like it would play. I watched The Circuit 2 just in case I couldn't make it work, so I'd have another Gruner film to review in this spot. But alas, we made it, and here it is. Also, this is the maiden voyage of my video capture software which will allow me to grab images off VHS. Not great, but the video wasn't great, so given the circumstances, pretty good.

Nemesis takes place in 2027. In it Gruner plays a cop tracking terrorists, who's ambushed and pretty much dies. He's reborn with cybernetic parts, and Tim Thomerson sends him after an old cyborg flame of his to get some data from her. If he doesn't do it, a bomb in his heart will detonate and he'll be donezo. But things aren't what they seem in 2027, and Gruner doesn't know who's good and who's bad. He doesn't even know if he's human anymore, or what being human even means. Luckily for us, he recovers from this existentialist nightmare in time to kick some major ass.



I'm not sure if, other than maybe Stone Cold, there's been a more requested film on the DTVC. And the demand for it has only gone up since I've made a concerted effort to get more Gruner here. I actually realized when I watched it last night, that I'd seen it before. For some reason I thought Nemesis was something else. The film came out in 1993, and I probably watched it somewhere around then, so that's 15 or 16 years ago. It's crazy to think that.

This is a decent film. It's essentially a futuristic western, which is cool. The action and fighting are decent, with plenty of sweet explosions and gun play. There were tons of silly elements too, like the idea of Japan and The US merging, or that we'd annex Mexico and turn it into New America. And I have no clue what New Rio de Janeiro is. Did the Brazilians become a colonial empire in the future? Maybe all the soccer players and MMA fighters broke off and started their own country on an island in the Bahamas. The truth is, that kind of silliness makes the movie for me as much as the action does.



Gruner's great here. This is the fourth film of his we've reviewed, and I think it's right up there with The Circuit. Maybe just a bit behind it. But I can't argue with anyone who likes this better. Especially when one takes into account the mullet he has in one scene that looks like Adrian Paul in a Scottish Highlands flashback sequence. Amazing. As it stands right now I'm looking at Gruner and Gary Daniels as inductees for the 2009 class of the DTVC Hall of Fame. With the response I've gotten from readers about both actors, I think that'll go over well. Look for The Circuit 2 in the next 8 posts or so as his next film.

The last Pyun film we did was Cyborg, back on post 251 (it was supposed to be 250, but I miscounted, and Beer for my Horses with Toby Keith was 250), so it's been a whopping fifty entries since his last review. That's crazy, and I don't know how that happened, because he has quite a bit out there that still needs to be covered. I may do Alien From LA next, just because it would be interesting to see the non-MST3K version. As far as this film goes, I think going up and down the list of Pyun films, I put this right behind Cyborg, and maybe make it even with Omega Doom. I really like Omega Doom as a Yojimbo remake. This film really has those elements I like too: that kind of western/samurai movie set in the future. I'm excited to see what Tales of an Ancient Empire ends up looking like.



This is quite the ensemble cast. You have Pyun mainstays Tim Thomerson, Vincent Klyn, and Thom Mathews. Then there's DTVC faves Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Brion James. Then there's a cameo from Branscombe Richmond of Renegade fame. A young Thomas Jane plays Billy, and I must say he's more believable as Billy than he was as the Punisher. Sven-Ole Thorsen has one of the most memorable scenes, when he's blown away by an old lady. Finally, Marjean Holden has a part, and I don't remember seeing her. If you don't know who she is, then you've never seen the Beastmaster TV show, and it's possible you might be better for that. If there's one thing Pyun does well, he loads his films with talent.

This is a difficult find. You can either try Amazon and get it used on VHS, or search the bargain bins in your area and hope you strike gold. It's definitely a necessary watch, and it'll be worth it once you finally do track it down. Why this isn't available on DVD anymore and easier to come by is beyond me.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107668/

Kickboxer 2: The Road Back (1991)

I don't remember when I first saw this gem. I think it's always been a part of my life. The real travesty is that I don't own it. I don't know why that is. Maybe it's always been on my To Buy list. Maybe I've just never seen it at the right time. Maybe I'm just a moron. Who knows?

