Mirror Images (1992)

On an upcoming episode of the DTVC Podcast, Jon and I look at two Shannon Whirry films, Mirror Images 2 and Private Obsession, and I figured I'd do the first Mirror Images in the process, and then figured it would be perfect for this month's Erotic Thriller review.

Mirror Images has Delia Sheppard as Kaitlin, the wife of political consultant Jeff Conaway; and her twin sister Shauna, who lives a less settled life with her on again off again boyfriend Joey Zoom (Nels Van Patten). When Shauna has to go on the run because a guy she's encountered may want to kill her, Kaitlin takes the opportunity to pretend to be her sister and live her life. It's exciting to start with, but when she encounters that same bad guy, and Conaway's new assistant Julie Strain ends up dead, she decides to find out what's going on. With the reluctant help of detective John O'Hurley (that's right, Peterman from Seinfeld), she goes in deeper to get to the truth. But will she like everything she finds? And will she make it out alive?

This is a great one. I think the second one is even better, but this one does the trick. Sheppard is great in both roles, you always gotta love Julie Strain, and Conaway works as the jerk husband--plus how can you not appreciate Peterman as the detective! It does have issues, like the idea that the baddie has burning heroin in a small, ornate jewel case that he uses to drug the women, when it's not exactly clear how that works at all, but when the rest of the film is enjoyable, I kind of just went with that part; but then when the only African American character has the character name "slave girl," that's a bit more problematic, and probably would be reworked if there were ever a modern remake. That aside, it is still the early 90s you want, with the sex you want, and the cast you want, so I think you get what you came for here.

We'll start with Delia Sheppard, who I thought did a great job in the lead. I was looking at her IMDb bio, and she doesn't have many leading roles like this, if she has any, which makes this one unique in the Erotic Thriller genre. The way the story works, she doesn't have to play duel roles as much as she has to play the "good" sister pretending to be the "bad" sister, which is still not easy, but she makes it work. Director Gregory Dark and cinematographer Paul Desatoff (not eventual Christopher Nolan cinematographer Wally Pfister, who would do a lot of Dark's stuff after this) do a great job creating this juxtaposition between Kaitlin's home being bright and open, and Shauna's being dark and more confined; and costumer designers Lothar and Ricardo Delgado do a great job giving her white outfits when she's playing herself, and darker outfits when she's playing Shauna; but ultimately it's up to Sheppard to pull all this off, and as I said above, I think she did great at that. This is the fourth time we've seen her here, as she plays the German woman who develops feelings for Whirry in Animal Instincts, and has two small roles in the Amir Shervan films Young Rebels and Killing American Style, so we'll tag her, as I have a feeling as we do more of these Erotic Thrillers we'll see more of her here as well.

Our one Hall of Famer is the great Julie Strain, and while her role is small, it's always great to see her. This is her 12th film on the site, which puts her firmly as second-most all-time among women on the site, but still 35 behind the top spot, which is Cynthia Rothrock at 47. If I continue the site for another 20 years, it is possible she may catch Rothrock, but it'll be an uphill battle. Even if she doesn't she's one of the best, and we'll hopefully see her again soon. This is also our fourth Gregory Dark film on the site, and considering I have another three of his watched that I plan to review soon, I figured I might as well tag him now so I'll have fewer to have to go back and add tags for if we decide to do it later. This is also our third Jeff Conaway film, the other two being PM flicks. I feel like I can't be the only one who gets "Gimme Shelter" in their head when they see Jeff Conaway's name, can I? "It's just Jeff Conaway, it's just Jeff Conaway!" Finally, you heard right in the earlier paragraphs, the great John O'Hurley plays the detective investigating Strain's murder. J. Peterman in an Erotic Thriller is too fantastic for words. And he does have a love scene with Sheppard. One fun fact about him: he was born in my home town, Kittery, ME. Even I wasn't born there, I was born across the river in Portsmouth, NH, so it's rare to see that! Oh, and I can't finish this paragraph without mentioning George "Buck" Flower as the creepy landlord, another great touch.

