Trail of a Serial Killer aka Papertrail (1998)

This one first came on my radar in a search of Don "The Dragon" Wilson on imdb, and now that we're almost done with his DTV filmography (after this we'll only have the PM Entertainment family film Hollywood Safari), it was high time I got around to reviewing it. Problem was, it took Netflix forever to send it, finally shipping me a copy from Hartford after weeks of waiting. Good work out of you guys.

Trail of a Serial Killer follows Chris Penn as a disgraced FBI agent, called back into action by old buddy Michael Madsen after a serial killer Penn chased for years resurfaces. He's killing chicks and severing their body parts. But why? What is the motive? And how do they find him? There's a connection with psychologist Jennifer Dale's group therapy sessions. Is there a killer among them?



This was a plodding, more blah than good, suspense thriller yarn. Penn and Madsen were solid, but the material was well worn, no matter how much they wanted to spruce it up, and there was a bunch of extraneous BS concerning Penn's estranged family that the film could've done without, especially since they never dovetailed back in with the rest of the film. I don't know, I just need a little more than simply the killing of young women. I'm funny like that.

I was considering not starting with Mr. "The Dragon" Wilson, because he's only in the film for one scene and that's it; but he is also the film's one DTVC Hall of Famer, so why not go for it. One scene, that's it. No bait-and-switch, though, because he isn't splashed all over the cover, and doesn't even make the first page of credits on imdb; more like it's just a novelty that he has the cameo. What I hope this review does do in terms of Wilson, though, is keep anyone from seeing it listed on his bio and thinking he's in it for more than just the one scene.



I went second with Michael Madsen, even though he isn't the main star, Penn is, because Madsen is so cool-- notice the Reservoir of Dogs look he's copping in that image above. If anyone can play the Noir-ish detective in a sexy-- or not so sexy, but preferably sexy-- suspense thriller, it's him. Too bad he had to play second fiddle to Penn, because had they switched the roles, it would've added a completely new dimension to the film.

Not that the late Chris Penn couldn't hold his own here, just that he's no Michael Madsen. Still, he does pretty well, except for when the writers tossed in those inane digressions about his estranged family, which did little more than annoy and distract me. Also, as you can probably tell from the picture, Penn was rather husky. Juggly, doughy, pudgy, whatever adjective you want. At the end of the film, he has this bloody, jiggly running scene that wasn't doing him any favors. Not sure whose idea that was, but it was an idea sautéed in wrong sauce-- or hilarious sauce if you're us, the viewer.



WARNING: THIS PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS. READ ON AT YOUR OWN PERIL!!!

One of my pet peeves is the killer twist where we find out our murderer wasn't a guy, but a woman, and we're supposed to buy that a male stuntman that was running around tackling and manhandling people much bigger than the actress that is revealed to be the killer, could've done that. Seriously, earlier in the film, the killer knocks down Chris Penn. A 100-120 pound woman is dropping Chris Penn? She'd bounce right off him! And what annoys me more is how the film makers are like: "see how clever we are? You thought only a guy could be a killer!" No, I thought only the 6-foot-tall 200 pound stuntman who was running around as the killer would preclude any 5'3" 100-pound women from being the killer. Silly me.

This isn't an easy get from Netflix, but Amazon has it both new and used on DVD and VHS for not very much. The problem is, anything more than free isn't worth it. Other than Penn and Madsen, this is pretty run-of-the-mill, and even with them the material is so bad that it can't be saved. Too bad, because those two could've been great.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119856/

Martial Law (1991)

This is not a film based on the hit Samo Hung/Arsenio Hall crime dramedy from the late 90s (which also starred the always hot Kelly Hu), in fact, none of those three are in this film. What it does have is DTVC Hall of Famer Cynthia Rothrock, 2010 class inductee David Carradine, and the ever charming Philip Tan, for once sporting his natural British accent. Oh yeah, and Chad McQueen, listed on the cover as Richard Brandes. Okay, that makes--huh? This was also covered by Comeuppance, Bulletproof, The Video Vacuum, and Fist of the B List.

Martial Law stars McQueen as a cop, known as Martial Law, because he kicks mad ass. He has a younger brother, a total delinquent, who falls in in a bad way with Carradine's gang. Rothrock is McQueen's girlfriend/vice cop, and when she finds a couple bodies killed through an ancient Chinese martial arts strike to the chest, McQueen, upon being assigned the case, insists on Rothrock being assigned as his partner. Partners in kicking ass is more like it.

