The Mark: Redemption (2013)

This weekend is Gary Daniels's birthday, and considering we haven't reviewed anything of his since we did The Gardiner in 2024, I figured I'd dip back into the religious film pool and do another of the three religious movies he did, which is a sequel to he first one we covered about 13 years ago. Will being a Daniels completist have me questioning my life choices?

The Mark: Redemption picks up where the first one left off, with Craig Sheffer and Sonia Couling awkwardly parachuting out of a plane in front of some poorly done greenscreen. The Rapture is still happening, as the priest from Ireland who fell off his horse in the 1800s predicted it would, complete with an antichrist who wants one world government called "The New World Order" and wants people implanted with tracking chips--the same chip Sheffer's got in him. So this antichrist sends Daniels out to get him, but to know where to find him, he needs to beat up a tied-to-a-chair Eric Roberts first. Oh by the way, there's trafficking too! We just need an ad telling us to buy gold, and some sea moss pills, and we'll have completed our Alex Jones bingo card.

When I did the first one of these back in 2013, I said I wouldn't make fun of the religious aspects, because I was the one treading on their turf to review a Gary Daniels movie. That said, as you saw in my synopsis, this isn't just religious, it's that intersectionality of White Nationalism and Christian Fundamentalism that's much more insidious than simple religion. When I was on the Red Dawn episode of the Exploding Helicopter podcast, I said if someone were creating a White Nationalist group, Red Dawn would be the first movie night in the recruitment process. This movie is more like two weeks in, you got the heads shaved, the swastikas tattooed on the biceps, but maybe there's some doubt creeping in as the recruits are feeling isolated in your compound in Northern Idaho, you throw this on and start yelling "this is what we're fighting against right here!"--the one world government, nationalizing industries, tracking chips in people, and whatever else you have on your alt right bingo card--and by the end of the 90s minutes those brains are fully washed again. Does this have any value beyond that? Daniels is kind of fun, Wych Kaos is the cinematographer, and Thai film mainstay Sahajak Boonthanakit is great in his small part. But even as a Daniels completist like me, I found myself questioning my life choices while watching this.

We are officially at 61 movies for Gary Daniels though, so maybe it was worth it. And as I said above, he turns in a fun performance. I don't know if he's rubber stamping the ideas in this movie, or he just needed a paycheck--or even more, maybe the coded language of things like "New World Order" weren't familiar to him. It's one thing to be religious, but the Alex Jones conspiracy stuff is another level. We have one more of these overt religious films of his left to do, The Encounter: Paradise Lost, and then there's one more he made in Thailand at that time, A Stranger in Paradise, that I've been trying to track down as well. Maybe I'll wait until I've tracked down that second one before I dive back in and do that last religious movie after how this one went. From there, it looks like he has his first movie since 2022's Repeater coming out soon, Lion Fist, so I'll be excited to check that out. While he's no threat to catch Dolph for most ever tags as an actor (and most ever overall), the next closest actor to him is Cynthia Rothrock with 47, and with a lot of her films not seeing releases lately, I don't see her catching Daniels for second anytime soon either.

As you're reading my review of this, you might be asking, "is it really worth it to say you've reviewed all of Gary Daniels DTV films?" The same question comes up when I mention needing to review Fat Slags for Dolph, people have been warning me off that one, but I have to do it at some point. But is it worth it? At the time as I'm watching something like this, as Craig Sheffer is talking about "Age of Accountability," or tells Sonia Cooling "you look hot in my mom's clothes," there is a sense that I'm making questionable life choices, and perhaps there's an Italian-directed 80s 'Namsploitation film shot in the Philippines I could be watching instead, or hell, maybe I could just rewatch Recoil on Tubi. On the other hand, to be able to say "I've watched and reviewed 61 Gary Daniels movies," it feels like I did something. What that something was, I don't know, but I did it. Now there are some limits to this. For example, Dolph was slated to star in a Kevin Spacey movie, and if that gets released I won't be doing that. But Fat Slags, that we'll eventually have to make happen.