We do have two Presidential Portraits in this, in Jeff Conaway's office he has one for Reagan and one for Bush 41. This is an interesting conundrum when it comes to these, which ones count and which ones don't. Like is just having a Presidential Portrait enough, or is the spirit of it that it represents the time that President was in office, and so having one in a film just to have it, even if that President wasn't in office at the time the film took place, kind of goes against that spirit. For example, when I was on the White House Down episode of the Exploding Helicopter Podcast, the White House is full of Presidential Portraits, do all of them count, or do none of them count? I'm kind of leaning toward the latter on that, but because both Reagan and Bush 41 have portraits here, and Bush 41 was in office during the time this took place, it still counts. The other thing is, if we only count this for Bush 41 and not Reagan, that leaves them both tied with four overall, so I guess then we'll use the fact that Reagan also appears here as a tie breaker.

Finally, we're going way off topic, but I wanted to give a quick shoutout to my Gunners, who won the Premier League this past week, their first time since 2004, meaning since I've been writing this site in 2007, they hadn't won a title at all. And in true European sports style, they won when the team behind them failed to earn all three points in their penultimate game, meaning there were no longer enough points available to catch my Gunners on the final matchday. It's an overall much better approach compared to how we do sports in America, where we have bloated leagues, unbalanced schedules, and regular seasons that don't matter because you don't win a title for that, you could go undefeated but if you lose in the playoffs, your season is a total waste. Even when one of my Boston teams were a favorite, a win for a championship wasn't guaranteed, so I don't get to enjoy a moment like I did today, where I could watch Arsenal knowing they were already champions. The reason US sports will never be that good? Billionaires, like everything else bad about America, Billionaires.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this free on Fawesome, fully uncut, which I think is a good way to go, but I think if you were able to track down a physical copy it would be worth having too. Either way, you should check this one out if you haven't seen it, or haven't seen it in a while.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102452/

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Alien Intruder (1993)

This is one of those ones I thought I'd done earlier on on the site, but didn't, and then for some reason it ended up getting pushed down the list, for almost 18 years it seems. Strange, considering this is the first PM flick I remember watching, so it has some significance. In addition to us, our friend Chris the Brain at Bulletproof Action has covered this as well.

Alien Intruder takes place two years ago in 2022, where a Commander Striker (William December Williams) gathers a Dirty-Dozen-style team of four convicts (Dirty Quartet?) to investigate a space freighter that went incommunicado. We know what happened, because in the opening scene, a crazed Jeff Conaway killed everyone at the behest of Tracy Scoggins, before turning the gun on himself (it was like the Rolling Stones song, "it's just a Conaway, it's just a Conaway"). After the guys do some virtual R&R, they start to notice Scoggins appearing in their fantasies, and then eventually appearing in their realities! Does Mr. December Williams hold the key to what's going on? And will our rag-tag group of heroes figure it out in time to stop Scoggins?

This one starts a little slowly, but it's the kind of slowly that in the mid-90s when I first saw this would be boring, but in 2025 is a fun nostalgia trip--even if it was only three years ago! In one scene, Maxwell Caulfield and the other guys are playing cards and busting each other's chops, and in that spirit Caulfield calls one of them a "brick shithouse," which is Generation Jones speak for "ya big lug." You can just imagine on college campuses in the early 80s people calling each other "brick shithouse," and even if they didn't, it's fun to imagine, right? Scoggins is great too as the alien temptress. The VR fantasies are like music videos with their themes and settings, and she's pretending to be the "video girl," only with a diabolical twist. And then they have a PM twist too, because PM uses the VR fantasies to inject action into the film, including a massive explosion at a gas station that sends a stunt guy flying off in the background--if only they did that in Michael Bolton's "Missing You Now" video! Top it off with the great Billy Dee Williams, and you have yourself a fun PM sci-fi actioner.

Speaking of Michael Bolton, the last time we saw Billy Dee Williams on here was in February of 2012, with Gary Busey in the submarine flick Steel Sharks--do you remember that Michael Bolton song, "Steel sharks, wrapped all around me..."? Maybe not. Anyway, the only reason my friends and I rented this back in the mid-90s was because it had Billy Dee. I didn't know anything about PM Entertainment, but in that period between Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace, Star Wars fans needed anything they could get, and Billy Dee Williams in a low-budget DTV sci-fi flick seemed like a good bet--not to mention as high schoolers we were also Colt .45 fans, if you knew someone who was over 21, you could give them $5 and they could get you a 40 and keep the change to buy themselves some cigarettes. What a simpler time. You don't get a lot of Williams in this, but PM does a good job of sprinkling him throughout so you never go too long without him, which is a nice thing. Here's to you Mr. Williams, you're truly one of the best.

