The Last Riders (1991)

For our PM review this month, we have this biker film starring Erik Estrada, along with William Smith, and a small early appearance by Mimi Lesseos. Those are the things I know about the film going in, it's what we get that we weren't expecting that make PM films so much fun! In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof and the guys at Comeuppance have covered this as well.

The Last Riders has Erik Estrada as the co-head of a biker gang (along with Angelo Tiffe), who, in trying to retrieve some stole drug money, kills the thieves, only to discover one of them is a dirty cop. Dirty or no, the full weight of the LAPD is coming for him, so he needs to give up his gang colors and go on the run. The first place he runs to is old buddy William Smith, who owns a garage in a small town in southern Nevada. He's happy to have Estrada work there and live in a trailer outside of town, and Estrada's happy to settle down, especially when a single mother (Kathrin Middleton) and her daughter (Minnie Madden) show up and need car repairs. But as he starts his new life, it wouldn't be a PM flick if his old life didn't come back to haunt him.

And boy does it come back to haunt him, which makes for an interesting movie story-wise. In most PM "hero's family is killed and now he's out for action-packed deadly revenge" movies, the family gets bumped off in the first act, and we don't get to know them too well, we just take it for granted that bumping off someone's family's bad, and then from there the hero starts the revenge process in the second act, and gives the baddie their ultimate comeuppance in the third act. Here, the first act is retrieving the drug money, and the second act is him falling in love with Middleton's character and starting a life with her, before she and her daughter are gunned down in the trailer. It's almost like the filmmakers were enjoying watching Estrada and Middleton's characters fall in love, and someone was like "hey guys, we need to get to the revenge part of this, the movie's almost over!" It creates that tonality issue we'd see a lot in early PM, where if you're watching this as a one-off in the early 90s because you found it on cable or at your local video store, you're probably not impressed, but in the context of a bunch of these you're excited to go along for the bonkers PM Entertainment ride. We also get some of the names we've come to know and love, like Cole S. McKay on stunts, Joseph Merhi directing, and Rick Pepin's cinematography. In that sense, you probably need to watch some of the better of these PM films before you get stuck in on this one, and even then, it's low on the list for me; but lower on the list PM is still not a bad way to kill 90 minutes if you're a PM Entertainment fan.

We're now at 58 PM flicks on the site, and what's interesting about this one, is it's their 22nd movie and came out in 1991, but feels like an earlier spine number joint from 1989 when they were still getting the hang of what PM would eventually be--which I guess isn't so crazy an idea when you consider 1989 and 1991 are only a couple years apart, there could be that overlap as they were still figuring out what worked best. And I'm not sure what the best PM moment in this was for me. Maybe when Estrada blows up the trailer with his deceased wife and step-daughter's bodies inside, while he and a tearful William Smith look on. No calling the cops, I imagine the Middleton's ex-husband would like to know what happened to his daughter, even if he was the jerkoff Middleton said he was, but nope, in the world of PM, the fiery funeral is all you need. From there, as he's getting his revenge, the bartender at their biker bar tells him she has feelings for him, and hey, he's back on the market now, even if the remaining embers of his dead wife and step-daughter's bodies are still smoldering near Lake Mead, why not go for it? And I guess that's what I think when I see another PM flick on Tubi, "come on, Matt, why not go for it?", because these things only work in the world of PM--and I don't even know if they work there either, or it's more the fact that they don't work that's so much fun.

One of the more fun aspects of the film was the band at the biker bar that performed over a couple of the montages. They were called The Sheilas, and their sound was in the mold of Pat Benatar's stuff, which is plenty fine for me. Even more fun, the first song featured a flautist. We're not strangers to the flute here at the DTVC, plenty of 80s exploitation films shot in the Philippines made ample use of the flute, perhaps because Italian directors thought jungles and flutes went together like peanut butter and chocolate, but we never actually saw the flautist getting after it like we do here. I never thought of it before, but yeah, a flute solo is exactly the music I need when I'm watching a shot of a biker gang back-angle parking their hogs against the curb. Now, if you're thinking flute music, Jethro Tull probably comes to mind, but can I throw out another name for you? Jazz flautist Ragan Whiteside is one of the best out there, in particular check out her cover of Little River Band's "Reminiscing," great stuff.

Corey Doctorow came up with the term "Enshittification" to describe how tech companies lock users in and then make their products as shitty as possible while extracting as much money out of them as they can. He's said on multiple appearances that he's okay with the term being used beyond the tech space, so I'm going to point out how this movie shows us the ways that so many things we took for granted in the early 90s have been enshittified now. Start with Las Vegas. In the early 90s it was a place where people with not a lot of money could go and have a fun time. Remember the Roseanne episode where she and Dan went with Tom Arnold and Sandra Bernhardt, and Roseanne got drunk and heckled Wayne Newton because she thought he was an impersonator? They ain't goin' to Vegas now, and even when I went in 2013 I could see it changing, nothing was cheap like it was in the early 90s, and in the 10+ years since, it's only gotten worse, as they'd rather cater to whales like Dana White compensating for inadequacies with six-figure blackjack hands than working-class stiffs looking to escape their troubles for a few days. From there, look at Estrada's job as a mechanic. The first thing William Smith would ask him today is, "how good are you with a computer?" And is Smith going to be able to pay him enough to support his new wife and step-daughter, even if they're living in a trailer by Lake Mead? Even Estrada going to the grocery store, it was like "oh man, the grocery store experience was so much nicer back then!" No memberships, no fugazi sales, Pepsi and ConAgra didn't own everything, Estrada paid a living wage so he can buy food, the grocery store workers paid a living wage too. Things aren't only worse now than they were in 1991, they're worse now by design, and have been for a while.

Finally, what the hell are we doing in that picture above? The cap, the mustache, the T-shirt, even the little cigar, and this guy is hanging out at a biker bar no less! You can't recreate this guy today, he'd either be dripping in irony, or imitated by a younger person who's still not generating the look organically. These weren't just decisions that were made in the morning as this man was leaving the house, these were completely legitimate decisions that no one he encountered that day would've looked askance at. And could there have been another beer that he'd be drinking other than Miller Lite? He's not quite what I would call a Cocaine Dad, which is a term I used for guys my dad's age who were born in the late 40s/early 50s, but when the late 80s/early 90s came, couldn't come to terms with the fact that they were getting older, so they pushed beyond their relevance and tried to look the part of someone ten years younger than them--and while they may not have all partaken in some nose candy, you wouldn't have put it past them either. This guy above has no use for terms like "relevance," he's completely authentic--I mean look at him, he's genuinely into the flautist performing her solo, even if he won't remember it tomorrow. Here's to you that guy in the picture above, you're one of the greats.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Tubi. As I said above, I think you'll get more enjoyment out of this after you've seen a lot of the better PM films first, but as a free streamer it does the trick.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102275

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

Scorned (1993)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judgement Day (1999)

I was looking to get more Ice-T on the site, and I saw that this was on Tubi. In addition to him, it has Mario Van Peebles, was written by Fred Olen Ray, Cole S. McKay was stunt coordinator, and has stars from two of my favorite shows, Barney Miller and Beverly Hills, 90210. In that sense, it was less about whether I should review it, and more about why I hadn't done it already! In addition to us, Matt Spector at Bulletproof has covered this as well.