The guys at Comeuppance talk about the "Sit-down Role," which is when an actor spends the bulk of the film just sitting. The best example is Dick Van Patten in A Dangerous Place, where his character is called "Principal," he never leaves his office, and the only thing that keeps his role from being entirely sit-down is when decorum dictates that he needs to stand when Erin Gray enters his office to discuss her son, Ted Jan Roberts. In this film, Eric Roberts is back in what is also almost a complete Sit-down Role, as the only time he's not sitting is when Gary Daniels moves him from one chair he's tied to to another. And the tied-to-a-chair seems to be the new bastion of the Sit-down Role, as we saw it a lot in the Bruce Willis Randall Scandals. It's like the film is saying "the guy has to be sitting if he's tied to a chair, right?" I don't know if Roberts went all the way to Thailand to sit in a chair and get punched in the face and talk about God, it's possible he shot his scenes in LA, but there's no way of knowing from IMDb alone, considering by my count he did 38 movies in 2013! Of the almost 900 credits he has on IMDb, this is the 18th film we've covered here, which I imagine isn't something a lot of people would've guessed, that Gary Daniels has over three times the movies Eric Roberts has on the DTVC, but when you look at his films, a lot of them don't belong on here, and I generally don't seek him out specifically, he just happens to be in something I'm reviewing for someone else, like another Gary Daniels movie he did, A Hitman in London aka Skin Traffik, which would've been another complete Roberts Sit-down Role--this time behind a desk using the phone--if not for a scene at an airplane hanger at the end. I guess it was a matter of "you need to fly home anyway, want to shoot a scene while you're here?" Maybe someday we'll accrue enough Roberts Sit-down Roles for him to get into the Hall of Fame.

Finally, I wanted to use this last paragraph to shout out a podcast I love that closed-up shop recently, Knowledge Fight. If you're not familiar with them, the show would make fun of and breakdown the lies and inconsistencies in Alex Jones's Info Wars show--"Knowledge Fight" being a play on the name "Info Wars." What I loved about it, was its hosts Dan and Jordan went beyond the click-baity aggregated clips and got into the heart of how the Alex Jones grift really worked, and I think because they were so good at pulling back the curtain, Jones never mentioned them, and it was understood that none of his other hosts could mention them either. When the news came that the Onion had found a new way to get Info Wars from Alex, at first I was excited, until I realized that they still needed a judge's approval--which they didn't get--and then found out they didn't include the Knowledge Fight guys at all. It led to Jordan doing a Twitch rant where he went scorched earth on the Onion, the aftermath of which ultimately led to Dan and Jordan ending the show; but I think it was a missed opportunity for the Onion to leave them out. To be able to air the show that debunked Alex Jones's grift on the Info Wars platform would've done more to hurt Jones's brand than Tim Heidecker doing an impression of him. Jones can do a shirtless rant about Heidecker being a Satanist or whatever, but he can't come at the Knowledge Fight guys for pointing out how Jones never really read an article he was saying proved his point about some conspiracy bullshit he's going on about, because if his listeners saw that they'd start to question things and stop buying supplements. Anyway, my Monday and Friday mornings aren't going to be the same without the Knowledge Fight guys there making fun of Right Wing grifters. Here's to you Dan and Jordan, you're two of the great ones.

And with that let's wrap this up. You can get this free on Tubi, but the question is, do you want to? How big of a Gary Daniels completist are you? I'm not asking this rhetorically, I'm saying if you're considering it, take a walk, clear your mind, and really think about how much of a Gary Daniels completist you are. I probably should've taken my own advice.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2563562/

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

Bad Ass (2012)

As we continue our October Hall of Fame inductions, and knowing that Danny Trejo was on 29 movies, I wanted his HOF induction and entry into the 30 Club to be a film that really represented him, and this was one that's been kicking around for a while, waiting for me to cover it, so it seemed too perfect not to do it. In addition to us, Mitch at the Video Vacuum, and RobotGEEK's Cult Cinema have looked at this as well.

Bad Ass (or "Bad Buttocks" if you want to work less blue) has Trejo as Vega, an aging Vietnam Vet who encounters a couple skinheads bothering an old man on the bus. He stands up for the old man, the skinheads attack him, and he takes them down. The whole thing was captured on video, so he becomes a viral sensation. Later, his best friend is murdered, and the police seem not to care, so he takes the law into his own hands. As he digs deeper, looking for his friend's killers, he starts to uncover a plot that goes all the way to the top, which includes local crime boss Charles S. Dutton and mayor Ron Perlman. Can our hero Bad Ass take all of these people down and get justice for his friend?