This is very solid late 80s/early 90s DTV action cheese. First you have the amazing music. In one scene, after Rothrock chases after a baddie, the cop with her exclaims "is she crazy?" With that blazing electric guitar screaming in the background, how can she not be? Then there was the upbeat smooth jazz throughout the film that sounded like something you'd hear in one of those baseball highlight videos, you know the kind, with the distorted colors, multiple replays, and then the image turning into a flying square, a la the Superman II parallelogram imprisoning Terrance Stamp, with the next highlight flying in to take its place. It was simply fantastic. Second, there were great fight scenes with McQueen, Rothrock, Carradine, and even Tan. Maybe there could've been more or more explosions and car chases, but considering how silly the overall product was, this fighting was plenty good enough. Finally, you have that silliness factor. McQueen's outfits alone were worth the price of admission. Sweet mullets and porno 'stashes on the stunt men, dialog that makes your average Lifetime Movie of the Week sound like a Pinter play, and last but not least, at the very end of the credits, the film's date is given as "MXCXXXX" (you can check that out at the image page). Exhibit A as to why you should always watch the credits.

Rothrock isn't the lead in this, but unlike Firepower, which billed Gary Daniels as the lead there, only to have it be Chad McQueen, because this one didn't sell that, I was okay with McQueen getting more of the action. Obviously though, if I had a choice, I'd take Rothrock over McQueen any day. While she's on-screen, though, she's excellent, which is all you can ask for. One great scene had her and McQueen fighting baddies in a night club, and this big dude comes at McQueen and he's like "uh oh...", then we see Rothrock and it's like "dude, everyone she fights is bigger than her!" While I was on hiatus, Salt came out in the theaters, and ESPN's First Take, during their roundtable debate segment, "1st and Ten", discussed who the best action movie chick of all time was, and Skip Bayless, who is a self-styled action movie fan, didn't once mention Rothrock. Sorry, but no one can call him or herself an action movie fan, and not mention Cynthia Rothrock, not only as the number one female action star ever, but one of the best action stars ever period. Sorry Angelina Jolie and Mila Jovovich, you have a ways to go.

In 2010 we are adding two new members to the DTVC Hall of Fame, late director Cirio H. Santiago, and late actor David Carradine. Both guys should've been in a long time ago. Let's focus on Carradine here for right now though. Considering he was a hero in his TV life, he was always a great baddie, and this film is no exception. With over 200 acting credits to his name, and the variety of roles he took, he embodies that DTV spirit of just doing any role as long as the money was right that we love here at the DTVC, especially since he always took every role seriously, even if it was a comedic one, like in Crank 2: High Voltage.

I believe this will be Phillip Tan's seventh film here, and we will finally be tagging him. Often, he plays a henchman or sleazy con man type, and just as often, he speaks with an Asian accent. Though he was Carradine's right hand man here as well, he spoke in his natural British accent, and he also showed off his martial arts skills. Both great, and both things we'll hopefully see when we do more movies that have him in them in the future-- though I doubt it. His smaller size seems to play better for the sleazy con man than the Brit who can fight, and I imagine the main reason they used his skills here was so he could fight Rothrock at the end. As an aside, Tan starred in both this, and the TV show Martial Law.

You may have noticed if you've been checking the image pages for some of my posts recently, that I've been capturing production and distribution company logos as well (you can get to a review's image page by clicking on any of the pics in that post. Not every review has one, but for the ones that do, there's usually four or five more pics that don't make the actual review). These old (are they that old, 20 years?) screens just add to that old (is it that old either, ten years ago?) video store ambiance. Even as recently as 2001-2002, one of our local video stores had tons of VHS greats we could choose from, not just these DTV cheesefests, but also classics, and not-old-enough to be classics from the 80s. We just took for granted that that world would always exist, that there'd always be a place to get Dolph Lundgren's Pentathlon, or Mr. T's Be Someone of Be Somebody's Fool, and though I love Netflix, the fact that they and DVDs and iTunes and ONDemand have obliterated that world, and did it in a relatively short period of time, is disheartening. Part of what we like to do here is spotlight new DTV releases, because the rise of quality (and not-s0-quality) new movies going direct to video in recent years has been great; but also, we like to look back and remember what got a lot of us into this kind of thing, those trips to the video store combined with loads of pizza, junk food, and Mountain Dew (or later on, beer), a night where we could all yell at the screen and not take ourselves as seriously. When I pop a tape into my VCR, and that logo draws itself, and that cute little music or sound effect accompanies it, I'm back in that time, and have that feeling I used to get when I was home from college and wasn't eating dining commons food for a night.