Judgement Day is about an asteroid that's heading for earth in three days. Higher-ups Max Gail and James Eckhouse want to use a device developed by Linden Ashby to intercept and destroy it, the problem is, Mario Van Peebles and his religious cult have kidnapped Ashby because they don't want the asteroid stopped. Gail thinks he has a leak in his department, so he gets FBI agent Suzy Amis to track Ashby down, but she can't do it alone, so she gets Ice-T out of prison, because he has a score to settle with Van Peebles himself. It's a race against time now, will it be relief accompanied by smiles and hardy handshakes in the war room, or doom and destruction?

You can probably guess the outcome, and to be fair, who wants to be deprived of those smiles of relief and hardy handshakes after the planet's been saved? Especially knowing Wojo and Jim Walsh are in the war room hoping Linden Ashby's device works. On the way there, there's almost a 48 Hours interplay between Amis and Ice-T as they track down Van Peeble's base of operations, which is a nice twist on the disaster movie that I'm surprised The Asylum hasn't used more often. That said, the Fred Olen Ray story has that feel of a few story templates fused together, and it might not have worked, except for the prodigious cast I listed above. For example, in addition to Van Peebles, Tom "Tiny" Lister is his right hand man. A rival drug dealer Ice-T and Amis go to for info is played by Coolio. Amis's boyfriend is Larry Poindexter--and no, unfortunately he doesn't drive a car while blasting Guns N' Roses' "Move to the City." Once you have all these names, it's just a matter of getting in and out in 90 minutes, having a few good action moments spread throughout, and then letting those names cook, and I feel like this one does all that.

We're at 19 movies now for Ice-T, and I think this might be my favorite of his performances. Also his screen time in this is probably more than four or five of the other movies of his we've covered combined, which was refreshing too. He's in the Hall of Fame for a reason, and this reinforces that. The moment he's onscreen, you know it's going to be good, but then there's the mix of hard edge and off-beat and quirky that allows him to thrive in the 48 Hours paradigm. The other thing about Ice-T is he was a rapper first, and this movie uses one of his songs, which is also fantastic. I don't know if between rights issues or studio time if he recorded a fresh track that it's realistic to expect every Ice-T movie to have his music in it, but it would be nice if more of them did, because it was a great touch here. We haven't done one of his films in two years, so I need to rectify that and get more of his stuff up more frequently, because he's always a great time.

I'm going to try not to go too fast and furious (Vin Diesel style) as I get through the other names in this, but there's a lot, so buckle up. First, among Hall of Famers, we have Cole S. McKay as stunt coordinator, plus he's in one scene which you can see above. We're at 65 for him now, and I have at least one other movie of his in the can that I need to review, so he'll be up to 66 soon enough. Then we have Fred Olen Ray as screenwriter. I think this is the fifth movie of his we've done that he wrote, but because he didn't direct this doesn't add to that total for him, which I think stands at 17, second-most all time among directors. Mario Van Peebles is great as the baddie, he gives you everything you want there, and is a name we always enjoy seeing on the site. Same for the late Tom "Tiny" Lister, who plays Van Peebles's righthand man, and gives you everything you want in that role. Then we have Linden Ashby, someone we've seen a few times and probably should be tagged. His part's not as big, but it's vital, so it was good they cast someone like him in the role. I mentioned Larry Poindexter. He probably gets it the worst in this, but that's okay, he'll always have American Ninja 2. Then as a big Barney Miller fan, how do you not love Wojo? We've seen him here before too, in particular DC Cab comes to mind, but here he's great as higher up tasked with stopping the asteroid. Fans of Firestorm (not sure if there are any of those out there) would know Suzy Amis, who ended up marrying James Cameron after this and hasn't done another movie since. If you're going to go out, why not have it be an Ice-T DTV flick written by Fred Olen Ray and directed by John Terlesky. That's right, Deathstalker II and Chopping Mall's John Terlesky directed this, as he did another Van Peebles/Ice-T film we did a couple years ago, Guardian. Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the late Coolio in a one-scene cameo. I don't know how many movies aren't improved by a Coolio one-scene cameo, and this film certainly wasn't an exception.

One name you may have noticed that's missing above is James Eckhouse, aka Jim Walsh from Beverly Hills, 90210. I wanted to give him his own paragraph, because I think he's one of the best TV dads of all time, but he never gets included on that list. Maybe that's because he was a little young to be playing a father to kids born in the early 70s, considering he was only born in 1955, but I always loved how he and Carol Potter's Cindy Walsh were the two grounding forces on the show. That might be why the show wrote them out eventually, because I think they wanted to untether the kids somewhat and let them find their way without the Walshes there to provide stability. Who knows what the reason was, but I'd take the Pepsi Challenge with James Eckhouse's Jim Walsh against any other TV dad out there, other than maybe Hugh Beaumont's Ward Cleaver and Robert Reed's Mike Brady. So, here's to you James Eckhouse, you're one of the great ones.

Finally, we get two common movie lines in this. The first one is so common Will at Exploding Helicopter has a Letterboxd list for movies that feature it, and that's "we've got company," which we get when Tom "Tiny" Lister is trying to drive off with Van Peebles, his wife (Shireen Crutchfield), and their bounty, Linden Ashby, when Lister notices the cops are coming and gives us the line. The second one was "it's the 90s." Anyone who lived through the 90s knows what this means, anything that was considered outside the bounds of conservative, buttoned-up, Reagan 80s culture was now given a grudging acceptance with those three little words, "it's the 90s." Women standing up for themselves? "Hey, it's the 90s, am I right?" Gay people demanding more rights? "I mean, to each their own, it's the 90s after all." Sinead O'Connor ripping up a picture of the Pope? "Okay, let's not get carried away..." Here it's within an off-beat, quirky, and slightly homophobic back and forth between Ice-T and Suzy Amis that we get the line, when Ice-T asks why she's not married, then asks if she's a lesbian, to which he explains he doesn't have a problem with it if she is, because "it's the 90s." Maybe we need a little bit more "it's the 90s" in our society today, because, man "it's the 2020s" covers a whole host of bonkersness that I don't even want to start on.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Tubi here in the States, which I think is a great deal. The names alone sell it, but in a sea of thumbnails on a streaming services, sometimes that's all you need. Hell, it's the 2020s, am I right?