Overall I really enjoyed this one. Trejo is great, it's a role that you feel like only he can play, and he delivers exactly what you'd want from that. The interesting thing is this is inspired by a real life incident--which I'd seen before and thought might have had some similarities to this, but I wasn't sure--but in that original incident, you had an old white man who beats up a younger black man who's giving him a hard time. I think the decision to make it a man of Mexican descent who beats up two skinheads harassing an old black man instead of an older white man beating up a younger black man was a great one, as it gets us out of that stereotype of black and brown young men being the scourge of the community, and what it then does is allows the film to use whoever they want for baddies without treading on those tropes. There were some moments that didn't work for me, like when Trejo wants information out of one of the guys who killed his friend, so he shoves his hand in a garbage disposal and runs--it something I think we could've done without--but that was a minor issue, and as I said above, I think this was great overall.

30 films and a Hall of Fame induction for Mr. Trejo. Not bad at all, and while the volume of his films has jumped up quite a bit, we don't often get to see him in the lead like this, which was why I wanted to cover it for this post. He gives you everything you want in a role of this caliber, there's the endearing quality of his age, his outfits, his fanny pack--more on that in a bit--while at the same time, there's the authentic Trejo bad ass-ery that we look for and love to see. With the number of films he's done now, and how many of those overlap with other big names on the site, his tag count will only go up from here, but I think with him officially being a Hall of Famer now, we can go to more of the smaller number of movies like these where he's the lead. Truly one of the all-time greats, this probably should've happened before, but we're making it happen now, and giving him his due on our site.

How bad ass is Trejo's character? He reads a map while on the bus. This is known as one of the biggest no-nos when visiting a city, police and other travel advisors will tell you over and over, don't read a map out in public. It shows you don't know where you are, that you're not from the area, and probably naive and too trusting, which makes you easy pickens for any baddies out there looking to do you harm. I think the idea wasn't to show how bad ass he was by looking at the transit map though, it was more to show how most younger people would look these things up on their phone, but for me it reinforced his bad ass-ery, because he's flaunting his lack of concern that anyone would do him harm by seeing him look at the map on the bus like this. "Yeah, I don't know where I'm going, but if you think you're going to victimize me, go ahead." My advice if you're coming here to Philly is don't do what Trejo's doing, but rather buy a busted up Phillies cap to make yourself look more local. Also, later in the film, they use the bus chase from Red Heat with Charles S. Dutton stealing a bus bound for Las Vegas, and Trejo giving chase in one bound for San Diego. As someone who uses buses and trains for inter-city travel, the idea of having to wait out that delay while they find another bus sounds dreadful, and I feel for all those poor passengers stuck at the bus station while these two characters smash their way around LA in the buses they were supposed to be taking.

In our Cyborg Cop and Cyborg Cop 2 posts, we discussed David Bradley's fanny pack. In the first film it totally betrayed how cool his hero was supposed to be; and then in the second film, they were just making fun of the fanny pack from the first film the whole time. This movie reinforces why the fanny pack idea was so bad in Cyborg Cop. It's being used here to make Trejo's character more endearing and unassuming, but it's also ironic that an older fella who keeps his stuff in a fanny pack could kick people's asses so much. As Kathy Griffin said in the late 90s when she was a judge for the MTV lip sync show during Spring Break, "fanny packs aren't outdated, they were never in," and then she proceeded to give the wearer of said fanny pack, a bushy, be-goateed contestant, a zero for his performance. But if anyone could make a fanny pack work, it's Trejo under the right scenario, and he pulls it off.

Finally, I've only been to LA a couple times, so I haven't seen a lot of it, including the shot above from the opening credits with all the establishing shots of LA accompanying it. It's a Felix the Cat car dealership, something I hadn't seen in anything about LA before and didn't know existed. What you may not know about me is I don't drive, so I have no need to buy a car, but if I did, and I lived out in LA, I'd definitely buy from a Felix the Cat car dealership. The IMDb trivia had more info on it, saying that when the dealership opened in the early 20s, the owner, also named Felix, was friends with Felix the Cat creator Pat Sullivan, and they decided to promote each other's brands. Now the dealership is the longest running in LA, and both it and Felix the Cat over 100 years old. I mean, how do you not love Felix the Cat? One of the best cartoon characters ever. I need to go back to LA to catch a Dodgers game at some point anyway, but now I feel like I'll have to find my way over to check this out as well.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Here in the States you can get this on most free streamers, including Tubi. With the tight, 90-minute runtime, fun story and fun Trejo performance, streaming it free is a great deal, and worth checking out. And here's to Danny Trejo, one of the all time greats, finally joining two exclusive DTVC clubs, the Hall of Fame and the 30 Club.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1928330

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Code of Honor (2016)

With Mr. Seagal turning 70 this weekend, we had to do one of his movies to celebrate, and this one's been in the can for a long time, so what better time to review it--especially since soon I'll be getting to the point where I'll need to watch it again in order to remember what happens in it. In addition to us, our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has done this one as well.