Kickboxer 2: The Road Back is 90 minutes of pure awesome about a kickboxer, played by Sasha Mitchell, who's the younger sibling to the two kickboxing brothers in the Van Damme movie. Cary Tagawa, playing a Thai businessman, wants revenge for Tong Po's loss, so he figures having Tong Po kick Mitchell's ass will suffice. Mitchell doesn't want to fight at first, so Tagawa has his goons burn his gym down. That was a mistake. He thought he had everything planned out, but he never planned on Mitchell being so awesome.



God I love this movie. It's so amazing. The plot's sweet, the fights are great, and the music is insane. They have the best songs for the beginning, middle, and end. That perfect late 80s crap action give-it-all-you-got rock song with the dude over singing. One of them the guy even does some scat. Wow. And this idea of Sasha Mitchell doesn't want to fight in the kickboxing association, so they burn down his gym. Only in bad action does this kind of thing happen. Can you see Dana White burning down Randy Couture's gym because he left the UFC? But it works so well in Kickboxer 2.

Pyun was having a bad spell here at the DTVC. For a Hall of Famer, two stinkers in a row is a mini crisis. But this film was a big reason why he got in the Hall of Fame, so I was waiting for just this occasion to pull it for him. That way if his newest film, Left for Dead, sucks, he'll at least have this extremely positive review in the middle.

Sasha Mitchell is great in this, as he is in Kickboxer 4. With the strength of this performance, it's kind of a shame he doesn't do more DTV films. According to IMDb, he hasn't done anything since 2005, and a DTV work since 2000's Luck of the Draw with Michael Madsen, Dennis Hopper, and Ice-T. Have to check that out, because we're running out of Mitchells to review. His kickboxing skills are sweet to watch. He's built perfectly for delivering solid knees to the face of his opponent while having him locked in the Muay Thai clinch. We need him back.



Cary Tagawa is great as the baddie. The idea of using unlimited Thai funds to usurp Peter Boyle's upstart kickboxing federation in order to get Tong Po a rematch with the youngest Sloan brother in order to retain Thai honor is fantastic, and Tagawa plays his part without the slightest twinge of irony. He really is one of the great DTV baddies, and we need only look to two Dolph Lundgren greats, Bridge of Dragons and Showdown in Little Tokyo, for proof of that. As an aside, if you ever wanna see a softer side of Cary, check him out in the bland Disney made-for-TV flick Johnny Tsunami, where he plays the cool surfer grandfather.

This has so many people in it. Peter Boyle, the dad from Everybody Loves Raymond is the guy starting a kickboxing federation. Albert Pyun mainstay Vincent Klyn plays Tagawa's righthand man. That means with Tong Po, you have three people playing Thai characters, and none of them are Thai. Miami Vice fans will love John Diehl as the accountant/manager/whatever to Mitchell. One cameo I dug was Brian Austin Green as the young punk who Mitchell teaches a lesson to at the very beginning. You may remember Green as David Silver on Beverly Hills 90210. My favorite moment from his run on that show was the time he was working the wheels of steel with this dude from the ghetto, and the kid was surprised at how good he was. Silver's response: "I may be white, but I'm not vanilla!"



My friend at Movies in the Attic (you can find a link to his site in the section listed "Other great sites") told me that Van Damme didn't do this film because he didn't get a long with Albert Pyun after a falling out during Cyborg. I didn't know that. I wonder what the film would've been like with the Muscles from Brussels. Don't get me wrong, I like Mitchell, and I like this with him; I'm just curious. What would be cool is if part 6 had Van Damme fight Mitchell, then team up and beat a bunch of other guys up. Can we do that?