Word on the street is, Martial Law 2 is even better, but I'll wait until I do that review to let you know what I think. As far as Martial Law, it's a great time, and I'm sure you'll have fun with it. If you need a late 80s/early 90s DTV action cheesefest, this will fill your craving more than adequately.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104822/

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/

Firepower (1993)

I don't know if anyone's seen the trailer for this, but it looks awesome. Really, does anyone do trailers better than PM Entertainment? Their trailers always make their films look like the most amazing 90 minute action fests the world has ever seen. It's like, we look at one of those, and we think "Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs III is the best action hero since Steve McQueen!", then we watch the movie and we're like "um... all the action was in that one car chase?"

Firepower takes place in the future, three years ago, in a world where the US government is dealing with the consequences of "Free Zones", places where all manner of lawlessness is legal. The problem with that idea no one thought of at the time: society's worst criminals can just pop outside of the zone, create all manner of havoc, then run back to the zone before the cops can catch them. Oops. Now Chad McQueen and his sidekick, Gary Daniels, are two cops who won't stand by and let these baddies get away with their transgressions, so they go pseudo-undercover as fighters in an underground fighting ring in the zone, looking to take down one of LA's worst crimelords.



As the saying goes down South, "this movie is dummern' a sack o' hammers", and for the most part that's a good thing. For instance, a poor move that I would kill most films for: the gratuitous killing of McQueen's wife, is pulled off so clumsily it's more funny than mean spirited. Why then does this movie not work when it should be so bad it's awesome? Gary Daniels is the sidekick to Chad McQueen. Let me just reiterate that. Gary Daniels, Mr. Ten Kinds of Awesome, rocking a too sweet mullet, has to endure a demeaning decapitation at the hands of the Ultimate Warrior, because he's just the sidekick, and it's McQueen who gets to triumph at the end as the hero. That's like casting Dolph Lundgren in a movie, and having him play sidekick to Joe Lara. Other than that, this is a great dummern' a sack of hammers good time, a rip-off of other greats like Escape From New York.

So as far as Daniels goes, then, this isn't a Gary Daniels movie, it's a Chad McQueen movie. That's very hard to type. Was Daniels great in it? Yeah, solid martial arts, too sweet mullet, sounds like a winning combination. Too bad it wasn't his movie-- even if he was on the cover! The Ultimate Warrior had a higher billing than him! I'm not calling this a bait-and-switch, I'm just saying Daniels is not the number one guy, which was a bad move on the part of the film makers. If I need a Gary Daniels fix, I'll go somewhere else, like Rage or Bloodmoon. We'll work on trying to get a more Daniels-centric film here in the future. Cross your fingers for Cold Harvest.



Check it out, it's Art Camacho. One of the biggest names in DTV action, but more often than not for what he's done behind the scenes, from great choreography to some solid directing efforts. Right now, it's only as a director that we have him tagged, but in this post we'll tag him as an actor, and with his induction into the Hall of Fame this fall, I'll go back and tag him for all the other films he's been involved with as well. A true pillar in the DTV community.

Yes, I did say the Ultimate Warrior was in this. I, like many others, believed the urban legend that he killed himself, which never happened. He's actually alive and well, and apparently said some mean things about Heath Ledger's death. In Firepower, he plays a bad guy named Swordsman, but without his trademark warpaint, he looks more like a buff Alice Cooper. Because of the way this film cast McQueen as the lead and not Daniels, we're denied a great end battle between the two, which was a major disappointment. Warrior just kicks his ass and decapitates him.



I'm at a loss again for a seventh paragraph. I could go topical and discuss how in 1993 AIDS was still a very feared and deadly epidemic, when now, three years after "the future", we've reached a point with expensive drugs and a broader education in this country that it isn't the front page headline grabber it was then. That's boring though. The thing is, looking at these dummern' a sack o' hammers visions of the future we see in bad action movies, I wonder if these people lived in the same 1993 I did. 2003 looked bleak, but 1993 looked bright. The Iron Curtain was down, there was peace in the Middle East (we didn't know then it wouldn't last), and Bill "don't stop thinkin' about tomorrow" Clinton was our new President, playing his sax on The Arsenio Hall Show. Is that what the problem was, it looked too bright and rosy? Too Liberal, maybe? Would Liberals create a "Free Zone", a la a US Conservative view of Amsterdam? Maybe that's why Tea Baggers are so scared right now, they looked at 1993, and instead of seeing things going pretty well, they saw Firepower-- dummern' a sack o' hammers.

This is a fun, stupid, bad actioner from the early 90s. In terms of the PM Entertainment trailer, it lives up to what it sells quite a bit. Just don't go into it expecting a Gary Daniels film-- even if he is all over the cover. This is a Chad McQueen film... which still sounds odd to say. Oh yeah, as an aside, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs is tagged because his voice is the play-by-play of the fights. He never actually appears beyond that.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106915/