Code of Honor has Seagal as a retired military colonel who has snapped and is now waging a vigilante war against local drug dealers and mobsters. The cops have no idea how to stop him, but as luck would have it, his former protege, Craig Sheffer, is in town, and he knows what they need to do to take him down. The problem is, Sheffer has his own demons to tackle. When a dancer at a local club is a witness to one of Seagal's attacks, Sheffer agrees to help her, and protecting her and her son proves to be the chance at redemption he's needed. At the same time, criminals are still dying. What does Sheffer know about his former mentor that could help bring him down? It turns out they're connected in a way that goes much deeper than just Sheffer trying to stop him.

 

For a Seagal DTV actioner, especially one from this period, this isn't too bad. Mitch had this as his best DTV flick since Pistol Whipped, which I agree with and think was definitely true when it came out, and really only now I'd personally put Attrition over it. The major difference between this and Attrition though, is in Attrition we had a totally invested Seagal, whereas here we have our usual not invested Seagal, but the film construct makes it all work. Seagal doesn't talk until 48 minutes in. It works. He sits most of the time. Same thing, it worked with what they were going for here. The problem is, the card this film played from a story standpoint, can only be played once--it's the film equivalent of a gun with only one bullet, and they fire it here, so no other movie can use this approach to mitigating the Seagal Factor. Beyond that, the action was good, Sheffer was solid, and Louis Mandylor was the DTV mainstay we've come to know and love. For 2010s DTV Seagal, this is a pretty good bet.

By my count, we have three Seagal films left, Cartels, Gutshot Straight, and End of a Gun; and then we have others like Clementine and The Onion Movie if we want to do that. It makes sense, as he hits the big seven-oh, that he'd slow down some. We can compare his turn in this to another vigilante flick, Death Wish V, where Bronson was 73 when he made that. Is that the number for Seagal? Or should we expect him to go beyond that? An 80-year-old Seagal still making DTV actioners? And considering Bronson was killing people with remote control soccer balls in that movie, and also considering Seagal has been sitting more in his films since he's hit his 60s, maybe Death Wish V is the model for the newly septuagenarian Seagal going forward. I for one would be okay with that. This film also provides a roadmap for a potential less active Seagal, but, as I mentioned above, it's the gun with one bullet, and the film has already shot the bullet, so another film can't use this story device. 

This is our fourth Craig Sheffer film here on the site, but this might have been my favorite role of his. He does the heavy lifting expected of someone costarring in a Seagal DTV actioner, but it doesn't feel like he's doing the heavy lifting to support Seagal. The way the story unfolds, it slowly becomes more about Sheffer, which is very different from the usual Seagal fare where Seagal remains the main character around which the story revolves, but he sits while the younger star has all the hard action scenes. It's the perfect mitigation of all the limitations Seagal puts on a production he's in, and Sheffer is great in his part to make it all work. I don't know how many more times we'll see Sheffer on here, but he has a fair amount of older DTV stuff that we haven't done yet, so this definitely won't be the last time. Another DTV mainstay who we've been seeing a lot of here lately is Louis Mandylor. He's in that new breed in the mold of Eric Roberts where he's trying to pump out as many films in a year as he can, yet unlike Roberts he also has some pretty substantial parts in some of these movies, especially the Jesse V. Johnson actioners. He I definitely can say this isn't the last time we'll see him, because he's been in some films I have in the can that I'm ready to review.

One of my favorite comic book characters is The Punisher, and I appreciated the way this movie used the Punisher Paradigm. It's easy to just rip off that concept, but they did some unique things that worked. By the same token, I like the idea of Seagal as the actual Punisher in a reboot DTV film series. If you think about it, his first appearance was in Spider-Man 129 in 1974, which would've made Seagal 22, so he could be a modern, elder Punisher, making sense of nearly five decades of killing. That's the thing with comic book characters, instead of aging they're often rebooted, but for someone like the Punisher, who has no superpowers, he'd age like the rest of us, and it would be great to see that ground covered. There is some hope now that despite Disney taking over the Netflix Marvel shows, they haven't cut them at all; by the same token, could we see Disney doing the Punisher, especially a 70-year-old Seagal Punisher, the way it needs to be done?