If you haven't seen this, you can't call yourself a bad movie honk. I probably should've posted it sooner, but I wanted to save the best Kickboxer for last, and I also wanted to see it again to put all the great parts fresh in my mind. However you gotta make this happen, do it. You won't disappointed.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102202/

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/

Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991)

A buddy of mine recently had me and a few friends watch The Dark Crystal with him. He said it was an important film in his life because it's what started his interest in fantasy films. I'm not sure what vulture puppets called Skankies have to do with that, but I took his word for it. Then I thought about what films were seminal in my love of movies. I guess Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon would be the ones that got me interested in Bogey films; or La Strada and Yojimbo got me interested in Fellini and Kurosawa films respectively. But that's not what the Direct to Video Connoisseur is about, it's about bad movies, and when I think of the film that got me interested in baddies, especially bad action, I think of Showdown in Little Tokyo.

I had a friend growing up whose parents stole cable, and we saw this on Pay-Per-View; for free obviously. I was twelve at the time, and though I'd seen many other bad action films before this, Showdown was the one that made me love them, and I haven't looked back since. Now I'm not saying that without Showdown I wouldn't have eventually found something else to pique my interest in this kind of schlock fare, I'm just saying that this one was lucky enough to be the one.



Showdown in Little Tokyo is a buddy action film with DTVC Hall of Famer Dolph Lundgren as a police detective of Caucasian-American decent that's also a samurai. He's a loner, and can't keep partners. Enter Brandon Lee (before he died), an Amerasian who could care less about his Japanese half. Dolph teaches him to be more Japanese, Brandon admires his penis, and the two protect Tia Carrere while beating down Cary Tagawa and his Yakuza bad dudes. Way better than the Lethal Weapons or Rush Hours.

I don't know where to begin. One of the best scenes is in the beginning, where a bad guy is in police custody, and instead of talking to the police, he breaks his own neck. In school, my friends and I used to mimic this when a teacher was especially boring. I know necks break very easily in action movies, but this one takes it a step further.



In another scene, Dolph does Carrere in his rice paper hut, and Tagawa's men surprise them. A scantily clad Dolph tries to fight them off, and Brandon Lee remarks, after looking at his crotch: "[y]ou have the biggest dick I've ever seen on a man". This is the kind of line in a Van Damme film that a woman would say, and Van Damme would seem proud of himself. With Dolph, though, we know it's supposed to add to the tongue-in-cheekness, which makes it even better.

That's not Brando's only great scene. At the end, he throws a guy in a vat of something, and holding a lit Zippo, says "you have the right to be dead" then tosses the Zippo in, making a huge explosion. This is, to my mind, Brandon Lee's finest performance, and it's too bad this film doesn't get more run.



Tagawa and the Yakuza are great too. They constantly cut off people's and their own limbs. Fingers, arms, heads. Like in Bridge of Dragons, Tagawa is a sexually frustrated crime boss, and has his hottie Asian woman stolen from him by Dolph. This time the hottie is Tia Carrere. Despite posing nude in Playboy, in this film, her nude scenes were done by a body double. Not a big deal, but just something to keep in mind as you're watching this.

The ending is spectacular. Dolph dons a samurai outfit with a complete straight face. He and Tagawa take swords from a parade, which means the figures in the parade were walking around with real samurai swords. Dolph gets sliced up, yet survives it all, just so he can pin Tagawa to this large wheel with fireworks surrounding it. The wheel spins, and Tagawa explodes.



This is bad action at its best. Tons of killing, tons of martial arts, tons of car chases, a bad guy who kills people who work for him and people he makes criminal deals with, hot chicks, and, of course, Dolph Lundgren. There may be better action movies, but there isn't one that's more fun.

I bought this on DVD recently for $5. There really is no reason why you shouldn't do the same. If you watch it on TV, make sure it's on a channel that isn't censored or edited to fit a time slot. Don't watch this on Spike or USA or what not. You're really better off just buying it anyway, so that way you can see it on Spike or USA, and you'll know what you're missing. Believe me, at $5, it's so worth it, and I'd pay even more if I didn't know I could get it for that cheap.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102915/