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0221309

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

Angels of the City (1989)

Continuing our trend this year of doing a PM post to start the month, I wanted to do something with Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, and decided the first of the two he directed would be a good way to go. (We've done the other one before, Coldfire.) Now you might be thinking, wasn't 57 Seconds the first February post? I'm still under he delusion that I'm posting on Saturdays instead of Sundays, and maybe I need to give up the ghost on that. Anyway, in addition to us, Mitch at the Video Vacuum covered this as part of his "It Came from the Thrift Shop" series, and Jon at PM is looking to cover this one soon too.

Angels of the City is about a group of kids in their late 20s going to USC, but acting like they're in their early 20s. They get an assignment from their sociology professor to interview people from another level of society from themselves, so two guys  decide to interview a lady of the night. Their girlfriends (Kelly Galindo and Cynthia Cheston), on the other hand, are pledging a sorority, and part of their initiation is to pretend to be ladies of the night for an evening. Both the guys and the girls end up in the middle of a turf war between two rival pimps, though the ladies get it much worse when they're kidnapped by one of them, and have to fight for their lives in some of the worst places of LA. Will they make it home alive?

This is quite a movie. Yes, it has the low-budget look of early PM, and you definitely see them trying to make the best of limited resources, like in an early scene where a lady of the night is being chased by some baddies on Hollywood Boulevard, and we see reused footage and locations being looped to extend the chase. But the thing is, the scope of what LHJ and company were trying to do here is admirable, and I think they pull it off in a lot of ways. Essentially it's a darker version of the 80s teen romp film, where a bunch of rich kids run up against the seedy underbelly of the city, but instead of that underbelly being a bunch of caricatures and stereotypes, they're complete people, while the kids, especially the two young ladies, see just how much they've started life on third base. I think the other issue is this movie has a 30-minute epilogue, and while it resolves itself well, there is a sense of "how did we end up here?" Grading PM on a curve though, between the ambition to want to do this commentary on 80s teen romp comedies, and the novelty of watching early PM--including a great death scene for Cole S. McKay--this is worth checking out.

Usually we start with the Hall of Famers, but I wanted to spotlight the film's director, co-writer, and co-composer Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs. In his review, Mitch mentioned that the same year this came out, his Welcome Back Kotter costar John Travolta had Look Who's Talking released in theaters, and while I know LHJ would've loved to have had a film like that himself, I liked that he took advantage of the platform PM was giving him to try to do something deeper. And it felt like everyone else at PM was into it and onboard, perhaps because it's the story of LA that wasn't often told. It's not just that there's a seedy underbelly, but that seedy underbelly exists right next to places like USC where some of the richest kids live; but also that that seedy underbelly is composed of actual human beings who didn't have it as lucky as those rich kids at USC, and to see that juxtaposition come through in every scene, even in what felt like a tacked on epilogue, was really impactful. The only other film he directed after this was Coldfire, but considering the kind of social commentary he demonstrated here, it would be nice if someone else gave him the platform to do more of this.

Many of the PM names you know and love are here. We have Rick Pepin on cinematography, furthering a template that PM used with him, and later Ken Blakey, where you could have an actor without a lot of directorial experience take the helm, and lean on either Pepin or Blakey as their DP. It also serves to give us the "PM look" we know and love later on, even if the quality of the film stock on this early one isn't quite what they use later. We also see Cole S. McKay doing stunts, including a great death scene as one of the rival pimp's goons; plus I've finally tagged stunt coordinator Michael J. Sarna, who starts off with 28 tags! When we look at the PM stunt coordinators, he's right there with McKay, Spiro Razatos, and Red Horton and "Broadway" Joe Murphy, so his tag was long overdue. Paul Volk, someone who probably should also be tagged, does editing duties on this, which I think he earns his money on some of these scenes where things are happening in different locations, and he needs to make them appear to look like one. Finally, Addison Randall was an assistant director, a name we see a lot of in early PM. If you look at their first handful of films, other than this one with LHJ at the helm, all of the other films were directed by either Joseph Merhi, Charles Kanganis, or Addison Randall.

I was trying to think of teen romp films that this could be answer to, and the two that first come to mind are License to Drive and Adventures in Babysitting. Another could be Risky Business. There's a cutesy, Hollywood idea of what sex work is, and what it means to be pushed to the margins of society, and the main characters experience it, live through it, and end up on the other side sleeping in their comfortable beds, while the people who are struggling no longer exist. And I think maybe that's why LHJ wanted the 30-minute epilogue, because it wouldn't have felt right to him to just roll credits after the young ladies escape their ordeal. He adds another layer in that epilogue too, where the sociology professor is more fascinated by what the girls experienced than concerned, so even he's coming from a place of seeing sex workers and other people struggling as more a novelty than as actual people. Ten years later when I was in college studying anthropology, my professors seemed more sensitive to this, making sure we looked at people as fellow human beings, and not subjects in a case study for a paper, and maybe that was why I was more sensitive to what LHJ and company were going for with the professor character in this film.

Finally, at the beginning of the film the radio announcer mentions Magic Johnson, and later a guy delivering Chinese food is wearing a Magic Johnson jersey. In 1989, the Lakers were a year removed from winning their fifth title with Magic, and despite the rise of the Pistons and the Bulls, plus the Trailblazers in the Western Conference, there was no reason to believe that run wouldn't continue. Two years later they lost to the Bulls in the Finals, and then Magic revealed he was HIV positive, and that was it. Now, no one should feel bad for Lakers fans, because they've won six more titles since 2000, which puts them in a tie with my Patriots for the most among the US Big 4 sports during that time, but it is interesting to think how we get so used to the world being one thing--that Magic Johnson had to retire early because he was HIV positive--that it's hard to put into perspective what that time capsule looked like right before it. Yes, the Lakers were declining a bit from their 80s dominance, but there was a sense that they still had another six or seven years left with Magic, they just needed to retool and within a couple years they'd be back. But alas it never happened, and the 90s were a lost decade for the Lakers, until they drafted Kobe and traded for Shaq. Again, not feeling bad for Lakers fans, just saying the mentions of Magic Johnson here forced me to look back at that slice of time and think about how different things were.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this free on Tubi here in the States, which I think is a great way to go. Between the novelty of early PM, and just the scope of what Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs and company were going for, I think it's worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099042

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

3 Musketeers (2011)

It's that time again, DTVC Hall of Fame inductions! And our first one is one we knew was going to be in as far back as March when we first decided to tag him, and discovered he had over 50 movies on the site! That's right, the one and only Cole S. McKay. This film is one of two he directed for The Asylum, the other being 200 M.P.H., and after hearing Will from Exploding Helicopter say good things about it, I figured it's be a great one for McKay's induction post.