Finally, back to Seagal, in addition to those last few DTV flicks I have to do here, there's the matter of the True Justice releases. For those that aren't sure what those are, instead of releasing Seagal's True Justice series as complete seasons on DVD, they released a series of two-episode "movies," and these "movies" are now available on Tubi. What's interesting is these were once listed on Letterboxd as part of his filmography, but have since been removed, I think because they're technically not movies; though, in the DTV world, we see this thing a lot, especially with failed TV shows, they'll be merged and packaged as movies to recoup some of the lost revenue on them. I guess the thing with these True Justice ones is we'll worry about them when we finish the last few actual DTV movies Seagal has left that we still haven't reviewed. It is very Seagal though that he would have his TV series released this way, isn't it?

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of my writing this, you can stream this for free on Tubi. I think if you're looking for great Seagal on his 70th birthday, a classic like Hard to Kill or Marked for Death is a better way to go; but as far as DTV Seagal from the 2010s, this is one of the best--which isn't saying much, but still means this is a good time.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4060866

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

The Mark (2012)

My girlfriend and I were talking about my blog last week, and she asked if I ever did low-budget religious movies.  She's not religious herself, but said she likes to fall asleep to them.  Off the top of my head the only one I could remember doing was the Dolph Lundgren flick Final Inquiry, which was a religious film that I wasn't expecting to be religious.  Beyond that, I had trouble thinking of anyone in our neck of the blogosphere that ever did religious films.  I know The Deadly Dolls House of Horror Nonsense once covered Left Behind, but that was about it.  In fact, many of my fellow low-budget movie bloggers explicitly said they wouldn't do movies like this because they weren't their thing.  That was my stance too, more so because I didn't want the trouble that comes from reviewing a religious movie: people get their dander up and like to pick fights, and that's the last thing I need to deal with.  On the other hand, as I was talking about it with my girlfriend, I was reminded that DTVC Hall of Famer Gary Daniels had three religious films in the can that he shot in Thailand recently, and I was on the fence about looking at them.  Well, now we're going to try this one, and we'll see how it goes.  In this review I'm going to do my best to be respectful to everyone's beliefs, and also look at the film on its merits beyond its religious content, especially Daniels's performance.  Let's see how it went.

The Mark is about mercenary Craig Sheffer, a former army man who fought in Afghanistan, and a nonbeliever.  He's injected with a microchip against his will, and the company he works for sends him and Eric Roberts to Berlin for the G20 summit in order to show the chip off.  There's another guy though who wants that chip, and he hires mercenary Gary Daniels and his team to hijack the plane and get Sheffer.  Next thing you know there's explosions at 30,000 feet and then The Rapture happens and all hell breaks loose-- no pun intended.



I didn't care for this much.  First off, there was a fair amount of proselytizing.  I'm not complaining about that specifically, because I'm the one who came to this religious movie, it's not like the people who made it knocked on my door; but it did interrupt the flow of the film.  It was often inserted inorganically, which threw off the rhythm, especially in the early going.  Also, from a writing standpoint, we had some plot convenience theater, especially with Daniels's character who is knocked out when The Rapture happens, then is completely ignored until the very end of the movie.  I thought he was one of the chosen ones he was so absent.  Speaking of The Rapture, it was a good ending point for the film, but we still had 36 minutes of the film spinning its wheels before we got to the credits.  It was annoying, especially the whole thing with Sheffer trying to get into the cockpit.  We knew he was going to get in there, they only prolonged it to pad the film.  Finally, the special effects were Asylum bad, but with The Asylum, we know their films are meant to be fun and campy.  This movie was serious, so the bad special effects came off as crass and hokey.  For most of my audience who isn't religious-- and I think even for those who are-- there isn't much here beyond your classic unevenly written plane hijacking yarn; but because it has that massive religious element, I'd say it's a skip for anyone not interested in hearing that.

Gary Daniels though was really good here.  I was looking him up to see if he was born again or something, and the best I could find is that he's making films in Thailand right now, and that's where these were shot, so either the paycheck or the role enticed him.  I can see how the role though would've done it for him, because this isn't a bad baddie, and he makes the most of it.  He said in an interview I read that he's always looking for parts that do something for his career, and if I were a DTV film maker I'd cast him as a baddie in my next actioner, for sure.  Of course, I'd rather have him as the lead, but I think he's proven here more than any of the other baddie roles I've seen him in that he's not just a one-note hero.



Eric Roberts is in this as well, playing the devious corporate dude.  He chews up all kinds of scenery, and really takes the substandard dialog and makes it into something fun.  I noticed that he has more of these religious films to his credit than Daniels does, but I'm not sure that he's overly religious either.  I mean, it could just be that he's done more movies period.  His character doesn't get as much to do though until near the end, and it devolves into cliched villain stuff that Sheffer counters in cliched hero fashion.  I liked though that Roberts took this one-note and made the most of him.  He just seems to have fun being an actor, and playing villains at that.