This is now 46 PM flicks on the site, but as I mentioned above, this is the earliest one I remember watching. Also as I mentioned above, I didn't know it as a PM flick--we didn't know what that really was back then, it was just another logo we saw a lot--we only rented it for Billy Dee Williams. If you look at the release date, 1993, we would've rented this around the time it came out, but back then the mom and pop we rented from, People's Video, didn't gouge on new releases like Blockbuster and the other big chains did, so it was the same $2 as the older movies. When Alex, the guy who owned the video store, was picking it out of the catalog, he was probably thinking Star Wars fans like us would grab it because it had Billy Dee Williams on the cover, and at least for us he was right. I couldn't have imagined 30 years later there'd be this thing called blogging, and that I'd be almost 18 years in on a site of my own reviewing it, let alone watching it again on a "streaming" site called Amazon Prime--forget the fact that Donald Trump is not only our president, but he's on his second term. PM had a better vision of what the 2020s would be in 1993, we just weren't worthy of it.

Speaking of the future, we usually talk about flying cars as the thing that didn't end up happening, but the one we usually miss is laser guns, which were prevalent in this film. How did no one pick that up? Especially here in the States, we love shooting people, a laser gun seems like a natural invention. I guess because guns are so easy to get and shoot up schools with, people were probably like "why would you want a laser when you can mow down tons of people, especially kids, with an automatic gun firing bullets?" It makes sense, there's no way a battery could hold enough charge for the laser shots required to equal a high-capacity magazine. And if there's one thing the United States does better than the rest of the world, it's mass shootings. We also like our deaths due to car violence too, which is probably why we never went too far into flying cars either. "If cars are in the sky, what reason would we have to displace people and wildlife to expand freeways in order to save drivers 30 seconds on their commute? And then who would be hit by cars at dangerous intersections if all the cars were in the air? Nope, better to keep the cars on the ground where they can hit more people and we can scar the landscape with more highways and parking." And that's why no laser guns and no flying cars.

Finally, Maxwell Caulfield's outfit here was too good not to comment on. Fluorescent yellow and blue Lycra spandex shorts with a black codpiece (??), and finger-less gloves. And look at the Wes Anderson-style shot composition with him leaning against the door frame, the woman fresh from the Hot Tropic pageant on the other side, and the living room and the windows with the view of the beach to the right. Just an absolute thing of beauty. Now I do need to confess, when I lived in Maine ten years ago, I biked a lot, and as such I needed the finger-less gloves and the spandex shorts. They served a purpose though: the gloves and shorts had gel padding in them, which mitigated the impact of my aluminum bike bouncing on the road. Also, if it helps, the shorts were all black and didn't have a codpiece, and I always wore a shirt too. Maybe it doesn't, and I understand. I realize too that in the interests of being forthright with my audience, I've just made this paragraph in celebration of that fantastic shot above all about me, so I apologize.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can stream this on Prime. I think there's also a decent YouTube version. As far as PM goes, this isn't a top 10 or even a top 20, but their deeper catalog is a lot of fun too, and this film is a great example of that. Plus you can't go wrong with Billy Dee Williams!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106244

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A Time to Die (1991)

With the unfortunate passing of Richard Roundtree, I wanted to do a post in honor of him, and saw that this PM flick he was in is available on YouTube, so I figured I'd make it happen. In addition to us, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, and Simon at Explosive action have all covered this--and in addition to them, IMDb says Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide have also covered this, but the links on the critic reviews page are no good.

A Time to Die has Traci Lords as a fashion photographer who was set up in a drug bust and now has to take pictures for the LAPD for her community service. She also has a son living with her estranged husband that she wants to gain custody of again. One night, on a date with detective Jeff Conaway, she sees the guy who busted her, Robert Miano, and decides to follow him after he leaves. She ends up catching him killing a pimp, and she has all the juicy pictures of it. She has no idea how high in the department this conspiracy goes, so she keeps it to herself, and hopes to use it to blackmail Miano into clearing her name. That should work out well.

This is another fun PM flick. It's right around the time Ring of Fire comes out, so has more of that less action early period PM feel than the full-on exploding car flips every ten minutes feel we're used to with them, but we still do get our exploding car flip, so there's that. Traci Lords also puts in a great performance, which really anchors things; plus Roundtree, despite being relegated to angry police chief--full mustache and all--elevates that part to something more, which adds to the proceedings. On top of that, you have Miano as a great baddie, and the novelty of Jeff Conaway is as good as you'd want--even if he seems a bit handsy with Lords, more on that later; not to mention we have the classic PM quirks, like an angry lesbian couple that seem to always be in trouble with the law, Lords's son who wears business suits to school, and a fashion shoot Lords does with two models who do some choreographed dance routine while she takes their pictures. If you're looking for a fun 90s thriller, this is worth checking out.