3 Musketeers is about an elite US military special ops team of the same name (Xin Sarith Wuku, Keith Allen, and Michele Boyd) who get framed for blowing up a South Korean airliner while doing some special ops stuff in North Korea. Meanwhile back at the Pentagon, agent D'Artagnan (Heather Hemmens) is sent to talk to a crackpot named Planchet (the great Steven Williams), but when he's assassinated, she knows this goes way deeper, so she tracks down the Musketeers for help. Turns out their former boss, Treville the Cardinal (Alan Rachins) is planning to assassinate the President of the United States! Will our heroes be able to stop him?

This was a pretty fun time. It does have some lulls in it, and it has the cheap CGI we've come to expect from The Asylum, but beyond that this does what you need it to do. I think the best part is Heather Hemmens as the lead. She underpins the whole approach The Asylum is going for here where they're doing something different with the Three Musketeers story, and that's furthered with the Musketeers themselves, Xin Sarith Wuku, Keith Allen, and Michele Boyd. This is a fun team that I want to see succeed, which is the key to making something like this work. On the opposite end, Alan Rachins is a great baddie, with David Chokachi working well as his second-in-command. Unlike a lot of the PM films McKay worked on though, CGI replaces a lot of the stunts, shootouts, and explosions, and that keeps this from being an all-time classic that some of those are; but I think the fun cast and the work McKay and the stunt team does in the moments that aren't CGI elevates this beyond the usual Asylum fair, making it worth a watch.

63 tags before a Hall of Fame induction may be a record, unless we decide to put Millennium Films in, but at least it'll be a record for a person. As I've mentioned before, Cole S. McKay was first put on my radar when I had Chris the Brain Kacvinsky from Bulletproof Action on the pod to talk The Sweeper (episode 165 in the archives). We were talking about Spiro Razatos, and he mentioned McKay then as another great stunt guy. From there, doing the PM Entertainment Podcast with Jon Cross, McKay kept coming up, so after reviewing Victim of Desire back in March I decided to tag him, and he had over fifty movies that we'd reviewed on the site! Since then, we've now done an additional 7 movies (this one included), meaning at that rate he could pass Dolph to be the most tagged all time! What's interesting with this movie, is you see the moments where The Asylum skimps with CGI that PM allowed their stunt teams, led by talents like McKay, to get after it. For example, we get a moment where Hemmens's character swings on a large advertising banner to escape some baddies, and it's just bad-looking CGI. You know had this been PM fifteen years before, a stunt person would've been rigged-up and been swinging through that scene for real. As I mentioned above though, what McKay and his team can do is elevate the moments of practical stunts we do get, so we get something closer to that golden age from fifteen years before, even if it's not quite that. He has a ton of stuff left to cover, especially from that golden age of DTV action, so it'll be exciting to see what comes next, but for right now, it's about finally getting him into the Hall of Fame, which we're doing in this post.

Our other Hall of Famer here is The Asylum, they of the Asylum Rule which states that anyone with over 30 tags is an automatic Hall of Famer. In that sense The Asylum made us induct them into the Hall of Fame by the sheer volume of movies they've made like this who have other people in them. The other thing is, when I first started the site in the late 2000s, these Mockbusters they were doing were ubiquitous, and a fun inclusion to get people interested in what we were doing. We did our share of Transmorphers and Snakes on a Train, and one thing I've found with those films, or the myriad disaster movies and big monster movies, is they often used those films to give people opportunities they wouldn't ordinarily have had. In that sense I think they're working in the same tradition as PM Entertainment, and when it works, like it does here, it's a lot of fun. So, maybe they forced us to induct them into the Hall of Fame, but watching a movie like this one is a reminder that they were also deserving of the honor.

We're going to try to stuff everyone else into this sixth paragraph, so buckle up, because there are a lot of names to get to. We'll start with Heather Hemmens, who I discovered from her IMDb bio is a fellow Mainer! She was great here, but it looks like the only other thing she's done like this was another Asylum joint, Rise of the Zombies, so maybe we'll have to give that a try. Among the Musketeers, I didn't recognize any of them either, but Keith Allen I thought looked like a combination of Todd Newton and Ryan Seacrest, which was perfect for the role he played as the computer whiz in the group. Then we had Xin Sarith Wuku and Michele Boyd as more of the action Musketeers, and like Hemmens were great as action leads. It's unfortunate the The Three Musketeers that this was mockbustering was kind of a bust, because it would've been fun to see this crew come back for sequels--and really, is it a rule that The Asylum can't make their own sequels, even if the blockbuster they're mockbustering doesn't get a sequel? With our baddies we had the late Alan Rachins, who brings this West Wing guest story-arc element to the proceedings, which would've been enough, but we also get Rachins Fu, when he fights Xin Sarith Wuku, which was beyond what I could've asked for. And then with Chokachi as his second-in-command, what I liked there was he brought a poor man's Casper Van Dien vibe, but the real Casper Van Dien would've been too much for Rachins's second-in-command, so it's almost like Casper Van Dien light, or like a side-helping of Van Dien. I never considered it before, but Chokachi works great in that lane where you want Casper Van Dien energy, but the real Van Dien is too big for the role. The Steven Williams one-scene was great. We haven't had him too much on the site before, that's why he wasn't tagged, but always great to see him when we can. Finally, the person in this film with the third-most tags was the one and only James Lew, who has one scene in the beginning, but does most of his damage on the stunt team. That's 20 movies for him now. Could he be our next candidate for an Asylum Rule induction?

Finally, in high school we watched the 1993 version of the film, and my friends I loved the opening sword fight between Chris O'Donnell's D'Artagnan and Paul McGann's Girard, mostly for McGann, like when he screams "liar!" and then the faces he makes while he's dueling with O'Donnell. I remember our friend's mom got mad at us for rewinding it and replaying it over and over, telling us we were going to break the VCR. To this day, 30 years later, when I hear the name "D'Artagnan" I hear McGann yelling "will get you D'Artagnan" in his screechy McGann voice. I hadn't seen that scene in 30 years though, so I thought for this review I'd cue it up and watch it on Disney+, which fortunately they hadn't vaulted like they tend to do with their movies, and it still made me laugh all these years later. While that scene is the lasting legacy of the film for me, I think for most people it's the theme song, "All for Love," by Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, and Sting. I don't know if that one was intended to be a franchise like the 2011 one, but had it made more at the box office, you have to imagine there would've at least been a sequel. It does make you wonder, why hasn't this concept not worked better? I think the period piece thing is always going to be an issue, but when I looked up adaptations, I didn't see any modern versions other than the one we're reviewing here. Could that be the key to the successful franchise? Maybe The Asylum was onto something.