We're seeing some more Craig Sheffer here.  Like Daniels and Roberts, I couldn't figure out if Sheffer was religious like this too, but unlike Daniels and Roberts who get to be baddies, Sheffer's character finds religion towards the end of the film, so if he doesn't believe this stuff, it might be a tougher bridge to cross.  I guess that's the challenge of being an actor.  Compared to his hero in Battledogs, the one in The Mark lacks the charisma that carried that other film.  I think The Asylum is better at writing heroes in their films because they write from a tradition of lantern-jawed 50s and 60s mensch-types in their modern send-ups of those films, and they've had time to hone their craft to make those guys more fun; this is definitely a much less polished hero written here, not always likable, walking around with a scowl on his face like he's a dad waiting in a long line at the Home Depot on a Saturday in late July.  The hero is the key in any film to make it work, and he has to be written well for that to happen.



Finally, I do want to touch on the theme of this movie quickly, and discuss how I think it might have been delivered better to the audience, both religious and non-religious.  It's that whole "the world is ending, and only the believers will be saved" idea, but because it's tied directly to modern events, and is set in modern times, it plays like a man with a placard around his neck bothering people in Times Square.  I think if the film were set like 50 years into the future, where the writers could have the freedom to create a total dystopian world for us to despise, and then introduce this same story with Sheffer and the microchip and The Rapture, it would have played better.  Still, the religious messages in either story, the one I'm proposing or the one we got, would have to be introduced to us organically, because, like we got here, when they don't feel natural, it throws off the pacing.

This is available on Netflix.  I'd like to say watch it for the great Gary Daniels, but the movie had a lot of flaws, and for my readers who aren't religious, those flaws will only be exacerbated by the film's religious bent.  I guess what I'd say is, if a high proselytizing content is problematic for you, I'd stay away.  Otherwise give it a look, you might have fun.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2058710/

Battledogs (2013)

I saw this was added recently to Netflix Instant, and I really wanted to give it a look.  It's an Asylum joint with a prodigious cast, and it's about werewolves.  All things I could go for.  The Asylum has had a pretty decent track record lately, and this looked like it had every chance to be another winner.  Let's see what happened.

Battledogs is about a woman who is bitten by a wolf in a forest outside of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and it's given her the werewolf virus, which she proceeds to give to a bunch of people in JFK airport after she lands there and turns.  Not cool.  President Bill Duke calls in the big guns: General Dennis Haysbert and contagious disease specialist Major Craig Sheffer.  Now they have all the werewolves from JFK in quarantine under armed guard while Sheffer races for a cure, the only problem is, Haysbert thinks a cure is a bad idea, and he wants werewolves to fight in the US Army.  I can't imagine that wouldn't end well.



I didn't care for this.  First off, we get some sweet werewolf action right away, and then it tapers off to a dull howl until we get to the end when it becomes that silly craziness we've come to expect from The Asylum.  In the middle, we're treated to two plot devices that I don't like: first, our hero is looking for case zero, our lady from Yellowknife, and he's talking to her, telling her how he needs to find case zero, and she falls asleep from the drugs before she can tell him, so we're given 15 minutes of our hero trying to figure out what we already know, which was very annoying, especially when it was in lieu of hot werewolf action; and second, Haysbert as our baddie was more like a heel with more power, which is always a bad baddie.  His main evilness was that he was too stupid to figure out what was going on, which isn't fun.  We need a calculating baddie who schemes much more effectively than the average heel.  This isn't the worst we've seen from The Asylum, but I think the bad outweighed the good, so overall it's a pass.

Craig Sheffer as the main hero was pretty great though.  He seemed like such a nice guy, but he had all those lantern-jawed 50s schlock scientist lead type qualities that worked so well.  What might have worked better, is if he and Haysbert had been on a team, as opposed to adversaries.  Like one of Haysbert's soldiers, playing the perfect heel, lets a werewolf out and then they all get out or something.  And then Haybert and Sheffer working together would've made for a fun crew, maybe leading different groups and coming together in the end to finish things off.  Then I think we would've had the movie we wanted.