While Roundtree's part wasn't big here, it was pure Roundtree, total leading man, commanding every scene he's in, so much so that I thought he was going to end up having a bigger role in this than he did. And I think that's the biggest travesty of his career, is that he didn't get more of those major leading roles, and while Hollywood's loss was our gain with films like this, it was also our loss too, because it would've been great for us to see him in those major leading roles too. Roles that his contemporaries got, like Harrison Ford or Michael Douglas, but that weren't made available to African American actors at the time like they would be later for Denzel Washington or Will Smith. And as great as those actors are, Roundtree was another level of leading man above them. Still, his iconic turn as Shaft to me is up there with Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, or Christopher Reeve as Superman--imagine if Marvel had been more on top of their film adaptations in the 70s and made a Black Panther film then with Roundtree in the lead? And that's the legacy Roundtree leaves behind, perhaps he didn't get the roles a star with his screen presence deserved, but the roles he did get, he hit out of the park, especially Shaft, and with it he influenced a generation of action film fans like myself, because I don't think I'd be here writing this blog if it weren't for TNT showing all the Shaft films in the early 90s.

The star of the film is Traci Lords, with this being the first of three films she did for PM in the early 90s. It's crazy to think she was only 23 here, as she's playing someone older, maybe like late 20s/early 30s with an established career, ex-husband, and a child. She's already holding her own at this age in scenes with Roundtree and Miano, let alone someone like Conaway. We all know Traci Lords's story with her start in the Gentleman's Cinema industry, but she wouldn't have been able to successfully pivot her career after the way she has if she didn't have the talent to pull it off, which she shows here. This is only her fourth film on the site, which seems low because she's done a lot of direct to video stuff, but in looking at her bio, a lot of it is stuff like this, where she's the lead, or if she isn't there aren't the kinds of names in it that get us to post, like Dolph or Rothrock. Considering she has two more PM flicks we'll have to do, that'll give us a start to get more of her stuff on here for sure, and I think with Shannon Tweed getting into the Hall of Fame this year, she's a candidate for a future induction herself.

In addition to her, we had Jeff Conaway and Robert Miano. Conaway played this drippy detective who's always trying to hook up with Lords, and eventually she does hook up with him. As I mentioned above, he's very handsy with her, which seems off given the disparity in their ages, but I'm sure he passed it off as "I'm just getting into character baby!" A total 70s icon who's star had pretty much faded by this point, but that's why we come to films like this, to see our favorite 70s icons make a go of it, especially after those Taxi royalty checks have been blown that month and they need a little extra bread. With Miano, I realized that I hadn't gone back and updated his tag, so he went from three films to 13, with now this movie being his 14th. He's great in this role as the creepy, villainous dirty cop, walking around with his rubber gloves on and his gun with the silencer ready to cause trouble. With now 14 on the site, I don't know if the Hall of Fame is coming, since he doesn't have a lot of starring roles, but with the amount of work he still does, I could see us doing another 16 that just happen to have him in them and him getting in on The Asylum Rule.

Usually we discuss the film's on Hall of Famer in the first post, but it worked out better that we finish with them. We're now at 43 PM flicks on the site, which puts them in a tie with Cannon for most from a studio. Between what I have in the hopper for each, PM will pass them soon, and after that it's onto the 50 Club. According to IMDb, this is the 20th film from PM, but as I mentioned above, it looks like it came out right after Ring of Fire, which to me signaled a start in the shift from thrillers like this with some action elements in it, to full on actioners, and when that shift happens, that's when we start getting those PM flicks that are some of the best actioners of the 90s, which makes PM that proper replacement to Cannon in the world of low-budget action. But even being something that wasn't a full on actioner, there's still a lot of fun to be had, which is what I love about PM flicks, chances are I'm going to get 90 minutes of fun, something that's not always a given nowadays.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can catch this on YouTube. The version isn't horrible, so I think it's worth it--and it's one I have added to my PM playlist on my DTV Connoisseur YouTube channel. As far as Richard Roundtree, he truly was one of the best to do it, and will be greatly missed. Here's to you Mr. Roundtree.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103090

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