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 deal. This is one of those Asylum movies where the formula works, so it's worth a watch if you're looking for a fun time. Also, here's to you Cole S. McKay, and your induction into the DTVC Hall of Fame. You're truly one of the greats, this is well-deserved.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1977681

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

Repo Jake (1990)

Our friend Jon Cross over at the PM Entertainment Podcast has been doing a celebration of PM films this month called "SePMtember," and I thought I'd get in on the festivities with this PM flick I'd been meaning to watch for a long time. In addition to us, we have a legit Murder's Row of other reviews, with Chris the Brain from PM, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Mitch at the Video Vacuum, and Simon from Explosive Action all having covered this as well. A sign that I'm long overdue to join the party.

Repo Jake is an early PM joint featuring the great Dan Haggerty as the eponymous hero, a burly fellow from Minnesota who moves out to LA temporarily because he hears the repo business is booming out there. Once he gets on with a repo company, it doesn't take much for him to rise to the top of the rag-tag fun group of fellow repoers--and fortunately the people he needs to repo cars from are just deadbeats, we wouldn't want to have to think about people struggling to make ends meet and falling behind on their payments during the recession in the early 90s, would we? Anyway, one of those deadbeats is a pimp and porn producer, and after Jake repos his car, he gets revenge by threatening Jake's new lady friend. Now he has to win a demolition derby-style race for said pimp--oh, by the way, Jake was a former Indy car driver. Wonders never cease.

There are a few places you can go with this. From a PM standpoint it's fun to see the seeds of some of the things that would be hallmarks of their films appear here, like people being thrown through windows, exploding cars, and Cole S. McKay appearing in a scene. The wave is starting to build here, and it's like we're wading in the water, watching the wave come in, waiting for those PM classics to come in push us to shore. There's also the 90s nostalgia. I loved seeing Haggarty come in on a Trailways bus--try not to think of someone with his massive frame having to sit on a bus from Minnesota to LA though, Christ, I'm 5'7" and my back and knees are seizing up just thinking of that trip! But the third element is taking it as a film on its own merits, and that may be where it falls a but flat. We get the classic PM action to start, but they hadn't developed that every 10-15 minutes rule yet, so we get dead spots too. The race scenes were hard to follow, and I couldn't make out where anyone was. And then the music, if it wasn't a wailing harmonica, it was a Casio preset whimsical theme. With all that in mind, while I usually use the term "connoisseur" ironically--and I guess I still am here--you have to really dig this kind of thing to enjoy it, which I did, but not everyone will.

We're now at 52 PM flicks, and if it seems like I've been covering a lot of them lately, you're right. This is three months in a row with a post, four months out of the last five, and 7 of the last 9. This is the earliest one we've watched in a while though, you can tell from that early logo, and between the logo and the script on the opening credits, it was a lot like Shotgun, only without the too-sweet theme song. There were other hallmarks of PM that we could see here too. Like when one of the repo guys fell asleep, and some of his coworkers put lipstick on him, then woke him up and sent him out on a job. That was it, nothing else happened, like the kids who put the pizza box in the oven in Riot and then after Chinese food with Daniels, are never heard of again. Another hallmark I mentioned above was Cole S. McKay, who had a scene driving a car Haggerty is trying to repo. Before you know it, Haggerty is on the hood hanging on for dear life while McKay is driving all over the place. It was a great way to get McKay's 62nd tag on the site. We also have Merhi's direction with Pepin's cinematography on a Jacobson Hart script, and Paul Volk working on post-production. With all these names working together, they were able to refine their craft with each successive movie, which I think more than anything was what made PM so great, each film was part of the process, not just a one-off.

This is only our second Haggerty film on the site, the other being Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan, which we reviewed in 2013. It does seem odd that 1300+ posts in and this is only his second film, especially when we have a classic like Elves that I discuss with Mitch on the podcast every year around Christmas. And it's in that mid-80s to mid-90s period where he did a lot of DTV damage, so I probably should make an effort to get more of his stuff up. He does have another PM flick, from the same year as this, Chance with Lawrence Hilton Jacobs, where Haggerty also plays a repo man, just not the same one he plays here. The thing about him that's so great is he has this avuncular quality that always makes him endearing to watch, whether it's as a race car driving repo man in penny loafers like he is here, or when he's tearing it up on Battle of the Network Stars. For all the things about this film that didn't work, he's definitely one that does.

We generally don't do our McDonald's paragraph this early in the post, but it is the 16th film we've had with a McDonald's, so I feel like maybe they've moved past the penultimate paragraph territory. And the thing is, similar to Presidential Portraits, I wasn't always tagging them in the past, so sometimes when I rewatch things we've already reviewed, I catch one and add the tag. Could we see McDonald's getting into the Hall of Fame on the Danny Trejo rule? I've looked at other fast food places, and none of them appear as much as McDonald's, I think in part because the one from this film and the one on the Vegas strip are in a lot of films from this period. Recently I made a trip to Chicago to see a White Sox game (ballpark number 14 for me!) and before my flight back I hit the McDonald's flagship location, where they have some international offerings, including the Big Arch Burger. Not to be confused with the Arch Deluxe, the Big Arch is two quarter-pound patties with white American cheese and this Arch sauce, along with some other accoutrements. The white American cheese was a bit strong for me, but otherwise I liked it. The best way to describe it? It's like what the rest of the world must think of American cuisine in the form of a burger.

Finally, for our actual finally paragraph, would you look at that sweet, late 80s Texas Rangers cap. There's a little mark in the middle, which I think was meant to obfuscate it enough to avoid MLB's lawyers calling to complain, but otherwise it's perfect. In 2023 I was lucky enough to be in Dallas for work, and was able to get a Lyft over to Arlington to see a Texas Rangers game (ballpark number 11). I looked online, and no place makes this version new anymore. As far as the ballpark, if you get a chance, it's worth seeing a game there. When I went, I got a cheap seat in the upper deck, but one of the ushers told me to sit in the section below that because they hadn't sold out, something I've never had an usher do before. The problem with the park though is there's no public transportation out there, and it's not in Dallas. For someone who goes to games here in the Northeast, and who doesn't drive, being able to take the subway--or even a light rail option--is much nicer.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can get this on Prime, which is a great way to go. It's probably a deeper cut PM, you've gotta really like movies like this to enjoy it, but if you do, I think you'll have a great time like I did.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340312

Pick up my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Dark Breed (1996)

We received some very sad news last week, Rick Pepin, the P in PM Entertainment, passed away. I wanted to post something in his honor, and this is one of the films he directed that I'd been meaning to review anyway. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, the guys at Comeuppance, Simon at Explosive action, and Fred Anderson at Ninja Dixon have all covered this as well.

Dark Breed is about a group of astronauts, including Jonathan Banks and Felton Perry, that return to earth and don't seem like themselves. Former astronaut and soldier Jack Scalia is called in to contain them. But when Robin Curtis is captured by the big wig in charge, Cutter (Lance LeGault), and beaten by two mustachioed gentlemen; and then his ex-wife, who was also on the failed space mission, takes him to a diner and tells him that everyone, including her, have been infected by aliens--but fortunately she's been infected by a good alien, not the bad aliens the other astronauts were infected by--Scalia knows this goes much deeper. Now they need to stop both the bad aliens and Lance LeGault. At least Scalia is handy with a rocket launcher.