As I mentioned above, this movie is full of name actors.  The Yellowknife woman was played by Ariana Richards, who you may remember from Jurassic Park.  She and I are about the same age, so I won't do the "it's crazy how much she's grown up since then", because I have too-- kinda.  The great Ernie Hudson pops in as the TSA head at the airport.  We always love to see him here, and he doesn't disappoint.  Veteran Canadian character actor Kate Vernon plays a doctor working with Sheffer, and like most Canadian character actors, she's solid and helps fill out the movie.  I can't forget Wes Studi, who plays a colonel working under Haysbert.  When you talk about character actors who take care of business, he's another one.

Oh, and I almost forgot, Bill Duke as the President.  I was trying to think if he was the best person cast for the President since we've been doing this at the DTVC.  We have Jerry Springer in the Dolph flick The Defender.  Rutger Hauer, who isn't even American, played him in Scorcher.  I gotta put Bill Duke up there though, if only for his iconic roles in The Predator and Commando.  No, he didn't buy a car and run over the salesman as he drove it through the showroom window, nor did he have his brains splattered on a rock, so that was disappointing, but you can't have everything.  It was an inspired casting decision, and it's too bad the rest of the film didn't live up to that.



Finally, Buffalo played the part of NYC in this, only with plenty of CGI filling out the rest of the skyline.  I remember one scene when Sheffer drove by the HSBC Center, which is where the Sabres play.  I see they've gone back to their old logo, which I love, it reminds me of their old Adams Division days playing against my Bruins.  I know a lot of the Rust Belt cities have been having a bad time of it since the recession-- or more accurately before the rest of us felt it--, so it's nice to see some movies shot there to help boost the economy.

So this is a pass for me, but it has some elements that I think some people might enjoy, especially those Asylum touches we're used to.  There are also some good inside jokes, like Sheffer finding the remains of a guy's face on the floor, a la Nightbreed, so someone might forgive the bad parts more than I did.  You can check it on Instant, or SyFy might show it from time to time too.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2457138/

Dracula II: Ascension (2003)

A long time ago I reviewed Dracula III: Legacy, and figured at some point I'd get around to doing this one too, and when it came up as a part of the Stars Play 11, I knew if I was ever going to do it, I needed to get it in now while it was on Watch Instantly. As an aside, Netflix lists this as starring Rutger Hauer, but it doesn't, he's only Dracula in part 3. Too bad, they could've used him.

Dracula II: Ascension takes place right after Dracula 2000. The charred remains of Dracula find their way to a morgue where workers Jason London and Diane Neal of Law and Order: SVU fame think they may have a score on their hands. A rich man says he'll pay top dollar for the body, plus, Neal's boyfriend is suffering from MS, and she thinks some Drac DNA might be what the doctor ordered. At the same time, Jason Scott Lee is a priestly vampire hunter called to duty by Roy Scheider, and he's hot on their trail. Can he stop the big fella before these kids unleash an unfathomable evil upon the world?



I don't know what you do with this one. It has its moments, Jason Scott Lee is good, as is Jason London; on the other hand, we get big spells of nothing happening. "I was riveted to the edge of my seat by the scene where Diane Neal draws Dracula's blood, and Drac makes Wings Hauser faces." "My heart was in my throat as they examined Drac's DNA." We had a few nice Jason Scott Lee vampire killings that broke up the monotony, but otherwise, we were subjected to the intrigues of a bunch of not-so-compelling characters. Definitely no Blade 2, I'll tell you that.

Going back to my review of part 3 back in 2008, one thing that helped that one was the higher Jason Scott Lee quotient. Him kicking ass always works, and when compared to smug hipster med students intriguing against one another for Drac's blood, it's no contest. I noticed too in the part 3 review that I misunderstood the Cliff's Notes version of part 2 that part 3 gave us. Jason London was not Jason Scott Lee's sidekick here, which was another thing about that one that made it better than this one. London and Lee have better chemistry than anyone in this had with anyone else-- plus, they were more fun to watch separately, and it was disappointing that they weren't in the film more. One of those rare situations where mistakes made in one film are rectified in the sequel.



Here's Brande Roderick. We get her in this scene, we get her a little later in black leather pants, then Drac gets her, and she comes back one more time in her underwear as a vampire and Jason Scott Lee finishes her off. Come on movie, help me out a little here. Out of all the people you want to limit the screen time of, Roderick has to be at the bottom of the list. All those scenes of these not-so-compelling med students doing whatever they're doing become so much more compelling and intriguing when they have a Brande Roderick wearing black leather pants in them. It was a bold move on the part of the film makers to think they could forsake Brande Roderick in leather pants and keep us interested on the strength of the film's plot, a bold move that failed.