This is up there as one of my favorite PM flicks, slotting in at number 12 all-time on my PM Entertainment list. A big part of it is Cole S. McKay's action sequences, which I think are some of the best from PM, including a fantastic car chase where Scalia's character is riding a satellite dish that's being towed by a bread truck like he's on an inner tube attached to a speed boat on a lake. I saw some reviews on IMDb and Letterboxd calling this just a cheap rip-off of Predator or Alien, but how can you watch a car chase like that and have that opinion? I think Fred Anderson in his review summed up my thoughts, saying that even if it is a mix of all those other movies, the action is what makes it such a fun time. Beyond that, Scalia is the perfect hero, giving us plenty of bad ass moments, like when he takes a rocket launcher from a sergeant below him, and shows him how to use it, turning his baseball cap backwards in the process--perhaps giving us the one exception to the rule that men over 40 shouldn't wear their baseball caps backwards. Then you add in the supporting cast, with the great Jonathan Banks as the head alien baddie, Lance LeGault chewing scenery as the head government baddie, a trio of great leading ladies with Robin Curtis, Cindy Ambuehl, and Denise W. Scott, and then the inimitable George "Buck" Flower as an unhoused individual who encounters the aliens. This is the too sweet PM you came for.

It's hard to describe the legacy Rick Pepin, with his production partner Joseph Merhi, created with PM Entertainment. 90s action wouldn't be 90s action without them, but also would 2010s action be what it was without guys like Spiro Razatos and Cole S. McKay having the freedom to do the crazy stunt scenes they did in these films. In wanting to do something in Rick's honor, I decided to review one of the films he directed, even though his work as cinematographer created what we know of as "the PM look," because Jon Cross from the PM Entertainment Podcast said these sci-fi movies he directed were what he especially enjoyed. I think out of those, I'd put T-Force and Hologram Man above this, but it's not far behind them. For us fans of action movies, it doesn't get much better than PM Entertainment, and with Pepin being the P in PM, he leaves behind something that he and Merhi created that I don't think will ever be matched. Not to mention personally giving me hours of enjoyment with all the fun movies they produced. Here's to you Mr. Pepin, you truly were one of the great ones, you'll really be missed.

We're now at 61 movies for Cole S. McKay, but we're closing in on October so we can officially get him into the Hall of Fame. And while I wanted to do a movie he directed for his induction post, this would've been a great one for that too. It also would've been a great one for his entry into the 60 Club, which ended up being Save Me due to movies getting shuffled around and our need to do The Stray for Michael Madsen's passing, but with this being the post in honor or Rick Pepin, we can't use it for his 60 Club post either. Looking at all the films I've seen that he was stunt coordinator/second-unit director on, I have this behind Hologram Man as his best, maybe just above Skyscraper, though it's close. I mean just the car chase with Scalia's character riding the satellite dish, I'd take the Pepsi Challenge with that against any of Spiro Razatos's great PM stuff, and McKay had plenty of other scenes in this that were great as well. He also gets a cameo as a guy attacking George "Buck" Flower, before one of the aliens beats the crap out of him. We'll get him in the Hall of Fame in just over a month, the question is, how many more tags will get before then!

This is our second Jack Scalia film on the site, the other being T-Force, so I'd say that's a pretty good two-film run. He has plenty of other DTV stuff out there for me to review, including The Silencers from this same year, which was also directed by Rick Pepin and action-directed by Cole S. McKay, so we know I'll have to do that one eventually. He's just fantastic here, everything you'd want in an action lead, total bad-assery. Speaking of two-film runs, the only other time we reviewed a Jonathan Banks film was Last Man Standing, a film I have at 4 on my all-time PM list, three places higher than T-Force, so Banks's might be better than Scalia's! Unlike Scalia though, Banks doesn't have a lot of other DTV stuff, so we may not see him again unless he finds his way into a Randall Scandal or something in the future. I recently finally got around to watching Breaking Bad, which he was fantastic in, so seeing him here now gives this an added element that I enjoyed. 

Finally, the Lance LeGault's character in this was named "Cutter." I don't know about you, but every time I hear "cutter" I think of Coors Cutter, Coors's non-alcoholic beer from the 90s. I did like most nowadays, and looked Coors Cutter up on Wikipedia, but the info is scant. They said the beer was introduced in 1991, revamped in 1994, but now mostly discontinued. I remembered it as part of that early 90s non-alcoholic trend that included O'Doul's and Miller Sharps. The one my grandmother drank was Genesee, which I thought was cooler than any of them, and I think if I needed an NA beer that's probably what I'd get. There's been a new trend recently in non-alcoholic beers, with Heineken joining in, and some companies exclusively brewing NA stuff, which I see advertised for sale at sporting events, after venues stop selling alcohol late in the games. For me, I don't drink much anymore anyway, but when I want to enjoy a beer without the alcohol, I get a hop tea instead. You get the hops taste without any of the alcohol side effects--though if I getting them to have while watching one of my teams play, I make sure I get the chamomile ones, because I don't need any additional caffeine while I'm stressing out about the outcome!

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi here in the States, which I think is a good deal. This is one of my favorite PM flicks, well worth checking out. And also a great one to watch in honor of Rick Pepin, a legend who, with his partner Joseph Merhi, gave us hours of fantastic movies, for which I will be forever grateful.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116026

Pick up my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Save Me (1994)

This is one I covered on a two-part episode with Jon Cross from The PM Entertainment Podcast and the After Movie Diner back in November, number 184 (part 2) in the archives, when we looked at a couple of Harry Hamlin erotic thrillers. The other thing is this is Cole S. McKay's 60th film on the site! That makes him our third member of the 60 Club, and ties him with Gary Daniels for second-most ever, behind Dolph.

Save Me has Harry Hamlin as an investment broker whose wife (Olivia Hussey) has left him and taken their son with her. Also, he was the top broker at the firm, so he's been able to coast on that reputation and do very little work since then. Anyway, one day he's out on his lunch break, and he sees a gorgeous woman (Lysette Anthony) go into a lingerie shop, so he follows her and spies on her. After another time, she gives him a note that says "Save Me" with a phone number on it. Seems she's trying to get out from under the clutches of her abusive partner Michael Ironside, which Hamlin is only too happy to oblige her. He skips work or leaves early so he and her can hook up in his Mustang. But when will this Noir-ish femme fatale show Hamlin she's not all she seems?

This isn't horrible as a fun, time-killing watch. It pops in at around 90 minutes, you get some fun performances, and the "erotic" in "erotic thriller" is there sufficiently well, even if it's not full on Shannon Whirry Skin-a-max kind of stuff. The business aspects of the story are a bit of a trip though. Hamlin has a jerk for a colleague played by Steve Railsback, and at some point their boss, Joseph Campanella, promotes Railsback to Hamlin's manager. Railsback then puts Hamlin on a performance improvement plan, aka "probation," which would lead one to believe that means one more slip-up and he's out, but according to this movie, it means Hamlin's untouchable during the probation period? Like he can tell Railsback "fuck you," and Railsback can't do anything about it? And Hamlin's character isn't necessarily likeable either, he's just more likeable than Railsback. You almost get to a point where you want Anthony to smoke them all and move onto the next town. But therein lies the charm, maybe? The erotic thriller isn't meant to be compelling cinema, it's meant to get us to the church on time, and I think this one does that.

If it feels like we were just celebrating Cole S. McKay's entry in to the 50 Club, that would be right, the thing is, he had over 50 films when we finally decided to tag him, so he skipped the usual 30 and 40 Club posts and came in in the mid-50s. The plan was to review something more action-oriented, or maybe one of the films he directed or starred in, for this 60 Club post, but reviewing The Stray last week changed all of that, and I didn't realize until I started putting everything together for this post that it would be his 60th, but I figured I'd go with it instead of moving everything around. (I also discovered that Kill 'Em All 2, which I'd planned to do here, is now gated by Netflix and unavailable if you don't have an ad-free version? Do these streamers just get more ski mask and gun-y by the day?) Anyway, since we tagged him a few months back, McKay has been cruising up the all-time lists, first passing Art Camacho, now tied with Daniels, and I think passing him will only be a matter of time, since we don't have many Daniels films left to cover, and there could be over 100 other McKay films that qualify--just 1994 alone he has like 25 movies, of which we'll now have done 8. Just his PM stuff will probably push him past Dolph. And while this movie doesn't have a ton of stunts, the ones it does have, like the person trying to run Hamlin down in a parking garage, are all excellent. We take stunts in a film for granted, and I think a big reason for that is McKay and his teams always makes them look great. 60 Club and beyond!

I believe this is our first Harry Hamlin film on the site, but we have looked at him twice on podcast, one being the two-parter I mentioned above that includes this movie, episode 184 in the archives; and the other being episode 132, "Short Shots," where we looked at a series of short films with Rich Hawes from DTV Digest, and Hamlin was in a short film called One Clean Move, which also starred Gary Busey and Luca Bercovici. The thing about these erotic thriller roles is he seems like a drip a lot of times in them, which, after seeing him in Mad Men, makes me think was more by design than I realized. Did he read these scripts and think "this guy is kind of up his own ass" or "I don't know if I'd want to spend ten minutes with someone who acted like this" and then just leaned into it? Take this movie. It looks like his character barely does any work, and often can't even be bothered to finish his day sitting in the office. When his friend (played by Neil Ronco, who also wrote the script--but wasn't the guy who invented an As Seen on TV rotisserie cooker) invites him and Lysette Anthony up to their cabin to spend a weekend with Ronco and his wife, Hamlin proceeds to use it for as a sex escape bed and breakfast with Anthony, the two of them making the beast with two backs all over the place there. Yet Ronco continues to be this guy's best friend. It creates this gray area though where we don't know if we should root for Hamlin or not. Maybe it doesn't matter if we're just having fun.

This is not our first Lysette Anthony film on the site, that distinction goes to Strippers vs. Werewolves, but this is her first starring role. She's everything you want in that erotic thriller/film noir femme fatale. She's alluring, seemingly vulnerable, yet can be diabolical when it's needed. Another name we've seen here before is Michael Ironside, who plays the psychologist that's also Anthony's lover. We never know if we can believe him or not, because he's Ironside, exactly who you want in a role like this to be this mysterious. Then there's Steve Railsback, a name we've also seen here before, but I think this is my first mention of him. He's had a great DTV career that we haven't really even scratched the surface of, the kind of name that probably should be in the Hall of Fame if we'd been reviewing more of his films. I'll definitely look for more of them now. And finally, you may have noticed two other names we tagged, Kato Kaelin and Jesse V. Johnson. Kaelin plays a broker at the firm Hamlin and Railsback work at, but I couldn't find him in the movie so I wasn't able to get a screen. And then Johnson is listed as a set designer. It's a tag, and while it doesn't count toward his director tags, it adds to his overall count, which now stands at 15. Other names that round out the cast were Bill Nunn, Olivia Hussey, and Joseph Campanella. They all do great and add that much more flavor to the proceedings, which is what you want when you see their names in the cast list.

Finally, the title of this film gets the Aimee Mann song of the same name from the movie Magnolia stuck in my head. Her hit with 'Til Tuesday, "Voices Carry," is one of my favorite songs ever. I don't know if I can name ten songs that came out after it was released in 1985 that I like better than it. I tried to get into more of  'Til Tuesday's stuff, but none of their other songs really worked for me the way that one did. I remember one time VH-1 was playing 80s stuff, and the VJ said that, while he liked "Voices Carry," their album after that one, Welcome Home, was one of his "all-time faves." It was my first time hearing "favorites" truncated down to "faves" like that, and I found it intriguing. Like, I don't know if I've ever been able to use the term unironically myself, but I do use it quite a bit in a more ironic sense, and you'll find it from time to time here on the site, like in my The Most Dangerous Game review where I call CT "one of my faves from The Real World." It's funny how I pick up these little verbal affectations over time, and how much they've become embedded in my speech, but yet how I also remember exactly where I got many of them from, all these years later.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi here in the States. Sometimes you just need a 90s Erotic Thriller with names you know, and this is one that'll get you to the church on time. (If you're wondering where I got that expression from, you should listen to more David Bowie.) And for the podcast episode on this that I did with Jon Cross, you can check out episode 184 in the archives, parts 1 and 2.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108045

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

The Stray (2000)

We lost another all-time great this past week in the legendary Michael Madsen. This is a film of his I'd been meaning to do for sometime, because it's a PM flick and also has DTVC Hall of Famer Frank Zagarino, so I figured it would be a good one for Madsen's in memoriam post. In addition to us, Comeuppance Reviews has done this as well.

The Stray has Madsen and Zagarino as cops hot on the trail of some guys in Uncle Sam masks picking up bags of drugs or money or whatever at public trash cans on the 4th of July (total coincidence that I'm reviewing this on 4th of July weekend!). After a big PM-style explosion, Madsen is suspended, so he lives with his girlfriend, Angie Everhart. Soon after, Everhart hits a guy in the road because she's using her cellphone while driving (it was an issue even in 2000!), and when she finds out he's homeless, she offers to let him live in the garage of the mansion she's living in with Madsen. Could this drifter have ulterior motives? And what about those guys in Uncle Sam masks? Madsen is suspicious of this drifter, but is there a basis for it, or is he just being a jerk? Everhart should probably figure it all out before she gets hurt--or worse!