There was something very Wings Hauser-ish about this Dracula. He had this penchant for staring at people with his mouth open in a way that reminded me of Wings. You know how Wings does that? That quintessentially Wings face with his mouth slightly agape. It kinda makes me wonder, why didn't they just cast Wings? Has Wings ever played a vampire before? Wings as Dracula is the one scenario I see where we could potentially have a vampire movie that tops Blade 2 for my best of all time. I don't know if it's too late, if Wings is too old for it to work, but I'd like to see it attempted.



You probably don't recognize this guy, or, if you do, you have no idea why I'm posting his pic here. If you go way back into the archives, you'll find a movie I did called Werewolf Hunter: The Legend of Romasanta, a Julian Sands werewolf flick about nothing in particular. This guy was in it, totally naked, running next to a Sands in werewolf form, his twig and berries flapping as he went. Now, whenever I see him in something else, he's the Naked Guy from Romasanta. It's a great name to have.

Out of the three films, part 3 is the best, but you may want to watch part 2 to understand part 3 better. I don't know though, I could've lived my life without seeing this one, and I would've been fine. Maybe if you see it on cable or something, you might enjoy it-- or you might just be better skipping it and watching something else.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0336325/

The Road Killers (1994)

I found this on Netflix while looking for more Lambert films. It has quite an all-star cast, with James Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Shooter McGavin. Oh yeah, and David Arquette. Should he even count when talking about an all-star cast?

The Road Killers has Lambert as a family man traveling cross country from Wisconsin with his wife and daughter; and his brother and nephew in another car behind him. While fixing an issue with his car on a desolate highway in Nevada, his nephew is standing in the middle of the road, and is almost run over. The brother is less than stoked when he sees the kid that was driving the car in a road-side diner, and he throws a glass of water on him. Back on the road, the kids throw a chicken in his car while he's driving, he gets pissed, and loses a game of chicken to them, crashing and dying. Now the kids need to cover up their crime, and Lambert needs to save his family from them.



This could've been good. Instead it spiralled out of control into a mass of random killings and ridiculous scenarios. Why? Here's where it went bad: Lambert was just a family man. He needed to be a military trained action hero. Why cast him in the male lead if he can't fight? He's not a great actor. Essentially the film devolved into a series of scenes where Lambert could almost get the bad guys, but they were always better than him. Stupid. What they should've done was a little divide and conquer, where he took them out one-by-one.

According to imdb, Albert Pyun cast Lambert in his upcoming Tales of an Ancient Empire. That should be good, because Lambert hasn't done a DTV film since Day of Wrath. I guess if anyone can pull him out of retirement, it's the best DTV director of all time.



Josh Brolin is in this as one of the kids after Lambert. He does a great job with what he has to work with. I've been meaning to see W., because I've heard so many good things. One thing I should bring up is his GQ cover from a year or so ago. In it, he was smoking a cigarette with the caption "The rebirth of cool". People wrote in and talked about how appalling it was that GQ would associate cool and smoking. I can see that for a Disney Channel magazine cover, but GQ? That's a magazine targeted to mature men. I think there's a point where this anti-smoking stuff is ridiculous. Are adult males really that impressionable? Oh wait, that's right, we have beer cans now that turn color when they're cold. My bad.

As I said above, this also has Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He's too young here for it to matter, but one film he did recently that's worth checking out is The Lookout. Richard Roeper had it as one of top films of 2007. I'm not sure if I'd go that far, but if you like good Film Noir like I do, then give that a try.



I'm from Maine, which has pretty much one industry: tourism. I'm not naive, I get it, and I accept that Maine would have no economy if people from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, didn't treat it as their own personal Disney World every summer. That being said, nothing irks me more than when these degenerates come into my town and act like they own the place because their state is better developed and has higher per capita college graduates. If you can't get away with parking in the middle of the road, walking in traffic, or just plain standing in my way in your home state without someone yelling at you, don't expect it here either. In this film, Shooter McGavin, Lambert's brother, is that guy. First, his son is in the middle of the highway. Why would you let your kid do that? Then throw water in the dude's face who didn't hit him? Maybe he didn't deserve to be burned alive in his car, but he did deserve an ass kicking.

This movie is all kinds of wrong. If The Lookout is good Film Noir, this is atrocious Film Noir. If you like Lambert, you won't like him here, and Brolin and Gordon-Levitt weren't quite there as actors yet to matter. When I think Lambert DTV, this kind of crap isn't what I'm looking for.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110999/