This is a movie that I think I would've killed had I reviewed it in 2007 when I started the site. The story is that unique combination of all over the place, and contrived as all get-out. I'm supposed to believe this drifter who has it in for Everhart knew she was going to use her cellphone at exactly the time he put himself in the middle of the road so she could hit him? And then that she'd definitely take him in and give him a place to stay? But then we have the PM aspect, where foot chases turn into car chases, which turn into flipped cars and explosions. In one scene near the end, our drifter guy gets fired from his job as a dishwasher at Everhart's restaurant, and he causes a scene. In a Lifetime version of this film, the police would escort him out, give him a summons, and that would be it. Here, he smashes through a window, leading to a foot chase, which becomes a car chase when he steals a motorcycle. It's the kind of thing that I can really get down on. And then Madsen is great as the grizzled detective. He might be mailing this performance in in spots, but even when he's doing that, it's great to see. I don't know where this goes on your PM journey, or if this is the film you should watch to honor Madsen's memory versus something like Reservoir Dogs, but it did the trick for me.

When I started this site, I think I expected more Madsen films, but his first appearance wasn't until 2010 with Luck of the Draw, and now in 2025, as we're honoring his memory, I'm shocked that this is only his 16th film. If you look at his IMDb bio though, he has a lot of really low-budget ones, the kinds of things where you don't know how much Madsen you'll get, and whether it's even worth it either way, and I think that explains why he has such a low tag count. Of the films of his we've reviewed, the most infamous is Extreme Honor, the write-up which birthed the term "300-pound pork roast;" and I think his best performance of the films we've covered was in Vice, with then another one of my favorites one we did more recently, Executive Target, also a PM flick. The thing about Madsen was he had an effortless style, where even if he mailed it in, it looks great, but when he brought it, it could be something magical, and I think we see both sides here, like when he can't be bothered during the classic "your suspended!" scene with their chief after the bust gone bad, to the unleashed Madsen beating the drifter with his crutch after the guy sets him off--he had the crutch after a dirt bike accident, because PM needed to get some action in there somewhere. He does have one more PM flick that we need to cover, The Sender, which was directed by Richard Pepin and has a pretty robust cast, and then from there it'll probably be a matter of how many of the really low-budget ones he's done that we get to. Even if it isn't that many, Madsen has left an indelible legacy. One of the best to do it, Mr. Madsen, you truly will be missed.

This is now 50 PM flicks on the site, which I didn't realize when I picked this movie, I thought we would only be at 49. At some point we'll do a proper 50th film on PM celebration, but I don't think it's appropriate now as we're honoring Madsen. This is one of those interesting PM mash-ups. More suspense thriller than anything, and not really on the erotic side, but then to follow the PM rule, we have plenty of chases, shootouts, and explosions. It's this alchemy that shouldn't work--and probably doesn't work--but after seeing enough of these PM movies it's all a lot of fun. Two interesting aspects that I think it help it here too: one, cinematographer Ken Blakey, who worked on a ton of PM flicks and had a huge part in crafting what we know as the "PM look," really seems to be able to spread his wings more here, and we get some inspired shots; and two, Cole S. McKay (in now his 59th film on the site) is stunt coordinator, and he wasn't only versed in action films, but had done a lot of thrillers as well, and I think the fact that he can live in both worlds marries this combination of PM flick with Lifetime-style suspense thriller in a way that feels more organic. So with all the ways this shouldn't have worked, it's fascinating with PM how many ways they manage to make other elements work and give us something a bit more than the average fare.

We do have another Hall of Famer in this, Frank Zagarino. He doesn't have a big role, but it's fun to see him act opposite Madsen. This is one of only two PM flicks he did, the other being No Tomorrow, and neither were a starring vehicle for him, which is too bad. I guess around this time PM was focusing on big names like Madsen, or action leads like Speakman, plus their own in-house guys like Daniels, so someone like a Zagarino would've been the odd one out, but seeing him here as a cop with Madsen, he would've made a great cop on the edge in a PM action romp. Looking over his bio, there's maybe 25 movies of his I have left to cover, including all four of the Airboss movies, and with him at 16 films now, that means somewhere down the road the 40 Club is in play. We probably should get him to 20 and 30 movies first before we think 40 Club, but at least we know that's the ceiling. On the other hand, our last Zags film was Project Eliminator in June of 2023, so it's been over two years since his last flick. At that pace we'd get him into the 40 Club in 2075? If I'm still alive then, and still reviewing movies on this site... I don't know, I feel like by then the nuclear apocalypse will have happened, but if I'm still around for it, maybe a guy in a leather vest with no shirt underneath will be my caretaker, and in between driving me to my appointments in his black Chevy Impala with a spiked grill, he can help me get my Zags 40th Club post up on the site--only to have us ambushed by evil water farmers or tire farmers or whatever.

We got off the rails quick there, and I don't know how we'll get back on track, but maybe Angie Everhart's a good place to go. More than Madsen, she's the star of this, even though the way the film opens they make us think he is, but I think as the lead she does a great job of being the central focus around which everything else revolves. With how good she does here, you'd think, why didn't she have a bigger DTV career? More movies like The Substitute: Failure Is Not an Option would've made sense at least, and to be fair, in the period right before and after this she does have some other stuff that we should review, but then it tails off. According to the IMDb trivia, there were some factors in her personal life that probably contributed to this, plus maybe there's a point too where you're just tired of making The Substitute: Failure Is Not an Option, which I can respect. At least she does great here, and adds more to the proceedings to get us over the finish line.

Finally, we'll do one last paragraph on Madsen, since this is the post in honor of his passing. Madsen had the kind of talent that shouldn't have put him anywhere near DTV flicks, but even as far back as this, he was in that realm. If you go on Tubi now, you could do a whole month watching one Madsen film a day on there, and not run out before the calendar turns. And I think when you get movies like this, that have a fair amount of him in it, it's something really special and fun to watch. And that's the thing, out of those 30, there might be five of these, maybe ten if we're being generous, but when you find them, it makes it all worth it. That's why we love movies, whether they're blockbusters, Oscar winners, or PM DTV flicks like this, we want to be entertained, and perhaps see something special, and with Madsen, if his name was on the tin, there was always that possibility. I don't know if I suggest doing a month of Madsen movies on Tubi, but I think he'll always be one of those names that's fun to watch, and while it's sad he's no longer with us, we were all lucky to have him while we did.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Tubi, perhaps as part of your month of Madsen, but if you're just going to do one, this isn't a bad deal either. Also, if you want more Madsen, Ty and I did a double-bill of his DTV flicks in episode 159, "Madsen MAYhem," which you can find in the podcast archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0194410

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